We need to get some facts straight regarding the way that women make choices, and that’s what this article is about. Let’s begin with Assanova’s reference to Evolutionary Psychology:
Women are attracted to dominant men because their instincts tell them to be. Instincts don’t care whether the guy is abusive of not. Instincts only care what is best for a woman’s offspring, and that is a man with power. So what if the man is abusive (or one of the other bad labels that are associated with dominant men) or not? Instincts only recognize power, regardless of what form it comes in. His clear show of dominance over women is also a show of dominance over many men, which guarantees her offspring lots of resources and the best chance of survival.
With due respect to Assanova (and in recognition of his invaluable contributions to Game theory and the workings of the female mind), this evolutionary psychology perspective that women are drawn to dominant men because it “guarantees her offspring lots of resources and the best chance of survival” is a load of EP poppycock. It sheds no light on the primal forces that motivate women. And while being provided for is an important motivator in the psychology of women, it is not primal (first cause).
The “primal forces” that motivate women relate principally to resistance to change, narcissism and fear… for example, fear of being left on the shelf, fear of not finding a provider to provide for her, fear of novelty and fear of the unknown. David DeAngelo tells us that attraction isn’t a choice, and on this, we can only concur. The thing that excites women about dominant men does not relate to anything as calculated as guaranteeing offspring with lots of resources. That’s nonsense. While women are attracted to power and success, they are never attracted to plodding providers. And you only have to look at women’s dumb choices to realize that if we left it up to them, the next generation would be swinging from tree to tree. What excites women about dominant men has less to do with the banal priorities of being provided for than it does with the simple exhilaration of narcissism, novelty and danger. Being provided for is extremely important to women, it is even a priority, but it is not primal. It does not account for when women throw caution to the wind. It does not explain why women’s menageries of mediocrity typically include thugs, slobs and losers.
In the longer term, dull, safe, beta providers do feature prominently in women’s more calculated choices. But when it comes to primal sex, it is the thrill of the forbidden, with all its attendant risks, that explains women’s more impulsive choices, from sports jocks, psychopaths and serial killers, tothugs, rapists and violent criminals
It would appear that Otto Weininger was on the right track when he suggested a relationship between criminality and prostitution (which today, arguably, manifests as raunch culture).
The role of self-esteem
Remember the so-called bell-curve distribution for men and women? Women tend to bunch towards the middle of the bell-curve. They don’t like extremes, and prefer conformity and middle-of-the-road to excelling and drawing attention to oneself. Men, by contrast, populate a flatter bell-curve, with larger proportions of men gathering in the tails of the distribution, from the extremely stupid to the extremely smart. The upshot of all of this is that when hypergamous women, typically clustered towards the middle of the bell-curve, select for the best among men at the upper tail of the bell-curve, an unavoidable crisis of confidence emerges. How can someone “average” perceive herself as an equal with someone who excels and stands out from the crowd? At a deeply visceral level, average will always feel itself to be something less than superior. The only tangible thing that a woman has to offer – her “looks” as defined by her biology – can only ever be perceived as something less than the smarts that she so admires in men at the higher levels of the pecking order and the far right tail of the bell-curve. There is no circumventing this cruel fate that awaits women. No amount of affirmative action can remedy this.
It therefore makes sense that while hypergamous women seek out superior men, they really do feel more comfortable with average men who, like they, are clustered around the middle of the bell-curve. There is an obvious conflict here, the basis for a cognitive dissonance that makes it difficult for women to reconcile their hypergamous impulses with their inherent inferiority complex. In this context, we are better placed to explore the breadth of women’s choices, from the ridiculous to the extreme.
Let’s take a closer look at the sorts of dynamics that account for men’s and women’s distribution curves.
The gender that provides and protects is constantly exposed to risk and danger. Men are constantly putting their lives on the line, in one form or another. Men are constantly testing their assumptions, constantly developing their strategies and their identities. At the cutting edge of cultural evolution, men’s survival depends on logic and rationality.
The gender that is provided for and protected, by contrast, is constantly shielded from risk and danger. Women have assumptions passed on to them from their mothers and their peer groups. As creatures of conformity, they rarely have their assumptions tested. Women prefer to assume and conform than to test or compete. Women subscribe to the laws of relational aggression, where popularity represents the height of personal achievement. Popularity and not logic or rationality provides the basis for personal “esteem”.
