sexual market value

Alpha Tells

Alpha Tells

For as long as I’ve been writing in the manosphere, the definition of “what is Alpha?” has been the number one point of contention I’ve had to state and restate the most often. I’m not going to rehash this now as I have several posts on the nature of Alpha already linked in the sidebar, so if you’re looking for my take on Alpha that’s where to find it.

However, to lead in to today’s post I need to address the basis of what I believe are the most common misunderstandings about the term Alpha.

Well before the inception of this blog, in the early beginnings of what would evolve into the manosphere there was a need of terminology to describe the more abstract concepts developing in the ‘community’. Some of these analogies and terms are still with the manosphere today, others have morphed into more useful abstractions; Alpha Widows, Hypergamy (in its true nature), the Feminine Imperative, even Red Pill awareness are all examples of established terms or analogies for understood abstractions. Among these are also the concepts of a man being Alpha and Beta.

From The Unbearable Triteness of Hating at CH:

5. Etymology Hate

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

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

One of the most common disconnects men encounter with the Red Pill for the first time is equating the term Alpha with its usage in describing the mating habits of Lions, Wolves or Silver Back Gorillas. It’s easy to ridicule or simply dismiss a valid, but uncomfortable, Red Pill truth when you’re simplistically comfortable in defining ‘Alpha Male’  in literal etymological terms.

This is the first resistance blue pill men claim they have with the Red Pill. They have no problem understanding and using abstractions for blue pill concepts they themselves are ego-invested in, but challenge that belief-paradigm with uncomfortable red pill truths and their first resort is to obstinately define Alpha (as well as Hypergamy) in as narrow, binary and literal a sense as they can muster.

“Get in Touch with Your Feminine Beta Side”

The next most common misunderstanding comes from conflating the abstractions of Alpha and Beta with masculine and feminine traits. In this (often deliberate) misdirection, the concepts of being Alpha or Beta become synonymous with being masculine or feminine. This is the personal basis of Alpha and Beta many Purple Pill advocates (really blue pill apologists) comfortably redefine for themselves, to suit themselves.

This purple pill conflation is really just a comforting return the the curse of Jung – anima & animus – if the complete man is an even mix of Alpha and Beta, masculine and feminine, then all the worst aspects of his “betaness” can’t be all bad, and he reinterprets what really amounts to a complete androgyny as “being the best balance”.

Unfortunately, and as blue pill chumps will later attest, the feminine expects to find its paired balance in the masculine, not an equalist idealization of both in the same man. Thus women, on a limbic level, expect men to be Men.

This one of the missives of an equalitarian mindset; that an individualized, egalitarian balance of masculine and feminine aspects in two independent people should replace the natural complementary interdependence of masculine and feminine attributes in a paired balance that humans evolved into.

What purple pill temperance really equates to is a 21st century return to the 20th century feminized meme “men need to get in touch with their feminine sides”… or else risk feminine rejection. 60+ years of post sexual revolution social engineering has put the lie to what an abject failure this concept has been.

What they fail to grasp is that an Alpha mindset is not definitively associated with masculine attributes. There are plenty of high-functioning, masculine men we would characterize as Alpha based on our perception of them in many aspects of life, who nonetheless are abject supplicating Betas with regard to how they interact with, and defer to women.

Whether that disconnect is due to a learned, Beta deference to the feminine (White Knighting), some internalized fear of rejection, or just a natural predisposition to be so with women, isn’t the issue; what matters is that the abstraction of Alpha isn’t an absolute definitive association with the masculine.

Likewise, Beta attributes are neither inherently feminine. As has been discussed ad infinitum in the manosphere, 80%+ of modern men have been conditioned (or otherwise) to exemplify and promote a feminine-primary, supportive Beta role for themselves and as many other men they can convince to identify more with the feminine.

The Beta mindset isn’t so much one of adopting a feminine mindset as it is a deference to, and the support of, a feminine-primary worldview.

The reason purple pill (watered down red pill) ideology wants to make the association of Alpha = Masculine, Beta = Feminine is because the “get in touch with your feminine side” Beta attributes they possess in spades can be more easily characterized as “really” being Alpha if it helps make him the more androgynously acceptable male he mistakenly believes women are attracted to (if not directly aroused by).

Alpha Tells

From jf12:

The sexual alphaness of a male towards a female is exhibited by her wanting to please him, and the sexual betaness of a male is exhibited by him needing to please her. A man’s alphaness obviously and definitionally does not cause her to more require him to please her (i.e. alphaness does not rub off like that). And also, betaness is not transferrable, no matter how much we betas wish that our women-pleasing caused women to want to please us.

Moreover, the social dominance of a male in a male hierarchy is barely correlated with his sexual alphaness, and certainly not causal. There are far too many counterexamples, such as Bill Gates, Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, and the list is very very long.

However, and this is a key sociologically empirical point, the social dominance of a *female* human (the best kind!) in a *female* human hierarchy is extremely correlated, in this precise way: A woman to whom women cater to will 99.9% of the time demand to be catered to by her man. This is why women believe man-pleasing women (I admit there are some) are “lesser”. It is also why men (e.g. me) who have tended to be mated to females who are socially dominant in a female hierarchy are invariably betas. It’s simply false that female-dominant women tend to choose men who demand pleasing.

What critics of an Alpha/Beta dichotomy conveniently sweep under the conversational carpet is that the dichotomy they want to debate only exists in their convenient, personal interpretations of Alpha or Beta mean to them.

From a male perspective we can endlessly debate (from our own personal biases) what we believe constitutes an Alpha state (remember, an abstract term, stay with me here) and the expectations of which we think women should respond to according to those expectation. But it’s women’s instinctive behaviors around Alpha men (or men they contextually perceive so) that provide us with the tells as to how she perceives a man’s Alpha or Beta status.

For as much as we believe women should respond to our definition of Alpha – and despite how women will explain they agree with those self-prescribed definitions – as always, it is their behaviors when in the presence of, or in a relationship with men they perceive as being Alpha (or of higher sexual market value than themselves if you prefer) that they bely their true, instinctual recognitions of Alpha.

In a social environment where men are conditioned to believe that women are as equal, rational agents as men, the belief men put their faith into is that women will appreciate their intrinsic qualities and base their sexual selectivity upon a man’s virtue, bearing, intelligence, humor, and any number of attractive intrinsic qualities. However, the truth of what women base their sexual selectivity upon (arousal) is far more evident in their instinctual, unconditioned behavior when around Alpha men – as well as men’s instinctual sensitivity to that behavior.

There are many examples of this Alpha reactive behavior. I’ll make an attempt to illustrate a few of them here, but I expect there’ll be many more offered in the comment thread an I’ll encourage a discussion of the behaviors that serve as Alpha tells. Rossy/Heartiste has made a sport with his ongoing “spot the Alpha” series of posts in which he analyzes a picture or video of a woman’s reaction to a man who she is obviously has an Alpha interest in as her body language and subcommunications suggest. (h/t to CH for today’s image)

The common criticism of these images is that red pill men would read too much into these displays, but the underlying message in that criticism is rooted in understanding and willfully ignoring what our instinctual perceptions of them are. We know Alpha when we see it, but need an explanation to protect our own ego’s Alpha assessment of ourselves.

The Real Selection

For all the delighted ego ’empowerment’ of women boasting they are the sexual selectors in this life, there is still a nervous uncertainty about being found acceptable themselves to an Alpha lover of higher SMV status than they might otherwise merit. This is where the illusions of an assortive mating model break down for women. If feminine-primary sexual selection were the only element to mating there would be no need for the behaviors women are subject to in seeking the approval from men they perceive as Alpha.

There’s a look, an attitude and a presence women will give to Men for whom they have a natural deference to. I don’t just mean blatant sexual subcommunications like casually biting her lower lip, or the hair twirling that’s almost cliché now. It goes beyond the sexual into a kind of meta-attraction/arousal. While the sexual urgency for an Alpha is strong and manifests in a woman’s forwardness toward him, the meta-attraction is both of submission and a subconscious desire for his approval of her.

Men predisposed to a Beta mindset also display many of these same behavioral cues with the women they hope will appreciate them in the same fashion a woman does for a Man that her hindbrain instinctually knows is of a higher SMV. In Beta men we see these behaviors as evidence of “clinginess” or “neediness” and is an identifiable Beta tell; but in women this natural and unprovoked leaning in to a Man, this desire to submit for his approval, is a positive indicator of Alpha attraction.

This is why, as third party observers, we instinctually find such behavior in men distasteful; we subliminally sense a complementary imbalance between the man and woman.

When a woman makes an unforced effort to please a man with subtle words, unintentional wide-eyed contact, and body positioning / posture you’re dealing with a woman who is compelled to defer to you as Alpha.

That isn’t to say this can’t be faked. In fact strippers, good ones at least, are not just physically arousing, or more sexualized, but are in tune with the deficit most men feel when it comes to this Alpha deference. Beyond just the sexual aspect, one thing that makes strippers so enticing and seductive is that the majority of men are simply unused to the fawning affections and Alpha interest (albeit feigned) of any woman, much less an attractive one.

This is also one reason men become so prone to ONEitis both inside and outside this contrived, transactional, sort of attraction. Men are the True Romantics, they want to believe a woman’s sincerity in her Alpha deference to him.

Does the girl you’re interested in come to you, or do you go to her?

I’ve emphasized the importance of establishing and maintaining Frame for years now, but I sometimes wonder if the importance of holding Frame isn’t lost on most men.

To an equalist mindset this Frame establishment seems like I’m advocating men be domineers of their relationships and a man rely on some dark manipulative psychology to enforce his will in that relationship. That’s not what I’m suggesting for the simple reason that it’s too effort consuming, and genuine desire is unsustainable within that constant effort. Maintaining Frame demands a voluntary, uncoerced, desired compliance.

What I’m suggesting is that men simply not invest themselves in women whose Alpha interest in them is mitigated by doubt or an obvious SMV imbalance. This is difficult for most men as it conflicts with our want for an idealized romance with a woman – a want for a love that requires a mutual definition with a woman lacking the capacity to realize this with him. And it’s within that idealized desire men lose Frame and excuse the behaviors of Alpha deference.

The Medium IS the Message

As I’ve written in the past, the Medium IS the Message with women. On some level of consciousness men instinctually understand their relative status with a woman based on the behaviors she directs toward him.

Is she affectionate without being prompted or only when circumstance makes your comfort needed for her?

Is Amused Mastery an easy default for you, or does she resist even playful attempts at it?

Does she initiate sex with you, or is your provocation only ever the precursor to sex?

Is sex even a priority for her (with you)?

Does she make efforts to make things special for you (you both) or is your relationship one of her grading your efforts in qualifying for her Alpha approval of you?

