Miscellaneous Feeds

If you follow me on Twitter or are a semi-regular viewer of my show Access Vegas, you’ve likely seen me being critical of what’s known as Mate Switching Hypothesis. This hypothesis has been proffered as an alternative or a counter to the prevailing hypothesis known as Dual Mating Strategy. The Mate Switching theory was popularized by the Godfather of evolutionary psychology, Dr. David Buss, in 2017. This theory made its way into his 2021 book Men Behaving Badly, which, in my opinion, was an effort in apologetics for conventional masculinity. This book’s release conspicuously coincided with Dr. Buss’ preselling his now-defunct The First Date Course in December 2020. The official website for The First Date Course was scrubbed this year, but the Twitter account and all the promotional videos are still viewable.

Since the publication of Men Behaving Badly, I’ve been roundly scolded for challenging Dr. Buss’s convenient pivot to a kinder, gentler female-appeasing alternative to Dr. Martie Haselton’s Ovulatory Shift hypothesis and Dual Mating Strategy. The Gatekeepers of evolutionary psychology mistakenly assume that Red Pill advocates are ignorant of the intricacies of intersexual dynamics. Therefore, how can we possibly be taken as credible critics of luminaries like Dr. Buss? Okay. What better way, then, to critique the theory than to parse it out from the man himself?

The following essay is an article outlining Mate Switching Hypothesis written by Dr. David Buss for Aeon in 2017. This was the earliest, most comprehensive writeup I could find by Buss himself. Remember that this piece was written in 2017, four years before the publication of Men Behaving Badly or The First Date Course. Emphasis is my own.

Scientists now know much about human mating. The menu includes at a minimum: brief sexual flings, long-term pair-bonding, some infidelity, some polygyny (one man, multiple wives), rare polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands), occasional polyamory, some divorce, and frequent serial mating. These strategies are not well-captured by single labels such as ‘monogamous’ or ‘polygamous.’ And we know with reasonable certainty that lifelong monogamy does not describe the primary pattern.

This last sentence is key because it contradicts the base premise of evo-psych Gatekeepers in 2024—that monogamous pair bonding (marriage) and family creation are the metrics by which an innate evolved sexual strategy should be measured. Furthermore, polygyny, polyamory, monogamy, etc., are not mating strategies. Rather, they are practices that facilitate men’s and women’s mating strategies. Brief sexual flings and long-term pair bonding are means to a sexual strategy’s ends, not the strategies themselves.

Divorce rates in the United States have hovered just below 50 per cent, and are variable but comparable across cultures around the globe. Among married couples, infidelity is far from a trivial occurrence. In 1952, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey estimated it at 26 percent for women and 50 percent for men, although other studies put rates lower or higher. We know that infidelity is the leading cause of divorce worldwide, from the Inuit in Alaska to the !Kung San of Botswana. And we know that most adults in the modern world, including roughly 85 percent in the US, have experienced at least one romantic break-up.

Divorce rates in the US in 2024 can be tracked at between 43% and 73%. Only 43% of first marriages are dissolved.[1] Second and third marriages fail at a far higher rate, though, with 60% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages ending in divorce. Forty percent of new marriages include a partner who is remarrying.

Using outdated Kinsey Institute statistics on infidelity from 1952 is a deliberate attempt to paint women as innocent players in the cheating game. According to recent data gathered from the General Social Survey, 20% of married men and 13% of married women admitted to having sex with someone other than their spouse. However, infidelity rates among women are on the rise – having increased by 40% in the last 20 years. Data from married adults ages 18 to 29 says that women are slightly more guilty of infidelity.

Despite popular opinion, in 2024, 75% of individuals and couples cited lack of commitment as the reason for their divorce. This was the most common cause of a marriage ending, exceeding even infidelity.[2] So, we’re already off to a bad start in selling the premises of Mate Switching Hypothesis (MSH).

But there has always been one missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding mating strategies, especially among women. Why do women have so many affairs when these do not increase the number of offspring they can produce?

