Mutton Hash and Turnip Tops

For Rollo at The Rational Male, a man who isn’t his wife's Kind of Alpha is more or less condemned to a lifetime of sexual frustration and thick contempt under a thin layer of civility-in-public. Without Alpha a woman in a relationship is an uncontrollable shrew, who will jump into the arms of the first passing biker with enough of her favourite drug. OK. I’m exaggerating his views only slightly. It doesn’t have to be a biker.

So there’s something Rollo doesn’t understand, and it’s an oversight common to good-looking men. For the majority of the population, who are not physically attractive, sex is a hygiene factor and its mere provision is enough. They don’t need to eat steak and salmon, as Somerset Maugham noticed:

The keenest pleasure to which the body is susceptible is that of sexual congress. I have known men who gave up their whole lives to this; they are grown old now, but I have noticed, not without surprise, that they look upon them as well spent. It has been my misfortune that a native fastidiousness has prevented me from indulging as much in this particular delight as I might have. I have exercised moderation because I was hard to please. When from time to time I have seen the person with whom the great lovers satisfied their desires I have been more astonished by the robustness of their appetites than envious of their successes. It is obvious that you need not often go hungry if you are willing to dine off mutton hash and turnip tops.

A woman with an honest view of her status will settle for the provisioning of sex by an ordinary man. It’s a hygiene factor for both of them, and they are both better off with it. The majority of the human race lives like this.

The nonsense starts when women have delusions about their desirability, or profess self-serving rubbish to mask the fact that they have married a man they don’t find sexually attractive, but do find a useful payer of bills. Hypergamy says that all women have ideas above their station, which isn’t true. What is true is that, given the chance on a plate all women would have a night with their favourite male hottie. That’s not hypergamy, at least any more than my willingness to own a Ferrari given one for free plus lifetime insurance and maintenance is a sign of my consumerism. Consumerism is when I sacrifice the quality of my life to get the Ferrari: hypergamy is when she refuses men of her value in the vain hope of landing one way above her value.

So let’s deal with the Alpha thing. Both Rollo and Roissy define in it terms of women. For Rollo, Alpha is a relational concept: X is an Alpha male for Y at time T if there exists a female Y who wants to have unconditional sex with X at time T. So today Rollo can be Alpha for Alice, but not for Barbie, and tomorrow he doesn’t even make the cut for Alice. For Roissy, Alpha is measured by weighted notch count, where the weighting is the SMV of the woman. So Roissy can be Alpha even if Alice and Barbie don’t want to fuck him, because he’s got the notch count to prove it.

As defined by either of them, Alpha is completely independent of a man’s moral character, economic productivity, intellectual and cultural creativity, self-discipline, and even his preference for dressing from Jermyn Street. So if being a douchebag or a drug-dealer is what it takes to get with the 10’s, then maybe a decent man stays away from the 10’s. If some Four with delusions of Eight gives him the brush-off, maybe he should count himself lucky. Self-respect matters, or should matter, more than getting laid and having a woman around the place.

However, a guy gotta get laid now and again, and that’s why English men and women drink so much: so they can take the sharp edges off their judgement and give themselves the chance of some physical intimacy. Game can turn the whole thing into, well, a game, but only if he accepts that he’s not going to be meeting any potential long-term relationships that way, and he’s willing to accept that it does not say anything about a woman’s moral character that she will fall for Game, anymore than it says anything about a cat’s ability as a mouser that it goes crazy for catnip.

So is Alpha something a man should aim for, as he should aim for a 200lb bench-press and deadlift? No. A man lives his life for the approval of himself and his few peers, not for the opinions of women, employers and other people with a vested interest in exploiting him.

But he should bear in mind that women (who aren’t co-dependent or looking for weak men to bully) need attention, excitement, to see that he has a purpose, and that he has thought about what they are doing the next time they meet, and before or after they have sex. (This is the ‘Alpha’ of which I was speaking in a previous post.)

He should also shun White Knighting, Beta supplication and orbiting, thinking that his goal in life is to provide for a wife and children, and also avoid TV and computer games, the use of social media for anything except Game, and thinking that he’s some kind of sad sack if he doesn’t have a woman in his life. What makes a man is purpose, self-respect, independence and permenant self-development. All of us flinch along the way, and all of us compromise some of it from time to time. The point is not to abandon it away for anything: money, fame, power, or women.