Insight Editions · No. 217
The Rational Male
Rollo Tomassi
Rollo Tomassi applies behavioral and evolutionary frameworks to gender dynamics, discussing hypergamy, male agency, dating strategies, relationships, and masculinity.
A study guide to The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
| # | Section | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| : | The Rational Male (title) | Behaviorism · red pill map |
| 1 | Introduction: Connecting Dots | Method · forums · blog · book |
| 2 | The Basics | SMV · desire · alpha/beta cues |
| 3 | Plate Theory | Non-exclusivity · abundance |
| 4 | Plugged In | Blue pill conditioning |
| 5 | Unplugging | Grief · anger · rebuild |
| 6 | Game | Applied behavior · LTR stakes |
| 7 | Communication | Covert/overt · just get it · Prince |
| 8 | Social Conventions | Shame · myths · protector dynamic |
| 9 | Hypergamy | Disposables · War Brides · equity |
| 10 | The Iron Rules of Tomassi | Nine hard constraints |
| 11 | Mythology | Lonely Old Man · looks · love |
| 12 | The Feminine Imperative | Fem-centrism · Wall · Positive Masculinity |
| : | Synthesis · Portable Stack | Main Points |
The Rational Male
Introduction: Connecting Dots
Rollo Tomassi (a pen name) enrolled at a state university in January 2001 at age 32, after what he calls his "rock star" twenties playing in bands around Hollywood. He studied fine art, worked in design, advertising, marketing and branding, and added psychology as a minor that became a double major. His first motive was practical: he wanted to understand the difficult personalities he dealt with at work. That pulled him toward personality studies and behaviorism.
The behaviorist foundation
Behaviorism appealed because it was concrete: it studies behaviors and the motivators behind them, not feelings on a couch. Tomassi says this gives Game awareness its first principle.
- The cardinal principle. Behavior is the only reliable evidence of motivation. A person can act on motives they never consciously recognize, and their stated rationale may differ from what actually drives them.
- Applied to women. Judge a woman by her actions and behaviors, not her words or implied intentions. This is the first "dot" he connected between hard psychology and inter-gender dynamics.
- The surprise in class. Teachers who championed behaviorism as hard science were the loudest critics when he applied it to sex differences. He later attributes this to the feminine imperative and romantic idealism, concepts the book develops.
From forums to blog to book
2001 onward: Joins SoSuave.com, which becomes his "testing ground" for over twelve years of debate and refinement.
2011: Starts the blog The Rational Male (therationalmale.com) at readers' request; it grows rapidly within a year.
2013: First edition published by Counterflow Media LLC, Nevada. Content is the first year of blog posts, rewritten and edited.
- Jargon retained. He keeps manosphere acronyms (for example SMV, sexual market value) and defines them as he goes.
- Reader-driven. Many essays begin with a commenter's question; he asks readers to focus on the concept, not on who posed it.
- Open to revision. He says no concept is "unmodifiable or above further refinement."
Why a book: the sons of Jaquie
The trigger was Jaquie, an older married woman who read the blog and wanted help for her son, who was about to marry a woman she believed would harm his life. "He's very Beta and whipped, but if I had a book to put in his hands he would read it." Tomassi dedicates the project "to the sons of Jaquie's."
2. New readers: clear your head of preconceptions about gender before you start.
3. Expect conflict: you will "violently disagree" with some ideas and have "ah ha" moments with others; some ideas flatter neither sex.
4. Watch your ego: beliefs you are invested in will feel attacked; the reflexive label "misogynist" is, he says, a taught response.
5. Credentials disclaimed: "I'm not a psychologist, or a PUA, or a men's rights activist, or a motivational speaker. I'm just a guy who's connected some dots."
The chapter closes with a line from The Matrix: "Why do my eyes hurt?" / "You've never used them before." The red-pill metaphor that runs through the book starts here.
The Basics
Four foundational claims sit under one definition of Power; each spawns a practical concept used throughout the book.
2.1 There is no ONE: ONEitis and the soul-mate myth
Tomassi defines ONEitis as "an unhealthy romantic obsession with a single person," usually unreciprocated and wildly idealized. Its effect is paralysis: "You cease to mature, you cease to move, you cease to be you." His slogan: "There are some good Ones and some bad Ones, but there is no ONE." The proof he offers is ordinary: widowed and divorced people remarry and call the new partner their real soul-mate.
- Why rational men resist. Men who accept biology, engineering or business as nuts-and-bolts systems become "violently opposed" to the idea that there is no predestined match. Giving up the belief feels like saying "God is dead" to the devout.
- Sociological, not natural. He argues ONEitis is socialized: spread through media, music, film, and marketed by dating services such as eHarmony. He separates it from the natural male capacity for protection, provisioning and semi-monogamy, which he accepts as real; ONEitis sabotages what those instincts would otherwise filter.
- Two failure modes. Single, ONEitis is "insecurity run amok." Coupled, the same insecurity keeps a person in a damaging relationship ("how could I live without my ONE?") or drives the fantasy of fixing self or partner into the ideal.
- Power imbalance. "There is no greater agency for a woman than to know beyond doubt that she is the only source of a man's need for sex and intimacy." The same applies to women who return to abusive "Jerk" partners they believe are their ONE.
Religion of the soul-mate
The essay dates from SoSuave posts around 2003 to 2004. Tomassi describes a psychology class where most students called themselves agnostic, atheist or "spiritual, but not religious," explaining religion as a fear-of-mortality construct. When the professor asked who believed "there was a special someone out there" or feared "the ONE that got away," nearly the whole class raised their hands, including frat guys and hook-up girls. His conclusion: people feel entitled to a great love of their life, which he calls statistically ridiculous and the product of a "Disney-fication" that has become a religion for the non-religious.
- Soul-mate men. Fear of losing the ONE powers later concepts: the Myth of the Lonely Old Man and Relational Equity only bite if the woman is the predestined one. He denies a conscious plot: generations of men perpetuate the myth themselves.
- Soul-mate women. For women the ideal is "arousing Alpha dominance matched with a loyal providership" that only she can tame. An Alpha Widow (a woman still pining for a past Alpha) feels this most after pairing with a Beta provider as her SMV declines.
- Hypergamy vs. the myth. "Hypergamy asks, 'Is he the ONE? Is he the ONE?' and the Soul-Mate Myth replies, 'He HAS to be the ONE.'" Hypergamy needs continual testing; the myth demands an absolute.
- Building the mystery. With no ideal available, people build one from available material, piling emotional, financial and life investments on a starting point (her most significant Alpha; his first lover). Women try to "build a better Beta" or tame an Alpha; men try to "turn a whore into a housewife."
- Not nihilism. Dropping the myth frees a man for a relationship built on "genuine desire, mutual respect, complimentary understanding of each other and love" instead of fear of loss.
2.2 The Cardinal Rule of Relationships
His illustration is his own job. He needs his employer more than the employer needs him, so he shows up every morning. If he won the lottery, earned a Master's degree, or had his pay cut, the balance could shift; then the employer would have to decide what he is worth and either part ways or renegotiate. Romance works the same way: each person meets the other's criteria, or there would be no relationship. That first "sizing up" is a comparison of value.
- Control, not domination. He clarifies that he means control, not a dominant ruling a doormat. In a healthy relationship control "passes back and forth as desire and need dictate."
- When it becomes manipulation. It turns unhealthy when one partner effectively blackmails the other with what would normally be a reward. This arises because the submissive partner is conditioned to allow it, the dominant initiates it, or both.
- His stated aim. Not dominance at a partner's expense, but for young men "predisposed to devaluing themselves" to develop self-worth and see themselves as the prize, not women as the goal of their lives.
- The shit test. Backing down in an argument is fine. Continually compromising to "keep the peace" because she will withhold intimacy otherwise is a power play, which he calls a shit test. If he folds, "she will progressively have less respect for you," the opposite of what conventional advice predicts.
- Enlightened self-interest. The man who passes refuses to compromise himself for a recognized manipulation and is willing to walk away, confident he has found and will find better prospects.
2.3 Truth to Power
Real change works from the inside out. Tomassi contrasts this with an outside-in mentality: a woman changing hair, makeup or breast size while the discontent stays rooted in self-perception. The Average Frustrated Chump (AFC) does the same thing with different tools. Self-analysis is hard because it means telling yourself you have been living wrong.
- Crisis as catalyst. "Self-estimation (not self-esteem) never happens spontaneously." A breakup, a death or a betrayal triggers the introspection where men discover the "simpering chumps" they were molded into.
- Ego-investment. When a mental schema is internalized long enough, it becomes part of personality, so attacking the belief feels like attacking the person. This explains violent reactions to challenges on politics, religion and gender, even against evidence.
- Denial as protection. People deny what would destroy something they hold dear. With a cheating partner, evidence is usually ambiguous, so motivated skepticism demands more proof for unwelcome conclusions. Denial must be unconscious or it fails.
- Self-image and dissonance. A secure man absorbs hits; a self-doubting one (which he calls a hallmark of "self-righteous AFC thinking") cannot admit error. Solution: deny the mistake and blame women for not playing by "the rules." Popular culture, eHarmony and religion reinforce the AFC's moral sense of purpose.
Articles of Power
Influence, wealth, prestige and status are manifestations of Power, not Power itself. "Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances." A man who surrenders, by force or will, to obligations of marriage, family, career or military has little influence over his own life.
- Power is the root of confidence. It lets a man spin plates, date non-exclusively, assert himself and make himself the prize; women want association with it.
- Why PUAs collapse in LTRs. Master pickup artists sell the appearance of Power, then revert to AFC insecurity once the woman has "bought the act." PUA skills should be the result of a real internal change to a "positive-masculine mental schema," not a mask over its absence.
2.4 You cannot negotiate genuine desire
The most common question Tomassi gets in ten years is "how do I get her back?": a return to the early months when she "couldn't keep her hands off" him. Six months into comfortable familiarity, genuine desire is gone, and men respond by negotiating.
- Forms of negotiation. Doing more for her in hope of reciprocal passion; couples counseling to "resolve sex issues"; promising dishes and laundry in exchange for sexual compliance.
- The result. "Negotiated desire only ever leads to obligated compliance." She may be more available, but the sex is half-hearted, and she feels worse for lacking desire after his efforts. Her desire has become an obligation.
- The male "if-then" error. Men run a deductive formula: I need sex + women have the sex I want + ask women their conditions + meet prerequisites = the sex I want. It fails because it relies on women accurately reporting what drives their desire, and the original desire came from unknown variables.
- The principle. "You can force a woman by threat to comply with behaving in a desired manner, but you cannot make her want to behave that way." Desire must be reached of her own volition, or led to covertly: "Real desire is created by her thinking it's something she wants, not something she has to do."
The desire dynamic and imagination
A woman's imagination is "the single most useful tool in your Game arsenal."Competition anxiety,
Demonstrating Higher Value (DHV)and sexual tension all depend on it; the manosphere slang is "caffeinating the hamster."
- The AFC failure. Full disclosure on the first date: he "vomits out" his story, value and character, the mystery dies, and he gets an LJBF ("let's just be friends") rejection. "Women never want full disclosure."
- Familiarity is anti-seductive. Comfort kills libido; women "need their imaginations stoked" to want sex with a partner.
- Why sex fades after commitment. Tomassi has "yet to meet the guy" whose sex became more frequent after an LTR, marriage or moving in. Cause: competition anxiety relaxes once she secures commitment, and many men surrender the frame before committing, believing commitment means accepting her frame.
2. Cultivate unpredictability. "Perfect is boring." Women want Mr. Dependable and sleep with Mr. Exciting; be both, neither at the cost of the other.
3. Imply other women's interest. Covertly and tactfully signal that other women find you desirable; otherwise she will get the rush of suspicion from tabloids, romance novels or friends' lives.
4. Keep Game in marriage. Cocky-funny, neg hits and playful teasing ("busting her chops") show you are unafraid of her reaction.
5. Break patterns. Getting in shape, earning more, a promotion: any demonstrated rise in value revives imagination and competition anxiety. "You're controllable and predictable so long as you're pudgy and listless."
2.5 Imagination, mate selection and the dual strategy
Tomassi lays out the evolutionary premise. A species must either give offspring the best survival conditions or reproduce in large numbers. For women this means sharing parental investment with the best mate they can attract who also offers long-term security.
- Women filter, men scatter. Women are "the filters of their own reproduction"; men's strategy is to spread genetic material widely ("no one's ugly after 2am"). He cites hormones: healthy men have 12 to 17 times women's testosterone; women produce more estrogen (which he links to sexual caution) and oxytocin (security, nurturing).
- The conflict. For her offspring to thrive, a man must abandon his strategy for hers. He then wants assurance she is the best candidate and that his children get both parents' investment.
- Side claim. Studies, he says, show men pick out their own children in a crowd of uniformed kids faster than mothers do.
- Social conventions. Women develop conventions favoring their strategy: the "prerogative to change her mind," lenience for fickleness, while men are held to "do the right thing." Players and absent fathers are villains; men who support other men's children are heroes. LJBF rejections, a propensity for victimhood (which triggers male "savior" schemas, slang "Cap'n Save-a-Ho") and even marriage are traced to this root.
| Concept | Tomassi's definition |
|---|---|
| Good Genes | Physical attraction, risk-taking, traits that make offspring "stronger, faster, more attractive" |
| Good Dad | Provisioning, stability, loyalty, long-term security |
| Short-term schedule | Mating reserved for the Good Genes male |
| Long-term schedule | Pair-bonding reserved for the Good Dad male |
| Reactive cheating | Paired woman has extra-pair sex with a Good Genes male |
| Proactive cheating | "Single Mommy" pattern: breed with Good Genes, then secure a Good Dad to raise the children |
| Cuckold | Man providing for another man's offspring for "mitigated" intimacy |
The paradox: women are at peak sexual viability for a short window (he says the early 20s) and the two sets of qualities rarely appear in one man. Hence women marry the "stable, loyal, (preferably) doctor" and "still fuck the pool boy." In ancestral settings, good genes implied good provision; modern conditions broke that link. Tomassi stresses most women have no conscious master plan; the process is unconscious. He also insists women are "ultimately, solely responsible" for whom they mate with, and that men who support single mothers for sex reinforce the convention.
2.6 Buffers: rejection is better than regret
Rereading his forum posts, Tomassi concluded that over 90 percent of his advice reduces to overcoming fear of rejection, and that most AFC dilemmas come from methods men use to limit exposure to it. He calls these methods buffers. Women use them too, but men should spot their own.
2. Playing Friends. After an LJBF, proving himself the perfect boyfriend in hope she changes her mind; variant: Cap'n Save-a-Ho.
3. Emails, IMs, texts, long calls. Constant contact that limits face-to-face exposure; reading a rejection feels safer than hearing one in person.
4. Facebook and online dating. "Perhaps the best buffer ever conceived"; whole businesses run on mutual fear of rejection.
5. Objectification. Men see sex objects, women see "success objects"; rejection by an object stings less. Hence the language of "game," "score," "shot down."
6. Idealization. The "Quality Woman" myth: fixating on one woman (ONEitis) or one archetype; any rejecter is reclassified "low quality."
7. Scarcity mentality. "Take what I can get and be glad I got it"; the sure thing becomes the only thing.
8. Older or younger women, certain body types. Preferences formed because those women seem less likely to reject.
9. Leagues. Deciding the impressive woman is "out of my league" so you never risk the approach.
10. Pornography. Sexual release with no social risk; he adds this is why some women hate it, since it devalues "her single best agency."
- Buffers harden into identity. They become ego-invested "preferences" and compound, one feeding another, until they read as "just how I am."
- Why accept rejection. Rejection is better than regret. Most buffers create longer, larger problems than a brief sting would have; and the habits transfer to career and every other area of adversity.
- What women read. Dependence on buffers gradually reveals character. "Are you Alpha enough to take a rejection on the chin, smile and confidently come back for more?"
2.7 Compensation and the problem of changing
Height is one of women's higher-order physical standards, linked to Social Matching Theory (people are sensitive to asymmetries). Tomassi's real subject is "short man's disease": the 5′6″ man benching heavy and throwing his ego around. His twist is that everyone compensates for deficiencies.
- Personality is not static. People change through trauma (he cites PTSD) or deliberate choice. Others call them posers when the change clashes with their expectations or interests, and accept it when they approve.
- JBY. "Just be yourself" is what people say when they have no real advice.
- Crabs in a barrel. Other AFCs pull a climbing man back; society tells him to stay the same. Tomassi calls this the "Societal Cockblock." They say he is compensating, and they are right, but for the wrong reason: PUA skills, psychology and Positive Masculinity are compensations, and that is how growth works.
- Who decides it's real. "When we compensate, we improvise, we fake it till we make it; but who determines when we've stopped faking it? You do." The transition is complete when his default response is his Game response.
2.8 Alpha
Tomassi expects this section to lose him friends, because every definition of Alpha gets bent by men's view of themselves. He asks readers to set aside their existing idea of Alpha before reading.
- Why men redefine it. Men who invested self-worth in playing by the rules resent seeing a "natural" rewarded, so they redefine Alpha to mean themselves. It mirrors the Looks vs. Game debate: each side champions what it has. "The worst beta schlub you know thinks he's Alpha," because women told him Beta is what they want.
- Counts don't define it. Three failed marriages and 100+ lays say nothing either way; a respected Beta may have 300 lays through fame or looks.
- Ethics of Alpha. Alpha traits reliably elicit women's breeding cues; from an evolutionary view Alpha is "as unprincipled, as efficiently ruthless" as its counterpart, hypergamy. Women, he says, never doubt themselves morally for outshining competitors: "Hypergamy is its own excuse."
- Sexual disqualification. Rivals attack each other's credibility ("he's good looking, so probably gay"; "girls who dress like that are sluts"). Betas label the overtly successful man with multiple girlfriends immoral rather than revise their own self-estimate.
- Every guy has a Game. Even the doormat Nice Guy thinks his supplication is the best route to intimacy.
- Tomassi's own arc. He says he has been "the worst, bottom scraping Beta, the douchebag Alpha rock star, and the strong (but lesser) Alpha father and husband," so no man's "stars are set."
The origin of Alpha: nature plus nurture
A reader, Jeremiah, asked whether Alpha traits are learned or inherited. Tomassi's answer: biology sets the starting point; environment refines or represses it. He borrows his art teacher's model: some artists have talent, some have passion that drives them, and the masters combine both.
Tomassi's amendment: agrees on the behavioral mechanism, but better-looking men get more encouragement and so "start earlier"; environment can strongly limit or nurture development. Mozart is "the perfect storm" of talent plus ideal environment.
The natural: every healthy five-year-old boy explores, takes risks, breaks things to see how they work. Until abstract thinking matures (he says ages 3 to 21, progressively) a boy is as Alpha as he will ever be; social conditioning then crushes it into the "pliable Beta." All Game, PUA technique and "Man Up" appeals aim to return a man to that primal energy.
Tomassi opens the section with Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead: "Everything that's been achieved in the history of mankind has been achieved by not being safe." He also calls feminization "a socialized effort in deliberate behavioral modification" of male drives.
The contextual Alpha
- Tomassi's verdict. He does not condone Hooker (he notes his own daughter was about to turn 15) and blames the case partly on the absence of strong fathers. But he agrees Hooker was Alpha only contextually: the classroom confers default authority and social proof, as a uniform does for a police officer who is a chump off duty.
- Roissy's Commandment XII. "Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses"; play to your strengths because "there is a groupie for every male endeavor."
- Why he still reeks of Beta. Hooker bought the soul-mate myth and probably cast himself as savior. White Knights use chivalry to excuse in themselves what they condemn in players. Outside the classroom he loses the context, and Tomassi predicts he will fail the shit tests that follow.
- Same energy, different context. A Marine in Mogadishu and Hooker draw on the same Alpha energy women respond to. "Hypergamy is a cruel mistress." He lists Jerry Seinfeld (dated his future wife at 18, he says), Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis as men given "an Alpha pass," adding that he finds it deplorable but understands why it happens.
Plate Theory
Options feed confidence; confidence feeds attraction; attraction feeds more options. Scarcity thinking breaks the loop.
3.1 The premise: spin more plates
Tomassi opens with a plate spinner: thin sticks, spinning plates, constant adjustment. Each plate is a separate prospect. Some fall and break, some you stop, some never spin fast enough. The claim underneath the metaphor: a man is as confident and valuable as his options.
- Abundance mindset. Confidence is derived from options. A man with irons in the fire has a subconscious sense that if one prospect stalls, others may expand.
- Scarcity mindset. A man without options becomes necessitous. "Necessitous men are never free."
- Link to the Cardinal Rule. Needing any one woman least (because others exist or could) is what keeps power from tipping permanently toward her.
- Why Cocky & Funny works. C&F is, he says, a natural mannerism of men who already have options; men without options must compensate by learning the mannerism. The same logic covers the "I don't give a fuck" pose: it is easier when you actually have other prospects.
3.2 Shotgun logic vs. the sniper
Outside a relationship, most AFCs use what Tomassi calls the Sniper mentality: all time, effort and resources aimed at one target, waiting for the perfect conditions to take one shot. That wait can last weeks or years. The cost is the resource he most wastes: potential opportunity.
- Shotgun / trolling net. The Plate Theorist spreads influence across a broader field, keeps the fish worth keeping, tosses the rest.
- Inside an LTR. The AFC placates because she is his only intimacy source, which breeds ONEitis. The man who at least covertly maintains the perception of options (professional status, social proof that other women compete for him) keeps the balance from locking onto her alone.
- Natural selection. More plates mean more data on what satisfies him, and they make him the prize: rock stars and athletes are not irresistible only for celebrity, but because they blatantly prove options other women will compete for.
3.3 What Plate Theory is not
Critics answer in binary: "I could never be with more than one woman out of respect," or "so I should lie and see girls on the side?" Tomassi calls these feminized social conventions that push men toward female-as-chooser dynamics.
- Men select too. He rejects the trope that women alone do sexual selecting. Women filter their own intimacies; men still select. Conventions that make men feel bad about non-exclusivity put selection on terms that favor women.
- Brutal honesty as the fix. Keep options above board. Honest non-exclusivity removes the teeth from the convention and signals options (or perceived options).
- Establish it from the outset. "She'll dump me if I see other girls" is, in his model, a reason she is not a plate to spin if exclusivity is demanded before you have chosen it.
- Not a license to be indiscriminate. Just because you can spin a plate does not mean you should. A man with options should be more selective, not less.
3.4 Plate Theory I: abundance and scarcity
A reader's report: applying Plate Theory felt addictive; options changed his emotional state; success bred more success. His fear was discovery: what if one girl finds out about another?
- Do not think in "risk of losing a great girl." That is scarcity returning after the first taste of options. Many men use Game only long enough to lock the first monogamous opportunity, then never internalize abundance.
- Not all plates are sexual. Spreading effort across a pool; some reciprocate, some do not. Non-exclusivity is a resolve, not a body count.
- Rules for the spinner. Do not shack up; do not slip into routines; do not call more than needed to set the next sporadic date; save weekends for women with proven interest (sex or physical intimacy); relegate unproven interest to weeknights.
- POOK, read carefully. Tomassi insists POOK did not mean you declare open options and demand she accept. Women hear that as an affront. Non-exclusivity must be covert: implied by manner, availability and behavior. Imagination plus competition anxiety do the work.
- Monogamy is a byproduct. Never a goal in itself. Enter commitment only after you have filtered enough to understand options, confidence and frame. Settle too early from newly perfected technique and she perceives she is your only option; your script flips; you get marginalized.
When she presses for exclusivity
At some point she will ask where this is going, ask if she is your girlfriend, or issue an ultimatum. Tomassi reads that as anxiety becoming unbearable and the need for security forcing overt communication.
| Response | Effect in his model |
|---|---|
| Agree to exclusivity (fear-driven) | She becomes broker of your intimacy; you lose options and power |
| Keep spinning her | She has gone overt; you will hear it again |
| Cool her off, return later | Attention value rises, or she leaves (weak interest exposed) |
| Let her drop | Protects the frame; frees capacity for better plates |
2. Communicate covertly. Never announce other plates. Let manner, schedule and scarcity of availability reveal it.
3. Create value through scarcity. Be available enough to keep interest, not enough to erase mystery. Even past proven ability to generate options shows in personality.
4. Pass the press. When she goes overt, choose from the table above; the coward's path is fear-based exclusivity.
5. Train like sparring. Confidence comes from having done it, the way an MMA fighter's confidence comes from bouts, not from a single lucky win.
3.5 Plate Theory II: the Akash consult (non-exclusivity and guilt)
Akash, 27, five months into the community, asks how to use a return to school and how to dissolve guilt about pursuing women outside committed relationships. Tomassi's reply is a core statement of the chapter's ethics and strategy.
- Personality is not static. "That's just how I am" is usually ego-investment. You are not a blank slate, but you can erase unusable parts and rewrite efficient ones. It takes time.
- Check the degree motive. Many men choose schools and careers to keep a woman or to manage fear of loss. The end of that story is often bitterness when she leaves for a man who held his own ambition.
- Guilt as conditioning. Temporary wives in some Islamic sects, Mormon polygamy, serial divorce as "soft polygamy": societies have moralized multiple arrangements. The dissonance is when rationalizations conflict with motives and stigmas. Recognizing the conditioning is the first step past it.
- Biological impetus vs. parental investment. He grants unlimited-access desire as a male drive (and cites pornography as a millennia-old simulation of it), and he also grants that committed two-parent opposite-sex families best serve parental investment and healthy gender identity in children. He rejects gender-as-purely-learned.
- The pragmatic bet. If you will eventually sacrifice wide sexual access for monogamy, select from the broadest high-quality pool you can attract first. At 27 you have less status than at 37; her sexual market value declines with age; so the bet on early, uninformed monogamy is costly.
