Cuckoldry is a Beta Male Mating Strategy

“Poly” Lifestyles are socially reinforced to facilitate women’s mating strategies.

With the rise of women’s independence from men, and the social unfettering of their sexual strategy (Hypergamy), women have shifted the old social norms from socially enforced monogamy to a female-initiated form of polygyny.

You’ll need a quick primer on Hypergamy to wrap your head around this. An expanded definition of Hypergamy must encompass the dualistic nature of women’s innate mating strategy. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks (or, politely, Alpha Seed / Beta Need). This distills down to women’s need to balance the short-term sexual and genetic benefits of a man (arousal, sex, and reproductive interests) with his long-term provisioning, protection, and parental investment potential. Old-order thinkers explained this as the Cads vs. Dads dilemma. It used to serve pretty well. But then, as now, most evolutionary psychologists try not to upset the Gynocentric academia that looms over their tenure. 

Today, what follows is the breakdown of women’s old strategy of looking for men who best embody genetic benefits and provisioning qualities. Instead, they focus primarily on one or the other in separate men depending on their needs. A feminine-primary social order conditions men, through a system of social reward and punishment, to fulfill these changing roles. Men must be serviceable to women at various stages as their reproductive and life needs change. In turn, men perform these roles to effect their reproductive strategies in ways they’ve been socialized to believe are in their best interests.

In the wake of the Sexual Revolution, WEIRD cultures (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) removed all social stigmas that used to surround single motherhood – and even elective single motherhood. This is the product of transitioning from male-primary monogamy to female-primary polygyny and the social support mechanisms designed to maintain it. Men are only now learning to maneuver and adapt their sexual strategies to this transition. Rapid technological advances and evolutionary gap make this adaptation all the more difficult. However, to accept their roles in this female-primary sexual marketplace, they must also condition themselves to sublimate their evolved sexual nature if they ever hope to have children.

Poly and Cuckoldry are Beta Male Sexual Strategies

Until the 21^st century, women had to keep their sexual strategies a secret. Dependence on men’s provisioning and authority meant Hypergamy had to be at least somewhat ambiguous. As women became less dependent on men for their long-term security, the need to keep Hypergamy a secret was no longer necessary. Today, women revel in their sexual strategies as a point of pride — and an aspect of empowered femininity that lesser men must accept. 

In a socio-sexual state of Sandbergian Open Hypergamy, the next obstacle is conditioning men to repress their innate need to ensure their paternity. Thus, eroticizing and embracing cuckoldry (in particular, self-initiated cuckoldry) is in the reproductive interests of the low-value men we have in abundance today.

The definition of cuckoldry is tightly controlled. In its strictest sense, it means “The state of a woman deceiving a man to believe the children she’s birthed are biologically his when they actually belong to another man.” When defined this way, “cuckoldry” is perceived to be rare. However, even this is changing with the advent of home DNA tests. The latent purpose of cuckoldry was to covertly effect women’s sexual strategy in securing the best genetic material from one man while ensuring the best provisioning and parental investment from another man. In the societal conditions before the Sexual Revolution, a woman could be shamed, ostracized, and even killed for her duplicity. In the past, most capital forms of punishment for women’s adultery (The Scarlet Letter) were deterrents for potential cuckoldry in other women. Men’s innate propensity to mate guard finds its expression in social norms of female modesty up to draconian sexual repression and genital mutilation of girls. In androcentric social orders, men’s mating strategies are expressed in societal norms. In gynocentric social orders, women’s mating strategies dominate the social fabric. 

Post-Sexual Revolution, Cuckoldry is a normalized part of a feminine-primary social order because it serves a female mating strategy.

Open cuckoldry is only socially acceptable when it happens in a Gynocentric society. In just 60 years, cuckoldry has become an accepted reproductive strategy for men and women. We’ve shifted social norms to encourage men to sublimate their innate need to ascertain paternity. Meanwhile, we prioritize women’s sexual strategy above men’s. By reinforcing women’s ‘cuckolding’ of men, we encourage men to adopt women’s sexual strategy as their own.

We convince men that this is a “lifestyle choice” when it is actually a social engineering effort that selects out their genetic interests while encouraging their responsibility to provide, protect and invest in children produced by another man.

• Single Mothers —> Stepfathers

• Female Promiscuity —> Polygyny

• Open Cuckoldry —> Polyamory and “Poly” Lifestyles

I argue that “cuckoldry” should be defined as “The state in which a man, either by deception or social conditioning, assumes the parental investment responsibilities of a child he did not sire.” That’s an important distinction. Men are praised for adopting the children of a single mother as a means to solve women’s reproductive problems. Men who involve themselves with single mothers initially do so as a means to reproduce with her. This is a de facto sexual strategy. A single mother’s reproductive strategy is openly (and acceptably) resolved when a man assumes the parental investment responsibilities of the man she chooses to reproduce with. Alpha seed, Beta need.

