Articles from July 2013

The Script

script

There is a certain formula most romantic comedies rely on to convey how relations between men and women ought to go. It’s an old formula, as in Shakespeare and Greek antiquity old. It goes something like this:

An avowed Alpha bachelor for life questions the existence and nature of love, the sincerity of women, the illogic of not living just for his own self-importance, certainly the institution of marriage and lives, according to his rules, a satisfying life. He rationally observes the “madness” of his friends and fellow men when they fall in love, and out of it. He either mocks their foolishness or is analytical to the core in understanding their madnesses. He is an elemental force of one – a captain controlling the course of his own ship. He’s not wrong in his estimations; they all add up, they all make deductive, provable sense.

That is until he meets her. The ONE special woman who miraculously, alone amongst billions, has the unique power to bring the facade of all that he thinks he is into stark, insightful self-realization. He’s bit by the bug, smitten by the only woman who could fatefully tame the arrogance of his otherwise cruel rationalism. It’s akin to a religious conversion; he’s seen the light, he’s in love and all of his former concerns are proven to be falsehoods – it’s the triumph of true love! The one thing he was missing (the one thing only a woman can possess of course), the last piece to a puzzle he didn’t know he was  putting together, has been added and now he is complete. And they live happily ever after,…

Every writer from Shakespeare to Bronte, to modern writers, use some variation of this outline. The locations, time periods and actors change, but the basic story doesn’t. If you need a contemporary example watch Gerard Butler (King Leonidas, 300) in The Ugly Truth. The reason this formula is so successful and timeless is because it is essentially the fantasy of love and emotionalism trumping logic and reason. Women naturally love this because it puts them into the position of being the ‘cure’ to a man’s illness while making him look like a brooding, sulking, bitter child for clinging so tenaciously to his rationalism, when all he was really pouting about was feeling unloved.

All his intense powers of rationality, all of his implicitly provable facts, all of his monuments and achievements of deduction mean nothing without the only irrational thing a woman can uniquely supply – unknowable, fantastical love. It’s part and parcel of the Myth of the Feminine Mystique which makes women the gatekeepers of the knowledge of love; don’t try to understand it with your silly boy-logic, just leave well enough alone and be eternally grateful to whichever god you worship that a woman has favored you with the love you need to be perfected.

In this story, the build-up to men realizing this is what stokes the feminine indignation that sustains women’s interest, but the real satisfaction is summed up at the end when he finally concedes to the feminine imperative and drops all his pretense and submits to love.

The satisfaction doesn’t last long though, because it was the build-up, the tension, the anxiety, the want of a woman to scream at the TV, “SHE LOVES YOU!! JUST GET IT YOU STUPID MAN!!” that was making it at all interesting. Once he’s submitted and seen her light, all of that fades away to predictable, boring comfort. She’s done with that romance novel, puts it in the pile of them at the garage sale, and moves on to the next. And he’s left with all the echoes of his past rationalism, and explaining to all those he’s influenced and built his reputation upon, how love conquers all and how wrong he was all along.

For that man, it’s the last chapter in the vindication of feminine primacy.

And they lived happily ever after,..

For women, the only thing better than experiencing this script vicariously through movies and stories is to see it happen live. David D’Angelo, Tucker Max are a few manosphere notable who’ve played the come-full-circle surrender to the script. There are far more guys who play it in a more visual sense (the repentant ‘Womanizer’ episodes on the Tyra Banks show comes to mind), but no one really remembers them, and certainly not in the ‘sphere. While there’s a sense of vindication for women to have a guy surrender his anti-social (i.e. anti-feminine primary) lifestyle and beliefs in favor of a feminine paradigm, and “settle down” into a feminine framed, normalized monogamy, surrender is still surrender. Essentially the strong vibrant man who posed such a challenge to her, the one who’s steadfast determination and conviction made him a man she was hot for as well as one she could respect, loses his status.

He’ll say, hey, you don’t know where I’m at in life, you don’t know the experiences I’ve had, life has taught me the value of compromise. Women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate a feminine reality, but if there’s one thing women outright despise, one thing men foolishly believe women should be able to appreciate, it’s a man willing to compromise the beliefs he’s established his reputation and integrity upon in order to facilitate her feminine reality. That’s the definition of a sell-out.

After the happily ever after comes the living. He can console himself in his new paradigm, he can hole up in a cocoon of domestication and simply not answer the phone calls of all his old friends who are also playing into the script, who are really only waiting to commiserate with him, but his new domesticity compromise wont allow him to. His old life is gone right? Love conquered him, made him a new man, ready to live up to the new, correct, feminine expectations he formerly railed against, but has been enlightened to and now calls his new masculine purpose. He’s been converted.

