The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi 2013
Game
If you ever need a reminder as to how you came to a particular belief or set of beliefs, the best way to consider (or reconsider) that process is to write a book about it. The book you now hold in your hands is the compilation of the past twelve years of my involvement in the so-called manosphere. It wasn’t even known as the ’manosphere’ back then.
For the men (and women) who’ve read my ideas since the inception of the SoSuave Forum almost 12 years ago, I expect they’ll find this section kind of remedial — like going back over old classics they’d internalized and take for granted now. If I make a reference to Hypergamy or the Feminine Imperative, for most, there’s a standard level of pre-understanding about the elements associated to each of these and many other concepts.
However, a problem of familiarity arises when I, or anyone else familiar with red-pill awareness makes an attempt to educate the unfamiliar. The Red Pill reddit community makes a good effort of this, but after going through 2 revisions of this book it became evident to myself and my editor that familiarizing the uninitiated is a major obstacle to reaching the men who’ll benefit most from unplugging (yet another manosphere term).
Familiarity
The majority of the requests I’ve received over the years for a comprehensive book of Rational Male ideology has come from readers expressing the desire for a condensed
version in book form which they can give to family and friends (mostly male) in the hopes that they’ll better understand their need for emancipation from their fem-centric mental models. Of course that’s always been my goal from day one, but it presumes that a large part of those reading will be unfamiliar with common terms and concepts I, or familiar readers, will already have a grasp of.
Another issue I often run into is the presumption that readers new to my blog or
commenters on other blogs have a familiarity with my work. I often find myself having to link back to articles where I covered a specific topic that a critic or an inquisitive reader might want to take me to task about. For the most part I make a conscious effort not to repeat something I’ve addressed, sometimes years before, but that’s simply a part of the medium of blogging.
It’s a difficult enough proposal to unplug men from their blue pill conditioning, but leading them to an understanding of principles they mentally have a resistance or aversion to is a particular challenge. For example, my editor is only peripherally familiar with these principles which is kind of a blessing and a curse. In one sense it requires me to revise old posts and concepts to be more ’noob friendly’, but it also challenges me to review how those concepts evolved over the years to be what I and other ’red pillers’ now consider common foundations. For instance, while I might rigorously debate the concept of the Feminine Imperative with those familiar with it on Dalrock’s blog, I had to spend over an hour defining it further with my editor after he’d read my seminal posts about it. More on this later.
Game
Of these concepts the one I return to the most frequently is that of Game. “Just what is Game?” Throughout my blog, and virtually every major manosphere writer’s blog, there’s a constant presumption that readers will know exactly what Game is when it’s
referred to. Game has been lifted up to an almost mythical state; like some cure-all for the common guy struggling with attracting women’s attentions and intimacy. It’s gotten to the point where familiarity with Game has become a flippant aside for manosphere bloggers — we have varieties of Game: we have internalized Game, we have ’natural’ Game, direct Game, Beta Game etc., but defining the term ’Game’ for someone unfamiliar with the very involved intricacies, behaviors and the underlying psychological principles on which Game is founded is really tough for the uninitiated to wrap their heads around in the beginning.
For the unfamiliar, just the word ’Game’ seems to infer deception or manipulation. You’re not being real if you’re playing a Game, so from the outset we’re starting off from a
disadvantage of perception. This is further compounded when attempting to explain Game concepts to a guy who’s only ever been conditioned to ’just be himself’ with women and how women allegedly hate guys “who play games” with them. As bad as that sounds, it’s really in the explanation of how Game is more than the common perception that prompts the discussion for the new reader to have it explained for them.
At its root level Game is a series of behavioral modifications to life skills based on
psychological and sociological principles to facilitate intersexual relations between genders.
Early Game
In its humble beginnings, Game was a set of behaviors, learned, adapted and modified with the express purpose of bettering a guy’s prospective sexual ’success’ with the women he had only limited (if any) access to. Game was defined as a series of behavioral skills and techniques observationally experimented with, and developed by the burgeoning pickup artist (PUA) culture of the early 2000′s. While there was a peripheral acknowledgment given to the psychology that made these behavior sets effective, the purpose was more about the result and less about the head-mechanics that made the result possible.
This introduction was many of the current manosphere’s first contact with ’formalized’ Game. The quality of the art in pick up artistry was (and still is) really left up to the practitioner’s capacity to understand the basics of behavioral psychology (with regards to women) and refining a deft ability to adapt and react to his target’s changing behavioral cues in a given environment and/or context..
If this were the only extent of Game it would understandably be very short sighted and limited in scope. In the beginning Game had a utility in that it helped a majority of men lacking the social intelligence to approach and develop a real, intimate rapport with women they fundamentally lacked. The problem was that beyond Game’s “in-field” uses it wasn’t really developed past the point of ’getting the girl’, and left even the most socially adept PUAs unprepared to deal with the real psychology motivating women on a greater whole. It was just this feminine meta-psychology that drove men, unaccustomed to enjoying, and then losing, the affections of women formerly “out of their league”, to depression and possibly suicide.
Game was a wondrous tool set of skills, but without the insight and foresight to deal with what these tools could build, it was potentially like giving children dynamite.
Evolving Game
From the earliest inception Game was more or less viewed as a solution to a problem. Game has been described as the logical social reaction to the women that the past 60+ years of feminism, social feminization and feminine primacy has created for the men of today. Courtesy of modern connectivity, the internet and collectivized social media, evolving Game or some variation of it was inevitable for men. Despite the public social stigma, ridicule and outright hostility attached to men attempting to understand the psychologies of women, privately the internet facilitated a global consortium of men comparing experiences, relating observations and testing theories.
The behavioral psychology that led to Game which prompted the desired reactions in women began to take on more importance for men. Sure, the now classic Game
techniques like being Cocky & Funny, Amused Mastery, Agree & Amplify, Neg Hits, Peacocking, etc. were effective in their own artfully used contexts, but the latent
psychology that made those behavior sets work prompted the questions of why they worked.
The psychological aspects of effective (and ineffective) Game began to take on a new importance. Through this broader exploration of the role biological, psychological and sociological factors affected Game sprang new ideas, theories and experimentative
models leading to new Game behavioral sets and the abandonment of less effective ones.
As connectivity grew, so did the knowledge base of the Game community. No longer was Game exclusive to the PUA pioneers; Game was expanding to accommodate the interests and influences of men who’d never heard of the earlier version of Game, or would’ve rejected it outright just years before due to their feminine conditioning.
Married men wondered if aspects of Game could reignite the sexual interests of their frigid or overbearing wives. Divorced men embraced the Game they ridiculed when married to improve their potential for new sexual interests, but also to relate their experiences and contribute to that Game knowledge base. Men, not just in western culture, but from a
globalizing interest began to awaken with each new contribution not only about how women were, but why women were. Game was making the unknowable woman
knowable. The enigmatic feminine mystique began unraveling with each new contribution to the Game knowledge-base.
Game was becoming something more. Men were now seeing the code in the Matrix: we knew the medium was the message, we began to see the feminine social conventions used to control us, we began to see the overarching reach of the feminine imperative and fem-centrism, and we came to realize the insidious, but naturalistic, influence feminine Hypergamy had wrought in both men and women. Game was prompting Men to push back the iron veil of feminine primacy and see what made her tick.
Predictably, fem-centric society sought to cast the rise, and expansion of Game as a
modern version of the ridiculous macho archetypes of the 50′s-70′s. The threat of an evolving, more intellectually valid form of Game had to be ridiculed and shamed like anything else masculine, so the association with its infamous PUA forerunners was the obvious choice for the feminine imperative. The feminine standard appeal to the
Masculine Catch 22 was the first recourse: any man who desired to learn Game was less than a man for that desire, but also less of a man for not already knowing Game (as
approved by the feminine imperative). Any guy actually paying for, or personally
invested in, Game was associated with the PUA culture that was characterized as a throw back to the ’Leisure Suit Larrys’ of the 70′s.
Contemporary Game
For all its marginalization efforts to shame Game back into obscurity, the feminine imperative found that the Game movement wasn’t being cowed as easily as it might have been in the mid 1990′s. The imperative was falling back on the reliable tropes and social conventions that had always pushed the masculine back into compliance. At the apex of fem-centrism in the 90′s these social constructs worked well on an isolated, shamed and ignorant masculine imperative, but with the evolution of the internet, by the late 2000′s Game was snowballing into a threat that required new feminine operative conventions to contain it.
