Wisdom Gained Through FDS

In my humble opinion, The Female Dating Strategy is the documentation of a wisdom that has been developing among feminists for several generations. I was at my most “pickme” in my twenties. As a teenager I never felt that pull toward being a wife, and I was obsessed with Victorian romantic literature precisely because I knew that my fantasies about romance were just that- fantasies. They were an escape from the dismay being instilled in my heart by our harsh reality. And I was sure there was no real romance out there. If the boys at my school were the pool I had to choose from, well, there was no Mr. Darcy that’s for sure.

Then in my twenties I got kicked out of a PhD program after being a victim of quid pro quo sexual harassment from an ugly old white man who was married and loved being a professor a little too much. I have disdain for him now in retrospect, but my overriding emotion at the time was fear. He was powerful and I was afraid of the possibility that he would use his power to blacklist me from ever having a career in the field I was eager to invest my talents and efforts into. I was also very young and lacking the maturity and confidence needed to stand up for myself. Instead I stayed silent. I had no voice.

After that I became uber pick me and I think I was trying to cope with the trauma of a man crushing my dreams by going out partying way too much, having empty sex with strangers and ultimately falling in love with an abuser. During these years I discovered many novel facets of my personality. I found my confidence in my passions for indie rock music, Brooklyn hipster clothing fashion, and Danish Modern interior design. I also learned lessons like a sponge soaking up all the growing pains I could get from my adventures in completing graduate school at a different university and beginning to work on my mental health in psychotherapy. Concurrently, I was also digging my pickmeisha hole deeper and deeper through many walks of shame under the brutal morning sunshine that tends to repeatedly savage the hungover migraine-ridden mind after nights spent on endless pub crawls and attempts to become one of those mystical creatures who gets considered to be such a cool chick by all the young dudes because of her ability to figure out how to derive pride from being a shameless slut. I guess I never really managed to take ownership of promiscuity in any positive way, because the sex was unsatisfying. Even when the men were hot as fuck, I never had a single orgasm during this entire run of escapades. Even the man I decided to give up sleeping around for would never give me a single orgasm in the entirety of the 2 years that I devoted myself to him for. Although the primary reason for that failure was the fact that despite getting hundreds of booty calls from him over the course of that stretch, he only had vaginal intercourse with me a grand total of 3 times and NEVER went down on me at all.

My first abuser told me that because of his addiction to porn where men are violent while receiving oral sex, he could only reach orgasm that way. My pick-me self saw his abuse as my way of showing him how much I loved him, in the hopes it would make him claim me as his exclusive gf one day. And he pulled what I have recently learned is a classic red-flag for narcissistic abusers. He wanted me to be faithful to him, and at the same time he demanded his right to his harem. He called the handful of pickmeisha’s that he was carrying on situationships with his “rotation”. He even blatantly got off on reminding me that I was nothing more than a friend to him while I was performing oral favors for him. I told him I didn’t mind him saying things like that because I understood it was part of his kink, but the fact of the matter was that those words were more than dirty talk, and we both knew that the way he was humiliating me was cutting me to the bone in an extremely painful way. Eventually I realized that I only meant something to him as evidence of his ability to “make girls act like sluts for him”. It was the hardest truth I had ever forced myself to face at that point in my life.

Even after 2 years of being abused, I wasn’t ready to wake up out of my pickme haze yet and I ended up falling for another abuser. My relationship with the man who would become my husband started with his love bombing me. He wrote poems for me, he bought me expensive jewelry, he wanted to be exclusive after the 3rd date, and he didn’t pressure me into sex, which was amazing when it happened 2 months into our relationship and I had my first ever orgasm that wasn’t generated by my own hand. I was still having regular orgasm with him and idealizing our romance a year later when I made a devastating mistake.

