Articles from August 2016

Losing My Religion

Losing

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll admit I’ve had this post in my drafts folder for some time now. As always, standard caveats apply with regard to my policy on posts about religion, politics, and socioeconomics. I don’t delve into the particulars of these subjects, but I will dissect how they coincide with intersexual dynamics.

It’s no secret that I’ve been a regular follower of Dalrock’s blog for over five years now. Along with Dal I also consider Donalgraeme and a few other bloggers in the ‘Christo-Manosphere’ Red Pill colleagues if not friends. I’ve always held Dalrock as a sort of Red Pill brother since both our blogs came up around the same time. I’ve quoted and credited him in both my books.

I do so because there was a time I considered pursuing a path in my writing that would follow the same Red Pill critique of religion, (Christianity for Dal) at least in some occasional sense. After reading Dalrock’s very insightful early posts I decided against it. Dal has earned the respect of the manosphere for his Red Pill lens of contemporary Christianity for good reason – he’s a consummate statistician and researcher, and he’s what I’d call “embedded” well within modern (I presume mostly evangelical) church culture. He does it better than I could hope to do that part of the manosphere justice.

I never go into any detail about my own faith for a couple of reasons, the first being it’s only peripherally relevant in my writing. Secondly, it’s always been my position that the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally areligious and apolitical. That said, I am familiar enough with ‘Churchian’ culture and the psycho-social side of mainstream religion to understand it through my own Red Pill lens.

When I analyze Red Pill principles within social contexts I always have a hard time with religion. It grates on me because I’m of the opinion that one’s religious leanings, one’s interaction with existence and life, one’s consideration of the spiritual, ought to be something personal and private if it’s in anyway genuine. As such, and for some, it can be a source of real vulnerability and exploitation which is really nothing new to anyone. It’s one thing to be even agnostic and trapped in a Blue Pill world, but it’s quite another to have been raised to adulthood in a religious context and coming to terms with having some very deep ego-investments shattered by a new Red Pill awareness.

If you ask anyone steeped in the Blue Pill conditioning of the Feminine Imperative about how this exploitation operates in an intersexual context you’ll likely get the standard answer that religion is largely a “social construct designed to maintain the Patriarchy.” And I have no doubt that in a Judeo-Christian sense this was likely the case for millennia. I won’t dig into how much of this had the latent purpose of controlling for Hypergamy in this post, but in the generations since the sexual revolution and the rise of feminine social primacy this maintaining the Patriarchy is a failing distraction on the part of the Feminine Imperative.

Creating Religion in the Image of the Feminine Imperative

For the past five generations, there has been a concerted re-engineering of religion (and not just limited to Christianity) to better suit the ends of the Feminine Imperative. Just as men are sold the idealism of the old set of books while living within the social context that confounds them, religion has been coopted by the feminine. The old books religion has either been replaced wholesale by a feminine-interpreted, feminine-directed religion that places women as its highest authority, or it’s been restructured and rewritten to serve the same feminine-primary objectives.

For going on six years now, Dalrock has masterfully documented and rightly criticized these shifts in Christianity. Although I’m focusing on western Christiainty here, this re-engineering of modern religion is not limited to just Christianity. A Red Pill perspective reveals a lot of uncomfortable truths, one of these is how well the Feminine Imperative has succeeded in supplanting any and all masculine influence in religion.

I expect there will be female critics who’ll cite that, in most of church culture, it’s still predominantly men who control churches and religious organizations, but in the era of feminine social primacy, it’s not who executes the control, but whose beliefs control the executors. Pair this with the commodification of religion and we can see the spheres of true feminine control and feminine-primary purpose.

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/737234578432233472

After almost six years of following the religious aspects of the Red Pill, I think it’s high time men acknowledge that modern Christian culture simply does not have men’s best interests as part of its doctrine anymore. Christianity, in particular, is by women, for women – if not directly executed by women, though even that is changing.

