For as often as I’ve made my best attempts to define what I believe constitutes feminine Hypergamy on this blog, it seems that critics of the red pill, and even newer, well-meaning red pill advocates, are beginning to think of Hypergamy as some convenient trope that manosphereans refer to when they want to explain away some annoyingly female trait.
Is she shit testing you? Must be Hypergamy. She broke a nail? Must be Hypergamy.
There is a very real want for understanding things in as simplistic a solution as possible, but feminine Hypergamy isn’t a dynamic that lends itself to a simple definitions. One of the reasons the early proponents of PUA ran into issues with legitimizing their ideas was due to so many of their ‘students’ seeking out easily digestible answers to solve their ‘girl problems’. As I laid out in Dream Girls and Children with Dynamite, these guys wanted the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) footnote version of what to do in order to get to the silver bullet, magic formula part of the lesson to either get with their dream girl or “start fucking hot bitches”.
It is exactly this mentality that’s now causing such frustration in understanding Hypergamy and seeing how it works, not just in individual women’s personal decisions, but as a societally influencing force of the Feminine Imperative. Hypergamy is not a “math is hard” dynamic, but because it requires a comprehensive (and evolving) understanding it seems like the go-to throwaway answer to women’s behaviors and mental schemas to men (usually new to the red pill) without the patience to really invest themselves into grasping it.
I’ve defined Hypergamy so often on this blog that if you search the term “hypergamy” in Google, the Rational Male blog is the number two return below the wikipedia definition. As I write my way through the second volume of the Rational Male book I’ve found that a concise understanding of feminine Hypergamy is vital to grasping so much of the social and psychological dynamics that are a result of it. Every PUA technique, every common frustration MGTOW experience, and every gender-biased social injustice MRAs set themselves against, all find their roots in feminine Hypergamy, women’s pluralistic sexual strategy and the social and legal manifestation employed to ensure maximal feminine social primacy in optimizing Hypergamy.
Looks vs Character (Game)
Over the course of the past five or so posts, the topic of discussion in the comment threads has eventually found its way back to the basics of Looks versus Character (or Game, depending on your perspective of how learning affects character). Only discussions over what constitutes ‘Alpha’ in a man are so contentious as the importance women prioritize physical arousal in men.
I’ve already covered this debate and what I believe influences women’s arousal priorities in the Looks Count and Have A Look posts. My intent with today’s post isn’t to reheat these old debates, but rather to investigate a bit further into the connection between Hypergamy and this arousal prioritization.
First and foremost it’s important to understand the part that women’s biologies play in influencing Hypergamy and how women’s biology is more or less the point of origin for how they conduct their sexual strategy. To review, I’ll ask that readers refer to my post Your Friend Menstruation, but the basis of women’s sexual pluralism is found in the natural attraction predispositions that women experience as a result of (healthy) ovulation.
In her up cycle (proliferative) phase of ovulation, women are psychologically and behaviorally motivated to prioritize physical arousal above all other breeding considerations. In her down cycle (post-ovulation, luteal phase) women are similarly motivated to prioritize comfort, rapport, and long term security to ensure parental investment and benefit survival.
What I’ve described here, in as brief a fashion, is the foundation of Ovulatory Shift. There exists over a decade’s worth of experimental psychological and biological evidence supporting this theory. Due to biological and psychological influence, women become subliminally predisposed to behaviors which maximize fertility odds with the best available breeding opportunity, and maximize the best potential for long term provisioning and parental investment.
Whether this behavior is manifested in a preference for more masculinized male faces and body type, greater ornamentation and lower vocal intonation for women during ovulation, or a predisposition for more comforting, nurturing and supportive male characteristics during her luteal phase, the end result is optimizing Hypergamy, and ultimately reproduction.
For further reading on Ovulatory Shift, see the research of Martie Hasselton.
Arousal vs. Attraction
From last week’s post, in one of his less long-winded comments, commenter Siirtyrion inserted this bit of evolutionary truth:
Females only receive two quantities of evolutionary value from males – direct benefits (observed in long-term mating, with implications for the survival of offspring), and genetic benefits (observed through indications of physical attractiveness in her mate). And since females can receive genetic benefits outside of marriage (i.e. through casual sexual encounters), and no longer need rely upon mates for the survival of their offspring, there is no pressure for them to compromise on holding out for an unlikely (long-term) fantasy partner.
