The following is a poem by Marie Howe that I recently became aware of from an NPR ‘Fresh Air’ interview:
Practicing
BY MARIE HOWE
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basementof somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths
how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out
the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:
concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes
instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.
We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was
practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song
for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.
Before you get titillated by this or think “WTF Rollo?” read the poem again. Despite reader compliments, I wish I could say I was more of a poetry aficionado; and yes Howe fits the man-jawed, womyn’s studies archetype to the letter, but after hearing this I had to look up the poem and read it for myself to really get the message. This is a message that I’m not even sure if Howe is really aware of, or intended communicating – You be the boy.
I’ve written in the past about sexual fluidity and the brilliance of it becoming the redefined, reinvented social convention du jour of feminization. I say ‘brilliant’ because it so deftly and conveniently places the inadequacies of its ideology on the backs of the men who wont (really can’t) play along in affirming women’s primacy. Men’s evolved biological predilections and sexual strategies simply refuse to be unengineered into complying with feminized utopian ideals. This has always been the bugbear of feminism. Empowered single mommies can raise a boy to pee sitting down, to leave the toilet seat down, but he still finds he has a natural compulsion to want to take a piss standing up, and seat be damned. It takes half a lifetime of psychological conditioning to repress the male sexual experience.
Similarly, sexual fluidity doctrine also gives the aging spinster a new outlook in her post-Wall years. “Never mind that men wont man up to our your mythologized standards, it appears you’ve been a lesbian all these long years and didn’t know it! But don’t worry, masculinized lesbians make for better ‘men’ than men.”
From Sexual Fluidity:
If you read through the article Why Women are Leaving Men for Other Women, you can’t help but notice the commonalities of the testimonies coming from otherwise feminine women being attracted to more dominant, masculine women. Often these come from long married-with-children women who’ve divorced their beta husbands in favor of a more dominant, butch, Alpha lesbian.
Ironically—or not, as some might argue—it is certain “masculine” qualities that draw many straight-labeled women to female partners; that, in combination with emotional connection, intimacy, and intensity.
“Men can’t understand why I want to be with Jack, a lesbian, when I could be with a biological man,” says Gomez-Barris. “And at first I thought it would be threatening, but I have a rebellious spirit. He’s powerful, accomplished, and appealing. And in some ways, the experience is better than in heterosexual sex.
So what are we seeing here? Heterosexual women, still crave the masculine dominance that men cannot or will not provide her.
Uncle Roosh has an uncanny knack for posting complimentary articles around the same time I’m contemplating a topic, and this offering was no exception. One thing his study on Eastern European women seems to have a consensus on is a lack of masculinity in feminized men (see: American Betas). Roosh’s article provides an interesting contrast to the sexual fluidity convention in illustrating a natural dominant/submissive dynamic that is an in-born imperative for women.
Hypergamy prompts a natural contradiction for women – security and provisioning versus sexual impulse and genetic preselection – this is the root of women’s evolved pluralistic sexual strategies, get the Alpha seed, get the long term provisioning. In the past I’ve gone into detail outlining the innate compulsion women have for desiring security (and parental investment) in the long term, but I think the idea of what represents security to women needs a better explanation.
Case Study
My friend Dave was a stereotypical beta chump and his shrew of a wife was the typical ballbusting so-con feminist who was only too willing to browbeat reminders of it into him constantly. In other respects Dave was a great guy, the sole provider for his family, a great handyman who renovated his home with his own hands (he even built me a nice wood guitar rack for my guitars), but to anyone who’d see him and his wife together it was clear that he was on the receiving end of what I’d consider borderline abuse. He essentially married his mother, who was also a domineering bitch over his father, which is ironic since his wife was already a single mother of two boys when they wed. They had a single daughter who, in her teenage years, took her cues from her mother and picked up the browbeating when mom wasn’t available.
Yet for all the domineering and all the derision she was so comfortable in laying on Dave, she would rip into anyone who would think he was less than a man. She could call him a pussy, but anyone saying the same would be met with a list of his manly credits to such a degree that you’d hardly think you were talking about the same person in the room. She would defend his manliness with the same zeal she had in abusing it. For all of Dave’s wife’s invectives she couldn’t allow anyone to think that the man she was paired with was anything less than the ideal of manhood. On some level of consciousness she wanted him to be dominante even if that meant she had to manufacture the appearance of it for people who knew them.
