Understanding the Hive Mentality.
Readership: All
Theme: Transactions
Length: 2,000 words
Reading Time: 11 minutes
Intro
Vox Day had a post on Sigma Game, The Benefits of Female Solipsism (2024/2/7), which reposts a long essay from a female contributor. This essay offers an insightful glimpse at female social psychology and motivation, and it makes a lot of sense with respect to what we already know about female nature. So I thought it deserved a deep dive.
In this essay, I’ll explore the perspectives raised, broken down into the following sections (with reorganization of text by topic, minor editing, and formatting).
- How female social groups are organized.
- How female social groups function.
- How female social groups are based on resource acquisition and distribution.
- How female social groups are based on status.
- How female solipsism has a positive function by serving as the grease to the female social group’s wheel.
- What Determines a Woman’s Social Rank / Value?
- The question of whether it is possible to construct a predictive model that anticipates female behavior on the basis of a woman’s social and/or sexual rank.
This post will cover 1 – 4. A total of 7 case studies were given throughout the contributor’s essay and are included here at the end. This is a long read at 2,000 words, but well worth the time. I’d even say this should be required reading for men struggling to understand female social behaviors.
I will cover 5, 6, and 7 in separate posts.
1. An Analogy of Female Social Groups : Hubs, Spokes, and Beads
Female social circles / cliques are described as a Wheel, with the Queen Bee as the Hub, and the other women as ‘beads’ on the spokes. This model assumes resource acquisition, management, and distribution as a primary purpose of the association. (This will be examined in Section 3.)
“Women’s social groups can be visualized as wheels, with a Hub woman whose character and values set the goals of the group and the type, general amount, and distribution of resources being allocated toward those goals.”
“The other women are “Beads” on the Hub’s spokes, who can slide in and out of closeness to the Hub based on the Hub’s willingness to allocate resources to them and how willing they are to having their resources allocated by the Hub.”
“The Wheel takes on the values of and pursues the goals of its Hub, and attracts Beads who share those values and goals.”
2. How Female Social Groups Function : Conformity
The Wheel model explains why women prioritize fitting into a group, and why women police group conformity.
“Women will compete to get into Wheels and will compete to be Hubs. The intra-Bead competition [for favored status] and Wheel gate-keeping to prevent low-status women dragging down the wheel’s overall value is where female competition gets the cattiest. A well-established Hub is usually above competition (re: not cutting the hottest cousin’s hair), and will crack down hard on a Bead who gets uppity.”
Here we find that there is a hierarchy of sorts among women, but it is constantly changing and so conformity (i.e. clothing, cosmetics, and also group-think / “hive mind”) is prioritized instead for cohesion. In comparison, for men, some degree of conformity is often assumed, and sometimes required (e.g. the military) but hierarchy is emphasized as central to order. Moreover, conformity is to women what hierarchy is to men. In either paradigm, conformity (for women) or hierarchy (for men) provides a much-needed sense of order to the respective groups.
“But beyond [the status of the men involved], except for maintaining a high-quality marriage with her own husband (which is its own high-value resource) the men are almost entirely irrelevant. The women often socialize with the children but without any men, and the Beads might not even know each other’s husbands. In more settled groups like this, there is less competition because the women tend to know their place on the wheel and are generally happy cooperating to get more overall resources than they’ve harnessed on their own through marriage.”
3. Female Social Groups are Based on Resource Acquisition and Distribution
The Wheel model explains the herd mentality as a type of micro-socialism that pools and redistributes resources through social networking.
“The Hub’s sexual value to men sets the cap for what external resources she can bring into the female social wheel.”
“The Wheels will be composed of women with similar levels of attractiveness to (i.e. ability to harness resources from) men, with the Hub as the group’s maximum.”
“The Wheel’s overall value is determined by the overall amount of resources it has pulled together (the women’s own plus male contributions).
- A wheel made out of single women has the women’s own resources plus intermittent male resources to allocate.
- A wheel of happily married women have their own resources plus much of their husbands’ resources consistently available.
The overall resource pool, and therefore status, of the Happily-married Wheel is higher.”
“In all cases, the women’s resource contributions to the social Wheel are fixed by how high status of a man they’ve married (or not).”
4. Female Social Groups are Based on Status
Commenter Jimmy Wu wrote some pertinent insights from a different perspective.
“While the topology of this model (hub-bead) might be correct, the explanatory dynamic is wrong.
- “Resource acquisition”. This is Marxist economic thinking in action. Human motivation is much more than dollar signs. The fact that poor aristocrat women will bitterly hold onto their social station and ruthlessly gate-keep against the nouveau riche, and the nouveau desperately trying to infiltrate the upper strata, plainly shows that women value “social status” more than money. High School observation might show the rich girls on top, but that is more a proxy of status, and the active shunning of any poor-but-higher-status-girls (due to jealousy), than “resource acquisition”. Remember that Female Status is not synonymous with “popularity”.
- “High status men”. Female Social grouping is not based on husband / boyfriend acquisition. This is due to the writer glomming onto Vox’s SSH, and trying to mirror that model. Also due to the confusion of sexual-attractiveness with actual active sexual activities. Women group by attractiveness more due to jealousy than anything else. Women’s social groups can be more body-diverse, if formed by other factors (a Hub accumulating friends over time). It is more that changes in attractiveness (weight loss, new hairstyle) might upset the social order and induce turbulence.
