rollo tomasi

Little Big Head

One of the dichotomies I consistently see in the manosphere is the differences in how men approach the importance (or feigned unimportance) of sex. I got a bit sidetracked in last week’s essay. I was planing on writing about this phenomenon when I saw the need to explore how it impacted a larger social narrative. So, let’s consider this essay an addendum to The New Polyandry.

How men publicly and privately prioritize sex is always something that leads to a judgement call about that particular man, how he lives his life, and what it says about his integrity. If you openly make sex a “big deal” in your life, or you acknowledge its importance in intersexual relationships, you open yourself up to men’s Beta Game virtue signaling. The presumption is that if you were a real Alpha sex is just something you should have mastery over. If sex is at all important to a man, and he expresses this, that guy runs the risk of being seen as “obsessed with sex“, a “pussy beggar” or in someway less of a man for allowing sex to control his decisions.

Why is this the perception?

Two weeks ago I had a lively debate with the producer of Pat Campbell’s morning show. While we did have other topics to hit on that morning, she and I dug in and talked about how “sex is the glue that holds relationships together.” You can listen to the full segment here if you like.

As I mentioned last week, the notion that men need sex is nothing I haven’t covered in the past. In You Need Sex I made a case for the importance of sex and how it was, until recently, something that constituted part of a man’s life experience. Now it seems that being a sexless virgin at age 40 should be considered an accomplishment by certain factions in the manosphere: 

One very common dismissal of Red Pill awareness I read from Blue Pill men is this feigned, blasé indifference to sex.

For the most part this false-indifference is really a conditioned, response couched in Beta Game. The idea is for the Blue Pill guy to promote the public perception that he’s above his sexual impulses in the hopes that any girl within earshot (or reading his comments online) will recognize his uniqueness in not letting his cock do his thinking for him. From a male deductive logic standpoint it makes sense to the feminized male – women have all told him how off-put they are with guys who only think about sex, so he’ll identify with the women he’d like to get with and “not be like other guys.”

“All that Red Pill, PUA shit is for guy’s who obsess over sex. They only go to the lengths they do to get laid and never see the bigger picture. You don’t need sex you know? You wont die from not getting laid.”

[…]Thats the Beta Game behind the “you don’t need sex” Buffer, but there’s more to this rationale than that. Technically the Beta reasoning is correct; physically, you’re not going to die if you don’t get laid. You could probably masturbate to relieve yourself or live a sexless existence due to a physical disability and live a productive life as satisfying as you can manage it. If you don’t know what you’re missing or if a sexual substitute does the job, what’s the difference, right? The line of reasoning is that if it isn’t food, water or oxygen it isn’t really a necessity for existence.

You’re All Obsessed!

Self-righteous Blue Pill men always look to make their necessities into virtues. It also helps the men who fall on the 80% side of the Hypergamous Pareto curve to convince themselves and others that their sexual strategy – one that follows enforced monogamy – is the moral one; or the logical, common sense one absent the moral context. If you cannot get laid yourself, at least you can make getting laid into an ‘obsession‘ for the 20% of men who can. By doing so you encourage the 20% of men, who women desire to fuck, to police themselves and women by adopting your own, self-superior, one-woman-per-man sexual strategy.

Pretty much every MRA I’ve listened to, most Traditional Conservatives and a few MGTOWs, like to qualify men who can get laid as being in some way obsessed with getting laid. We’re told how morally superior they themselves are for essentially thinking with the big head instead of the little one, thus confirming their own part in a monogamous sexual strategy. As I mentioned in the last essay, a majority of men tend to fall on one side of the Strategic Pluralism Theory with respect to their sexual strategy.

Low SMV (sexual market value) men are basically forced to invest in one woman at a time if they are to successfully reproduce. This is the basis of a socio-sexual order founded on enforced monogamy. The larger pool of men benefit reproductively if the majority of men can be relied upon to follow the dictates of socially accepted, socially enforced, form of monogamy.

In the past this emphasis also had a culling effect on the worst aspects of women’s Hypergamous tendencies. If all men – including the 20% who could enjoy many women – agreed to play by the old social contract and adopted monogamy as their sexual strategy (in spite of being able to reproduce outside it) then more men would have the opportunity to reproduce. Furthermore, women’s Hypergamy would also be forced to accept lower SMV men’s monogamous strategy as a buffer to worst aspects of their own.

In the past, religious and social mores used to act as a buffer against Hypergamy, but the compromise for women was that they could expect to have the Beta Bucks provisioning aspects of their Hypergamy more or less provided for by the majority of men who adopted this strategy. In an evolutionary sense, protection and provisioning are already an integral part of the male mental firmware. But all of that went out the window after the Sexual Revolution, unilaterally female-controlled hormonal birth control and the socio-sexual/socioeconomic landscape that sprang from the Fempowerment narrative.

Today there is a radical imbalance between the old social contract upon which enforced monogamy was a key element and the new social contract dictated by a gynocratic social order that places women’s sexual strategy well above that of men’s. So it’s small wonder that men would revert back to 80% of low SMV men insisting on, and shaming, the 20% of high SMV men comply with a sexual strategy that women readily confirm isn’t in their best interests. 

On the male side of the strategic equation a majority of low SMV men cannot afford to have Alpha men playing by the rules of polygyny.

That polygyny is really a form of female-directed polyandry (see last week’s essay), but to the 20% of men who enjoy the benefits of falling on the enthusiastic consent side of Hypergamy it just makes sense to go with it. As such, low SMV men are compelled to find ways of discouraging these Alphas from following their r selected sexual strategy. They realize women will want, and pursue, Alphas. And in a polyandrous socio-sexual order based on the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy low SMV men drew the shortest straw.

Intrasexual Combat

When Beta men shame women for wanting to fuck Alpha men it has the effect of making those Beta men seem more insecure. In a feminine-primary social order one of the highest crimes is to attempt to challenge Hypergamy in any way. Even in a religious context, to challenge Hypergamy is to be guilty of repressing women’s sexuality. Today, just this impression is conflated with ‘toxic’ masculinity.

In truth, it would never occur to most low SMV men to shame women for their sexual strategy because they know that in doing so they reduce their own chances of reproduction. Women simply deem them ‘losers’ in the SMP (sexual marketplace). They become scolds, or worse, they become men who are “insecure in their masculinity” because they confirm their low SMV status in doing so. In today’s socio-sexual environment men policing women’s Hypergamy is a lost cause.

The solution then becomes an effort to disqualify the Alpha men they compete with by changing the rules that “real men” are supposed to play by. If you can’t win the Game, change the rules to better fit your strengths.

The ‘Real Man®‘ becomes the guy who exclusively invests himself in one ‘Quality Woman‘ – just like they do.

The apex of masculinity becomes whatever definition best aligns with what they believe they represent.

The’Real Man®‘ is the guy who best fulfills a woman’s, often duplicitous, sexual/life strategy by adopting the K mating strategy of socially/religiously enforced monogamy – just like they do. Oh, and the Quality Woman becomes whatever woman whose necessity compels her to agree with and adopt that strategy (Epiphany Phase).

The Real Man®‘ is the guy who plays by the old social contract rules of enforced monogamy, so more Betas might have a better shot at reproduction. True ‘Manhood‘ becomes a title Betas now feel qualified to bestow on other men; just as women also do with men who help complete their Hypergamous life-strategies. 

Trads vs. The Playboy Lifestyle

In order for Beta men to effect this reigning in of the Alpha men women want to tame and breed with, the high SMV man must be demonized and disqualified from the SMP for following his sexual/biological imperatives. The most common way to do this is by conflating his strategy with a degenerate hedonism. he must be made to seem as if he’s not in control of his sexual nature. So the effort becomes one of building an archetype around the ‘Playah‘ – A man who would be a bad long term bet for women’s Hypergamy because he lacks self-control. For this straw man character his little head does the thinking for the big head making him unreliable as a prospect for parental investment.

If enforced monogamy defines the accepted SMP, and women are presumed to be coequal, co-rational participants in it the ‘Playah’ needs to be cast as the outsider. The latent message is the same intrasexual combat method women use with ‘slut shaming‘; the ‘Playah‘ is a bad bet for long term security even if he is the guy women want to fuck.

However, that Playboy is a cruel reminder to low SMV men that they’ll never be able to fully exercise their own masculine imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. The closest the majority of men will ever get to this is online porn; which of course is why it’s so popular. There is a reason why 68% of Christian men watch porn. They understand that it’s the only viable substitute for their sexual imperative that they’re likely to experience in this lifetime.

While MRAs and MGTOW tend to reserve a special hate for ‘Playahs‘, it’s the Trad-Con mindset that is the most vocal against the Playboy lifestyle. There’s an overarching need amongst Trads to confirm their ego-investment in locking themselves into  enforced monogamy. 

There’s two complications to this:

First, Trad men (and women) tend to superimpose their religious and social belief set on their own sexual strategy. It’s a sin if they don’t accept monogamy as the standard. Today, this belief is a vestige of the old buffers that used to guard against either sex getting too far into their primal sexual impulses and strategies. It’s much easier to impose your sexual strategy on other men, effectively policing their strategy, if it’s ‘God’s Will’ that everyone behave according to that old social contract. I should add that this is the primary reason most Trad men suffer the worst from having their belief in the old set of books destroyed by Red Pill truths. It is galling for men who’ve invested their whole lives in the old social contract to have it vividly disproved by ‘Playahs’ (and women’s behaviors that confirm it) who understand the new social contract well enough to make it work for them.

