She's not yours, it was just your turn.

How evolved possessiveness trumps social constructionism

She was never yours. It was just your turn.

Iterations of this phrase have existed since the earliest days of the Pickup Artists (PUA) online communities. Like much of the wisdom of that time, the reasoning for it gets distorted by various factions of what’s become the Manosphere today. The gnashing of teeth of Black Pill, Doomers, and VolCels (not Incels) – is what most mainstream influencers conflate with Red Pill today. Along with the Success Porn, self-help funnel marketers, Big Con influencer brands practice a pick-and-pull approach to Red Pill praxeology. One that aligns with their beliefs and circumstances and demonizes what doesn’t. Both factions misconstrue what the Red Pill has taken 20+ years to develop. It doesn’t serve the ends of either perspective to spend too much time thinking about contentious Red Pill principles. Misrepresenting it is more valuable in confirming their belief sets. Especially when doing so generates views, subs, and ad revenue.

To the Doomer mindset, She’s not yours… is a confirmation of women’s duplicitous, fickle, or evil nature. That’s not to say the nihilistic perspective doesn’t approach women’s nature from an objective Red Pill understanding. It means they focus on surrendering to it and giving up on women. This confirmation bias also gets mixed up in the Doomer’s understanding of Hypergamy. Hypergamy resonates with them because it reaffirms the idea that all women will dump a guy at the first sign of his losing an Alpha Frame veneer, an act that he must constantly maintain in a world of endless options and online attention for women. Let the act slip once too often, and she’s gone at the first opportunity. 

They think hypergamy is a straight jacket, and She’s not yours… justifies Doomer Black Pill defeatism. You will never find lasting contentment with a woman because she holds the first right of refusal in any intimate relationship (i.e., Briffault’s Law). Ergo, your turn will be over sooner or later, and all the effort, time, and emotion you invested in her will be for nothing (i.e., Sunk Cost, Relational Equity). It may be worse than nothing when you consider the opportunity cost of having bothered with trying to make her yours in the first place. While the juice might taste delicious in the short term, it’s never really worth the squeeze in the long term. This conclusion upsets the Success and Faith gurus because it’s hard logic to refute – at least from their own Man Up! Personal Responsibility perspective.

That’s the Doom Pill interpretation. It’s based on reflexive, immutable binary extremes – the default reaction of this generation – because it confirms a hopelessness that defines them. Ironically, the very PUAs of the 2000s they despise originally coined the phrase. Back then, it reminded guys never to get too attached to one particular woman while dating several women concurrently. It was almost a mantra to ward off overcommitting because they were spinning plates, and “catching feelings” for one girl tended to destroy them. It was a maxim that worked best as a preventive medicine. 

Most early practitioners of Game saw it as a means to achieve the monogamy their Blue Pill social conditioning convinced them was possible. Average men build lives around serial monogamy; it’s always been the surest way to solve the average man’s reproductive problem. So when you open them up to an (even marginal) abundance of sexual/intimate potential, they tend to use it to get their Dream Girl and ignore what the Red Pill says about women’s nature. For all the aspersion critics heap on Game or the Red Pill, most men use the information to find a girlfriend or wife. Very few men parlay Red Pill awareness into a Player’s lifestyle.

In today’s Manosphere, “She was never yours, it was just your turn” has become a salve for guys who invested in a woman and she dumped them. Despite all their Blue Pill qualifications or Game savvy, Hypergamy gets the best of all women, and they inevitably move on to the bigger and better deal. Ironically, Mate Switching Hypothesis is also premised on this aspect of  Hypergamy. You better stay sharp, fellas. You never know when she might trade up to a higher-value man.

This perspective presupposes that stable monogamy, not non-exclusivity, should be the goal-state for every guy. Notice the maxim here is cast in the past tense. She was never yours…At some stage, a man believed she was his (or should be), and she no longer is. Thus, She was never yours becomes a post-facto rationalization to the guy probably feeling gutted by his breakup. The real issue is the guy’s desire for a permanent solution to his desire for intimacy. We see this all the time among simps. The guy spends a small fortune (monthly) to achieve some virtual intimacy with his favorite OnlyFans cam-girl. In this case, She was never yours is reconfirmed for simps repeatedly as they move from one cam-girl obsession to the next.

This is all grist for the mill for Success Porn gurus. On the one hand, men struggling with confidence (see social skills), achieving intimacy/sex, and finding purpose are their bread and butter. On the other hand, they usually sell the Blue Pill ideal of sustainable contentment for otherwise discontent men – if they trust the process. That contentment includes the hope that a permanent, loving, and monogamous relationship with one woman is possible and a sign of his authentic manhood. 

When Dr. Phil sells this hope, we write him off as a naive Pollyanna and old-order thinker. However, this same Blue Pill hope is repackaged and sold online as a return to masculine virtue by today’s Power Dad Life Coaches in the Hustle Economy. The permanence of your contentment amounts to your ability to qualify for it and sustain it with their (usually repackaged) concept of masculine virtue. Any discontent on the client’s part is dismissed as his lack of determination, hard work, or not sticking to the process. 80s televangelists and 90s multi-level marketing hustlers used similar grift. It’s a monetized version of the philosophy of personal responsibility — which has always been a darling of traditional conservatism and is now a staple of the personal development sphere. Any failure of the concept is always attributable to the man’s deficient effort and investment, which can then be attached to his character. This isn’t to say that all personal development guys are unscrupulous hustlers; it’s just that the actual responsibility of education rests with the student.