In a moment of vulnerability that felt like a raw genuine experience of connection, I stupidly decided to open up to him about the details of the narcissistic abuser who had traumatized me with his “facefucking” fetish. My husband didn’t really start holding it against me until after we were married the following year. We were on our honeymoon when he admitted to developing an addiction to that same kind of abusive violent porn because he was aroused by feeling jealous while fantasizing about what it looked like when I was gagging on my ex’s penis. He also revealed that part of him now saw me as a cruel woman whose choices boiled down to a female “reproductive” strategy of being sexually submissive to hot men while exploiting the time and resources of a “cuckold” type (like husband saw himself to be) without ever putting out sexually in the same way for the not-hot doting husband. This was when he mansplained to me what cuckold porn is, and honestly, it was less infuriating to be seen as a hunk of flesh by the fuckboi than it was to be seen as a sadistic cuckoldress by my husband. But regardless of which is worse, neither abusive LVM ever had any desire to share an egalitarian vulnerable emotional connection with me through sex and that’s just sad because maybe the idea of having romance and sex at the same time is something I can never have.

After 9 years of being in denial and pretending that I could turn him into a HVM by “fixing” him, I was finally waking up. Tensions grew as he realized I had figured out his game. Then he raped me for the first time a week ago and I kicked him out. We are getting a divorce. He is living with his parents. I have never felt more woke and free.

FDS helped me realize that my husband was a LVM who never truly loved me in the first place. I always knew on some level that his jealousy regarding my past from before we even met was a flashing neon sign that he saw me as a sex object more than a real full person. And the fact that he was jealous of a man who I told him had sexually abused me should have made it impossible to ignore his core of misogyny. But he was anti-Trump and he was still writing me love poems, and he is handsome, and he did make certain changes to improve in ways I told him I wanted, like being more cleanly and organized and partying less and talking to me more and with more honesty and emotional availability in our conversations, and he even let me be completely in control of when and how we had sex, although he did harbor resentments over that.

His pent up anger eventually exploded the HVM persona he had been constructing under my direction, leaving behind the LVM core of his personality. But before his unraveling peaked, we attempted to halt the downfall of our marriage by working with a couples counselor.

You know, one of the most shocking things you learn when a misogynist opens up to you about his misogyny is that he seems to truly believe that either women will find him less attractive if he doesn’t project a caricature of masculine dominance through his sexual performance, or even worse, he could believe the most radical of all misogynist fantasies, that women consciously prefer vanilla sex but unconsciously repress cravings to be raped. This is when they invoke pseudo-science tropes in an effort to pervert the theory of evolution to justify their baseless claims that they are only giving us what our bodies truly desire even if it is something our minds are too inhibited and too civilized to let ourselves enjoy. That’s how the LVMs will try to deal with their own guilt for their utter failure to achieve a healthy sexual romantic relationship- by performing abuse theatre while convinced of the utter fallacy that he is doing it for my benefit. He is pretending to be his fantasy of the so-called “alpha”.

A lifestyle marked by daily productions of sexual abuse theatre is exactly the kind of absurdist bull shit that guys imagine the life of the alpha to be. Meanwhile the real alpha is probably in a sex addiction treatment group working through the trauma he self-inflicted by having a toxic overdose of random sex with strangers when he was diving headfirst into being his own ideal fantasy of being the king of tinder. That guy, the pussy posse player type, probably ruined himself from having potential as an HVM through the desensitization caused by being a man-slut. This is pretty much an exact parallel with the way the pretend alpha got desensitized by his porn addiction.

During one couples counseling session, my husband also confessed to me that he would sometimes go hang out in front of colleges in Manhattan to try to get “digits” from young women just to reassure himself that “he’s still got it”. He said this behavior was motivated by his “existential fear of aging and death”, lol that’s really what he said. I don’t know how I kept a straight face at the time. I’m dying laughing thinking about it as I write this. Anywho, just be warned that some of the red pillers seeking prey out there are also married husbands who are soulless narcissists who care only about the propping up of their own ego and have tricked some poor women like me into believing his love bomb con for long enough for him to lock her in as his legally bound victim/property/slave/free prostitute. And now he is talking to you because his insatiable appetite for narcissistic reinforcement is constantly pushing him to find more sustenance to feed the self-love addiction that will forever prevent him from sharing a feeling of being in-love with another person.

