equalism

Raiders of the Lost Covenant

I hate to begin an essay with an apology, but I feel like one is in order this time. For the past year and a half I’ve been invested in writing my fourth book, The Rational Male – Religion. This required a degree of perseverance, dedication in research, feedback, interviews and general behind the scenes dialoging that I’ve never had to involve myself in before. As a result, I’m less able to devote myself to writing this blog as well or as regularly as I believe I should. For that I’m apologizing here for skipping a week more often than I should.

I’m enjoying every minute of the work I’m putting into the new book, but it is taxing. A criticism I always get is that my books are just re-edits of this blog’s essays, and “Why should anyone buy your books if they can get it all for free here?” Ironically, these are also the critics who berate me for selling out, or they assume pushing my Red Pill books is all I do for a living [insert eye-roll here].

Well, not this time. This time the book will be (almost) entirely fresh material and this takes time, effort and concentration. There will be some material from a handful of past essays, but about 85% of the book is new material.

This process began prior to my publishing Positive Masculinity in July of 2017. I knew then, while still writing my third book, I wanted to do a book on how the Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics intertwined with religions and religious mindsets for the series. I began to do some casual research in Spring of 2017 as an aside to the third book. This quickly snowballed into a part time job for me. Now, add this to my schedule with:

  • The Red Man Group
  • My own YouTube presence
  • A few regular live spots and interviews I do
  • Red Pill 101 I do with Pat Campbell every Sunday
  • The keynote talks I’ll be giving at three 21 Conventions in 2019
  • Producing a new liquor brand for my real job this year

Anyway, that’s my way of saying I feel bad for missing a week or two on this blog. The Rational Male will always be my comfortable place to come home to and I want to let you all know, just because I’m posting less in the comments doesn’t mean I don’t read every one. In fact, this is one of the only forums, among dozens, I make a point to keep up with consistently.

Covenant vs. Contractual Marriage

Since digging into the new book I’ve gotten in the habit of comparing notes with various religious personalities who I think might give me a better perspective into how aspects of the Red Pill dovetail into religion. Everyone from Jewish Rabbis to Greek Orthodox ministers (?), to the Muslim faithful, to Evangelical pastors have been on my discussion list for two years now. One notable of late was Dr. Everett Piper, the recently retired president (chancellor?) of Oklahoma Wesleyan University.

Dr. Piper has a regular segment on the Pat Campbell radio show that comes on a half hour before I go on with Pat every Friday morning at 9:05am EST. The link to all our archives is in the sidebar.

Listen to the full discussion here

Last Friday Dr. Piper and I had a discussion about the state of marriage today. I’m loathe to call it a proper “debate” because there’s a lot that he and I agree on with respect to the value of marriage for men and women – at least, the value of what marriage had in the past and should mean to men and women going forward. Marriage is always going to be a persistent hot button issue in the Manosphere. Depending on what your personal, moral and/or rational beliefs are, marriage is something to be actively avoided or something only to enter into with the most serious degree of vetting and caution. Today’s marriage is defined by the dangers it poses to men. Unfortunately, this caution is rarely a consideration for most Blue Pill conditioned, Beta men.

Another area that Dr. Piper and I (and the Manosphere) agree on is the ‘feels before reals‘ priority our feminine-primary social order has embedded in our social consciousness. Today, the “correct” way to address a decision is to lead with our emotions, but it’s exactly this ‘feelings first’ idea that leads men to disregard the life-damaging potential that modern marriage poses to them.

I took the pro-avoidance side of this discussion. And, as usual, I always have to qualify my doing so first; Yes, I’ll be married for 23 years in July. Yes, I’m still happily married to the same woman and have never been divorced, nor have I ever considered divorce. My marriage’s success is directly attributable to my Red Pill awareness and putting it into practice. Mrs. Tomassi and I are still very much in love, we’ve raised a gorgeous and smart daughter to adulthood, and I think my marriage is as close to most people’s ideal as can be.

And yes, I would still never remarry were I to find myself single tomorrow – I simply cannot endorse marriage, as it exists today, as a good idea for any young man. Remember, this is coming from a guy with a damn good marriage. As MGTOWs are fond of saying, endorsing marriage today is leading the lambs to slaughter. I agree. It is simply, statistically, the worst decision a man can make in his life at present, yet so many men want to believe they won’t be one of those statistics.

This confuses a lot of people. Fundamentally, I think the institution of monogamous marriage has been one of the bedrocks of success for western civilization. Marriage is a good idea; it’s how we execute it in the late 20th and 21st centuries that makes it one of the worst prospects imaginable for men. So, I’m technically not anti-marriage; I’m anti-never-saw-it-coming-Pollyana-how-could-she-do-this-to-me?-hypergamy’s-doesn’t-care marriage.

This was my position going in to this talk with Dr. Piper. Have a listen to the whole segment if you have the time, but what we distilled it down to is the idea of a Covenant Marriage vs. a Contractual Marriage. This was the premise used to describe the divide between marriage how it should be done – religiously, personally, devotionally, how it was done in the past – and the way marriage is now – the worst contractual liability a man can enter into. Needless to say a lot of qualifications followed this.

By my understanding a Covenant marriage presumes a mutual religious reverence and understanding of what is expected of a man and a woman before they enter into marriage. It is founded on the agreement of two individuals who believe they are better together than they are apart. On paper this sounds good, but it presupposes quite a bit – particularly on the part of that woman today. I’ll detail the reasons why in a bit, but I take the Covenant definition of marriage to mean that there’s a mutual understanding between the man and woman that they are marrying for love in accordance to what they believe is their religious and monogamous obligation. Fine. We’ve got a model for marriage that is set apart from the Contractual model.

The Contractual marriage is one based on mutual support and an insurance that this support will continue even if the marriage itself dissolves. MGTOWs liken this to a bad business contract that, were it not marriage, no right-thinking man would ever agree to sign off on.

Contractual marriage is the standard for today. Dr. Piper sees this model as the “what can I get from my partner marriage“, but you can decide for yourself if you listen to the discussion. I think this is a bit disingenuous since it implies that men’s only consideration for agreeing to what amounts to a bad business contract would in any way make sense due to a desire for getting what he can out of what’s already a bad deal. Why marry at all if what you’re taking away from it is nothing you can’t get outside of marriage without the risk?

Essentially, Contractual marriage is the marriage-divorce-support structure that men are wisely hesitant about today. Dalrock once noted that sometime after the Sexual Revolution “we moved away from the marriage model of child rearing and into the child-support model of child rearing“, and I think the Contractual model of marriage becoming the default was an integral part of this.

If you’ve ever watched the documentary Divorce Incorporated you can see the machinations of the Contractual form of marriage at work. This is just a taste of some of the real world consequences that accompany Contractual marriage’s liabilities. However, I think going in – and with the emphasis on leading with our feelings – most men have idealistic, Covenant marriage, expectations for their marriages.

It sounds pretty good, right?

And for the premarital sex mindset it’s the only game in town if they want sexual access. So, it serves a purpose to convince oneself that a man’s spouse is necessarily on the same page as they are with respect to his idealistic concept of love (versus a woman’s opportunistic concept of love). This is where most Beta men get themselves into trouble. They presume their ‘bride‘ to be shares his mutual idea of love, and combined with a potent cocktail of dopamine and endorphins, he leads with his Emotional Process rather than his Rational Process.

Off the Books Marriage

While we also discussed the issue of Responsibility vs. Authority in marriage, what got me was his marching back the question about separating a ‘Covenant’ marriage from the ‘Contractual’ marriage. This is something I’ve discussed with MGTOWs occasionally. Would marriage work if you removed the state and any entitlement to the cash & prizes liabilities from the equation?

I brought this up because this “private ceremony”, off-the-books unofficial marriage is what saved my friend Anthony Johnson from losing his ass in his own divorce. He wasn’t wise enough to see through his ex’s deceits, but he was smart enough not to involve the state in his marriage.

I was genuinely surprised to hear Dr. Piper disagree with the idea of separating the marriage models we’d discussed at the time, but to have him state that he wasn’t willing to somehow give up on the heroic fight to reform the ‘Contractual’ marriage was, in hindsight, kind of disingenuous. In both instances, with respect to headship and authority, and the reluctance to let go of the contractual definition of marriage (especially after making such an impassioned case for a covenant marriage) I can only come to the conclusion that Dr. Piper’s position on marriage is influenced by the feminist undercurrent prevalent in the church today – and without his really realizing it too.

Once again the fiscal considerations of not offending women’s (feminist influenced) sensibilities comes to the fore in another religious leader. This has been a constant theme among the Pastors and church leaders I’ve been interviewing since I started the fourth book.

Churches are business franchises today and if you want to keep the tithe checks forthcoming in order to keep the lights on pastors and church leaders need to prioritize the sensibilities of the primary consumer in the western world – women. It’s gotten to the point now that church leaders have internalized that women’s eyes and ears will be judging their words minutely in sermons and public appearances to ensure their Pastor is on ‘team woman’. This is why opposing a separation of Covenant marriage vs. the Contractual is literally a ‘no brainer’ for these men. They don’t ever think about it any other way because they’ve already adopted the feminist zeitgeist that’s assimilated their churches. To endorse that separation is to deny women their potential for cash & prizes if a man displeases God by making them unhappy.

I think maybe I expected more from Dr. Piper. I was hoping to find some common ground, but I think he may be committed to a doctrine that panders to the Feminine Imperative without realizing it. When we got to the part about headship (Corinthians) he came right out the gate with pre-qualifying headship vs. being a domineering asshole. I’ve come to expect this from a female-primary church that deemphasizes male authority. In fact, it redefines that ‘authority’ as responsibility before you get to discuss any other aspect of what women might allow as “headship”.

It’s like a mental illness with these people. If a wife isn’t perfectly happy and beautiful it’s the husbands fault.

It’s a disgusting view of marriage which can only increase unhappiness for the average Christian couple because there’s no way to keep a woman happy all the time, and, age means women are going to get old. It’s part of life, and it is enough for a woman to age gracefully without these Pastors trying to brainwash men into thinking that any lack of beauty is their fault.

7817 dalrocks Blog

Imperfect Men Vet Imperfect Women for Imperfect Marriages

The “You should’ve vetted better” or “You should’ve married a ‘real’ Christian woman” excuses are something I encounter a LOT from Christian church leaders. Dr. Piper also used this one too. It’s really the Christian version of the Quality Woman dilemma.

As I’m working my way through my fourth book and on The Red Pill & Religion this is one cop out I get regularly. Apparently no ‘real’ Christian woman would ever initiate divorce and if men were only Godly and wise enough to discern from the outset of ‘courting’ that their “bride” wasn’t a fully devoted woman of Christ then it’s their fault for marrying her – or their fault for screwing up God’s perfect plan for his married life later in the marriage. This is ex post facto rationalization that reinforces moralistic beliefs, but also justifies the reaming you’re going to take in divorce court for not being wise and Godly.

It’s basically another play on the No True Scotsman logical fallacy. “They not ‘real’ Christians/Muslims/Jews/Krishnas/etc.” should be the subtitle for my new book, I’ve heard so many times.

Deus Vult

When it comes to debating church leaders I simply cannot win the “God says so” clause. This is another obstacle to discussing Red Pill ideas in a religious context. It’s an appeal to faith that is always the go-to response to issues I bring up that they have no real answer to. That, or they don’t want to answer for fear of offending the Feminine Imperative in the church today.

