Pope Paul VI On Birth Control Externalities

Courtesy of commenter “max from australia”, a juicy quote from a former Pope which accords with Chateau Heartiste analysis of the deleterious blowback from the availability of widespread, cheap contraceptives (of the sort never before experienced by humanity until relatively recently):

Predictions from a wise Celibate bloke in a dress, Pope Paul VI, 1968 Humanae Vitae (Latin, “Human Life”)

“Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men—especially the young, ….. growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion” (HV 17).

Pope Paul VI was close to the mark, but he forgot to mention the distaff side the equation; specifically, that as cheap contraceptives silently and subtly move men toward devaluing women, so too does the technology move women toward devaluing beta males, those bitter losers in the sexual market (note: I did not say marriage market or child market) for whom contraceptives, coupled with female economic self-sufficiency, have rendered them practically superfluous as primetime sexual partners.

The mass-produced condom and the Pill have freed men from feeling obligation for women as much as they have freed women to regularly and blithely pursue what was historically risky sex with caddish alpha males on the make.

The contraceptive is, in practice, a female hypergamy facilitator.

It’s funny for me to write this, because contraceptives have, in fact, been very very good to me. I did a back of the envelope calculation and figured that my aggregate sex life would have been truncated by 90% if contraceptives were prohibitively expensive, unreliable and hard to get. A world in which women had to grapple with real, palpable fears of STDs, pregnancy and subsequent abandonment is, not to put too fine a point on it, a really shitty world for womanizers and serial monogamists and uncomplicated lovers of the art of seduction itself. I imagine I’d have to *gasp* start promising marriage or some such claptrap to any woman I wanted to bang, just to loosen her up enough to unhook her bra.

I am on record as predicting that the Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse will be the cultural and technological juggernaut that hastens, if it is not the sole cause of, the death of Western civilization.

Is this revelation, this knowledge, supposed to turn me from my wicked ways? Here I am, standing at the edge of the abyss, pointing into its bowels like a histrionic jester, leading the ignorant and the deluded to peer into the void and imploring them — no, more precisely taunting them — to heed my warning of their desolate future…

and still I cavort insouciantly along its lip, secretly relieved that no one will seriously weigh my prophecies.

Pope Paul VI, apparently, was as far-seeing as I. Yet his vision of the good world, the civilized world — a vision with which I find no quarrel — would, if it were fully realized, necessarily mean a lot less fun for me. And that’s a reality I can’t abide; my own private delusion.

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Petraeus And The Infidelity Risk Curve

A reader writes amazedly:

I like sex as much as the next guy, but I’m amazed at what men will throw away to get it: a Presidency (B. Clinton, DSK), a 38 year career, CEO positions, money, respect, freedom…it just doesn’t make sense. No matter who she is, she’s not worth it. IMHO, obviously.

He speaks of Generals Petraeus and Allen and their Lebanese immigrant, faintly masculine mistresses (last I checked of this labyrinthine lovers’ octagon.) Yes, the scent of an attractive, height-weight proportionate woman is strong, stronger still when her surroundings are populated by bloated pustules formerly known as women. Scent of a Womb, you could call it. Men sniff it in the air, like a wolf picking up the odor of prey animals, and they are sprung to action. But it is useful to remember that as strong as that fertile pussy odor is to men, equally strong is the alpha male odor to women. Perhaps even stronger in women, since alpha males are so much rarer, and thus more exciting when discovered, than are young fertile women to men, who need only stroll around a SPWL neighborhood for a few minutes to ogle ten or fifty babes who can adequately stiffen the staff.

A woman in a room with a four star general is as overtaken by powerful urges to FUCK AND FUCK NOW as a man is when in the company of a pretty, young woman with suppleness in all the right places. You just don’t fiddle with the god of biomechanics and expect a slurry of sexual harassment lawsuit threats or career-ending consequences will keep His Dark Eminence at bay and the work environment safely borg-like and aridly void of sexual tension.

Feminists can screech and shriek, manboobs can pule, white knights can huff and puff, but, like all of us, their knees too will bend to the cosmic prime directive.

The scandal itself — so mundane in its predictability* — is only noteworthy for three reasons:

1. The conspiracy angle. It’s hard to avoid suspicions that Petraeus was not going to be fully cooperative on Benghazi and was therefore summarily deep-sixed by timely revelations courtesy of Team HopeandChange.

2. The male archetype on display of the “beta male in alpha clothing”. Too many people readily confuse occupational status for alpha maleness, when it’s a man’s attitude, first and foremost, which imbues him with the alpha allure. Although very high social status and alpha maleness correlate, it is by no means exact. Petraeus’s (or was it Allen’s?) self-incriminating email avalanche is some proof that he harbors the soul of a beta. A real alpha male does not do the email equivalent of gushing like a lovestruck schoolgirl, unless he really was lovestruck. (More on that later**.) He especially does not do this when he is high ranking military brass with a lot to lose should his illicit effusions be discovered.

As for the archetype of Beta Males In Alpha Clothing, these types of men get action from women entranced by their status, but then quickly lose these women’s interest when their betaness reveals itself in manifesting clinginess. The leader of men can be just as blind to the nature of women as the celibate omega male or the cloying beta male. Leader of Men beta males are often victimized by their mistresses because the women don’t have the strong feelings of love and loyalty to them that they would have to attitudinal alpha males.

3. The game lessons contained therein. Petraeus and Allen both miserably failed the Jumbotron test. You do not write tens of thousands of sappy emails to your mistress that you wouldn’t be comfortable airing on a Jumbotron for the world to see. That goes doubly for CIA directors. I like to follow the KISS principle in matters of the heart: Keep It Scarce, Stupid. And for God’s sake — the Draft folder? Have you dumbasses never heard of anonymizing remailers?

There are many tawdry twists and turns in this saga soon to come, I’m sure, but you really only need to see two pictures to understand pretty much 99% of what’s going on.

The wife…

And the mistress…

Wow, notice that masculine digit ratio she has? That, plus the squared off, clenched jaw and forehead zit are leading indicators that this broad is well on her way to breaking a land speed record for cock gobbling the alpha males in her midst.

How in tarnation is Petraeus’s potato sack poster wife for Puritan living supposed to compete with this fuel-injected sex machine? There isn’t a man alive who would pass up a chance at tapping that harlot if his only alternative was Miss Massachusetts 1687. You may as well dangle a chunk of raw meat in front of a starving lion’s maw and expect it to sit still for twenty years.

