Vetting still has relevancy, but for a different purpose.

Readership: All
Theme: IOIs and Vetting
Length: 850 words
Reading Time: 4.5 minutes

The theme for September 2023 is IOIs and Vetting.

To kick off this month’s theme, this post will recount the history of vetting since the turn of the century.  Then I’ll describe why vetting is still important.

A Brief History of Vetting

The Red Pill community went through several phases of vetting that had its origins in PUA culture, took on a new spin for LTRs around 2015, and reached its peak between 2019 and 2021.  Then it quickly died out during (and perhaps because of) the C0V!D lockdowns. 

Back in ye olde days of the Manosphere (2005-2014), the purpose for vetting was initially for selecting quick lays, that is, being able to quickly size up whether a woman is DTF in order to reduce wasted effort / investment and streamline lay efficiency.  (I’ll go further into this line of reasoning in a future post.)

Around 2014, the SMP went belly up and MGTOW kicked in, and then Vetting morphed into an emphasis on LTRs.  This brand of vetting was only relevant to a much smaller number of men who could pass women’s then-evolving Game saavy filters. Vetting also became more important because LTRs required more investment from men — and garnered more risk too.  This continued until the time period between the Great RP Persecution of 2018 and the Great RP Schism of 2020, in which the Christian Manosphere seceded from the Secular Manosphere, and then the latter evaporated.

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When the Christian Manosphere became the last standing embodiment of the Manosphere for a brief time in 2020-2021, Vetting for LTRs was narrowed down even further to Vetting explicitly for wife material, with an even smaller number of men in the running. DeepStrength did a considerable amount of work on LTR vetting for Christians.  Here at Σ Frame, we cited Scott’s Axiom and boiled it down to “Look for IOIs”.

In parallel, the C0v!d epidemic in 2020-2021 brought with it a resurgence in vetting to new heights, as the restricted social environment caused by the lockdown shifted the sociosexual dynamics to prefer LTRs. Cohabitation became prevalent and men were deciding on whom to shack up with.

As the lockdown progressed, the topic of vetting all but disappeared from the RP content output.  Meanwhile, YouTube and vlogs became the main Go To for turnkey RP content, and RP based content exploded from a multitude of secular content producers.  Interestingly, many of these secular sources cited Christian concepts in their deliveries, which proved the impact of the Christian Manosphere in the year prior.  Praise God!  Despite the rising popularity of video formatted content, most of the philosophical theories and heavy lifting, although far fewer in number, continue to be done on the few remaining blogs.

Vetting finally died out in 2021 and little has been written or video-casted about it since then. It was believed that Vetting no longer held much value — neither to churchian beta boys and MGTOWs who never got any attention from women in the first place, nor to Chads, who had multitudes of chicks flocking to their nocturnal chambers and could easily NIX the current fling for the NEXT one if she proved to be too onerous.

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Young men are not taught what visceral attraction from a young woman looks like. 

Perhaps the most valuable life hack that has been added to RP lore throughout all these evolving phases of development is knowing what IOIs look like and the magnanimous importance of reading them correctly.  Read them correctly, and you’re IN like Jim.  Read them wrong, and you could wind up counting cobwebs in the slammer.  The value of this knowledge has never changed throughout all these shifts and schisms and has only become more important as time goes on and the culture becomes more debased and more vindictive towards men.

Several commenters have described how they were never taught what visceral attraction from a young woman looks like, neither did they see it expressed between their parents (e.g. parental divorce).  It’s also as rare as a 25-year-old virgin.  Most men just don’t meet many women who will show them that level of sexual attraction.  Most women just don’t feel this way about most men.

Several regulars, including Jack, Thedeti, and many others have reminisced on their own lives with sore regrets of having been so j@ck@ss clueless about IOIs in their younger years.  The typical story tells a tale of having multiple women all in the 19-23-year-old age range during and just after college who exhibited all the signs of hard physical attraction that would have been easy to recognize with even a fraction of conventional Red Pill knowledge.  But we never picked up on that because we had never been taught those things.  Instead, we were taught lots of other worthless chivalrous and gynocentric garbage that kept us locked up in Beta prison.

Naturally, older men who have such regrets have a burden on their consciences to see to it that younger men have their heads screwed on straight (the Big head, that is).  This fuels the ongoing importance of teaching and stressing the practice of Vetting.

img-1783681973-6a50d3b58684b0.17160378.jpgIOI #1: She’s in la la land whenever she looks into his eyes.

The Current Value of Vetting

Overall, I sense a shift in the value of Vetting as it takes on a new importance in the current SMP which is drying up and blowing away (or drying up for most, and blowing away for a few) — not only for choosing good girls, but also for detecting and avoiding bad ones. 

Right now, we’re in an environment where it’s a greater priority to determine which berries are poisonous than which are edible.* Therefore, it is necessary for men to maintain integrity by adding “self-preservation” to their internal locus of control, as MHD always says with his slogan, “Protect yourself at all times.”*  Only when the coast is clear can a man then vet for anything further.

Even men who have no intentions with women, MGTOWs (or whatever they call themselves these days) gotta protect their flanks, you know.  Otherwise, “gynophobic” will be the next solipsistic slur used against men.  (I’m surprised it hasn’t been used yet.)

Thus, I anticipate another “Vetting craze” will resurface, but NOT primarily for matriculating lays nor for establishing LTR’s as before.  Instead, Vetting is becoming increasingly valuable for identifying high risk women / social situations. We might compare this to an employer that does a criminal background check on potential hires, except that we don’t have much of a database on what constitutes a socio-sexual repeat offender. This series is intended to fill in this gap. Granted, this is not really Vetting as we typically think of it. Maybe “socio-psychological-relational analysis” is more to the point. In times prior, Vetting always carried the burden of hope for a viable relationship and not messing it up. But the new form of Vetting will carry the burdens of diligent awareness (especially of female evasion and control tactics), vigilant discernment, self-preservation, and warding off self-deception.

Therefore, this topic will be revisited here at Σ Frame this month, with an emphasis on vetting for character and trustworthiness with the view of increasing male dominance and social relevance and controlling / decreasing risk.  I will begin with a few posts about old style Vetting to summarize what we already know for younger men, and as a refresher and reading entertainment for the RP veterans. This will be followed by some currently more practical applications of Vetting in various social contexts and interactions.

* H/T: Bardelys the Magnificent

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