- Two paths. Explore multiple short-term relationships with honest non-exclusivity while you improve; or keep a moral/religious hold-out and still date non-exclusively with shallower experience. He warns religious men who "hold out" then rush into marriage to get to sex and overlook character flaws.
- Women as compliment, never focus. "When you start living for a woman you become that woman." Stay the prize into the LTR. His concrete advice to Akash: do not entertain monogamy until established in career for two years after college; commit to yourself first. Enlightened self-interest: you cannot help anyone until you have helped yourself.
3.6 Plate Theory III: transitioning off monogamy-as-goal
First contact with Plate Theory usually triggers rejection because it conflicts with monogamy-as-goal, a mindset he says serves the feminine imperative and also feeds a natural desire for security.
- What the imperative promises. Monogamy will cure loneliness, make you responsible, supply constant sex. Option-poor men then build Beta methods to buy that promise.
- Logistics objection. "I have no time; I can't manage more than one." Game-aware men with less free time, he claims, run 4 to 5 women a week without consuming all leisure. He does not push PUA-style compartmentalized lying; he wants plates that spin themselves because non-exclusivity was never hidden as exclusivity.
- Fear of losing a "good one." Evidence of scarcity and soul-mate thinking. Plate Theory needs fearlessness, not carelessness: plates should call you; you remain the scarce prize; you still show up, but you can let one fall.
- Personality objection. "I don't want to be a player." Players, in his definition, are dishonest: they isolate each plate so the others never meet. The plate spinner never implies exclusivity. Accept that or you are not a plate.
- Female competition anxiety. Everything from makeup to shoes to social talk is, in his view, colored by competing for the best security and making sure the girl next door does not get him first. Male rejection-fear is the analogue. He wants men to use that anxiety rather than soothe it away.
3.7 Plate Theory IV: female plate theory and orbiters
Tomassi disagrees that women will only want to fuck one man at a time. He agrees they are socially encouraged to seek monogamy when convenient, but "the talk rarely matches the behavior."
- Calculated hypocrisy. Fear of the "slut" label versus the drive to sample for security with the best available. Social reinforcement (women and some option-poor men) excuses the gap.
- Orbiters. Attractive women keep a bullpen of "maybe" guys. Five or six pursuers boost self-worth and peer status and let her drop any plate knowing replacements wait (he adds Facebook-era counts). She may never sleep with an orbiter; his attention still has value.
- Woman's prerogative. "A woman can always change her mind." Default social sympathy sides with the feminine after the fact, which frees plate-spinning from much reprisal. First principle of power, in his gloss: when you have power, feign powerlessness.
- Covert communication keeps men in stasis. If he believes commitment is always required for intimacy, he patiently pulls the cart while she weighs options. Seeing the machinations clearly would end the pull, so the belief must be protected.
- Plate wars. Calling another woman a "slut" is intra-gender warfare: expose her as not playing the public rules, reduce her threat. Anonymous hot women get appearance attacks from groups of women for the same competitive reason.
- Closing line of the essay. "Gentlemen, as I'm fond of saying, women will fuck. They may not fuck you, they may not fuck me, but they will fuck someone." The Cancun spring-break girl and the commitment-rhetoric girl are, in his telling, the same sexual agent in different contexts.
3.8 Plate Theory V: lady's game (who Plate Theory is for)
Shit tests, in his breakdown, probe:
- Confidence
- Options (is he into me because I am special, or am I his only shot?)
- Security (long-term provisioning capacity)
- Scarcity tactics. One example he has given men: do not answer the phone Friday to Sunday evening even with no plans, to foster perception of demand.
- When weekends are jammed. Best problem to have. Under 30, stay in the game; over 30, cool occasionally. Only contemplate monogamy after experiencing abundance. Hook a proven plate midweek; keep weekends for other pursuits and friends. Scarcity increases value; constant equal attention across plates pushes you toward settling.
- Plates spin themselves. Anxiety that any pause will drop a plate is usually wrong; often scarcity creates pursuit. Some plates will break; that is the cost of spinning more.
- Path to an LTR, with a warning. Practice long enough to learn what "quality" means from experience, not from teenage idealization. Uninitiated success plus dream-girl fantasy produces a self-destructive LTR. After commitment, competitive anxiety falls, sexual frequency often falls with it, and you cannot spin plates inside a committed relationship in his model. Methods exist to restoke anxiety in an LTR; they are weaker than the single man's position.
3.9 Plate Theory VI: scarcity and abundance (stub)
The book spine ends the section with the heading Plate Theory VI · Scarcity & Abundance and no further body in the extracted chapter file. The abundance/scarcity contrast is already argued through Parts I to V: options create confidence; scarcity thinking reappears the moment a man treats one plate as irreplaceable.
Plugged In
Each schema protects the man from rejection while deepening dependence on feminine framing.
4.1 Why the jargon exists
Manosphere terms (LTR, ONS, AFC, Beta) sound to outsiders like a tree-house club. Tomassi grants the optics, then defends the need: new concepts need codification. AFC (Average Frustrated Chump), coined in the Mystery Method era, overlaps Beta and Japanese "herbivore" slang. The label matters less than the identifiable pattern.
Unplugging others is "dirty work": expect resistance, shit tests from women and feminized men, and ridicule. His triage line: save those you can, read last rites to the dying.
4.2 Qualities of an AFC
2. Feminine idealizations as personal truth.
3. Supplication as support: under gender equalism she must increase, so he decreases; relational equity is the rational basis of the bond.
4. Savior Schema: intimacy as payment for problems solved.
5. Martyr Schema: more sacrifice proves more devotion.
6. Friends Debt: LJBF and pseudo-friendship as a path to sex.
7. Adolescent skill set: dating tools frozen at teens/early adulthood.
8. Serial monogamy history and the insecurities that ride with it.
9. Word over behavior: believes women consciously know and honestly report what they want; uses deductive reasoning from statements; assumes female default is rational, not emotional.
10. Heavy buffer use against rejection.
11. Identification Myth: the more like her he becomes, the more she will want him; shared interests as sole key to enduring intimacy.
12. "Not like other guys" doctrine, even under anonymity.
13. LDR as viable intimacy.
14. League logic: "out of my league" / "loose slut" labels that protect ego on the fly.
15. Terror of long solitude that makes him settle early, often with lifelong cost.
16. Androgyny as goal: men as fine feminine models, women as fine masculine models; equality without sex difference.
4.3 LJBF and the Friend Zone
How do you get out of the Friend Zone? Never allow yourself into it.
- What LJBF does for her. Preserves his attention after rejection; shifts responsibility onto him if he declines "friendship"; lets her sleep without guilt ("I offered friendship"). Social convention, not a unique compliment.
- AFC response. Accept LJBF to prove worth as surrogate boyfriend: loyalty and attention with no intimacy. He becomes the Emotional Tampon, Beta support while she complains about the Alpha she sleeps with. Symmetric vice: men using women as fuck buddies with no commitment.
- Sniper Mentality. Wait for one target, desexualize to "not be like other guys," build comfort first, then escalate. That skips arousal and sexual tension and jumps to post-orgasm oxytocin comfort. When the stuffed animal gets a hard-on, she feels betrayed: "All you wanted was sex?" LJBF follows. He hears it as a real offer, tries harder, cycles until she dates someone else.
- Default male move. Excuse yourself from the LJBF. Whether she is testing or rejecting, walking away signals prize status, plants doubt, and stops the waste. Accepting the "friend" ultimatum is negative social proof; declining can make him the dickhead socially, but gut and interest align with exit.
Boyfriend Disclaimer
Women who weave "I have a boyfriend" into early talk are running a proactive LJBF: diffuse approach before it starts. The man who will not accept that script, Tomassi says, leaves the stronger impression of confidence and future security provisioning, against the biological impulse to avoid conflict.
4.4 LDRs are not relationships
- ONEitis at scale. LDR men alter majors, universities, jobs, states, religions and continents for a ONE, then meet someone who was never the fantasy.
- Worse than LJBF. You internalize exclusive-partner duties with no sex, and when it ends you own the failure narrative ("I didn't persevere") plus guilt whether you or she "cheated."
- Invisible friend. Every romantic, career and maturity opportunity censored for someone you barely see. Guys cling because rejection now feels worse than regret later. Rejection is better than regret.
- Social read. Declaring an LDR signals no local options. Plates spinning would make an LDR look absurd.
- "But we visit every few months." Still a life molded around a hoped-for future relationship.
4.5 Enter White Knight: honor bent to feminine purpose
A young reader asks whether men can discuss Game in public. Parents call him sexist; peers marry early on Disney scripts. Tomassi answers with Morpheus: most people will fight to protect the system that owns them.
- Public correction hunger. The chivalrous AFC waits to redress the "villain" who speaks coldly about gender, hoping a woman notices his quality. That is White Knight Beta bread and butter.
- Defending the architecture. Beta Game needs the assumed system. Challenge the system and you threaten his identity and his only practiced route to intimacy.
- Crabs in a barrel. AFCs drag climbers back ("just be yourself"; "she's not quality if she can't see you"). One successful second date under the old script becomes moral high ground against PUA friends.
Honor as captured tool
Tomassi traces honor as a male institution later positioned for feminine ends. He cites Robert Greene's Art of Seduction: when women lacked overt power they excelled at covert psychological power, with sexuality as primary agency. Men respect overt dealing; women exploit that overtness.
- Shaming and "do the right thing" sit on male honor.
- "Man" redefined as living up to a feminine imperative disguised as honor.
- Polygamy example. Biblical adultery rules in a polygamous world versus modern taboo: social conditions evolve; romanticizing old Honor while ignoring how today's version is used is a fool's errand.
- Man Up or Shut Up Catch-22. For ~60 years: assume male responsibilities when convenient, denounce masculinity as patriarchy when inconvenient. Half of Western men feel women dominate; women still cite lingering patriarchy. The guy who Mans Up is chauvinist until he is needed to Man Up again.
- Default respect for women as unearned honor ("never hit a girl") ferociously encouraged since Victorian times, then colliding with post-Pill sexual opportunism. The AFC tries to uniquely embody this false virtue.
4.6 The Savior Schema and Protector Dynamic
Savior Schema (Cap'n Save-a-Ho): Beta expectation that solving her problems purchases sexual intimacy.
- Linear male logic. Need sex → women have sex → learn requirements → perform them → reciprocity. Fails because desire is not an invoice.
- Negotiated intimacy is never genuine. Flat tire, money, lasagna, shoulder, babysitting: she may still fuck the outlaw boyfriend because that desire is unobligated. Irresponsible washouts often out-sex dutiful AFCs for the same reason.
- Law of reciprocity. Real in animal social exchange; women, he argues, learned to use it inside a frame where their attention is an unassailable resource no male effort can overtly merit. Outrage at "dinner for sex" grows from that convention.
- Protector Dynamic. Real evolutionary male protectiveness (testosterone, provision) gets confused with Savior. Biochemistry reinforces the mental habit even when her behavior never reciprocates; he blames individual women, not the schema. White Knight root: exchange protection for intimacy, on unequal terms.
4.7 Intergender friendship
Tomassi grants acquaintances; he denies that men and women can be friends to the degree same-sex friends are.
- Reality: when she becomes intimate with another man, your "friendship" must decay for that bond to mature. Married 17 years, a deep bond with an attractive other woman is suspect of infidelity; same-sex friendship lacks that sexual charge.
- Attraction colors the start. Most men befriend women they initially find attractive. Even asexual beginnings get limited by other intimate relationships.
- Templates clash. Each sex imports same-sex friendship norms. Her phone-friend dynamics are not male buddy dynamics; feminine-centric culture expects him to adopt her template. He tolerates behavior from girl-friends that would end a male friendship.
- No Friend Zone, only limbo. Either you are fooled that the friendship is equitable, or you discover that a new boyfriend makes your attention a liability (or you pull back when you get a girlfriend).
- Female wingman myth. Social Circle Game and preselection are real; assuming a girl-friend will endorse you to her hot friends usually fails. She filters for the least threatening friend; your prior LJBF status travels by gossip. Exclusive female friend groups also damage Alpha credibility: facility with male peers matters.
4.8 Why public Game talk detonates
The young man's negative experiments (parents, peers settling into soul-mate marriages at 21) illustrate Tomassi's Morpheus point in practice. Random chumps within earshot of Game talk wait for a chance to correct you publicly. Even anonymous forums produce the same reflex: uniqueness performed for a hypothetical female reader.
- Beta Game needs the stage. Identifying with women against the "chauvinist" is how he proves quality without seeming to try.
- Success under the old script hardens dogma. One girlfriend acquired through patience becomes proof that Nice works, and license to moralize at PUA friends. Conditions of that success (she was available to him; he settled) get rationalized away.
- Unplugging as triage revisited. You will not convert the ego-invested White Knight in a comment thread. Spend effort on men still in pain enough to hear.
4.9 Soft polygamy and the honor hangover
When Tomassi links polygamy's fall from status signal to taboo, he is not recommending a harem. He is showing that Honor content is historical, while AFCs treat today's version (default female respect + sexual double expectation) as timeless virtue. The Catch-22 keeps Beta men chasing approval: cursed with masculinity as "patriarchy," still drafted to Man Up when the imperative needs a payer, a husband, or a war body.
- Chris Rock's line is crude shorthand for the Savior invoice: niceness as veiled sexual bid.
- Protector vs. Savior. Wanting to protect a mate can be healthy biology; confusing it with a payable contract for sex is the AFC turn. Repeated non-reciprocation should falsify the schema; instead he protects the schema by blaming individual women.
Unplugging
Unplugging is not a weekend seminar; it is disillusion, then identity work, then practiced behavior under social pushback.
5.1 Women get the men they deserve
Tomassi tells readers to hunt articles they disagree with. Inside the community, MRA vs. PUA and Game vs. MGTOW already clash. His project: study why intergender dynamics evolve, what they do, and build contingencies. That study brings disillusion.
- Magic replaced by chemistry. Oxytocin and trust; dopamine/endorphin profiles of infatuation likened to heroin; ovulatory cycle effects on sexual predisposition; evolutionary psychology only prominent for ~15 years at the time of writing. "Poof! There goes the magic."
- Social schema exposed. Game is the recent male countermeasure to feminine primacy, made possible by networks and theory. From the late 1960s sexual revolution through the 1990s, he argues men were clueless during a deliberate restructuring of gender; feminization then spreads with Westernization into Asia and Latin cultures.
- What men clung to. Guilt about "patriarchy," plus residual magical thinking: Sugar & Spice, respect-her-wishes, marriage-as-goal, all reinforced until Game named hypergamy.
- Oz's curtain. Anonymous sharing lets men compare notes; feminine pushback grows as the program is named. Cries of "Man Up" demand old husband duties without old authority, while a younger cohort posts bathroom nudes. Mothers who shaped the sons lament unmarried, childless daughters at 35. "Women get the men they deserve."
5.2 Identity crisis: can you identify with her without selling out?
Asked whether a man can identify with women without compromise, Tomassi answers: if it is a conscious effort to mold yourself to her, no.
- Identity is malleable. Personality studies agree identity changes with conditions (PTSD as extreme case). Deprivation of intimacy plus sexual drive makes identity compromise especially tempting.
- The common error. Become more like the target to earn intimacy. College chosen for her roster; career path chosen to "support her ambitions"; Friend Zone phone hours spent learning her criteria. That is voluntary personality alteration for acceptability.
- Deductive loop. Need sex + women have it + ask what they want + do X + alter identity to get X. Breaks because X is unknown or unstable under hypergamy.
- Genuine overlap vs. forced overlap. Shared love of racing or fishing can be real. Changing interests to manufacture connection is the tell. He has seen men change careers and move thousands of miles for unrequited targets; 65-year-old men in 40-year marriages still identifying with wives as the standing method for sex.
- Irony. The least attractive move is wholesale self-sale. Independence cues security. Women want to hear No; shit tests check whether he will suspend self-interest for her sexual power. Passing says his goals trump her one real power over him. That man is the prize.
5.3 Pride, scripts and children with dynamite
Healthy pride differs from pridefulness. Humility is real when backed by competence. The AFC self-deprecates to seem "not like other guys," not noticing that script is the majority.
- AFC scripts are scripts too. Critics call PUA robotic; Tomassi says plugged-in behavior is equally scripted, only internalized over a lifetime as "yourself."
- Results vs. feelings. Dropping chump behavior for self-priority often improves outcomes even while others call you bitter or fake.
- PUA without mindset. Mystery in Neil Strauss's The Game collapses into suicidal chumpishness over ONEitis Katya: skills without killing the inner AFC. Ross Jefferies: teaching PUA to chumps is "like giving dynamite to children."
- Dream-girl disaster. New confidence plus no vetting yields hotter partners, including manipulative or BPD cases, then extreme ONEitis and despair when it breaks. Tools without discernment.
5.4 Kill the Beta: education, practice, emotion
Knowing is half the battle
Educate continuously. Most men remain plugged in; only a fraction will hear Game. After unplugging, some fail socially, spit the red pill back, and try to re-enter ignorance. There is no going back: they still see the code and grow hostile to it. Stay sensitive to media gender scripts or you backslide.
Practicing the change
Field-test. Old social circles will call a sudden shift fake; move cities and you could play asshole Alpha with no historian. Humans want predictability; change threatens it; shaming aims to pull you back into their frame. Change insistently, but not too quickly. Friends may mean well and still prefer the old you. Learning to accept "you're an asshole" as non-fatal, even useful, fights a lifetime of not offending desired women. Indirect offense that still attracts is the hard conflict; emotional control decides who makes it.
Aesthetics vs. social robots
Tomassi blames Jungian popularization for the idea that each sex carries equal unexpressed masculine/feminine energies and should aim at androgyny. Historically, he says, men were the reserved romantics; inaccessibility created interest. Today boys are taught emotional spill as problem-solving, which cheapens male emotional display. Men are "True Romantics"; women are vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. Reserve emotion as a rare gift, not a constant feed. Unlearn why you flood; do not freeze into a robot. Drivers-ed metaphor: turn into the skid.
5.5 Appreciation, ordinary marriage and "relationships are work"
Tomassi is not anti-marriage; he is anti-uninformed, ONEitis-fueled, shame-induced, bankruptcy-bound marriage. His own marriage is "fantastic" past 17 years, and still he refuses to sugarcoat male sacrifice.
- Love as taken-for-granted. "OK, love you, bye" on every call; the three-hundredth Saturday oatmeal with bills and kids fighting over the remote. Hallmark text is outsourced; real marriage is ordinary. "Keep it fresh" nights still return to day-to-day.
- Appreciation gap. Men uniquely deceive themselves that women will fully appreciate their sacrifices. In a feminine-centric reality, provision, fidelity and household duty are expected; they register mainly in absence. Even the maverick is defined against that reality.
- White Knight quandary. Does the 40-year-old who dates age-peers get credit, or is he only doing what is expected? Does marrying a single mother and investing in another man's child raise his character score, or vanish into baseline duty?
- "Relationships are work" as convention. Rarely male-originated. Often he does the work and she grades it. "I'm working on him" becoming "we're working on us" marks frame capture. Work means him conforming to her ideal.
5.6 Dream killers: delay commitment for ambition
- Mid-20s fork. Law school, hospital internships, serious trades: monogamy's time and emotional load compete with ascent. He suggests sexual/emotional/relational non-exclusivity until 30, maybe 35.
- SMV timing. As he matures, average desirable women's sexual value declines; balance tips toward the developed man who waited. Serial monogamists' anger often hides regret at liabilities assumed before potential was known.
- Single at 35 with moderate success. Envy of man-dom: time and maneuver. Power as control over your own life. Fear of dying lonely can trap you in passionless settlement.
- Build it and they will come. She wants a man other men want to be and other women want to fuck, not a slave to her intimacy (that casts her in the masculine chase role). His legitimate ambition becomes the "other woman" she competes with. Law and medicine read as solid; art needs proof; trades need a path to ownership.
- Women as dream killers. Not from a cabal, but because men willingly trade ambition for steady sex and the duties attached. Aim too low and succeed: the real danger.
5.7 Have a Look (not costume peacocking)
New Game men conflate Mystery-style peacocking with having A Look. "Just Be Yourself" comfort plus "I want someone who likes me for me" often pairs with zero results.
- A Look is contextual. MMA/tats, emo, Armani, and dozens more: women cast roles. Freakish to one group is mundane to another. Tomassi dresses up at work for respect; changes kit for product-launch clubs. Mystery does not buy a Big Gulp in full stage gear.
- Peacocking is a prop skill. Subtle difference or conversation piece that pulls her into your frame. Nice shoes as example. Women's covert status scans transfer to how they read men. A little goes a long way; the Look is the lure, Game plays the fish.
5.8 Five stages of unplugging
Mapped onto grief stages (with a late sixth):
| Stage | Name | Typical line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denial (still plugged) | "Game is clownish misogyny; women aren't stupid." |
| 2 | Anger (post-awareness) | "Why jump hoops? Why wasn't I a Natural? Blame parents/media/feminists." |
| 3 | Bargaining | "Maybe some points... forget hot girls; will it work on Plain Jane? Must I wear the fuzzy hat?" |
| 4 | Depression (bitter taste) | "Women respond to this act? World is sad." |
| 5 | Acceptance | "Maybe this is how it works; time to drop mythology." |
| 6* | Jaded (MGTOW drift) | "Too many rules; porn and games are easier; let them come to me." |
*Added as a common aftereffect, not a classical grief stage.
Family and friend pushback often tracks these stages in reverse: they deny your change, get angry at the new boundaries, bargain for the old you, then either accept or write you off. That social friction is why Tomassi tells newly aware men not to rush conversion campaigns on relatives still deeply invested in soul-mate scripts.
5.9 Myth of the Dark Arts and the bitter taste
Game-aware women, once exhausted of denying Game, often demand men use it only to build better Betas for feminine-centric monogamy. Good Game vs. bad Game tracks what serves that end. Hypergamy becomes "just how women are"; male contingencies become "dark arts" because the feminine imperative owns social definitions of anti-social.
Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) gets glued to Game to scare Betas off. Tomassi's answer: Game is not those traits. The imperative cannot beat the evidentiary core, so it infiltrates, concedes lesser points, and aims to produce men who feel empowered while remaining useful to feminine ends. True emancipation is labeled Dark.
Hopeless nihilism after leaving the old system is common; the task is to build hope in a system you control more directly. There are no Dark Arts, only Game and the degree of comfort you have using it in a context you define: chosen monogamy or multiple plates, both live or die on the same fundamentals. Echoing Greene on power: power is not moral or immoral; denying its utility is itself a power move (his unwritten 49th Law), and that is the feminine tact against Game: moralize male use while redefining acceptable female use. Feminized men watching "quality" women debate which Jerk traits are lovable and which are evil experience a second shock: the moral categories they trusted were always contingent on her phase and needs. That incongruity is what the Dark Arts label papers over. Tomassi's parallel to Greene: your discomfort with power principles does not exempt you from having power used on you.
5.10 Ordinary love without the sales pitch
The marriage material is easy to misread as bitterness. Tomassi's move is to separate institution from sales script. Oprah-freshness and Hallmark language sell a product; oatmeal, bills and the hundredth school run are the product. Covert appreciation (she assumes you will be there) can coexist with love; what destroys men is the expectation of overt gratitude proportional to sacrifice.
- Mavernick irony. The man who refuses the common script often receives more feminine interest than the dutiful conformist, even while the culture praises the conformist.
- Fixer-upper path into frame loss. "I'm working on him" is her project language. When it becomes "we are working on our relationship," his identity is already partly leased.
5.11 Absolutism after hunger
Freshly unplugged men want a program: wear this, say that. That absolutism is what makes outsiders call Game a cult of scripts. Distinguishing peacock props from a coherent Look is one entanglement; another is measuring success only as "got the dream girl" and then freezing. Ambition-first sequencing (non-exclusive development into the thirties) is his structural answer to absolutist shopping lists: become the man worth competing for, then choose.
Game
Schematic of Tomassi's SMV timeline, not a measured psychometric. Female peak early 20s; male peak mid-30s; turbulent comparative span between them.
6.1 What Game is
Writing a book, Tomassi says, forces you to define terms the blog treated as shared air. New readers hit a wall of jargon; critics hear "Game" as deception.
Early Game
2000s PUA culture: behavioral skills for sexual success with women the practitioner could not previously access. Cocky & Funny, Amused Mastery, Agree & Amplify, Neg Hits, Peacocking. Emphasis on results over deep theory. Effective in field, thin after the get: men unaccustomed to affection from "out of league" women then crashed hard. Dynamite for children, again.
Evolving Game
Internet connectivity let men compare notes globally despite stigma. Why-techniques-work questions pushed into biology, psychology and sociology. Married, divorced and non-Western men joined. Hypergamy, feminine imperative and social conventions became visible as "code in the Matrix." Feminine media cast it as leisure-suit machismo; the Masculine Catch-22 returned: wanting Game makes you less of a man, not knowing feminine-approved Game also makes you less of a man.
Contemporary Game
By late 2000s old shaming failed more often. Game branched: Christian, married, divorced, high school, and more. Core need: internalize a positive masculinity apart from sixty years of shame archetypes. That re-empowerment threatened an imperative that needs men necessitous. Response: poison the well, then co-opt: concede lesser truths, sanitize Game into tools for building better Betas still useful to feminine ends, brand uncooperative use as Dark or sociopathic. Even positive male improvement gets called sexist. "In girl-world, encouraging men to be better Men is sexist."
His hope: Game evolves toward emancipation from conditioning, not MGTOW negligence waiting for women to "come around," and not a return to ignorant usefulness.
