Social Commentary

A dominant man is one who wins. He’s one who holds sway over his dominion. And he does it with his aims, responsibility, interdependence, and victory.

In my article on having girls come join you, a commenter named Max asks the following:

“Hey,

This is a totally off topic question, but in all articles regarding, being powerful, dominant and sexy, I could only pick out physical attributes such as slower body movements etc. Can you just describe his attitude and how he look at life, and how can I become one too, through day to day activities. Thanks!”

This is a fun question for me. I rank dominance of his own life and sphere as a quality at the apogee of man’s cultivation. The man who holds true dominion over his endeavors is the closest man can ever get to absolute freedom. Combine this dominance with a clear moral character and you have a man who not only gets what he wants, but attracts, inspires, and leads, as well.

How you come to possess this attitude of striving toward dominion, and the kind of clarity and magnetism that surround it and intertwine with it, is what we’ll talk about today.

Hypergamy is her tendency to date or marry ‘up’. She wants the best, richest, highest status guy she can get, they say. But science disagrees.

One of the memes of the manosphere is that the women of Western society are ardently in pursuit of the wealthiest, highest status man they can get. The qualities women are said to prize most of all include:

• Wealth
• Status
• Looks
• Fame
• Other forms of power
  

Manosphere pundits call this phenomenon ‘hypergamy’.

‘Hypergamy’ originally described the practice of marriage into a higher social or economic class by women. The manosphere has expanded that definition to describe women’s desire for and tendency to pursue men who are their ‘betters’ in some way or another for hook ups and relationships, as well as marriage.

I’m not a fan of the manosphere alpha-beta redefinition, but I have no qualms with its expanded definition of hypergamy. Seems like a natural fit for the term, especially in our present sexual/romantic environment.

So, let’s discuss.

Is hypergamy bad for you?

How big are its effects?

And, how must you adapt?

In a moral panic, no one is safe. Neighbors turn on neighbors, and opportunists use the panic to advance their careers. To survive the hysteria, you must be smart.

Last week I wrote an article titled “When Does ‘No’ Actually Mean ‘No’?” to help you stay smart and safe without having to hole up in a bunker and outwait an age of ambiguity and fear around sex. Today, I want to talk about survival during a general moral panic.

You may have come of age during the ‘rape culture’ witch-hunt. So this might be your first such experience with moral panic. Yet hysterias like this are a fixture of civilization.

A moral panic is a big fear that snakes through society, egged on by crusaders and amplified by the media. In a moral panic, an opportunistic minority become inquisitors in a grab for power. Meanwhile the rest of the population hunkers down and tries to wait out the storm. The few who try to fight back early on are often crushed.

Moral panics turn neighbor against neighbor. They do this by encouraging one man to condemn another for his own protection. If you accuse your neighbor of being a witch, surely you must not be one yourself.

So how do you survive a moral panic? Are you forced to keep your head down and hope no one fingers you as a boogeyman? Should you join the mob and gang up on others until the whole thing blows over, then pretend it never happened?

As I’ll lay out, these are the last things you want to do... Because they leave you defenseless against any accusations leveled against you.

Instead, you must seek to actively define yourself. You must make your identity so clear that the idea of accusing you seems not only pointless, but foolish.

When does no mean no? As the lines of consent increasingly blur, today’s men find themselves caught in a sexual Catch-22.

You’re somewhere private with a girl... kissing, caressing, running hands on one another’s bodies. And then you go to lift her shirt up.

“No,” she says.

It’s not a firm ‘no’. It’s more of an “I’m not quite ready” no. Or so you think.

But... Well, you might be wrong. You’re not quite sure.

You don’t want to be that guy who pushes her too far and makes her do something she doesn’t want to.

She isn’t a child, of course. She’s an adult like you. She has agency; her choices are hers.

Yet you want to be a force for good... not regret.

On top of this, you’re terrified of a girl crying rape... You realize 43,000 men have false allegations of rape made against them in the U.S. every year. Most of those cases get thrown out, but often only after tens of thousands in legal fees.

It’s the Salem witch-hunt of the 2010s. And you do not want to be the accused yelling “More weight.” You don’t want your life cindered for nothing.

Yet sex resistance is part and parcel to sex with American girls. If you have intercourse in America, you will encounter this. It is what girls from here do.

So what exactly should you do? And when does ‘no’ actually mean ‘no’?

Note from Chase: this is the first article by Varoon Rajah, who runs our podcast series. Varoon’s launching this book review series, where he aims to review a new book each month related to dating, attraction, relationships, or psychology. Here’s Varoon...

