social conventions

The Savior Schema

“Every time a man is being nice to you, he’s offering dick. That’s all it is. ‘Uh, can I get that for ya? How ’bout some dick? Can I help you with that? Can I help you with some dick? Do you need some dick?’ ” – Chris Rock

The Savior Schema – the beta male expectation of reciprocation of intimacy (usually sexual) for problems solved.

This is a learned/developed behavior that results from men’s natural push to deductively search for the most rational solution to a problem. It’s really a linear logic; I need sex + women have sex + I must discover what is required for me to get sex from women + I will perform/embody/identify with said requirements = woman will reciprocate with her intimacy. Needless to say this is simplistic at best, but men have a tendency to believe that women will respond as rationally as they themselves would in qualifying for her stated desires. The manosphere is full of men who can tell you this simply isn’t the case for any number of reasons, but sadly they still think that women ought to live up to their implied “agreement.”

The fundamental flaw of the Savior Schema (also, Captain Save a Ho) is that it is essentially negotiated intimacy, and negotiated intimacy is never genuine. You can fix a woman’s flat tire, help her out of a financial jam, fix her a nice lasagne, give her the perfect shoulder to cry on, take care of her kids and listen to her drone on for hours on the phone, and she’ll still go fuck her outlaw biker boyfriend because her intimacy with him is genuine, unnegotiated, unobligated desire. She wants to have sex with him, she doesn’t owe him sex.

What AFCs fail to understand is that all the financial, emotional, dependable support you could possibly offer a woman is no substitute for raw, unmitigated, chemical desire. Some of the most irresponsible, unreliable, poverty level washouts often get more sex than any dutiful AFC suffering from a Savior Schema, because there is no obligation.

Reciprocity

In the wild, the law of reciprocity and fair exchange is a fairly obvious one. Most high-order social animals have some innate understanding of exchanging resources. In fact you could argue that pair bonding, family structure and social collectives are for the most part based on this shared exchange arrangement. So it stands to reason that in the course of human evolution we too developed this innate psychological wiring, thus making men prone to seeing it as the shortest distance between what we have and what we want.

The difficulties arise when (perhaps cleverly) women learned to covertly use this  innate psychology of exchange within the context of a social framework that gives them a resource advantage for little or no exchange of their own. Thus women modeled a social norm, that mirrors men’s natural default position of disposability, and put their attentions and intimacies as unassailable resources so valuable that no effort on a man’s part can merit it. When a woman is appalled by the notion that she should be obligated to have sex with a man in exchange for a dinner and a movie (even over multiple occasions), this social convention is the root of that insult.

The Protector Dynamic

Of course the flip side to this argument is the Protector Dynamic which is the natural propensity for a man to want to provide protection for his mate. Over the course of our evolutionary history certain psycho-biological behaviors proved to be beneficial to the survival of our species. Specific hormonal releases prompt different emotions and behavioral reactions as a response to our environments. Women, for instance, produce higher volumes of oxytocin and estrogen thus prompting a natural instinctual feeling of wellbeing and nurturing her children (which also, interestingly enough, is released after female orgasm). The same is true for men. Being generally physically stronger and posessing 17 times the testosterone, men have evolved chemical cocktails of their own and thus feel a natural protection instinct when prompted.

The conflict comes when the AFC confuses this Protector Dynamic with a Savior Schema. The natural feelings derived from his biochemistry only serve to reinforce his Savior mentality and solidify it as part of his personality. Even when a woman’s repeated behavior directly contradicts this notion of reciprocating intimacy for help (or his idea of ‘protection’) the Savior Schema only rationalizes it as being inconsistent with a single, individual woman.

This then is the root of the White Knight schema; exchange protection for intimacy (i.e. sex). And, once again, women cleverly, almost subconsciously so, use this dynamic to arrange a beneficial, but unequal, exchange of resources.

Pure Evil

Presently I have two new brands of liquor I’m launching concurrently. In an average year I may introduce one or possibly two, but these are progressive releases and really don’t hit the consumer market until Q3. So with that and my upcoming travel schedule I’m finding it a challenge to do daily updates on RationalMale. Forgive me, but I don’t blog for a living.