He looks into that girl’s eyes, the one who changed him for the better, but the memory of the urgency, the desire to tame him, the adrenaline he inspired all seem like an old song that reminds her of that thrill.

 

I would never wish ill on my fellow man, no matter his crimes, no matter his station, so I wont do so now. I sincerely hope nothing but the best for any man making this surrender, he will need every good fortune that comes along in the face of compromising his reputation and purpose in order to facilitate a woman’s primacy.

However, I’ll add that I also make it my policy never to speak ill of the dead.

Left Behind

left_behind

I’m going to relate a real story of a good friend of mine here as an illustration of a larger dynamic.

My friend Rob was what most guys would call a ‘natural Alpha’ in his younger days; fit, smart in an unlearned kind of way, and to the guys who couldn’t appreciate his straightforwardness, he had the Alpha ‘attitude’ that made him kind of an asshole to the people who didn’t know him. He was in the military for a bit right out of high school and that seemed to work well for him since he learned to be a damn good airframe mechanic and parlayed that into a pretty good career for a while.

Although he was a natural Alpha, Rob’s approach to women was very much conditioned by the influence of the feminine imperative. He had girls who were attracted to him, but he had a tendency for ONEitis so once he’d locked on to Kim that was his focus. He would say “I would do anything and everything for the right girl” because that was his belief, sacrifice and support were his mandates before they’d even met. Eventually she ‘accidentally’ became pregnant when they were both 19.

Rob’s ONEitis took on the predictable sense of masculine purpose to “do the right thing” when she told him the news. They were young, and even 20+ years ago he was aware that couples married young had a very low ‘success’ rate, but as expected he believed he and his soon to be wife would be the exception to that rule. Whether it was his predisposition for ONEitis or his righteous ‘natural’ Alpha stubbornness, at 19 he was determined to be a good father and husband.

Kim was always the less enthusiastic partner in the marriage, but she wasn’t going to have an abortion, and while she was uncertain about Rob’s future potential at 19 she married him. 5 years later they had two daughters and then a son 2 years after that. I would describe their marriage as one of convenience except that Rob genuinely loved Kim and the kids. His Alpha attitude only drove him on that much further as a good provider, but as Kim and he entered their early 30’s and their older children became more self-sufficient it was becoming clear that she was subtly and indifferently distancing herself from Rob.

At about 29 Kim went to work in a middle management position. Up until then she’d been a stay-at-home mom, but with the kids in school (except their youngest) she wanted to get into working. For having 3 children Kim was in exceptionally good shape (too good of shape in hindsight), Rob had put on a few pounds, but still had his upper body muscularity. Kim was at the gym and work more than she was at home now, and it was something that even heroic-ONEitis Rob was beginning to be annoyed with.

Kim had new friendships at work now, mostly single women in their mid to late 20’s while Kim was almost 31. All of her new work girlfriends were single and wanting her to come out with them for drinks after work. They didn’t call them GNOs (girls night out) but this is what they were without calling them such. Dutiful Rob would look after the kids and content himself with beer and movies at home. Even as this became a more common occurrence Rob still clung to the heroic, supportive, father/husband/provider role. Rob still wasn’t what anyone would call a Beta, but in his ONEitis devotion and his increasing domestic role this is what Kim saw in him.

Kim went from living vicariously through her 20’s girlfriends’ weekend stories, to watching them from the sidelines at the clubs, to actively engaging in their escapades. I’m sure most readers know where this is going, and yes Kim eventually cheated on Rob. I had the dubious, but serious, honor of talking him out of murdering both Kim and a co-worker guy she’d hooked up with at 4am after he’d tracked them both to the motel they ended up at that night. He had the kids in the car with him the whole time we were on the phone.

Missing Out

I’m presenting this story, not as some precautionary tale to scare you into not marrying early so much as to better understand the other side of doing so. Anyone who’s read my blog long enough knows I advocate men not even becoming seriously monogamous until after the age of 30. I realize that for most men this is a pretty tall order, and for most guys untenable, but the principle is that men need to realize and actualize their SMV potential before they can accurately assess their true role in the SMP, and then, evaluate the quality of any woman they’d want to become monogamous with according to their Game awareness.

