Articles from December 2012

Sanitizing the Imperative

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It would appear that over this (and last) week the manosphere topic du jour has been defining the Feminine Imperative. Sunshinemary started off the hit parade with her post The feminine imperative, fact or crap? and then followed up How doth the feminine imperative grow and then this week’s seminal effort in redefining the Feminine Imperative into more fem-friendly terms with The Feminine Imperative vs. the Feminist Imperative. All of this is amounting to what’s really the feminine equivalent of a circle jerk debate over semantics.

The recurring theme in all of these posts isn’t a want for a concrete definition of what the feminine imperative is, but rather an effort to dissociate the uglier aspects of the imperative away from blaming women for the negative consequences that result from the feminine imperative. Both for Aunt Giggles and Sunshinemary the overarching concern is the default scapegoating of the feminine imperative for any inter-gender woe a man might complain of.

If this feminine ‘concern’ sounds familiar it should; it’s just a new derivation of the “Devil biology made me do it” Red Queen / Selfish Gene biological determinism reasoning they feared would end up being men’s go-to explanation for excusing their bad (i.e. non feminine compliant) behaviors. Only now the narrative isn’t about the worry of men saying “my selfish genes made me cheat on my wife” the message they hope to control is men complaining “the feminine imperative is what makes me a sexless loser.” That control comes in an interesting form of blaming the victim for his lack of performance in the face of the feminine imperative. The Feminine Imperative can’t be held responsible for men’s social ineptitudes so the Male Catch 22 is effected – as a man you’re a whiney beta if you complain, but you’re less than a ‘man’ if you don’t stick up for yourself by saying something.

While I will admit that Sunshinemary’s point of origin probably started as an honest inquiry into the nature of the feminine imperative, her want of a feminine friendly definition stems from the same desire Aunt Sue or any other female writer in the manosphere seeks when confronted with the harsh truths of Game, Hypergamy, the Feminine Imperative and contemporary understanding of intergender dynamics – feminine absolution of acknowledgement of them.

The solution to acknowledging the Feminine Imperative follows the same formula as with other aspects of men becoming aware of intergender dynamics; dissociate (or dilute) feminine accountability, redefine terms and sanitize those redefinitions to fall back into accordance with the Feminine Imperative. I predicted exactly this process of Game sanitization when I wrote Could a Man have written this?  Only women are allowed to be self-critical, which of course is yet one more social extension of the feminine imperative.

Suck It Up Guys

The primary fear Sunshinemary has is that men will see the inherent amorality of the Feminine Imperative (hypergamic warts and all) from both an evolutionary and social perspective, and that this would become some self-defeating source of anger for them.

The feminine imperative isn’t something to be angry about, it’s something to be aware of and planned for accordingly. Up until recently the issue has been about the awareness part of that equation, now it’s the contingency part that men are having to deal with, and by extension so are women. The real fear isn’t about anger issues, it’s about the contingencies men will develop with their new awareness to circumvent the more egregious aspects of the Feminine Imperative, and its effect on women. Some men, understandably, get mad for having invested themselves for so long in a set of social rules they believed everyone was (or should be) playing by, only to become aware that the game’s been rigged all along. No one’s actually been playing by the “rules” that the imperative sold them and they’ve lost a lot of personal investment as a result.

Hypergamy and many other evolved aspects of the feminine imperative are (or were) certainly instinctual, largely unlearned, survival factors that contributed to our species’ success. However, the uglier, intrinsically unfair, dynamics like concurrent cuckolding, violent mate guarding, the War Brides dynamic and even women’s inborn sexual pluralism (rooted in her menstrual cycle) are aspects most men wouldn’t voluntarily sign on for if they knew the machinations behind them, or they had an inclination of how their SMV will progressively mature.

Solution? Develop feminine operative social conventions to ensure those unpleasant realities become more palatable duties for men.

For Feminine Imperative redefiners, the basic confusion stems from separating the feminine imperative from the social conventions that evolved to better effect it. They don’t see the fundamental separation of the two. Simply put, the feminine imperative is the totality of the framework – social, biological, personal, etc. – that implicitly benefits the feminine. And while they are correct that the social conventions of the feminine imperative are (for the greater part) learned and acculturated, they are the social tools used by the imperative, not the motivating imperative itself.

To Serve and Protect

Sunshinemary, in her effort to dissociate feminine accountability to the overall Feminine Imperative, attempts to separate the social implements of the Feminine Imperative from the naturalistic (evolutionary) side of the imperative. Thus she attempts to split the definition into two camps; one the good, natural, sometimes ugly, but species beneficial Feminine Imperative, the other, a monstrous social reengineering push responsible for the evils men endure under the Feminist Imperative:

The feminine imperative: protection and resources are preferentially and willingly provided to females by related males (related by family or by marriage), which benefits both sexes due to the increased survivorship of offspring; this is primarily an evolved biological construct. Resistance is useless due to differential survivorship of offspring.

The feminist imperative: protection and resources are preferentially but unwillingly provided to females by all males regardless of relationship, with no concomitant benefit to males; this is primarily an artificially imposed social construct. Resistance is useful.

Beyond the fem-positive spin of Mary’s redefinition here, the problem is that feminism is itself a social extension of the Feminine Imperative. Feminism is essentially a social reengineering project with the express purpose of benefiting the Feminine Imperative. On a base level hypergamy IS the feminine imperative. Hypergamy and women’s sexual pluralism is literally written into women’s genetic code. In her proliferative phase, women’s hormonal predisposition is for Alpha seed, after ovulation and menses the hormonal predisposition is for Beta need. Feminism, and all of the operative social, political and psychological conventions that are derived from it serve a solitary purpose – the advancement and consolidation of the Feminine Imperative as the dominant socio-sexual frame for our species.

