Susan Walsh

Hysteria

In light of the Feminine Imperative having itself capsized over the UVa rape fantasy retracted by Rolling Stone this month, I was reminded of this video and post by Heartiste (Roissy) a few years ago:

Basically, the guy had a few friends follow him around the mall, one guy filming him and the other two guys (I can’t tell if any of his hired guns were women) acting as his “groupies” or entourage. He goes around identifying himself as “Thomas Elliot” when people, mostly women, ask him his name. Eventually, he begins to pile up admiring and gawking female attention, which only snowballs into more female attention. Apparently, not one of these starstruck chicks thought to question if Thomas Elliot was a real celebrity. That’s the power of preselection and fame; so powerful, it can disengage a woman’s neural logic circuitry.

Heartiste goes on to make the prerequisite Game principle  & application observations here, but there is a much larger dynamic in play. While the mall makes for a good setting to test this experiment, it is fairly isolated. A security detail gets assigned to “Thomas Eliot” and even some shops close in order to avoid a crowd panic, but could this dynamic be proven on a larger scale?

This is a very interesting social experiment, particularly when compared to the now infamous (and staged) viral video of Shoshana Roberts walking around New York and enduring the attentions of men she found less than savory. Interesting because they’re essentially trolling for attention from the opposite sex with similar methods, and the results are telling about how each gender perspective generates and reacts to that attention.

Darryl Long made a comment on this topic, and I’ve been considering it for a while now:

On this topic of how women’s attraction changes across their lifetimes I don’t think any analysis is complete without looking at the phenomena of teen-idols. As a man who has sisters and daughters its clear that there is something biological going on with pubescent girls in a way that is radically different from boys. Boys may fantasize about a poster girl, but they never fall over themselves for heartthrobs like Bieber, or Lief Garret, and David Cassidy (in the old days). I’m amazed that many of these teen heartthrobs are more on the fair/effeminate side than masculine. They look like they have good genes, but the most important thing is that all the other girls like them. They are male figures that girls lend incredible status making them even more attractive.

Preselection is a very powerful motivator of women’s hypergamous decision making process. Even the perception of fame (or even the potential for it) is a prime motivator and incentive to lock down a man who presents the hypergamous optimal ideal – a guy who satisfies the sexiness her Alpha Fucks hypergamous needs require and the long term security of provisioning potential from status-confirmed Beta Bucks.

Whether this “famous” guy actually embodies this ideal is irrelevant to a woman’s Id-centric psyche. When women are younger, tweens and teens, this self-convincing is much easier since girls lack any real world experience to reference with respect to what the guy really represents. A capacity for abstract thinking is something that develops as we mature, but the desire to optimize hypergamy is a limbic, instinctual drive for girls and no amount of reasoning can compete with the fantasy of a pre-fabricated idealized Hypergamy.

They want to believe it.

Thus we have hordes of girls and young women willing to go to behavioral lengths they would never consider with the mundane men they’re familiar with in order to just brush with the possibility of  that hypergamous ideal. They will literally climb over one another to realize this.

In a Game sense, preselection (and prequalification or 3rd party endorsement) is a very powerful, instinctual impetus for women. Even in marginal, isolated social settings preselection is an overriding imperative:

Your goal should be to attract women effortlessly, so play to your strengths no matter what they are; there is a groupie for every male endeavor. – Roissy

Mass Hysteria

Once you have a basic understanding of the preselection dynamic and how it is an evolved feature of women’s psychological firmware, the next step is to understand how the power of preselection influences women (and by association men) when scaled to a feminine social dynamic.

Roissy notes from the first video:

Apparently, not one of these starstruck chicks thought to question if Thomas Elliot was a real celebrity.

As I’ve noted in prior posts, perceptions are the overriding imperative of the feminine psyche. It’s not that women on an individual level don’t possess the faculties to discern legitimate social proof, it’s that on a social level they want to believe in that social proof. The estimation of the collective feminine mindset is a powerful influence on the individual woman since it plays on that non-abstract, instinctual need for a pre-verification of optimal hypergamy.

In other words, the effort of sexual-selection vetting has already  been done for them by the feminine hivemind.

Verifying legitimate social proof takes individual time and effort. Perhaps not as much as men have a rational capacity for (the New York stunt fooled more than a few tag-along guys affirming the pseudo-social proof), but for women that opportunity for meeting a hypergamously ideal man supersedes the mental efforts needed to verify social proof. The greater mass of women already believe in the preselection and the intersexual competition is on and overt.

I’ve made the distinction before with regards to women’s preferred communications methods; covert communication being women’s native language, but when women resort to overt communications it’s generally because the content of the  information needing to be transferred outweighs the need for how it’s delivered, or the context of that information.

Transferring information about a man’s preselected approval amongst a collective of women is one such override. However, it’s very important for men living in a feminine-primary social order to understand that social proof is not just limited to preselection of men as potential partners.

This social proof dynamic extends to the perceptions of women in a collective peer group, as well as men for whom they have no sexual interest in, but serve their material interests nonetheless.

The current cultural atmosphere of male suspicion and autonomous rape-threat assessment of men is another variation of this perceptual, hysterical, collective belief dynamic. Women want to believe in the presumption that every man outside of their preselected, collective approved, hypergamous ideal  is a potential rape threat. In other words, a man who might, by force or coercion, assume control of her hypergamous sexual selection.

The narrative, the perception, is all that matters.