What most guys think are ‘mixed messages’ or confusing behavior coming from a woman is simply due to their inability (for whatever reason) to make an accurate interpretation of why she’s behaving in such a manner. Usually this boils down to a guy getting so wrapped up in a girl that he’d rather make concessions for her behavior than see it for what it really is. In other words, it’s far easier to call it ‘mixed messages’ or fall back on the old chestnut of how fickle and random women are, when in fact it’s simply a rationale to keep themselves on the hook, so to speak, because they lack any real, viable, options with other women in their lives. A woman that has a high interest level in a guy has no need (and less motivation) to engage in behaviors that would compromise her status with him. Women of all ILs will shit test, and men will pass or fail accordingly, but a test is more easily recognizable when you consider the context in which they’re delivered.

Are you making psychological concessions with a woman who’s never displayed an Alpha deference to you?

Last Minute Resistance

LMR

Many PUAs have at one point encountered and considered what’s commonly known as LMR, Last Minute Resistance after they’ve successfully moved through the various phases of seduction and had a girl reconsider fucking him and ultimately reject him at the zero hour before sex was in the offing.

LMR is the acronym PUAs gave to the tendency, but you don’t need to be a PUA to have had the experience of pleading your case for sex while spooning on the bed with a girl you’ve been trying to ‘make comfortable enough’ to want to fuck you using your best Beta Game for two months. I’d say blue pill men are much more familiar with LMR than most self-styled PUAs.

I’ll admit, I did this in my younger Beta days.

This was long before I realized that sex was about urgency, anxiety and tension, not comfort, familiarity or rapport, or proving how much better a boyfriend I’d make than the Jerks she’d enthusiastically spread her legs for because they naturally created that urgency.

It wasn’t until I’d hit my sexual stride in my semi-pro rock star 20s that I realized that striving to make a girl feel comfort and trust was anti-seductive.

Eventually I got to the point that I could get laid predictability enough with girls who were enthusiastically down to fuck, that I no longer felt the responsibility to endure the blue balls I had in trying to behave according to how girls ‘told’ me I should go about being intimate with other girls.

It was then I realized I had been attempting to Game girls according to the advice other girls had given me (or even some of the girls I wanted to get with themselves). I realized how adolescent this really was; these are games teenage girls played with guys who’s attentions they enjoyed, but couldn’t bear the thought of fucking someone they were so familiar with. I figured out that when a woman says, “I don’t think of you in that way. I think of you as a brother.”, what she’s really saying is “I’d consider sex with you to be incest”.

I didn’t know it then, but this was an important lesson in my red pill education.

I’ve never been an advocate for pushing past last minute resistance with a woman. From that point on in my life if there was any hesitancy on the part of a woman becoming sexual with me, and certainly once clothes were about to come off, I knew something else was affecting the needed sexual tension and urgency. Something else was mitigating genuine desire and I knew it wouldn’t be the kind of sex I wanted to have, or couldn’t already have had a better experience with another plate I was spinning at the time.

I get that for a lot of guys, “pushing” for sex – really trying to wait a girl out for sex – is the only Game they really have to speak of. However, I’d gotten to the point where I realized that any sex a woman makes a guy wait for is negotiated desire and mitigated sex, and the experience was never worth the wait.

I learned how to do very effective takeaways during this point in my life, but not because they were practiced to perfection from a want to bang a particular woman. Rather, and unintentionally, I had what PUAs termed a very good ‘push/pull’ technique due only to the fact that I knew if a new girl I was with was hesitant to get sexual I was wasting time I could’ve spent with another girl who was a proven commodity.

Women pick up on cues like this. Men are often oblivious to them, but there are subtle differences in our behaviors, indifferences to women’s expected behaviors from us, and subtle attitudes we sub-communicate which women are attuned to thanks to an evolved psychological understanding of when they have a sexual competitor for our attentions. Women who have a genuine interest in a guy, rarely confuse that guy with “mixed messages“.

I didn’t consciously process it then, but an overt attempt to overcome last minute resistance broadcasts a perception of ‘pussy begging’ in an obvious way. While I realize there’re sometimes situations that call for a need to be sexually assertive to promote a dominance women are testing for, if you’re in a position of what amounts to pleading or “c’mon baby” convincing a girl to fuck you, you’re negotiating (really compromising yourself) for her unenthusiastic desire.

When you overextend yourself in getting past LMR, you risk sending the message that “you just don’t get it” with regard to how women need to be seduced, and how the men they do want to fuck organically behave. By being too self-effacing in convincing a woman to fuck you, you present the perception of being optionless with other women, and thus a non-sexual Beta and she can deal with you, or not deal with you, accordingly.

It was really simple pragmatism for me to walk away from a sexual dead end girl – I had other options – but in doing so I’d unwittingly, but organically, passed a shit test. And more often than not I got laid a week or two after “bumping into” her again; after she’d had time to process it.

Game 101

Now, why am I going back to Game 101 here?

Likely this is something I should’ve included in the book, or come about to in the early posts of Rational Male (I have actually, but not in depth). Well, it’s because of a pathetically brief throwaway post from Lindy West praising the recent Yes Means Yes law on California campuses.

West usually wrote feminist agitprop before she was surreptitiously let go from Jezebel a few months ago, and rest assured this is the first and last time I’ll ever quote her on this blog, but in her giddy sputtering over the YMY law she did manage one coherent point:

“Why would you want to be tolerated when you could be desired?”

Following along in the wake of the Yes Means Yes social initiative, many a feminized blogger has gone through a good deal of mental contortions in order to rationalize why they support it. The problem they encounter is that in supporting YMY they have to explain away more than a few previously, and publicly, held stands they made in the past about gender relations to align with YMY.

One such inconsistency stems from women’s dubious want for comfort and rapport prior to sex that conflicts with what, essentially, amounts to negotiating for their genuine desire. Thus, I agree with Lindy, why would you want to be tolerated, when you could be desired?

What Lindy is oblivious to (no doubt from a lack of experiencing male attention) is that genuine desire cannot be negotiated for. Many a hapless Beta suffering in a ‘tolerance’ relationship is all too familiar with the lackluster experience of ‘duty sex’. Women will bemoan some fanciful epidemic of misogynists who think they’re entitled to, or owed sex, but the fact of the matter is the same women actively contribute to that belief by (legally now) requiring a checklist of terms necessary for men to have sex with them.

When I published Iron Rule of Tomassi #3 I received (and periodically still receive) a rash of criticism from the femosphere for insisting men excuse themselves from, and not wait for, compromised, mitigated and I daresay now, unenthusiastic sex.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #3

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

When I wrote this it was an effort in illustrating a pragmatic approach to save men the time and resources of investing in a less than optimal sexual experience. In essence, it’s a rule to help men avoid negotiated, unenthusiastic sex with women who feel obligated to fuck him. Whether it’s ostensibly from pity or duty or some other pretense the outcome is still the same.

I also wrote a follow up to this rule in Three Strikes:

Risk & Reward

In Game, there is a subtle balance that needs to be recognized between risks of over-investing in a particular woman with regards to practicality and not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water and losing on a potentially rewarding opportunity. Women, as is particular to their own Game, will naturally come down on the side of casting doubt on a man’s valid assessment of a woman’s potential value, both in long term perspectives and potential sexual satisfaction. This presumption of doubt is a built in failsafe social convention for women; if only you’d been more patient, if only you invested a little bit more, you’d be rewarded with a great mother for your children and the best pussy of your life – don’t blow it now!

The short version is that it’s not in women’s best sexual-strategy interests for a man to have sexual options. Women’s sexual strategy is very schizophrenic – ideally women want a Man that other women want to fuck, but in order to assess his sexual market value to other women he’s got to have exercisable options for her to compete against, or at least display indirect social proof to that effect. So, she needs to limit his options while simultaneously determining he has those options. Now add to this the hypergamous necessity of maintaining  a reasonable pool of suitors suspended in doubt of her own SMV in order to determine the best one among them for short term sexual provisioning and long term security provisioning.

As ever, the intent here is to determine the potential for genuine enthusiastic sex – if there’s no interest, or hesitant acceptance: NEXT.

At the time of my writing these posts I was castigated for exactly the same rationale that femosphere bloggers are now endorsing Yes Means Yes with today. The (now scrubbed from certain blogs) criticism then was one of how terrible it was for Men to punish women by not playing along with feminine-primary Game.

Only two years ago the criticism was, “What? You just want some whore who gives it up on the first night?”

However, under the Yes Means Yes initiative, this Three Strikes pragmatism is flipped and endorsed by the women who were previously outraged by it. YMY fosters a social environment which actively promotes Pump and Dump sexual encounters, since the furtherance of that sexual relationship into an LTR increases the risk and liabilities that are the result of the YMY threat point.

Commenter jf12 from last week’s thread:

YMY makes a good case for men abandoning what women consider to be their assortative equals, i.e. women who are older, crankier, and more likely to say no, for women who are younger, nicer, and more likely to say yes. YMY is a total green light for men to push for sex immediately if not sooner.

So the question becomes one of how men will most pragmatically develop contingencies for the YMY threat point in their own sexual strategy? In an age when Sheryl Sandberg is openly telling young women to fuck the Bad Boys, and settle down with the Nice Guy before her SMV decays into non-competitiveness, when open hypergamy is not only embraced, but proudly preached in the media, what logical choice do men have but to push for sex immediately and go their own way?

YMY combined with Open Hypergamy promote a sexual marketplace based on enthusiastic consent for Alpha Fucks, and mitigated, ambiguous consent for Beta Bucks. Now add to this environment the effects and behaviors inherent with women’s Ovulatory Shift on a monthly basis and we can begin to see the latent purpose behind Yes Means Yes – insurance against regrettable sexual behavior.

Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany

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About three weeks ago I was made aware of Jenny Bahn’s article, 30 is the New 50 which I thought was timely as it went beyond the xojane pablum where it first appeared to wider readership being picked up by Time. It was timely (heh) because it was right around the same week I published Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma and, coming from a fairly attractive woman, it highlighted many of the points I’d made in that post.

Commenter myreality asked me:

To what extent, if at all, do you think that validation hunting is part of male preference for large age differences when a man is in his late 30’s and beyond? It is definitely not 0%…

I think this is presuming a truth that isn’t.

The idea that men “seek validation” for their earned status or to ‘right’ past wrongs to their egos while they were working their way to that status is a social convention. The Feminine Imperative relies on memes and conventions which shift the ownership of women’s personal liabilities for their sexual strategy to men.

When men are blamed for the negative consequences of women’s sexual strategy it helps to blunt the painful truths that Jenny Bahn is (to her credit) honestly confronting in her article at 30 years old and the SMV balance shifts towards enabling men’s capacity to effect their own sexual strategy.