Look, I’m not claiming Broadwell is any raving beauty. She’s probably around a 7, adjusted for age. And she has that incipient manjaw going on, a classic tell of the late stage America, careerist shrike tankgrrl female with clit dick. But in relation to the wife, she’s a hard 10. Hard enough to cut diamond. If your wife — and I say this with the utmost clinical detachment — is utterly unbangable, then a 7 prancing around your office day in and day out, year after year, in high heels, pencil skirt and a sexpot squint will test the resolve of the most religiously indoctrinated or divorce theft-averse man. Every day you don’t expel yourself in the tramp’s come hither wicker is one more day you drag yourself home to suffer in stark contrast the sad, depressing sight of the Michelin Ma’am dutifully holding down the home post. Your guilty thoughts will eat you alive either way, so you may as well enjoy the benefits of the burden of that guilt.

The God of Biomechanics does not reward virtue. His works are Total Gonad.

I find the notion coming from some quarters (feminists and white knights and manboobs, oh my!) that Petraeus ought to have been more virtuous absolutely laughable. The man’s station in life, if nothing else, made him a rock star in his milieu. Women would have made their sexual intentions known to him rather blatantly. Virtue is easy when there is little to realistically tempt one to vice, as is typically the case for nearly all omegas of either sex, and betas of the male sex. This was not the case here. Petraeus had the equivalent of a thousand attractive men’s temptations thrown in his face every day. A choir of heavenly saints would have trouble keeping the Boner of Light in their pants under such circumstances.

Which brings me to my next jeremiad: Tossing men and women together in the workplace is a recipe for dissolving marriages, sexually dispossessing beta males, and corraling women under the banner of a few industry captain alpha males. Men and women in a putatively monogamous society are simply not meant to be in each other’s company, away from family, all the day long and night. Is it any wonder, really, that female infidelity rates are now approaching that of men’s rates? The gender neutral workplace experiment has brought alpha males and fertile females together like no other arrangement yet devised by man. And it happened under everyone’s noses, because no one bothered to note that human nature is real, and it isn’t going anywhere soon.

There is a reason why newly minted wives rush their husbands out to the suburbs, and it’s not just to get their kids into good white schools: it’s to sequester their men from the sea of luscious young pussy that swims the streets of the cities. Similarly, most husbands are much happier when their wives either stay at home or work in jobs where they are mostly surrounded by other women or beta males, like teaching or accounting. The goal for each is the same: to reduce excessive alpha male/hot female temptations.

Of course, don’t bother telling feminists this undeniable aspect of society: they’d rather stuff purple saguaros in their ears than contemplate the merciless, gender aneutral reality of humanity. Their willful ignorance is rivaled only by their catastrophic stupidity.

*How predictable was this affair? Very. The greater the sexual market value disparity between a husband’s wife and his female coworkers, the likelier the odds of his having an extramarital affair with a woman closer in SMV to himself. This postulate is best expressed graphically:

A high status man whose wife is a full 10 points lower on the looks scale than the women he works with is guaranteed to cheat, and cheat a lot. You will notice that some alpha males advanced in the ways of self-abnegation can resist the temptation to cheat, so long as the other woman is no more than a couple points better looking than the wife. But once the other woman crosses that threshold from “kind of prettier” to “yup, she makes my wife look like a duffel bag of laundry”, the infidelity is set in stone. And only those who loathe male desire will see fit to condemn such a man for his actions.

For the recent members of the studio audience: Feminists and their lapdog beta supplicants tend to be the types to nurse an irrational loathing of natural, normal male desire.

There are those tricky little trolls who will innocently(!) ask “Don’t you feel sorry for the wife? What did she do wrong?”

I do feel a twitch of pity for her, but it stops there. She did nothing “wrong”, in the Biblical or PC sense, but the fact that she obviously felt it reasonable to so fully let herself go is evidence that she cared not a whit for her husband’s animal desires, and was probably up to her ears in feminist ideology about the uselessness and evil of appealing to the visceral demands of men for physically attractive, slender lovers. Had she stayed thin (something which is entirely possible, barring very rare physiological ailments), she would have enjoyed more loving sexual attention from her husband. But she is undoubtedly a creature of the zany zeitgeist, and as such was likely imbued with latent hatred for the idea of pleasing one’s husband in the way that husbands prefer to be pleased.

There is also the matter of expectations that are inevitably placed on women who have managed to capture in unholy matrimony a rising star alpha male. The pressure to stay sexy and feminine will be much more strongly felt by a wife hitched to a valuable alpha male. After all, he has options most men don’t. The luxury of resting on her wifely laurels to scarf down a pint of Edy’s is not in the cards for such women. To put it mildly: Ladies, if you want the alpha male, be prepared to put in the hard work to keep him amused. If you don’t want that responsibility, then go marry a beta male who won’t have the SMV leverage to complain or seek alternate humanistic outlets for his needs.

Naturally, some of you women will balk. But try this thought experiment on for size:

The fat wife of an alpha male is the SAME THING as the unmotivated, dull, needy husband of an alpha female.

If you would be hard pressed to place full blame on the alpha female for her succumbing to infidelity, then so should you think twice before placing full blame on the alpha male for his succumbing to infidelity.

If you cannot grasp this elementary logic, then you are either a raving feminist loon, or a very feminine woman who confuses feelings for reason.

**Was Petraeus in love? I bet he was. Broadwell was considerably younger than him, and considerably sexier than his wife, and those two things are prerequisites for illicit love to bloom in the heart of a man. Feminists often sputter angrily when they see a much older, powerful man with a younger woman, a reaction which arises because they are aware that what they are seeing is an asymmetrical power relationship, but even worse, that the subordinate woman in the relationship ENJOYS IT! The man likes having a pretty girl look up to him, and the woman likes having a powerful man to look up to.

I think it is within the realm of possibility, then, that Petraeus really loved Broadwell, and saw her as much more than a fun fling. He returned her love, though in the end it appears she didn’t get what she wanted from him, and her knives came out.

Will anyone in the media beside this blog talk about the genuine love Petraeus, or Allen, had for their respective mistresses? No. The belief that a man cannot love more than one woman at once is ingrained deeply in the psyche of the masses. Most cling tightly to hopes that non-monogamous relationships cannot be loving. And who wants to believe that an older man can truly fall in love with a younger woman? Certainly not the legions of older wives!

Then there is the uncomfortable fact of female nature: who among the media elite really wants to confront the reality of the base desires of women, of their yearning for powerful men, and of their natural inclination to happily assume the subservient role to such men? Who will mention how cavalierly women will dismiss the far-reaching consequences of their actions if such actions bring them closer to joyful fulfillment in the arms of their married lovers?