Now, we can get to the nuts and bolts of MSH. The base premise here is in error. The presumption is that mating strategies are validated according to pair bonding being the ultimate outcome. It prioritizes monogamy as the framework in which the Switching takes place. This infidelity presupposes an established paired heterosexual relationship. It has nothing to say about the strategies employed to create that relationship in the first place.

From an evolutionary perspective, male infidelity is fairly straightforward. Men have evolved a strong desire for sexual variety, stronger than women’s on average, due to the large asymmetries in parental investment. Men can reproduce with as little effort as it takes to inseminate a fertile woman. Women require a metabolically costly nine-month pregnancy to produce a single child. Stated differently, an ancestral married man with two children could have increased his reproductive output by 50 percent by a single successful reproduction with an affair partner. Adding additional sex partners for women who already have one generally does not, and never could have, dramatically increased their reproductive success.

This is Red Pill 101. Eggs are expensive. Sperm is cheap. I will point out that Dr. Buss has always had a habit of reducing male sexuality to “Well, duh!” simplicity. We all know men will fuck anything, are indiscriminate breeders, and need sexual variety to feel like a real man. So, what’s the point in trying to understand why men have sex? Women are far more discriminating because their reproductive liabilities are much greater – at least when we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes on the Subsaharan African savannahs 200,000 years ago.

Yet women do have affairs, a phenomenon that, up until now, has been explained by the ‘good genes hypothesis’: the concept that women have evolved a dual mating strategy – securing investment from one man while mating on the side with men who have better genes than their regular partners.

This is where the inconsistencies begin with Dual Mating vs. Mate Switching hypotheses. The biggest conflict is in the definitions of these hypotheses and how they are applied. Much, but not all, of these mischaracterizations are deliberate attempts to paint the Red Pill’s broadened definition of Hypergamy as something misunderstood by non-academics in the Red Pill.

Hypergamy in the Red Pill sense is distilled to ‘Alpha Fucks’ / ‘Beta Bucks’ — women seek a balance in a mate between genetic benefits (good genes) in short-term sexual strategies with long-term security/survival benefits in the same man. Ideally, this is what women call the ‘complete package’: the man who combines physical prowess, arousal, and a satisfying sexual experience with the provisioning, protection, and parental investment potential for long-term security and emotional investment.

Problems arise in this model for two reasons. First, rarely does the ideal combination of Alpha Seed and Beta Need manifest in the same man at the same instance in time as a woman can appreciate it to want to form long-term bonds with this ideal man. This is not just a modern frustration for women. The template for ancient and contemporary romance literature is based on stories of women agonizing over their decision to marry the hot, exciting bad boy or the stable, loyal, good-dad prince. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle falls in love with the Beast, not the Prince. But the character of the Beast/Prince is the perfect analogy of this Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks dichotomy. Belle can have the wild Beast or the stable Prince, but never both simultaneously. 

Secondly, one man embodies the proximate outcome of hot sex and good genes. The other represents the ultimate outcome of a stable, loyal provider and long-term security. Women regularly make distinctions between the hot guy they want to fuck and the guy who is Boyfriend Material. In the rare instance where Alpha Fucks and Beta Buck manifest in the same man, these men are locked down by women who have the sense to recognize him as that rare combination. This leaves the Alpha Cad and Beta Dad as singular choices for women’s mating opportunities as their ability to attract them allows.

This distinction between Fuck Boy and Boyfriend Material archetypes is the premise of the Red Pill’s definition of Dual Mating Strategy. Women’s strategies that optimize well-timed mating with the Cad and the Dad all center on solving this reproductive dichotomy. Female promiscuity and cuckoldry are essential tools for resolving this reproductive problem. In either case, this strategizing comes well before a long-term paring exists.

 Mate Switching Hypothesis begins as an explanation of infidelity, not an explanation of women’s innate sexual strategies and the problems they attempt to resolve. Dual Mating is presumed to be an outmoded understanding of why women cheat because Gatekeeping academics rely on a false premise of what defines Dual Mating. Dual Mating is far more expansive a theory than Mate Switching.