Have a look at my Sexual Market Value Graph. (click to enlarge)

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Although I’ve gone into explaining the loose metrics I’ve based this graph on several occasions, I’ve added some arrows here to illustrate a point that often gets missed or simply blown over because the truths it represents aren’t very flattering. Women would rather men not be aware of their own SMV potential prior to women being able to consolidate upon her sexual strategy.

Popular culture never presumes women are ‘validation hunting’ when they’re enjoying their peak SMV potential at 23 and (by order of degree) indulging that opportunity with men while at their peak. Women are acculturated to feel “empowered” by their sexuality, and really, no guy who wants to bang a hot 23 year old woman is ever going to rebuke her for it, much less develop social conventions to limit their odds of doing so.

However, men enjoying peak SMV in their mid to late 30’s are (by default) presumed to be vindicating themselves and validating their “fragile egos” by dating the younger (and in Jenny Bahn’s case an SMV peaked 23 year old no less) women they naturally find more attractive.

If there is any ‘validation’ for SMV peaked men it’s less about the sense of deserving a hot piece of ass or vindication for the women of his peer age who found him sexually invisible until he hit his peak, and more about validation in a new self-awareness that he finally is in a position of choosing and qualifying women for his intimacy rather than being filtered for his own acceptability for so long.

It’s not about turnabout or fair play now that the sexual selection shoe is on the other foot, but simple deductive pragmatism for a man who is aware of his own SMV and, assuming he’s hasn’t hamstrung his ability to maneuver, wants to exercise that value at (presumedly) the top of his game.

It’s not (usually) that he’s made a conscious effort to make himself an Alpha Agent of Righteous Karma, but that he steps into that role by default when the SMV balance shifts to his favor, and he naturally prefers sexual access to the best physical, and most sexually available woman his newly recognized SMV will afford him. That may not be a 23 year old coed, but it might be with a necessitous 29 year old looking for a solution to her long term investment.

About Those Arrows

One very common (or deliberate) misunderstanding about this chart is the presumption that like should necessarily attract like. A lot of critics claim indignation over the idea that I was suggesting a 23 year old woman should be attracted to a 36-38 year old SMV peaked man. I’ve never proposed this scenario in any post I’ve ever written about SMV, but it’s important to understand the prioritizations of attraction women make during the later phases of their maturation.

Critics who like to presume that this attraction is only based on looks, prowess and virility often don’t take this attraction prioritization into account. Obviously a more youthful man is in better physical shape when he’s younger, and if all we were considering was short term mating prospects and the Alpha Fuck side of feminine hypergamy this graph would look much different. However, once a woman has reached 30 (thank you Ms. Bahn) those attraction (not arousal) priorities look much different.

The primary reason I placed men’s peak SMV in his mid to late thirties is because, if he’s made the most of his potential, this is when he is most likely to have established himself in his status, affluence and achievements while (if he’s maintained himself) still retaining the looks of a more mature man.

It’s exactly women’s sexual prioritization at their most necessitous which puts men at the top of their SMV game. As I’ve detailed in many prior posts, hypergamy wants optimization (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). Women’s pluralistic sexual strategy is optimized when a woman can consolidate a monogamous commitment from a man who can deliver a better genetic benefit and a better personal (providership) investment than her own SMV should realistically be able to warrant her.

In general, at no other point in a man’s life does he possess the a better potential to optimize women’s innate hypergamy.

If you follow the pink arrow, from about women’s 30th year that established SMV peaked man has the best potential to satisfy both aspects of the dualistic nature of hypergamy. It’s important to consider that when a woman reaches her 30s her sexual prioritization is affected by her own capacity to attract and hold male attention. What happens is a sort of subconscious establishing operation – as her capacity to attract becomes diminished, and as the next generation of SMV peaked women comes into their own, the urgency to cash out of the sexual market place increases.

So it’s not that the expectation should be one of 23 year old women wanting to get after it with 38 year old men (though this is exactly the scenario in Jenny Bahn’s story), but rather that 38 year old men increase exponentially in value to 30 year old women at a time when what he possess is what she needs the most.

Back in May a data set was released on Twitter from OKCupid founder Christian Rudder is his book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). It’s a fascinating read actually and reinforces much of what I speculate about with regard to my own SMV graph.

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It’s important to remember that this data is based primarily on looks, but it illustrates the point of my adding the blue arrow to the graph. Men’s arousal and attraction triggers are virtually static. While men’s attraction value variates for women, it is a locked value for women.

While in her SMV peak – as we can see averaged her to around 22 – women enjoy the benefit of having the most sexual selectivity of their lives. However, the power of this selectivity declines as she ages and is further stressed by sexual competition as she does. And while men compete for sexual access to women, the sexual market value of the woman being competed for is still rooted in her capacity to attract attention and arouse men.

When in her SMV peak years, women’s preferences and sexual strategy supersede those of the men who would compete for her, however as she moves towards maturity, and as men ascend to their own SMV peak, a man’s preferences gradually take precedence over women’s.

Jenny Bahn, a reasonably attractive (former model) woman provides us with an excellent example of this transition.

Alex is 38. I’m 30. Technically, there are no “people our age.” But I’m starting to feel that a 30-year-old woman might as well be a 40-year-old man, though infinitely less desirable, culturally speaking.

At 40, a man is well into hitting his stride, something the guy I’m arguing with is all too aware of, as evidenced when he professes on multiple occasions, “I’m an amazing guy.” “We’re killing it. KILLING IT,” he tells me, while explaining that he’s been caught up in his rapidly expanding architecture firm.

[…]A 30-year-old woman is an undertaking, and it’s the real reason Alex has been putting me on the back burner for the past two months, telling me that I’m amazing and that he’s interested and then disappearing to hang out with a 23-year-old instead. Age ain’t nothing but a number, until it’s a number someone else doesn’t want to deal with.

As I mentioned in The Threat:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

Jenny, like most women in their Epiphany Phase, is now coming to terms with the transition of sexual selection power from what she once no doubt enjoyed to a man who’s made the most of his maturity and potential she wants to consolidate on in long term monogamy.

Jenny has a rare honesty and insight to recognize this, but naturally the ‘validation’ social convention is there to assuage her predicament. Even in her self-acceptance of her situation Alex is colored with an uncooperative attitude. His perspective is ‘incorrect’ in a fem-centric social order. If he were really ‘mature’ he would be dating and marrying Jenny (a victim of her own past decisions) instead of seeking ‘validation’ with a 23 year old hottie.

The presumption of Alex validating himself with a hot 23 year old makes men his age, in general, more shallow or manipulative, or uncooperative with the mandates of a feminine-primary social order. A mature, established man shouldn’t want to date women in their 20s, he should cooperate with the Feminine Imperative and validate Jenny’s sexual strategy by becoming monogamous with her.

What Alex is doing isn’t seeking validation, it’s simple SMP pragmatism – the power of sexual selectivity (though by no means unilateral) has switched in degree to his favor. Alex is enjoying his peak SMV and a large portion of that value comes from his desirability from women like Jenny; women who delayed capitalizing on their SMV peak and now, at 30, find themselves on the necessitous side of that sexual selectivity.

Game Works

game_works

Game, for lack of a better word, is good. Game is right. Game works.

After listening to myself on this weekend’s interview with Christian McQueen and Dagonet I realized that as I became more comfortable with the interview I found myself verbally ‘dialoging’ in much the same way that I scribble down fragments of ideas in my notebook or when I’m fleshing out a draft for some topic I’m considering in-post.

It’s always been a strange sensation for me to hear myself speak. Even when I record a voice message on my iPhone it always makes me self-conscious to listen to the message play back. However, as I was in the midst of listening to myself on the show I had the same familiar internal conversation and I picked up on a thought I had planned to write about, but I think it slipped my mind until now.

Towards the middle of our conversation I considered a few things about the benefits of Game, and it made me think about how Game has progressed to what it is today. One of the chapters in The Rational Male I specifically wrote for the book – and later converted to a blog post – was called The Evolution of Game. I added this as an effort to help uninitiated men have a better grasp of just what Game really is.

There’s been a lot of redefining of exactly what Game is over the past 12-13 years, but I’ve always considered Game an abstract term for a much larger concept.

Naturally, critics predisposed to a blue pill worldview want to portray “those red pill game guys” as throwbacks to the PUA set of the early 2000’s. This is a very shortsighted evaluation, usually proffered by guys ego-invested in a blue pill mindset and in need of easy definitions and buzz words to ridicule and move onto the next distraction.

Facing red pill truths is uncomfortable, and I understand the need to casually pass them off for fear of really having to critically reconsider ego-investments; that type of insight requires either real depth of character or an experience traumatic enough to shake one from beliefs that, in essence, make up part of their personality.

Both require a concentrated effort to learn from, and honestly, most people are too lethargic to consider red pill truths when there are more entertaining distraction to inure themselves with.

It’s just this lethargy that prevents them from understanding that Game and red pill awareness have matured far beyond the PUAs techniques of the past. Neil Strauss published The Game in 2003 – that’s 15 years since Mystery was wearing top hats and elevator boots.

Those caricatures may be comforting to laugh at, but in fifteen years the developed techniques and observations Game practitioners failed and succeeded with fed into what we would eventually come to understand as red pill awareness today.

Even some well meaning red pill Men may want to self-affirmingly ridicule the PUAs of the past and present, but if you have embraced a red pill awareness today, at least partially, you have these Men to thank for risking rejection and practicing techniques that laid a foundation for contemporary red pill awareness.

Now, imagine for a moment that, today, all men had to build on was the antiseptic studies and controlled experiments of a social science academia firmly steeped in a feminine-primary, feminine-correct social context. Imagine what red pill awareness would be if not for the guys in the field doing ‘experiments’. Imagine what marriage counselors and ‘relationship experts’ would (and honestly, still) advise men to do in order to change their lives with an understanding based solely on what a feminine- primary, controlled social science approved of.

Only the PUAs of then and now have had the unfettered freedom to perform in-field social experiments, and relate their collected evidence and observations with other men; the types of which social science has been forbidden from due either to ethical considerations or by feminine-primary social conventions.

Game does not Occur in a Vacuum

Recently the comment threads here have had a tendency to devolve into a “looks are all that matters so why bother learning Game?” line of reasoning. The commentariat can lean towards go-your-own-way defeatism, then to resolving to live in the gym until one inspire female arousal, or, to appeals to positive confidence.

And while I have always recognized – more than most other manosphere bloggers if I dare – the obvious truth that Looks are a prime requisite for arousal (and attraction), I also recognize an effort to discredit Game and red pill awareness by absolutes, extremes and absurdities.

For anyone with the sense that Game and red pill awareness is valueless and superfluous in the face of women’s primary drive for physical arousal, I suggest you read Advocatus Diaboli’s treatise on how to pragmatically use escorts (either that or relocate to the state of Nevada). Honestly, I hold no disapproval for men who feel this is the best way to satisfy their need for sex and female contact. It may indeed be your best option under the current social environment.

