Lady

by Roosh Valizadeh

  Our original nature prepared us to be constantly anxious about the threats in our environment, but now that most of those threats are gone, we’re anxious about things that don’t threaten our survival. We get stressed out by a mild health symptom, an unexpected home repair, how we think people will see us at a party, or why a particular man or woman doesn’t like us. If you think about the things that have caused you stress in the past month, it’s likely that not one of them posed an immediate or acute threat to your survival. Unless you were in a horrific car accident or violently attacked, all your stress and anxiety arose from things that were not genuine threats.

  If you’re not in real danger, why do trivial matters make you feel anxious? Because you were built as an anxiety-generating machine that can survive in practically any harsh environment. For example, has it happened that you left home but couldn’t remember whether or not you locked your door? You agonized over going back and checking, and if you weren’t too far from home, you reluctantly returned and found that the door was indeed locked. From a natural standpoint, this anxiety is beneficial, because it can protect us from catastrophic events, but played out day after day in our safe and modern world, it can be crippling.

  Every month, your mind will automatically produce a certain amount of anxiety, no matter your situation. Some people, due to their individual nature, produce more anxiety, whereas others produce less, but even if all your survival needs are met and there is nothing actually wrong with your life, you will still be anxious. Unless you drug your brain, which I don’t recommend because of the side-effects, there is no way to stop being anxious. Instead, you must understand it. You can say, “Ah-ha! You’re producing anxiety because it is encoded into my being, but there is no threat right now, so I will not strengthen you by looking for assurances.” When you seek out information or knowledge to relieve your anxiety, you actually feed it. Anxiety survives on attention—the more you give it, the stronger it becomes. Instead, the best response is to allow the anxiety to happen, not feed it by seeking out assurances, and watch it starve of its own accord after a few days or even hours.

  I’m sure you can see how useful anxiety is for focusing your attention on something that could harm you. In the past, a woman was in real danger of starving to death or being attacked by male warriors from other tribes. Not only did women live with this constant fear, but if a neighboring tribe did attack, her husband would be murdered, she would be raped, and she would be forced to start a new family with her rapist.

  Modern feminists would have you believe that this sort of “rape culture” still exists, where Western women are being raped at a higher rate than women living in poor African slums, but the fact is that you can walk alone at night with only a minuscule chance of being attacked by a stranger, something that was virtually impossible a few generations ago.

  If rates of rape, violence, and starvation are lower than they were in the past, what threats do you face today? The biggest is dropping your smartphone in the toilet bowl. Since this is the main device you use to communicate with friends and document your life, you will be extremely upset during the time it takes to replace your phone. The second biggest threat is being rejected by an attractive man, particularly one who disappeared after having sex with you. These things can be acutely stressful, but in the grand scheme of things they are minor and do not threaten your survival.

  If you break your phone, you can take actionable steps of going to the store and getting a new one, but there is often nothing you can do about romantic problems, especially if the man has firmly decided that he does not want to be with you. Attempts to “think” your way out of the problem just makes you more stressed. In fact, you can’t think your way out of any problem unless it results in taking action that puts you one step closer to a resolution.

  If the things that are happening to you today don’t threaten your survival, it’s best to brush them off as life’s normal inconveniences or disappointments instead of internalizing them as a sign that your life is bad. It’s a big step from “It sucks that my phone broke” or “It sucks that Chad doesn’t like me” to “My phone broke, so my life is horrible” or “Chad doesn’t like me, so I will die alone.” The former attitude accepts the reality that bad things happen in life, whereas the latter allows fleeting, short-term events to define your entire existence.

  Ironically, if you do face a genuine threat to your survival, you’ll be surprisingly calm when it happens. The anxiety acts as fuel to focus your attention on concrete action that eliminates the threat, which is exactly what nature intended, but if your survival is not actually threatened, and there is no concrete action step you can take, the anxiety doesn’t get burned up as fuel, and its noxious fumes start to make you sick. The result is that you worry endlessly, convince yourself that you’re not a happy person, and look for a harmful material “solution” to suppress the anxiety.

  Problems that can’t be responded to with concrete action push you towards materialism to feel better in the moment, at the cost of your health or long-term well-being. Because you live in modern society, you are most likely stuck in a vicious cycle of feeling anxious or unhappy and relieving this feeling temporarily through food, shopping, sexual attention, or drugs. Many of the harmful behaviors women engage in, such as emotional eating, binge drinking on the weekends, or hooking up with men who don’t care about them, are futile attempts at alleviating a vague, nagging anxiety that does not put them in danger like being kidnapped and raped by warriors from other tribes.

  The good news is that we will never be able to simulate ancient conditions where our survival was in near-constant threat. Thanks to modern technology, advanced food-production methods, and armed protection from the government, it is unlikely that we will die prematurely unless we’re involved in a fatal car accident or contract a serious disease, outcomes that are far more abstract than starvation, rape, or war. To prevent starvation, you can harvest crops and store them properly, which will assure your survival, but to prevent a car accident, all you can do is wear a seat belt and hope that a driver doesn’t randomly plow into you.

