SMV – Page 8

December 28, 2015

Ladders & Snakes

All men are created equal. What you do from there is up to you.

Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but always take the credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you an aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

When I was first introduced the the 48 Laws of Power the seventh was the one I had the most trouble accepting. I should really say I have trouble ’employing’ this law, because I’ve spent my entire life as an artist in some capacity and I’m very particular about the integrity and character of what it is I create. Obviously we have rights management and plagiarism laws to ensure against the more blatant ‘stealing’ of ideas, but a lot of what accounts for taking unwarranted credit occurs in more nuanced social situations.

It’s usually in these social circumstances that the average person makes use of Law 7. It’s hardly a law at all considering how naturally humans will use it. In a purely ethical sense it’s kind of a no-brainer; don’t assume credit that you’re undeserving of, but bending the perceptions of what we base our estimates on is where the real art comes in.

On a personal level, my investment in what I create and how that creation is received is what matters most to me. I understand the want for a quick reward, but I’m more concerned with a cheap imitation of what I’ve created debasing the quality and effort it took to create it. For instance, I’ve spent the better part of my career creating products and brands for people with a lot of money who really had no real investment in what it was I was making for them. All they wanted was a “product” that they could promote and sell.

Naturally the quality and integrity of that brand or product had to be something they could get behind (the horse must at least look like it could win), but not be held too personally accountable should that product end up being less than ideal. That’s a nice way of saying most salesmen I’ve known love a widget if it’s something that sells, but they’re never really on the hook for if it sucks – that accountability rests with the creator.

While we were dining after the Man in Demand conference we had discussion about exactly this dynamic. I make an effort to keep my business endeavors as businesslike as possible, but there are brands and things I create that I will personally invest myself into. I have to be very careful of this because it took me a long time (and more than a few failed attempts) to develop the discernment to know what’s worth putting myself into. However, it is especially satisfying for me to travel to another country and see one of my bottles in the duty-free stores at the airport and then be at a bar & grill somewhere on vacation and see one on the backbar.

I explained to the guys that what I create (and own) are not “products” to me. I dislike that term in that sense. I understand the utility of that word to salesmen; product is an easy unit of measure, but to the person creating that thing it’s a measure of the quality of their idea. To refer to that creation as a product impersonalizes that creation and allows the seller to remain at arms distance should the creation be wildly popular or a horrible failure.

That pride of ownership or the abandoning of it is a convenience for someone only invested in promoting that thing, but on some level it is never really theirs with the same responsibility as the one who created it. So ultimately the noncommittal position of selling, promoting, endorsing, etc. becomes an arrangement of convenience since the creator’s idea is where the ‘product’s’ strengths lie – and also where the real accreditation should too.

I’ve occasionally been accused by the ignorant on Twitter of being dependent on The Rational Male for my revenue. Most of my regular readers know what I do for a living and understand why that’s silly, but I don’t think it’s any real secret that what I write here and in the books is something very personal to me. The Rational Male has always been something I’ve invested myself in for obvious reasons, but I’ve always resisted turning it into a brand per se. There wont be any TRM T-Shirts coming in the foreseeable future.

I’m proud to be responsible for what I do here and I will never be beholden to making what I create into a ‘product’ for others to sell. One of the best things about being in the position I am is being anti-fragile enough to write what I believe is important while still keeping myself solvent on what I do apart from it. This allows me a much greater freedom than needing to write something to stay solvent.

Bargain Debasement

You’ll have to forgive my intro here, but it got me to thinking about a larger point I had in mind about how and why a man invests himself in various endeavors in life. I’ve worked hard to get to a point in life where I can say my personal successes (and failures) are my own and not the result of others’ funding or some fortunate dispensation, but rather based on the strength of ideas and responsibly owning them as the creator. Yet another reason I have a problem with Law 7; for as much as you may gain by employing it you rarely develop the insights that failing of your own accord teaches you. Experience teaches harsh, but it teaches best.

I think one of the reasons men find the popularized, feminist, social convention of ‘male privilege‘ so disingenuous is because we want to be appreciated for the sacrifices and perseverance needed to even have what looks like a meager, hand-out, kind of privilege. An atmosphere of default privilege debases what men have honestly invested themselves in. I’ve always held that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate their feminine-primary reality, but that’s not to discount men’s want to still be appreciated for them.

Whether that’s manifested in financial wealth, personal freedom, status or earned wisdom there’s a fundamental want for an appreciation that is rarely ever forthcoming. One reason I believe many men have a self-fulfilling definition of what it is to be Alpha is because they feel they’ve earned that identification through hard work and playing by a set of rules everyone else should, but get frustrated when their efforts go unappreciated, if not outright exploited. Again, Law 7. It’s galling to see others rewarded for exploiting what you think should be appreciated.

There’s a subset of MGTOW reader/writers who question every man’s motive for doing what it is he does thinking that appeasing women is at the root of every effort. Nothing is a genuinely inspired passion if the end result is women’s affectations. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, but what exactly is a genuine motive in that sense? If the byproduct result of my genuine interests is having sex with gorgeous women and/or a beautiful wife and a couple of well adjusted kids should that then discredit my unique talents and interests in what I do?

What if, after all a man does, he seeks an appreciation that will only rarely be unsolicited on his part? It’s one thing to command respect; it’s quite another to demand it.

Institutionalized Success

In this sense I think what is most egregious about the present state of marriage is that, for the greater part, all of the personal equity a man invests in himself over the course of his lifetime is only a divorce settlement away from being halved for him (if not more so). A man’s personal equity (not to be confused with relational equity) is only one false rape allegation away from ruin. This is the institutionalization of Law 7: that a woman can largely and legally get a man to do all the work and then take (at least half) the credit from his own success – or at least that’s the social expectation.

Granted, a woman can also be on the hook for her lack of character judgement should she pair with a man who becomes a burden to her. There are rare instances when a woman may find herself financially beholden to a bad choice in marriage, but then it’s a situation of that man’s genuine achievements in life and usually an inability to take his burden of performance and make the most of it. For the most part, the role of support falls to the man in societal expectations; women and feminized men are the ones supported.

In fact, it’s a point of shame for men to be supported in such a fashion. Whether that’s warranted of not, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves than what they started with. A needed provisioning from women only puts his achievements’ validity in question. Like it or not, men should avoid the perception of themselves not pulling their own weight.

Doing More

A while back I was asked why the Burden of Performance should be called a “burden” at all. Should it not be a “challenge” or a “opportunity”? All optimist semantics aside, it is uniquely men whose character is judged on what he started with and what he made of himself.

I’m sure equalist critics will want to cast women into the same performance role, but in a uniquely male sense, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves. To be a ‘man’ is to produce in excess of what you consume – thus having the potential to support a family, an extended family, ensure security, give back to his community and/or reinvest that excess in greater endeavors or passions. While it may be part of the Feminine Imperative’s media campaign to popularize the character of the Strong Independent Woman® there is still room for women to expect the best out of a man while being provided for herself. In other words women have both the option to strive for independence while also retaining the option to be provided for by her husband or an LTR. And failing either of these, they retain an institutional right to Law 7.

Men must be independent resource providers, they must make more of themselves than what they began with, independent of dispensations or special privilege. There is no safety net, no other socially acceptable option to be provided for and still retain his being definitively a ‘man’. One of the hesitations I have with endorsing the Red Pill idea of going ‘Monk Mode’ is less about the isolation and more about the motivation men need to find within themselves to better themselves.

We look down on men who are dependent on women. Whether that’s financially, emotionally or physically, there is no option for dependence. One of the primary complaints professional, educated, independent women bemoan is their inability to pair off with a man of ‘like’ (or above) status. They’ll make euphemisms to characterize the men who would be their ‘equals’ who wont date them, but what they fail to acknowledge is the fundamental, root level truth of men’s burden of performance. For all the high-minded hopes of equalism, women’s Hypergamy still wants to filter for both sexual and provider acceptability in men.

Back in 2012 I based a post on Creative Intelligence from a study about how improvisational skills and creativity factored into a woman’s Hypergamous considerations. I wont quote it in length here, but suffice it to say that there is a measurable difference in how women perceive men with a trained or innate ability to improvise in, and overcome, times of adversity. As might be expected a man with a proven capacity to produce more than he consumes – especially when he’s had to come back from failure or misfortune – tends to be a more attractive mate choice that the man who chances into his own affluence.

Bear in mind that attraction and arousal are different sides of the Hypergamy coin (AF/BB), but many cross-cultural studies suggest that a capacity for creative, innovative, adaptive intelligence has been an evolutionarily selected-for socio-sexual trait in men – much less so in women. That’s important for the MGTOW critic to remember, it’s not as simple as a feminine-primary social order dictating men being slaves to their burden of performance. Just as gender is primarily biological, and not a social construct, neither is women’s evolved, Hypergamous sexual filtering.