Why Him? Why Her? is a book by Helen Fisher which ultimately suggests who you fall in love with (for GC readers – who men and women are attracted to) is powerfully influenced by who you are. Or, in other words, your personality is influenced from a very young age by your inherent temperament in addition to developed character traits. While it is commonly thought that your experiences in life shape who you are, what is not as clear to many is how a person’s inherent biology ultimately shapes them, as well as guides their choices and decisions well through their life – including the domain of relationships, love, and romance.

Helen briefly discusses this distinction – personality based on experiences and character versus personality based on biology and temperament – early on in her book:

“Your character traits stem from you experiences. Your childhood games; your parents’ interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as polite, dangerous or exciting; how they worship; what they sing; when they laugh; what they do to make a living and relax – these and innumerable other cultural forces combine to build your unique set of character traits.

The balance of your personality is your temperament, all of the biological based tendencies you have inherited, traits that emerge early childhood to produce your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving… Temperament is the “I am,” the foundation of who you are. Curiosity; creativity; novelty seeking; compassion; cautiousness; competitiveness: to some degree, you inherit these and many other aspects of your disposition.”

Fisher, Helen. (2009). Why Him? Why Her?: finding real love by understanding your personality type (pp. 3-4). New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

And thus, we all have an inherent disposition and behavior that shows up to others. You might imagine where and how this is useful with your woman life – knowing the nature of that cute girl you’re about to approach or just approached, that cute girl you just met at 2 AM in a nightclub, that cute girl you’re about to go on a date with, and maybe even that cute girl you’re already dating or in a long term relationship with – has absolutely massive implications as to how you show up to her, how she shows up to you, and how elements that you present to each other serve or don’t serve to bring you two into getting together.

And knowing this – knowing your target and who she is – can enable the seeking of girls most suitable to partner with you, as well as cater your own experience with her to manage her needs, attractions, and repulsions.

And with that, we dive into this exploration of where experience meets biology.

In Mao Zedong’s communist China, in the late 1940s, a new approach to encourage ‘right-thinking’ emerged, termed xǐ năo, which means “wash brain”. This washing of the brain was designed to scrub out bad thoughts and ideas, freeing the now-cleansed brain to think about things ‘correctly’.

The term ‘brainwash’ entered the English vernacular in the early 1950s and became a dreaded boogeyman during the Cold War era. 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate made brainwashing the subject of a popular film, and in 1974 the United States’ own mind control program, dubbed MKUltra, came partly to light (though only after the CIA destroyed most of the project’s records a year earlier).

Chinese brainwashing and American reprogrammed assassins are interesting examples, but they’re just new takes on an age-old principle, one that’s been a central tenet of states, religions, rites of passage, and social groups of all shapes, colors, and sizes, since time immemorial.

That principle is at work in everything you see, read, listen to, or debate.

It’s even at work right now as you read this page.

That principle, of course, is that every message you let into your eyes or ears informs your worldview and alters your mental model ever so slightly... or sometimes so much.

And if you’re not careful about whom you let play switchboard operator in your brain, you may end up with a set of beliefs about the world that lead you all kinds of places you’d rather not go.

I recently was privy to a conversation between a handful of women in their early- to mid-thirties. They were for the most part quite attractive and confident, and their careers were solid and their paychecks healthy. The conversation went something like this:

Girl 1: I’m someone who thought she’d always be single her entire life and never get married. But I had to take care of my aging mother when my father was in the hospital, and I realized someday that will be me and it might really be nice to have someone around to look after me when I’m like that.

Girl 2: I never thought I’d want to get married either. I’m still not sure if marriage is what I want, but as I get older I think more and more it’d be nice to have a companion.

Girl 1: Exactly. But I’d never settle! I’d only get married if someone was truly the right match for me.

Girl 3: You should never accept someone who isn’t the right match for you. The right person will come along sooner or later; you just have to have the patience to wait for him.

Girl 2: That’s a beautiful way to put it.

Girl 1: Totally right.

You may hear something like this and think, “For a group of smart, educated, professionally successful women, they sure don’t seem to be able to think or communicate about love in any way that doesn’t rely on romcom tropes and tired clichés.”

And, you’d be right.

However, before you judge these gals silly for the naïveté of their talking points, I’d caution you to be aware that this is a common trap people fall into in societies that abandon educating their youths on life history... and men fall into it every bit as much as women.