SMV

Archetypes

archetypes

Law 17

Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

In Law 17 Robert Greene hits upon a human dynamic that has much broader implications than a useful tool for power. Of course Dread – whether a passive acknowledgement or an overt display – is rooted in this principle, but the fundamental dynamic is that humans have an inherent ability to perceive patterns in nature.

It’s comforting for us to know what to expect in both people and our environments. It gives us a certain sense of security to have things remain consistent, but it also allows us to better pick out and isolate exceptions to that consistency. In a herd of brown cows we can better avoid or prefer the lone purple cow in the field.

It’s important to understand this basic need in humans because it’s both an aid and a hinderance to a Red Pill awareness. Dread works because when it’s applied, or even when it’s simply a new perception, what a woman is being forced to recognize is an inconsistency in what she’s come to expect about a man she’s familiar with. When a husband (or a wife) takes on an interest in hitting the gym where previously he’d had none before, the imaginings this prompts is the triggered result of seeing an inconsistency in a previously reliable behavior pattern.

We are creatures of habit, so when that habit is replaced by another behavior this then becomes the purple cow in a field of brown cows. I’ve stated this in many prior posts, but familiarity, comfort and rapport are anti-seductive elements in a man’s Game. This is one of the first areas I try to address with men trapped in a sexless LTR. Most Beta conditioned men believe that a woman needs to be comfortable with him before she’s willing to sleep with him and are then dumbfounded by how quickly she bangs the hot guy in the foam cannon party in Cancun on Spring Break.

These men believe that consistency in behavior will lead to their becoming intimate with a woman – this is a principle of Beta Game that’s reinforced by women with a ‘plan’ for him. However, it’s important to bear in mind that this comfort and familiarity is based on establishing a pattern of behavioral consistency; a pattern women really have no capacity to appreciate.

That’s not cut on women per se, but women’s lack of being able to appreciate a man’s consistency is founded in the same human want to experience security in the environment. Thus the anomaly is what’s appreciated; the ‘hawt’ guy in the right place at the right time who “she wouldn’t normally do this with”.

Bucking the Meta

Men’s unlearned, deductive Game derives from efforts to appear unique amongst the herd. This is the foundation of all Game really. Early PUAs identified the base utility in principles like Peacocking, being Cocky & Funny and mastering the art of Negging because their willingness to experiment with the boldness necessary to do so (often with women they perceived were above their SMV level) set them apart from the masses of men who’s Game was based on the comfort, rapport and familiarity women had told them would make them attractive all their lives.

These early PUA were bucking the meta game of the time. Women were (and mostly still are) accustomed to being pandered to by ‘Nice’ guys, ready and pre-programmed to defer to, respect and pedestalize them by virtue of their being a woman. Thus the anomaly, the man undisposed to that deference, who reverses her expectations of him qualifying to her becomes the purple cow.

Statistically Beta men are the common herd, but this isn’t what they believe of themselves. What that Beta  believes his herd is is what makes his efforts fail and traps him in the plan of the Feminine Imperative. He believes he is the purple cow, but that belief is what makes him common.

That Beta man makes his efforts about adhering to what a fem-centric culture has convinced him will make him unique. He believes he’s bucking the meta; a meta environment he’s convinced is overwhelmingly populated with insensitive Alpha assholes. He believes the Alpha Men (women love to hate) are the common herd and the more he is alike with women and his behavior is more consistent than the Alpha ‘douchebags’ the more he will appear unique amongst them.

Archetypes

I’ve been asked on many occasions about my impressions of Vox Day’s now manosphere-common referencing of different sub-types of men as Alpha, Beta, Delta, Sigma, Omega, etc. I had Goldmund ask me about these classifications when we had dinner last week and I had to admit that I’m much more of a reductionist when it comes to delineating and Alpha mindset from a Beta mindset.

I’ve always been impressed with Vox’s thinking and observations, and I do think his classifications have a definite merit as useful models for abstract personality types, but I have to also temper that by saying these classifications are by no means absolutes. I say that because I know that humans have an insatiable desire to see consistency and familiarity in people. For the better part that want to interpret patterns is generally reliable in predicting behavior, but that isn’t to say personality is ever static.

Robert Greene works his own personality archetypes into the first half of his book The Art of Seduction. He too categorizes different seduction types in an effort to make their strategies more understandable – The Dandy, The Natural, The Rake, etc. And again, these are very useful archetypes upon which Greene builds and applies examples of how each uses various seduction strategies more or less effectively.

While generalizations are always a necessary tool in a broader understanding of a dynamic it’s important to grasp that the archetype you believe you embody are neither static nor deterministic. As I’ve stated before, Alpha and Beta are mindsets, not demographics. We’ve recently had an interesting debate about how uncommon it is for men to break their Beta cycle, and how rare it is for a man to change his stars. I’d like to address this by saying that personality is never static.

Over the years I’ve evolved from naive Beta high school chump to unwitting Alpha semi-pro rock star, to simpering Omega crushed by a BPD woman, to a lesser Alpha husband / father, to an Alpha businessman, artist, and successful brand owner – those are demographics. You could’ve placed me in many of Vox and Greene’s personality types along my progression to who I am today, and my Game evolved with what I adapted to and what proved successful (or so I thought) for me then.

But when I distill it down to an essence, what shifted for me in all these instances wasn’t the label I would’ve applied to myself, but rather what mindset I adopted at that time – Alpha or Beta. The results of my Alpha or Beta impression of myself became what I was. This is why I’m more of a reductionist in this respect. A want for consistency makes archetypes comforting, but there is never growth, there is never arousal or stimulation in comfort.

Equalism in the Meta

I should also address that the prevailing ideology of egalitarian equalism hates the idea of easy archetypes (even though it fluidly applies its own). The easy observation of course is that if all are equal blank slates then categorizing people by personality type smacks of profiling and denying the individual in a state of equality. However the real flaw in the equalist philosophy comes from an ego-investment in a blank slate state that doesn’t allow for ‘types’.

While critics in the manosphere see this categorization as deterministic and incapable of changing, the equalist chafes at the idea that people could be too predictably alike in type and behavior.

Preferences

In Women’s Physical Standards I briefly outlined the concept of men’s fetishization of their ‘type’ preferences when it comes to women:

You see, men will very readily cater their physical sexual “preferences” in accordance with what has proven sexually successful for them in past experiences. In other words, men tend to return to the same watering hole they found to be plentiful in the past. These preferences of convenience manifest themselves as ‘fetishes’ for men. And you don’t even need all that extensive research to prove this.  All one need do is search the vast variety of porn available catering to the physical attributes that men will fetishize. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass, small ass, every hair color of the rainbow, shaved snatch, hairy snatch, teen girls to MILFs and older, tan, pale, ultra-thin to the ubiquitous BBWs (Big Beautiful women). Ladies, name the physical attribute(s), and there’s a fan-group just waiting to bang you. Rule 34 was never more provable than in men’s willingness to fuck damn near any physical demographic of women – just ask the female midgets catering to that fetish of porn.

Men tend to stick with the same breeding circumstances that proved successful in the past. Again, this is another function of the want of a predictability in pattern and behavior. It’s the Watering Hole Theory as I stated here; we go back to what worked for us before.

Men’s deductive, rational nature when it comes to problem solving is both a blessing and a curse in this respect. The problem inherent in repeating the pattern in order to extract a similar success runs the risk of a man being trapped by what he believes are his “natural ”  preference for a certain ‘type’ of woman – the type who would eventually fuck him.

We may fetishize these preferences and thus men believe their only options for sex and intimacy with a woman get pared down to archetypes of women – Goths, Plain Janes, single mothers, big “beautiful” women, etc. become the ‘type’ that will fuck him. They become his ‘preference’, but in the same way men consider the deterministic nature of applying archetypes to themselves, rarely do they consider the archetype of woman their conditions and self-image predispose them to.

Most men don’t see the link between physical types and personality types. In other words they don’t really grasp why they like what they like. A fem-centric society, with the imperative of keeping a man ignorant of it, will offer him the easy answer that his desires, his very arousal cues, aren’t ‘natural’ at all. Rather they’re the result of a nebulous “society” programming him to only respond to what makes a woman less able to compete and consolidate on a man.

In reality physical and personality preferences can differ according to what was priorly successful for him, as well as what a man understands about himself (maturity, SMV peak potential) and what women have or lack in contrast to that.