All one need do is consider the socio-sexual effects of feminism over the past 40+ years. Remove the necessity for male provisioning, remove the pre-sexual revolution resource dependency, enable women with unilateral control of their birthing schedule through hormonal birth control and what do women default to? Their innate Hypergamy, the prime directive of the Feminine Imperative.

Hypergamy, while inherently cruel, is in fact a proven species survival schema. However, because of women’s place in our biological order, they must be the filters of that hypergamy. Ergo, the necessity of a dominant socio-sexual framework defaults to the feminine.

By sheer force men can and have taken control of that dominant framework, by rape or religion or any other moralistic social constructs, but women’s fluid, social reengineering of those constructs circumvents and repurposes them. If you need an example just study the history of western civilization; we’ve ‘progressed’ from a society that owned women as property to women’s default ownership of men’s progeny, property, their future property and even the means for them to acquire it all through the same social convention (marriage) that was intended to prevent women from engaging in their evolved propensity for sexual pluralism and proactively or retroactively cuckolding men.

Sunshinemary’s hope is that men will refocus their (perceived) anger on the evils of the Feminist Imperative as a distinct and separate force, and accept (preferably embrace) the Feminine Imperative for being “it is what it is”. Her impression is that the Feminine Imperative is amoral while the Feminist Imperative is immoral – an impression, I might add, that trad-con feminized-church women would like to perpetuate – focus on those deplorable feminists while we functionally serve the same purpose they do.  The main disconnect here is that there is no Feminism without a Feminine Imperative. Feminism doesn’t exist without a Feminine Imperative to serve.

Too Hot

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Over the Christmas break I had Dalrock and several SoSuave members alert me to a recent story about the firing of a dental assistant for “being too attractive”. I’d thought it was pretty laughable at first glance, but there’s a lot more going on in this situation than just what’s on the surface here. Naturally the fem-centric media starting point is the egregiousness of the all-male Iowa high court unanimously agreeing that a woman could be fired for something other than her job performance. It’s always interesting to observe the legal twistings when when the feminine imperative smacks into a law it hasn’t yet distorted to its own purposes (like right-to-work laws). I’m sure the case will be taken up the chain to even higher courts, but the operative will be the same – women don’t want to be beholden to general laws that conflict with the feminine imperative. Give it time and new definitions of what constitutes sexual discrimination, and you’ll see how fluidly the imperative achieves its ends.

Beyond the indignation prompting social fallout, there’s an interesting illustration in Game theory here. Melissa Nelson, a semi-attractive 32 year old dental assistant has her 10 year employment stint terminated by 53 year old Dentist, James Knight for representing too tempting a  potential lover and too potential a threat to his marriage. This is where it gets interesting:

Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.

Well, considering all she wore were standard issue medical scrubs it would appear that it didn’t take much to arouse the good dentist.

While her former boss claimed her clothes were so tight he couldn’t look at her without being aroused, Nelson said the only outfit she wore to work was standard scrubs worn by many nurses and assistants in dental offices.

Think about this for a moment, when Knight hired her 10 years ago she would’ve been 22 and he would’ve been 43. Looking at the more recent pictures of Nelson, I can see she’s followed the standard SMV curve, and while I wouldn’t rate her higher than maybe a cleaned up HB7, no doubt Knight was privy to watching her progress from her SMV peak at 22, to the inevitable two child, postpartum “chop it short” mommy-do at 32. After watching this and enduring the slow-burn, sexual pangs for a decade I suspect that Knight probably spent in inordinate amount of masturbatory energy on her mental image.

He also once allegedly remarked about her infrequent sex life by saying, “that’s like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it.”

No doubt about, we’ve got a beta here. Blatant and obviously telegraphed sexual interest ham-fisttedly delivered  as a compliment not only belies the beta, but no woman in human history has ever responded positively to it. In all my time counseling in the manosphere I’ve heard some derivative of this line constantly used by beta orbiters hoping that their ONEitis will get the message that she’s not being treated as well as she should be, and he’s uniquely qualified to appreciate her for her rarity. What chumps like Knight don’t get is that genuine desire and sexual impulse cannot be negotiated.

All a long-married beta like Knight is doing is falling back on his adolescent social skill set. This is the hallmark of a chump who’s never developed his Game beyond what it took to convince his wife to marry him.

Knight and Nelson — both married with children — started exchanging text messages, mostly about personal matters, such as their families. Knight’s wife, who also worked in the dental office, found out about the messages and demanded Nelson be fired. The Knights consulted with their pastor, who agreed that terminating Nelson was appropriate.

Once you see the pictures of Mrs. Knight all of this crystalizes for us.

mrs_knight

Now we add in the element of Mrs. Knights suspicion and a healthy dose of parochial shame from their pastor (most likely at Mrs. Knights behest) and we see the good dentist moved to terminate “just an ordinary mom”.  Here we see an all too common theme of the feminine imperative; using men to settle a score between women. My guess would be that had Mrs. Knight not discovered said texts, Nelson in all her ‘hotness’ would still be employed.

Knight is a very religious and moral individual, and he sincerely believed that firing Nelson would be best for all parties, he said.

I generally reserve my interpretations of the religious ramifications of Game to blogs like Dalrock’s, but at the risk of encouraging the moralist commenters on my blog, I have to draw attention to how the feminine imperative influences religious perceptions. This very religious and moral individual in all likelihood had been devising scenarios in his head about how he might engage in some kind of sexual tryst with Nelson through out her peak SMV years. He watched her progress through a relationship, watched her get married, gave her maternity leave when she had two kids, and still he pined. That pining only ended when Mrs. Knight demanded Nelson’s termination. Once again, biology trumps conviction, and did so for a decade, but once his back is to the wall he makes necessity a virtue.