Love can thrive in relationships where lust is the driving force. When I read that Petraeus was having an affair with Broadwell, I was happy for him. Imagine the torment such a man with his temptations must suffer, just to keep up appearances in service to his political career and his dreary family life. But he went ahead with his affair anyway, and he did it for love. He put love ahead of duty and the wrath of the PC Kommisars. He chose to live not as the mass of men live — empty of any joy. Petraeus may be a fool and betrayer, but he is also a bold, exuberant romantic. A man willing to risk it all for a pretty woman’s love, the best thing that there is in this godforsaken world.

In the final analysis, the magnetic appeal of this story is clear:

Petraeus is us.

PS I predict that the cuckolded beta male hubbies, both of whom are “conventionally alpha” doctors, of Broadwell and Kelley will be the least examined aspect of this story by the media. Remeber, folks, men are expendable! And that goes triply for beta males. They are the forgotten lepers in the wilderness of unspoken tabulations of human worth. We will hear a never ending tale of woe about Mrs. Petraeus, but hardly a peep about the sad sacks who suffered their wives’ unfaithfulness. Some sexes are just more equal than others.

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Reformed Beta Of The Month

Le Chateau has highlighted great and gruesome stories of alphas and betas, but what about those beta males who transcend, through sheer force of will, the prison of their supplicating souls? More than a learning tool or a life lesson, these enlightened post-betas are inspirations. The 80% or so of men who qualify as beta males need a role model like them; someone who can show them the way. There is a better life if they would just take it, and the reformed beta is proof that you don’t have to be born an alpha to have the good things in life and experience the flush of power that the alpha male takes for granted.

My prudish husband has left me because I lied about my sex life

When I met my husband 40 years ago I knew he was ‘the one.’ He had firm opinions on sex before marriage (outdated even then) and was a virgin.

As I got to know him, it became clear that he’d never consider marrying somebody with ‘history.’ He thought sex special and wouldn’t want to imagine his wife having it with others.

But, by 22, I’d been having sex for four years. Madly in love and wanting him to marry me, I lied.

He was bound to realise I wasn’t a virgin, so I made up a story that I’d been in a long engagement, giving up my virginity under pressure only a month before my wedding day, then reluctantly had sex twice with my fiancé, who then dumped me, leaving me devastated and ashamed.

He was very understanding and proposed soon after. We married and moved to his home town — a relief, as I’d worried we might bump into a friend who might speak out of turn.

We had two children and a very happy and successful marriage. But a few weeks ago, an old friend contacted me over the internet, and I invited her round.

My husband left us to talk and went off to the garden. Inevitably we talked of the past.

After she left, I found my husband looking devastated. He said he’d gone into the conservatory to read and heard everything.

He said he felt utterly betrayed, as he had a right to expect honesty, but our entire marriage had been based on a fundamental lie.

I said we’d had a wonderful 40 years, so what could it matter what I did before I met him?

He moved in to the spare room and avoided me. A week later he moved to a bedsit and told me he wanted a divorce.

Nothing would change his mind. Our adult children have tried, but he is absolutely fixed.

Men who want to find a woman for a long-term relationship or marriage (a codified LTR) are put off by histories of a slutty past. The woman who has given herself freely to men before him proves that old GBFM aphorism that it makes no sense for a man to pay for the pussy that was handed over no strings attached to other men when it was younger, hotter, tighter. You don’t seriously invest in a rode hard and tossed away wet pussy; instead, you ride it harder and wear it out a little more, then look for fresher pussy that doesn’t need its 60,000 cockas maintenance as soon as you sign the dotted line.

My method may be glib, intended to inflict maximum emotional pain for make benefit of my personal amusement, but the foundation upon which the glibness rests is true. Men have evolved intricate mental algorithms that subconsciously push them to devalue women with extensive sexual histories as long-term partners. The reason for this is obivous: the slut is a bigger infidelity risk, and thus a bigger cuckolding risk, than the chaste woman. Science has proven this, in yet another example of the lab coat crowd catching up with conventional wisdom and common sense observation.

Therefore, when a long-loyal husband finds out his wife rode the cock carousel, even if discovered to have occurred in a prior life of hers, his respect for her drops a notch. His love for her shrinks three sizes. His honed beta ability and predilection to put her on a pedestal and adore her suffers a grievous diminishment. She has, in a word, become a less worthy woman in his eyes. And, likewise, in the eyes of all men, because men, like women, share universal preferences for certain types of mates.

So good for this reformed beta for walking away from his once-whore wife. In the big picture, the sin she committed may be small, but sometimes it takes horrible and swift retribution by a man to violently shake a woman, and women in her sphere of influence, from comfortable delusions and easy expectations regarding the self-imposition of controls on their behavior. All it takes is a relatively few betas to toss a stone cold rock in the world of women and the ripples will eddy and swirl through the masses. The beta male has suddenly become uncontrollable, unpredictable, untamable! This is the stuff of revolution, and it will set women on the path to happiness more powerfully than a million grrlpower tomes, feminist blogs or fat acceptance hugboxes.

The haters are apoplectic. Their splutter is the stuff of delicious slo-mo videos. “But but but,” they will protest, “I can be slutty and still land a man! Any man who leaves me because I’m a slut doesn’t deserve me!”

Deservin’s got nothin’ to do with it, honey. It’s biomechanical turtles all the way down.

But I’ll throw the haters a bone, here. Yes, it’s true that a slut, assuming she is sufficiently physically attractive, can cajole a man into a relationship. Men are, before all else, born slaves to a pretty female face, and it takes effort to break those chains forged of unalloyed pulchritude. Many men do indeed slavishly pursue sluts simply because those sluts are hot with perfect apple bottoms.

But “sufficiently attractive” is the key word. The higher value the man, the more beautiful the slut has to be to ensnare him in a relationship. High value men, aka alphas, have options in the mating market that beta males don’t; these men, when they aren’t just plowing through sluts for fun and penile profit, will generally balk at dating sluts in favor of settling down with more modest, and less sexually experienced, women.

There is, then, a tacit assumption that the sorts of men the feminist sluts are pulling aren’t exactly the top of the alpha male heap. They are likely beta males, maybe some of them greater omegas with cute undulating manboobs and receding chins, who are so desperate for sex and female love that they can readily suppress their distaste for sluts if it means having a girl on their arms.

Maxim #56: The more limited a person’s options in the sexual market, the laxer his or her mate standards.

(For those interested in the science behind this, I believe there is a study floating around internetland which purports to show that very beautiful women with extensive sexual histories don’t suffer too much of a hit to their marriage marketability, because the betas who marry them are quick to forgive their slutty ways. In short, very hot women are so intoxicating that many men will assume the higher risk of getting cuckolded by them for the chance to enjoy a few years of glorious, incomparably pleasurable sex.)

