The Benefits of Female Solipsism

A woman explains the irrelevance of men to female social groups

A long essay from a female reader that attempts to describe the way in which female social groups function and how solipsism has a positive function by serving as the grease to the female social group’s wheel. I’m not going to criticize it, nor does it have much relevance to the male Socio-Sexual Hierarchy, but it is an interesting perspective from an informed party. How accurate it is, it’s not for me to say, but her analogy is in line with my observation that it may not be possible to construct a predictive model that anticipates female behavior on the basis of a woman’s social and/or sexual rank.

Attempts to frame female social systems in terms of the male types the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy has defined in men are doomed to failure because female social groups are based on resources acquisition and distribution, not on dominance. 

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 Hub’s sexual value to men sets the cap for what external resources she can bring into the female social wheel. 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 the how willing they are to having their resources allocated by the Hub.

She can clearly harness a formidable amount of male resources.

The Wheels will be composed of women with similar levels of attractiveness to (ie 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. 

Women will compete to be Hubs and will compete to get into Wheels. The intra-Bead competition 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. 

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.

A high-status wheel would presumably look something like this.

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. 

The Wheel takes on the values of and pursues the goals of its Hub, and attracts Beads who share those values and goals.

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.

Groups of women do tend to have what passes for a “uniform”.

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 her 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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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). But beyond that, 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 are often socialize with the children but without any men, and the Beads might not even know each others husbands.  In more settled groups like this there is less competition because the women tend to know their place on the wheel are generally happy cooperating to get more overall resources than they’ve harnessed on their own through marriage. 

In this context, women’s solipsism serves to advertise adherence to the Wheel's values and the Hub’s vision. The Hub sets the values, so will talk about things in relation to herself to show what she places value on. And the Beads will talk about themselves to show how they fit within that vision, or, when gossiping, to out-group women who don’t. The Wheel is part of the identity for the Hub and to varying degrees the Beads, so showing that you consider how all external events relate to the group’s wellbeing is an important part of demonstrating group loyalty - that you are willing to be active in harnessing resources from men, other women, and the community and that you are willing to protect the group from threats (primarily the antics of lower value women).  So here, solipsism in conversation signals loyalty to the other women in your in-group.

In this regard, what men think of women’s solipsism is irrelevant, as it serves an in-grouping and out-grouping purpose that men are permanently out grouped from.  Except as the husbands of an individual woman and random men who might help a pretty girl out in a pinch, the men themselves are irrelevant to the women’s social Wheel. There is no need for women to dispense with solipsism, and its in-group/out-grouping function in order to gain respect from men, for the purpose of female social hierarchies. Having the respect of men has nothing to do with what resources they are willing to provide a particular woman, to the contrary being seen as "a strong independent woman" may lead them to deny resources. For the purposes of bringing resources into female social groups and securing standing within them, women would do better to focus on earning men's loves and compassion (and the resource provisioning associated with them) than to change their communication style to earn respect from men. 

R-E-S-O-U-R-C-E. Who needs respect when you’ve got access to resources?

Women only need to dispense with solipsism when they enter into co-ed or primarily male social systems and/or work environments (which has to do with a woman's own temperament, interests and goals), but there is no need to dispense with it to maintain good standing within female social systems. Indeed, solipsism (but not narcissism) is critical to success within female social systems, and men's lack of respect for it is irrelevant. 

The biggest losers in the female social systems either can’t get into or stay in a Wheel ("one of the guys") or are confined to low status Wheels, which only get lower as they age.  Because low status Wheels have lower resources overall, the competition to get into the Hub position and then to move up to a better Wheel is more intense. Among unmarried women at any level, competition is always high to secure high status men and move up a Wheel or three. But in a high-resource, high-value Wheel of married women, there will be abundance and therefore less competition and more likelihood that the women in the group settle rather happily into their place in the social system. 

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts on the lady’s reflections.