And like the women who never had an afterthought as to whether “Thomas Eliot” was the real deal, likewise women become so ego-invested in the certainty of their collective perceptions that, even in light of contrary evidence, the only acknowledged verification of that perception is how it makes them feel.

This contradiction of a collective feminine hysteria is what many luminaries of the Feminine Imperative are now being forced to confront. It’s important to remember during this UVa / Rolling Stone rape debacle that women, and more than a few enabling male sympathizers, wanted to believe this travesty was true in spite of the vaudevillian outlandishments and still refuse to accept that it isn’t.

From Truth to Power:

Denial

The first step to really unplugging from our preconditioning (i.e the feminine Matrix) is recognizing that this conditioning has led to the beliefs we think are integral to our personalities. The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. When a person internalizes a mental schema so thoroughly, and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such a violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, inter-gender, etc. expressions of belief – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable, empirical evidence that challenges the veracity of those beliefs.

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof. Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function.

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence, your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt, however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image. Solution: deny the mistake. Attribute it to an outside element rather than resort to introspection.

This degree of core-level denial is where the likes of Jessica Valenti, Susan Walsh and Zerlina Maxwell find themselves today.

In spite of still growing confirmation that the story was a hoax, femosphere bloggers hold out hope against hope that even the smallest part of a medieval-like rape story to rival Silence of the Lambs could be true.

The pivot for this will of course be how the falsehood injures women who genuinely are rape victims, but this is just the shiny keys jingling to distract anyone sympathetic to their ego-investments from the fact that they wanted to believe this story was legitimate.

They wanted to believe it without an afterthought of critical analysis.

They wanted to believe it in spite of the obvious melodramatic dialogue described by “Jackie”.

They wanted to believe a naive freshmen girl could be frat boy initiation raped for three hours on the shards of glass from a broken glass table and never seek medical treatment or have anyone raise an eyebrow over the bloody mess that her back must’ve looked like as she nonchalantly walked out of the party house.

They wanted and still hope that even the most marginal parts of the story might be true. They want any shred of hope that will distract from the fact that they must now confront their complete acceptance of this obvious farce without any compunction of critical thinking.

They all have to face the fact that their presumption of male guilt comes before any logic or reason. This is the uniquely feminine hysteria that even men will invest themselves into if it means they can more positively identify with the Feminine Imperative.

Malice and Forethought

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After the engaging conversation in this week’s comment thread, there’s something I’ve been contemplating and I think it might make for a good weekend discussion.

With regard to this new comfort women have with open Hypergamy now, proudly laying bare their Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy, to the degree that advertising agencies are making blatant commercials about it, I’m starting to think that women hold (or are progressively developing) a subconscious level resentment for those men who would willingly accept her intimately in spite of that foreknowledge.

I realize this reads like a “well, duh Rollo” moment, and I get that a deductive, lesser respect for a Beta man impulse resides in women, but what I’m considering here is this lesser respect in a new, open Hypergamy social context. Whereas before a Beta man might be excused for his ignorance of women’s sexual pluralism (AF/BB) due to women’s secrecy or marginalizing it, now women discover that the Beta men they need to consolidate on in the long term are such hopeless romantics and so sexually optionless that they’ll willfully ignore that open Hypergamy and accept them intimately in spite of it.

It’s an interesting conflict; on one hand the urgency of consolidating on a long term prospect leads her to the Epiphany Phase rationalizations for wanting to do things ‘the right way’ with the Beta provider, but on the other hand, there’s the fact that he accepts his pro-active cuckolding with full knowledge of not just her own prior Alpha ‘indiscretions’, but open Hypergamy on whole.

She needs the guy for provisioning and parental investment impulses, but now the buffer of convincing herself that this Nice guy is simply naive to how Hypergamy functions is gone, thus leaving her more resentful that the type of man she at least figuratively would spend her life with is this pathetic.

Commenter, salemsuwareh had an excellent observation from the last post  that I didn’t want to be lost in the pile:

 I just went to HUS’s article and the explanations given by the women and white knights there actually impressed me because they conveniently demonstrate so many things:

– The most important point is that the whole scenario is defined by the feminine imperative, this point really overrides and defines all others. It’s a form of thought control. If you define what was, what is and what could be according to your imperative then you can make yourself look right. It’s like a way more sophisticated version of 1984’s thought control.

– Women keep chiming in with their stories of how they too enjoy more attention from the other sex now that they’ve fixed some aspect of themselves (and they’ll try to clutch at Stephan doing the same thing to support their argument). What they don’t mention is the difference in SMV between men and women. Women START OUT being arousing to men and go downhill from there. A woman who made herself look better would’ve had at least as much attention when she was younger if she weren’t ugly then.

– Stephan describes himself as not having changed but the women say that is what he has. They are literally conjuring up the idea that Stephan is now more alpha out of thin air.

– They accuse men of doing the same thing women are doing if they can’t make a point or they accuse men of starting it. For example they say MEN who perpetuate the “beta bux” myth. In the next sentence, Susan says that only one of beta bux or post-wall women overestimating their SMV can be true, which coming from her can only be a case of willing, studied ignorance. She’s trying to take pieces out of Rollo’s words and put them against each other but she’s changing the context that the words were made for in the first place, for example – her comparison is false because post-wall women are DEFINED BY (other than visible outer signs ie. fading looks) a realisation that their SMV is under fire, that doesn’t put that in opposition to beta bux, it supports it. By now I’m thinking women have a natural talent for projection and rationalization.