In stark contrast, have you ever seen what an alpha male does to plain-looking sluts? It isn’t pretty. To call it pump and dump would be a euphemism. Think more along the lines of “facelessly screw and scatter to the wind”.

These realities of the sexual market aren’t often instantly apprehensible. You can go a few years only subconsciously picking up cues that your behavior is hurting your mate value. But in the aggregate of many lifetimes, and over each lifetime, the god of biomechanics imposes his relentless, merciless, unavoidable will. And you will bend the knee to him, sooner or later. You have no choice.

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Intermittent Love

Providing evidence ♥♥♥YET AGAIN♥♥♥ for another Chateau Heartiste maxim, a study has come out which finds that women love men who parcel their displays of love unpredictably (h/t: reader George).

I Heart Unpredictable Love

TO love is to suffer; to be happy is to love. So must one suffer to be happy? This syllogism won’t win any prizes in logic, but it accurately describes a curious paradox of human behavior: the allure of unpredictable romantic partners. […]

This kind of amorous attachment is like gambling — except that the currency is affection and sex. The key is that the reward is unanticipated, which makes it particularly powerful and alluring to our brains.

To understand why, consider what happens in the brain when people are given rewards under two different conditions: predicted and unpredicted. The psychiatrist Gregory Berns did just that in a study in which subjects were given fruit juice and water, both naturally pleasurable rewards, while scanning their brains with an M.R.I. During part of each session, subjects received water and fruit juice at random intervals; during another part, the water and juice were administered every 10 seconds.

Professor Berns discovered that the water and juice elicited greater activation in the brain’s reward circuit when the reward was unanticipated than when it was delivered in a predictable fashion. The pattern held true whether the reward was water or fruit juice — even though most subjects claimed a clear preference.

When the reward circuit fires, it also tells the brain something like, “Pay attention and remember this experience because it’s important.” This circuit releases dopamine when stimulated, which, if it reaches a critical level, conveys a sense of pleasure.

Intermittent rewards are far more powerful a bonding agent than predictable rewards. This is why aloof and inscrutable men are so intoxicating to women — they are like the unanticipated glasses of water and juice. You want to keep a woman on her toes by showering her with your loving lovingness in a very haphazard fashion, what pickup artists like to call hot/cold/hot/cold. The more astute readers will notice that the hot/cold/hot/cold routine is frequently and instinctively deployed by women when they are in the early stages of dating a new man, and need to test him for alpha male congruence. You, as the hopeful womanizer, should know from reading this blog that adopting the psychological tricks of women for your own nefarious ends is quite a potent weapon in the battlefield known as the sexual market.

This blog long ago discussed the relevance of intermittently rewarding women for good behavior and promptly punishing women for bad behavior.

VI. Keep her guessing

True to their inscrutable natures, women ask questions they don’t really want direct answers to. Woe be the man who plays it straight — his fate is the suffering of the beta. Evade, tease, obfuscate. She thrives when she has to imagine what you’re thinking about her, and withers when she knows exactly how you feel. A woman may want financial and family security, but she does not want passion security. In the same manner, when she has displeased you, punish swiftly, but when she has done you right, reward slowly. Reward her good behavior intermittently and unpredictably and she will never tire of working hard to please you.

The article about the study goes on to discuss why people are attracted to intermittent rewards.

The reason this happens is simple. The brain’s reward circuit has evolved over millions of years to enable us to recognize and extract various rewards from our environment that are critical to our survival, like food and a suitable sexual mate. Unlike predictable stimuli, unanticipated stimuli can tell us things about the world that we don’t yet know. And because they serve as a signal that a big reward might be close by, it is advantageous that novel stimuli command our attention.

Which brings us to inconstant love. It turns out that human love and attachment are, like the fruit juice in Professor Berns’s experiment, natural reinforcers that can activate your reward pathway. The anthropologist Helen Fisher studied a group of 17 people in the grip of intense romantic love and found that an image of their beloved strongly activated the reward circuit.

If you are involved with someone who is unpredictably loving, you might not like it very much — but your reward circuit is sure going to notice the capricious behavior and give you information that might conflict with what you believe consciously is in your best interest.

Indeed, you may not even be aware of your own reward circuit’s activity. One of the curious things that Professor Berns found was that most of his subjects couldn’t tell the difference between the predictable or unpredictable condition in which the reward was given.

Since unpredictable rewards cause more dopamine release than predictable ones and more dopamine means more pleasure, one implication of this study is that people experience more pleasure with unpredictable rewards than with predictable ones — but they may not be consciously aware of this fact.

Poon Commandment VI… CONFIRMED. By science! Oh, and by real-world experience.

By the way, the fact that people aren’t consciously aware of the pleasure-giving power of intermittent love goes a long way to explaining why women can’t adequately tap into their true desires and explain them without resorting to pretty lie generating hamsterisms. They simply might not be cognizant of the primal emotional machinations fueling their tingles.

Not just that, but there was essentially no relationship between the subjects’ stated preferences and the observed activity in their reward circuit. This suggests that our reward pathways may not only be activated without our recognition, but perhaps even in ways that are contrary to what we think we prefer.

Did science unintentionally uncover more evidence for the existence of the rationalization hamster? Why yes, yes I believe it did! Proof that you should watch what women do, not listen to what they say, about matters of love.

These data might explain, in part, the paradox of people who complain constantly about their unreliable lovers, but keep coming back to them, time and again.

Science discovers that chicks dig aloof and indifferent jerks. Feminists disengage from scissoring to console each other with an uninterrupted stream of feelgood bullshit.

Science: 1. Game: 1. Chateau Heartiste: 1. Love: 1. Game denialists and haters and feminists: 0.

I feed your unfathomably bitter tears to my Galactus-sized ego. Yum.

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Latest Baumeister Paper Supports CH Concept Of The Sexual Market

Baumeister, the primary coauthor behind the seminal 2004 paper titled “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions”, has released online the latest addition to that work, titled “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends“, another steely-eyed examination of the sexes that pretty much validates the core Chateau Heartiste concept of the existence of a merciless sexual market, and its primacy among all markets.

I was planning to write a sole synopsis and commentary on the recent study, but others, like Mangan (back from hiatus), have done a good job covering the essential hypotheses and conclusions in the paper, so instead I’ll post in addition, in the near future, an email from a reader who forwarded to CH his astute objections and comments to the original Baumeister paper in an email sent to the author. (I don’t know if Baumeister replied.)