6.2 Rewriting the rules in an LTR
POOK again: women would rather share a successful man than attach to a faithful loser. Married readers ask how to keep marriage fresh. Oprah-work advice, he says, keeps him qualifying forever so she can lock security and be his only intimacy source.
- Pre-commitment sex vs. commitment sex. Before exclusivity, sex is partly a proving ground under competition. After, urgency often becomes utility: reward and reinforcer inside the LTR. Agency varies with her desirability vs. his.
- Vagina = Authority as parroted male fear. Honey-do lists in hope of a fraction of early desire.
- Counterintuitive upper hand. Subtly restore competition anxiety. Not "plenty of other girls" speeches (hostility, obligated compliance). Incrementally become a man other women would want and other men would want to be: gym, achievements, social proof, status. Imagination does the heavy lift.
- Gym first. Raises her interest and her suspicion that others notice. Women cut weight before breakups for the same market reason; seeing him do the parallel "caffeinates the hamster."
- Tell her No. Especially when her sexual agency is the silent trump. Devaluing that trump restores respect long-term even if it costs a week of sex. "Nothing is as simultaneously fear inspiring and arousing for women as a Man she suspects is self-aware of his own value." Feminization must keep that self-awareness confused.
6.3 Final exam: the sexual marketplace
Tomassi plots SMV 0-10 against age from 15 up, combining long- and short-term desirability, fertility, provisioning, and related cues. Outliers exist; the graph is a teaching schematic.
Women's SMV (as men evaluate it)
- Peak about 22 to 24 (he marks ~23): fertility, desirability, attention.
- Post-peak to ~30: effort aims to recapture peak experiences; competition for suitable mates intensifies.
- 27 to 30: subliminally most stressful; short-term party protocol should yield to long-term provisioning strategy; "new life" / "getting right with myself" rationalizations often begin; Wall anxiety rises.
- Reminder: women do not set this curve by manifesto; male response patterns do. Self-worth is not the same as SMV.
Men's SMV
- Starts low at 15 relative to what mid-teen girls value (older teens/men rate higher).
- Twenties: slow build via prowess, status, maturity, affluence, dominance.
- At her peak (~23) he is only beginning ascent.
- Peak around 36 if potential is developed: still physical enough, socially and professionally mature.
- Decline is slower than hers because status can be maintained; hers is more physical and steeper.
Comparative span
Roughly 15 to 16 years between female and male peaks: first marriages, single motherhood, degrees, careers, Hitting the Wall cluster here. Around 30, valuations may cross near mid-scale (his "5"): he is waking to potential; she is losing ability to compete with younger women indefinitely. Feminine social influence, in his model, works to keep him ignorant of his rising SMV long enough to consolidate hypergamy (legally and emotionally). Men who learn the graph only after a locked commitment are the ones who say they wish they had found the manosphere earlier.
Practical reading of the curves
- Do not marry at 22 to 24 because her attention feels like destiny; that attention is partly market-timed.
- Do not panic at 28 to 32 into settling from loneliness while your own SMV is still climbing if you are building.
- Outliers (athletic women, high-status young men, illness, wealth) break the cartoon; the teaching point is asymmetric peaks, not a fixed destiny number.
- Long-term pair bonding, shared projects and character are not on the graph. Tomassi's claim is that ignoring the graph while chasing soul-mate mythology is how men sign contracts before they can read the fine print.
6.4 Just Be Yourself
Is the woman in daily makeup, with implants, in heels, or in a padded power suit "being herself"? If JBY were ideal, the sedentary pizza-and-football man should magnetize the fitness model by authenticity alone.
- Personality is flux. You are not who you were two years ago. Traits persist but conditions rewrite.
- Shallow/superficial are traps. Vague female disapproval words that never define the line between legitimate growth and fakery.
- You are who you believe you are, and who she perceives you to be.
- JBY as filter failsafe. On the surface it sounds kind; latently it freezes men in place so hypergamy can assess them accurately. After monogamy the same women often switch to "I'm working on him," exposing the earlier pseudo-genuineness.
- Greene Law 25. Re-create yourself; do not accept foisted roles; master your image. Fake-it-until-you-make-it is not automatically false: strangers have no baseline to call you a poser.
6.5 The Nice Guy-Jerk spectrum
Binary thinking ("so I have to be an asshole always?") misses degrees. Women named the archetypes; men internalized them.
- Ends of the spectrum. Consummate Jerk (obnoxious, bordering abusive, still flocked) vs. ultimate Nice Guy (buys approval, phone-friend martyr). Extremes are rare.
- The mass sits Nice-ward. Social conditioning suppresses masculine impulse; ~85% of guys, he estimates, default nice. That density makes even a mild Jerk-lean notable and competitive.
- Two attractions of the lean. Biological Alpha cues (decisiveness, options) and Purple Cow contrast in a field of nice cows.
- AFC optical illusion. He thinks Nice is rare and Jerks dominate, because female friends narrate Jerk boyfriends while validating his listening. He waits for his turn after she has fun (and possibly bred) with the Bad Boy.
- Mass conversion fear is unfounded. Men do not find the community because nice is overproducing sex. They resist becoming what they were taught to hate. Awakening beats policing a hypothetical Jerk wave.
6.6 Beta Game
Alpha/Beta language comes from animal hierarchies; in humans Tomassi treats them more as mindsets than fixed castes. A contextual workplace Alpha can still be AFC with women; money does not confer Alpha mindset.
Beta Game is the alternate breeding method when open Alpha competition fails: poach by psychology.
| Move | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Identification | Become like her; "not like other guys"; match stated long-term prerequisites; earn feminine social rewards for empathic security-seeking |
| Disqualification | Attack rival fitness ("he's probably gay"; "Neanderthal"; "misogynist"); borrow feminine ridicule tools; paint Alpha as common, self as unique empath |
| Persistence under anonymity | Even online, with evidence against the method, keep performing for a hypothetical female reader |
Like-attracts-like is the fallacy; most women do not want to marry their female clone. Beta Game is the boy who joins the girls' kickball team to win them and becomes another girlfriend.
Everyone has a Game. PUAs adapt by venue; Betas cling to one reinforced script and call it authenticity.
6.7 The Pheromonal Beta (Something About Mary)
Dom's movie advice: masturbate before the date so you think "like a girl" and stay calm. Tomassi: they want a loaded gun. De-sexualization as Game is a primary Beta error.
He sketches (with a disclaimer that he is not an endocrinologist) a chain:
- Testosterone biases sexual cue perception and drive.
- Post-orgasm oxytocin buffers testosterone, promotes trust/comfort, and has an evolutionary story for keeping sperm in place and nudging pair bonding.
- Sweaty T-shirt style findings: higher-T male scent rated more viable, especially near ovulation; genotype-similar scent less arousing (inbreeding avoidance story).
- Chronic masturbation as "Pheromonal Beta" broadcast: lower motivation and chemical cues than a man oriented toward partnered sex.
- Comfort/trust are post-orgasm conditions; anxiety and urgency are pre-orgasm conditions.
- Cultural double standard: female masturbation framed as empowerment, male as failure. Latent social function he proposes: shame male masturbation to redirect sexual energy into building and competing (Freud: all energy is sexual).
6.8 Dread Games
"Dread" in manosphere usage means a felt risk of losing intimacy/provision, used to keep frame. Feminine reaction to the word is explosive because, he argues, dread is already a female ambient condition, especially past the Wall as re-partnering options narrow. Gynocentric divorce defaults are, in this telling, legalized dread insurance.
- Faces of dread. Friend John: low SMV, sole provider, shrewish surveillance wife who fears strip clubs he never visits. Possessive neurosis without realistic poaching risk. Bodybuilders' partners show the high-SMV version: constant reminder of other women's interest. Porn-as-adultery rhetoric: she competes with a fantasy and fears loss.
- Use, lightly. Not melodrama blackmail. Covert DHV when she drifts into comfortable indignation-seeking: gym, better dress, raise, travel, new friends, cocky-funny risk. Sometimes social proof arrives without your push. Constant reassurance is what most men already overdo; it never reaches ideal contentment because of residual competition anxiety.
- Dark Triad. He is not an advocate for routine dark methods; with solid Game they are usually unnecessary. Extreme cases only, and recognize that needing them means a line was crossed.
- She wants the boat rocked enough to feel alive; she also wants security. Living only on comfort makes the bond feel dead.
6.9 The Meta-Game
Before widespread internet, men in the 1990s learned in the dark: no AFC label, no forums, pickup books ordered from Hustler ads, porn from back rooms. "The internet is to Men what the sexual revolution was for women."
- Global triage. A noob's LJBF problem draws advice from Britain, Australia, Spain, Canada, US coasts: collective fathers the sons did not have.
- Meta-Masculine vs. Meta-Feminized. Jezebel-type media as antithesis; still, naming conventions is half the battle (G.I. Joe line reused).
- Same memes for 60 years. How do I get her back? Why LJBF? Why the Jerk? Do looks matter? Why did sex die after moving in? Dismissing seekers as only wanting lay-count misses the search for solid masculine confidence under feminine Meta Game.
Pre-internet loneliness
Without forums, a man could believe his LJBF, dead-bedroom or Nice-Guy failure was uniquely his. Meta-Game collapses that isolation: the same five questions appear on every continent. That is emancipatory for some and radicalizing for others. Tomassi wants the former: men who rebuild agency. He is hostile to the idea that naming feminine conventions is itself abuse.
6.10 Familiarity problem for teachers
A recurring meta-point: long-time readers share a vocabulary (Hypergamy, Feminine Imperative, buffers) that new men lack. Condensing the blog into a book meant rewriting for the uninitiated without boring the initiated. His editor needed an hour on Feminine Imperative after reading the seminal posts. That gap is why Game sounds like a cult from outside and like weather from inside.
6.11 Co-option as the mature threat
Early ridicule (leisure suit Larry, pay-for-PUA shame) gave way to a smarter counter: agree that women love confidence, agree that Nice often fails, then redefine acceptable Game as whatever produces improved provisional monogamy for women. Branch interests (married Game, Christian Game) do not matter to the imperative; only whether a branch can be bent. Men who refuse the bend get Dark labels. The political fight over Game is therefore not mainly about negs and hats; it is about whether male sexual strategy may be spoken as openly as female strategy already is.
6.12 SMV graph as graduation requirement
A commenter told him the material should be required for high school seniors. The lecture tone of "Navigating the SMP" is half joke, half earnest: eighteen-year-olds about to sign education, fertility and marriage paths deserve the curves before the Wall and before male peak, not after a first divorce. Comparative SMV around 30 is the danger band where she needs consolidation and he is only starting to see his hand. Threat essay line reused: nothing more threatening yet attractive to a woman than a man aware of his value to women.
6.13 Spectrum practice notes
- Moving from Nice toward Jerk is inching, not flipping into abuse.
- Lazy path after rejection: downgrade the woman ("club slut") rather than upgrade the self.
- Quality-girl rhetoric that demands unconditional desire "for who he is" is often a plea to skip improvement.
- Social risk of manufacturing Jerks is, in his view, dwarfed by the cost of never waking Betas at all.
6.14 Dread versus comfort addiction
Ambient female dread (loss of security with age) explains possessive surveillance even in low-SMV pairings and porn-panic in higher ones. Male-initiated dread game is the contested mirror. His preferred dose is lifestyle DHV that would be healthy anyway (fitness, status, social life). Pathological control is the caricature critics need; it is also a real failure mode if a man skips subtlety. Reassurance remains necessary; reassurance alone never finishes the job because hypergamy does not sleep because you said "I love you" again.
Communication
Chapter 7 map for Communication.
7.1 Opening
I hate the term 'Mixed Signals' or 'Mixed Messages'. More often than not there's nothing 'Mixed' being communicated and rather it's a failure (willful or not) to read what a woman is communicating to a man.
When a woman goes from hot to cold and back again, this IS the message - she's got buyers remorse, you're not her first priority, she's deliberating between you and what she perceives is a better prospect, you were better looking when she was drunk, etc. - the message isn't the 'what ifs', the message IS her own hesitation and how her behavior manifests it.
Women with high interest level (IL) wont confuse you.
When a woman wants to fuck you she'll find a way to fuck you. If she's fluctuating between being into you and then not, put her away for a while and spin other plates. If she sorts it out for herself and pursues you, then you are still playing in your frame and you maintain the value of your attention to her.
What most guys think are 'mixed messages' or confusing behavior coming from a woman is simply due to their inability (for whatever reason) to make an accurate interpretation of why she's behaving in such a manner. Usually this boils down to a guy getting so wrapped up in a single, solitary girl that he'd rather make concessions for her behavior than see it for what it really is.
A woman that has a high IL in a guy has no need (and less motivation) to engage in behaviors that would in any way compromise her status with him.
More often than not women tell the complete truth with their actions, they just communicate it in a fashion that men can't or wont understand. As a behaviorist, I'm a firm believer in the psychological principal that the only way to determine genuine motivation and/or intent is to observe the behavior of an individual. All one need do is compare behavior and the results of it to correlate intent.
We get frustrated because women communicate differently than we do. Women communicate covertly , men communicate overtly . Men convey information, women convey feeling. In relating information, men prioritize content , women prioritize context .
One of the great obfuscations fostered by feminization in the last quarter-century is this expectation that women are every bit as rational and inclined to analytical problem solving as men. This is the result of an equalist mentality that misguides men into believing that women communicate no differently than men.
Scientific study after study illustrating the natural capacity women have for exceptionally complex forms of communication (to the point of proving their neural pathways are wired differently) are flags proudly waved by a feminized media as proof of women's innate merits, yet as men, we're expected to accept that she "means what she says, and she says what she means." While more than a few women like to wear this as a badge of some kind of superiority, it doesn't necessarily mean that what they communicate is more important, or how they communicate it is more efficient - just that they have a greater capacity to understand nuances of communication than do men.
One of the easiest illustrations of this generational gender switch is to observe the communication methods of the "strong" women the media portray in popular fiction today. How do we know she's a strong woman?
You don't need to be psychic to understand women's covert communication, you need to be observant. This often requires a patience that most men simply don't have, so they write women off as duplicitous, fickle or conniving if the name fits.
And why wouldn't it? We're Men. Our communications are (generally) information based, deductive and rational, that's Men's overt communication. Blunt, to the point, solve the problem and move on to the next. Feminine communication seems insane; it is a highly dysfunctional form of communication….,to be more specific, it's a childish form of communication.
Yes, they do. And more often than not, they get what they're really after - attention. Women are crazy, but it's a calculated crazy. Covert communication frustrates us every bit as much as overt communication frustrates women. Our language has no art to it for them, that's why we seem dumb or simple at best to women.
This is the same reason we think of feminine communication as being obfuscating, confusing, random, even when it seems they are making earnest attempts to clearly relate their intent. The difference is that our confusion and frustration is put to their ultimate use.
"Silly boy, you'll never understand women, just give up" is exactly the MO. Once you accept this, she's earned a lifetime of get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Now as Men we'll say, "Evil, immoral, manipulative woman! Shape up and do the right thing, saying one thing then doing another makes you a hypocrite!" and of course this is our rational nature overtly making itself heard in exposing a woman's covert communication.
Appeals to morality only work in her favor, because all she need do is agree with a Man's overt assessment of her and suddenly he thinks he's 'getting through to her'. As Men, we have become so conditioned by the Feminine Mystique to expect a woman to be duplicitous with us that when she suddenly leans into masculine communication forms and resorts to our own, overt communication method and agrees with us, it seems she's had an epiphany, or a moment of clarity.
Have you ever been in a social setting, maybe a party or something, with a girlfriend or even a woman you may be dating and seemingly out of the blue she says to you privately, "ooh, did you see the dirty look that bitch just gave me?!"
You were right there in her physical presence, saw the girl she was talking about, yet didn't register a thing. Women's natural preference for covert communication is recognizable by as early as five years of age.
Within their own peer group, little girls fight for dominance with the threat of ostracization from the group. "I wont be your friend anymore if,.." is just as much a threat to a girl as "I'm gonna punch you in the face if,.." is to a boy.
Their covert way of communicating this using innuendo, body language, appearance, subcommunications, gestures, etc. conveys far more information than our overt, all on the table, way of communicating does.
Women enjoy the communication more than the information being transferred. It's not a problem to be solved, it's the communication that's primary. When a chump supplies her with everything all at once we think, yeah, the mystery is gone, he's not a challenge anymore, why would she be interested?
Lastly I should add that women are not above using overt communication when it serves their purposes.
"Can't we just be friends?" is a covert rejection, "Get away from me you creep!!" is an overt rejection. When a woman opts for the overt, rest assured, she's out of covert ideas.
Likewise, men can and do master the art of covert communications as well. Great politicians, military leaders, businessmen, salesmen to be sure, and of course master PUAs all use covert communications to achieve their goals. It's incorrect to think of covert communication as dishonest or amoral, or even in a moral context.
7.2 The Medium is the Message
To be sure, relationship Game (or married Game) varies widely in application compared to the Game used in single-man-sex-life, but the foundational principles are essentially the same - as are the pitfalls - only the risks are higher and the rewards negligible by comparison.
Having experienced the ups and downs of single-man-sex-life as well as married-man-sex-life, I can honestly say that I've never found Game more necessary than when it's within the context of marriage. I've also written volumes about the all-risk proposition of marriage for men, and women's utter inability to appreciate the all-risk sacrifices men assume in committing to marriage.
In your single-man-sex-life Game, you have the leisure to Spin Plates, drop the ones which don't produce dividends, and non-exclusively enjoy the ones who do.
Dumping a girl (or getting dumped) when single may be an emotional ordeal for some guys, but the decay of a marriage and the financial, familial and emotional consequences for lacking Game in marriage is a punishment that will make a single man's break up tears seem like a blessing.
A lot of men will respond that marriage is just not worth all that contextualization of Game, and they'd be right. It's all risk with negligible reward / appreciation and the liabilities are too steep.
Some guys get mad at just the suggestion that they'd need to Game their potential wives. "She should just love me for who I am!" They expect to be able to drop the Game, relax and be who they are, only to have their wives progressively convert them into their imagined ideal which really isn't the guy who tingles their vaginas.
7.3 Crossover
When the lines of communication are broken between you and your wife or girlfriend, you aren't going to get a message that the lines of communication are broken. That's what the lines of communication being broken means.
I usually have to control my laughter whenever I overhear an AFC in the crab barrel parrot back the Matrix-speak about how "good relationships are all about communication with your girlfriend/wife." When this is coming from a single guy I can at least partially excuse him for lack of any practicable experience, but when it comes from a married Plug-In it's just evidence of the totality of his conditioning.
I was once at a liquor event with my usual 'pour girls' and during our conversations one tells me about her 'guy problems' with a "clingy boyfriend" obviously on the down end of an SMV imbalance.
"It's so frustrating Rollo, why can't guy's just get it?"
With a practiced, but cute, little wrinkle of her nose, and the huff of her $5,000 tits, my girl had just indirectly revealed one of the most vexing complexities of intergender communication - women want men to "just get it."
7.4 Just Get It
The guy with the capacity to call a woman's bluff with a confidence that implies she is to be worthy of him rather than the other way around is the Man to be competed for. Essentially the 'chick speak', 'chick advice' phenomenon is a shit test writ large on a social scale.
She wants you to 'get it' on your own, without having to be told how. That initiative, and the experience needed to have had developed it, makes you a Man worth competing for. Women despise a man who needs to be told to be dominant, told to be confident, told to be anything they have on their list of prerequisites for their intimacy.
Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he's not the man for her.
In my Pour Girl's example we see this 'get it' paradox from the single-man-sex-life perspective, but due the risks and punishments inherent to marriage, it is even more important in the married-man (or LTR) -sex-life perspective. Many men will complain that they hate the presumption that they need to be a mind reader and ideally women ought to just communicate overtly and directly - just as a reason-based man would communicate.
This is why the "communication is everything" meme has been responsible for the demise of more relationships than anyone will ever admit. It's not that you communicate, it's what you're communicating and how you communicate it.
A cardinal truth of the universe is that genuine desire cannot be negotiated. The moment you tell your wife, your girlfriend, that you will exchange a behavior or attitude or belief or any other compromise for her desire you fundamentally change her organic desire into obligation.
What she wants, what her hypergamy wants confirmation of, can never be explicated, it can only be demonstrated. If her desire is for you to be more dominant, her telling you to be so negates the genuineness and the validity of your becoming so.
She wants a man who knows he needs to be dominant with her, that is the confirmation of hypergamy.
Dijo sin hablar - Told without speaking .
Communicate with your behavior. Never overtly tell a woman anything. Allow her to come to the conclusions you intend. Her imagination is the best tool in your Game toolbox. Learn how to use it.
This is the single greatest failing of average frustrated chumps: they vomit out everything about themselves, divulging the full truth of themselves to women in the mistaken belief that women desire that truth as a basis for qualifying for their intimacy or enduring commitment.
Nothing is more self-satisfying for a woman than to think she's figured a Man out based solely on her mythical feminine intuition (i.e. imagination).
When you blurt out your 'feelings' or overtly make known your optionless status, regardless of the context or the nobility of your intent, all you do is deny her this satisfaction.
Always remember, women care less about the content of what's being communicated and more about the context (the how) of what's being communicated. Never buy the lie that good communication is the key to a good relationship with out considering how and what you communicate.
Despite what any pop-psychologist has ingrained into you, communication is no t the key to success in an LTR. It's what and how it's communicated that is. It seems counterintuitive to deliberately withhold information that you think would solve whatever problem you have.
You cannot 'tell' women anything, they must be led to your conclusion and be made to think that they are the ones coming to it with their own devices - preferably by way of her imagined feminine intuition.
You want to be a guy who 'Just gets it'?
Speak without speaking. Women would rather be objectified than idealized.
One of the best litmus tests for how unplugged a guy truly is how he reacts to the words of his idealized woman. I briefly covered this idea in the Self-Righteous AFC:
You see, when an AFC clings to the mental schema that make up an AFC mindset it requires a constant need for affirmation and reinforcement, particularly in light of their glaring lack of verifiable success with women while clinging to, and behaving in accordance with the mindset. AFCs are crabs in a barrel - once one get to the top to climb out another drags him back in.
So when an AFC finally does get a second date and then finally does get laid it becomes the ultimate validation for his mindset. "See, you just have to be a nice guy and the right ONE really does come along." This is when the self-righteous phase begins and he can begin telling his Game / PUA friends that he's "getting some" now without all the Positive Masculinity claptrap.
This need for validation of a Beta Game mindset is very strong for guys - particularly when you consider a lifetime of being steeped in fem-centric conditioning. When you grow up in girl-world you want to believe the idealizations of women are actually attainable. This is what makes the 'red pill' so hard to swallow; men truly want the fantasy, the romanticism and love, in the context girl-world presents it to them for so long, to really exist for them.
7.5 Straight from the Horse's Mouth
When a woman (or a man impersonating a woman) posts some self-description or personalized experience about how they conform more to this idealization than to the "silly caricatures of bitter misogynists" online, this triggers an internal conflict for men.
Men want to believe that the exception to the rule could exist for them since it agrees with his initial social conditioning, but the learned, unplugged, conditioning he's applying to see the forest for the trees, and factoring in women's generalized, observable behaviors, fights against this. Becoming Game-aware teaches Men that the medium is the message, but to varying degrees Men still want to believe that women are completely self-honest, rational agents, and completely cognizant of their internal motivations.
In our 'plugged in' years, men rely on the same deductive pragmatism with women that we use to solve most other problems. Our problem solving natures predispose us to identifying the elements of a problem to arrive at a solution.
7.6 What Women Want
I can remember asking this very question uncounted times in my plugged-in teenage years. Hindsight being what it is, I can only laugh now when I read teenage guys still asking the same thing four generations later.
Women and girls naturally love to answer this question because it gives them a default authority, while at the same time feeds their attention needs.
In either case, whether due to ignorance or duplicity, the secret of the ugly, cruel truth of female hypergamy is to be protected and obfuscated as women's first priority. So important is keeping this truth from men that the feminine imperative must socialize it into women's collective psyches.
What do women want? Maximized hypergamy with a man blissfully unaware of hypergamy. The perfect union of emotional investment, parental investment and provisional investment with her hypergamous nature.
However, men still want to believe that women earnestly want to communicate their intimate desires in an effort to make better men. We believe that women, the emotional, erratic, dramatic, mysterious and romantic creatures of story are also consistent, well-grounded pragmatists that rival men themselves and are only waiting for the man unique enough to listen to her. The more her story agrees with our mental construct of what women should want, the more we want to believe she exists.
You know, I'm not quite sure if my readership is aware of this, but I'm a Prince.
No really, I'm a Prince (stop laughing), or at least that's the expectation I've come to have others recognize in me after sifting through women's online profiles on such fantastical dating resources such as Plenty of Whales Fish and OK U-Bid Cupid.
You see, virtually all the women you encounter on these online dating resources are simply undiscovered, under-appreciated jewels in the rough. They're Princesses, and goddammit they deserve to be treated as such.
A few years ago the denizens of the SoSuave forum accidentally conducted one of the most humorous social experiments ever performed. A member by the handle of Bonhomme was a frequenter of Plenty of Fish and noticed an interesting trend in women's profiles. Though most of the women using online dating run the gamut from hopelessly fat to 2-drink fuckability, the one thing most had in common was an entirely overblown sense of self-worth to compliment their grossly overrated self-impression of their sexual market value (SMV for those of you playing the home game).
What hadn't been studied up to then was the descriptors and qualifications that online women used in both their "list of demands" and their own self-evaluations, or "the brochure of value added features" any man with common sense (see fem-centric conditioning) would ever be considered a 'Man' for appreciating in a woman.