For anyone else, I think it’s very important to look at the benefits of Game both in an intergender and interpersonal context. If you consider yourself “red pill” (another useful, but abstract term) Game has benefitted you – because it was the early trials and errors of Game that led to red pill principles we understand now.

If you have even a cursory grasp of how women’s biology and menstrual cycle influences ovulatory shift behaviors in mate preferences and you’ve altered your perception of women, Game has benefitted you.

If you understand the basics of feminine hypergamy and the sexual strategies women use to optimize their mate selection, and then changed your intergender tact as a result of it, Game has benefitted you.

If you’ve internalized the core psychological principles underlying women’s perceptions of Amused Mastery, Command Presence, Agree & Amplify, Cocky & Funny, Social Proof, Dread and even Chick Crack, whether you’ve applied them or not, Game has expanded your consciousness of women’s behaviors and their motivators.

If you’ve had the insight to understand your blue pill conditioning, the reasons for your predispositions towards a Savior Schema, feminine identifying, why a LJBF is a rejection, why Beta Game comes naturally to men but is self defeating, or why SMV accrues and decays over the course of a lifetime, Game and the red pill have benefitted you.

If you’ve used or modified any of these principles to better your marriage, your dealings with co-workers, your daughter, mother or even your best friend’s domineering wife, you’ve benefitted from Game.

If you’ve saved or bettered another man’s life, or bettered his intergender relationships, you’ve both benefitted from Game.

I could go on, but if you honestly believe that women’s primary physical arousal cues trump any value that Game or red pill awareness really has, then you’re wasting your time here reading and commenting on what I have to offer. You’d be better served by focusing all your attentions to lifting in the gym and shifting your career goals toward a job that is physically demanding and keeps you at your physical best.

Ironically, getting in shape is also an aspect of Game. Even if your belief is “Looks are everything”, but yet your understanding of this comes as a result of your red pill awareness of the Alpha Fucks side of hypergamy, Game has benefitted you.

Just a familiarity with Game concepts, whether you accept them or not, still influence your perception of women and the motivations behind their behaviors.

Red pill awareness challenges feminine-primary thinking. Why do you think the mass dissemination of red pill awareness is so threatening to the Feminine Imperative?

Doing Something

What is the manosphere actually ‘doing’?

This is the first critique I expect from from a poor debate opponent – disqualifying the strength or validity of a premise by the ‘success’ or lack thereof of a proponent’s efforts to enact or convince others of that premise.

By this logic, one could make the case that the MRM is an utter failure, but it still doesn’t mean they aren’t correct in their efforts.

As I mentioned on the Christian McQueen Show, I’m of a bottom up, or an inside – out mind when it comes to enacting red pill ‘change. The manosphere is raising awareness and this needs time (maybe even a generation) to mature into personal consciousness and then popular consciousness.

It’s difficult to quantify the ‘results’ of the manosphere, red pill awareness and Game because its effects are individually subjective at this stage. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t receive an email, a forum/blog comment or a tweet about how my book or what I’ve written on the blog has changed (or literally saved) a man’s life.

That’s not meant to gloss myself, but rather to illustrate a point – the red pill (and Game) is doing something, it’s changing minds and lives. It’s not rallying men in the streets and waving banners, nor is it effecting legal or social policy (yet), but it’s making men aware of their condition and changing their beliefs.

No hate for what the MRM is doing, I recognize the intent and applaud it, but thus far it’s been impotent in effecting “real change in policy”, while red pill awareness has done more for men individually. For all of the MRM’s efforts to enact public change, all it takes is one White Knight in a position of authority to say “GTFO you misogynist creeps!” Now imagine in the future a man who’s red pill aware in a position to effect that policy.

Real change isn’t going to happen directly it’s going to happen indirectly, on a man by man basis. And not just publicly but personally.

That change will happen in men’s relationships with their wives, daughters and sons. That change may simply be a form of ‘civil disobedience’ in not marrying at all, or holding women accountable for their open embrace of hypergamy and their AFBB sexual strategy and only marrying / supporting women who make an effort to control their hypergamy.

That change will happen in the workplace and hiring practices. That change will filter into men’s better understanding as the red pill spreads and men reassume some of the social frame control the Feminine Imperative unilaterally legislates and provide to women now.

The red pill is ‘doing’ something, it’s planting the seeds for a greater shift in gender power with every man who becomes aware of how women ‘are’ and what they will predictably do.

The Burden of Performance

performance

 

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

One of the most fundamental misconceptions plugged-in men have with regard to their intersexual relations with women is the issue of performance. Back in late March of this year I read an interesting article from Roosh, Men are nothing more than clowns to the modern woman and it struck me that although I certainly agreed with him in the context he presented it, there was more to the ‘entertainment’ factor than simple amusement on the part of women.

Women don’t seek out comfort or stability in men anymore—they seek entertainment. They seek distraction. They seek hedonistic pleasure. This is why provider men (beta males) are so hopelessly failing today to secure the commitment of beautiful women in their prime, and this is why even lesser alpha males fail to enter relationships with women beyond a few bangs. Once the entertainment or novelty you provide her declines—and it inevitably will—she moves on to something or someone else. In essence, the only way you can keep a girl is if you adopt the mentality of a soap opera writer, adding a cliffhanger to the end of each episode that keeps a woman interested when being a good man no longer does.

After reading this I tried to imagine myself being a recently unplugged man or a guy just coming to terms with the uncomfortable truths of the red pill and learning that all of the comforting “just be yourself and the right girl will come along” rhetoric everyone convinced me of had been replaced by a disingenuous need to transform oneself into a cartoon character in order to hold the attentions of an average girl.

That’s kind of depressing, especially when you consider the overwhelming effort and personal insight necessary in realizing red pill awareness. Roosh later tempered this with How to be a good clown and Clown Game vs. Good Man Game, and although he clarifies things well in Game terms, the root of the frustration most guys will have with the ‘clown factor’ is that, in these terms and in this context, their performance isn’t who they are.

In this environment it’s easy to see why the MGTOW option seems like an understandable recourse for red pill men. It’s a very seductive temptation to think that a man can simply remove himself from the performance equation with regards to women. I’ll touch on this later, but what’s important here is understanding the performance game men are necessarily born into. Like it or not, play it or not, as a man you will always be evaluated on your performance (or the perception of it).

I think what trips a lot of men up early in their red pill transformation is sort of a sense of indignation towards women that they should have to “be someone they’re not” and play a character role that simply isn’t who they are in order to hold a woman’s interest. I covered this idea in Have A Look and developed how women are like casting agents when it comes to the men they hope will entertain them.

This was really about a sexual context when I went into it, but as I read Roosh’s original article I began to consider that women’s “character” role they expect men to perform changes as their own phases of maturity dictates and their SMV can realistically demand for that phase. In other words the “characters” they want performed in their Party Years will be different than the ones they want after their Epiphany Phase, which may be different than the character they want for their mid-life years.

How realistic it is for men to be that character becomes less and less relevant as women are socialized to expect disappointment from men actually living up to the characters they’re conditioned to believe they should realistically be entitled to at various stages of their maturity.

Living Up

Right about now I’m sure various male readers are thinking, “fuck this, I’m gonna be who I am and any girl who can’t appreciate me for me is low quality anyway.” This will probably piss you off, but this is exactly the blue pill mentality most ‘just be yourself‘ Betas adopt for themselves.

It’s actually a law of power to despise what you can’t have, and deductively it makes sense, but the fact still remains, as a man you will always be evaluated by your performance. So even with a ‘fuck it, I’ll just be me’ mindset you’re still being evaluated on how well ‘you are just you’.

The simple fact is that you must actually be your performance – it must be internalized. In truth, you already are that performance whether you dictate and direct that, or you think you can forget it and hope your natural, undirected performance will be appreciated by women (and others), but regardless, women will filter for hypergamous optimization based on how well you align with what they believe they are entitled to in a man in the context of their own perception of their SMV.

Looks, talent, tangible benefits and other core prerequisites may change depending on the individual woman, but to be a man is to perform. Even if you’re a self-defined man going his own way who enjoys escorts to fulfill his needs, you still need to perform in order to earn the money to enjoy them.

It Doesn’t Get Easier, You Get Better

For Men, there is no true rest from performance. To believe so is to believe in women’s mythical capacity for a higher form of empathy which would perdispose them to overriding their innate hypergamous filtering based on performance.

Women will never have the same requisites of performance for themselves for which they expect men to maintain of themselves. Hypergamy demands a constant, subliminal reconfirmation of a man’s worthiness of her commitment to him, so there is never a parallel of experience.

Women will claim men “require” they meet some physical standard (i.e. performance) and while generally true, this is still a performance standard men have of women, not one they hold for themselves. There simply is no reciprocal dynamic or prequalification of performance for women, and in fact for a man to even voice the idea that he might qualify a woman for his intimacy he’s characterized as judgmental and misogynistic.

Social conventions like this are established to ensure women’s hypergamous sexual strategy is the socially dominant one. Expecting a woman to perform for a man is an insult to her ‘prize status’ as an individual.

From a humanistic perspective there’s a want for a rational solution to this performance requirement, but as I’ve outlined in prior posts, appeals to women’s reason are no insulation against the subliminal influences of hypergamy.

I read many a ‘dating coach’ who’s approach is complete honesty and full disclosure in the hopes that a like-minded, rational woman will naturally appreciate a man’s forthrightness, but this presupposes a preexisting equal playing field where subliminal influences are overridden by mutual rationalism.

The real hope is that women will drop their innate hypergamous performance requisites in appreciation of this vulnerable, inadequate honesty.

What they sweep under the rug is that you cannot appeal to a woman’s reason or sentiment to genuinely forgive a deficit in a man’s performance. Love, reason, both demand a preexisting mutual appreciation in a common context, but neither love nor reason alleviate the necessity of performance for a man.

Women simply are not motivated to compromise hypergamy on their own accord. They will not be reasoned into accommodating a situation of mutual needs by overt means.

It is a Man’s capacity to perform and demonstrate (never explicate) higher value that motivates women to accommodate mutual needs in a relationship – whether that’s a same night lay or a 50 year marriage.

Demonstrating Higher Value

I get the impression that DHV tends to get a bad rap both from blue pill critics as well as red pill aware men. A lot of that gets wrapped up in technique and practice. It’s easy to dismiss this concept as posturing or bluster, but DHV, as a principle isn’t defined by egotistical measures or how well a guy can ‘showboat’ himself around women.

A lot of DHV is unintentional. In fact the best most genuine forms of DHV are exhibited when a Man doesn’t realize he’s actually performing in a way that demonstrate his higher value. This can be as simple as walking int a room in the right context or environment. Even humility can be DHV in the proper context.

