Practical Female Psychology for the Practical Man - David Clare, Joseph South, Franco 2008
Female Basic Conflict
Tell me, what you’re thinking about
When you got me waiting patiently
Usually, I don’t have to wait for nobody
But there’s something about you
That really got me feeling weak
— Tell Me, by P. Diddy (feat. Christina Aguilera)
Truly understanding the psychology of women requires being aware of a fundamental conflict in the nature of women’s relationships with men: women are more sexually attracted to men who are less inclined to provide for them. That is, in their hearts chicks love to love bad boys, but in their heads they know that nice guys make much better husbands.
This Female Basic Conflict is a schizophrenic duality between a woman’s need for survival, on the one hand, and her need to express her own sexuality, on the other. This creates a psychological condition whereby a woman’s sexuality is necessarily ambivalent and conflicted, in order to be able express itself to the maximum extent. In this chapter we will help you to easily recognize this phenomenon in women and how to deal with it effectively.
In a nutshell, the Female Basic Conflict is:
• The need to manipulate a man into the role of her Provider.
• Automatic contempt and a lowering of her sexual attraction towards a man who lets her do so.
The Lover-Provider Dichotomy
Before we discuss the Female Basic Conflict in depth, we need to provide you with an explanation of certain terms. Throughout history, women have typically been condemned for any expression of their natural sexuality. In addition, women have naturally a strong survival instinct, which is intrinsically tied in with pregnancy and child care. Because of these two factors, women have developed a strong tendency to divide men into one of two categories: Lover or Provider.
The Lover
The Lover is a man with whom a woman can freely express her sexuality, without having to be worried about that man attempting to exert control over her — either in a physical way or with respect to her material well-being — and without having to be worried about being morally judged by that man.
In our modern society, a woman will typically consider a man a Lover, only if he is not in a position of having any responsibility for her or her children, and only if he does not live in the same territory as her (i.e., he does not share a house or apartment with her), nor exerts any physical or material power over her. At the same time, the Lover induces a strong sexual attraction within the woman.
The Provider
A Provider, on the other hand, can be defined as a man who has agreed to take responsibility for the woman and her children, both financially and emotionally. This usually is accompanied by the exerting of power over the woman.
We will analyze the characteristics of men who are either Lovers or Providers throughout this book. At this time, suffice it to say that when a woman chooses a Lover, she is primarily basing this choice on an emotional basis, with respect to the raw sexual attraction she feels. An intelligent woman will usually only choose a man as a Provider after careful, rational analysis over a period of time. The conflict arises due to the fact that when a man positions himself in the Provider role, he will generally be perceived by the woman in such a way that her feelings towards him as a Lover are negated or at least diminished. This is due to the fact that, in many ways, the Lover personality is in conflict with the Provider personality.
The Lover-Provider dichotomy creates a psychological dissociation within the woman, which occurs mostly on the subconscious level.
For the modern man, it is essential to be able to discern the expression of this conflict, by reading the neuropsychological responses of the woman’s brain activity and through an understanding of the role of evolution behind such behavior.
To be able to deal successfully with a woman’s emotional life, you need to focus on the process, much more than any specific words being spoken, during any interaction with a woman.
You should also to be able to view the relationship with a woman as more of an ongoing process, rather than something static and stable. Men — who are normally very good at understanding processes — often make the big mistake of considering a relationship with a woman as something fixed, immovable, or permanent, especially once the couple has settled in to a moreor-less long-term type of relationship, or expressed words of commitment to each other.
This erroneous, predominantly male viewpoint only results in disappointment for both the man and the woman.
Dissociation
The Lover-Provider dichotomy often presents itself psychologically as an act of dissociation in women. This occurs so often due to the oppression of female sexuality throughout history. As a modern man you need to fully understand what is involved in the phenomenon known as dissociation. Dissociation is a state of acute mental decompensation in which certain thoughts, emotions, sensations, and/or memories are compartmentalized because they are too overwhelming for the conscious mind to integrate. An example of dissociation is this:
Woman: (to her girlfriend or lover) “He is a good husband but I can’t help but laugh at him for his niceness. He does all that I demand.”
Unconsciously, what this woman is really saying is: I cannot feel sexual attraction for a man who is being a Provider to me because I know he does that because he cannot get women to be sexually submissive to him. So I need now a Lover who makes me feel like a woman again.
Many women may act like this in a totally innocent manner, not even aware of all of the psychological forces at work, because in their marriages with Providers they have felt they are under the effect of an oppression which has been put upon women for centuries.
Now as a man what you need to know is this: under the effect of the Lover-Provider dichotomy a woman can find herself in a totally dissociative state which, means that she can act out under the influence of strong emotions in seemingly unpredictable ways. In other words, you can expect just about anything.
Dangers of Being Strictly a Provider
As we discuss at length throughout this book, behaviors are both evolutionarily-determined as well as learned. The process of learning behaviors, however, is very slow. New human behaviors which fit better with survival can be learned and behaviors which become obsolete may be unlearned, but this takes a lot of time; often this process can take several generations.
In Western countries in the 21st Century we find ourselves in precisely such a situation. Women no longer have much of a practical need to manipulate a man into serving as a Provider to them, and women therefore find that they are struggling to unlearn these manipulative behaviors.
This is a very difficult process because on the one hand, such manipulative behavior can still be very fruitful to a woman in terms of survival in today’s world, but on the other hand such behavior often brings internal and external conflict to the woman.