The following is an actual example pulled from a typical profile:
"Here is a well thought out idea of what kind of guy I am interested in… 5'10″ or taller, lives near by, compassionate, intelligent, giving, VERY Attractive (someone other than your mother or sister has said so, lol) and in shape, prefer self employed, FAMILY orientated, open to new spontaneous things, likes to camp, likes to golf, wants children, would be a good father and faithful husband, a gentleman, gives me my space when I need it, not a nerd or too sarcastic, can take a hint, social, calls for no reason, remembers sending a note or a nominal gift IS romantic and necessary, respectful, sense of humor, and thinks the world of me.
Wow! A rare find indeed. Thank heaven for the internet in providing men such a valuable resource that we might encounter so rational and strong a woman as this.
Well, far be it from Rollo J. Tomassi to deny these undiscovered royals their due!
Quickly I began to craft a cunning profile of my own; one which these pouting Princesses would surely recognize as that of none other than the Crown Prince of Man-dom.
"Here is a well thought out idea of what kind of gal I am interested in…5′ 5″ or taller, but not over 6 feet (because while I don't mind being eye to eye with you, I won't ever be looking up to you), lives close enough to be at my house within 10 minutes after I make the call, genuinely passionate, intelligent enough to be good company, sexually available (preferably insatiable) and VERY attractive - we're talking Jessica Alba, Keyra Augustina attractive - women with a body-fat percentage higher than 8% need not apply.
She must want children after 33 years of age if at all, and only after she's proven to be a good mother and faithful wife, must be a lady with class and know when the right time is to speak and not to speak, not a prude or bitch, can take the first hint, sociable, unexpectedly texts me pictures of her wearing something new from Fredericks of Hollywood, understands that the best gift she can give me is expressing her desire to fuck me like a wild animal, and also understands that gifts for her are treats or rewards for desired behavior.
Must be respectful of my decisions being final, can't take herself too seriously and thinks the world of me. I'm not interested in anyone over 31 (since this is most women's expiration date anyway), she cannot have exorbitant spending habits or a credit debt load in excess of $1,000 since I do not plan on changing the lifestyle I have grown accustomed to and hope to one day be able to send my own children to college (rather than pay for your student debt), and furthermore… my children will be taught to reasonably earn their achievements on their own and respect the decisions of their Father and mother (and absolutely will not be spoiled brats either).
There! What woman could possible fail to appreciate all of the qualities of a Prince based upon their very own template? Insidious, clever and witty. All I had to do was await what could only be a landslide of returned affection and positive responses.
"I read your profile, and is any of it serious?????"
"Why do you think it's not serious? Am I not allowed to be a bit specific?"
"Sorry not about to put up with your kind of shit."
Strange and yet strange again. Here I'd learned that self-confidence and assertiveness were traits women admired in the land of gender-equalism. Ah, perhaps this Princess was a bit jaded by such a dearth of qualified Princes at her disposal.
i speak when i want to say what i want and when i want and the way ur profile sounds i dont we;d be a match and the part about raising a spoiled brat thats a hard one to over come depends what u see as spoiled sure my boys r a bit spoiled well a lot but thats the way i was raised and it did me no wrong my kids know that they have to work to earn their spending and treats but no reason why a parent cant buy something just because so maybe ur profile can off wrong but my feeling is not some one id wanna meet hmmmmm"
"Honestly, I really tried to read your message to me, but all of the bastardized English and the run-on sentences made it virtually impossible to understand what you were trying to say."
I do say. Whomever this royal child's au pair was is deserving of a public flogging! The thought of so ill-preparing a Princess for courtly discourse with the Man who will one day be her King is inexcusable.
"uh, yeah, i don't think so. maybe your profile's a joke (which would make it less sad), but i don't find it amusing, not my sense of humour at all.and the fact that i'm even bothering to reply to say no, rather than just ignore you, should tell you how distasteful it is.happy hunting.
"After checking out your profile, you are one of the rudest people i've even encountered. In your dreams…"
Hmm, I was beginning to see a flaw in my profile design.
You see I had simply reworded the profile of my original Princess' profile and changed the gender specific terms to the masculine, while adding a bit of my own desires to the outline of the ideal Princess I'd like to meet. After all, they all want to be treated like Princesses, I'm just asking to be treated like a Prince.
"I am friendly, outgoing, generous, loyal, honest and adventurous. I work in a hospital. I also drive and have my own car.
I love fashion and style. I care about pop culture and social issues.
I have an IQ of 146. I am extremely intelligent and educated.
First Date: I dont want to meet Cheaters, users, players, haters, crumb bumbs, guys who want booty calls or fuk buddies… ya'll dont let the door hit cha on the way out… I guess Im looking to meet someone around my own age, who is taller than me preferably caucasian, attractive, who likes to work out, has a unique, ghetto and sarcastic sense of humor like me."
Well,..not the ideal prize I'd been seeking, but perhaps this was another jewel in the rough that just needed a bit of spit and polish.
"i mak emy own moneya nd pay for own 5hit..
I found this confusing since I had no picture on my profile at this point. I'd have to address that, but strange that the assumption was that my physical stature would necessarily be inadequate for her. I respond,..
"Dear woman, for someone with such a high opinion of her intelligence your grammar, punctuation and syntax are far from reflecting this. You type like shite."
What I'd found most entertaining about this whole affair is that these women somehow felt compelled to respond to the profile. As if it were so personal an affront to their sensibilities that it should need their attention to correct, rather than simply move on to the next profile with indifference.
One of the best ways to illustrate how insaturated feminization has become in society is to flip the gender script on certain gender-specific dynamics.
As funny as all this was, it serves to show that women live and operate in gender assumptions that they simply take as normalized conditions. Were a Man to publicly expect the terms and demands for his own provisioning and intimate access that women demand without an afterthought, he'd be instantly accused of misogyny at worst, comedy at best. There are many more dynamics that illustrate this fem-centric normalization. My critics get fits of hysteria when I describe the acculturated, feminine-centric undercurrent operating in society.
Social Conventions
Chapter 8 map for Social Conventions.
8.1 Opening
Often I'll be in the middle of some socio-psychological tear on a particular topic when I'll come to a dead halt because I play my own devil's advocate while I'm typing and reasoning aloud, and have to review and edit the paragraphs I've spent the last two hours constructing because I'd failed to consider how others might interpret my intent.
Needless to say it's an arduous process, however I've found that starting blog topics, in regards to certain theories and ideas, bearing in mind that I have to see what their intent will be read as helps me greatly. So with this in mind I'm presenting a particular section of my work here to see what the consensus is on what I've come to call Operative Social Conventions.
8.2 Operative Social Conventions
In the 'community' we've become all too familiar with a standard set of problems that are commonly asked of us for advice - "Should I date younger/older women with/without children?""what about women with money/career?" etc.
I count myself among those who do this as well. I'm very prone to see the forest for the trees so to speak and fire back with my stand by reply of Spin More Plates, or NEXT.
For the most part, Plate Theory covers a multitude of AFC sins, but my concern was with understanding why these dilemmas come up so often and what their root cause is. To this effect I've attempted to 'distill' down the symptoms (i.e.
Essentially all of the symptoms of these conventions are manifested as the frequent problems guys come up with, but the disease is the latent purpose of these conventions.
8.3 Shame
Perhaps the easiest and most recognizable form of social convention is shame. Not only this, but it is also the most easily employable and the most widely accepted - not just by women of all ages and descriptions, but also by popular culture and the media.
"Men shouldn't be so 'shallow' as to put off single mothers as viable long term mates."
"Men have 'fragile egos' that need constant affirmation in an almost infantile respect."
As well as being popularized myths, all of these are subtle (and not so subtle) manipulations of shame. Each is an operative social convention that places a man into a position of having to live up to an idealized standard that simultaneously raises the standard for a woman, thus placing her into a better position of sexual selection and in some instances, leveling the perceived playing-field with regard to the feminine competition dynamic (i.e.
The 'Shallow' effect - The useful myth of superficiality.
I'm mentioning this as an aside to the Shame methodology since it appears to me to be the root of the Shame operative. In all of the above examples (or symptoms) the burden of expectation that is placed on a man comes with the threat of being perceived as "Shallow" or superficial. In other words, the very questioning of whether or not a man ought to date a single mother comes with the veiled threat of having women (mothers or not) tar the questioning man with being 'superficial'.
This is a major obstacle in transitioning from AFC to positive masculinity. AFCs all initially laugh at PUA technique (Cocky & Funny, Peacocking, Neg Hits, etc.) because they carry the potential of being perceived as 'shallow'.
8.4 Selection Position Insurance
Women are 'allowed' to understand men, but women must necessarily alway s be a mystery to men.
Getting "lucky" with a woman when referring to sex.
Selection position insuring methodologies revolve around fomenting the Scarcity Mentality in men. If the value can be inflated, the value can be increased, thus ensuring a controlling frame. This convention holds fast to the Feminine Mystique or Female Intuition mythology. So long as women remain 'unknowable' there becomes less motivation to try to understand them.
This is exactly the reason why guys will ridicule men seeking an applicable understanding of women when they search it out in "how to get girls" books, DVDs, PUA seminars or on the internet.
8.5 Social Escape Clauses - A Woman's Prerogative
Women always have the prerogative to change their minds. Men must be resolute.
LJBF rejections - "I already have a boyfriend" (boyfriend disclaimers) or "I'm not interested in a relationship right now" rejections.
Escape clause conventions always offer an ou t to a woman and absolve her of, or dramatically reduce her responsibility of personal accountability by means of social reinforcement.
The Feminine Prerogative has been an accepted social norm since the early Renaissance and the advent of 'courtly love'. Like the Position Insurance convention, this serves to ensure that the 'mysterious woman' is validated in her ambiguity by socially plausible reinforcement.
This, and the cart-carrot of a woman's intimacy reward, is exactly why it is socially acceptable for a man to wait hours for a woman to prepare/show for a date and the kiss of death for a man to be more than 5-10 minutes late.
I don't think I need to go into too much detail regarding the LJBF ("lets just be friends") escape clause, but I will add that the LJBF escape is perhaps the single most useful convention ever conceived by women. The LJBF rejection has classically ensured that a woman can reject a man yet still maintain his previous attention. It also puts the responsibility for the rejection back on his shoulders since, should he decline the 'offer of friendship', he is then responsible for entertaining this friendship.
8.6 Sexual Competition Sabotage
"She's a 'slut' - he's a 'fag'" and the sub-communications in the terminology.
This convention is the reputation destroyer and it's easy to observe this in the field. Since it also serves a woman attention needs, it is among the most socially acceptable and widely flaunted, however the foundations and latent purpose of this convention takes some consideration to understand.
In terms of female to female gossip this satisfies the attention need, but when men are brought into the salaciousness it becomes a qualification tool.
I'll also add that this breeding sabotage isn't limited to just women. What's the first thing most men are apt to say about another, anonymous, extremely attractive male? "He's probably a fag."
Men have learned this convention from women, they sexually disqualify a man in he most complete way possible; "this guy might be as attractive as a GQ model, but he would never breed with a woman and is therefore disqualified as a suitor for your intimacy."
8.7 Gender Role Redefinition
Masculinity is ridiculous and/or negative with the potential for violent extremes.
"Men should get in touch with their feminine sides." - Identification as false attraction.
Although there are more operative conventions to outline, I'll finish with this, the most obvious and most discussed convention. There's no shortage of articles dedicated to this convention, so I wont rehash what's been stated. Instead, I should point out the latent purpose behind the popularity and mass cultural acceptance of this, the most damaging convention. The function behind this convention could be promoting androgyny as an idealized state, or a power struggle to redefine masculine and feminine attributes, or even to ensure women as the primary selectors in mating.
It's the man who remains in touch with his masculine side, the guy who, despite all of pop-culture denigrating and ridiculing his gender and the very aspects that make it a necessary, positive strength of human society, will endure and steadfastly resist the influences that want to turn it into something it was never intended; it's this guy and his confidence that women all over the world find irresistible.
He embodies the masculine arousal that their feminine has been seeking and they can't explain it.
It's the guy who understands that it's gender differences, not androgynous similarities, that make us strong. It's the Man who can see that the sexes were meant to be complimentary, not adversarial, who passes this shit test.
After detailing the Qualities of the AFC, I feel it's necessary to illustrate that social conventions aren't the exclusive domain of the feminine imperative . AFCs have their own set of social conventions - those which are commonly practiced and self-reinforced by the Beta mindset.
You could simply call AFC Social Conventions AFC 'rationalizations', but I think this ignores the socially reinforcing element of these conventions. When I wrote the Qualities of the AFC I outlined the characteristic traits, behaviors and core mental schema of what are commonly believed to be AFC qualities. This was a brief list to sum up a few root elements in identifying and dealing with a Beta mindset and aid in unplugging an AFC.
I'm going to define a few more examples of what I'm most commonly noticing as AFC mental schema that are reinforced socially. A strong part of the internalization process of these conventions is that the reason they are socially reinforced is because they're socially unassailable (or at the very least foolish to do so).
8.8 The Myth of the "Quality" Woman
It seems like all I read about in the manosphere is the never ending quest for a "Quality Woman." There's always been plenty of articles and comment threads asking for clear definitions of what constitutes a "Quality" woman and most conveniently set women up into 2 camps - "Quality Women" and Whores, as if there could be no middle ground or grey area.
I think the term 'Quality' woman is a misnomer. Guys tend to apply this term at their leisure not so much to define what they'd like in a woman (which is actually an idealization), but rather to exclude women with whom they'd really had no chance with in the first place, or mistakenly applied too much effort and too much focus only to be rebuffed. This isn't to say that there aren't women who will behave maliciously or indiscriminately, nor am I implying that they ought to be excused out of hand for such.
The dangers inherent in this convention is that the AFC (or the even the 'enlightened man' subscribing to the convention) then limits himself to only what he perceives is a Quality woman, based on a sour-grapes conditioning. Thus, they'll end up with a "Quality" woman by default because she's the only candidate who would accept him for her intimacy.
So why is this a social convention then? Because it is socially unassailable. Since this convention is rooted to a binary premise, no one would likely challenge it. It would be foolish for me to say "Yes Mr.
Beware of making your necessity a virtue in making a Quality woman your substitute for a ONEitis idealization.
8.9 The Myth of the Dodged Bullet
In my lifetime I've had sex with over 40 women and I never once caught a venereal disease, nor did I get anyone pregnant. I can also point to men I know who contracted Herpes from the only women they'd ever had sex with.
The myth of the dodged bullet is a social convention that's rooted in the rationalization that monogamy serves the purpose for controlling sexually transmitted diseases and thus fewer partners are more desirable than many. From a statistical standpoint this may seem logical on the surface. Fewer opportunities for sexual intercourse would indeed decrease the risk from a single individual, but unfortunately this isn't a practical estimate. You'll also have to base the numbers not only on how many sex partners you and your monogamous partner have had, but also how many prior partners they've had and how many those partners had as well and so on exponentially.
Of course, since this is a social convention, I would be grossly negligent and severely lambasted by the public at large for even implying that I'm condoning, much less advocating, that a man explore his options and open his experience up to having sex with multiple partners. Again, this social convention is unassailable.
8.10 Location, Location, Location
Another common contrivance is the presumption that less than desirable (low quality) women will necessarily be found in bars & clubs (or other places of "ill repute"). Thus the chump will only too eagerly avoid these places. This is, yet again, another example of the binary logic of an AFC and completely ignores that A.) women with whom they might make a successful connection with do in fact frequent clubs and B.) less than desirable women can also be met in "alternative" meeting places too (coffee house, university campus, library, Bible study or any number of other "safe places"). However, making approaches in a club are difficult for the inexperienced Game adherent and AFC alike.
8.11 The Myth of 'Other Guys'
This is perhaps the most dangerous AFC social convention.
We'd all like to think we're unique and special individuals. It's a comforting thought, but our uniqueness means nothing if it isn't appreciated. We'd all like to be beautiful, talented, intelligent and extraordinary in some way to some degree and have others notice these qualities unequivocally.
This is the root for the Not Like Other Guys convention. The idea is that the AFC can and will be appreciated in a greater degree for his personal convictions and/or his greater ability to identify with women's stated prerequisites of a man by comparing himself to the nebulous Other Guys who are perceived not to abide by her stated conditions for intimacy.
The fallacy in this schema is that it's always better to demonstrate social proof than to explicate it, but this is lost on the AFC subscribing to this convention. This only becomes more compounded by the reinforcement he receives from other AFCs (and really society at large) sharing his desire to outshine the phantom Other Guys .
I'd argue that 95% of men aren't even aware that they're repeating / reinforcing a social convention at all because the convention is so embedded into our social fabric that it's taken for granted.
I encounter AFC mentalities all day long in my line of work, and I don't encounter them strictly from men either. More often than not I find myself in some social/work environment where it's women fomenting an AFC attitude and it's men who jokingly play along with them in an attempt to identify with these women in order to qualify for female intimacy.
For a positively masculine Man there is no better opportunity to set yourself apart and start to plant the seeds of critical thought into AFCs than when you're presented with these social situation.
The concept of commitment is a fantastic utility for women. Men can be simultaneously shamed for not sticking to a commitment that benefits them and still be shamed for steadfastly adhering to a commitment that doesn't.
There's an interesting control of the message here; the principle of commitment is cast in feminine-centric perfection. The idea is that commitment should only have meaning in a feminine defined reality. Ironically, it's Men who commit far more readily to ideals, family, military, business ventures or partnerships, and servitude than women have the capacity to appreciate, because recognizing this doesn't serve their imperative.
Whenever I get into these debates about infidelity (albeit usually from the male perspective), and it becomes an immoral / amoral / moralist menage à trois, I wonder, what is the greater "moral" imperative; to remain faithful to your morally obligated commitment with your spouse in spite of a loveless, passionless, sexless partner, or to break that commitment in order to pursue the obligation and commitment you owe yourself as a "superior" Man deserving of a better "quality" partner?
What has moral priority, a commitment to yourself or a commitment to marriage? You see it's easy to wave the flag of self-righteousness when the issue is a right vs. wrong issue. It's much more difficult when the question is right vs. right.
Whatever you cannot say 'No' to is your master and makes you it's slave.
This is a favorite go-to trope for moral arguments where there's a clearly defined right and wrong, however, by this definition then, does not commitment make you a 'slave' by default?
You can even take marriage out of the equation; if I'm in a committed LTR with a girlfriend and over the course of that relationship I realize that she's not what I'm looking for (for any number of reasons, not just sex), even though she's 100% faithfully committed to me and the LTR, should I then break that commitment?
What's my obligation; neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?
It's my take that commitment 'should' be a function of genuine desire. Ideally, commitment should be to something one is so passionate about that the limiting of one's own future opportunities that come from that commitment is an equitable, and mutually appreciated exchange. This is unfortunately rarely the case for most people in any form of commitment because people, circumstance, opportunity and conditions are always in flux.
In practice I'm getting at is where do you draw the line?
In the 'community' we brazenly tell freshmen chumps to dedicate themselves to self-improvement; to seek out and accomplish what's best for them - in other words, to uncompromisingly commit themselves to their own cause in as positive a manner as possible.
I'd argue that genuine desire is a necessary precursor to this, but in advocating this self-concerned improvement, are we not then doing them a disservice if their duty ought to be focused on the principle of commitment, even when that commitment is (or becomes) deleterious to their commitment to a positive self?
What holds more water, being a martyr to chivalrous commitment, or a steadfast dedication to ourselves? Should we not then hold AFCs in the highest respect when they selflessly sacrifice their futures due to their devoted commitment to a ONEitis girl who'll never reciprocate on, much less appreciate, that commitment?
8.12 The Paradox of Commitment
One of the surest indicators of an AFC-beta mindset is the automatic presumption that anything remotely critical a man would say about women, or the feminine, is by default, equated with misogyny.
All a man need do is open his mouth, in the most objective way he can muster, about anything critical of the feminine and he's instantly suspect of sour grapes.
What an amazingly potent social convention that is - when a man will censor himself because of it on his own.
"You're just bitter because you got burned by some bitch in the past and your misogynist ideology is just your way of lashing out."
I hear this a lot from both men and women. It's an easy response to parrot and it's very useful. It foists the responsibility of confronting one's critical ideas back on the man, all while shaming him for forming an ideology based on what he (and now a community of many other men) confirms by observations.
This is a feminine social convention that's in the same vein as shame. Any guy that has a point about the feminine, no matter how valid, can always have his argument poisoned because he's a guy, most guys are frustrated that they aren't getting laid, and this is his petty way of venting.
8.13 The Protector Dynamic
The protector dynamic has evolved into a beta breeding methodology. It's like a Darwinist version of Cap'n Save A Ho - so at the slightest critical word about a woman or the feminine in general it's, "See how quickly I come to a woman's defense? What girl wouldn't want a great protector like me? I'm unique. I'm not like those bitter 'other guys' so your best emotional/sexual/parental investment would be coupling with me as evidenced by my example." Of course that isn't their conscious, cognitively recognized reaction, but it is the subroutine that's running in their unconscious.
8.14 Whiners and Losers.
"Game Blogs, PUAs, MRA guys, they're all a bunch of whiners who'd rather kvetch about feminism and real or imagined wrongs than just get up and get along. "
The problem I think most people have with the tone of what Game has, or is evolving into, is that essentially Game is a masculine response to what feminism (really feminization) has evolved into. While I can empathize with the feeling that Game can assume a plaintive tone at some blogs - particularly MRA oriented ones - contemporary Game is really a countermeasure to the social conditions feminist ideology has embedded in our culture for the past 50+ years.
One dynamic I encounter from guys who've experienced the 'community' in varying degrees is a desire to go back to their previously comfortable, ignorant bliss. The reality they become exposed to is too much to bear and they spit the red pill back up.
No person both frightens and disgusts me more than one who understands truth, but willfully opts for denial. It's not the desire to do so that disgusts me, I understand the desire, it's that there is no going back.
Even if you never read another post or blog and regressed back to your old ways, you'll still make the associations, see the signs of what others have analyzed in your own periphery, in women's and the world's behaviors and motivations, and you'll be reminded (even if subconsciously) of that truth, or at least the uncomfortable push to get at the truth.
There comes a point of conflict (or revulsion if you want) after a guy has been unplugged from the Matrix long enough where he begins to doubt himself and what he's seeing go on around him. All of the gender dynamics and the complex, but discreet, interplay between the sexes that's been such a mystery for so long starts to become apparent to him. The Neg Hit PUA techniques he never would've dreamed of attempting in his AFC days become so predictably reliable at sparking interest that it becomes depressing.
What's depressing isn't that a well delivered neg, or being Cocky & Funny, or harnessing the attractive Alpha Asshole energy could actually generate sexual interest in women, it's the principle behind them - the reason why they work - that prompts the internal conflict.
Are women, generally, more like this than not? So a guy experiments a little more, and tests other theories, and discovers that with some minor variations, yes, for the most part the principles are valid if not predictable. This then becomes a real tough pill to swallow, especially when you consider ideas like the ruthlessness of feminine hypergamy. It's very despairing, almost nihilistic, to a man fed on a steady diet of the flowery tropes of feminization for the better part of a lifetime. It's very hard to measure oneself up and adjust to a new understanding of how women think and behave.
"Women are really not as bad as these misogynists, these bitter, burned men would all have us believe. They're shallow and soulless to think women are all out to get them. They over-analyze everything when they should all just be themselves and let fate or some divine force pair them up with their soul mates.
I've heard all of these regressive rationales from boys as young as 14 to men as old as 75. It's a comfortable ignorance to believe that things are just unknowable and beyond one's control or efforts to really understand.
Hypergamy
Chapter 9 map for Hypergamy.
9.1 Opening
Martyrdom is the ultimate expression of social proof.
After I'd finished my Chivalry vs. Altruism post, I had to pause for a moment to consider the impact of ' women & children first ' as an operative social convention. Even before the overt rise of the feminine imperative, this female protectionism was in effect, and I'm fairly certain that this was a result of our primal hind-brain wiring to protect our families. Most higher order animals have evolved this instinct so I don't see that as much of a stretch.
9.2 Tits for Tat
In its rawest form, the sexual marketplace of our early ancestors would've been one where feminine hypergamy and Alpha dominance would've been more or less in balance.
As our species began to socialize, collectivize and cooperate, our earliest social conventions would've revolved around the environmental prompts and biological cues that were essential to the survival of their more feral ancestors.
The earliest form of proto-Game would've been a sexual quid pro quo. Can't figure out how to seduce that hot, hunter-gatherer woman in the tribe? Save her ass from being torn limb from limb by a saber tooth tiger and she'll reciprocate her gratitude with open legs. In other words, risk your life and women will reward you with sex in gratitude.
It's such a primal, male-deductive-logic principle that's worked so successfully, for so long, that social contingencies were evolved to both mitigate it and exploit it. Don't believe me? Promise a young middle eastern girl 70 virgins in heaven and see if she'll strap explosives to herself.
All of this kind of brought me around to thinking about the psychological 'software' that's been evolved into our species as a result of environmental adaptations of the past. In War Brides I go into detail about the Stockholm Syndrome women seem to have an inborn propensity for, which logically makes them predisposed to abandoning emotional investments more readily than men.
Likewise, men have evolved into the disposable sex as a result of that same feral past. in the present environment it's very easy for men to draw upon ethical indignation about our disposable status, but it's not primarily due to social influences. To be sure, social influence has definitely exploited men's disposability, but the root of that devaluation (in contrast to women's) really lies in our evolutionary past and our biological make up.
As socialization and acculturation progressed, so too did the social rationales for men's disposability. It became honorable to sacrifice oneself, ostensibly for a greater cause, but subversively as a means to recognition.
Martyrdom is the ultimate expression of social proof.
9.3 Appreciating the Sacrifice
Unfortunately, as is women's biological imperative, once a man's martyred himself women seek a suitable substitute within the week.