You be the Boy
The impetus that brought this post about has been the recent discussion thread about Rational reader Ted D’s situation at home. He’s been stuck for some time over at Hooking Up Beta, but his story, and others like it are all too common in a fem-centric socialization that encourages equalism in favor of complimentarianism. It’s the triumph of blank slate ideology that men should be shamed out of a natural position of dominance that women’s own in-born need for security has need for. It’s tragic that it’s been conditioned to the the point that men have internalized equalism to such an extent that the desire to assume a necessary position of dominance, even a marginal position of guidance or leadership is equated with a tyranny. Even the word ‘dominance’ is conflated with power and control in a negative context.
From the first Iron Rule of Tomassi:
What these men failed to realize is that frame, like power, abhors a vacuum. In the absence of the frame security a woman naturally seeks from a masculine male, this security need forces her to provide that security for herself. Thus we have the commonality of cuckold and submissive men in westernized culture, while women do the bills, earn the money, make the decisions, authorize their husband’s actions and deliver punishments. The woman is seeking the security that the man she pair-bonded with cannot or will not provide.
There is no such thing as egalitarian equality. Even for homosexuals, there is a dominant and submissive partner. It doesn’t make one an evil controller, nor the other a complacent doormat, it’s just that someone has to drive the car. Either you trust that person to drive or you take that control away from them. Someone has to be the boy.
Power abhors a vacuum, if you are unable or unwilling to be in control of the frame, a woman’s innate need for security will compel her to control it for you – in spite of her subconscious need for you to be the boy. You can be the Dom or the Sub, just know that you’ll only be the Sub for as long as it takes her to find a Dom to drive the car. This is the paradox of Hypergamy; that her desire for the best genetic/provisional partner would conflict with his ability to dominate her, all while professing a desire for equality masquerading as control just in case he can’t or wont take the driver’s seat.
April 20th, 2012 at 9:04 am
YaReally – “Again that’s you. You are a man. Figuring out your purpose and following a path in life is what you should be doing regardless of who’s around.”
I get it. It isn’t at all what I was led to believe a relationship was about, which is why I’m throwing a temper tantrum I suppose.
I’m kinda overloaded with info right now. I’m here, I’m reading, and I’m thinking. But right now I haven’t managed to make heads or tails of all this yet, and I don’t have anything to ask/say that doesn’t sound ridiculous to my own ears, so I’m just going to shut up for now…
April 20th, 2012 at 3:48 pm
TedD: It’s cool, take your time digesting. You might even want to stay off all the blogs for a couple weeks. You’re waking up to the fact that not only have you been lied to your entire life by pretty much everyone around you including people you completely trusted, but also you BELIEVED those lies in good faith and built and structured an entire life around them.
You’re totally justified in throwing a temper tantrum lol Most of us did too.
April 21st, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Sasha, I don’t follow your Star Wars reference, but I get what you are saying.
One doesn’t wage wars against ideas (“feminism”), one wages them against those who hold ideas (modern women), and no woman is today untouched by the lies their mothers told them. Ideas don’t occur in a vacuum. They are promulgated unconsciously through cultural assumptions, political efforts, and deliberate maneuvers. And by now they achieve their ends almost completely unconsciously because we offer only sporadic and disunited resistance.
I don’t understand the reluctance to call this one-sided conflict what it is: the most important and most visible battle in a fifty-year culture war. It’s not enough to simply present civil counterarguments to a entrenched tyranny. If ever that were possible, Americans would have done it with the relatively benign imperialism of the British Empire in the late 18th century. No, you have to enforce new modes of thinking and be willing to insist upon them, perhaps with violence. You must put your “lives, fortune, and sacred honor” at risk or else it’s just more flatulence in the hot wind.
Right now our energy is directed toward personal sexual conquest, but even the PUAs are seeing the limits of training a mob of trickster-alpha mimics. The conversation is presently trending more toward the political and theoretical and less toward the practical; after all, there is a finite set of pick-up tips and they have been comprehensively covered. The gamesters are speaking more about how to permanently reassert one’s manliness in this fin-de-siècle culture than they are delivering new methods on how to find em, fuck em, and flee.