Game evolved beyond the behavioral sets, and beyond the psychological and sociological mechanics that underlined women’s psyches and larger socializations. While still encompassing all that prior evolution, Game was becoming aware of the larger social meta-scale of the feminine imperative. Game began to move beyond the questions of why women are the way they are, and into piecing together how the intergender acculturations we
experience today are what they are. Game asked how did we come to this?
Game branched into specific areas of interest in its scope to answer these broader questions and solve more expansive problems. While we still have all of the prior iterations of Game, we have expanded into Christianized Game, married Game, divorced Game, socialized Game, high school Game, etc.
However, underpinning all of these areas of specialization was still the need to internalize and personalize Game in a Man’s life. Game was the path to male re-empowerment; an empowerment that even women today still feel men should Man-back-Up to.
Game required a reinterpretation of masculinity towards something positive, beneficial and competent — something entirely apart from the negative, shameful and ridiculous archetypes 60 years of feminization had convinced women and men of. Call it Alpha, call it Positive Masculinity, but Game necessitates the re-imagining of the importance of the masculine imperative. Game needs Men to change their minds about themselves.
Needless to say, even in its most positive of contexts, the male re-empowerment that Game led to was a threat too great for the feminine imperative to allow. Controlling the intrinsic insecurities that the feminine imperative is founded upon has alway depended on men’s ignorance of their true personal value, and true necessity to women. Men have to remain necessitous to women in order for their insecurity to be insured against, and the feminine imperative’s control to be ensured of.
The well of knowledge and awareness that Game represented had to be poisoned.
The social conventions the feminine imperative had relied on for decades were no longer as effective as they were in a pre-internet era. The continued expansion of Game into the social, psychological, evolutionary and biological realms was evidence that Game was something those old convention couldn’t contain, so the imperative evolved new tacts while reinventing old ones.
Shaming and ridicule were (and still are) the rudimentary tactics that the less intellectual of the feminine imperative would resort to, but the expansiveness of Game needed
something more distorting. Proponents of the feminine imperative began to concede
certain universal points that Game had long asserted about the feminine nature (and the feminine imperative had long rejected) in an effort to co-opt the social momentum Game had taken over a decade to develop.
The Feminine Imperative couldn’t argue with the extensive, provable validity of the tenets of Game, so it sought (seeks) to re-engineer Game from within and modify it to its own purpose. The Feminine Imperative wants just enough male empowerment to return men to an improved (really an older) state of usefulness to its own ends, but not so much that true male emancipation from the imperative would threaten its dominance. In co-
opting Game and conceding to the truths it finds less threatening, the imperative hopes to build better Betas — men who believe they are empowered by Game, but are still
beholden to the Feminine Imperative.
True emancipation from the imperative threatens its dominance, so Men with the vision to see past this are labeled Dark, Sociopathic and Deviant by the imperative. It wasn’t enough just to infiltrate Game and sanitize it for its benefit, the Feminine Imperative had to categorize Game for itself — Evil vs. Good Game. The good, of course, being characteristic of whatever aspects benefited the imperative, and the bad being whatever
’selfishly’ benefited the masculine. The Feminine Imperative doesn’t care about the various branchings of Game — natural, internalized, marriage, etc. — it only concerns itself with what aspects of those branches that can be distorted to its advantage and what aspects cannot.
This brings us to Game as we know it today. Game is still evolving, and had I the
prescience to see where it will go next, I would venture that it will come to men’s real
emancipation with the Feminine Imperative. Not an emancipation from women, but an emancipation from their imperative’s conditioning and purpose. Not a ’men going their own way’ negligence of women in the hope that they’ll come around to behaving as men would like after being given no other choice, but a true Game driven emancipation from the control that fem-centrism has maintained for so long.
Make no mistake, the Feminine Imperative needs men to be necessitous of it, and it will always be hostile to the Men attempting to free other men from that necessity. In this respect, any Game, even the co-opted Game the imperative will use itself, is by definition sexist. Anything that may benefit Men, even when it associatively benefits women, is sexist. Freeing men from the Matrix, breaking their conditioning and encouraging them to re-imagine themselves and their personalities for their own betterment is, by feminine definition, sexist.
In girl-world, encouraging men to be better Men is sexist.
The Evolution of Game
Women would rather share a successful Man than be attached to a faithful loser.
— Pook
One of the most common things I’m asked on the SoSuave forum is “how do you keep a marriage fresh Rollo?” Among my responses to this is usually how, contrary to the advice column Oprah-standard answer, a good relationship should be effortless. All of this “marriage is a constant work” is bullshit meant to keep a husband in a constant state of qualifying for his wife’s intimacy intended for her long term frame retention. Women in marriage and LTRs want to push past that nagging hypergamic competition anxiety; they want security, not just financial, but emotional, and the security that comes from a locked in commitment in knowing they are the only source of sex & intimacy for their spouse/partner.
Pre-Commitment to Commitment
One of the reasons sexual frequency declines for women after a romantic commitment is that the urgency of sex that was necessary prior to the commitment is replaced with the agency of sex being a reward / reinforcer within that LTR. In single, uncommitted, non-exclusive life, sex, while being very enjoyable, becomes a proving ground for most women. In essence, it’s the free samples before the buy, and its urgency is fueled not only by (hopefully) genuine attraction and arousal, but also at least the subconscious knowledge that she is in a sexual marketplace of competition. It’s one of the few times in life when a woman must qualify for a man’s approval. Admittedly, most men are so sex
deprived or so inexperienced early on in life that the sell is usually not a tough one for her. However, on some level of consciousness, even when the sell is virtually assured, she is aware that she could be replaced by a better competitor. Hypergamy drives women to sustain a prospective man’s interest.
This then is the contrast for committed sexual interaction. The dynamic now shifts from qualification sex to utility sex. Now before anyone jumps to conclusions, yes, sex is still enjoyable, it can still be passionate, and she can definitely want it, but the impetus shifts. Sex is now a tool. In her uncommitted sex life it was a tool for qualification; in her LTR life it’s a tool for compliance. This is pretty obvious, and it may be more or less extreme depending upon the woman’s disposition or how important a particular issue is to her, but make no mistake, there isn’t a woman on the planet who doesn’t take her sexual agency into account when dealing with her LTR / husband. That agency may be more or less valuable — dependent upon her looks, demeanor, sexual availability, etc. — in comparison to the sexual market value of the man she’s paired with.
And this is where the Cardinal Rule of Relationships plays in. This is the constant interplay of vying for who is more dependent upon the other. Women have for the past 50+ years made a concerted effort, and using social conventions, to establish their sexuality as the end-all for men in power. Vagina = Authority and this is what all too many men parrot back to others and self-reinforce. “Change, do it, sublimate your desires, or there wont be any nookie for you tonight mister!” On the surface it seems intuitive to ’keep the peace’ and finish all the things on her honey-do list in the hopes that she’ll recover even a fraction of the desire she had when you were single, childless and getting blow jobs in the car after a date because she couldn’t wait to get home to fuck you.
The Upper Hand
Well LTR gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that, yes, you do in fact have an intrinsic upper hand in this regard if you’re fearless and willing to exercise your power. What I described in the last paragraph is simply the male deductive problem solving we use for so many other things in life. It’s the most intuitive solution — do what she says = get sex.
So it should come as no shock that the answer to this is counterintuitive. You must find ways to, subtly, return back to the state of competition anxiety she had in the beginning. I emphasize subtly, because, as with most everything else female, doing so overtly will be met with hostility, resentment and at best, obligated compliance.
To get more (any?) sex, to retain the frame, to inspire more respect in her, you must disengage from her. That doesn’t mean becoming arrogantly aloof, or sulking like a child, or becoming an instant asshole; those are overt signs and methods. What is needed is incremental reassertion of yourself as the primary AND that her sexual agency, while still welcomed, is not a motivator for your own decisions.
I’m fond of saying no vagina is worth years of regret, yet this is exactly where most men find themselves, because they are either unwilling or unable to rock the vagina boat. They fail to understand that a woman’s imagination is the most powerful tool in the Don Juan toolbox.
The deductive and obvious way of stimulating that imagination would be to blurt out and say “look bitch, your pussy’s not made of gold and there are plenty of other girls ready to polish my nob if you don’t straighten up, see?” And this of course is met with either
resistance or shame from her. What serves a Man better is to make incremental changes in himself that she will perceive as attractive to other women.
Women want to be with Men who other women want to fuck, and other men want to be.
This cuts both ways. The more empowered he becomes, the better physical shape he attains, the more professional achievements he gathers, the more social proof and status he accrues, the more valuable he makes himself, the more anxiety is produce — and this is the same old familiar competition anxiety a woman’s hindbrain can’t argue with.