Second, there’s the self-fulfilling idea that a man who opts for the traditional monogamous lifestyle is in some way more progressive or evolved, or life-satisfied than the ‘Playah‘ with the option to enjoy his non-exclusive sexual strategy. These are the guys who play up the ‘sour grapes’ Law of Power:

Law 36 – Disdain the things you cannot have

If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

MRAs and Trads alike don’t like being reminded that sex has always been an integral part of a healthy life experience for the majority of men who’ve ever lived on this planet. However, to them, sex is almost always a reward for desired behavior that they believe women expect of them. For most of them sex is always transactional so they never live out any frame of reference of having sex with a woman in a validational sense. It’s likely that they will never experience sex in any other context than the transactional. This is simply one of the visceral realities of a Darwinian sexual marketplace. As such, this pretext colors all of their understanding about what is, or should be accepted as, a legitimate sexual strategy – which unsurprisingly is his enforced monogamy strategy.

“Meaningful” Sex

The low SMV majority have many contrivances to corral uncooperative Alphas to adopt their sexual strategy. However, there’s also an involved necessity to convince themselves that their Blue Pill conditioning is the best sexual strategy that would benefit everyone if we’d all just see the validity of it as they do. To effect this they apply a subjective “meaningfulness” to their enforced monogamy (K selection) and “meaninglessness” to pursuing men’s biological imperatives (r selection) or the Alpha sexual strategy.

As a result, low SMV men tend to deemphasize the importance of sex in life. I asked this in the introduction; why is there a perception that a man who enjoys many women is somehow having sex that is less ‘meaningful’ than a man whose sex live is dependent on his relationship with one woman – or, a man who is ostensibly celibate?

The tactic involved here is the control over what constitutes meaning in sex. Low SMV men need this control to direct a meta-Frame that foments their sexual strategy; sex is only valid if it’s ‘meaningful’ in a way that aligns with an enforced monogamy sexual strategy. Thus, they can disqualify high-SMV men by delegitimizing his sexual experience. The higher the notch count, the less meaningful the sexual experience – and the likelier he can be seeen as “obsessed‘ with (meaningless) sex.

“Meaning” is deliberately ambiguous to better salve the egos of low SMV men, but meaning only aligns with what better promotes the enforced monogamy strategy. This strategy conflict actually serves Hypergamy in the long run as well. Women will endorse the importance of meaningful sex since it helps to convince the r selected Alphas that they should (eventually) shift to K selected commitment and parental investment with them. To the Beta moralist, any sex that doesn’t implicitly lead to marriage, children and the formation of families it’s always ‘meaningless’.

For the less moralistic low SMV man the idea that sex is something easily had, something inherently cheap, serves in devaluing Alpha men’s sexual experience. A popular idea among MRAs is that meaningless sex is something any guy can realistically achieve in a random club on a Friday night. This also serves to debase the value of learning Game; something MRAs never seem to have any facility with. By unrealistically cheapening the process of Game the same ‘meaninglessness’ imperative is created.

If any guy can find a worthless club slut with minimal effort then the low SMV man can raise his value by appearing to have higher standards than to lower himself to doing so. See how that works? This is a variation of the ‘sour grapes’ strategy I mentioned earlier. The Alpha who can easily get women becomes common. And by enjoying what Beta men believe should be a common sexual experience that man is reducing himself to his baser instincts. They say he’s “obsessed with pussy” or a “pussy beggar” because he’s applied himself to learning, in the most marginal way, how to have sex on his terms. And if he plays by a rule set that doesn’t align with the “correct” rules all his efforts become “meaningless”.

I should add here that MRAs and some Trad-Con men also like to foment the idea that because they eschew all that easily-had “meaningless” sex that Alpha men and Low Quality women are engaging it frees him up to pursue more esoteric, philosophical and creatively productive pursuits. Again, this helps to boost their esteem while presenting the appearance of uniqueness in spite of the fact that few of them ever have anything concrete to show for it. Along these lines they also love to imply that famous celibate men of antiquity were somehow more accomplished because they had the forbearance of mind to understand sex was a hindrance. When no one believes you aren’t making your necessity a virtue it’s sometimes necessary to paint men more famous than you with the same false-virtues.

The common refrain is that they’ve reached some Nirvana state of higher purpose or that they’ve evolved above the common need for sex. They shame the Alpha’s intelligence by claiming they allow their sexual nature to dictate to their rational nature. This too is a sexual quality signaling (or they believe it should be). They hope that their coequal, co-rational, Quality women will respond to it because they presume they’re using the same enforced monogamy rule book. Most Beta moralists are egalitarian blank-slate equalists. If they are evolved above their sexuality, then evolved, rational women should be too – but only if they are quality.

The New Polyandry

About five years ago I wrote a post called You Need Sex. In that essay I asserted a few key points about the importance of a healthy sex life for men. If I’m honest I kind of expected most of the reactions I got from that post and even now it remains one of my more contentious pieces. Even when I was in my Blue Pill youth in the 80s and 90s I’d run across the guys who always wanted to deemphasize sex in some reverse-psychology effort to get women to believe that they were deeper than the guys who just wanted to bang them. These were the guys who’d listen to a girl say something like, “I don’t see why sex is such a big deal to guys” or “Am I just a piece of ass to you?“, they’d take it to heart, and then construct some kind of personalized Game around how they respected women and wanted to really relate with them ‘beyond the sexual’.

That’s exactly what the Blue Pill teaches guys; they should always defer to, empathize with and identify with the feminine. This is Blue Pill conditioning at its most basic. It is a boy/man’s imperative to place women’s existence as more important than his own – and with men’s innate protection instincts for women this Blue Pill training is key to establishing a gynocratic social order.

But guys also have to find some way to set themselves apart from the competition in the Blue Pill sexual marketplace. They have to find someway to make themselves unique in how unlike ‘typical‘ guys they are. The miscalculation is, of course, the belief that the more alike, the more they identify, with (as?) women the likelier a woman would select them for intimacy and reproduction. 

Men are natural problem solvers. It’s part of our evolved firmware to look for solutions to challenges in our environment. This makes us constructive, creative, often innovative and more ready to take risks. It also makes us competitive and that competitiveness extends to the sexual marketplace. So it’s not too much of a stretch to see how Blue Pill conditioned young men might look for creative ways to outdo one another in the ‘female-identification olympics. 

One way this identification competition gets pushed to new heights is in how well a man might better devalue and abase his own sexual strategy to better accommodate that of the woman he believes will appreciate it. Taken to the binary extreme this means finding some way to devalue all men’s sexual natures. What better way to set oneself apart from other guys than to not be a guy? What better way to empathize with the feminine than to tear down the gender women say they despise?

Does all that seem kind of ridiculous? I used to think this way when I was younger. There was a time I might’ve even jumped on the “masculinity is toxic/confusing/outdated/outmoded/ridiculous” train because I truly believed it was the way to a woman’s vagina heart and mind. Even in the 80s and 90s this was a popular misconception. It wasn’t until I’d been through my first bad breakup that I realized the truth. Then I had nothing to lose by making myself more important than the women I was idealizing and behold! The women I wanted, wanted me – sexually to be sure, but they wanted to lock me down in commitment.

In my 20s I had unwittingly shifted from one sexual strategy to another, and I liked the change. It didn’t happen overnight. I had to learn to adopt the attitude, the swagger, the character that would get me laid, but I found that the most important part of playing the game well was putting my own desires well above those of any woman.

Suddenly I discovered I could easily nail the girls I could only jerk off to in my younger years. I can remember the time I first had sex with a girl I thought was the apex of hotness when I was in my teens. She was the best friend of the girlfriend of the drummer in the band I was in then. Both were swimsuit models and I thought I’d finally reached the goal. It wasn’t until after I dumped her to get with a centerfold model that I knew I’d set my sights too low.

Does that sound like a humblebrag? If you’re still held back by a Blue Pill mindset it probably will. I mentioned on a podcast recently that a majority of men will never know sex as anything but a mitigated, compromised transaction. They’ll never know what it’s like to have a woman lust after them. They’ll never experience the dilated eyes of a woman that would give anything to please him in that moment. Not because she’s obligated, but because her ego is validated at the same time her body is aching to have sex with him.

Strategic Pluralism Theory

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

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

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

The latter quote here is a simple outline of Hypergamy, but the first part, Strategic Pluralism Theory is what I want to focus on today because this is where the “sex is no big deal” cop out derives from for men.

The first sexual strategy, the one in which a higher SMV (sexual market value) male can enjoy the sexual experience of many women is a strategy predicated on what our most basic, evolved, biological instinct directs us to. It served ancestral men better to ‘hit it and quit it’ and move on to the next girl as expediently as possible for a variety of reasons. This is also a reason why women’s Hypergamous filtering is a base part of women’s sexual selection process today. The investment cost of becoming pregnant was so high that it became part of women’s evolved firmware to be hypersensitive to reproduction cues as well as parental investment cues (provisioning resources) to ensure survival of herself and her offspring. If you ever wonder why rape is such an existential fear for women you have to understand that this fear is written deep into women’s evolved mental firmware because of men overriding this filtering process by violence.