Knight fired Nelson and gave her one month’s severance. He later told Nelson’s husband that he worried he was getting too personally attached and feared he would eventually try to start an affair with her.

When you compare James Knight to David Petreaus’ situation you can’t help but notice some surface level similarities. Both married to well-past the Wall wives and open (at least ideally) to getting with younger, better looking women. Their stories are an all too common theme in today’s SMP. Just based on what I see from the pictures, Knight strikes me as that archetypal mature guy who married young (well before fully realizing his true SMV), played by the rules, and probably only woke up to his SMV when a hot 22 year old made him realize his past potential. When a guys like this make sexual allusions comparing undriven Lamborghinis to the objects of their sexual desire, the real message is their own sexual dissatisfaction with their wives. Harboring that angst for 10 years while your ‘too hot to work with’ ONEitis is only infrequently getting banged is a special kind of beta hell.

When I wrote about the redefining of men’s mid-life awareness, Knight’s circumstance is the uglier side of that.

The truth about men’s mid-life crises isn’t about recapturing youth, it’s about finally understanding the trappings they’ve been sold into through their 20′s and 30′s and coming to terms with that often horrible truth. Some men do in fact buy the sports car, get the new hottie wife or act in some fashion that appears reckless and irresponsible. This isn’t due to infantilism, but rather new understanding of their own position as men. They’ve “lived responsibly” for so long and for so little appreciation that when that true realization is made they feel the need to move. They’ve become respected, put in the hours, the sacrifice, the censoring of their own views. They realize now that they’ve sold off true passions in favor of maintaining what others have told him was his responsibility – whether it was his choice or not. And all for what? A fat wife? A shrew? Maybe even a fantastic marriage and a wonderful family life, but also a nagging doubt about not seeing enough of the world by 40 because of it.

Now, before it gets said, I’m not suggesting that Knight have gone ahead and got after it with Nelson (if that was ever a consideration), but I do understand his predicament and the motivators behind it. If anything Knight serves as yet one more warning for men in realizing their SMV too late. The real tragedy here is that for a brief moment Knight was becoming aware of his (waning) SMV only to reinsert himself back into the Matrix with the aid of his wife and pastor. The real damage will be dealt in his new need for constant repression of this knowledge every time he bangs his wife, every time she nags, every time she gives him that doe-like thousand yard stare; he’ll understand the oldest manosphere proverb – once you know about the Matrix there is no going back.

First Man Awake

As most readers know I rarely engage in political discourse unless it has relevance to intergender dynamics. This video is an exception. If you need a clear example of a feminist controlled state, this is it.

I actually went through Women’s/Gender Studies course when I was in college. The main reason I took the class was because there were only 2 classes being offered on campus that completed a Capstone, Humanities and Diversity requirement in a single class – Holocaust Studies and Women’s Studies. That’s basically the estimation most women want you to think their ‘sufferage’ is on par with; the Holocaust. I chose Women’s Studies because I basically wanted to put my money where my mouth has always been (literally and figuratively ) and also get inside what popular media, and the feminization that it’s gone through for the last 40+ years, has been selling both men and women. I enjoyed debating these ladies as I was one of 2 guys in the Women’s Literature class.

I didn’t know it at the time, but one of the beacons of positive masculine hope I had back in the days before the internet, before understanding Game and even the term ‘red pill’ was reading Why Men are the Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell. It opened my understanding of intergender relations in a way I’d never understood. If I had a red pill moment in my past reading this books was it. It was published in 1986 so the specifics might be a little dated for a modern reader, but for an overall perspective of how our gender landscape has evolved it will always be on my ‘must read’ list for guy just now taking the red pill.

My phone-it-in feminist stepmother and beta-confused father had picked up the book in order to eviscerate it in some proto-SWPL home book club they belonged to at the time. Oddly enough it ended up on their bookshelf after that (replete with my stepmother’s penciled in margin notes), and I remember picking it up in the hope that it would give me some self-effacing insight into how I could be a more accommodating beta schlub for my BPD girlfriend who was slowly eroding the last vestiges of my former Alpha self.

What it did was enlighten me.

Farrell is anything but a rape apologist, I would compare him with the first man to wake up in the Matrix. Most of his insight, research and writing were prompted by his involvement in the early 70’s feminist movement. He even self-identified as a male feminist back then, but it was this experience that brought him to a fuller understanding of the feminine imperative.

Intellectual Lethargy

What offends me about this protest isn’t the actual protesting, but the sheer ignorance behind it. If it were the easily digestible blatherings of Rush Limbaugh they were protesting I could understand it, but Dr. Farrell isn’t even in the same universe. All this is is an example of intellectual lethargy, which is really a shame because I would expect that the young men and women involved in the protest, all students at U of T, would be acquainted with research and critical thinking skills necessary before formulating such strong opinions and visceral reactions.

To be educated takes a constant effort. Most people in modern society simply do not have the time, inclination or motivation to be in any way knowledgeable about more than a peripheral understanding of the world around them. The ridiculously ironic part is that we live in an era when communication of information has never been more easily accessible to us.

Now add to this that we’re expected to be at least somewhat well informed due to this access. Our ego-investments with regards to politics, religion, social dynamics, gender relations etc. all depend upon a belief that we’re actually well informed enough know what we’re talking about and draw our own conclusions. We would have to be, right? It’s expected of us as intelligent human beings.