– Men who fear being single like women do are beta men. They are so because a man with options by definition cannot fear being single, since he has options. If you’ve never had any success with women and you’re a plugged-in blue pill, of course you will fear being single! the leaps and haphazard logic she’s making here are just astounding, and that’s before I even begin talking about what she’s implying by saying/implying that men and women have the same problems.

– Susan is selecting the cases that support her point. The two ugly ducklings who find each other at age 28 and live happily ever after.

– Susan talks as if women have no idea what they’re doing with men. If epiphany-phase women are giving signs of being hooked on you, they must genuinely want to fuck you! because women are warm, fuzzy creatures and would never do something like try to push someone’s buttons to get what they want.

– It’s made out like Stephan can turn into a winner if he takes one of these leftover women, or rather that he already IS one because they want him now. They’re trying to prop up his ego to get him to go along with their imperative. Don’t worry Stephan, these girls finally understand that the person they really felt their tingles for was you all along! they were just confused by biker-Rob with the skull tattoo, but I’m all yours now baby.

Overall It’s pretty cool to see the three female weapons as I see them – the anointed trinity of Female Imperative, Rationalization and Projection – in action. They do it so well that you wouldn’t see it for what it is unless you’re familiar with something like Rollo’s blog, which is what’s going on with most men. Unfortunately for these women we have a failsafe, which is to observe what choices women make instead of listening to why they themselves say they make them (assuming she’s a rare woman who holds herself accountable for her own choices, that is).

The problem with convincing Stephan he’s on the right path (of Beta assimilation) is that this feminine-primary advice mistakenly presumes an old order, closed-Hypergamy social paradigm. The ladies at HUS presume Stephan is ignorant of this new-order open Hypergamy (or just initially questioning it), and as with women of their age, they cling to the idea that they can put the Hypergamy genie back in the bottle, reapply his Beta blinders, and thus re-prepare him for a 27-30 year old woman necessitous of his provisioning potential.

This is where their resentment stems from. Any man with the visceral knowledge of women’s dualistic sexual strategy who would still pardon their own participation in it is a man even less respectable than the forgivable Beta without that foreknowledge.

He’s a guy who Just Gets It, yet is so pathetically optionless he willingly chooses to participate in it, since to him the prospect of being manipulated is preferable to the threat of perpetual loneliness; which is the very same threat these women level at him in their advice.

The ‘better’ Beta they think can be built isn’t ego-satisfyingly believable if he’s already aware of and participates in the schadenfreude they have for him.

Moments of Clarity

momentofclarity

Even for the most abject Beta man there comes significant points in his life when he makes a Red Pill connection – a point at which, despite his feminine-primary socialization and for all his own participation in a system that deceives him, his circumstance or a trauma rattles him into a state of clarity.

As I wind my way through the Preventive Medicine timeline in the second draft of the next book I come to understand the periods at which these moments of clarity most commonly occur for Beta men.

Early in life that prompt may be the sting of having a high school sweetheart break up with him before she goes off to college. In or after college it might be the undoing of a long distance relationship he thought for sure his soul-mate would help him dutifully preserve. Later it maybe the realization of how much of his personal potential he truly lost after investing so much in a wife who divorced him and separated him from his children.

Not all of these events are as traumatic as this, but it’s during these Red Pill moments of clarity a man begins to see a hint of the code in the Matrix; a suspicion that maybe what he’s believed about how intergender relations should be really haven’t been directed toward his best interest.

So it was with a certain amount of interest I took notice of a man named Stephen when he petitioned advice from a mouthpiece of the Feminine Imperative this week. Though he doesn’t yet realize it, Stephen is at a Red Pill moment of clarity in his life, and as most Beta men are won’t to do, he seeks answers from the same feminine-primary trough that’s kept him in a state of patient stasis until his yet unrealized potential has now become useful to the Feminine Imperative.

Rather than simply allow the feminine crabs drag him back down into the barrel (until his next Red Pill moment of clarity), I’m going to re-post his plea for understanding here and give him (with the help of my esteemed commenters) the Red Pill truth he deserves at so critical a juncture in his life.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my college dating experiences. I’m 28 years old now and I’ve noticed a very odd phenomenon lately. I’m getting noticed (and approached) by women that never would’ve given me the time of day when I was in college. Successful, accomplished women! One in particular is incredibly hot, but they all are attractive. I am baffled by this. You may laugh, but this is making me extremely frustrated and stressed out.

Reading your blog has offered some explanations. I’m an analytical guy, so I’ve been very impressed with the social science you weave into your writing, and the research about how 28 is the ideal male age for women helped to explain what might be going on. But I still can’t figure out what’s going on, with me or with them. I feel emotions like resentment and suspicion, as well as desire, but I’m not at all flattered. I find myself unable to respond in any way, positively or negatively. I feel paralyzed.

Sometimes I think I’m just offended. These are the very same women who rejected me time and again in college. I mean, I know they’re not the same but…they’re the same. I wanted relationships (I tried casual sex…EPIC FAIL), they didn’t want me. My one serious college girlfriend cheated on me with her professor. I was really, really hurt, felt like a chump, etc. 
To put it in a HUS context, the [college girls] preferred alpha males (I’m definitely a beta, introverted, overly intense, with a baby face.) Or maybe they were reluctant to get involved during college because they wanted to be free to move on after graduation and not be tied down.

The thing is, I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. Frankly, I couldn’t change if I wanted to, even if it meant getting these women. I may have come out of my shell a little, but I honestly don’t think it’s me that’s different. It’s them, and I don’t think I like the difference. I think I’m the consolation prize. I think they still want the alphas but they’ve given up. Time to settle. I’m offended. I don’t trust these women.

