The Red Pill Parent

This week I’ll be exploring a new angle in the Red Pill: how parenting and family relations influence and direct the Blue Pill conditioning of a generation, and what Red Pill aware men can do to redirect this. It was encouraging to see fathers and sons together at the Man In Demand conference. I honestly wasn’t expecting this, but it was a humbling experience to see fathers and sons coming to a Red Pill awareness together. I also met with a few men who told me their sons had either turned them on to my books or that they would be required reading for their sons before they got out of their teens.

One of the greatest benefits of the conference was the inspiration and material I got from the men attending. A particular aspect of this was addressing how men might educate and help others to unplug and in that lay a wealth of observations about how these men’s upbringings had brought them to both their Blue Pill idealisms and ultimately their Red Pill awareness.

I’m beginning this series with some of these observations, but I plan to break protocol and be a bit more proscriptive in the last essay with regard to what I think may be beneficial ways to be a Red Pill parent. In The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine I included a chapter which outlined how men are primarily conditioned for lives and ego-investments in a Blue Pill idealism that ultimately prepares them for better serving the Feminine Imperative when their usefulness is necessary to fulfill women’s sexual (and really lifetime) strategies.

That chapter is only available in the book, but if you have it, it might be helpful to review it after you read this.

Reader (and MiD conference attendee) Jeremy had an excellent observation from Solipsism II:

@Capper

The only thing I take issue with is the advice, from the book that his wife read, which told her to place her husband above her children. Children come first for a mother, and they should for the father too. I’m not advocating to neglect her husband, but he needs to accept some biological facts and not be hurt because of it

What you’re repeating there is actually the first steps of a hostage crisis. That is first-wave-feminism boilerplate response. It is the first redirection in a misdirection perpetuated by women in order to sink any notion that men should have some authority on matters. Think of the children. It’s been repeated for so long, it’s a cliche…

It’s typical crab-basket behavior. Women seek power over their lives and somehow instinctively believe that the only way to achieve power is to take someone else’s power away. So they attack male authority by placing children above the man. This then becomes a stick with which to beat male authority into submission, as the woman is allowed to speak for the needs of the children. This is literally textbook subversion, and plays out on so many levels of human culture it tends to make one consider how boring humanity must look to any alien life that happens to stumble across our unremarkable corner of the universe.

When the children’s needs become the “throne” of the household, and the wife is allowed to speak for the children’s needs, then the authority of the household becomes a rather grotesque combination of immediate child needs and female manipulation. Worse still, the children are now effectively captives of the wife, because at any time she can accuse the husband of anything the law is forced to throw him in handcuffs for, and take away the kids.

What you’re repeating is the first steps in that hostage situation. Equalists will try to convince you of the logic that children come first, that children are the future, that all of that which makes them better is more important than anything else. This is bullshit.

Do you think cavemen sat around in caves all day playing and socially interacting with their babies? Do you think they had some kind of fresh-gazelle-delivery service that allowed him to interact with the children directly? Do you think the mothers were not under exactly the same survival condition, needing to forage for carrots, potatoes, berries, etc, while the men hunted and built structures? Do you think the “children” came first in any other era of humanity? If so, you are very sadly mistaken.

Children are more than capable of getting everything they need to know about how to live simply by watching their parents live a happy life together. This is how humans did things for eons, changing that order and putting the “children first” is frankly perverse and the beginning of the destruction of the family. Children are more than information sponges, they are blank minds that want desperately to be adult. Children want to understand everything that everyone around them understands, which is why a parent telling a child that you’re “disappointed” in them is more effective than a paddling. If you focus on children, you are frankly just spoiling them with attention that they will never receive in the real world. If instead you focus on yourself and your spouse, you will raise children that see you putting yourself as the MPO (as Rollo calls it), and your marriage/partnership as an important part of what you do each day.

Don’t put the children first. That’s essentially like negotiating with a terrorist, they’ll only make more demands on you until the cops storm the plane and lots of people get shot.

Your Mental Point of Origin should never waver from yourself.