Church culture is now openly hostile towards any expression of conventional masculinity that doesn’t directly benefit women and actively conditions men to be serviceable, gender-loathing Betas. The feminist narrative of “toxic masculinity” has entirely replaced any semblance of what traditional masculinity or manhood once was to the church. Any hint of a masculinity not entirely beholden to a now feminine-primary purpose is not only feared, but shamed with feminine-interpreted aspersions of faith.

I recently read a study that our current generation is the least religious in history and I think as far as men are concerned much of that disdain for religion is attributable to a church culture that constantly and openly ridicules and debases any male-specific endeavors or anything characteristic of conventional masculinity. It’s no secret in today’s church franchisement that reaching out to, and retaining the interests of, men is at its most difficult.

Again, this is attributable to a generation of feminized men being raised into a church culture, and eventual church leadership, that has been taught to prioritize and identify with the feminine and reinforced with articles of faith now defined by the Feminine Imperative. The modern church has trouble reaching men because the church no longer has a grasp of what it means to be ‘men’.

To be clear, that’s not an indictment of the genuine faith itself, but rather a fairly measured observation of the way a feminine-primary church culture has shaped that faith. In the future, any man with a marginal capacity for critical thought will avoid the contemporary Christian church and religion for the obvious misandry it espouses; the only religious men you will find will be those raised into a life of religiously motivated Beta servitude – or those dragged to the feminine-directed church by wives who hold authoritative ‘headship’ in their relationships.

And even in what some consider to be pro-masculine or “macho” churches, we still find the Paper Alpha leaders preach from a mindset that defers wholesale to the feminine’s “Godly perfection” as they attempt to AMOG other male member to greater devotion to qualifying for, and identifying with, the feminine influence that pervades their church.

Religious men will be synonymous with a Beta mindset.

It’s gotten to a point where it’s better to look after your self-interests and repent of the sin later than commit to an institution that openly seeks to indenture you. I realize that might be anathema to the more determined religious man, but just understand that this is the pragmatic, deductive future that the contemporary, western-feminized church is presenting to men. The social contract of marriage from a religious perspective has shifted into the ultimate leap of faith for men. They literally risk everything in marriage – child custody, sexual access, any expectation of true, male authority or respect, long-term financial prospects, etc. – but this leap of faith comes with a metaphysical price tag.

Men declining to participate in faith-based marriage decline an aspect of a faith reset to serve women; women who are held as a higher order of sinless being than men by this new church. For the agnostic or areligious man, discarding a Blue Pill social conditioning for a Red Pill awareness is a difficult task, but for men raised to believe that their only doctrinally approved path to sex with a woman is abstinence until marriage, that man’s only hope is to accept his fate and stay the Beta a feminized church has conditioned him to be.

And once he gets to marriage and his approved expression of his sexuality, the “Christian” man finds that the feminized church, even the male elders, expect endless qualifications to women and his wife’s unceasing appeasement in exchange for that approved sex. It’s a tail-chasing that holds men to the old books social order expectations while absolving women of all accountability and expecting him to also make concessions for a new (feminized) social order that’s ensaturated the church.

SeventiesJason from Dalrock’s blog:

And then we have “Christian marriage” divorce rates which are only a few paltry percentage points lower than the secular world……..men like Chandler will blame “men” for not leading, not being ‘holy’ enough, not bold n’ biblical enough, not going to bed exhausted every night….and a pile of other excuses for why she “had no choice” but to end the marriage.

We have a whole cottage industry of ‘christian counseling’ and self-help books, usually written for and by women. We have conferences, TV channels, broadcast networks, podcasts, radio stations, outreach, plenty of churches in this country……..the Internet. A ton of resources. Books……every pastor great and small today is “working on” or has written a book.

How on earth did the early church survive under the penalty of death? Persecution. Seclusion, and outright shunning? How did it grow? How did it survive?