One of the first things I tell men trapped in a ’her-frame’ relationship is to get to the gym, train hard, look better. This has two effects; first it makes her physical interest in fucking increase, and second it fires up that imagination.
“Why is he doing this? He’s really looking better these days, I see it, other women must see it too. Maybe I need to start working out? Gosh those girls at the gym look really good.”
She can’t argue with a healthy desire to look better, feel better, and be concerned with your health. Getting in better shape is the easiest, most immediate change you can effect. You may have little influence in getting a promotion at work, but you can change your body habitus right now. Women, being the calculating gender, know all too well to hit the gym months prior to a break up — she’s not getting in shape for you, she’s getting ready to hit the ground running with the next guy she’ll be fucking. They know this, so your manifesting the same behavior ’caffeinates the hamster’ since it hits home for them.
Vagina is Not Authority
Don’t accept that her sexuality is the authority of the relationship. The better you make yourself the more authority you command, the more you abdicate to her the less authority (and respect) you command.
Women need to be told “NO”, in fact they want you to tell them “NO”, especially in light of the 800 pound gorilla in the room — her sexual agency. When a woman controls the LTR frame with her vagina, it’s always going to color your dealings with her. This is no way to go through life. It becomes this ever-present, unspoken understanding that she can ultimately play the pussy card and you’ll comply.
While this may gratify her in the short term, you will lose her respect in the long term. She wants to be told “NO” in spite of you knowing she’s going to hold out on you. This is the ultimate repudiation of her sexual agency — “if he says “NO” with the foreknowledge that he knows he wont be getting any, my sexual powers are devalued.” If her sexual agency is called into question it leaves room for doubt and opens the door once again for competition anxiety to creep back in.
As I’ve said before, marriage is no insulation against the sexual marketplace, and no one knows this better than women who can rely on a society that rewards them for recognizing it. Use that to your benefit now.
Nothing is as simultaneously fear inspiring and arousing for women as a Man she
suspects is self-aware of his own value.
This is precisely why a feminized culture must continually confuse him, continually inspire doubt and humiliate him; feminization can’t afford men knowing their true value and potential.
In the end, who cares if you don’t get laid for a week? It’s well worth the price for increasing her respect for you as a commodity, and increasingly, an authority. If you want to maintain that anxiety, you must perpetuate yourself as being a commodity women will compete for, even (especially) in the confines of committed monogamy.
Rewriting the Rules
You know, there’s really no substitute for graphs, and charts, and data plot maps. Human beings, as essentially a visually oriented species, see a graphic heads-up display, a God’s eye view as it were, as essential to seeing the forest for the trees. You may not like being on a budget at home, but show a guy a graph of where all his money goes in a month and he’ll feel better about not pissing it away for a peck on the cheek over the course of a couple weekends.
So it was with this in mind that I took it upon myself to plot out a chronology of the little known and far too under-appreciated sexual marketplace (SMP) we presently find ourselves experiencing (at least since the sexual revolution). Bloggers in the manosphere often use the SMP in a context which presumes that readers are already familiar with their mental model of it, and understand the dynamics of the modern SMP. Personally I think this presumption is fraught with individual bias, both intended and unintended. Make no mistake, I’m about to define the SMP and sexual market values (SMV) from my own perception, but I fully recognize the want for defining these dynamics in a clear, understandable format, so I’ll beg my reader’s forgiveness for this indulgence.
Can I Graduate?
At the time of this writing it was about graduation time for many high school seniors, and with that comes a lot of pontification from ’adults’ who want to impart some grand words of wisdom to the next generation as they launch headlong into a future of student debt and/or dismal employment prospects. This is a special time for parents and childless adults alike to reflect upon their own lives and ask themselves “what would I tell my younger self to do differently?” and hope against hope that the 18 year old they feel compelled to cast in the role of their younger selves will tear themselves away from texting their friends about who’s going to get whom to buy their prom night liquor long enough for it to sink in. So you’ll have to forgive me for playing the professor here for a moment while I make the same vain attempt.
Not long ago I had a commenter tell me,..
“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.”
Well, far be it from Dr. Rollo J. Tomassi, Professor Emeritus, to be so remiss in his sacred charge of educating the next generation about the perils of the sexual marketplace they would otherwise so blindly stagger into. Challenge accepted.
So please gather round the podium, turn off all your cellular devices (prom night liquor’s easy to come by), take a sheet of notebook paper from your Pee Chee folder and prepare to take notes on,..
Navigating the SMP
Now class, if you’ll direct your attention to the display above I’ll explain the parameters of this graph.
In the vertical column we have Sexual Market Value (SMV) based on the ubiquitous ten scale. Professor Roissy emeritus at The Chateau Heartiste did us all the good service of elaborating upon individuated sexual market valuations for both men and women long ago, however for our purposes today it is important to note that the valuations I’m illustrating here are meant to encompass an overall sexual value based on both long and short term breeding prospects, relational desirability, male provisioning capacity, female fertility, sexual desirability and availability, etc. et. al.. Your mileage may vary, but suffice it to say the ten scale is meant to reflect an overall value as individuated for one sex by the other. Outliers will always be an element of any study, but the intent is to represent general averages here.
On the horizontal metric we have a time line based on the age of the respective sex. I’ve broken this down into stages of five year increments, but with notable ages represented for significant life-to-valuation phase for each sex to be detailed later in our lecture.
As an aside here you may notice I began the SMV age range at 15. This is intentional as it is the baseline starting point for the average girl’s midrange desirability value as evaluated by the average high school boy of the same age. Also of note will be the age range between 23 and 36 which represents the peak span years between the sexes, also to be detailed later.
Lastly, I’ve delineated each gender’s respective SMV range bell curve and indicated their crossover phases accordingly.
Women’s SMV
In various contexts, women’s SMV is without doubt the most discussed topic in the manosphere. Try as we may, convincing a woman that her sexual peak lay actually
between 18 and 25 is always an effort in debating denial. For all the self-convincing
attempts to redefine sexual valuation to the contrary, SMV for women is ultimately
decided by Men, not by women. Thus this bell curve is intended to represent the sexual value of women based on men’s metrics, not as women (by way of ceaseless social
engineering) would like to define desirability.
As we continue along you can see that the peak years for women’s SMV tops out at around 23 years. Fertility, desirability, sexual availability and really overall potential for male arousal and attention reach an apex between 22 to 24 year of age. Remember this approximation isn’t an estimate of personal worth, fidelity, intellect, character, or any metric beyond a baseline of desirability invoked in men. Ladies, on average, this is your best year. I don’t think I’m relating anything the cold truth of your hindbrain hasn’t woke you up at night over.
At no other phase in a woman’s life will she enjoy more affirmation or legitimate male attention, more zealously applied for her sexual approval than this brief stretch. Once past the apex, every effort she spends on generating male arousal cues will be in an attempt to recapture the experiences of this phase. Every post-apex, pre-Wall (24 to 30) calorie women burn will be motivated by the memories of her SMV peak.
By the age of 27 women’s SMV decline has begun in earnest. That isn’t to say that
women can’t remain stunningly attractive and vivacious in their post-peak years, but comparative to the next crop of 22-23 year olds, the decline progressively becomes more evident. Competition for hypergamously suitable mates becomes more intensified with each passing year. The age’s between 27 and 30 are subliminally the most stressful for women as the realization sinks in that they must trade their ’party years’ short term
mating protocol for a long term provisioning strategy.
It’s at this point that rationalizations of ’living a new life’ or ’getting right with herself’ begin to formulate; not as a result of guilt or conviction per se, but rather as a function of relieving the anxieties associated with the new reality that she will eventually no longer be able to compete effectively in the SMP. The writing’s on the Wall; either she must establish her own security and provisioning, or settle for as acceptable a provider as her present looks, personal desirability and sexual agency will permit to secure a man’s long term provisioning.
Men
It may seem dismally pessimistic to begin boys SMV at so low a starting point at 15, but recall that we’re looking at overall averages. A 15 year old girl will look at an 18-20 year old man’s sexual approval as more valuable than that of her same age peers. It’s not that notable boys’ attentions are worthless, but they are far more mundane to a mid teens girl, thus the evaluation starts much lower.
As men age you can see that their SMV tends to level off during their 20′s with a gradual rise up to age 30. This represents men’s slow build SMV as they become more valuable by metrics of physical prowess, social gravity, status, maturity, affluence, influence, and, hopefully, dominance. It’s a slow process and, unfortunately, of a man’s significant maturing to his SMV, most of it occurs while women are reaching their own SMV peak. At age 23, while a girl is enjoying her prime SMP value, a man is just beginning to make his own gradual ascent.