The first archetype of Strategic Pluralism Theory we could day is the Alpha archetype. This is the guy who has the luxury, by effort or genetic lottery, to pursue what I’d speculate was our ancestors’ pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer sexual imperative. This is what guys like to call the “Natural” with women. Thanks so any number of intersexual advantages (looks, Game, social proof, preselection) it serves him best to spread the seed and women are only too happy to enjoy him as well. He represents the 20th percentile in the 80/20 Pareto distribution of the sexual marketplace.

This side of Strategic Pluralism Theory reflects the r aspect of the r/K reproductive theory. A lot of well meaning Red Pill theologians seem to think that r/K reproductive selection is only limited to the female side of the equation. I’d also point out that this applies to the male side as well. Hypergamy is women’s evolved sexual strategy, however, I would argue that men’s innate, default sexual strategy is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. This r strategy is manifested today in our base predilection for pornography. Untempered by societal restraints, Alpha sexual strategy is what men a majority would default to if given the choice. 

More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring.

I’m establishing this perspective to better illustrate the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism Theory. For sake of convenience I’m labeling men who fall into the ‘more attractive men’ category as Alphas. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch for most of my readers, but if you have a problem with this just consider the statistics laid out in the book Dataclysm. A majority of women rate 80-85% of men as “unattractive”. That last 15-20% are our ‘more attractive’ Alphas here.

This then leaves the remaining ‘less attractive men’ as the Beta cohort. 

…the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

This then is the Beta mating strategy and if it sounds like the conventional idea of monogamy you’re not too far off. This is the K side of the r/K selection theory. Before I continue I want to stress that monogamy or non-exclusivity is not a value judgement in this essay. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks has male sexual strategy implications beyond women’s Hypergamy. I refer to Alpha and Beta as placeholder terms here.

For the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism the reproductive strategy is one that, in part, aligns with one side of Hypergamy. The 80% of ‘less attractive’ men find it necessary to compromise their biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality) in order to successfully reproduce. This is the nuts & bolts of what is today being called “enforced monogamy”. While this idea is taken to absurd extremes by critics, the premise is rooted in Strategic Pluralism. Since monogamy serves the largest block of men’s reproductive efforts it follows that it would be the institutionalized standard for ‘civil’ society.

Monogamy is Beta

Monogamy is a social norm, if not an evolutionary norm. A lot has been written about how monogamy in its present incarnation – one man, one woman – is really the result of a post-agrarian social order that optimized the sexual strategy of Beta men. In essence socially-enforced monogamy serves the largest population of Beta males.

However, the tradeoff for women was long term provisioning, protection (in as far as the man was capable) and parental investment – all thing conducive to sustainable futures for women and their children. All that was expected of women was a compromise on the Alpha arousal side of Hypergamy. And naturally, Alpha men and most women found ways to circumvent this socio-sexual adaptation that benefitted women in spite of Beta men. 

Monogamy serves Beta men. Alpha men still get sex, broke or not.

I had the above video passed along to me by a Twitter follower about 2 weeks ago. I think he expected me to take issue with how she was defending ‘gold-diggers’ but, ironically, she unwittingly detailed the basics of Hypergamy and Strategic Pluralism Theory. She’s not wrong. Women’s sexual strategy is optimized in conditions of polygamy and polyandry, while men’s sexual strategy – the Beta sides anyway – is optimized in a condition of socially enforced monogamy. 

What’s really ironic is that this girl discounts what so many men discount when they consider Hypergamy. She couches her total perspective on the Beta Bucks, long-term provisioning side of Hypergamy while conveniently omitting the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. The only consideration she has is for resource transfer – again perpetuating the Beta sex experience – and ignoring the fact that even poor men still get to bang women like her if they’re “hawt’. ‘Monogamy is made to benefit men‘, no it’s made to benefit Beta men; Alpha men solve the reproductive problem irrespective of (in spite of) socially enforced monogamy. ‘Broke men don’t get women‘,…unless they’re hot broke men.

I’ve seen Jordan Peterson and more than a few notable evo-psych professors make a similar mistake. They deliberately make Hypergamy solely about the Beta Bucks side of a dualistic mating strategy. Mostly this misdirection is due to personal bias or a want to present the feminine in a positive light. But likewise we also tend to see focus of men’s sexual strategy centering on what long term resources a man has to measure his worth by. Historically, women have generally been the losers in a social order based on a monogamy that tries to ensure that the most men (majority Beta) are solving the reproductive problem. Because women lacked the same resource generating capacity of men, because up until 50 years ago women needed men to solve the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, monogamy was a at least a workable solution to their own reproductive problem.

In 2018 this is no longer the case. For all of the bleating of women wanting a ‘good man’ once they exit the cock carousel, the reproductive problem they’re trying to solve isn’t founded in the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy it’s on the Alpha Fucks side. For as much as the women in this video tried to defend their mercenary sexual strategy of being justifiable gold diggers they really didn’t need to. All of the provisioning needs side of Hypergamy is relatively provided for for women in western cultures today.

The monogamous priority – the one that tried to ensure that most Beta men reproduced – that priority has now shifted to a neo-polyandry. This new social mechanic attempts to solve the Alpha Fucks side of the reproductive problem for the largest number of women. Just as patriarchal monogamy attempted to aide men who wouldn’t otherwise reproduce, the new polyandry seeks to ensure that even the lowest SMV women are entitled to breed with an Alpha male of their choosing.

Once all social stigma and religious buffers were removed from Hypergamy (since the Sexual Revolution) it has been a rapid shift from a male-beneficial monogamy that’s been the social norm for millennia to a form of polyandry that benefits the female sexual strategy.

I’ll be continuing this post in the next essay, but before I leave this essay let me reiterate the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies: For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. Think of this on a sociological meta-scale.

State of the Manosphere 2018

On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.

I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.

But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.

One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.

Good morning gentlemen.

There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.

If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.

As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.

When I met Anthony I was skeptical. 

That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.

This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend. 

All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.

I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order. 

I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.

As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe. 

I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.

So, here I am. 

What is the Manosphere?

For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.

For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous. 

To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications. 

Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.

The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere –  all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.

Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women. 

Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.

It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement. 

Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined). 

Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel. 

Or maybe they find my blog and books.

Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.

Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives. 

And this is what I’m talking about.

Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more. 

It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.

Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.

The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.

As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.

In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order. 

We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.

Now things have changed. 

The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.

Gender Warfare

Do you understand what I’m saying? 

This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today. 

Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).

You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media. 

There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.

“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved” 

These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.

Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.

Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.

This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.

But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.

I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.

As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.

You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.

My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps. 

To get “me too’d” is now a verb.

Segregation

The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men. 

So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.

These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.

The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.

Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.

How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?

I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.

They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.

If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.

And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.

Widows & Warbrides

warbrides  

I received the following Tweet from a reader this week:

Hi Rollo, thanks for all of your amazing work. I think one topic that you have not touched upon in detail is the conflict between alpha widowhood and war bride dynamic. If women are constitutionally inclined to move on, then how can they remain sad about their ex alpha lovers? Even if alpha’s SMV was much higher than her, isn’t the whole point of the war bride dynamic is to enable a woman to move on and reproduce without lingering thoughts of her former lovers? This happened to me recently when I had to end a relationship due to unacceptable logistics (long distance). What followed was extreme anxiety on her part about losing me. So this contradicted with what I always hear about women moving on easily.

This was a great question, and one I haven’t addressed before (no, I haven’t written everything), so I thought I’d pick this one apart today.

The TL;DR version is this: Women only ‘widow’ for men that made an Alpha impression on them. If their previous Alpha was somehow ‘killed’ and replaced by a lesser man, their hindbrains resist that man’s authority over her while using her previous Alpha as the lesser man’s SMV (sexual market value) benchmark. In the most extreme examples, a woman who’s been forced to accept the authority of a lesser man who defeated her former Alpha will resist him and/or plot revenge for the idealized lover.

Historical accounts and various cultural fiction are rife with this archetypal story. The woman who is married off to a lesser man or becomes the War Bride of an undeserving rival (usually by subterfuge or sinister means) is an archetype because it reflects women’s deepest evolutionary, existential, fear – to have her Hypergamous sexual selection strategy forcibly chosen for her by a man (or men) who are undeserving or are suboptimal breeding prospects. As I mentioned, this is an existential fear for women; anything less than unilateral control over her own Hypergamous destiny is tantamount to rape. The fear is that she will spend her life raising the child(ren) of a suboptimal man.

War Brides

The premise of the War Brides dynamic is thus: Evolution selected for women who could more easily transition psychologically from one dominant male to another. In our chaotic ancestral past women and girls were a commodity to be preserved for a conquering tribe. While men or boys were either killed or enslaved, fertile age women would be preserved as spoils of conquest for superior, invading, men. Simply put, women have reproductive value – men (and often their sons) were mostly obstacles in the way of resource acquisition and those reproductive opportunities.