“Contractual” marriage is an all-downside proposition for men today. I tried to make my best case for why men shun it in the discussion. Naturally, there’s a common impulse for Publicity Pastors to AMOG from the pulpit and shame men for avoiding marriage, but they can’t argue against the marriage stats and the life-destroying fallout of divorce for men. It’s all too verifiable. The marriage & divorce rates today are unignorable, so men deductively go with the pragmatic response and avoid marriage or go MGTOW.

All that means nothing to the faithful Christian mindset. “It doesn’t matter if contractual marriage is one of the worst decisions a man can make today – “God says you should marry.”

“What about the incentive of cash & prizes women have in divorce?”

“Doesn’t matter, God said get married”

So I can’t argue with the divine creator of the universe. God says jump, so you jump. That’s the absolutist-moralist win button for any rational argument to the contrary.

Alternative link to the interview is here

Discussion at Dalrock’s Blog

The Myth of the Alpha Female

On last Saturday’s Red Man Group we took a call from a woman who has apparently just discovered the “red pill school of thought” and looked up what ever convoluted definitions she could find from the ‘normie web’ to better understand it. For context, the whole exchange began around the 2:04:00 mark here, but the bit I want to dissect I’ve cued up to 2:09 in the above video. The Red Pill as a praxeology is often something most uninitiated people don’t have the patience to really want to understand. So when they’re confronted with a Red Pill truth that conflicts with some ego-invested belief they often just resort to what I call “point and sputter” – they spit out some school yard taunt, tell you how unbelievable it is anyone could ever believe such a thing in this day and then move along to whatever ideological site they’re comforted by.

Credit where it’s due, this woman (and I apologize for not getting her name) at the very least was prompted to ask some questions about how we come to whatever misattributed ideas she read were what it is we think. Listen to the whole exchange for context. In the beginning I was asked the standard “what do you tel your daughter about all of this?” as if this is going to somehow shame me back down to earth, but the part she was most distraught over was the idea that “women are only valuable for what they look like”.

My response to her was based on an essay I wrote 4 years ago titled Separating Values. In that piece I tried to outline how women today have trouble separating their sexual market value from their self-perceived personal worth:

Conflating Values

One of the major problems women have, and more than even some red pill men have, is the conflation of sexual market value with their intrinsic personal value as a human being.

It needs to be emphasized that while personal value is influential in sexual market value, SMV is distinct from your value as a human being. I’m stressing this because, in the age Disney Princess empowerment, this conflation of the two has become a go-to social convention; and not just for women.

What [Robin] Korth suffers from is presuming her personal value is her sexual market value.

It’s disruptive to her self-perceptions and ego-investments when that presumption is challenged by a man who doesn’t want to fuck her for reasons based on the intrinsic value she believes she’s entitled to by virtue of maturity and imaginings of self-sufficiency. Just as women aren’t aroused by men’s own self-concepts of virtuousness and aspirations of higher purpose, men aren’t aroused by whatever ephemeral self-perceptions a woman may have.

Listening to this woman’s concerns, it’s a fairly common refutation and one we come to expect from a mindset that presumes men callously objectify women out of hand, or due to their being taught to be so by a chauvinistic toxic masculinity. Women cling to this because it sounds right and reinforces the victimhood narrative that defines the collective identity of the Sisterhood. So when they read it or see it openly embraced, or spoken about men in a positive context it’s confirmation of an offense they want to believe is endemic in men. Thus, we get the “literally shaking”, sound of a quavering voice.

However, all of this gets in the way of women really understanding that they’ve been conditioned to conflate their personal worth with their sexual market value. As I mentioned in my response, a woman can be a wonderful humanitarian, a great mother, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone who adds value to the depth and breadth of humankind, but it won’t make her look any better in a bikini. And that is where sexual market value starts for women when it comes to men’s arousal and attraction. For as long as I’ve been writing this blog I’ve tried to explain this in as simple a way as possible; men and women are different. Part of our differences is that what constitutes sexual market value for one sex is not an equal evaluation for the other. For as much as the equalist mindset pervades our social consciousness, the reality is men and women are different in many fundamental ways.

One reason Red Pill awareness in men gets vilified by women is because it nakedly exposes, discusses and develops sexual and life strategies around some very Darwinistic and unflattering realities of intersexual dynamics based on those differences. But exposing these differences is only offensive to this social order because there is a presumption of a blank-slate equalism that’s been embedded into every aspect of our gender understanding for almost 70 years now. This offensiveness is less about the actual nuts and bolts of evolution, biology and psychological differences between men and women, but more so it’s about the ego-invested idea that men and women should be blank-slate, functional equals in all respects. Even this presumption is a horse-shit cover story for the latent purpose of feminism floating the lie of “equality” – fundamentally disempowering men so women can aspire to be their masters in various ways.

The woman from our discussion expressed this barely containable angst that men only value her as a sexual object, and it’s important to suss out the reasoning for this confusion and rage. As I mentioned, the problem women have is an inability to separate their sexual market value from their personal value a ‘basic human being‘. A quote I’m known for is “virtue is anti-seductive.” No guy ‘virtues’ a woman into bed, and while I get push back for devaluing the importance of virtue occasionally, what I don’t get is any disagreement from men or women on that point. Virtue, intelligence, honor, duty, wisdom and any number of other esoteric features that would make a man a terrific human being do nothing (or sometimes work against him) for his raw visceral sexuality that women are aroused by. For men, however, these traits and many more will definitely add to his attractiveness as a long term prospect for women.

In men, affluence, status, intelligence, improvisation, creativity, ambition, drive, perseverance, humor, positive-conventional masculinity, and many more aspects make this man an attractive choice for a long term relationship with women. These are attributes that contribute to a man’s sexual market value, but they are incomplete without a raw, visceral physical component. Hypergamy serves two masters, Alpha seed and Beta need – and as such it hates the one and loves the other depending on what a woman’s most pressing necessity happens to be at that point in her life. Women have an innate, limbic understanding of what makes a man a complete package – a great catch.

Where this and most other women fail is that their own Fempowerment conditioning teaches them that what makes a man attractive, what makes his SMV appealing to women must necessarily be what makes for her own personal value and sexual market value. The reason this woman is shaking here is because this conditioning has convinced her and generations of women to build a life predicated on a fallacy: What makes her a “good person” should necessarily make her attractive and arousing to men. This is a great falsehood that is the root of many of the gender conflicts and misunderstandings we see around us today.

Gendered Differences in Attraction

The things that make a woman’s sexual market value high are not the same things make her sense of personal worth high. Yet, this is exactly what the Feminine Imperative conditions women to believe and seeks to shame men for not complying with this fallacy. When men opt for younger, hotter, tighter at all ages of their own maturity, the visceral message is clear – it makes no difference what a woman’s personal value is when it comes to sexual valuation. Where women fall short is they presume that men cannot appreciate women for anything but their sexual value.

This is an interesting dynamic since the Imperative teaches women never to implicitly do anything for a man.

The prime directive of feminism for the past 50 years has been founded on women striving to achieve the ideal of the Strong Independent Woman® (SIW). This SIW ideal is the carrot that gets the mules to pull the cart. That ideal is never fully attainable because if it were it would make an end state for feminism a realizable goal rather than the self-perpetuating social mechanism it is. The SIW ideal is intentionally ambiguous, but the concept is based on selling women the idea that they can not only “have it all” but they can be it all too. The ‘independence’ feminism sells predicated on being a self-sustaining, self-satisfying, autonomous ‘thing’ that doesn’t need for anything. A woman is every bit as good a feminine role model as she is a masculine one, ergo, she has no need for men beyond the physical aspect. In fact, an independence from men, from any form of dependency on men, has been part of the feminist charter since Seneca Falls in 1848.

From a Red Pill perspective, and in my opinion, this independence from men has been the single most damaging aspect of feminism in its history. Men and women evolved to be complements to the other and in evolutionary terms are far stronger together than apart. Each compensates for the one’s innate weaknesses with the other’s innate strengths. Feminism preaches two lies in this respect – the first being that a woman can “have it all”, but also she can be an autonomous being with no intrinsic needs beyond what she can provide for or address herself. The lie is that she “don’t need no man” when a hundred thousand years of evolution says different. Men and women need each other, but it’s feminism that’s selling the lie that they don’t.

The ironic part about this socialized lie is that in emancipating women from the ‘dependency’ of men feminism has founded the basis of ‘having it all’ on how closely a woman can emulate a man. The definition of a successful Strong Independent Woman is how closely she can replicate the success of men. This ideal for SIW success is based on a masculine ideal. As feminism has refocused women’s goals on these masculine ideals it has systematically altered the definition of femininity to align with its ideal of ‘success’.

The Myth of the Alpha Female

As part of that new masculine ideal of female success, along came the concept of the Alpha Female. I’ve read dozens of articles about this fantasy creature; how she’s a boss who takes no shit and turns companies around from the brink of bankruptcy by virtue of being female. A woman of the future who emulates and exceeds the successes of any apex-male CEO of those sexist Fortune 500 companies. Even if she’s not a high powered exec, the match (literally) of any man, women still love to imagine themselves in this “alpha” role in their own little worlds.

“I’m an Alpha Female, and maybe I’m not a jet setter, but I’m a Type A personality and as such I’m headstrong, a go-getter woman who knows what she wants.”

This sloganized mental model is part of the new Strong Independent Woman® costume that feminism is selling to women today.

If you’re a woman who’s bought into the Confidence Porn narrative that’s so popular today, allow me to ruin that image for you. There is no such thing as an “alpha” female – at least not in the respect of the idealistic Fempowered fantasy you think applies to you. The Feminine Imperative likes to convince women that they are ‘Alpha’ using that same masculine model definitions I detailed above here. The Strong Independent Woman meme only holds up insofar as it emulates masculine success and a masculine defined concept of ‘Alpha’. By this definition every woman has a potential to be an ‘alpha’ female in her own little way. Like I said, the Confidence Porn women gobble up is so tasty because it’s so achievable – all you have to do is cop the “I’m the boss, I’m a Type A person” attitude, put some foam inserts in the shoulders of your ‘power suit’ and you too can be Alpha because you say so and you walk the same walk as an Alpha Male.

The push for female-primacy has conditioned generations of women to expect an entitled, default respect, and a deference to their authority from men. They’re told at every opportunity from the time they’re 5 years old that they can do anything, have it all, be it all, and they’re the “natural leaders of the future”. By extension this leads women to the Alpha Female trope.

Ironically, the same people who love to ridicule the idea of ‘Alpha Males’ completely accept the concept of an Alpha Female. They’ll make funny videos ridiculing the Red Pill for using ‘alpha’ as a referential term – “These jokers think they’re wolves or Silver Back Gorillas, hur hur!” – but they’ll eagerly embrace the idea of an ‘alpha’ female. That conditioned deference of the feminine makes it believable; and they like the idea that identifying with women’s delusions of empowerment might get them laid.

Attribution Bias Error

The error that women and feminism make in the ‘Alpha Female’ respect is an attribution bias error. Women are conditioned to believe that if they value the aspects of what makes men attractive, what makes them a good pairing, that men must also value those traits in women. If status, power, social proof, affluence, careerism, drive, etc. is what gets them hot for men (in the long term) then possessing those traits themselves must also be attractive in the reverse. Unfortunately for women, they’re painfully (but slowly) learning that men and women are in fact different and the lie of egalitarian equalism has essentially cost them a future with a husband, children and family living.