She’s not yours, it was just your turn, and other unignorable truths that the Red Pill makes men aware of defeats the self-reinforcing circular logic of the personal responsibility hustle. It forces the hustler to admit that something outside men’s control might affect their lives. Rather than accept this and work within the framework, the response is more of the same: deny the phenomenon exists or presume that even acknowledging it indicates a defeatist mindset – thus, a shirking of personal responsibility that completes the circular logic.

This is the origin of the “Truthful Anger” fallacy. Around 2015, the instructors working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD) started getting a lot of questions about the material in The Rational Male from students attending RSD seminars. At some point, they had to address these questions, but to do so would mean acknowledging the validity of the concepts in my book. These concepts challenged the positivity grift they were pivoting to during the time. The solution: Acknowledge the truth in my work but tacitly disqualify it by presuming it came from a place of anger. They cautioned against internalizing it at the risk of becoming angry or bitter against women — both concerns that mainstream, gynocentric influencers used. It was misconstrued as “truthful anger.” It’s poignantly true, but it’s best not to dwell on it if a guy wants to be happy. In other words, would you rather be happy, or would you rather be right? The fallacy of sustainable happiness is always easier to sell than truth.

Now that we understand the opposing sides of the impermanence of women debate we also have to consider the Lie of Individuation that usually gets thrown into the mix to dismiss the She’s not yours maxim. 

The Individuation Fallacy is most easily understood as:

“People are all individually special cases; each a unique product of their environments and experiences, and are far too individually complex to understand via generalizations according to sex, etc.”

The individual supersedes any commonalities attributable to biology or evolution. It’s based on social constructionism and personal circumstances to motivate behavior, develop personality, and influence others accordingly. The supremacy of the individual is the natural extension of an underlying belief in The Blank Slate. When you start from an assumption that we’re all functional equals, everyone is an angel or a devil according to the choices they made. Depending on the person’s circumstances, they can be forgiven or damned for the consequences of those choices according to how we interpret their character as individuals. This is how we get rationales like not all women are like that and “People are too complex to categorize” to dismiss the unignorable commonalities we see in men and women in the information age. No one likes to think they aren’t unique in some way as much as they don’t like to think determinism has influenced (in some way) what makes them unique. 

And since I’m sure you’ve made this connection already, the Individuation Fallacy also dovetails nicely into a doctrine of personal responsibility. Traditionalists just add a helping of the Ghost in the Machine to it.

When we read examples of a woman opting out of a relationship (or sex) with one guy to take up with another, the reflexive response is to individualize her behavior according to her individualized circumstances. She’s damaged, she’s got Daddy Issues, she’s insecure because you weren’t Man Enough, etc. Any consideration that deflects from categorizing her actions as commonalities in women’s innate nature is the reflexive rationale. ‘She’s not yours, it was just your turn’ describes her actions in a visceral that conflicts with the Blank Slate’s individualism. The maxim is a description, not a prescription.

Men have an evolved need to know paternity. If men have a unitary ‘purpose’ in life, it’s solving their reproductive problem and sending their DNA into the next generation. Unhindered by social strictures or women’s Hypergamous filtering, men would opt for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality as our innate and preferred mating strategy.

Historically, most men have never been able to actualize this strategy. Ergo, socially enforced monogamy became the best mating strategy compromise for men as modified by the selection pressures of women’s mating strategies. The inherent risk in this compromise is the assurance of paternity. If a man is to sacrifice his mating opportunities with many women to parentally invest in one woman, the deal must come with one key assurance: the child must be his genetic stock. Otherwise, the opportunity cost invalidates his investment and his existence (evolutionarily speaking). 

To ensure this, men evolved a mental firmware that predisposes us to jealousy, mate guarding, and a desire to possess a woman. This is why we develop a Sense of Ownership with our girlfriends, wives, and children. The dynamics of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism all find their root in men’s imperative to ascertain and protect their paternity and genetic legacy.

The need to control women’s sexuality is nothing less than men’s evolutionary compulsion to ensure that their compromise in parental investment is not for nothing. Men could nominally control the reproductive process in a social order where masculine responsibility to wife and children was balanced with commensurate masculine authority. Part of that process included possessing a woman. This was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative. 

Every man loves a slut. He just wants her to be his slut.

In today’s gynocentric social order, the thought of owning a woman is an affront to the female primary sensibilities that stem from individuation. Gynocentrism has conditioned generations of women to believe they are autonomous ‘things‘ with no need for anything outside themselves – least of all men – to find true contentment. They are Strong Independent® women who believe their fulfillment comes from self-ownership. Eschewing a man’s surname in marriage, or even marriage, is a sign of independence and a stiff middle finger to the idea of passive femininity or notions of ever submitting to a man’s authority. The evolved complementarity between men and women is replaced with the social contrivance of an idealized egalitarianism. Husband and wife are replaced with “Equal Partners,” an arrangement that is fundamentally premised on the Blank Slate and Marxist ideology.

For women, the problem with this equalist fantasy is biology and evolved impulses are excused, if not encouraged, in a social order that prioritizes women’s mating strategies. Anything goes when the worst consequences of women’s Hypergamy can (enthusiastically) always be attributed to men’s inability to accept them as individuals. Yet when men practice a form of Zen-like non-attachment with women, it conflicts with that innate need of women for men to invest in them, both parentally and emotionally. It’s a living cognitive dissonance.

The problem for men is that we still have an innate want to possess a woman to ensure our paternity and invest in our genetic legacies. This desire for permanency with one woman was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative in a patriarchal social order. In a gynocentric social order, the evolutionary imperative to possess a woman remains, but the social imperative says…

She was, is, will, and never will be yours; it was just your turn.

And that is why this Maxim rubs so many men, not women, the wrong way.