AFC Spreadsheet Challenge Ends This Friday!

If you recall, a few months back I issued the AFC Spreadsheet Challenge, inviting all married men who were curious about the Red Pill to track their sex lives with their wives over a 90 period, starting August 1 and ending October 31.  As that day draws to a close, I encourage all of you to make that final push to get your numbers up or, conversely, begin the painful process of data analysis with the data pool that you've assembled.

How many times did you approach?  How many times did you initiate? How many times were you successful?  How many times were you rejected?  What reasons/excuses/rationalizations did your wife give you?

Remember, there is no right answer, except in the sense that you are evaluating raw, hard, objective data about your sex life.  Every relationship is different, so don't feel competitive with other men about your stats.  What's important is what you feel when you look down at those raw numbers, and realize what they say about you, your wife, and your relationship.  Without real data, it's impossible to spot a problem, much less fix one.

Feel free to share your results here (Anonymously, if you like), because while this isn't a competition, the whole secondary purpose of this exercise is to share data with your peers for review.  If you're working a Red Pill strategy, how does it stack up to the Blue Pill strategies?  Let's see what the data says.  And no embellishments, Gentlemen.

I'll probably leave this post up awhile.  As a brief programming note, I'll probably be neglecting this blog for a few months, thanks to one of my projects being green-lighted (could be an Ian Ironwood-written porn movie coming out, it seems) along with some other writing projects I need to focus on.  I'll still be lurking, don't get me wrong, but if I'm not as active on Twitter, here, and Reddit for awhile, don't get worried.  This is one of my most productive times of year.

Lastly, Happy Hallowe'en, and to my Pagan brethren, may you have a productive and reflective Samhain!

"Making Responsive Desire AWESOME": Feminism still has no answers.

I was hanging out over at Feminist Sex Nerd Dr. Emily Nagoski's blog, The Dirty Normal today, and I came across this post about how to make responsive desire (which most women possess most of the time) "awesome".  

Problem is, Emily's answer to it falls somewhat short of "awesome".  But she does invite her readers to tell how "spontaneous desire" people (i.e. most men, most of the time) deal with "responsive desire" people (i.e. most women, most of the time).

The responses that followed tended to be straight-up Blue Pill methodology, i.e. the "responsive desire" spouse still maintains the sexual control in the relationship and the "spontaneous desire" spouse is advised to "self regulate" (i.e. masturbate).

While I'm all for a good wank, the plain fact of the matter is that men don't get married so that they can masturbate.  Our desire for sex is paramount to most other considerations.  Open, honest communication, which Dr. Emily suggests is the winning strategy, tends to flow out of our mouths as "I'm horny and I'm bitterly disappointed that you rejected me again", to which the RD spouse usually says "deal with it."

So . . . no win for Emily, there.

Most of the following (my comment, too long not to turn into a post and in danger of being deleted in moderation) will not be a big surprise to most of you, but might be instructive to those who are new to the Red Pill.  Here is, in a nutshell, how I got here and why:

I'll bite.

My partner (wife of 23 years), like most women, falls into the standard 70%/30% responsive/spontaneous category, dependent primarily on her place in her menstrual cycle.  I'm about 80% spontaneous, 20% responsive.  For the first eighteen or nineteen years of our relationship we followed the Standard Model of post-feminist marriage, with hit-or-miss sexual encounters involving a large number of initiations on my part and a large number of rejections on hers.  Once we matured as a couple, things got a little better, but we were still largely depending on random variables and crappy timing.  Attraction was high, arousal was not.  That's mostly because we didn't truly understand the functioning male/female cishetero dynamic, until I started studying the potential for Female Viagra, which (among other areas) led me to this blog and Emily.

Emily's work has led me to conclude that the Standard Model used by most married couples post-1965, depending on the ideal of presumed equality of sexual experiences and outcomes between the genders, is highly flawed and works in a minority of cases at best.  It ignores the essential gender differences between cishet men and women, and depends on a range of low-return strategies that lead, eventually, to divorce.  It discourages, rather than encourages, pairbonding and long-term relationship survival, and encourages infidelity, socio-sexual polygamy, divorce, and the dissolution of families.  As sexuality is the root of marriage in every human culture, and as "married sex" is highly denigrated by both popular mainstream culture and feminist subculture, using the Standard Model as a workable theory is a recipe for failure.

In breaking down a workable replacement for the Standard Model, Emily suggested to me the SIS/SES mode, which makes far more sense and fits with the observable reality of cishet LTRs.  And when examining the Context Dependence elements of the SES, it became clear that no amount of chemical monkeying around with female sexuality is going to increase a given woman's over-all sex drive and satisfaction.  Pink Viagra doesn't exist.  Female sexuality is, as Emily has explained, just far too complex and sophisticated to respond to cheap neurochemical theatrics.