My husband’s most honest moment in couples counseling was when he admitted to violence, abuse and rape in his sexual fantasies and also admitted to feeling incapable of relating to me as anything more than a sex object because he was obsessed with the image of the ideal sex slave. I caught a whiff of foolhardy hope, and wondered if just maybe this honest insight was an indicator that he was on his way to finally becoming a HVM for me. It felt like a meaningful step in the right direction when he took ownership of his inner demons. He even promised to try to stop engaging with violent fantasies in both his porn consumption and the movies playing in his mind’s eye during sex with me. Then 3 nights later, after he went cold turkey from a 2-3 time per day porn addiction, he initiated some real efforts to connect with me emotionally by having actual real conversations with each other. Unfortunately, the conversation veered off into the explosively triggering topic of why his jealousy towards my ex was so painful for him. He described his feeling of narcissistic injury in reference to my ongoing aversion to giving head. I must have looked at him with sympathy for a fleeting moment, because he excitedly jumped on the opportunity to ask me to do some role play sex with him and let him just get one night to experience dominating me the way my ex used to. I said no and he seemed disappointed but dropped the issue at first. He then proceeded to get more overtly romantic in his approach, and I felt confused because part of me loved the attention, but at the same time his intensity was becoming intimidating.

He spent the next couple of hours cooking dinner for us and he had a bottle of my favorite kind of wine, white Sancerre, delivered to our apartment. The conversation over dinner was a display of his best impression of a charming witty conversationalist. As our dialogue progressed into the evening, the vibe between us started stirring raw emotions again. At the end of the night, right before bed, he crowbarred in another request. This time couched in rhetoric about the shame he felt regarding his sadomasochism and how it has hounded him since puberty. He seemed to be playing the victim card in order to guilt me into a pity blowjob. And this ploy revealed a side of him that was too tired to put forth a convincing acting performance. His bitterness was more transparent than usual.

When I rejected what would end up being his final blowjob request of me, he seemed rapidly overwhelmed by anger. He got out of our bed and went to sleep on the sofa. A few hours later, I was startled from a deep sleep by the feeling of him pulling my pajama bottoms down below my butt. I said “no”. I said “stop”. He said “if you want me to stop, you’re going to have to make me.” I froze. I felt paralyzed. He raped me.

Patriarchy directly results in exponentially higher rates of rape and abuse of women and invests exponentially greater cultural importance in men’s attribution of their unexplained anger to being caused by women failing to provide them with the sex they are entitled to. And unexplained anger is a constant for all men. This is not rhetorical hyperbole. This is a fact of life. I am not pointing out this fact in an effort to lay blame. Men do not choose of their own free will to produce this anger within themselves using some kind of volitional emotion regulation. The man’s primal rage is simply a byproduct of neural and hormonal patterns that were selected for genetically and culturally in an environment that was very different from today’s climate. It is a lack of fitness to the current environment that made masculinity toxic in the first place. For the vast majority of the time in which humans have existed, levels of kinetic masculinity were much higher than what we call toxic now, and in the pre-historic environment of tribal human communities, these very high levels of masculinity-based aggression were not only advantageous, but downright necessary to avoid extinction. So think of it this way- let’s say you spent the last 20 years showering after work instead of before work because you were working in a coal mine, but now the mine has closed and you just got hired for a new job at the local Whole Foods, where you will be interacting directly with customers. Continuing to not shower prior to work would be a toxic decision for your status as an employee. Consider FDS to be Amazon corporate writing you a letter to advise you to switch your shower routine from post-work to pre-work. Until this message sinks into the burgeoning universal culture currently being forged by globalization, our many varied human cultures will all maintain a status quo of toxic masculinity. And since this rage producing machine is an incessant beast, whenever men are not getting the sex they have been indoctrinated to feel entitled to, they are fantasizing and making up their story of lies about the ideal alpha, so that they can substitute the sadomasochistic dream of alpha dominance wherever their reality is found to be lacking. Red pill much?

As it turned out, my husband’s ability to tolerate engaging with actual reality instead of red pill fantasy was exactly 72 hours. Are all straight cisgender male BDSM Doms compelled to commit violent abuse by the red pill mass delusion in the same way my husband fell prey to the pied pipers of the manosphere? No, but I would estimate that at least half of them are only feigning allegiance to the protocols of prior consent negotiations and only pretend reverence to the sanctity of safe words. For the red pill army gaining territory in the kink world more and more day by day, the protocols of the prior consent negotiations are the role play, and their authentic self only comes out when in the presence of the submissive who is ready to sacrifice her body to his sadistic desires. For this half of the heterosexual cisgender Doms out there, the prior consent role play is a method of using virtue signaling to mask their lack of scruples. And of those abusers who are out there committing sex crimes actively while engaged with sadomasochistic fantasies, the plurality at least, if not the majority, are deliberately targeting the youngest and most inexperienced women in the BDSM community. There is plenty of documented chatter available online providing anecdotal evidence of this diabolical strategy being promulgated by manosphere influencers. And the tragic outcomes for young women continue unfolding in the shadows, while data gathering and scientific study are failing to capture these phenomena in our present moment. Thus the scrote predators intensify their addiction to sexual violence through the deployment of “coerced consent”. Shades of gray much?