What I’m driving at here is that after reading all of this you might think I’m saying you need to be superhuman to qualify for women’s performance standards, and again that’s kind of depressing – that’s not what I’m getting at. A woman’s performance standards are dependent on many varied contexts and according to the priorities she places on the type of character she finds both arousing and attractive and according to what her conditions dictate for her.

It’s not how you perform so much as that you perform. Ambition and personal drive to perform and be the best and most successful you you can be may have absolutely nothing to do with your intention of attracting a woman, but you are still performing and you will be evaluated on that performance.

DHV or DLV is performance whether intentional or not. You cannot remove yourself from this performance equation. You can cease to direct your part in this performance, but until you die you cannot exit the game.

 

 

 

Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma

Karma

Reader Keyser Soze had an interesting comment last week that I thought would be a good jump off point for today’s topic:

@Siirtyrion: You said, “Many scientists still go by this notion because it explains the frequent tradeoffs in mating and gives us a more complete picture for sexual selection as a whole. I understand that I uphold physicality as king, but understand that hypergamy isn’t completely about a short-term mating strategy, regardless of what some people may think. Women may be able to fund their our lives currently but rest assure, they still seek out Beta Bucks in other forms aside from monetary or material gain (i.e they still seek out physiological and emotional comfort from less than ideal males).”

Question for all:

Reading this, I had a thought. We often talk about women hitting the wall at 35ish and their sudden willingness to be me more reasonable with their expectations in a mate as they realize their SMV has decreased. I wonder if the above quote also plays into this. By the time women hit 35ish, historically (without modern methods of assisted conception) they are past their childbearing years. I wonder if their mating strategy changes at this age not only because of diminished SMV, but also because they are no longer looking for prime genetic material for reproduction as much as they are looking for “physiological and emotional comfort”. Perhaps this was implied all along, but I never thought about it this way before.

I hate to think this is going to come off as sympathy for the aging spinsters who had their cake in their youth and now, late in life, are looking to make honest amends for their past decisions, but it probably will.

A few months ago I broke-down Robin Korth’s aging sexual denial and in response we got a glimpse into the rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) at work in feminine solipsism:

http://twitter.com/RobinKorth/status/486636301207093248

My intent here isn’t to pick on Korth personally or really any woman in the post-Wall demographic in particular, but this self-insight is an excellent illustration of the feminine solipsism I often refer to on this blog. Furthermore, this sense of ego-blamelessness is then combined with the easy rationales and social conventions ready-made by the Feminine Imperative to affirm her self-importance.

Deti comments:

Robin Korth should be reposing in the love of her husband of the past 35 years, give or take. She should be doting on children and grandchildren as the esteemed matriarch of her family.

Instead, Ms. Korth is still out there acting as if she’s 25 years old. She’s still trying to navigate the sexual and dating minefields. In the end she’s trying to show everyone (but really herself) that she’s still “got it”; that she can still arouse a man sexually. It is all really about self aggrandizement. It is all about self- validation and affirmation. In the end, it’s all about Robin Korth. It’s pathetic and sad, really.

And no, Ms. Korth, your life is not the result of what you think about yourself. You are what you do. You are NOT what you think, read, or write. You are not what you were or what you’d like to be.

You are what you do. Period. Full stop.

And from The Difficulty of Gaming Women by Age Brackets by (the old) Roissy:

36 to 38 year olds

She is at peace with her spinsterhood and her failure in the dating market. She will acquiesce easily and gratefully to sex with very little game, as long as you don’t look like a grandpa. Her expectations are so low, it will be a challenge to disappoint her.

If you are prone to guilt, you might feel it when you inevitably dump a woman in this age range. Don’t. Remind yourself that her past is littered with her insouciant dumping of many beta men before you. You are merely an alpha agent of righteous karma.

Granted, Robin is well past the 38 year old mark by over 20 years, however even at 59 the description is still remarkably apt in light of Deti’s overview, however, the real lesson here is for men.

There comes (or should come) a certain empowerment for men after a point of maturation in life where he grows into an understanding of how the Game is played by women. As I’ve noted in the past month, this game, the former secret of women’s dualistic sexual strategy, is becoming more and more of an open secret amongst a feminine-primary culture becoming increasingly more assured of its primacy. If anything this plan for women’s optimizing hypergamy is just this side of proudly flaunting it to men.

As I pick my way through exactly this ‘plan’ in writing the next book, I’ve actually become less surprised by so many examples I find of this willingness with which women will overtly share their strategy for assuring short-term Alpha sexual desires during their SMV peak, and then consolidation on the security a Beta provider represents as their SMV decays beginning at around 30 years of age.

My purpose in writing this next volume of The Rational Male is to make men aware of just this life-schedule and sexual strategy, but even with my own efforts and the glaring willingness with which women will now confirm it, a larger whole of men simply don’t mature into this overall understanding.

For all the education the Red Pill represents for men, the larger blue pill whole simply don’t want to accept the ugly reality of women’s sexual strategy even when women openly confirm this for them – or when they do it’s too late for anything but pensive self-reproach and then signing the alimony/child support check anyway.

As this understanding becomes more widespread some social change will have to follow. Men will either become so pathetic as to ‘normalize’ it for themselves, and personally identify with what amounts to their open (proactive or reactive) cuckolding under women’s grossly overt championing of their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy – or Men will come to the realization (hopefully sooner than later) that the fantasy of monogamous bliss based on a notion of intergender compromise and the ‘give & take’ (but mostly give) they were sold on was never in the best interests of feminine-primacy.

The Feminine Imperative was (and is) only ever concerned with men’s imperatives or male-specific priorities insofar as they align with the superseding, primary imperatives of women. Thus, as open hypergamy becomes more common and the truth of this duplicity and imbalance (really disinterest) of mutual sexual imperatives becomes more evident, men will again (as with Game) evolve methods and mentalities to consolidate on their own imperatives or simply live in denial of it all.

The Long Game

For almost 6 months I’ve had this post from Cail Corishev bookmarked. It’s an excellent driver for exactly this point: prior to the digital age men tended not to play a long game when it came to socio-sexual strategies. The short game is all that matters in the moment, and all that stimulates, but until the advent of digital forums where men could figuratively compare notes, most men were simply unable, and perhaps too distracted to ask the obvious questions about women’s hypergamy and how it plays out over the course of 10-30 years and the roles women expect men to play during those stages of their lives in order to accommodate their strategy.

In Cail’s piece he describes a woman he knew at age 30 and how attractive she was, and his consideration of starting a relationship with her. After a failing interest and 10 years of no contact, she reinitiated with Cail:

But while we were chatting, I saw some of her recent pictures, and whoa!  She’s gone from a 7-8 to maybe a 5, and that would be adjusted for age.  She hasn’t gotten fat, but that’s about the only positive note.  She looks so rough that I found myself wondering what I was thinking ten years ago, but I looked back at some old pictures, and she really was pretty at 30 — not a model or anything, but enough to turn heads.  Now she looks like she’s lived 20 hard years in 10.  She works nights at a pretty demanding job and has had some serious health problems, so I guess it’s no surprise, but it was really striking: ten years ago I ached for this girl, and now I wouldn’t look twice at her if I passed her in the grocery store.

That got me thinking about Rollo’s chart.  My own SMV, as far as I can tell, hasn’t changed much from mid-30s to mid-40s, just as his chart would predict.  I’m about the same weight, same build, maybe a little less hair, but I’d lost quite a bit of it already back then.  I’m not much better-off financially, but at least not worse, and I have more of a sense of direction in my life.  I’m certainly more confident, especially with women, and more established in my communities.  So some pluses and some minuses, holding steady at about the same level.  The amount of interest I get from women seems to support that.

She, on the other hand, going from 30 to 40, has gone from fertile to not likely.  She’s also a grandmother now, so instead of looking to start a new family, she’s focused (and rightly so) on helping her kids with theirs.  (If single moms don’t have much spare attention to give a husband, imagine the single mom of a single mom.)  An additional ten years of dating and relationships under her belt certainly doesn’t add to her appeal.  On top of those reasons, add the drastic decline in her looks, and now I not only don’t want to marry her, but as we chat I’m mostly thinking, “How soon can I politely say goodnight so I can get to sleep already?”  Harsh, but true.  Just as Rollo’s chart predicts, her SMV has been on a steady decline since we met — maybe more of a free-fall in her case — and now mine is well above hers.

I had a similar post to this I published back in December of 2011 – Protracted SMV:

It’s a simple matter to tell a guy he’s dodged a bullet in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s altogether different to provably show him how he’s dodging it. For all the evils of facebook at least it gives him [men] an ability to see the forest for the trees, but the feminine can’t even afford him that. You must stay dumb, you must stay plugged-in for the feminine to maintain primacy. For all the benefits of a globally connected world, the feminine imperative expects you to accept a feminine-centric normalization of it.

What the Feminine Imperative fears is men becoming what Roissy terms Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma. Due to a lifetime of feminine conditioning, men tend to underestimate the leverage their SMV has in the context of women’s biological imperatives.

Pity for Reneé

I have a similar story to Cail’s. When I was a senior in high school I had a ‘friend‘ named Reneé, she was a gorgeous auburn-red head with a fantastic 17-18 year old body. We were good ‘friends‘ in the sense that it was clear I wasn’t ever going to see her naked and she had all of the personality trappings of a girl who knew she was attractive (she did modeling after high school), but also had the beginnings of a very self-important ego-invested feminist mind set.

I never really stayed in touch with her after graduation since by then I had moved on to women who enthusiastically reciprocated my interests and I moved along in life. It wasn’t until 2009 that I got on FaceBook and began having old friends look me up – Reneé was among the first. Very similar to the woman in Cail’s story we started to catch up with what the other had been doing through their 20s, 30s and now 40s.

As it turned out she was still fairly attractive for having had one daughter and never marrying the father, or any other guy for that matter. Most of the predictable single mommy issues and false-empowerment memes were bandied about by her, but the short version is here she was at 41 and her daughter was a year away from leaving for college. She was between jobs, but the one she had and the one she hoped to get were mediocre low to mid-management type, subsistence level employment.

She was and still is single 5 years later. The predictable questions about what my wife was like and how long we’ve been married came up, how we met, and where I’ve travelled in my work, etc. and I can honestly say I felt bad for her just recalling all of the life I’ve lived in the interim and basically forgot about her since high school.

She’s 46 now, and loves FaceBook as much as any aging spinster, but I really don’t want to call her that. In between the many pictures of her 4 cats (no lie) she occasionally posts some lament about how lonely she is now that her daughter has gone away to school and she comes home to an empty apartment these days. She makes not-so-subtle pleas to her FB community friends to set her up with ‘a great guy’ and all the dutiful Betas come out of the woodwork to tell her how pretty she (still) is and to keep her chin up and the right guy will “come along” – not so unlike the advice she gave me and at least half a dozen other guys I knew back in the day.

