When Neil Strauss was writing The Game there was an interesting side topic he explored towards the end of the book. He became concerned that the guys who were learning PUA skills and experiencing such success with women of a calibre they’d never experienced before would turn into what he called “Social Robots.” The idea was one that these formerly Game-less guys would become Game automatons; mouthing the scripts, acting out the behaviors and meeting any countermanding behaviors or scripts from women with calculated and planned “if then” contingencies.
The fear was that these Social Robots “weren’t themselves”, they were what Mystery Method, Real Social Dynamics, etc. were programing them to be and the relative success they experienced only reinforces that “robot-ness”. My experience with guys from this blog, SoSuave and other forums has been entirely different. If anything most men transitioning to a Red Pill mindset tenaciously cling to the ‘Just Be Yourself and the right girl will come along’ mentality.
A strong resistance guys have to Red Pill awareness will always be the “faking it” and keeping it up effort they believe is necessary to perpetuate some nominal success with women. They don’t want to indefinitely be someone they’re not. It’s not genuine to them and either they feel slighted for having to be an acceptable character for women’s intimate attention or they come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to maintain ‘the act’ indefinitely. Either way there’s a resentment that stems from needing to change themselves for a woman’s acceptance – who they truly are should be enough for the right woman.
I’ve written more than a few essays about this dynamic and the process of internalizing Red Pill awareness and Game, but what I want to explore here is the root idealism men retain and rely on when it comes to their unconditioned Game. In truth this Game is very much the result of the conditioning of the Feminine Imperative, but the idealistic concept of love that men hold fast to is what makes that conditioning so effective.
What’s Your Game?
I’ve written before that every man has a Game. No matter who the guy is, no matter what his culture or background, every guy has some concept of what he believes is the best, most appropriate, most effective way to approach, interact with and progress to intimacy with a woman. How effective that “Game” really is is subjective, but if you asked any guy you know how best to go about getting a girlfriend he’ll explain his Game to you.
Men in a Blue Pill mindset will likely parrot back what their feminine-primary conditioning had him internalize. Just Be Yourself, treat her with respect, don’t objectify her, don’t try to be someone you’re not, are just a few of the conventions you’ll get from a Blue Pill guy who is oblivious to the influence the Feminine Imperative has had on what he believes are his own ideas about how best to come to intimacy with a woman.
For the most part his beliefs in his methodology are really the deductive conclusions he’s made by listening to the advice women have told him about how best to “treat a woman” if he wants to get with her. A Blue Pill mindset is characterized by identifying with the feminine, so being false is equated with anything counter to that identification.
When you dissect it, that conditioned Blue Pill / Beta Game is dictated by the need for accurate evaluation of men’s Hypergamous potential for women. Anything that aids in women’s evaluating a man’s hypergamous potential to her is a tool for optimizing Hypergamy. The dynamics of social proof and pre-selection are essentially shortcuts women’s subconscious uses to consider men’s value to her. Likewise the emphasis Blue Pill Game places on men’s ‘genuineness’ is a feminine conditioning that serves much the same purpose – better hypergamous evaluation. If men can be conditioned to be up front about who they are and what they are, if they internalize a mental point of origin that defers by default to feminine primacy, and if they can be socially expected to default to full and honest disclosure with women by just being themselves, this then makes a woman’s hypergamous evaluation of him that much more efficient.
This is where most Blue Pill men fail in their Game; who they are is no mystery, their deference and respect is worthless because it’s common and unmerited, and just who he is isn’t the character she wants him to play with her.
So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is. However, it’s important to consider that this genuineness is still rooted in his idealistic concept of a mutual and reciprocal love.
From Of Love and War:
We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.
We want to, so badly.
If we do, we soon are no longer able to.
In The Burden of Performance I made the case for men’s need to perform for feminine acceptance and how men’s idealistic concept of love centers not on a want for unconditional love, but rather a love free from the performance requirements women’s opportunistic, Hypergamous, concept of love demands of him. This quote sums up that idealistic want for rest from having to perform to earn a woman’s love and acceptance.
The problem of course is the supposition that a performanceless love would ever really be love, but men’s idealistic nature still believes that the state is realizable. On a social scale the Feminine Imperative sees the resource utility in this and so encourages the idea that both men and women mutually share his concept of idealized love. Thus men, unaware of the respective differences in concepts both sexes hold with regard to love, enter into a perpetual state of qualifying for a love they believe women should be capable of. Men will work hard, build empires and amass fortunes to come to that state of performanceless rest they idealize should be possible with a woman.
The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism
About two weeks ago I was called to the carpet in the commentary by George Meeks (one of many aliases) for what he believes was an inconsistency in my assessment of men’s idealistic concept of love and how that idealism is really symbiotic with women’s opportunistic concept of love. I’ll spare you his autistic attention trolling, but he did raise a few points I do need to clarify about how men and women’s separate, but purpose driven, concepts of love developed.
From Intersexual Hierarchies:
In the beginning of this series I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can really see how the two dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two come together.
When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.
From Heartiste’s post:
7. Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance were highest in couples where the woman made all or most of the decisions. Female decision-making status was an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.
8. Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers. Lesson for men: You can have a happy relationship with a woman who makes more than you as long as you remain the dominant force in her non-work life. Or: GAME SAVES MARRIAGES.
When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.
This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.
In and of itself, a man’s idealism can be a source of strength or his greatest weakness. And while unfettered Hypergamic opportunism has been responsible for many of women’s worst atrocities to men, in and of itself Hypergamy is the framework in which the human species has evolved. Neither is good nor bad, but become so in how they are considered and how they are applied.
Men’s idealistic concept of love is a buffer against women’s opportunistic concept of love. When that idealism is expressed from a Beta mindset women’s opportunism dominates him and it’s debilitating. When it’s expressed from an Alpha mindset it supersedes her opportunism to the relationship’s benefit.
Conditioned Idealism
If you want to use Blue Valentine (the movie) as an example, the guy in the relationship abdicates all authority and ambition over to his wife’s opportunism. He idealistically believes “love is all that matters” and has no greater ambition than to please her and ‘just be himself’, because his conditioning has taught him that should be enough. His Beta conditioning convinced his idealism that his wife would shared in that idealistic concept of love in spite of his absence of performance. Consequently she despises him for it. She’s the de facto authority in the relationship and he slips into the subdominant (another child to care for) role.
Now if a man’s Alpha, willful, idealism propels him to greater ambition, and to prioritize his concept of love as the dominant, and places himself as his mental point of origin for which a woman accepts you can see how this leads to the conventional model. His idealism is enforced by how he considers it and how he applies it.
Men’s idealistic concept of love can be the worst debilitation in a man’s life when that idealistic nature is expressed from a supplicating Beta mentality. It will crush him when that idealism is all about a bill of goods he idealistically hopes a woman shares and will reciprocate with. This is predominantly how we experience idealism in our present cultural environment of feminized social primacy.
From an Alpha perspective that idealism is a necessary buffer against that same feminine opportunistic concept of love that would otherwise tear a Beta apart.
There was a time when men’s idealistic concept of love was respected above the opportunistic (Hypergamy based) concept of love. I explored this social control of Hypergamy in Women Behaving Badly.
Under the old set of books, when men’s attractiveness (if not arousal) was based on his primary provisioning role his love-idealism defined the intergender relationship. Thus, we still have notions of chivalry, traditional romance, conventional models of a love hierarchy, etc. These are old books ideals, and the main reason I’ve always asserted that men are the True Romantics is due exactly to this love-idealism.
There was a time when men’s idealistic love concept pushed him to achievements that had social merit and were appreciated. Ovid, Shakespeare and the Beatles would not be the human icons they are if that idealism weren’t a driving force in men and society. Likewise, women’s opportunistic, hypergamy-based concept of love, while cruel in its extreme, has nonetheless been a driving motivation for men’s idealistic love as well as a filter for sexual selection.
Under the new set of books, in a feminine-centric social order, the strengths of that male idealism, love honor and integrity are made to serve the purpose of the Feminine Imperative. Men’s idealistic love becomes a liability when he’s conditioned to believe that women share that same idealism, rather than hold to an opportunistic standard. This is what we have today with generations of men conditioned and feminized for identifying with the feminine. These are the generations of men who were conditioned to internalize the equalist lie that men and women are the same and all is relative. From that perspective it should follow that both sexes would share a mutual concept of love – this is the misunderstanding that leads men to expect their idealism to be reciprocated and thus leads to their exploitation and self-abuse.
A man’s idealism becomes his liability when he enters a woman’s opportunistic frame still believing they both share a mutual concept of love.
March 22nd, 2015 at 2:51 pm
Back in the wild, men may have been less idealistic. After agriculture took hold, prosperity spread, men may have become idealistic. As societies were built, women benefited but couldn’t be how things are today because life was still very harsh for men and women. So men could still be idealistic. Idealism can be liability now because things are so easy. Especially relative to how it used to be for women.
Buying a new phone every time a new version comes out. Grocery stores are always stock. Turn a knob for instant water.
How easy are things when you can even bring “The End Of Men” and not be called crazy? You might as well say you really have to put oil in your car.
There’s an article discussing around the time of the start of agriculture that it was 1 man breeding with 17 women ratio.
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/17-to-1-reproductive-success
March 22nd, 2015 at 2:52 pm
“There just isn’t any point in doing all this. Women are not capable of empathy, genuine intimacy, or love. So even if you successfully game her and her desire is genuine, what is it really worth?”
It is worth nothing – except some objectivly measurable, real-life-rewards. Like mind-blowing sex etc.pp.
The moment you fully realize (not just know, but realize) that it is worth nothing, this reward is freely given.
Because Hypergamy has no real dangers to fight (–>coddled western society, feamles free to do anything) and is out of control, the rewards of hypergamy are given only to those who still break it.
What is the ultimate counter move? Not caring at all – because real world pressure is gone, hypergamy inflates itself to encounter resistance – and the ultimate restiance is considering females worth nothing (but, socially savy, not explicitly saying so).
That’s why all inner game development that devalues females WHILE still being superfically sociable(!) gives you instant, massive amounts of options.
March 22nd, 2015 at 3:05 pm
@ Hobbes – Good observations, and the truth is I actually don’t really know the history of this idealized view of love. My belief was that it’s quite recent actually, and arises during medieval time as “romance” and “courtly love” and “chivalry”. It makes sense that these were memes first developed in court, by elites who’s wealth and relative security made more practical considerations less pressing.