Even so, I’m still managing to put ideas to page, but every so often I get stopped in my tracks by something that interrupts my thought train so significantly it demands an immediate post. The lead ‘secret’ from PostSecret (today’s pic) this week was one such article.

In Bitter Misogynists I outline the facility with which our fem-centric socialization will label men as ‘burned’, or presume to ridicule the length of a man’s cock, if he should so much as offer a passing critical thought about women’s motives. I understand why plugged-in men (and women) read the ideas of the manosphere and think that it’s anti-women, misogynistic, cynical and plaintive. With critical thought comes the attendant risk of becoming iconoclastic, and iconoclasts don’t play very well with ego-investments in a system of belief.

Before I go any further, and for the benefit of those unfamiliar with my writing, I unequivocally do not hate women. Got that? I love women; and in fact I sincerely doubt that, but for a negligible few, you could find a Man in the community who genuinely ‘hates’ women. True misogynists are just as rare as true misandrists – the grey area in between the two extremes is where we have to live. However, that said, under the fem-centric social pretexts we live in today, and due to the innate, subconscious hypergamy that motivates it, women are generally unaware of their own misandrist social conventions. As I’ve stated in many a prior post, anything can become normal.

I realize that explaining the latent motivations and core concepts behind feminized social norms to women (and plugged-in men) doesn’t sink in when, on some level of consciousness, they understand that their functioning in society depends upon them NOT thinking too much about them – and discouraging you from doing so either.

Pure Evil

There was a time I thought that the ultimate female-centric lie a woman could tell a man was, “It’s your baby” – I stand corrected, this is it:

“I killed our baby and it’s your fault I did.”

No verification necessary, just pure, wracking, potentially life enduring psychological and emotional distress based entirely on her ability to sell it convincingly. Why go the Carrie Underwood route and smash his car when you can do THIS kind of psyche-damage to him? This is the nuclear option of covert, psychological revenge. As I’ve stated in countless posts, men fight in the overt and physical, women fight in the covert and psychological; and here it is writ large and bold.

I mean really, what an absolutely brilliant tactic this is. She knows you’ll be amenable to her coming back to you a few months later, what better time to drop a bomb like this? In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if this “Your Fault Abortion” revenge isn’t covered on a few websites or forums devoted to getting back at him.

This psychological combat is what gave me pause to write this. I’m sure there’s a contingent of men who will think it’s no big deal, or that a guy would come up with his own rationalizations to cope with any guilt of having a woman purport to be pregnant and then, allegedly, abort the child. He dodged a bullet, right? I would think so too only that, in all the manosphere discussions about the overwhelming male risks associated with marriage, the single most common (only) upside was that marriage is the best environment in which to raise kids. Theoretically, marriage is worth the marriage risk for men who want children of their own. Furthermore this presupposes a motivation in men to want children at some point in life. My assertion is that on some level this registers for women and the opportunism it represents is something viewed as a bargaining token.

NAWALT

Not all women are like this, I know, and I’m not trying to conflate this particular instance to the whole. I love women, remember? What I am illustrating is women’s psychological gender combat skills and how the hypergamic imperative hones them – even when they’re unaware of it doing so. This is an extreme example of a greater dynamic. Irrespective of whether a woman actually is pregnant, or even if the paternity doesn’t belong to you, the fact is that in pregnancy women assume a much more powerful role. If women are socially respected by default, mothers are veritably deified. In a fem-centric world, the life-givers are absolved of any circumstantial indiscretions that led to their pregnancies.

There’s an assumption that men would prefer abortion; to further his wanton sexual strategy of scattershot sexuality, men necessarily would rather avoid the entangling responsibility of parental investment. Yet we have men contemplating entering into an institution that is knowingly stacked against his own best interests in order to “raise a child in the best environment”. That upside must really be important to men to involve themselves in such risk.

On this blog, in my analysis I always try to remain as objective as circumstances permit. By definition I make my best attempts to leave issues of morality out of the discourse (unless the topic IS morality), however in this case it’s unavoidable. This is deliberate evil.