We are told over and over by pastors that “God has an amazing plan for your life!” and then to sell men in the world this ‘churchian’ ploy that you are somehow not as holy, balanced, ready, equipped, or mature to handle this amazing plan….ah, but your wife to be is! The unspoken consolation prize is “but…..hey, you get to have sex….and that’s the only thing men need or think about and want!”

That seems to be given begrudgingly today (in my men’s group…..goodness, so many of the married guys complain that their wives never want sex)

How did the early church turn the world upside down? All God did was send a few men, and they made it happen. We have so many tools today…..and we’re “helpless” and we tend to think a “building program” will help everything and if we let the men fix things on the property they will feel “useful”

For over five generations now, the modern church has become a Beta farm existing only to produce the same masculinity-confused men that the secular world has perfected today. In our idealism I think too many (even well-meaning Red Pill) men believe that the church is some insulation against the worst of the Feminine Imperative when it is in fact an institution that produces the same men we hope to free from the Matrix.

Dean Abbot had an excellent post about this dynamic in his critique of another post by Mark Braivo:

In spite of what you might hear in the media about how terrible and retrograde evangelicals are, the entire movement, even the “conservative” end is thoroughly feminized.

The central Christian teaching that ALL people are sinners gets glossed over. Instead, the notion that men are somehow worse by nature than women is everywhere, sometimes stated overtly, often in the subtext.

At the same time, women are elevated to a position of moral and spiritual superiority. Women’s sin is often excused in light of a man’s failings. I remember hearing a very well known evangelical leader tell a story about how his wife freaked out and started smashing all their dishes. What was his point? That she did this because he had been neglecting her. See, she is not an adult beholden to practice self-control, but rather an innocent, sweet victim driven to outlandish behavior by his shortcomings.

“Toxic masculinity”, any masculinity inconvenient to a feminine-correct purpose, is a sin both actively and retroactively in today’s church.

With every successive generation of Beta pastors that are produced by this farm you get more and more men whose only experience of that religion is one of servile deference to a faith that’s been fundamentally altered to the utility of women and feminine-primacy. Women love to complain that it’s largely men who do the preaching and decision making in church, but what they ignore is that these men are the developed implements of the Feminine Imperative.

I will wager that in the next 10 years Christianity will be unrecognizable from its prior tenets of well defined conventional masculinity and the faith itself will expressly be centered on deference to the feminine.

Culture Informs Faith

I’ve had several critics tell me that the problem with the modern church is really one of its culture and should be considered apart from the ‘genuine’ faith, however it is church culture that ultimately informs and restructures doctrine and articles of faith. When that culture is informed by the Feminine Imperative, open Christian feminists, and a feminine influence posing as doctrinally sound egalitarianism, this fundamentally recreates an old order religion in the image of a new order, female-primary, imperative.

This and endless variations of the feminization of religion across every denomination and sect is why contemporary religion is openly hostile to any semblance of conventional masculinity. Church is no place for a single man and is just a formality for the man married to a religious woman at this point in time. All considerations of faith aside, I cannot fathom an adult man with any self-respect finding anything attractive about the modern church. Either there is nothing for him there or he is despised and denigrated, openly in a faith altering way or discreetly in resentment, or in pandering ridicule of his juvenilized maleness.

I don’t type this without a sincere sense of what’s been lost, particularly for men genuinely seeking existential answers for himself. My observations here will undoubtedly be thought of as some attack on a genuine faith, but my issue here isn’t with religion per se, but rather the thoroughness with which the Feminine Imperative has either subverted wholesale or covertly influenced really all modern religion.

Yes, I realize that faith is something personal that should be set apart from churchy social influence, but the culture is a manifestation of the doctrine and collective belief system. That culture ultimately modifies and informs the faith itself, thus with every successive generation that social influence becomes an article of the faith for the next.

Better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, especially when the ‘saints’ are the priestesses of the Feminine Imperative.

The Red Pill lens in today’s church is a scary prospect.

Another commenter, The Question, had a good comment about this:

You’re absolutely right about the state of the Church in the West.

