"A weaker sex drive is at the basis of female superiority."
I don't normally review books, but occasionally I'll stumble across something that's too good not to share. The Empress is Naked by Adam Leonas happens to be just one of these books.
I'll start with a few disclaimers. First of all, I do not take unsolicited book review requests. Don't send me your book I won't read it. Secondly, I am not making money off of this, nor does the author realize I'm doing this review, nor has he asked me to.
Now that's out of the way- The Empress is Naked.
This book and author has been around TRP and mensrights for a while and one afternoon I decided to take a peek just to see what it was about and I have to say it's one of the most interesting insights into the history and current state of sexual relations in culture that I think I've seen.
The ideas in this book aren't necessarily unique or new to anybody familiar with TRP, however the author actually does a pretty good job of organizing and arranging the ideas in a coherent narrative that constructs a plausible history of sexual relations between the genders, and explains why we're in the quandary we're in today, and what the causes of the frustrations are on both sides.
The book begins by challenging some popular misconceptions- that women are systemically oppressed, or that men are institutionally put in charge. Again, not exactly groundbreaking territory, however it's nice to see the arguments made succinctly in small bite-sized chunks that can easily be digested.
It continues by analyzing to what degree sex, and the availability of sex, has affected relations between the genders. It draws a connection between economy and restriction of sex, suggesting that women were freer with sex when there was surplus, and the restriction of sex became the norm when there was scarcity. The most interesting thing it highlights, in my opinion, is the fascinating use of sexual access (or the restriction thereof) to control and use the male population.
I recommend highly grabbing this book, if for anything, for the first half of the book. If you can, get a paper copy that you can share with people you know who are on the fence.
I will admit the second half seems to drag a little and ventures outside the realm of plausibility into conjecture and suggestion, but nevertheless I believe it's worth a read if the battle of the sexes is a topic that interests you the way it interests me.
Reposting an Excerpt that the author originally posted on reddit:
Games People Play
In this section we will see why women are in a better position to satisfy their social needs. But first let's define a frame of reference for these needs. To do this, we will use Games People Play, a book by eminent psychologist Eric Berne.
Berne describes the interactions between people as exchanges of what he calls “strokes”. The baby needs his mother's caress in order to feel intimacy and safety. This need for positive stimuli, the “infantile stimulus-hunger”, is transformed in adults, due to social and other difficulties, resulting “into something which may be termed recognition-hunger”.
“A movie actor may require hundreds of strokes each week from anonymous and undifferentiated admirers to keep his spinal cord from shrivelling, while a scientist may keep physically and mentally healthy on one stroke a year from a respected master... ‘[S]troking’ may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse...”
Stimulus-hunger and recognition hunger are two fundamental aspects of human psychology. A third one is “structure-hunger”. To many people “unstructured time”, when there is no framework set for an interaction, makes them feel at a loss, awkward, uncomfortable. They dread the specter of silence, these moments when no one can think of something interesting to say. “The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.”
One of the activities that structure time is work, but “it is of interest here only insofar as [it] offer[s] a matrix for ‘stroking’”. Conventional social interactions offer another way to structure time.
Beyond these, “as people become better acquainted”, interactions in the sphere of personal relationship begin to take place. And this is where things start to get interesting:
“These incidents superficially appear to be adventitious, and may be so described by the parties concerned, but careful scrutiny reveals that they tend to follow definite patterns which are amenable to sorting and classification, and that the sequence is circumscribed by unspoken rules and regulations. These regulations remain latent as long as the amities or hostilities proceed according to Hoyle, but they become manifest if an illegal move is made, giving rise to a symbolic, verbal or legal cry of ‘Foul!’”
Berne calls these kind of interactions Games. Indeed, “the bulk of social activity consists of playing games”.
So what is the problem with Games? “[G]ames are substitutes for real living and real intimacy”. They have “ulterior quality” and have profit as their goal. “Every game … is basically dishonest”.
Female Games
Using the above terminology, we can posit the following: Society has been configured so that it is easier for women to get the “strokes” they need, as attested by measurements of happiness and the dramatic reversal of life expectancy in their favor. Due to their more controllable sex drive, they are in position to play dishonest games with men, so that the strokes they receive are obtained at men's expense. “Good” women do it completely unconsciously, just because they can and it pays – i.e. it is pleasant. “Bad” women do it on purpose, calculating their profit in advance.