Law 25

Re-Create Yourself

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

I began this essay with the truth that others will always want to see a consistency in your behavior. It’s interesting when you consider this and how flashes of Alpha tend to both shock and excite women expecting a Beta response from you in a confrontational instance.

Both men and women want what they expect from you consistently. Granted, the comfort of the pattern is part of human nature, but the categorization that comes from it is often a way to keep you trapped in the role others expect of you. One reason I advocate that there is no “Beta with a side of Alpha” is because the inconsistent side of that equation is never believable. Women want that consistency to keep you in the role they expect of you.

Men struggling in Dead Bedroom marriages, or ones in which the power/authority dynamic defaults to their wives fight an unenviable, uphill battle to reclaim the Alpha respect their wives really want from them. It’s a difficult situation because the believability of that change doesn’t happen in an instant, it takes the progressive establishment of consistent behavior changes. A sudden switch from Beta servitude to Alpha respect from a woman never happens. What’s necessary is a persistent, slow, believable change in the pattern she’s expecting.

Interview with Goldmund

Last week I got a tweet from fellow manosphere blogger Goldmund Unleashed informing me that he’d be making a slight detour to his ‘American Tour‘ as it were and he wanted to visit me in Reno. Far be it from me not to play the gracious host, I put him up at one of my clubs for a couple nights and we got together for dinner and talked a bit.

After we’d finished and were heading back to the club Goldmund asked if I’d be down for an impromptu interview. My time was limited, but I thought what the hell, and we ended up doing a quick half hour talking on the video of his SLR camera and a little mic he had. It was early evening and the high dessert was cooling off so I just pulled over to a spot I thought might do.

What follows here is what we discussed.

I generally don’t do video ‘appearances’, but Goldmund is doing what I can only describe as touring documentary of the manosphere as he makes his circuit around the United States, so I felt compelled to do this one. He’s making a herculean effort in this ‘On the Road’ trip and I had to make sure his stay here was comfortable and worthwhile. This isn’t some new foray in my going public; I thought my readers would appreciate this.

On Goldmund’s blog Jack Raynor left this comment and I thought it might make for an interesting discussion:

On the topic of being, instead of acting (which I’m 100% in agreement with), my current position is that this isn’t something that is possible for all men, or even “most”…

Just like the behavioral differences between males and females are the results of inborn traits (and these traits’ adaptations to the environment), not just “socialization” (the blank slate hypothesis), the behavioral differences from one male to the next are likewise the results of such inborn traits. These things can be…tweaked, but how far?

I, for example, have had an easy time with the red pill because I’ve have always had a rather shallow emotional response. My own brother, however, has always had a terrible temper. (He takes after my father much more in that regard.) As he’s matured he’s learned to get it under control a little, but it’s still there. He’s even gotten into Buddhism, but it hasn’t suppressed it completely. The difference between us is significant enough that he claims that I’m a natural born Buddhist, even though I don’t know the first thing about Buddhism…

This thought of mine originated while getting more involved in the conversation on r/theredpill. I’ve observed individuals who talk about the fact that, try as they might, they can’t get their emotions under control enough to keep up the act for long periods of time , much less to simply “be”.

Any thoughts on this?

Let me know what you think.

That was then

wait_for_me

Rollo Tomassi confession time: There was a time when I was in my late teens to right before I was 21 when I would’ve easily married one of my first LTR girlfriends. My Beta conditioned state of mind was such then that I would’ve launched headlong into what would surely have been a tragic marriage based on Blue Pill naiveté and changing the course of my life.

I made a special effort to cover the commonalities of this period in what I called the Break Phase in my second book and from the Preventive Medicine series of posts. It’s a dangerous time for young men feminized and conditioned to put women’s imperatives, ambitions and support above their own. This eagerness to please and put off his own future ambitions (the ones he allows himself to entertain) is the result of an acculturation process that prioritizes identification with the feminine and sacrificial supportiveness of any woman’s ambition he may be paired with during these ages.

Often this is the first time in his life he has the real opportunity to prove his dedication to a girlfriend by arranging his life around her goals – goals that are based on her own acculturation of female empowerment and entitlement. Sometimes this drive comes from a young man wanting to out-support the performance his father dismally failed at with his victimized mother, but mostly it comes from a thorough Blue Pill conditioning that assures him the old set of books are the rule set women can be expected to follow.

This is the crux of it; he is at his most eager to please while she is just coming into realizing what her sexual market value peak can leverage for her. Don’t assume that this leveraging is strictly based on securing things for herself, but rather what her impulses are leading her to. The time at which young men are their most ready to be “the perfect boyfriend / husband” is usually when young women want monogamy the least. Young men’s Blue Pill idealism is generally unblemished by having it betrayed at this point.

When I was passing through this time I was ready to suspend, postpone or simply abandon the ambitions I wanted for myself then just for the prospect of securing a girlfriend, wife, LTR, stable and lively source of sex and intimacy.

How could I not? I’d been conditioned my whole life up to that point to believe in the Disney fairytale that had me believe if I could just do more for a woman, be more like a woman, be sensitive to her feelings, and do everything in my very limited power to help her achieve her dreams she would appreciate the effort and the sacrifice and reciprocate with her own genuine love, sex and devotion to me.

Naturally the Blue Pill had convinced me that men and women shared a mutual concept of love and that my burden of performance was only based on how well I could help a woman rise above the horrible injustices that my poisoned gender had ruthlessly perpetrated on womankind in the centuries before I was born.

I’m thankful I was spared from the worst consequences of that delusion. I know too many men today who did just what I would’ve then. Most are on their 2nd or 3rd marriage, with kids from the first or second and still wondering how it went so wrong for them. They all either forced that fantasy to happen for themselves or paired with a girl who simply hadn’t come to understand her SMV during that period before she said “I do.” Almost to the man, these men’s wives went through what I describe in Making Up for Missing Out.

It’s not to say that I didn’t take the sting of rejection during that time, but I’m glad to have been rejected in light of so many men’s experiences for making their Blue Pill dreams come true.

Wait For Me

It’s ironic that the time at which young men are most eager to put on the yoke of what the Blue Pill has conditioned them for is the same time women want it the least. As I mentioned in Dream Killers:

The truth however is that the longer you remain uncommitted, the more opportunities will be available to you. It’s been stated by wiser Men than I that women are dream-killers – and while I agree with this, I’d say this is due more to the man involved, and their own complicity and apathy, than some grand scheme of women.

[…]Women are dream killers. Not because they have an agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.

I recently read a forum post from a young man who was lamenting his ‘friend zone’ state with a girl. I had to laugh because I’d heard his ONEitis girl’s exact same words, verbatim, when I was about 19 or 20. She said to him,

“You’re such a great guy, but I’m not ready for a relationship right now. How about this, if neither of us is married when we’re 30 we’ll get married, ok?”

Hearing this negotiation now at 47 I have to laugh sardonically; it’s the same ‘deal’ I’d been offered at 20. At 47 I can see the machinations behind it – “Hey Beta chump, I like your dedication to the Disneyland narrative, and you’ll make for a dutiful and lucrative supporter once I’m 30 and done with the Alphas I really want to fuck while I’m in my prime, so how about you and I get married once I’m ready to finally ‘get it right with the right guy who was there all along’ okay?”

In other words, wait for me and be my Plan B guy just in case, ok?

What makes this unfunny is that at 20, young men want to believe the best of women. They want to believe she really thinks he’s so special she wont be able to not marry him and fulfill his Beta programming at 30,…so long as he’s patient. He wants to believe her earnestness because to do otherwise would be to judge her, and that, he’s been taught, is the worst thing a man can do no matter what choices she makes. What makes it unfunny is he actually considers it as a viable option for his life.

What also makes it unfunny is that on some level of consciousness this negotiation, this very long game, is something a woman pre-plans in her head. She knows at 20 years old that she’ll need her Beta-in-waiting. It’s not serendipity that she’ll find a Beta ready to out-support and out-forgive the other guys of her “crazy mixed up past” or her “journey of self-discovery”, no, she has it planned a decade before. It may not be a conscious acknowledgement at the time, but the expectation is there long before she comes into her SMV peak and the years just before her Epiphany Phase.

Beta Idealists and the Endgame

But at the time, young men want to believe it. There’s a certain satisfaction in the prospect that the ‘happily ever after’ will be fulfilled in the future. Of course during that time it’s vital a man disabuse himself of that fantasy, become Red Pill aware and see the ‘deal‘ for what it really is – an insult to him.