Reneé still clings to all of the feminist memes and mantras (reposts all the most popular), and complains of not being able to find a “great guy” anymore. This is of course infantile men’s faults for not manning up to her fem-correct standards, or else it’s a complaint about the ‘creepy’ men who really just want to bang her when she out with friends.

Unhappy Feminists

I hadn’t really ever considered using Reneé as a blog post subject until I read this article in Psychology Today:

According to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning the cash would increase if you skipped any 40-something, single female professionals and focused on the middle-aged male managers with one child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered “profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers.” And here it is:

  • Male
  • 39 years old
  • Married
  • Household income between $150,000 and $200,000
  • In a senior management position
  • 1 young child at home
  • A wife who works part-time

And the unhappiest profile?:

  • Female
  • 42 years old
  • Unmarried (and no children)
  • Household income under $100,000
  • In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)

Minus the professional status, essentially Reneé fits the profile for the most unhappy person in the western world today. Now, return back to Robin Korth’s comment, her life is the result of what she thinks of herself. What does this say about the decision making both she and Reneé have made in their lives?

I can’t say I have any sympathy for the likes of Korth, but for Reneé I do feel a pang of pity (in spite of Roissy’s advice for women of this age). For all of the accusations of red pill “misogyny” I genuinely do like women, and I’m not rooting for them to smash into the Wall. However I can see why my observations make this seem so – hard truths are often warnings that we don’t like to heed.

I often wonder if women of this profile aren’t as much victims of an ideological conditioning as Betatized men are over the course of their lives. Much of what’s resulted in Reneé’s life are the consequences of having (and still subscribing to) a mindset that’s based on equalist individualism, and she’s now beginning to reap what she’s sown – knowingly or not.

I don’t know the father of her daughter, but my red pill instincts (and knowing how hot she used to be) tell me the guy was likely a pump and dump Alpha bad boy. Reneé never struck me as the type to ‘settle’ on a Beta provider because she was too headstrong and independent® for that – she was certainly hot enough to attract the Alphas and independent enough to never consider a Beta for a relationship.

Observations

So my observation is this; while granting that women’s decisions are their own, and they should in all ways be accountable for the consequences that follow from them, how much of those decisions are based on a conditioning that promotes an idealized ideology of feminine, equalist independence?

For the same reason I can’t entirely fault a man with an internalized blue pill mindset over his conditioning, shouldn’t we also consider that women are likewise mislead by a similar influence? Are we (again) giving women too much credit for being rational independent agents under different circumstance?

For men’s part, it’s hardly avoidable that we become Alpha Agents of Righteous Karma by default for women in this cohort. Perhaps not as Alpha as we’re perceived, but as our SMV ascends in our 30s and (sometimes) through our 40s, it’s almost unavoidable that, even with a baseline of ambition, we’re seen as more desirable long term prospects.

In all honesty, were I to find myself single tomorrow, Reneé or women like her would never make my ‘to date’ list. Women love to complain that mature men really aren’t, and all they want is a young girl to fuck and coo for them. I would argue that men in my demo (at least should) have the depth of experience to know what the Feminine Imperative (and its social arm feminism) has bred and conditioned into women, and we honestly don’t want the hassle of dealing with it.

There is precious little reward for a man, and no appreciation, for having a big enough heart to save a woman from the consequences of her past decisions. That’s not meant as a callous punishment, just simple pragmatism.

As I stated in The Threat,

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When you’ve spent your whole life attempting to ‘have it all’ on your own, perhaps men can’t help but be an agent of Karma when that ‘all’ includes a man’s participation.

The Myth of the ‘Good’ Guy

Janus

For as often as I’ve made my best attempts to define what I believe constitutes feminine Hypergamy on this blog, it seems that critics of the red pill, and even newer, well-meaning  red pill advocates, are beginning to think of Hypergamy as some convenient trope that manosphereans refer to when they want to explain away some annoyingly female trait.

Is she shit testing you? Must be Hypergamy. She broke a nail? Must be Hypergamy.

There is a very real want for understanding things in as simplistic a solution as possible, but feminine Hypergamy isn’t a dynamic that lends itself to a simple definitions. One of the reasons the early proponents of PUA ran into issues with legitimizing their ideas was due to so many of their ‘students’ seeking out easily digestible answers to solve their ‘girl problems’. As I laid out in Dream Girls and Children with Dynamite, these guys wanted the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) footnote version of what to do in order to get to the silver bullet, magic formula part of the lesson to either get with their dream girl or “start fucking hot bitches”.

It is exactly this mentality that’s now causing such frustration in understanding Hypergamy and seeing how it works, not just in individual women’s personal decisions, but as a societally influencing force of the Feminine Imperative. Hypergamy is not a “math is hard” dynamic, but because it requires a comprehensive (and evolving) understanding it seems like the go-to throwaway answer to women’s behaviors and mental schemas to men (usually new to the red pill) without the patience to really invest themselves into grasping it.

I’ve defined Hypergamy so often on this blog that if you search the term “hypergamy” in Google, the Rational Male blog is the number two return below the wikipedia definition. As I write my way through the second volume of the Rational Male book I’ve found that a concise understanding of feminine Hypergamy is vital to grasping so much of the social and psychological dynamics that are a result of it. Every PUA technique, every common frustration MGTOW experience, and every gender-biased social injustice MRAs set themselves against, all find their roots in feminine Hypergamy, women’s pluralistic sexual strategy and the social and legal manifestation employed to ensure maximal feminine social primacy in optimizing Hypergamy.

Looks vs Character (Game)

Over the course of the past five or so posts, the topic of discussion in the comment threads has eventually found its way back to the basics of Looks versus Character (or Game, depending on your perspective of how learning affects character). Only discussions over what constitutes ‘Alpha’ in a man are so contentious as the importance women prioritize physical arousal in men.

I’ve already covered this debate and what I believe influences women’s arousal priorities in the Looks Count and Have A Look posts. My intent with today’s post isn’t to reheat these old debates, but rather to investigate a bit further into the connection between Hypergamy and this arousal prioritization.

First and foremost it’s important to understand the part that women’s biologies play in influencing Hypergamy and how women’s biology is more or less the point of origin for how they conduct their sexual strategy. To review, I’ll ask that readers refer to my post Your Friend Menstruation, but the basis of women’s sexual pluralism is found in the natural attraction predispositions that women experience as a result of (healthy) ovulation.

In her up cycle (proliferative) phase of ovulation, women are psychologically and behaviorally motivated to prioritize physical arousal above all other breeding considerations. In her down cycle (post-ovulation, luteal phase) women are similarly motivated to prioritize comfort, rapport, and long term security to ensure parental investment and benefit survival.

What I’ve described here, in as brief a fashion, is the foundation of Ovulatory Shift. There exists over a decade’s worth of experimental psychological and biological evidence supporting this theory. Due to biological and psychological influence, women become subliminally predisposed to behaviors which maximize fertility odds with the best available breeding opportunity, and maximize the best potential for long term provisioning and parental investment.

Whether this behavior is manifested in a preference for more masculinized male faces and body type, greater ornamentation and lower vocal intonation for women during ovulation, or a predisposition for more comforting, nurturing and supportive male characteristics during her luteal phase, the end result is optimizing Hypergamy, and ultimately reproduction.

For further reading on Ovulatory Shift, see the research of Martie Hasselton.

Arousal vs. Attraction

From last week’s post, in one of his less long-winded comments, commenter Siirtyrion inserted this bit of evolutionary truth:

Females only receive two quantities of evolutionary value from males – direct benefits (observed in long-term mating, with implications for the survival of offspring), and genetic benefits (observed through indications of physical attractiveness in her mate). And since females can receive genetic benefits outside of marriage (i.e. through casual sexual encounters), and no longer need rely upon mates for the survival of their offspring, there is no pressure for them to compromise on holding out for an unlikely (long-term) fantasy partner.

This current social pattern increases highly male variance in mating success, because female sexual choices always tend towards small male breeding populations (narrow range of male phenotypes), while male ‘preferences’ are inclusive of a broad range in female variance.

I believe one of the main contentions Siirtyrion kind of needles with this is that, as described, modern conveniences of female social empowerment (actual or imagined) discounts the need for hypergamic assurances of long term security. I’m not so willing to accept an overall disregard for the provisioning aspect (Beta Bucks) – you’re not going to reprogram millennia of psychologically evolved firmware overnight – but in discounting this need, the characteristics for which women would seek out a male exemplifying the best long-term security are deemphasized if not considered entirely.

If you read through any woman’s online dating profile you undoubtedly come across some variation of what Roissy has described as the “483 bullet point checklist” of stated prerequisites a man must possess in order for her to consider him a viable candidate for her intimacy. While I don’t think there are quite that many items on the checklist, you’ll find a host of common-theme personal qualities a guy has to have in order to be her boyfriend – confident (above all), humorous, kind, intelligent, creative, decisive, sensitive, respectful, spiritual, patient,..I could go on or you could just read this old joke.

The point is that all of these characteristics that women list as being ‘attractive’ have absolutely no bearing on how sexually, physically, ‘arousing’ a woman finds a man. As I’ve described in the past, while Game and personality can certainly accentuate arousal, all of these esoteric personal qualities have no intrinsic  “‘gina tingle” value if a man isn’t an arousal prospect to begin with.

The confusion that most Beta men make is presuming that what women list as being necessarily ‘attractive’ IS what makes him ‘arousing’. So when he models himself (often over the course of a lifetime) to personally identify with this checklist of attractive prerequisites he’s often frustrated and angered when all of that personal development makes for little difference when a woman opts to regularly fuck men of a better physical standard.

It’s duplicity of a sort, but it is also a strategy of deliberate confusion.

It may not be a woman’s conscious plan, but this deliberate confusion makes the best pragmatic sense to effect an optimized Hypergamy. Remember that Hypergamy is not just Alpha Fucks, it’s also Beta Bucks … if a bit delayed in her life in order to maximize Alpha Fucks. So when a woman describes what she finds “attractive” in a man this list will include all of the above bullet point characteristics because they “sound right” – because they shine her in the best light, yes, but also because in being so concerned she imputes the idea that she’s following the ‘right’ plan of looking for a good man to have a future with, and raise kids with.

Then and Now

This is going to sound like I’m glossing myself, but bear with me – I can remember how effortless sex used to be for me when I was in my 20’s. I had sex outdoors, in cars, hotel rooms, in hot tubs, in the steam room of an all women’s gym (after hours), I even got after it with a girlfriend in the balcony of a church in L.A. once (again after hours, no one around, only for convenience I assure you). Mostly I didn’t have a dime to my name, but I still had one of two fuck-buddies who would literally come to the bedroom window of my apartment to fuck me in the morning once or twice a week before I went off to the community college I was going to.

