The Ironwood Collection of Alpha Moves (10 page)

Because if you wait for your reactive-desire wife or girlfriend to suddenly develop spontaneous desire, you're going to be there for a while.  With blue balls.  You have to step up and aggressively pursue a consistent strategy of seduction and pursuit or you're locked in Blue Pill Betahood until the divorce.

It's possible to be sexually proactive and not be a douchebag.  Indeed, a lot of happily married couples with long histories figure out ways to do just that, and end up enjoying a long and lusty sex life.  The ideal Red Pill goal is to get to a place where your ability to initiate gets distilled down to a comfortable, easy-to-recognize signal that immediately dampens panties. 

That's the beauty of Married Game, and the difference between it and Dating Game.  In Dating Game, the goal is to establish a relationship that leads to sex with the least amount of effort and expenditure of resources as possible.  Married Game's goal is to establish a pattern of sexual behavior in a relationship that encourages an interpersonal intimacy in which sex is not "if" but "when", with the least amount of effort and expenditure of resources as possible.  In Dating Game you're hunting wild pussy.  In Married Game, you have domesticated pussy available.  But if you don't husband it properly by consistently and aggressively initiating sex with your woman (paying particular attention to her menstrual cycle) and
giving her the opportunity to react favorably
, then no matter how well the initial domestication went, you're going to have problems on your hands and more porn on your computer.

It can be hard.  Once you take the Red Pill, and understand the realities of the situation instead of focusing on some theoretical ideal of  sexual equality your relationship is supposed to measure up to, then you can accept the idea that initiating sex is your responsibility as a man, not your (plural) responsibility as a couple.  If her sexuality is reactive, and you aren't being proactive, then she's going to sit there in neutral and start doubting her own attractiveness, and therefore the strength of your relationship, and that way lie
th
madness.

So suck it up.  Forget about how nice it would be if she just came in, dropped her panties, bent over and said "do me, please".  Because the fact is,
if you want to cultivate that kind of response the only way it can be done (without recourse to pharmaceuticals of dubious legality) is by cultivating a proactive pattern of sexual behavior in which you do initiate often and enthusiastically enough that she feels confident and secure enough to initiate sex herself without fear of rejection
(which women handle and interpret entirely differently than we do) secure in the knowledge that yes, you do find her irresistibly attractive because
why else would you be trying relentlessly to nail her all the time?

So suck it up and go make out with your wife.  If you do it right, she'll forget all about who started it. 

Alpha Move: Give
H
er
C
hocolate . . .
T
he
R
ight
W
way!

Athol and I and a whole bunch of other Manosphere guys are hardcore geeks and nerds (there is a difference, but only a geek would know it and only a nerd would argue about it).  That's off-putting to some folks who don't "get" sci-fi and think it's all a bunch of ray guns and rocket ships. 

The fact
is, the reason a lot of us geek-
out about sci-fi and comics and such is that
they present more elegant and useful metaphors for the realities of our post-industrial existence
.  "Using the Force", for instance, when you are closing your eyes driving through traffic on the interstate, or "entering the Neutral Zone" when undertaking activity of dubious legality.  The fact is, we use sci-fi metaphors because
they are apt and elegant and they are a common point of reference for many of us who
…
didn't do a lot of dating in High School.

That being said as preface, we come to the topic of
the chapter
, the proper
(Red Pill)
way to give your wife chocolate.

Mrs. Ironwood and I have been eagerly enjoying
The Big Bang Theory
, not only for it's witty nerdicissms but also for it's portrayal of a gang of misfit Betas, Sigmas, Deltas and Omegas attempt to overcome their terminal geekatude and find babes.  When one
(Leonard)
actually does, his roommate Sheldon, an anal-retentive OCD
narcissistic
genius theoretical physicist, has a hard time dealing with her feminine
idiosyncrasies
.  Instead of pitching a hissy fit, he handles the situation with masculine cunning. 

Basically, when the girlfriend, Penny, did something Sheldon didn’t like, he gave her a note of disapproval until she corrected the behavior.  When she did, he casually offered her a chocolate in pursuit of Pavlovian programming.  Sheldon was, in essence, building Leonard a “better girlfriend”, even though Leonard did not believe the tactic would work.  Try to find the clip on the internet somewhere, or check out the episode – it’s Red Pill gold.

When Mrs. Ironwood and I first watched this, we laughed so hard we almost peed.