For my part that came from not wanting to wait around and learning how to get laid like I wanted to. That period of my life had some great moments as well as some pit of misery ones, but I learned, I grew; and had that girl actually been unmarried at 30 instead of a divorced single mother of two when I got there, I still wouldn’t have married her.

It’s an insult to a man’s masculine nature because it presumes he’d in any way be an attractive choice for his steadfastness. Any guy who’d even entertain the insult only confirms his Beta, optionless and destitute status to a woman who’s already planning to follow the dictates of her Hypergamy. He’s the sure thing, and his Blue Pill conditioning would convince him that his burden of performance is predicated on his perseverance, when in fact it just verifies him as a guy who Just Doesn’t Get It.

Again from Dream Killers:

I tend to promote the idea that Men should be sexually and emotionally non-exclusive until age 30, but this is a minimal suggestion. I think 35 may even serve better for Men. The importance being that as a Man ages and matures in his career, his ambitions and passions, his personality, his ability to better judge character, his overall understanding of behavior and motivations, etc. he becomes more valuable to the most desirable women and therefore enjoys better opportunity in this respect. Women’s sexual value decreases as they age and it’s at this point the balance tips into the maturing Man’s favor. It’s the Men who realize this early and understand that bettering themselves in the now will pay off better in the future while still enjoying (and learning from) the opportunities that come from being non-exclusive and non-commital make him a Man that women will compete for in the long term.

One of the first things I have to explain to a young guy about the Red Pill is that what he believes is so vitally important to him in the now will be rendered meaningless in only a few years. I can only try to explain to him how his idealism about holding together his now long distance relationship with his high school girlfriend will change and decay, but at this age and with his Blue Pill conditioning it’s very hard to communicate.

The Break Phase is an all or nothing prospect when it comes to helping a young man unplug himself. Unfortunately it usually takes the trauma of a breakup (made all the worse due to his investment in a Blue Pill fantasy) and confronting the reality his girlfriend is experiencing in college and her coming into her peak SMV years.

What he lacks is the insight and experience to fully grasp his situation. One reason the Sandbergian plan for Hypergamy reaches its limit around a woman’s Epiphany Phase is because it’s at this critical point that a man can more or less be expected to be a better judge of a woman’s character – or at least that’s the anxiety that the Wall engenders in women.

This point also coincides with a woman’s SMV decaying, whilst his is on the ascent to being realized. There’s a lot riding for her on a man remaining ignorant of the Game that’s been played for the past decade. Ironically it’s this same ignorance, the one she needs him to retain for so long, that makes him unattractive and ultimately unsuitable as long term prospect she can be aroused by or respect.

Thus we see the infancy of this anxiety in her earlier years when she asks her “perfect boyfriend” to wait for her until she’s ready for him to serve her necessity. She plans ahead with the ending in mind.

 

Our Sisters’ Keeper

sister's_keeper

“Men are to blame for women’s behavior. The Feminine Imperative only has as much power as men have allowed it to have. Hypergamy (open or otherwise) wouldn’t be the unrestrained social juggernaut it’s become without men’s complicity or accomplice.”

This quote is a go-to rationalization I read a lot from women just coming to terms with their first taste of the Red Pill. Unfortunately it’s also become a common refrain among certain sets in the manosphere; this rationale is usually particular to the moral absolutist strains of the manosphere.

When I read it from women it’s kind of ironic considering it usually comes from women who share in the same moral absolutism, who were “so different when they were in college”, but they’ve had their Epiphany and “got right with God.” They often cling to the Strong Independent® identity for themselves, but turn over a rock and show them the visceral, observable, ugly truth of unfettered Hypergamy and then, then it’s men’s partial or total responsibility for fostering women’s conditions.

It becomes men’s fault for not having the fortitude and presence of mind to correct them when they needed it – never mind the lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning that taught them judging women made them misogynistic assholes. I understand axiom that men and women get the men and women they deserve, but I wanted to explore this blame game dynamic a bit more.

From Validation Hunting & The Jenny Bahn Epiphany:

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.

As I was writing the Adaptations series it occurred to me that men on the ends of both the Alpha and Beta spectrum adapt their own sexual strategies in accord with the sexual marketplace and how that environment dictates the approach to what seems the most efficient.

As I stated in the last post, Hypergamy is nothing if not pragmatic, and efficient. However, men’s adapting to the “market” dictates of Hypergamy has to be equally efficient if that guy is to fulfill his own sexual imperative. Pragmatism doesn’t have time for how things should be. You make the best play with what’s in front of you.

Just to illustrate, for about 25 years or so, popular culture strongly pointed men towards a sexual strategy that could be defined as Beta Game. Play nice, respect a woman by default, be supportive of her self-image and ambitions to the sacrifice of your own, don’t judge her and do your utmost to identify with the feminine, was the call to action that, deductively, should make a man more attractive to a woman.

Furthermore, the intrasexual combat amongst men for sexual qualification was (at least ostensibly) focused on out-supporting, out-sympathizing, out-emoting and out-identifying with the feminine more so than other men. To set oneself apart from “other guys” the seemingly most strategic tact was to accept what women said they wanted from men. To pragmatically effect this men gladly joined the chorus of ridiculing conventional masculinity; denouncing and resisting the very element that would in fact have set them apart from the nebulous “other guys“.

So while this is an illustration of men’s deductive pragmatism in their adapting to the SMP, it’s also an illustration of how that adaptation can work against men’s best interests. Between the 80s, 90s and into the early 2000s this adaptation involved men following women’s lead to systematically turn conventional, positive masculinity into ridiculous or gay-associations of “macho-ness”. Later, defining the very idea of masculinity would progress from ambiguousness to women being the sole authority of what masculinity should mean to a man.

Women and Moral Agency

For as long as I’ve read and commented on Christo-Manosphere blogs a common thread has cropped up again and again; the debate as to whether women have the same moral agency or the same accountability for it as men. I’ve always found it fascinating because for all my dealing in cold harsh observable facts I’ve never paused to consider that women might have some excusable reason for their ethically challenged behavior. In my own estimate Hypergamy isn’t inherently bad or good – it just depends on whether you find yourself on the sharp end of it.

My point here isn’t to reheat that debate, but rather to see how it feeds into the rationale that men are in some way responsible for what contemporary women have become, and how they’ll progress if men don’t assume some responsibility for women’s behaviors.

Hypergamy is pragmatic, but it’s also inherently duplicitous. It’s unjust and unforgivable to a guy who doesn’t measure up to his burden of performance. When you consider the War Brides dynamic it’s downright reprehensible, but we have to also consider the pragmatism in that dynamic. From a male perspective we want to apply masculine concepts of honor and justice to women’s action – and in the past there was a high price to pay for infractions of it – but are we presuming our concept of justice is one that’s universally common to that of women?

Much in the same way we were Blue Pill conditioned to presume that our idealistic concept of love was mutually shared by women I would propose that men’s concepts of justice, honor, and (from an intrasexual perspective) respect are dissimilar from those of women.

For women, whatever actions serve Hypergamy are justifiable actions.

All that needs to be sorted out is reconciling those action with the concept of justice held by men. In the intersexual arena, what best serves men’s imperatives is justice. Up until the sexual revolution the balance between the sexes’ concepts of justice was mitigated by mutual compromise – each had something to lose and something to gain by considering the other sex’s imperatives.

For roughly the past 70 years this balance between the two concepts has listed heavily to the feminine. Our age has been defined by women’s unilateral and ubiquitous control of Hypergamy, and as such it is women’s sexual imperatives that is biologically and sociologically setting the course for future generations.

Along with that unprecedented control comes the prioritizing of women’s concept of justice above that of men’s. We can see this evidenced in every law, social convention or social justice movement that entitles women to rights and privileges that free them of any accountability for the negative consequence their Hypergamously based behavior would hold them to in a concept of justice that men would have.

I would also argue that women’s inherent solipsism reinforces this separation of concepts of justice between the sexes.

Rivelino had a good take on this on Twitter:

1 The woman is always the victim

2 Nothing is her fault

3 She is not responsible for her actions

4 A man is to blame

To which I’ll add a 5th: Any fault is always a ‘strength’.

The problem I see in assigning the blame of women’s behavior to men’s lack of control is that, presently, men have no real control nor does men’s concept of justice align with that of women. There’s a manosphere idiom that says women are the gatekeepers of sex while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. I’m not sure I completely agree with that.