What makes it so dangerous for a Blue Pill man is that it is ground-zero for girls entering the epiphany phase. The single men who remain in the church are the ones will be pressured to fulfill their role in that strategy and will be treated with hostility if they don’t. I personally anticipate a renewed church “man up” campaign somewhere in the near future as the next wave of twenty-somethings near 30 and beyond.

I’d say the only reason to go is to meet cute single young women and that’s if the church actually has them and its theology isn’t wholly intolerable. College town churches like mine have quite a few young single ladies which is why I go.

I will admit, putting aside conscience and morality, the modern (‘Relevant’) church would be a veritable untapped gold mine for a PUA savvy of christian culture. Churchianity’s already got the perfect social architecture installed for pick up. Christian women aching for sexy Alpha dominance in a sea of preconditioned christian Beta “good guys”, high intrasexual competition anxiety for both sexes, instant reconciliation and sin forgiveness for women, hell, you can even talk a woman into an abortion without her having any accountability for killing her child at this point. What’s not for a PUA to like? Feminine-primary churchianity has been waiting for christian-savvy players for years now.

Men with a well defined Red Pill lens, having the sensitivity to understand the subcommunications of what’s going on around them in church, should be rightly horrified.

This is one reason Men like Dalrock are vilified by Christian women who understand he’s wise to what’s transpiring in the church – the Feminine Imperative has taken the Lord’s name in vain by presuming to promote its agenda and socially engineer generations of men to support it by claiming it’s God’s will.

Read the Fempowerment narratives of any ‘Christian women’s ministry speaker’, they will defend the sisterhood above any tenets of faith. They’ll tolerate blasphemy of the faith, but never the Feminine Imperative. They’ll rationalize abortion as a man’s sin, but never accept accountability for it and any man to attempt to rebuke them (for anything really) is counter-shamed for male chauvinist judgementalism. And being judgemental of any woman is the most mortal of sins a man can make in the new church

In the feminine-primary church, the Holy Spirit is the Feminine Imperative, what she says is an article of faith. Men who become aware of this via the Red Pill are a danger to it.

The Key Masters

keymaster

In last week’s comments Not Born This Morning dropped this comment in the last thread:

It has been said and it seems fairly well established as a presumed reality that “Women are the gate keepers to sex and men are the gate keepers to commitment”. This model of gender specific “gatekeeping” seems to be the most widely accepted model in the red pill community and the general culture accepts it readily. This model seems rational enough, it significantly forms our frame of understanding about gender dynamics upon which we base our interpretations of behavior & intents, and our decisions to act. But is it the best model to explain what is really going on? Could this model be inferior in that it fails to account for an underlying more fundamental motivator? Is there a more accurate explanation for women’s intents and behaviors? Could this model be potentially deceptive?

The sex side of this model is simple and easy to understand. It is very clear and specific to the fundamental biologic. It is inarguable, not negotiable. The primary drive motivating the sexual aspect is not political or social. It is biological. This is not the case with the commitment side. The commitment side is primary to the political and social realm. “Commitments” are always components of contracts written or otherwise.

To comprehend what I’m about to explain, we must first agree on the primary definition of commitment. As I understand it, a commitment is a pledge to do something, a proclamation to perform certain action (or inaction) within a specific context for the benefit of another usually in exchange for some consideration. In the sexual context women seek “commitment” from a man primarily for provisioning and sexual exclusivity. The man “commits” to the woman that he will abandon his freedom and not enter into sexual relations with other women. He pledges himself financially and sexually to her exclusively. Realistically, this form of “commitment” includes the man abandoning his options. If he becomes sexually involved with another woman, it is widely considered that he has “broken his commitment” and he is dishonored by her and society for “breaking the commitment”. But, has he really broken any commitment other than a self denigrating pledge to forgo his freedom and abandon his options? Since obviously the male imperative is polygamy and spreading his seed, then isn’t the imposition to “commit” in the first place really a dishonor of his sexuality and a dishonor to him? If so, isn’t “commitment” in this context nothing more than a form of enslavement?