But it turns out that romantic love occurs across cultures. I’m tempted to think of it as connected to women’s advantage in sexual selection, but as I’ve said many times, I don’t play amateur scientist. As an aside I am reading voraciously on evolutionary biology and sociology and cultural history – currently reading some Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday and also The Social Order of the Underworld – both absolutely fascinating.
I’m finding that in order get any perspective on this at all one needs to think about the society as a whole. Just think about what tribal/clan societies went through with divorce – men and women have long broken up. The clan of the husband who came up with the dowry want their money back, and the clan of the women who received the dowry have to pay it. There may also have been politics of territory or clan/tribe/band that were dealt with via the marriage. In other words there was a ton of social pressure to not divorce.
It wasn’t handled quietly – everyone with a stake weighed in and argued it out. A man’s family and business associates, to whom this could mean, for example that your tribe lost travel rights over another tribe’s land, would all have their say.
That is also because most everyone in a band/clan knew each other and within tribes knew of each other or had common connections to each other. The divorce would effect many people. But today? We live in weird, voluntary, often fairly narrow social constructs with each other and the idea that our family or peers/friends would argue about this with me or my ex or her family about our divorce before it occurred in an open way seems impossible.
It is worth noting that when my marriage started circling the bowl due to my wife going full-metal-cunt, one person in our family did speak up to her, it was her sister. She read her the riot act for how badly my ex would treat me in public – but that was it and that was well before the divorce. Fyi, this was new treatment by my ex – I didn’t marry a woman who got her kicks by treating me like shit. This began in like year 6 of a 9 year relationship – 1 yr after the child, when she knew she had the gun cocked and locked. I hadn’t changed a bit, and perhaps had only gotten better as my career was rocketing upward at that time and also had demonstrated what a committed and loving Dad I was by that time.
But I remember thinking many times how fucked up it was that this whole thing wasn’t more of a family and community issue. I also wish there was some shame associated with it. But that isn’t the point. My point is that when thinking about how all this changes, one has to look at the complete social context and there are so many factors which contribute to how sex and marriage and courtship and families and divorce and infidelity etc occur.
I think right now we are seeing a “Perfect Storm” of politics, culture and hypergamy on ‘roids in a fit of runaway selection due to the feedbacks, and it’s throwing our whole society out of whack. It’s bound to burn itself out, but wow, does it suck to be dealing with. I also realize that I’m just a grain of sand on a beach, and am being whipped around by all this. I can change exactly nothing about it, all I can really do is try to deal with it.
I just want to be happy, I don’t need to be a hero. Really. I’ve written two songs about it so far, one called Heroes Game and another called The Very Start. Making art about my Red Pill journey is quite revealing. In Heroes Game, “Looking back on the road I’m on, at the things I’ve left behind. What have I been playing where have I been aiming this life of mine? Heroes Game, Heroes Game, Heroes Game is what I’m playing. It’s all I know and who I am.” I didn’t really get how huge the heroic journey was in my view of masculinity until I wrote this song.
The heroic journey cultural meme is so overarching for male identity that many men don’t realize how controlling it is of their worldview. I’ve had it beaten out of me, and my Red Pill journey is really about seeing how that entire meme serves everyone but me. The thought of picking all that weight up again, only to be kicked in the balls again when I have a vulnerable moment by some ungrateful bitch seems ridiculous.
March 22nd, 2015 at 3:26 pm
correction. Dowries were paid by wives families, I mixed them up in the above comment.
March 22nd, 2015 at 4:41 pm
@Glenn, do you have a link to any MP3s of your music? I’d like to give it a listen.
March 22nd, 2015 at 6:06 pm
@ Rollo – Not currently as I got bored of recording and the old stuff kind of sucks. I am considering doing something on YouTube and will send a link when I do so.
March 22nd, 2015 at 6:08 pm
The question that has started to run around in my head is this: is the destruction of marriage/LTR an inevitability in any sufficiently advanced free civilized society?
Think about the past where humans evolved in tribal societies. Your options for mates were limited (pretty much static), and the established heirarchy was more or less static as well. While polygyny and hypergamy made sense at a species-wide level, to the individual and even to the tribe they didn’t. They would be a source of internal conflict that could be quite damaging or even fatal to the entire tribe.
Fast forward to small villages passing from tribal to more civilized society size. These are still social arrangements small enough that everyone knows everyone and travel between locations is still limited so things are more or less static. Polygyny and hypergamy are still very damaging to these societies.
As cities grow larger and larger, it becomes more and more possible to engage in uncommitted relationships and not have your reputation ruined or your pool exhausted. Increased availability of technologies for mobility further dilutes the consequences of unfettered roaming for the attractive individual.
There comes a point where incentives are aligned in such a way that an attractive individual has absolutely no reason to commit long term, male or female. This is even without the Feminine Imperative. Attractive individuals of both sexes are best off engaging in relationships opportunistically, and disposing of their partner when said partner’s SMV drops.
Committed LTR then becomes strictly the domain of the low SMV individual that lacks options and needs to secure sex or provisioning else risk missing out on reproduction completely.
Ultimately at the society-wide level this would result in the destruction of social fabric as children come less and less from backgrounds that help them develop proper psychological health. Now add in the modern distortion of this entire process to offload all the downsides to men and give women as many of the upsides as possible.
Even if I could instill an idealistic sense of love in a woman or at least impose an idealistic structure of love on the relationship, I have doubts that I can counteract all those inventives toward pluralistic sexual strategies for both sexes.
Now coming from a largely empiricist view of reality, I’m comfortable with the concept that there are no absolutes. For instance, the Law of Gravity is only considered a Law because we have a 99.99999% certainty it’s correct. There is no 100% certainty. Life is a game of probabilities and chances. I’m willling to accept that existence means risk. However, risk should be calculated and understood before engaging in it.
It seems to me that the current environment leaves so much uncertainty in the equation with so many incentives acting against a Man that counting on your own Idealism to act as a balancing force against Hypergamy + an incentive strcture against commitment is a dubious proposition at best. Very cautious skepticism is, in my mind, a healthy reaction to Rollo’s assertion particularly in light of much of what else he teaches that aligns with reality.
Rollo, I think I see the problem. If you were merely talking about Idealism vs. Hypergamy, it takes confidence that a man burned repeatedly in life may have difficulty mustering to commit to a relationship with his Idealistic concept of love. It might be possible, but it’s a calculated risk. When a man is up against Hypergamy + a society full of incentives aligned with never settling, all bets are off. Idealistic love has nothing reinforcing its position in the relationship, but Hypergamy does.
Even the most Alpha male on the planet will have difficulty when the fight is him vs. the whole of society. He is, after all, only human in the end.
March 22nd, 2015 at 7:01 pm
So here I am traveling the world with barely enough time to read, much less reply. But I’ve got to commend your image choice here Rollo; it’s really excellent. Making me think a bit even before reading the post.
Maybe a bit because I’ve been sightseeing and sometimes have had to, begrudgingly, take selfies for family so all my pics aren’t just like some damn postcard.
Cheers from Portugal! Enjoying lurking here between it all.
SF
March 22nd, 2015 at 7:05 pm
@Glenn
If all you’re getting from this post, or Vulnerability, or Empathy or Frame, you need to read a whole lot deeper.
I understand your frustration and a want for easy answers, but anything I write is always going to be descriptive, never prescriptive. If all you’re getting out of this blog is simple binary absolutes then perhaps going your own way is your simplest recourse.
You already know damn well it’s not an either or between Man Up or Check Out. It’s being aware of the system you find yourself in and make your decisions based on that awareness instead of a plugged in obliviousness. You can be The Most Interesting Man in the World and still be raked over the coals because you made bad decisions, or were put into adverse circumstances, because you based your understanding of yourself and your choices on a set of Rules you expected everyone else to abide by.
How you interacted with women in the 80s changed in the 90s and how my grandfather approached my grandmother back in the 30s isn’t how my son in law will approach my daughter in the next 10 years. No one is going back to the good ole days, so spare me about traditionalism. Anyone reading my writing in depth knows that’s bull shit.
But you already know this because you’re better than that Glenn, you’re a survivor and you’re intellectual enough to get my meanings.
March 22nd, 2015 at 7:16 pm
Either way, women loving opportunistically doesn’t last once you hit the wall.
http://todayslifestyle.com/entertainment/celebs/the-20-hottest-babes-of-the-90s-where-are-they-now-201544310
March 22nd, 2015 at 7:46 pm
Glenn,
“I think right now we are seeing a “Perfect Storm” of politics, culture and hypergamy on ‘roids in a fit of runaway selection due to the feedbacks, and it’s throwing our whole society out of whack. It’s bound to burn itself out, but wow, does it suck to be dealing with. I also realize that I’m just a grain of sand on a beach, and am being whipped around by all this. I can change exactly nothing about it, all I can really do is try to deal with it.
I just want to be happy, I don’t need to be a hero. ”
I’m not very empathetic, but I feel for you. A year ago I would have said the same thing in the quote above. I felt in denial that our society (The United States) was in serious decline despite all indications to the contrary. I couldn’t get through the five stages of grief. But after reading Aaron Clarey’s book “Enjoy the Decline”, subtitled Accepting and Living with the Decline of the United States, I was able to make it through the five stages of grief and get on with being happy.(Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance). From the book description on Amazon: “From learning how to adapt your psychology to learning to let go and take advantage of the socialist system, “Enjoy the Decline” carries the freedom loving American through the 5 stages of grief and puts them on a path to enjoy their life regardless of what is happening to their beloved America.”
And from my current perspective I don’t perceive that the decline is bound to burn itself out. The only thing that can turn it around–I don’t want. And that would be a apocalypse. In a post apocalyptic world we would see a reboot.
I used to be comforted by the fact that in Man’s and my struggles that if I wasn’t exactly happy I was satisfied by my accomplishments as the decades went by. I can now say that after a couple years of the manosphere and the red-pill reboot I can add I’m now happy with how things are with me. But I’m lucky to be in a community the decline hasn’t quite hit like a tidal wave yet.
Also over the decades some pursuit, most often a passionate hobby, has been able to distract me enough to still care for my job, family, spouse and avoid nihilism.
March 22nd, 2015 at 7:55 pm
Rollo,
Thank you for writing this. I know I had requested “The Marriage of Idealism and Opportunism” and you wrote it here. It does not go over my head.