Filters

Now, with the evolutionary basis of attraction in mind, it’s also important to consider that in our evolutionary past women evolved to take calculated risks in optimizing their Hypergamous sexual selectivity. The utility such Red Pill concepts as social proof, dread, Game, amused mastery, etc. are evidenced because they work with (or sometimes against) this Filter.

From The Curse of Potential:

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes.

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

As I’ve mentioned in many prior posts, Hypergamy demands assurances. In fact so paramount is that need for Hypergamous certainty that women have evolved peripheral awareness to be sensitive to psychological and socio-sexual cues that confirm a man’s Hypergamous acceptability to her. Furthermore, so important is this need of assurance that in a society founded on feminine social primacy, the Feminine Imperative will legislate legal institutions to prevent men from misrepresenting themselves as a more optimal Hypergamous choice – as well as legislate penalties that insure women against both Hypergamous fraud and less than optimal mating choices.

As you might guess, the development and evolution of Game is one such psycho-social contingency men refine and use to workaround this Hypergamous filtering; and one that the imperative is still making efforts to restrict. However this doesn’t discount the way men have, in the past, built themselves up based on both social expectations, but also genuine interests and passions. Naturally, if a man is the genuine article and as a byproduct attracts women as a result of it, that might be preferable to ‘faking it till you’re making it’ – but if that’s the route you go be sure that you do in fact ‘make it’ because it’s what you feel passionate about.

Warnings

The primary reason I wrote Preventive Medicine was to help men avoid having women’s institutionalization of Law 7 ruin their long term personal efforts and achievements. Many critics want to lock horns with me as to when a man’s Peak SMV generally occurs in life. That’s fine, but whether or not you agree with my accuracy in this regard the fact remains that it takes much more concentrated, long term effort to reach that peak than women’s fast-burn peak SMV. I don’t just mean this in terms of his professional status, but also his maturity, his acquired wisdom, his judgement of others’ character, the lessons learn from the bruises of his failures and near misses.

All of this requires an investment in oneself that simply the having of resources handed to you will never satisfy. That personal investment in oneself, as it should, amounts to a lot of internalized equity – an equity that will never be appreciated by women whose Hypergamy is looking for a pre-made man. Hypergamy doesn’t care about the effort and perseverance required to achieve the status you (should) enjoy at your SMV peak.

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to short term sexual selection, the most wanton sex I had was at the time in my life when I was the poorest. As an underemployed semi-rockstar I used hit it with the best of them, and from a purely sexual perspective, it’s true, criminal and Alpha cads will still fuck 80% of women. But there’s more to the worth of a man than just his notch count. Sexual experience constitutes a very important measure of that, but a man should want more for himself as a man, as a father, as leader, as a creator, even as a cad.

Life experience and the benefits that a man should draw from it are personally valuable. In fact, men feel the equity of these efforts are so valuable that men will commit suicide at 5 times the rate of women; and in particular between the ages of 45-49. Why do you suppose that is? What assurances of long term security does the common man have for himself? What is he faced with when the plan he sets forth for himself in his life is destroyed in one precarious instance?

Once again, using the male deductive logic, it may seem a better option for him to hit the reset button than to be faced with having his life’s equity, his largest investment, his creation, stolen from him. This is a graphic illustration of men’s Burden of Performance, a burden women simply don’t face.

December 16, 2015December 16, 2015

Open Relationships

During the last post’s comment thread I sort of went back in time to when I’d first heard the term ‘open relationship’. It was back in the mid 80s and I’d heard it being proposed to me by my first girlfriend when I was around 19 and she’d grown bored of my predictable Beta perfection. Needless to say this moment preceded my semi-pro rock star 20s and the natural Alpha-ness I matured into. So at the time I was thoroughly steeped in the dutiful Beta conditioning of believing that ‘going steady’ monogamy and only banging the ONE girl was the right thing to do.

I also believed that women’s motives were reliably based on what they said rather than what their behaviors implied (and their contradicting behaviors were the result of being confused by nebulous ‘society’s’ unfair expectations of women). So it was with a great deal of confusion that I was forced to wrap my head around exactly why my ‘girlfriend’ would want to retain me as an intimate orbiter while she pursued other guys to bang and become potential intimates with.

She suggested an “open relationship” – all the same non-sexual intimate expectations with no expectation of reciprocal sexual fidelity – an idea she’d no doubt been familiarized with from her former hippie ‘free love‘ parents. And not unlike the simpering Beta in today’s cartoon, I too was uncomfortable with sharing my 18 year old girlfriend with any other guy. Looking back it was quite the conflict to my 19 year old, Beta conditioned mind. On one hand I was taught to respect the independence of a woman and didn’t want to be the guy to tell her what she could or couldn’t do, but I also bought into the Disneyesque sacrifice all for true love narrative.

I suppose now I owe her some gratitude since my rejecting this “I want to play the field” episode was instrumental in setting me on a course for my Alpha 20s and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude that unintentionally served me so well with women then.

Today there are cutesy synonyms like ‘poly’ to describe a woman who believes it’s in her multiple lovers’, as well as her own, mutual interests that they obligate themselves to what really amounts to her attention, emotional and sexual needs independent of each guy who fulfills that role for her. The problem arises in the degree of investment those men believe that an above board ‘poly’ woman will be able to appreciate. I had this situation presented in last weeks’ comments:

Why does an open relationship favor women and not men? It’s only cuckoldry if you don’t approve of it. If you agree to an open relationship for both of you, then it seems like an equal footing.

The cuckoldry Devil is in the details; and in this case that Devil is in the perceived ‘agreement’ and who’s doing the agreeing. Contemporary Open Cuckoldry and the social conventions of ‘free love’ era faux-idealisms in ‘open relationships’ work in tandem today to promote the sexual selection strategy of women’s Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry, in its most visceral, Hypergamous sense, favors women because there is no margin for error on a man’s part. Bear in mind that an ‘open’ relationship only serves a woman’s sexual imperative because she benefits from comfort, rapport, security and likely provisioning of the primary man with whom she’s come to this agreement with. In all honesty I’ve rarely met a guy in an open relationship who wasn’t a Beta at the mercy of his wife or LTR’s proliferative phase, Alpha Fucks, Hypergamous impulses.

Most of them understand their optionless condition and resign themselves to the women they’ve committed to, wanting to, and acting on fucking more suitably, conventionally, masculine men than themselves. Arguably, most stay at home fathers fall into a sort of contextual form of an open relationship for much of the same reasons even if their wives are only getting a vicarious Alpha ‘fix’ by working among higher status men who haven’t abdicated on their burden of performance by adopting the feminine support role.

What About Those Assholes?

Now I am aware of the often domineering men who insist on fucking women outside of their commitment to a monogamous lover. I also understand that the reverse can and does apply. I’m also aware that when a man’s SMV exceeds a woman’s it places her into a similar position to that of the Beta men I’ve just described.

Bear in mind that the issue I’m on about here isn’t one of fault, but rather how an effectively polygamous relationship serves the interests of either genders’ sexual strategy.

It’s vitally important to consider how both of these ‘open relationship’ formats are popularly perceived in a cultural context. For a woman, being ‘poly’ may hold some stigma to it. She may be considered a de facto slut in some sense – remember she’s maintaining the pretense that she’s committed to one or more men, rather than a booty call where there is no pretense of exclusivity – but the social (not to mention legal assurance) efforts being made to ‘normalize’ what amounts to her cuckoldry of that ‘primary’ partner is reinforced because it seemingly serves as some kind of new-age feminine-primary family unit. And after all, he too is ostensibly free to exercise his sexual strategy in this arrangement. A win-win, right?

In the case where the ‘primary’ partner is the woman and the high SMV man leaves her no choice but to adopt his sexual strategy as the dominant one in the relationship, that ‘open relationship’ is considered dysfunctional and socially frowned upon. He’s a cad or a philanderer at best, and an abusive self-absorbed inconsiderate monster at worst. Reverse the sexes in today’s cartoon and imagine what the feminine-primary social response might be.

Force Fitting Sexual Strategies

What we’re observing in a modern interpretation of ‘poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is a conflict between the normalization of unilateral control of sexual strategy within a monogamous relationship context. I know that sounds like a mouthful but consider…

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

No doubt many Blue and Purple Pill readers will (in the interests of “equality”) remind us that there was a time when it was socially expected of (high socio-economic status) men to “keep” a mistress (or use prostitutes) as well as a wife, or even have many wives. All socio-economic Apex Fallacies aside, this being an outlier rather than a norm, those arrangements still put that man into a position of maintaining support for both (all) women in order to satisfy his sexual appetites as well as the relative wellbeing of them.

In the modern instance where western(ized) women are a protected class in a feminine-primary social order, the priority of sexual strategy changes hands. I cover this exchange in the Adaptation series of posts, but to paraphrase, Free Love, open relationships or now, ‘poly’, has really become an increasingly acceptable methodology for women to optimize both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy while still enjoying a semblance of the security that old order monogamy provides for women’s emotional needs.