A war-footing is a state of mind above all. A war-footing means it’s not all about you and your sexploits. It means helping a brother out, as we have been doing here with Ted C. It means not selling a brother down the river for a cheap piece of strange. How the effort must ultimately manifest itself in specifics is not yet clear. But it doesn’t hurt to get your mind right, now, in preparation for the collapse ahead.
The rotten fruits of feminism are coming a-cropper in our generation. When the enemy begins surrendering en masse, we will need a smart approach to their newfound submission. In other words, after a fifty-year holiday from history, men are going to have to learn how to be men again. How to get women is a vital part of that process, and the PUAs damn well got that covered. But they are not prepared for the magnitude of the upcoming victories, their thinking is boyish and immature, and the most they can tell their charges is to keep going back to the well, and keep slurping up tang. Their slapdash and selfish approach isn’t worthy of the revolution they sparked, nor is it adequate to the greater task, nor is it the leadership men will need.
Matt
April 21st, 2012 at 9:43 pm
“… she was a bit of a butch.”
Ew. You ruined the iconography.
April 21st, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Fuck the nanny. Even if she’s a dreadnaught. Take one for the team. That will focus your wife’s attention.
More seriously though, Scruggs, feel your oats, brother. The others counsel caution when it comes to abuse, but one more set of restraints is not what you need. “I wouldn’t ignore her protests,” Stingray wrote. “She may use that against you.” Ignoring is an subverbal art. If you are an oaf and a dolt, then yeah, pay attention to the content of her speech, you might miss an important cue. But the smell of self-restraint works counter to your purposes. You can’t conditionally put the fear of God into someone. You have to lose control a little. Above all, she has to sense your potential for losing control. You have to rewire her brain (which, through regular capitulation, you have allowed to fall into desuetude) before she can acquire the limbic capacity to respect you.
God bless Stingray, she is a woman, and it would be impossible for her to counsel something other than Listen To Her on some level: it is an expression of her own female anxiety and she’s more beautifully feminine for it. But that’s not our bag, brother. Ask yourself this honestly. Do you want to harm your wife? I don’t think you do. Do you love her? I believe this must be the case. So be confident that your taking control of the situation is what’s best for her, even if there is some pain and fear involved in the transition.
I realize in our hypersensitive culture, my broaching this taboo will be interpreted as an encouragement of wife-beating. It’s not, and fuck you for thinking so. Wife beaters are spastic cowards who cannot manage the exigencies of manliness. I don’t know you or how you will take what I say, but that won’t stop me from supplying the truth. You have to achieve a mode of dominance within a mode of trust. She doesn’t know she is shit testing you, she just does it. You have to shock her with a rejection of her games in a decisive and memorable way. She doesn’t believe you have it in you, and after this long, neither do you. Or do you?
Think like a woman, as Stingray has been trying to help you do. If you can’t handle little ol’ her, how can you protect her from the much tougher hombres out in the world?
Yes, it hurts. Life hurts. Nobody likes pain (unless they think they deserve it, and seek penance). But she likes pain if it is an indication of her man’s strength. You are a bull in her china shop. She must know your beastly power is in the service of her well-being, but from time to time, she must also be reminded you haven’t lost those powers. Envelop her with your will. Stop allowing her fear to dictate your family’s actions. Figure out the sweet spot. “You be the boy.”
Matt
April 22nd, 2012 at 4:12 am
So…..do you really know Krista D from Tahoe?
Your description of her isn’t perfect but is fairly close.
She did indeed need an alpha male to take the lead.
The fellow she married is probably not so much alpha
in that he never had the need to womanize but is one
of the most competent and confident people I know.
He was the best thing to happen to her in the almost 20 years
I’ve known her.
April 22nd, 2012 at 5:04 am
[…] More You Say…”Xsplat – “Do You Love Me?”Rollo Tomassi – “You Be the Boy“, “Wife Porn”Blaze Frasier – ““You Gonna Learn […]
April 22nd, 2012 at 8:29 am
Scruggs:
About dominance in the bedroom it might be that you need to become more dominant outside of it to have her respond properly. However, you can try to use more mental and gradual dominance rather than being forcefull. Direct her more during the sex and gradually amp it up. You can control her without being hard physically. I would check out both Daniel Rose` Sex God method and David Shades Manual to learn more about mental bedroom dominance. Shades use of yes ladders, for example, is a very usefull tool.
Have you read marriedmansexlife by Athol Kay? He does specialize in these kinds of power shifts and gets very good results with it.