  Today, we are unable to take concrete steps to limit our anxiety as we could in the past. This forces us to rely on materialism as a short-term fix, but this only makes things worse in the long run. The best answer is to understand how anxiety works and try to live according to our nature, whether masculine or feminine. By taking the huge step of understanding, we can begin to avoid the cycle of seeking out false solutions.

  Our basic nature is to survive and pair-bond with our sexual opposite. At the very least, you are accomplishing the first one, assuming you don’t get so triggered by my writing that you have a fatal heart attack. Before we can address pair-bonding, it’s important to understand our sex-linked nature.

  If humans were not made of two biological sexes, we’d be like bacteria and reproduce asexually through simple division. Instead, we have male and female, and barring an expensive fertility procedure in a laboratory, the male and female need to connect sexually and emotionally to produce children. To accomplish this end, nature gave men and women their own set of specific tools. Although there is some overlap in tool function, the differences are far more pronounced, ranging from physical abilities to ways of thinking. You may think it’s unfair that there are things men can do that you can’t, but when the masculine and the feminine are combined, there is nothing humans can’t achieve. This combination has resulted in our species becoming the most dominant life form on Earth, of seven billion somewhat intelligent organisms who can explore space, control aspects of the environment, and write books like this.

  But there’s a catch: we have a bad side to our nature. For men, it is the unquenchable desire to have sex with multiple women. For women, it is the unquenchable desire to have sex with high-status men, where status can mean wealth, strength, fame, confidence, or attractiveness. The bad side of my nature wants me to sleep with as many beautiful women as I’m physically able to, and I d
id this for many years, but remember that we’re also equipped with an adaptation program. I got used to sleeping with new women and became tired of it, but the bad side of my nature still insisted on more variety. This created a conflict where I couldn’t bear to put in the work required for each additional lay, but I still wanted the decreasing reward. Imagine me as a fat man whose monstrous obesity left him so weak that he couldn’t even stand up and walk to the refrigerator to get more food.

  As a woman, the second you secure the commitment of a man you value, your nature will cause you to window shop for more men and test the field to see if another man who has higher status than your boyfriend will also commit to you. Since there will always be a higher-status man who is willing to at least have sex with you, though not necessarily commit to you, a woman who pursues the bad side of her nature will end up sabotaging all of her relationships. When a woman is in her early twenties and in the prime of her beauty, she may not have any trouble getting into a new relationship to replace a broken one, but once she enters her thirties, and the main bait she uses to hook the masculine—her beauty—is not as strong, she will find herself in a difficult situation.

  I used to think that a new notch on my bedpost would make me happy, and many women think that getting a commitment from a high-status man will make them happy, but the second we achieve that new notch or commitment, the bad side of our nature tells us that we have to keep going to get yet another girl or another man of even higher status. The cycle doesn’t end unless you consciously block it out by understanding that the negative side of your nature will put you on the road to suffering and loneliness.

  What makes things even worse is that society teaches women to raise their own status by focusing on career as if they were men. I have lost count of how many times an American woman has tried to impress me with her job title as if this type of status is attractive to a masculine man. It isn’t, because the masculine man craves making love to beauty, something he doesn’t have, not to a career, which he likely already has. A man is more likely to desire a beautiful woman who is working at McDonald’s than an ugly woman who is a high-powered attorney.

  Some women have also adopted the masculine behavior of seeking notches, particularly men from foreign countries, thinking that that novelty will provide fulfillment, but it only damages their ability to have a monogamous relationship. If you consider that a woman is not even guaranteed to experience an orgasm from a casual sex act like a man is, it’s hard to see how she benefits from a drunken hookup with someone who doesn’t care about her.

  When I would bring a new girl to my home from a nightclub, I would wonder why she was so willing to donate her body for far less gain than I was about to receive. The only explanation is that she was trying to relieve her anxiety, boredom, or unhappiness with a burst of sexual validation that faded in a day and left her less capable of bonding with a good man in the future.

  When the culture teaches you that men and women are “equal,” what it’s really saying is that your nature is not linked to your biological sex. This softens you up so that you don’t protest when you’re forced to learn masculine traits, such as building your status through a career instead of enhancing your femininity and beauty. On the other end of the spectrum, men are embracing the feminine and becoming so obsessed with grooming and appearance that many women confuse them for being gay. In essence, we’re teaching cats to bark like dogs and dogs to meow like cats. It’s no surprise that neither sex is content.

  You have three choices. The first is to buy into “equality” and deny your basic sex-linked nature, causing you to adopt the masculine and try to build up your status through a career and materialism. This will produce the most misery.

  The second is to accept your nature but to feed those parts of it that demand you constantly seek higher-status men in a process that will result in being alone when you are older or ending up with a man who is nowhere close to your first choice. This will also make you miserable, but not as miserable as with the first choice.