Now lets review The Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

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

In an economic state where women are less financially dependent on (or autonomous from) men, the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy will take priority. That’s not to say the Beta comfort and rapport appeal becomes worthless as an emotional investment, but it’s less likely for a woman to need to prioritize that aspect while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect. Beta comfort and security have a value, but that value requires less urgency than pursing Alpha sexual experience (functional breeding opportunities).

Consider the poor Beta symp in the cartoon. That caricature is of a Beta conditioned man struggling with the Old Set of Books, with the old order ruleset expectations from a woman who will never recognize them because she’s never needed to. It’s his investment in her, his necessitousness, his optionlessness and his inability to see it’s the source of his frustration and his anxiety. He needs her, expects more from her, than she needs him.

The lie inherent in the humor of the cartoon is that women possess the capacity to compartmentalize their emotional investments. The Medium is the Message; women can only compartmentalize their feelings for men they don’t see as Hypergamously optimal men (i.e. Alpha, higher than their own SMV men). For men who embody that optimization, women simply cannot afford to feel anything more than submission (a submission to a dominant man they innately desire) to him and are thus unable to consider anything like compartmentalizing their emotions for him.

And from Schedules of Mating:

For a female of any species to facilitate a methodology for breeding with the best genetic partner she’s able to attract AND to ensure her own and her offspring’s survival with the best provisioning partner; this is an evolutionary jackpot.

‘Open’ relationships, and the social narrative reinforcement of the concept, are one such adaptation to facilitate this methodology.

All of this may seem a bit pervasive coming from the guy who advises men to spin plates and date non-exclusively for as long as it takes (if ever) to attain the depth of experience to become a relatively good judge of women’s innate nature, and then if he so chooses, decide how best to pair and parent with her.

The difference in this approach is characteristic of the differences in men and women’s sexual strategies. In Plate Theory, while there is an above board implication of non-exclusivity, there is never an implication that a woman is (or should be) more than a non-exclusive dating opportunity. There should never be any pretense of there being an established, invested relationship as we see in the ‘poly’ concept of women.

In fact this is the primary distinction in non-exclusivity; who’s Frame is the predominant one? In a woman’s ‘poly’ Frame there is a retainership implied in what she believes should be an accepted non-exclusivity.

Ask yourself this, why would a man persist in an ‘open’ relationship? What unique advantages does he get in this arrangement that he couldn’t by simply staying single, practicing Game and spinning plates? Then ask yourself what unique benefits does a woman receive from the same ‘polyamorous’ arrangement?

When you’re contemplating this, try to divorce yourself from the emotional investments and focus on cold hard evolved Hypergamy and how it would function for either sex in that arrangement. Keep in mind that as far as feminized society is concerned, and for all of the triumphalism of independent women, the onus of committed relationship responsibility still defines the worth of a man.

Beta “Manhood”

From MoodyPrism had an interesting observation about the social acceptance of cuckoldry:

I’ve seen men make the mistake of mentioning that they would never raise another man’s child on FaceBook. Shit storms ensued. The usual shaming tactics were trotted out such as manning up. Interestingly enough I’ve heard a woman (on one of those absolutely dreadful day time talk shows such as the View) say that a woman in a relationship with a man with his own kids was a fool for wasting her time on his kids instead of hers. The framework for open cuckoldry is already there, we just need to see the push that makes it completely socially acceptable.

Open Cuckoldry is already in its developmental stage in a social respect. When you consider the Sandbergian plan for Open Hypergamy, the logical implication of this is what’s described here – prioritizing the sexual selection and Hypergamous optimization of women on a societal level while maximally restricting (via social shaming and disapproval) the sexual strategies that would ever serve male interests,…so long as that male is anything less than an optimal Alpha.

Open Cuckoldry has many euphemisms now, but in the Red Pill aware perspective it’s just a matter of time until the social plan of prioritized Hypergamy and outright cuckoldry becomes a social norm.

TuffLuv also presented me with a related question in the last comment thread:

A little too black and white on this stuff Rollo. Sure cuckoldry, as you call it is becoming the norm.. the euphemism being “mixed family”. But I see the majority of instances not being a chick who had the child of some alpha bad boy, or even alpha good boy.. I just see fickle chicks who dumped the baby daddy cuz she either found something better or went looking for something better. The poor dad is just an every day average guy who got his heart broken by the bitch.

So, ponder if you will, if there is a difference between a man raising another man’s child(ren) where the bio father is less alpha (possibly by far) than the new suitor, and a beta man raising the child of one of the woman’s former studs.. I think in the real world you find the former far more than the latter, except in cases where the married or committed woman actually went out and cheated and got pregnant with another man’s child. Maybe that happens a lot but that is not *open* cuckoldry.. That’s classic cuckoldry, and perhaps the only thing that should be called cuckoldry.

I think there should be another designation for the former case. It’s still a bit shameful, but not nearly as much as the latter, eh?

Definitely something to consider, but this situation also implies a change in conditions or context with regard to the woman doing the cuckolding. The fundamentals don’t change – that woman may have bred with a less than optimal man, but the Hypergamous sexual selection impulse still drives her to seek out the Alpha fucks aspect of Hypergamy. She’s Making Up for Missing Out and still she has the provisioning and support she needs in order to pursue the opposite side of the Hypergamous equation she missed out on courtesy of the Beta father.

December 7, 2015

Open Cuckoldry

During the Q&A section of the Man in Demand talk I gave back in September I was asked about where I believed the social dynamic of Open Hypergamy would lead. In specific the idea was proposed, and I agree, that the logical next step for a social order founded on feminine Hypergamy and one that prioritizes the female sexual strategy as preeminent would lead to a state of openly accepted cuckoldry.

Although I can’t say it’s an accepted social dynamic as yet, there are many social indicators that are revealing this push towards a normalized cuckoldry. I’ll explore these for a bit in this essay, but for now these indicators are about a move away from conventional monogamy in the hopes that a ‘soft cuckoldry’ might be a precursor to instituting a more accepted open cuckoldry.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind a couple of primary principles about this shift. First is the fact that, initially, an openly accepted state of feminine-controlled cuckoldry will never be called ‘cuckoldry’ proper. If we use the example of a socially accepted (if not celebrated) open Hypergamy as a model, open cuckoldry will be sold as a more logical, more humane sexual strategy for men and women in light of divorce statistics, romantic boredom and other sexual studies that indicate men and women weren’t evolved for monogamous commitment.

The second is that open cuckoldry is the extension of a unilaterally feminine controlled Hypergamy. That is to say that as Hypergamy becomes more normalized as a social imperative that sexual strategy will extend to optimizing Hypergamy across genders. If that optimization is taken to its logical end it will require men not just to adopt cuckoldry as a norm, but to socially reward them for advocating it among their own sex.

Cuckoldry By Any Other Name

As I said, it wont be called ‘cuckoldry’; the connotations are negative, so a redefining will be made in order to make the practice more socially palatable. The Feminine Imperative wont recruit the very men it needs to perpetuate cuckoldry as their own sexual strategy if the term is derogatory. Thus we’ll get euphemisms for alternative lifestyles, ‘open marriages’ or a “Designer Relationship“:

We live in an era when everything is customizable. Relationships are no exception. Some people will continue to practice their grandparents’ form of monogamy, and others, probably the majority, will be serially exclusive and pair-bonded. Still others will explore some form of non-monogamous expression that encompasses one or more of the facets we’ve discussed or may flow in and out of being exclusive based on what the relationship requires. (We’ve done this ourselves.) Having the ability to customize a relationship means having the freedom to respond to life’s vicissitudes.

The first time I came across the concept of ‘soft polygamy’ I was in a behavioral psychology class exploring the practices of modern marriage and contrasting them with the long term sexual behaviors of men and women. As you might imagine the context of the study focused entirely on the ‘bad behaviors’ of men who essentially transitioned from serial monogamy to serial marriage. The idea was that in the process of moving from one LTR to another men were establishing a soft form of polygamy.

In a social respect, men have far more to lose from serial marriages than do women. The financial liabilities of divorce are well known to the manosphere, but so are the emotional and familial accountabilities. So from a strictly male perspective, serial LTRs are a dicey prospect, but from a female perspective, in a feminine-primary social order, institutionalized Hypergamy and the soft polygamy that results from the Sandbergian sexual strategy, soft cuckoldry becomes pragmatic in optimizing Hypergamy for women.

At this point we should consider the Heartiste maxim about feminism again:

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

Institutionalized cuckoldry is the logical means to restricting male sexuality, but we have to consider what function that restriction serves for women. From an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks perspective the plan is simple; restrict that sexuality as women find need for a particular man’s service.