That’s not to be defeatist, or an endorsement of a MGTOW course of action, but it is to say that if a man has neither the sex appeal to be a short term sexual prospect nor the provisioning appeal to be a long term investment, women feel entirely justified in acting in the best interests of Hypergamy and controlling his capacity for commitment as well.

And yes, that’s pretty fucked up if you, again, find yourself on the sharp end of it. Men’s adapting to the intersexual conditions set by women isn’t some deterministic prospect, but the idea that the mass majority of men would be responsible for the state women find themselves in is ludicrous. There will always be men willing to accept the sexual dictates of women because it serves their breeding imperatives. It’s good for him personally and it’s good for the species.

There will never be some global Lysistrata where men organize in solidarity, promising not to fuck another woman until they comply with demands that would place the Masculine Imperative above that of the feminine’s. Our own biology guarantees it.

Personal Responsibility

On a final note here, whenever I delve into the ethical implications of Red Pill awareness I invariably run into the personal responsibility equation. I do my best to make as coldly rational an observation of dynamics I see and allow my readers to make their own judgements. However, those observation are never intended to excuse the behaviors men and women find themselves prone to acting out.

There is always a want on the part of either sex to see their concept of justice enacted on those who would act against it. Thus you get honor killing in the Muslim world, and you have men’s access to the DNA testing of children they suspect aren’t their own denied in the “best interest of the child.”

So are men to blame for the conditions they find their women in? Are we our sisters’ keepers, hamstrung by our own culpability to actually help them be better women? Or do they bear the responsibility to conform to our perspective of justice and police the worst impulses of a Hypergamy most are only peripherally aware of?

 

Hats Off to the Bull

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CH maxim: The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality

The following is a story from the Red Pill subredd:

My all too true story goes like this: years ago in my divorce my wife basically stopped having sex with me. The lack of sex was in line with her seemingly having a problem with anything I did (be it how I dressed, how I told jokes, and more). …Note: sex was once every two months or so if that.

I tried to talk to her about how it seemed we just weren’t getting along that well. She said we were getting along just fine. The only problem was me. Per my wife I had UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS about married life after 15 years of being together and with kids running around. Her work demands also helped make sex a low priority for her. She was too tired in the evening. The kids were up in the morning. The weekends were needed to catch up on house stuff and spend time with the kids. Vacations were also “kid” time. The twist she put on it was DIDN’T I LOVE THE KIDS?

Another problem I had (per my wife) was that was I was TOO SENSITIVE. My “whining” about the lack of sex and closeness was proof of this.

[Game note: If I were to consider another Iron Rule of Tomassi it would be this: Never complain, whine, negotiate, or otherwise attempt to appeal to a woman’s reason by explaining your need for sex, intimacy or “closeness”. Nothing demonstrates lower value and reconfirms a woman’s Beta perception of you than openly complaining, or explaining, about your sexless status.

This is not exclusively for married men. Rank Beta men will often make these “dryspell appeals” to female friends who then talk to their other friends and pass on your DLV impression to them.]

Unfortunately, I bought her story line and internalized it. I self-censored, essentially stopping my complaining about no sex and just accepted it. I was less accepting of her poor day-to-day treatment of me but even on that point I tried not to complain too much (not wanting to come across as “whiny”).

And I was pro-active about trying to make our marriage better. I tried my best to be positive about things. I even kept a diary to keep myself honest. I did more chores around the house. I more and more let her have things her way. And I was already in quite good physical shape. I made myself even more so.

And the end result of all this? Turns out my wife had been having secret affairs for years. She was having sex 4 or 5 times a week with her lovers (lunch time, quickies after work in a park, the beach locker, the driveway at night, etc.) Her story line on “my problems” had mostly just been bullshit to keep me at bay so she could continue her secret affairs. As she told me at the tail end of our divorce in a moment of candor, the “forbidden fruit” of extramarital sex was “very exciting”. Her longest term lover (3 years) had just been a play thing and only ended when he asked her to marry him (not realizing he was also being “cheated” on with another lover my wife had).

Next up is TRM reader Razorwire who came strong with this comment from the Adaptations II thread:

[…] I’d say by now the societal and personal risks are negligible for pretty much any decision made by women. So these days, the delay of the beta-bucks model is extended to encompass a starter marriage or having children. The cuckold window is wide open.

I’ve seen this in fellow genXers who actually married young (by todays standards) but of course those men turned out to be jerks or were too irresponsible or selfish (all of the things that got her wet) so they divorced and she quickly locked down the beta-bux who was likely her “friend” back in college or some “nice” co-worker she met in her three-year career with the insurance company.

I went to one such wedding a couple of summers ago. Now that they have a kid and she’s realized the full potential of the AF/BB transition, she can’t (or doesn’t bother to) hide her disdain for his niceness and general lack of alpha behavior. He’s a dead man walking.

On that note, I caught a trailer of an upcoming Will Ferrell film: “Daddy’s Home.” Frames it up nicely.

While I’m sure they will have some hollywood make-believe ending in which the biological dad realizes his loss, has to confront manhood (as defined by the FI), and is jealous/admiring of the stepdad for his honorable provisioning of the kids, the interesting part of the trailer was how it focused on the two “dads” competing for the love and attention of the kids. I’m sure it is funny, but also telling.

Not only is the Sandberg stepdad supposed to be a just-in-time dad to fulfill the equalist needs of the post-wall (and in this case – post reproduction) wife, but he is also expected to pedestalize and perform for the offspring of the cad in order to earn (and keep) his place as the settle-down guy in the eyes of the wife. He must keep winning his way through the consolation bracket for a wife who has not just achieved the AF/BB transition, but has done so after capturing the genetics of the Alpha. He doesn’t even “get” the beta bucks prize of breeding.

The dwindling societal pressure to honor marital commitments and minimal shame of divorce has allowed the delay of beta bucks to blow past birth control in terms of prevention into what is now birth control in terms of actualizing female preference for the AF offspring – with rapidly decreasing risk/impact on her ability to secure the Beta Bux stepdad or post-baby-daddy husband (because now marriage means something to her.)

With, of course, big daddy gov’t as a stand in. But I’d reckon that the attractive single moms are not struggling at all to parlay into BB.

Because they aren’t his kids the stepdad’s burden of performance includes purchasing/exchanging resources for the children’s love which is one more condition he must continually meet in order to maintain her conditional love. Talk about a fleeting proposition.

Peruse any online dating site and you will see the teaser advertising for this coming from all single moms. It’s really just “must love dogs” on crack but often with more bait n switch mechanisms.

Meanwhile the perpetual competition (between you and him) merely deepens the resource pool for her to leverage into her lifestyle and security.

One man is operating under the threatpoint of divorce, the other under the legal extortive aspects of the post-divorce financial fatherhood model. Both must pay to play. Both are subject to her approval, her terms – backed by the social and legal structure. As such, neither are actually fathers, but just offshoots of motherhood channeled through provisioning and conditional exchanges.

I’d say even with the extensive provisioning (the kids in this flick have it all), the kids are still getting the shit end of it. Two marginalized dads is still less than one Father, one marriage. They are just being indoctrinated into the consumerist, fem-centric, self-indulgent model of modern marriage.

A mom who goes full AF/BB with kids in tow may get sold as the heroines journey, but it still strikes me as deeply selfish.

We had an interesting discussion in this thread about modern cuckoldry and the rise of it becoming ‘fetishized’ for men as some new form of ‘alternative’ lifestyle. I’ll get into the grisly biological nuts and bolts of this later, but before I do the practical reasonings for a societally acceptable cuckoldry need to be highlighted.

I chose Razorwire’s comment and the story above to illustrate a fundamental Red Pill truth – Hypergamy is nothing if not pragmatic.

In a larger respect, a woman optimizing Hypergamy follows a predictable schedule, but as Razorwire points out, on a psychological level it also builds fail-safe contingencies into that schedule. Root level, largely subconscious, survival/parental investment insecurities and long term insurances against them drives this pragmatism. Thus we see operative social conventions carefully prepared to excuse and absolve women’s duplicitous behaviors in both a social and personal scope.

What benefits a female sexual strategy is forgivable and prudent in a fem-centric social order no matter what the personal consequences are. Women’s default victimhood status is their strongest insurance against those consequences while what benefits men’s sexual strategy is characterized as selfish, juvenile or criminal. These characterizations, and the social conventions that are an extension of them, are part of the pragmatism of Hypergamy.