(Quick aside: Mangan asks a related question regarding a prominent claim in the Baumeister paper that men supported the entrance of women into the workforce to increase men’s sexual access: “Is there a direct relationship between looser morals and more women in public life?” I would bet that there is, and that a trend toward higher female participation in the workforce, and particularly in government and similar social gatekeeper occupations, is one of the crucial indicators that a nation is beginning the downward spiral into stasis and eventual decline.)

Continuing, some choice quotes (with editor commentary) pulled from the latest Baumeister/Vohs (a woman!) paper to give you a flavor for its contents.

In simple terms, we proposed that in sex, women are the suppliers and men constitute the demand (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). Hence the anti-democratic, seemingly paradoxical sex ratio findings that Regnerus describes. When women are in the minority, the sexual marketplace conforms to their preferences: committed relationships, widespread virginity, faithful partners, and early marriage. For example, American colleges in the 1950s conformed to that pattern. In our analysis, women benefit in such circumstances because the demand for their sexuality exceeds the supply. In contrast, when women are the majority, such as on today’s campuses as well as in some ethnic minority communities, things shift toward what men prefer: Plenty of sex without commitment, delayed marriage, extradyadic copulations, and the like. [ed: yep, life has been good for those of us who know the score.] […]

Sexual marketplaces take the shape they do because nature has biologically built a disadvantage into men: a huge desire for sex that makes men dependent on women. Men’s greater desire puts them at a disadvantage, just as when two parties are negotiating a possible sale or deal, the one who is more eager to make the deal is in a weaker position than the one who is willing to walk away without the deal. [ed: this is why practiced male aloofness is attractive to women — it signals that the man is holding a stronger market position, and that his goods are therefore valuable.] Women certainly desire sex too — but as long as most women desire it less than most men, women have a collective advantage, and social roles and interactions will follow scripts that give women greater power than men (Baumeister et al. 2001). [ed: culture emerges from sexually differentiated genetic roots.] We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage (see Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Women have often sustained their advantage over men by putting pressure on each other to restrict the supply of sex available to men. As with any monopoly or cartel, restricting the supply leads to a higher price. […]

Recent work has found that across a large sample of countries today, the economic and political liberation of women is positively correlated with greater availability of sex (Baumeister and Mendoza 2011). Thus, men’s access to sex has turned out to be maximized not by keeping women in an economically disadvantaged and dependent condition, but instead by letting them have abundant access and opportunity. [ed: was the sexual and feminist revolution fomented by undersexed beta males? a case can be made.] In an important sense, the sexual revolution of the 1970s was itself a market correction. Once women had been granted wide opportunities for education and wealth, they no longer had to hold sex hostage (Baumeister and Twenge 2002). [ed: that is, they no longer had to suffer the indignity of beta provider courtship. now that they had the resources, it was open season on alpha male cock hopping. the sexual revolution appears to have backfired on beta males expecting a bigger slice of the snatch pie.]

What does all this mean for men? The social trends suggest the continuing influence of a stable fact, namely the strong desire of young men for sexual activity. As the environment has shifted, men have simply adjusted their behavior to find the best means to achieve this same goal. Back in 1960, it was difficult to get sex without getting married or at least engaged, and so men married early. To be sure, this required more than being willing to bend the knee, declare love, and offer a ring. To qualify as marriage material, a man had to have a job or at least a strong prospect of one (such as based on an imminent college degree). The man’s overarching goal of getting sex thus motivated him to become a respectable stakeholder contributing to society.

The fact that men became useful members of society as a result of their efforts to obtain sex is not trivial, and it may contain important clues as to the basic relationship between men and culture (see Baumeister 2010). Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization, and it cannot at present be considered a proven fact, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. [ed: that last clause is critical. men will always take the path of least resistance to sex. it is up to women to make that path more difficult if they want to extract more concessions from men.] (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, “If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.”) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that. This puts the current sexual free-for-all on today’s college campuses in a somewhat less appealing light than it may at first seem. [ed: what’s interesting and unspoken here is that the sexual free-for-all is chugging along nicely well beyond and outside of the college years, with the difference being that, in their 20s and 30s, a select number of fewer men (let’s call them… alpha males) are enjoying the ample premarital rewards of sexually available women.] Giving young men easy access to abundant sexual satisfaction deprives society of one of its ways to motivate them to contribute valuable achievements to the culture. [ed: damn, i’m torn. do i want a thriving society or easier access to sex? yeeeeah… i’ll take the latter and leave the self-sacrifice required of the former for the anti-poolside chumps.]

The changes in gender politics since 1960 can be seen as involving a giant trade, in which both genders yielded something of lesser importance to them in order to get something they wanted more (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). As Regnerus states, partly based on our own extensive survey of research findings, men want sex, indeed more than women want it (Baumeister et al. 2001). Women, meanwhile, want not only marriage but also access to careers and preferential treatment in the workplace. [ed: women are the reproductively more valuable sex, and so it makes sense that evolution would have “gifted” women with an oversized entitlement complex and the inability to engage in self-criticism.]

The giant trade thus essentially involved men giving women not only easy access but even preferential treatment in the huge institutions that make up society, which men created. [ed: but the grand bargain did not work out as intended for the masses of beta males who acquiesced to the new girl order. while alpha males certainly saw more action from “liberated” women, the average joe did not. instead, all the average joe got in return for sacrificing his workplace status in hopes of easier sex was… a heaping helping of humiliation and wage stagnation and anti-joe animus, which continues at an accelerated pace to this day. this is a critical distinction i would like to see Baumeister address.] Today most schools, universities, corporations, scientific organizations, governments, and many other institutions have explicit policies to protect and promote women. It is standard practice to hire or promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man. Most large organizations have policies and watchdogs that safeguard women’s interests and ensure that women gain preferential treatment over men. Parallel policies or structures to protect men’s interests are largely nonexistent and in many cases are explicitly prohibited. Legal scholars, for example, point out that any major new law is carefully scrutinized by feminist legal scholars who quickly criticize any aspect that could be problematic or disadvantageous to women, and so all new laws are women-friendly. Nobody looks out for men, and so the structural changes favoring women and disadvantaging men have accelerated (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). […]

Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near-equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small. [ed: what do you think will happen to a nation’s cultural progress when it goes out of its way to give preferential treatment to its women who, as a sex, prefer tawdry one-to-one relationships to men’s preference for the growth potential in large shallow relationships? that’s right, the economy and the culture come more and more to reflect women’s preferences. result: progress that is the hallmark of rising empires grinds to a halt.] […]

Why have men acquiesced so much in giving women the upper hand in society’s institutions? It falls to men to create society (because women almost never create large organizations or cultural systems). It seems foolish and self-defeating for men then to meekly surrender advantageous treatment in all these institutions to women. Moreover, despite many individual exceptions, in general and on average men work harder at their jobs in these institutions than women, thereby enabling men to rise to the top ranks. As a result, women continue to earn less money and have lower status than men, which paradoxically is interpreted to mean that women’s preferential treatment should be continued and possibly increased (see review of much evidence in Baumeister2010). Modern society is not far from embracing explicit policies of “equal pay for less work,” as one of us recently proposed. Regardless of that prospect, it appears that preferential treatment of women throughout the workforce is likely to be fairly permanent. Because of women’s lesser motivation and ambition, they will likely never equal men in achievement, and their lesser attainment is politically taken as evidence of the need to continue and possibly increase preferential treatment for them. [ed: the preferences shall continue until morale improves.]