So . . . what's a standard model, spontaneous desire-driven husband to do? 

Current literature on the subject includes lots of "helpful" advice which falls into two categories: Treat Your Wife Like A Princess (let's call it Mode A), essentially using your resources to decrease her SIS until she's just so darned relaxed that she has no real reason to say no to sex; and then there is the much-smaller Mode B, which, among other things, does not advocate treating your wife like a princess. 

The problem is, Mode A doesn't work.  Oh, it can have a few short-term positive effects, but if the goal is to increase your sex life (as it is with most husbands with strong spontaneous desire) then Mode A involves expending a lot of resources for very little return.  It will make your wife feel good, no doubt, but . . . well, anecdotal evidence demonstrates that subservient, attentive husbands just are not having the crazy amounts of sex with their wives suggested by the Treat Your Wife Like A Princess model.  Quite the contrary.  There are so man Very Good Men who are doing everything under the sun for their wives, and their wives are still divorcing them for no particularly good reason.  It's a big enough deal that major news outlets are writing about it.

So, just how does your standard cishet married couple learn to deal with such issues?  For one thing, I educated myself about the difference between arousal and attraction.  Mode A emphasizes trying to build desire by fueling attraction - being supportive, communicative, and other stuff to work on the SIS.  All well and good . . . but it does jack to build desire.  As studies have shown repeatedly, doing laundry and housework does not actually lead to more sex for a married couple, despite two generations of feminist rhetoric to the contrary.  It might make the wife happier, but it actually decreases the amount of sex.  So Mode A is a fail, for this purpose.  Waiting around for her to ovulate so that you can take advantage of her brief spontaneous desire window is not the kind of sex life most husbands signed up for.  Indeed, once-a-month sex is the clinical definition of a "sexless marriage".

If Mode A builds attraction but not arousal, then . . . what?  Emily has little to say about stimulating the SES, in any helpful fashion.  And there's a reason for that.  Because the one thing that DOES consistently (and scientifically) tend to build arousal in women, as opposed to attraction, is dominant male behavior.  That's Mode B.  That's the mode that Emily and the rest of the current crop of sex educators doesn't want to delve into, for two reasons.  One, it's dangerously close (ideologically speaking) to nasty ol' patriarchy, denies women's agency, encourages male sexual "entitlement" (because men wanting to have sex is "entitlement") and otherwise contradicts the feminist narrative about How Sex SHOULD Work.  All that consent stuff Emily wrote about, after this post, for instance.

It's good stuff, don't get me wrong . . . but it ignores (as much of Emily's writing on the subject does) the ugly reality that regardless of what genderless pronoun constructions you try to use to describe it, generally cishet men and cishet women are very different in generalizable ways, when it comes to their approach to sexuality.  And while those generalizations do not describe every situation adequately, the do so well enough for most folks to be of use.  The fact is, if a man wants to learn how to invoke reactive desire in his wife consistently, then the only certain way to do that is to cultivate a male-dominant attitude and approach to both his sex life and his personal life.

And that really damages the whole "equal partner" construct that modern marriage is supposed to reflect.  Problem is, modern marriage is coughing up blood trying to swallow that particular pill.  That's not an issue for folks who view marriage as a temporary thing, as most modern women often do, but for men who value their commitment and wish to establish a permanent relationship, being an "equal partner" in a marriage seems about the surest way to kill it beyond criminal charges or an unemployed live-in brother-in-law.  The "equal partner" dynamic insisted upon by Mode A does not encourage female arousal.  It discourages it.  Husbands working under the "equal partners" mode do not initiate often, they do not persist after an initial rejection, and they are so mindful of their partners mental-emotional state that they will fail to initiate even when circumstances present themselves, leading to frustration on the part of both parties. 

Mode A "equal partnerships" do not encourage male-dominant behavior, they discourage it.  And in doing so, they discourage the arousal triggers that allows a man and a woman to properly function as a sexually-fulfilled cishet monogamous couple.  In short, the wife grows less and less aroused by her husband, even if her attraction for him waxes, and eventually an opportunity or a growing sexual dissatisfaction encourages her to seek for sexual novelty outside of the relationship to make up the lack.  Equal partnerships lead far more frequently to infidelity than male-dominated marriages.

