Every so often I’m in the midst of considering an idea, sometimes even typing away at a draft, when the internet gods hand me the divine gift of an example of exactly the concept I’m attempting to make a bit more concrete. Today was one of those days.
59 year old Robin Korth made an effort in feigned indignation on the Huffington Post last Saturday. I can’t imagine most of my readers haven’t been made aware of it already since this story is making the rounds in the manosphere; Return of Kings and Chateau Heartiste were predictably first to the punch. Please do, at the very least, skim through these posts (they’re not long); they provide many more examples of red pill wisdom than just the points I’ll make today.
These blogs have already done an admirable job in dissecting Ms. Korth’s feminist boilerplate, male-shaming efforts so I don’t really feel the need to toss another log on that fire. Briefly though, Robin was upset that a 55 year old man she met online found her body beyond his threshold of physical arousal – in other words, she didn’t pass the boner test for him.
For all her self-induced self-perceptions of what she believed men should find attractive arousing about her, the man, Dave, was completely honest with her about his evaluation of her sexual market value. But as I’ve stated in prior threads, women say they want honesty, but they never want full disclosure.
Dave went so far as to make a counter offer, by making suggestions she might better present herself in a more sexy context for him to increase her arousal potential:
We talked for some time more, my head reeling at the content of the conversation. He spoke of special stockings and clothing that would “hide” my years. He blithely told me he loved “little black dresses” and strappy shoes. He said my hair was not long and flowing as he preferred, but that was okay because it was “cool looking.” I felt like a Barbie Doll on acid as I listened to this man. He was totally oblivious to the viciousness of his words. He had turned me into an object to be dressed and positioned to provide satisfaction for his ideas of what female sexual perfection should be.
He explained that now that I knew what was required, we could have a great time in the bedroom. I told him no. I would not hide from my own body. I would not wear outfits to make my body more “tolerable.” I would not undress in the dark or shower with the bathroom door closed. I would not diminish myself for him — or for anyone. My body is beautiful and it goes along with my mind and my heart.
I’m just going to take a moment here to point out a few notable observations.
Initially I assumed Dave was attempting to establish Frame, and maybe in a Beta way he was, but in doing so Dave is negotiating desire – his own desire, and this is equally ineffective when men do it from an advantage because eventually a man will realize he’s compromised his genuine passion and the woman will grow resentful.
Also, Dave makes the mistake of appealing to Robin’s reason – an obvious Beta tell. Like a properly conditioned Beta, Dave lays everything on the table in full disclosure. Most feminized men internalize the popular notion that women want to know and discuss the sexual things “they like” in order to pragmatically and rationally fulfill each other’s “needs.”
It’s counterintuitive for men to express what they like sexually, especially when this trope is taught to them as part of their ‘open communication’ (i.e. “the key to a great relationship”®) sensitivity training. What Robin was really upset with was less about his words and more about her hypergamous filters being tricked by a guy who ‘just doesn’t get it’ that a woman has to want to please a man.
Genuine, unnegotiated desire doesn’t work rationally or pragmatically.
If Dave had read The Gift he would know that buying for, or requesting that a woman wear lingerie is a Beta push. A woman buys and wears lingerie to please a Man for whom she has a desire to please – anything else is a form of negotiating desire.
However, Ms. Korth’s example is one of a commonly solipsistic woman who’s default presumption is that pleasing anyone but herself is self-diminishing servitude.
I can’t say as this comes as a shock – most properly conditioned women now feel that just cooking for a man is a form of submitting to, and appreciating him for, his authority (cooking has become the expectation of men to prove their worth in a fem-centric role reversal). Under the doctrine of egalitarian equalism any act of anything less than mutually autonomous independence has the potential to be turned into (the perception of) patriarchal domineering.
Conflating Values
One of the major problems women have, and more than even some red pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.
It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.
What Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.
It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.