Beyond the 48 laws of power, are there others on a to read list. I have 4 months before a tremendous workload.
March 22nd, 2015 at 9:10 pm
A final thought.
The only way I can see a man being idealistic in harmony with a woman’s opportunism is to constantly measure her against his own ideal template of who she needs to be to fulfill him.
I read somewhere men marry their girlfriends and discover to their shock that they got wives instead. The girlfriend is the ideal, the wife is lesser, and the maintenance costs are higher.
With correct mindset once the weight increases and hair gets cut she is no longer ideal and his love for her reflects her lack of adherence to his ideal standards. If the changes are in attitude and demeanor the same applies.
What I am suggesting is that a man’s idealized love is a projection of his love for himself as projected onto his woman. What the FI has done is get him to focus on loving her at the cost of his own love of self.
The blue pill reframed love as sort of voluntary slavery. Commitment becomes a gift of obligation where no gratitude is to be expected and love is set of chains. The burden of performance is now solely for the benefit of the woman, and her evaluation the whip.
Where there is harmony between idealism and opportunism is that the man’s idealized and projected love of self carries the strength to reject her performance demands and enforce his ideal expectations of her. This would place her in the position of most easily satisfying her hypergamy by facilitating his goals and his priorities.
March 22nd, 2015 at 9:32 pm
Just re-read the article, and I still get a purple feeling from this idea of Idealism. But in the end I am going to hold off judgement until I read the book. This post came up as a response to someone questioning what was written in the book, so maybe reading the idea in the context it was originally presented will either make me see I’m just missing it, or whether I decide it just doesn’t fit into my experience of things.
When I first came to TRM I remember being in a state over a woman I was seeing at the time- new to RP. I remember Rollo responding to me specifically and just not getting it. Maybe this is at play here, but this is not an emotional conflict with me, like unplugging definitely was…. this is evoking a cognitive dissonance I get when something is just rationally off.
Or who knows, maybe if I ever get inspired to have a relationship again and start desiring one then this will be relevant to me.
Either, soon as this semester is over. I can’t wait to read the book. If this is any indication, it may turn out to be a really challenging experience, and every RP challenge I’ve had to face so far has been a blessing in disguise.
Or maybe Rollo is just wrong, lol. Nobodies infallible after all
March 22nd, 2015 at 9:34 pm
Did Fortune Magazine’s
Erica Swallow just respond to the success of “The
Rational Male – Preventive Medicine” by Rollo Tomassi?
A close friend just shared her views
on the Erica Swallow piece.
The FB comments below her post
fit this discussion of Idealism
and “egalitarian equalism”
(phrase coined by Rollo Tomassi)
March 22nd, 2015 at 9:57 pm
There was once a blog in the manosphere from Solomon II. Does anyone remember him? It was before my time on the manosphere.
It was about idealism for the longtime married guy’s wife. There is still this ability to be old school if the wife was locked down before the time of cellphones and Facebooks.
Those of you technically skilled can potentially go to the archive at ROK and go to page 69 of the archive and read about how an old guy can still choose the old wife over the hottie harlot young chicks.
Keep in mind that those that married in the 90’s, if they didn’t settle still could have locked down a good woman. It is not gloating. Just like Rollo’s father said. “Seems to have been the right thing to do at the time.” And it turned out to not blow up in our face for some of us. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Solomon II. A good read.Sorry to offend anyone if I am propagating something the original author wanted to keep off the grid. Dalrock had some discussions with Solomon and ROK DGAF.
http://www.returnofkings.com/misc/The-Solomon-Group.pdf
March 22nd, 2015 at 9:58 pm
And where’s jeremy? I need to know, man.
Is that a Bell&Howell super8 or straight eight that Monsieur le Hipster is arseing about with? Or an early Canon? (Couldn’t care less about Girly’s 35mm reflex).
March 22nd, 2015 at 10:08 pm
“Even the most Alpha male on the planet will have difficulty when the fight is him vs. the whole of society.”
Sun, maybe I should just leave off commenting and let you pull the waggon. Bang on it, my son.
Cunt’s still got to feed himself, keep himself warm and never, ever get sick. Even if he’s all on his own-i-o.
A hard task, outside the Tropics. Impossible on your own, for more than a couple of winters. (Break a leg for luck, luv!)
Which a lot of *Very Silly People* can’t seem to grasp.
March 22nd, 2015 at 10:09 pm
Pffttt. Spot the errant italic tag, people.
March 22nd, 2015 at 10:31 pm
I can see Rollo be whipped by his wife at home LOL ;)
March 22nd, 2015 at 11:10 pm
Thanks Rollo, this article was the missing link for me, that has set my mind at ease.
March 22nd, 2015 at 11:13 pm
@cyfox- can I ask how so? I feel like I’m missing it. What did you get from it that it set you at ease?
March 22nd, 2015 at 11:15 pm
@badpainter
The only way I can see a man being idealistic in harmony with a woman’s opportunism is to constantly measure her against his own ideal template of who she needs to be to fulfill him.
I can see this and agree with it. I expected that if an Alpha Man brings his idealism to the marriage, then it will require his constant vigilance to be maintained. Then again, it’s the job of any leader to maintain any relationship he’s engaged in by measuring against his ideal then enforcing changes. I wouldn’t expect his marriage to be any different.
March 22nd, 2015 at 11:56 pm
@Sun- I think I see my problem here- If a man is constantly measuring and enforcing then he is not, by my definition, idealizing. That doesn’t sound like idealism, does it? It sounds like very pragmatic thinking. So maybe I’m getting hung up on the definition of “ideal”, but it seems a better word should be chosen if that is what we are saying.
For example, if what we are defining as idealism is a man comparing his real gf/wife to an ideal and then measuring and enforcing rules to get the relationship to his ideal, then we can say even BP betas do that- they just do it in all the wrong and ineffectual ways. But even a beta sees his gf/wifes flaws and deviations from his ideal and then scrambles to get things on track- in the case of the beta he tries supplication and appeasement, but he is doing as you say. And alpha does it as well, but he uses dread, game etc to more effectively, and more likely succeed. But at its core it is the same.
If that is the case, then I can see how my definition of idealism is my sticking point.. but up to now I’ve taken idealism to mean the desire of a man to be loved reciprocally, to be appreciated etc. In all fairnes, that is the definition of idealism we have used up to now when discussing the BP beta mindset.
March 23rd, 2015 at 12:02 am
So after writing in the manosphere (before it was ever called that) for 12+ years (not to mention what I wrote in university), 3 and a half years and 416 blog posts on RM and two books published you wonder if Mrs. Tomassi knows about what I write?
Heheh…ok
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:04 am
@Hobbes.
I’d have to read again to bring up fine points, but… I now feel comfortable with the “burden of performance”. I used to be blue pill ideal. Now I know not to look for that anymore. I can look back at my experiences, and see what a tragedy blue pill thinking led to. After a year or more of internalizing these new ideas… processing all the memories/nightmares in a new mindset, the only question I had left was: “What am I going to do with my desire for a soulmate… for the ideal relationship? What about loving others as myself?”
Think about being on the sports field. You are out there to perform, and you love performing. As an athlete, it’s your drive. You love it. It’s not really a burden. Sometimes, however, you do need a safe harbor. You can have a safe harbor, just avoid that with women you have a romantic interest in. **
Incidentally, I’ve come to another realization, that helped tremendously. I stopped looking for ideal relationships in every manner. I’m a lot more aware that people are different from me, but that I can have them as friends anyway. Now I see my entire community as friends, and I feel thankful for my interactions with them, even if they aren’t ideal. It is quite nice to have this diversity, actually.
Now I see that I’m supposed to lead with relation to a woman, and that the women I’ll interact with will like this, and think me better for it. I’m still ideal based, in that I make decisions with regard for the happiness of others. It makes sense now, why I should lead.
I can continue to love others as myself, in my idealistic way. I just have to also spread that love, because a woman can’t really return this. I love willingly, knowing that as an alpha, my love will at least be appreciated, although not returned, by a woman.
** I have a guy friend who just attempted suicide, because, there’s really not much health for him to hold onto, and his speech is now slurred most of the time, so he can’t even talk to people. He’s now at a ward. I was turned off when, in the past, when I saw that he was a coward. But he was also a safe harbor for me. He was really good at listening, and we would shoot pool together late into the night. I got over the cowardly thing, and accepted him as a friend anyway. If I were in his situation, I would probably suicide as well, because I have nothing left to perform with. I told him as much, and I also told him I’d miss him if he were to go. I don’t think less of him. I would treat him as an equal in my company. Only women do the pecking-order thing.
Ok, so I know this all sounds horrific, to someone with a beta mindset, that is just starting to transition to red pill. I’m not all the way there yet. Too many blue pill years under my belt. But, once you internalize this stuff… once you can start to read women and the interactions start to make sense, you know where you stand, and you have the power to control the outcome. It’s fucking awesome.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:08 am
[…] Comment on Rollo Tomasi’s Blog sums up How It Feels To Me: […]
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:38 am
It’s possible for an alpha who’s always maintaining frame to be idealistic about marriage itself, but how can he be idealistic about his partner? By definition, her opinions and behavior are irrelevant and only useful to determine tactics.
With betas idealization/supplication is really about the only tool in the toolbox a man has left. Even a framing alpha is essentially supplication and a bluff. Who is going to spend time on Marriage Game if it isn’t needed? Marriage Game is needed because the wife of a framing alpha can still walk away at any time for any reason, and he knows it.
The cavemen dragging their women by the hair were not idealists. In my memory, the Bible is not idealistic about women. They are shown to have sexual attractiveness, but behavior is all over the map from good to bad. The idealization comes from courtly love and feminism. Watch how women were portrayed in the 1930s say, versus today.
So for beta guy, all of the other traditional male tools are gone. Plus the fact that average man can go several years between girlfriends, so if he’s thinking about a family, he might have had one other serious relationship, perhaps none. Meanwhile, the average women he is marrying likely has more sexual experience and is largely proud of that. Not a good jumping off point for establishing dominant frame. Beta guy hasn’t had a lot of choice in recent years.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:57 am
@Hobbes
It is an act of idealism to get married in the feminized first world to begin with, in my opinion.