That's the uncomfortable truth that Emily, and the other feminist-oriented sex researchers (and that's the vast majority, these days) don't want you to really understand.  There is no Pink Viagra, because women's sexual psychology is too complex to respond to a drug.  The drug it craves is psycho-sexual stimulation brought on by the context or observation of male-dominant social behavior.  Every time a wife exercises her "independence" at the expense of her husband, socially, she is sabotaging her own arousal for him, and her own possible sexual fulfillment as a result.  Every time a husband defers to his wife’s judgment, presenting a submissive side to her, he squashes his own hopes of a fulfilling sexual experience.

You want “concordant desire”?  You want “enthusiastic consent”?  You want “joyful succumbing”?  Feminist sexuality has no practical route to that for cishetero couples.  Not one based in reality and demonstrating any kind of success.  While bashing the shaming nature of our culture when it comes to sex – and quite rightly – the feminist-led sex education and research establishment in our culture has done little to rectify that.  Indeed, instead of decreasing the amount of shame, feminism has encouraged the wholesale shaming of male sexuality and male social dominance to the point where it has had a profound and widely-observed deleterious effect on men in our culture.  Men being socially dominant at work are told to “check their privilege’ by well-meaning feminists.  Men being socially dominant at home are told to beware of patriarchy creeping into their lives (without any explanation about why patriarchy might, in fact, be a good thing).

The feminist sex education industry has done some remarkable things when it comes to improving the understanding and sex lives of women.  But when it comes to improving and understanding the sex lives of men, or the practical functioning of an actual cishetero relationship, the political ideology of equality runs smack into the hard, cold science of sexuality.  Women dig dominant men, and are aroused by them.

Feminism discourages men from becoming dominant, and actively struggles against a culture that encourages men to be dominant.  Once Emily convinced me that feminism was just the wrong way to run my marriage, things got a LOT better.

By establishing a regime of socially-dominant and traditionally-masculine behaviors, the kind of stuff that leads directly to female arousal, not female attraction, I’ve managed to work with Mrs. Ironwood’s responsive desire and escalate the number of sexual encounters while reducing the number of rejections.  We went from once every 2 weeks or so under Mode A to five or six times a week, sometimes more, under Mode B.  Male social dominance, confidence (which is more than just knowledge and understanding of your body) and applied charisma did more to increase reactive desire and improve sexual joy than any amount of dishes, backrubs, and flattery.

Nor am I alone.  Thanks in part to Emily’s work, thousands of couples are now taking a second look at male dominance in their marriage, and end up saving and improving their marriages as a result.  Without, I might add, recourse to marriage counseling and other crutches.  While this is by no means a silver bullet, it is a far, far more productive strategy when dealing with a woman with strong reactive desire than anything I’ve seen come out of Emily’s work, yet. 

That may be in part due to her feminist identification, which precludes advocating masculine dominance in any setting, no matter how effective.  Or, she might surprise me and propose a workable and practical way to make the Mode A “equal partners” approach work in a way that invites the happy fulfillment of both parties, not just the woman, and a way that doesn’t encourage infidelity or presuppose the temporary nature of “commitment”, when it comes to marriage. 

But the science is there.  The practical application is there.  The peer-reviewed exchange of information is happening.  Techniques are being refined.  And the current surge of suspicion of feminism that’s surfacing in the popular culture is indicating that there is fertile ground for this approach to fall on.

I’m not tempted to believe Emily will respond to this comment, or even read it – she doesn’t, usually, considering our opposition on several points, and her unwillingness to read comments longer than her original posts.  But I leave this here to help inform any other poor husband desperately searching for a way to make his marriage work again.  You won’t find the answers here.  You will find some good information, but Emily won’t tell you how to make your wife aroused for you again, she’ll only be able to convince your wife that there isn’t anything wrong with her lack of desire for you.

If you want the real answers, you’ll have to seek them elsewhere.  But that’s how one spontaneous desire husband dealt with his reactive desire wife.  He rediscovered his masculinity, honed it into a helpful tool, and applied it wholeheartedly to his marriage.  Now he’s getting laid like a teenager and his union has never been stronger.  Hold that up to a 50% divorce rate and declining marriage rates, and see if you can find anything in feminism that promises better.

Breaking Beta: Ending Female Social Entitlement

Feminism has made a lot of "male sexual entitlement", the demon responsible for everything from catcalling and beer commercials to sex trafficking, according to the Cathedral.  Indeed, the feminist attack on male sexuality stems from its constant battle with "male sexual entitlement"; the feminist theory goes that if a man feels that he has a decent shot at having sex with a woman under nearly any normal circumstances, he's actually oppressing her with his patriarchal entitlement to her body, or something like that.