The inability of women appreciating men's sacrifices isn't an issue of who's better than who, it's merely an observation of facts and corollaries.
"Yeah Rollo, it's pretty fucked up that women have some inborn ability to 'switch off' their emotions for you in favor of a higher SMV male… "
You're right it's pretty messed up. It's also unethical, insincere and duplicitous when you also consider the planning involved in dissociating her emotional investment in favor of a new investment; but all of these are social conditions we apply to the underlying mechanic.
We can also apply principles of cowardice and betrayal to men who refuse that sacrifice in favor of self-preservation, but these are qualification of social conventions that we establish as a culture.
The biomechanics are what they are, irrespective of the social paint we color them with. It's not that women lack an intellectual capacity to appreciate men's sacrifices, it's that this isn't their evolved psychological predisposition.
In English this means evolution has prepared her socially and psychologically for his sacrifice, and readies her to move to a better provisioning should one present itself in her surroundings.
Ravenous wolves tearing apart an elk aren't evil; they're doing what nature has prepared them to do in order to survive.
Reader Nas had an interesting question regarding female duplicity:
"Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schema that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities.
Can you please expand on this Rollo? I find it fascinating.
OK, baton down the hatches, we're heading for dangerous waters. What I'm getting at here is suggesting that women's propensity for solipsism is a psychologically evolved mechanism.
To really grasp this you need to understand women's brain function and chemistry. I'm not going to get too detailed in this, but suffice it to say numerous studies show that a female brain is hard-wired for emotional response and communication on a more complex level than men.
Given the harsh realities that women had to endure since the paleolithic era, it served them better to psychologically evolve a sense of self that was more resilient to the brutal changes she could expect be subjected to.
Anxiety, fear, guilt, insecurity are all very debilitating emotions, however it's women's innate psychology that makes them more durable to these stresses. Statistically, men have far greater difficulty in coping with psychological trauma (think PTSD) than women.
On the face of it you may think that men's better ability to rationally remove themselves from the emotional would make them better at coping with psychological trauma, but the reverse is actually the case. Women seem to have a better ability to accept emotional sacrifice and move on, either ignoring those stresses or blocking them entirely from their conscious awareness.
Stockholm Syndrome is far more pronounced in female captives (the story of Jaycee Duguard comes to mind), why should that be? Because women's peripheral environment dictated the need to develop psychological mechanisms to help them survive. It was the women who could make that emotional disconnect when the circumstances necessitated it who survived and lived to breed when their tribe was decimated by a superior tribe.
Men are the disposable sex, women, the preserved sex. Men would simply die in favor of a superior aggressor, but women would be reserved for breeding.
Now, here is where I'll step off the diving board and into the theoretical. It's my purview that a lot of what men would complain are duplicitous acts of indifference towards them are really rooted in this innate feminine solipsism.
That's a bold statement, I realize, but I'd argue that what men take for inconsiderate indifference in a break up or in ruthless shit tests is really a woman tapping into this innate, self-preserving solipsism.
Add to this an acculturated sense of female entitlement, social conventions that excuse this 'duplicity', and a constant misdirection of intent by women themselves, and you come to where we are now.
Ever wonder why it is a woman can 'get over you' so quickly after a break up from a relationship you'd thought was rock solid for so long?
After reading all of this I can understand if anyone thinks this is a very nihilistic observation. Let me be clear, this dynamic is real by order of degrees for individual women.
Also, we are dealing with subconscious elements of her personality here, so it would come as no surprise that feminine solipsism wouldn't be cognitive for most women - thus offensive and denied.
9.4 Women's Sexual Pluralism
In a study I linked by Dr. Martie Hasselton there was a very salient point that kind of gets passed up since the focus of that social experiment was more about isolating variables in women's physical preferences for males.
According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring.
From a woman's perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).
Over the course of a woman's life the priorities and criteria a she holds for a 'suitable' mate fluctuate in response to the conditions she finds herself in. The criterion for short term coupling are much easier to demand when a woman is in her peak fertility phase of life and thus places these prerequisites above what she would find more desirable for a long-term pairing.
Thus it follows that as a woman exceeds or is outclassed of her previous SMV, her priorities then shift to an attraction for more intrinsic male qualities. For the short-term strategy, quick impulsivity and gratifying sensation take precedent.
The dirty little secret to all of this is that although a woman may abandon one strategy for another depending on the phase of life she's in, nature has seen fit to make sure she never quite abandons one for the other completely.
This is a very uncomfortable truth for contemporary women in that it exposes the underpinnings of a great many feminized social conventions intended to misdirect men in an effort to maintain superiority in sexual selectivity and effecting these strategies.
Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.
9.5 Biomechanics
An even more uncomfortable truth is that women's pluralistic sexual strategy is literally written into their genetics. In a woman's sexual peak, across her ovulatory cycle she will tend to seek out High-Testosterone cued Alpha Men to pursue for her short term breeding strategy during her pro-phase of ovulation.
I'm elaborating on the genetic aspects here because I think it's important for men to understand the biological mechanics of women's sexual strategies in a broader scope. I endure an endless stream criticism for implying that women are selective sluts.
As I've said before, all women have the capacity to throw caution to the wind in order to pursue her short term sexual strategy. Right place, right guy, right ovulatory phase, I was drunk, he was cute and one thing led to another,..
Due to the cyclic nature of women's sexuality it's a misnomer to think that "women are just as sexual as men", however, to the importance of sexual selectivity dominance, women are much more sexual than most men are led to believe.
The key is understanding that women want to be sexual on their own terms as their cycle dictates.
9.6 NAWALT
Here is a tip - level headed girls who are intelligent have told me they don't want to get fake breasts, even when they're an A cup. Also some girls prefer to take it a step slower.
This was from a guy. I used to believe this, until I understood the fundamentals of female hypergamy.
However, observably and predictably, their behaviors and choices don't bear this out. On the contrary, their behaviors prove the validity of female hypergamy even in the personalities of what we'd consider the most virtuous women.
Without all the social pretense, on the most root level, women are keenly aware that men's primary interest in them is fucking - everything else is ancillary to sex.
9.7 The Truth is Out There
Almost a year ago Ferd over at In Mala Fide wrote a very eye-opening post about what appears to be an endemic of online Self-Shooters - millions of unprompted, unsolicited young women shooting and posting nude and semi-nude pictures of themselves from a smart-phone. Just image search Google keyword "self shots", you'll get the idea.
Have a look at the sheer volume and frequency with which average women will voluntarily become sexual. Are they all sluts? How many of these women have uttered the words " I want to wait so I know you want me for more than sex?" How many of these women would make great wives in 5-10 years? How many of these women are already (or have been) wife material?
Most girls will go through an experimental phase at least. I don't think that makes them sluts, necessarily. Depends on degree.
I half agree with this. There is most definitely a phase of life where women will opportunistically leverage their sexuality - usually this is mid-teens to late 20s, but you have to also take into consideration why this sexual attention is such an urgency as well as being so rewarding for a woman in this phase.
I'm also compelled to point out that women in their 30s, 40s and even 50s will still "slut it up" and seek that sexual attention if their conditions dictate that they must return to that agency. Again, refer to the self-shots phenomenon; not all of these girls are 18 y.o. misguided youths experimenting with their sexuality for the first time.
The point I was making is that the "quality woman" meme is entirely subjective to the sexually strategic conditions that a woman finds herself in. As per usual, guys would like to make their necessity a virtue and define whatever is working for them currently as an ideal situation without considering the factors that contribute to it or would radically change it if those conditions were altered.
9.8 Now What?
So where does this leave a Man? I think it's determined by where you are yourself in life and what your expectations for yourself are. If you're young and just beginning to find your footing in the SMP then I'd advise spinning plates and enjoying yourself, but with the understanding that you are learning from experience. Maybe that's as far as you want to (responsibly) go, or maybe you entertain the idea of becoming monogamous at some point.
The most common words hear newly divorced men utter is some version of "I never saw this coming in my wildest imagination, we were married for 20 years, we have 4 kids, how could she be over me so quickly?" A lack of understanding the basics of hypergamy is exactly why men are blindsided.
Hypergamy doesn't care how great a Father you are to your kids.
Hypergamy doesn't care how you rearranged your college majors and career choice in life to better accommodate her.
Hypergamy doesn't care how inspired or fulfilled you feel as a stay-at-home Dad.
Hypergamy doesn't care that you moved across 4 states to accommodate your long distance relationship.
Hypergamy doesn't care how 'supportive' you've always been of her decisions or if you identify as a 'male feminist'.
Hypergamy doesn't care about the sincerity of your religious convictions or aspirations of high purpose.
Hypergamy doesn't care about those words you said at your wedding.
Hypergamy doesn't care about how you funded her going back to college to find a more rewarding career.
Hypergamy doesn't care how great a guy you are for adopting the children she had with other men.
Hypergamy doesn't care about your divine and forgiving nature in excusing her "youthful indiscretions."
Hypergamy doesn't care about your magnanimity in assuming responsibility for her student loans, and credit card debt after you're married.
9.9 Hypergamy doesn't care if "he was your best friend."
Hypergamy doesn't care about the coffee in bed you bring her or how great a cook you are.
Hypergamy doesn't care about all those chick flicks you sat through with her and claimed to like.
Hypergamy doesn't care about how well you do your part of the household chores.
Hypergamy doesn't care about how much her family or friends like you.
Hypergamy doesn't care if you think you're a "Good" guy or about how convincing your argument is for your sense of honor.
Hypergamy doesn't care whether the children are biologically yours or not.
9.10 Hypergamy doesn't care if "she was drunk, he was cute, and one thing led to another,.."
Hypergamy doesn't care how sweet, funny or intellectual you are.
9.12 Hypergamy Doesn't Care
When I started in on the Hypergamy doesn't care,.. post I knew it was going to come off as some unavoidably deterministic rant about the evils of hypergamy.
That post was born out of all the efforts I've repeatedly read men relate to me when they say how unbelievable their breakups were. As if all of the investment, emotional, physical, financial, familial, etc. would be rationally appreciated as a buffer against hypergamy.
For men, this is a logically sound idea. All of that investment adds up to their concept of relationship equity.
That isn't to say that women don't take that equity into account when determining whether to trade up or in their choice of men if they're single, but their operative point of origin is always hypergamy.
This dynamic is exactly the reason the surrogate boyfriend, the perfect nice guy orbiter who's invested so much into identifying with his target, gets so enraged when his dream girl opts for the hot asshole jerk. She's not making a logical decision based upon his invested relational equity.
This is a really tough truth for guys to swallow, because knowing how hypergamy works necessarily devalues their concept of relational equity with the woman they're committed to, or considering commitment with. Men's concept of relational equity stems from a mindset that accepts negotiated desire (not genuine desire) as a valid means of relationship security.
There are a lot of fluffy little pieces of interpretive Alpha fiction extolling the virtues of Beta men (who are told the y are the real Alphas only without teeth, pee sitting down and only say sweet things about girls) Irony aside, these female authors still fall prey to two fallacies in their pleas for a better Beta.
The first is as discussed above; the hope or the realistic expectation that women's hindbrain hypergamy can be sublimated in favor of a rational cognitive decision making when choosing with whom to spread her legs for, much less settle down with. The limbic influence hypergamy has over women's decision making processes is a constant subroutine playing in the background.
This then leads into the second fallacy which presumes relationship equity - even the potential for that equity - will make the life time commitment to a "he'll-haffta-do" Beta endurable while repressing her innate hypergamy. Hypergamy doesn't care about relational equity. If it's a consideration at all in a woman's decision making process, it's only for comparative purposes when assessing risk motivated by hypergamy.
All of that may sound like I'm excusing men from the equation, I'm not. When men progressively become more aware of their sexual market value, the better their capacity develops to assess long term investment potential with women.
As this relates to men, most spend the majority of their teens and 20′s pursuing women, following the dictates of their biological impulses, and to varying degrees of success learn from experience what really seems like women's duplicity or fickleness. So it comes as a breath of fresh air for the average (see Beta) guy to finally encounter what he believes is a woman who's "down to earth" and seems genuinely concerned with hearth and family at age 29.
There's a new breed of White Knight in the manosphere who love to enthusiastically promote the idea of rigorously vetting women as potential wives. It sounds like virtue.
For serial monogamists playing the 'Good Guy' card, it sounds so satisfying to lay claim to having experience and integrity enough to be a good judge or authority of what will or will not do for his 'exacting standards'.
This is really a new form of Beta Game; "look out ladies, I've been through the paces so if you're not an approximate virgin and know how to bake a hearty loaf of bread, this guy is moving on,.." and on, and on, and on.
Know this right now, no man (myself included) in the history of humanity has ever fully or accurately vetted any woman he married. And certainly not any guy who married prior to the age of 30 or had fewer than 1 LTR in his past.
Right about now, I can hear the "wow, that's some pretty raw shit there Mr.
Bear this truth in mind, you do not buy into a good marriage or LTR, you create one, you build one. Your sweet little Good Girl who grew up in the Amish Dutch Country is just as hypergamous as the club slut you nailed last night. Different girls, different contexts, same hypergamy.
9.13 Relational Equity
"Hypergamy states that a woman seeks a man of higher status than herself for marriage. Nothing less, nothing more."
The theory is more like this, from what I have read. Hypergamy is a woman's natural (which is to say, genetically wired) preference for a higher status male-that is, higher status than herself and also higher status than the other men in her field of vision and also perhaps higher status than men she has known in the past and even (at the extremes) higher status than most men she can personally imagine meeting.
"Status" has a varied meaning in this definition. Certain things correlate with high status, for instance money, prestige, social standing, etc. However a man can have all of that and still be low status because of low status intra-personal behavior (i.e., needy schlumpitude). The highest possible status male would be rich, good looking, fit, well dressed, high social cache, high prestige job (preferably one which involves risk, physical risk being better than mere monetary risk), and also extroverted, dominant, the leader of his group of friends, able to command any social situation, and so on.
As to marriage, sure women want to marry up. But this does not exhaust the effects of hypergamy. Women can marry up-both intrinsically and in their own mind-and still ditch their catch because someone "better" comes along.
Also, when women are pursuing short and medium term mating, hypergamy has no less force. They always prefer the most socially dominant male they can get.
It's not all about marriage. It's about mate selection across the range of circumstances.
That, at any rate, is how I believe the manosphere understands "hypergamy."
Escoffier makes an astute analysis of Hypergamy in a much broader perspective than Susan's feminine definition-approved "researchers" are willing to recognize. On the fem-centric side we have Sue casually dismiss "Hypergamy" in this context as some fabrication of the Game-set and therefor not a legitimate analysis.
That the term Hypergamy should be so wantonly limited in its definition, and in such a way that it serves to deliberately confuse a better understanding of it as an evolutionary impulse on the feminine psyche, speaks volumes about the importance of maintaining its misunderstanding to the feminine imperative.
It's almost ironic that the collective feminine ego should even need to deign to recognize Hypergamy in the terms that it is cast as in Susan's default response. "Hypergamy states that a woman seeks a man of higher status than herself for marriage. Nothing less, nothing more." forces the feminine to at least begrudgingly accept that women are in fact basing their long-term commitment prospects on status (as defined by researchers), and not some ephemeral soul-mate, emotional precept.
While I wont argue the credentials of the researchers - I often acknowledge all of the same in other posts and comments - I will however make the point that the feminine interpretation (as is everyone's) is subject to bias.
In the evolving understanding of the motivators that influence inter-gender relations there are going to be terms that describe concepts. AFC's, Alpha, Beta, Hypergamy, etc. are all defined by the concepts they represent.
'Hypergamy' serves well in a much broader capacity, but should the feminine imperative find that broader definition threatening to its purpose it will casually dismiss it as illegitimate. The real question then is, why would that concept be threatening to the feminine?
9.14 The Conspiracy that Wasn't
One issue many of my critics have is that in exposing these inconsistencies, these operative social conventions and the latent purposes behind them, my writing (really most of the manosphere) seems to take on a conspiratorial tone. I can fully appreciate this, and it might shock a few readers to know that I reject much of the popularized MRA (men's rights activists) perspective in this respect.
and this is exactly why what I outline on my blog is so pervasive.
There doesn't need to be a unitary group of 'anti-men' bent on some melodramatic goal of world domination; because this feminized ideal is already embedded in our socialization. Fem-centrism i s our collective social consciousness.
It doesn't need a centralized directorship because the mindset is already so installed and perpetuated by society at large it's now normalized, taken for granted and self-perpetuating. AFCs raising AFCs leads to still more AFCs.
What's to question, especially when calling attention to the feminization dynamic leads to ridicule and ostracization?
So to answer the conspiracy question; no, there is no Illuminati shadow conspiracy and that's exactly what makes feminization the normalized and overlooked default.
Paradox on the SoSuave forum had an interesting question after reading War Brides:
I've seen it mentioned here in passing but I would like to know how women handle regret.
How do they handle decisions that may affect their destiny?
Seeing someone on a train, bus, coffee shop, grocery store but not saying hello when the moment comes.
Meeting someone great at a party but not exchanging numbers.
I have seen low IL (interest level) changed to high IL but do women generally waver in their interest level all of the time?
Any observational answer I could offer here is going to have to be adjusted to account for women's inherent solipsism - everything is about her, and everything confirms her assessments as the default.
The root of this is grounded in women's constant, in-born psychological quest for security. Hypergamy, by necessity, makes for solipsistic women in order to best preserve the survival integrity of the species.
9.15 Guilt and Regret
Using hypergamy as a woman's point of origin, this affects how women process regret. At this point I should note that guilt and regret are not cut from the same vine. You can feel guilty about something you did or didn't do, as well as feel regret for something you did or didn't do, but the two are not synonymous.
After you finish reading this bit check out the 'Missed Connections' section on your areas Craig's List. Read the differences in tone, vernacular and purpose of both men and women lamenting a missed chance at something they hoped might develop.
9.16 Women's Regret
Women's experience of regret depends upon the degree or intensity of the encounter in relation to their own conditions. I know that sounds like psycho-babble, but let me explain.
At the risk of coming off as shallow again, the fat chick who thinks she blew a shot at a Brad Pitt will regret it more than the HB 9 who happened to lose an "average" guy's phone number. I'm going to catch fire for this I'm sure, but it's really an autonomous response for human beings to make subconscious comparisons and employ a natural ego preservation. While its latent psychological function is to help us learn from experience, generally regret is painful, so our natural response is to defend against it.
So the debate is really how do women in particular process this reward valuation with regard to men? Again, I'll say it breaks down to subliminally recognizing their self-worth, modified by social affirmations and then comparing it with the value of the encounter.
Even semi-attractive women (HB 6-7) have a subconscious understanding that most inter-sexual encounters they have are mediated by their frequency - how rare was that opportunity? Meaning if a girl is constantly reinforced with male attention (guys asking her out all the time, social media influences, etc.) the rarity of any one encounter is compared against the frequency with which guys are hitting on her. This is female Plate Theory in action.
One requirement I have of most of the men (and women) I do consults with is that they read The 48 Laws of Power (The Art of Seduction is in the class syllabus as well). In the introduction author Robert Greene runs down the ethical implications of understanding and employing the various laws. If you look at the synopsis of the laws you can get an idea of how uncomfortable some of these laws will naturally make people feel.
Most people are conditioned to think that deliberate use of power is inherently manipulative, self-serving and sometimes evil. In context this may or may not be true, but in so demonizing even the desire to understand power, not only do we inhibit a better critical understanding of power, but we also make the uneducated more vulnerable to the use of power against them.
I bring this up because, just as with the Laws of Power, there will be articles of Game, or foundations of inter-gender communication - complete with all of the underlying motivators - that Men (and women) will be uncomfortable accepting or employing to the point that it challenges some deep rooted emotional or ego investments.
I should also add here that even though you may not be comfortable in exercising a particular tactic or don't feel confident in approaching an interpersonal situation in some way, it is still vital that you do understand the concepts and methodologies behind why those laws, principles, techniques, attitudes, etc. do work. You may have personal reasons for not wanting to involve yourself in some particular aspect of Game, but it's imperative that you fully acknowledge the mechanics behind that aspect before you decide it's not something you can employ.
9.17 Half the Battle
The primary (though not exclusive) focus of my blog has been devoted to the critical analysis of the mechanics behind inter-gender dynamics, Game-practice, Game-theory, social and evolutionary psychology just to name a few.
"This is brilliant stuff Rollo, but how do I use this to make my life better with the next girl I sarge, etc.?"
This is a common desire from my readership, and the best I can offer is Knowing is Half the Battle. One size doesn't fit all for everyone in Game or inter-gender relations.
It's for exactly this reason I spend more time and critical thought on the foundations and functions of gender dynamism than pick up artistry. Game is psychology, sociology, economics, biomechanics, evolution and politics. Game is far broader than simple tricks and techniques.
9.18 Head in the Sand
Sweetening the poison doesn't make it any less deadly.
I can remember a time in my mid-20s working as a stage tech for a casino cabaret show. The magic act I set up and struck every night involved a Bengal tiger and a black panther.
The trainers would keep them at distance from the rest of the cast and crew, only myself and one other tech were able to get close since we were the ones wheeling them out in special cages at their particular point in the show.
I learned a valuable lesson from this when one night I was wheeling the panther out to the curtain. She was in what was basically a reinforced acrylic aquarium on casters with a velvet cloth draped over it. A few minutes before my cue I'd thought the drape was falling to one side and lifted it to even it out. It was then that I was face to face with this "pet" in nothing but faint stage lights and about 4 inches of transparent acrylic between us.
It's a mistake (and sometimes a fatal one) to ignore what you know is just under the surface. It's comforting to believe that you've got a special connection, and while the conditions are right, you'll preserve a relationship based on mutual trust and shared affinity. The flaw is in believing that trust, and kinship is unconditional; that the underlying feral motivators are subdued to the point of being inconsequential.
You know better, but the desire for that connection is so strong that you marginalize the natural impulses into feel-good rationalizations. Every divorced man I know has uttered some variation of "I never thought she was capable of this." In their comfort they wondered how they dropped the ball, especially after having played by the rules for so long.
9.19 Play My Game
It is a far healthier approach to accept the laws of power, the laws of Game, red pill awareness, Hypergamy, etc. and fashion a life around an understanding of them than to convince oneself that they are an exception to them.
There are those who seek power by changing the game - by lowering the basketball hoops in order to better shoot a basket - but in 'leveling the playing field' they only succeed in changing the nature of the competition to better suit their individual abilities, neither improving the game nor themselves.
Then there are those who accept the game for what it is, they understand it and they master it (or at least attempt to do so).
Don't wish things were easier, wish you were better.
It's the aberration who seeks to legitimize her cheating at the game as the new way the game should be played. Shoot the arrow, paint the target around it, and you'll always get a bullseye.
The Iron Rules of Tomassi
Chapter 10 map for The Iron Rules of Tomassi.
10.1 Iron Rule of Tomassi #1
Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who's frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.
The concept of "frame" is yet another ephemeral idea that had need of a term in the very beginnings of the great masculine awakening that's become the 'community'.
In psychological terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced.
The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we're painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame.
One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is not power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who's 'reality' in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender's internalized concept of frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you're operating in hers.
10.2 Pre-LTR Frame
Often I'll see forum posts or blog comments lamenting some loss of frame - "Lost the frame, how do I get it back?"
A lot of times guys believe that because a woman initially gave them indicators of interest (IOIs) or was 'really into them' in the beginning that they had 'frame'. This is another unfortunate misconception about frame - and I partly blame the PUA culture for it - but frame is not interest level (IL). Simply because a woman is attracted to you does not mean she's ready to 'enter your reality'. Her entering your frame may become a byproduct of that attraction, but it by no means guarantees it.
Most Game incongruities develop around a guy's inability to establish frame and opting in to a woman's frame. What's ironic is that on a base level, we understand frame imbalances instinctively. If you feel like you're being led on, or being made to wait for sex, you're operating in her frame.
Ideally, you want a woman to enter your reality. Her genuine (unnegotiated) desire for you hinges upon you covertly establishing this narrative for her. Famous men, men with conspicuous affluence and status, and men with overwhelming social proof have very little difficulty in establishing frame - they can't help but establish frame in a very overt fashion. A woman already wants to enter that world.
Unfortunately, you and I are not this Man, he's a feminine idealization.
However it's important to understand how hypergamy plays into establishing frame. The Man who impassively accepts women's hypergamous natures has a much easier time establishing frame from the outset.
The default pedestalization of women that men are prone to is a direct result of accepting that a woman's frame is the only frame. It's kind of hard for most 'plugged in' men to grasp that they can and should exert frame control in order to establish a healthy future relationship. This is hardly a surprise considering that every facet of their social understanding about gender frame has always defaulted to the feminine for the better part of their lifetimes.
In order to establish a healthy male-frame, the first step is to rid themselves of the preconception that women control frame by default. They don't, and honestly, they don't want to.
10.3 Post LTR Frame
In most contemporary marriages and LTR arrangements, women tend to be the de facto authority. Men seek their wives' "permission" to attempt even the most mundane activities they'd do without an afterthought while single.
These are just a couple of gratuitous examples of men who entered into marriage with the frame firmly in the control of their wives. They live in her reality, because anything can become normal. What these men failed to realize is that frame, like power, abhors a vacuum. In the absence of the frame security a woman naturally seeks from a masculine male, this security need forces her to provide that security for herself.
It is vital to the health of any LTR that a man establish his frame as the basis of their living together before any formal commitment is recognized.
Even very influential, professional, intellectualizing women still crave the right man to establish his frame in her life. They may fight it bitterly, but ultimately it's what will make for the best healthy balance she can achieve. There's a growing undercurrent of mid-life women questioning and regretting their past decisions to remain single into spinsterhood.
Gentlemen, you will establish frame in any monogamous relationship you have. You will enter her reality or she will enter yours.