I predict that future advancements in the scientific study of human sexuality will generate statistical data that will prove my theory that heterosexual cisgender men have a predisposition toward developing an addiction to the experience of sadistic pleasure. The result of this predisposition going unchecked is the mass-victimization of women’s bodies currently taking place on a daily basis. Turning this tide will be dependent on the meme of true romantic love overtaking the popularity of the red pill meme. In other words, we need the emergence of a cultural consensus that women are not just bodies, as they are not just sex objects, but rather, they are also most importantly thinking and feeling people who suffer trauma. And our concept of masculinity must undergo what will likely be an even more extreme transformation. What masculinity will look like once aggressive tendencies and sadistic fantasies are made taboo will be primarily determined by thought leaders who act with intention to spread love, reduce human suffering, and create the new global feminist culture.

The first to go from the inner sanctum of culturally condoned behavior patterns will be overt narcissism as manifested by men who play with violence towards women. My husband had a cuckold fantasy that placed him in the role of masochist in his mind. Here we see how the switch kink is analogous to having versatility regarding the yin and yang of covert narcissism vs. overt narcissism. My covert switch husband took me much longer to see for who he is than my overt strictly Dom ex, because the reversal manipulation is so effectively disorienting and sublimely disarming. My husband saw me as sadistically withholding pleasure from him, and I think this form of attack is more difficult to defend against because it uses the leverage of my scruples to jam the radar of my red flag detectors. Gaslighting much?

In the end, despite the slippery trickery that obfuscated my victimhood, his fantasy still revolved around seeing me as nothing more than a sex object, even if not quite seeing me as a “sex slave”. And just like the presence of too much blood and gore will prevent a movie from being labeled a “chick flic”, the presence of his objectification of my body obtruded any chance we had of achieving an actually real emotional connection. God forbid he would ever give oxygen to the vulnerability necessary for experiencing romantic love.

This sad state of affairs betrays the quality that separates healthy masculinity from toxic. The ability to integrate healthy masculinity into your personality is dependent upon holding out hope that the myth of true love actually represents a real thing. Toxic masculinity sees the glorified ideal of true romantic love as a ploy used maliciously by hypergamous women who want nothing more than to distract men from their essential man stuff, like football, the stock market, war, their dicks, etc. This is supposedly how we trick our beta cucks into investing all their time and resources into the parenting of the genetic offspring of the alpha male. Our siren song decrying the dream of romance is our tool for hypnotizing them. Blue pill much?

The red pill is at heart a pathological obsession with the experience of orgasms. For the red pill scrote, all other experiences exist solely in service of the quality and frequency of orgasms. All of his thoughts and behaviors are part of a singular plan to serve the orgasm master. It is not women who are trying to trick men into falling in love, but rather, it is the pick up artist who has been selling the dream of romance to us as a means of manipulating us to hop into his bed. Many of these scrotes are all to successful at gaming us, but even the most efficient man-sluts wind up feeling empty, alienated, lonely and unfulfilled, because the proposition that orgasms are the pinnacle of life is just plain wrong, so they waste their lives eating the fruit of a poison tree.

One thing you notice about guys who are “in touch with their feminine side” is that they tend to be much more aware of their emotions and derive much more meaning and satisfaction from emotional life than a narcissistic misogynist scrote could ever dream of experiencing. The secret to a satisfying and meaningful emotional life is found in loving others for who they are, and this demands the courage to let go of the security blanket of narcissism for long enough to recognize that embracing vulnerability in your relationships is the key to authentic happiness. In order to connect with someone on a real emotional level and have a healthy relationship, you have to expose your raw genuine emotional core to the other person, which leaves you vulnerable to getting hurt or even traumatized by that other person. It takes a hell of a lot more bravery to expose your emotional core than it takes to expose yourself in an unsolicited dick pic.