By age 36, the average man has reached his own relative SMV apex. It’s at this phase that his sexual / social / professional appeal has reached maturity. Assuming he’s maximized as much of his potential as possible, it’s at this stage that women’s hypergamous directives will find him the most acceptable for her long-term investment. He’s young enough to retain his physique in better part, but old enough to have attained social and professional maturity.
Comparative SMV and the Peak Span Years
One important note here is to compare men and women’s SMV decline. Women’s SMV being primarily based on the physical, has a much more precipitous decline than that of men’s. who’s decline is graduated upon a declining capacity to maintain his status as well as his health / looks. Since a man’s SMV is primarily rooted in his personal accomplishments, his SMV degradation has much more potential for preservation. Women’s SMV burns hot and short, but men’s burns slow and long.
Now class, please address your attention to the critical 15-16 year span between a
woman’s peak SMV and that of men’s. It should come as no surprise that this span is generally the most socially tumultuous between the sexes. The majority of first marriages take place here, single-motherhood takes place here, advanced degrees, career establishments, hitting the Wall, and many other significant life events occur in this life stage. So it is with a profound sense of importance that we understand the SMV context, and the SMP’s influence as prescribed to each sexes’ experience during this period.
At age 30 men are just beginning to manifest some proto-awareness of their inherent sexual value, while simultaneously women are becoming painfully aware of their marked inability to compete with their sexual competitors indefinitely. This is the point of
comparative SMV: when both sexes are situationally at about the same level of valuation (5). The conflict in this is that men are just beginning to realize their potential while women must struggle with the declination of their own.
This is the primary phase during which women must cash in their biological chips in the hope that the best men they can invest their hypergamy with will not be so aware of their innate SMV potential that they would choose a younger woman (22-24) during her peak phase over her. I write about this later in The Threat:
Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.
The confluence between both sexes’ comparative SMV is perhaps the most critical stage of life for feminine hypergamy. She must be able to keep him ignorant of his SMV
potential long enough to optimize her hypergamy. The entirety of feminine social
influence revolves around optimizing this hypergamy for as long as she is desirable enough to effect it.
In men’s case, his imperative is to awaken to his SMV (or his potential of it) before he has made life-altering decisions based on a lack understanding his potential and remaining apart from women’s pluralistic sexual strategies to make those life-decisions based on his own best interests.
Every man who I’ve ever known to tell me how he wished he’d known of the
manosphere or read my writing before getting married or ’accidentally’ knocking up his girlfriend has his regret rooted in not making this SMV awareness connection before she had consolidated (legally and emotionally) on her own sexual imperatives. They tended to value women more greatly than their own personal potential for a later realized SMV peak — or they never realized that peak due to not making this awareness connection.
Well, I’m afraid that’s all I have space for today class. I hope this brief intensive has given you some food for thought as you enter a feminized world legally and socially dedicated to the benefit of optimizing hypergamy. Just remember, as you see your
illustrious manosphere instructors gazing proudly from the gallery in our professorial caps and gowns, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Class dismissed. We are who we say we are.
We are who we say we are.
Is the woman who applies make up everyday ’being herself”?
How about the woman with implants, is she ’being herself’? What about the woman wearing high heels because it boosts her height 4 inches? Is the girl you see in nothing but party pics on FaceBook being herself?
Lets turn it the other way, what of the woman wearing a business suit that emphasizes her shoulders with pads in the jacket is she ’being herself’? If she colors her hair does this make her less genuine?
If being ourselves is an idealized state then I should reasonably be able to expect a like-minded fitness model to be attracted to me even if my greatest passion is to sit on my couch, eat a large pizza and wash it down with a 6 pack of Michelob while watching Monday Night Football, right? After all, I am just being myself — it’s who I am.
Believe and so you shall become
The hardest distinction the uninitiated have with the JBY (just be yourself) dynamic is that personality is malleable. Personality is always in flux. The person you are today isn’t who you were 2 years ago, nor the person you’ll be 2 years from now. There are traits and characteristics we may carry with us for a lifetime, but even these are subject to change depending upon circumstance. You define what being yourself is at any given moment and it’s relative to your personal conditions and environment.
So where do you draw the line? When does a genuine change of character become
legitimate rather than being ’shallow’ or ’superficial’ or “someone you’re not?” Those are just catch terms that women (and too many chumps) have used with success over the centuries and men have internalized as being states of perception that women think are undesirable, yet they never accurately define. Rather, they stay intentionally ambiguous and, usually, relative to an individual woman’s interpretation, while their behaviors
indicate their own motivations.
You are who you believe you are, and you are who she perceives you to be.
One of the hardest things for anyone, male or female, to hear is that they need to change their lifestyle. It implies that their just ’being themselves’ is in some way at fault for their present conditions. It’s analogous to telling someone they’re not living their lives
’correctly’ or that they’re raising their kids wrong.
If I have a friend that is shooting heroin and I actively encourage him to stop and make an effort to help him ’clean up’, society calls me a hero or a savior. When I encourage my friend to quit smoking before she gets cancer, I’m a concerned good-friend helping my friend with a health risk behavior. But when I tell a friend he needs to change his approach to women and this is a reason for his unhappiness and he needs to change his outlook on, and approach with women, look better and feel better, then I’m a ’shallow’ prick and insensitive to his ’problem’. Worse still is even attempting to offer constructive criticism, in as positive a light possible, that a person can improve themselves by
changing their outlook and modifying their behavior.
Personality is not only malleable, but it can change dramatically under specific
conditions.
An easy example of this is veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. These men were exposed to traumatic environments that fundamentally altered their personalities. While this is an extreme illustration it shows that becoming a ’different person’ is a matter of conditions. If my conditions are such that I enjoy sitting at home eating a whole pizza, washing it down with a six pack of Budweiser and watching Anime on a Friday
evening, can I realistically expect that hot fitness instructor at the gym to come on over and genuinely want to fuck my brains out?
And why not? After all I’m only being myself and she should “love me for who I am”, right? If this were my case, the conditions that define my personality are incongruous with attracting and/or maintaining a relationship with someone whose conditions are not my own.
JBY is an operative social convention that aids hypergamy.
Women are only too happy to endorse and reinforce JBY for the conscious reasoning that it ’sounds like the right thing to say’.
It’s an unassailable position; who wouldn’t want you to be you? If what counts is all on the inside then anyone telling you to change must be manipulating you for their own selfish reasons. This dovetails nicely into the popularized fat-acceptance self-acceptance mantra most women will fall back on when the impact of the Wall begins to manifest itself in their physiques and they want to be loved for “who they are” rather than what they used to look like.
However, on a subconscious level, the latent purpose of fostering the JBY social
convention in men is yet another sexual selection filtering mechanism. Actually it’s more of a filtering failsafe in that by socially mandating a genuineness in the general populace of men, women are more secure in the accuracy of their sexual assessment of men. If all men are Just Being Themselves and are encouraged to be the person they ’truly are’, this then aids a woman in determining which man will best satisfy her hypergamy.
As I’ve stated in many a prior post, women claim to want honesty from men, but no woman wants full disclosure. In a general sense I advise this because it serves to sustain a Man’s aura of mystery, only to be progressively discovered by women with the
appropriate levels of interest and responsiveness to men. However, another reason to remain deliberately ambiguous is to defuse the JBY dynamic that women assume would be a man’s default psychology.
An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative
involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors. What this means is 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.
JBY is a tool in maintaining the feminine imperative as the social imperative. Furthermore JBY serves in optimizing hypergamy in aiding a woman’s sense of security about assessing which man will best suit her hypergamy. Ironically, the JBY dynamic gets
upended once a monogamous relationship is established by a woman’s anxiety over ’fixing’ her partner once in that relationship. What was once the pseudo-genuineness of just him being himself is replace by “I’m working on him” in order for him to become the ideal man to meet with her hypergamic approval — thus exposing the calculated nonsense JBY really is to begin with.
We are who we say we are
We can alter our own personalities and have them altered by our conditions or any combination of the two, but to suggest that personality is static is a falsehood.
The trap is to think that altering personality is in anyway disingenuous — there are
certainly terrific ’actors’ or ’poseurs’, and the like, that when we are confronted with them we sense (or even know) that they are pushing an envelope that they may not be
entirely comfortable with, but there is merit to a ’fake it till you make it’ doctrine.
We only perceive it as being ’false’, ’superficial’ or as “trying to be something your not” when we have a concept or knowledge of a previous set of personality behaviors. If you met a likable cocky-funny guy at a club this weekend, how are you to know whether he’s the real deal or stretching the limits of his personality if you’ve never met him before?
