The original huff amongst women in the manosphere about dread came in the wake of a post about instilling a sense of dread in a woman in order to help maintain a consistent frame control in a relationship. Naturally, women’s unconditioned response to this overt assertion of control was to demonize the whole idea of dread. When you think about it dread, as proposed, is really a sense of conceptualizing the potential outcome of losing the intimacy of a partner and the resulting fallout (emotional, financial, familial, personal, etc.) from that loss. Such an overt declaration for promoting a sense of dread conjures melodramatic images of fiendish men blackmailing their women into
emotional enslavement to their possessive and insecure whims.
I think what’s lost amongst all this sensationalism about dread – a very weak term for the concept – is the applicability dread has in a much broader scope (and particularly for women) than the overly dramatic characterization of it when men openly discuss using it themselves.
Faces of Dread
I have a good friend, John, who’s just this side of 37. I love the guy, but John’s not much to look at. At around 30 he essentially gave up on himself. He got married far too young on the business end of a do-the-right-thing ‘accidental’ pregnancy, and from a personal standpoint that was the end of his
window of opportunity to explore any other options he may have had. His wife let herself go just after the second pregnancy, ballooned into a beach ball, and he followed suit. In actuality it wouldn’t take much for him to get back on top of his game, but he has no desire to.
Now, after detailing John’s situation you might think he’d be the last candidate to participate in anything resembling a manipulation of dread in a relationship, and you’d be right, but he, and guys like him are often the unwitting participants in their wives’ or girlfriend’s own dread-games.
Although John isn’t going to spontaneously attract women with either his looks or due to his complete obliviousness to Game, he is an exceptional provider for his family. He regularly busts his ass as a programmer and is the sole breadwinner of the family – singlehandedly funding his wife’s schooling. In addition he’s a very attentive father, husband and is somewhat of a handyman around the house. In spite of all this his wife tends to be a bit of a shrew, browbeating him on a regular basis, which has been passed onto the personalities of his teenage daughters who engage in the same heavy handedness
their mother does.
Yet for all the passive-aggressive derision, John’s wife is easily one of the most possessive women I’ve ever known. He literally lives in a constant state of surveillance as to his whereabouts. She calls to verify he is where he says he is, and continually suspects him of running off to a strip club (which to my knowledge he’s never set foot inside one) or engaging in anyway with another woman. It’s gotten to the point that it’s comical to think that she’d have any worry that he’d be snatched away by a better woman, but there it is, the dreaded competition anxiety prompting unease in an, albeit low self- esteem, woman with no realistic possibility of it ever occurring.
“I can’t compete with that,..”
Some of the most neurotically possessive women I’ve ever known have been the girlfriends and wives of amateur circuit bodybuilders. Most of these girls, even the fitness competitors, had to either be very self-assured or they resorted to controlling tactics and possessiveness due to the constant reminder of how desired their Men were by other women. Even when that was explicitly not the case, the perception of their desirability was enough to bring this out in them. They had the love and desire of very physically elite Men, but this still wasn’t enough to pacify that innate sense of dread.
Manosphere blogger Dalrock has blogged ad infinitum about the feminized notion of how a man’s viewing ”using” porn is conflated with adultery by wives. To say nothing about the constant push to pathologize the male sexual response, this is an easy out for women following the Eat, Pray, Love script wanting to exit a marriage with cash and prizes. However, the fundamental point in that
conflation is a woman’s, often overstated, inability to compete with the “porn star ideal of physical perfection and sexual acrobatics that no normal woman could ever be comfortable with.”
Considering the sheer variety of men’s sexual appetites this is ludicrous on the surface of it, but it is illustrative of the predominance dread plays in women’s psyches. It doesn’t matter what the
particulars of his sexual appetites are, she feels inadequate in that competition and fears a loss of intimacy.
Dread Games
I catch a lot of hostility from the femosphere for even suggesting a Man directly foster competition anxiety in his LTR, but the underlying reason for this venom is a preexisting condition of dread in women that can barely be tolerated when it’s under the surface, much less when it’s exposed. Dread, in this context, is an innate fear of loss of security that intensifies as a woman progresses further beyond the Wall and with her diminishing capacity to reestablish that provisioning security with a new partner. In fact it’s exactly this dread that is the root source of the gynocentric laws that award women cash & prizes in a divorce settlement.
So powerful is this fear that legal assurances needed to be instituted to account for a woman’s lessened ability to secure long-term provisioning after a failed marriage, after the Wall, after pregnancies, etc.
Dread, for lack of a better term, is a female condition.
Although I’ve suggested casually returning flirtations with other women as a means to amplifying desire and illustrating social proof, this is hardly the only, or best, means of fostering competition anxiety. Overt flirtations are a blunt means of stoking this anxiety, but often all it takes is a nuanced shift in a predictable routine to trigger that imagination. The idea isn’t to instill and sustain a constant terror from fear of loss, but rather to covertly, subtly, demonstrate higher value; particularly when a woman’s attention is straying into comfortable, routine familiarity and she begins seeking indignation and drama from other sources.
Sometimes all that’s necessary to provoke that imagination is to get to the gym, dress better, get a raise, travel for work, change your routine, adopt a Game mentality, hang out with a new (or old) friend, be cocky & funny with her – risk to offend her sensibilities.
Most women believe that their pussies are sufficient to hold their men in thrall for a lifetime, but as a woman’s SMV declines and a Man’s appreciates their confidence in this form of leverage falls off, thus forcing them to adopt new schema for controlling the fear of loss. When you head off to Las Vegas for that trade show and your wife fucks the ever-lovin’ shit out of you the night before you go, you’re experiencing one of those new schema. It doesn’t take much, most times the lightest touch will do. Good dread game doesn’t even have to be initiated by you. Often enough, women will do it
themselves, or discover sources of social proof that reaffirms your desirability.
In light of this ambient fear of loss women seek to avoid, one might be tempted to use a more
sympathetic approach in order to allay a woman’s fears. This is hardly worth mentioning here since this is generally the tact that most men intuitively use in their LTRs anyway – a constant reassurance of love and devotion to settle her fears. Guy’s like my friend John will follow a perpetual strategy of appeasement in spite of themselves.
Lets be clear, the vast majority of women are secure enough not to allow this condition to get the better of them, and it’s in the extreme cases I’ve used above that real neuroticism flourishes. Contrary to popular belief I’m not an advocate of the Dark Triad methodologies of Game. Not because I think they’re ineffective, but rather because, with the right art of Game they’re not even needed. Only in extreme cases are the dark arts to be employed, and if a situation necessitates their use it’s important for a guy to understand that a line has been crossed with a woman who necessitated their use.
women’s intrinsic fear of security loss and the competition anxiety that comes from a declining capacity to compete with her sisters’ attentions, you will never achieve an ideal state of contentment of it, and certainly not by relying solely on comfort and familiarity. She wants you to rock the boat, it’s what makes her feel alive.