So by saying men are the “gate keepers of commitment” aren’t we really saying that men are the “gatekeepers of their own enslavement”?

I’ve read this line of thought from various MGTOW hardliners in various iterations and I’ve even written a post on the concept of commitment  and what it does or doesn’t mean to a man. The idea is to equate committing to a woman with some irrational agreement to self-induced slavery. However, the problem most men have with commitment is that the old set of books has a social mandate for men to keep their word or honor an agreement. It’s what men do. Say what you mean and stick to it, but as with most every uniquely male custom, Honor among men has been one more useful distortion of the Feminine Imperative.

As I mentioned in the Paradox of Commitment, men don’t have nearly the fear of commitment our feminized social order would have us believe. Men aren’t “commit-o-phones” when it comes to military service or dedicating themselves to a business. These are the areas the women’s magazines conveniently overlook when it comes to comparing men’s commitment with committing to women in monogamy. I’m bringing this up because it’s important to see how men commit to things other than fidelity to a single woman.

If we’re going to equate monogamous fidelity to a woman with slavery we also need to see how other commitments can be viewed as being, or not being, slavery. Is the commitment of military service slavery? Particularly if you know have a pretty good idea of what to expect from that commitment? Are you volunteering for slavery if you start a business and become financially beholden to it?

From  the Paradox of Commitment:

You can even take marriage out of the equation; if I’m in a committed LTR with a GF and over the course of that relationship I realize that she’s not what I’m looking for (for any number of reasons, not just sex), even though she’s 100% faithfully committed to me and the LTR, should I then break that commitment? If I do, am I then being unethical for having broken that commitment irrespective of how I break it? Should the commitment to my own personal well being and future happiness be compromised by another commitment?

What’s my obligation; neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?

It’s my take that commitment ‘should’ be a function of genuine desire. Ideally, commitment should be to something one is so passionate about that the limiting of one’s own future opportunities that come from that commitment is an equitable, and mutually appreciated trade. This is, unfortunately, rarely the case for most people in any form of commitment because people, circumstance, opportunity and conditions are always in flux. A commitment that had been seen as equitable sacrifice at one time can become debilitating 5 years after it depending upon circumstance.

Under the old social contract, the idea that a man would compromise his sexual strategy to fulfill a woman’s (Hypergamy in the long term) had a presumed exchange – sexual access, parental investment, companionship, a good, supportive feminine role example for the kids, etc. – that made the commitment of marriage at least somewhat appealing, if not entirely equitable. I supposed a case could still be made that even under the old order of conventional gender roles and expectations men were still committing themselves to a downside bargain. But in our new, feminine-primary social order, with our broader communication, it’s certainly signing up for slavery of a sort in comparison to the options available being single.

A lot of guys think that by my advising men to spin plates and remain as non-exclusive as possible that its sole purpose is to free them up to indiscriminately bang as many women as possible. While sexual variety maybe an upside to non-exclusivity, there are many more freedoms and options that a non-exclusive man can invest himself in where committed men cannot, or wouldn’t even think to.

So yes, from a male sexual strategy perspective, and considering the terms of that commitment and consequences of breaking it are all glaringly apparent, signing up for that commitment might be assigning yourself to a kind of slavery. Under our present social conditions, staying single might be as good as it gets for men.

However, that said, there is still an undeniable, idealistic, hope that men can make the best of a marriage. Most men (see the 80% Beta men) still remarry in far greater margins than women, even after horrific divorces. We can attribute that to the sustainability of men’s sexual market value lasting longer than women’s, but the desire to want for a lasting monogamy is what I’m getting at. Even in light of the fact that women are hardwired for Hypergamy, and in light of women’s inability to appreciate the sacrifices men must make to facilitate their realities, men still, sooner or later, have a desire to lock down or otherwise wife-up a woman he idealizes. I have read the testimonies of men who will go to any length to stay in a marriage if even the outside hope of it improving exists.