But the good genes hypothesis fails to explain why, in the wake of infidelity, so many women literally stray, throwing over a current mate for the affair partner. My team’s new concept – the mate-switching hypothesis – fills the gap in scientific understanding, explaining what we observe in the real world. The mate-switching hypothesis posits that women have affairs to extricate themselves from a poor mateship and trade up to a better partner.

Again, the Devil is in the details here. MSH is only valid when attempting to explain why women might want to trade up to a more affluent and prestigious mate in terms of the long-term security (Beta Bucks) side of the Hypergamous equation. I’ll also challenge the idea that what Dr. Buss’ team observes in the real world is factual. What actually defines a “poor mateship?” This is never adequately explained, but in recent years Mate Switching proponents have retconned the definition to include “sexual incompatibilities” to cover their respective asses. This is never mentioned in the article, but ironically, it pushes MSH closer to including Dual Mating Strategy as a component of Mate Switching.

For both sexes, the hypothesis explains what we commonly observe: a year after publicly declaring her marriage vows, a woman finds herself sexually attracted to her co-worker. After changing his child’s fifth diaper of the day, a man wonders whether he made a terrible mistake and fantasizes about his high-school sweetheart who got away. After six years of marriage, a woman finds that she’s the primary breadwinner and her husband’s laziness has eroded her confidence in their union; she notices that her co-worker lingers longer in the doorway of her office than strictly needed. After years of living a life of quiet desperation, a man starts a passionate affair with his next-door neighbor. A woman confesses to her best friend that she’s in love with another man and surreptitiously lays the groundwork for leaving her husband – a separate bank account and a deposit on an apartment.

How are these observations any different from what the Red Pill and seduction communities have been calling attention to for over two decades now? Interestingly, the Alpha Widow dynamic—pining over the ONE who got away—is far more prevalent in women than men. Watch the ending of Titanic (lauded as one of the greatest love stories ever told), and you’ll understand how ludicrous applying this dynamic to men is.

These diverse scenarios stem from a common cause – humans have evolved strategic adaptations for mate-switching, a phenomenon that is widespread across species. The simplest such adaptation is the ‘walk-away’ strategy, in which organisms simply physically separate themselves from costly cooperative partners. The mate-switching hypothesis proposes a version of the walk-away strategy underpinned by human psychological adaptations designed to detect and abandon costly mates in favor of more beneficial ones.

I don’t entirely disagree with this notion, but it is incomplete without a nod to Briffault’s Law. MSH is one such strategy, amongst others. In my War Brides essays, I detailed how women are more apt to fall in love with their conquerors in ancient and modern times. This survival adaptation is rooted in women’s need for long-term security. In post-war France, the Vichy French women who slept with German soldiers publicly had their hair brutally shorn off. Those women were Hypergamously playing the odds that occupied France would stay occupied and fell in love with Nazi officers. Would this dynamic be a result of Mate Switching Hypothesis or the result of women’s evolved mental firmware for survival?

Many in modern cultures grow up believing a myth about lifelong love. We are told about falling for the one and only. We learn that the path to fulfillment is paved with a single glorious union. But the plots of fictional love stories often come to a close upon the discovery of that one and only, and rarely examine the aftermath. The story of Cinderella ends with her getting the prince. After overcoming countless obstacles, a union is finally consummated. Few romantic fantasies follow the storyline of committed mating – the gradual inattentiveness to each other’s needs, the steady decline in sexual satisfaction, the exciting lure of infidelity, the wonder about whether the humdrum greyness of married life is really all life has to offer.

In long-term, committed, exclusive relationships, women stop wanting to have sex in years one to four. I find it interesting that Buss’ team acknowledges a decline in sexual interest as a pretense for infidelity. Especially when MSH posits that the primary reason women cheat is due to dissatisfaction with “poor mateship” choices; however these choices are ambiguously defined.

In fact, we come from a long and unbroken line of ancestors who went through mating crises – ancestors who monitored mate value, tracked satisfaction with their current unions, cultivated back-ups, appraised alternatives, and switched mates when conditions proved propitious. To understand why, we must turn our gaze to those ancestors and uncover the mating challenges that they confronted.