And after that it became an inside joke.  I started carrying around a small bag of candy (Hershey's drops, but any kind of small, easily portable chocolate candy will do) and whenever she did something I approved of, say, initiate sex, talk dirty, or  verbally offer me respect for what I do, or some such, I'd whip out the bag and say "Chocolate?" and she'd laugh.  I'd laugh.  Funny.

But I kept doing it.
  After a while, it stopped being funny in one way, and started being funny in another as she
acknowledged my conscious attempts to take control of the relationship and modify her behavior
.  Whenever I suddenly offered her a chocolate, it was a tangible and concrete sign of my approval, and a tacit rejection of the behavior she avoided. 

In other words, it made her unconscious behaviors I disliked
conscious
, calling her out and holding her accountable, while rewarding her for her efforts to counter them -- even if they were accidental.  I tried to never do it ironically, always supportively.  And after a while, I didn't even need the chocolate.  I could just pantomime handing her one and asking, and she'd get the point.

L
ittle subtle, subtextual rituals can communicate volumes in a marriage.  I'm not trying to demean my wife, belittle her or insult her intelligence. 
But I am making a point of letting her know that I am observing her behavior and such little things do not escape my notice or my memory (as she once thought they did).
  And lastly I am making the point that I would much rather lovingly offer her chocolate for good behavior than, say, get into an argument over negative behavior.

Yeah, I can use it to be an asshole sometimes.  But she forgives me.  Hey, I give her chocolate. What's she going to say?

Alpha Move:
Be
Iron Chef

A commenter
over at Badger’s illustrious Hut
basically said that cooking was women's work
and totally Beta
.  I passionately disagree.  Here's why.

While cooking has traditionally been done by women in agricultural and tribal cultures due to the division of labor,
there is nothing unmasculine or inherently and irredeemably
B
eta about cooking.
  Indeed, it can be an intensely profound exercise of male power.

Mrs. Ironwood can't cook.  At
all
.  Her brother and her
(
male
)
cousin were both adept professional chefs.  She and her mother . . . well, they couldn't cook their way out of a refugee c
amp with Paula Deen and a pound of lamb
.  My wife once washed pasta with
soap
.  Two weeks after moving in with her, I excused her from all future attempts and assumed the duties exclusively.  Indeed, I wrote into our marriage vows that I will "Feed her when she is hungry".  She's utterly abysmal, due in part to her training in science, which requires exact measurements and such. ("It's says 'brown the beef' . . .
how brown?
  What shade of brown?  AGHH!" -- actual quote).

I, on the other hand, have cooking as a part of my family culture, with a legacy cookbook and everything.  I've cooked professionally for years, and pursued it as a passionate hobby since my teens.  The skill certainly got me laid in college -- there is great Game in cooking, if you do it right.  The first time I cooked a full mean for Mrs. Ironwood, she dropped the fork, swallowed, and said "I want to have your babies."  I'm
good
.

So when we cohabitated, I cooked.  She didn't.  When we got married, I cooked, she didn't.  I do every meal, and I don't phone it in.  I have demanded that she learn how to respect the food even if she doesn't know how to prepare it, and I've introduced her to all sorts of cuisines she likely never would have tried.  My subtextual message was pretty loud:
FOOD
COMES THROUGH ME!  IF YOU WANT TO
EAT
WELL
,
KEEP ME HAPPY.

Even in my worst Beta years, I was always Alpha in the kitchen.  I could have a girlfriend in my kitchen and even assist, but if she started trying to take control, I'd throw a bitch out. MY DOMAIN.  And if she didn't like the food . . . well, sure sign of poor relationship material.

Mrs. Ironwood loves everything I put in front of her.  While her single girlfriends were eating Ramen noodles or "dating for dinner" or hitting McD's AGAIN, she was getting incredible meals every night.  Serious DHV.

So, now that I have kids, and I'm running a family in addition to a relationship, the kitchen and meal prep is an even more important extension of power and order in
my household.  There's nothing B
eta in mandating when and what shall be consumed by the family, what is purchased at the grocery store and how much is spent. 

In a post-industrial world where cleaning and supplying has been largely outsourced or simplified, cooking (and laundry) remain the key components of housework left.  Athol has spoken at length about the Game value of doing laundry, and I defer to his expertise on the matter.  But the Married Game value of cooking is at least as high, and can be much, much higher.