In order to counter this harsh reality an industry in biotech egg-freezing has sprung up around the very real female insecurity that these confident Alpha Women wont find a suitable man to start a family with now that they are well past the Wall. Feminine-primary society is capitalizing on this fear.

But the reverse is true; men’s sexual selection criteria is far more simplistic than women’s. From an evolved, naturalist perspective men select women based on looks and sexual availability – and on a subconscious level women know this, yet they rationalize that men should be interested in their coequal professionalism, status and any number of intrinsic qualities they believe they possess. The root of this misunderstanding is once again the socialized lie of egalitarian, blank-slate equalism. Only now women expect that if they invest themselves in the same pursuits as Alpha men that this should compensate for their lack of physical appeal. If men and women are functional equals what defines male dominance should also define female dominance. Evolution says differently.

The woman on the left (Reneé Sommerfield) is the true Alpha female by the standards of evolutionary realities. The woman on the right (Sheryl Sandberg) is what our gynocentric social order would have men believe should be considered an ‘alpha’ female. This is the conflict that’s at the heart of so many manufactured crises of attraction for women and the failure of their long-term plans to have a family.

The Alpha Female is really the woman who best embodies what men’s evolved, biological imperatives determine what makes her an attractive breeding and long-term mate choice. Men’s criteria is very simple; fitness, youth, assertive sexuality, playfulness, conventional femininity and genuine desire to please him. Beyond this, submission, respect, nurturing (potential mothering qualities), a natural deference to male authority, humility, admiration and an unobligated desire to recognize that man as her complementary partner are just some of the long-term attributes that make a woman someone a man might want to invest himself in a family with.

Unfortunately all of this criteria is counter to the message ‘alpha‘ Females are taught are valuable today. They are taught that anything a woman might do for the expressed pleasure of a man is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman® meme. The presumption is that a desire to meet any of this criteria is a failure on the part of a woman who demands to be the ‘equal’ of a man. Even acknowledging the innate, complementary natures of men and women is an affront to the equalist narrative. Furthermore, any man who would base (much less express) his own decision making criteria as such is shamed via social conventions. The narrative is that he must be needy, or threatened by a “strong woman” or he must want this woman to be his Mommy substitute. All of this is a social mechanic meant to force fit that natural complementary criteria into the box of egalitarian equalism.

Value Added

I don’t write for a female readership per se. In fact, I don’t really direct my writing towards any audience, but in this instance I want to end here with a message for my female readers. Take this message to the bank: the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, not adversarial. But that adversarial feeling you get when you read me describing some unflattering aspect of female nature is the product of your own Blue Pill conditioning that’s taught you the lie of egalitarianism-as-female-empowerment. If you truly want to ‘empower‘ yourselves set aside your self-importance, look inside yourselves and ask this question –

What is it about me that a man would find attractive from a naturalistic perspective?

What do I possess that a man would truly believe is Value Added?

That may feel a bit counterintuitive to you, but understand that the reason this introspection is alien or offensive to you is because you’ve been conditioned to believe that your masculine qualities are what men should find attractive about you. You turn this offense back on men and make it their fault for not finding your ‘alpha femaleness’ the root of their attraction to you. Is the idea of changing yourself, to add value to your package, for the pleasure of a man a source of anger for you? Why is that?

I see far too many otherwise beautiful women who destroy themselves on the lie of the ‘alpha’ female and a never ending struggle to perfect an equalist archetype in themselves. They rail on about infantile men, or bemoan that men are afraid to ask them out, or ask “Where are all the good guys nowadays?” Understand that these efforts to shame men into finding something attractive about you based on your masculine criteria for attraction will always fail; leaving you a lonely childless middle aged wreck all because you refused to accept that you need to be someone worth marrying.

Men and women are better together than they are apart. We evolved to be complements to the other. But, feminism, the Feminine Imperative and an endemic Fempowerment culture have taught you to believe “you are enough”, you are complete, you don’t need a man because you can satisfy all of your own needs. This is the most damning lie ever perpetrated on womankind – that you can be it all – and only when it’s too late do women realize that they’ve been had.

Instinct, Emotion and Reason

Before I dig in here today I want to give credit where it’s due. I was inspired to consider what I’m about to go into here by a quick-hit Tweet from Illimitable Man. I didn’t bookmark it so I apologize for not linking it here today, but the general gist of it was about the mental processes humans go through when we’re presented with environmental stimuli that demands interpretation and a behavioral response. I considered this process quite a bit while I was studying behavioral psychology – Instinct, Emotion and Reason (or rationality if you prefer) – and I’m almost embarrassed that I haven’t covered this in terms of a Red Pill perspective in over 600 essays now.

The idea is fairly simple; when we are prompted by environmental (and sometimes internal) stimuli human beings process this information using three psychological mechanisms – our primal instincts, our emotional interpretations and our rational (reason) facilities. I’m not sure these processes get their proper due in Red Pill theory today.  I’ve detailed all of these processes individually for years on this blog, but generally they were outlined in the context of whatever topic I was focusing on. In this essay I’m going to elaborate on these aspects individually. Later, as part of this series, I’ll explore how they act in concert for our overall cognitive process, and then how they influence intersexual and intersocial dynamics. I think this is a useful exercise because a lot of foundational Red Pill ideas stem from these processes as well as the social conventions and interpretive priorities the Feminine Imperative relies on today.

For sake of clarity I am going to use a few behavioral psych terms like stimuli in this essay. This isn’t to throw $10 words at you, it’s just easier to elaborate on these processes with abstract terms. For example, when I use stimuli I mean any physical, environmental or cognitive prompt that our conscious or unconscious mind demands an interpretation, processing of and response to. That can be a wide variety of things so, stimuli serves as a general term.

Lastly, the following here is my interpretation of these processes. While a lot of this will align pretty well with established theories, this is my take on them and not some official, settled science of facts. If you think I’m full of shit please tell me why, this is still a work in progress for me.

Instinct

Instinct seems like the easiest of these processes to understand, but it’s really the cognitive aspect that’s most misunderstood, marginalized and often demonized. The reason for this is because our instincts reside in our subconscious (hindbrain) processing of stimuli. When I refer to men or women’s evolved mental firmware in my essays it’s our instinctual process that I’m referring to. These are the unlearned, inborn aspects of our human nature that influence the other processes and remain largely in our subconscious. Our instinctual processing is a direct result of our evolution. It evolved as a vitally necessary aspect of our cognitive processing in that it aided in our ability to survive in, and adapt to, a chaotic, primal environment when food was scarce, predators and rivals wanted us dead, and reproductive opportunities and raising a child to a survivable age were at a premium.

There are a lot of examples of our instinct level processing and each instinctual response triggers more complex processing up the cognitive chain through emotion and reason. If we were presented with a dangerous stimuli (a sabertooth tiger) our instinctual process triggers a fight or flight response physically in our bodies (adrenaline release). Needless to say this was an evolved adaptation that served our species well and was passed along genetically as part of our mental firmware. I’m going to use some simplistic examples here but, if you really want to dig into our preloaded mental firmware and how we developed it I would suggest looking into the earlier works of Dr. Steven Pinker and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (I’ll post links in the comments).

Another example is human beings’ innate fear (reservations at least) of snakes and spiders – poisonous animals that looked easy to kill, but could kill humans without warning. That’s an example of relatively beneficial firmware, but the reason instinct gets a bad rep is due to the instincts that once were beneficial to us individually, but are less beneficial to us socially. Greed and gluttony were very practical, instinctually motivated behaviors that stemmed from a need to survive in a time when resources were scarce. Today greed is (mostly) seen as anti-social and a compulsion to overeat in a time when food is abundant is why we presently have an obesity epidemic.

Those are easily understood examples, but where things get more complex is in how our instinctual process influences the other processes (emotion and reason). Instinct gets demonized because in our ‘enlightened‘ era we like to believe that instinct is more trouble than it is beneficial. Most of that is due to a belief that our other processes are superior to (or at least should supersede) our instincts. Most of what we call sin or immoral behavior is motivated by the instinctual process. In fact, the only time our instinctual awareness and reactions are really credited with anything positive is when it gets us out of some life threatening situation or it leads to some prosocial outcome. For instance, the male instinct to protect women by putting ourselves between them and danger; that’s an instinct and resultant behavior (seemingly altruistic male self-sacrifice) that gets a lot of praise in our feminine-primary social order. However, for the most part, we tend to judge ‘baser instincts’ as a net negative.

The truth about the instinctual process is that none of our other processes function at full efficiency without it. Today, as a result of our feminine-primary acculturation, we want to relegate instinct’s influence to something “we’ve evolved beyond”. The popular consensus is we’ve raised ourselves above base instincts by either acknowledging the importance of the emotional process or that rationality and the self-control based on it immunizes us from its influence. Not only are these belief foolish and hubristic, they’re provably untrue. When it comes to concepts like the ‘selfish gene‘ and the physical differences in the evolved instinctual processes of men and women, it becomes necessary for a social order based on blank-slate equalism to demonize and marginalize the influence of, and behaviors attributed to, instinct.

The survival benefits and behaviors that make up the instinctual process were so necessary that they had to become part of our unconscious species firmware. Because the instinctual process is part of our animalistic hindbrain mental subroutines it’s something we have little or no direct control over until its effect is brought (often forced) into our conscious awareness. As such, and because we prefer to think of ourselves as emotional and rational beings, we tend to think of the influence of instinct as something we either have or need to have mastery over, and to a large extent this mastery makes sense. The truth is that instinct is an aspect of ourselves that needs to be controlled as well as embraced depending on circumstances.

Emotion

From an evolutionary perspective, the emotional process of interpreting stimuli is a mechanism of how our brains and biochemistry interact to affect our moods, demeanor and ’emotionality’ in response to both instinctual cues and the raw information of stimuli itself. Furthermore, the emotional process can also be influenced and/or modified by the rational process. I’m trying to be concise here, but our emotional response to information/stimuli is very much an evolved dynamic with latent purposes and practical functionalities. I’m making this distinction here because for millennia we’ve raised the effects of emotion to a mythical, metaphysical, importance.

While emotion often has immediate effects on us, emotion also has long term effect with regard to the stimuli it processes. There are dozens of definitions of emotions and there’s no way I’m going to lay them all out for you here. However, popular psychology asserts that there are as many as ten and as few as six base emotions:

  • Anger.
  • Disgust.
  • Fear.
  • Happiness.
  • Sadness.
  • Surprise.

Sometimes Contempt is added to this list. If these seem overly simplistic they are, again, abstracts to build more complex emotions on (some paleo-researchers insist there are only four base emotions across our evolved ethno-histories). For our purposes these base emotions will serve to show the connections between the instinctual process which prompts them and the rational process that modifies and sometimes informs them.

Each of these emotional responses is prompted by how our senses, brain and then instinctual process interprets a stimuli. Again, using our sabertooth tiger example, the instinctual process determines imminent danger and triggers a synaptic and hormonal response to that danger. As a result of that instinctual process an emotional process and response is triggered – likely fear (flight in most cases), but sometimes anger (fight).

Another example: you see an arousing woman (stimuli) at a party who is displaying behavioral cues and environmental indicators of interest (IOIs). Your instinctual process determines a high potential for a reproductive opportunity. From there the emotional process kicks in: hormones and dopamine (and not a small testosterone spike) that your instinctual process triggered flushes your system and serves as the basis for your emotional process to form an emotional response to the same stimuli. If it all passes the smell test that response (hopefully) will be happiness (and a little surprise mixed in).