However, more to your point yes I do see it as idealism even if a Man is measuring and adjusting. Think for a moment about what you consider the ideal man you wish to be, and then think about how you’ll probably never achieve it. It is still being an idealist to aspire to that ideal, even if you in all reality know you’ll never achieve it. To me idealism is the mere act of aspiring to an ideal and making effort toward it. That will require occasional reflection on whether you are making progress toward your goal or not.
Contrary to what some on here think, I do not think idealism and realism are necessarily always mutually exclusive. There are times when they are, for instance ideally I’d love to get laid by an HB10 tomorrow with absolutely no further effort on my part. That is an ideal completely and utterly devoid of reality currently. However a year or two down the road with a lot of hard work on myself as a Man, it’s within the realm of reality. Difficult, possibly even unlikely, but could actually happen. If along the way all I find I can land is HB8s, I’m still better off than I was simply because I aspired to the ideal of banging a 10.
So to answer your question: yes it sounds like idealism to me. It’s about what you aspire to and make effort towards, not what you actually manage to achieve necessarily.
March 23rd, 2015 at 8:58 am
I like RP because it is creating beasts out of men, unleashing manliness and the IDGAF attitude. Damn it feels good to feel alive.
I just wonder sometimes why RP isn’t more widespread, its like there are only a handful of people like Rollo posting about new topics in the manosphere. How is it out of the billions of people in the world we only have like less than 10 writing about the RP theories. How is it possible something so true in reality is only discovered by a such a small group of men.
March 23rd, 2015 at 10:33 am
” You can be The Most Interesting Man in the World and still be raked over the coals because you made bad decisions, or were put into adverse circumstances,”
I think this is what Glenn is saying.. You will be put into these adverse circumstances.. no matter who you are or what you do. Your ‘decisions’ and actions are practically meaningless in this new paradigm. So why expend all this energy trying to juggle it, navigate it, and hope you reach the promised land? Just accept it, but take no shit and take no prisoners.
To make myself feel better.. I’ve tried to get across about my own situation (in my earlier posts).. I had it good for a long time fellas.. meaning I was large and in charge.. I had a patriarchal family.. a hot wife.. control of the situation.. the envy of my peers.. she slowly chipped away at it with a psychological arsenal that I couldn’t compete with. Remember, I also fell into my marriage through youthful ignorant carelessness.. put myself in a sink or swim situation and took the helm and did my best. I’ve tried to convey that an overwhelming amount of ‘good’ in my life came from these tripwires. Not only did the young marriage and fatherhood provide an escape from the SMP so many of you lament, it also caused me to grow up and get my ass in gear.. something I would have delayed otherwise (know thyself).
I think you young men who choose to start a family are faced with a future of two possible outcomes.. Either your marriage will last and your wife will be loyal for one of two reasons: either she sowed her oats while younger or she’s hideous and unwanted post-wall. or.. you will meet the same fate as myself and so many others if your wife is high SMV after she’s done the raising kids thing for a bit.
The only exceptions to this rule (for women with high SMV) are women who are: a) raised very well with old school ethics, and maintain close ties to their families, who would judge them very harshly for being a whore. b) Women who were raised fairly well, but come from modest backgrounds (small towns), and who remain in this environment, without the trappings of this new disgusting world we live in.
Very difficult formulas to consciously acquire. But really, not to offer advice again, cuz no, wouldn’t want to take advice from losers.. but..
Just accept that the possibility of getting severely fucked over will not be quashed. And there’s something to be said for throwing caution to the wind if you want a family (which I’ve tried to say before). I know for certain, if I took all this understanding of the female condition back to 1994 with me, I would not have done it.. shit.. I probably would have had a vasectomy immediately.. lol.
But, importantly.. if I could take it back to 2005, 10 years into my marriage, I could have truly saved myself. Not by changing my game, or manning up, or trying to mentally defeat the indefatigable bitch that was my wife.. but by stashing cash.. preparing for the day she wields her sword.. steering the ship into deep waters, so she doesn’t get to disembark in paradise, but must walk the plank instead. THAT is what a new age wise man should do.
March 23rd, 2015 at 10:35 am
Ps
Idealization leads to pedestalization .
March 23rd, 2015 at 10:47 am
Man this has to shared with other males it’s the only way not to get attacked in public for bringing it up. Observe and go forth.
March 23rd, 2015 at 11:08 am
p.s. if you follow my prescription above, you must make sure to spend some time with fellows who have gone through the meat grinder (i.e. the family courts). Their advice will be priceless, and unfortunately, the average married chump avoids those men, and those topics, like the plague. Big mistake. The system is so fucking irrational and skewed, your intuition will NOT suffice. You must acquire first hand knowledge.
For example, stashing cash.. you can do this easily.. however, her cunt lawyer will dig deep and spend much effort trying to identify exactly that. You must be very cunning and thorough in your efforts, or they will come back to bite you.
March 23rd, 2015 at 11:50 am
(h/t to TRP)
Beta Idealism: ‘I hope I can find a woman who makes me feel the way I want to feel. She must be out there.’
Alpha Idealism: ‘I’m worth too much to settle for anything less than what I want in a woman.’
Here’s something to consider; A guy like Roosh can live the better part of his life in different countries, make a living sleeping with countless women and telling the story, and come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of women aren’t worth his emotional investment. The best of them don’t come close to his ideal.
Yet, after all this experience, he still has that ideal. In spite of all the clowning and roleplaying he has to do to entertain women there’s still a want for that ideal connection. Even MGTOW still want that ideal concept of love, they just don’t see it as being realistic or worth the investment needed to maintain it. They wouldn’t turn it down if the opportunity presented itself.
It is overwhelmingly men who are open to 2nd and 3rd marriages, even after horrible 1st marriages, while women are ‘meh':
http://time.com/3584827/pew-marriage-divorce-remarriage/
Even in the face of statistics like this, men want to remarry:
http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/04/why-second-marriages-are-more-perilous/
Why do you suppose that is? Women’s opportunistic concept of love is easy to wrap your head around, so their consolidating on their security needs explains their lackluster desire for marriage or remarriage, but why do men, even after they get burned, want to remarry more?
I would argue that Beta conditioning combined with Blue Pill hope and men’s idealistic concept of love predispose them to insecurities they believe only women can uniquely solve for them.
March 23rd, 2015 at 12:31 pm
OT…
I did not get a chance to say Congratulations on the new book Rollo. Somehow my wordpress login wasn’t working. So, Congrats.
I owned a paper copy of the first one, and passed it onto my brother. He has since passed it onto one of this friends/acquaintances. Last word from that guy is that he loved it and also passed it onto a friend of his. Sorry for cutting into your sales, but just wanted to share that.
I’m going to be getting multiple copies of both the first and the second one next week. I already have it in mind to hand one copy to a young kid I sail with, he’s just turning 19 in a year or so. He’s got lots of hot girls down at the yacht club desiring attention, so I’m thinking it’ll do him a lot of good.
Honestly, reading it through, the first book really does feel like just a springboard. There’s so much more to write on this topic.
March 23rd, 2015 at 12:42 pm
That’s OK Jeremy, that’s what I want you to do with the print copy
March 23rd, 2015 at 12:49 pm
@Rollo
“I would argue that Beta conditioning combined with Blue Pill hope and men’s idealistic concept of love predispose them to insecurities they believe only women can uniquely solve for them.”
My personal observation is that these men are on a never-ending quest for idealized reunion with their mother’s “unconditional” love (or, if they didn’t get it from mommy, to rewrite their life script and obtain that which their conditioned BP hope tells them is out there in that one special snowflake). They are like bugs that will endlessly cling to the outside of a screen door or repeatedly bump into the window pane in a vain attempt to reach the light.
March 23rd, 2015 at 12:51 pm
“Playing nice is a privilege, playing dirty is oft a necessity. One must balance their ideals with their immediate needs.” – IllimitableMan
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:09 pm
And Roosh—not to downplay his massive contributions to the Sphere in any way—fairly reeks of “desperately seeking the Madonna.” It’s always interesting that many of the borderline misogynist gamers seem to keep flying at the “ideal woman” window pane and that they are obviously frustrated BP idealists. At least through my red colored lenses, anyway.
I don’t fault Roosh for his ongoing quest. It has driven him to publicly generate a prodigious and helpful body of work. However, in an RP reality—such an ideal is obviously not a realistic, achievable goal.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:09 pm
@ Rollo – Thanks for the spirited response and I guess to some degree I’m being provocative intentionally to air this out. It’s also true that I find myself very emotional about all of this and well, I just let it rip as i think that’s the best service I can do for other men here. I also appreciate the clarification, in the sense of being descriptive rather than prescriptive, it actually makes a difference in how I see your commentary. And yes, I guess I have to admit that I know you are not recommending a binary man-up or check-out approach. But still, I wonder how many men could ever make it work in today’s world? And at what cost to them personally? Is the bar just impossibly high for most men?
I guess I also should admit that I’m still in kind of a low spot mentally and this post hit me in the nutz – I’m definitely not being my best self these days. And yes, I do long for a respite from the constant pressure to perform, and I kind of hate this about myself. So you did press some buttons, damn I hate being this honest sometimes…
I was blown away by your next comment about the idealism of men a la Roosh. I see it in myself – even with the most straight-up fucktoy relationship I’ve ever had with a women, as I mentioned in my comment I find myself wanting “more”. And she’s not compatible with me intellectually or in terms of interest and would not likely make a good wife or LTR. But still, that inchoate desire is always cooking away.
That sentiment is also the root of lots of trouble in relationships for me, I think. When I transcend that “wanting” I find I get much better results with women because really, they aren’t operating off of the same vision as me and when I impose it there is always trouble. It’s kind of shocking when I experience it because I realize how wrong I’ve been about women, yet that idealism is always there as an impulse.
I think one of the reasons it persists is due the heroes meme that I brought up in my comment. We get to be “winners” and “heroes” in our own minds by winning a high value woman. Men’s lives are all struggle and competition and this is just another one in which we get to judge and value ourselves inside of. I think this gets to the real cause of my visceral reaction here. I am really tired of grinding myself to bits and I am also tired of finding myself coming up short in my own assessments of myself. After 52 years, I’m a bit tired of it all.
Perhaps the truth about me is that my grasp exceeded my reach and that I should have lowered my sights. I don’t know, but what is true right now it that I feel quite bitter and also ashamed about having “lost” at the game of marriage and family. As much as I see how I was overcome by events and circumstances and the behavior of others, when I adopt the Red Pill informed view, I see how much I was at fault and how I let myself off the hook for performance. It’s all just so cutthroat, ya know?