From The 48 Laws of Power:
Law 25: Re-Create Yourself
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions— your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
I know, I know, Nice Guy vs. Jerk has been done into the ground many times.
I think one of the easiest targets for Game hate is the terminology. It’s far too easy to apply subjective definitions to archetypes like ’Nice Guy’ or ’Jerk’. The standard binary response is usually,
“So, I gotta be a complete asshole all the time or girls wont be attracted to me? Screw that man, I’m not into game playin’.”
You can sift back through any number of forum pages of advice I’ve offered and read me over and over again telling young men to “get in touch with their inner asshole.”
However, in any of my posts, never do I state to in fact become an asshole.
The two most common questions I get asked advice for is “Why do girls love Jerks so much?” and the “How do I get out of the friend-zone?” line. Both of these illustrate different ends of a spectrum.
Try to think of it this way — on one end of the spectrum you have the consummate Jerk, he’s obnoxious, an asshole, borders on abusiveness, but women flock to the guy in droves.
On the opposite end of the scale we have the ultimate Nice Guy who does and embodies everything any girl has ever told him he needs to become in order to achieve their
intimacy and has internalized this doormat conditioning into his own personality. This is the guy who’ll spend countless hours on the phone being ’friends’ with a girl or spend fortunes on gifts for her in order to buy her approval.
I think it’s important to look at the roots of the terms “Jerk” and “Nice Guy.” Lets not forget these characterizations exist because women gave them these names and classifications based on their own common evaluations. Women defined these terms — guys simply made the association with them. We tend to see these as parodies or caricatures now;
abusive wife-beating Jerk or doormat Nice Guy. These are two extreme ends of the
spectrum and when considering them after candid assessments, the mistake becomes falling into a binary all-or-nothing interpretation.
“So I haffta be more of a Jerk then,..well, I’m just not like that.” says the AFC frustrated at what seems like women’s duplicity of words and actions, but this misses the point.
The problem is that if you think of a center point between that Jerk and Nice Guy
spectrum, most guys lean towards (if not half way over to) the Nice Guy. That’s the “get in touch with your feminine side, believe women’s words instead of actions” default for the vast majority of men. This is what women are used to because it is so common, and women only encourage it because it suits their gender’s imperative best. The real extreme Jerk is as rare as the real extreme Nice Guy, so it’s necessary to look at things in order of degrees in this respect.
Most men are Betas, or overwhelmingly invest themselves in a Beta male identity. They opt for the nice, accommodating, supplicating side of this spectrum - for the majority, they’ve been socially conditioned to suppress any natural masculine impulse in favor of accommodating and identifying with women’s imperatives (or at least what they’re led to understand as their imperatives) at the risk of intimate rejection. It’s exactly this mindset, this Beta male default to the ’nice’ end of the spectrum that 85% of guys subscribe to, that makes the guy who leans into the ’jerk’ end of the spectrum attractive.
Yes, confidence and indifference are Alpha traits, but in a world awash in nice guys ready to buy a hot girl a drink, it’s the guy who ’couldn’t give a shit’ who she marks as a sexual potential. It’s just this conditioning over the last 50+ or so years that makes the nice side of the spectrum the default. That doesn’t mean all Nice Guys are pathetic symps without a spine and groveling at the feet of any ONEitis they happen to attach themselves to. It is to say that, by comparison, and because the overwhelming tendency to “go nice” is the standard, the guy who leans even marginally to the Jerk side of the spectrum becomes at least notable, and at best attractive, simply by dissociation from the masses of nice guys.
He’s attractive on two levels, the first being the rudimentary Alpha, biological level for a guy who’s decisive, in control, confident and has an attitude of caring less about a
woman, since he realizes (to some degree) his value as a commodity comes from his
having the options to have such an attitude.
The second is that the Jerk-leaning guy is a Purple Cow in a field of bland, colorless Nice Cows. He’s notable, and this too, makes him a male worthy of female competition, which then reinforces his sense of having options. He’s not an abuser, he’s not a manipulator per se, but he tends to put himself before and above (sometimes innocently, sometimes callously) the women who are attracted to him.
Now the irony of all this is that the AFC thinks that this situation is in reverse. He believes that Nice Guys are the anomaly in a sea of Jerks. Of course he believes this because it’s all his female-friends talk about — their “Jerk BFs”, and how Nice they are for being good listeners. So his self-image gets validated and he believes he’s unique and valuable for being “not-like-other-guys” and his patience and sensitivity will eventually pay off — which it very well could once the object of his obsession has had her fun (and possibly bred) with the Bad Boy.
A New World Jerk Order.
Another criticism leveled at Game is a fear that nominally Nice Guys will take this lesson to heart and become a new social wave of intolerable assholes. The fear is a new generation of arrogant pricks ’not being themselves’ all in order to hook up. I understand the fear of a mass of men radically leaning their personalities towards the Jerk end of the spectrum as prompted by the PUA or MRA (men’s rights activists) communities.
Let me be the first to say those fears are unfounded. Guys don’t search out the
community, blogs or forums because they’re getting too much pussy from being
archetypal ’nice’. In fact the observation that more, shall we say, “self-centered” Men seem to be getting laid most consistently is so prevalent that there’s an entire section
dedicated to it on the main SoSuave web-page. This leads me to believe that a sudden paradigm shift to Jerk-ness isn’t remotely the threat that anyone should fear. Nice Guys, by definition, have a real tough time effectively pulling off acting like a Jerk, much less genuinely converting their personality’s to that of a Jerk.
Most men would prefer to inch towards the jerk end of the spectrum, if at all, and assuming they come to believing things aren’t as they previously believed. The more common mindset for Beta males is to expect that women should appreciate them for being the ’nice’, dependable, self-sacrificing guy that every woman since his mother has told him he should be.
It’s far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want. It’s the lazy man’s path to disqualify or cheapen things that he desperately wants, but lacks the motivation to change himself to get. So the hot, ’quality’ girl he wanted before, becomes the ’trashy club slut’ after she rejects him. The real quality girl should love/desire him unconditionally, “for who he is” rather than force him into improving himself, which in this instance means he ought to become the caricatured Jerk archetype he’s been taught to hate. Most people resist becoming what they hate, even if it’s a change for the better.
We ought to worry less about social implications of converting nice guys into jerks than making them self-aware to begin with. The risk of creating a bona fide Jerk in such an effort is a decent trade off.
Final Exam — Navigating the
Sexual Marketplace
Just Be Yourself
The Nice Guy - Jerk Spectrum
Before I launch into this proper, let me define a few terms in the fashion that I interpret them. With the popularity of the manosphere and a few notable blogs, there’s been a new push with regards to using the terms Alpha and Beta (and sometimes Omega) when describing certain classifications of males in modern culture.
Allow me to go on record as viewing these ideas as mindsets whereas terms such as being an AFC or Alpha are really states of being. For instance, a contextual Alpha can be the master of his professional realm and still be an AFC with regards to women. A Beta male can still be as wealthy and astute in status as his conditions and fortune have placed him in (often by circumstance).
Some states necessitate certain mindsets — a positive masculine state requires an Alpha mindset — others do not. Also, don’t make the mistake of associating success (personal and career) with an Alpha mindset. There are plenty of Alphas on hotchickswithdouchebags.com, however that doesn’t necessarily make them well rounded individuals. I tend to think of the ideas Alpha and Beta as subconscious states or attitudes that manifest themselves in our thoughts, beliefs and actions.
Beta Game
With this in mind I’d like to propose the idea of Beta Game. Since we’re using the Alpha and Beta terminology here, it’s important to grasp where it comes from. Anyone with even a cursory understanding about animal social hierarchies knows the principal of Alpha and Beta individuals within a social collective. Alphas tend to be the males who exhibit the best genetic characteristics and behavioral skills that put them at the top of the potential breeding pool. In fact Betas are rarely mentioned as such in scientific studies; there are Alphas and there is the rest of the pack or collective. The Beta term, in PUA lingo is really something of a novelty. Relating these terms to human social interactions, while at times a subjective stretch, isn’t too hard to understand the basic representative concepts. We can see the similarity, and the applications in long term and short term breeding methodologies in the wild that mirror our own.
Like any other Beta animal, alternate methodologies had to be developed in order to facilitate human breeding under the harsh conditions of Alpha competition. In essence, and as found in the wild, Beta males have developed (evolved) methods which attempt to ’poach’ potential females from an Alpha’s harem, or at least in this case his perceived, potential harem.
Identification
Beta male Game focuses primarily on Betas identifying and assimilating themselves to be more like the women they hope to connect with, but it goes beyond this.