There is a visceral biochemical interrelation between emotion and the stimuli/instinct relation that prompts the reaction. Adrenaline is one easy example, another is oxytocin or the “love hormone”. This is a bit of a mischaracterization of the hormone. Oxytocin induces feelings of trust and comfort and is thought to be a significant factor in human’s forming pair bonds and parental investments. There’s a lot more to oxytocin’s implications to our evolution than that, but for now lets look at how our biology influences the emotional process.

We proceed from stimuli to an instinctual response. If there is nothing mitigating that response (such as a rationally learned buffer to mitigate it) the next step in the chain is a biological reaction to that instinct – such as dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream or a post-orgasm flush of oxytocin after sex. From there the emotional process picks up the interpretation of this information as prompted by the cocktail of chemicals moving through our bloodstream and affecting our mental and physical interpretation of that stimuli. That biochemical factor prompts one, or a combination, of the base emotions listed above.

From there more complex emotions (feelings) and combinations thereof begin to form an emotional interpretation and response. This emotional response can be anything from a fast, reflexive one to a more nuanced and contemplative one. Furthermore, this emotional interpretation and response can also be modified by our rational mental process as well as our gendered capacity to process emotions. One thing to bear in mind about our emotional process is that it can imprint its interpretations into our ‘hard memory’ – sometimes so significantly that the memory of that stimuli can re-trigger that physical and emotional response.

Gender-modified interpretation of our emotion process is an important aspect to consider in Red Pill praxeology and one I’ll be elaborating on in the next part of this series. Until recently the accepted ‘science‘ about our emotional process has been based on a blank-slate equalist approach to emotion. In fact we still suffer from the outdated presumptions of academia that both men and women process emotion in the same manner, and, in theory, ought to be expected to have an equal capacity to interpret, respond and express emotion. In light of new technology and new research in a variety of interrelated disciplines we know this is old presumption is patently untrue. Men and women have different mental hardware and are born with different mental firmware. Both sexes interpret and process emotion in gender-specific manners.

I’ll be getting into the personal and social implications that the legacy of this (deliberate) misunderstanding presents in the next essay. For now it’s important to consider that human beings have an innate predisposition to elevate the emotional process above instinct and reason. Likely this is due the to the survival dependency we had on our feelings in our evolutionary past. In a time when we lacked the greater rational facilities and information we’ve developed in our more recent past, depending on and learning from emotion, and the latent purposes it serves, was a species-beneficial system. We depended on our emotions to guide our behaviors (long and short term) for us more in our prehistory when we lacked the more developed rational process we take for granted now. Emotions served latent evolutionary purposes for us in our prehistory and today are still overly emphasized – often to metaphysical attributes – as superior to reason. More on this soon.

Reason

The final piece of our interpretive process is reason, or rationality (I’ll use these interchangeably). Ironically, for all of the social preconceptions that our emotions have made us “more evolved” above instinct, it is our rational process that has evolved us above both instinct and emotion. From and evolutionary standpoint our rational process is a relatively recent development; pushing us past the limitations of instinct and emotion. The definition of rationality is the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. It is the quality of being able to think sensibly or logically and being endowed with the capacity to reason.

Biologically it’s postulated that our larger brains allowed us to develop a capacity for reason, but that doesn’t mean other animals lack the same facility, it’s just that the rational process is less developed (some would say less environmentally necessary) in those animals by order of degree. Dogs, for example, rely primarily on the instinctual process and the mental (vestigial) firmware they’re born with to solve most of their existential/environmental problems. That doesn’t mean that they lack the ability to learn and form novel (adaptive) behaviors using a rudimentary form of logic. Animals can be taught things, but their capacity to form novel ideas and behaviors is limited to their cognitive abilities. Humans, being the apex species on the planet, had the leisure to take the time necessary to evolve a capacity for logic and as such the rational process developed in us.

Of all our interpretive processes reason is the one that takes the longest to function. Our rational process forms our interpretation of stimuli based on information dissociated from the interpretations of instinct and emotion. Reason requires (accurate) knowledge derived from learning and experience, but there is also an improvisational element to the process.

Before I get too far in the weeds here I need to make a distinction; what I’m outlining is the rational mental process we employ to interpret and interact with stimuli, not rationality, the concept of reason or rationalism. That’s important because it’s all too easy to get lost in philosophical implications of reason when we look at the process of how we come to it.

As mentioned above, the rational process modifies the instinctual and emotional processes. Example, in high school, in drivers ed class, we’re taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid. When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our instinctive impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is make a precarious situation worse. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, we make this our default reaction and we avoid disaster. This is the rational process interpreting a stimuli and forming a novel behavior that modifies the interpretation of the instinctual process.

The limitation of the rational process is in its necessity to take time to interpret information and develop a new apparatus. Where instinct and emotion are intimately linked with our biological hardware and psychological firmware, the rational process is dissociated from them in the same immediacy. Instinct and emotion are processes that evolved from a survival-need for fast interpretation and reaction. The rational process requires time, repetition and the right biological structures to be effective. Human beings are remarkably fast learners (even with complex challenges), but the learning that the rational process leads to is slow in comparison to instinct and emotion – which are essentially preloaded firmware in humans.

The rational process deals with the nuts and bolts of what we can understand of our reality. From there it can modify the other processes or it can serve to interpret stimuli on its own.

In the next part of this series I’ll be exploring how these cognitive processes interact and cooperate and conflict with each other. I will also consider the gendered advantages and disadvantages these processes represent to our individual experiences as men and women and the influence they play in intersexual and intersocial dynamics.

Old Lies

Apparently no one has bothered to let this poor sap (I don’t know who he is) know that the “Toxic” masculinity  narrative has now been replaced with “masculinity is toxic“. I find it interesting that when it comes to the mainstream societal understandings of what masculinity once was and what it is now – or what the mainstream believes it should be now – much of these interpretations are based on fanciful, anachronistic, ideas of what contributed to our understanding of masculinity now. I’ve gone into my own definitions of what constitutes ‘conventional’ masculinity for men many times before so I won’t belabor it now, however, as the popular narrative changes I’ve noticed some very common presumptions that masculinity critics like to use and are repeated over and over.

The first of these, and the most common, is the deliberate misconception that a boy’s learning to be masculine never left the 1950-60s. In the wake of the Nikolas Cruz shooting this rationale surfaced quite a bit. It still is. The idea is that boys are born as these tender, delicate souls, all naturally ready to emote and sensate like precious little girls – that is until the nebulous evil ‘patriarchy’ gets ahold of them and batters them into “being tough”, not crying and told to stop being such pussies. This is the old anachronism that presupposes western society never left the ‘macho tough guy’ preconditioning of boys to raise them to be these future murderers, wife beaters and misogynists.

This is, of course, the “boys are broken” narrative I addressed in Good Humans. It’s kind of ironic when you think that this narrative would have us believe boys naturally wanting to be boys is a net social negative and it takes some strong intervention in their upbringing to turn them into good humans. So what is it? Are boys being their natural selves by wanting to be rambunctious, risk taking, shit-giving, masculine boys, or are they naturally these tender little emo-beings coming fresh out of the womb only to have their ‘genuine’ sensitive emotional souls crushed by “hyper-masculine” fathers, male teachers and school coaches. This is one of the more stupid, but deliberate, paradoxes the Village and the Feminine Imperative conveniently switch between as circumstances require yet one more anti-masculine response.

Lies for Boys

You can see this confusion in the above Tweet.

Our society teaches boys to “toughen up”.

Actually no, the feminine-primary social order that has been systematically feminizing boys into feminine-identifying men for the past 50 years does nothing of the kind. Since the mid-seventies the cultural narrative took a hard turn to the feminine-correct in raising boys into pacified ‘harmless’ men. We’re going on five generations of telling boys it is incumbent upon them to get in touch with their mythical feminine sides if they want to evolve beyond ‘traditional masculinity’. There is no ‘toughening’ being taught to boys in a female primary education system that teaches boys in a manner that presumes they are defective girls.

…which is okay, but not okay when “toughening up” also means suppressing feelings.

Feelings are perhaps the only thing boys are being taught to prioritize in their feminine-primary educations today. This fact deserves a bit of explanation here. Male and female humans process emotions differently. Women in particular process negative emotions in a much different way than men. Men tend to prioritize information through a filter of rational discernment first and then sort out how they feel about that information in an emotional context. Women are much the opposite; girls process information through an emotional filter first and then sort out what the information actually means to them (and after that, how it might affect others). If this sounds like the essays I’ve written about how men’s and women’s communications methods differ you’re not too far off. Men prioritize the content (information) of a conversation while women prioritize the context (the feels she gets) from a conversation. This is how our brains work, and when one method isn’t socially favored above the other both methods can be complementary to the other.

But in a feminine-primary social order this is not how things work. As I mentioned, for the past 50+ years our educational system has shifted to favor the learning methodologies of girls at the expense of boys. This ‘girls style’ teaching has been the standard for so long now that we largely take it for granted that it is the only correct style of teaching. Today, men account for less than 25% of all teachers in the United States. In the UK it’s 25% and n Canada only 17% of elementary school teachers are male. Teaching is a female dominated profession and especially for younger kids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers, are men. How do you think stats like these affect the learning methodologies applied to boys and girls?

Yet still this lie that boys are the victims of some overwhelming toxic masculinity in their upbringing is the first reflexive explanation we hear from women and feminized men when a kid commits a criminal act. Why?

Lies for Equalism

Because it sounds right. It sounds like it should be right. The presumption is that boys are, in fact, girls; or at least they should be a functional equivalent of girls when it comes to educations. Over the past 50 years the baseless presumptions of blank-slate egalitarian equalism has not only inserted its lies into our social consciousness, but also into our presumptions about educating kids. I’ll repeat, men and women are biologically and psychologically different and boys and girls are equally different. The ways they learn are distinct to their sex. Yet for the past 4 generations egalitarian equalism has convinced (mostly female) educators that boys and girls are functional equals and gender differences are learned rather than innate.

While equalism informs (mostly female) teachers that boys and girls are the same, the teaching methodology that works best for girls and women is the predominant one today and for the recent past generations. The only way to justify this method as the universal one is to presume that boys are the same as girls – just ‘defective’ girls that must be taught to quash their innate maleness. If boys and girls are presumed to be blank-slate equals then it must follow that boys are just as emotion-prioritizing and sensitive as any girl, and it is through a process of an imagined patreo-misogyny social conditioning that boys psychologically cover over their “true” natures – that of precious little (defective) girls. In essence the equalist belief is that all babies are born as little equal blank-slates, but the ideal template for those blank-slates is a female nature irrespective of the sex of the child.

When a boy’s real, masculine, inborn nature expresses itself the first thing it meets in this equalist-but-feminine-primary education is derision and shame. For as much as boys would be boys they are taught that they aren’t good for being so. They’re encouraged to self-repress, self-deprecate their gender and self-police their brothers. They’re taught that the correct way to think is to emote like girls because that’s correct for the template of a “good human”. Despite the female-centric teaching boys innate nature still find ways for boys to be boys and when this happens an egalitarian (feminine-primary) social order presume the ‘bad behavior’ must be the result of the influence of an evil patriarchy that truly hasn’t existed in the way they believe it does for 50 some odd years.