Am I too proud? Getting my revenge? Guarded from past humiliations? Or have I just grown up and learned from my experiences?

Stephen

Stephen, the moment of Red Pill clarity you’re now experiencing is coming from your newly realized status. The women you describe being attracted to you (different than being aroused by you) are entering what I call The Epiphany Phase – the point at which their sexual market value begins to decay in earnest while a man’s begins his greatest potential to capitalize upon his own SMV as it steadily (should) increase.

This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice of husband (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in the prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

Where you find yourself now, Stephen, is in the midst of these women coming to terms with their waning SMV and the increasing effort it takes women of that age bracket to effectively compete in a sexual marketplace where younger women simply outclass them with every new year that she doesn’t consolidate on a man who represents a good long term provisioning prospect.

As you suggest, these are the same women who found you sexually invisible when they were younger and enjoying the same SMV peak with the relatively more Alpha men they wanted to have short term sexual experiences with. These women were the younger competition they now find threatening their sexual selection today.

Are they exactly the same individual women? I don’t know for sure from your outline, but even if they aren’t, the Schedules of Mating script women follow is so common and predictable that they may as well effectively be the same women to you – and this is precisely what your subconscious instinct is attempting to relate to your conscious-self now.

…I honestly don’t think it’s me that’s different. It’s them, and I don’t think I like the difference.

Unless you’ve made a drastic improvement to your physical appearance or you’ve become more Game aware and have changed your intersexual outlook and behavior the obvious answer is, it is these women who’ve changed.

Now the question remains, why?

What has changed in these women’s lives that prompted this dramatic shift in how they’ve re-prioritized what they now find sexually acceptable? What is it about you in the now (and not back then) that makes you ideal for that acceptability?

Aunt Giggles wants to convince you to let bygones be bygones and follow along with the script the Feminine Imperative expects of you by shaming you for not forgiving a woman of her past indiscretions…

No doubt the girls at college rewarded the males who were early developers and exhibited masculine qualities then. Why take that personally?

I’ll tell you why, because the men they were interested in short term sexual prospects with then weren’t being asked to make anything resembling the life changing personal investment in these ‘reformed’ women she hopes you’ll man-up and be a ‘Better Beta’ for. Those men got the milk for free because the cow milked herself and gave it to them, gladly.

Now that’s a hell of a proposition for a guy who’s played by what his prior feminine conditioning would have him believe were the ‘rules’ for as long as you have. Is it really that far a stretch to want to protect the investment of your personal potential, not to mention your yet unrealized peak SMV potential, with women who now hope you’ll be sex, love and desire starved enough for the past 10 or so years to look past all the short term sex they had with more Alpha men in the Party Years of their early to mid 20s?

Maturation of Beta Bucks

Aunt Sue has always ridden the fence when it comes to acknowledging the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks nature of women’s sexual strategy. When it suits her narrative she agrees with Hypergamy, when it doesn’t, well, you’ll never know because those posts get scrubbed from her blog.

Fortunately you don’t need her input on Hypergamy to understand women’s pluralistic sexual strategy – there are many, much higher profile women than Susan Walsh who openly and publicly endorse exactly the strategy these women (who are suddenly attracted to you now) are using:

“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

And since we’re interested in the research perhaps we can ask Aunt Sue why it is nearly half of women in relationships retain a ‘Plan B’ guy:

Whether he’s the one that got away, the office husband, or a gym partner, chances are he is the “Plan B” man you fantasize about running away with. Like an insurance policy, this man is the handpicked boyfriend or husband replacement you have on standby once “plan A” starts to break down on you. According to a survey conducted by OnePoll.com, an online market research company, half of women who are married or in relationships have a Plan B man on standby who is “ready and waiting” because of “unfinished business.”

You see Stephen, it’s not those “Red Pill, Dark Triad cads” who perpetuate the “Beta Bux” theory; we don’t need to, it’s modern women who proudly, triumphantly, openly confirm their own Hypergamy and blatantly expect you to comply with it by default. In fact they’ll shame you, as all the commenters on HUS are doing now, for even questioning your expected role in affirming their sexual strategy.

So, with the knowledge of this new Red Pill truth, openly confirmed by the very same women who are ‘attracted’ to you now, how do you intend to benefit from it? Will you stick your head back in the blue pill sand of HUS, or will you become curious about the broader truths of the Red Pill. Just remember, now you’re aware of a Red Pill truth, there’s no going back.

However, bear in mind, you’re 28, the women you’re dealing with now have had a lot longer than just the 4 years they may have spent in high school to decide if you were attractive to them – these women have had the better part of the past 10 years and the benefit of experiencing the peak of their SMV potential up to this point in life.

Aunt Giggles’ would have you believe your new found SMV is the result some maturation process or change in your personal conditions when in fact it’s the very calculated result of an proudly confirmed, pre-designed sexual strategy. And it becomes really insidious when the operative feminine social convention in play accuses you of wanting “revenge” for acknowledging the same strategy that these women do openly already; you could be cowed into the fear of remaining alone, but that’s a myth to bust in another post.

Commenters, perhaps I’ve missed something here.

Please, feel free to post your advice for Stephen in the always open, never moderated and entirely uncensored comment section only here at The Rational Male.

Equalism and Masculinity

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What a lot of feminists hate about red pill theory is that it simply does a better job of predicting social behavior than feminism ever has. I’d like to think that red pill awareness has fundamentally altered (or enlightened if you’d like) intergender interpretations and understanding in a relatively short time, but that would be a mistake.