Here, Jimmy agrees that women are ultimately dependent on men, and therefore in general, the overall attractiveness of women is a major determinant of the status of a man that she can keep as a provider.
However, Jimmy objects to the micro-socialism aspect of the Wheel model, arguing that status is a more powerful aspiration that motivates women to join and interact with a Wheel.
IMO, both factors are interrelated and both are at play, but one or the other may take precedence in different Wheels. For example, working-class Wheels might vie for resources, while middle-class Wheels might compete for status. But it’s probably more complicated than this when you start digging into the social dynamics of individual Wheels.
Being “broken on the wheel” was a method of public torture and execution used primarily in Europe from antiquity through the Middle Ages and up to the 19th century. Case Study 1 — Single vs Married Women with Children
A wheel of 30-something moms with dedicated husbands who allow them the resources to be active, hands-on moms will have overall higher attractiveness to men and therefore more resources available (both economic resources directly from their men, but also their own freed up energy, attention, emotional availability, and non-job hours) than a wheel comprised of single 30-something women, who have intermittent access to male resources and are tied up with the provider role and the emotional drama of dating/divorcing/having a baby daddy.
Case Study 2 — Hot Young Hopefuls
A young women’s Wheel might have a hot Hub with daddy’s money, allocating sexual appeal (hair, make up, clothing style) and access to high-status men. The Beads will compete with each other for closeness to the Hub by putting the resources into the group in order to be favored recipients of the resources being distributed (skill with make-up and hair, sharing clothing, etc.) This might be a high-status Wheel overall when the women are in their earlier 20s because they are hoping to secure commitment (resources) from high-status men, but it will drop in overall status overtime if the women fail to secure high-status men and end up as washed up forty-year old bar flies with little access to male resources and whose own shareable resources still consistent primarily of hair, makes up, and clothing provisioning.
Case Study 3 — Heavy Weight Competition
The example of a woman losing weight and her friends trying to undermine it, shows that she no longer fits into her pudgy-friend social Wheel. The other Beads of those Wheels will try to drag her down to the norm for the group. The Hub, who was likely skinnier to begin with, will gatekeep the Hub position, ejecting the Bead if she becomes viable competition for the Hub position. The newly skinny woman would do well to find herself a skinnier, higher value (more resources) Wheel where she fits the norm for a Bead.
Case Study 4 – “Top Tier” Wheels
A top-tier Wheel has a Hub who is a devoted wife and mother, the prettiest and most generous of the group who has married a high-status man who brings her resources and frees her up to contribute resources to her female social Wheel. They have a good marriage and peaceful home, so she isn’t wasting emotional and time resources on internal drama. He’s freed her from working a 9-5 so that she has time and energy to contribute to the Wheel of women with whom she is raising her children and, if resources are abundant enough, her community more broadly to make it the kind of place she wants it to be for her family. Her temperament, interests, and goals for her family will set the tone, activities and membership of her Wheel. Each Beads’ contributions of their own resources (her own time / attention / activity as freed up by their husband’s physical and financial resource provision) toward those projects set how close she is to the Hub and what resources the Hub allocates back to her, and thus her children.
Case Study 5 — “Mommy and Me” Wheels
One Hub might be a mommy-and-me type, allocating craft projects, birthday party invites and attendance, orange slices for halftime, the logistics of carpool arrangements and activities sign-ups, teacher gifts, etc. to attract and manage Beads that share her values and goals for an active social life for their kids with other kids from good homes.
Case Study 6 — “Home and Garden” Wheels
Another healthy wheel system might have a Hub who is less outgoing and not interested in activities, but oriented toward health and wellness. She’s running a Wheel focused on home gardening and food preparation and allocates resources among her Beads in terms of gardening tips, plant starts, canning and food processing events, sharing home-baked goods, and hosting food-based gatherings in her home, for example. This is a less extroverted wheel and it may be smaller overall but still high status with lots of resources as provided and freed up by high-status husbands.
Case Study 7 — Multi Wheeling Beads
The Hub of the home garden wheel might even distribute home baked goods and fresh garden produce to the Mommy-and-Me Hub in order to be a Bead on the latter’s wheel, so that, as an introvert, she doesn’t have to manage all the activities-planning on her own. But by being a Mommy-and-Me bead her kids still get to be on the teams and go to the birthday parties of good families, building bonds to find them good mates down the road. In this scenario, the Garden-Hub has her own Wheel that is suited to her goals, and she would also be glad to be a Bead on Mommy-and-Me’s Wheel at the same time.
Related
- Dalrock: Marriage and children were always her priority. (2019/7/17)
- Σ Frame (Lexet): Aristocratic Hypergamy (2021/5/14)
- Σ Frame (NovaSeeker): The Upper Middle Class Career Life Script Model (2021/5/17)
- Σ Frame: Women were Created to Conform (2023/5/8)
- Σ Frame: The Logic of WGTOW (2024/6/14)
- Σ Frame: Female Competition : Consumerism (2024/9/6)
- Men are Good (Tom Golden): Mean Girls and Feminists: Is There a Difference? (2024/12/4)