It is therefore inevitable that the gender that provides and protects will define itself from a perspective of positive self-esteem, while the best that the protected, provided-for gender can hope to achieve is the less resilient self-esteem grounded in popularity. And when you base your sense of worth on the opinions of others, well, that’s hardly empowering, is it? It is impossible to establish a robust sense of self-esteem when narcissism is your passion and popularity provides the foundation on which it is built.
But wait! Have women not achieved parity with men in the workplace, thus demonstrating that women are every bit as reliable as men, every bit as capable of providing-for as men? Not at all. But have women not also earned the right to “respect” for their ability to achieve? Absolutely not.
Women’s “parity” with men could not have occurred without affirmative action. Affirmative action is the essential ingredient that enables the masquerading of women’s supposed “equality” with men. But the reality of the dynamics of men’s and women’s positive and negative self-esteem always plays out in the fresh air of the sexual marketplace.
Thus respect and competition are crucial to a man’s identity, while belonging and agreeability are crucial to a woman’s. And it is at this juncture that properly deployed Game provides its greatest impact. A man with neither self-respect nor Game will never be attractive to women. If a man cannot project confidence, he may still find utility as a provider, or maybe even an arbitrary hook-up with a drunk or a slut who fails to detect his ruse, but he will never make a woman feel sexy (the way that sexual dynamics work is, in a nutshell, men desire, women are desired, and the idea of men as being “sexy” is a feminist-inspired absurdity).
We are right to have our reservations with mainstream interpretations of Game. However, insofar as Game has a place in dating strategy, implicit in the effective deployment of Game is the essential assumption that the woman’s frame of reference is always in submission to the man. Busting on a woman, teasing her, not taking anything she says seriously – all in a good-natured, humorous way, of course – cannot be done without this assumption. And confidence is how you pull it off. Confidence lies at the heart of what makes a man interesting. You cannot “pretend” confidence.
It is the confidence/submission duality that provides the basis for Game.
Women’s low self-esteem and the auto-spook response
Getting back to David DeAngelo’s view that for women, attraction isn’t a choice. Given that a man cannot pretend confidence and a woman cannot pretend desire (we’re not talking about faking orgasms), then this inherently places female eroticism in a position of submission to the male. It cannot be any other way. The sex that is protected and provided for can never embrace empowerment as can the sex that protects and provides. This is much more than a matter of degree. It represents a paradigmatic shift in perspective that, especially for women, can never be traversed.
In terms of what motivates female desire towards men, it is respect for the formidable. Women are drawn to formidable men. At a primal level, they are drawn to men that they can respect and look up to. And so while women often find beta providers useful, supplicating betas are not the types of men that women really notice. “Formidable” covers a broad spectrum of male stereotypes, from successful and charismatic to brooding and mysterious, from cocky sports jock to violent thug. Supplicating betas and omegas are excluded from this spectrum.
Women’s more fragile self-esteem has important consequences. At the gut level of attraction is also fear. Hypergamous women in search of the alpha stud will work themselves into a lather of anticipation. Should a woman encounter the man of her dreams, her first impulse is to spook. Seemingly, she will often go out of her way to jeopardize everything that she had ever dreamt of. She will clam up and play hard-to-get. It is important to realize that this is less a strategy than it is an emotional response to emotionally draining anticipation. Nincompoops like the authors of “The Rules” might strategize deception and evasiveness for the typical Oprah Winfrey audience, but at a more visceral level, playing hard-to-get should never be interpreted as a strategy. Irrespective of whether it is implemented as a strategy, being spooked is just what women do.
Remember that just as DeAngelo assures us that attraction isn’t a choice, so too, a woman’s angst of anticipation isn’t a choice. The lower self-esteem implicit in female sexuality places her knight-in-shining armour (KISA) upon a pedestal to reliably thwart any chance of her dream-beau being realized – that is, if it was left entirely to her. Unless her KISA has Game and can harness her auto-spook response (busting on her, cocky-and-funny), she will lose him. An important part of Game is to disarm a woman’s auto-spook response, to make her feel comfortable, relaxed and at peace with the world.
As I’ve mentioned, women are drawn to formidable men. Just because a KISA might fail the initial introductory phase of an approach does not necessarily mean that he’s mucked up his Game. It is just as likely that she has mucked up her auto-spook response by over-reacting and heading for the hills.
Arrogance is hot. Supplicating arrogance is not. The very thing that women find attractive in men is the very thing that militates against the realization of their dream KISA. Supplication and arrogance represent a contradiction in terms and it is for this reason that a man needs to implement some version of Game in order to harness most women’s auto-spook responses. Western women need to be babied, and this has to be done whilst retaining the mystery that embodies masculine respectability. It goes without saying that this is inherently not an easy task. In the absence of proper training, it is not easy being a KISA, managing that fine line between self-respect and supplication.
