As everyone familiar with men knows, there is really only one masculine motivation: the sexual impulse to attract and to reproduce with women. Fortunately for us in the 21st century, things are a bit more subtle and nuanced than they were in prehistory. This essay looks at how the sexual impulse manifests in the behaviour of men today.

The first of the four great masculine motivations is the unconscious sexual drive, which man shares with the lower animals. This corresponds to the state of clay in elementalism.

At this level, men are barely thinking at all. This is the mindset that a drunk is in when someone spills his drink and he tries to start a fight. He doesn’t know that the reason why he wants to fight is because of his sexually inspired desire to establish dominance over a given territory for the sake of controlling the resources within it.

Much less does he appreciate that this sexually inspired desire has been repressed by his culture, nor that this repression is reversed under the effect of alcohol.

Although this level is the one at which all activity began, women tend to avoid men that are here to the degree that those women are intelligent. The obvious reason for this is that any man at this level of thinking is liable to go and chase some other woman as soon as the first one is pregnant.

The second is the conscious sexual drive, which the majority of man share with each other. This corresponds to the state of iron in elementalism.

This is as far as most men ever get, and the characteristic of this stage is the development of the capacity to get laid by scheming. Here a man will use his higher cognitive functions to plan and execute a plan to get laid.

It might sound primitive to some, but over the course of human history a colossal amount of energy has been sunk into enterprises at this level by men, and it’s historically where much of the joy and flavour of life comes from.

It was also at this level that many of the patriarchal elements of human society and interaction were established. Marriage and the cultural norms surrounding it are, ultimately, little more than male attempts to establish the certitude of their paternity.

The third is the unconscious sublimation of the sexual drive into a creative endeavour, which man shares with the more intelligent of his kind. This corresponds to the state of silver in elementalism, and most men do not ever reach this level, at least not meaningfully.

This stage is characterised by the production of art. Probably the first ever expression of it was music, perhaps something as simple as a man drumming a tune on a hollow log to amuse a woman.

Developing over time, this impulse found expression in all manner of great works of architecture, literature, music, sculpture and painting.

This stage is not easy to distinguish from the second stage, because it isn’t clear where the border between art for art’s sake and art specifically for the sake of attracting women is. Perhaps the best way to distinguish them is that acts made in the second stage do not produce much else apart from an orgasm.

The fourth is the conscious sublimation of the sexual drive into a creative endeavour, which only the highest of men partake in. It is entirely absent in some ages and places – and in the vast majority of men – and corresponds the the state of gold in elementalism.

Relatively few men dabble with this drive, although doing so may have been popular in times and places that revered the art more.

It isn’t easy to summarise all of the behaviours that fall into this category. This is for a couple of reasons.

This is because actions in this category are particular to the individual. A man might create a work of art to impress a woman, or as a conscious sublimation of his sexual impulse, and in either case the work of art will be the same (or at least similar).

The second reason is that very few men have the necessary education to understand where his sexual energies ultimately come from, and without this knowledge it is impossible to consciously direct where those same energies might ultimately go.

Taken together, these four great masculine drives explain much of why men do what they do.