 

The Burden of Control

One of the primary ideas I’ve offered since starting this blog is that of the socially insaturating influence of the feminine imperative. I’ve even dedicated a particular category for it on my sidebar. It’s a recurring theme for my outlook on gender relations because I believe it’s the environment we subconsciously accept as the default. Women of course have little reason to question the primacy of their own imperative when it serves them, and men are less willing to analyze the social fabric they exist in if it intuitively means they might be rejected for intimacy, sex and social affirmation. Unplugging from the feminine Matrix takes an act of will.

I euphemise this environment at times when I refer to the details and social conventions of the imperative as “girl-world“, and often I think that readers may interpret the rise of fem-centrism as something unique to the late 20th century up to the present. And while it’s certain that 3rd wave feminism was the catalyst for the present day “girl-world” society we find ourselves in, I don’t think that it adequately accounts for the prime, directive motive that the feminine imperative demands, and has demanded since before our present feminization.

That prime motivation is control.

Risk vs. Security

It’s easy to simply pass off this feminine need for control as a grab for power, and to an extent that may be true, but this would be interpreting that need from a male perspective. Men tend to want power; power over others, and their own lives, to affirm status, esteem, affluence, etc. From a female perspective, there may be a minority of women who crave male power, but the vast majority seek control in terms of satisfying an innate need for their security. For women, security comes in many different varieties, financial, emotional, self-worth, etc., but their need for control is rooted in minimizing the risk and uncertainty associated with achieving that security.

Through a combination of testosterone and evolved neural wiring, Men thrive and grow in risk taking endeavors – we have a propensity for behaviors that are rewarded in risk. We will go to great lengths in order to take risks. Women’s primary impulse is to avoid risk; being the primary vehicles through which the next generation will pass and be nurtured it’s logical that women’s neural software and biochemistry be evolved for risk aversion. In seeking security, women developed their own set of uniquely evolved propensities for security. Ergo, they became the sex with the better developed capacity for communication, after a need for determining the most secure decisions available to them.

With the catalyst of the sexual revolution, the power dynamic shifted to the feminine imperative in a way it never had before in society. Once freed from the old societal norms, women were encouraged by the feminine (and their new found male sympathizers) to pursue their independence as they saw fit, but what generations of women did with this new freedom was more vigorously pursue what hundreds of thousands of years of evolved psychology had designed in them – to consolidate their own security.

Every law men see as blatantly misandrist from marriage to divorce, alimony to child custody, employment to sexual harassment and more, are primarily rooted in women’s inborn need for security. Virtually every feminine social convention is designed for women to consolidate on a long term security for themselves. Security is their reason for control. If they can control for the options, control the risk management, control the preconditions of their decisions-to-be, they can more definitively consolidate on their security need. Girl-world, our modern, fem-centric society molded by the feminine imperative, was founded on making a better environment for women to exercise this control in order to better facilitate their security motive.

Every browbeaten husband who’s abdicated his frame to appease his wife does so because she doesn’t trust him with controlling for her security. Encouraged for generations to be the self-sufficient, independent woman, and combined with generation of masculine ridicule, she predetermines for herself that men cannot be trusted to provide for her security. In order to meet this need she must take the reigns as a precondition for any marriage or pairing in spite of her wanting a man to do so.

Men are shamed for not being the men women expect them to be because they seem incapable of providing for their security. In girl-world this is the preconceived norm, men wont do it so we have to.

Rewriting Evolution

However the confounding element in this push for feminine control is Men’s influence and cooperation with their imperative. I took a lot of heat for declaring that Men define what is sexy for women. In girl-world this is an affront; women need to control men’s desires in order to make them compliant to their overall security need. Hypergamy can’t function efficiently if men are allowed to define women’s value in the sexual market place. That need for control is aggravated by men’s biologically hard-wired predisposition to prefer women THEY find sexy. Solution? Rewrite the societal rules for what men are allowed to find sexy. Thus we have a fem-centric societal push to encourage men to care about “what’s on the inside” and define their physical attraction cues as “superficial” and “shallow”. It’s the height of the feminine imperative’s arrogance and solipsism to think that it can rewrite the environmental cues for men evolved over centuries.

Entitlement

Feminine entitlement is a topic of much rancor in the manosphere, but one element I think is lacking in that discourse is the role that the feminine security need plays in it. Feminine entitlement is an extension of this need for control – men should owe women the security that their provisioning affords them, and they’re mad about it. In a recent post on In Mala Fide, Ferdinand details the lastest entitlement push for this feminine control – the new ‘dating’ site,

Tawkify.