[…] Long-term mate selection is all about the future trajectory, and the future often carries treachery and tragedy with it.

This is interesting wording from the Buss Team. Notice how uniquely female sexual strategies are interchangeable with gender-universal strategies employed by our “ancestors.” Does this mean the team accounted for men “who monitored mate value, tracked satisfaction with their current unions, cultivated back-ups, appraised alternatives, and switched mates when conditions proved propitious?”

Another challenge facing a committed mateship is that more valuable mates, initially not present or not available, sometimes appear on the scene. Your mate value might rise, rendering you attractive to potential mates who were initially uninterested. A previously unavailable potential mate could suddenly become unencumbered due to the death or desertion of their own partner. The fusion of two separate tribes could present a fresh wealth of mating opportunities. In short, the vagaries of life provided new prospects for our ancestors to trade up in the mating market.

In the interests of full disclosure, the War Brides dynamic, as outlined in my book The Rational Male, accounted for all of this since 2013. In our ancestral past, the “fusion” of two separate tribes often consisted of one tribe systematically killing all the men and boys of a conquered tribe. Women had reproductive value, so they were taken as spoils of war. Those who had the psychological fortitude to accept that all their sons and menfolk were dead integrated into the collective of females in the victorious tribe. Those who could not didn’t live to pass their non-accepting genes on to future generations.  This is why women uniquely monitor mate value, track satisfaction with their current unions, cultivate back-ups, appraise alternatives, and switch mates when conditions prove propitious. These behavior sets are evolutionary spandrels for conditions that existed in our ancestral past. Evolution selected-for solipsistic women predisposed to Stockholm Syndrome who could fluidly uninvest themselves emotionally from one mate and reinvest themselves in another. It’s also why women get over a breakup with “poor mateship” qualities faster than men can get over women.

Not exactly the win proponents of MSH were looking for, but there it is. 

[…] All of these ancestral challenges favored the evolution of strategic solutions. Some solutions involve tactics of mate retention, motivations to fend off mate poachers, and holding on to an investing partner. These tactics range from vigilance to violence. 

[…] Although much scientific research has focused on the initial stages of mate selection and mate attraction and some on mate retention, relatively little attention has been given to adaptations for mate switching. 

This is an important distinction because proponents of MSH tend to conflate mate selection and attraction strategies with adaptations for mate switching after an initial pairing is established. This is where Dual Mating Strategy (DMS) and Mate Switching Strategy differ. DMS (Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks) applies to both the initial stages of selection and attraction as well as the framework for why women cheat within a pairing. MSH only addresses infidelity from within an established pairing and then only focuses on the long-term security needs (Beta Bucks) side of the Hypergamous equation. DMS is a more complete framework in that it accounts for short-term sexual benefits and long-term security benefits both before and after a monogamous pairing. 

One of the most important involves monitoring a partner’s mate value, which is made up of dozens of qualities. These include social qualities – the status or esteem in which they are held; their network of friendship and coalitional allies; the power of their kinship alliances. Physical qualities also contribute to mate value, such as athletic prowess, physical formidability, attractiveness, and observable cues to health.

MSH gives scant mention of physical qualities as a criterion for possible mate switching, but this is one of the few instances where Buss’ team acknowledges it in passing. However, it should be noted that this mention is still in the context of long-term pairing as an ultimate outcome. It is not cast as the proximate outcome of short-term sexual genetic benefits. Women are interested in the visceral arousal cues of Dads but for different reasons than those of Cads.

Personality is important, too. Is a partner energetic, dependable, ambitious, emotionally stable, sociable, easy-going, or dominant? Most of these qualities change over time, and social status can rise or fall.