In the end, of course, most western women never obtain their dream KISA, and they finish up making compromises. Their rationalization hamster will reassure them that it’s not their fault, but that of their KISA. They will conclude either that he is not interested in them, or that he has failed their shit-tests by failing to be persistent enough. They are thus just as likely to rationalize that all men are insensitive, unfeeling brutes. It never occurs to them that perhaps they should learn to tame their rationalization hamster, that they should ignore The Rules and the proliferation of self-styled guruettes advising women how to snare their beau. Typically, they lower their sites, often settling for the first slob that lunges a second grope, and then calling it love.
After years of having their dream of a KISA dashed upon the rocks in the swirling surf below, western women learn to not expect much of men (beyond the superficial characteristics that supposedly identify alphas). KISAs become gay, betas become providers, omegas become manginas, provided-for women get bored, divorced women become cougars, chumps become husbands and slobs get lucky. The system auto-corrects to the wonderful solution to which we bear witness today. Our zeitgeist becomes a vast sea of arbitrariness where we can expect to see our future generations swinging from tree to tree in Bonobo nirvana. The cultural system develops an auto-immune response that attacks things like honor and virtue, establishing cultural destiny as a cesspool of mediocrity.
The power of projection
The differences in the ways in which men and women think call for a very different strategy in interpreting and understanding our opposite sex. We should never take women’s logic literally. We should learn to read between the lines. For example if a woman tells you that she does not like something, do not always assume that she does not like that thing. You’ve got to read between the lines to understand why she notices that thing, what it is about that thing that relates to her experience of it, and so on. In other words, what is the context behind her dislike? Oftentimes shock and disgust over some thing (such as is typical in women’s emotive reactions to rape) betray a fascination with that thing that is reflected in their fantasies, the choices that they make, or some other inadvertent manifestation of their innermost impulses. For example, shock and disgust with rape stories can actually project a fascination with rape and an inclination to fantasize about rape.
And when feminists accuse men of taking advantage of their positions of authority to oppress others, they are projecting. They are telling us whatthey would be doing if they were put in the same positions of authority.
And when feminists complain that it’s not fair that only men occupy the most powerful positions of authority, they are projecting. They are telling us that men in power are the only ones that matter. Those men at the lowest ranks working as janitors, labourers and factory hands, don’t matter. They’re invisible. They don’t count.
Let’s illustrate the importance of projection with some more arbitrary examples. Consider the following quotations that I had taken from A Voice for Men:
Robin Morgan – former president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and editor of MS magazine:
I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan:
I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.
Catherine MacKinnon:
All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.
Marilyn French; The Woman’s Room:
My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.
Each of these women is projecting. Compare what they are saying, with your own experiences.
Robin Morgan is telling us that she is a vindictive, hate-filled person. By contrast, I have met men who are capable of taking on an opponent respectfully, impartially and in the spirit of competition, without vindictiveness or hatred.
Barbara Jordan is telling us what she notices and values in men. Cold, arrogant and unfeeling is hot, baby. By contrast, I have met many men who are caring and compassionate.
Catherine MacKinnon is letting her rape fantasies get ahead of her. ëNuff said. On the odd occasion, she even borders on graphic:
I think that sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially constructed as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation. That is, our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us.
Mmmm… sounds like the basis for a yummy rape fantasy.
And, saving the best to last, what is it that gets Marilyn French’s panties all hot and wet? Well, nothing less than a “handsome young nazi soldier”. What is Marilyn French really telling us about her true values and what she expects of men? “My feelings about men are the result of my experience.” Indeed. Here she is admitting to the very choices that she has made in men, and her inadvertent candour provides a welcome change.
Of course the reality is that whenever we open our mouths, irrespective of whether we are men or women, we project something of what we value, what we notice. But there’s a key difference between men and women as to what can be inferred from the projection. Men focus on the “external” (career, hobbies, interests), while women focus on the “internal” (me, me, me, I, me, I want, I need, I hurt). Projection of a passion for motor sports is thus not quite as insightful as the projection of spiteful contempt.
More on women’s dumb choices
The subject of women’s dumb choices is a deeply complex one. Questions of double standards abound, not to mention the question of how intelligence is measured. Roissy’s takes on the Duke Rejection List and the preference of many women for jerks are compelling, well written and entertaining, and they do indeed resonate with a fundamental truth about women’s dumb choices. Roissy’s gifted contributions continue to provide us with powerful insights.