10.4 Iron Rule of Tomassi # 2
Never, under pain of death, honestly or dishonestly reveal the number of women you've slept with or explain any detail of your sexual experiences with them to a current lover.
Rational reader Poker ran this one by me recently:
I've been seeing this girl and we've slept together a few times… Today, in bed, I got asked, "How may girls have I been with?" and "Why won't I be her friend on Facebook?"
Here's how I handled it - would love to know if you think this was handled properly… (using cocky-funny attitude)
Me: "I have some freedom of information forms in the car - you could fill one out and get your answer in 20 years."
Her: "Don't you want to know how many guys I've been with?"
The single most disastrous AFC move a man can make is to overtly describe past sexual experiences and/or give a number (accurate or not) to how many women he's been with prior to the one he's with.
This simple act, whether you offered the information or she dragged it out of you, always comes off as pretentiousness and is often the catalyst for an avalanche of emotional resentment, if not outright emotional blackmail from an insecure woman.
If a woman puts you on the spot by directly asking you for this information always sidestep this COVERTLY. C&F works wonders in this situation and still keeps the air of mystery and challenge about you.
Her: "So how many girls have you been with?"
Her: "Really, how many girls have you been with?"
Her: "C'mon, how many girls have you been with?"
You: "You know, I really lost count after 50″ (or something outrageous).
When a woman asks you this question she is seeking confirmation of what she already suspects - Neve r give her this satisfaction.
While this scenario may be fraught with potential disaster, it is also an opportunity to encourage her imagination and prompt some competition anxiety.
Her: "How many girls have you been with?"
You: "I have an idea, lets fuck and then you can tell me how many girls you think I've been with, OK?"
A lot of Game rookies think that since they've only been with 1 or 2 women in their lives what's the harm in open, honest, full disclosure?
They tend not to see the utility in keeping that information, or being ambiguous about it, plants a seed of competition anxiety and stokes her imagination.
Second, if she's your 9th then every girl up to 8 becomes a stamp in her collection to use against you in the first fight you have.
I should also add that this is the first question a BPD (borderline personality disorder) woman will ask you so she can feel horrible about herself for not measuring up to "your standards" and drag you into the emotional hell-pit with her.
10.5 Iron Rule of Tomassi #3
Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait.
When a woman intentionally makes you wait for sex you are not her highest priority.
Sexuality is spontaneous chemical reaction between two parties, not a process of negotiation. It's sex first, then relationship, not the other way around. A woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. She will fly across the country, crawl under barbwire, climb in through your second story bedroom window, fuck the shit out of you and wait patiently inside your closet if your wife comes home early from work - women who want to fuck will find a way to fuck.
If a girl is that into you she'll want to have sex with you regardless of ASD (anti-slut defense) or having her friends in the room videotaping it at a frat party. All women can be sluts, you just have to be the right guy to bring it out in them, and this happens before you go back to her place.
I'm probably going to ruffle a few PUA feathers here, but I've never been a proponent of breaking down LMR (last minute resistance) with a woman.
Now don't take this to the binary extreme and assume I mean the only good sex you'll ever have is a first night lay (FNL) with some tart who can't keep her legs closed. What I mean is that if you're still trying to figure out what the magic words are to convince some girl that she ought fuck you after 3 dates - or longer - you're in desire negotiation hearings counselor.
Once you get past a certain point in the waiting game, what once had the chance to be an organic, sexual desire becomes mitigated negotiation of a physical act.
As I stated, barring a physical inability, this is almost always because of an unmentioned agenda on her part.
In any circumstance, sex with you is not an urgency for her. If she's perceiving your value as high as it should be, she wont hesitate longer than a few dates to become sexual - and she certainly wont tell you she's making you wait.
One of the more frustrating situations I often encounter comes from guys who've been overtly told that they're being made to wait for sex until some circumstance or criteria is met for the woman. The standard filibuster (or loss-leader as the case may be) usually comes with the reasoning that she "needs to feel comfortable" before she has sex with a guy.
First and foremost, sex, by it's nature is uncomfortable. Sex that is motivated by mutual, genuine desire is a tense affair, fueled by testosterone, anxiety and urgency. When two people get together for a first dance (a precursor to copulation), it's rarely if ever an intimate slow dance.
Don't take this the wrong way, but sex is threatening. It needs to be, and you need to be considered a sexualized player in her personal sphere. Overtly agreeing to wait for her to become sexual is anti-seductive. It confirms for her that you aren't a sexualized player to her; an Alpha wouldn't wait for sex and she knows this.
Secondly, always remember why women resort to overt communications (the language of men) - so there is no, or less, margin that her message will be misunderstood. If a woman, point blank says, "I'm not having sex with you until X,Y, and Z happens", what is her medium telling you?
You want her to be so into you that she's willing to break the rules. The ideal situation is for her genuine passion to be so uncontrollable for you that she'd renounce her religion and throw her convictions to the wind to be with you. That might seem a bit dramatic, but you get the idea.
10.6 Rapport ≠ Comfort
A lot of "waiters" find all that a tough road to hoe. They want to stick it out and see if things "might develop", and NEXTing their 'waiting girl' seems a lot like throwing the baby out with the bath water after all the time they've invested in building what they think is rapport.
There's a lot of confusion about rapport, most of which is due to well meaning PUAs conflating rapport with comfort. It's a pretty esoteric term, but rapport is a connection; it's an implied trust between two acting agents who previously had never met or only have limited knowledge of each other.
Comfort comes from familiarity and predictability; all decidedly anti-seductive influences. And while comfort has it's own merits in interpersonal relationships, it is not the basis for genuine, passionate sexual desire.
Here's an easy illustration: As reported by both men and women alike, which of these circumstances provokes the most intense, memorable sexual experiences ? When a couple plans and arranges a romantic "date night" to 'keep it fresh' and reconnect? Or is it the 'make-up sex' after a horrible breakup, or narrowly averted breakup, where long dormant competition anxiety is brought back into being a very real possibility again?
10.7 Three Strikes
The problem inherent with coming up with hard and fast Game rules of engagement is that there's always going to be a caveat or special conditions for a guy's particular girl of focus at the time. Even when there's not, guys are prone to think "there's something special about this one." Part of the reason that Plate Theory is integral to Game is that it encourages Men to disabuse themselves of their previous Beta impressions of each woman they accidentally drew interest from as some unique little snowflake.
10.8 Risk & Reward
In Game, there is a subtle balance that needs to be recognized between risks of over-investing in a particular woman with regards to practicality and not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water and losing on a potentially rewarding opportunity. Women, as is particular to their own Game, will naturally come down on the side of casting doubt on a man's valid assessment of a woman's potential value, both in long term perspectives and potential sexual satisfaction.
The short version is that it's not in women's best sexual-strategy interests for a man to have sexual options. Women's sexual strategy is very schizophrenic - ideally women want a Man that other women want to fuck, but in order to assess his sexual market value to other women he's got to have exercisable options for her to compete against, or at least display indirect social proof to that effect. So, she needs to limit his options while simultaneously determining he has those options.
10.9 Pragmatism
In light of understanding women's sexual strategy, it's important for Men to adopt a mental schema of pragmatism - in the SMP you're really another commodity in hypergamy's estimation. I realize the difficulty most guys (particularly younger guys) have with mentally training themselves for thinking this way, so let me state that I'm not suggesting you kill your romantic, artistic souls in favor of cold calculations. In fact it's vital you do keep that side of yourself intact for the survival of any future relationship and a more balanced human experience.
Hypergamy doesn't care if you're a great, poetic soul. Hypergamy doesn't care about your most sincere religious devotions. Hypergamy doesn't care if you're a great Father to your kids. Hypergamy seeks its own level, it wants the best commodity it's capable of attracting and maintaining.
I had a lot of shit slung at me when I initially offered up the third Iron Rule. I had the predictable feminine doubt doctrine lobbed at me in response from the beginning.
Put it this way, with just average Game, in 3 dates you should be able to determine if her desire level is high enough to want to fuck you.
In 3 dates you'll know if her desire is genuine or if it's mitigated by something else - another guy in rotation, sexual hangups, filibustering, she's in the down phase of her menstrual cycle, etc.
In 3 dates you'll have had sex or you'll have had the "I wanna wait / I need to be comfortable talk."
If you have sex on the 1st date or a same-night-lay, in all likelihood she's really hot for, and into, fucking you based on physical criteria alone.
If you have sex on the 2nd or 3rd date, she's into fucking you and probably wants a relationship, but she wanted to give you a token impression of her not being 'easy'.
If she fucks you after the 4th date, you'll do as her first alternate.
If you're sexless after 5-6 dates you've probably been at it for over 6 weeks and The Medium is the Message. NEXT.
10.10 Disclaimers
This rule has proven to be the single most contentious thing I've ever published on The Rational Male. Only my essays on the nature of Alpha has stirred up more controversy. For motivated, hypergamous reasons, my arguing for genuine sexual interest as an indicator of desire on a woman's part never sits well with women.
My counter to these arguments is generally based in women's observable, organic behaviors. While it may be ennobling to consider that a woman might want to be cautious with whom she has sex, women's biology and hypergamous nature puts that assertion to the test.
That's going to be a consistent paradox with this rule, but it doesn't make it any less tenable. Even for the more religious minded men, who's convictions compel them to chastity, the rule still provides them with a benchmark for genuine desire. As I outlined in Plate Theory, you don't have to be banging every girl on your roster, but those women should want to be banging you.
10.11 Iron Rule of Tomassi #4
Never under any circumstance live with a woman you aren't married to or are not planning to marry in within 6 months.
You are utterly powerless in this situation. Never buy a home with a girlfriend, never sign a rental lease with a girlfriend. Never agree to move into her home and absolutely never move a woman into your own established living arrangement.
I'm adamantly opposed to the "shacking up" dynamic, it is a trap that far too many men allow themselves to fall into. My fervor against this isn't based on some moral issue, it is, again, simple pragmatism. If you live with a woman you may as well be married because upon doing so every liability and accountability of marriage is then in effect.
I should also emphasize the point that when you commit (and it is a financial commitment) to cohabiting with a girlfriend you will notice a marked decrease in her sexual availability and desire. The single most common complaint related to me in regards to how to reignite a woman's desire comes as the result of the guy having moved into a living arrangement with his LTR.
"I the undersigned promise not to fuck any woman but this girl for a one year term."
She thinks, "if he wasn't serious about me, he wouldn't have signed the lease." Now all of that impetus and energy that made having marathon sex with you an outright necessity is relaxed.
Just don't do it. Relationships last best when you spin more plates or at the very least keep each other at arm's distance.
There was a time when the hip, counter-culture thing to do was flip the establishment the bird and cohabit with a girlfriend, sans the marriage contract. In the swinging post- sexual-revolution 70′s, feminism was more than happy to encourage the idea until it ran into the problem of making men financially accountable for all the "free milk" the cows were giving away.
Of all the reasonable excuses I've heard for men wanting to cohabit with their girlfriends, the most common is that they did so for financial reasons. He (or she) needed a roommate and why not one that they enjoy fucking?
That's the cover story, but underneath it there's the semiconscious understanding that it would be far more convenient to have a continuous flow of pussy as part of the utilities, uninterrupted by the formalities of having to go on dates or drive somewhere to get it. I can't say that, on the surface, this doesn't make perfect sense.
Shacking up, just as in marriage, affords a woman a reasonable sense of comfort. It becomes at least a marginal shelter from the competition anxiety that she had to endure while living on her own and dating a guy who still had at least the perceived option to be unpredictable. Not so in the quasi-marriage that living together dictates.
By the same reasoning, most AFCs view cohabiting as an ideal arrangement.
Men who are spinning plates, men with options, men with ambition, rarely see cohabiting as anything but a limiting hindrance on their lives. On some level of consciousness women understand this dynamic; guys with options (the Alphas they'd prefer) wouldn't consider cohabitation.
What's jarring for a woman is that she may start her living arrangement thinking she's found the elusive Alpha ready to commit, only to later find he was just a clever Beta who reverts back into his former, comfortable, AFC self after they sign the lease agreement.
Now all that said, what makes more sense? To live independently and enjoy the options to live unhindered with a live-in girlfriend, or move her in and have to deal with her every waking moment?
10.12 Iron Rule of Tomassi #5
Never allow a woman to be in control of the birth.
It's called birth control because someone is 'controlling' the birth.
There are presently 41 different types of contraception available for women, for men there are only 2 - vasectomy or a condom - your only line of defense against her 'choice', the only thing separating a man from a lifetime (not just 18 years) of interacting with the decider of altering the course of his life is a thin layer of latex.
Always have protection. I've had far too many guys hit me with the argument that they implicitly trust their girlfriends to be on the pill or whatever, and that she "doesn't want kids" only to be an unprepared Daddy nine month later after 'the accident'. The only accident they had was not being in control of the birth themselves.
Accidental pregnancy is practically a cottage industry now. For a woman without education (or even with) and without means, an 'unplanned' pregnancy may be a pretty good prospect, especially when every law and social expectation weighs in her favor. These are Professional Mommies .
10.13 Flush it
In 2002 the NBA issued a highly controversial and publicized warning to professional basketball players stating that players be advised to wear condoms when having sexual intercourse with women when on road games and to "flush the condom down the toilet" in order to dispose of the semen. This warning was the result of several paternity suits that year involving women these players had slept with by retrieving the condoms from the trash and 'self-impregnating' with the players semen.
To what degree is protection implicitly implied? If a man does everything in his power to avoid a pregnancy (barring abstinence or a vasectomy) and can prove his intent and the woman still becomes pregnant, even by fraud, the man is still liable for that pregnancy. Women are 100% protected and men are 0% protected.
A lot of guys would like to make a moral issue of this but it's not a question of right or wrong, it's dealing with the facts of what is in the environment we find ourselves in today. The fact of the matter is that unless men use prior discretion and take responsibility for the birth 'control', not allowing a woman to be solely responsible for it, he is 100% powerless.
Mothers want to be Mothers, otherwise they'd decide not to be. Single Mommies are far too common an occurrence to bet the odds with the rest of your life.
The sexual revolution had far more to do with the development of hormonal means of birth control than the legalization of abortion. Condoms have been around since before World War II, but even in the Baby Boom there were far less unwanted pregnancies or single motherhood than after the advent of the pill.
Abortion rates skyrocketed in the decades after estrogen based birth control was developed, thus prompting a need for legal and clinical regulations of abortions as well as reforming paternity laws in the 70s.
And now even with the vast variety of birth control methods available to women today and 30+ years of safe medical abortions, we still see an increase in single mother families and abortion rates.
In fact the single mother birth rate has climbed (adjusted for population) since a leveling off in the late 80s and abortion is just as popular as ever even when new methods such as the 'morning after pill' and RU286 are readily available.
This isn't a scientific problem, it's a cultural one. Mothers want to be Mothers. Men are only Fathers when a woman decides this for him even in the happiest of marriages.
10.14 Controlling the Birth
It's a much different task to put on a condom in the heat of the moment (reactive) than to simply swallow a pill in the morning (proactive). It's arguable what the more difficult task is, to remember to take a pill in the morning or to apply a condom at the appropriate time.
Taking her birth control is up to her and rarely would a guy be certain on a daily basis that his partner was faithfully taking her pill. In fact to even ask about it would be presumptuous and bordering on rude if it's a casual encounter. When a man and a woman fail to take the precaution of putting on a condom they're both aware of it.
The obvious answer is to put men in control of the birth - wear a condom.
Forgive me for belaboring the point, but there are no accidental mothers. Consider fertility statistics and that it takes a considerable amount of negligence for a woman to miss several pills on a regular basis to 'accidentally' become pregnant. One could also argue that even a couple engaging in condom-less sex could still be relatively confident that a woman wont get pregnant even if she's missed several pills regularly.
This is why I laugh at the accidental pregnancy excuse so common these days. If a woman wants to become pregnant she can do so with impunity and contrive any excuse she'd like about accidents, but the guy is an 'idiot' for not wearing a condom and taking responsibility for his actions, even if he's led to believe she's taking control of her contraception.
10.15 Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are fundamentally incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved by a woman.
Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.
This pull quote comes from Xpat Rantings blog. The discourse there is brief, but insightful:
"I really, really, really hope the myth that girls are the hopeless romantics gets kicked to the curb ASAP. Everyone needs to realize that men are the "romantics pretending to be realists" and women; vice versa."
I found this particularly thought provoking - Men are the romantics forced to be the realists, while women are the realists using romanticisms to effect their imperatives (hypergamy).
10.16 Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.
In its simplicity this speaks volumes about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.
Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.
In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can't actualize how a man would have himself loved by her.
Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love.
For the plugged-in beta, this aspect of 'awakening' is very difficult to confront.
It's very important to understand that this love archetype is an artifact from our earliest feminized conditioning. It's much healthier to accept that it isn't possible and live within that framework. If she's there, she's there, if not, oh well. She's not incapable of love in the way she defines it, she's incapable of love as you would have it.
The resulting love that defines a long-term couple's relationship is the result of coming to an understanding of this impossibility and re-imagining what it should be for Men. Men have been, and should be, the more dominant gender, not because of some imagined divine right or physical prowess, but because on some rudimentary psychological level we ought to realized that a woman's love is contingent upon our capacity to maintain that love in spite of a woman's hypergamy.
10.17 Men in Love
I once had a woman ask me this innocuous question in a comment thread:
"Can men really not tell when a woman doesn't love them?"
As would be expected, the male responses to this and her follow up comments ranged from mild annoyance of her naiveté to disbelief of her sincerity with regards to her "want to know." However, her original wonderment as to whether men did in fact know when a woman doesn't love them, I think, carries more weight than most guys (even manosphere men) realize.
Can men really not tell when a woman doesn't love them?
Why? Because men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is.
Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves.
All right, I keep hoping your rule #6 is wrong, but it hasn't proven to be. So is the big lie that men miss not that women can provide this, but that we don't invest this energy into fellow men? That we don't find men we can be vulnerable with, so that we are emotionally prepared for the trials that women will create in our homes.
Presuming this woman was genuinely confused (and I'm half-inclined to think she is) this is exactly the source of her confusion. Women's solipsism prevents them from realizing that men would even have a differing concept of love than how a woman perceives love.
I don't necessarily think it's a 'big lie', it's just a lack of mutuality on either gender's concept of love. If it's a 'lie' at all it's one men prefer to tell themselves.
10.18 Bridging the Gap
Later in the discussion Jacquie (who is one of the two female writers to make my blogroll) brought up another interesting aspect of bridging the lack of mutuality between either gender's concepts of love:
If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing?
As I was telling the first guy, it's more a lack of mutuality on either gender's concept of love. The original question about whether a man can determine when a woman doesn't love him goes much deeper than she's aware of.
So he finds a woman, who says and shows him that she loves him, but not in the manner he's had all this time in his head. Her love is based on hypergamic qualifications, performance, and is far more conditional than what he'd been led to believe, or convinced himself, love should be between them.
So he spends his monogamous efforts in 'building their relationship' into one where she loves him according to his concept, but it never happens.
It's an endless tail-chase of maintaining her affections and complying with her concept of love while making occasional efforts to draw her into his concept of love. The constant placating to her to maintain her love conflicts with the neediness of how he'd like to be loved is a hypergamic recipe for disaster, so when she falls out of love with him he literally doesn't know that she no longer loves him.
It took me a long time, and was a very tough part of my own unplugging when I finally came to terms with what I thought about love and how it's conveyed isn't universal between the genders. It took some very painful slap-in-the-face doses of reality for this to click, but I think I have a healthier understanding of it now.
If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this?
I don't think it's necessarily impossible, but it would take a woman to be self-aware enough that men and women have different concepts of their ideal love to begin with, which is, improbable. The biggest hurdle isn't so much in women recognizing this, but rather in men recognizing it themselves. So, hypothetically, yes you could, but the problem then becomes one of the genuineness of that desire.
10.19 Iron Rule of Tomassi #7
It is always time and effort better spent developing relations with new, fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to reconstruct a failed relationship.
Rollo, HELP! I fucked up big time and I want her back! How do I get her back?
Easily one of the most common questions I've fielded at SoSuave over the past 7 years has been some variation of "how do I get her back?" It's common for a reason; at some stage of life every guy believes that rejection is worse than regret. Lord knows I tried to recover an old lover or two in my own past.
Never root through the trash once the garbage has been dragged to the curb. You get messy, your neighbors see you do it, and what you thought was worth digging for is never as valuable as you thought it was.
Even if you could go back to where you were, any relationship you might have with an ex will be colored by all of the issues that led up to the breakup.
In other words, you know what the end result of those issues has been. It will always be the 800 pound gorilla in the room in any future relationship.
You or she may promise to never do something again, you may promise to "rebuild the trust", you may promise to be someone else, but you cannot promise to accept that the issues leading up to the breakup don't have the potential to dissolve it again. The doubt is there.
You will never escape her impression that you were so optionless you had to beg her back to rekindle her intimacy with you.
10.20 Iron Rule of Tomassi #8
Always let a woman figure out why she wont fuck you, never do it for her.
"Rollo, I'm newly Game-aware, red pill guy and I've been meeting girls with more and more success since my conversion, but I can't help the feeling that the really hot girls I want to get with a so out of my league.
An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors.
This is really the definition of hypergamy, and on an individual level, I believe only the most plugged in of men don't realize this to some degree of consciousness.
For hypergamy to sustain its dominant position as the default sexual strategy for our society, it's necessary for the feminine imperative to maintain existing, foster new, and normalize complex social conventions that serve it.
One of these social conventions that operates in the spectrum of the personal to the societal is the idea of 'leagues'. The fundamental idea that Social Matching Theory details is that "All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themselves." In a vacuum, this is the germ of the idea behind the 'leagues'.
The latent function of 'leagues' is to encourage men to filter themselves out for women's intimate approval.
As social conditions progress and become more complex, so too do men's ability to mimic the personal attributes of providership and security. In other words, lesser men become intelligent enough to circumvent women's existing sexual filters and thus thwart their sexual strategy. These ever increasing complexities made it hard to identify optimally suitable men from the pretenders, and women, being the primary sexual selector, needed various social constructs to sort the wheat from the chaff.
The concept of leagues is just one of these doctrines. Your self-doubt about your worthiness of a woman's intimacy stems from a preconditioned idea that 'you're out of her league'.
A lot of approach anxiety comes from your own self-impression - Am I smooth, hot, affluent, funny, confident, interesting, decisive, well-dressed enough to earn an HB 9′s attention? How about an HB 6?
I'm not debating the legitimacy of the evaluative standards of the sexual market place - it's a harsh, often cruel reality - what I'm really trying to do is open your eyes as to why you believe you're only meritorious of an HB 7. Looks count for a lot, as does Game, affluence, personality, talent, etc.
As I stated above the purpose of fomenting a stratified league mentality in men serves to autonomously filter the lesser from the greater men for women to chose from, however, it also functions to increase the valuation of the feminine as a commodity.
Like any great economic entity, the feminine imperative lives and dies by its ability to inflate its value in the marketplace. Essentially the feminine imperative is a marketeer. One of the sad ironies of this, and the last, century is that the feminine imperative has attempted to base women's SMP valuation on a collective importance to the detriment of the individual woman's SMV.
What I mean by this is that, as a collective entity women's sexuality cannot afford to be perceived as anything less than the more valued prize. If all vaginas are considered the gold standard then men's sexual default value will always be lower.
For further consideration lets assume that average men, most being varying degrees of Beta, are blessed with the 'miraculous gift' of an average woman's sexual attentions.
This is the intent of the League schema - to unobjectively predispose men to commitment with women who under objective condition couldn't enjoy the same selectivity. It's been postulated that for a healthy relationship to exist the Man must be recognized by the woman to be 1-2 points above her own SMV.
10.21 Gaming the League
All of the above isn't to say that there isn't a kernel of truth to the notion of leagues; it's just not the "truth" men have been led to believe.
Needless to say men have their own rating systems - most popularly the ubiquitously physical HB (hot babe) 1-10 scale.
Irrational self-confidence is a good start to circumventing and unlearning the concept of leagues; unlearning this conditioning being the operative goal. The Game-aware Man can actually use the concept of leagues to his advantage with enough guile.
When you approach a woman without regard to a league mentality or even a Zen-like obliviousness to it (ala Corey Worthington, the Alpha Buddha), you send the message that there's more to you than a feminine reality can control.
Just in the attempt of Gaming a woman obviously "out of your league" you flip the feminine script by planting a seed of doubt (and prompting imagination) about your perceived value. Doubt is a very powerful tool, in fact the very concept of leagues is founded upon men's self-doubt.
10.22 Iron Rule of Tomassi #9
Never seriously self-deprecate with a woman you intend to be intimate with.
Apologizing for a lack of Game isn't Game.
One disservice I think most men tend to overlook is an attitude of self-depreciation that they'll resort to as a means of engendering interest in a potential woman by attempting to play to her sympathies.
I actually wanted to call and talk to you tonight, but I just moved into my new place today and lost track of time and now its after midnight. Anyways, I was a complete tool the last time we talked. I thought about what you said to me, and I really have been lame lately. I think back to our first couple of "dates", and I realize what a complete and boring reject I was.
I hope we can start hanging out again, because I do enjoy your company. But I promise if we do, I will drink, relax, and not be such a wallflower. I also promise no more gay-ass text messages.
This was an actual email passed on to me from a young woman I counseled after she blew this guy off over the course of three dates, and is one of many emails and IM texts I've gone over time and again with women.
This is a direct manifestation of men being socially conditioned to recognize and acknowledge their weaknesses, and in confessing them they will become strengths, and ergo, attractions (since they mistakenly believe that doing so will make them "not-like- other -guys" and therefore unique).