But this pattern of male behavior makes more sense if we keep in mind that getting sex is a high priority for men, especially young men. Being at a permanent disadvantage in employment and promotion prospects, as a result of affirmative action policies favoring women, is certainly a cost to young men, but perhaps not a highly salient one. What is salient is that sex is quite readily available. As Regnerus reports, even a man with dismal career prospects (e.g., having dropped out of high school) can find a nice assortment of young women to share his bed.

Mangan makes a valid objection to this Baumeister theory that affirmative action for women increased men’s sexual access by noting that it was likely contraception and cost-of-sex-reducing technology — the Pill, abortion, and penicillin — which opened the floodgates to “free” love. I put “free” in quotes because in reality, the sexual revolution did not benefit all men equally; alpha males got the lion’s share of premarital sex from economically self-sufficient women. Beta males suffered more than usual, having to endure watching from the sidelines as alpha males cleaned up, while simultaneously being deprived of the best leverage they had in the sexual market: their promise of marital resources.

However, I do think Baumeister is onto something true, in that increased female workplace participation meant that men with reasonably high status jobs had a lot more fleshy temptresses from whom to conveniently choose, and that women must certainly have felt less restricted in their sexuality once they were meeting their own financial needs and could afford to risk happy dalliances with sexually desirable, but more non-committal, alpha males.

Again, Le Chateau was on top of all this years ago, when we proposed a sea change in the American cultural landscape heralded by the coming of the Four Five Six Sirens of the Sexual Apocalypse:

1. Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and the de facto contraceptive abortion).
2. Easy peasy no-fault divorce.
3. Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio is any indication).
4. Rigged feminist-inspired laws that have caused a disincentivizing of marriage for men and an incentivizing of divorce for women.
5. Penicillin (reduced the cost of contracting STDs)
6. Widely available hardcore porn.

I added numbers five and six to the list of Sexual Apocalypse Sirens, because they seem to me just as important to understanding how the sexual market changed in the last fifty or so years.

So, a crib sheet of quippy replies if you ever need it to send a feminist or manboob howling with indignation:

1. The Pill
2. No-fault divorce
3. Working women
4. Man-hating feminism
5. Penicillin
6. Porn

Toss into a social salad bowl already brimming with an influx of non-European immigrants thanks to the 1965 soft genocide act, mix thoroughly, and voila!: a huge, inexorable, relentless leftward shift in American politics, an explosion of single moms, wage stagnation, government growth, upper class childlessness, lower class dysgenics, and a creaking, slow deterioration in the foundational vigor of the nation and the gutting of the pride of her people.

Into this pot pie of portent throw in the Skittles Man, Bring the Movies Man, Nah Man, and Disappeared Again Man, for whom girls have always swooned but who now, thanks to relaxed pressure from women themselves requiring men to put a ring on it before getting any huggy or kissy, and the incentivizing of risky sexual behavior by government policy and contraceptive technology, could enjoy sex without the entanglement of marriage or gainful employment.

Game, for all the shit it gets from the usual suspects, was just a rational response to a radically altered playing field. It didn’t cause this calamity; it just profited from it.

Meanwhile, beta males are left scratching their block-like skulls, wondering what the fuck just happened.

Back to Baumeister.

Nowadays young men [ed: correction: alpha males] can skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex. Nor does he have to get married and accept all those costs, including promising to share his lifetime earnings and forego other women forever. Female sex partners are available without all that. [ed: …to those men with charm in the game.]

So maybe the young men don’t care that much about how the major social institutions in the world of work have become increasingly rigged to favor women. Sex has become free and easy. This is today’s version of the opiate of the (male) masses. The male who beds multiple women is enjoying life quite a bit, and so he may not notice or mind the fact that his educational and occupational advancement is vaguely hampered by all the laws and policies that push women ahead of him. After all, one key reason he wanted that advancement was to get sex, and he already has that. Climbing the corporate ladder for its own sake may still hold some appeal, but undoubtedly it was more compelling when it was vital for obtaining sex. Success isn’t as important as it once was, when it was a prerequisite for sex. [ed: success isn’t as important for beta males, either, because success doesn’t provide the same sexual market leverage like it used to for them. how is a no-game-having, 9-to-5er beta male supposed to woo a lawyercunt pulling six figures?]

If men don’t need career success to get sex, then what if anything do they need success for? Some research indicates that career motivation really intensifies for men when they become fathers. Indeed, it has long been known that the transition to parenthood has opposite effects by gender. New mothers withdraw from their work and careers; new fathers embrace work and career with enhanced seriousness and motivation (for a review see Baumeister 1991). [ed: the “pay gap” explained.] […]

With regard to work, the societal changes are producing less contribution by men and more by women. These might offset, with few or no costs to society. Still, replacing male with female workers may bring some changes, insofar as the two genders approach work differently. Compared to men, women have higher rates of absenteeism, seek social rewards more than financial ones, are less ambitious, work fewer hours overall, are more prone to take extended career interruptions, and identify less with the organizations they work for. They are more risk averse, resulting in fewer entrepreneurs and inventions. (Baumeister 2010, noted an appalling gender imbalance in new patents; nobody is seriously suggesting that the U.S. Patent office systematically discriminates against women, but women simply do not apply for patents in anything close to the rate that men do.) Women are less interested in science and technology fields. They create less wealth (for themselves and others). [ed: the roman empire wept.] […]

The female contribution of sex to the marriage is evanescent: As women age, they lose their sexual appeal much faster than men lose their status and resources, and some alarming evidence even indicates that wives rather quickly lose their desire for sex (Arndt 2009). To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, many husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality—and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography, and extramarital dalliance.

Baumeister is a serious realtalker.

We speculate that today’s young men may be exceptionally ill prepared for a lifetime of sexual starvation that is the lot of many modern husbands. The traditional view that a wife should sexually satisfy her husband regardless of her own lack of desire has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband. […] Today’s young men spend their young adulthood having abundant sex with multiple partners, and that seems to us to be an exceptionally poor preparation for a lifetime of sexual starvation.