Diamonds and Rust

While I’m reluctant to prognosticate, my guess is that future generations of men will be conditioned to accept their role in this cuckoldry as part of their socialization. The above Forevermark diamond advertisement is one illustration of this. Open Hypergamy and its acceptance has already made its popular debut in mainstream media and advertising, and likewise open cuckoldry is just now finding a social foothold.

It takes the Red Pill Lens to appreciate the efforts as they’re being made by a large society. The Forevermark ad is intended to be funny or cute, but it belies a deeper, more poignant truth about Alpha Widows, Hypergamy and the long term sexual strategy Plan and roles women expect men to play in it.

I was made aware of this ad being circulated from a reader on Twitter and at first thought it was a reworked joke. It is however legit and billboards with this campaign are up in major cities. Without the benefit of a Red Pill Lens I can see how most men would laugh it off or women might giggle sardonically about it, but the the fact remains that a clever copywriter is aware of the sexual dynamics that make it funny.

I pulled the following quote from Deti on one of Dalrock’s more recent post:

“I think what we will continue to see is growing disengagement.”

Yeah, this has been discussed here and elsewhere in the almost 5 years I’ve been around here.

I think that what will happen is that things will continue sliding in the same direction they’re going now, until a critical mass is reached. I don’t know what that critical mass is, what will trigger it, or when it will be reached.

We live in a mostly free society with a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. We have maximum freedom and autonomy right now, with both sexes being free to pursue pretty much whatever they want, however they want to. That is the prime characteristic driving the current circumstance — that, and up to now, there’s been enough money taxed, borrowed and stolen to pay for it.

A growing number of men are not getting as much sex as they want. A growing number of women aren’t getting commitments in the form they want — when they want or from the men they want.

So things are going to keep sliding that way. More and more men will walk away and direct what energies they have left elsewhere — into work, or beer/bros/Xbox/porn, or travel/leisure. (Oddly enough, this might make many of them more attractive to women, since they’re spending less time directing their attentions to women.) More and more men will earn just enough to support themselves, since they don’t plan on marriage, and fatherhood is out of the question. They will lack the skills to improve their lives. They will not get nearly as much sex as they want, but they will learn to live with it — mostly through porn, the occasional hookup, and the even more occasional prostitute. The price of prostitutes will skyrocket as demand increases; and a few more women will go into high-end call girl work to earn side money.

More and more women will direct their attentions into their work, travel/leisure, and having children without men. (This will definitely make more of them less attractive to men except as on again, off again sex partners.) They will not get the commitments from men they want, but they will learn to live with it. They will complain about it with increasing volume and shrillness, but they’ll learn to live with it.

Until something happens to cause the tides to turn. Again – don’t know what, or when, or how. But something will happen to cause a hard reset. And it will be exquisitely painful for everyone. I don’t want it to happen, nor do I relish it. It’s not something to desire or look forward to because of the pain it will bring. But I do think it will happen. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime or my kids’ lifetimes. We could easily slide like this for another 50 to 100 years.

I think one consequence of this separation of the genders will include a socially normalized institution of cuckoldry. To take hold it will need to be termed something different, but in effect the process of women conceiving with one man and then expecting another man to parentally invest himself in that child will be a casual expectation of women. With so many men effectively (if not intentionally) going their own way, the idea that any man wouldn’t be expected to serve as a surrogate parent will become commonplace.

Genders divided by feminism or feminine social primacy will need a ‘customized’ form of cuckoldry that allows for the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy to be reconciled with the Beta Bucks side by enlisting different men for either purpose.

The Pink Pill

I want to end here with an essay I read recently on the fallout of the new female form of Viagra:

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realized what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restore without really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

To develop drugs to boost libido is like ‘giving antibiotics to pigs because of the shit they’re standing in’

The American psychologist Christopher Ryan argues that the institution of modern marriage – meaning an exclusive couple bound by romantic love – is antithetical to long-term excitement. Ryan is best known for Sex at Dawn (2010), a book authored with his wife Cacilda Jethá, that makes the case that sexual monogamy is deeply at odds with human nature. He is among a growing number of researchers suggesting that the rift between women’s purportedly limitless sexual potential and their dulled actuality might owe to the circumstances of intimacy. Accordingly, the conjugal bed is not only the scene of dwindling desire, but its fundamental cause. The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust. While love angles toward intimacy, desire flourishes across a distance.

The entire article is very insightful if not a bit depressing, but with the Red Pill Lens we can begin to understand the latent purpose behind the message. I’ve gone on record about the pushback against clearing the pink pill for use as being a direct threat to women’s control of their own Hypergamy. The concern, ostensibly, is that a libido stimulating drug might be used to induce a woman into having sex that her otherwise sober sense would prevent; effectively it could be a ‘rape’ drug.

What’s finally being addressed in this article however is what I’ve been saying since I was aware of the drug’s trials – a chemical that induces libido in women removes an element of their control in sexual selection and compromises Hypergamy. I’m not entirely sure the author was aware of the points she was revealing in this, but she succinctly makes the case for both institutionalized cuckoldry (or certainly a ‘customized’ soft polygamy for women) and advocates for women maintaining control of their Hypergamy unclouded by a drug that would remove that control by chemically inducing them into sex that isn’t of their own choosing.

The ‘cure’ to women’s low libido is holistic, not biological. Women’s sexual deficiencies are presumed not to be the result of a ‘broken’ biology, but rather a lack of proper motivation. I should point out that all of this validates all the points I was making about Dread in marriage last month on Biblical Gender Roles – maintaining a condition of proper motivation (i.e. Dread), the holistic cure, is exactly what even femosphere authors are tacitly advocating.

The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust.

Yet now, even when a pharmaceutical solution to the lust problem is made available the ‘cure’ is rejected. Why? Because on a root, limbic level women’s hindbrains know that Hypergamy cannot be optimized with a drug that removes Hypergamous choice. The real solution has never changed and women are now put into a position of having to openly acknowledge that for all of the pretense of “mismatched libidos” or “sex just declines after marriage” social conventions, men’s cuckoldry is the real plan for Hypergamy.

When presented with a pill that will make them sexual, when given a cure to their low sex drives with the men who’ve made lifetime commitments to them, women will still refuse to take it. Hypergamous doubt can’t be quelled with a pill.

December 1, 2015

The Tyranny of Biomechanics

Well, dammit, I had a very insightful article warming up in my drafts folder about Open Cuckoldry (it’s still coming, promise), but I felt compelled to riff on the new Pirelli Tyre calendar photoshoot first. The calendar art is replete with a semi-nude Amy Schumer sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, “tastefully” rendered in greyscale (the calling card of an ‘artiste’ as a opposed to just a ‘photographer’) and the doughy eyed stare of a comedienne who grasps the ludicrous seriousness of how her image will be received and delivered by a feminine-centric society.

I’ll be honest, I don’t much care for Schumer as a comedian or an actress, and if you read here with any regularity I’d expect you don’t either. She characterizes, with triumphantly unwarranted hubris, everything the Feminine Imperative would like generations of women to celebrate as a victory over the evil “Patriarchy” that, by design, is never entirely defeated. In a post-End of Men society, fat, goofy women will be the banner bearers the imperative will have dance on the symbolic corpse of the “Patriarchy” that will never die or be unuseful to it.

The irony here is that Amy’s naked girth is being lauded by the usual media suspects as “brave” and “stunning”. Calling a woman of this physique “stunning” is like telling the retarded kid he actually ran the football back for a real touchdown to win the big game. Perhaps Amy is self-aware enough to realize this, but her participation in her own humiliation tells the bigger story. The fact that she rationalizes her nudes as being “authentic” as opposed to ridiculous verifies this.

Now before I go much further here, I’ll remind readers that I’m entirely aware that this “groundbreaking” photoshoot of “real” women is little more than a publicity effort, nominally on Pirelli Tyres (are they a British brand?), but mostly for photographer Annie Leibovitz and her feminist triumphalisms (she also shot ‘Woman’ of the Year, Caitlyn Jenner).

Since the inception of this blog I’ve always gotten props for the pictures I select as my lead-ins to what I’m writing. This talent is really the result of my having worked in advertising and brand development for years, and having to be the de facto photographer and photo editor for more than 20 years. Trust me, I get the language of imagery, and it’s not difficult to see the train that Leibovitz is riding here.

At the launch of the calendar on Monday, Leibovitz explained that none of these photographs had been conceived with the male gaze in mind. Williams’s photo was “not a nude but a body study”, she said, while Schumer’s was a comic conceit: “The idea was that she was the only one who had not got the memo about wearing clothes.”

The ‘Male Gaze” card is disingenuous when the stated intent of the shoot is an,…

…arty soft-core ode to pinups produced by the Italian tire manufacturer,…

The Bigger Narrative

There’s a much larger story being sold here than a fat comedienne’s rationalizing her nude form as championing “authenticity” or “realness”. What we’re observing, yet again, is the frustration of women being able to optimize their inherent Hypergamy against what our evolved biology dictates for them.