[…]A partner’s mate value is critically also a function of how much they value you. The technical term is welfare-trade-off ratio (WTR), the ratio of how much value they place on your welfare relative to their own welfare. Some mate selectors suffer a rude shock when a high WTR during the courtship phase turns into a selfishly skewed WTR after the wedding vows. This might be one reason why divorce is most common in the first few years of marriage and then tapers off over time. A partner who initially shows high investment might curtail that investment over time. Relationship satisfaction, a barometer that goes up and down with the tides of time, is the key psychological monitoring mechanism that tracks components of a partner’s mate value, their level of investment, and the WTR they hold with respect to you.

If the anti-Red Pill proponents of MSH were attempting to defuse the Black Pill notion that the “Juice is never worth the squeeze,” this list of prerequisites only confirms their observations. The academic Gatekeepers who post data sets about how height, looks, affluence, and prestige don’t matter in terms of attraction — all in an effort to confound the Red Pill — aren’t doing themselves any favors in listing the criteria of what women want in a man else they Switch Up to a better option than him after 5-7 years of marriage. To the letter, this has been the Black Pill position for as long as the movement has existed. They can’t measure up either in the attraction phase or retaining women after a pairing. So, what’s the point of trying?

Mate value within couples is inherently relative. Consequently, monitoring a partner’s mate value is not enough. Self-assessment is required. A woman’s or man’s mate value can increase over time. Either person might rise in status, inherit a bounty of resources, or distinguish themselves through acts of bravery, leadership or wisdom, rendering them more desirable on the mating market. A woman whose mate value increases can find herself dissatisfied with her husband, even if his overall desirability has remained unchanged.

Once again, this relativity in sexual market value was succinctly covered in my essay, Hypergamy is Not a Straitjacket. Chalk another one up to the Red Pill. However, the distinction I made is that mate value has a far more predictable trajectory for men and women than Buss’ team is willing to admit. 

I also smell hints of the Blank Slate in quotes like, “A woman’s or man’s mate value can increase over time. Either person might rise in status, inherit a bounty of resources, or distinguish themselves through acts of bravery, leadership or wisdom, rendering them more desirable on the mating market.” This is patently false because it presumes the metrics for mate value are measured by unisex criteria. These criteria are male-specific evaluations of the mate value women hold for men. Men do not care about status, affluence, bravery, leadership, and wisdom when evaluating a woman’s mate value. At least not in an appreciable way that would lead a man to cheat on his wife. Buss’ team attempts to gender-neutralize here, but in doing so, they exposed their biases in the development of MSH. These value attributes are decidedly male attributes, not equally applicable to either person. Why?

A woman whose mate value increases can find herself dissatisfied with her husband, even if his overall desirability has remained unchanged.

Again, what are the criteria for women’s self-perceived mate value? Up to now, Buss’ team has evaluated these qualities according to a male metric. A woman promoted to CFO in her company may perceive her mate value to be above her blue-collar husband’s. Buss’ team uses male attraction cues as value indicators interchangeably for women. 

Women high in attractiveness elevate their mating standards, expecting higher levels of mate qualities on metrics such as status, resources, commitment, and cooperativeness. A woman’s mate value even varies over the monthly ovulation cycle. To the degree that a woman’s mate value is a function of her fertility, she becomes more desirable around ovulation than at other phases of her cycle. Subtle changes in women’s attractiveness reflect these ovulation shifts. Their skin glows a bit more, their waist-to-hip ratio becomes slightly lower, and their voices rise a bit, all qualities found to enhance perceptions of female beauty. The fact that women become more exacting in their mate preferences at precisely this time in their cycle might reflect an adaptation to monitor their own mate value and adjust their standards accordingly.

It is the height of irony that Buss’ team still acknowledged Ovulatory Shift in 2017 to affirm MSH that academic Gatekeepers think is irrelevant in 2024. While Dual Mating Strategy isn’t as entirely dependent on Ovulatory Shift as the Gatekeepers would have us believe, it is a crucial element in balancing the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks equation. Note that Buss’ team focuses primarily on the long-term security side of this equation, but here, we see another nod to the short-term sexual side. For all the contentious hand-wringing about Ovulatory Shift being unreplicable in research, the Mate-Shifting Hypothesis was initially just as dependent on it as the Dual Mating Strategy.