Sigh.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:34 pm
rollo…why are ur books so cheap? i am not complaining..thanks fore making ur works available. u save men agony
[I’m a saint, what can I say? Actually spreading the message is more important to me. I make a good living in my career already; turning my writing into a living would compromise the message. I don’t ever want to be dependent on writing for my livelihood – I’ve seen what’s happened to the Purple Pill bloggers who have.]
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:46 pm
One thing that I think sets off the likes of some RP guys is that I make an effort to test my own assertions in as antiseptic a way as I can objectively do.
I’ve mentioned before that Hypergamy is neither good nor evil in and of itself, but how it’s applied and how it’s controlled for. Despite all that it’s important to remember that women’s sexual strategy evolved as a pragmatic response to their physical conditions. Hypergamy works. It sucks for men to be on the cruel sharp end of it, but it is the most efficient result of adapting to conditions.
With that in mind there is also a latent purpose to men’s idealism and, as an extension, men’s idealistic concept of love. Women’s strategic opportunistic concept of love serves a survival-level purpose, so it stands to reason that men’s idealistic concept of love must also serve a species-sustainability purpose.
Beta Bucks provisioners’ idealism may serve the monogamous purpose of sustaining offspring that may or may not be his own. From a sexual strategy perspective that idealistic love concept doesn’t necessarily serve his own genetic best interests, but it does ensure species survival.
The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to be fulfilled, the other’s must be compromised or abandoned.
Men’s idealism may serve the purpose of facilitating this abandonment or compromise of sexual strategy for the benefit of parental investment. Women’s Hypergamic duplicity may also serve much of the same purpose. I’ve speculated that women’s solipsism, harsh as it is, is the result of survival adaptations (War Brides). Men’s idealism may also follow in that adaptation.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:46 pm
@Rollo
“I would argue that Beta conditioning combined with Blue Pill hope and men’s idealistic concept of love predispose them to insecurities they believe only women can uniquely solve for them.”
@Glenn
” I do long for a respite from the constant pressure to perform,”
I think what we’re broadly defining as idealism here is more along the lines of Glenn’s statement, than Rollo’s.. imo
Guys are gluttons for punishment, and will ignore red flags and carry on with a worthless woman, because they are weary, because they are desperate, because they want things to be easy, because they want to rest, end the rejection.. they want to believe.. yes.. idealism.
They settle easily because it beats playing the game, and it beats loneliness. Let’s face it, we can’t all be Glenns (by his description of his Odysseus-like existence). The majority get almost nothing for their performance. So they will close their eyes and hope, stare into medusa’s eyes with reckless abandon, sell their souls to the devil, just for a brief respite.
I can see this clearly in the desperate sap (but otherwise upstanding good guy) who is now engaged to my wife (yes, still my wife), completely enabling her prima donna attitude, despite watching her perform the most vile acts from the front row. Insanity.. but he is weary.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:53 pm
@Glenn
“But still, I wonder how many men could ever make it work in today’s world?”
Obviously very few. Look at how few men as a percentage of the population actually join this community. Starting with the truth about yourself and the world around you is the bare minimum. Then look at how many guys get a look at that, throw their hands up with a “Fuck it I can’t win.” and go MGTOW. What’s left is probably the sum total of men that can do it. Not very many.
“And at what cost to them personally?”
What has it cost you? There’s your answer. Possibly more depending on how bad off a guys is.
“Is the bar just impossibly high for most men?”
The Sexodus isn’t happening for nothing. First world populations aren’t shrinking because guys suddenly started hating sex. Most guys just give up out of frustration before ever learning the truth of why they fail.
“It’s all just so cutthroat, ya know?”
Yep. It’s why your emotional posts don’t upset me. We’re all coming to grips with the complete destruction of what we believed reality to be. Only the most dissociated of robots could not be hurt, upset, or ground down by that.
March 23rd, 2015 at 1:56 pm
It’s also the same exact reason we hang on for so long to obviously broken relationships, as long as our base needs are being met..
We don’t want to be cast back out into that morbid see of wannabes who don’t have a woman locked down, and must perform. I think rejection buffering is your greatest articulated concept. For me it is the number 1 thing I am currently internalizing. A 100% ‘no fear’ attitude toward rejection. This is truly loving oneself. You can say you love yourself all day long, but unless you’ve accomplished ‘no fear of rejection’, and displayed it.. you do not truly love yourself.
March 23rd, 2015 at 2:06 pm
I realize there is a socialization aspect to this, but why should it be that most men retain a natural deference to the feminine? For all of men’s default respect for women and playing nice, they’re met with negligible reward (if any) for that disposition.
Why does it still feel ‘wrong’ to be an asshole to women when that’s what women directly or indirectly reward men for? Most Blue Pill guys will still cling to that Nice Guy script even after it’s been proven to them that women love Jerks. It feels wrong to act like the Jerk. Why?
March 23rd, 2015 at 2:08 pm
This is idealism 1908
http://www.jacklondons.net/buildafire.html
March 23rd, 2015 at 2:26 pm
@rollo
Man, I think it’s just because guys are trying to qualify to be that long-term prospect for a woman, not just a lay. Again, because they want their quest to end here, with her, so they can rest. Anxious to believe they’ve found ‘The One’.
They wholeheartedly believe, and probably correctly, that the chick differentiates between cads and long term prospects, and they want to present themselves as the latter. Occam’s razor my friend.
“For all of men’s default respect for women and playing nice, they’re met with negligible reward (if any) for that disposition.”
That’s the rub of the green. The chick might have accepted your cad approach and given it up to you.. maybe.. But the chances of her settling on you as “her one true love” are far lower.. so more often than not, the guy comes up empty handed. But they still persist in approaching it this way and justify it by saying, “I’m not looking for the slut, I’m looking for the one”.
What they’re really doing is pedastalizing every woman they approach. Instead of capitalizing.
They don’t want their initial impression of the girl ruined, by witnessing her succumbing to them in douche mode.. This kills their own internal desire to accept her as their one. It’s almost like handing the girl a mask and saying, would you mind wearing this?
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:09 pm
I find it so hard to see men still think women(hypergamy) would reward them for their ideal love .
the moment you lose your job is the moment hypergamy would kick in and all your ideal love is worth nothing to her.
the best way is George`s way .
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:24 pm
Well here is a soundbite of idealism
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VaFFwABew1w
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:29 pm
@ Glenn,
While I can empathize with the feeling of “pressure” to constantly perform… in reality there is no pressure save what we place on ourselves. You can absolutely go through life with low expectations, game the ugly tatted chicks, and still have a happy life. No one is saying that you *must* use your knowledge of the red pill to succeed at nailing down an HB8+ for life, or else you’re some kind of failure.
“Perform” as much or as little as you like. Just know that your skill at gaming is likely a direct linear function to how much you practice those skills.
This brings up a topic that has come to mind lately…. too much manosphere (for me) actually drains the passion for women that I think should be there. That passion for them that would naturally come from normal testosterone levels and normal boredom is redirected by the time I spend reading and responding here… it’s muted, it’s restricted… it’s emptied from me. This says absolutely nothing, zero, zip, nada, about the absolutely essential knowledge, wisdom, and other’s experience that I get from reading and commenting around the manosphere…
Remember, the difference between poison and medicine, is often in the dosage.
It’s that passion for finding a new chick to talk to/plate-spin that has to exist to make performing feel worthwhile. It also should help tremendously at giving you the right attitude to approach and be successful while approaching.
Take breaks from the manosphere if you’re feeling low. You can’t go back to not knowing this stuff, but you can regain a lot of your day-to-day desire/passion to “perform”… rather than feeling “pressured” to do so.
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:29 pm
one last thought
the only time when a woman appreciate the “ideal love” is when you are 30 and she is 50.
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:30 pm
Your fame is spreading, chief. Even as far as this popular, long-running and fairly tough-minded housing and economics forum over in EnglandLand.
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?/topic/147969-deluded-old-scrapper-birds-on-dating-sites/page-285#entry1102689700
[OK OK, only a few of them are actually nutso, the rest are sound]
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:33 pm
@Glenn
YOU NEED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM WOMEN .
try it for 6 months.
March 23rd, 2015 at 3:53 pm
Great commentary this week. Sun Wukong keeps up a streak of 50% saying what I want to say first and 50% saying things I didn’t think of. Glenn hammers things out aggressively.
Not trying to just be everyone’s cheerleader here, but don’t have much time atm for critical reply. Just wanted to give a few shout-outs.
Ang Angmar; great comment earlier. I’ve postulated before that women posess less agency wrt their sexual instincts – men have limited control, women nearly none. This goes far in explaining the (apparently genuine) sentiment women have about their choices being someone else’s fault – it really does feel that way to them.
March 23rd, 2015 at 4:27 pm
@Forge
“I’ve postulated before that women posess less agency wrt their sexual instincts – men have limited control, women nearly none. This goes far in explaining the (apparently genuine) sentiment women have about their choices being someone else’s fault – it really does feel that way to them.”
Or so they would have you believe. This, my friend, is a very slippery slope of rationale that justifies all sorts of bad acting from serious rape accusations to the more commonplace “it just happened” excuses.
March 23rd, 2015 at 4:42 pm
@Rollo- If that is what you are saying, then I think my problem was the opposite of what I thought. In short, I was reading too deeply into it and expecting it to be more complicated than what you are trying to say. Go figure.
@Sun, Glenn etc- I honestly think that is you didn’t get married in the 0’s in your 20s, or unless you are now young enough to catch a woman before she goes feral, thus being able to influence her with more power.. then the marriage ship has sailed. Shit, even under those more idealistic conditions it’s a crapshoot, but post 30 in the present decade? You would have to be utterly BP and fucking fuckign insane to even try it. I date alot of women, mostly under 30 but up to pushing 40 if they remain fuckable (I’m 45) and I teach at a community college and work in a hospital, in other words, I meet lots of women of a wide age range. They are ALL fucked in the head as far as relationships go. What is confusing is that they can be pleasant, nice people who seem fairly reasonable and say the right things etc. But dig an inch below the surface and watch the feral, go girl, hypergamous fangs come out.
Fuck that shit.
