What if women don't love (even their own) children, after all?

"There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone; it is quite hopeless."

That's the source witticism you may have seen going around the Manosphere in a condensed form. It might come as a surprise, but it doesn't come from an "enraged" RedPiller, neither a "bitter" MRA. It comes from a Mrs Alice Thomas Ellis, a British religious conservative female writer of essays, novels and cookbooks. This is a woman declaring what is, in my opinion, the essence of The Red Pill: that it is hopeless from a man to expect love from a woman.

I'm not at all sure the second part of the quote, "Women love children", is true, though.

What if this terrible fact is true: women don't love anyone, not even their own children?

Obviously, the truth or lie of this proposition depends on the definition of "love". But despite the millennia-old discussions around it, the essence of "love" is not difficult to define. It is, simply, what people think it to be: sacrificial love.

Love is willingly sacrificing your own interest to further someone else's.

If your "loving" behavior is just an action in an ongoing transaction of give and take, people (correctly) don't consider it to be love. So, if you are giving a gift in order to get one back, there is no need to involve the notion of love therein. "Commerce" or "exchange" would suffice. If you are caught being nice to someone because you expect him to become successful and "reciprocate" by paying back many times over, you will not be considered "loving", but rather a damn good investor. Etc etc you get the idea.

There was that old hypothesis that all "love" evolved from the relationship between mother and child, which somehow got transferred to men due to the similarities in the human organisms. Like nipples. This doesn't seem to be the case. Nowadays there is a clearer picture. Female and male love, in general, are different. And it is male love that corresponds to what people think real love is. Female, not.

In the discussion about the evolution of "true love", as in the discussion of true altruism, there was, up to recently, a missing link: (this is extremely interesting, watch:)

"What The Fuck. If you do a real favor, without the expectation of return, you are giving away a capacity which could be spent more wisely furthering your chances of survival and reproduction. It is stupid. You are undermining the potential of your genes. Evolutionary, it doesn't make sense. Therefore, true altruism, and true love, cannot have evolved."

It fucking makes sense, doesn't it?

Well, only if you ignore sexual selection.

Sexual selection is what drives evolution, much more decisively than natural selection. You cannot ignore it.

And sexual selection is predominantly about how females choose their mates.

Females choose their mates by observing their capacities. And the most reliable indicator for a huge capacity is wasting it nonchalantly. "Prodigious waste is a necessary feature of sexual courtship. - G. Miller."

Essentially, it's the good-old handicap principle at work, here: giving without return is damaging, and that's why females could use it as an indication of true abundance. Only, to have the full picture, you have to take it one step of thinking ahead: Human groups that evolved a pro-social mode of displaying abundance such as male love, out-evolved the ones that used anti-social ones, such as bashing each other's heads.

So: the capacity for male love evolved as a pro-social display of abundance.

(Note the word capacity. It is a potential that may not become a reality. Individuals, like whole societies, might be underdeveloped. But I will omit this important discussion for brevity's sake.)

What about female love then?

First important observation is that females don't need to display abundance, so their not loving any person, i.e. not expanding their own effort and convenience for anybody, is a pretty logical consequence. I won't go into details. What is much more interesting is what happens with women and their own children. Do they "love" them? Do they display sacrificial behavior towards them?

There are some very vivid examples that show that this is not the case. The most characteristic one, (a feminist destroyer story, really), is the Albanian sworn virgins: Girls that upon the death of their father and the resulting widowhood of their mothers, they were coerced by their mothers to denounced their sex and dress, behave and live as a man for their whole life, "because if you get married I'll be left alone, but if you stay with me, I'll have a son.". (source: Wikipedia).

How's that for motherly "sacrificial love"?

What we are observing in that example is a pronounced female trait reminiscent of an "arrested development". As there is an evolutionary explanation in men developing the capacity to care for others without expecting return, there is an evolutionary explanation in women prioritizing their own selves before their offspring - contrary, perhaps, to popular idealism: before the institution of marriage as a pro-female means of ensuring continuous providing for the woman's children, females were the main, if not the only, providers for their children. If they perished, their children did also. It was kind of like the oxygen masks in the airplane: first help yourself, then your child. Women being so ancient beings, this female solipsism, even in the context of the mother-child relationship, is so deeply ingrained in her biology that no amount of assurances and social institutions is able to root it out: early human bands were highly egalitarian regarding food distribution, but still, women left on their own devices would gravitate towards the behavior I described.

The example with the Albanian sworn virgins, although illuminating, may seem extreme. We don't have to go to an obscure country to observe such things, though. Doesn't today's single mother phenomenon in the West clearly echo this primal female nature? Upon given absolute sexual freedom, women proceeded en masse to fuck up their children's lives, by depriving them of their fathers and their sense of stability, because "mother should be happy; only then child will be happy too." Mothers raise their sons to be Blue Pill Betas, setting them up for a life of failure and agony, in order to serve their own (sex's) sexual strategy. They antagonize their own daughters, simultaneously keeping them emotionally tied up, an easy target for their emotional vampirism. They do these things not because they "truly love their children", but for the exact opposite reason: women are programmed to receive, and in the absence of a strong male frame, they will cannibalize their own children to feed their pettiness.

Women are quite an obsolete model of a human being. There are hardly any female evolved behaviors that are conducive to modern society. Not even motherhood.