I’ve written extensively on the conflict between an idealized Equalism and human beings’ evolved predilection for Complementarity. Whenever there is a new ‘outrage’ over “body shaming” or “fat shaming”, with a Red Pill lens we can see what this conflict represents: The frustration women experience, and the anxiety of insecurity they feel when presented with the prospect of not being able to optimize their Hypergamous impulses because simple biology selects them out based on their physicality.

No doubt Leibovitz believes in her rationalization that she’s shooting artful nudes without the mythical ‘male gaze’ in mind, but she knows on a visceral level the form of every nude woman in art throughout history has been rendered with the intent of replicating a beauty that inspires arousal (thus the ode to the pin-up). The simple hard-coded fact of nature is that the form of a semi-nude woman, by order of degree, stimulates the area of the male brain associated with tool use and thereby objectification. On a limbic level, sex with beautiful, arousing women is literally a problem to be solved by the male brain.

Leibovitz gets this. In fact she banks money on instigating the deliberate contradiction that human biology poses to her own (and a larger society’s) ego-investments in blank-slate Equalism. The root of this prefabricated indignation rests in women’s existential doubt of optimizing Hypergamy. That doubt conflicts with the uncertainty of establishing a social order that will force men to act and be influenced by idealized Equalism rather than their evolved biology.

In other words, the latent purpose of this social order is to force men to comply with women’s sexual strategy, irrespective of their evolved sexual arousal cues.

The ostensible want for an ideal Equalism, or a dubious gender parity, is really the cover story for the want of 100% consolidated control over their ability to optimize Hypergamy by literally controlling the sexual selection choices men are able to make for themselves.

Schumer apparently earns the label of “real” because a few rolls around her midsection are on display – because her body is less than perfect by pop culture standards. Would she be any less “real” if she didn’t allow her body to be consumed in this way? Can’t all bodies count as “real”, no matter what they look like and who lives in them and whether or not they choose to show themselves – clothed or naked?

I find it interesting that an out of shape Vin Diesel is ridiculed for his present physique, or that ‘Dad Bods’ are sardonically described as ‘sexy’ while the over-the-shoulder giggles ensue, but what I don’t expect is for these men to be held as a physical ideal in women’s estimate. There are no photographers, male or female, shooting artful nudes of overweight men, normal “real” men of professional accomplishment, or middle linemen for exclusive calendars. Firemen with rippling abs sell very well, but “real” men? Not so much.

However the difference is that men don’t expect women’s choices of what physically arouses them to shift in favor of their physiques based on expected societal shifts. In fact, we don’t even expect women not to laugh at a naked Seth Rogan or Jonah Hill. The automatic impression is to laugh at them because they don’t come close to women’s physical ideal, so the presumption of intent must be humor. Yet we are expected to perceive a naked Amy Schumer as “real’, “authentic”, “brave” and “stunning”, and to do so with genuflection, devoid of laughter and ridicule.

The uncomfortable truth is that women have far higher, far more static and far more stringent physical ideals for men than men will ever have for women when it comes to basic visceral arousal cues. Yes, I understand there are more variables to attraction than just the physical, but we are talking about representing physical ideals in photos and calendars here. Firemen and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are the standard order for a reason – evolved, practical, efficient biomechanics that have made us what we are today, not pop-culture stereotypes.

T-Rex Wants to Hunt

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

Sexuality, families, and men did not come about because of society. To the contrary, sexuality, families, and men are what made society possible in the first place. – Pook

These are some excellent examples of the conflict I’ve described above here. The Equalism of Annie Leibovitz – the dubious societal idealism that hopes these fundamental, biological underpinnings can be overridden by a self-defined higher order cognitivism – will always lock horns with the T-Rex that represents human biology. Annie and the rest of the prophetesses of gender equality are only, symbolically, trying to feed the T-Rex of evolved gender dynamics in the hopes he’ll stay in the paddock, behave himself and only occasionally put on a good show for the customers.

However, even in the hopes of that a contrived, idealized gender Equalism will ever pull the teeth of the T-Rex, the same evolved need women have for Hypergamous certainty informs the concept of what that ideal “equality” should look like. The T-Rex is women too.

November 24, 2015

Attitude Sells

attitude_sells

There are many attitudinal and subtle behavior traits that manifest in men who are presented with options or enjoy even casual social proof. I’m not sure a lot of guys really realize just how sensitive women are to those ‘tells’. You will do things, say things, without thinking about them that indicate on a limbic level what you believe about yourself. Women have evolved to perceive the smallest cues and subtlest of hints – to the point it’s a subconscious subroutine running in their background processing of information about you when they’re not even cognitively aware of it.

They may not be able to consciously put a finger on it, but on some level of consciousness these tells are informing a woman’s limbic understanding of your SMV.

I’ve gone back and forth about covert communications vs. overt communications on this blog over the years. There is a certain school of Game that teaches a bold, direct action wherein a guy overtly inserts himself into that woman’s immediate experience and I can certainly see the merits of it.

Law 28
Enter into action with boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

There is a certain gravitas that accompanies an extroverted approach with women, the trick is not coming off as a ‘try hard’ and overplaying it, thereby overtly confirming your following a script. When you don’t believe it’s you it’s a pretty good bet she doesn’t either.

A lot of proponents of this in-your-face approach will tell you it’s the only way a “real” man should interact with women; boldly and confidently, and entirely on his terms. And while I agree with this, how you go about effecting that can vary depending on context and condition.

When a guy is initially establishing Frame and drawing the woman (women) of his choosing into his reality, that overt, direct approach can be the deciding factor for a woman’s acquiescing to his Frame. Caught up in the moment (such as an ‘insta-date’ or an encounter she wasn’t expecting) and charging her with an immediate rush of endorphins, a woman’s Hypergamous filtering process gets overridden by that excitement. This is the same principle operating behind planning dates with an excitement factor involved (rock climbing, sky diving, are both exaggerations, but you get the idea) – an emotional attachment paired with an endorphin rush associates that ‘feeling’ with you.

There’s a tendency I think for Red Pill aware men to view women’s Hypergamous / Solipsistic natures as hinderances to men effecting their own interests with them. Shit tests, filtering, sexual prospect comparison and a whole host of other conscious and subconscious vetting inherent to women seems like an insufferable waste of effort for men. However, while Hypergamy may define the rules of the game it’s important for men to understand how to work it to their advantage in both a direct approach and in understanding the subtle filtering that women do.

I’ve read more than a few ‘dating gurus’ define this “being direct with her” approach as the only legitimate form of Game. A Real Man® sees what he wants and goes out and boldly gets it. The problem is that this attitude gets tied to The Male Catch 22 and any derivation is compared with unmanliness.

As I said, while I agree there’s merit to this directness, it shouldn’t be done at the cost of understanding how women subconsciously vet and filter to better discern a man’s (perceptively) true sexual market value to her – as well as how she contrasts his SMV to her self-perceived SMV. There is nothing “unmanly” about having a curiosity for how the female mind works and then using that understanding to your advantage.

Maintaining Frame

It’s one thing to draw that woman into your reality and your psychological Frame, it’s another to maintain this Frame once she’s stepped into it.

I went into some of the subtle ‘tells’ about a man’s SMV in Alpha Tells and Beta Tells and the subcommunication messaging that transfers between men and women. In these posts I described the process beneath those tells and what’s being communicated in them. One thing I believe even Red Pill aware men subscribe to is the idea that their Frame can only be maintained by the same overt and bluntly direct means that helped them create it.

This is the root of men’s initial anxiety of having to upkeep their Red Pill “act”; “Red Pill is impossible to float all the time! What? Am I expected to Game my LTR forever?” The answer of course is internalizing Red Pill awareness into one’s personality, but one thing that also goes along with that is the manifesting of behaviors that help maintain your Frame.

Women pick up on behavioral cues, attitude, how things affect you, how you apply yourself to a task, how you deal with adversity and certainly the interplay you engage in with her while playing with her. If you’re thinking that women wanting men who Just Get It is all direct Game and all above board you need to reconsider that quite a bit of women’s filtering occurs when you’re not ‘on‘ and she’s casually picking up on your behavioral cues.

She want’s you to ‘get it’ on your own, without having to be told how. That initiative and the experience needed to have had developed it makes you a Man worth competing for. Women despise a man who needs to be told to be dominant. Overtly relating this to a guy entirely defeats his credibility as a genuinely dominant male. The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because that’s ‘the way he is’ instead of who she had to tell him to be.

Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he’s not the man for her.

Much of a woman’s vetting process takes place in her hindbrain. It’s very easy for most guys in western(ized) culture to presume that hot, but vapid, women are too oblivious to really pay much attention to this process. Lost in their hedonism and self-affirmations it’s easy to believe that those processes aren’t as influential in hook-ups as they might be in a long term arrangement, but trust that even though they might be under the surface they are being processed.