This current social pattern increases highly male variance in mating success, because female sexual choices always tend towards small male breeding populations (narrow range of male phenotypes), while male ‘preferences’ are inclusive of a broad range in female variance.
I believe one of the main contentions Siirtyrion kind of needles with this is that, as described, modern conveniences of female social empowerment (actual or imagined) discounts the need for hypergamic assurances of long term security. I’m not so willing to accept an overall disregard for the provisioning aspect (Beta Bucks) – you’re not going to reprogram millennia of psychologically evolved firmware overnight – but in discounting this need, the characteristics for which women would seek out a male exemplifying the best long-term security are deemphasized if not considered entirely.
If you read through any woman’s online dating profile you undoubtedly come across some variation of what Roissy has described as the “483 bullet point checklist” of stated prerequisites a man must possess in order for her to consider him a viable candidate for her intimacy. While I don’t think there are quite that many items on the checklist, you’ll find a host of common-theme personal qualities a guy has to have in order to be her boyfriend – confident (above all), humorous, kind, intelligent, creative, decisive, sensitive, respectful, spiritual, patient,..I could go on or you could just read this old joke.
The point is that all of these characteristics that women list as being ‘attractive’ have absolutely no bearing on how sexually, physically, ‘arousing’ a woman finds a man. As I’ve described in the past, while Game and personality can certainly accentuate arousal, all of these esoteric personal qualities have no intrinsic “‘gina tingle” value if a man isn’t an arousal prospect to begin with.
The confusion that most Beta men make is presuming that what women list as being necessarily ‘attractive’ IS what makes him ‘arousing’. So when he models himself (often over the course of a lifetime) to personally identify with this checklist of attractive prerequisites he’s often frustrated and angered when all of that personal development makes for little difference when a woman opts to regularly fuck men of a better physical standard.
It’s duplicity of a sort, but it is also a strategy of deliberate confusion.
It may not be a woman’s conscious plan, but this deliberate confusion makes the best pragmatic sense to effect an optimized Hypergamy. Remember that Hypergamy is not just Alpha Fucks, it’s also Beta Bucks … if a bit delayed in her life in order to maximize Alpha Fucks. So when a woman describes what she finds “attractive” in a man this list will include all of the above bullet point characteristics because they “sound right” – because they shine her in the best light, yes, but also because in being so concerned she imputes the idea that she’s following the ‘right’ plan of looking for a good man to have a future with, and raise kids with.
Then and Now
This is going to sound like I’m glossing myself, but bear with me – I can remember how effortless sex used to be for me when I was in my 20’s. I had sex outdoors, in cars, hotel rooms, in hot tubs, in the steam room of an all women’s gym (after hours), I even got after it with a girlfriend in the balcony of a church in L.A. once (again after hours, no one around, only for convenience I assure you). Mostly I didn’t have a dime to my name, but I still had one of two fuck-buddies who would literally come to the bedroom window of my apartment to fuck me in the morning once or twice a week before I went off to the community college I was going to.
The point is there was no pretense of ‘attraction’ being anything other than a girl and I enjoying ourselves then. There was no ‘checklist’ of acceptable pre-qualifications for intimacy. The providership necessity that dictates a need for long-term consideration wasn’t even an afterthought; in other words, the Beta Bucks / Character / Integrity aspect of Hypergamy that women publicly claim is a dealbreaker for real intimacy was prioritized far below Alpha Fucks sexual urgency.
You can say these were just the types of girls I was getting with at the time, but courtesy of social media, I assure you, you would think these women would never have had that capacity now. They were all “sooo different when they were in college.”
It’s not until after a woman’s Epiphany Phase at around the time she becomes aware of her SMV decline that she begins to consider making that Beta Bucks checklist any kind of prerequisite for sex and intimate partnering. However, this epiphany isn’t the sudden revelation women would like men to believe it is.
For the life of me I can’t remember where I read the link, but I was reading a ‘Dear Abby’ sort of advice seeking article from a young girl (early 20’s) who was exasperated over finding the “perfect guy” only she couldn’t ‘get with him now‘. Her words were something like “He’s so great, awesome personality, funny, in love with me, supportive, etc., but I wish I could freeze him in time so he’d be the same guy and waiting for me when I turn 29 or 30.”