10.23 Iron Rule of Tomassi #9
This is a Kiss of Death that you self-initiate and is the antithesis of the Prize Mentality. Once you've accepted yourself and presented yourself as a "complete douche" there's no going back to confidence with a woman.
Never appeal to a woman's sympathies. Her sympathies are given by her own volition, never when they are begged for - women despise the obligation of sympathy. Nothing kills arousal like pity. Even if you don't seriously consider yourself pathetic, it never serves your best interest to paint yourself as pathetic.
People seem to get confused about how self-deprecation really functions. I'm not suggesting that a Man take himself so seriously that he can't laugh at himself; in fact a brilliant tactic is to present a prevailing, ambient sense of seriousness, then admit to and laugh at whatever goof it was that removes you from it. Nothing endears a Man more to a woman than to think only she can break through your shell and get you to find humor in yourself.
deprecation, it's the "I'm a complete douche, but really I'm worth the effort" apologetic sense of deprecation. There is a marked difference between being pathetic and being able to laugh at yourself in good faith.
I'm not advocating that guys never own up to mistakes or wrongs they do; you should sensibly apologize in given situations depending on the conditions and do so appropriately, however self-depreciation is another mental schema entirely.
Humility is a virtue (up to a point), but it's simply not a virtue that a woman you're interested in will ever appreciate in the manner you think they will, and in fact often conveys the opposite intent.
If you are already involved with a woman, she may develop a socially mandated sense of appreciation, but again this is only up to the threshold of you trading her estimation of your confidence for your ability to address fault on your part.
That said, true self-depreciation is pervasive. Contemporary men have become so steeped in deprecation and male ridicule by popular media that it seems a normative way of attracting women.
The message is 'women love men who laugh at Men'. Thus, you have to be hyper-aware of it and unlearn it. You have to catch yourself in mid-sentence so to speak.
That's a strong impression you wont recover from easily if ever. Women want a competent, confident, decisive Man from the outset, not one who's self-image is that of a "complete douche" or even a partial douche. The stereotype of the quirky, but lovable guy who bumbles his way into a woman's heart may work for romantic comedies, but not in the real world.
All of this is not to say that it's wrong to recognize your own weaknesses and understanding when you're in the wrong. It's simply how you go about addressing it that's the point. There are plenty of ways to assume the responsibilities of fault that aren't self-depreciating. The easiest way is to always adopt the attitude that you're 'getting better all the time'.
Mythology
Chapter 11 map for Mythology.
11.1 Opening
Is loneliness a disease that necessitates a cure? If men could be made to believe so, think of the potential profit to be made from, and the potential for manipulation of, men.
The real test for a man is how he lives with himself, alone.
Precious few men ever truly allow themselves to be alone and learn real, singular independence and self-reliance. The vast majority of guys (see Betas), particularly in western culture, tend to transition from mother to wife with little or no intermission between.
The fear of loneliness is entirely too exaggerated in modern western romanticism. The popularized fear-mythology of becoming the "lonely old man who never loved" is the new 'old maid' myth made popular in an era when a woman's worth was dependent upon her marital status and (at least now) equally as false a premise.
I'm going to suggest that most AFCs, most feminized, conditioned males, like and embrace the lonely old man myth because it is a Buffer against potential rejection. Does that sound like a stretch? It shouldn't. When used from a feminized perspective this myth is most certainly a 'shaming' social convention with the latent function of getting men to commit to a feminine frame - "you better change yourself soon, or your soulmate might pass you by and you'll be lonely and destitute in your old age" .
It's really a triple whammy. There is the feminine reinforced fear of solitude. Then, the self-reinforced expectation of maturity or "doing the right thing".
Case example: I have a friend who is trapped in a passionless marriage with a woman, who's set the frame from day one. He'd like to come off as dominant with his male friends, but it's clear to most of our friends that his wife owns the frame of the marriage. Prior to meeting this girl our friend was a serial monogamist branch swinger. The LTR girl he'd been with prior to her ran the show in much the same way for almost 5 years.
His story was the classic one where a guy shakes off his old ways of thinking about women and dating, and almost unplugs from the Matrix, but fails to kill his inner AFC and slides back into his old Beta mentality once he'd secured another 'soulmate'. Here was a guy who'd spent more than half of his 20s in a miserable LTR who managed to briefly unplug for about 3 months before latching onto another ONEitis. Yet his reasoning was "I'm tired of the dating games.
The Myth of the Lonely Old Man is a Buffer against rejection. It's a hiding in relationships they're told they must constantly work to perfect, because of the fear of potential rejection.
The foundation of the myth is associated with maturity, and who's going to tell you not to be more mature? This is how we get the 'Kidult' social convention women like to trot out; "He'll never grow up!" The problem is that this lack of maturity is only paired with a Man's willingness to commit or not to commit to women's long term provisioning goals.
Don't buy into the powder-puff idea that if you don't find your mythological soulmate, or the ONE by the time you're 30 and ASAP you'll tempt fate and risk a life of quiet desperation.
Don't buy this lie. The man who is comfortable with himself and confident in his true independence is the one that women will want to be associated with and to share in it.
How you handle being alone and what you do with the opportunities that freedom allows is the real measure of a man. If you're single and 50 you STILL have options if you're only brave enough to explore them.
11.2 The Myth of Women & Sex
"Booty is so strong that there are dudes willing to blow themselves up for the highly unlikely possibility of booty in an other dimension. There are no chicks willing to blow themselves up for a penis." - Joe Rogan
One of the single most annoying tropes I read / hear from men (more so than even women it seems) is the "Women are just as / more sexual than men" canard. Nothing stops me in my tracks more abruptly than reading this line parroted back in some form by a self-effacing white knight trying to convince himself, hope against hope, that it could be true. This is a very effective feminine social convention, even internalized and spouted back by the likes of more than a few infamous PUAs.
Women are more sexual than men, but they are repressed due to society or a lack of "trust" with a guy.
Patently false. A healthy male produces between 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone a woman does. It is a biological impossibility for a woman to want sex as much as, or as often as men. Trust that when a woman says, "I don't understand why sex is so important to guys" she's speaking the literal truth. No woman will ever experience 17 times the amount of her own testosterone levels (barring steroids). Amongst it's many other effects, testosterone is the primary hormone involved with stimulating human libido.
Critics of this observation like to argue that, for female sexual response and arousal, testosterone isn't the only factor to consider. To which I'll agree, however it is the primary factor in sexual response. A woman cannot possibly understand what 12 to 17 times their present amount of testosterone could feel like without steroid use. In fact the first effect female bodybuilders report when cycling anabolic steroids is a 100 fold increase in sexual interest and libido.
Women's sexual desire is also cyclical. Even at the peak of her ovulatory cycle, when she's at her horniest, she'll never experience what men do 24 hours a day.
Like men, women rely on testosterone to maintain libido, bone density and muscle mass throughout their lives. In men, estrogens simply lower testosterone, decrease muscle mass, stunt growth in teenagers, introduces gynecomastia, increases feminine characteristics, and decrease susceptibility to prostate cancer.
I also understand that female sexuality functions differently than male sexuality, but this only reinforces my point. Women's sexuality is cyclic, not only on a monthly schedule, but also over periods of a lifetime (menopause, and peak fertility for instance). There are periods over a month and a lifetime where sexual desire waxes and wanes, (healthy) men's stays relatively constant from puberty to about age 40.
It should come as no shock that post-menopausal hormone therapies use testosterone to boost women's flagging libidos too. When women are at the peaks of their ovulatory cycles, low and behold they experience a sharp spike in testosterone levels in order to facilitate pregnancy and then it gets flushed out during menstruation.
Now the real question is, why would such a popular myth be such a useful social convention? Think about it. It sexualizes women, while not making them outright sluts.
It's a sexual selection convention. The fantasy is that women are really these wolves in sheep's clothing for the right guy. To an extent this is true. Studies do indicate that women in their peak fertility window do in fact aggressively seek out Alpha males for conventional sexual encounters, especially so during the proliferative phase of their menstrual cycles.
No self-interested Man is ever going to be encouraged to refute the idea that women are equally preoccupied with, equally aroused as, or equally desirous of sex as men are. We love the fantasy that women are secretly yearning for sex with us, if only society were more open and accepting of feminine sexuality. Yet, in the same breath we'll hear about how slutty and aggressive women have become in the fall of western society by the same guys.
Women of course love to encourage and reinforce this social convention because it sounds like empowerment in the face of patriarchal sexual oppression (yes, we'd be more sexual if you'd only allow us to you evil men), while at the same time tacitly acknowledging that, turns men into white knight sympathizers of the cause (i.e.
The point of my starting this topic wasn't to debate whether or not women are sexual at all - obviously they are - however it was my intent to draw attention to the canard that women (and their would-be male identifiers) would like everyone to believe, "women are just as / more sexual than men". No woman can make a realistic assessment about that unless she's had 12 -17 times her natural testosterone levels increased and lived in a man's biological condition.
Good girls are just bad girls who never got caught.
Allow me relate here a case study I counseled a friend on personally about 6 years ago. I have a very good friend, Rick, that I hired and work with. Though we started out as work associates he became one of my better friends and had the benefit of my personally having unplugged him from the Matrix. He was a good student (for lack of a better term), but in becoming so he went through a transformation process.
Unbeknownst to me Rick had entertained a flirtatious "friendship" with a semi-attractive PR girl we were working with for a while. He knew what I'd said about LJBF rejections and "playing friends" with women, so he left me out of the loop on the whole affair. He had "dated" her on several occasions, but beyond the infrequent "kiss while drunk" she kept him at arms distance using the standard filibuster techniques women classically use - "I'm not ready for a relationship", "I'm not looking for a boyfriend", "We're good friends", etc.
This all came to a head when one night she had to do some work with Aaron Lewis (yes, from Staind) while he was doing his solo acoustic act at our casino. To make a long story short, the PR girl ended up buzzed on this night and fucked Aaron Lewis' tour manager in a classic situation of right-Alpha, right-environment, right-conditions. Her mistake was in feeling the need to confess her actions to Rick who'd felt betrayed considering all the investment he'd put into doing what he thought was the right way to go about things.
This was of course when he consulted me and informed me of everything leading up to it, only now he was at an impasse. She apologized profusely to him and held out (once again) the olive branch of a LJBF rejection. He asked me what he should say, and it was at this point he took the initiative to tell her "no, we can't 'just be friends'." He did what I advised him to and he walked away from a woman for the first time in his life.
Now I'm exceptionally proud of Rick because, unlike most guys finding the true power of a takeaway, he stuck with it rather than being contented with her chasing him and then giving into the LJBF.
In addition he also came to understand the principle of understanding a woman, not by what she says, but by what she does (the Medium is the Message) - he learned the importance of reading behavior. Of course after about 6 or 8 months she stopped pursuing him "to be friends" and he has talked to her in the interim years, but the frame of their discourse has changed.
11.3 Good Girls
This girl, at every opportunity, loved to display her 'properness' and would always say she "wanted a man with a good heart" when asked what she looked for in a guy. She was very outgoing as befits a PR person, but at all times she presented herself as someone conscious of how people perceived her and her reputation. Hers was a classic case of basing estimations upon behavior above words. Biology trumps conviction - sexuality, for as much as we think we can, will not go unexpressed.
One of the trappings of a woman a guy perceives as a 'good girl' is that he'll have a tendency to pedestalize her by default. White Knights are a given, but even hardened PUAs are prone to want to read more into the personality of a 'good girl'.
"I just want a guy with a good heart" sounds so fairytale perfect and with just the right amount of naiveté applied, she comes off as a girl who truly believes Disney wishes really do come true. To guys with Game she's a jewel in the rough amongst the bitch-shielded mean girls that populate the new hook-up paradigm.
In this seminal work he begins by profiling the archetypes of seducers and amongst them we find our 'good girl' is really The Natural; a child like innocence that masks a seductive motive. You may be inclined to think of a good girl as a prude, but this is often in error.
The good girl's Game is built around playing to the 'Quality Woman' mythos that men harbor. They want to believe she exists among a sea of vapid, self-absorbed sluts looking to cash in before they hit the Wall. She's not the prudish Madonna and she's not the Whore of Babylon, she's the cute good girl somewhere in between.
Just like all men have some form of game, women have their own game. Since we live in a feminine defined reality, women's game is not considered subterfuge, it's simply how women are, or the feminine mystique.
The wise practitioner of Game knows what works best for him, but he must also be aware of the Game being used against him. One of the most important aspects of the principle of Amused Mastery is actually having the mastery to be amused.
For example, the operative goal of girl-game is to maximize hypergamy, this is a foundation of Game. So in knowing this, you can craft an amused response to any seduction methodology women use on you. The good girl is still looking for an Alpha, and will still stop the good girl car to get out and fuck him should the opportunity arise.
11.4 The Myth of the Good Girl
Popular culture likes to teach women and, by association, unenlightened men, that there is an innate biological clock inside each woman that slowly ticks down to a magical period where her maternal instincts at long last predispose her to wanting a child.
The concept of a biological clock sounds very convincing on the face of it - it's "biological", and when it comes to feminine social conventions, nothing convinces women more than their bodies, their selves.
Unfortunately, and as fate would have it, the hard science of biology often tends to crash headlong into feminine social conventions. Lo and behold many Women Underestimate Fertility Clock's Clang . In 2011 NPR aired an article of the same title.
A new survey finds a big disconnect when it comes to fertility. The age women think they can conceive a baby is far different from what their bodies are actually capable of.
What's the chance a 30-year-old can get pregnant in one try? Many thought up to 80 percent, while in reality it's less than 30 percent. For a 40-year-old, many assumed up to a 40 percent success rate. It's actually less than 10 percent.
Not only is the myth of the biological clock inaccurate in terms of when a woman should get pregnant, it's dangerously misleading in the odds of becoming pregnant.
"The first thing they say is, 'Why didn't anybody tell me this?'" says Barbara Collura, who co-authored the survey and heads Resolve, the National Infertility Association. She laments that no federal agency pushes this issue, and neither women nor their OBGYNs tend to bring it up.
"Let's be honest, women don't want to hear that they can't have it all," she says. "We can have a great job, we can have a master's degree, we don't need to worry about child-bearing because that's something that will come.
I wont argue that women actually possess maternal instincts, I will argue that their understanding of when they manifest has been deliberately distorted by a feminine- centric cultural influence. If women are "angry" about the revelation their inability or difficulty to conceive in their post Wall biological conditions presents, their anger is misdirected.
"I just feel like it's something else they lump onto women that we have no control over," says filmmaker Monica Mingo, who's blogged about her decade-long effort to conceive. She says the real issue is society at large, which is pushing back the age people are expected to settle down and have kids.
"You tell us your fertile years rapidly decline in your mid-20s," she says. "Well, if I'm not dating anyone, and I want to have a family, what's that information going to do for me?"
Well for one thing it might force you to come to terms with the course you want to set for your future life with an informed choice, rather than blaming it on so-called "Kidult" men when you do realize you want kids. I guess that's asking too much when you're in your prime party years at film school.
What were seeing here is a collision of hypergamy and feminine primacy smashing against the harsh reality of biology. The feminine imperative needs to create a new social convention to make this incongruent reality agree with it's doctrine.
If there were an actual biological clock, it was ticking its loudest when a woman was 22-24, not conveniently when she needs male provisioning the most, and when her sexual market value is in declination by her mid-thirties.
11.5 The Myth of the Biological Clock
"Your bulletproof Game and charming personality wont make you look any better when your shirt comes off."
Have two. Three is best, but if you only have one, Game is the most essential.
I realize that I'm heading into dangerous territory with this, but I maintain that looks are an integral part of attraction - sorry, that's a fact of life - but I've never stated that looks cancel Game.
The problem is with people who can only think in absolutes. It's always an either-or proposition; Game trumps physique or physique trumps game is horse shit. They're both important and play off each other. There are plenty of average looking guys who pull tail thanks to Game in spite of their looks, and there are also good-looking guys who pull tail without ever hearing what Game is.
Consider that greater than 66% of people in western society are overweight (33% are morbidly obese). So it stands to reason that 2/3rd of the guys seeking out the community in order to change their lives, outlook and sexual prospects are going to be struggling with obesity from the outset. Now also consider the preferred belief among guys that looks, at least, matter less than personality, Game, etc.
The first thing most men who were previously out of shape will tell you is the marked increase in attention they receive from women after they got in shape.
There is a popular misconception men adopt in thinking that "looks aren't as important for women" and that they're more forgiving of a few extra pounds if a guy is witty,
humorous and/or embodies some combination of the laundry list of nonsensical adjectives they place on their online dating profiles. This is the male version of the body image acceptance social convention women have been promoting themselves for the past 50 years. Don't worry about getting in shape; money, humor and confidence will make any woman swoon for you. If this were the case the Louie Andersons and Danny Devitos of the world would be swimming in top-shelf ass.
While this may seem like a male-specific social convention, guess again; it's actually a very calculated feminine convention. In terms of feminine breeding strategies and women's schedules of mating, it is far more advantageous for a woman to engage in short-term breeding strategies with Alpha men during the peak of her sexual viability when she knows there is a social structure ready to accommodate her long-term breeding strategy (i.e. provisioning) with future men.
In accordance with women's sexual strategies, women place an importance upon looks according to their phase of life. The priorities and importance of characteristics that women will consider prerequisites for intimacy shift as her life's conditions dictate.
14 - 24 years old: Looks are everything . Yes, some romanticism might help complete the fantasy, and Game is definitely a factor, but the priority for arousal is primarily Darwinian. Women will gladly overlook character flaws or a lack of assets in favor of fucking the physical Alpha while she approaches her own sexual apex.
25-30 years old: Looks are still of primary importance, but other factors are beginning to compete in significance as she becomes increasingly more aware of hitting the impending Wall. While she's still hot enough to command attention, her hypergamic priorities lean more towards the life time provisioning potential and parental investment potential a Man represents.
30-35 years old: Most single women in this demographic are in varying degrees of denial (aided by social conventions), but on some level of consciousness they realize that they're past their expiration date and securing a commitment is a progressively more difficult battle with every passing year. Looks lose precedent in favor of assets and status. Game and personality become more prominent, but the primary focus is catching up to the choices she made (or should've made) when she was about 28.
35-45 years old: She's well past her expiration date, hit the Wall and is, graciously or not, accepting the fact that she's used goods. Any notion of a list of requisites or priorities are a fond memory now. She may play the Cougar card in an ego protection effort. This may seem like she's back to her primary Looks focus in playing the Cougar, but again, on some level of consciousness she understands that younger Men are doing her the favor by fucking her and in no way expects more than a physical fling.
Changing yourself takes an effort. The greatest obstacle in change is the first one; recognizing and accepting that you need to change. This is where AFCs and Beta males chomp at the bit because they've been told for the better part of a lifetime to "just be themselves" and everything will go according to fate's plan.
But change takes effort and people are lazy. They want the quick fix; the magic pill that makes them happy, successful and sexually irresistible. So they flock to guys selling the best program that promises all that for a minimum of effort. Learning Game demands practiced effort, but it requires far less physical effort than improving one's body, and it's especially daunting for guys unaccustomed to working out.
There are countless "chubby chaser" websites dedicated to catering to this particular "fetish" for men, but not a single one exists for women, why? By that I mean there is a percentage in society of otherwise average, fit men seeking out obese women, yet the standard for ideal masculinity seems to remain constant for females by the lack of fetishes for obese males.
Why do you suppose this is? There has never been a "rubenesque" period for Men - where overweight men were consider the feminine ideal - in history. A muscular athletic build has always been the masculine standard.
Men define what is feminine and sexy for women, however the inverse is true in that women define what is masculine and sexy for men.
Yes, Game is vitally important, as is root level, dynamic personal change. I don't think I need to explain just how important this is. However, looks count , looks matter.
What I find amazingly ironic is that looks are one of the few areas of change that a Man has direct control over - his body. Barring physical disabilities, you have no excuse not to be in better shape. Why wouldn't you want the full package? Stop being so Goddamned lazy and accept that you'll need to exert some effort and sweat to make yourself more attractive and more arousing to women.
* Side Note: I should also point out that for as much as women will assert that a man's penis size is irrelevant to their sexual pleasure, often the first insult they'll hurl at a man in order to shame him is "I'll bet he's got a small dick!" You connect the dots.
11.6 The Myth of Male Looks
The manosphere has been awash in articles detailing the sexual marketplace (including my own) and the impact women's short-term vs. long-term sexual strategies have for them for as long I've been writing about gender issues (10+ years). These analyses range from the biological consequences to the insidious, life-damaging punishment a socialized feminine primacy (feminism) inflicts upon unassuming members of both sexes.
Yes, I'm guilty of cracking this topic more than once, but it bears repeating how feminism, equalism and the feminine imperative conspire to reinvent sexual market value for women.
In Navigating the SMV I graphed out my own rudimentary overview of how the SMP lays out, as well as sexual market values relative to each sex. Although I began a bit tongue in cheek, in all earnestness I attempted to visually plot out what a persons' life time-line might look like were he or she to have a 'God's Eye' perspective of when their SMV will be at it's apogee, when it builds and when it wanes.
This was an effort in defining a contemporary, realistic view of how sexual market value fluctuates for each sex.
What I didn't account for is feminization's influence on women's (and by association men's) collective understanding of their own SMV.
As if on cue, Team Red vents his frustration from a comment thread:
"Why should money even matter anymore to these women in the long-term when it seems like the majority of them have put their careers first and put marriage/kids off until later on in life?
I found this comment apropos since it sums up my thoughts on the Myth of the Biological Clock: Women want to be men. This is the legacy that a since-decayed feminist social impetus has imparted to the generations of both men and women who've come after the Gloria Steinem's got married themselves, dried up and blew away.
If a man can wait until his maturation develops, his achievements are more actualized and his SMV peaks at 38-40; equalism says "why shouldn't you Man-Girl?"
Whether it's in terms of Dom vs. Sub in sexually fluid relationships, or in terms of respect or social entitlement, Women want to be men. This is what 60+ years of feminization has taught women is valuable, and taught men to accommodate for. In fact men are 'lesser men' for not offering women a 'hand up' to manhood.
Hypergamy and women's innate psychologies naturally conflict with this socialization effort. Thus we have women expecting masculine equability while simultaneously feeling entitled to traditionally feminine courtesies and expectations.
So it should come as no shock that in a desire to be like men, a popularized parallel had to be socialized into women's collective understanding of SMV expectations.
11.7 Feminized SMV
By a combined effort of feminism, feminine primacy and its imperatives women have been socialized and acculturated to believe that their SMV profile encompasses and is synchronous with that of men.
I could have simply recolored the men bell curve from my previous SMV graph to illustrate the feminized redefinition of SMV, but that would be inaccurate.
One thing I did find a need to account for was the Myth of Sexual peak. As Team Red laments, and in my post Myth of the Biological Clock, this feminine defined delusion is deceptively close to women's post-Wall valuation. Since men's SMV generally peaks around 38, women needed a social convention that would also make their sexual peak coincide with men's.
11.8 Cracks in the Wall
For all its efforts to convince women of a feminized redefining of SMV, there are obvious cracks beginning to show in the social constructs designed to ensure a lasting feminine primacy.
The institution of gender primacy (masquerading as 'equalism') is largely, and grossly apparent, at odds with women's true sexual market valuation and its progression. Try as it may the feminine imperative has never had an effective counter for the biological motivations that drive SMV - as women age, feminine primacy becomes a victim of its own hypergamy.
Women are now realizing their true SMV isn't what feminization has convinced them of too late - one crack in the Wall. Another tact is to shame men for their unwillingness to participate in the SMP the feminine imperative defines for, and expect them to participate in.
That many a feminist writer can form a prosperous career and celebrity around her inability to come to terms with the conflict between her true SMV and the SMV model the feminine imperative has conditioned into her ego is an indictment of the scope to which the distorted, feminized SMV model has been insaturated into women and our culture.
11.9 The Myth of Feminine SMV
Generally people of either sex don't like to have love defined for them. The concept of love is loaded with subjectiveness, and not unsurprisingly you'll offend people's interpretations and sensibilities by trying to contain their idea of love in a defined box.
We see love in religious contexts, personal interpretations, philosophical essays, biological dynamics and a whole slew of other arenas, so it's very easy to understand how universally convoluted, manipulative, and yet also how binding and nurturing love can be according to how well, or how ill our concepts of love aligns with that of others.
In outlining (not defining) a male perspective of love in contrast to a female perspective it's necessary to understand how a man's understanding of love shifts as he matures. A lot of Rational Male commenters wanted to find the base root of that concept in their relationship with their mothers. As Freudian as that rings I wouldn't say it's a bad start. Men do in fact learn their first impressions of intimate, physical and nurturing love from their mothers, and this then forms the foundation of that expected love from their potential wives (or lovers).
That circuit gets printed before we learn to talk = before we are able to form abstract and concepts. It's a basic four piece, emotional / behavioral circuit.
There are many ways that circuit can be imprinted "wrong". One is to have the mom (or dads) on the receiving end, making the kid the giver. Other is having him owning the frame. Other is to have the mom (or dads) respond only when the kid acts out.
Your experiences from ages 12-21, of course helped forming you, because you're 35 now and this is a sum accumulative game.
I'm trying to locate the source of the pain, and is this: like a compass or a geometrical piece that wants to find equilibrium, the pain wants to find the "good" again (from the good the bad and the ugly), but it only knows to reach that "good" by balancing violently between the bad and the ugly and episodes of rage and if that doesn't work, splitting / self mutilation ( cutting out the undesired parts of you, your past, identity, emotions, people, relationships, blocking stuff out, etc)
It's a constant look out for the elusive "good" part of the dynamic.