The truth of the matter is that unless we are immediately benefitted by educating ourselves about a particular subject (i.e. as short term a profit as easily manageable), for the vast majority of modern society, educating oneself is a hobby at best. We live in a fast-food, fast-information society. We can’t be bothered to, or in some cases really afford to, develop critical thinking skills – particularly when they might challenge our own ego-investments. This is why the feminine Matrix flourishes today, it’s easier not to think about things that are counter to our social conditioning.

But we want to be right, and to be right we have to believe that we have these critical thinking skills. In fact our personalities and well being depend upon being correct in our beliefs. This is an age of ego-investment. Ego investments are beliefs we associate with, and internalize, so strongly that they literally become elements of our personalities. So to challenge that belief is to literally attack the personality of the person with that ego-investment. It would make no difference how empirical your evidence to the contrary of that belief might be; you attack the belief and you attack the person. Religion, racism, political affiliation, gender dynamics, social dynamics, world view, all find their roots in individual ego-investments in those beliefs.

Needless to say this has an extremely polarizing effect upon lazy people who’d rather not put forth any effort to objectively educate themselves in ways that would ever challenge their core ego-investments. So we see a factionalizing of people into camps where those ego-investments are reinforced in spite of any controverting evidence. Thus a team mentality evolves; our red team is better than your blue team irrespective of any factor that might be contrary. So long as my team wins and your team loses my ego-investments remain validated. It becomes a clash of who’s ego-investments get validated and any value the “other’s” might have had are never acknowledged.

This is a shame because Dr. Warren Farrell has dedicated his life –most of it spent in the feminized cultural wastelands of the late 80’s and 90’s – to researching, understanding and revealing the uncomfortable truths of intergender dynamics. He’s the godfather of the manosphere that most red pill men aren’t even aware of.

The Epiphany Phase

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When I was detailing the landscape of our contemporary sexual marketplace in Navigating the SMP there comes a point on women’s SMV (sexual market value) progression where she becomes cognizant of her SMV decline and impending date with The Wall. Generally this occurs in women’s late 20’s and possibly early 30’s but as a rough estimate on the graph I provided in that post, this is the point of transition at which women realize their decaying capacity to hypergamously compete with women in their sexual primes, and the point at which men are beginning to realize their own increasing SMV potential. I dubbed this intersection the point of Comparative SMV. It’s also important to note that this phase conveniently coincides with the social convention of women’s mythical biological clock. (more on this later).

The Epiphany Phase

I’ve previously described this phase as a parallel to men’s feminine-redefined midlife crisis. This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain to her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in their prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

For the spiritually inclined woman (which is to say most women) this may manifest in a convenient return to convictions she’d disregarded since her adolescence. For other’s it may be some kind of forced celibacy; a refusal to have sex under the hypergamic auspices of her ‘party years’ in the hopes that a well provisioning male (the ones not realizing their own potential SMV as yet) will appreciate her for her prudence – so unlike herself and all of the other girls who rejected him over the last decade.

The self-affirming psychological schema is one where she’s “finally doing the right thing”, when in fact she’s simply making the necessity of her long term provisioning and security a virtue she hopes men will appreciate. And if they don’t, then there’s always shaming them to think they’re ‘less-than-men’ for not living up to her eating her cake once she’s had it.

The Shifting Point

Case in point Hephzibah Anderson, author of the book Chastened, The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex. Here we have a graphic insight into the inner workings of women’s rationalization at the crossroads of acknowledging her decaying SMV, the need for long term male security, provisioning and intimacy, and realizing the necessity for a new psychological paradigm to justify her shift in behavior.

It’s easy to dismiss this interview as just another 3 women allowing their hamsters to colate on camera, but when you view this clip in a red pill context a surprising amount of information is revealed about the Epiphany Phase women experience.

We begin here with the now clichéd Kate Bolick Brand® former boyfriend-in-love regretfulness as the catalyst for Hephzibah’s newly gained insight. He’s serendipitously buying a ring for his new fiancé and the Alpha Widow mojo takes root in her psyche, “some girl found him valuable enough to marry.” She then proceeds through the predictable, “I’m 30 and need to reprioritize my life” boilerplate that’s made more than a few women authors a good deal of money writing for The Atlantic.

As I noted earlier, this phase also coincides with a woman’s sharp decline in fertility and childbearing capacity, so the instinctual urgency to breed, reinforced by the myth of the biological clock contributes to this internal crisis. All of this coalesces into some amazing feats of rationalization hamster acrobatics.

I’d thought those thoughts once or twice, but it would never have occurred to me that I’d actually go ahead and voluntarily eject sex from my life. It took a bizarre serendipity, a torrid affair and a chance anecdote to make me realize that the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a post-feminist, 21st-century Western woman — a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy — was not working for me.

Better late than never right? Unfortunately no. While I’m sure this realization will seem ennobling to the more moralistically predisposed  mindset, what you see now is the expectation of a new appreciation for her insight which was prompted by her need, not a genuine introspective. It’s kind of ironic in that the Chastening Hephzibah is so proud of was prompted by her own necessity.

All right, in most circumstances it’s still just about required for life’s perpetuation, but we can lead perfectly healthy and, indeed, happy existences without nooky, whoopee or bonking. People can — and do — go decades without sex. Some live their entire lives without it.

Side Note: In Girl-World a woman can electively forego sex for an entire year and it’s recognized as a sacrifice worthy of writing a book to be published by a major print publisher, while the only way a man can be recognized for his 40 year celibacy is when he enters a fitness center and guns down 7 women in a pilates class. As I’ve stated before, when a woman tells you “I don’t understand why sex is sooooo important to guys“, she’s telling you the literal truth.

Elizabeth I was known as the Virgin Queen, and there was nothing metaphorical about the title, history assures us.

Robert Dudley and a long list of the Queen’s confirmed lovers disagree. What follows here is an attempt by Hephzibah’s rationalization engine to affirm what she’d like to think is her radical decision to go abstinent – plenty of luminaries from the past have gone without and lived perfectly fine lives. What she’s in denial about is the necessity of sex in a mature human experience. Sex is the glue that holds a relationship together; without sex a woman becomes a man’s mother, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, but not his lover, and certainly not his wife. Deemphasizing the importance of sex, actively desexualizing yourself in the hopes that it will make you more sexually arousing is an effort in self-defeat.

What follows here is yet another overwritten self-examination of a woman facing the Wall and attempting to reconcile a past of eschewing offers of genuine intimacy with (albeit probably beta) guys and her own hypergamous impulses during her 20’s. When a pre-Wall Anderson makes a conscious effort to remove sex from the equation in order to bring her more “clarity” about a man’s long term value what she’s doing is attempting to dissociate hypergamy from that process. In doing so she devalues the important sexual aspect of a relationship and turns off the men she’d probably fit well with because she believes that sex is the foil in her past failures, not herself, not her ego-investments, not the delusions the feminine imperative has saddled her with. Sex isn’t her problem, her innate hypergamy will eventually reveal this to her, but it’s how she’s been doing it and the late hour at which she’s come to her “new” epiphany with all of its urgency.

Hephzibah is easy pickings for the manosphere Men with a bent for shaming women about riding the Cock Carousel (she even alludes to this in the article). That’s a given, but it’s not the operative issue I’m on about here. What her story illustrates for us is the psychological machinations behind the reconciliation of her unfulfilled hypergamy and her need for future intimacy, security and provisioning.

For red pill, Game-aware Men, this is a supremely important stage in women’s maturation to consider. A woman in the Epiphany Phase is looking for a “fresh start” for a much more visceral reason than some newly inspired sense of self. This motivation prompts all kinds of behavioral and social conventions to facilitate a man’s commitment to forgiving her past indiscretions. As Roosh has pointed out more than once, it’s women in this phase of life (or the mothers of women in this phase) who most vocally complain about men’s lack of interest in committing to them. As Hephzibah is painfully aware of, women in their peak SMV years don’t complain about a dearth of marriageable men– “Man Up” is the anthem of women in the Epiphany Phase.

I Have a Secret

One of my Monday morning rituals is to check out Postsecret and peruse the week’s selection of postcard confessionals. A former co-worker turned me on to the voyeurism of this blog almost 6 years ago now. When I was first introduced to the blog and read each of these confessions (they’re not really secrets if you think about it) what struck me was the consistency and repetitions of certain themes. Granted, Postsecret selects for what’s going on seasonally so you’ll get family confessions around the holidays, sex confessions around Valentine’s Day, and the ubiquitous “my father was a no good sonofabitch” secrets around Father’s Day.

However, it’s during the off weeks, when there is no impending holiday or no important world events (like a mass shooting of innocent children) that the themes and regularity of confession really solidify when you pay attention. I’ve used a select few of these secrets as header pictures for a handful of my posts, but my secret is that I’ve made a habit of keeping tabs on a specific themes of postsecrets this year. So, from the selections I’ve collected below, see if you can figure out my secret themes,..

icheat

itgetsbetter

2ofthem

onback.somysonandfuturebabysharethesameDNA

SIze Matters

happynow

free

lakers

 

untilyoudid

PS3

PS2

PS1

Alpha-Widow1

secret

video

Dreams of the Future Past

Untitled from Where the Dreams were Growing Wild

For about the last two weeks I’ve been conferring with a good friend about a situation I’ve yet to address since becoming red pill aware.

My friend James is an interesting fellow. Now at 56, he’s had a life of ups and downs, and varied experiences. He’s travelled extensively both in his impoverished youth and now in his affluence (and relative celebrity) he still makes trips to location most people wouldn’t have on their vacation destinations list. He’s insightful, mature and what I’d call a lesser Alpha.

James has been through two tumultuous marriages – one from an idealistic phase where he pedestalized not just his young wife, but the institution of marriage itself, and one from his 30’s after not having learned his lessons in idealism. He’s been on the receiving end of the divorce industry, but thankfully he didn’t come into his money until after these were settled. He is presently on his 3rd marriage and this is the “one that stuck” for him. They compliment each other well, but considering they were in their late 40’s and he’d finally come into some marked success when they married I’m hardly surprised.

For the most part, and by my own estimation, James is a successful, well-intentioned Man – his only delusion in being still firmly entrenched in his blue pill understanding about women and the greater game that’s influenced his life thus far. He’s resisted my efforts to educate him in Game-awareness for a while now, and since he’d married a woman who complements his personality so well I didn’t see the harm in just letting him be and focus my efforts elsewhere. James has a demonstrated predilection to white knight and his somewhat Alpha attitude has made him one of the more vocal opponents I’ve had in explaining red pill truths to him or others involved in our past conversations. He has a knack for baselessly rejecting or sidestepping red pill truths that just don’t fit into his personal narrative, or he feels in someway invalidates how he’d handled the women in his past.

The Mentor

One thing James was never able to do situationally (not biologically) with his past wives was to have children. He makes the convenient declarations about how he “never wanted to be a father” most successful childless men do. Once he’d met his 3rd wife they were both at an age where kids were impractical for them. Remarkably his present wife was childless when they married and both of them didn’t want to run the risks of pregnancy at such a late stage in life. Neither did they feel any compulsion to adopt since James’ success came to him at a later stage in his maturity, however that didn’t stop him from wanting to, at least indirectly, be a father to someone.

Almost six years ago James became a mentor to a relatively impoverished boy of 12. Over those six years, he’s filled in for the father role of this boy who’s own father left his mother when he was 5. Whether it was from a sense of wanting to pass on his wisdom or an unachievable need to be a father in some respect, James admirably took Michael under his stewardship.

Over the years James played the role reasonably well considering the demands of his job and personal life. He payed for Michael’s schooling needs, encouraged him in sports, made attempts to motivate and inspire him, and gave him opportunities to experience things he would never had the chance to without his mentorship. He was certainly a great father figure for a kid who had no father.

The years went on and like most father’s James had to deal with his ‘son’s’ teenage misbehaviors. Nothing criminal occurred, but the requisite delinquency and sometimes truancy that boys will engage in was off-putting for him. In actuality Michael’s personality was a lot like James’, a lesser Alpha when he wanted to get his way (or ignore other people’s ways), but a confirmed beta when it came to deference to women. Michael has the predictable ‘promise keeper’s‘ Oedipus beliefs about his biological father, as a result of his having been raised by a single mother’s predominantly feminized influences.

The Perfect Storm

All of this investment and third hand discipline has come to a head now. James is currently dealing with a 17 (soon to be 18) year old boy who’s entered into the perfect storm phase of his life. He’s gotten himself a girlfriend, and is struggling with what to do with himself after high school ends in June. Michael has no interest in planning for a future beyond graduating from high school. He’s become increasingly disconnected with James – which is really putting James off for having invested himself in his adolescence – and essentially disregards anything James has to say about his interests in his future.

Recently James footed the bill for Michael to take the SAT and ACT exams for which he never showed up for, and this set James off. His understandable reaction was to lecture him about the necessity of a good education (something James himself only came to after ‘exploring’ on his own for the first 3-4 years after his graduation) and was met with simple ambiguous disinterest in his ‘fatherly advice’. Michael claims to have a plan, but say “college isn’t for him”.

James’ next step was to seek advice himself on how to deal with his ‘family’ crisis from other fathers he knew as well as anyone he thought might have more insight than he. He’s only been doing the father thing for six years as it is, so logically he needed some outside advice from other parents. Most predictably sided with his indignation. The kid is just ungrateful and doesn’t realize the advantage he’s been given to him from people truly invested in his future success. The tough love route was suggested and James is no longer going to be paying for certain bills he’d assumed for Michael while he was in high school.

James says it’s not a punishment, but a learning occasion to teach Michael the necessity of having a job in order to pay for things, but it’s difficult to believe coming from James who’d had high hopes for future appreciation; for doing good in some young man’s life – it’s almost a Savior Schema. Only now that expectation of a shared association of Michael’s future success is looking more like a dead end.

Revelation

About a week and a half ago James asked me for my input. I’ve been familiar with Michael and James’ commitment to being a good surrogate father with him for about 4 years now. I wasn’t sure that James really wanted to hear what I was going to tell him, because it was going to require that he listen to the red pill reason he didn’t like.

Having been raised by the feminine imperative, Michael is now making the transition into dealing with the insecurities that come as a part of that conditioning. He’s finally having sex with his first girlfriend and everything revolves around ensuring a future where he can perpetuate it. His girlfriend is one year behind him in school so his greatest ambition at this point is finding a way to guarantee they will be together once she graduates and moves on to some college of her choosing. His plan for his future is to follow along with whatever plan is her future.

Asking Michael to abandon her, in his own best interests, is to ask him to be selfish – much in the same fashion that he associates his biological father as being selfish. Michael can’t think past this because focusing on himself would be aligning himself with his real father. Beyond this, the reinforcement of semi-regular sex cements the certainy of his duty to making his future her future.

As expected, James didn’t like this revelation. He was a white knight, and to a degree so is Michael, but the point of contention was too obvious to ignore – Michael’s dependency on what the feminine imperative had conditioned into him (really both of them) was now at a loggerhead with the financial, personal and emotional investment James had committed himself to, and expected appreciation for, over the last six years.

James went into denial. He wouldn’t accept that what I’d been telling him for years was the source of his frustration with Michael. Out came the standard boilerplate platitudes, “Ah kids, they never appreciate anything you do for them! He’s just at that age. Who really knows what they want to do at 18? I didn’t.” I thought his words were ironic, not because he’d only been a parent for 6 years, but because of how similar his own experience was with Michael’s. It was almost a surrender for him. He wanted better for Michael, but that desire was conflicting with his own ego-investment in the feminine imperative.

So I find myself at an impasse here. I’m attempting to simultaneously unplug a soon to be 18 year old kid and a 56 year old man, both suffering from from the same infection. James, like I think most men do, had hopes of directing his ‘son’s’ path towards a brighter future by avoiding the pitfalls he had to endure. Only now he’s being cruelly reminded of how his own social conditioning began by re-experiencing it through Michael.

For his part Michael isn’t going to have any ambition for himself until he has nothing left to lose, including his girlfriend. He’s not going to join the military, sees no point in taking the SAT and will most likely only do just the bare minimum to sustain himself until such time that his girlfriend’s ambition supersedes his own and she moves on, or worse, he knocks her up. Even James’ framing the possibility of his girlfriend leaving him due to his lack of ambition doesn’t register for him because Michael’s feminine conditioning has ‘taught’ him that she’ll inherently appreciate his investment in her.

Awareness and Intent

coma

 

My good friend DJ Damage had an interesting question regarding last week’s post and the time-tested classic LJBF rejection:

Hey Rollo would you say that women consciously know what they are doing to their male friends?! I mean lets take the AFC out of the equation for a moment and focus on the women. When a woman lays the LJBF’s line on her “male friend” doesn’t she realises that this AFC who is standing before her wanted to fuck her for the longest time?! Doesn’t she see anything wrong with the fact that in her eyes its not ok for a man to reject the LJBF’s line yet its ok to string a man along, pepper him with false hopes and some physical contact and then be surprised (or act surprised) he may want more??!!

Or is it just to accept the fact that women are women and you shouldn’t worry about their predictable behaviour but rather accept it and follow the rules of engagement.

I think it kind of depends on the individual, but to varying degrees I’d think no. As I stated in Playing Friends, the LJBF rejection has been so provably time-tested that it’s entered into a standardized feminine consciousness. In other words, it doesn’t need a formal teaching to understand how it’s useful. It’s simply demonstrated in so many different ways (media, personal interactions, etc.) that it becomes subconsciously learned. 12 y.o. girls don’t sit around at slumber parties discussing the best way to deliver a LJBF rejection to boys that like them. They learn the convention from TV, their big sisters, their mothers, etc. examples.

This is what makes it all the more jarring for a woman to have what’s always been a useful social tool explained to them. And of course the fail-safe for it is the risk of social ostracization on the guy’s part for outright rejecting her LJBF, making it far less likely an occurrence.

Now, that said, you’re really asking two questions. The second is, does the LJBF girl know the “friend” wants to bang her? I’d say most definitely. Not that any woman would admit it, because in doing so it puts the burden of her being straightforward with him on her. It’s plausible deniability. It’s far easier to deny, what by early adolescence girls know (boys want to fuck them) than to accept responsibility for leading him on. Bear in mind, attention is the coin of the realm in girl-world, but the guy also bears a good amount of responsibility for his own illusions.

When you think about it, it’s really a self-perpetuating cycle. Guy wants to qualify for girl’s intimacy, girl knows this, but isn’t attracted to the guy for the exact reason he is qualifying himself. Girl should be forthright with the “non-interest” guy, but still enjoys the attention and the affirmation that comes with it. Girl plays ‘friend’ and only becomes flirtatious when the attention flow breaks to reestablish it. Guy gets to make-or-break point, initiates intimacy and girl falls back on LJBF. Guy believes he still needs to qualify more and the cycle repeats.

Now, is any of that a conscious process? If a girl says ‘yes’, she’s a self-serving, grand manipulator, and this causes a cognitive self-image conflict. Due to a  fear of ostracization from attention she can’t exactly cop to a foreknowledge of the process. But that’s OK because there are many other feminine social conventions she can fall back on to avoid this. The feminine prerogative (she can change her mind) being the most useful, or The Feminine Mystique (women are unknowable) being a close second .

If the answer is no, and she’s not aware of the process, our social sense of personal responsibility takes over; she’s naive or at least immature. However, even in this event she’s also excused from culpability.

Regardless of whether a woman is aware of her own motives, it’s up to men to see her behavior as the only reliable indicator for them. As I’ve said before, there are no mixed messages, women will tell you exactly what their intent is. You just need the ability to read the behavior. As I’ve said before, the medium IS the message. The LJBF IS the message. Women with a high interest level don’t get to this point with a guy they want to fuck.

Awareness

I sometimes get critics telling me that what I reveal at Rational Male is very negative or disproportionately biased against women. I understand that perception, but it’s not my intent to do so. I’ve stated on several occasion that all I do is hold up a mirror, you’ve got to want look – and the main trouble with women (and men in some instances) is that after having been immersed for a lifetime in a fem-centric , feminine primary reality they don’t really like what’s being reflected back at them. It’s a very foreign experience for most women to see the root motivators of their own behavior, so the natural reflexive response is to demonize the one illustrating them, or really even making an attempt to understand and educate others about them. When the feminine Matrix is your most favorable and comfortable environment, it follows that attempts to unplug someone from it are met with considerable resistance.

From Moral to the Manosphere:

“,..when I wrote War Brides, it was in response to men’s common complaint of how deftly and relatively unemotionally women could transition into a new relationship after they’d been dumped by a GF or wife. I wanted to explore the reasons how and why this functioned, but from a moralistic perspective it is pretty fucked up that, due to hypergamy, women have an innate capacity to feel little compunction about divesting themselves emotionally from one man and move on to another much more fluidly than men. If I approach the topic in a fashion that starts with, “isn’t it very unjust and / or fucked up that women can move on more easily than men?” not only is my premise biased, but I’d be analyzing the moral implications of the dynamic and not the dynamic itself.”

When I explore the War Brides dynamic, the amoral aspects of Hypergamy or any of the more moralistically uncomfortable dimensions of Game, people want to apply their own perceptions of justice or moral sensitivity to what are sometimes very inhumane conditions. I realize that’s going to happen, in fact, in the interests of inter-gender civility it should happen – but what gets (sometimes intentionally) confused in coming to those conclusions is the demonizing of the revelations behind what motivates those dehumanizing realities. We want to hold people responsible for the motivators who have no idea what they are in the first place.

Hypergamy has served an evolutionary purpose for the human species; it doesn’t mean we have to like it, but it doesn’t mean we can ignore its influence, nor does it mean the person revealing it or attempting to better understand it is inherently an asshole for doing so. It also doesn’t excuse us from the consequences of being unaware of it.

As DJDamage asked in the beginning of this post, women for the greater part are unaware or casually oblivious to the motivators of their own behavior. Recently some notable ‘red pill women’ have been making what I believe are sincere effort to better understand those motivators as well as the feminine primary social environment that favors and reinforces them. While I’m not sure that they’ll want to throw their lot in with the manosphere wholesale, it’s at least a small step in the direction of better understanding.

Shouting in the Wilderness

Hat tip to reader BoxerRearZenith for bringing this to my attention:

Rollo, I’ve been a reading your blog since it’s inception. I love how eloquently everything is written and presented; therefore, I’d like your written opinion on this following Youtube video, if possible. It’s from ESPN First Take that was shown yesterday and Stephen A Smith was discussing Red Pill rhetoric (Being Anti-Oprah, lol) on a national platform. It was based off Chad Johnson and his wife Evelyn Lozada. And I had this similar discussion with friends who are also fans of this show and they couldn’t understand Stephen A’s point; even though, he illustrated and demonstrated his points so well. I tried to explain his position and why he went off but I got berated so I let it go. Is there anywhere to simplify his point of view to where my guy friends would somewhat understand? Btw, these are blue pill guys trying to figure why women are the way they are. Basically trying to find the red pill but not knowing to look for it if that makes any sense.

I’ve used the end summation of Stephen A Smith’s opinion here just for brevity’s sake, but if you have 15 minutes the entire clip is well worth watching, I’ll start by saying that it’s good to see even a marginally red-pill aware Man make a statement like this. We’re told all the time how football is really the last refuge for masculinity, but I’ve never agreed with this, and Smith’s bold and confrontational words here illustrate exactly how deep fem-centrism has saturated into even the most male of arenas. Smith is attempting to provide just a marginal consideration for a male perspective here and the reactions by Skip and his female co-host Cari Champion are an excellent example of how efficiently the feminine imperative shuts down that perspective. While Smith is obviously agitated and raises his voice, not once is he fumbling for words, nor does he slip and use expletives. He knows his perspective, has done his due diligence and is ready to express it.

And express it he does, but like most Men making public declarations attempting to bring awareness to fem-centrism, Skip and Cari, both obvious Fem-Matrix plug-ins, look at Smith as if he were speaking a foreign language. They can’t believe what’s coming out of his mouth. So saturated into our social fabric is feminine primacy that the thought of expressing a male-centric consideration, even as measured as Smith’s, is alien to those steeped in it.

Even Smith is guilty of this conditioning in his feeling it necessary to constantly footnote his perspective by repeating that he’s not endorsing violence against women. He has to do this because, like any other Man attempting to vocally expose fem-centrism, he’s learned that the first, reflexive response plugins will acuse him of is misogyny. So he must preface his words repeatedly or be dismissed as an evil patriarch. This constant qualification is necessary because the first resource of fem-centrism is to associate any perspective counter to the feminine imperative, no matter how remote, as an act of violence against women itself. Even women expressing a male perspective critical of fem-centrism are subjected to this association.

White Knights of the Feminine Imperative

For all of Smith’s intensity his message is entirely lost on an avowed white knight like Skip Bayless. Skip’s reaction is that of a well conditioned male in the feminine Matrix. As I wrote in Enter White Knight:

Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism.

If you watch the full clip, Skip’s calling Chad Johnson to the carpet about his domestic violence and impending divorce is exactly what I’ve come to expect from white knight Beta Game. Skip’s provocation of Chad isn’t about his desire to ‘get to the bottom of things’, but rather to establish himself as a champion of the feminine imperative – and by association make himself more attractive to women by being the tough male advocate for women everywhere. Guys like Skip look for opportunities to appear like upstanding responsible Alpha men by scolding true Alphas like Chad in as public a way as possible. Essentially they use the same shaming tools of the feminine imperative in an effort to better align and identify themselves with the women they subliminally hope to impress – and yes, even the married ones.

A beta game response is what I’d expect from this mentality, but I think what red pill viewers of this clip need to understand is the subconscious fluidity with which this reflex occurs. Chad was ready to lay Skip Bayless out on the studio floor, but this doesn’t even occur to Skip until after he’s embroiled in the confrontation. White knights seldom realize the real danger they put themselves in until that white knightery backfires on them; that’s how internalized the mentality is, it overrides a capacity to see danger cues.

Redirect

Cari Champion’s reaction is also a predictable, feminine-centric response. Where Skip will fall back on the convenient excuse of wanting to ‘get to the bottom of things’ Cari will do what most women will – presume that any man declaring a male-centric counterargument to the feminine ‘has issues’ with women. He’s “expressing a lot of anger” about women, even when the issue isn’t about women, but the societal circumstances of men. Then, as is the standard feminine reflex, Cari makes attempts to reframe Smith’s point to be individually specific to women. Smith makes a good effort of not allowing this reframe, but notice that in order for him to stay on point he must once again reiterate that ‘he’d never harm a woman’ just so he can get back to it.

Recently there’s been some great discussion over at Sunshine Mary’s blog regarding the validity of the feminine imperative as a concept in and of itself. Unfortunately it’s easier to show examples of the feminine imperative than it is to definitively describe it. I think Smith’s efforts here are an attempt to make plugged-in people understand just what the feminine Matrix is. But no one can tell you what the Matrix is when you’re in the Matrix. So when you see the lone man shouting truths in the wilderness, it isn’t what he’s saying that’s important, but who is listening.

To answer Boxer’s question, I’m not sure there is a way to simplify Smith’s message. Your friends aren’t going to understand it because they have no frame of reference to relate his message to. Everything is fem-centrism for plugins, and the feminine imperative already has long established social contingencies (like the one’s observed in this clip) to dissuade any real awareness of it. I have no doubt that Smith’s inbox was filled with the hatred of countless plugged in men and women arguing for him to seek therapy for his misogyny – which ironically was exactly the point he was trying to make. One of the most effective social conventions the feminine imperative ever established was disqualifying those critical of it from ever having credibility about it.

Unfortunately Boxer, your friends, like most men, will have to learn from harsh experience to ever be open to seeing the feminine imperative as Smith does.