 

As I’ve detailed in past essays, society only sees fathers as tolerable and superfluous when it comes to raising boys. Single mothers are celebrated as super-human and in the equalist lie that would have us believe that women can not only ‘have it all’ but they can ‘do it all’ we rarely question the necessity of a masculine influence in a child’s life. We give it lip service and parrot back the need for a man to “step up and take responsibility as a parent”. The message to dads is always “do better”, because the pretense for fathers is that they are inherently irresponsible and ‘broken’ just like all boys are.

The Village might even concede that a father is some advantage to a child, but ultimately he’s superfluous – that is until that kid is involved in some kind of criminality. Then the questions become “Where was this kid’s father? Why wasn’t he around to teach this kid some discipline and respect for human life?” The children of single mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be come involved in criminality, but we don’t look at her half-measure parenting as a possible cause. Remember, she’s a super-hero and blameless, so any blame for this kid’s acts fall on the shoulders of a weak or absent father. Then fathers are necessary. Then the kid needed to ‘toughen up’ and dad should’ve taught it to him. And all of this comes full circle and feeds into the idea of father’s inherent incompetence again.

Lies for ‘Defective Girls’

The next lie is that boys can be,…

…both tough and fragile, vulnerable and resilient. Being vulnerable doesn’t affect your manliness.

I’ve written a lot about the lie of transvaluation and  Vulnerability in the past, but this was really in terms of how women perceive men and require strength and dominance. Another aspect of masculinity that is encoded into women’s mental firmware is to seek out men with superior competency. A woman just is, a man must become is the first maxim of a man accepting his Burden of Performance. Part of this masculine competency involves strength, know-how and determination; all things that have been replaced with feminine-primary emotionalism and naval gazing for boys.

Men are expected to know how to do everything and what they do not know, what they are not competent in is one criteria of how they are judged by women. A lot of guys might think, “So the fuck what? I don’t base my self-worth on the opinions of women.” As well you shouldn’t, but it doesn’t change the truth that if you don’t know how to change a tire when you get flat, or you need another man who does know how to do it to change it for you, a woman sees you as less competent – and by extension less capable of providing her with the security she needs from a masculine ideal. Women evolved to see men as a Jack of all trades, master of some.

A man’s vulnerability (taught to him as a child by his female-primary teachers) most definitely affects his manliness. Vulnerability is, by definition, a weakness. It is a flaw in the design, a chink in the armor and vulnerabilities will be exploited by enemies and rivals to ensure that man fails while a stronger one succeeds in all things. This is Darwinism so simple that to question it seems illogical, but in our equalist utopia toughness and fragility find no contradiction; vulnerability and resilience are bed partners. Again, we must consider that this illogical balance can only exist in the female ‘good human’ template and the idea that everything is learned and nothing is innate about male and female humans. Promoting the idea that ‘vulnerability doesn’t affect manliness’ presumes that the person declaring it is in some way an authority on a manliness that has been already demonized and conditioned out of our boys today.

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. A kid like Nikolas Cruz was bound to happen in a world that teaches boys to prioritize feelings above rationality. He was taught like a defective girl. He never learned the masculine inspired discipline, determination and resiliency because all that conflicts with the lie that vulnerability is ever a strength. All that conflicts with his feminine-primary upbringing.

As such, these ‘defective girls’ are unequipped to handle the rejection of a girlfriend. The participation trophy generation, the one where everyone’s a winner and no one ever has to deal with defeat, never teaches these ‘defective girls’ what to do when they finally do taste a bitter defeat. They never learned how to come back from it because that would mean admitting that vulnerability and emotionalism (the female-correct way to handle it) are in fact weaknesses. So, predictably, a ‘defective girl’ like Nikolas Cruz does what any petulant teenage girl would – he has an emotional outburst. Only his outburst consists of gunning down 17 kids with an assault rifle.

The answer to incidents like this doesn’t lie in gun control or further feminization of boys. It lies in reimagining how we educate boys and how we see masculinity as a net positive that can deter exactly this kind of emotional outburst. If you truly want these shootings to stop it’s time we embrace real men teaching real toughness and resilience in our boys. It’s time we teach boys like they will become tough, strong, invulnerable young men we may need to provide future generations with a much needed security. And the time where we’ll need them is coming faster than anyone today really thinks.

No Prescriptions

On Saturday I had a great discussion with Anthony Johnson, Rian Stone (Married Red Pill Reddit) and “Carl” from Black Label Logic. The topic was a critique of the impact Dr. Jordan Peterson is having on a society of ‘lost’ (mostly) young men and how his message is affecting this generally rudderless generation of men. It’s a little over two hours long, but from the overwhelming response on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other forums it’s definitely struck a nerve. As an aside here, I’m considering making this meet up video format something I may do semi-regularly (like every other week) with some of the men I consider peers in the manosphere.

You can watch this talk at your leisure, but it has taught me a few things. As I mentioned in the chat it’s next to impossible to have any disagreement or critique of people whom other’s believe are your betters. As Rollo Tomassi it’s impossible for me to be critical of any high profile guy in the sphere without the accusations of professional jealousy or sour grapes being the first reflexive response from haters. I got that, but I’ve learned the conversation is more important that trying to convince anyone of it being genuine. In fact, I think it belies a bigger problem when they are above critique.

That aside, I think it was good to finally parse where Red Pill awareness and what Peterson is advocating have some overlap and where we differ. Peterson is a fountain of hope for the ‘lost’ boys, so anything critical of his message is going to sound like it’s endorsing an “enjoy the decline” mentality. I can’t expect everyone to have read up on my own opinion about that, but the short version is that I’ve never been convinced of some inevitable decline and fall of western civilization. In other words, I think it is possible to turn the ship around; where I may differ is in how that might be done.

For the record here I want to say that I have a great respect for Dr. Peterson. I think he’s what the sphere has needed for a while and I think he fits the role of ‘champion’ that a generation of young men have wanted to place on someone. Ideologically I agree with about 85-90% of what he advocates and there’s no doubt that he’s got definite skin in the game. In fact I really hate it when people use that as some catch phrase to disqualify men today. As a man we all have skin in the game now. How much and to what degree may be debatable, but we all live in a feminine-primary social order and as such we all have a lot to risk whether we acknowledge this or not.

Where I differ with Peterson is in his very Trad-Con solutions to turning the ship around. I wasn’t shocked to see him endorsed in videos for Prager University. In some ways what he proposes resonates with young men looking for a direction because their fathers and generations of Blue Pill men haven’t been able to deliver a way out of Hell for them. I go into this in more detail in our talk here, but here are some of my issues with Peterson’s take on things:

• Life is suffering and sacrifice: In every video I’ve watched Dr. Peterson’s founding (zen-like) premise is that life is suffering and the best men can do is to find ways to minimize that suffering. Men (and I’ve yet to see a video addressing women) must sacrifice parts or all of themselves in order to qualify for “genuine” manhood. The degree of that self-sacrifice is relative to how high a status that man can achieve.

I fundamentally disagree with this premise though I do understand why it’s so appealing to a ‘lost generation’ of young men. From my own perspective, life is based on a perpetual discontent, but how a man deals with that discontent – creatively or destructively – is the measure of him. Furthermore, I would argue that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make in order to facilitate their reality.

• Blue Pill conditioning seems to define his perspective of women: Essentially the archetype he has for women was formed for him as a 7 year old boy when he first developed a soul-mate ONEitis for his wife. His reluctance to acknowledge the Alpha Fucks side of women’s Hypergamy in any video (beyond his repeated use of 50 Shades of Grey as a humorous example) leads me to the impression that he defaults to women as innately ‘good’ and above too much criticism. As such he focuses almost entirely on the good provider / parental investment / Beta need side of Hypergamy. This is unsurprising as it follows the same Trad-Con interpretations of women being “closer to God than men” and men must qualify themselves, and sacrifice themselves for women’s (wives) intimate approval. Dalrock has covered this dynamic among male “complementarian” Christian leaders quite extensively.

• Sacrifice of men is a parallel to men’s disposability: Men will blow themselves up for pussy. From what I gather from his talks Peterson endorses male disposability as a form of Honor. He seems to play on the ‘Man Up / Shut Up’ dynamic I talked about in The Honor System. What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny. I’m not suggesting Peterson is accusing men of Patriarchy or Misogyny, rather, like most Trad-Cons, it’s a question of living up to one’s duty as a man in his disposability and his usefulness in that sacrifice.

• “Get your shit together” is also a plea for sacrifice: If a man is less valuable his sacrifice is less meaningful. No one cares about mediocre / average men’s sacrifices, but if a man accepts that he is to improve himself it is so that his sacrifice is more appreciated and important. Thus, the comparisons to Christ’s sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of sacrifice and meaning which Peterson uses in his dissertations on manhood and the Bible. My issue here is that women and a feminine-primary social order lack a capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make because these are taken-for-granted expectations of what a man just “ought to do”.

• Peterson is egalitarian to a fault: The mantra may be for men to sack up and make something of themselves, but this is couched in an egalitarian equalism that’s prevalent today. If I had one question to ask Jordan it would be this; is there a dominance hierarchy in a healthy LTR or marriage? I don’t know for certain. My guess is he would say it passes back and forth between a husband and wife which is to say he falls back on an egalitarian ideal. However, outside the family structure he acknowledges that men and women in a state of egalitarianism choose to adopt traditional gender roles (I think he gave the same example as was covered here).

• Dr. Peterson regularly resorts to shaming language with men, rarely does he do the same with women: This may be a simple question of his delivery, but Peterson is always harder on men than he is with women. In so doing he adopts the AMOGing of only men techniques that a pastor like Mark Driscoll uses from the pulpit. Inso doing he pedestalizes women and absolves them of any consequences of their Hypergamous choices by imploring men to “man up and marry those sluts“. In essence the sacrificial nature of men becomes one that is necessary for the continuance of ‘family’ and western culture in spite of women. I also see how this plays into the idea of women lacking any moral agency, personal responsibility and wiping the bad behavior of women off on the men who have allowed this to happen. Once again it comes back to the hypoagency of women.

• Peterson believes that desire can be negotiated: This is my biggest problem with Peterson’s approach to women. This undoubtedly comes from his being a clinical psychologist, but like most therapists he defaults to the idea that genuine desire can be motivated by a process of negotiation. If there is one example of his lack of experience with women it is this belief. In several of his interviews and podcasts he makes reference to appealing to women’s reason and negotiating terms for acceptable behavior (always a man’s behavior) in exchange for intimacy and/or a stress-free marriage. This is the egalitarian, Oprah Approved, male-sublimated means to achieving transactional intimacy.

As you might guess, I strongly disagree with negotiating intimacy. You cannot negotiate genuine desire. You can obligate a woman to fuck you (now called rape) via negotiation, but you cannot organically inspire genuine desire in a woman. This has always been my main point of contention with the marriage counseling trade for a long time.

What is the Red Pill version of “man-up”?

I had a commenter ask me this in the last comment thread. I think there’s two sides to this question. First, I think there’s a need to keep the Red Pill (in the intersexual sense) as close to an objectivist purpose as possible. That means Red Pill awareness is the result of a continuing praxeology.

I’ve locked horns with a few Red Pill guys recently who seem to think that ‘Red Pill’ is an ideology and it’s just the counter revolt to feminism; basically it is feminism for men. I think that does a huge disservice to everything and everyone that’s brought us to where we are today in Red Pill awareness and all of the work and personal risk that was put on the line to explore what we know as Red Pill awareness now. Not only that it casually devalues the effort and work that’s continuing right now.