There’s a distinct group of self-evincing red pill guys who like to remind us in various comment threads that it hasn’t always been thus. Their story is our forbearers “knew better” with regard to how men and women ought to interact with one another, and essentially spelled this out for future generations in the religious and philosophical texts of antiquity.

While I can’t deny the merit of this, I also know that the men of those bygone eras didn’t have anything approaching the mass of information and the connectivity men possess today. It’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of the idea that back in some Golden Age of manhood, men knew about the dangers of allowing women’s hypergamous natures to run amok. I’m sure those men knew of the consequences of allowing women to control their fates. I’m sure there were Beta men and cuckolded men as well, but even the most wise Alpha among them could never, for instance, understand the impact that a unilaterally feminine-controlled form of birth control would effect upon a globalized society.

The sages of manhood-past may still have many relevant lessons for the men of today, but they simply lack the compounded experiences and understanding men possess now. Though they undoubtedly were keen observers of human behavior, the greatest thinkers of antiquity simply didn’t have an inkling as to the evolved, biological motivators of the sexual strategies our psyches developed in our hunter-gatherer human past.

What frustrates the advocates of this bygone manhood wisdom is that for all of our collective experience and knowledge, for the past sixty or so years, men struggle to come to terms with what that masculinity should mean to them. For all of the accumulated male experience and relation of it that’s led to red pill awareness, men still grapple with ‘what being a man means to them’.

Undoing of a Man

When I do consults with men of all ages I have to begin from a presumption that what these men’s concept of masculinity is usually is the result of a deliberate attempt by the Feminine Imperative to confuse men about what being a man should be for him.

Even the men who tell me they were raised by the most dominant, positively masculine fathers still suffer the internalized effects from this feminized effort to cast doubt on men’s masculinity.

Recently NPR began a series of articles attempting to suss out what it means to be a man in the 21st century. I do listen to NPR, and while I know bias will always be an inevitable part of news stories, I couldn’t help but assess what a morass attempting to define masculinity has become for contemporary men. Each story, each attempt to redefine masculinity, relied on the same tired tropes the Feminine Imperative has been using for men since the start of the sexual revolution.

Weakness, vulnerability, is sold as strength. Submissiveness and compromise to the feminine is sold as “support” and deserving of praise and a reciprocal appreciation (which never manifests in women). Beta is Alpha and Alpha is insecurity, bluster and compensation.

Those are the main premises, and, to a large degree, most red pill aware men realize that behavior is the only true determinant of motivation, and reject the feminized, egalitarian equalist messaging. However, what still surprises me is that this same, deliberate effort to cast doubt on what masculinity should be for a man hasn’t changed its message or methods of conditioning men to accept this masculine confusion for almost 40 years now.

Through the late 80’s and up to now, the idea of anything positively masculine is either ridiculed, cast as misogynistic, or implies a man might be gay if he’s too celebratory of his maleness. Since the start of the sexual revolution, any definition of what masculinity truly should mean has been subject to the approval of the Feminine Imperative.

In the absence of a clear definition of what masculinity is for men, the Feminine Imperative is free to create as grotesque a straw man of ugly masculinity, or as beatific a feminized model of masculinity as it needs to serve its purpose. With the aid of the Male Catch 22, blurring and distorting masculinity, raising and conditioning men to accept ambiguity and doubt about the security of a ‘manhood’ they’re encouraged not to define for themselves, are all the methodologies employed to ensure a feminine-primary social order.

Equalism vs. Complementarity

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests.

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

The mistake is applying a humanistic, egalitarian equalist ideal to human sexual strategies that evolved over millennia to be complementary to each other, not an equitable exchange of resources to be negotiated over. This is one reason genuine desire cannot be negotiated – this fundamental is rooted in our most primal, complemetary understanding of sex.

The point at which egalitarian equalism (the religion of feminism) fundamentally fails is presuming that intergender relations should ideally exist in a goal-state of egalitarian equalism and / or a reciprocally equal state of mutually supportive interests.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about equalism and reciprocity.

The sexes evolved to be complementary to each other for the betterment of the species. Why do you think women form the most secure emotional attachments to men 1-2 SMV steps above themselves? Why is masculine dominance such an attractive male aspect for even the most feminist of women who’d otherwise plead for equality among the sexes?

I have a bit of a weird relationship with “traditional masculinity”. I’ve looked critically at it enough to know how much damage it does as a paradigm. I’ve seen the harm it can do to both men and women on an individual level. I’ve been subject to the violence it encourages. But despite all that, holy shit does it ever turn me on.

[…]

There’s just something about assertiveness (let’s be real, sometimes flat out arrogance) that does it for me. No matter how much I can be attracted to someone emotionally and intellectually, my swoons only happen when confronted by a powerful, competent man.

This has lead to some issues in my personal life. Who knew being attracted almost exclusively to men that inherently make bad partners wouldn’t work out well for me?

What we’re observing here is a rudimentary conflict between an internalized humanist idealism (the way equalism teaches thing’s should be) versus evolved, impulsive realism (the way things are).

The doctrine of equalism presumes a socialized expectation of being turned-on or attracted to men exemplifying a ‘gender equitable’, equalist-correct, mindset and the evolved, visceral arousal / attraction to a man exhibiting the dominant characteristic traits of masculine complementarity.

Another example of this conflict can be found in my essay on Choreplay.

In 2008 the transactional nature of sex-for-equitable-services was an over blown meme. The message then was that men needed to do more feminine-typical chores around the house, and the equitable exchange would be his wife reciprocating with more frequent and more intense sex as a result of his “equitable” participation in that negotiation.

Fast forward to 2013 and now (by the same author mind you):

Hey, fellas, put down those vacuum cleaners and pull out the lawn mowers.

Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and sex.

“Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher sexual frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor,”…

So what you see illustrated here, in just the space of 5 years, is the frustration and conflict between an equalist idealized model vs. the evolved complementary model of gender relations. It’s not about the equitability of like for like exchanges or like for like reward/benefit, but rather the way that equitability is expressed and how it grates against instinctually human expectations of behavior.

Sex differences, biologically and psychologically, didn’t evolve for hundreds of thousands of years to be co-equal partnerships based on humanistic (or moralistic) idealism. They evolved into a complementary form of support where the aspects of one sex’s strengths compensated for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

For every behavioral manifestation of one sex’s sexual strategy (hypergamy in females), the other sex evolves psychological, sociological and behavioral contingencies to counter it (mate guarding in males). The ideal state of gender parity isn’t a negotiation of acceptable terms for some Pollyanna ideal of gender equilibrium, it’s a state of complementarity between the sexes that accepts our evolved differences – and by each individual gender’s conditions, sometimes that’s going to mean accepting unequal circumstances.

Feminists (and anti-feminist women), humanists, moral absolutists, and even red pill men still obliviously clinging to the vestiges of their egalitarian blue pill conditioning, will all end up having their ideologies challenged, frustrated and confounded by the root presumption that egalitarian equalism can ever, or should ever, trump an innate and evolved operative state of gender complementarity.

And thus we come full circle, back to a new model of masculinity that is found upon the evolved complementary order and aided by red pill awareness. I have no doubt that it will be an arduous process of acceptance for blue pill, masculine-confused men vainly attempting to define their own masculinity under the deliberately ambiguous contexts laid out for them by the Feminine Imperative, but I do (hopefully) believe that red pill awareness is already making a positive impact on countering a presumption of equalism that only truly serves feminine primacy.

It’ll take time, but with every aware man utilizing red pill awareness to realign his masculine identity and benefit from it, other men will begin to come to the same awareness or else fall off into their own ambiguity.

Cashing Out

Photo on 2011-06-24 at 10.51

Well I didn’t think I had one more of these in me, but after having read Morpheus’ most recent debunking of Aunt Giggles’ third plea for manosphere site traffic help with her failed rebrand,..SMV analysis, I thought I’d propose a few other dynamics I’ve observed in all of Susan’s schoolyard rock throwing.

The main reason the Tomassi SMV Graph is in any way contentious with the zealots of the feminine imperative is that it points out the ugly truth that the age range women attempt to cash in their SMV chips (27-30) in marriage is conveniently the time at which most women begin to acknowledge their lessened capacity to compete with the next wave of women entering their SMV peak. They dislike this reminder for a couple of reasons.

The first, is simply the audacity of having a Man be aware of how the dynamic works and explain it to women in stark, unflattering terms that they have a real tough time accepting. Of course, they are aware of this on some level of consciousness, but to have any Man read this awareness back to them in no uncertain terms is a threat to women’s sexual strategy. One theme the manosphere has always pointed out, and the mainstream media is reluctantly beginning to address, is the predisposition of women to enjoy their ‘party years’ (18-26) and then, as Dalrock has noted so well, exit the cock-carousel at or around 30 years of age and ‘settle down’ with the “he’ll have to do” Beta provider who’s been patiently waiting his turn (after the Alpha cads are done with her) to get with her.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, even Susan Walsh concurs that women popularly express a desire to be married between the ages of 28 and 32. In essence, Aunt Sue is agreeing with my cashing out observation, but can’t seem to wrap her head around why this age bracket would predominantly be the time women would want to pair off in the long term security of marriage.

Actually she does know why, but her rebrand audience demands a fantasy she (and every other plugged-in HuffPo gender pundit) is required to deliver. According to her most recent posts, women’s prime sexual market value can, and mostly does, extend well into women’s 50’s (hell, why stop there, when apparently it can go into a gal’s 80’s). She simply picks up the girl-world / equalitarian narrative’s fantasy for female SMV and the Myth of Sexual Peak and feeds it back to the 7 or 8 commenters she approves to post comments on her blog. See Sue? You’ve just rebranded around reheating what other bloggers have already beat you to years ago.

I wouldn’t so much care about this repackaging, but Aunt Giggles further compounds the lie with this assertion:

2. Fertility declines very gradually between the ages of 27 and 35.

In a study of 782 couples:

They found that women between the ages of 19 and 26 with partners of similar age had approximately a 50 percent chance of becoming pregnant during any one menstrual cycle if they had intercourse two days prior to ovulation. For women aged 27 to 34, the chance was 40 percent.

3. Fertility declines more dramatically after 35.

Even then, female fertility hardly goes to zero:

For women over the age of 35, the probability dropped to 30 percent.

Notice how the male sexual value begins its precipitous drop at around 36, after declining gradually for five years. Not much difference.

She knows this is flagrant, potentially damaging, bullshit, but posts it because it makes good copy for her rebrand and her ignorant girl-world readers will eat it up. I say it’s flagrant bullshit because she knows better and has posted about it in the past:

III. Tick Tock Biological Clock

Despite progressive sex ed curricula in most areas of the country, adult women today are seriously misinformed about the state of their ovaries.

During a recent story that aired on NPR one infertile woman in her early 40s couldn’t understand it. She insisted that she works out regularly, does yoga, even has a personal trainer. She eats well and is healthy. She never knew that her ovaries were becoming less productive in spite of those measures.

A recent survey found that women dramatically underestimate how much fertility declines with age. They estimated that a 30 year-old had an 80% chance of getting pregnant in one try. The real likelihood is 30%. They also thought a 40 year-old woman would have a 40% success rate, while those odds are less than 10%.

Women are surprised to learn this information and they’re angry about it.

And that was around the same time I wrote the Myth of the Biological Clock. So whom do you trust HUS readers? The 2011 Susan Walsh, warning against cashing out of the SMP too late (or more difficult) to conceive, or the 2013 rebranded, marketeer Susan Walsh who’s telling you your SMV never drops below that of men’s and you can settle down and easily have it all into your 50’s and 60’s?

The Warning

The Second reason the Tomassi SMV graph is so inflammatory is that it poses a direct threat to the feminine imperative (and all its adherents, male and female) in that it serves as a warning for young men to be well aware of this cashing out dynamic, while encouraging them to invest in themselves and become Game-aware so as to capitalize on it when their time comes. I wrote about this preparation in The Epiphany Phase:

For red pill, Game-aware Men, this is a supremely important stage in women’s maturation to consider. A woman in the Epiphany Phase is looking for a “fresh start” for a much more visceral reason than some newly inspired sense of self. This motivation prompts all kinds of behavioral and social conventions to facilitate a man’s commitment to forgiving her past indiscretions. As Roosh has pointed out more than once, it’s women in this phase of life (or the mothers of women in this phase) who most vocally complain about men’s lack of interest in committing to them. As Hephzibah is painfully aware of, women in their peak SMV years don’t complain about a dearth of marriageable men– “Man Up” is the anthem of women in the Epiphany Phase.

The Epiphany Phase, and all the accompanying psychological, social and conveniently religious self-rationalizing for it, is the signaling of a woman ready to cash out of the SMP casino. Women’s pluralistic sexual strategy hinges upon men’s ignorance of it up to, or far enough past it, to consolidate and optimize Hypergamy. Although I wrote Final Exam – Navigating the SMP as a bit tongue in cheek, the intent was to seriously address a common complaint and request:

“Rollo, I just wanted to say that your stuff has been truly groundbreaking for me. This material should be a graduation requirement for all high school seniors.”

“Where the hell was all this info and wisdom when I was single? I so wish I’d discovered the manosphere / red pill before I proposed / had kids / got divorced / got burned by listening to what my girlfriend said / was younger,..etc. etc.”

The primary reason I compiled the Rational Male into a book form (and made it affordable) was to serve exactly this purpose; to educate and warn the upcoming generations of young men of the complexities of women’s sexual strategies being played on them, while also, and regrettably, educating those men with the predisposition to accept the realities they’ve probably fallen prey to. Really this is the mission of the manosphere on whole, but as I stated in The Threat, for the feminine imperative to sustain itself, the FI can’t afford this awareness to become too widespread, otherwise the feminine loses its social primacy.

This maintaining of feminine social primacy is at the heart every social convention perpetuated by the feminine imperative. Every Jezebel gender pundit, every Aunt Giggles, every PZ Meyers or Hugo Schwyzer (until he comes clean) is only interested in perpetuating a feminine social control via a constant repetition and fluid repurposing of feminine social convention. I’ve posted before that on the surface this might seem conspiratorial, but the real truth of the matter is the underlying desire for this control is less about effecting social power and more about maintaining as indefinitely as possible women’s capacity to optimize hypergamy.

Perpetuating the myth that women’s SMV remains a viable constant (and exceeding that of men’s) over the course of a lifetime may seem like arrogance, but the latent purpose of that myth is to extend a woman’s prospects of optimizing hypergamy well past a realistic believability. As women advance socially, economically, educationally and professionally the necessity to extend SMP viability long past a women’s realistic peak SMV becomes increasingly more necessary as the difficulty and effort-investment of measurable success becomes more prolonged. The tl:dr takeaway is, the longer it takes for women to ‘have it all’ the longer it takes for a woman to optimize an acceptable hypergamy, the longer she needs to believe her SMV is still viable.

Thus for a woman to literally ‘have it all’ she, and every man invested in the feminine imperative, must be conditioned to believe that a woman’s SMV can remain competitively intact well into her 50’s. Susan Walsh is only one such profiteer cashing in on convincing women that they shouldn’t feel what they all instinctively feel – that they should be cashing out at or around 30.

For this extension to be realized it becomes increasingly important that men be kept ignorant of the feminine imperative and women’s long term sexual strategy. The outrage isn’t about 38 year old men thinking they can get with 22 year old women (which was never proposed) but rather the real outrage stems from enlightening young men that they will eventually possess more SMV potential than women after 30, to prepare for it, and not submit their lives to women’s imperatives for men. In other words, the Tomassi SMV Graph warns men that it will be within their power not to let women have their hypergamous cake and eat it too.

The Hypergamy Conspiracy

Rollo Tomassi:

“Hypergamy is a selected-for survival mechanism.”

Aunt Sue:

“Hypergamy states that a woman seeks a man of higher status than herself for marriage. Nothing less, nothing more.”

Escoffier:

“I don’t think that’s right.

The theory is more like this, from what I have read. Hypergamy is a woman’s natural (which is to say, genetically wired) preference for a higher status male–that is, higher status than herself and also higher status than the other men in her field of vision and also perhaps higher status than men she has known in the past and even (at the extremes) higher status than most men she can personally imagine meeting. That cuts across a range of possible relationships, all the way from a ONS to marriage. In all cases, women naturally prefer the highest status man they can get. And sometimes they want so much status that they won’t settle on ANY man they could actually get.

“Status” has a varied meaning in this definition. Certain things correllate with high status, for intance money, prestige, social standing, etc. However a man can have all of that and still be low status because of low status intrapersonal behavior (i.e., needy schlumpitude). The highest possible status male would be rich, good looking, fit, well dressed, high social cache, high prestige job (preferably one which involves risk, physical risk being better than mere monetary risk), and also extroverted, dominant, the leader of his group of friends, able to command any social situation, and so on. However, women are wired to be turned on more by the latter BEHAVORIAL traits than by be the former SUBSTANTIVE traits. So, if you have have to choose one or the other, to get women, be socially dominant and a broke societal loser rather than socially awkward and a rich societal winner. But best to be both, if possible.

As to marriage, sure women want to marry up. But this does not exhaust the effects of hypergamy. Women can marry up–both intrinsically and in their own mind–and still ditch their catch because someone “better” comes along. That is hypergamy at work.

Also, when women are pursuing short and medium term mating, hypergamy has no less force. They always prefer the most socially dominant male they can get. This is often relative (A&B are both a little dweeby but A is more alpha than B and since I want someone NOW I choose A) but sometimes it is more intrinsic (A&B are both a little dweeby and even though A is a little more alpha, since I don’t have to have someone NOW, I am going to hold out for the Real Deal).

It’s not all about marriage. It’s about mate selection accross the range of circumstances.

That, at any rate, is how I believe the manosphere understands “hypergamy.”

Aunt Sue:

“Yes, because they made it up. Researchers do not recognize that definition. It’s pure Game.”

The main reason I only sporadically participate in the comment threads at Aunt Sue’s echo chamber Blog is because conversational gems like this have a marked tendency to get buried under, sometimes, thousands of other comments. I think it’s a shame really. I wanted to draw particular attention to the difference in interpretation of terms with regards to the dynamic of Hypergamy here.

Escoffier makes an astute analysis of Hypergamy in a much broader perspective than Susan’s definition-approved “researchers” are willing to recognize. On the fem-centric side we have Sue casually dismiss “Hypergamy” (twice) in this context as some fabrication of the Game-set and therefor not a legitimate analysis. A rose is a rose, and as I’ve stated in prior threads, Hypergamy is a term that should have a much broader definition when considered in context with the feminine imperative and the eminently observable feminine behaviors that manifest as a result of Hypergamy’s influence.

That the term Hypergamy should be so wantonly limited in its definition, and in such a way that it serves to deliberately confuse a better understanding of it as an evolutionary impulse on the feminine psyche, speaks volumes about the importance of maintaining its misunderstanding to the feminine imperative.

It’s almost ironic that the collective feminine ego should even need to deign to recognize Hypergamy in the terms that it is cast as in Susan’s default response. “Hypergamy states that a woman seeks a man of higher status than herself for marriage. Nothing less, nothing more.” forces the feminine to at least begrudgingly accept that women are in fact basing their long-term commitment prospects on status (as defined by researchers), and not some ephemeral soul-mate, emotional precept. God forbid men (PhDs or otherwise) should have the temerity to extrapolate any further social, psychological or evolutionary implications that could’ve influenced that Hypergamy dynamic into existence.

While I wont argue the credentials of the researchers Sue will undoubtedly quote – I often acknowledge all of the same in other posts and comments – I will however make the point that her interpretation (as is everyone’s) is subject to bias. And in this case, that bias serves the feminine imperative in keeping the definition of Hypergamy in as closed a way as possible to benefit the feminine. In the evolving understanding of the motivators that influence intergender relations there are going to be terms that describe concepts.

AFC’s, Alpha, Beta, Hypergamy, etc. are all defined by the concepts they represent.

‘Hypergamy’ serves well in a much broader capacity, but should the feminine imperative find that broader definition threatening to its purpose it will casually dismiss it as illegitimate. The real question then is, why would that concept be threatening to the feminine? You can delegitimize the term, but the concept is still the operative issue. Why is the concept of that larger scope of the term so offensive to a fem-centric society?

The Conspiracy that Wasn’t

One issue many of my critics have is that in exposing these inconsistencies, these operative social conventions and the latent purposes behind them, my writing (really most of the manosphere) seems to take on a conspiratorial tone. I can fully appreciate this, and it might shock a few readers to know that I  reject much of the popularized MRA perspective in this respect. I agree with an MRA perspective in a rational analysis to a certain degree, but there is no grand conspiracy, no secret mysterious cabal pushing a negative perception of masculinity – and this is exactly why what I outline on this blog is so pervasive. There doesn’t need to be a unitary group of ‘anti-men’ bent on some melodramatic goal of world domination; because this feminized ideal is already embedded in our socialization. Fem-centrism IS our collective social consciousness.

It doesn’t need a centralized directorship because the mindset is already so installed and perpetuated by society at large it’s now normalized, taken for granted and self-perpetuating. AFCs raising AFCs leads to still more AFCs. This generation doesn’t realize their own bias because it’s been standardized, encouraged and reinforced in them, and society, over the course of several generations now.

What’s to question, especially when calling attention to the feminization dynamic leads to ridicule and ostricization?

So to answer the conspiracy question; no, there is no illuminati shadow conspiracy and that’s exactly what makes feminization the normalized and overlooked default.