That may seem like a bleak proposition to a Blue Pill conditioned mind today. We want to believe in some egalitarian dream of humanism and cooperation, but our evolved, ancestral past is responsible for what we are today in terms of base biological and psychological imperatives. I first proposed this theory in War Brides:

“Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schema that preserve their psyches from what would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses resulting from being continuously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism.”

A lot of critics of the Red Pill make two key mistakes in their assessment of basic truths. One is that we don’t fully consider the dynamic, and/or two, we think too much about it. The fundamentals we consider about female nature, with respect to women’s psyches, are rooted in our evolutionary past. So, when I deconstruct certain aspects of that nature I have to ask the question, “why would a dynamic be something beneficial to women and/or our species on whole?” When I consider Hypergamy, female solipsism, women’s collectivist mindset, or any number of other characteristics the question I’m going to ask is why is this dynamic still present in modern women, and what are the outcomes of that dynamic in today’s environment?

Look at the obesity epidemic in western cultures today. 68% of adults in the U.S. are overweight today and 34% are morbidly obese. Childhood obesity is at an all time high. Evolutionarily speaking this is the result of how our metabolism evolved to solve certain environmental challenges we faced. Back then food was scarce. Finding a way to insure we fed ourselves and our tribe was at a premium and our biology adapted to give us the best chance of survival. Today this metabolism is a liability in an environment where food is plentiful and what we need to do to get it is much less strenuous. That’s the quick way to illustrate what I’m getting at in the War Brides dynamic:

Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the Paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect to be subjected to. Consider the emotional investment a woman needs to put into mothering a child that could be taken away or killed at a moment’s notice. Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it’s women’s innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women. Why should that be? On the face of it you may think that men’s better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness. Women possessing a more pronounced empathic capacity undoubtedly served our species in nurturing young and understanding tribal social dynamics, however it was also a liability with regards to a hostile change in her environment. Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives, why should that be? Because women’s ancestral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior force. This is also known as the War Bride dynamic; women develop an empathy with their conquerors by necessity.

So how does this relate to the Alpha Widow dynamic? Let’s parse that out a bit.

Alpha Widows

Alpha Widows are women who’ve had an Alpha man in their past make such an impression upon them that any man that comes along after him must essentially fight with that impression in order to replace him as the optimal Alpha in her life. This is usually the man a woman pines for from her Party Years. Often he’s the first guy who ever fulfilled her Hypergamous dance card. Generally, this man is at least her perceptual ideal of the sexual selection criteria she was prioritizing during that phase of her life. Usually this guy is her sexual ideal as well. That sexual impact forms a strong psychological attachment because the memories of the sex she had are associated with hormonal triggers. The memories of a significant Alpha male are enough to prompt a physical arousal response in women.

Furthermore, that Alpha impact is so significant it can alter her future sexual strategy for every man who comes after him. This is one reason women generally have a Plan B man on hold should that Alpha ideal not present himself, or should he not be ‘tamable‘ by her in the long term. Women’s long term sexual strategies tend to be punctuated by holding out for their ‘soul mate’ who also happened to be the best sex she’d ever had. Lesser men who follow in his wake are simply contingency plans. In today’s feminine-primary social order, where women are encouraged ‘never to settle for less than they deserve‘, we see generations of women experiencing the consequences of this Alpha widowhood. In fact, we go to great efforts societally to placate to it, to lessen the impact of it, and to plan contingencies for it.

But where does that leave us?

One reason I detailed the War Brides dynamic in my earliest writing was because I’d had so many men ask me this question; ‘Why is it that women can so easily move on after a breakup? We were together for years and it’s like she never even knew me now!‘ The ugly, visceral truth of this is that women are far less convicted to feel remorse, guilt or shame over abandoning (Beta) men who didn’t meet their Hypergamous ideal. We all know the stories of the ‘ride or die‘ girl who would literally do anything for her man. I once had a reader link me a story about a woman who stole a police car whose arrested boyfriend was handcuffed in the back seat. There are definitely women who will help their man bury the bodies. However, that man almost universally is that woman’s Hypergamous, Alpha ideal. And this is where the power of Hypergamy comes into the equation.

Women’s prime reproductive imperative is consolidating in the long term on a man who best embodies her Hypergamous ideal. Even now I’m not sure readers really understand the influence Hypergamy has over women. Even factoring in the War Brides dynamic, there will always be women who will literally kill for a man who best exemplifies what she believes is (or was) the best she could ever do Hypergamously.

I covered some of this in SMV Ratios & Attachment. Hypergamy influences women’s concept of love, so much so that it forms the basis of who they will allow themselves to feel ‘love’ for when it comes to reproductive opportunities. If a man embodies this Alpha ideal no substitute will replace him, unless another man exceeds the previous man’s Alpha impact.

So, how does this modify the War Brides dynamic? Hypergamous imperatives can supersede the War Brides phenomenon in that it incentivizes women to mate guard and even kill a rival to preserve a long term reproductive opportunity with an idealized Alpha man. We can add layers of social and moral doctrines to this (marriage, tribe, religion), but it’s all really embellishments or a cover story for what’s really a biological phenomenon.

Women who monogamously pair with Beta men are far less motivated to feel remorse over that man’s death or replacement by a more Alpha rival. This is where the War Brides dynamic comes in full. Hypergamy never seeks its own level and if a woman’s lesser man is defeated by more Alpha rival this only gives her a better excuse for pivoting into that superior man’s Frame. That may seem duplicitous and self-serving, but this is the ugly, visceral truth, remember? The inverse of this is that Hypergamy dictates that women will only become Alpha Widows for worthy (Alpha) men – and sometimes even the fantasy of that ideal man is enough to replace a lesser man.

So, it follows that the degree to which a woman becomes an Alpha Widow or more easily adopts a War Brides mentality is directly related to what her perception of her former partners was. Regret, remorse and jealousy are reserved for what a woman’s hindbrain believes is her ideal reproductive opportunity. In light of this I’ll have to add some caveats to both the Alpha Widow and War Bride dynamics. Neither are mutually exclusive of the other, and both depend on a woman’s perception of the man (men) involved.

In case you were wondering about the title image here: Dutch and French women who slept with German soldiers during World War II publicly had their heads shaved to shame them for their natural Hypergamous impulses. This is an example of the survival-level conflict between Hypergamy and tribal affiliation.

Past Indiscretions

past_indiscretions

Now that the 21 Convention, 2018, is in the history books it’s time to get back to actually exploring intersexual dynamics rather that talking about exploring them. My speech this year was about the state of the Manosphere and what we can expect from an ever expanding, ever more power-ravenous, Gynocracy in the MeToo era. It’s never been a more dangerous time to be a man who reveals the truths about intersexual dynamics than now. Even if you do so from the most objective perspective you run the risk of censure at best, personal destruction at worst.

One thing I am very thankful of the convention for is the depth and breadth of not just the speakers, but the attendees. Last year I came back with so many new concepts to explore it finished out my year of blog essays. This year the attendance was twice as big and I’ve got a wealth of new material to dig into courtesy of the stories and personal situations men would relate to me. I’ll be doing a more complete breakdown of the convention around the time the video of my talk drops on 21 University. Anthony Johnson has fast tracked this video as well as the Red Man Group Live discussions (there were 3) we did on the bonus 5th day for anyone who stuck around for it.

One of the stories I had a guy hit me with was his making me aware of the black market that’s opened up in the sale of positive pregnancy tests online. There are forums (not even on the dark web) dedicated to convincing “commitment-phobic” men that their girlfriends are pregnant in order to lock them down either in marriage or an LTR. That blackmarket (if you can call it that) also led me to investigating the phenomenon of women covering for their girlfriends’ infidelity or pretending to be an alibi in order to allay any suspicions their Beta boyfriends might have about it. This then led me to another truth about the nature of women:

The Sisterhood will always show solidarity for, provide cover for, or aid and abet a woman trying to optimize Hypergamy,…unless that woman is in direct intrasexual competition with her for the same optimization.

Right now I’m sure there are guys thinking, “Rollo, we know that women can get really brutal when it comes to competing with each other.” And yes that is true; “slut shaming” is almost entirely reserved for women’s intrasexual combat, and there are many other ways women disqualify other women from the sexual marketplace if they feel threatened by that woman’s direct competition. But women evolved to be collectivist and cooperative in our hunter/gatherer past, and this has given rise to a globalized Sisterhood wherein women buy into the narrative of their own victimhood and most understand their gynocentric position of power simultaneously. If there is a prime directive to the social order it’s that all women everywhere are entitled to the best available opportunities to optimize Hypergamy.

Women will almost universally run cover for their sisters’ infidelity, and especially so if they are anonymous and there is little risk attached to their involvement. The rationalization is always the same too; it’s men’s responsibility to “Man Up” and marry a sister and thus subterfuge is justified, or, a woman deserves a shot at hot short term sexual opportunities if that woman is paired with a Beta partner. Either scenario is consolidation of Hypergamy.

Men are never afforded the same luxury of being able to vet women or to abandon one for his own reasons. I constantly get questions from guys asking how to vet a woman for marriage, but the fact that I would be audacious enough to offer advice on this is enough to set most women off. How dare I think that any woman might not be suitable for a long term commitment? To the Sisterhood, that vetting is only ever valid when it comes from another woman, why? Because to women only women should ever have control over Hypergamy and sexual selection. And in a feminine-primary social order a man telling another man that he should pass on a woman for commitment is conflated with misogyny.