But then as a guru of the seduction community, Roissy holds Game in undeserved high esteem, in the implicit assumption that there exists some kind of standard, tending to objectivity, for assessing womanly worth. Thus, according to this golden standard, the 9s and 10s that have been anointed by alphas are the real deal and their alpha choices, in turn, validate alpha reality. But we should be clear that, within the broader context of Game, Roissy writes from the perspective of the cultural ecosystem that he inhabits. Within the ecosystem comprising nightclubs, singles and the seduction community, properly deployed Game can work quite well, if you accept their definitions of alpha dominance, female hypergamy and female attractiveness. But the more brutal truth is that women do not always choose alphas. Women do not always go for “the pick of the bunch”. Insofar as one might be tempted to regard frat-boys and jerks as somehow occupying the top of “the” pecking-order, there are other pecking orders, other bunches that do not work well with Roissyesque Game theory. Women choose for a complex of reasons that include security, circles of acquaintances, peer pressure, parental pressure, dumb luck, and so on. Game does not always work. Sometimes it can work against you, if a woman perceives you as a player and she prioritizes security. The bottom line is that Game theory’s ranking system itself does not provide a reliable estimator of womanly smarts. Indeed, Roissyesque Game theory works because it is based on the implicit presumption that women are less intelligent than men, and, by inference, that their choices are vulnerable to easy manipulation. There are some men for whom this kind of shallow, cosmetically-masked, narcissistic woman, regardless of her perceived standing as a 9 or a 10, is simply not all that appealing.
Ultimately, neither men nor women have a clue about their opposite sex. This ignorance works mostly against women. How often do “liberated” women feign the licking of lips in their expression of faux-lust for the hot, grease-covered mechanic, or the bare-chested, hose-carrying fireman? Give me a break. These images don’t interest women. Their faux-lusting for bare-chested “hunks” just makes women look stupid and deluded. Women don’t have a clue either about men or their own sexuality. The ignorance of women is positively dangerous.
In the spirit of the Duke Rejection List, consider the 2009 Cronulla Sharks scandal (transcript here) where a team of Australian Rugby League players participated in group sex with a 19-year-old university student (“Clare” – not her real name) while on a tour in New Zealand. As it turns out, she was naÔve and misguided at the time and apparently, did not fit the profile that we would normally expect of a gang-banger. During the Four Corners interview, Detective Sgt Neville Jenkins of the Christchurch Police said that “she was a nice girl. She was young, um naÔve, not worldly, just a growing up teenager.”
From the Four Corners transcript, it would appear that the Cronulla Sharks team members thought their gang-bang in a Christchurch hotel in New Zealand was all great fun and a terrific joke, a boisterous bonding experience replete with banter, hilarity and wholesome groping and masturbation lavished upon a willing participant. By inference, if we read between the lines, it would seem that “Clare” presumably complied in silent confusion, stunned into passive compliance and not comprehending the reality of what was taking place. Hilarious. Whatever she was hoping to experience as fawning attention from a couple of manly men quickly degenerated into something that had more in common with Sharks in a feeding frenzy on a lone, mutilated carcass bobbing up and down with the waves in a vast blue sea.
The impression one gets is of a misguided social outcast who has failed to connect with her peer groups, seeking male attention and romance in all the wrong places. In this, the story appears to have its parallels with The Atlantic article on the Karen Owen story, including Roissy’s aforementioned interpretation and TuckerMax’s more compassionate interpretation. The common theme that we all appear to agree on is that there is less female empowerment taking place than misguided, impressionable ignorance culminating in considerable psychic harm. Even clinically cool Roissy gets it that, deep down inside, even the raunchiest slut is not a soulless automaton defined by hormonal impulses:
…even the raunchiest cockgobblers have a heart inside that beats for a man to love and cherish them above all others. The love of a man, true and loyal, is the slut’s white whale.
The reality is that sluts are never 100% dumb party whores, and that if you were stuck with one on a deserted island, chances are that she will become your fawning servant, worshipping every one of your footprints on a remote sandy beach – whether you want her or not. Of course we should point out that there are many kinds of sluts, from toxic bitches who only ever fawn over thugs, to misguided teens searching for identity, who have lost their way. Many a slut, as a social outcast who has failed to connect with her peer groups, will readily forgo her cock carousel lifestyle if only she can encounter the good fortune of stumbling upon but one man who can love her above all others. You can count on it.