We all have some intuitive sense deep down that vulnerability is the holy grail we seek, but vulnerability is by definition a frightening proposition. Of course the prospect of being vulnerable to trauma will trigger anxiety. Advancements in our clinical knowledge of defense mechanisms has consistently increased the weight of evidence arguing in favor of the hypothesis that splitting is the most frequently preferred defense mechanism used by narcissists to avoid facing the threat posed by vulnerability. As a psychoanalyst (and no that doesn’t mean I believe in Freud’s penis envy version of misogyny, it just means I believe good therapy has to examine the unconscious parts of the mind), I feel like I can see pretty clearly how my husband used splitting in every aspect of his personality, and in every close relationship he ever had. When LVM use splitting against us, they are really experiencing arrested development in the infantile stage when the onset of the cognitive ability to dichotomize coincides with the onset of our ability to associate our emotions with our fantasies about our relationships. This stage spans from the womb through the first few years of life. The end result of this process is the inevitable dichotomization of our fantasies about our mothers. Pleasurable experiences are attributed to being loved by the good mom, and painful traumas are attributed to being hated by a sadistic bad mom. My husband was hurting me in a misguided effort that his unconscious was engaging in as a means of exacting revenge on the split off bad half of his mother; the mother who did not feed him when he was crying from hunger sometimes because she was probably too busy playing pickmeisha for LVM dad, cuz he is complaining that “you only love the baby now” and his “sexual needs are being ignored” and he is “worried he will resent the baby for being a cockblock” if you don’t prioritize LVM “once in a while” (read: with nauseating frequency). I’ve seen a few comments about pickme moms raising LVM narcissistic abusers, and I would argue that the mechanism of action for this phenomenon is the pickme’s pattern of decisions to sacrifice mothering instincts in the name of the masculine idol aka the husband, who would actually be encouraging his child’s mother to embrace motherhood if he wasn’t so paranoid about his own masculinity, attractiveness and status. He has an obsession with the fantasy that he is inferior to some idealized alpha male. The children end up bearing the brunt of this problem, because while mom is tending to dad’s fragile ego, the child is suffering their first narcissistic trauma by having their needs placed on the back burner. Thus the cycle repeats through generations.

In my husband’s case, his obsessive idolization of my ex as the alpha ideal was what defined the contours of his own inferiority complex. Chasing his own tail by maniacally spiraling down these obsessive thought loops was his way of staving off the bottomless pit of depression lurking just beneath the surface of his narcissism. In this game, I performed as the pickme from the moment I projected my wish for an ideal romance onto our early relationship. I was pretending that my husband was the fantasy alpha because I was desperately fleeing my own fear that without an LVM by my side, I would be forced to face down the depression that had been stalking me since childhood with the constant refrain: “You are not a full human being unless you are in a relationship with a man.”

How can we break this vicious cycle? Perhaps the female dating strategy should embrace what the red piller’s call female reproductive strategy. My husband used to bring this horse shit up in our couples counseling as a rationalization for his abuse, but ironically it might actually be the best way to raise a HVM son; to just get pregnant by a hot fuckboi who is getting way too much action to ever even consider settling down and being a husband and father. Except rather than getting a cuckold husband to exploit for time and resources, I could just pursue my career with passion and ambition while hiring a well-paid professional to care for my child as her job that she is an expert in. Which, by the way, is something I think feminists must do a better job of on the whole- paying great nannies the salaries they deserve. Please read Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the undervaluation of mothering as a professional skill. Not all mothers are equal. And not all nannies are equal. If you are an FDS mom who has self-respect for your career, and you are trying to raise high value kids, then please put your money where your mouth is and pay for a professional high quality nanny. If they ask for less than $70k annual salary, which is all too uncommonly high for nannies to earn, then sadly they probably have internalized society’s lies about the value of mothering and they probably don’t have the level of self-respect for their own expertise that is just plain necessary for performing a job up to one’s full potential, as opposed to falling prey to the trap of performing a job that uses your body like a tool while disengaging your mind. This is yet another reason why patriarchy and capitalism are such good old pals- because the most common reason employees become mentally disengaged during work hours is from feeling underpaid. Don’t shit-test your childcare professionals. Unless you want a pickme raising your kids for some reason.