American Parenting is Killing American Marriage

Of course, Ayelet Waldman’s blasphemy was not admitting that her kids were less than completely wonderful, only that she loved her husband more than them. This falls into the category of thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me. As with many religious crimes, judgment is not applied evenly across the sexes. Mothers must devote themselves to their children above anyone or anything else, but many wives would be offended if their husbands said, “You’re pretty great, but my love for you will never hold a candle to the love I have for John Junior.”

Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children.

There are doubtless benefits that come from elevating parenthood to the status of a religion, but there are obvious pitfalls as well. Parents who do not feel free to express their feelings honestly are less likely to resolve problems at home. Children who are raised to believe that they are the center of the universe have a tough time when their special status erodes as they approach adulthood. Most troubling of all, couples who live entirely child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home.

In the 21st century, most Americans marry for love. We choose partners who we hope will be our soulmates for life. When children come along, we believe that we can press pause on the soulmate narrative, because parenthood has become our new priority and religion. We raise our children as best we can, and we know that we have succeeded if they leave us, going out into the world to find partners and have children of their own. Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought.

I think these quotes outline the dynamic rather well; a method of control women can use to distract and defer away from Beta husbands is a simple appeal to their children’s interests as being the tantamount to their own or their husbands. If the child sits at the top of that love hierarchy and that child’s wellbeing and best interests can be defined by the mother, the father/husband is relegated to subservience to both the child and the mother.

This gets back to the preternatural Empathy myth that women, by virtue of just being a woman, has some instinctual, empathetic insight about placing that child above all else. That child becomes a failsafe and a buffer against having to entertain a real relationship with the father/husband and really consider his position in her Hypergamous estimate of him.

If that man isn’t what her Hypergamous instinct estimates him being as optimal (he’s the unfortunate Beta), then “she’s tolerating his presence for the kids’ sake.” Jeremy was responding to a comment made by Capper about an incident where a woman was being encouraged to put her husband before her kids in that love hierarchy priority. The fact that this is so unnatural for a woman that it would need to be something necessary to train a woman to speaks volumes about the facility with which women presume that their default priority ought to be for her kids.

Most men buy into this prioritization as well. It seems deductively logical that a woman would necessarily need to put her child’s attention priorities well above her husband’s. What’s counterintuitive to both parents is that it’s the health of their relationship (or lack) that defines and exemplifies the complementary gender understanding of the child. Women default to using their children as cats paws to assume primary authority of the family, and men are already preconditioned to accept this as the normative frame for the family.

As with all your relations with women, establishing a strong Frame is essential. The problem for men with even the strongest initial Frame with their wives is that they cede that Frame to their kids. Most men want the very best for their children; or there may be a Promise Keepers dynamic that guy is dealing with an makes every effort to outdo, and make up for, the sins of his father by sacrificing everything, but in so doing he loses sight of creating and maintaining a dominant Frame for not just his wife, but the state of his family.

It’s important to bear in mind that when you set the Frame of your relationship, whether it’s a first night lay or a marriage prospect, women enter your reality and your frame – the same needs to apply to any children within that relationship. Far too many fathers are afraid to embody that strong authority and expect their wives (and children) to recognize what should be his primary place in the family.

The fear is that by assuming this position they become the typical asshole father they hoped to avoid for most of their formative years. Even for men with strong masculine role models in their lives, the hesitation comes from a culture that ridicules fathers, or presumes they are potentially violent towards children. Thus the abdication of fatherly authority, in as positive a tense as possible, is abdicated before that child is even born.

Ectogenesis

At the Man in Demand conference last weekend I had a young guy ask me what my thoughts were about a man’s being interested in becoming a single parent of his own accord. I had this same question posed to me during my second interview with Christian McQueen and essentially it breaks down to a man supplying his own sperm, buying a suitable woman’s viable ovum to fertilize himself, and, I presume, hire a surrogate mother to carry that child to term. Thereupon he takes custody of that child and raises it himself as a single father.

In theory this arrangement should work out to something similar to a woman heading off the the sperm bank to (once again Hypergamously) select a suitable sperm donor and become a single parent of her own accord. It’s interesting that we have institutions and facilities like sperm banks to ensure women’s Hypergamy, but men, much less heterosexual men, must have exceptional strength of purpose and determination to do so.