When you look at the time line I presented in the Preventative Medicine book and series, and you get to the stages just before and just after a woman’s Epiphany Phase – the phase at which a woman’s subconscious understanding that her SMV decline has begun in earnest – you begin to see a bigger picture; a meta overview of the necessity of keeping Blue Pill men ignorant of their long term role in that strategy.

While women increasingly embrace Open Hypergamy and become increasingly more confident of their capacity to satisfy both sides of it (AF/BB) due to a presumed expectation for men to also openly support it, there comes less expectation to try to optimize Hypergamy with only one man.

The Future of Hypergamy is Cuckoldry

The following quote came from a fantastic essay one of Heartiste’s readers, Chris, submitted regarding the recent gay marriage ruling:

I don’t know many men who would sign up to an institution where the partners are expected/morally obliged to be emotionally faithful but not sexually faithful. It is much easier for women to get casual sex than men, so any man signing himself up to that deal would be signing himself up for cuckoldry and cuckoldry is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a man pursuing a long-term mating strategy, (and it is the evolved moral norms surrounding the long-term mating strategy which marriage as a cultural institution is/was developed around/for.)

Of course, if people became more knowledgeable about evo-bio/evo-psych and instead started calling marriage essentially what it is, the social-codification of the long-term mating strategy in humans, then this concern wouldn’t really matter. (No worrying about importing norms anti-thetical to the reproductive interests of one party in the relationship and subsequently which disincentivizes the pursuit of the strategy from that party as its definition is strictly evo-bio/evo-psych.)

In The Myth of the Good Guy I put forth the idea that while women would ideally like to have both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy satisfied by the same man, women today don’t even have the expectation that this is in anyway possible, much less is it preferable to them anymore. The expectation becomes one of the Sandberg plan; expect to bang the bad boys, the Alphas and the thrill providers while your SMV is high, and expect a good, persistent and reliable ‘Dad’ to be ready to forgive and forget all that before you’re 30.

What Chris digs into in that essay isn’t so much about gays being married, but rather the fundamental restructuring of the nature of marriage. Religious issues only serve as a convenient distraction, the nuts and bolts of it is that this edict fundamentally restructures the legal aspects of male/female marriage. When this restructuring questions and impedes the access to long-term resource provisioning for divorced women (initiators of 70+% of divorces), that’s when you’ll see a truly misandric inequality in hetero vs. homosexual marriage arrangements. Men will still need to be forced into indenturement and forced to cooperate with a binding commitment to Hypergamy in the face of alternative marriages not based on monogamy.

Indeed, what man would sign up for that arrangement? Particularly in an era when women (not the Red Pill) blatantly lay bare the duplicity of their sexual strategies.

Limiting Dick

Around the time I was writing the second book I’d gotten into a Twitter debate with several feminists on a hashtag called #askmenanything or something to that effect. The pretense was of course to “ask men” all the insipid meme questions and answer them for men with feminist boilerplate. Once the Red Pill forums and manosphere proper got involved the tag quickly switched footing and feminists lost interest.

It was during one of these exchanges that I’d quoted Heartiste’s maxim from the start of this post to a particular feminist; Feminism’s end goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

Her response was an incredulous, “So you think all feminism is about is limiting dick?!”

It was of course the type of simple dismissive I’ve come to expect from the fem-powerment generation, but it sums up the dynamic pretty well. It’s always been my take that feminism in all of its waves has always been another social arm of the Feminine Imperative; which has always been an imperative driven by the best interests of optimizing women’s Hypergamous choices.

So yes, feminism is in fact about ‘limiting dick’ by socially, legislatively, personally and psychologically facilitating the selecting out and opting in on what best serves a woman’s short term and long term sexual strategy needs – throughout her entire life, not just around her Epiphany Phase. She needs the Alpha bull for his raw sexuality, dominance and confidence, and she needs the Beta comfort, investment and reliability that her bull is unwilling or unable to give her.

In this new age of proactive and reactive cuckoldry, men are expected to put up and shut up with playing the role of one or the other. In our thread conversation about cuckold fetishes the idea was put out that there’s some sick or deviant mindset in which a man gets off on watching his wife get pounded by another man. Keep in mind the possibility that the rise in popularity of cuckold porn may be an extension of this new paradigm.

The cuckold fetish narrative follows the same Hypergamous script as any other “alternative lifestyle”. As I mentioned in the Adaptation series, even within the ostensibly Free Love paradigm the same Hypergamous imperative was played out. In cuckold porn there is always an Alpha bull, a ‘superior’ sexual competitor that fucks that man’s wife; an inferior Beta sexual partner is never the tingle generating center of that fantasy. Thus that husband plays his expected passive, supportive role within that “fantasy” and thus is that wife’s dualistic Alpha Fucks sexual strategy completed.

That’s the messy nuts and bolts of it, but it’s all too easy to get caught up in the sensation of our blood boiling in righteous indignation than to see the larger perspective. This too is a part of the pragmatism of Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry is not simply about who got to breed with a woman before or after she settled into a committed monogamy; it’s about the consistent impulse to optimize Hypergamy. It is cuckoldry for a man to assume the parental investment responsibilities of another man that a woman previously bred with. It can be proactive or it can be reactive, but the purpose it serves is the same.

Few people really grasp how outrageous it is for a man to take part in his own cuckoldry. We call those men heroes for playing savior to a woman who made “bad choices” and invests himself in a child he didn’t father, but even this association has become yet another expectation of the dutiful Beta’s role. A conditioned White Knight disposition makes him feel good about it, but it’s a woman’s strategy that comes to completion, not his own. A bull was in his bed long before him.

Adaptations – Part III

chart7

Today’s chart comes courtesy of Time’s recent analysis of how Americans met their spouses (h/t to Heartiste). Heartiste provides the most obvious reasoning for these stats:

Every inception source of romance is down over the past 70 years except for bars and online. What happens in bars and online that doesn’t happen in the normal course of events when couples meet through the more traditional routes? That’s right: Intense, relentless, and usually charmless come-ons by drunk and socially clumsy men, that pump girls full of themselves. We’ve entered the age of the narcissistically-charged woman who houses in the well-marbled fat of her skull ham a steroid-injected, Facebook-fed hamster spinning its distaff vessel’s place in the world as the center of existence.

Not to be outdone, but what CH doesn’t address here is the adaptive strategies men are pragmatically employing in order to facilitate their sexual strategy. What this chart illustrates is a graphic representation of the adaptive sexual strategies of the sexes over the course of 70 years.

Granted, in contemporary society women’s attention and indignation needs are as ubiquitously satisfied as men’s need for sexual release (i.e. internet porn) is . This of course leads the mass of women to perceive their social and SMV status to be far greater than it actually is – and when that inflated SMV is challenged by the real world there are countless social conventions already established to insulate women and simultaneously convince men that their perceived status should be the fantasy they believe it is.

It’s important to keep this in mind because men’s adaptive strategies key on women’s self-impressions of their SMV (and often personal worth). I start with this for the last installment of this series because the intergender conditions we’re experiencing today were seeded by the adaptive strategies men used in the past and the contingent counter-adaptations of women employed then too.

From The Abdication Imperative:

The Abdication Imperative

Hypergamy is rooted in doubt. Hypergamy is an inherently insecure system that constantly tests, assesses, retests and reassesses for optimal reproductive options, long-term provisioning, parental investment, and offspring and personal protection viability in a potential mate. Even under the most secure of prospects hypergamy still doubts. The evolutionary function of this incessant doubt would be a selected-for survival instinct, but the process of hypergamy’s assessment requires too much mental effort to be entirely relegated to women’s subconscious. Social imperatives had to be instituted not only to better facilitate the hypergamous process, but also to reassure the feminine that men were already socially pre-programmed to align with that process.

In an era when women’s sexual selection has been given exclusive control to the feminine, in an age when hypergamy has been loosed upon the world en force, social conventions had to be established to better silence the doubt that hypergamy makes women even more acutely aware of. And nowhere is this doubt more pronounced than in the confines of a monogamous commitment intended to last a lifetime. Thus we have the preconception “Happy Wife equals Happy Life” pre-programmed into both gender’s collective social consciousness. It’s as if to say “It’s OK Hypergamy, everything’s gonna be alright because we all believe that women should be the default authority in any relationship.”

When you disassemble any operative feminine social convention, on its most base, instinctive level the convention’s latent purpose is to facilitate and pacify hypergamy.

