One of the results of becoming Red Pill aware is a meta “awareness” of the feminine centric social order we live in today. On this side of the Red Pill it’s almost routine for me now to filter what’s presented to me in popular media, social doctrine or even casual conversation through a Red Pill lens.
Whether it’s the latest pop hit lyrics of a song my daughter is listening to in the bathroom, the latest movie or book, or just listening to someone rattle off an old Blue Pill trope in casual conversation, my sensitivity to how thoroughly immersed in fem-cetrism our society has become is overwhelming.
I’ve had guys in the manosphere joke with me that having this ‘lens’ is like having the special glasses that let you see the alien/zombies and propaganda in the movie They Live. While I get a laugh out of this I also have to think that those glasses never really come off. So when the holiday season comes around this awareness manifests itself more for me since I’m reacquainting myself with family and friends who are immersed in this Matrix and don’t realize they’re mouthing the meme’s and social focus of a feminine centric order.
I think it’s kind of ironic that during the holidays we’re expected to lock horns with our relatives over the latest generational/political/ideological differences, yet these all take place in a common, feminized social narrative. Your uncle may not agree with you politically, but he’ll slap you on the back while you both drink a beer and say, “Women ‘eh? I guess we’ll never figure ’em out” and expect you to have some common agreement with him in spite of those differences.
I bring this up today (and for this weekend’s discussion questions) because it was due to this seasonal Red Pill awareness that I was better prepared to appreciate the holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life from a Red Pill perspective.
I’d just returned from a work trip last week and my daughter informed me that the movie was being shown in our local metroplex theater on Christmas eve. I’d seen it before on TV with all the intermittent commercials, and remembered how tedious I thought it was (it’s a pretty long movie for 1946), but she insisted and I wanted to do something with the family. I’ve never watched the movie start to finish, and when I did pick up scenes on TV during Christmas time, it was long before I had any Red Pill inclination.
Needless to say I was shocked (pleasantly) by how thoroughly Red Pill I found it. If you want to see what a pre-sexual revolution gender dynamic is like, this is your movie. Yes, it’s idyllic, but that idealism is founded in a social order, an ‘old books‘ social order, that reveals what our new feminine-primary social order is today. It shows you what we’ve become, but unfortunately the greater whole of our contemporary society lack the special glasses to really appreciate this distinction.
Some notable scenes:
- George Bailey, the cab driver Ernie and the cop Bert ogle the sexy Violet Bick after she flirts with George and just flows down a busy street to be checked out all the more by every man on the street. In modern terms these men are all guilty of sexual harassment, but in 1928 (the film’s beginning) and viewed from a 1946 perspective of that time, there is nothing harassing about it. It’s de rigueur, and she enjoys the attention.
- The family interaction between George, his brother Harry, and their father with Ma Bailey just prior to Harry’s graduation party. There is matronly deference to their mother, but both of the boys are being boys and there is no expectation for them to settle down. Both the brothers are naturally, effortlessly, cocky & funny with the maid and their mother. This isn’t a forced attitude, it comes off as both positively masculine and fun at the same time. Also, their father is the respected head of the household, both by virtue of his social status and integrity as well as his position as ‘father’. Needless to say, he’s never ridiculed as the buffoon he’d be portrayed as on a post-sexual revolution social order, and in fact dispenses a wisdom that benefits George later in life.After the graduation party George and Mary walk home in the odd dry clothes they were able to find after having fallen into the school pool. Mary is in a bathrobe and George in a football outfit. This flirtation and interaction is perhaps one of the best examples I can think of as an old order form of Game. George is cocky, funny, confident, ambitious, playfully teasing and yet still conscious of Mary’s perception of him as he effortlessly delivers a positive, masculine vibe.Again, it’s idyllic, and men being the true romantics will want to believe such receptivity could actually take place without any confusion of signals with an idealized, Quality Woman woman like Mary, but it’s the atmosphere and the attitude of expecting Mary to respond to George’s delivery that belies the era this scene and story was written in. Nothing seems forced at all, and we don’t expect Mary to match George’s masculine Game with one of her own feminine-empowered forms of Game. From a Red Pill perspective, we want a gal like Mary to exist, but you wont find her in 2014.
These were just a few scenes I thought stood out, but this film is an essay in the old order social structure a lot of well meaning Red Pill advocates would like to believe is still a possibility.
In the last thread commenter Xsplat asked the question whether an Alpha man could also be a provider. His criticism of the manosphere is that Alpha men are being painted as caricatures of cads, assholes and bad boy players women want to bang as part of their Hypergamous mating protocol. Betas are the opposite of this; good for provisioning only – cuckolds to be used for parental investment with only a perfunctory servicing of mediocre ‘duty’ sex as an intermittent reward to keep him pulling the cart.
If there are caricatures of Alpha and Beta being drawn I’d suggest this is due more to women and their comfort with Open Hypergamy and men deductively modeling their gender expectations as a result. That said, Xsplat’s not wrong. It is entirely possible for an archetypal Alpha Man to be an upstanding member of society, provide for his family and be well respected both by his peers and his wife. The character of George Bailey is an old order example of exactly this kind of man.
In our era women have an unprecedented facility for providing for their own security need, but that doesn’t eliminate the root level, emotional need for optimizing Hypergamy with a man who is an Alpha provider. For the most part women simply don’t expect to find this optimization in the same man. There are men they want to fuck and men they want to consolidate monogamy with, and finding this satisfaction in the same man is so rare, so unexpected, that his character becomes unbelievable. The George Bailey of 1928 is an unbelievable character in 2014.
As I’ve illustrated in many a prior post, Alpha is a state of mind, not a demographic. Just because the Alpha energy of a kid like Corey Worthington will get him laid without trying doesn’t preempt a woman from being aroused by, and attracted to a George Bailey. Context is king of course, but what matters is that self-interested Alpha mindset. While many a convicted felon possesses this mindset, and receives women’s sexual interests as a result of it, I’d still encourage men to use that Alpha energy to a positive, self-benefiting effect.
So the questions for this weekend are:
What Red Pill observations do you find unignorable in contemporary society? It’s dangerous to attempt to make others aware of this perception, but do you try anyway?
Do you see examples of the old order as I have in It’s a Wonderful Life? Understanding the idealisms inherent in it, what other examples of this old order to you know?
Alpha providers, while being an idealistic character, can exist, but are they realistic? I’d propose that embodying this role has become one of being seen too readily as a Beta by women due to the unbelievability of it. Does men’s romantic nature predispose them to thinking they can adequately fulfill this role? Does that romanticism expect women to be receptive and appreciative of it? Is that expectation on of investing in Relational Equity?