The basic premise is an overt illustration of exactly the one-sided need for security control women feel entitled to have with men. The premise?

You give the site your name, phone number and email. After getting a code from a robocall, you fill out ten questions — your age, your state, your sex etc. — and upload your photo. Then you select whether you want one match or three (the former costs $8, the latter $15), pay via PayPal, and that’s it. The site’s owners will personally match you to someone based on the info you’ve provided and you’ll get a seven-minute long phone call from them the following Monday.

The kicker is that no woman is expected to tender a picture of herself for the man’s benefit. His interest is dependent entirely on the controlling factor of the ‘matchmaker’ and her determination of his acceptability. And what was the motivation for starting this service?

THE WOMEN ARE IRATE. The women are talking about men, young men, the men they’d like to date and marry, and are they ever pissed. Here’s what they’re saying:

“All they want is sex. They don’t care about relationships.”

“They’re so lazy.”

“All they do is play video games.”

“They aren’t men. They’re boys.”

The women are a little bewildered. They’re good girls. They followed the script: did well in high school, got into college, worked hard there, got out, got jobs, started looking around for someone special to share life with, and …

“I met a guy the other night. Good-looking, smart. Twenty-eight years old. He still lives at home. With his mom.” Young men are now nearly twice as likely as young women to live with their parents; 59 percent of guys ages 18 to 24 and 19 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds live at home. Based on those Census Bureau stats, 64,000 young Philly men have returned to or never left the nest—and they all have mothers, ex-girlfriends, grandmothers, dads and other friends and relations worrying about their plight.

Essentially the site’s founder, E. Jean Carroll, has taken the Kate Bolick / Kay Hymowitz ‘Man-Up’ model of dating in the new masculine paradigm to the next level – simultaneously monetizing women’s insecurities about male ‘Kidults’, reinforcing feminine security entitlement and absolving women of the decisions they made that put them into this new dating paradigm. Bottom line, Carroll is selling hypothetical dates with “real” men with the means to provide the security that women are owed them. And once again the theme repeats itself; men can’t be trusted to provide for your security ladies, so Carroll will do it for you

A League of Your Own

“Rollo, I’m newly Game-aware, red pill guy and I’ve been meeting girls with more and more success since my conversion, but I can’t help the feeling that the really hot girls I want to get with a so out of my league. 

Any suggestions?”

Iron Rule of Tomassi #8

Always let a woman figure out why she wont ƒuck you, never do it for her.

An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors. As I’ve detailed in many prior comments and posts, this means that a woman’s sexual strategy necessitates that she be in as optimized a condition as her capacity (attractiveness) allows for her to choose from the best males available to satisfy that strategy.

This is really the definition of hypergamy, and on an individual level, I believe only the most plugged in of men don’t realize this to some degree of consciousness. However, what I think escapes a lot of men is the complex nature of hypergamy on a social scale. For hypergamy to sustain it’s dominant position as the default sexual strategy for our society, it’s necessary for the feminine imperative to maintain existing, foster new, and normalize complex social conventions that serve it. The scope of these conventions range from the individualized psychological conditioning early in life to the grand scale of social engineering (e.g. Feminism, Religion, Government, etc.)

One of these social conventions that operates in the spectrum of the personal to the societal is the idea of ‘leagues’. The fundamental idea that Social Matching Theory details is that “All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themselves.” In a vacuum, this is the germ of the idea behind the ‘leagues’. The social convention of ‘leagues’ mentality is where ‘all things are not equal’ and used to support the feminine imperative, while conveniently still supporting the principle of social matching theory.

The latent function of ‘leagues’ is to encourage men to filter themselves out for women’s intimate approval.

As social conditions progress and become more complex, so too do men’s ability to mimic the personal attributes of providership and security. In other words, lesser men become intelligent enough to circumvent women’s existing sexual filters and thus thwart their sexual strategy. These ever increasing complexities made it hard to identify optimally suitable men from the pretenders, and women, being the primary sexual selector, needed various social constructs to sort the wheat from the chaff. With each subsequent generation they couldn’t be expected to do all of this detective work on their own so the feminine imperative enlisted the aid of the men themselves and created self-perpetuated, self-internalized social doctrines for men to comply with in order to exist in a feminine defined society.