Heirs of Free Love

Over the course of this series I’ve mentioned the “Free Love” movement. When most people hear that term their first mental impression is usually something like the picture I posted for part one; hippies at woodstock smoking pot. Later it quickly morphed into the 70’s adaptation of socially permissive promiscuity. However, it’s very important to understand that this most recent Free Love social push is by no means the first in human history.

Our impression of Free Love today was colored by the Baby Boom generation, but there have been many Free Love “movements” in the past. This was a fascinating read in light of the SCOTUS recent ruling on gay marriage:

A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. An Early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage. They practiced nudism and believed themselves to be without original sin.

In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage,[15] and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership

[…] The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where ideas such as free love could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins), who supported the French Revolution developed early ideas about feminism and free love.

Notable among them was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine’s apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.[19] His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as “Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?” and “Earth’s Answer” seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem “London” he speaks of “the Marriage-Hearse” plagued by “the youthful Harlot’s curse”, the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the “frozen marriage-bed”.

There are certain manosphere writers of note who believe that our current state of “social degeneracy” is unprecedented in human history. And while it’s certain that no prior generation did it in the same manner as the one before it, ours is simply one more chapter in a Free Love flareup that’s punctuated history for many cultures, not just the west – all prompted by the underlying bio-evolutionary / psychological impulses our race has always been subject to.

That said, it’s important to consider the residual social after effects of our most recent Free Love incidence. I can’t speak to the era in the past, but the Free Love ideology is very much an evident part of the egalitarian equalism ideology that’s rooted itself in our contemporary culture. As western culture spreads, so too does that equalism rooted in Free Love.

The Rise of Fem-powerment

By the time the 80s had begun the redefinition of conventional masculinity – masculinity adapted to capitalize on women’s short-term, Alpha Fucks, sexual strategy – was beginning to take shape. By the mid 80s gone were the Captain Kirk and Han Solo archetypal machismo characters. They were systematically replaced by sensitive, supportive, asexual and unthreatening Dr. Huxtable and increasingly contrasted with laughable parodies of conventional masculinity; these roles redefined to fit into shaming and obfuscating any former idea of masculinity and the men who’d attempt to embrace it.

The action heroes of the era abounded, but the expectation to accept a new archetype, the Strong Independent Ass Kicking Woman® was coming into its own.

Granted, the feminization process was gradual. Throughout the 80s this feminization was primarily reinforced by men (or men like them) who’d borne the brunt of the ‘macho men’ of the 70s sexual opportunism. Beta men of the post Disco Generation and the men who identified with them adapted their own Beta Game of increased identification with the feminine, and thus began the rise of the era of fem-powerment.

A new paradigm was evolving; a social environment founded on the same ‘higher selves’ faux-equalism of the Free Love generation(s), but one predicated on Beta men’s enthusiastic supportiveness of women’s imperatives. Gradually the Free Love narrative was sublimated by a one-sided expectation of male supportiveness and self-identification with women.

From Identity Crisis:

Far too many young men maintain the notion that for them to receive the female intimacy they desire they should necessarily become more like the target of their affection in their own personality. In essence, to mold their own identify to better match the girl they think will best satisfy this need. So we see examples of men compromising their self-interests to better accomodate the interests of the woman they desire to facilitate this need for intimacy (i.e. sex). We all know the old adage women are all too aware of, “Guys will do anything to get laid” and this is certainly not limited to altering their individual identities and even conditions to better facilitate this. It’s all too common an example to see men select a college based on the available women at that college rather than academic merit to fit their own ambitions or even choose a college to better maintain a pre-existing relationship that a woman has chosen and the young man follows. In order to justify these choices he will alter his identity and personality by creating rationales and new mental schema to validate this ‘decision’ for himself. It becomes an ego protection for a decision he, on some level, knows was made for him.

Beta Game is predicated upon this effort to become more alike, more in touch with a calculating feminine ideal men they were being conditioned to believe was equitable to their concept of love and would be reciprocated with appreciation and intimacy. Into the 90s, men built their lives around the ‘high self’ hope that if they could just relate more to the feminine – supporting their girlfriends and wives in equalist endeavors women of the past never had access to – they could out-support the ‘ridiculous cad’ parody straw men they’d created for themselves.

The burden of performance that the men of the Free Love eras had hoped to avoid with higher self conditions of love were replaced with a burden of more accessible Beta supportiveness. Thus, into the 90s we had more and more characterization of masculine competition become associated with men out-supporting one another. Stay-at-home Dad became a socially lauded life choice to be proud of. Tootsie, Mr. Mom, Friends, and the culmination of total abdication to feminine identification, Mrs. Doubtfire, became apex examples of men adapting to a socio-sexual environment they’d been conditioned for – a burden of support.

Mrs’ Doubtfire was a particularly egregious depiction of this male to female transition. The apex Beta Father Provider versus the social and sexual Alpha ‘great guy’ in a battle for the genetic rights to the Beta’s children (which he eventually concedes and accepts). This story epitomizes the subtle undercurrent of socially acceptable cuckoldry that would define men’s adaptations during this era.

By assuming the female role, by identifying with the feminine they’d been convinced was so lacking in themselves, men reinforced, aided and abetted the rise of contemporary women’s default entitlements; not just to support, but to conventional masculinity when convenient, and equalist independence when convenient.

There’s a presumption in the manosphere that women have become more masculinized today, and while this is true, the Hypergamy that’s defined every era for women is more dominant now than in any other age. There is nothing that defines the feminine more than the Feminine Imperative’s want for the security of provisioning and sexual optimization that the masculine provides for women.

As men we’re prone to believe that if we’ve become more feminine women have become more masculinized, but is it this or is it the expectation that women need to adapt a masculinized outlook to counter men’s conditioned Beta passivity? Even staunch feminists get tingles from conventionally masculine, unapologetically Alpha men.

Adaptations – Part II

Studio 54

When I first published the comparative SMV graph a few years ago one of the first criticisms was that the age comparisons between men and women seemed too concrete and too specific to contemporary times. I tried to make concessions for this then, but when I was writing that post it was at first meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Still, I try to write with the presupposition that critics will take things either too literally or too figuratively. I knew that the literati then and now would think, “…well, yes it’s a good outline, but you’re looking at the SMV from the perspective of 2012 and society was much different 50, 70, 100, 2,000 years ago so this graph is flawed…”

My SMV graph was never meant to be some canonical tablet handed to me from the almighty. I thought of it then, and still think of it now, as a very good workable outline for how men and women’s comparative SMV relates to the other. This has been borne out in many other statistics from individual studies sent to me by readers or just my coming across them since I created that graph.

That said, and in relation to where I’m going with this Adaptations series, those critics aren’t wrong to suggest that this outline would be subject to the social environments and simple physical realities of earlier times, and likely some times yet to come.

Take what I’m about to delve into here with a bit of salt; I’m not a historian. One of my favorite figures from the civil war ear was Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. If you’ve seen the movie Glory you know who I’m referencing here. This young man was 23 when he enlisted and 25 when he was promoted to Major and then Colonel. In that time Shaw saw some pretty grisly shit, including the battle of Antietam.

I’d seen the movie when it first came out in 1989, but after watching it again for a class assignment I had a new appreciation for the real man who was Robert Shaw. I saw the film using what was just becoming my Red Pill lens. It struck me that the realities of that era forced men to become Men much sooner than men do today. The realities of our times give us a leisure the men of Shaw’s age simple couldn’t imagine. The realities of that time necessitated a quick maturation to bear the burden of heavy responsibilities. Those burdens were much more imperative then, but a 23 year old is still a 23 year old.

I thought about how I’d spent my own years between the ages of 23-25 when I was at the peak of my semi-rock star tail chasing in the late 80’s Hollywood scene. I began to really think about the differences in the social and physical environments of the 1860s and the 1980s-90s. I’ve always joked that men don’t become Men until they’re 30. Even on the SMV graph the point at which I attribute men’s real ascendency to their peak SMV at around age 30, but this wasn’t always the case in the past.

Men (comparatively) live longer lives as a result of health and medical advances, but (at least in westernizing culture) it takes much more time and personal investment, as well as acculturation for men to realize their personal potential. Men’s burden of performance wasn’t much different in prior eras, but the timeframe necessary to reach a man’s peak potential was much more accelerated.