Mindset

It’s a Tomassi Maxim now, but bears repeating; Alpha is a mindset, not a demographic. I’ve explained what I mean by this on many occasions, but when it comes to what I consider the abstraction that is Alpha it can primarily be reduced to a particular mindset of masculine dominance and confidence.

I wont belabor this here again, but suffice to say that while I believe there is a natural component to it, I do think that to varying degrees this Alpha mindset, or something approaching it, is a learnable state for men. That said, I also think men need to use caution when when evaluating how to go about cultivating and internalizing this mindset.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the hope for a magic solution to your problems in life. There’s no shortage of motivational speakers and charismatic ‘self-help’ gurus ready to sell you a book, or a sermon, or some self-styled social movement promising to show you how to develop this “winners’ mindset”. It’s important to bear in mind that any mindset you learn is only as legitimate as the realities that inform it.

A lot of hate directed at PUAs, motivational speakers, pastors or even your parents can be traced back to their failings in understanding simple evidential realities. Their hopeful formulas for your success end up being frustrations and anxieties when they’ve proven to fail you because you invest yourself in part, or in whole, in them.

Much of what constitutes Blue Pill conditioning is founded in the same misgivings. It’s very easy to hype up and sensationalize Blue Pill idealisms in ‘optimism’ soaked rhetorics, but these hopes are easily dispelled with a Red Pill aware lens. That’s one reason the Red Pill can be bitter – it’s a real buzz kill when you’re high on Blue Pill optimism.

The primary reason I’ve always been reluctant to be prescriptive with Red Pill awareness in practice is because I’ve always believed that the Red Pill is never going to be one size fits all. While Red Pill truths are universal, their application is subjective to the man employing them. How he develops the mindset that best serves him is contextual to his own circumstance.

That said, I think a pragmatic approach based on Red Pill awareness and the fundaments that make it up would serve men best in developing a Red Pill mindset that works for him. You might think that in light of my recent Purple Pill post that I’m alluding to the ‘coaches’ and re-definers of the Red Pill in all this, but lots of “Red Pill” men are actually Purple Pill hoping that some of the old rules might still apply.

While I emphatically recognize the power of positive thought in altering one’s mindset and changing the course of one’s life, I also understand that zeal for change needs to be tempered with a healthy skepticism. If you find yourself being swept up in a tide of super-optimism that’s the time to question the foundations of it. Positive, motivational memes can become clichéd aphorisms when those foundations are proven to be false.

November 6, 2015

Always Default to Game

default_game

In the last comment section a very old Game conundrum got reheated. It’s the old confusion on when to “run” Game on a woman and when not to. This concern used to be debated quite a bit in my early days at SoSuave. Occasionally it comes up now and then with guys who’re new to the Red Pill and, still in the process of disconnecting their Blue Pill ideals, want to know when it’s appropriate to use their new Game superpowers for good.

It’s kind of good to revisit the fundamentals; it gives you a better perspective on how you came to a more advanced idea so I’ll get a little remedial here. Essentially the idea guys were talking about then was how Game was something they were turning on or off as situations dictated. Guys would come up with various hypothetical or actual situations where they were unsure if using Game was appropriate. Sometimes these were ethical dilemmas, other times it was just a want for avoiding bad consequences.

Should I use Game on the woman at the office?
Should I use Game on the fat chick I honestly have no interest in?
I find myself using Game on my overbearing Mother and it works, should I feel bad?
When I apply Game / Red Pill aware practices in other areas of my life I find I’m better able to enjoy the results I want, is this manipulative?

These are a few of the more common ones, but there are many others. However, the base assumption in all of these is that Game is an act and separate from that individual’s personality or “who he really is”. While I might advise against actively, overtly “gaming” women in your workplace, the Frame you establish by applying Red Pill awareness practices (i.e. Game) will be invaluable to you.

Every time I’ve dealt with this question/presumption it’s usually the case that the guy asking about the situation is still thinking in the same Blue Pill mindset he’s been conditioned to, but has more or less accepted the realities of Red Pill awareness. He may have even killed the Beta for the better part, but the process of changing one’s Blue Pill programming, to say nothing about placing himself as his own mental point of origin is a time consuming one.

The answer is a very simple one: Always default to Game.

Law 14
Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Although this Law is really directed towards one’s power rivals it is also an apt illustration of how Game is applicable in situations that you may have no real intimate interests in. In this instance that artful spying takes the form of learning to read a particular woman even when you have (or wisely shouldn’t have) no real intimate interest in her.

There was (is?) a school of Game thought that a guy new to it should apply it with “less than optimal” women in order to perfect the practice. Furthermore, for the newly Red Pill aware, it’s a relatively low investment way to evaluate proof of concept and build upon it. For as much as I’d like newly aware guys to be able to go from zero to sixty with Game, I can see the logic in this.

I say that with a caveat though; you’ve still got to consider the complications and attachments that will result from your Game actions. Not just this, you even need to be at least peripherally conscious of how your Frame control, Command Presence, Amused Mastery, etc. will impact non-intimate women’s disposition and attachment to you. Bear in mind that most men, Beta men, don’t leave the mental imprint on women that a Red Pill aware, self-MPO man does, to say nothing of a more Alpha man.

Case in point: In my line of work (liquor and gaming) there are many times when I’m working a promo with my girls, or I’m meeting random women I’ve never met before, where I have to make a mental effort to be self-conscious of how I interact with them. It’s sort of the reverse situation to constantly making an effort to stay in Frame to effect Game; it’s become such a part of my nature and personality now that I default to Game.

In fact it’s not even Game to me anymore, it’s just who I am, and particularly when I’m ‘on’ and I need to interact in a social context. It flows so naturally for me I sometimes have to make an effort to dial it back when I see IOIs or I get kino from the women working for me. When women are hitting me up to come party with them after my setup time is through, that’s a reminder that I’m making an impression on them I don’t really want to follow up on.

From Mental Point of Origin:

Your mental point of origin is really your own internalized understanding about how you yourself fit into your own understanding of Frame.

If Frame is the dominant narrative of a relationship (not limited to just romantic relations), your mental point of origin is the import and priority to which you give to the people and/or ideas involved in that relationship. It is the first thought you have when considering any particular of a relationship, and it’s often so ingrained in us that it becomes an autonomous mental process.

From Recursive Game:

While it is of course vital for a man to internalize the various fundamental truths about the nature of women (hypergamy, solipsism, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks, love based on opportunism, etc.), these fundaments need to become an ambient condition for you in your dealings. This understanding needs to become an internal – under the surface – part of your interactions with women.

Too many guys think that all of this requires some endless capacity to psychologically micromanage every aspect of their interactions, not just with the women they become (or potentially become) intimate with, but also women they work with (or for), their mothers, sisters or daughters. A common reason men initially reject the practice (not necessarily the concept) of Game is due to some imagined expectation that they’ll need to cognitively account for every variable a woman may or may not be subjecting him or herself to.

When you think of Game as some act you put on or some cognitive fencing match between you and a woman it’s easy to believe it’s just too exhausting. That’s when one of two things usually happen; Game-awareness either sinks in and becomes part of his personality, or he relaxes and/or abandons what he’s learned of Game.

And from Artificial Joy:

Once this awareness is internalized and becomes a part of a Man’s personality there is no vigilance, just awareness. There is a subconscious understanding of the order of things from a red pill perspective, but that doesn’t mean I suspect the female bank teller I’m making a deposit with is ready to rob me blind the moment I turn to walk out the door.

Neil Strauss hinted at ‘social robots’ in The Game; guys who were nothing but Game all the time and were unable to make real emotional connections. I would argue just the opposite. The real danger inherent in Game and Red Pill awareness is a man using it to fulfill his former blue pill idealisms – that does require a constant effort.

A healthy red pill awareness requires not only a Man’s reassessment and recreation of himself, but also that he abandon his former blue pill paradigm and learn to live in a new, positive, red pill paradigm. It seems like a daunting task when you first come to terms with it, but ultimately your awareness becomes an internalized part of who you are. You can allow that to consume you with a paranoia rooted in your former blue pill frame, or you can learn to create hope in a new system – one that you not only have more control over, but one that requires you to assume that control.

I’ve quoted these here to give you a better feel for what I mean when I say always default to Game. With that comes a practiced learning and internalization process of Red Pill awareness and a confirmation of its fundamentals. Once your personality becomes one that defaults to Game you’ll discover that Game is not just for picking up women. I’ve personally used Red Pill awareness and Game practices to close business deals, convince people with money to go with my creative ideas and even get out of a traffic ticket.

So that said, the discussion questions for the weekend (yes, I’m bringing them back) are:

Do you hesitate to use Game in different situations, and if so why?
Do you think Game is only applicable to your intimate interactions?
Are you hesitant to use Game because of ethical or Blue Pill considerations?
Have you ever applied Game and/or Red Pill aware ideas to women below your own SMV?
Do you think it’s advisable to “practice” Game with such women?