The concept of leagues is just one of these doctrines. Your self-doubt about your worthiness of a woman’s intimacy stems from a preconditioned idea that ‘you’re out of her league’. The booster club optimist idea that “if you think you can’t, you’re right” is true, and boundless enthusiasm may overcome some obstacles, but to address the source of the disease it’s more important to ask yourself why you’ve been taught to think you can’t. A lot of approach anxiety comes from your own self-impression – Am I smooth, hot, affluent, funny, confident, interesting, decisive, well-dressed enough to earn an HB 9’s attention? How about an HB 6? Our great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.

I’m not debating the legitimacy of the evaluative standards of the sexual market place – it’s a harsh, often cruel reality – what I’m really trying to do is open your eyes as to why you believe you’re only meritorious of an HB 7. Looks count for a lot, as does Game, affluence, personality, talent, etc. but is your self-estimation accurate, or are you a voluntary participant in your own self-devaluation in the SMP courtesy of the leagues mentality the feminine imperative would have you believe?

The Economy of the League

As I stated above the purpose of fomenting a stratified League mentality in men serves to autonomously filter the lesser from the greater men for women to chose from, however, it also functions to increase the valuation of the feminine as a commodity. Like any great economic entity, the feminine imperative lives and dies by its ability to inflate its value in the marketplace. Essentially the feminine imperative is a marketeer. One of the sad ironies of this, and the last, century is that the feminine imperative has attempted to base women’s SMP valuation on a collective importance to the detriment of the individual woman’s SMV. For men this is inverted; a man’s sexual valuation is primarily individualized, while men as a collective gender are devaluated in the SMP.

What I mean by this is that, as a collective entity women’s sexuality cannot afford to be perceived as anything less than the more valued prize. If all vaginas are considered the gold standard then men’s sexual default value will always be lower. By this definition men, on whole, are out of women’s league.

For further consideration lets assume that average men, most being varying degrees of beta, are blessed with the ‘miraculous gift’ of an average woman’s sexual attentions. The power dynamic is already pre-established to defer to a feminine frame, so it’s small wonder that men would be prone to ONEitis even with an objectively average woman. This is the intent of the League schema – to unobjectively predispose men to commitment with women who under objective condition couldn’t enjoy the same selectivity. Roissy once postulated that for a healthy relationship to exist the Man must be recognized by the woman to be 1-2 points above her own SMV. This is a pretty tall order considering the feminine imperative’s emphasis on women’s sexuality being the more valued as default. And this is  to say nothing of contemporary women’s overinflated self-evaluations due to the rise of social media.

Gaming the League

All of the above isn’t to say that there isn’t a kernel of truth to the notion of leagues; it’s just not the “truth” men have been led to believe. For as much as the feminine imperative would have men subscribe to Leagues, it equally seeks to exempt women from the same League hierarchy by evaluating women as a whole. Needless to say men have their own rating systems – most popularly the ubiquitously physical HB 10 scale. I should add that it’s a foregone conclusion that any rating system men would establish for women in the feminine reality would necessarily need to be ridiculed, shamed and demonized, but you knew that already.

Irrational self-confidence is a good start to circumventing and unlearning the concept of Leagues; unlearning this conditioning being the operative goal. The Game-aware Man can actually use the concept of Leagues to his advantage with enough guile. When you approach a woman without regard to a League mentality or even a Zen-like obliviousness to it, you send the message that there’s more to you than a feminine reality can control. It’s exactly this disregard for the influence of the feminine imperative that makes the Alpha attractive; he’s unaware of, or indifferent to the rules his conditioning should’ve taught him earlier. Just in the attempt of Gaming a woman obviously “out of your league” you flip the feminine script by planting a seed of doubt (and prompting imagination) about your perceived value. Doubt is a very powerful tool, in fact the very concept of Leagues is founded upon men’s self-doubt. Turn that tool to your advantage by disregarding women’s social convention of Leagues.