So to address the concerns of the temporal critics of the SMV graph, yes, this graph might look a bit different to the men and women of the 19th century. Considering lifespans of the era and the social conditions then, the ages during which a woman would reach her own peak might be around 17, and a man’s may be 25, however the same curves of the bell wouldn’t change drastically. Men adapted to the conditions their environment dictated to them then in much the same way they did before and after the sexual revolution. And this adaptation came as the result of what was expected of them as their burden of performance, as well as what their social leisures would permit them.

Love American Style

Into the 70’s the new social contract of the Free Love generation began to take a new shape. Bear in mind that this new equalitarian contract was based on the hopeful presumption that both sexes would mutually honor the “what’s on the inside is what counts” normalization of attraction. Under this contract women’s Hypergamous natures could flourish, while men’s unlimited access sexual strategy could ostensibly be realized.

Of course these lofty, higher-consciousness, presumptions  were meant to supersede human nature and an evolved sexual arousal function based on human biology. One thing that still thwarts ideological feminism today is that its perceived goal states contradict human beings’ natural states. This contradiction gets narratively blamed on men not wanting to cooperate with feminism, but even the most ardent feminist is still guilty of her own biology and arousal triggers contradicting herself.

Biology trumps conviction. People get fidgety when I apply this in a religious context, but it’s equally applicable to feminism and really any ideology that under-appreciates human nature and the realities of its conditions.

As the new sexual landscape began to solidify, men began to adapt their own sexual strategies to the conditions of this fast and loose environment. Just prior to the Disco Generation hardcore pornography began its path to the ubiquitous porn we know today. The sexual restraint necessitated by the realities of prior generations loosened in light of widespread hormonal birth control and safe(er) legal abortion.

While Hypergamy was effectively unleashed, the women of this era hadn’t fully grasped the scope of it being so or what it would become. Acceptable premarital sex, abortion and unilaterally feminine controlled birth control meant that women had an unprecedented degree of control over their Hypergamous decision making. I doubt many women of the time understood this, but the only real control men had (and still have now) over women’s breeding and birthing outcomes was now grounded in the psychological (Game) or the physical (arousal). Provisioning was still a consideration for women, but the division between short-term and long-term pairing became more stark.

As I mentioned here in the beginning, a slowing of the maturation process was the inevitable result of women’s freedom of Hypergamous choice. Short-term Alpha Fucks no longer posed the same societal and personal risks of a pre-birth control generation, thus long-term pairing choices (Beta bucks) began to be delayed. The ideological cover story was one of women expecting men to “love their insides” despite their age, psychological baggage or physical condition.

Women’s preoccupation with The Wall was ostensibly mitigated by the Free Love social contract that men would honor their end of the higher-consciousness equalitarian dream of a mutually agreed attraction based on intrinsic qualities. The biological realities for both sexes was much different.

Women trusted they could be sexually ‘free’ without social stigmatization, but the reality was that the long-term needs of Hypergamy could be postponed in what would eventually become a Sandbergian sexual strategy. The more Alpha men of the time – ones in touch with the visceral nature of women and themselves – understood the incredibly boon this represented to them.

It’s important to bear in mind that Hypergamy was not the openly embraced dynamic it’s come into today. Thus, the unspoken, secretive nature of Hypergamy was something a man who ‘just got it’ instinctively understood and women were aroused by it.

Machismo

During the 70s ‘Macho’ men began to adapt to a new paradigm. They adapted to the reality that women were conflicted by the Free Love paradigm. These men embraced both the sexual openness expected of women, but they also understood that in spite of the social contract of love being based on intrinsic qualities, women still wanted to fuck (with abandon) the men with extrinsic arousal triggering qualities. The physical began to take priority above the emotional pretentiousness.

The macho quality could take different forms. Whether is was the good ole boy of the south or the Tony Manero at Studio 54, understanding the mindset is what’s important here.

Macho men in the discos and key parties of the 70s figured out they could ‘Game’ the old paradigm of non-exclusivity paired with birth control by re-embracing (with disco era gusto) a masculinity that had been abandoned just a decade earlier. Unlimited access to unlimited sexuality was for men who overtly challenged the Free Love preconditions. They enjoyed the rewards of its expectations of women while rebounding off the self-expectations of the Beta men who were still cooperating with the Free Love social contract.

This era is an interesting parallel to our own. I think much of the Red Pill resentment coming from men still plugged into a Blue Pill mindset is rooted in a similar perception that they’re playing by an acceptable set of rules that “men with Game” are exploiting for their own selfish ends. What they don’t realize is that their Blue Pill interpretations are a designed part of a social paradigm that supports feminine primacy. Game works because, like the macho men of the 70s, it’s primarily based on women’s inborn psychology and the visceral realities of women’s biological impulses.

Beta men in the 70s still believed that the Free Love mindset was equally and mutually beneficial for both sexes since it was supposedly based on a freedom from performance for themselves while freeing women from sexual repression and (covertly) from the reality of the Wall. In reality the Free Love paradigm put men at a disadvantage by giving women almost total control of Hypergamy and the time in which to realize short term mating and long term provisioning.

So these men’s resentment of the Alphas of the era is understandable when you consider that their visceral attractiveness was observably and behaviorally arousing to women who were supposed to idealistically love them for who they were not what they were. These men represented a return to that burden of performance they’d hoped to avoid in the Free Love contract.

These Alpha men understood women’s base impulses then, and that understanding became an integral part of their “just getting it” attraction. However, as we’ll see in the next part of this series, these men would eventually become the butt of their own joke as the Feminine Imperative fluidly transitioned into a new social paradigm of Fem-powerment developing in the 80s and reaching its apex in the 90s.

The arousing ‘macho’ men, the Alphas of the era, would systematically become the most ridiculed parodies and caricatures of masculinity as women came into a better understanding of the power they were only beginning to realize and the Beta men took their perceived revenge. And likewise men adapted to this new paradigm based on the same visceral reality women’s sexuality is fundamentally based on.

Building Better Worlds

building_worlds

I had an interesting conversation this week with my good friend Ray and a couple of my designers, Sadie and Sam (names changed to protect the innocent). Just a little background first; Sadie is the Japanese woman I mention in Mental Point of Origin. She’s been divorced once and her relationship history is one punctuated by her involvement with Beta men.

She’s is the definition of the opportunistic concept of female love, but her frustration comes from never having been able to consolidate on an optimized Hypergamy – she simply doesn’t have attractiveness or feminine pleasantry to generate the Alpha interest that would satisfy her. Thus, she attracts Beta orbiters looking for some low hanging fruit, and force-fits them into a contextual Alpha frame. In other words, she opportunistically entertains the Betas with provisioning potential and hopes they’ll man up into dominant Alphas. Thus far she’s been disappointed.

Sam is a gay man in his early 30s who makes a good living afforded by not having children and possessing a high calibre technical skill set. He’s got the outgoing, “look at me, I’m special because I’m gay” exuberance I expect from gay men, but he’s not flamboyant and can still be professional when he has to be. He’s been “dating” a new guy for a while now and has moved this guy into his home recently. He took part in our conversation because the issues of sharing resources, money and picking up half the rent (in his case mortgage) in a relationship came up.

Ray has been one of my best friends for over 15 years now and he’s the guy I mention in Good Girls Do. He’s worked for me directly or indirectly for most of that time and he’s notorious for starting conversations like this when we have downtime. He’s a firestarter, it’s what I like about him, and among the three he’s the only one who knows my online reputation. Ray is Red Pill aware so he knows how to prompt a controversial conversation with me when we’re in mixed company.

Ray: “RT, hypothetical question…”

RT: “Do I have to?”

Ray: “Let’s say you move your girlfriend in with you…”

RT: “Let’s say I don’t and I would never do that. End of hypothetical.”

Ray: “No, I know, but, say you did, and let’s say your rent is $1,000 a month. Would you tell your girlfriend ‘Hey the rent is $1,000 a month how about you pay $300 and I’ll pay $700 or would you say 50/50?”

RT: “No. I’d pay it all myself. I’d also be sure that only my name was on the lease.”

Sadie:”What? Why, that’s silly?”

Ray: “You wouldn’t expect any contribution?”

RT: “No. I wouldn’t turn it down if she took it upon herself to contribute, but I wouldn’t expect it from a girl I (foolishly) brought into my living arrangement.”

Sadie: “You wouldn’t expect her to pay half?”