  The third choice is to accept and understand your nature, not let it sabotage you, and disconnect yourself from the materialistic roller-coaster ride of anxiety and fleeting happiness. This choice will produce the least misery, although life may still be difficult, because as I discussed earlier, nowhere is it decreed that experiencing pain and frustration aren’t aspects of human life. The key word in this choice is “understand.” You cannot totally defeat your feminine nature, just like how I cannot stop having sexual thoughts when I see a beautiful girl.

  Not long ago, I was in a monogamous relationship. During this time, I had lustful thoughts about girls who were more beautiful than my already beautiful girlfriend, but these thoughts didn’t mean there was a problem with my relationship. It was simply the bad side of my nature acting out. Fighting the lust by making myself feel guilty or ashamed wouldn’t work, because I would just feed it further, keeping the idea of having sex with other women alive in my mind. I chose neither to fight it nor to act on it, and would wait hours or days for a lustful flare-up to subside. This is how I was able to remain faithful during the relationship.

  In your case, once you get into a relationship, you may immediately start to doubt if your boyfriend is the best man you can get. You’ll take action by window shopping for other men and flirting with them, which will inevitably lead to emotional or physical cheating. If acted on, the male instinct to lust after women is as damaging as your instinct to seek out higher-status men.

  I could spend my entire life searching the world for more beautiful women to bed and never feel like I had finished. You can spend your entire life upgrading your man by finding another, yet there will still be millions of men who could be even better. It never ends! And by continuing to listen to the bad side of our nature, we will utterly fail to experience the immaterial bond of love between woman and man and also between woman and child through the creation of a family, which is the best way for humans to remove themselves from the shallow pursuit of sex, novelty, and status.

  I have realized the importance of creating a family late in life. My chances of establishing one diminish with each passing year, so the best I can do is to warn others about the future they face if they don’t look at their significant other and say, perhaps reluctantly, “This person is good enough,” and step off the treadmill entirely, because if you let the bad side of your nature take hold, you’re guaranteed to have a lonely outcome.

  Think about the path of your life in the past few years. Do you feel like you’re letting the bad side of your nature control your behavior, or have you been able to minimize its worst effects? If you’ve been able to minimize them, it’s probably because someone has taken the time to teach you uncomfortable truths. It’s encouraging to know that our deepest flaws can be minimized simply by understanding them. Not only does understanding remove feelings of guilt or shame, it also gives us the choice to ignore an instinct that, in the modern age, will lead to harm. Sometimes you’ll lose out to the bad side of your nature and make the wrong choice, but in time you’ll be able to treat a negative instinct like a stubborn fly that you can’t quite manage to kill. Simply let the fly have its way until it dies of natural causes in a day or two.

  Once you decide to ignore the bad side of your nature, you can pursue a goal that will maximize the joy you experience in life. This goal is to have a practical love with a man who believes you are the most beautiful woman he can reasonably get, minimizing the risk that he will stray from you, in a relationship that allows you to give birth to children whom you will deeply love.

  Love must be part of our solution because it is immaterial unlike money, physical attractiveness, and even sex. One sign you know something is immaterial is if it still brings you joy after it has been taken away from you. If—God forbid—your husband or children die while you’re alive, their memory will make you sad, but you will also feel immense happiness from having loved them and been part of their lives, even though their physic
al existence has ended. Outside of your husband and children, the only other way to experience immaterial love is having a deep relationship with God.

  In other words, we should have listened to our grandparents. They were wiser than us because they nourished a practical love that resulted in creating a family, which kept them away from shallow temptations. What would my grandmothers do? If you stop reading this book right now and walk away with just this question, you will be better off. Since today’s culture contains far more degeneracy than your grandmothers’, you’ll have to be that much stronger to overcome it and bond with one good man whose children you want to bear.

  It’s finally time for some positive news: we also have a good side to our sex-linked nature. For a man, it’s wanting to provide food and shelter for his family and defend them with his life. Almost all men would sacrifice their lives for their families, especially their wives, without hesitation. For a woman, the good side of her nature is primarily to raise and nurture children and secondarily to please the man she loves. It is as instinctual for a man to trade his life for his family as it is for a woman to trade her life for her children.

  To understand why you would never sacrifice your life for your husband’s, we have to take a look at ancient history. When a village was invaded by a barbarian tribe, the men were killed first because they posed the greatest threat to the invaders. The women, however, were useful as kidnapped brides or slaves. To not be sold off as a slave, a woman “only” had to love the man who killed her husband and hope that he would step in and provide for her. Many women couldn’t live with this arrangement and killed themselves or became slaves, but the ones who were able to love their barbarian husband went on to have more female descendants who also had the ability to love a barbarian rapist.

  If you have rape fantasies, it’s likely because you have a female ancestor who was raped and created a family with her rapist. It’s why books such as 50 Shades of Grey are international bestsellers. I don’t condone rape or violence, but the reality is that a woman has the capacity to be with the man who forcefully took her after killing her husband.