Critics and feminists alike want to draw parallels in the manosphere to whatever (fictitious) wave of feminism they think applies to whatever the Men’s Rights Movement is calling Red Pill at the moment. Believing that Red Pill is an ideology is one more casualty of how the term / brand has been bastardized by other ideologies who’ve never had any business referring to themselves as “red pill”.

Presuming Red Pill is just an ideology is juvenile, and unsurprisingly it’s an opinion of some underexperienced men in the manosphere who want for simplistic answers. They don’t want to think about what Red Pill awareness implies on a larger social scale. They want a flag to wave and an easy to understand ideology so they can stick it to their feminist enemies. I get it. They want Red Pill (however they define it) to be that ideology, but to me, I think, and I’ve always said it, the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, areligious and amoral to ensure that it stays true to understanding truth. It needs to remain true to being an aggregate of men’s collected experiences with intersexual dynamics.

What these guys want is a meaning to that truth, but that’s not the Red Pill. Meaning is what men will apply to that truth according to their individual needs, situations and circumstances. This is why Peterson and probably some more personalities to follow him will be popular in the future; they prioritize meaning above truth. If you listen to the first podcast of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson they spend the entire time trying to come to an agreed measure of truth between the two of them so they can move on (in the second podcast) to what is meaning.

You want to know why I don’t do prescriptions on The Rational Male? Because we disempower ourselves when we follow someone else’s path and not our own.

There is a deep need in almost all people to improve or ‘fix’ ourselves in some way. I’ve written essays about it; discontent is is the human condition. That in no way means that life is suffering as per the Peterson (Zen) doctrine, but it is man’s condition to never be satisfied with even the greatest of accomplishments. That is what put us at the top of the species contest on this planet. You can be constructively or destructively discontent, but when you tell me that life is suffering and the only way to lessen that suffering (never to solve it of course) is to sacrifice my way to a better life all that says to me is that you’re out of ideas for a creative solution and you’re all-in on the destructive methods. Either that or you’ll continue naval gazing.

Fuck that.

So, the Red Pill needs to remain a praxeology and it ought to always resist being force-fit into an ideology because it’s always some ideological hack who wants to claim the truth it reveals as proof of his own purpose. The Red Pill has to remain an open source aggregate of men’s experiences. That’s why we’re still here today in spite of the Rooshs who said it would die out 3 years ago – it’s open source and decentralized information.

Now, to the second point, what does ‘Man up’ mean in the Red Pill context? I think this is really for the individual to decide, but I’d say that it would involve a man utilizing and internalizing the awareness the Red Pill represents to him and improving his life with it. In the Safety Net post’s comment thread there are hundreds of examples of how men saved their own lives, often literally. How the Red Pill truth reached them and then manifested in their lives is highly individual. I mentioned the need for a dissociation with ideology because that usually means aligning oneself with the expectations of someone else’s version of truth, not the objective (or as objective as we can make it) truth of the Red Pill.

When I hear ‘man-up’, I identify the context only as derogatory… is there any other definition which is not?

It should, because in almost all contexts imploring a guy to “Man Up” is following someone else’s path, not your own. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not in the business of creating better men, I’m in the business of men making themselves better men. And in today’s world of men seeking direction there is no shortage of personalities who’d like nothing more than to profit from selling men on their paths.

If there is a definition of ‘manning up’ in a Red Pill sense it is living a better way than your previous life that was informed by the falsehoods of your Blue Pill conditioning. Manning up Red Pill is killing off that old Blue Pill-created persona and killing off the false idealisms it taught you. It’s understanding and internalizing that those lies made you a less authentic person because the Blue Pill is firmly an ideology, but one that wears the mask of freedom or choice or individualism. If self-improvement in a Red Pill sense entail some basic tenets, one is that a man cuts himself away from that old Blue Pill paradigm and rebuilds a better life for himself based on a real understanding of intersexual truth on the personal, social and political scales.

Manning up Red Pill begins with rejecting the lies of egalitarian equalism and a commitment to real objective understanding of intersexual dynamics.

 

Male Control

Back in October, 2016 I wrote an essay called Sexual Zoning. In that post I explored the social inconsistencies and potential for (sometimes catastrophic) consequences for men in misunderstanding what were, and what have become, particular zones in which men and women covertly acknowledge the potential for an intersexual connection.

In the bygone Western social system, young people were expected to regularly interact with one another in controlled, regulated environments, in a way that fostered productive, long-term, monogamous, assortative relationships. This was a sort of “holistic” milieu, so to speak, where young people treated one another as potential future partners, sexual and otherwise, in a socially regulated manner, in all cases when they were permitted to interact. This was even the norm in workplaces where both men and women were present. The average man found a girlfriend through his extended family or social circle, because families and social circles were normally large.

What we have today is the complete opposite: “sexual zoning”. Some mixed-sex environments, like the workplace, schools and campuses, are made completely asexual – sterile, so to speak. No sexualized interactions are permitted to take place. This is demanded by law and expected by society. In such environments, you’re supposed to treat members of the opposite sex strictly as colleagues or professionals, non-sexual beings. (Hot men are allowed to get away with more, of course, but that’s another issue.) Other mixed-sex environments, on the other hand, like nightclubs, are expected to be full-on sexual. Everybody there knows that all interactions entail the future possibility of casual sex. It’s basically a meat market. You’re expected to hit on girls, and girls expect to be hit on by attractive men. Socializing in these environments requires action, engagement. If you want to find a partner, either just for sex or something more, you have to go there, you have to have Game etc.

The video I’ve chosen to dissect here is a prime example of how generations of men have been raised to deliberately misunderstand intersexual dynamics and at the same time demonize the conventional masculinity that so much of western culture has been founded upon. To be thorough though, really every culture throughout history has been primarily founded on conventional masculinity and the aspects that contribute to maleness.

Jonathan McIntosh finds an easy mark in the archetypal masculine characters of Harrison Ford, but there’s a very important reason the 80’s icon is so egregious to the men of McIntosh’s generation. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, etc. are all the Alpha male rogues this generation has been taught to love in terms of bravado, but to hate because they ‘always get the girl’; and they get her in such a way that it grates against all that their feminine-primary upbringing led them to believe was just this side of sexual assault.

McIntosh relates that he was part of a generation that idealized Harrison Ford’s most iconic characters, yet now he feels pangs of regret and resentment for having looked up the characters’ archetype. This is a perfect illustration of how conventional masculinity has been reverse engineered by our feminine-primary social order since the Sexual Revolution. I’ve mentioned in many prior essays that while overt masculinity is vilified as the cause of all social evils, it still remains the most arousing aspect of men for women. Boys like McIntosh saw this archetype and made that connection to female attraction, but it took generations of Blue Pill reconditioning to make them feel bad for ever attempting to adopt that bravado into their own personalities.

While growing up the message was the same Blue Pill identifying with the feminine (in fact Beta Game depends on that identification). Play nice, play equal, respect all women by default and never assert yourself too overtly or too crudely lest you risk offending her sensibilities. These are the boys who were raised by family, media and their schooling to expect a rationality that women could be expected to say what they mean and then do what they said. Yet that never seemed to gel when they would deductively see the girls they wanted, the ones who told them they wanted a ‘nice guy’ who respected them, consistently reward the asshole jerk with the intimacy and sex they thought would come to them if they followed what they were told.

In the end, Han Solo and Indiana Jones get the girl and she genuinely desires him – not because this is some odd fantasy of the writer’s imagination, but because this is (was) a standard aspect of women’s genuine attraction to men. The aberration is the idea that the attraction and affair would go any other way. Only in this feminized generation does thousands of years of male-female interaction seem at all unsettling.

So, here we have conventionally masculine archetypes – sometimes rakish, sometimes bold and dutiful – following their own path, making themselves their Mental Point of Origin, and making their mission (not their woman) their priority. Whether it was Captain Kirk, Han Solo or Conan the Barbarian the mental order was always firmly focused on the individual man and his action. Between the time of the Sexual Revolution and 2017, the Feminine Imperative has systematically erased the conventionally masculine archetype; so much so that the gender-loathing men of this generation are either appalled at displays of masculinity or they simply have no frame of reference with which to contrast it with the distorted and blurred ideas of what masculinity should mean to them.

For some ‘men’ the notion of conventional masculinity itself is rejected altogether. It doesn’t mean anything to be a man for this generation, so conventional archetypes of men are offensive.

As a result of these four to five generations of progressively more feminized men we now see the confusion and disgust at conventional masculinity coming from this generation of men. We see a generation of males who have no positive association with their own gender. They become increasingly more isolated because they are convinced that anything that might be gender-exclusive to men alone is, by default, a form of misogyny. There is nothing ‘positive’ about being a man, yet for all of the misconceptions about gender being social constructs, exclusively female organizing of women and fempowerment is still viewed as beneficial; a sign of society ‘evolving’.

I recently read an article in the Boston Globe about middle aged men’s increasing social isolation. I would argue that for all of the raising of awareness about this phenomenon it is primarily generations of men’s inability to interact with other men that is at the root of this isolation. For decades now men have been discouraged from meeting with other men in any formalized fashion. Men are either suspect of misogyny or homosexuality if they get together for the sake of being men. What were seeing now is generations of men who no longer understand how to socially interact with other men.

Furthermore, when this isolation becomes a concern of women, those men are again berated for not interacting with other men in the ways that women do. Women talk, men do, but a feminine-primary social order only approves of one way for men to associate with one another – in the way that women do. Thus, we see the confusion of women that men don’t call each other up to schedule a coffee date for the express reason of conversation. Men and women have different forms of communication, but the socially approved form is only ever from the feminine context. Men interacting “as men do” – in a conventionally masculine way – is always misogynistic. Thus, we see overseers in the locker room, if only symbolically, to regulate what and how men communicate with each other.

The End of Toxic Masculinity

Dalrock had a great quick-hit post recently about how Michael Moore was suggesting that men be required by law to seek their wife or long-term girlfriend’s (or most recent Ex) signed permission to purchase a firearm in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Vegas.

That this idea would ever be a serious consideration speaks volumes about how masculine gender-loathing has become endemic in western culture. I get that Michael Moore is a self-inflicted cuck, but all I’m seeing in the wake of the Vegas shooting is less about gun control and more about male control.

It’s no longer about categorizing masculinity as “toxic” or “hyper” – that narrative is officially dropped after this shooting. Now, any masculinity is a threat, any expression of conventional masculinity is the true problem. Suggesting that a woman’s oversight and discernment should be necessary for a man to have access to a civil right only further reinforces what I’ve been saying for some time now – only the feminine is ‘correct’ in any social discourse. Only the feminine is legitimate in exercising judgement, educating new generations and deciding which man will breed and which will not.

Think about this; what’s being suggested is that men be denied a civil right that apparently only women should legitimately have. For all the fallacious blathering of women in pink pussy hats about how they think they’re losing rights today, here we have an actual right of men being denied by women, by the Feminine Imperative.

The ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative made a qualitative distinction between a feminine-acceptable form of masculinity and a potentially dangerous form. Needless to say the accepted form always consisted of whatever aspects of masculinity that was immediately beneficial to womankind. ‘Toxic’ masculinity was always characterized as Man Up or Shut Up masculinity:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

Now, in the Feminine Imperative’s unceasing efforts to Remove the Man a distinction between a useful masculinity and a dangerous masculinity is no longer something that resonates. All masculinity, all aspects, beneficial or detrimental, are to be considered the problem:

That the problem might just be masculinity, plain and simple, is not something we’re eager to countenance. While we might be prepared to apply a little structural analysis to the situation – yes, there is something about men and the way they are conditioned that leads us to this place – we’re unwilling to draw any final conclusions. Masculinity doesn’t kill people; it’s those mysterious toxins that are to blame.

