Monday, January 01, 2001

Fitness Testing (Shit Tests)

 Pinched from the Rational Male - by Rollo Tomassi 

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

My use of the word “threat” here isn’t to imply malice. I’m sure more simplistic associations with violence or conflict is the natural one, but a “threat” is a challenge – how one deals with it is what’s at issue. As I stated in the Three Strikes thread,
Women’s sexual strategy is very schizophrenic – ideally women want a Man that other women want to fuck, but in order to assess his sexual market value to other women he’s got to have exercisable options for her to compete against, or at least display indirect social proof to that effect. So, she needs to limit his options while simultaneously determining he has those options.
This internal conflict between a want for security and provisioning, and a need for the ‘gina tingles that only the excitement indignation, drama and Alpha dominance can stimulate is the fundamental root for women’s shit tests. From Plate Theory VI:
Essentially a shit test is used by women to determine one, or a combination of these factors:
a.) Confidence – first and foremost
b.) Options – is this guy really into me because I’m ‘special’ or am I his only option?
c.) Security – is this guy capable of providing me with long term security?
Women’s shit testing is a psychologically evolved, hard-wired survival mechanism. Women will shit test men as autonomously and subconsciously as a men will stare at a woman’s big boobs. They cannot help it, and often enough, just like men staring at a nice rack or a great ass, even when they’re aware of doing it they’ll still do it. Men want to verify sexual availability to the same degree women want to verify a masculine dominance / confidence.

For a woman, to encounter a man with a healthy awareness of his own value to women, this constitutes a threat. Here is a man for whom’s attention women will demonstrably compete for, AND he knows this. This is the most basic affront to the feminine imperative; to be unplugged, of high SMP value and to derive confidence from it. Therefore, in order to actualize her own sexual strategy, his self-confidence MUST be put into self-doubt, because if such a man were to use this knowledge to his own benefit he may not select her from a pool of better prospective women. Thus she must ask “Are you really sure of yourself? You think you’re so great? Maybe you’re just egotist? Don’t tempt fate.”

In this example we can see the conflict inherent in women’s sexual strategy; she wants the Alpha dominance of a confident Man, but not so confident that he can exercise his options with other women well enough to make an accurate estimation of her own SMV.

Ambiguity in men’s assessment of a woman’s true sexual market value is the primary tool of the feminine imperative.

The same characteristics that give him his confidence and acknowledged sense of worth are exactly the same things that women want to be associated with. Even the most controlling, domineering wife still wants to tell her friends that the AFC she married is a “real Man”, and even after privately berating him, will defend him as such because anything less is a reflection on her own self-image. She wants to be with a Man that other men want to be, and other women want to fuck, because it confirms for her that she’s of an equal or higher value to attract such a Man.

Women don’t want a man to cheat, but they love a Man who could cheat.

That is the threat and the attraction. Women want a Man that has confidence in his own value; that’s sexy, but the more he self-realizes this the greater the anxiety is that she’ll be found wanting as he better understands his options. So it becomes necessary to develop social contrivances that are standardized across the feminine gender that limit the full recognition of masculine self-value. Thus masculinity is ridiculed, men become characterized as slaves to their sexuality, and masculinity becomes doubted by virtue of itself. In a global sense, the feminine imperative relies on the same ambiguity women will individually employ to confuse the efforts of men to assess their true SMV. By means of social conventions, psychologically force him to doubt his own SMV and women become the arbiters of it.

Race to Awareness

Because of women’s relatively short window of peak sexual viability it is imperative that men be as unaware of their slower, but progressively increasing SMV for as long as possible in order for them to achieve the prime directive of female hypergamy; realize the best genetic options and the best provisioning options she has the capacity to attract in that peak window. If Men become aware of their SMV before a woman can consolidate on her options with monogamous commitment her sexual strategy is defeated.

The mistake (and the binary retort) is to think this need for contrivances was concocted in whole as some grand sisterhood conspiracy. This just proves an ignorance of social constructs. For a social contrivance to be such, it necessitates being repeated by society WITHOUT a formal conception – meaning we learn the contrivance from seeing it, internalizing it and repeating it ourselves without forethought. The best social contrivances are inconspicuous and rarely questioned because they’ve been learned without having been formally taught. This is why I think encouraging men NOT to bother trying to understand women is in itself a social convention. Don’t look at that man behind the curtain, just accept it for what it is, enjoy the show, you’re better off that way, the Mighty Oz has spoken.

This is the threat that Game represents to the feminine imperative. Widely shared, objective assessments of Men’s SMV and how it develops is the antithesis of the female sexual strategy. Women’s greatest fear is that they could become the ‘selected’ instead of the ‘selectors’.

Pinched from the Rational Male - by Rollo Tomassi