The point is there was no pretense of ‘attraction’ being anything other than a girl and I enjoying ourselves then. There was no ‘checklist’ of acceptable pre-qualifications for intimacy. The providership necessity that dictates a need for long-term consideration wasn’t even an afterthought; in other words, the Beta Bucks / Character / Integrity aspect of Hypergamy that women publicly claim is a dealbreaker for real intimacy was prioritized far below Alpha Fucks sexual urgency.

You can say these were just the types of girls I was getting with at the time, but courtesy of social media, I assure you, you would think these women would never have had that capacity now. They were all “sooo different when they were in college.”

It’s not until after a woman’s Epiphany Phase at around the time she becomes aware of her SMV decline that she begins to consider making that Beta Bucks checklist any kind of prerequisite for sex and intimate partnering. However, this epiphany isn’t the sudden revelation women would like men to believe it is.

For the life of me I can’t remember where I read the link, but I was reading a ‘Dear Abby’ sort of advice seeking article from a young girl (early 20’s) who was exasperated over finding the “perfect guy” only she couldn’t ‘get with him now‘. Her words were something like “He’s so great, awesome personality, funny, in love with me, supportive, etc., but I wish I could freeze him in time so he’d be the same guy and waiting for me when I turn 29 or 30.”

On some level of consciousness, like most women, she knows the dictates of what her own Hypergamy is predisposing her to. She knows she’ll eventually need that ‘perfect’ supportive, in-love guy to live out the long-term aspect of her Hypergamy with,…after she’s exhausted her short term breeding potential with men who better embody the Alpha Fucks dictates of her Hypergamy.

Arousal Preparation vs. Provisioning Preparation

For all of Siirtyrion’s vernacular, I will have to agree (to a point) that the balance between women’s short term breeding impulse and the long term provisioning needs Hypergamy predisposes them to now strongly favors the Alpha sex side of that optimization.

In Open Hypergamy I made a case for the aspect of an ‘old order’ of Beta Provisioning being a previously ‘attractive’ element for women’s determining long term suitability with a man, and that this old order was being replaced with other, extrinsic means of ensuring a woman’s security needs. Whether by social funding, or by indenturing men to provide for women’s wellbeing through other social conventions the effect is an imbalance between the dual nature of women’s sexual strategy.

However, I also feel it goes beyond just the social element now. Men are still confused by a feminine conditioning which wants to ‘freeze’ him in time in order to be the dutiful ‘perfect’ guy, ready to be thawed out and ready to serve the Feminine Imperative at a woman’s convenience.

While still convenient, men must be conditioned to confuse him that ‘attraction’ qualities are ‘arousal’ qualities in order to have him ready to be ‘perfect’ at his appointed time – and it is women who need to believe for themselves that this is what they think should be true.

The Myth of the ‘Good’ Guy

In the beginning of one of my earliest posts, Schedules of Mating, I briefly refer to the ideally balanced guy who would satisfy the optimization purpose of women’s Hypergamy:

There are methods and social contrivances women have used for centuries to ensure that the best male’s genes are selected and secured with the best male provisioning she’s capable of attracting. Ideally the best Man should exemplify both, but rarely do the two exist in the same male (particularly these days) so in the interest of achieving her biological imperative, and prompted by an innate need for security, the feminine as a whole had to develop social conventions and methodologies (which change as her environment and personal conditions do) to effect this.

There is a dichotomy that exists for men in this respect, which really has no parallel for women.

I am aware of certain (formerly red pill) bloggers who promote the archetype of a ‘Good’ guy as some role for men to ideally aspire to. The ‘Alpha Cad’ archetype must necessarily become the ‘douchebag’ caricature of an overtly distasteful masculinity (for men less able to embody it) and yet, the opposite caricature of the doormat, supplicating ‘Beta Dad’ is equally distasteful and certainly untenable when we consider that ‘attractive’ qualities are never ‘arousing’ qualities.

So the archetype of the ‘Good’ guy is offered up as some sort of livable, compromised ideal. If men could aspire to embody the best of the Alpha and temper that with what they define themselves as the best of the Beta, well then he’d be the ‘perfect’ catch for any woman of course.

The problem with this ‘Good Guy’ myth is not because men can’t or wouldn’t want to try to balance women’s Hypergamy for them, but simply because women neither want nor expect that balance in the same man to begin with.

It comes back to the Just Get It principle for women – any guy who needs to make a concerned effort to become what he expects women will want from him to be ‘the perfect guy’ doesn’t get it. They want Mr. Perfect because that is who he already is.

I mentioned above that there really is no parallel for this in women and I’m sure the Madonna / Whore dichotomy will be mentioned in the comments later, but allow me to point out that there is no concerted parallel social effort on the part of women in which women prompt each other to become a ‘Good Girl’ in order to satisfy the ideals of men. If anything a hostile opposite resistance to this is most true.

Women neither expect nor want a ‘Good Guy’ because he’s not believable, and his genuineness is always doubtable. That may sound jaded, but throw away any idea of being a ‘Good Guy’ balance of Alpha and Beta, because the Beta side of ‘good’ is so reinforced and common in men that it’s become the default template for women’s perception of you.

There is no Alpha with a side of Beta, there is only the man who’s genuine concern is first for himself, the man who prepares and provisions for himself, the man who maintains Frame to the point of arrogance because that’s who he is and what he genuinely merits. There is only the Man who improves his circumstance for his own benefit, and then, by association and merit, the benefit of those whom he loves and befriends.

That’s the Man who Just Gets It.

20 Questions

 

RT

Back in May of this year I was asked to do a second installment of the red pill Reddit forum’s AMA (“ask me anything”) and I’m not really sure too many of my core readers were aware of it. Unless you follow me on Twitter you probably didn’t know I’ve done two now.

After I’d closed out that discussion thread it reminded me of another ‘interview’ I was asked to participate in at my home forum of SoSuave back in December of last year. I hate to say, but I never really got around to posting my replies back to the original thread, however I did save the questions as a post draft so I could do the interview some justice later.

Well here we are. Next week will mark the three year anniversary of my launching Rational Male, and as always I’ll be doing another year’s retrospective post as well as another Best of Rational Male – Year Three links post.

I make it a policy not to go into too much personal detail on Rational Male unless the topic is something I can illustrate better with a personal story. I’ve never wanted the Rational Male to about me, but rather the experiences and input of my readers. However, after almost three years and one book later, I figure I’ll open up once and publish these question I was asked back in December with the hope that maybe something I answer will give someone some new insight themselves.

 

 

1) What brought you to SoSuave and how did you find the site?

Unlike a lot of SoSuave guys I actually found the forum because someone suggested to me that I might be able to reach more guys who needed help there.

Most guys go searching for answers about how they can get back with an ex, or why their last LTR imploded on them because they went too Beta or didn’t understand the basics of red pill awareness. I found SoSuave through the old Ladder Theory site as I was toying with the idea of psychology as a second major when I was at university. A lot of people don’t know the SoSuave of today is actually the second version of the forum. My understanding is that Alan, the forum admin and owner, had to expand to a larger server and forum architecture due to the site being so overwhelmingly popular.

There really wasn’t a manosphere or what we term Red Pill back then, just Mystery Method, PUArtistry, FastSeduction, RSD and the collected experiences of guys just posting their Field Reports and hitting upon commonalities of those experiences.

Mystery had made some conjectures with regards to the psychology involved in pickup and I just happened to come across it while I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies. I also found that making the connection between the two, at least publicly amongst teachers and classmates, was a very contentious prospect. I got called a misogynist a lot back then just for proposing the germs of the ideas that have built the foundation of what the Rational Male and the red pill have become now.

2) Any special reason for your SoSuave username, why you chose it?

It was actually a hold-over from my old online persona from some other forums and it stuck. If you watch the movie L.A. Confidential you’ll get the meaning of it. It actually seems more fitting now with the book’s release. Rollo Tomassi was the generic name given to a nameless criminal who got away with his crime.

I also understand that Rollo was the name of an infamous viking. I found this interesting since we both descend from Danish heritage.

3) What’s the best and or worst advice you’ve ever received in regards to chicks?

JBY, Just Be Yourself is definitely the worst advice because it’s so endemic of people who are ignorant of Game. It’s such a passive, easy dismissal of a guy wanting to know why what he’s been doing isn’t getting him the results he wants, but at the same time it illustrates the belief and trust of the person saying ‘just be yourself’ in the conditioning that brought them to it.

It’s a very uncomfortable revelation for anyone to embrace in thinking they should need to change and/or improve themselves in order to get the results that they want. The foundational mistruth of blue pill conditioning is that a nebulous ‘being of oneself’ should be enough for anyone (or ‘the right ONE‘) to be attracted to, and discourages any real self-analysis or improvement. ONEitis and Just Be Yourself tend to be codependents and, in tandem, really fuck up a lot of guys lives.

Best advice is more difficult, but for me personally it was “believe what a woman does, not what she says.” For most red pill guys this seems kind of remedial now because it’s a foundation for really unplugging I covered almost 11 years ago, but it can’t be stressed enough.

This basic truth is what inspired The Medium IS the Message and as stupid-simple a truism as it is, it’s often the most difficult part of Game-awareness that blue pill guys first struggle with. They struggle because their earliest feminized conditioning has always taught them that women are fundamentally the equal, rational agents that men are and they will relate to boys / men in full confidence and reason (just as they would expect from men) if they themselves don’t play games with them and communicate in full confidence and full disclosure.

It’s believe what she says and ignore, forgive or get over your judgementalism for what she does because she’s (supposed to be) being equitably honest, forthright, and knows exactly why she does what she does in spite of herself.

I don’t believe men and women are equals of each other in an egalitarian sense – there are simply too many empirically provable differences in both sex’s psychology and biology to draw any other conclusion; and as such each sex has it’s own imperatives and strategies for achieving them.

I do however believe that the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, one sex’s strengths compensating for the other’s weaknesses. It’s this overreaching social impetus (idealistic humanism and feminine social primacy) that encourages us to believe we are independent, autonomous and self-sufficient entities (founded in feminine solipsism), equal in biology and psychological potential that imbalances that mutually beneficial complementariness.

4) Have you ever posted in or lurked in other seduction forums/blogs etc?

I occasionally post on Dalrock’s, Just 4 Guys, Chateau Heartiste, Roosh’s forum, The Red Pill reddit, Return of Kings and a few others. I sometimes track back to forums my articles get linked to, but I honestly don’t have time to respond to everything I read.

5) How many chicks have you slept with?

My N count is public record; more than 40, less than 50. I’m not trying to be ambiguous, it’s just that when I try to make an accurate count I just don’t remember some names – mostly just places partners and experiences.

Just for some red pill perspective, most of that experience was between the ages of 17 and 28 in the late late 80’s to mid 90’s when there was no formal Game, manosphere, internet, cell phones, Tinder, etc. – getting laid was all analog and mostly instinctual.