[…]But strip away the so-called toxic aspects of masculinity: the aggression, the violence, the hate, the guns, and what are you left with? Strength, endurance, a woody-scented perfume, a liking for the colour blue? Certainly nothing that need be associated with manhood or maleness. These are simply individual qualities. The only reason to code them as “masculine” is to preserve a social hierarchy that ought to be destroyed.

[…]What would be so terrible about a world in which boys were treated no differently to girls from the day they were born? In which there are no pink/blue codifications to hide behind? In which a man’s anger and aggression were considered every bit as aberrant and unnatural as a woman’s?

The problem we’re facing isn’t toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic. It’s time we questioned even its most subtle manifestations.

Going forward this will be the narrative. There will be no distinction between misogyny, masculinity and maleness. What this author, perhaps deliberately, doesn’t want to address is that masculinity and all the associated ways our thinking and our behaviors that manifest from the biological side of our nature aren’t something that can be dissociated from us without killing us or erasing what we were evolved to be. There are no truly positive or negative aspects of masculinity, just as there are no positive or negative aspects of Hypergamy. They just are, and what makes them beneficial or detrimental all depends on the context in which they are applied. That may seem strange coming from the author of a book titled Positive Masculinity but understand that what is positive about masculinity is made so by need and by circumstance.

In a world created in the image of the Feminine Imperative masculinity itself is a horrible evil, until it’s needed to save women from rising floodwaters.

You see, for as much as the imperative would like to remove the ‘man’ from our language, our cultural consciousness, that man will always be needed in spite of the hate directed towards masculinity. This is what a feminine-primary society would have us redefine as some other term, something not unique to a male human being. But conventional, evolved, masculine strength and purpose will always manifest in men who unapologetically embrace it without an afterthought.

In my interview with Craig James we discussed men’s higher order thinking and purpose as well as our vital animal nature. You don’t separate one from the other. This is what the Feminine Imperative would have from men; a unilaterally female controlled utility-based masculinity that saves them from the worst consequences of both their environments and their decisions and simultaneously disappears when inconvenient. We hear women bleating about a lack of Real Men and the disappearance of true grit, and in the next article linked we see efforts to erase men entirely from social influence.

As I told Craig, when I’m in the squat rack I’m glad I have a feral, animal nature. It’s a survival aspect of human evolution. I’m not suggesting with this essay that men will become extinct; on the contrary I think what will help define our new conventional masculinity will largely be determined by how we express it in spite of a world arrayed against Man-kind. An equalist culture based on blank-slate equalism doesn’t see that you don’t separate the animal side of the human being from the high-order side. It is unwilling to accept that we need both; that we benefit and sometimes suffer from both.

The Lie of Equality

Reader KFG dropped this insight in last week’s post and I thought it was very relevant to something I’ve been contemplating for a while now:

As a general principle genetic fitness is always relative to the environment. A spread of genetic traits makes a species more robust, because it will have individuals better suited for survival in a greater range of environments.

There’s more than one breed of working dog because no one is “better.” Each has its specific strengths, paid for with corresponding weaknesses. A terrier is to small to hunt wolves, but you’re not going to stuff a wolfhound down a badger hole.

This was a great analogy. It’s also one of the primary reasons I believe the egalitarian equalist narrative is a deliberate lie with the hoped-for purpose of empowering people who cannot compete, or believe they have some plenary exclusion from competing in various aspects of life. One of the primary selling points of egalitarian equalism for men is the idea that they can be excluded from the Burden of Performance.

There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

The tests that a chaotic world throws at human beings is never equal or balanced in measure to our strengths to pass them. Equality, in the terms that egalitarian equalists are comfortable in defining it, implies that that every individual is equally matched in both value and utility within a totality of random challenges. Aside from this being patently false, it also demerits both strengths and weaknesses when that individual succeeds or fails at a particular challenge as a result of their individual character.

This is ironic in the sense that it provides easy, repeatable, excuses for a person’s successes or failures. If someone wins, well, we’re all equal so that person’s strengths which led to the success can be passed off as a result of assumed or circumstantial ‘privileges’ that made them better suited to their challenges – rarely is their hard work recognized, and even then, it’s colored by the overcoming of a presumed-unequal adversity that grants them ‘privilege’. If they fail, again, we’re all equal, so the failure is proof of a deficit, or a handicap, or a presumed repression of an equal person in a state of baseline equal challenge.

Individual Exceptionalism

One of the longest perpetuated cop outs (I should say paradoxes) that equalists cling to is the notion that People are People; that everyone is a unique individual (snowflake) and as such there is really no universally predictable method of testing character or knowing how a particular sex will respond to various challenges. It’s all random chance according to the individual’s socially constructed character and their capacity to be a ‘more evolved’, higher-thinking being.

On the surface this all-are-individuals notion may seem the antithesis of the ‘equality’ narrative that equalists cling to, but it is part of a cognitive dissonance all equalists struggle with. This approach is a means to standardizing individuality, so no scientific evidence that might find patterns of an evolved ‘nature’ of a person – or in our Red Pill case, a sex – can be predicted. It’s the hopeful cancellation of reams of empirical evidence that show how influential our biologies and inborn predispositions are. This ‘higher order’ individualism is always touted so the equailist mindset can claim that the exception to the rule disqualifies the overwhelmingly obvious general rule itself.

“We’re all exceptions to the rule.” – Carl Jung

“…and when we’re all special, no one will be.” – Syndrome

This fallacy is where we get the NA*ALT (not all ____ are like that) absolution of the most unflattering parts of human nature. Not All Women Are Like That is standard feminine-primary boilerplate for women and sympathizing men (White Knights) who’d rather we all ignore the aspects of female nature that shine a bad light on what are easily observable truths about their behavior and the motives behind them. The social convention relies on the idea that if there is even one individual contradiction to the generalization (always deemed an ‘overgeneralization’) then the whole idea must be wrong.

Of course, this individual exceptionality rule only applies to the concepts in which equalists have invested their egos in. When a generality proves an equalist’s ego-investment, that’s when it becomes an ‘endemic’ universal truth to their mindset. A binary over-exaggeration of this effect is the reflexive response for concepts that challenge their ego-investments. Thus, we see any and all of the (perceptually) negative aspects of masculinity (actually the totality of masculinity) painted as evidence of the endemic of ‘toxic’ masculinity as a whole. The individualist exceptionality in this instance is always ridiculed as ‘insecurity’ on the part of men even considering it.

The exceptionalism of the individual is always paired with some high-order consciousness, and/or the idea that anything that proves their ego-investment is “more evolved” – despite any evidence that proves the contrary – is proof of that this individual is a being who represents some evolutionary step forward. If you agree and support feminine-primacy it is ‘proof‘ that you are more ‘evolved’ than other men. Thus, the ‘more evolved’ status becomes a form of reward to the individual who aligns with the ideology. Conversely, the avoidance of being perceived as ‘unevolved’ serves as a form of negative reinforcement.

This is kind of ironic when you consider that the same equalist mindset that relies on the individualist exception is the same mindset that insists that everyone is the same; equal value, equal potential, equal purpose and equal ability. Again, the irony is that everything that would be used to establish the ‘unique snowflake’ ideology (so long as it contradicts innate strengths and weaknesses of an opposing ideology) is conveniently ignored in favor of blank-slate egalitarianism. There is a degree of wanting to avoid determinism (particularly biological determinism) for the individual in this blank-slate concept, but it also provides the equalist with a degree of feel-good affirmation that the individual is a product of social constructivism. So, we get the idea that gender is a social construct and, furthermore, that blank-slate individual is ‘more evolved’ to the point of redefining gender for themselves altogether. Even when that ‘individual’ is only 4 years old and hasn’t the capacity for abstract thought enough to make a determination.

To be an egalitarian equalist is to accept the cognitive dissonance that the individual trumps the general truth and yet simultaneously accept that the individual is just the blank-slate template of anyone else, thus negating the idea of the individual. It takes great stretches of belief to adhere to egalitarian if-then logic.

I apologize for getting into some heady stuff right out the gate here, but I think it’s vitally important that Red Pill aware men realize the self-conflicting flaw in the ideologies of post-modern equalism. Our feminine-primary social order is rife with it. They will disqualify the generalities of Red Pill awareness with individualist exceptionalism and in the next breath disqualify that premise with their investments in blank-slate egalitarianism.

This is easiest to see in Blue Pill conditioned men and women still plugged in to the Matrix, but I also see the same self-conflicting rationales among Red Pill aware men using the same process to justify personal ideology or their inability to de-pedestalize women on whole. There’s a common thread amongst well-meaning Red Pill men to want to defend the individual natures of women who align with the Blue Pill ego-investments they still cling to. All women are like that so long as those women are granola-eating, furry-armpit feminists – ‘Red Pill Women’ then become the individual (snowflake) exceptions to the otherwise general rule because they fit a different, idealized, profile.

The Inequality of Equality

I’ve stated this in many prior threads, but, I do not believe in “equality”.

I don’t believe in equality because I can objectively see that reality, our respective environments, our personal circumstances, etc. are all inherently unequal. Everyday we encounter circumstances in life which we are eminently unequalled for in our ability to address them. Likewise, there are circumstances we can easily overcome without so much as an afterthought. Whether these challenges demand or test our physical, mental, material or even spiritual capacities, the condition is the same – reality is inherently chaotic, unfair and challenging by order of degree. To presume that all individuals have equal value in light of the nature of reality is, itself, an unequal presumption. To expect sameness in the degree of competency or incompetency to meet any given challenge reality throws at us is a form of inequality. And it’s just this inequality that equalists ironically exploit.

As KFG was stating, “each dog has it’s strengths for a given task”. One dog is not as valuable as another depending on what determines a positive outcome. What equalism attempts do to – what it has the ludicrous audacity to presume – is to alter reality to fit the needs of the individual in order to make all individuals equally valuable agents. This is the ‘participation trophy’ mentality, but it is also a glaring disregard for existential reality. Which, again, contradicts the idea of individual exceptionalism; reality must be made to be equal to accommodate the existence of the equally valuable individual.

To say you don’t believe in equality is only outrageous because it offends the predominant social narrative of today. It seemingly denies the inherent value of the individual, but what is conveniently never addressed is how an environment, condition and state defines what is functionally valued for any given instance. Like the dog bred to hunt ferrets out of their warrens is not the functional equal of a dog bred to run down prey at 45 MPH. The value of the individual is only relevant to the function demanded of it.

The default misunderstanding (actually deliberate) most equalists believe is that functional worth is personal worth. I addressed this in Separating Values:

When you attempt to quantify any aspect of human ‘value’ you can expect to have your interpretations of  it to be offensive to various people on the up or down side of that estimate. There is simply no escaping personal bias and the offense that comes from having one’s self-worth attacked, or even confirmed for them.

The first criticism I’ve come to expect is usually some variation about how evaluating a person’s SMV is “dehumanizing”, people are people, and have intrinsic worth beyond just the sexual. To which I’ll emphatically agree, however, this dismissal only conveniently sidesteps the realities of the sexual marketplace.

Again, sexual market value is not personal value. Personal value, your value as a human being however one subjectively defines that, is a definite component to sexual market value, but separating the two requires an often uncomfortable amount of self-analysis. And, as in Ms. Korth’s experience here, this often results in denial of very real circumstances, as well as a necessary, ego-preserving, cognitive dissonance from that reality.