[But] you weren't confident / self reassured about your needs and wants, because you were still negotiating how to even feel "good" and safe, so you didn't develop game nor saw girls / relationships for what they were - but you just added this to the previous unresolved mix, like, seeking the "good" (basic, maternal, paternal love where you're defenseless and you're intimately loved and taken care of and safe) from girls, mixing the defenseless and the sexual aggressive drive and the long time affection longing and the sense of despair of never feeling safe, etc.
From the moment we're born we realize love is conditional, but we want for it to be unconditional; our idealized state is unconditional love. To be a Man is to perform, to excel, to be the one for whom affections are freely given in appreciation and adoration.
On a base level it's this constant striving for that idealized love-state that helps us become more than we started as, but it comes at the cost of a misguided belief that a woman is capable of, much less willing to love us as we think is possible.
11.10 A Place to Rest
We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us.
If we do, we soon are no longer able to.
This is a realization that men don't make until they are in a 'love relationship' with a woman. For men this is (should be) the catalyst for maturing beyond that want for an idealized unconditional love.
There is no rest, there is no respite or reprieve from performing, but so strong is the desire for that unconditional love assurance that men thought it prudent to write it into "traditional" marriage vows - 'for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and obey, forsaking all others until death do you part' - in other words, a pledge of unconditional love in spite of all circumstance.
In prior essays I've mentioned a 65 y.o man whom I used to counsel, who's wife had emotionally blackmailed him for over 20 years. He'd been married once before and divorced from his first wife after 12 years due to "not living up to her expectations" of financial provisioning. He never made the connection that the women he was 'in love' with had different concepts of what love meant to him. Rather, he evolved his previous concept of love wholesale to match that of women he 'loved', and thus his idea of love was one based upon an endless quest for qualifying for that love. In the first year of his second marriage he lost his job, and was unemployed for about 5 months, leaving his wife as the only revenue source for them.
I remember him proudly recounting this story to me at the time, because he said, as pissed off as he was at the time, he was 'grateful' for her kicking him in the ass to be a "better man". By this point his concept of love had been completely altered from his almost identical experiences with wife number one into a model that was entirely dependent upon his capacity to earn his wife's love.
After 20 years, at 65 (now 69) and in failing health he had come to realize that his efforts to secure her 'love' indefinitely had never been appreciated, only expected; so here he was facing the very cruel reality that he was losing his health and thus the means to maintain that incessant qualification for her love and affection.
11.11 The Reconciling
I get a lot of email and correspondence about the ruthlessness of my, I guess seminal, War Brides essay.
Women don't like me detailing this phenomenon for obvious reasons, but I think men
dislike the notion of their easy 'disposability' because of that same inconsistency in gender concepts of love. Even as martyrs, even in death, that unconditional male concept of love is rebuked by women's, by-necessity, fluid and utilitarian concept of love.
I get that this seems overly nihilistic, but that's the point. All of the very positive, very beneficial aspects of accepting a red pill reality come at the cost of abandoning the blue pill idealisms we've been conditioned to for so long.
I'm not debating the genuineness or sincerity of women's capacity to love. What I'm positing here is that women's concept of love isn't what men would be led to believe it is.
The Feminine Imperative
Chapter 12 map for The Feminine Imperative.
12.1 The Feminine Imperative
I think one of the basic premises I acknowledge in my essays is one that even some of the more 'enlightened' Men of the 'community' don't entirely grasp. This is the presumption of a feminine reality.
I think I may be a bit mistaken in this.
Everything a man experiences, every social conditioning he receives from the earliest age, every accepted social norm and every expectation of him to qualify as the definition of a mature adult Man in contemporary society is designed to serve a female imperative. Moralist wallow in it, absolutists and defeated white knights existentially depend upon it, and even the better part of relativists still (often unwittingly) feed and serve the feminine purpose.
Our media celebrates it, and brooks no dissent. There is very little dissent, since to peel back the veneer is to be at odds with a reality defined by the female purpose. You feel lonely because you can't understand its influence, and the conditioning you've been subjected to defines the objective solution to curing that feeling.
You get married, out of fear for not being found acceptable of it, or from social shame for not yet having accepted your role in service to the imperative. Your children are offered in tribute to it, while in turn you unknowingly perpetuate it in them.
We can excuse it with moralism, we can attach notions of honor and stability to it, we can even convince ourselves that the feminine imperative is our own imperative, but regardless, men still serve it.
For one gender to realize their sexual imperative the other must sacrifice their own. This is the root source of power the feminine imperative uses to establish its own reality as the normative one. From this flows the rules of engagement for dating / mating, operative social conventions used to maintain cognitive dominance, and laws and legalities that bind society to the benefit of the feminine.
Monogamy and fidelity are only useful when paired with an optimized hypergamy. Without that optimization, they're inconvenient obligations to the feminine reality.
In order to effect this reality men must be convinced of a themselves having a degree of more control than the feminine imperative exerts. They must believe that it is they who are the masters of a reality defined by the feminine, while remaining dependent upon the systems that the feminine reality outlines for them.
The crowning irony of the feminine reality is that men should be accused of patriarchy while enabling the very framework of the feminine imperative. The feminine sexual strategy is victorious because even under the contrived auspices of male oppression, it's still the female goal-state that is agreed upon as the correct effort.
Forgive me if I've waxed a bit too poetic here, but it's important to see the Matrix for what it really is. The next occasion you lock horns with even the most well-meaning woman's (or feminized man's) opinions about life, relationships, marriage, having babies, religion, etc. understand that her perceptions are based in this reality.
12.2 Fem-Centrism
My intent with all this is to illustrate how the reality in which we find things "normal" is rendered by fem-centric influence. Across ethnicities, and encompassing all manner of social diversity, this influence is so insaturated into culture, laws, media, entertainment, from our collective social consciousness to our individual psyches that we simply take it for granted as the operative framework in which we live.
I can remember first becoming aware of just the hints of this the first time I watched a popular sit-com on TV with a critical eye. There simply were no positively masculine actors or roles on any show, and rather, every male was ridiculed for his masculinity. This then led into other aspects of society and media I was just starting to become aware of.
I remember at first feeling guilty about feeling offended by just my noticing this. I felt ashamed of myself for thinking that maybe things weren't as 'normal' as women would like me to think. What I didn't understand was that this was part of my conditioning; to internalize a sense of shame for questioning that 'normalcy'. A lot of men never get past this programming and never unplug.
Once I'd gotten past the self-shame, I began to notice other patterns and interlocking social conventions that promoted this fem-centrism.
12.3 Observing the Framework
Recently I listened to an advice radio talk show where a woman called in emotional distress with her husband's actions. Apparently she'd dated the man for a year or two before marriage and they talked about how neither wanted children from the outset. Prior to the marriage both agreed, no kids, that is until about a year into their marriage the wife had secretly gone off the pill and made deliberate efforts in her sexual activities with her husband in order to conceive.
The ensuing indignation wasn't directed at the woman's admitted duplicity and covert efforts to deceive her husband into thinking she'd had an accidental pregnancy, but rather all the fires of hell were concentrated on this man's alleged deception of her. This serves as a prime example of how the feminine reality frames the directions of our lives. Publicly and privately, not even an afterthought was spared for the woman's motivation and desperate measures to achieve her sexual imperative because the feminine imperative is normalized as the correct goal of any conflict.
Some will argue that it hasn't always been thus, and that in certain eras woman have been reduced to property like cattle. While that may have some merit I would argue that the perpetuation of this notion better serves the new feminine reality in promoting a need for recognition of victim status and thus a need for restitution.
12.4 Sexual Revolution
I got into a hypothetical debate with an online friend as to what it would mean to humanity (and masculinity in particular) if a new method of birth control was developed with the specific and unique ability to allow men to control conception to the same degree women were given with hormonal contraception in the mid-sixties.
Put simply, the feminine imperative will not allow this.
Imagine the social and economic damage to the feminine infrastructure if Prometheus gave such fire to Men? Imagine that balance of control veering back into the masculine; for men to literally have the exclusive choice to fulfill a woman's sexual strategy or not.
The conversation got heated. Men could never be trusted with such a power! Surely humanity would come to a grinding, apocalyptic end if the feminine sexual strategy was thwarted by reliable male contraception. Societies would be sundered, population would nosedive, and the nuclear family would be replaced with a neo-tribalism dictated by men's sexual strategies.
The ridiculous, pathetic endemically juvenile and perverse masculinity that 50 years of systematic feminization created could never be trusted to further humanity in pursuing their sex's inborn imperatives.
Yet, this is precisely the power that was put into the hands of women in the 1960′s and remains today. The threat that male contraception represents to the feminine imperative is one of controlling the framework of which gender's sexual strategy will be the normative.
Prior to the advent of unilaterally female-exclusive hormonal birth control and the sexual revolution that resulted from it, the gender playing field was level, if not tipped in favor of masculinity due to men's provisioning being a motivating factor in women achieving their own gender imperative.
Once feminine-exclusive birth control was convenient and available the locus of control switched to feminine primacy. Her imperative became the normalized imperative. His sexual imperative was only a means to achieving her own, and now the control was firmly placed in favor of feminine hypergamy.
12.5 The Feminine Reality
Perhaps the single most useful tool women have possessed for centuries is their unknowablity. I made that word up, but it's applicable; women of all generations for hundreds of years have cultivated this sense of being unknowable, random or in worse case fickle or ambiguous.
While a Man can never be respected for anything less than being forthright and resolute - say what you mean, mean what you say - women are rewarded and reinforced by society for being elusive and, dare I say, seemingly irrational.
The feminine mystique appeals to the feminine psyche for the same reasons 'chick crack' works so well in PUA technique. It appeals to the same 'secret power' dynamic that makes meta-physical associations so attractive (religion, superstition, intuition, etc.) One need look no further than women's innate love of gossip to understand; There's power in secrets for women. It's hardly a surprise that connections with witchcraft have been associated with the feminine for so long.
Combine that mysticism with sexuality, and you've got the true feminine mystique - the most useful tool the feminine imperative possesses in its quest for optimal hypergamy.
The feminine mystique permeates inter-gender communication. On every forum response, on every blog comment, on every Facebook post and in any article ever written by women with a personal, feminine investment in the subject, there is a residue of recognizing the feminine mystique.
The first (and second) rule of Fight Club for the feminine imperative is to protect the mystery of the female - and the sisterhood has no mercy for those who would betray that.
For years I've striven to breakdown confusion and common problems by observing behavior. Women are human beings with the same basic motivations that men are subject to with some greater or lesser variation in their reasoning and methodologies. The point being is that women are every bit as subject to being as mundane or as extraordinary as men are, but the difference is that men don't enjoy a masculine mystique. With rare exceptions, we don't generally cultivate this sense of mystery because we're not rewarded for it to the degree women are - and honestly, we haven't needed to. But for a woman, if she can cultivate this mystique, her attentions become a reward unto themselves for the guy who is 'lucky' enough to tame her.
In contemporary times, men are far too ready to write off women as irrational agents. Even Freud was fooled by the hysterics of women's responses and wrote them off as largely incapable, random and duplicitous to their own interests.
How many times have you been asked by a friend, "so, did ya get lucky with Kristy last night?" We don't think much of this passing question, but it's framed in such a way that men autonomously perpetuate the myth of this mystique. It's not luck that gets you laid. I understand that circumstance and being the right guy at the right time most certainly plays a part, but that's not the operative here.
The feminine mystique discourages questioning the process or the motives involved in inter-gender relations; men are just happy to have had the chance of experiencing the unknowable woman they scarcely understand. When mixed with sexual deprivation, the lucky fate element makes the sex that much more absorbing. It's this luck precognition for men, fostered by women, that leads to the scarcity mentality and often (but not exclusively) ONEitis in men.
12.6 The Feminine Mystique
Throughout this book thus far I've made references to the Wall - the point at which women lose their competitive edge in the SMP to younger rivals. The following was contributed by a Rational Male commenter 'S'.
Yeah, it's a term I have seen before arriving at this blog but have never heard in reality. I always attributed it to a woman losing her looks but to place it at exactly 30 seems to me to be too precise a calculation…as there are many variable to be taken into consideration I would imagine. For example, a party girl, serial tanner and smoker could probably lose her looks long before she reaches 30, whereas a clean living late bloomer might not even realize her potential until her mid to late twenties.
Technically the Wall was a sports term used for athletes who had reached an age where they'd lost their competitive edge. The infamous Wall a woman reaches (or slams into as the case may be) is somewhat of an ambiguous term that was actually coined by catty women long before the manosphere came into existence. It used to be a relatively less combative term that women used for one another in an effort to disqualify an intra-sexual competitor.
Underneath the obvious utility of the Wall as an epithet is a more painful truth; the inevitable decay of women's sexual appeal - their first, and for most, only, real agency of power they've ever actualized over men to ensure their long term security needs. In the heyday of 2nd wave feminism, the sisterhood's message was all about collective empowerment and solidarity, but beneath that was the intrinsic hypergamic need to compete for the best mate their looks and sexual availability could attract.
Women's intra-sexual combative use of the knowledge and fear of the Wall did not go unnoticed by men. Therefore the feminine imperative found it necessary to make the truth about the Wall as socially and individually subjective as possible. As with most uncomfortable truths unique to women's weaknesses, the feminine creates social conventions and ambiguities to misdirect men from becoming aware of women's eventual powerlessness over them (i.e.
12.7 Implications of the Wall
Thus, in an inter-gender social context, the Wall became individualized and subjective for women, and it's within this framework that women like 'S' are most comfortable in addressing the reality of the Wall. "Not all women are like that" (NAWALT), the go-to mantra of feminized subjectivity, is a direct result of subjectivizing the inevitability of the Wall. In fact, virtually every operative social convention women rely upon for empowerment and self-esteem finds its root purpose in avoiding the fear of the Wall.
It's important to bear in mind that all of these complex social conventions are rooted in a fear of the Wall. I'm repeating this point to emphasize the importance this has in a feminized society that's subjected to feminine hypergamy as its most operative doctrine.
When enough women, through cultural forces or personal circumstance, can't capitalize upon what they think is their due, optimal hypergamic male option, then society must be acculturated to believe that women past their Wall expiration date can and should be just as desirable as those in their prime.
12.8 Defining the Wall
When I wrote Navigating the SMP, the reason I used 30 as the general age women typically hit the 'Wall' is really a combination of factors.
However, there is a male part of the Wall equation that needs to be understood. 30 is also the general age at which men (should) become aware of their own, longer-lasting sexual market value and potential. This affects women's interpretations of the Wall.
When we (and as women in particular would have us) view the Wall in terms of just physical attractiveness we don't see the full picture and relevancy the Wall has for women. It's just as much a psychological issue as it is a physical one. It's very easy (and often fun) to compare pictures of girls we knew in high school with their current FaceBook profile shots at 40+ years old and get a laugh at how bad she hit the Wall.
However the Wall is much more than just the physical; it's the conditional that accelerates or decelerates a woman's date with the Wall.
Do notable exceptions to these exist? Of course, but they prove the rule. And that rule comes in the form of such an overwhelming fear that contemporary society needed to be restructured to help avoid it.
12.9 The Wall
Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.
My use of the word "threat" here isn't to imply malice. I'm sure more simplistic associations with violence or conflict is the natural one, but a "threat" is a challenge - how one deals with it is what's at issue.
Women's sexual strategy is very schizophrenic - ideally women want a Man that other women want to fuck, but in order to assess his sexual market value to other women he's got to have exercisable options for her to compete against, or at least display indirect social proof to that effect.
This internal conflict between a want for security and provisioning, and a need for the ' gina tingles that only the excitement indignation, drama and Alpha dominance can stimulate is the fundamental root for women's shit tests.
Essentially a shit test is used by women to determine one, or a combination of these factors:
b.) Options - is this guy really into me because I'm 'special' or am I his only option?
c.) Security - is this guy capable of providing me with long term security?
Women's shit testing is a psychologically evolved, hard-wired survival mechanism. Women will shit test men as autonomously and subconsciously as a men will stare at a woman's big boobs. They cannot help it, and often enough, just like men staring at a nice rack or a great ass, even when they're aware of doing it they'll still do it.
For a woman, to encounter a man with a healthy awareness of his own value to women, this constitutes a threat. Here is a man for whom's attention women will demonstrably compete for, and he knows this.
Therefore, in order to promote and actualize her own sexual strategy, his self-confidence must be challenged with self-doubt, because if such a man were to use this knowledge to his own benefit he may not select her from a pool of better prospective women.
In this example we can see the conflict inherent in women's sexual strategy; she wants the Alpha dominance of a confident Man, but not so confident that he can exercise his options with other women well enough to make an accurate estimation of her own SMV.
Ambiguity in men's assessment of a woman's true sexual market value is the primary tool of the feminine imperative.
The same characteristics that give him his confidence and acknowledged sense of worth are exactly the same things that women want to be associated with. Even the most controlling, domineering wife still wants to tell her friends that the AFC she married is a "real Man", and even after privately berating him, will defend him as such because anything less is a reflection on her own self-image.
Women don't want a man to cheat, but they love a Man who could cheat.
That is the threat and the attraction. Women want a Man that has confidence in his own value; that's sexy, but the more he self-realizes this the greater the anxiety is that she'll be found wanting as he better understands his options. So it becomes necessary to develop social conventions that are standardized across the feminine gender that limit the full recognition of masculine self-value.
In a global sense, the feminine imperative relies on the same ambiguity women will individually employ to confuse the efforts of men to assess their true SMV.
12.10 Race to Awareness
Because of women's relatively short window of peak sexual viability it is imperative that men be as unaware of their slower, but progressively increasing SMV for as long as possible in order for them to achieve the prime directive of female hypergamy; realize the best genetic options and the best provisioning options she has the capacity to attract in that peak window.
The mistake (and the binary retort) is to think this need for contrivances was concocted in whole as some grand sisterhood conspiracy. This just proves an ignorance of social constructs.
The best social contrivances are inconspicuous and rarely questioned because they've been learned without having been formally taught. This is why I think encouraging men not to bother trying to understand women is in itself a social convention.
This is the threat that Game represents to the feminine imperative. Widely shared, objective assessments of Men's SMV and how it develops is the antithesis of the female sexual strategy.
12.11 The Threat
If you type the word "equalism" in a blog's text box you get that annoying little red line underneath it indicating that you misspelled something. In other words, the English language doesn't officially recognize that word in any dictionary (yet). I suppose this is apt since for the last 50+ years the effort to feminize society has always used the abstract concept of gender equalism as something ambient in the background of the agenda.
However, that's not the "equalism" my computer wont recognize. I sometimes see it creeping in from the edges on blogs decrying some nefarious, neo-liberal social agenda, or I see it written as some corrupting element keeping conservatism from realizing it's 'true' potential, but what I don't see is a very good accounting of it.
12.12 New Gender Definitions
Masculinity has been redefined by people (men and women) who have no concept of what its original definition was. The behaviors and characteristics that constitute what is uniquely masculine aren't being challenged; they've been redefined to fit the purposes of an agenda. In 1905 no one wrote articles on how to "be a man" or bothered to analyze the fundamentals of masculinity.
Traditionally, women define what is masculine and men define what is feminine. The characteristics that made a man desirable were ones that presented the opposite to what men similarly found desirable in femininity.
The root of the AFC endemic lies in the fact that as recently as 50 years ago there has been a concerted effort to "de-masculinize" society, not only in mass media, but down to how we educate and condition our youth to assume masculine and feminine roles. What is being challenged is the predisposition of males in predominantly western culture, to even consider what masculinity is.
When men become feminized, are we leveling any playing fields or are we progressing towards androgyny and homogenization of gender? The equalist hails this as a triumph of a new gender paradigm.
The very characteristics that define traditional masculinity - independence, self-confidence, rugged individualism, physical strength, risk taking, problem solving and innovation - we are now to believe are (or should be) the aspirations of women to the point that ridicule of the singularly feminine female is the order.
That's not to say, given this new gender dynamic, that women are discouraged from claiming their femininity in addition to their masculinity. On the contrary they're encouraged to "handle their business as well as any man" and "still be a sexy, vivacious woman" every man should want.
Yet in opposition to this post-modern gender dynamic, men are not encouraged to embrace their masculine side We are told to "man up" for sure, and yet our masculinity (as we define it) is a flaw; we're poisoned by our testosterone. Our higher aspiration ought to be becoming more feminized, sensitive, emotional, empathetic, nurturing, etc,..
Yet the 'masculine' that the feminine imperative would have us strive for doesn't encourage anything resembling traditionally masculine traits in a male's personality. In fact it's ridiculed to such a degree in mass media and larger society that it's literally akin to a disease.
While women are congratulated for embodying masculine traits with an acceptance of her feminine character, men are conditioned to believe that feminine traits are masculine traits and any traditionally masculine characteristics that manifest themselves in us are the unfortunate byproducts of our 'flawed' biology.
The true crime of this gender redefining is the real "double standard" that men should be so feminized as to loathe their innate masculinity, yet still be held liable for uniquely male, traditionally masculine responsibilities and accountabilities by virtue of them being male.
Needless to say, all of this convolutes what masculinity was, is and is intended to be. Before you can set out a plan to live out what I call Positive Masculinity you first have to take into consideration why masculinity has value and should be encouraged as well as cultivated in yourself, your sons and society as a whole.
So where do you start? With yourself. You must change your mind about yourself as a "m"an and begin thinking of yourself as a "M"an.
You need to become impervious to convenient accusations of "misogyny" or 1950′s caveman thinking whenever you assert yourself.
You have to genuinely live it in order to set an example of it.
12.13 Positive Masculinity vs. Equalism
I would be remiss in my duties as a new author if I weren't to give credit where due, and especially after such a long and involved process of developing the concepts you've just read.
The following is a list of blogs I frequent and have found very useful and engaging in helping me mold the ideas in this book. Some of the authors have become personal friends and others informal colleagues of the manosphere.
First of course is my own blog The Rational Male: therationalmale.com. Most of what you've read thus far can be found in its original form in the Year One link page. Here you can find most of the essay in this book, but these are a small fraction of the essays from 2011-2012. At the time of this publication there is also a Year Two collection of essays. I presently have more than 320 posts.
The SoSuave forum is where most of my earliest ideas took root. I may have 320+ posts on The Rational Male, but I have well over 5,300 post on this forum where I am still a moderator: www.sosuave.net/forum/index.php
Among the manosphere I'm accounted among one of the Three 'R's, Roosh, Roissy and Rollo. I'm honored and humbled by this association. While I believe my involvement in Game has been at least as long as them both, these two bloggers are easily the most influential in the 'sphere with regard to Game as a concept and as a practice.
Roosh can be found at http://www.rooshv.com/ and Roissy (or one of his many aliases) can be found posting as Heartiste at http://heartiste.wordpress.com/
From a purely practical and practicable approach to Game Nick Krauser at http://krauserpua.com/ is one of the best. Nick is the author of many PUA guides and focuses primarily on approach and seduction, but is also very deep in his understandings of the psychological and social mechanics behind the technique.
Of all the bloggers I've encountered since starting The Rational Male and becoming a fixture in the manosphere, no one has had more profound an impact on me than Dalrock:
http://dalrock.wordpress.com/ I'm impressed with Dal because he's the one Man in the 'sphere I can bounce off ideas of common morality and how they relate to Game concepts and know he and I are on the same wavelength.
12.14 Afterword
accurately applies them in a Christianized context. For the sake of clarity and to avoid the impression of a moralistic bias, that would otherwise color the objective deductions I attempt to make, I intentionally avoid contexts of morality and strive to define my analysis in as amoral a way as possible. Dalrock bridges this gap for readers who are uncomfortable with such an antiseptic approach to Game.
I sincerely hope reading this book has changed your mind about how you previously perceived inter-gender dynamics. Maybe you've agreed with the entirety of the book, maybe you have some rebuttals or questions. I encourage that discourse and so too does the manosphere for the greater part.
If this book has helped you become more aware I'd love to read about. If you think I've upset the gender applecart by proposing dangerous ideas, I'd also love to read about it.
Portable Stack
Portable stack
| Layer | Gist | Chapter anchors |
|---|---|---|
| Method | Behavior over words; dots from forums → blog → book | Ch1 |
| Market | SMV, desire vs need, alpha/beta cues | Ch2 |
| Abundance | Plate Theory; non-exclusivity until earned | Ch3 |
| Conditioning | Plugged In myths; Unplugging grief cycle | Ch4-5 |
| Practice | Game (single and LTR); communication channels | Ch6-7 |
| Environment | Social conventions; Hypergamy risk models | Ch8-9 |
| Constraints | Iron Rules 1-9 | Ch10 |
| Stories | Myths that steer panic and hopium | Ch11 |
| Ambient | Feminine Imperative; Positive Masculinity | Ch12 |
Carry the stack; falsify with long behavior, not speeches.
Main Points
- Behavior is the metric. Stated intent is secondary evidence.
- Desire cannot be negotiated. Chores and confession do not create want.
- Plate Theory buys abundance so one woman cannot dictate terms.
- Unplugging includes grief; anger is a phase, not a destination.
- Game is applied behaviorism; LTR Game is higher stakes than bar Game.
- Covert vs overt: read context and behavior; dijo sin hablar.
- Conventions (shame, escape hatches, Quality Woman myths) steer selection.
- Hypergamy seeks highest relative value; relational equity is not a pause button.
- Iron Rules constrain recurring AFC failure modes (frame, count, wait, cohabit, birth, love asymmetry, ex-rebuild, leagues, self-deprecate).
- Myths (Lonely Old Man, Good Girl, looks-hopium) keep men anxious or self-rejecting.
- Feminine Imperative names ambient defaults; Positive Masculinity is agency without apology.
- A CLOSER LOOK stays on: evo-psych absolutism, War Brides, Rule #3/#5/#6 totalizing claims, FI as unfalsifiable will.
About this book
The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi, 2013. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions