Prior to the post-Sexual Revolution era men adapted to their socio-sexual and relational realities based on a pre-acknowledged burden of performance. I’ve outlined the expectations of this period in The Second Set of Books,
[…] when men transition from their comfortable blue pill perspective into the harsh reality that the red pill represents, the experience is a lot like Ball discovering that the set of books (the set of rules) he’d believed everyone was using wasn’t so. Likewise, men who’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that women were using a common set of rules – a set where certain expectations and mutual exchange were understood – were in fact using their own set. Furthermore these men ‘just didn’t get it’ that they should’ve known all along that women, as well as men’s feminization conditioning, were founded in a second set of books.
During the eras prior to the Sexual Revolution that first set of books was more or less an established ideal. Men were every bit as idealistic as they are today, but the plan towards achieving that ideal (if it was in fact achievable) was preset for them. Even the worst of fathers (or parents) still had the expectations that their sons and daughters would follow that old-order rule set as they had done.
For men a greater provisioning was expected, but that provisioning was an integral aspect of a man’s Alpha appeal. The burden of performance was part of a man’s Alpha mindset or was at least partly paired with it.
The danger in that mindset was that a man’s identity tended to be caught up with what he did (usually a career) in order to satisfy that performance burden. Thus when a man lost his job, not only was he unable to provide and meet his performance expectations in his marriage, he also lost a part of his identity. Needless to say this dynamic helped incentivize men to get back on the horse and get back to his identity and his wife’s esteem (even if it was really her necessity that kept her involved with him).
A lot of romanticization revolves around the times prior to the Sexual Revolution as if they were some golden eras when men and women knew their roles and the influence of Hypergamy was marginalized to the point that society was a better place than the place we find ourselves in today. And while it’s undeniable that cultural shifts since the sexual revolution have feminized and bastardized those old-order social contracts, men will always adapt to those new conditions in order to effect their sexual strategies.
There’s a lot of nostalgia for these idealized periods in the manosphere at the moment; seemingly more so as its members mature past their “gaming” years and begin to feel a want for something more substantial. Men are the true romantics of the sexes so it’s no great surprise that their romantic / idealistic concept of love would run towards romanticizing a hopeful return to what they imagine these eras were like.
It’s kind of an interesting counter to how feminism and the Feminine Imperative paints these eras – rather than some idyllic place where women appreciated men, feminists exaggerate and deride these times as oppressive; the sexual revolution akin to the Jews leaving Egypt. What both fail to grasp is the realities of these eras were still just as susceptible to human nature – the human nature described by what we call Red Pill awareness – and both sexes adapted to the social environments of the times to effect their natures.
Condoms were widely available in the 1940’s and men painstakingly painted half-nude pinup girls on the noses of their bombers. Women too adapted to that environment; from What Lies Beneath:
two books by John Costello; ‘Virtue Under Fire’ and ‘Love, Sex, and War’ in which all too much of the above female psychology manifested itself;
“Of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate – and this wartime phenomenon was not confined to any one section of society. The babies that were born out-of-wedlock belonged to every age group of mother, concluded one social researcher:
Some were adolescent girls who had drifted away from homes which offered neither guidance nor warmth and security. Still others were women with husbands on war service, who had been unable to bear the loneliness of separation. There were decent and serious, superficial and flighty, irresponsible and incorrigible girls among them. There were some who had formed serious attachments and hoped to marry. There were others who had a single lapse, often under the influence of drink. There were, too, the ‘good-time girls’ who thrived on the presence of well-paid servicemen from overseas, and semi-prostitutes with little moral restraint. But for the war many of these girls, whatever their type, would never have had illegitimate children. (pp. 276-277)”
and;
“Neither British nor American statistics, which indicate that wartime promiscuity reached its peak in the final stages of the war, take account of the number of irregularly conceived pregnancies that were terminated illegally. Abortionists appear to have been in great demand during the war. One official British estimate suggests that one in five of all pregnancies was ended in this way, and the equivalent rate for the United States indicates that the total number of abortions for the war years could well have been over a million.
These projections are at best merely a hypothetical barometer of World War II’s tremendous stimulus to extra-marital sexual activity. The highest recorded rate of illegitimate births was not among teenage girls, as might have been expected. Both British and American records indicate that women between twenty and thirty gave birth to nearly double the number of pre-war illegitimate children. Since it appears that the more mature women were the ones most encouraged by the relaxed morals of wartime to ‘enjoy’ themselves, it may be surmised that considerations of fidelity were no great restraint on the urge of the older married woman to participate in the general rise in wartime sexual promiscuity. (pp. 277-278)”
Women of the “greatest generation” were still women, and Hypergamy, just like today, didn’t care then either. Dalrock made a fantastic observation in a post once, and I regret I don’t have the link on hand, but paraphrasing he said “Every generation in bygone eras dated differently than the ones before it. Your parents dated in a social condition that was very different than your grandparent or their parents. No one in this generation is going to date like they did on Happy Days.” I think it’s important we don’t lose sight of this, but it’s also important to consider that in all those eras men and women’s sexual strategies remained an underlying influence for them. All that changed was both sexes adapted to the conditions of the times to effect them.
Post-Sexual Revolution Adaptation – The ‘Free Love’ Era
While there’s a lot to criticize about the Baby Boomer generation, one needs to consider the societal conditions that produced them. Egalitarian equalism combined with ubiquitous (female controlled) hormonal birth control and then mixed with blank-slate social constructivism made for a very effective environment in which both sexes sexual strategies could, theoretically, flourish.
Women’s control of their Hypergamous influences, not to mention the opportunities to fully optimize it, was unfettered by moral or social constraints for the first time in history. For men the idea of a ‘Free Love’ social order was appealing because it promised optimization of their sexual strategy – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.
The new Free Love paradigm was based on a presumption of non-exclusivity, but more so it was based on an implied condition of non-possessiveness. Men adapted to this paradigm as might have been expected, but what they didn’t consider is that in this state their eventual cuckoldry (either proactively or reactively) amounted to women’s optimizing their own Hypergamous impulses.
The social contract of Free Love played to the base sexual wants of permissive variety for men, or at least it implied a promised potential for it. Furthermore, and more importantly, Free Love implied this promise free from a burden of performance. It was “free” love, tenuously based on intrinsic personal qualities on the inside to make him lovable – not the visceral physical realities that inspired arousal nor the rigorous status and provisioning performance burdens that had characterized the intersexual landscape prior.
It should be mentioned that ‘free love’ also played to men’s idealistic concept of love in that freedom from a performance-based love. The equalist all’s-the-same environment was predicated on the idea that love was a mutually agreed dynamic, free from the foundational, sexual strategy realities both sexes applied to love. Thus men’s idealism predisposed them to being hopeful of a performance free love-for-love’s-sake being reciprocated by the women of the age of Aquarius.
That’s how the social contract looked in the advertising, so it’s hardly surprising that (Beta) men eagerly adapted to this new sexual landscape; going along to get along (or along to get laid) in a way that would seem too good to be true to prior generations. And thus their belief set adapted to the sexual strategy that, hopefully, would pay off for them in this new social condition.
For women, though not fully realized at the time, this Free Love social restructuring represented a license for optimizing Hypergamy unimpeded by moral restraint and later unlimited (or at least marginalized) by men’s provisional support. For the first time in history women could largely explore a Sandbergian plan for Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks and, at least figuratively, they could do so at their leisure.
The problem inherent in the Free Love paradigm was that it was based on a mutual understanding that men and women were functional equals, and as such a mutual trust that either sex would hold the other’s best interests as their own. That basis of trust that either sex was rationally on the same page with regard to their sexual strategies is what set the conditions for the consequent generations to come.
This trust on the part of men was that these “equal” women would honor the presumption that it was “who” they were rather than what they represented to their sexual strategy at the various phases of their maturity that would be the basis for women’s sexual selection of them.
In part two I’ll continue this exploration through the 70’s and into our contemporary socio-sexual environment.