As a modern man you need to learn to be able to read this conflict in women on the fly as part of her ongoing, internal processes. You need to be able to objectively analyze this conflict on an ongoing basis as it occurs within the particular woman in front of you.
If a man tries to put himself strictly in the Provider role with a modern woman, sooner or later he will elicit in her the following symptoms:
• Boredom
• A massive lowering of her sexual attraction towards him
• In some cases, even outright contempt from her towards the man
You need to realize that the Provider frame is a dangerous frame to find yourself in nowadays. It has always been dangerous, but before, women were acting less dissociative than now. In the Modern Age the degree of dissociation coming from the Lover-Provider dichotomy is at it’s maximum. This is largely due to a culture which simultaneously grants women greater sexual freedom than ever before, while compelling men to provide materially for families that they may no longer form a strong part of, i.e. in cases of child custody disputes, child support payments, and alimony.
To keep up a woman’s sexual attraction you have to be a Lover to her first and foremost. You can be also a Provider to her, but only without taking away the Lover part of your personality. As you read and absorb the information contained in this book, you are developing the tools you need to achieve that goal.
In today’s modern society this can be quite a challenge. Young women are unfortunately often raised to view men as little better than sperm donors, fuck buddies or ATM machines. Young girls raised with an absence of fathers tend to view men in a love-hate fashion, and they tend to be quite mystified as to the psychological needs and desires of men, if they even care about that at all.
Consider the consequences on relationships with women subject to the Female Basic Conflict. Under the influence of this conflict a modern woman can and will give you contradictory communication, and she will do so on a continuous basis. It cannot be emphasized enough: a relationship with a woman should be viewed as a never-ending, ongoing process; not something that can be resolved once and for all.
Commitments, marriage, pronouncements of never-ending love made during romantic moments; none of these change the fact that a relationship with a woman is a never-ending process, and hopefully a happy process at that.
Female Projection
An important feature of female psychology is the projection of her emotions and needs into the environment. In other words, women tend to automatically place the responsibility for their emotions and needs on to their immediate environment. People with psychological education know that this is actually a trait of Borderline Personality Disorder. Obviously, the vast majority of women are do not suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, but it is interesting that this trait is apparently a normal part of psychologically healthy women in a reduced sense.
Female Ambivalence
Ambivalence is defined as state of having emotions of both positive and negative valence or of having thoughts or actions in contradiction with each other, when they are related to the same object, idea or person (for example, simultaneously feeling both love and hatred for someone or something). The term is also commonly used to refer to situations where ’mixed feelings’ of a more general sort are experienced or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness concerning something.
A woman will often assume the right of delivering mixed messages to you, without accepting any responsibility for doing so. In our modern society, this is in fact an extremely useful evolutionary trait for a woman to adopt, in terms of her survival.
The evolutionary positive gain for the woman from her use of Ambivalence is that she keeps her options open, and in this way she can gain advantages from as many sources as possible. For example, a woman will often achieve material advantage with a Provider and sexual pleasure with a Lover and successfully rule over both of them, if these men do not have the skills to deal with her manipulation.
Men are logical creatures. When they build relationships with females they tend to act along structures based on a logical sequence a → b → c → d → e → f · · · and so on. When you create a structure you are doing something yang i.e. masculine.
The secret wish of every woman is: to find a man who is able to build a safe and strong masculine yang structure around her feminine yin.
For more on Female Ambivalence, please see Chapter 12 under the section “A/B Indecision”.
Practical Advice
One of the standards you must adopt as a man, in advance, is to decide what role you would prefer to fulfill, with any woman you encounter. For example, if you are not interested in becoming a Provider, you will want to avoid behaviors that will tend to demonstrate that you are slotting yourself into the Provider role or that the woman can count on you for Provider-like behavior. For example, if you want to be strictly a Lover to a woman, it would be unwise to make a big display of showering her with free dinners and gifts, particularly before you have had repeated sexual relations with her.
Understand that women will unconsciously test, and test vigorously, and they will then slot you into either the Lover or Provider category. For example, a woman may demand that you pay for her dinner or movie ticket, while reciting some commonly-used line such as “a gentleman always pays.” This will not be a problem for you if you have already decided — well in advance — the type of man you are and what a woman can expect from her time with you.
If you are wavering on this point — if you say to yourself that you will have a policy of never paying for a woman but then buckle when confronted with a determined, sexually-hot female — you will invariably lose this game. A woman may or may not really prefer a man who pays for her, but she will always despise a man who is unsure of himself and his standards.
The challenge to you as a man lies within your ability to tolerate female ambivalence. If you can, you may succeed in becoming dominant over her, which can greatly increase the chances of her remaining sexually attracted to you and a generally happy relationship.
Your goal as a Modern Man should be to build a Yang structure for the relationship, while simultaneously being able to psychologically tolerate female ambivalence. In fact, the more feminine she is, the more she will tend to be and act ambivalent.
Unfortunately, the abdicating personal responsibility by women is widely promoted and condoned in western media culture and modern society. Therefore, as a Modern Man you need to learn to deal with this factor in real time and on an ongoing basis with the women you interact with. One way to do this is to set strong borders with a woman. This does not mean to become controlling or domineering. Controlling and manipulative behavior will automatically kill her perception of you as a Lover. It does mean having strong principles and standards that you adhere to and do not waver on, regardless of a woman’s tears or how sexually desirable she appears to you.