My friend Rob never made that connection and lived (and still lives) by what an adolescent social skill set and his feminized conditioning had taught him. Rob was enraged about the infidelity, but he took Kim back, they went to the ubiquitous marriage counseling, and attempted the typical negotiations of Kim’s genuine desire for Rob. Rob was still playing by a rule set he believed Kim should recognize and should appreciate (i.e. Relational Equity fallacy), but after 3 kids and “missing out on her 20’s”, Kim’s Hypergamy didn’t care.

At this point, Kim’s leaving Rob was just a formality, but the end came when Rob had an on-the-job injury to his back and he could no longer perform his job. He got pretty good disability, but it wasn’t what Kim had built up to making. Blood was in the water, and Kim went feral. Eventually she took the kids and left Rob to his own means, while she moved half a state away to “find herself” and get into the scene she missed in her 20’s.

For the men in the manosphere who want to use Game as a means to locking down an idealized wife, a lot gets made about marrying (or becoming monogamous) with a woman while she’s young – preferably in or just before her peak SMV years (18-24). Generally the idea is that if you can get to her early enough – before she rides the infamous cock carousel – and she’s cut from the right cloth for monogamy, then by way of a guy being the (hopefully) first Alpha she’s encountered, she’ll solidly pair-bond with him – bearing him healthy children in her fertilely prime years and remain his emotionally bonded, loyal and devoted wife for a lifetime.

I like this fantasy, as I’m sure most idealistic men would. In fact it might even be realistic for a guy in his peak SMV years (30-36) to pull this off with the right amount of status and Amused Mastery if his own value is well established. However, as per the story of Rob and Kim here, there is another risk to the ‘marry young’ scenario and that’s what I call the Left Behind dynamic.

Left Behind

In contemporary western society, even the most farm-raised, home schooled of girls are still going to be incessantly bombarded by the ‘be all you can be’ (previously ‘you can have it all’) social advertising the Feminine Imperative has for girls. Raising a daughter in such times (and I speak from experience) is fraught with risks of appearing to be limiting her potential while attempting educate her about the real limitations of women’s fast-burn SMV and the choices she’ll have to make very early in her life that will affect her later life once she’s past those peak years. I should add that for a father to even hint at these limitations publicly makes him instantly guilty of misogyny, patriarchy, male privilege oppression and every other male-crime the Feminine Imperative has a long established name for. However, even mothers will be accused of being domineered by that patriarchal mindset for attempting to educate their daughters about the real limitations of being a woman today and choosing between different life paths.

With this as the foundation, the inherent risk of finding, not to mention wifing-up, the ideal young girl, predisposed to marriage (unplanned pregnancies not withstanding) is that as a she matures, a woman begins to question the choices she made. While it’s almost a cliché now to breakdown the life path that led to the regret of never-married or divorced aging spinsters in the age of career women, the other side of that coin is the early-married woman contemplating ‘her life that could’ve been’ and the motivation to change her path. It’s easy to find fault with women who delayed accepting a marriage proposal for their own SMV convenience or self-interest, but it’s the early-married Kim’s of the world who are far more susceptible to the Eat, Pray, Love script as they approach the downslide of their SMV.

Ironically it’s the same feminine-primary social influence that encourages ‘be all you can be’ (and demeans her for not living up to her girl-power potential) that also embraces her when she re-plots her life course after leaving the husband of her youth. Mix in her single and divorced friends’ encouragement with fem-centric social promptings and top it off with an innate Hypergamy that never stops subconsciously asking “is this guy the best you can do?” after 12 years of marriage and you can see why she’d feel left behind.

As a Game aware, red pill Man it’s imperative that you consider both sides of a woman’s choices and adjust your Game accordingly. Half the reason I made the rough attempt at graphing the SMP and men and women’s SMV’s respective to each gender’s age is so men could predict and expect the behaviors, mindsets and social variables women will be susceptible to at various phases of their lives. It is, however, important, to consider the choices women have made in the lives they led before and after they meet you. It’s becoming increasingly too easy for men to think, “damn, if only I’d have met her when she was younger and inexperienced, she’d be more attached to me now.” This isn’t always the case.

Crisis of Motive

woman-pulling-puppet-strings

I had an interesting conversation with a cocktail waitress recently about how she wore the sexy outfits she did because they reaffirmed who she was.

“I do it for me.”

“Really? Lingerie, high heels, push up bra, that’s all for you?”

“Of course. I’m my own woman.”

“So, it’s not about the attention and affirmation you get from the men around you.”

“Well, that’s nice, if it’s coming from the right kind of guy, but I don’t wear what I do for them.”