Because feminism can't wrap it's frizzy little head around the concept that the male desire for sex - which crosses all sexual preferences in our sex - is such a powerful force in our lives that we would willingly give up, say, a fulfilling platonic relationship with a woman if there wasn't a sexual component.  Despite the propaganda about gender equality, when it comes to dating and mating, feminism still jealously guards the female imperative to control sex in the SMP.  Feminism feels assured that if it shames and browbeats enough men, they will cease pitting women against each other in competition for the highly-valued mates ("Alphas", though they never use the term) and allow feminine society to determine which women should end up with which men and for how long.

Of course that's ludicrous, for many different reasons, but that's the feminist M.O. on mating: male sexual entitlement (male sexuality) is BAD, while female social entitlement ("Let's just be friends", or LJBF) is seen as some gracious gift nearly as valuable as the one she keeps between her legs.

Female Social Entitlement is the ugly dark side of the feminist equation.  You won't find it spelled out specifically in the literature, exactly, but it implicitly enshrines the AF/BB concept as an institution, when accepted.  And this, not coincidentally, is where many poor Beta boys start the inevitable downward spiral.

When a woman rejects a man, but doesn't want to lose access or support she can casually pick up from him at no personal cost to herself, using LJBF is a way her Rationalization Hamster can assuage her guilt for rejecting a dude who, on paper, is a Perfectly Decent Guy.  It's not that she dislikes the Beta Boy - she just has no tingles for him, and her hypergamous instinct tells her to shelve such a pristine dude for later, when her sexual capital starts to wane.

By attempting to make a social connection with an undesired male permanent with a LJBF, the woman is staking a kind of claim on his time and energy that she does not necessarily deserve . . . but she rationalizes it through her sense of social entitlement.  Why wouldn't a decent man want to be her friend, after all?  Why would he allow base sexuality to come between him and what she just knows in her heart is a fulfilling future of platonic social interaction?  Why wouldn't he want to introduce her to his circle of handsome and successful friends?  Is he that threatened by her?

Heh.

That's what Female Social Entitlement is: the expectation of an alliance based on an unreciprocated sexual interest.  It's a shit-test of the highest order, and women know it.  Indeed, to her mind, rejecting a LJBF shit-test is both a criticism of her worthiness and - as a result - her hamster must reconcile such a rejection with her own sense of self-worth (usually hyperinflated) by denigrating the male who dared reject her gracious offer of friendship.

But for the Blue Pill Beta Chump, LJBF is an insidious trap.  Not seeing it as the shit-test it is, they blindly stumble into the heart of female social expectation with their dick in their hands and end up frustrated, angry, and resentful.  If they do stick around long enough to witness the woman's unceremonious and inevitable impact with the Wall, they might just pick her up in a moment of weakness . . . still seeing her for the highly-valued potential she once had, not the last dregs of her sexuality she's reserving for him . . . or whatever Alpha she can scare up one last time.

Women who use the LJBF rejection don't understand the implied humiliation they are heaping on the recipient - they see their friendship as a valued consolation prize, perhaps ultimately more valuable than their own sexuality.  Friendship, to women, implies an alliance . . . with other women.  With men, it's decidedly a one-way street.  Of what value does a platonic female friend have for a dude?  Unless she's actively trying to get him laid, she's represents a waste of resources unlikely to pay any significant dividends.  She will expect her orbiting chumps to help her move, help her with work or school, bail her out of jail or trouble, come to her defense, and even loan her money without any sexual expectation because the concept of "friendship" varies so differently between men and women.
Yet if you attempt to challenge a woman on this, in most cases she will become rightously offended.  If of a feminist bent, she will attempt to shame you for your inability or unwillingness to control your sexual desires, degrade you for being shallow, and otherwise respond more or less as she would for rejecting any other shit test.

I've seen a number of adept players spin LJBF into something more productive, but it takes iron-clad holding of Frame and a cultivated insensitivity to female feelz.  The acknowleged master in my day was a pre-law Duke student named Trevor, who was the kind of short, aggressively-Alpha dude who made up for a lack of looks and build by utterly dominating Game.

When Trevor would hear LJBF, he'd get a concerned look on his face.  He could play it a couple of different ways, but usually the conversation went something like this:

SHE: "Look, I really like you, you're a great guy, but I don't want to be in a relationship right now.  Can't we just be friends?"

TREV: "My friends help me get laid.  Are you going to do that?"

SHE: "I beg your pardon?"

TREV: "I'm highly selective about the women I sleep with, and I'm even more selective about the people in my circle I call my friends.  They have one thing in common: they all are actively trying to get me laid."

SHE: "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

TREV: "True nonetheless.  They find it a rewarding pursuit - I can be a very, very good friend, (This was true - Trevor was highly appreciative if you found him a promising lead).  But if you aren't working in my best interest, you're not really my friend, are you?"