March 23rd, 2015 at 5:08 pm
@everyone,
Thanks for your comments
March 23rd, 2015 at 5:45 pm
@Rollo
“I realize there is a socialization aspect to this, but why should it be that most men retain a natural deference to the feminine? For all of men’s default respect for women and playing nice, they’re met with negligible reward (if any) for that disposition.
Why does it still feel ‘wrong’ to be an asshole to women when that’s what women directly or indirectly reward men for? Most Blue Pill guys will still cling to that Nice Guy script even after it’s been proven to them that women love Jerks. It feels wrong to act like the Jerk. Why?”
I don’t see being a jerk as a natural response for most mentally healthy, intelligent, honorable, civilized men. Most of the true alphas that I know do not resort to being an actual jerk. Borderline cruel teasing, yes. Playful contrariness, yes. Even unapologetic selfishness, yes. Maybe it is BP socialization, but, personally, it takes me a huge amount of effort to intentionally be an asshole. That being said, I understand exactly how it can be perceived by (some) women as shorthand for dangerous IDGAF power of a sort.
I prefer the more subtle method of amused mastery. Works just fine as a substitute for asshole game. You taught me that.
March 23rd, 2015 at 5:56 pm
That was the best comment I got the “privilege” to learn from yet.
March 23rd, 2015 at 6:00 pm
@Rollo
Why does it still feel ‘wrong’ to be an asshole to women when that’s what women directly or indirectly reward men for? Most Blue Pill guys will still cling to that Nice Guy script even after it’s been proven to them that women love Jerks. It feels wrong to act like the Jerk. Why?
Maybe I’m blithely missing a point or being overly simplistic here but: because being a nice guy is the path of least social and psychological effort. People are lazy.
March 23rd, 2015 at 6:06 pm
@Hobbes
I honestly think that is you didn’t get married in the 0’s in your 20s, or unless you are now young enough to catch a woman before she goes feral, thus being able to influence her with more power.. then the marriage ship has sailed.
In all fairness this is entirely possible, but then again you’re also implicitly invoking the magical unicorn fable here. If you believe in unicorns, then yes the time may have passed. If you believe you don’t find a good woman but instead make one, then things are tougher but not impossible.
I’m still not quite sure where I stand on that subject either. A part of me is inclined to say there never was a unicorn, but then another part of me has met women briefly at some points in my life who never gave even the tiniest hint of not being one. Granted, they were always taken, had wonderful relationships and/or marriages, perfect children (if they had any), and traditional gender roles.
Were they made by their man, or were they naturally predisposed to be that way? It’s entirely possible it’s a little of both. I can honestly say I’m not sure in the end though.
March 23rd, 2015 at 6:28 pm
@Sun- there is alot of territory between a unicorn and clay the can be molded. I imagine you’d agree that there has to be a minimum of quality for anything to work. I’m saying most women don’t reach the minimum requirement to qualify as malleable. Forget unicorns man, it’s about having a minimum of standards- i.e. a reasonable n count, capable of intimacy, non alpha widow, non virulently feminist/careerist, etc.
You can’t turn shit into gold, and while a mans behavior will influence a womans behavior, it’s not like you can think that if you just “Manned Up” enough, you will turn a hoe into a wife. That is a recipe for disaster.
Maybe its the cities I’ve lived in (NY, Miami) but I have yet to meet a woman post 30 who met a minimal requirement, and whenever I have lowered those requirements I have regretted it. The last woman I knew who was capable was my ex, back in 2003 and she was 25 at the time, I was 35. I have dated many women in their 20s since and not one met those minimal requirements… much less the post 30s women.
March 23rd, 2015 at 6:49 pm
I wonder how many ghetto baby daddys suffer from idealism.
Dalrock made an interesting point about failure to launch being young mens reaction to a lack of female signalling or to put it differently the waning of idealism.
Pre Millenials are grounded in monogamy culture idealism, post Millenials will be a different kettle of fish.
Just talked to one of my soccer players (23 years old) and he mentioned how he calculated that it would be cheaper to break up with his girlfriend and pay child support than remain within a relationship (his 2nd child, already paying for another one with a different woman).
That’s the sort of conversation young guys are having, another (20 years old) said he’d kill himself if he knocked up a girl. The young men are experiencing serial polygyny at the coal face and I can tell you idealism is far from their minds. Pragmatism is the order of the day for these young men and they have no illusions of unicorns.
The younger men are swimming in serial polygyny, they have no experience of monogamy culture idealism and they are adapting.
March 23rd, 2015 at 8:32 pm
@The Diplomat –
I recognize the ability for women to utilize this narrative for their own benefit. I think it’s similar to how a man might have, in previous times especially, used an ‘I don’t know my own strength’ excuse for beating their wives or children. Acknowledging the rationalization there does not excuse the man, and it would also be foolish to thereby deny that men do, as a matter of fact, have greater strength.
So I could be wrong here. I have no data nor a clear way of collecting it. But if I’m right that would be valuable information to have as a man – whatever you intended to do with it. But I do agree that there is no cause for an abandonment of responsibility. If a certain degree of sexual arousal or activation is sufficient to remove a woman’s volition, it is contingent upon her to avoid such circumstances as inspire it. If she is not taught this fact, it becomes contingent upon society to teach her.
Instincts don’t provide any excuses, but they may provide explainations.
March 23rd, 2015 at 8:39 pm
A bit of a digression, but I think it’s very useful in general for men to understand woman’s arousal state and process – if not intuitively, at least didactically at first so you can figure out how to properly initiate, escalate, and figure out your weak spots.
Wish I had that knowledge a few years back, ha. It’s probably easy for men who have had no issue with attracting women how huge such small things can be.
March 23rd, 2015 at 9:21 pm
What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.
James Joyce, Ulysses
March 23rd, 2015 at 9:31 pm
Quoting Ulysses is an intolerable act of cruelty no matter how nicely played.
March 23rd, 2015 at 10:20 pm
@bp
March 23rd, 2015 at 11:58 pm
Gotta tell an anecdote, only sort of related to idealism, but anyway:
Went to a party this weekend, all guys, played cards. The wife of the host was there, tending to stuff. Nice looking woman, still slender, but in her 40s so getting on up there. Anyway, I am not yet divorced, and I have backed away from any tentative dating to work on myself, game, whatever.
Another man there is my age (middle age) and has been divorced for some time. He is going on about meeting people on Match.com et al and hititng up the host and his wife to see if they know anyone he can date. So the wife stammers a bit and comes out with “Do you think you can handle Jennifer?”
Gah. This woman in her 40s is shit-testing on behalf of her friend so this guy can qualify to date her aging friend. Aging friend is likely a single mom, or if never married a nutcase. But she’s still a princess, and this woman is fully on Team Woman. This “can you handle me” business. Why is that a badge of honor? You’re not a princess. i want a woman that odoesn’t cause me problems, someone that helps me. Not some entitled whore.
Anyway, the shit-testing needs to be done by proxy to “weed out.” Gotta reward the assertive alphas. Now the guy who is hitting people up for dates is no prize himself. Despte earning a decent wage, he lives in a lousy place in the worst part of town due to gambling and poor decisions, including contesting his divorce heavily, then still agreeing to payments so onerous that he’s declared bankruptcy multiple times. Also, this is a case where he was the one to file divorce, he was unhappy in the marriage.
Now I don’t know if he is going to pursue anything with “Jennifer” or what will go down there. I’m sitting that one out. But the shit test is so ridiculous. All it does is weed out the cautious, responsible types in favor of the most aggressive. Since they haven’t been in the driver’s seat in choosing their spouse in most of history, it’s no surprise that they’re so poor at choosing partners.
March 24th, 2015 at 12:48 am
@Striver
“Do you think you can handle Jennifer?”
Depends. Does she wear a collar I can hook the leash to, or do I have to bring a muzzle?
March 24th, 2015 at 12:57 am
Actually I think my future response to that one any time I hear it will be shorter:
“I own a pet crate.”
March 24th, 2015 at 1:10 am
Lol. Striver’s friend is on Match.com and is beseeching his party host’s wife to hook him up with dates at a man’s card game.
Shit test survey says: It’s pretty obvious that guy can’t handle Jennifer. Or Leslie. Or Karen. Or Charisse.
March 24th, 2015 at 3:23 am
@RM:
“I realize there is a socialization aspect to this, but why should it be that most men retain a natural deference to the feminine? For all of men’s default respect for women and playing nice, they’re met with negligible reward (if any) for that disposition.”
I think you perhaps seriously underestimate the power of socialization as an aggregate of life-long-forces, rewards and punishments.
Just a few examples of what socialization can make humans do:
– blow yourself up to kill (only a few) enemies
– willingly let yourself be sacrificed for a snake in the sky that somehow wants to eat your heart
– build a giant tomb for your sun king at your expense(willingly; relativly few slaves were used)
– go an a long, dangerous and miserable journey into the desert to fight for some dead bones of “holy” men
I could go an.
The interesting thing is this: Biological impulses lead to vague feelings and impulses that are codified into psychological and later social rituals.
Many societies of the past had a clear way of securing men’s imperative versus female subversion of it, leading to all the really important high cultures. (Sorry, small stone-age matriarchies that surivive in some isolated corner of the world purly because nobody wants to wipe them out don’t count)
And they certainly did not play nice with women (rightfully so), except in meaningless rituals that were underpinned by a serious, realist everyday-handling of women.
It was absolutly basic for them to consider women as they did, which we have to “re-learn” today.
That is what socialization *can* do – if applied correctly.
Fun fact:
All high cultures that LEFT the path of treating women like this were wiped out / started to degenerate.
This was so conspicious that many authors in the field of history (most prominently Spengler) used “female sexual freedom” as one of several hard criteria to diagnose the decline of a society.
March 24th, 2015 at 3:29 am
@ Striver: “This “can you handle me” business. Why is that a badge of honor?”
To females, it is. It’s a classic case of sexual projection:
Just because women think that a “untameable” man who is hard to control is sexually attractive, they project that onto men as some version of a “seductive challenge” – it’s part of pop songs on a regular basis.
They mean something like: “I am very wild and sexually developed, are you alpha enough to MAKE ME WANT to be a good pussycat?”
Of course, those are the exact same women who go to see Fifty Shades, but can’t handle even a minor spanking & some rough action in the sheets without nearly breaking down into “unsexy, scared little girl mode”.