“So if I came over to your house unannounced at like, 4 in the afternoon, you’d be wearing all this while you were vacuuming the house and not in sweatpants and a t-shirt?”

“Well,..no, but that’s not the point, I’m more comfortable in sweats,..”

“I see.”

It was far too easy to box her into the corner she was painting herself into, but I wont be too hard on her since this crisis of motive is also found in men. I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard guys at Gold’s tell me the same thing as to why they workout.

“I do it for me! Yeah, of course, chicks check me out more now that I’ve dropped the fat and bulked up, but this is all for me man.”

I’ll admit, I was that guy at one time. For a guy it makes sense to cop the story of singularity of purpose since it implies that he’s his ‘own man’ and not improving himself to become more acceptable to the women he observably and admittedly wants to get with. This is the paradox of self-improvement – are you doing it for yourself or because you want to others to respond more positively to you? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both.

There are certainly many side benefits to bodybuilding – improved health, attitude, lower stress, life-preserving function that results from increased muscularity, etc. but the minute we drop ‘a better sex life’ into that equation then we have to qualify it all with the “I do it for me” standby; as if our motivating desire to get laid is any less important than all of that. I’ll tell you right now, with 25+ years of lifting on my record, while I enjoy a lower life/health insurance premium as a result, I enjoy sex far too much to ever let myself become a fat ass. I do it for me and I do it because Mrs. Tomassi (and other women) responds positively to it and I enjoy the results.

This is a fundamental question guys swallowing the red pill and adopting a new Game-aware life have to answer – who are you doing it for?

There are a lot of traps involved in answering this question; traps that other AFC crabs in the barrel will use to pull you back in, traps that will attempt to convince you that you’re ‘being someone you’re not‘ and traps that will flatter you for your insightful desire to improve yourself, but only insofar as it serves feminine purposes. This is a common tar pit for men on the edge of accepting Red Pill truth:

From the Unbearable Triteness of Hating:

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Whether he was intending to or not, Roissy was of course responding to exactly this crisis of motive. I don’t specifically agree or disagree with all the tenets of men who identify as MGTOW (I understand the reasoning), but I must point out that, from what I read, the crux of their beliefs are rooted in this same motive crisis. Is what you do, who you are, what you believe, a genuine, organic result of your own decision making (doing it for you) or is all you are the result of a latent purpose to better please a woman (or the Feminine Imperative for that matter)?

Introspect

Aunt Giggles had a post about a week ago lauding all the introspective men concerned with their own self-improvement. Bravo! Bravo introspective Beta, dig down deeper and embrace your inner white knight. While it may range between ego-flattering to self-evincing, true introspection is only useful in the light of why  you’re being introspective in the first place. You may get a pat on the back from the Feminine Imperative for introspectively aligning yourself with the Beta model it’s conditioned you for, or you may get a well needed cold bucket of Red Pill awareness splashed in your face as the result of your introspection, but the question is still who or what are you being introspective for?

With a crisis of motive, it’s very easy to not only cast doubt about the motives of others when they don’t agree with our own, but also to reaffirm our own faith in our own decision making. How many times have Game denialists said something like “those red pill guys are just misogynists, only interested in getting laid as much as possible”? This belief-disqualifier is based on the the presumption that sex is a red pill Man’s only, true, motivator – not himself, not for his own enlightenment, not of his own genuine volition. Red pill guys believe what they do to get laid and therefore dance to the tune women (or their sexual impulse) are playing for them. Distilled down to it’s base, the message is they aren’t acting as individual rational agents, but as robotic slaves beholden to external influences (in this case women or their sex drives). In other words, someone or something is controlling their decisions for them.

That’s some powerful affirmation for the one making accusations of disingenuousness, because it confirms for himself that not only is he a ‘genuine’ actor, but his insight must necessarily be more valid than the guy he’s judging. The problem with this, as I’m sure most are now aware, is that the accuser is already molded by outside influences himself. Thus, his motivation for accusation is suspect of a crisis of motive.

I understand this is some heady shit to take in, but I think it’s important to consider for guys on the cusp of Game-awareness, doubting their genuine want for changing themselves, as well as for guys falling back on motive crisis reasonings in order to justify why other men might disagree with them. I think an important question Men need to ask themselves is why am I changing my belief, my customs, my interpretations? It may be that it comes as a result of introspection, or a new awareness brought to them from an outside influence (the manosphere), but the answer to the question of who do you do it for is both yourself and the outside motivator.