On some level of consciousness, like most women, she knows the dictates of what her own Hypergamy is predisposing her to. She knows she’ll eventually need that ‘perfect’ supportive, in-love guy to live out the long-term aspect of her Hypergamy with,…after she’s exhausted her short term breeding potential with men who better embody the Alpha Fucks dictates of her Hypergamy.
Arousal Preparation vs. Provisioning Preparation
For all of Siirtyrion’s vernacular, I will have to agree (to a point) that the balance between women’s short term breeding impulse and the long term provisioning needs Hypergamy predisposes them to now strongly favors the Alpha sex side of that optimization.
In Open Hypergamy I made a case for the aspect of an ‘old order’ of Beta Provisioning being a previously ‘attractive’ element for women’s determining long term suitability with a man, and that this old order was being replaced with other, extrinsic means of ensuring a woman’s security needs. Whether by social funding, or by indenturing men to provide for women’s wellbeing through other social conventions the effect is an imbalance between the dual nature of women’s sexual strategy.
However, I also feel it goes beyond just the social element now. Men are still confused by a feminine conditioning which wants to ‘freeze’ him in time in order to be the dutiful ‘perfect’ guy, ready to be thawed out and ready to serve the Feminine Imperative at a woman’s convenience.
While still convenient, men must be conditioned to confuse him that ‘attraction’ qualities are ‘arousal’ qualities in order to have him ready to be ‘perfect’ at his appointed time – and it is women who need to believe for themselves that this is what they think should be true.
The Myth of the ‘Good’ Guy
In the beginning of one of my earliest posts, Schedules of Mating, I briefly refer to the ideally balanced guy who would satisfy the optimization purpose of women’s Hypergamy:
There are methods and social contrivances women have used for centuries to ensure that the best male’s genes are selected and secured with the best male provisioning she’s capable of attracting. Ideally the best Man should exemplify both, but rarely do the two exist in the same male (particularly these days) so in the interest of achieving her biological imperative, and prompted by an innate need for security, the feminine as a whole had to develop social conventions and methodologies (which change as her environment and personal conditions do) to effect this.
There is a dichotomy that exists for men in this respect, which really has no parallel for women.
I am aware of certain (formerly red pill) bloggers who promote the archetype of a ‘Good’ guy as some role for men to ideally aspire to. The ‘Alpha Cad’ archetype must necessarily become the ‘douchebag’ caricature of an overtly distasteful masculinity (for men less able to embody it) and yet, the opposite caricature of the doormat, supplicating ‘Beta Dad’ is equally distasteful and certainly untenable when we consider that ‘attractive’ qualities are never ‘arousing’ qualities.
So the archetype of the ‘Good’ guy is offered up as some sort of livable, compromised ideal. If men could aspire to embody the best of the Alpha and temper that with what they define themselves as the best of the Beta, well then he’d be the ‘perfect’ catch for any woman of course.
The problem with this ‘Good Guy’ myth is not because men can’t or wouldn’t want to try to balance women’s Hypergamy for them, but simply because women neither want nor expect that balance in the same man to begin with.
It comes back to the Just Get It principle for women – any guy who needs to make a concerned effort to become what he expects women will want from him to be ‘the perfect guy’ doesn’t get it. They want Mr. Perfect because that is who he already is.
I mentioned above that there really is no parallel for this in women and I’m sure the Madonna / Whore dichotomy will be mentioned in the comments later, but allow me to point out that there is no concerted parallel social effort on the part of women in which women prompt each other to become a ‘Good Girl’ in order to satisfy the ideals of men. If anything a hostile opposite resistance to this is most true.
Women neither expect nor want a ‘Good Guy’ because he’s not believable, and his genuineness is always doubtable. That may sound jaded, but throw away any idea of being a ‘Good Guy’ balance of Alpha and Beta, because the Beta side of ‘good’ is so reinforced and common in men that it’s become the default template for women’s perception of you.
There is no Alpha with a side of Beta, there is only the man who’s genuine concern is first for himself, the man who prepares and provisions for himself, the man who maintains Frame to the point of arrogance because that’s who he is and what he genuinely merits. There is only the Man who improves his circumstance for his own benefit, and then, by association and merit, the benefit of those whom he loves and befriends.
That’s the Man who Just Gets It.