RT: “No. If I can’t provide my own $1,000 rent or food, or to keep the lights on, I have no business bringing a woman into that arrangement. If I have more than enough for myself I don’t need her paying. Besides, if she’s that into living with me, she’ll want to contribute in other ways and I wont have to ask.”

Sam: “You don’t think it should be an equal split? Maybe that’s a man and a woman thing…”

RT: “Yes and no. I’m sure between you and your boyfriend there’s a more dominant personality right?”

Sam: “Yeah, me.”

RT: “And you probably make more money too. So there’s really no ‘equality’ when it comes down to it.”

Sadie: “I expect my boyfriend to pay half the rent.”

RT: “Of course you do, because women think in terms of equality when it works to their advantage. What if your ‘boyfriend’ could pay for all the rent, utilities and most of everything else? Would you still try to pay half?”

Sadie: “Yes of course.”

RT: “What if he only paid just half and you knew it was a better deal for him?

Sadie: (tentative) “Yes,…”

RT: “I doubt that, but what you’re saying is that you’d limit improving your way of life to maintain a belief in equality.”

Sadie: “All the guy’s I’ve lived with have been mooches.”

RT: “Which explains why you’re not living with them any more. It goes both ways, women don’t respect men they need to support. All this stuff about equality in relationships is nonsense.If your boyfriend could easily make rent while you struggled to come up with it you’d resent him for it. There is no equal division.”

Sam: “I guess I see what you’re saying, but the expectation is still the same even for me and [boyfriend].

RT: “There is no equality in a relationship, but there can be complementarity where either person’s benefits can offset the needs of the other.”

Ray: “So you and Mrs. T aren’t 50/50?”

RT: “Ray, I make about 4 times the money that she does, how is there ever going to be anything like equality with that kind of balance?”

Ray: “But what about chores and shit?”

RT: “I take care of the outside of the house, she takes care of the inside. I do the smelly dirty jobs, she keeps the fresh cleaning ones, it’s not rocket science.”

Sam: “Sounds like you just want to stay in the power position.”

RT: “Yes, but it’s only a power play if you’re exploiting your partner. Women like to say they want an equal partner, but they don’t, do they Sadie? They want someone to respect and look up to. So when that comes down to numbers, to money, what’s really holding you together? Love? Mutual interests? (at Sam) Right now you can’t help but be the more dominant one in your relationship. So do you stop being so just to balance things? Do you expect [boyfriend] to pick up the slack more?

The Cardinal Rule of Relationships

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

This principle isn’t so much about ‘power’ as it is about control. This might sound like semantics, but it makes a difference. It’s very easy to slip into binary arguments and think that what I mean by the cardinal rule of relationships is that one participant must absolutely rule over the other – a domineering dominant to a doormat submissive. Control in a healthy relationship passes back and forth as desire and need dictate for each partner. In an unhealthy relationship you have an unbalanced manipulation of this control by a partner. Although control is never in complete balance, it becomes manipulation when one partner, in essence blackmails, the other with what would otherwise be a reinforcer for the manipulated under a healthy circumstance. This happens for a plethora different reasons, but the condition comes about by two ways – the submissive participant becomes conditioned to allow the manipulation to occur and/or the dominate initiates the manipulation. In either case the rule still holds true – the one who needs the other the least has the most control. Nowhere is this more evident than in interpersonal relationships.

When I was writing this post many years ago I hadn’t fully considered how this rule interacts with, and contradicts, many of the tenets of egalitarian equalism. The idealistic state of that equalism is one in which two co-equal, yet independent people come together in a perfect union of balance. In theory that balance should account for resources, emotional investment, family considerations, as well as intellectual and social status aspects of either partner.

These considerations alone should be enough to illustrate equalitarianism as the manipulative farce it is, however, all we really need to do is take into account the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. It’s very easy to be accused of being controlling when you embrace the truth of this rule – and particularly so when the reigning social undercurrent is one in which everyone ought to be co-equal rational actors.

I expected to have that leveled at me in this conversation, but it’s important to bear in mind the real nature of power. By my own definition, power is the degree of control we exercise over the direction of our own lives. As I mentioned, I don’t mind being the more powerful partner in terms of resources in my marriage because I accept that stupid notions of maintaining anything like “equality” is simply infeasible. I know more than a few men who’ve sold their lives’ potential away in the belief that they should lessen themselves in order to support a more balanced, equalist ideal. Ultimately their relationships, marriages and families suffer because they never own that potential – just the idea of owning it is a source of guilt and shame.

For all of the bleating about more equitability being needed between men and women. the fundamental truth is that it’s neither a realistic nor workable state. I’ve used money for my illustration here, but this applies to many other facets of an intersexual relationship. From an equalist perspective this sounds a lot like a want for creating a condition of dependency, but in truth it is an unachievable state of egalitarianism that creates a never-satisfied state of dependency.

Her World or Yours?

If you go back and look at the video from Bachelor Nation you can see the dichotomy that presumptions of “equality” sows in western(izing) women today. Within the first 6 minutes of the video we see the internal contradictions inherent in women. There is a want for an idealized equal pairing, but yet a desire for a man to be a Man. The documentary finds the root of this dichotomy in modern resource imbalances between the sexes, and makes the predictable appeal to men not living up to their burden of performance. The male shame comes in contrasting women’s taking on what should be men’s performance burdens – the male obligation to which ironically flies in the face of anything like true egalitarian equalism.

Stay-at-home dads, house husbands, and anything relatable will always have a stigma attached to them in spite of any weak attempts to make them socially acceptable. That stigma is founded in a limbic-level understanding of men’s burden of performance; to be a Man is not just to produce sustainable resources, but to provide a surplus of those resources.

I recently read a poll sponsored by Forbes magazine that listed men’s top goals in life and for the first time in that poll’s history “a good physique” outranked all personal and financial ambitions for top executives. The predictable shame then followed that men aren’t “Manning Up” any more, and they’ve become vain, self-absorbed narcissists for a new focus on what image they present.

The obvious Red Pill conclusion is of course a realignment with the prevailing social perceptions (courtesy of the Feminine Imperative I might add) that women are out-earning men financially and educationally; thus the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy takes precedent. If America’s top execs are heeding the message of Open Hypergamy, why bother establishing yourself financially, academically, ambition-wise or otherwise?

The problem with this equation is evident in the Bachelor Nation video. I can understand the sentiments of MGTOW; if the opinions expressed by the quality of woman represented in the video are any indicator of a female zeitgeist it makes the idea of abandoning the Game altogether that much more appealing.

That said, and I’m going to dare to get prescriptive here, I believe that establishing yourself as an independent Man should be your top priority. I have no doubt that that sentiment will get convoluted with feminism’s Strong Independent Woman® meme, but lets clarify something first – the ideal that men ought to be strong and independent has always been the precursor to his quality as a man. Independence, self-sufficiency and determined ambitions have always been the hallmarks of a man comfortable with his burden of performance. Only in women is independence a novelty.

Yet now, in men, this independence is not just a novelty, but it’s been distorted into being an obsessive-compulsive sign of a man’s imagined insecurities. The very strength and independence men have always been expected to embody is the domain of women, while any hope for it from men is a sign of a fragile ego.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #1

Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.

I firmly believe Alpha is a mindset. That mindset can get the poorest son-of-a-bitch laid with the right application, tact and circumstance. That’s a tough pill to swallow when you work your ass off in the belief that your affluence and status should be the metric Alpha is judged by and women respond to. That’s also not to say affluence and status won’t get you laid by their own merit, it’s just the context in which that happens that makes the difference. There are many men who’ve found their retroactive cuckolding after having based their personal successes on the presumption that those successes should be the basis of his quality to women.

The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we’re painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame. What concerns us in terms of inter-gender relations however is the way in which frame sets the environment, the ambience, and the ‘reality’ in which we relate with both the woman we sarge at a bar and the relationship with the woman we’ve lived with for 20 years. One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is NOT power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ‘reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender’s internalized concept of  frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you’re operating in hers. Also understand that the balance of frame often shifts. Frame is fluid and will find its own level when a deficit or a surplus of will is applied to change it. The forces that influence that lack or boost of will is irrelevant – just know that the conditions of an operative framework will shift because of them.

We can go back and debate the Crisis of Motive once again – who do you really do it for? – but in terms of Frame, even if you subscribe to a MGTOW perspective, it’s important for a Man to have a world into which a woman might enter. Not for her sake, but for a Man’s edification.

Establish your world; you shall make your mission, not your woman your priority. Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.