We do not know whether these cyclical or more enduring changes in women’s desirability influence qualities such as their level of satisfaction with their current partner, their attraction to alternative potential mates, their effort to cultivate backup mates, or their temptation to have an affair. But there is tantalizingly suggestive evidence. 

One study found that women are most likely to evade their partner’s mate-guarding efforts precisely around their most fertile phase – an effect most pronounced among women partnered with men low in attractiveness. These women find themselves more interested in attending social events, perhaps because they might interact with alternative mates. And they report engaging in greater flirtation with men other than their regular partner. These findings point to the possibility that women monitor their own mate value, and when it increases, alternative mates can seem more attractive. This, in turn, requires monitoring alternative possible mates.

Dual Mating Strategy already accounted for all of these Alpha Fucks Ovulatory Shift variables. From the short-term sexual perspective, DMS is the hands-down winner in explaining why women cheat as well as why women select the men they pair with. In this light, Mate Switching Hypothesis looks more like an apologetic contrivance to explain away women’s justification for cheating on and switching to another spouse.

According to the mate-switching hypothesis, scanning for alternative mates remains activated even among those in happy relationships. Sometimes that tracking occurs at low levels when newly available mates appear or when a potential mate’s attraction or interest increases. Sometimes it gets activated at high levels, as when a woman becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her regular mate and wants out of the relationship.

Scanning for available mate alternatives also falls under the purview of Dual Mating Strategy. In recent times, we’ve made this scanning exceedingly easier for women using social media. All women need do is post a few sexually suggestive pictures on Instagram (thus advertising the perception of their sexual availability) and wait for a parade of better pairing alternative suitors to like their images and gush over them in the comments. Consider that social media is rooted in imagery, perception, and the emotional associations with those perceptions, and you begin to see that authentic cues of mate value have little, if anything, to do with the infidelity that MSH hopes to explain.

[…] So, how do women actually implement a potential mate-switching strategy? We propose three key strategies – cultivating backup mates, implementing affairs, and enacting a break-up.

The mate-switching hypothesis explains an array of findings that otherwise remain mysterious. It explains why most people cultivate backup mates, why desired qualities in opposite-sex friends map on to desired qualities in a long-term mate, and why backup mates typically fly under the radar of the regular mate. 

Once again, most people don’t cultivate backup mates – most women do. The Red Pill and Dual Mating Strategy have been banging this gong for at least eight years now. 

Do we really need Mate Switching Hypothesis to explain what Dual Mating has been accurately describing since 1994? The evidence is in the wording here. Women – not men – curate a bullpen of potential alternate mates if things go sideways with her main guy. It is decidedly not “people” (men) who premeditate a failsafe with a Plan B backup. But this is why Buss’ team proffers MSH as an alternative to DMS — they wanted to control the narrative of the unflattering truths that Dual Mating and the Red Pill have been exposing for over two decades now.

It explains why women become dissatisfied with their existing relationships when there exist available alternatives in the mating pool that are higher in mate value than their regular partners. It provides a cogent explanation for why women are willing to risk so much to have affairs, an enduring evolutionary puzzle because women gain no direct benefits in the currency of reproductive success.

Dual Mating Strategy explains all of these dynamics more comprehensively because it accounts for the visceral short-term sexual benefits (Alpha Fucks) of women’s pluralistic mating strategy that underlies all of the adaptive strategies suggested in this article. Mate Switching Hypothesis (almost) exclusively focuses on women’s provisioning, protection, and parental investment needs for long-term security (Beta Bucks) while soft-selling it on equalism (men people do it too, kinda). 

Recognizing that humans have evolved a psychology dedicated to mate-switching undoubtedly will be disturbing to many. It might be disconcerting to a man to realize that his wife is carrying a mate-insurance policy, harbors sexual fantasies about her co-worker, or has ‘just a friend’ who is his rival. It might be depressing to realize that you are more replaceable than you knew. It could be disturbing when it dawns on you that your partner’s unhappiness might not be transient and instead portends a hidden plan for exiting the relationship.