So what made you change? Was it something I or another blogger wrote? Was it a traumatic experience that shocked you into awareness? Or were you just getting what you’d always gotten by doing what you’d always done?

Beer and Boobs

I can remember watching a few episodes of The Man Show back in 2002 or 2003. I was finishing my degree at the time, and although I was much older than most of my college peers then, I actually had offers from fraternities to join during ‘rush’ week. I never took them up on it; my being at least 10 years older than even the oldest ‘brother’ didn’t sit right with me, and the fact I was working 40+ hours a week didn’t leave me much time to ‘go greek’. Of the few friends I had time for then, at least 4 were frat guys, and they loved The Man Show.

These guys knew of my interest in gender and personality studies in (my then minor) behavioral psychology, but it was mostly due to my presenting them with something they could agree with about how women were. They innocently suggested I check out The Man Show thinking I would be interested in it because “it’s finally a show for guys.” Back then I was dissecting the masculine ridicule and caricaturizations of male roles in movies and TV and these guys were enthusiastic about what I was writing and telling them.

I thought the show was pretty funny at first. I still love and reference Adam Carola, and his insights on gender. However, after watching the show for a while, something wasn’t sitting well for me. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but at some point I thought, “man this is stupid, can’t we do better than this?” The realization I was making was if this was a “show for men” then men were, well, kind of stupid.

I was already well aware of the dumbing-down of the masculine roles in popular media (TV, movies, etc.), but when what was supposedly an exclusively male oriented show is offered it seems that masculine ridicule is only reaffirmed. I’m using The Man Show as an illustration of a bigger dynamic here – if all we had to go on was popular  (i.e. feminized) culture to help us characterize what is masculine then we’d be bad off enough, but it appears that men themselves are almost subconsciously complicit in reinforcing these feminine-defined cartoons of ‘how men really are.’

I love football. I would probably bore you to tears with my enthusiasm about next season and how the pre-season can’t get here soon enough. Ask me about baseball, I’ll tell you I like the Dodgers, but I know relatively nothing about America’s pastime. Soccer, golf, tennis, hockey, I couldn’t carry a conversation about any of them. I like big boobs (fake or real), I like women’s long legs and great assess. You all know I’ve worked in the liquor industry for over 9 years, so I have a vested interest in booze too. However, these natural interests of mine are only small component elements of who I am as a Man.

Granted, sex and alcohol seem to be the top two elements contributing to human happiness, but there is much more to me, much more to my existence as a man, than my base impulses. The problem with defining masculinity in terms of our root interests is that men begin to believe that’s all we have the potential for. For all of its social influence, the Feminine Imperative has no real frame of reference when it comes to the male experience. So in its effort to marginalize the masculine, effectively emasculating society, its only recourse is to define manhood in terms of what best demonizes masculinity. The Imperative can’t afford men to define masculinity for themselves, so the real roles of men are either ridiculous buffoons in need of uniquely feminine correction, or they’re boorish, brutes, poisoned by testosterone and little more than alcoholic, easily manipulable, walking hard-ons.

That’s what men get in their man-space. Hooters, football, beer and boobs. Even in their ‘man-caves’ this is what a woman can expect to find. Left to their own devices, men would simply turn the world into one grandiose Bro-Culture. Nowhere will you find the dreamers, the leaders, the thinkers, the artists or engineers – in girl-world, the majority of men are either pigs or damaged goods.

But if the Feminine Imperative is anything, it’s self-effacing and self-contradicting. According to the Feminine Imperative, for all of the feral worst it characterizes masculinity as, it’s not enough to accept men’s nature as so. You see nothing, not even the feminine reinforced pig-man nature is actually real, it’s just a mask men are socialized to wear.

So what is real masculinity? Make no mistake, the confusing redefinition of masculinity is a deliberate effort in social control on the part of the Feminine Imperative. Pointing out its schizophrenic misunderstanding (or intentional distortion) of the masculine is easy enough, but men have unwittingly adopted and reinforced their own gender role confusion. Either by embracing the Bro-Culture lie or by subscribing wholesale to the feminine identification of what masculinity should be, men are complicit in limiting themselves from defining masculinity for themselves.

Understand this now, a fem-centric society wants you to believe that masculinity is loutish, beer-swilling frat boys AND horribly damaged male psyches socialized into being so. A fem-centric society can’t afford to allow men to self-define masculinity, because it throws that deep feminine need for security and control over to the men they cannot trust because of the same definition it encourages for its own control.