The methodology dictates that the Beta be perceived as being unique (or at least set apart) from the more “common” Alpha males whom his desired women naturally prefer. This is the beginning of the “not-like-other-guys” mental schema he hopes to evoke in his idealized woman.
Due to his inability to compete with an Alpha competitor in the physical, he must fight an uphill psychological battle on his own terms. This involves convincing his target that her best parental investment should be with him (as per her stated requirements) as he more closely embodies her long term prerequisites. The Beta likens himself to her and self-models himself in accord with feminine imperatives in an effort to maximize his compatibility and familiarity with her and the feminine.
This identification process is further reinforced through the feminine social conventions he subscribes to. Feminine society (both Beta men and women) indirectly reward him for more closely assimilating to its ideal — be more like an archetypal woman; sensitive, empathic, emotional, security-seeking, etc.. Not only this, but take de facto feminine offense when presented with anything to the contrary of a female-positive perspective. Lift women up, become less so they become more, and in reciprocation she’s more apt to breed with the Beta.
That’s the principle, not necessarily the reality. In some ways it’s a Cap’n Save a Ho
mentality written on a grand scale. The fallacy in this of course is the presumption that like should attract like. Beta men fail to understand that opposites attract, and barring the notable exceptions, most women don’t want to marry other women, least of all a carbon copy of themselves.
Disqualification
When presented with a competitor of superior status, both sex’s innate, subconscious
reaction is to disqualify that competitor from breeding in as expedient a method as
possible. For animals this usually involves some kind of courtship performance or outright competitive hostility. While the same could be said for human beings, our natural social impulse requires we take a bit more tact.
“Look at that girl, she must be a slut to wear / act like that”, or “Yeah, he’s pretty good looking, but guys like that are usually fags” are an example of the standard social
weapons people use to disqualify their respective sex. Disqualify the competitor on the most base level — question their sexuality. Literally cast doubt on a competitor’s sexual fitness to breed with potential mates.
While most men (Alpha or Beta) will make similar attempts to disqualify, the Beta’s methodology ties back into his need for feminine identification in his disqualifying a competitor. Essentially he relies on feminine ways of disqualification by drawing upon his likeness to the women he hopes to emulate — thus, he believes, furthering potential attraction through an opportunity to prove how well he identifies with the feminine. The competitor may not be gay, but he must be cast as inferior to the Beta himself due to his
competitor’s inability (or lessened ability) to identify and empathize with his desired female as well as he does.
With Alpha competitors, the field has already been plowed for him by feminine social conventions, all he need do is plant the seeds. The fact that the Alpha tends to embody the masculine opposite of what he’s embraced also feeds this drive. His belief is that women aren’t attracted to the macho tough guy, they want a man who’s kind and thoughtful; a good listener. So the natural recourse is to amplify this disparity — “the Alpha is a 1950′s Neanderthal throwback, he’s “bitter”, he’s a misogynist, he’s a child in a man’s body with a fragile ego only interested in fucking women and moving on.” He’s unlike anything on women’s collective, stated, list of prerequisites for an acceptable male. He must be ridiculed — as all women ridicule — for his selfish, overt, hyper-masculinity.
Furthermore, the Beta needs to make the Alpha seem common, while making himself seem unique. In order to effectively disqualify an Alpha, the Beta has to display his
empathy for the feminine, and she must appreciate it or it’s been all for nothing (which it usually is). Not only is this an ego preservation mechanism, but it’s also perceived as a tool for achieving the desired sexual reciprocation / appreciation he desires.
Interpretation
All of this really just scratches the surface of how Beat Game has evolved. I will add that all of these methods come back to a common root; the need to breed under the duress of competition. Most of what I’ve gone into here, and primarily the feminine identity association, become ego-invested and internalized over the course of a lifetime. It gets to the point that under the auspices of relative anonymity (like the internet) that the Beta will still cling to his mental model, even in the face of very rational, empirical evidence that contradicts the effectiveness of his Game, for no other reason than that a woman, a potential mate with whom he could identify, might read his post and may become attracted to him. The Game is never dropped for him, even in light of proving his errors.
Beta game is like the boy who decides to play on the girls team when a boys vs. girls kick ball game is started. He thinks it will endear himself to them, when all it really does is make him another girlfriend to giggle with.
Everyone has a Game in some respect. The validity of that Game may be more or less effective, but at some point a man is going to adapt to a methodology of seduction as per his conditions and environment warrant. Even master PUAs still need to adapt their Game for differing environments — different clubs, types of women, socio-economic levels, countries, etc. — there needs to be adaptation and improvisation.
The same applies for Betas, but the disparity is that the Beta tends to think of a one size fits all approach. For all the complaints of worry about the Game community turning into scripted ’social robots’, it’s actually the Beta who adopts a far more embedded script and is less likely to variate from it. Betas tend to stick with what worked for them, what was reinforced for them, in the past.
Beta Game
You choke the chicken before any big date, don’t you?
Anyone who’s seen the movie Something About Mary is pretty familiar with the now classic ’Hair Gel’ incident.
Dom: “You choke the chicken before any big date, don’t you? Tell me you spank the monkey before any big date. Oh my God, he doesn’t flog the dolphin before a big date. Are you crazy? That’s like going out there with a loaded gun! Of course that’s why you’re nervous. Oh my dear friend, please sit, please. Look, um, after you’ve had sex with a girl, and you’re lying in bed with her, are you nervous? No, you’re not, why?”
Ted: “Cause I’m tired…”
Dom: “Wrong! It’s ’cause you ain’t got the baby batter on the brain anymore! Jesus, that stuff will fuck you’re head up! Look, the most honest moment in a man’s life are the few minutes after he’s blown his load — now that is a medical fact. And the reason for it is that you’re no longer trying to get laid, you’re actually… you’re thinking like a girl, and girls love that.”
Even if you’ve never seen the film, it’s likely you’re at least peripherally aware of the Beta Game principle Dom is explaining here. Can you spot the inconsistency?
“.. you’re thinking like a girl, and girls love that.”
No, they don’t. Sorry Dom, they want a loaded gun.
De-sexualization as Game is one of the primary mistakes Betas make. This is the
’Something About Mary’ effect; the presumption that your biological impulse to desire sex is a hindrance to getting sex. From a rational standpoint this is ridiculous, but betas eat this idea up because it dovetails nicely into their misguided sexual conditioning that assumes like attracts like — identify more with the feminine to be more attractive to the feminine. Watching this movie is like an effort in deconstructing all the Beta Game tenets of the past 40 years.
I apologize for not having the sources to site for this, but I can remember reading case studies on the biochemical effect of human sexual interaction doing grad work in
college. I believe they were done by Dr. Martie Hasselton, but they outlined the chemical endorphin and hormonal profiles present in healthy adults bloodstream’s while in various phases of attraction, arousal, pre-sex and post-sex interaction between couples. The most dramatic one to look up is the similarities in the chemical properties of dopamine and
heroin for people experiencing “love” or “infatuation.”
Even more fascinating is the effects hormones play on portions of men’s brains when
assessing sexual cues in a potential sex partner. Healthy testosterone levels literally
causes men to perceive women as sexual objects; stimulating the same portions of our brains used for cognitive problem solving and manipulating tools.
However, testosterone is mitigated by oxytocin, the hormone secreted just post orgasm. While testosterone is responsible for sex drive and aggressive impulses (not to
mention muscular development, deepening of voice and hair growth), oxytocin is linked to feelings of nurturing, trust, and comfort. Oxytocin is believed to be a primary influence in post-sex, and post pregnancy, emotional attachment in women who produce the
hormone in much higher amounts than men. Postpartum depression is speculated to be a withdrawal symptom triggered by the decrease in oxytocin (and progesterone) in post-birth women. The effect of post-orgasm oxytocin in men is similar to women, however in men it is also serves as a buffering agent to heightened dopamine and testosterone levels.
Oxytocin plays a critical part in regulating a man’s testosterone levels. Just post-orgasm, the human body flushes oxytocin into the bloodstream to balance out the endorphin and dopamine high of sexual arousal. While this hormone promotes feelings of trust and comfort in men, it also serves to ’calm the guy down’ sexually. Oxytocin is a testosterone buffer in men, thus resulting in you going limp for a while after busting a nut.
From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense in that it ensures the sperm deposited stays in a woman’s vagina, thus increasing fertility odds, instead of being shoveled out by a still erect penis. Not only that, but oxytocin serves to promote ’pair bonding’ in that it fosters feelings of protective trust in men. Oxytocin discharge in humans is also triggered by pheromonal and environmental prompts (touch or kino for instance).