My go-to-answer for these cases (that I don’t encounter much anymore because my aura usually deters them immediatly) is:
“No, I am too weak to handle a woman like that. I am very, very sorry.”
March 24th, 2015 at 5:58 am
@Rollo, “Why does it still feel ‘wrong’ to be an asshole to women when that’s what women directly or indirectly reward men for? Most Blue Pill guys will still cling to that Nice Guy script even after it’s been proven to them that women love Jerks. It feels wrong to act like the Jerk. Why?”
I think, at least at first, acting like a jerk feels kind of like giving a speech you didn’t prepare for – a kind of anxiety about playing an unfamiliar script – that will, on top of that, have unpredictable consequences. When I’ve managed to pull off the asshole (hard for me), it’s resulted in unpleasantness 2/3 of the time for the short term – even if the long term effect has been good, that association remains.
So, at a reflexive level, I think being a jerk mostly comes across as a risk with unknown consequences and poorly (intuitively) perceived rewards. And I hardly need state that modern people in general tend to be very risk-averse.
This explains a reluctance to be a jerk to people in general, though; there’s something more going on if a man fears being a jerk more to women than other men. Perhaps a women’s reactions just feel like more of a black box to them – more mysterious? I suspect living in a society where the FI is dominant creates a subconscious reverence as well. It’s not like being a jerk towards an equal, it’s like being a jerk to your boss.
If you could demonstrate to me, intellectually, that being a jerk to my boss would enhance my career, I suspect we’d find a similar difficulty in my applying it.
Myself, I’ve found a sort of exposure therapy to be the only thing that works. Start will very mild insolence in convos, teasing, don’t smile at a girl who looks at you – just stare dead at her – things like that. Gradually learn that you tend to get a new sort of response, and even when it’s negative you don’t die or ruin your life or anything. Escalate from that.
And then I thank my lucky stars I’m good-looking and not socially inept, it makes it tons easier. You need to do a lot more to get a positive response, I think, if you don’t have looks going for you. I can start to get IOI’s from nothing more than confident eye contact across the street.
March 24th, 2015 at 6:26 am
Sometimes perfect ‘marketing’ pieces just appear in front of you. The 100+ comments in support of the project are priceless.
Many comments were from ex boyfriends that assume they’ll be written about in the book. Interesting.
March 24th, 2015 at 6:30 am
“Now I don’t know if he is going to pursue anything with “Jennifer” or what will go down there. I’m sitting that one out. But the shit test is so ridiculous. All it does is weed out the cautious, responsible types in favor of the most aggressive. Since they haven’t been in the driver’s seat in choosing their spouse in most of history, it’s no surprise that they’re so poor at choosing partners.”
The “shit test” as some kind of “fitness test” that women give men is moronic. It’s just bad, immature and rude behavior by women. If anything, a shit test is an indicator that it is the woman that is the one that is not fit to be in a relationship with the man. Considering a shit test as some kind of legitimate evolutionary behavior to weed out undesirable men by women for relationships/mating is idiocy. It’s actual dating that is the appropriate means for evaluating man over time. I’ve never been shit tested by women that genuinely liked me. If a woman genuinely likes a man, and she is emotionally healthy and mature, she makes it obvious and encourages him. People that promulgate this stupidity need to seriously rethink their shit test theories. If shit tests are viewed as common behavior, it’s just an indicator of just how bad young women are being raised and socialized in society today – these women are just shitty women and emotionally unhealthy women, and not suitable for a normal and healthy relationship with a decent man.
The idea that perceived “shit tests” can be “passed” is just a testament as to how flighty, indeterminate and illogical women can be in their behavior and judgement regarding men. Womens’ opinion of a man can turn on a dime in an instant, and at anytime in a relationship. The length of the relationship and the past and current level of sacrifice and commitment by the man does not mean anything to the woman. The relationship is all about and for her, all the time. If you meet a woman this way, do you honestly want to be in a relationship with such a woman?
Women are notoriously bad at evaluating and choosing men as suitable marriage material. Women need men for leadership and guidance in their lives. Without men in their lives, womens’ lives turn into shit.
(Which gender writes love letters to murderers, criminals and serial killers in prison? It’s women. I’ve never heard of men doing this, if they do it’s definitely an anomaly.) Women at their base instinct, on their own and without the influence of responsible males, tradition, religion, laws, taboos, etc., can be emotionally and sexually promiscuous. Women will like a man for the most moronic, emotional and illogical of reasons – and not just the “alpha” guys, hence the plethora of stories of young women running off with the village idiot or town bad boy.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:33 am
“If a woman genuinely likes a man, and she is emotionally healthy and mature, “
I can’t think of any cases on record. Probably doesn’t exist.
Beneath all the tankgrll bluster and YOLOism they pretend to, I have to agree with 447. Too often been disappointed by an instant reversion to “unsexy, scared little girl mode” the minute she’s out of the public gaze and the door shuts. It’s a real cock-shriveller.
Or is it just me? Should I shower&shave better, maybe?
March 24th, 2015 at 9:50 am
Back to the topic at hand. Men and women have a symbiotic relationship. Like predator/prey, wolves and deer, whatever. It is the job of the wolf pack to hunt the deer the best they can. However, if the wolves become too numerous or efficient, they gorge on deer for a while, then die of starvation because all of the deer are gone.
Right now, Western women are gorging at the hypergamy and serial monogamy troughs. Their resource extraction and opportunism has become far too efficient, and they are killing off the idealism of men. It can’t last. I thought I had a good one with soon to be ex, and her frivorce proves her excellent resource extraction skills. Lesson learned.
As for me, I no longer have resources for a woman to extract. I have kids to raise, followed by retirement. If a woman wants to team up with me, for mutual enhancement, I’ll consider it. But she needs to pay her share every step of the way. Otherwise, I might work on my game so I can have a little fun, but I’m obligated out.
Another incident I had recently. Woman in a bar I’ve been going to has been working me. Finally she makes a move. I’m not going there because she’s too heavy. I’m not even that picky, but she’s too heavy. Not only that, but when she makes her move she spills all of this crap about driving her car into the ditch because she’s drunk and having the cops come to her place, getting written up at work because she sexually harrassed a coworker, not having any money, and complaining that one of my friends is giving her the evil eye. Well played. Why do women think that many men are going to wade through the gallons of garbage they continue to spew?
So for me, can I handle a difficult woman? No. Next.
March 24th, 2015 at 10:08 am
Do you guys ever wonder if women don’t have their own blue pill and that the female red pill is coming down the pipe? I think the female red pill will reveal to them that men aren’t the powerful, raping, threatening, oppressive monsters they complain about but secretly desire. They’ll figure out, in fact, that most guys want a break from performing and some damn peace. I wonder which gender will find their own respective red pill more disappointing.
March 24th, 2015 at 10:41 am
All I can say is that maybe the mindset here is long gone but surely missed
http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html
March 24th, 2015 at 11:36 am
“Can you handle Jennifer?”
“I sEEeee. Forget I asked.”
As for ideals, I have them. Experience has proven to me what “love” ideals are realistic with regards to women, so I keep it simple.
1. Shorter than me.
2. Weighs less than me.
3. Dark, preferably black, hair.
The only one that really matters to me is #2. If she starts weighing more than me, she doesn’t “love” me, end of relationship. Simple, realistic, finite. Sure, I could just say “passes the boner test as long as she’s with me”, but, it isn’t well received in conversation, or is deliberately misconstrued as a segue to the obligatory FI shaming to follow.
Unless my womanese is failing me, “Jennifer” fails #2, sight unseen. I mean, sheesh, if someone is prompting me to rent a forklift for a date with her? While asking “can you handle her?” she was likely thinking “how’s your back?” There is an always-implied-but-never-spoken second half of “can you handle her?”, and it is: “because she’s more than a handful”. That, or “…because she’s a snatch.” Either way, chasing is bad DHV.
You must have SOME ideals, you just can’t base them on immeasurable concepts. A woman can “love” me however she pleases, all I ask of her “love” is to remain fuckable. That’s the only “love” reciprocation most men need from a woman, the rest of the emotional jargon only serves to confuse us into a woman’s frame.
Everything from hygiene to attitude falls under that “remain fuckable” umbrella ideal should you consider it pragmatically.
But, like I said, my experience has led me to this ideal. I can’t even start to recount how many times my path parted ways when a woman with me has seen a chocolate shop down another path. After all, women “love” chocolate. Is it possibly any different than their love of men?
Chocolate is a woman’s “blue-pill”. Consider “fat is beautiful”.
March 24th, 2015 at 11:39 am
Now that I considered “fat is beautiful”, let me retract “chocolate” and instead offer “Viagra is a woman’s ‘blue-pill'”, instead.
March 24th, 2015 at 11:50 am
What “you can’t handle me” really means:
http://therationalmale.com/2013/02/27/you-cant-handle-me/
March 24th, 2015 at 12:37 pm
Yes, yes… it’s just another reincarnation of the same ‘ol “jump at my pedestal” trick.
I used to fall for that “man up and deal with my crap” shame routine. GAH!
Twenty-nine abortions?
I suddenly have an idea for a “Dead Kennedys” album cover, not unlike the soap scenes in Fight Club, except with a different clinic’s dumpster.
March 24th, 2015 at 1:07 pm
This post exemplifies something that has bothered me about your writing from the start. It’s what I call the “one-dimensional society” fallacy. The greatest exemplar of this fallacy was the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, as laid out in their work the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer lived through the emergence of totalitarianism. They thought that, alongside Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the United States also exhibited an emerging totalitarianism in its economy and culture, but one that was more subtle. So they sifted through all the laws, habits, practices, and culture to undercover a single, all-encompassing hegemonic order that was served by every facet of society. Every random, seemingly arbitrary, innocuous, or natural behavior was in fact a sign of complicity with a single totalitarian order. The result was that there was no possibility of escape—a result that led Adorno and Horkheimer, as well as their followers, into total despair. The inherent finitude, irrationality, and stupidity of any merely human effort to achieve total control was ignored. All the little things that escaped the grasp of the powers-that-be were forgotten.
The insidious power and reach that you attribute to the Feminine Imperative is fully on display in this passage:
“So even in the best of Blue Pill circumstances, a man is still playing at who he believes will be acceptable to the feminine. His genuineness is what best identifies with the feminine. Blue Pill / Beta Game is really an even more insidious version of social robotics; the script is internalized, the act is who he is.”