I would check out the Authentic Man program if I was you. It is very good at develping deep inner game and I think looking into their work will help your wife respond better to you. It is somewhere between Davi Deida and regular game but much more concrete than Deida so easier to get results with.
Is there a way you can gradually take over some control of the day to day family stuff? Something you can make the kids or kids and wife do with you that you direct and are in control of? Are there things you can make your wife do differently? I am suggesting figuring out ways to start directing how she does some of the things she does when you are not there. Several manosphere women and MMSL readers describe how even though the wife makes most of the day to day decitions in household and kids management because she is the one doing most of that work the husband still has the final word if something bigger needs to be deceided and he does give both overal commands and some micromanagment from time to time. I am thinking you should try to gradualy figure out how to do more and more of that. THe easiest first is probably as I suggested to find something new that you can introduce so you have control. You can also probably start taking control of vacations. Figure out a good different and exciting for the whole family place to go for your next vacation. Make it something where you can be in charge and direct things for most of the vacation and use that time to boss your wife arround a bit and be a strong leader for your kids.
One little caring dominance move a friend of mine does with his girlfriend is to tell your she needs to take a break, sit down and look at Desperate Housewifes (becasue nothing calms her more than that) and that he will finish whatever she is doing. He will usually physically guide her from the dishes or whatever she is doing to the sofa, or carry her over and place her in it and then set on the DVD and makes it clear she has no choice. This way you get to both display dominance, that you “see her”/see her needs and that you contribute to the family/workload.
THere are a multitude of ways you can start to take over how things are done. Maybe you can introduce some new diet or elements of a diet to put your whole family on. Introduce a regular outing to a resturant followed by an activity every other week or once a month. Find some new skill or something that you start teaching your daughters and then gradually involve and direct your wife in teaching it to them.
Check out the gamingmwife blog. He describes very well a gradual shift of power in his relationship with trial and error once he deceided to try to game his wife. Also read the DaveFromHawai post at Hertiste and his own posts about relationship game at Hawaiianlibertarian.
April 22nd, 2012 at 11:24 am
Wow. I’m usually left floundering around for words to get across the dominance dynamic. This is all very good detailed advice.
Here is another trick. If she is tired and says “I’m sleepy, I’m going to bed”, use that as an opportunity to sneak in a command. Say “go to bed”.
April 22nd, 2012 at 11:38 am
This is a life strategy I employ.
April 22nd, 2012 at 7:34 pm
The red pill has a bitter taste.
From the sublime imagery of an archetype to the sublime irony of a cosmic joke… Typical learning experience.
April 22nd, 2012 at 7:39 pm
Whoops. Last comment was supposed to be a reply to King A above.
April 24th, 2012 at 10:23 am
I did an interesting experiment. Remember Heartiste’s post on the asymmetry of faces (Linkage Disequilibrium)? Well, I took the photo I submitted for my passport, straight face, no smile, and mirrored the right side of my face and then the left. Bizarre. Mirroring my left side showed a slightly feminine, softer-looking face. My right side symmetry showed a dark, almost sinister, masculine face. The first face does not intimidate, the second one looks like you don’t want to fuck with that guy.
Without an explanation of what she was seeing, I showed my wife the photos side-by-side and asked her which one looks most like me. She picked the second, the masculine side.
Thanks again to everyone who weighed in on my issue. It is clear what I need to do.
April 24th, 2012 at 3:24 pm
wow.. awesome fuck’n post rollo
May 6th, 2013 at 2:08 pm
[…] longer are Men allowed a monopoly on masculinity. Domineering women as a default status in heterosexual relationships pushes masculinity into her domain. Dominant […]
April 20th, 2014 at 6:58 pm
[…] I will however disagree with Mark’s assertion that homosexuals are in some way ‘hybrids’ of men and women. If you read through my Sexual Fluidity post you’ll come to realize that even in homosexual relationships there is almost invariably a dominant and submissive partner, either of which reflect the evolved natures of intersexual relations – dominant, masculine male to submissive, feminine female. It’s not that a homosexual is gender-role indecisive or is some hybrid of the two, it’s about determining who’ll be the male and who’ll be the female. […]
November 25th, 2014 at 10:07 pm
[…] or merit according to the Feminine Imperative. So Men must be removed from masculinity. Domineering women, as a default status in heterosexual relationships, pushes masculinity into her domain. Dominant […]