I think this desire might be both a conditional and innate drive in men.

In Mrs. Hyde I quoted a study by Dr. Martie Haselton from Why is muscularity sexy? :

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

It’s entirely possible that a man’s sexual strategy is the simple result of his adapting to his circumstance.

Under the old social order, prior to the upheaval of the sexual revolution and feminine social primacy, investing heavily in one’s mate made good sense if the guy wanted to procreate. As men, I think we still want to apply more value to our commitment in this respect. I think it gets back to the fallacy of relational equity, but because most Blue Pill men believe that there is value in their committing to a woman, and they falsely think that women have the capacity to appreciate it, we tend to build more into it as some kind of mutually understood relationship leverage.

Gatekeepers

Back before Roosh began making his necessities into virtues, he had a pretty good insight about women being “gatekeepers” of both sex and commitment:

A popular manosphere saying is that women are gatekeepers to sex and men are gatekeepers to commitment. I wish this was an absolute truth, but it’s not. As a collective, women are often gatekeepers to both sex and commitment. Most men reading right now can surely attest to their failed attempts to secure commitment from women they slept with, and if you poll the entire population of men, you may find that they are the initiators of monogamous relationships more often than women. It only makes sense for this to be true: it is way more damaging for a man to have his woman sleep with another man and get cuckolded than the other way around. The 0.5% of the population who are skilled players and have more say with commitment don’t put a dent into this common reality. As a sex, men have very little say in determining the relationship dynamic.

[…]It would be a nice fantasy for us men to believe that we have a say in relationships and sex. It’d be nice to think that our “alpha” behavior and our game determines how a relationship can proceed, but often it doesn’t. We’re just giving the girl what she has already decided on. Do you really think you’re selling televisions to customers who came into the store with the intent to buy bicycles? The girl who falls in love with us wanted to fall in love with us, the girl who had fun with us wanted to just have fun with us, and so on. And even when a girl wants a bicycle, she still wants a certain kind of bicycle. This is why game is a numbers game, because girls are incredibly picky even when they are sexually available. The horniest girl in the club who decided on having sex will still have her pick of the litter and opt to get the best that she can.

From the perspective of men using Game to secure some kind of commitment with a woman, I’d agree, it is a numbers game. But, in general, most men aren’t learning PUA/Game to settle into an LTR and most Red Pill aware men (should) understand the nature of women well enough to leverage Game if (ever) they do look for commitment.

Roosh was correct about men not really being gatekeepers of commitment though. I think there’s a definite want on the part of guys to believe that they have some sort of leverage in the ultimate scheme of things. The Feminine Imperative constantly conditions men to think that their commitment to a woman is something insanely valuable to women. Thus, we see shaming tactics designed to call men out for avoiding commitment irrespective of men’s reasons for wanting to take precautions. This has the effect of conditioning men to think that they are the gatekeepers of something valuable.

In a sense, commitment is something valuable to a woman, however, in the age of Open Hypergamy and Strong Independent Women®, the writing is on the wall for men with regard to the convenient need for that commitment at the end-game phase of a woman’s sexual market value. So yes, a man’s commitment to monogamy with a woman has inherent value, but men are hardly the gatekeepers of it when it is a woman who does the deciding as to whether any one guy’s commitment makes any difference to her.

So, we come to a question of comparative equity with regard to men “signing up for slavery” and how inherently valuable his commitment (as convenient as it’s needed) really is to a woman. I have no doubt there are several women reading this right now who are in “relationship limbo” with a guy they desperately want to commit to them in some official capacity. And no doubt they’ll drop a story in the comments personalizing it to be typical of men, but I would argue Roosh’s point that men are the initiators of monogamous relationships far more often than women. Ironically, commitment only has value to a woman when it’s denied to her by a man who’s SMV outclasses her own.