The Flirting Game
A woman's life, from the end of childhood up to decrepit old age, are spent playing the flirting game. Women set its rules and derive pleasure from it. The great majority of men play this game at a negative psychological cost. The game, in its milder form, goes as follows: “[She] signals that she is available and gets her pleasure from the man’s pursuit. As soon as he has committed himself, the game is over.” In a more “advanced” level, “[She] gets only secondary satisfaction from [his] advances. Her primary gratification comes from rejecting him, so that this game is also colloquially known as ‘Buzz Off, Buster’. She leads [him] into a much more serious commitment than the mild flirtation ... and enjoys watching his discomfiture when she repulses him.”
As in all Games, in flirting, the female motivations are unconscious. At the conscious level, she has put on make-up, a nice dress, highlighted secondary sexual characteristic (her legs, chest, butt) supposedly because “she just feels like doing that”, not because she likes men to look at her of flirt with her. In other cases, a bit more consciously, she does want men to flirt her, but only the “alpha males”, not every second-class loser in town. The Average Frustrated Chumps who are attracted to her are summarily shot down “collateral damage”.
Social scientists have called this “social flirting”. The game is virtually free, with no cost for women, and, as mentioned earlier, with a negative cost for men. It is like playing craps, with men winning only with double sixes, while women win with all other outcomes. If we wanted to balance it from the perspective of game theory, we should introduce a cost factor for women, a punishment, i.e. some form of violence, verbal or physical, from the conned man. However, as this is forbidden, socially or legally, the average man is left completely unprotected.
One result of the flirting game is that since the great majority of approaches are rejected, many men decide to stop playing the game altogether. It is quite telling that PUA's in their recipes for how to get a woman, explicitly forbid asking her out. The “benefit” for women, especially the most insecure ones, is that they can derive extra pleasure from whining “what has happened to real men?”
“Nora Vincent ... said she thought dating women would be one of the most pleasant parts of her undercover life. As a lesbian, she had already dated women, but now there would be many more available to her, and she looked forward to the experience. She found it sobering and discouraging. As a man, she would approach women at the bar to try to chat them up, and more often than not she got a quick and unkind (sometimes downright humiliating) rejection. She soon lost her nerve and, were it not for the demands of her experiment, she says she would have given up. She wondered how men manage to do it, to persevere, to summon up their courage to approach women despite the expectation of being rejected most of the time and despite the accumulating history of bad outcomes. She said she did not know which was worse, the women who rejected you at a glance without giving you a chance to prove yourself, or the ones who rejected you after a couple of dates and some degree of getting to know you.”
While the game has only immediate profits for women, it does nevertheless have an indirect cost. It produces a disappointment in men that might turn into rage. This is why women can fall victim to “sexist” teasing on the street, especially if they are dressed provocatively. However, women who are teased are not necessarily those that “play” the most. This statistical deviation is perhaps the reason cat-calling is generally presented as a problem for women, while it is only a minimal cost that the female sex pays, in relation to the psychological benefits they derive from the Game. And let us keep in mind that only a very small number of these “teasings” is really annoying. Most are good-natured and welcomed by women. If you are feeling down and want to fix your mood, you can wear something nice and go out for a walk at a street market, where you can enjoy the sellers' humorous cat-calling...
The Raping Game
Revealingly, Berne does not consider the Raping Game as being separate from the Flirting Game. Berne argues it's just one of its variations, in the “3rd degree”. The description of the game is as follows:
“[She] leads [him] into compromising physical contact and then claims that he has made a criminal assault or has done her irreparable damage. In its most cynical form [she] may actually allow him to complete the sexual act so that she gets that enjoyment before confronting him. The confrontation may be immediate, as in the illegitimate cry of rape, or it may be long delayed, as in suicide or homicide following a prolonged love affair. If she chooses to play it as a criminal assault, she may have no difficulty in finding mercenary or morbidly interested allies, such as the press, the police, counselors and relatives.”
Rape fantasy is one of the most common fantasies for women. Studies in the past 30 years have indeed found that “between 31% and 57% of women have rape fantasies, and these fantasies are frequent or preferred in 9% to 17% of women. Considering that many people are ashamed to report rape fantasies, these stats are most likely lowball figures.”
Certainly, not all rapes are caused by women. To go from a fantasy to provoking a real rape you need to be at least a bit disturbed. But then, “Mental disorders are common. World wide more than one in three people in most countries report sufficient criteria for at least one at some point in their life.” Given this, it is not unreasonable to suspect that many rapes are actually female-initiated.
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