Are You Experienced?

About three weeks ago I was made aware of an article on the New Republic blog called Bros Before Homes and a few of my followers on Twitter asked me for my take on it then. I did feel it merited more than 140 characters so I figured I’d build a post on it. Honestly, I had more than a couple irons in the fire for blog posts ahead of this, but in hindsight now I’m glad I waited a bit before digging too far in.

I am going to riff on it here, but before I do I’d like to point out that my posting Sugar Babies, before this post was a strategic decision on my part. You’ll understand why a bit later, but keep in mind the general premise of that post – women’s commodification of intimacy dynamic – and the priority of self-importance women place on themselves with regards to what men must pay for and why women believe they’re worth men’s having to pay for it.

I’m asking readers to keep this in mind because Bros Before Homes will contrast starkly next to Sugar Babies.

From the tone of the article you probably won’t need to look up Phoebe Maltz Bovy‘s portfolio to understand her clichéd feminist bias. It’s all of the self-importance and the prerequisite solipsism you’d expect from ‘journalists’ of her stripe, but try to read past the snark she thinks is interesting. Her sarcasm only highlights women’s duplicity with regards to men freeing themselves from the Feminine Imperative and women commodifying their intimate interests in ‘acceptable’ men.

The gist of Bovy’s fabricated angst is how offensively sexist it is for men to prioritize life experience, exploration, self-betterment, hobbies and the virtue signaling she sees inherent in men when they actually go their own way. Men cutting themselves free from the expectations of the Feminine Imperative and a feminine-primary social order always imply the threat of them coming to realize their own value.

It’s also that the very idea of experiences mattering more than things is a way of valorizing the stereotypically masculine. “While men are conditioned to dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity—women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants,” she wrote.

Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences. While the enjoyment of domestic life, of stuff, isn’t inherently negative, it is dismissed precisely because of its associations with the feminine. An orientation towards stuff over experiences, moreover, gets cast either as recklessly materialist or, as Tony perceives it, an impediment to enjoying life. The only constant is that what women prefer, or are imagined to prefer, is thought inferior.

[…]We’re meant to admire the experience-lovers for their indifference to stuff, which implies they’ve got their priorities straight: to live life to the fullest. It’s no coincidence, though, that these experience-lovers are so often male, as it’s a stereotypically male aspiration not to be “tied down”—that is, not to have domestic responsibilities. But these men do have roofs over their heads. The bourgeois life they’re rejecting is simply one they’ve outsourced. After all, Tony hasn’t rejected the material life. He’s just got a woman—his mother—tidying up after him.

Bovy’s presumptions here smack of her reaching for some way to denigrate men’s pragmatically eschewing materialism or being tethered to what would otherwise be considered “grown up” responsibilities and looking for something more personally meaningful for themselves. As with all femosphere journalists you get a bonus 10% on your women’s studies essays if you can find a way to sneak the word’s “sexism” or “misogyny” in a piece.

Bros Before Homes is really nothing novel in the manosphere. MGTOWs have been advocating this reward-for-independence from women for as long as there’s been a movement. What is novel is that this return to a man being his own mental point of origin and prioritizing life experiences as his first priority is a result of an awareness that’s now filtering into the mainstream. It’s very easy to criticize men for being juvenile about foregoing what popular culture would have us believe is preparing ourselves for adulthood, but when this new idealism affects the men women hope will be well-positioned Betas when they’ve reached the end of their Party Years, then there’s cause for concern.

As a side note here, I should also say that it’s interesting to see how fluidly the progress of feminism comes full circle in Bovy’s thought process. She uses the same ambiguous tropes of a regressive society expecting women to resign themselves to domesticity and tidying up after men as if 60+ years of Fempowerment “leveling the playing field” never occurred. This is the same, very tired, cover story that second wave feminism used in the sixties.

The underlying irritation here is that men’s new prioritizing of experiences above materialism is a thorn in the side of women who’ve been given carte blanche to their Hypergamous whims. Bovy cries sexism because she presumes men are unable to engage in all this experience seeking without a support team of mothers and house-bound women, but what really makes her sore is that men doing the seeking reminds women of their natural predilection for materialism and the base of opportunism their concept of love is founded upon.

Bovy’s first mistake is that she’s statistically inaccurate.

The Blue Pill conditioning of the past 60 years has done everything but teach men to “dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas”. That particular conditioning is reserved for women playing along with the Eat, Pray, Love narrative. If anything it’s just the opposite. From education to family to church, men are conditioned for servile Beta-hood and lambasted for not ‘Manning Up’ and being supportive of women’s empowerment at the cost of their own. Conversely, women and womankind have been lifted to unrealistic idealism in pursuing their own interests at the cost of childbearing and monogamous domesticity. Apparently, Bovy’s never read Lean In or even watched a Disney princess movie in the last 50 years.