In addition to all of this, there’s the role that pheromones play in regard to sexual attraction and arousal. You can google these, but there are several pheromonal studies that
indicate that men with differing scents from those of women tend to attract opposite scents in women.
From an evolutionary perspective the conclusion drawn is one that
people of similar genus or genotype (i.e. blood related family members) will be less aroused sexually by persons of the their own genotype, thus ensuring biodiversity
(nature’s prevention plan against inbreeding). However in the same “sweaty t-shirt”
studies, the perspiration of men with higher testosterone levels were deemed more
sexually viable or arousing by women than men with lower T levels — and particularly
so for women in the proliferative phase of their menstrual cycles.
You can attribute whatever legitimacy you want to studies like this, but the evidence points to higher testosterone levels as playing an influential part in sexual attraction. Also bear in mind that pheromones influence women living in close proximity to each other to synchronize their menstrual cycles — another evolutionary mechanism believed to ensure fertility and communal support for social animals.
The Pheromonal Beta
From a biomechanical perspective, the indication is that men who consistently
masturbate are essentially broadcasting their status as Pheromonal Betas — and women’s biochemical mechanics subconsciously registers this about them. Higher testosterone males manifest their sexual viability in both sexual assertiveness and scent.
If you are chronically depleted of testosterone, and/or subjected to the calming effects of oxytocin your sexual viability is at a disadvantage. In fact, from an evolutionary standpoint, the Beta males of our feral hunter-gatherer beginnings would be more prone to masturbation as a sexual release since, theoretically, they would’ve had less access to breeding opportunities than Alpha males. It would then follow that definitive, subconscious behavioral and chemical cues would evolve to aid females in selecting the best mate for parental investment.
So, for as much as Beta guys would like to have you believe that snapping your radish before a date will improve your chances of fucking the girl, odds are you’re shooting yourself in the foot. This stupid belief is rooted in the “Something about Mary” myth that women don’t want an overly sexualized man, but the biological truth is far from that. The myth is one that women need to be comfortable with a guy in order to sleep with him, so men will actively de-sexualize themselves in order to comply. However, all indications point to a need for sexual anxiety and tension in arousal to prompt sexual intercourse.
Comfort and trust are post-orgasm conditions; anxiety, arousal and sexual urgency are pre-orgasm conditions — and both have their own unique hormonal signatures.
Disclaimer
And now for the disclaimer; I’m not a endocrinologist, biochemist or physician. I’ll admit this is a work in conjecture, but it’s plausible conjecture. For the record, it’s not about ’less’ desirable pheromones, it’s about a lower incidence of any sex-cue pheromones due to depletion and the behaviors that depletion prompts. It stands to reason that women would be more attracted to men motivated to being sexual with them, manifesting this in chemistry and behavior, than sexually unmotivated men manifesting signs of disinterest.
I used to think that the primary issue with beating off was this feminine double
standard — women masturbating is sexy, arousing and, nowadays, socially empowering. For men, masturbation is a perversion. It implies an inability to be ’man enough’ to fuck a real woman; whacking off is failure for a man, but empowerment for a woman. Why would this social conditions exist, and what is it’s latent function?
I still see the double standard in all that, and while I think it’s valid, it kind of only
brushes the surface of self-pleasure from a social convention perspective. Sigmund Freud once said, “all energy is sexual”, meaning that subliminally we will redirect our motivation for ungratified sexual impulse to other endeavors. Thus it’s men, being the sex with the highest amount of libido inducing testosterone, who must look for far more outlets to transfer this motivation to than women.
So is it any real surprise that it’s historically Men who’ve primarily been the empire builders, the conquerors, the creators, and destroyers who’ve (for better or worse) moved humanity the most significantly?
Masturbation defuses this impulse. It kills that drive, or at least sublimates it. So wouldn’t it stand to reason that a global social convention that shames men for masturbation would be beneficial to a society interested in expanding? Thus the cultural meme becomes men who jack off are losers, and Men who don’t thereby prove their sexual viability (because if they’re not beating off they must be fucking women semi-regularly for sexual release) and become motivated to redirect that impulse to the betterment of themselves and/or society.
The Pheromonal Beta
The original huff amongst women in the manosphere about dread came in the wake of a post about instilling a sense of dread in a woman in order to help maintain a consistent frame control in a relationship. Naturally, women’s unconditioned response to this overt assertion of control was to demonize the whole idea of dread. When you think about it dread, as proposed, is really a sense of conceptualizing the potential outcome of losing the intimacy of a partner and the resulting fallout (emotional, financial, familial, personal, etc.) from that loss. Such an overt declaration for promoting a sense of dread conjures melodramatic images of fiendish men blackmailing their women into emotional enslavement to their possessive and insecure whims.
I think what’s lost amongst all this sensationalism about dread — a very weak term for the concept — is the applicability dread has in a much broader scope (and particularly for women) than the overly dramatic characterization of it when men openly discuss using it themselves.
Faces of Dread
I have a good friend, John, who’s just this side of 37. I love the guy, but John’s not much to look at. At around 30 he essentially gave up on himself. He got married far too young on the business end of a do-the-right-thing ’accidental’ pregnancy, and from a personal standpoint that was the end of his window of opportunity to explore any other options he may have had. His wife let herself go just after the second pregnancy, ballooned into a beach ball, and he followed suit. In actuality it wouldn’t take much for him to get back on top of his game, but he has no desire to.
Now, after detailing John’s situation you might think he’d be the last candidate to participate in anything resembling a manipulation of dread in a relationship, and you’d be right, but he, and guys like him are often the unwitting participants in their wives’ or girlfriend’s own dread-games.
Although John isn’t going to spontaneously attract women with either his looks or due to his complete obliviousness to Game, he is an exceptional provider for his family. He regularly busts his ass as a programmer and is the sole breadwinner of the family —
singlehandedly funding his wife’s schooling. In addition he’s a very attentive father, husband and is somewhat of a handyman around the house.
In spite of all this his wife tends to be a bit of a shrew, browbeating him on a regular basis, which has been passed onto the personalities of his teenage daughters who engage in the same heavy handedness their mother does.
Yet for all the passive-aggressive derision, John’s wife is easily one of the most possessive women I’ve ever known. He literally lives in a constant state of surveillance as to his whereabouts. She calls to verify he is where he says he is, and continually suspects him of running off to a strip club (which to my knowledge he’s never set foot inside one) or engaging in anyway with another woman. It’s gotten to the point that it’s comical to think that she’d have any worry that he’d be snatched away by a better woman, but there it is, the dreaded competition anxiety prompting unease in an, albeit low self-esteem, woman with no realistic possibility of it ever occurring.
“I can’t compete with that,..”
Some of the most neurotically possessive women I’ve ever known have been the girlfriends and wives of amateur circuit bodybuilders. Most of these girls, even the fitness competitors, had to either be very self-assured or they resorted to controlling tactics and possessiveness due to the constant reminder of how desired their Men were by other women. Even when that was explicitly not the case, the perception of their desirability was enough to bring this out in them. They had the love and desire of very physically elite Men, but this still wasn’t enough to pacify that innate sense of dread.
Manosphere blogger Dalrock has blogged ad infinitum about the feminized notion of how a man’s viewing ”using” porn is conflated with adultery by wives. To say nothing about the constant push to pathologize the male sexual response, this is an easy out for women following the Eat, Pray, Love script wanting to exit a marriage with cash and prizes. However, the fundamental point in that conflation is a woman’s, often overstated, inability to compete with the “porn star ideal of physical perfection and sexual acrobatics that no normal woman could ever be comfortable with.” Considering the sheer variety of men’s sexual appetites this is ludicrous on the surface of it, but it is illustrative of the
predominance dread plays in women’s psyches. It doesn’t matter what the particulars of his sexual appetites are, she feels inadequate in that competition and fears a loss of intimacy.
Dread Games
I catch a lot of hostility from the femosphere for even suggesting a Man directly foster competition anxiety in his LTR, but the underlying reason for this venom is a preexisting condition of dread in women that can barely be tolerated when it’s under the surface, much less when it’s exposed.
Dread, in this context, is an innate fear of loss of security that intensifies as a woman progresses further beyond the Wall and with her diminishing capacity to reestablish that provisioning security with a new partner. In fact it’s exactly this dread that is the root source of the gynocentric laws that award women cash & prizes in a divorce settlement. So powerful is this fear that legal assurances needed to be instituted to account for a woman’s lessened ability to secure long-term provisioning after a failed marriage, after the Wall, after pregnancies, etc.
