Gendernomics- Building Value Page 5
Male value is largely built through demonstrations of competence in areas that are valued within a tribe. I suspect that traditionally this would have been the man who was a great hunter or warrior, the Shaman who was the spiritual adviser to the group and the chief, or other similar roles. Within our modern world there are many hierarchies to climb from business, to military, law enforcement, wealth social and artistic, they are all niche markets within the sexual market place, and they all correlate to some degree. For instance, a rock star will rank highly on the social, artistic and wealth. This is a clear example of to those who have much, more flows.
However, there are also many smaller niches that allow a man to leverage his natural abilities to achieve above average mating success. From my perspective, most of the things men do are informed by basic cause and effect chains about what will make them more successful in their mating life. Men are willing to go through grueling trials over many years in order to slightly improve their chances of landing a mate. Men are willing to put themselves through massive work-loads, travel schedules and risky jobs in order to provide for the mate that they have secured for themselves.
At the foundation of male value is competency, both in the broader term and the narrow term. Women appreciate male competence, however merely being the best programmer or Call of Duty player is not going to land you at the top of the overall hierarchy. The overall hierarchy is a composite of all other hierarchies that exist, we can refer to it as the overall dominance hierarchy for the human population. It would be rather laborious to break down all of these from every angle, and it is a book in itself, however to give a brief introduction, it goes back to the overlapping over dominance hierarchies.
A successful businessman will rank highly both within business and most likely within wealth, if he isn’t a complete recluse he will also most likely rank high within the social dominance hierarchy. Rank within a hierarchy is based on influence within that hierarchy, and rank in the total dominance hierarchy is a function of overall dominance within the hierarchies. The major reason that sexual market value is quite simple to define for women is that it is always heavily weighted towards youth and beauty, with beauty being a proxy for judging fertility. The reason why sexual market value is much more difficult to quantify for men is that it contains many more variables where they all differ based on context and target market.
The overall value of a man is based on his position in various hierarchies, we can refer to this as his objective value as it is the aggregate of all his value across multiple spheres. However, what one must keep in mind is that a man’s value and a man’s sexual market value are not the same, they are two distinct valuations where the first is made by all of society, whereas the latter is a valuation made only by women.
Section 2
This section of the book aims to give you a practical framework to help improve your sexual market value. This isn’t a practical, hands on “Do X and then Y” guide, for that there are many sources that are free and available online. This is a framework that helps you determine your present state and structure your efforts to obtain maximum results for your future.
This is based on a model that I’ve often used in business to create and implement strategy across complex organizations in a way that ensures a solid foundation, makes sure that the actions taken are effective and that outcomes can be measured.
An observation of mine with people in general is that we are very fond of talking about how much effort we put in, instead of looking at what we gained from that effort. To exemplify, if I go to the gym 5 days a week, spending 2 hours there each time, I watch my diet, make sure I get enough protein, healthy fats and clean carbs. I supplement to make sure I get the vitamins and minerals I need, and even track my sleep. Nobody would say that I don’t put a lot of time and effort into health and physique. However, if I do this for 2 years, I still weigh the same, still lift the same weights for the same number of reps, and nobody can really tell that I lift, my effort is high, but my efficacy is low.
I put work, but I don’t put in effective work. This is why the first steps of the model is based around a GAP analysis of your life, and those areas within it that you want to improve, then we work our way to an overall strategy. “Strategy” is a term that people love to use, but in the simplest terms it’s a plan to win a battle. Within the same strategy, there can be many tactics, and movements that when viewed from the big picture perspective make sense even though they may seem strange in isolation.
By building our strategy on a solid foundation we ensure that each step forms a part of the whole. For some of you this will be a short-term thing to fix a small gap, but for others, you may need to dedicate a year or more of your life to get to the position that you want for yourself.
Throughout this section I will lead you through the methodology that will be informed by my own experiences and those of men I’ve known throughout my life. This will not be as comprehensive as your personal strategy should be, but it will serve to illustrate the methodology as we progress through it. In the capstone chapter of this book, I will take you through the case of Dave, who is an amalgamate of myself and many men I’ve known throughout my life as a demonstration of the methodology.
Factors of Self-Improvement
Self-improvement comes in many forms and many varieties, it can range from practical things such as improving one’s relationship with money, other people or bettering situations at work to more esoteric pursuits.
One observation that I’ve made is that I’m not quite sure which is the cause of bettering a man’s life, the improvements he made through his effort and dedication, or the change in his mind as a result of accomplishing a task he set out to do.