For obvious reasons, highly desirable women, women at the peak of their sexual market valuation, are always the least concerned with men’s capacity to commit. They largely have the luxury to be selective, but furthermore the time at which women are at their highest SMV is usually the point at which men are still building upon their own. Eventually, commitment only has an appreciable value to a woman when she is most in need of it; when her SMV is in decline.

I should also point out that men, the majority being Blue Pill Betas, are the most necessitous of a woman’s commitment when she is at her highest, his is an unproven commodity, and he appreciates the value of a woman’s commitment. Thus, most men look for a stable monogamy in their early to mid 20s, while more mature men who’ve had time to build their SMV into their mid to late thirties tend to be less concerned with monogamy. This is why we hear the constant drone of women bemoaning that highly valuable, supposedly peer-equitable men’s unwillingness to commit and settle down with women aging out of the sexual marketplace. Women are far less concerned with the commitment-readiness of young, unproven men who themselves would commit to even a women in the mid-range of her SMV.

At the end here, I think it’s time Red Pill men disabuse themselves of the idea that they are the ‘gatekeepers’ of commitment, and rather employ their internalized Red Pill awareness and Game to be the ‘key masters’ of women. While I have no doubt that commitment can be a carrot on the stick for some women, the problem really lies in how that commitment is in anyway valuable and balance that knowledge with the fact that commitment, once given, becomes valueless and taken for granted when it’s established. The fact that you’d commit to a woman isn’t something that carries a relationship, no matter how badly she wanted it from you before.

There really is no quid pro quo when it comes to commitment or value in believing you’re a gatekeeper of it.

Law 20
Do Not Commit to Anyone

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

The Red Pill Monthly – Frame

If youtube isn’t your thing you can get the audio archive here.

 

I managed to get some time with Niko once again yesterday. He was kind enough to stay up late and get a talk in for another installment of our semi-regular podcast The Red Pill Monthly (more like bi-monthly recently).

I really liked this one because we delved into some new stuff about Frame and the importance of establishing and maintaining a solid sense of self and purpose in all aspects of a man’s life, but focusing on the interpersonal and intersexual importance of Frame.

The concept of Frame is not my original idea, it’s actually derived from interpersonal psychology. However, way back in my early days at SoSuave I made the connection to the psychological principle and what PUAs of the time were advocating as a means to control in seduction. I begin my Iron Rules of Tomassi with Frame because I’ve always felt that everything else in seduction, and life in general, hinges upon the realities we create for ourselves.

The pop-cultural term for it today is ‘mindset’, but I feel the concept of Frame extends beyond what’s generally a retreading of The Power of Positive Thinking that’s being promoted as mindset now. It certainly plays a part in the entirety of holding Frame, but the overall establishment of Frame with a woman, with other men, with your family or with your employer requires an art that extends past just how one thinks of himself.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #1

Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are. 

The concept of “frame” is yet another ephemeral idea that had need of a term in the very beginnings of the great masculine awakening that’s become the ‘community’. If memory serves I think it may have been Mystery who first picked up on what’s really a very rudimentary and well established psychological principle. In psych terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced. One’s capacity for personal decisions, choices for well-being, emotional investments, religious beliefs and political persuasions (amongst many others) are all influenced and biased by the psychological narrative ‘framework’ under which we are most apt to accept as normalcy.

Rather than go into too much depth here I’ll just encourage you to listen to the podcast and we’ll have an open comments thread about Frame. I think it’s good to review some older principles, not just for the benefit of newly Red Pill aware men, but also because I think it’s good to reconsider these ‘standards’ from a perspective of time and where we are as a Red Pill community today.

Frame, and understanding its importance, is the foundation of dozens of other Red Pill principles and applications. As most of my readers know, I try to avoid specific prescriptive advice. I’m not in the business of telling men how to live their lives with formulaic step-by-step Red Pill templates. The Red Pill isn’t one-size-fits-all and men need to interpret their Red Pill awareness according to their personalities, cultural context, social situations and personal beliefs.