Denial of sexual market valuation is a psychological insurance against women losing their controlling, sexual agency in their hypergamous choices.

This is where the appeal to emotion begins for the equalist mindset. It seems dehumanizing to even consider an individuals functional value. Human’s capacity to learn and train and practice to become proficient or excel in various functions is truly a marvel of our evolution. Brain plasticity being what it is, makes our potential for learning and overcoming our environments what separates us from other animals. We all have the potential to be more than we are in functional value, and this is the root of the emotional appeal of equalists. It’s seems so negative to presume we aren’t functional equals because we have the capacity and potential to become more functionally valuable. The appeal is one of optimism.

What this appeal ignores is the functional value of an individual in the now; the two dogs bred for different purposes. What this appeal also ignores is the ever-changing nature of reality and the challenges it presents to an individual in the now and how this defines value. What equalism cannot do is separate functional value from potential value.

Adopting a mindset that accepts complementarity between the sexes and between individuals, one that celebrates and utilizes innate strengths and talents, yet also embraces the weaknesses and compensates for them is a far healthier one that presuming baseline equivalency. Understanding the efficacy of applying strengths to weaknesses cooperatively while acknowledging we all aren’t the same damn dog will be a key to dissolving the fantasy of egalitarian equalism and create a more balanced and healthier relations between the sexes. Embracing the fact that condition, environment, reality and the challenges they pose defines our usefulness is far better than to assume any single individual could ever be a self-contained, self-sufficient island unto themselves – that is what equalism would have us believe.

Blue Pill Conditioning and Equalism

Rational reader Playdontpay had a very poignant comment in last week’s thread:

I’ll stick with the “boner test”. Women are only playthings anyway!
Do I enjoy fucking her? After sex is she good feminine company? This is all I need to know, if shit goes sideways I’ll just get another one.

She’s only going to lie and present a fictional version of herself based on what she thinks you’re looking for anyways. Women don’t do real self improvement they just convince themselves that they already are “better” because if she can’t convince herself it will be more difficult for her to sell it to you.

She will rewrite her sexual history and “because she’s a different person now”, well, that’s the way she has always been. Stop taking them so seriously, how are you going to vet a Machiavellian liar that’s been learning game from the age of 12?

His perspective on women is exactly why I tell men to avoid marriage altogether even though I’ve had a fantastic marriage myself for over 20 years. A lot of my haters, and more than a few supporters often get hung up on this.

Most of the criticism I get for writing what I do and still maintaining a good relationship with Mrs. T comes from men who cannot wrap their heads around the very simple, accepted truths described in this approach towards women. They think there must be something more to it. They think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are. So, naturally, the easy presumption is that any self respecting woman would never put up with a Red Pill man’s outlook and approach, because they believe the blank slate lie.

If an egalitarian ideal between men and women were tenable I’d completely agree, but it isn’t. So, in order to protect their ego investments, the rationale follows that any woman who falls for a Red Pill man must, by definition, be lacking in self esteem, self respect, low quality, etc. They believe that because anything else destroys their equalist fantasy world. This stems from a much deeper, root level, ego-investment in egalitarianism and I think this is a perspective a lot of Red Pill aware men have a tough time with to say nothing of men still plugged into the Blue Pill world view.

If you’ve read me for any length of time you’ll know I’m rarely prescriptive in my writing. I’ve always been of the belief that men need to find ways to utilize Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics for themselves on an individual basis. However, I will say that there are certain general aspects of that awareness and how to put it into something applicable in a man’s life that seem self-evident to me. First and foremost among these generalities is that in killing your inner Beta and disabusing oneself of his Blue Pill conditioning, a man needs to understand that the foundational belief that informed and defined his Blue Pill existence is equalism. The presumption that an idealized, blank-slate egalitarian state between the sexes is both possible and desirable informs all Blue Pill beliefs that follow it.

This equalist presumption often forms the mental point of origin for most Blue Pill men. Ostensibly, this mental prioritization of some equal state between the sexes is what most Blue Pill guys will tell you attracts women. This notion is also fundamental to Blue Pill guys’ drive for identifying their own psyches with the feminine and forms the basis of Beta Game.

Transitioning this early equalist ideology to a sexual strategy is a simple, deductive process for men. Little boys are raised on feminine primacy memes and the narrative of Fempowerment, all the while being conditioned to believe that, beyond some insignificant biology, boys and girls are identical beings with the same potential and proficiencies. It’s gotten to the point where this process is normalized and pushed to the backgrounds of most people’s consciousness. We’ll raise boys in feminine-primary educational standards, we’ll teach them they’re the same as girls, but we’ll also teach them they’re defective for not aligning themselves with girls, for not getting in touch with their feminine sides.

I’m fleshing this process out a bit here because unlearning this equalist’s mental point of origin is a key transition in a man’s unplugging. Often the hardest part of killing the Beta and accepting Red Pill awareness is replacing equalism with oneself as a mental point of origin. This is a hard step for most guys because it requires he shift his opinion of himself and risk being called a selfish asshole. Remember, anything that would disagree with or challenge the idea of intersexual egalitarianism will always be equated with misogyny, intolerance, tyranny, etc. Questioning the validity of equalism (however it’s applied) will always be countered with a  binary extreme.

This is exactly why Playdontpay’s comment appears so outrageous and self-indulgent to anyone not Red Pill aware. HIs pragmatism will be conflated with anger.

Interghangeability

Anonymous Reader posits:

Rollo
…men who cannot wrap their heads around the very simple, accepted truths you describe about your approach towards women. They think there must be something more to it.

Often because they’ve been told since they were toddlers that there is “more to it”, also known as the Blue Pill.

They think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are.

Exactly so and very important. The feminist fallacy of “interchangeable” leads to this. The mental habit some men have of projecting themselves onto others, believing “Well, I’m like this, so everyone else must be also” leads to this. It is extremely frustrating to encounter female behavior that is so obviously stupid it is like catching someone peeing in the kitchen sink.

Many betaized men will put up with bad behavior for far too long, then have a major blowout of anger and expect behavioral change. That doesn’t work with toddlers or dogs or women. Constant, low key, correction does work. Neuroplasticity points to a “why”; daily reiteration of a desired habit works better than once per week, etc.

It’s important to recognize the difference between real introspection and brooding or ruminating, too. Some women will brood over wrongs done but not connect that up with their own behavior. That’s not introspection. That’s not “failure analysis”. That’s rewiring neural pathways to perpetual resentment.

It is extremely difficult for an equalist, betaized man to accept the fact that women want and need to be dominated, because they for sure would hate and resent that. It is even worse for the churchgoing men, because the equalist chant from the conservative feminists in churches is almost always slathered with a layer of “sisterly love”.

What Anon is driving at here is my second point in Blue Pill and Red Pill men understanding the depth of their conditioning. Equalism and feminism depend on interchangeability. In order for little girls to grow up to be anything they want to be there must be an agreed upon “level playing field” from a socio-sexual point of view. This means that if little girls want to grow up to become football players and little boys want to grow up to be prima ballerinas there (at least ostensibly) must be an agreed upon equalist environment in which this can happen.

The egalitarian ideal the Blue Pill conditions us to believe is possible presumes there is a mutually agreeable state of intersexual equality. In reality this state is entirely contradictory to our evolved sexual strategies and our biological realities, but in theory, an egalitarian ideal can only exist in an environment that is deemed equal by both men and women. If such a state were possible, if evolved influences of our biological realities for both sexes were non-factors, then this state would also presume a mutual interchangeability between the sexes.

The combination of our equalist conditioning and this interchangeability is the root of much of the dysfunction we see between men and women today. Because we are taught all-is-one, because we presume we’re all the same except for the plumbing, there is also a presumption of uniformity of purpose between the sexes. Equalism is really just the religion of the Feminine Imperative, but it hides behind this feminine-primary advertising that men and women are playing by a mutually agreed upon set of rules, striving for mutually agreed (Blue Pill) goals and all in spite of our natural predilection or any competitiveness. No other social condition in the history of mankind could place women in a more socially controlling position than Hypergamy excused by equalism.

In such a state women can mandate their unilateral control over Hypergamy, but there is one downside – men expect a mutual interchangeability. Blue Pill men actually expect women to play by that mutuality of purpose. That’s the interchange. Women will still ensure that optimizing Hypergamy is the prime directive, and they’ll hide behind equalism to keep men in check and absolve themselves of the worst of their predations in doing so, but men still expect women to feel as men do. Blue Pill men believe that women can and will love them in an idealized way that runs contrary to their Hypergamous opportunism. Why? Because they were conditioned to believe, from a very early age, that interchangeability exists between men and women.

The difference between men and women’s concepts of love is a prime example of this equalist interchangeability fallacy. Men’s concept of love is rooted in idealism; love for the sake of love. This is a result of men’s outward looking idealism and existential experience being male. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism. This is a result of natural solipsism and the need to optimize Hypergamy. It is intrinsic and inward looking and based on security and ensuring survival. When we introduce a condition of egalitarian equalism to men and women only one of these concepts can be the mutually correct concept. Both can exist in a natural state of complementarity between the sexes, but if all-is-one, there can only be one concept of love that decides for both sexes.

The confusion Blue Pill men have is presuming that men’s idealistic concept is the mutually accepted one. This then wars with women’s natural opportunistic concept; and by extension her intrinsic need to optimize Hypergamy. Of course, I’m under no illusion that equalism is anything more than a social utility to ensure a feminine-primary social order, but this is one illustration of how deeply conditioned equalism is what a majority of men base their intersexual understandings on.

I see this conditioning persist even amongst men I would otherwise think had a firm grasp of Red Pill awareness. As I said, they think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are. They still want to hope in that Blue Pill goal of interchangeability. For all of the Red Pill and self awareness I could credit men of the MRM with, they still cling to this equalist mindset. This Blue Pill ideal of true equality between the sexes ultimately works against their best intentions since it is women who are more perfectly placed to take advantage of this ‘equality’. Once again, you will never achieve Blue Pill idealistic goals with Red Pill awareness. Most men are taught that those Blue Pill goals are worthwhile, but they are carrots proffered by the same builders of the cart who hope to get the mule to pull it.

I have read and heard the words of many otherwise brilliant, otherwise Red Pill aware men who simply cannot unlearn the falsehoods of egalitarian equalism. Nothing’s more frustrating to me than to hear a guy I have a deep respect for parrot back some meme or catchphrase of a feminine-operative social convention, or what he thinks is a funny, gender-deprecating quip that belies his ego-investment in the same equalism he just spent a book’s worth of research to debunk. I see brilliant men like Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dr. Warren Farrell or Steven Pinker, who I would hold up as guys who have a lot figured out, still rattle off the same memes I would expect to see from equalists on Facebook. I find it the height of irony that the same men who would systematically destroy the idea of the blank slate still pander to the hopes and goals of the equalists who built those goals based on a blank slate ideology.

Understanding how your prison is constructed, how it works, who your jailers are, is not the same as understanding how to escape it. It’s interesting how refined our Red Pill Lenses can become yet we still never drill down to the root beliefs that still keep us ignorantly hopeful. It’s time we embrace an ideology of true complementarity between men and women. It’s time we accept that we are not equal and in some circumstances that puts men and women at respective advantages and disadvantages based on what any challenge poses to us. It’s time we threw away the Blue Pill goals that equalism has taught us are ‘correct’ and replace them with realistic ones founded on Red Pill awareness.