This paragraph implies only one message: Do better, or your wife will leave you, and she’ll be justified in doing so. 

If the Buss team intended to provide a counternarrative to Dual Mating and the Red Pill, they’ve only reinforced Black Pill nihilism and despondency with the Mate Switching Hypothesis. “You are more replaceable than you knew,” so why even bother?

Also note the gender shift in the narrative: It might be disconcerting to a man to realize that his wife is carrying a mate-insurance policy, harbors sexual fantasies about her co-worker, or has ‘just a friend’ who is his rival. What happened to “most people cultivate backup mates?” The shift here is intentional because the entire notion of Mate Switching as an alternative to Dual Mating is a contrivance meant to appease a female audience. 

This is also evidenced by academic gatekeepers mischaracterizing DMS. The bumper sticker dismissal is that Dual Mating is basically a proactive cuckoldry. Women only want to fuck the hot guy with good genes, so they fiendishly marry a hapless provider, Beta male, and then proceed to dupe him into thinking the baby she conceived with her Alpha lover is his. This is a gross distortion of DMS, but it’s necessary to sell its alternative strategy in the Gynocentric, female-dominated field of psychology. 

Mate Switching only focuses on the long-term security ‘needs of women’ narrative for its justification of infidelity. Women aren’t interested in adulterous affairs for the shallow reason of hot monkey sex! They cheat on good men because they aren’t good enough. They were or became, poor mateship choices. Evolutionary pressures then force wives to cultivate failsafe lovers because their husbands can’t deliver on meeting their needs for long-term security and an evergreen sense of personal fulfillment. This narrative is unassailable. Who could disagree with a woman’s dissatisfaction in a relationship when her primary partner is not meeting her long-term security and, ultimately, family interests? Who could blame her for having the prudence and foresight to cultivate extra-pair relations if her husband can’t live up to his performance burden? 

Mate Switching Hypothesis is yet another manifestation of a woman’s existential fear of reproducing with a man who she believed was Alpha but later realizes he’s a Beta. MSH is a psychological insurance policy, sanctioned by those who know better, that allows women the prerogative to feel good about their extramarital affairs and cuckoldry. They cheat, but they cheat for the right reasons.

Or do they?

The most recent study (September 2024) on the evolutionary origins of female infidelity suggests that women cheat for genetic benefits from attractive affair partners, thus reconfirming the Dual Mating Strategy as the dominant theory. From Why women cheat: testing evolutionary hypotheses for female infidelity in a multinational sample:

Women in the study generally rated their affair partners as more physically attractive but less suitable as co-parents compared to their primary partners. This pattern aligns with the dual-mating strategy, where the primary goal of an affair is “good genes”…

Yet, even in the face of confounding evidence, the academic Gatekeepers would either fail to mention or soft-sell this data to the Gynocentric academic establishment they know it will offend. They would rather fall on their swords for Mate Switching Hypothesis than concede a point to DMS. Why? Perhaps it’s because they know that appeasing a female-centric psychological establishment—already rife with ideological infighting and a 15-year replication crisis—is the best strategy for maintaining their future careers as influencer/personality brands. The Red Pill has none of these limitations. As such, we have the freedom to question the academic Gatekeepers and their motives. And we will continue to be that thorn in their side to remind them of their lack of integrity.

In Neil Strauss’s book The Game (2005), there was a concern that men in the seduction communities of the time would justify their manipulative pickup artist tactics by citing the evolutionary works of The Selfish Gene or The Red Queen. Men could guiltlessly dismiss their sexual conquests as acting according to their evolved natures. “The Devil made me do it” was replaced with “My selfish genes made me do it.” In 2017 to 2024, we see the gender roles reversed. Only now, we have EvoPsych luminaries and academia endorsing hypotheses that effect the same outcome — only that outcome is justifiable. It’s a woman’s selfish genes that made her cultivate a backup partner and leave her poor mateship husband after he lost his prestigious job. Can you blame her for following her evolutionary imperatives?