My husband was very much raised by parents who were the epitome of Ms. Pickmeisha and Mr. Narcissistic abuser. He never had a chance in hell of making it out of that home without his personality being molded to replicate the false narratives of the stereotypical patriarchal drama. The only variable to be determined was how effective he would be at achieving narcissistic gains through his relationships. It so happens that he was masterful at fooling me into feeding his covert narcissism by manipulating me with the smoke and mirrors of his love bombing and gaslighting. He was a good enough actor to keep this show on the air for the better part of a decade.

In the end, his lack of willingness to build a healthy relationship with me was so glaringly massive that he could actually rape me and seem to have no remorse too. It made me horrified even more to think about how many wives have suffered marital rape. Google says 14% but we know it’s more like 33 with underreporting and if u count the pickmes who are so masochistic that they consent to their own abuse, then the number probably lands around 42% at the very least. We need more and better science on this to even begin to see the extent of the problem we are facing, but instead we are mostly just sticking our heads in the sand about it so far. At least I live in a country where marital rape is theoretically illegal. My parents were born and raised in Mumbai, India, where my reading online earlier this morning just introduced me to the shockingly abhorrent fact that marital rape is legitimately legal in the country my family originated from. But even though I had the option of calling the police on my husband here in the States, I couldn’t bring myself to make that call. Maybe I should have.

My husband’s narcissism was severe enough to lead him to commit the crime of rape against me, and he didn’t appear to have even a scintilla of remorse in the immediate aftermath, but apparently he is not an utter and complete sociopath, because he did cry tears of remorse while apologizing profusely the next morning. He even offered to go with me to the precinct and plead guilty. Perhaps this was just another manipulative chess move on his part, and I am deluding myself by thinking that he was expressing a sincerity that most narcissists are constitutionally incapable of. But in the end, even if my gullibility to his lies was a contributing factor, I have faith in my belief that the prevailing factor in my decision to let him skate was pride in my own feminine virtue of being capable of forgiveness and mercy. When they go low, we go high. God it sounds like some liberal feminism bull shit, but at the same time I know in my heart that my own inner child needs that security blanket right now after having suffered this gut-wrenching trauma. And I am coming from a place of mercy right now, both towards his sins and my lost innocence.

The virtues of mercy and forgiveness do go back to the intellectual roots of my feminism. My personal romance with feminist thought was sparked during an undergrad class on the psychology of women. We read Carol Gilligan’s masterpiece, “In a Different Voice”. Her research on the difference between feminine morality based in mercy and masculine morality based in punishment was my very first insight into why feminism is so necessary in our modern world.

My husband is a sickening red pill scrote who will probably hurt another woman next, but I am not sadistic, I have no desire to punish him, and if anything, my strongest resistance to pressing charges is the fact that I know I would have a very hard time emotionally tolerating the guilt I would feel from seeing his life ruined after I spent 9 years of my own life giving my love to this man in a naive state of hope that I could mold him into an HVM. I would be literally torturing myself to pursue his punishment.

Now I am ready for divorce. If a husband is a true HVM thru to his core then he will never be mad at you for not desiring to have sex in the exact way he fantasizes that sex should be. For a husband to be worth staying married to, he has to see his task of satisfying me sexually as a goal for him to never stop working towards, and not as a secondary byproduct of my obligation to validate his feeling of being entitled to control my body for the gratification of his own narcissistic ego. Too many husbands are being allowed to drag out marriages that offer nothing to the wife but the excitement of trying to figure out which lies were him intentionally gaslighting you and which lies were him being in denial of his own sadism. I’m sick of being lied to. I’m sick of being an emotional punching bag. I’m sick of wondering if this will be the time he finally gets how to make me happy, because the truth is that I have been a good wife to him throughout and he has known all along what I need from him and he has never tried to do anything more than loudly take credit for minimal efforts as a way of tricking me into telling myself “don’t divorce him, at least he is trying his best”. Now that is some denial ass bull shit. I may never find a HVM to marry me in the end, but at least I can use the story of my marriage to help other women avoid bad decisions that waste years and invite traumas that are not easily recovered from.