This is attributing far-reaching, invasive powers of social control to the Feminine Imperative, so that even the highest aspirations, the most closely held ideals, of the majority of men make them mere pawns in a social order perfectly engineered to the total hegemonic power of women. I think this might be going too far.
March 24th, 2015 at 1:34 pm
@Lucien:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/03/13/the-hypergamy-conspiracy/
If we were discussing totalitarianism from a political perspective I’d agree entirely, however the Feminine Imperative transcends political and sociological ideology.
It’s literally an imperative coded into our DNA. While that imperative can be exploited or repressed by psychological and sociological means it’s still part of who we are. Our past and present social conditions are an extension of that.
Feminine social primacy and its interests (personal, legal, sociological) are an extension of the biological impetus of Hypergamy. Whether that primacy comes in the form of Chivalry, the suffragettes, courtly love, enforced polygyny, agrarian monogamy, or the social influences of 3rd wave feminism the root impulse is the same.
There is no unitary, centralized cabal of totalitarian illuminati determined to enforce Hypergamy. It’s influence is the same now as it was in our hunter-gatherer tribal beginnings.
March 24th, 2015 at 1:40 pm
Lucien – “They thought that, alongside Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the United States also exhibited an emerging totalitarianism in its economy and culture, but one that was more subtle.”
Seems they right about that at least.
March 24th, 2015 at 2:32 pm
@ Lucien
Have you ever read the Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone? She’s a 2nd wave radfem who later turned out to be schizophrenic, I think. She argued that Marx, while correct about the origin of ideology in our experience of our material condition, had failed to recognize a “sexual substratum” beneath productive and economic relations. In other words, the original material condition is a sexual market place of mates. Even if she was wrong about everything else and even if she misread the implications of that substratum, I think that’s spot on. The real germ of society and the origin of the social fabric out of which everything else would spring is mating and the interplay between sociobiologically rooted male and female heterosexualities which are at cross purposes.
March 24th, 2015 at 3:16 pm
This is why this blog appeals to me. You talk about BIOLOGICAL reality, the 1s and 0s which are affected by this reality, the social implications of this reality. It simply isnt wishy washy but grounded in evidence and research. There have been so many times in the past Ive gotten advice on issues of gender and its always been some type of feel good meme…keep doing what your doing Rollo…you bring a sanity to a world of “the feeelz”.
March 24th, 2015 at 5:05 pm
I wonder if Lucien would say the same thing about a “male” imperative if it were written like so…
Both sexes have hard-coded strengths and weaknesses that are complementary. Both sexes therefore need the services of the other to be a complete reproductive unit. It stands to reason then that both sexes would have literally evolved methods of extracting those services in any way possible.
This is not conspiracy, it is not “one-dimensional society”… it is just evolution giving organisms the tools needed for survival and reproduction in forms that are adaptable to a wide variety of circumstances.
March 24th, 2015 at 6:48 pm
“The greatest exemplar of this fallacy was the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, as laid out in their work … “
… paging 8oxer, paging 8oxer over @Dalrock’s …
Over to you on this, my fine frankfurtian friend.
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
March 24th, 2015 at 6:53 pm
Agreed. Shulamith Firestone was somewhere beyond schizo, well into shrieking moon-cabbage territory. Made Charlie Manson sound rational.
March 24th, 2015 at 7:50 pm
“This was the meat of George’s confusion. As with the opportunism that Hypergamy predisposes women to, men’s idealistic concept of love stems from his want for genuineness and a want for what could be. I’d suggest that men’s idealism is the natural extension of the burden of performance. From a Beta perspective, one where women are his mental point of origin, that burden is an unfair yoke; one to be borne out of necessity and ideally cast off if he could change the game. To the Alpha who makes himself his mental point of origin, that burden is a challenge to be overcome and to strengthen oneself by. In either respect, both seek an idealistically better outcome than what that burden represents to them.”
^^I do not understand. How is a man his own mental point of origin if he is still busting his ass to get a woman to like him? If I’m my own mental point of origin, then that automatically means that I’m MGTOW. I don’t see any other way. From my point of view, what you’ve said is nonsense. How has your point of origin changed at all if you accept in both cases that you have to bust your ass to get love?
Maybe you’re tired of me posting stuff like this on your channel, but there is something I really don’t get. I’ve known about this redpill stuff for several years, but I’m still in the nihilistic despondent phase that you talk about. I think the thing that gets me most is that in order to do “Game” I have to lie to my partner. I have to pretend like I don’t actually care about her, or I have to genuinely not care about her, and I have to play stupid games with her. I would attack any man who treated me the same way that game says you should treat a woman. How am I supposed to love somebody that I have to lie to, and why would I want to be with somebody who I didn’t love? I would rather masturbate. I don’t really mind the idea that women are attracted to status, and I have to perform, but how am I supposed to love somebody who I have to pretend not to care about? If I were a father, I would want to be able to tell my children, “I love you” and I would want to be able to be honest and clear with them. Obviously the children would still know that I have the superior position. Why does this have to make women unattracted to me? I would never never never want children if I had to use game with them. Obviously I’m not gonna whine to my kids about all my problems, but I think I should expect that I should not have to lie and play stupid games with them to get them to accept me. If I’m not even allowed to be genuine with a woman, then to me she’s nothing but a masturbation aid. I’ve used game before and it got women attracted to me, but I was revolted by it. I’m planning on getting some viagra so that I can follow through next time, because it disgusts me so much that my dick shrivels as if I dunked it in ice water. Maybe I’ll understand if I actually get around to fucking women that I am disgusted by.
March 24th, 2015 at 8:00 pm
http://therationalmale.com/2014/11/14/mental-point-of-origin/
March 25th, 2015 at 12:13 am
@Brendan
Why should you care about your SO more than yourself?
Can you know what your SO needs better than He/She does? If so, what’s your secret to mind reading? If not, then you have to acknowledge that the person you know best is yourself, and no one else. If we both agree that you know yourself better than anyone else does… then we must acknowledge that if you’re not looking after your interests first… no one else will to any effectiveness.
Ultimately, no one on this planet is a mind reader. No one on this planet knows what someone else needs/wants better than they do. So the only way to effectively function as an individual with integrity is to put yourself first wherever possible. Anything else is self-imposed slavery to the will of others.
The exercise of game should not be a “lie”, it should not be “pretend”… it should be the appropriate use of your idealism from the perspective of your frame. If that seems selfish, that’s because the self is the only starting point you have.
March 25th, 2015 at 12:27 am
I wanna live my life in a way that ends such as this.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-02-12/news/0702120173_1_laurence-gonzales-medical-school-ww-ii
March 25th, 2015 at 2:03 am
Thank you for being patient with me Rollo. I hope that you can be patient for a little while longer. I would like to make sure that I understand these things correctly. Maybe somebody else can answer me if Rollo doesn’t.
When I first read the part of your article that I quoted, I was very offended and angry and I did not understand. But I realized from the other comments that everybody else understood. So what you said obviously made sense, but there was some sort of psychological block that was keeping me from wanting to understand it. So I went by myself for a while and thought about it. So now I’d like to ask some questions to make sure I understood.
I think we both misunderstood what the other person was trying to say at first. I think the thing that got me mad was that it seemed to me that fair play, or honor, contradicted what your idea of “frame” was. I think I see now that the problem I have is not frame, but unreasonable expectations that I have for women. I believe that I have self-respect, and I want to interact with other people who have self-respect. So I treat the other man as I would want to be treated; honorably. If I want something from another man, I go and tell him what I want, and what I am willing to give for it, and then I wait for him to decide if he is interested in what I am offering. I would also want to be treated this way if somebody wanted something from me. I think this works rather well for me for men, because I cannot remember a case since puberty where a man disrespected me to my face. But women do not have honor. I have heard this several times before, but somehow the implications did not sink in. It is hard for me to imagine a human being without honor, since this is so central to my being. When I communicate with a man, what I instinctively try to communicate is that I have honor, or that I will not betray him. Since women have no honor, they must interpret this as me putting myself beneath them. They don’t see that I’m trying to treat them as I would like to be treated, they only see that I am making things more difficult for myself by playing straight. So I am already in the middle of my own frame, but women do not see it because I treat them honorably, which is something that they are totally incapable of appreciating. Do you think I understand correctly? Or is fair play something that is incompatible with being in the center of your own frame?
I have a couple more questions. You said that men project themselves onto women by thinking that women have an idealistic form of love. It occurred to me that the way alpha’s act seems very much like a woman’s solipsism. Do you think that women are attracted to alphas because they project their own opportunistic type of love onto men?
If it is true that hypergamy rules women, then doesn’t that mean that they will go for the best of the best no matter what? So doesn’t that mean that it’s not possible to increase the romantic/sexual satisfaction of the entire male population? If every man read your stuff, and stuff that other red pill men write, and then they all learned to be alpha, wouldn’t the women just pick the most alpha of the alpha, and most men would experience no improvement in their condition? I suppose even if that happened, the red pill would still be valuable to some men, because it would teach some of them self-respect, and it would let them understand why they had trouble with women.
I realized something when I was mad about what you wrote. If I’m mad at something that somebody says, it must be because I have an emotional aversion to what he said. So if I really want to understand something, then I need to chase after the things that I feel like running away from. I noticed that after the idea that women have no honor really sank in, I did not think that women were as disgusting as they were before. It is not like they have honor and choose not to listen to it (that’s what I thought was disgusting), but they do not even have a concept of honor. They cannot even tell the difference between what is honorable and what is not. Now instead of feeling disgusted, I feel like I just need to be careful with women, and I need to not treat them like rational and responsible adults. I think in the future, whenever I feel disgusted by women’s behavior, it will probably be because I do not understand how they actually work. I think the reason that I hated PUA so much was that I learned rules about how to make women like me, but I did not learn why the rules worked. I think I would be better off if I forgot about all the rules, and understood on a fundamental level what makes women tick. Then I would not need to follow a script and feel like a fake clown. And I also think that I need to get around to fucking women. Probably I can’t say that I really understand how they work until I am able to get sex when I want it. Even if I decide that busting my ass to get casual sex isn’t worth it in the long run, I think it is important to understand how the other half of the population thinks. I think I will take it easy to start with by starting with Viagra and prostitutes. I don’t think I will be able to flirt properly if I still have it in my head that women are disgusting and I’m not able to get an erection when I get them to like me.