Case Study – Creative Intelligence

Below I have posted descriptions of 4 men from a case study I was involved with as part of a graduate study for personality psychology. Before you ask, no, this wasn’t an original study, however it was a measures experiment we performed to see how the results matched with our own university.These descriptions are excerpts from that case study comparing female mate selection. They were presented individually to 101 university women between the ages of 18 and 36. All were single/unmarried and none were aware of the intent of the experiment. I’ll present more details of the experiment after you have chance to respond so as not to spoil your genuine responses. Here are the descriptions:

––––––––––
M is an art student. M has always had a passion for painting and plans to pursue a career in art. He creates paintings of people and complex landscapes. His paintings are so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photographs. The consensus amongst his art professors is that he is, by far, the most talented student they have seen. One professor, an expert on lifelike paintings, says he believes M is one of the most talented artists ever to produce these paintings. To make extra money to support his schooling, M has sold a few of his best paintings. They have sold for between 100 and 200 dollars. One professor lamented that M’s paintings are worth far more, but like so many other artists, he will probably never make very much money selling them.

L is an art student. He paints abstract paintings. L came into art by chance. He took an art class as an elective because it fit well in his schedule. For his midterm project, he produced an abstract painting after an hour of “fooling around” with the paint and canvas. The majority of the painting actually consisted of paint he accidentally spilled onto the canvas. A very wealthy man who was looking for art for his home discovered L’s painting in the student art studio. He paid L $5,000 dollars for the painting. Some of the man’s other wealthy friends liked L’s painting and commissioned a total of $100,000 in paintings from him. L and his art professors were shocked at the success of L’s paintings, because, in the words of one professor, “he has no real talent, just some good luck.” L continues to capitalize on his success by selling his abstract art.

L and M are considered highly desirable by other women on campus and very attractive. Friends of L and M say that they are dependable, kind, and generous friends.

J is an entrepreneur who had great success in his first business venture. He started a small software business in a friend’s garage. His product was a new kind of software for improving factory designs to radically increase the profitability of manufacturing. Within his first year, J secured contracts with Ford, General Electric, and Boeing. In the next three years, J sold his software to most of the top manufacturing companies in the United States and several of the top companies in Asia. After 5 years in business, J’s company was valued at 120 million dollars and had 250 employees. The Wall Street Journal credited the success of J’s company to the “brilliance and novelty” of J’s product and to J’s “sheer genius as a businessman.” However, J’s company fell victim to misfortune the next year. After J rejected a take-over bid from Microsoft, Microsoft filed a lawsuit claiming that J’s software infringed on some of their patents. Although most experts agreed that the suit had no merit, the cost of defending himself against the lawsuit created huge cash flow problems for J, which drove the company into bankruptcy. Although J has very little money left, he has recently begun a new business venture to sell another of the software products he has invented.

R recently inherited 20 million dollars from the couple who had adopted him when he was a year old. They died in a car crash, having made their fortune in commercial real estate. Before they died, R worked as a sales person at a computer company. Although R worked at the company for several years, he had not advanced past his starting salary or rank within the company. He went to a community college, but after graduation he didn’t feel sure what to do with his life. A friend who was working at the computer company suggested that R join him and work there. In R’s words, “I guess I’m just not very good at this job. At least now I won’t have to worry about money any more.” R and his adoptive parents were very close, and he was deeply saddened by their deaths.

J and R are both attractive and in their mid-twenties. They were recently nominated as two of the most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles.
–––––––––––

Bear in mind, these guys a theoretical archetypes, how they relate to women is irrelevant. How the subject women percieved them is what’s being assessed. Of these 4 men, which do you suppose was rated the highest in desirability with which to have a short-term sexual affair with by these women? And which man was rated the highest in desirability to enter into a long-term relationship with?

This study was done to determine comparative priorities in women with regards to male ‘creative intelligence’ vs.‘provisioning ability’ in female mate selection. I would’ve titled this thread as such, but I wanted to get some unbiased and impulse responses from readers here to see what the perceptions of these archetypes were from men and the reactions guys expected from women to these archetypes.