October 10, 2015

The Vetting Process

I apologize for interrupting the flow of this series’ posts, but I felt this question from reader Andy deserved a full stop:

I could care less who I’m talking to. IMO if you’re looking to disqualify a woman based on her sexual history you’re doing yourself a disservice because you better believe that the high quality chicks have been fucked in every way imaginable. If not you it’s somebody else… Might as well be you!

Have a look at this guy’s story in Saving the Best:

“I married a slut who fucks like a prude.”

Andy, I do agree with you in part. Too much overt concern (i.e. asking) about a woman’s sexual past is indeed demonstrating lower value. Men whom women consider Alpha, the men that women already have a mental impression of, don’t overly concern themselves with women’s sexual pasts because those men have multiple options going.

On some level of consciousness women know that if what he can glean from interacting with her about her sexual past is off-putting to an Alpha he’ll simply eject and move on to a better prospect. An Alpha mindset is often very minimalist, blunt and direct, but there are aspects of interacting with women that come as a default for a man who is his own Mental Point of Origin. One of those unspoken aspects is a self-understanding that he has options (or can generate more) and this is manifested in his indifference to a woman’s long term sexual suitability. If she doesn’t enter his Frame, to his satisfaction, he moves on to the next prospect with very little communication.

However, we weren’t discussing non-exclusive dating/fucking; we’re discussing making an investment in a woman we’re vetting for our own parental investment. When you consider the all-downside risks a man must wager on that investment it behooves him to be his most particular about that woman’s sexual past and the consequences that YOU will be burdened with if you don’t vet wisely.

Most men (myself included at the time) have very sparse prerequisites when it comes to their considering a woman for marriage or even an LTR. This lack of insight is the result of a constant battery of shame and preconditioning by the Feminine Imperative that tells men any requisites they would have of a woman for marriage are ‘passing judgement’ on her character. He should consider himself “lucky” that any woman would have him for a husband (or “put up with him”) and his concerns about her are shameful, typically male character flaws on his part.

Consequentially men rarely permit themselves the luxury of putting their own considerations above that of a potential mate.

Vetting

If you asked a woman whether she would be wary of marrying a man who was a recovering alcoholic or a cleaned up heroin addict she’d probably disqualify him as a marriage prospect from the outset. And were she to go ahead and marry him anyway with full disclosure of his past addictions, would we be sympathetic with her if he were to relapse and she to bear the brunt of his past indiscretions?

Now suppose that woman married this former addict, but due to his being offended about her prying into his past, she was ignorant of his old addictions. She has her suspicions, but society tells her it’s not her purview to hold him accountable for anything that happened in his past.

He’s moved on and so should she, right? Any lingering consequences from his addictions (such as a DUI, criminal record or his unemployability) shouldn’t be held against him, nor should she judge him, nor should she consider those consequences whatsoever when she’s assessing his suitability for marriage now.

In fact, she should feel ashamed to even consider his past with regard to her feelings about who he is. Her judgementalism only points to her own character flaws.

Now, would we praise that woman for “following her heart” and marrying him? Would we hold her accountable for the decision to marry him if he relapses?

Reverse the genders and this scenario is precisely why women become so hostile when men even hint at ‘judging’ women’s past sexual decisions. There is a very well established operative social convention that the sisterhood will all unanimously get behind; and that is the ruthless shaming of men who would ask any questions about any woman’s sexual past. This is the degree of desperation that women feel during the Epiphany Phase when they acknowledge men becoming aware of their long term sexual strategy.

They understand that, in their Epiphany Phase, the clock is ticking down to zero. That’s the cause of a lot of anxiety. They are just beginning to understand that their marriageability (Beta Bucks) now conflicts with their previous short-term mating strategy (Alpha Fucks). As I detailed in Betas in Waiting, women of this age cannot afford to have their short term sexual strategy count against them at a time when they are at their most necessitous of what that Beta can provide towards her long term security.

Again, on some level of consciousness, women understand that were the ignorant Beta she’s decided to marry (start a family with or help her raise her illegitimate children with) becomes aware of what she did in her sexual past he too might expect that same degree of sexual performance. The performance she reserved for the men she perceived as Alpha and freely gave to them.

Women must keep the details of that past secret and obscured. So grave is this anxiety that men must be punished for having the temerity to be curious about it. It is vitally important because a woman’s capacity to bond with a man is reduced with every new sexual partner. Every new sexual partner is a potential Alpha to be widowed by, but the man who marries her must be kept ignorant of those men if she is to secure his resources and his parental investment.

This social convention operates on absolving women’s past indiscretions by redefining them as a period of learning who she would become. It was her “journey of self-discovery” and she’s “not that person” any more. Cleverly enough this is exactly the same convention and same rationale of women who divorce their husbands later in life to “take the journey of self-discovery” of Eat, Prey, Love she passed up when she was younger.

Knowing this, it is also vitally important for men to keep women’s dualistic sexual strategy in mind at every age of her maturity.

Lets not forget the advice of Sheryl Sandberg here:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Open Hypergamy is triumphantly crowed about when women are at their SMV peaks, and sometimes again once that woman has secured her long-term provider or divorced him, but when a woman is in her Epiphany Phase, when she’s anxious and frustrated in securing her own long term provisioning, that is when she will fall back on the social convention that shames men for their own awareness of the same Open Hypergamy they would otherwise flaunt for him.

So, now that we understand the latent purpose of this social convention, let me explain to every gentleman reading – vetting a woman’s sexual past is not just your prerogative, but an absolute imperative to the health of any future relationship you hope to have with her. When you consider the dire risks you are essentially setting yourself up for – risk no woman will EVER acknowledge or appreciate – the single most important thing you can do is vet that woman’s sexual past.

That doesn’t mean you make weak, DLV, overt inquiries about her past. It means you subtly, covertly and discretely pick up on the many cues and tells she will reveal that past with. Most men would rather use a direct approach to this, and while there’s merit to that, it’s far better to do your vetting by drawing out freely offered information. It’s much more honest and reliable. Once you go the direct route the jig is up and she will play the role she thinks you expect from her, not the honest one you need to make your determinations.

Sex is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the height of irony that a woman would place so high a priority on her own sexual experiences while in her SMV peak yet completely disqualify that importance when she gets to the phase where it becomes a liability to her. As a man it is vitally important for you to know whether you’ll be her apex Alpha lover or if your burden of performance will be measured against the ghosts of Alpha men from her sexual past – all while you endure the stresses and joys of raising children with her.

October 7, 2015

Red Pill Parenting – Part I

“If I’m not going to have children, she told herself, then I’m going to have lovers.” – Robin Rinaldi, The Wild Oats Project.

In last week’s essay I put an emphasis on men’s understanding women’s rudimentary doubt of their Hypergamous choices with regards to rearing children and the overall health of a family. There are a great many social factors in our westernized feminine-centric social structure that encourages women to delay both marriage and becoming a mother well past their prime fertility windows.

In the Myth of the Biological Clock I detailed the misconceptions women hold with have with regard to their own capacity of having children later in life:

Popular culture likes to teach women and, by association, unenlightened men that there is an innate biological clock inside each woman that slowly ticks down to a magical period where her maternal instincts at long last predispose her to wanting a child. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, this coincides perfectly with the Myth of Women’s Sexual Peak as well as conveniently being the age demographic just post or just prior to when most women hit the Wall.

[…]I wont argue that women actually possess maternal instincts, I will argue that their understanding of when they manifest has been deliberately distorted by a feminine-centric cultural influence. If women are “angry” about the revelation their inability or difficulty to conceive in their post-Wall biological conditions presents, their anger is misdirected. Rather than come down from the heady pedestal of ego-invested female empowerment psychology, they’ll blame men for not being suitable fathers, or lacking a will to “play-by-the rules” and satisfy the dictates of the feminine imperative by whiling away their time in porn and video game induced comas.

The “have it all” mentality popularized by feminism has led to some very bad social effects for women on whole. While a great deal of “having it all” is couched in messaging that appeals to enabling ’empowered®’ women get a similar deal from career life that men are supposedly enjoying, the subtext in this message is one of never settling for a less than Hypergamously optimal (better than, not equal) monogamous pairing with a man.

The “have it all” advertising is about life fulfillment from a distractingly equalist perspective; meaning an ostensibly equitable or better fulfillment than the Feminine Imperative would have women expect that men are getting from life. Women want to be men. Thus the push for female college enrollment that imbalances men’s enrollment, etc., but in so doing the life course women are directed to by the imperative also limits their Hypergamous optimization efforts by putting unrealistic expectations upon it.

As a result women either delay childbearing until ages that put them and any offspring at a health risk, or they simply forego marriage altogether and birth a child with the foreknowledge that the father (though maybe an adequate provisioner) will never be a contender to quell her doubts of his Hypergamous suitability.