Some men will have a much shorter journey than others. This was one of my main sources of irritation when watching VH1’s “The Pick-Up Artist” featuring Mystery, in that the winner or even the top 3 competitors were always the men one knew would do well from day 1. They were in many ways a Superman who just needed to take their glasses off, get a decent haircut and stop dressing like a High School stoner.
The men who really needed help from the show, who were likely to have months, if not years of work ahead of them and who struggled with multiple, complex, interrelated and self-reinforcing negative problems, they were usually kicked out in episode one.
Some men find themselves reading this in the “average” trap, 40-inch waist, 5 ft 10, BMI around 26, wearing “Standard Dude” uniforms, and get average results. Some men will find themselves reading this from an above average position, but they may struggle with one or two problems that they need to figure out. Finally, some men are reading this from a position similar to Dave, who we are going to meet later in an example case study, their lives are on fire and they have no idea where to begin.
I found it important that the methodology be generic enough to work for most problems, and scalable enough that it can be applied to projects of any size.
I identified 3 major areas that tend to create problems for men going on a self-improvement journey:
A) Consistency – They fail to be consistent with their efforts over time. The typical example people the influx of people in the gym in January who are all gone by February.
B) Desired outcome – They fail to define and be clear about what they are trying to do, and are dishonest with themselves and others about what they are doing and why.
C) Tracking Results – They fail to design a system to track if they are progressing, if so, how much and finally if their progress is consistent with their desired outcome.
The process outlined in the coming chapters are designed to take a man from point A to point Z, and for this reason a large part of the process is dedicated to establishing the present state and context of the man, and his desired outcome. This is done in order to make sure that the man really knows what he wants and then that he has a method for tracking whether he is moving in the right direction.
Present, Past and Fu
ture States
The self-improvement focus in the red pill community is one of my favorite aspects of the community, and something that I think brings tremendous value to the many men who partake in it. Not only does it serve as a source of inspiration, it also keeps men accountable to themselves. However, the trouble with change is that it brings about a gap between present and future, in addition to creating a larger gap between past and present.
A while ago, I was asked a very good question about the concept of "fake it until you make it", the man, the man who asked, by his own description was accomplished in his professional life, had a solid income, a cool job and for the most part appeared to have his life in order. However, in attempting to change his persona in his interactions in general, and with women in particular, he "felt fake". This guy appears to be a man of moderate to high value by his own description, alas this is not what he feels like.
This made me think of another gentleman with whom I conversed regularly some time ago, who was also attempting to change his life in a rather radical fashion. He found himself trapped in a constant vacillation between his past decisions, present desires and future visions, and in this sense he is a lot like the man who asked the question about “fake it until you make it”. At any moment, we exist in three states, our past, our present and our potential future.
Thus, we are at the same time our past self, our present self and our future self.
Our past decisions are the reason for why we find ourselves in our present state. Men find the manosphere because they are finding flaws in their lives that they wish to change, but they do not know how. Many of us have made decisions in the past that to varying degrees have shaped not only our situation, but our perception of ourselves and the world. At the same time, reviewing our past from the position of our present permits hindsight, and we can often see where we went wrong. However, as is often the case with the good boys, they cannot see where they went wrong, in fact when evaluating their past, they see themselves doing everything right, but the actual outcomes do not reflect the outcomes they predicted.
They see themselves putting effort into getting good grades, a great, sensible college degree, a good job, predictable life, and developing the qualities they have been told to develop in order to make themselves into great potential husbands and fathers. Sometimes, this even appears to play out swimmingly just as they have been told for a while. They hit their late 20s, stable jobs, stable incomes, egalitarian-equalist mindset, relatively inexperienced with women, and having told themselves for the better part of 15 years "Once the girls grow up they'll learn that the badboys are not right for them and will come find the good guys".
Then suddenly, their ship appears to come in, the woman who wouldn't give them the time of day in high school, or college, or right after college is sitting across from them in a restaurant, her eyes glittering, beaming smile and hanging on his every word. In a fleeting moment, he may think to himself "She's not quite as hot as she was in high school, she put on a few lbs, she's starting to get some wrinkles, and her eyes aren't as lively as they were", but it all disappears in a rush of endorphins and oxiotocin. He finds himself married, envisions a future where happily ever after, house, white picket fence and 2.5 kids finally seems possible.
5 - 7 years later many of these men find themselves sitting in a small studio apartment, having spent all their efforts over the past years attempting to fix what could be not be fixed. They are now locked in a state where miserable in the present they obsess over their past and are incapable of envisioning a future for themselves.
This is just one story, that repeats itself daily across the western world that illustrates the fact that our past shapes our present, however it does not have to shape your future.