Wifing up a single mother and adopting the children sired by another man is a Beta male sexual strategy that has developed in the wake of feminine-social primacy. The cost of his reproduction is an exchange of his resources invested in another man’s genetic legacy. This is the definition of what I call retroactive cuckoldry. As reproductive stresses continue to escalate in modern societies, more Beta men will accept their cuckolding as a necessary strategy if they are to reproduce at all. With 43% of children born out of wedlock today, it’s easy to see that an ever-increasing number of men will choose to exchange their interests in paternity for reproductive access with women who’ve already reproduced with another man.

“Poly” Lifestyles are socially reinforced to facilitate women’s sexual strategies.

Men’s drive for paternity is more difficult to sublimate in Alpha men than in Beta men. Men’s innate impulse to mate-guard and the jealousy that stems from it ruins any notion of how Poly or eroticized Cuckoldry might become an acceptable norm. There is a physical aspect to jealousy for men, particularly Beta men, whose sexual strategy is to over-invest in a single partner due to sexual scarcity.

Cognitive dissonance is needed to justify a Beta male’s cuckoldry. It requires him to gaslight himself to believe it’s in his interests. Moreover, men’s preoccupation with paternity (and the violence that results from it) means it is innately counterintuitive for a man to convince himself that sharing his woman is a good idea. Yet today, we have the “top minds” in the field of sexology rationalizing it all away to justify their own sex lives. So we imprison Andrew Tate for practicing what David Ley, Justin Lehmiller, Dr. Geoff Miller, and Dr. David Buss have advocated for over a decade. Of course, it’s tyrannous for a man to initiate polygyny, but if women default to it in a gynocentric society, it’s evidence of social progress.

Why is normalizing poly in its various forms (cuckoldry) so important to us socially? The Free Love Generation and 70’s swingers had nothing like the current impetus. More than enough research shows that women’s capacity to pair bond with men in the long term decreases with every new sex partner. We know that (Beta) men mate-guard and feel a natural, physical jealousy at the thought of their pair-bonded mate copulating with another man. Even Dr. Dianna Fleischmann admits she struggles with “feelings of jealousy” in her “poly marriage” to Dr. Geoffrey Miller. 

Popular opinion is that cuckoldry makes a man ‘more secure in his masculinity.’ 

Why? What purpose does masculinity shaming serve? It promotes the normalization of a mating strategy that requires Beta men to accept their roles as cuckolds and their masculine duty to raise another man’s child.

On a philosophical level, this thinking demands that men subscribe to a social-constructionist form of despondency — which we have in spades in the Incel communities of today. The message is that men’s innate paternal interests are an antisocial lesson learned from a Patriarchal Society. An interest in paternity is evidence of “toxic masculinity” and “endemic misogyny.” Vulnerability is strength. You’re only a real man if you accept being a cuckold. Anything else is masculine insecurity and possessiveness that represses women’s sexual expression.

Finally, why do couples pretend to be monogamous while practicing open cuckoldry? Why not simply stay single, practice non-exclusivity, and honestly spin plates? Because unfettered Hypergamy is the preeminent sexual strategy in this era. Low-value men have adapted their sexual strategies to be contingent on unfettered Hypergamy. But first, they must condition themselves to get past the evolutionary block of the male jealousy response. Solution? Eroticize that response in popular media. Learn (from pornography) to get off on the jealousy and self-loathing that intrinsically come from watching your wife’s bull sexually satisfy her in ways a lesser man never could. 

That’s the proximate goal of cuckoldry. The ultimate goal of cuckoldry is fulfilling a woman’s reproductive strategy in an era when she doesn’t need a man but she wants a man. So we’ve transitioned from a retroactive cuckoldry – assuming the parental responsibilities of the men single mothers chose to breed with – to actively participating in the sex act that would (potentially) result in the same bastard child. If the term bastard seems offensive, ask yourself why it offends you. It’s an old term reserved for an illegitimate child whose father abandoned all parental interests. Even illegitimate as a designation for a child probably seems offensive today (I can’t even combine illegitimate with child in Grammarly without a rewording suggestion). The offensiveness stems from almost a century of reconditioning men and women to accept cuckoldry as a social norm. In an androcentric society, bastard and illegitimate make perfect sense. In a gynocentric society, the terms are highly offensive because they conflict with women’s interests as the uncontested arbiters of human reproduction.

This is a complete reversal of the evolutionary function of male mate-guarding and jealousy. By endorsing open cuckoldry, its proponents participate in the extinction of their genetic legacy in exchange for an orgasm and a dopamine hit.