In the evolved scheme of things men’s reproductive best interest involves sacrifices. When a man commits to parental investment with a woman he takes on sunk cost risks. The time he spends investing himself committed to one woman and the children they produce comes at the cost of reproductive opportunities with other women. Women’s sexual strategy necessitates he compromise or abandon his biological imperative. Naturally, both men and women have adapted ways to circumvent monogamy to optimize their sexual strategies (infidelity, short-term breeding schema), but the basic equation is the same; if a man is invested in one woman it limits him from seeking other (potentially better) reproductive opportunities. If you want to know why Plate Theory irks women so much look no further.

The only way this compromise of sexual strategy can be advantageous to men is if he can be relatively assured that the child he’s raising is his own. This is where men’s Existential Fear of paternity fraud begins. He cedes his own strategy and the sunk opportunity cost for reproduction in exchange for the certainty that he’s invested in a child that bears his name and his blood.

I call this men’s Existential Fear because denying men the certainty of paternity presents the same existential anxieties as a woman’s control of Hypergamous doubt taken from her. Women fear the idea of being forced to birth and raise the child of a suboptimal man not of her choosing, while men fear the idea of being deceived into raising a child not of their own genetic lineage. And until the advent of DNA testing only a woman could be certain that the child was her own.

This is root level stuff here. So important was the determination of paternity for men that an obsessive concern for it was written into our mental firmware. The risks of falling for paternity deception was that important, and the men who evolved this compulsion were selected-for. The reason we Mate Guard, the reason our hindbrains default to jealous suspicions, the reason we cannot bear the thought of another man mating with our woman is rooted in the fear of investing ourselves in a child not our own.

In the previous essay I mentioned the natural revulsion response humans have towards things that are inherently harmful to us. A reservation or revulsion of snakes, spiders, feces, rot and necrosis are part of the evolved firmware we’re born with. I would also argue that the revulsion women feel towards “creepy” (low SMV, Beta) men and the revulsion men feel towards “slutty” women is part of this. Both these revulsions are adaptational protections against our respective Existential Fears. Each represents our Instinctual Interpretive Process letting us know what our ancestors had to avoid.

The Mentor

“But Rollo, isn’t it a noble thing to adopt or mentor a child that is not your own?” 

I get this response a lot when I discuss this, and yes, it absolutely can be when the choice to do so is of your own making. In fact, the reason adoption/mentoring seems such a noble undertaking is exactly because it requires a man to repress his natural concern for his ow paternity. Kinship affinity will always play a role in men and women’s relationships with the next generation. Human beings are innately tribal and familial because tribalism promotes the advancement of selected genes. So repressing this innate predisposition is exceptional, maybe even noble depending on the social context, but it is so because it requires a man to ignore his natural wiring. For what it’s worth, I think multi-generational mentorship in Red Pill awareness is going to be a new imperative in the coming decades.

It’s just this pushing past our natural, evolved, concerns about paternity that’s been the operative dynamic of the Feminine Imperative in consolidating power. The human revulsion response can be molded. Usually this is through some form of operant conditioning. Revulsion can even be conditioned to be associated with pleasure. The Feminine Imperative has been remolding men’s evolved need for paternity to its own ends for some time now.

The popularization of ‘Poly Relationships‘ is one of the more recent redirects of men’s paternity need. As I mentioned above, the goal state of the Feminine Imperative is ensuring that women’s sexual strategy – and anything that foments it – is the socially ‘correct‘ imperative. Men must become more like women if they want to be accepted by a social order defined by women’s experiences. Men’s sexual strategy is only acceptable when it serves a woman’s purpose, so men’s existential imperative of ensuring paternity is always going to be in conflict with women’s strategy. A man insisting on his own paternity and the perpetuation of his name is in direct conflict with women ensuring she chooses to breed with the best specimen and be provided for by the best male she can lock down.

This being the mechanics of it, it comes as no surprise that the social conventions of this era encourage men to abandon that evolved need. We make “heroes” of men who marry the single mother and assume the parental investment costs of the man she chose to breed with. A fem-centric society makes this a noble responsibility – “He Manned Up for the loser who wouldn’t take that responsibility” – all while ignoring the simple fact that this ‘hero’ is only completing women’s Hypergamous imperative. And it’s come to the point that a man abandoning his sexual strategy is part of women’s expectations and entitlements of Beta men.

For the men who insist on their own strategy, the message is one of shame. Only a man who’s “insecure in his masculinity” would think that a child would need to be his own. In fact, the very title of “father” is offensive to a social order based fulfilling women’s imperatives. Father’s Day must become, ‘special persons’ day‘. Men should never insist that a wife assume his last name. And of course, DNA testing to determine paternity (even in light of life threatening illness) is to be discouraged if not outlawed.