SHE: (Confused) "Uh, I guess so . . ."

TREV: "I mean, if you're my friend, are you going to introduce me to your slutty good-looking girlfriends?"

SHE: "No!  I mean, yes!  Maybe!  I . . ."

TREV: "See how conflicted you are about that?  Suddenly you're my friend, and you've promised to try to get me laid.  But you don't really want to let me screw your slutty friends.  Where does that leave us?  You keeping me from hitting on your friends?  The only reason to do that is if you want me yourself."

SHE: "You wouldn't really hit on my friends . . ." (preparing for another shit-test, now that she realizes that Trev is not your AFC)

TREV: "Honey, I'd fuck your two best friends on your bed while you watch, just ask any of my friends.  I'm in this to get laid, and either you're with me or against me." (it was the 1990s . . . I actually heard him use the line "if you don't blow me in the parking lot, the terrorists win" successfully once).

SHE: "That's so . . . crude!  Why can't we just be friends?"

TREV: "I've told you why, darlin'.  My friends look out for my pecker.  That's their defining characteristic.  Now if you want to be my friend, that's what you're signing up for.  Conversely, if you want to look out for my pecker by yourself, well, I'm open to that possibility as well."


And on and on it went.  By steadfastly holding Frame and denying the legitimacy of her Female Social Entitlement, he could turn a LJBF into a fast close in the space of three minutes.

Not everyone is so masterful.  Trev is now a very successful patent attorney, and he had natural charisma the way Sinatra had pipes.  But there are some strong lessons to be pulled from his Game.

First, of course, is that LJBF is a bona fide shit-test under any circumstances.  If you accept it, you lose.

Second, women have a natural feeling of entitlement to your friendship, alliance, and good will based entirely upon your sexual attraction to them (and their lackluster assessment of you as a mate).  This is not a bad-faith move, as it appears, it's just the residue of feminine hypergamy at work.  Stacking up a few orbitors is good insurance for BB later on down the road, post-Wall.  But if you don't want to be BB, then you have to disabuse them of the notion that your friendship - which serves as a diminished form of your commitment to her - is free for the asking.

What that does, in effect, is to de-value your own friendship while inflating the value of her sexuality.  She does not really mean to be a supportive friend, and you both know it.  But that does not mean that she will not impose on that friendship, if she has the need and opportunity, and you both know it.  It also means that her sexuality is more-or-less permanently off the table, regardless of your feelings on the matter.  And you both know it.

Beta chumps will get suckered on this play.  Alphas won't.  They don't cooperate with Female Social Entitlement any more than a feminist cooperates with Male Sexual Entitlement (unless he's really cute or has a motorcycle or something).  An Alpha will shut that shit down the moment it comes up.

A Beta aspiring to break the vicious, ugly cycle of LJBF often discovers that rejecting a woman's Female Social Entitlement - and dealing with the resulting ugly consequences of her hamstering - is often the first step on the road to breaking his Beta.  By valuing your interpersonal relationships and actual friendships as much as a woman values the sexual power of her vagina, you establish hand in any relationship you indulge in.  Keeping the idea of "female friends" as a capitulation to Female Social Entitlement, and a genuine disservices to the interests of the man in question, is vital to cultivating the masculine mindset that keeps your Game fresh and effective.

There are ways to use the "LJBF" cynically, of course.  Agreeing, ala BB, to "just be friends" and then using that friendship to get close to her own circle of female friends is one way to go about it.  I've seen a hardened player go through three or four girls in the same social circle by trading on the "Oh, I'm good friends with Julie, but she's not into the same sorts of kinks I am" line and make it pay off handsomely.  Of course, he left a trail of broken hearts and bruised hamsters behind, but that's the nature of the beast.

Lastly, for those of you genuinely offended by the idea that a man and a woman can't "just be friends", your idealism does you credit . . . but it's going to damage your social life.  The painful LJBF meme is openly acknowledged on both sides of the ideological spectrum, although the perspectives on it are different.  Feminism and its allies want you to believe that men are secretly noble and good and can "control their sexuality" enough to be decent to women without their sexuality becoming an issue, but that nobility is hidden under a thick layer of culturally-derived and artificial baggage about "gender norms" and stereotypes.

The Red Pill, on the other hand, acknowledges that men are sexual creatures whose primary goal in life is expressing that sexuality with as many women as he comfortably can - and that sexually non-productive relationships are an unnecessary drain on his resources.

Now the more Beta Boys we can get to recognize the reality of the latter, and start answering LJBF with the acid it deserves, the better.