It’s kind of funny to think that my N count is well above average, but I expect in comparison to many of the single, active, members of the manosphere / PUA community, 40 individual sex partners might be so low as to disqualify me from being taken seriously with regards to Game.

By the time I was 21-22 I’d figured out how to get laid with some relative predictability. Mostly because I was a fairly good looking, semi-professional musician playing in Hollywood with a bit of social proof and a practiced ability to pick out women who’d be into me.

I should also mention that of those 40+, four were long term relationships, including my wife.

This’ll sound facetious, but I’ve never thought of sex as being “validating” or ego-affirming. I honestly think a lot of that expectation comes from a feminized conditioning about “how sex should be” for men. I was, and still kind of am, more into sex as experience. It’s always been something fun to enjoy with a woman for me, not some meaningful act of cosmic significance. I’ve had sex with women I loved and women I didn’t, some were memorable, some were…meh. Even in my bluest of blue pill days my ‘validation’ came from other sources, not sex.

6) What was your worst and best experience with a chick? (wife, girlfriend or not)

The worst was the 4 years I spent with a BPD girlfriend. I did a post on it. I was in the pit of blue pill hell and pushed to the brink. I didn’t know what borderline personality disorder was back then, in fact I don’t think the DSM even recognized the complex as a psychological disorder in the early 90s.

My best experience is hard to put a finger on. It’s interesting to think about definitively bad experiences, but hard to put a “best” title on a good one. All of my best experiences would have to be with Mrs. Tomassi, our wedding, our daughter’s birth, the fact that even in her late 40s she’s still in fitness caliber shape and we genuinely enjoy each other.

Pre-marriage, I had my share of rock-club women, and when it was on, it was really ‘on’. I can think of at least 4 very memorable women, one was a fuck-buddy who was easily the most sexually hungry (and not just with me I came to find out).

I know the trope is that older women are supposed to be better in the sack than younger women – this was never my experience at all. In fact the younger the girl, the easier time I had bedding her, and the more adventurous a lover she usually was. I think even marginal social proof has a greater impression on younger women and they’re more eager. The older women I’ve been with have always been much more self-conscious.

7) Have you ever gotten friendzoned by a chick and if so were you able to get out of it?

Of course, particularly in my teenage years. In my early 20s I had enough female interest that I’d simply blow off the women I learned weren’t worth the investment. There was one exception though; a girl I knew from a community college who “didn’t date rocker guys or guys in bands.”

In hindsight I know she was leaning into her Epiphany Phase (maybe a bit early) and was trying to do things “the right way” after getting after it with various guys in her early 20s.

I was kind of surprised at getting a LJBF since it hadn’t happened to me for years by then, but all it took was right place, right time, a little social proof and the competition anxiety of other interested women, and I got the lay – which, by comparison at the time was kind of underwhelming. Still, I went back to pursuing her afterwards, got re-LJBF’d and I moved on to other plates.

8) Have you ever had a chick or chicks offering their pussy to you on a platter and you blew them off for whatever reason? And why? (i.e. they offered the pussy on a platter to you at a bar in conversation or even at your or their place and you blew them off.)

Yes, but mostly due to logistics rather than from spite or wanting to up the urgency with a girl as most guys think denying women sex will do. Most often it was because I had a better offer somewhere else or I was just plain tired. When it’s happened to me in the past the girl was a) on the cusp of my maximum weight limit, or b) there was something a bit off about her personally – as in she didn’t seem right mentally.

I once left a DTF girl in a hot tub because I just couldn’t bring myself to hitting that big of a girl (but, in her defense, I have what I think are exceptionally high physical standards for women)

9) How did you handle chicks who’ve flaked?

It depends on what time of life we’re talking about. In my younger, hungrier days, I tolerated flaking because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the medium was the message, and I thought it was caused by something I fucked up, which I guess it was. Later I simply didn’t care because I had other plates going at the time, but I found that the more options I had going (or had the potential to get going) the less women were likely to flake.

I go into it in Plate Theory, but there are a lot of subliminal behavioral cues a guy gives off (mostly unknowingly) when he’s seeing another (or more) woman that other women pick up on.

Mannerisms, attitude, vernacular, a guy with options just acts different than a guy with none. It’s like women pick up on the subcommunication of a guy who’s less invested in them and associate it with their sexual competition of women who might be interested in him.

10) Most plates you’ve spun at one time?

Actively (meaning I double shifted at the time) 4. Inactively 7 when I was about 23.

11) How did you handle a time of having no plates?

Again, that’s really a question of which time.

Between the ages of 17 and 21, I wouldn’t even consider seeing more than whatever girlfriend I had ONEitis for at the time. However, even before I met my wife, I had some irons in the fire, but when I didn’t I don’t think I worried too much about it since I knew I was probably just one party or gig or business event away from meeting some new talent.

I know a lot of guys get weird or depressed about a dry spell, but I was always kind of optimistic about having no plates because I enjoyed having the freedom to get with whomever, and I looked forward to meeting new women.

12) Dress style you use for going out on the town/ social functions?

I work in the liquor and casino industry so it depends on the event and what time of year it is. Nowadays if I’m out it’s usually because I’m at a promo, a new brand launch or some casino special event I’m involved with.

Lets just say that ‘business casual’ is neither. I either go loose or I go tight, but it really depends on the venue. Loose is jeans, some nice slip-ons, a stylish tailored button down, maybe a casual sport coat. If I’m tight it means I’m somewhere upscale or I’m with the people I work with, so I fall back on well tailored suits.

When you get older, style is much different than when you’re younger. What you wear at 22 is not what you wear at 42; there’s ways for men to capitalize on a maturity in style that women expect from men with the refinement that comes from maturity.

I’m probably not the best guy to hit up about style though – I think I spend way too much on what I could probably get cheaper. Christian McQueen is a better guy to ask about style.

13) Are you currently working out/exercising?

Always. I’m at the gym at 5-5:30am five days of the week, and I haven’t gone more than taking one week off from that schedule for about 15 years now. That may seem like dedication, but it’s really about convenience; early morning is the only time my schedule permits me to work out, and honestly I prefer working out in an empty gym.

For about the last 3 years I’ve been doing kind of a modified Max OT workout. I got into straight Max OT when I lived in Florida after a trainer friend suggested it to me.

I’m not overly huge to begin with, but once I started lifting heavier (and I mean heavy all the time) and my intensity went up, it helped me push past a plateau naturally. I put on a solid 8 lbs. of muscle inside of 4 months. Heh, I had to buy new pants because my thighs got bigger.

It’s probably not for everyone, I just know my body responded well to it. You do have to be careful of injury though, and not just in the lifts. I fucked up my back twice in about 2 years just getting cocky pulling heavier dumbbells off the rack. Just because your focused muscle group can do the lift doesn’t mean your other supporting muscles can. You gotta be careful.

14) For meeting chicks in the past which way was most successful in your point of view and have you tried all venues? Day, Social circle, Online social media/ Online dating, clubs, vacation, through family, work or whatever else.

Again, I’m probably not the best guy to ask about contemporary pickup Game. Back when I was inadvertently spinning plates, my Game at the time consisted of playing in various semi-pro bands and hooking up after a gig. I suppose that would amount to Night or Club Game now, but it was the environment I was in and familiar with. Most of my Game relied on social proof, DHV and looking the part. There was a definite ‘character role’ women liked that I played very well then.

It got to a point where I could get a girl to buy me a drink which I’d nurse for a bit while I talked her up. If I got the right IOIs from her I’d simply say something like “hey, our set’s coming up, watch my drink till I get back will ya?” If she was still there at the bar with my glass after an hour the girl was always DTF.

I should add that, later in life I became very apt at social circle Game, but again, that’s always going to be dependent on social proof, preselection and demonstrating higher value to get a third party endorsement of your SMV.

I know the popular presumption is that if a guy walks into a club/party/social gathering with a ‘hot girl who’s his friend’ it sends some magic preselection vibe to all the other women at the gathering. I’ve never found that to be true. Not that I doubt it happens, but rather if I’m somewhere with a woman (friend) who’s SMV is 1-2 points above the most attractive woman at the event, other women tend to get catty or figure if I can score her why would she bother with me?

There’s a fine line between the benefits of preselection and women simple feeling outclassed by a sexual competitor.

15) Have you ever went full “No Contact”? (Not expecting “results” of getting a chick back but simply cutting all ties.)

Oh yes. I really had no choice but to go no contact with the BPD girl I’d been with in my 20’s, but she’s really the only woman I’ve ever made a conscious effort never to contact again.

For other’s I think no contact really came down to my indifference to the women I really had no more interest in after some event. Though I didn’t do it intentionally, I was spinning plates and had other options to exercise so I’d just become occupied with another woman making no contact just a matter of course.

As I put forth in Plate Theory, non-exclusivity and maintaining your options is your best insurance against ONEitis, which in turn makes for a healthier frame of monogamy for a man later if that’s what you choose to do. No contact is easy when you’re genuinely indifferent to the girl you’re going no contact on.

16) How is married life going for you so far?

18 years on July 20th. I’ve only ever written a couple of direct posts about my marriage, but that’s mostly due to my not wanting men to view it as some model to aspire to. I understand my circumstance aren’t what most guy’s are, personally, family or career-wise, but I don’t for a minute believe I married the elusive unicorn of a woman.

I love Mrs. Tomassi more than anything in this world, we’re a very good match, and red pill awareness has only accented that good match. And for the record, yes, Mrs. Tomassi occasionally reads what I write here and has read my book.

17) Have you read the full DJ Bible? Or some of it/none of it/ participated in it?

The old version yes. The new version not entirely, but I have several of my old essays included in it. I still think it’s a pretty valuable resource for guys new to the red pill.

18) Have you ever met up with or talked to any SoSuave posters offline?

Yes, when I lived in Florida there were about six guys from the forum I used to meet occasionally for sushi or at one of my vodka brands’ promos. Beyond that I do email and (very rarely) phone consults with people who request them depending on my availability and ability to help at any given time.

For the record, I never charge money for a consult.

19) Favorite So Suave posters or posters on your site other blogs etc?

Gawd, I don’t want to play favorites, but in no particular order off the top of my head I think Deti, Dalrock, Novaseeker, Donalgraeme, Good Luck Chuck, Deepdish, Stingray, Morpheus, Han Solo, Obsidian, Mark Minter, Yohami, YaReally, Jeremy, Earl (yes Earl), LiveFree and even the commenters I most emphatically disagree with, all give me something new to think about.

20) How’s feedback coming along for your book, The Rational Male?

Better than I ever imagined. It’s been a success in everything I hoped it would be in the regard that it’s reaching men and helping change their minds and lives. My intent was never to make a load of cash from it, but rather to make it as accessible as possible to have the greatest reach possible and it’s more than done this after only 9 months.