From the Timeline of the Professional Woman:
This is the overreach of the feminine imperative – to attempt to thwart men’s biological predispositions by convincing them what they should find attractive and arousing in women. This becomes all the more ironic when you consider that the women the imperative would have men be attracted to are masculinized versions of women.
Feminist ‘equalism’ is always shocked that evolved human biology and its feral predispositions won’t cooperate with it, but such is the frustration with any social order or ideology which fails to account for the realities of human being’s natural states and biological imperatives. There is a conceived, higher-order expectation that, through freewill, conviction or some other learned, reasoned means, people will rise above the influence of their base nature and comply with what they believe will make for an idealized existence.
What egalitarian equalisim, struggles against is basic human instinct, nature and impulse.
Sexual Market Value vs. Personal Value
After two years since publishing it, my SMV chart continues to be a benchmark for manosphere / red pill theory and it’s extended beyond whatever humble hopes I had for it. However, it’s always been very contentious because it places a valuation on men and women according to the dictates of the sexual marketplace:
[…] however for our purposes today it is important to note that these valuations are meant to encompass an overall sexual value based on both long and short term breeding prospects, relational desirability, male provisioning capacity, female fertility, sexual desirability and availability, etc. et. al.. Your milage may vary, but suffice it to say the ten scale is meant to reflect an overall value as individuated for one sex by the other. Outliers will always be an element of any study, but the intent is to represent general averages here.
When you attempt to quantify any aspect of human ‘value’ you can expect to have your interpretations of it to be offensive to various people on the up or down side of that estimate. There is simply no escaping personal bias and the offense that comes from having one’s self-worth attacked, or even confirmed for them.
The first criticism I’ve come to expect is usually some variation about how evaluating a person’s SMV is “dehumanizing”, people are people, and have intrinsic worth beyond just the sexual. To which I’ll emphatically agree, however, this dismissal only conveniently sidesteps the realities of the sexual marketplace.
Again, sexual market value is not personal value. Personal value, your value as a human being however one subjectively defines that, is a definite component to sexual market value, but separating the two requires an often uncomfortable amount of self-analysis. And, as in Ms. Korth’s experience here, this often results in denial of very real circumstances, as well as a necessary, ego-preserving, cognitive dissonance from that reality.
Denial of sexual market valuation is a psychological insurance against women losing their controlling, sexual agency in their hypergamous choices.
You Shouldn’t Know This Stuff!
I recently read a story on the Red Pill Reddit forum about a guy who’s girlfriend discovered my book he’d been reading. She began picking through various sections and, expectedly, got really pissed off at the chapters on SMV (the chart in particular). They both discussed the parts she’d read and she admitted she wanted to read the whole thing, but from what they talked about she confessed that there wasn’t really anything she disagreed with.
Her words were, “You men shouldn’t know this stuff!”
It wasn’t that she was irritated by the sections of the book, but rather the fact that men might become aware of women’s sexual strategies as laid bare by the SMV sections and chart.
In the most visceral, biological sense, the primary value of women to men is sex. Almost a year ago I was involved in a lively blog discussion about how men sexually size up women within the space of a glance. Either a woman has sexual potential or she doesn’t. Women like to complain that this is sexual objectification, but men’s brains are literally wired to do exactly this. When we see an arousing woman it triggers the parts of our brains involved with tool manipulation – that’s a feature, not a bug, of the male sexual response.
That may seem shallow or dehumanizing, but just because sexual valuation is a prime value for women it doesn’t mean it’s their only value – in fact far from it. However, there is a distinction between the two, but there’s is a definite utility to women’s interest in maintaining their hypergamous selectivity when they conflate the two together, or deny / reject the validity of sexual market value altogether.
This is what Ms. Korth, and countless other women who share her mindset, has illustrated here. The reality is that a man, Dave, is separating her sexual market value from her estimation of her personal self-worth (inflated and exaggerated as it may be). Robin mistakenly believes her self-impression should be her sexual market value, but this simply isn’t, and never will be, the case.