Despite dealing with the very likely inability of the surrogate mother to disentangle her emotional investment in giving birth to a child she will never raise (hormones predispose women to this) a man must be very determined financially and legally to become a single father by choice. In principle I understand the sentiment of Red Pill men wanting to raise a child on their own. The idea is to do so free from the (at least direct) influence of the Feminine Imperative. However, I think this is in error.

My feelings on this are two part. First, being a complementarian, it is my belief that a child requires two healthy adult parents, male and female, with a firm, mature grasp of the importance, strengths and weaknesses of their respective gender roles (based on biological and evolutionary standards). Ideally they should exemplify and demonstrate those roles in a healthy fashion so as a boy or a girl can learn about masculinity and femininity from their respective parents’ examples.

Several generations after the sexual revolution, and after several generations of venerating feminine social primacy, we’ve arrived at a default collective belief that single mothers can perform the function of modeling and shaping masculinity in boys as well as femininity in girls equally well. The underlying social message in that is that women/mothers can be a one woman show with regard to parenting and thus men, fathers or the buffoons mainstream culture portrays them as, are superfluous to parenting – nice to have around, but not vital. This belief also finds fertile ground in the notion that men are obsolete.

Secondly, for all the equalist emphasis of Jungian gender theories about anima/animus and balancing feminine and masculine personality interests, it is evidence of an agenda to suggest that a woman is equally efficient in teaching and modeling masculine aspects to children as well as any positively masculine man. With that in mind, I think the reverse would be true for a deliberately single father – even with the best of initial intents.

Thus, I think a father might serve as a poor substitute for a woman when it comes to exemplifying a feminine ideal. The argument then of course is that, courtesy of a feminine-centric social order, women have so divorced themselves of conventional femininity that perhaps a father might teach a daughter (if not demonstrate for her) a better feminine ideal than a woman. Conventional, complementary femininity is so lost on a majority of women it certainly seems like logic for a man to teach his daughter how to recapture it.

Raising Betas

This was the trap that 3rd wave feminism fell into; the belief that they knew how best to raise a boy into their disempowered and emasculated ideal of their redefined masculinity. Teach that boy a default deference and sublimation to feminine authority, redefine it as respect, teach him to pee sitting down and share in his part of the choreplay, and well, the world is bound to be a better more cooperative place right?

So it is for these reason I think that the evolved, conventional, two-parent heterosexual model serves best for raising a child. I cannot endorse single parenthood for either sex. Parenting should be as collaborative and as complementary a partnership as is reflected in the complementary relationship between a mother and father.

It’s the height of gender-supremacism to be so arrogantly self-convinced as to deliberately choose to birth a child and attempt to raise it into the contrived ideal of what that “parent” believes the other gender’s role ought to be.

This should put the institutionalized social engineering agenda of the Feminine Imperative into stark contrast for anyone considering intentional single parenthood. Now consider that sperm banks and feminine-specific fertility institutions have been part of normalized society for over 60 years and you can see that Hypergamy has dictated the course of parenting for some time now. This is the definition of social engineering.

I’ll admit that when I got the question of single fatherhood I was a bit incredulous of the mechanics of it. Naturally it would be an expense most men couldn’t entertain. However, as promised, I did my homework on it, and found out that ectogenesis was yet another science-fiction-come-reality that feminists have already considered and have planned for:

Prominent feminists and activists, including Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, have concluded that not only will women be further marginalized and oppressed by this eventuality, but they will become obsolete.

Fertility, and the ability to be the species’ reproductive engine, are virtually the only resources that women collectively control, they argue. And, although women do have other “value” in a patriarchal society–child rearing, for example–gestation remains, worldwide, the most important.  Even in the most female-denigrating cultures women are prized, if only, for their childbearing. If you take that away, then what? This technology becomes another form of violence.

Women already have the power to eliminate men and in their collective wisdom have decided to keep them. The real question now is, will men, once the artificial womb is perfected, want to keep women around?

[…]“We may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,” she writes. “We have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?”

This was a great article and it came at an auspicious time – the time we find women sweating about having their sexual market leverage with men potentially being undercut by sex-bots and/or immersive virtual sex substitutes.