Case in point, this story is of a guy who discovers his girlfriend used to be a Sugar Baby and had sex with older men for money in her sexual past. He has plans to break it off with her, but naturally every woman and every Blue Pill simp in the thread thinks he throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This situation isn’t all that uncommon. In fact, with the rise of the internet and a permanent social media digital footprint, combined with Open Hypergamy, it’s become necessary for women to legitimize every woman’s sexual past for fear that their own might disqualify her for a man’s commitment.

So the Sisterhood will cover for infidelity, aid in fraud and deception, keep Beta men ignorant of a woman’s duplicity and support single motherhood if it means that woman can lock down an optimal ideal of Hypergamy or parental investment from a man.

In an age when a woman’s sexual past is part of her digital footprint, a new social convention is needed to absolve her from any preconditions a man may have in vetting her out of his long term investment in her. Solution: Shame men for “judging” her by that sexual history. Men must be shamed as “insecure in their masculinity” if they might ever use a woman’s Party Years against her in a court of marriage. Likewise, women will fall back on the old tropes of traditionalist sexual repression to amp up the victimhood should a man ‘have a problem’ with women’s maturing sexual natures.

A similar situation occurred with the guy in Saving the Best who discovered that his sexually unadventurous wife had some video tapes of herself in amateur porn gangbangs when she “used to be so wild back in college.” His response was Great, I married a slut who fucks me like a prude. This of course sent the Sisterhood apoplectic and he was the one who had the “problem” for committing to and marrying a woman with that kind of past. That he had no knowledge of the videos prior to it made no difference; how dare he judge a woman’s past indiscretions? And then it became and indictment of womankind rather than an indictment of a woman. Men are not allowed to have concerns about a woman’s sexual past when it comes to matters of commitment because it implies a measure of control over Hypergamy.

Long term provisioning is a very serious problem for women’s subconscious Hypergamy. As it stands today a woman’s Epiphany Phase represents the culmination of Hypergamy. It’s vitally important that a woman never be judged for her sexual past if she’s to ever ‘stick the landing’ so to speak. If she follows the Sandbergian plan of Hypergamy she can’t afford to have men judge her for prioritizing Alpha Fucks, short term breeding, in her peak sexual market value years if she’s going to lock down a (hopefully still ignorant) Beta in Waiting. She must stick the landing and cash out of the sexual marketplace just at the right moment, between the ages of 29-31.

During her Epiphany Phase a woman needs to be absolved the ‘indiscretions’ of her Party Years. I’m putting indiscretions in scare quotes because those behaviors are really part of a long term breeding and life strategy. They are anything but indiscretions, they are part of the design.

However, most men have a natural revulsion to women who’ve been with a lot of men. It’s takes a great deal of social conditioning – a lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning – to prepare a man to believe it’s his duty as a man to look past what his instinct is trying to warn him about parentally investing in a woman for whom his paternity might be in doubt. I wrote about this in the War on Paternity, but there is a part of men’s evolved mental firmware that is instinctually suspicious of the certainty of paternity. Our hindbrains want to warn us of bad prospects for a certain paternity with a woman.

partner_count

You’ll notice here that a higher partner count for men is less deleterious than it is for women. I’ll address this fact in a followup to this essay, but for now let’s focus on the effects a higher N-count has for women. Our instinct, it seems, is correct when it warns us that a woman isn’t suitable for a man’s parental investment.

Women with a higher number of sexual partners have more difficulty developing solid attachments, a higher incidence of infidelity and higher rates of divorce. Primarily I see this as being due to the Alpha Widow potential (more lovers, more chance one makes a lasting Alpha impression) and the subconscious comparisons to a past lover. This is a workable theory as to why men adapted for a revulsion (or at least a hesitation) of high N-count women.

This instinctual reservation is a survival adaptation based in men’s need for certainty in paternity. Investment costs and a loss of reproductive opportunity is so high for men in a state of paired monogamy that certainty of paternity became an evolved mental subroutine for men. Men’s biological imperative is to spread seed. This is why we can become aroused on a moment’s stimulation, why we can mentally compartmentalize sex from intimacy, and why we generally err on the side of over-estimating sexual interest in women.

Long term monogamous investment in rearing a child costs a man more than just him following his biological imperative. As such, a certainty of paternity became a key element in that tradeoff for parental investment in a woman. So when women shame a man for even thinking that her sexual past might be indicative of future returns it is literally a woman’s attempt at getting a man to ignore 100,000 years of an evolution that led his ancestors to have him. You don’t just wish away 100,000 years of successful breeding adaptations because it’s impolite for a man to question a woman’s past or the convenience with which she disregards it at a time when her own sexual strategy might benefit most.

This tradeoff exists in direct oppositional conflict with women’s Hypergamy, and in the context of her very limited sexual market value (fertility) peak. Women between 29 and 31 are on the downside of their sexual marketability with respect to locking down a high value man for long term parental investment. While some women can maintain their sexual value longer than others, the decay is undeniably on the downturn with respect to her intrasexual competition and her reproductive viability. She’s gone through her best fertility years focusing most on the visceral side of the Hypergamous equation (short term Alpha seed) and / or investing herself in low ROI monogamy.

In the Epiphany Phase she (and the Sisterhood) knows she can’t afford suitable Beta provisioning men to have revelations about her sexual past affect her viability for long term security.

Hypergamy is in conflict with the male need for certainty of paternity.

As such, the Sisterhood (and its male ‘allies’) unites against any reservations, or shames men for being ‘judgmental’ of her sexual past. This is how Hypergamy fights with men’s paternity imperative. Ultimately it’s a battle of his resources (sunk cost investment) versus her capacity to optimize Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. For more information on this conflict see The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies.

Thus, social conventions must be created to prioritize Hypergamy above Paternity. So, being a Step-Dad makes a man a “hero”. Paternity is legally defined by the mother / wife, and gynocentric legal and medical doctrines restrict doctors from revealing who the real father of a child is to the “dad”. There was a time when being an unwed mother was something society shunned. It was a time when both men and women agreed on a man’s priority of his own paternity. If a young woman became pregnant out of marriage, or if a woman slept with a soldier of an invading army, she was shunned and publicly excoriated. That’s the degree of importance the social order of the time placed on paternity. Now, the Village shames men for ever expecting a child would be his own or that he’d be justified in his concern about a woman’s past.

Now the Village conflates men’s instinctual desire to know paternity (to even put a value on it) with a social construct. It’s not that he’s naturally concerned about paternity, it’s that he learned to be concerned as part of his toxic masculinity social educations.

Finally, I should also add that part of this social convention meant to repress the paternity imperative is about absolving women of the liabilities of a promiscuous past. As I mentioned, men’s reservations inhibit women’s Hypergamous strategies. So men are shamed by women for those reservations, but they are also shamed by Beta male sympathizers (symps). This piling on with the women only aids in the deconstruction of their ow sexual imperatives, but male ‘allies’ used this shame as an extension of their Beta Game in the hopes of identifying themselves better with the feminine (as they were conditioned to). They see the identifying with women’s imperatives as a means to their own reproduction.

Body Language

I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in trouble with this post. One thing I’ve learned from sixteen years of writing in the manosphere is that people take the issue of Looks are very personally. I think there’s something engrained in how our minds evolved to make us aware of where we fit in as far as image is concerned. I think maybe that’s the root of where we get the idea of leagues with respect to sexual market value. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my belief that everyone is keenly aware of their personal conditions on some level of consciousness and how we look to others is part of that awareness.

My friend Tanner Guzy wrote a great book this year titled The Appearance of Power and I learned quite a bit from it with respect to the, often derided, subconscious choices we make in how we present ourselves to others. A lot goes into what we think is the very simple task of dressing ourselves each day and the message we’re conveying to other men, women, our families, our coworkers, our church, etc. We all have at least a peripheral awareness of what we’re communicating with our clothes, our behaviors and our speech.

Another great book I’m presently reading is the new title from Joe Navarro, The Dictionary of Body Language. Joe was one of the speakers at last year’s 21 Convention and I had the pleasure of talking with him for a bit there. For 25 years he worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and this book is a very good resource for a lot of reasons. I’m not sure Joe likes being affiliated with the manosphere, but there’s no doubt that what he’s studied and written about for so long can be an invaluable tool for reading the sub-communications of women in Game applications. 

Way back in 2011 I wrote a brief essay called Learn to Read. At that time my focus was on emphasizing the need to be aware of the information a guy could glean from his surroundings, understanding the social environment and also the sub-communications a woman might be relaying to him in that moment. We tend to take it for granted, but there is a lot of information our brains need to process in social settings. For the most part our subconscious minds push out the background noise and less important information to our peripheral awareness so our conscious minds can focus on what we think is most important. Sometimes the part we take for granted, the information that our subconscious processes can be at least as important as what our consciousness is sorting out.

I’m calling attention to this process (as well as Joe’s work) because I want to stress the importance our Instinctual Process plays in interpreting what we see with respect to social interactions, but more importantly for our purposes, when we see men and women interact with one another. For the past 12 years my career in the liquor and gaming industries has put me in the unique position of being able to people-watch and study the unspoken communications that goes on between men and women in settings where they’re primed to apply their interpersonal skills (or lack of). However, it wasn’t until I started contrasting what I was seeing with what I understood about behavioral psychology, evo-psych and the sexual strategies men and women evolved for.