A person really only has 3 choices from the present, they can improve, they can decline, or they can remain the same. Put into Gendernomics terms, they can invest more in themselves, invest less in themselves and thus not even cover replacement investment, or they can just barely cover the replacement investment. For most, the decision to do the first of the three comes from dissatisfaction with the outcomes that your past actions and decisions have generated for your present. The decision to decline is rarely a conscious one but it is often the natural state of things, decline happens naturally and in order to avoid it we must make a conscious choice to fight it. The decision to remain the same is also rarely a choice made with open eyes, but rather a consequence of defaulting to habits that feel comfortable to us.
The two men I referenced in the beginning found themselves at two different positions in the cycle, the man who asked about “fake it until you make it”, appears fairly satisfied with his present state, but he wants to improve it further, to some extent disassociate with his past self, and become congruent with his current self in the future. My friend on the other hand was never able to fully disassociate with his past, nor did he really have the desire to do so. To quote Marx:
"To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions." Karl Marx
It is fully possible to at the same time abhor one's present condition, see the errors one has made in the past, yet fall victim to comfort, familiarity and habit. Einstein is frequently quoting as saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and in order to have your future be different than your present, you must make different decisions in the present than you did in the past. However, doing so inherently means breaking with those habits that you've developed, and voluntarily bringing discomfort upon yourself. It's very easy to decide which state is preferable between two binary states, in a "cake or death" type dilemma, it's much harder to continue to make yourself uncomfortable when you have yet to see the full fruits of your labor.
I'm going to assume that you've done what the first man did and greatly improve himself, yet you feel "fake" or like everyone can see through your new self. This is often called "imposter syndrome" and was coined by some clinical psychologists in 1978. The core of imposter syndrome are people who fail to internalize their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as frauds. The research was done on women, but it does not appear to be a gendered phenomenon, and quite frankly in my talks with men, especially relating to sexual market value, it's very common for men to under-value themselves and women to over-value themselves.
Signs and symptoms of imposter syndrome are:
Perfectionism
Overworking
Undermining one's own achievements
Fear of failure
Discounting praise
These are all very common traits among the good boys, and among many of the men who find themselves in red pill community for one reason or another. They've put immense volumes of work into themselves, often with perfectionist leanings such as attending the best schools, getting top grades, working at highly prestigious jobs, having strings of accomplishments, yet, despite all of this they consider themselves of lesser value than any woman. Part of this is simply the pedestal effect, but another and very significant part is that they never updated their self-perception.
My advice to the man who sent us the text was that he had to update how he perceived himself because the feeling of being an imposter comes from himself, not from others. A man I knew was very severely bullied as a child about being weak. Back when I knew him, I believe his powerlifting total (deadlift, squat and bench) was in the 1200s, yet he still saw himself as a weakling. This is similar to how some men who suffer from "megarexia" can be 6 ft 4, 270 lbs and still view themselves as tiny. They have not updated their software to take into account the changes in hardware and external circumstances. This is one of the areas where I think affirmations can be very valuable by repeating your accomplishments to yourself, you can force a software update.
Imposter syndrome is a case of devaluing the positive and over-valuing the negative, thus landing yourself in a negative fee
dback loop, where continued progress is halted because by devaluing results, you also devalue the benefit of putting in continued effort. It's very difficult to not be bound by the past in this way, every time you make a grand leap forward. First you are in a state of comfort, then you are in a state of discomfort, then you reach your goal, and you have no idea what to do now. You are comfortable with who you are, you are in a state of change, then you are someone new, but you're not exactly sure who this new person is, and you must spend time getting to know them.
I recently listened to a podcast that AJA Cortes did with Rollo Tomassi and a major topic for the first hour or so of the podcast was congruence. Rollo had a great example, where if a man looks very Alpha, yet acts very Beta this throws women off because their perceptions of him does not reflect their experience of him. When some part of you changes, it takes time for the rest of you to catch up with it. In the case of the gentleman who asked about “fake it until you make it”, he has made the changes, yet they are not an internalized part of his self-perception. In the case of my old friend, he was comfortable with his past self, his past perception of the world, and the illusions about his condition. He was uncomfortable with his present, the changes he would have to make, and the potential effects they would have, and thus he found himself with one foot on each side of the teeter-totter.
To step to one side would require that he give up some of his attachments to his past, including accepting the sunk-costs of his past choices. To step to the other side, would mean that his future self may not include some of the values that are dear to his heart. To remain in his position would result in perpetual anxiety as he attempted to balance two sides of himself that were like oil and water. In the end, comfort and habit won out.