And Roissy isn’t the only PUA who realizes this stuff. Other PUAs also realize that sluts possess a tender side, try as they might to deny it. Essential to success with women is the ability to make them feel comfortable, to entertain their fantasy that it is a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship that they are in, even if it is only for one night. It’s an essential part of the confidence/submission dynamic that I refer to above. As Assanova clarifies:
Make her feel secure. Even the sluttiest of the slutty women like to feel secure before sleeping with a guy.
So much for feminist fantasies of empowerment and the purported insatiability of rancid cockgobblers asserting their sexual appetites.
Getting back to the gang-bangers. What’s going on here? What is it that women don’t get? Don’t women understand when they are being laughed at, mocked, degraded and ridiculed? Don’t they understand that these gang-bang experiences have less to do with empowerment and connecting between women and men than it has with misogynistic male bonding rituals in which the woman serves merely as a prop? Of course at some gut level they will apprehend this. But don’t expect them to receive support from feminists or from other women whose shallow identities have been cemented securely into “well-adjusted” peer groups. It’s the feminists and their ever-supportive manginas who know an opportunity for masquerading female empowerment when they see one. Their hatred of men exceeds the mounting carnage of impressionable, misguided lives that get tossed aside as collateral damage. Feminists do understand that any suggestion that these experiences are anything but empowering for women could be very damaging to the feminist cause. Of course that possibility would never occur to their supplicating manginas, who, understanding neither men nor women, know never to question the feminist orthodoxy.
The feminist/mangina symbiosis is a very powerful one that relies on two key principles:
- Ultimately the success of feminism depends on a systemic kind of prostitution, where the promise of sexual “freedom” is traded for an assortment of freebies for women at the expense of men, from “equality” by way of affirmative action, to the pussy-pass in laws and gubmint incentives;
- Omegas who have failed to secure their place on the male pecking order can exorcise the bitterness in their hatred of men by becoming supplicating manginas.
Interpreting these stories of women’s sexual “empowerment” as tragedies of misspent, misguided youth is not really in the interests either of this kind of prostitution or this kind of mangina. Supplicating manginas are unable to relate to women in a sexual kind of way, so Feminism provides them with the opportunity to at least sniff at her panties, if nothing else.
And there is just one small problem with this collateral damage of misguided lives tossed onto the trash-heap of apparently isolated human misery. It is never just collateral. It is an expression of a culture that values lies and deceit above truth and reality. It is a pervasive dumbing down of humanity where everyone is affected. This is what feminism stands for. This is what feminism looks like. Feminism is the standard-bearer for this kind of “collateral damage”. It is a form of collateral damage that cannot happen in any other kind of society.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that “Clare” went on to marry a rugby player from a different team. At one level bizarre, at another level understandable. It all depends on whether the groom was an active participant in the aforementioned team bonding traditions that take place around the Land, or an exile from them. Both participant and exile share a history that “Clare” recognizes and is drawn to. One of them just might provide the best therapy that she could possibly receive, the other, sealing off her escape and assuring her descent into hell.
Does a woman’s history of bad experiences matter? Maybe women don’t think that it matters. If it was all confined to the genetic code, if it was all about evolutionary psychology and the so-called survival of the fittest, with nature red in tooth and claw, it might make some kind of sense. Genetically superior alpha studs mating, spreading their seed… can’t complain about that, can we? Where’s the problem?
Perhaps we can start by suggesting that sports jocks do not always represent superior genetic material. One study suggests that footballers have much in common with criminals. I can buy that. It presents problems for the evo-psych crowd though, unless they accept that there is such a thing as devolution and reversion to a more primitive state, a throwback to apes swinging from tree to tree.
Or maybe it hasn’t got anything to do with genetics and evolutionary psychology at all. Maybe it has everything to do with something deeper, something about the way we make choices and establish our identities. When a team of thugs mocks and degrades an apparently willing but misguided teenager searching for her identity, do they not effectively also mock and degrade her family, and even society itself? How does this garbage recirculate throughout the culture and the identities of everyone living within it? If someone you loved was a gang-banger, what might that say about you? What are we becoming? Cast your eyes around. Can we really believe that this mockery of humanity that we see around us today is what humanity used to look like a hundred years ago?
Ultimately, these questions relate to much bigger existential concepts, well beyond the scope of The Spearhead. But there is one conclusion that I do bring, and that’s that women are capable of extremely dumb, destructive choices. When they ride the cock carousel in preference to the responsible betas that they find so boring, well, I guess they pay. Their history matters. But why should we care, given that our cultures care so little about false rape allegations and what is happening to men in the family courts, the workplace and society in general?