And this, this is the part where I get myself in trouble. In that time I think I’ve developed a pretty good ability to read what men and women are communicating with their clothing, expressions, posture, physical positioning, etc. and interpreting it with a Red Pill Lens. I get in trouble with this because, like I said, people tend to take my reading into things very personally. Even if I’m reading the photograph of a couple they know nothing about they associate something in the image that with how they perceive themselves.

Most of us were taught from an early age never to “judge a book by its cover.” We were taught it’s wrong to be judgmental and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. This has never really sat well with me, but you run the risk of sounding catty when you judge a person by their looks or whatever it is they’re doing in a picture. They say you sound like a gossipy woman, or else it’s supposedly some indication that you’re projecting your own insecurities onto whoever it is you might be critical of. This is unfortunate because our Instinctual interpretive process makes judgment calls all the time in our peripheral awareness. We all make comparisons in our hindbrains, it’s just impolite to give voice to them. This does nothing to help us objectively assess what sub-communications are taking place.

So, fair warning, I’m going to make some reads on some pictures here and if what I interpret seems a little self-serving or judgmental just know that I’m doing my best to stay objective.

For the past 3 months I’ve gotten into the habit of reading the images of various couples that guys on Twitter have been sending me. If you want a brief primer for this I talked about it with Tim Wenger last August here. For the most part these guys wanted me to determine what they were seeing were Alpha Tells or Beta Tells in the body language between the couple. In the majority of these shots, the Beta male body language was fairly evident even to the untrained eye. What was less evident was what the woman’s sub-communications were conveying.

Leaning In

Of the more than a hundred shots I read, the number one most common position for men was the lean in. This posture is something Roissy once called attention to as the hallmark of a Beta subconsciously manifesting his mindset in his body language:

The lean-in is easily identifiable, and while I don’t think it is always a Beta Tell (depends on context) it’s certainly the starting point for other manifestations of men with a necessitous subconscious. What I mean by that is that the lean-in is a physical display that illustrates how a man’s subconscious has decided that his woman’s Frame is the dominant one in the relationship. He feels the compulsion to put himself into her space as his natural impulse.

It’s also important to bear in mind that when we are photographed with others, in this case women, we are, or would like to be intimate with, there is a subconscious recognition that anyone viewing the image will infer a relationship context. More on this later, but for now keep in mind that some of these inferences will be related to mate guarding behaviors.

The reflexive critique of this lean-in is usually “Well, that’s just that one shot” or “The photographer told him to lean in” to which I can only say that the predominance of couples shots, candid and staged alike, most consistently pose a man as the leaner.

Lean out

The counter to this leaning-in is a woman leaning out or away from the man. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken conflict of hindbrains going on. A (Beta) man leans in to find inclusion and acceptance in a woman’s Frame while her own hindbrain instinctively reacts and attempts to lessen any inference of intimate acceptance to a larger audience.

Above are some examples of the lean-out. In some of these the latent message the woman’s hindbrain is conveying is almost “Get him offa me!”, but with a smile so as not to be too obvious. Also notice the positioning of the free hand in most of these pictures. We’d like to rationalize this as a gesture of affection after the fact, but in the context of these shots the unspoken message is a defensive one against the man’s lean-in. Again, this is one more manifestation of a war playing out between the couple’s subconscious.

The Eyes Have It

I also want to draw attention to the facial expressions of these women. Notice the commonalities in gaze direction and the message their eyes and expressions are sub-communicating. Women are keenly aware of the permanency of an image and what that image communicates. I’ve pointed out in many a prior essay that women’s brains evolved to give them a much fuller capacity for communication and a sensitivity to nuances than men. Men prioritize the content (information) of communication while women prioritize context (feeling) of communication. This is a truth we have to consider when we analyze the expressions and physical communication of women in photos.

I joked with the guy who sent me the second image here that she looks like she wants to bang me, not the guy doting on her. There’s more than a bit of truth in that assessment. Women today are hyperaware of how an image can be used to facilitate or handicap their sexual strategy. It’s no accident or casual glance when a woman directs her attention towards the viewer. It’s not a person behind the camera that she has in mind when she knows she being photographed, it’s the potential audience – an audience that’s grown exponentially in the age of social media. 

In all these shots the woman’s attention is on how she will be perceived by any viewer of the shot. In some other images I was sent the woman’s focus was on anything other than the men whose only focus was her. In advertising there’s a presumption that when two or more people appear in an ad the one with the presumed dominance is always the one looking away or out at the viewer. The submissive party was the one whose attention is directed at the dominant person. The dominant person is the one telling the story in the ad. A common complaint among feminists about magazine ads in the 60s through the 80s was that it was women who were always disempowered as a result of being posed in subservient positions where they focused on a male in the ad image. The only exception to this was in what feminists still refer to as the Male Gaze wherein the dominance a woman was afforded was limited to her sexual viability and her capacity to hold the attention of any men in the ad and men viewing the ad. 

These concepts are an interesting contrast to the millions upon millions of photos girls and women post of themselves on social media every day. Think of the gender power dynamics in all these shots. It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but the reflexive impulse a majority of women default to is one of advertising themselves for potentially better options in the sexual marketplace.

Whether or not this is a practiced or unconscious tact, the latent purpose of women’s responses to their men’s Beta Tells is to advertise their sexual availability to the audience. Some guys have said that women default to these expressions as a means of ego aggrandizement and I’m willing to accept that there’s undoubtedly an element of egoism (certainly solipsism) involved. No doubt women often enjoy the envious attentions of other women on Instagram in the right context. However, these ‘ego shots’ almost universally center on the woman in the power dynamic. In each of these images the power belongs to the woman.

Mate Guarding

Another common Beta Tell is the death grip pose many men will opt for in their couple’s photos. This is a position where the man locks an arm around his woman or drapes an interposing forearm barrier between the viewer and the woman who is trying to coyly escape his mate guarding message. 

In a lot of these the woman often has her hand on his hand as if trying to pry him off to release her. It seems like a reciprocation of affection – similar to the hand on the chest pushing him away – but this is afterthought rationalization. Death grip is a clingy positioning, but again the battle between his and her subconscious centers on the guy mate guarding and her own subconscious desire to broadcast her sexual availability in spite of him.

I Love Mommy

In almost all of these images the male is focused intently on the woman. From a Red Pill perspective, I see this as a manifestation of how these men have been Blue Pill conditioned to make their women their Mental Point of Origin.  Even in the images where the man is looking at the camera his sub-communication is one of clear abasement to, or guarding of, his most important priority.

However, the most disturbing trend I’ve seen in couple’s photos is what I’ve dubbed the I Love Mommy pose. Maybe it’s my instinctual interpretation of it or maybe its’ an obvious Freudian connotation, but in these shots the Beta assumes and almost childlike position of kissing on his woman. 

Okay, so the last one is a press shot, but you get the idea. You can see the I Love Mommy positioning in a few of the prior photos above as well.  I could probably dedicate an entire essay to all of the psychological implications of this phenomenon. I had one critic on Twitter ask me if I genuinely thought this tendency was due to unresolved issues these men had with their mothers; it wasn’t until later he admitted he had a tendency to do the same and was honestly concerned. 

I’m sure the possibility exists, but more importantly I think this habit is due to men internalizing the myth that vulnerability is endearing to women. There’s this persistent lie that accompanies the vulnerability myth. That’s the lie that men can let their guard down and ‘relax’ around the woman they feel securely paired with. As a result they mentally revert to the boy who didn’t need to qualify himself for his mother’s love and they regress to a subconscious comfort in that vulnerability they believe will endear them to their woman. They sub-communicate all this in the I Love Mommy position.

I’ll have to return to this Mother Issues concept in a future essay, but for now, how do you suppose a woman’s hindbrain imperative for Hypergamy will perceive this habit, particularly in light of how image conscious women are in the Instagram generation? My first impression is that it would be one of revulsion, apprehension and resistance. Nothing turns off a woman more than a man indicating that he’d rather be her child than her lover or husband.

Alpha Tells

So, if all of this reads like the overly-critical projection and nitpicking I told you most critics will accuse me of earlier, maybe I can assuage your own judgment by presenting some Alpha sub-communications examples here. Finding these examples can be a tall order in an age where any man photographed in a position not entirely focused on his woman runs the risk of being called ‘toxically’ masculine. Today, men who are confident enough to default to body language that communicates they are their own mental point of origin get accused of ‘abuse’ or at least being self-centered. But as you’ll see this isn’t such a bad thing.

The best example of Alpha Tells in couples photos focus on the man being the center of importance in the shot. Yes, this is Vincent Cassel (51) and his wife Tina Kunakey (21). I have no doubt some hater will come up with some reason in the comments why Vince doesn’t align with whatever their interpretation of Alpha is, but for our purposes these images illustrate the opposite of a lot of the Beta sub-communications we just went through. So try to look past the celebrity and see what’s being displayed here.

First off, notice how Tina’s focus of attention is always on Vince. Women who hold genuine admiration for their men consistently make them the story in photos. Even in the shot where they look at each other her focus is on him. It’s not difficult to assess the power dynamic in their relationship, but you can also feel a genuine desire emanating from Tina.

Also, women who genuinely admire their men are unconcerned that their actions in a shot might be read as subservient or ego-abasing by women’s audience. I’d go so far as to suggest that the attention a woman receives from a man her Hypergamous hindbrain confirms as Alpha is far more valuable to her ego than any lower quality attention she might temporarily enjoy by appeasing her audience. Much of this observation is rooted in the Desire Dynamic. Hypergamy cannot afford to have a high SMV man be confused about her desire or motives. A woman who is proud of the association with man she’s paired with is less concerned about the perception other women might have of her actions – in fact, she’ll convert any disparaging opinion of them into a point of pride, if that man is above her own sexual market value.

When a little girl thought a little boy on the playground was cute her reflexive response to him was not something she had learned to consciously control at that age. That response is often reflected in the expressions of adult women when when their peripheral awareness of an attractive man connects with their Hypergamous hindbrain. The biting of the lip, the beaming admiration, the laser eye focus and the hopeful smile followed by a coy embarrassment of what she’s doing when she regains her composure are all the physical cues of a woman whose primary concern is the man she’s with.

Now, contrast these images with the earlier ones in which the men are clearly the hangers-on of the women in those photos. I’ve mentioned before that a natural Alpha man is almost never aware of his own Alphaness and that’s what really stands out in these photos – the men aren’t trying to evoke the reflexive responses of the women. They fluidly (almost Zen-like) prompt these reaction in women. There is no pretense or the obvious mugging for the audience that you see in shots where the Frame is clearly being directed by the woman while the hapless Beta tries to prove how in love he is by kissing on her while she finds something more interesting to occupy herself with. When a woman admires her man he is literally all she can think about.

In closing here I want to reiterate that I’m aware that all of this is going to come off as self-serving or catty. It’s impossible to objectively interpret body language without someone resorting to point & sputter insults about how they think you’re just being petty or you’re jealous of some celebrity’s life. Be that as it may the discouraging of anyone attempting to understand sub-communications only serves the the party that has the most to gain from a larger ignorance of them. So I hope this breakdown has provided at least some useful references to consider your own, or your woman’s, default behavior when the cell phone cams come out at a party.

But if you learn nothing else from this post, and you need one take-home message, please, whatever you do, don’t be this guy in your next couples shot.

The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity

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I’m happy to announce today that The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity is now available on Amazon. The Kindle version is now available too.

Positive Masculinity is the newest supplemental reading in the Rational Male series designed to give men, not a prescription, but actionable information to build better lives for themselves based on realistic and objective intersexual dynamics between men and women.

The book outlines four key themes: Red Pill Parenting, The Feminine Nature, Social Imperatives and Positive Masculinity.

Free of the pop-psychology pablum about parenting today, Red Pill Parenting is primarily aimed at the fathers (and fathers-to-be) who wanted more in depth information about raising their sons and daughters in a Red Pill aware context. While not an instruction manual, it will give men some insight into how to develop a parenting style based on Red Pill principles as well as what they can expect their kids to encounter from a feminine-primary social order determined to ‘educate’ them.

The Feminine Nature is a collection of essays, revised and curated, that specifically address the most predictable aspects of the female psyche. It outlines and explores both the evolutionary and socialized reasons for women’s most common behaviors and their motives, and how men can build this awareness into a more efficient way of interacting with them.

Social Imperatives details how the female psyche extrapolates into western (and westernizing) cultural narratives, social dictates and legal and political legislation. This is the Feminine Imperative writ large and this section explores how feminism, women’s sexual strategy and primary life goals have molded our society into what we take for granted today. Also detailed is the ‘women’s empowerment’ narrative, and the rise of a blank-slate egalitarian equalism masking as a form of female supremacism that has fundamentally altered western cultures.

The last section, Positive Masculinity, is comprised of essays, reformed and expanded upon, that will give men a better idea of how to define masculinity for themselves from a conventional and rational perspective. In an era when popular culture seeks to dismiss, ridicule, shame and obscure masculinity, this section and this book is intended to raise men’s awareness of how fluid redefinitions of masculinity have been deliberately used to disempower and feminize men by a feminine-primary social order.

This book was a long time in the making and a lot of that was due to my wanting to create an organized flow of topics as well as to make sure the grammar and syntax was as perfect as I could make it. Like my two previous books, I’ve returned to my most popular essays and arranged them to speak to different themes in the book.

When I began writing, compiling and rewriting this book I had an initial working title – The Rational Male, The Red Pill – however, as I progressed I shifted this to Positive Masculinity. There came a point in my compiling and editing where I’d taken a different path in the purpose of the book. Where I had wanted to explain and/or defend the initial, intersexual, definition of what the term ‘Red Pill‘ has increasingly been distorted away from, I found myself leaning more into expressing ways in which this Red Pill awareness could benefit men’s lives in many ways, both in and apart from intersexual dynamics.

I’d hit on this in my Red Pill Parenting series from a couple years ago and I knew I wanted to revisit and make that series a prominent part of this book. As it sits now, it accounts for a full quarter of the book’s content, but as I moved into my writing more I decided that the best way to really define ‘The Red Pill” as I know it was to go into the various ways men might benefit from redefining masculinity for themselves in a conventional, Red Pill aware sense.

When I finished the parenting section I realized that I was really laying out general, if not prescriptive, ideas for ways men might better raise their sons and daughters in a feminine-primary social order that’s determined to raise and condition them. My purpose with both the series and section was to equip fathers with Red Pill aware considerations in making their sons and daughters Red Pill aware themselves in order to challenge a world that increasingly wants to convince us that fathers’ influence is superfluous or dangerous.

It was from this point that I’d made a connection; what I was doing was laying out a much-needed reckoning of sorts with regard to what conventional, positive masculinity might mean to future generations of Red Pill aware men. Since my time on the SoSuave forums and the inception of my blog I’ve used the term Positive Masculinity. I’ve even had a category for it on my side bar since I began too. From the time I began writing I’ve always felt a need to vindicate positive, conventional masculinity (as well as evolved conventional gender roles for men and women) and separate it from the deliberately distorted “toxic” masculinity that the Village of the Feminine Imperative would have us believe is endemic today.

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I’ve always seen a need to correct this intentionally distorted perception of masculinity with true, evolved, biologically and psychologically inherited aspects of conventional masculinity. This is what I set out to do with this volume. I’m prepared for critics to paint this purpose as some want to return to some pro-masculine glory days of the “chauvinist 1950s”, but the intent is not about building a time machine. Rather, it’s a pragmatic look at how a male-exclusive masculinity has been made ambiguous, distorted or demonized with the deliberate intent of destroying its true, conventional definitions. Furthermore, I layout the evolutionary and biological differences that make masculinity a male-exclusive definition and provide information and encouragement in men’s reclaiming masculinity away from a social order that seeks to destroy it and men.

Some have asked me why I’d title the book Positive Masculinity, worried that it would imply that there is a negative opposite to it. This work sets out to break down the latent purposes of why present day “masculinity” is already considered a default negative, ridiculous or shamed, and how to embrace conventional, evolved masculinity, unapologetically as a source of strength despite a world that wants to erase it.

I hope you’ll benefit from reading it as you have with all my work. It’s been a definite labor of love. The book is a robust 364 pages long. I do have plans for an audio version in about 6 or 7 month’s time.

I’ll be returning to my regular essay postings next week. Thanks for reading.

– Rollo Tomassi

Transitioning

As most of my readers know I’m presently editing the final draft of my third book. A very large part, almost a third, of this new book will be dedicated to Red Pill Parenting. I’ve written several series-posts about parenting from a Red Pill perspective and I felt it was an important enough topic to deserve a category itself in my sidebar links. I’ve expanded significantly upon these essays in the book as well as adding more material and some general advice for Red Pill aware men in their parenting efforts.

One thing I’m asked of from men who are Red Pill aware fathers is what to look out for and what to apply themselves to in raising a son or daughter using a Red Pill Lens. While prospectively it will give women some parenting insights, I’ve written this section with the intent of informing men about what they can expect from a feminine-primary social bent on conditioning a man’s children to assimilate to a Blue Pill mindset.

Without giving too much away, I’ve tried to express the dangers of a system of feminine-primary acculturation that contributes to what we term ‘Blue Pill Conditioning’ in the manosphere. What defines a ‘Blue Pill‘ mindset means different things to different men, but what conditions him to literally think, and invest his ego into that feminine-primary identification is initiated at a very early age. One thing I think gets lost on guys becoming Red Pill aware is just how much of his very natural-feeling sense of self is the result of a conditioning that’s taken the better part of his lifetime to develop in him.

The main reason I began developing a Red Pill parenting dialog is because it’s vitally necessary for Red Pill fathers – really any father with a sense of conventional masculinity – to come to terms with how his sons’ and daughters’ upbringing will be defined by what I call ‘The Village’ in the book. I coined this from the popular meme that “it takes a village to raise a child”, and the Village we have today is one that is dead set on instilling and normalizing a state of deliberate gender confusion – and hopefully perpetuate that state into a person’s adulthood.