If Momma Aint Happy, Aint Nobody Happy

I’m fleshing out this aspect of Hypergamy here because I believe, as with all thing female, that a broad understanding of Hypergamy is essential to a man’s life and has far reaching effects that go beyond just learning Game well enough to get the lay on a Saturday night when a woman is in her ovulatory peak phase.

A byproduct of the societal embrace of Open Hypergamy is the degree to which women are largely disposed to delaying commitment until what I call their Epiphany Phase and then transitioning into a need for security once their capacity to attract and arouse men decays and/or is compromised by intrasexual competition (a.k.a. The Wall). I detail this child-birth postponement process in Preventive Medicine where I outline women’s Party Years through their Epiphany Phase, however it’s important for men to understand that this phase is largely the result of women believing they should have a similar window as a man in which they can have both a career and find the “right guy” to partner in parenting with.

Equalism’s fundamental flaw is rooted in the belief that men and women are both rational and functional equals, separated only by social influence and selfish imperatives (uniquely attributed to men). The grave consequences women accept in this belief is that their sexual market value declines with age, both in terms of intrasexual competition and fertility.

As such, we entertain the bemoaning of generations of women frustrated that they were unable to consolidate on a Hypergamous ideal because they believed they had ample time to do so while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect of their Hypergamy in the years of their prime fertility window.

Furthermore, they believe that the men who are available and ready to fulfill the Beta Bucks aspect of Hypergamy simply don’t measure up to their socialized, overinflated, sense of Hypergamous entitlement (and particularly in comparison to the men who made them Alpha Widows in their Party Years).

So distressing is this prospect, and so keenly aware of it are women that they are beginning to mandate failsafe measures in anticipation of not being able to optimize Hypergamy – such as preemptive egg freezing and legislating that men pay for their infertility while married in alimony settlements.

It’s come to the point where the ages of 29-31 are no longer being considered a crisis point for women with regard to child bearing. With the cultural popularization of the false hope in frozen ovum extending a woman’s birthing timeframe, now, even 35-38 years old seems to magically grant women some bonus years in which to secure a man for parental investment. The question is no longer one of a woman making herself suitable for a man’s parental investment (by his late 30’s no less) – her default suitability is inherent in her femaleness according to the Feminine Imperative – but rather, she believes, a magical-thinking proposition of waiting out the Hypergamously right father for her children.

Parental Precautions

I’m stressing these points here before I move on to Red Pill parenting ideology so men who are, or want to become fathers, husbands, LTR boyfriends, understand the import that Hypergamy plays in any family arrangement they hope to create.

Just to head off all the MGTOWs reading first; don’t get married. Under contemporary western circumstances there is no advantage for men in a state of marriage and 100% advantage for women. Unfortunately, as things are structured, marriage will always be a cost-to-benefit losing proposition while women insist on making marriage a legalistic contract of male-only liabilities.

That said, also remember that an entire world steeped in feminine-primary social imperatives is arrayed against your efforts in being a positively masculine father to your kids. Those anti-father efforts start with women’s own fem-centric conditioning that leads them to both manically push for Hypergamous optimization personally and societally, but yet they will delay that optimization until all opportunities for her have been exhausted. If you are considering marriage and starting a family with a woman between the ages of 27 and 31, statistically this is the situation and mentality that woman is likely experiencing.

I’m presenting these things to you as a father or potential father, because it’s important for you to discern what women have been conditioned to believe and expect from men and for themselves. In the coming weeks I will post an essay on the complementarity both sexes have evolved for to make our species what it is today; and that conventional complementarity is something idealistic equalism would distort. However, for now it’s important to realize that women have been thrust into this zero-hour, jump-at-the-last-second, cash out of the sexual marketplace schedule of mating that their very biology rebels against.

Single Moms and “Good” Fathers

It’s also important for men to understand that, while there is a constant ‘Man Up’ beratement of fathers for their lack of willing involvement in a child’s life, men are simultaneously presented with the female ’empowerment’ meme. That meme proposes these fathers’ parental involvement is effectively superfluous to that child’s maturation because Strong Independent Women® can reportedly fulfill a fathers’ role equally as well as any man (the equalist narrative).

For all the public awareness campaigns extolling fathers to be fathers, the message is always one of being “better” fathers and placing them into a default position of being less than ‘good’ by virtue of their maleness. In fact a ‘good’ father is a rarely appreciated commodity because that ‘good’ quality is always tied to a man’s never ending and ever shifting burden of performance.

On the other side, the single mother empowerment meme is endemic. However it’s important to use our Red Pill Lens with this meme because the message is one that forgives women of their inability to make themselves appropriate prospects for men’s parental investment. At the same time this meme also foist the blame for men’s unwillingness to parentally invest squarely on men’s presumed responsibility to women optimizing their Hypergamy to their satisfaction:

I’m Stupid Picky.

In my 15 or so years of dating, I’ve been around. I don’t mean that to sound skanky, but … it’s not like I haven’t given love a chance. The problem? Out of all the men I’ve ever dated, there has only been one or two that I felt a genuine connection with. It is a rare thing indeed for me to meet someone I feel like I could picture spending forever with. Sadly, I can’t even remember the last time I met a man who gave me butterflies. It’s definitely been years.

I Want the Fairytale.

There are very few relationships I’ve witnessed in my life that I would actually want for myself. Which begs the question, what do I want? Well, I want a man who is great with kids and totally open to adopting a houseful with me. I want a man who is smart and driven, sexy and hilarious. One who gets me, and who challenges me, and who makes me weak in the knees. Basically … I want everything. And I’m not sure the image I have in my head of what love should be is something that actually exists in real life.

My Daughter Will Always Be Priority Number One.

If you think my expectations of what I want for me are implausible, we probably shouldn’t even discuss my expectations of what I want for the man who steps into that paternal role for my daughter. Truthfully, as much as I want that father figure for her, I am also absolutely terrified of choosing wrong, of messing up our dynamic by choosing a man who isn’t worthy of being her father.

This article’s entire checklist reads like a manifesto for the Strong Independent® single mother with no consideration given to how men, potential fathers or husbands might interpret it. As expected, Campbell perpetuates the ‘put your kid first’ religion of motherhood here, but after reading through her single-mom rationalizations, and then combined with men’s presumptive servitude to the beneficiaries of the Feminine Imperative, it’s easy to see why most, if not all men, might be hesitant to sign up for their expected duty.

Preparations

My point here isn’t to dissuade men from wanting to be fathers, but rather that they enter into being a parent with their eyes open to how Hypergamy, and a cultural imperative that’s built around it, influences women’s life choices today. I mentioned earlier in this essay about women between the ages of 27 and 31 experiencing the first harsh realities of the consequences their choices have predisposed them to. Understand, as a man, your desire, your potential, for parental investment puts you into a position of being very sexually selective. So much in fact that the Feminine Imperative has long-held social conventions to pre-established with the purpose of convincing men they are not only obligated to fulfilling women’s Hypergamous strategy, but should feel lucky to do so.

The truth is that it is women who are at their most necessitous of men during this phase of their lives – thus placing men with the means and desire to become a parent into a prime selector’s position. Feminine social conditioning has done all it can to predispose Beta men to wait out and forgive women their short-term Alpha Fucks indiscretions during their Party Years, but as Red Pill awareness becomes unignorable the pressures of maintaining the image of being the prime selector will wear on women.

That said, I’ve had many men ask me how best to go about becoming a Red Pill parent. I’ve had many men express that the only advantage to marriage is in creating a healthy, hopefully complementary, environment in which to raise children. However, I’m not sure even women would concur with this assessment in the face of a social narrative that tells them they can raise a child as well as any father can. Yet, by the definition of the Feminine Imperative, a ‘good’ father is one who will sublimate his masculinity and assume a feminine, subservient gender role, thus making his superfluous whether he’s available or not.

In the last essay I emphasized establishing a strong, dominant, yet positive masculine Frame. This is the vital starting point for any long term relationship a man might hope to raise children in. The next imperative a man must confront is the Herculean obstacles he faces in a western culture that devalues him as a father, but obligates him to be an involved ‘good’ father who can only ever qualify himself to the mother of his children (who should place them above his interests) and qualify himself to a society that’s been conditioned to hold him to her standards.

Finally, a potential father needs to understand the circumstance in which women’s never ending quest to satisfy their Hypergamous doubt places them in at various phases of their maturity. For Red Pill men, a lot gets made of ‘vetting’ women for personal attributes and character to make them contenders for being the mother of their children. While this is important, I can’t stress enough how important it is to account for the Hypergamous choices women make prior to his consideration, as well as the consequences she should be held accountable for, yet attempts to avoid by his obligated graces.

In Part II I will expand on what to expect when raising sons and daughters from a Red Pill perspective.