Dread, for lack of a better term, is a female condition.
Although I’ve suggested casually returning flirtations with other women as a means to amplifying desire and illustrating social proof, this is hardly the only, or best, means of fostering competition anxiety. Overt flirtations are a blunt means of stoking this anxiety, but often all it takes is a nuanced shift in a predictable routine to trigger that imagination. The idea isn’t to instill and sustain a constant terror from fear of loss, but rather to
covertly, subtly, demonstrate higher value; particularly when a woman’s attention is
straying into comfortable, routine familiarity and she begins seeking indignation and drama from other sources.
Sometimes all that’s necessary to provoke that imagination is to get to the gym, dress better, get a raise, travel for work, change your routine, adopt a Game mentality, hang out with a new (or old) friend, be cocky & funny with her — risk to offend her sensibilities.
Most women believe that their pussies are sufficient to hold their men in thrall for a lifetime, but as a woman’s SMV declines and a Man’s appreciates their confidence in this form of leverage falls off, thus forcing them to adopt new schema for controlling the fear of loss. When you head off to Las Vegas for that trade show and your wife fucks the ever-lovin’ shit out of you the night before you go, you’re experiencing one of those new schema. It doesn’t take much, most times the lightest touch will do. Good dread game doesn’t even have to be initiated by you. Often enough, women will do it themselves, or discover sources of social proof that reaffirms your desirability.
In light of this ambient fear of loss women seek to avoid, one might be tempted to use a more sympathetic approach in order to allay a woman’s fears. This is hardly worth mentioning here since this is generally the tact that most men intuitively use in their LTRs anyway — a constant reassurance of love and devotion to settle her fears. Guy’s like my friend John will follow a perpetual strategy of appeasement in spite of themselves.
Lets be clear, the vast majority of women are secure enough not to allow this condition to get the better of them, and it’s in the extreme cases I’ve used above that real neuroticism flourishes. Contrary to popular belief I’m not an advocate of the Dark Triad methodologies of Game. Not because I think they’re ineffective, but rather because, with the right art of Game they’re not even needed. Only in extreme cases are the dark arts to be employed, and if a situation necessitates their use it’s important for a guy to understand that a line has been crossed with a woman who necessitated their use.
So yes, you should be seeking to reassure an LTR of your love and devotion, but know that due to women’s intrinsic fear of security loss and the competition anxiety that comes from a declining capacity to compete with her sisters’ attentions, you will never achieve an ideal state of contentment of it, and certainly not by relying solely on comfort and familiarity. She wants you to rock the boat, it’s what makes her feel alive.
Dread Games
In the starting of my blog I’d been contemplating the last 10 or so years I’ve spent on SoSuave. Every time I consider the things I’ve written for the ’community’ I always need to put them into the perspective of where I’ve come from and what I’ve learned in that time. I reviewed a ’single-mommy’ story in another forum thread, one that I learned from almost 20 years prior. I also go into how things were before the advent of the internet occasionally.
I think it’s really hard for a generation of young Men to fully appreciate the progress that guys in their mid-30s, mid-40s and even 50s have made in their respective times. It’s hard for mid 20s and teenage guys to relate to a time before the level of communication we take for granted today. There was no term for an AFC, Beta or “herb” in 1995. I didn’t own a cell phone until 2002 and never texted anyone regularly until 2005.
When guys in their 30s and 40s now were learning the lessons I relate in this book and on my blog, there were no forums, no PUAs (formally anyway), and the phenomenon we call feminization and the ’Matrix’ was at the peak of its influence by virtue alone of no one questioning, let alone being aware of, its influence. We lacked the male-to-male social communication, certainly the global communication, to really bring common
experiences together and form ideas from those observations. We were in the dark.
Remember, no internet, and the “how to pick up girls” books were what losers ordered by mail from an ad they saw in the back of a Hustler magazine. In fact porn was only
accessible by renting it from the back room of a VHS rental store, by magazine or
pirating the Spice channel from cable. Good times.
Now lets flash forward to 2013. I can’t go a day without having Viagra or porn solicited to me in my email. Porn is now part of the utilities; it’s like hot and cold running water, but moreover, so is the collected experience of literally a world of men considering the same nagging questions. Thanks to globalized, instant communications, a new generation of Men can collectively consider experiences and observations that were previously left
unsaid. Where before there was a stigma of “not being man enough” just in asking
questions and seeking relevant advice about women, now it’s been replaced by the
’community’.
The internet is to Men what the sexual revolution was for women.
The genie is now out of the bottle, and for better or worse the information is liberating.
This is the Meta-Game. Lets consider it for a moment: Just last week I added my voice to a chorus of other men from around the world to help out a young man struggling with his AFC problems. I joined guys from Britain, Australia, Spain, Canada, New York,
Los Angeles, and anywhere in between. A global collective of Men advised this kid. That’s pretty powerful stuff. This is a world of men advising a young man about his
situation with a girl acculturated in a world that’s been influenced by women’s interests for over five decades.
This is the Meta-Masculine pushing back against the Meta-Feminized. We’re now aware that this Feminine Matrix is everywhere, and I think we can appreciate how encompassing and pervasive it is. I know the Jezebel.coms of the world are largely the antithesis of the Meta-Masculine. I didn’t say the mountain looked easy to climb. However, just the collectivity of the global community gives me hope. Every time we unplug a guy from the Matrix it’s a group effort. We are the collective fathers these sons never had.
Yes, there’s differences of opinion. The community advocates, Game gurus, and theorists of the world are going to lock horns over priorities and details, but the bigger pictures is making Men aware. The global collective waking them up is the first and best benefit. It is dirty, filthy, work unplugging Men from the Matrix, but that’s the start.
If I’m optimistic about anything it’s in the hope that the next generation of men will at least have the opportunity to be made aware of the “code” in the Matrix — that simply didn’t exist when I was struggling to unplug myself. By that I mean that a younger generation of men will develop at least a capacity, or at least a sensitivity to acknowledge that certain feminine social conventions exist, and were the gender roles reversed they’d be accused of sexism. I’ve always felt that making these comparisons is the first real step in understanding what the Matrix is. I am far more attentive to the veiled, socially
excusable, feminine sexism that we casually pass off in common culture today because I realize the latent function those conventions serve. Like G.I. Joe says, knowing is half
the battle.
The main obstacle for the positive-masculine Meta Game is that a majority of the same men it would serve are the unwitting (or at least willfully ignorant) pawns of the feminized Meta Game. I think its wrong to think of these men — the Betas, the AFCs, the plugged-in Alphas — as “recruits” for the feminine imperative. I come to that because it takes an entire feminized society to condition a young man over the course of a lifetime to psychologically ego-invest himself in the feminine Meta Game as a means to achieving his best interests. They need to be raised and trained before the ego-investment becomes self-propagating, at which point only extremely traumatic experiences will open his eyes to that conditioning.
I used the example of a typical rAFC (recovering AFC) or ’seeking’ young man asking for advice from the collective. Almost universally the problems they want to solve are themes so tired and so thoroughly covered by the collective of men in the community that we’ll defer them to well-worn advice or rephrase old posts on the same topic. I do this myself, but think about the profundity of that for a moment; here we have a questioning guy dealing with a problem I dealt with, sometimes, over 20 years ago, and men my
senior dealt with 30 or even 40 years ago.
The memes haven’t changed much in the past 60 years. I think a common missive is to think that the only reason guys seek out the community is to “get laid more” or “find the secret to getting their dream girl”. While that’s a definite motivator, so many more want solutions to relational problems that have existed in their current form for over half a century now:
How do I get her back? Why did I just get LJBFed? Why does she fuck the Jerk, but tell me I’m a such a great guy? Do looks matter? How do I get my LTR to bang me now that we moved in together?
There are countless others. Our Meta Game does a great disservice to ’seekers’ when we dismiss them as just wanting to get their lay count up. Of course that’s only the recognizable motivator, but what they’re really searching for, what they’re unaware they’re searching for, is a real, positive, confidence in a masculinity that can rise above the chatter of the invectives of feminized Meta Game.
When I see five pages of advice on the SoSuave forum explaining to a noob the reasons he’s in the situation he finds himself in, and instructing him how best to deal with it based on collective experiences while opening his perspective up to consider the greater landscape he’s in, that is the masculine Meta Game pushing back.
Think of that; a poor, isolated kid, frustrated by how to approach, how to deal with a LJBF, how to “man-up”, etc. pits the influence of a world-wide collective of men’s
experience against the behaviors and mindset of an individual girl who’s been socialized and acculturated by the feminized imperative. That is the Meta Game.