You’ll notice that care was taken in these archetype descriptions to balance out the physical attractiveness of each man (i.e. both artists were considered equally attractive by peers and both businessmen were ‘eligible’ bachelors). What was at issue wasn’t their extrinsic characteristics – comparative physiques or obvious Alpha presence – but what women chose in regards to these men’s intrinsic characteristics. The theory being that Creative Intelligence is of a higher mating value in the short term while a better Provisioning ability is more desirable in the long term. Bear in mind that hypergamy influences the decision making process for both of these sexual strategies. Also added was the caveat that legitimacy of provisioning ability, and the potential for future provisioning in it’s absence (i.e. the down on their luck men), played a factor in this mate selection.

Creative Intelligence

So what exactly is “Creative Intelligence”? Although there is no firm consensus on how to define it, we often know it when we see it. We also know a bit about it from a century of creativity research. Within humans, creative intelligence is closely associated with the highly heritable general intelligence, and creative intelligence seems to rely on the generation, selective elaboration, and skillful implementation of ideas and strategies. In other words, creativity represents a strong capacity for successful improvisation, thus it became a desirable, selected-for species survival trait.

The problem is that creativity sounds desirable, as does intelligence, so “creative intelligence” can become a vague term that seems useful for solving any behavioral problem, whether technological, ecological, social, sexual, or cultural. Many plausible adaptive functions explain the origins of human creative intelligence. These include: tool-making and tool-using, hunting, foraging, and food preparation methods, social strategizing within and between groups and sexual courtship dynamics (i.e. hunter-gatherer proto-Game).

Sorry for the psych lesson, but we had to be specific.

Trade Offs

As I elaborated in Schedules of Mating, most women face trade-offs in mating. In selecting a long-term mate, it makes hypergamic sense for women to put greater weight on traits that advertise ability and willingness to invest in protection, provisioning, and care of the woman and her offspring. This will favor the evolution of ‘good dad’ indicators – reliable cues of paternal investment ability and willingness to participate in those responsibilities. In our past, women of very high mate value (HB 8 and above) had the luxury of attracting a long-term mate who has both good dad potential and good genes. Fast forward through the ages and women have progressively had to settle for a committed partner who is not ideal either paternally or genetically. Then add to this the increasing complexity of men adapting to mimic these cues in order to facilitate their own breeding strategy. Consequently women are, by order of degree, incentivized to secure better genes or better paternal care from short-term or extra-pair partners, while simultaneously seeking long term provider males. Either would help at any time.

In this study, the idea was that, issues of relative attraction and arousal being satisfied, women will prefer a male possessing a higher capacity for Creative Intelligence in short-term sexual encounters to ensure the best possible future options for her offspring, while choosing a mate with better Provisioning ability for long term parental investment.

Art and business were chosen as two contrasting domains of work. Each requires distinct styles of creative intelligence, but both demand combinations of practical and theoretical skills, individual effort and social interaction. Hence, merit-based success in either domain may function as a mental fitness indicator. In each domain (art or business), one vignette described a man who showed high creative intelligence in his work, but who was poor due to bad luck and adverse circumstances. The other vignette in each set described a man who was average on creative intelligence, but who was wealthy due to good luck and beneficial circumstances. All vignettes made clear that each man’s creativity level was largely endogenous, reflecting natural (and presumably heritable) talent, but that his wealth level was largely accidental, gained through no merit or fault of his own.

Results

Each woman completed two forced-choice questions: (1) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a short-term sexual affair?”; (2) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a long-term committed relationship?” (L or M in the artist vignettes, and R or J in the entrepreneur vignettes). Next, participants rated the desirability of each man as a short-term mate and as a long-term mate on two 9-point scales (where ‘1’ = not at all desirable, ‘5’ = average; ‘9’ = extremely desirable). The rating questions were as follows: “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a long-term partner?” “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a short-term partner?

In this study M was overwhelmingly chosen as the short term partner. 89% of the participants chose the naturally talented, but out of luck artist for a short term sexual encounter. 7% chose L the rich artist, 3% chose J the poor/talented businessman and 1% opted for R the wealthy/untalented businessman.

J was also rated highest for long term relationship, but not as significantly as M in the short term. 67% of our subjects chose J, and surprisingly 17% chose L (rich artist). R was rated at 12% and M took 4% for the long term choice.