Game can save marriages from the fate of sexual starvation. At least until the wifey is no longer attractive enough to stimulate the hubby. Ah well, waddayagonnado?

Although we have noted warning signs and problems, we remain optimistic. [ed: i don’t.] Despite the obstacles and changing contingencies, men and women have always managed to find each other and work together to create a modicum of happiness for both and to create a sphere in which children can grow, thrive, and sustain the culture for another few decades. [ed: yes, men and women will always find each other. the question is, what form will that finding take? that is the issue which matters for those who seek to maximize the social good.] The coming generation will face novel challenges, but somehow we think they will muddle through and manage to reinvent family life yet again. [ed: sometimes the reinvention is not as good as the original.]

All in all, a stellar paper that lays down the hammer of hurt on the pushers of pretty lies. For this reason, I expect the liars and degenerates and serpentine sophists currently running the country into the ground to thoroughly ignore and/or distort it.

My main objections to the paper center around the fact that Baumeister/Vohs don’t explore female hypergamy and alpha male/beta male distinction in much detail, which is a shortcoming I hope the both of them will address in the future. Nonetheless, their work is essentially a huge vindication of the concepts that the proprietors at Chateau Heartiste have been elucidating since the first day this blog drove a stake through the heart of the reigning discourse and claimed a piece of this decaying culture for itself. And someday, perhaps soon, a real rain will come and wash all the lies off the streets.

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The Necessity Of Relationship Game

What ho! Another scientific study ♥♥♥confirming♥♥♥ CH observations about the functioning of female sexuality? You bet!

Women with stable but not-so-sexy mates become more distant, critical during periods of high fertility.

Long after women have chosen Mr. Stable over Mr. Sexy, they struggle unconsciously with the decision, according to a new study by UCLA researchers who look at subtle changes in behavior during ovulation.

At their most fertile period, these women are less likely to feel close to their mates and more likely to find fault with them than women mated to more sexually desirable men, the research shows.

“A woman evaluates her relationship differently at different times in her cycle, and her evaluation seems to be colored by how sexually attractive she perceives her partner to be,” said Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and senior author of the study.

Now where have we heard this before? Oh yeah. Here… and here.

Creeping marital betatude isn’t an on/off switch; it’s a viral agent that slowly, but inexorably, sickens your wife until she wants to get as far away from you as possible. Usually into the arms of a man who isn’t infected.

As usual, the Chateau is well ahead of the curve.

I really love these studies validating core game concepts because I know they cause the haters to blow steam out of their puckered sphincters. Haters seem to be under the delusion that science is on their side, so the bubble bursting is even more delicious.

If you aren’t tracking your wife’s ovulation cycle, and you’re a constitutional beta male who strongly suspects you won her over with your promises of stability and resources and her looming wall as your ally in love, you should act now. Because when that egg’s a-layin’, those players you despise are gonna have the key to her heart. And no amount of beta puling will pull her back from the brink. In fact, it will make it worse.

The good news, if you can call it that, should be a relief to cuckold fetishists everywhere.

Nevertheless, the negative feelings appear fleeting, and they don’t seem to affect a woman’s long-term commitment to her romantic relationship, the study found.

If your ego can emotionally weather the morbid sight of your wife swooning for guys with smooth moves, and perhaps cheating on you one week every month, your marriage should be good to go. Naturally, most men can’t tolerate that, so game becomes of paramount importance for keeping their wives or girlfriends maximally attracted to them, and not other men. I.e., to keep them in line. Because much of game is, in essence, learned charisma of the high status alpha male, your beloved boo can be… how shall we say?… massaged, or imperceptibly guided, to avert her focus from other men back onto you, during those times when she is most susceptible to the allure of competitor cock.

Through a series of high-profile studies, Haselton’s lab has revealed telling changes that take place in women’s behavior during ovulation. Possibly to increase the odds of attracting suitable mating partners, these behaviors include a tendency to dress up and to speak in a higher-pitched, more feminine voice and — in a potential inbreeding-avoidance mechanism — to refrain from contact with male kin. In addition, the lab has found that women whose mates are less sexy and masculine tend to be more attracted to other men during the few fertile days leading up to ovulation.

The more beta you are, the more you need game just to tread water with the woman you love. A woman who is shackled to a beta male is going to feel more powerful urges to copulate with an alpha male when she’s biologically able to conceive. It’s as if her body knows, somehow, that the man who provides for her and supports her and bores her to death is worthy of genetic obliteration. Aren’t women sublime creatures?

The researchers, who used a questionnaire designed exclusively for the study, found no significant change across the cycle in how the women perceived their level of commitment to the relationship or, at least initially, in their satisfaction with it.

What this means is that women unknowingly lie to themselves, and effectively at that. A woman’s evolutionary programming has ensured that she is shielded from conscious, spontaneous knowledge of the functioning of the worst of her biomachinery, such as her id-driven desire to be impregnated via infidelity with an interloper alpha male. An ovulating woman who has, seemingly inexplicably, begun nagging her beta husband or boyfriend, is not going to like to be confronted with the real reason why she turned into a raving bitch. If you were to ask this woman about her level of relationship commitment, of course she will answer that all is well, because to admit otherwise is to upend and potentially sabotage the ancient female sexual directive to amass both alpha fucks and beta bucks. And her genes would not like that at all. AT ALL.

But an exercise that required the women to rate how close they felt to their men yielded dramatic results. As women mated to less sexually attractive men moved from their least fertile to most fertile period, their closeness scores dropped one point on a seven-point scale. Women mated to the most sexually attractive men, meanwhile, experienced the opposite effect. As these women moved from their least to most fertile period, their closeness scores rose by a point.

If you are already an alpha male — either by fortune of inheritance or by grind of self-correction — then your girlfriend or wife will fall MORE in love with you when she is ovulating. She will go from pleasantly in love to lustfully in love. Yet more proof that there is no end to the ways in which being alpha is better than being beta.

The questionnaire asked the women to rate how characteristic such faults as being moody, childish, emotional, thoughtless and critical were of their mate.

The researchers found that women mated to the less sexually attractive men were significantly more likely to find fault with their partners and, again, feel less close to their partners during the high-fertility period than the low-fertility period. Women who rated their mates as more sexually attractive, meanwhile, did not exhibit these changes and instead reported being more satisfied with their relationship at high fertility than at low fertility.