The Village

This Village is a catch-all term and I mean to have it represent all of the influences a child receives in its upbringing that contributes to its Blue Pill sense of self. This includes the influences of media, popular entertainment, academia, their pre and grammar school education, popular culture that actively seeks to instill its own ideological base, etc. These are fairly recognizable sources of the Village’s systemic influence, but it’s also important to understand that this influence will be reinforced by your child’s peers, their Village family and relatives.

‘The Village’ will raise your kids if you don’t. You will be resisted, you will be ridiculed, you will be accused of every thought-crime to the point of being dragged away to jail for imparting Red Pill awareness to them (in the future I expect it to be equated with child abuse). The Village will teach your boys from the most impressionable ages (5 years old) to loath their maleness, to feel shame for being less perfect than girls and to want to remake their gender-identity more like girls – to the point that transitioning their gender to girls’ will be the norm.

The Village will raise your daughters to perpetuate the same cycle that devalues conventional masculinity, the same cycle that considers a father’s presence as superfluous and their sacrifices as granted expectations. It will raise your daughters to over-inflate their sense of worth with unmerited confidence at the expense of boys as their foils. It will teach them to openly embrace Hypergamy as their highest personal authority (publicly and privately) and to disrespect anything resembling masculinity to be less than some silly anachronism or reverse it into being all about men’s insecurities.

The good news is that for all of these efforts in social engineering, the Feminine Imperative is still confounded by basic biology and the psychological firmware evolved into us over millennia. That basic root reality is your greatest advantage as a father. If there’s one underlying truth upon which to base your parenting it’s this; children are still motivated by evolved influences that are relatively predictable. Begin from the root truth that we evolved our psychology and our behaviors from intergender complementarity that made us the preeminent species on this planet. It takes a global Village to distort this by teaching failed notions of egalitarian equalism.

Useful Tools – Blue Pill Fathers

Although the Village would assert its influence to be the primary one in your child’s life, and although it would have women believe that father’s are both necessary when convenient and superfluous, father’s are not without their uses. The Feminine Imperative (by way of the social system of the Village) needs fathers to help reinforce its feminine-primary influence in their children’s lives. Thus, Blue Pill fathers must also carry the feminine-primary water in their parenting. They must be taught to believe that parenting a daughter is preferable to parenting a son:

I realize that everything I could do with a boy I can do with my daughters (i.e. play basketball, teach them how to throw a punch, and play in the dirt). Yes, I know that’s a big fat “duh” for many of you, but I’m a recovering knucklehead with minimal relapses, so please humor me. And yes, I’m going to teach them much more than those three things – but I promise you that I will teach them those three things.

The Feminine Imperative needs men to constantly reaffirm the fallacies of egalitarian equalism, but it is The Village that needs a father to instill them into the minds of their own flesh and blood as well as those of other fathers. The meme is always a pretense of gender-neutral equity, but the latent purpose is one of devaluing the very existence of boys, and, by extension, conventional masculinity.

And this is the crux of the effort to enlist fathers in the system of the Village; masculinity and maleness are always portrayed as problems to be solved – the solution always being more feminine identification. The main goal of the Village is to destroy and redefine conventional masculinity in a way that only benefits the feminine.

I realize that being “girly” is just a myth. What does that mean, anyway? Would my kid be less girly if she dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween instead of a princess? (and that’s exactly what she did, by the way). Would she be less girly if she wanted to tackle little boys on the football field instead of taking ballet classes? Not to me.

This is precisely the degree of gender obfuscation the Village requires fathers to endorse. The squid ink here is the idea that masculine and feminine, boys & girls, male and female are all one, undifferentiated whole; in fact the old ideas of gender differences that brought the human race to where it is today, we are taught, were nothing more than “myths”. The underlying note is that girls are the functional equals of boys, but girls have the social and sexual advantage of being female.

The social narrative of the Village, the one it needs fathers to internalize and parrot back, is one of Fempowerment, but simultaneously one of male disempowerment. The idea then evolves into a sense of conventional masculinity being a defect of men; men are just unperfected women who are in need of women (or their daughters’) innate correction.

The idea here is that men with daughters make for “better men” as defined by the Feminine Imperative and approved by The Village. What Red Pill fathers need to acknowledge in this that their sons will be taught that their maleness is inherently flawed. All of the attributes and evolved instincts that make him a boy will be connected with his masculinity being “toxic”.

“Toxic Masculinity” or “Hyper-masculinity” are common tropes in the Village. We’ve gotten to a point that any form of traditional, conventionally masculine behaviors are now equated with a character flaw in men. So thoroughly has the Village distorted the old books definition of manhood that anything resembling a characteristically masculine behavior is, by default, an act of ‘hyper’ or “over-the-top” masculinity. This, of course, makes characterizing those acts as toxic, or ridiculous.

The Preferred Gender

In my essay, Environmental Stresses I added this quote from the book The Red Queen:

Contrary to popular belief a preference for boys over girls is not universal. Indeed, there is a close relationship between social status and the degree to which sons are preferred. Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan noticed that, in feudal times, lords favored their sons, but peasants were more likely to leave possessions to daughters. While their feudal superiors killed or neglected daughters or banished them to convents, peasants left them more possessions: Sexism was more a feature of elites than of the unchronicled masses.

[…]Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today: A poor son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a rich man. In modern Kenya, Mukogodo people are more likely to take daughters than sons to clinics for treatment when they are sick, and therefore more daughters than sons survive to the age of four. This is rational of the Mukogodo parents because their daughters can marry into the harems of rich Samburu and Maasai men and thrive, whereas their sons inherit Mukogodo poverty. In the calculus of Trivers-Willard, daughters are better grandchildren-production devices than sons.

These quotes are a part of a much more in depth look at how both environmental and social stresses contribute to a ‘preferred gender’ dynamic in both animal populations and human social structure. As I was reviewing this book recently it hit me how western cultures have blatantly been endorsing ‘female’ as the preferred gender for the past 60-70 years now.

I realize this assertion grates on popular culture’s sensibilities when it comes to gender, but as I stated in that essay, at no other time in human history has it been more advantageous to be female than today. Whether you want to argue that assertion from socioeconomic, education, gender identity, social ‘progress’ or any other metric, women in this era enjoy a condition that places their sex as the primary one in terms of social advantage. Women today live in a social condition that advantages, ensures their relative successes and directly or indirectly provisions for their personal security while simultaneously seeking to handicap being male and ridiculing the conventionally masculine.

In many a prior essay I’ve made the assertion that this effort in feminizing boys – in “perfecting” them with feminization – has been a long effort in social engineering. And while I still believe this is true, I think that in recent years the adaptive response to this preferred gender dynamic for Blue Pill fathers, men and boys is now an effort in socially engineering boys to imagine their gender identity as being transitionable to that of girls. Needles to say this push for gender self-reassignment has been embraced by the Village.

Olivia loves Disney’s Frozen princesses, all things sparkly, bright tights and ballet. During her family’s Cuban vacation last summer, she danced in the children’s “mini-disco” before the evening shows, twirling and leaping across the stage. One night another guest turned to her parents, exclaiming, “Your daughter is the girliest girl I’ve ever seen!”

Olivia was born a boy.

She “socially transitioned” from male to female, in nursery school last year. She was four years old.

Today, she attends kindergarten at a Montreal primary school. Only her teachers and the school board know she is transgender, for now.

Olivia (not her real name to protect her identity) is part of a growing phenomenon that is being celebrated but which is also raising strong emotions: an increasing number of children as young as preschoolers appearing at gender identity-clinics across the country, convinced they are of the opposite sex.

The new push to normalize transgender acceptance relies solely on the presumption that gender identity is a social construct rather than influenced by biological, and evolved psychological dynamics inherent in both sexes. The idea again comes back to the egalitarian presumption of a blank-slate equalism and a rejection of gender as a binary determination. Yet in over 90% of transgender identity shifts we see it is boys who opt to “become” female in their self-reassignment. Left to their own non-abstract decision making – and reinforced by Blue Pill parents and the Village – boys will, in the binary, shift to a female / feminine gender identity in overwhelmingly greater numbers than girls shifting to a male / masculine identity.

I would argue that this greater transgender preference for boys is a direct result of the Preferred Gender dynamic and reinforced by the Village conditioning boys for it while normalizing the idea of it in a larger cultural respect. This is the next step in cultural feminization of boys and men that began in the touchy-feely days of men needing to “get in touch with their feminine sides.”

It is no longer enough for boys just to be educated in a feminine-correct manner. It is no longer enough to teach them to despise the gender they were born into, “hoping their penises will fall off”, and it’s no longer enough to condition them to defer to girl’s perfectness. Boys must literally be transitioned to be girls from as young an age as 4 years old.

This is the degree to which the Village and the Feminine Imperative will go to condition future men into a Blue Pill mindset. I outline this in the upcoming book, but this is vitally important for Red Pill fathers to understand because these will be the ‘boys’ they may eventually need to mentor and unplug from their very early psychological damage. Many voices in the manosphere call this damage child abuse and it’s easy to understand why; this damage works on a boy’s most intimate part of his sense of self.

Red Pill fathers need to recognize this perversion of conventional masculinity for what it is and protect their sons (as well as daughters) from it while still anticipating the fall that will result from the “men” this re-engineering of gender will create.