Off the Reservation

What worries women is that all the Blue Pill conditioning men have endured for the past several decades might be undone if men were to actually make themselves their mental point of origin. What worries the representatives of the Feminine Imperative is that Betas might see the pragmatism in following the example of men who put themselves first. Men who eschew the trappings of building their lives around the materialism women seek when their looks fade and their need for men’s resource security is a better prospect than having to compete for men with their sisters. When marriage is an easily recognizable sucker’s bet to the point that even Betas can see the sense in avoiding it, that’s when the Feminine Imperative must shift to a new tactic.

Open Hypergamy makes for aware Betas. Men aware of the game they are expected to play must either tamp that understanding down into denial or they simply refuse to play. That refusal can come in many examples, but the reasoning is the same. The deductive, pragmatic response is for men to go their own way and put themselves at the beginning of their thought processes and goals.

The success of women’s sexual strategy depends on ignorant Betas being prepared to meet (or wait for them) at the time at which their need for security is the greatest. This expectation of Betas in Waiting is part of a Hypergamous plan; it is the consolidation of an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks prioritization (also known as the Sandberg Plan). Bros Before Homes is an offense to this plan.

This then becomes a paradox for the Feminine Imperative. A man’s life experiences are generally a wellspring of attraction if not arousal for a woman. Experience is the source of a genuine Amused Mastery and a man’s self-serving experience is usually a prime indicator of an Alpha mindset. My Red Pill brother Goldmund is a perfect example of how personal, self-asserted, self-initiated experiences can be parlayed into a very effective Game.

Be that as it is, the proposition of any and every Beta going MGTOW in various ways, hitting the open road and regaling women with the stories of their exploits presents a problem to Hypergamy; Hypergamy wants certainty and a well-traveled Beta is still a Beta. Furthermore, living for the experiential implies less investment in Beta men developing skills, status, affluence and the personal equity that make them good prospects for Beta providership when they reach the critical age at which women need their cooperation in fulfilling their Hypergamy. At least, that’s the implied concern for women. Men with a sense to educate themselves from experience are usually all the better for it – even when that experience is a nightmare.

I should add here that prioritizing experience above other consideration needn’t be limited to Bovy’s silly impressions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  What concerns the feminine is that men would devote the lion’s share of their personal efforts on anything unrelated to meeting women’s future or present security needs. It’s not just men wanting to scale Mount Vesuvius, it’s men having any self-import at the expense of women. When men’s ambitions are centered on satisfying themselves  and not about developing equity that’s useful to women, that’s when those men (and those who would encourage it) are shamed for not being an adult. They are shamed for not manning up or growing up to meet the needs of women and thus not living up to “adult responsibilities”.

Responsible Adults

It’s not an accident that society conflates men’s servitude with qualities of adulthood – it’s the design.

As such, women begin to get nervous that their future provisioning and security are their own responsibility. How those needs are met are a discussion for various other threads I’ve written, but the social expectations of men qualifying for ‘manhood’ by assisting women to fulfill their own Hypergamous imperatives are at the root of the “sexist” accusations on Bovy’s part. To her, it’s sexist not to plan one’s life according to women’s ‘correct’ sexual strategy.

Bovy actually shares a lot with contemporary Christianity. Ensaturated by feminine primacy, the modern church has made efforts to convince men that their servitude to women is both an article of faith and a prerequisite for responsible adulthood. In a reversal of traditional faith, men aren’t men until they’ve established themselves as being capable of providing for both themselves, but for women as well. Any man shirking this is shamed for “prolonging is adolescence”. All life priority and preparation is presumed to revolve around supporting a future wife irrespective of her own decisions and the results that come from them. The contemporary church is a Beta production institution as it is, but it’s interesting to see how both Bovy and modern Christianity align on the position of men’s proper roles.

This is an interesting parallel when you consider the lengths to which women have gone to emancipate themselves from (ostensibly) being dependent upon men’s influence and provisioning. Western culture has evolved around the strong independent woman stereotype, yet it’s sexist for men to emancipate themselves from the worst of women’s sexual strategy. Bovy’s perspective relies heavily on the Old Books rules set in the misguided belief that women are still beholden to roles of domesticity and repression in an era of triumphantly embraced Open Hypergamy.

Materialism

As I mentioned in the opening, it’s important that we contrast this concern for Betas leaving the plantation with the blatant soft prostitution of the Sugar Babies dynamic. In the light of women’s naked opportunism, and with that opportunism’s materialistic purpose, it’s easy to see how patently false Bovy’s premise is here.

In an era where we develop successful apps to aid women in setting their price on a basic date, it’s easy to recognize Bovy’s disingenuousness. MGTOW and its Red Pill aware derivatives are really just practical, logical responses of men protecting themselves from an Open Hypergamy women are all too ready to educate them about. The End of Men is also the eventual end of women’s expectations of long term provisioning. If Bros aren’t interested in homes the old social contract is put in jeopardy and Open Hypergamy only serves to expedite this shift. Women at the Epiphany Phase looking for the “equal partner” that Sheryl Sandberg assures her sisters will be waiting for them find that men have declined to play along.

The old joke is that if women would have sex in a cardboard box men would never buy a house. The joke’s played out now because women are happy to fuck an Alpha in much less, and now they’re proud enough to tell Betas all about it.