When a man’s woman is being bitchy, the problem is him, but not in the way most men would think. Most men will promptly resort to DEFCUNT Level 1 Beta Supplication Mode to appease their harridans, thinking, wrongly, that their women are bitchy because they haven’t gotten enough signs of commitment and support from their partners. And who could blame these men for thinking this? When nagging, inconsolable women lob heat-of-the-moment accusations at their men, the accusations usually take the form of scattershot wails about one-size-fits-all conventional relationship issues that come straight from therapists’ hackneyed textbooks.

“You don’t care about me.” “You never listen.” “You don’t support this marriage like I do.” “You forgot to go food shopping AGAIN. How many times do I have to remind you?!”

So these beta men, quite reasonably, care harder, listen longer, support stronger, and buy enough groceries to fill a fat housewife’s appetizer plate. He reasons, “This is what she claims she wants, so this is what I’ll give her. And that should make her be nice to me like she was last week.”

In the meantime, the alpha male is now on his fifth year of forgetting to go food shopping, and his lover hasn’t bitched once about it.

If the beta male only knew what worlds of unburdened joy lie just beyond his reach…

The truth in these matters is just the opposite of the conclusions that the beta male’s reasoning takes him: what their nagging, maximally fertile women want is not more beta, but LESS BETA. They want the alpha male who dismisses their nags with a wave of the hand, a cocky attitude, and a vigorous entitlement to belittling sexual conquest. And they want this DESPITE what they claim to say they want. The man who understands this paradox about women is the man who succeeds with them by measures of success that transcend traditionalist bromides.

The researchers believe the findings shed light on a suite of conflicting behaviors that stem from mating strategies that might have provided an evolutionary benefit to women’s female ancestors of long ago but today probably serve no other purpose than to stir the domestic pot.

The form may change, but the urge remains the same.

She calls the urge for a stable long-term partner along with the increased desire for a more sexually attractive mate during periods of high fertility the “dual mating hypothesis.”

Haselton and Larson next plan to look at whether fault-finding and the feelings of distance and dissatisfaction have any long-term destabilizing effects on the relationships of women with less sexually attractive men.

Science proves that game can help strengthen a monogamous marriage. It’s not just for banging a lot of club sluts anymore.

They also plan to look into how, if at all, the behavior is perceived by the male partners of these women.

“We don’t know if men are picking up on this behavior, but if they are, it must be confusing for them,” Larson said.

Ya think? Thank the lord of illuminating truth that storehouses of real-life acquired knowledge like this digital retreat exist for men. The reign of confusion about women’s nature is beginning to close, and a new chapter in the history of love and romance is being written. This message will be uglier to some, more beautiful to others, dangerous to a few. But one thing it will be for all: a path out of the darkness.

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When The Handicap Principle Is Just A Handicap

The Handicap Principle, or what is known in layman terms as conspicuous consumption, is an important biological hypothesis that explains why the males of some (most?) species have evolved costly status signaling displays. The idea is that a high fitness male demonstrates his high status to females by showing he can afford to waste resources on, for example, showy plumage or sport cars. It is objectively better for the male’s survival to not have heavy plumage that could make escape from predators more difficult, or to save money for future contingencies instead of waste it on an expensive car; yet, males of different species will often acquire these presumable maladaptations or waste resources on nonessentials because sexual selection exerts a force equally as powerful as natural selection.

So goes the theory. In reality, the theory bumps up against a wall.

You can’t get much more handicapped that that, unless you were limbless and genital-less with a concave forehead.

People open to the ideas of evolutionary psychology sometimes forget that nature operates within a system of checks and balances just as free markets and republics (putatively) do. The Handicap Principle helps explain some odd evolved male traits in species, but nature is always ensuring that the evolved handicap never gets too far out of control. Because when that happens, it’s no longer a status signal; it’s a real handicap that will repulse women or get you killed.

Game and the Handicap Principle have a rocky relationship. Handicapping yourself — a la Mystery with his furry hats and Victorian coats — is a great way to signal high status, IF you have compensating alpha male traits. Mystery has those compensating traits; specifically, his height, his grace under pressure, and his renowned game ability to handle the inevitable female shit tests and seamlessly escort women through the stages of seduction.

If, on the other hand, you are short, ugly, nerdy, insecure and without any game at all, dressing like Mystery is apt to backfire. Your calculated self-handicapping will not be a signal of confidence and high status, but an actual handicap that makes your job of getting laid harder than it need be. For you, the appropriate level of self-handicapping would be something along the order of uncommon shiny cufflinks or a gaudy ring. Just enough to incite curiosity in women, but not so much to banish yourself to the realm of weirdos.

Maxim #55: The degree to which you handicap yourself in an effort to signal high status to women should be commensurate with your game expertise and your confidence level.

The more confidently you can pull off showy clothes or an asshole attitude, and the more effortlessly you can deflect the shit you will invariably get from others offended by your ostentation, the more the Handicap Principle will work for you instead of against you.

Keep in mind, as well, that Mystery’s fraught couture is a game tactic in itself, designed to provoke reactions from women that allow Mystery to demonstrate his alpha prowess through his unperturbed handling of those reactions. You should welcome shit tests from women, because that means you have aroused interest in them. Mystery’s garish dress is a short cut to coaxing those much-valued shit tests out of women. But you need unshakeable confidence bordering on delusion to successfully pull it off, which, in my observation of fledgling PUAs, most men practicing the dark art of pickup don’t have in sufficient quantity.

For the average man who has leapt above the fray and grasped that important sex differences in psychology exist and thus interactions with women require a different toolkit than conventional wisdom offers, the Handicap Principle will be most relevant to him during the comfort stage of seducing a woman into bed (or into a longer-term relationship). In CH parlance, this is known as “vulnerability game“, and it is vital, in small doses, as a quasi-handicapping game technique for strengthening emotional connections with women.

Signaling that you possess beta provider potential is a powerful bonding glue to women who are at heart creatures of duality seeking the best of both alpha and beta in men. But since alpha is in rarer supply and harder to acquire, and since beta comes naturally to most men and is easier to acquire, the trick to finding the right balance is to emphasize your alpha while leavening it with droppings of beta. These beta droppings are the equivalent of handicapping yourself with costly displays of provider plumage and emotional vulnerability. They will only work when you have already established your attitudinal alpha male seed-cred.

If you haven’t established that alpha seed-cred, your beta droppings will go over like an elephant’s dung heap, because they won’t be droppings so much as “more of the supplicating same”. This is why women love to feel like they have to struggle to get a man to admit his emotional core, and dislike having men dump a bucket of their emotional core all over them. As women perceive it, the struggle is an irrefutable sign that the man is non-needy, has options with other women, and will give her the challenge she subconsciously craves.

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