That said, in the coming months I will be offering some more generalized, prescriptive ideas or suggestions as to how I feel men might apply certain Red Pill principles in their lives. The 9 Iron Rules are about as close as I come to prescriptive advice, and while I’m not in the business of making ‘Rational Male Men’, after reviewing them with Niko I think that some generalized advice according to Red Pill awareness might be something in the offing.

So, let me know what you think about this ideas as well as any questions or input you have about Frame once you’ve listened to our talk. It runs about an hour and a half. I’m also toying with the idea of discussing each of the Iron Rules in the coming RPM podcasts. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in listening to.

Enjoy!

rollo_t

Trust Issues

I was driving with a friend of mine and his wife to a promo last month. The parking at this particular gig was packed so it made sense to take one car and as I sat in the back seat I observed the behaviors and connected them to the conversation his wife and he were having while we drove. He was driving as well as any other guy I know; observant, careful, efficient, casual, basically a good driver, I didn’t even give his driving much mind. However, judging from the nervousness and fidgety behavioral tics of his wife you’d think he was drunk and reckless.

She clung tightly to the “oh shit” handle you see above the passenger-side window in most SUVs today. Her body language was one of fear trying to maintain polite composure, but every time we’d slow for traffic or a stop she would gesture with her hands as if she were bracing herself for impact. She simply did not trust her husband in the driver’s seat. She’d insist he switch lanes miles ahead of a turn so as to be ready to make the turn, or she’d coyly ask him to slow down when we were on the highway.

I see this a lot in couples where the power dynamic is one where the woman is the tacit authority of the relationship. These two were a textbook example. The buzz word term for it is ‘passive aggressive’ behavior, but that behavior is prompted by a root-level influence of women’s security need. My friend, being the Beta he is, made every attempt to calm his wife’s fears by accommodating her passive (and some not so passive) posturing and requests. It still wasn’t enough. She simply doesn’t trust the man she’s been married to for 10 years with her safety – regardless of his actions.

Now, from a Red Pill perspective, it’s important to bear in mind that women are always looking for an emotional rush whether positive or negative. I detail this in Indignation but in the absence of indignation, women will actively create it for themselves. Any PUA worth his salt knows that leaving an emotional impression on a woman is a key to seduction. Some men can do this effortlessly and often unaware depending on the social context and circumstances he surrounds himself with. These are guys we think are ‘naturals’ even though the learning process and the trial, error, reward mechanisms of it for him are just an internalized part of his personality. However, making this emotional impression can be learned, expressed ‘naturally’ and it can be internalized.

When we look at the dual nature of Hypergamy we tend to focus primarily on the Alpha Fucks side of women’s sexual strategy. For obvious reasons, it’s the part guys tend to have the most interest in, and since seduction is the key to STRs and LTRs, it’s also the part guys need to develop most. It’s tough for most Blue Pill men to behave counter to what their conditioning has taught them. Just like my friend’s driving here, most guys believe that comfort, trust, rapport, friendship, appeasement, and generally self-sacrificing are what’s at the heart of a good relationship. All of course based on the mystical “open communication” trope.

Selfish vs Self-Interest

Vox Day had an interesting back and forth with Kitten Holiday about this dynamic this weekend:

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/762307577560563712

For men who’ve been conditioned to believe that the key to success with women is to play nice and solve women’s problems for them with patient understanding, suggesting selfishness is attractive to women is counterintuitive. However, agreeableness and humility in men have been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners. So is it selfishness that makes a guy attractive or arousing?

I’ve suggested in the past that it is actually men who dare to place themselves at the center of their lives who make the most significant emotional impact upon women. This emotional impression is a byproduct of men who make themselves their first priority and when this prioritization becomes an internalized second nature to a man we say that he’s made himself his Mental Point of Origin.

I’m clarifying this here because it’s easy to conflate ‘enlightened self-interest’ with “selfishness”. A common criticism among the MGTOW set is that a man investing himself into anything with the express purpose of attracting women is vanity or wasted effort. However, it’s defining the point where this personal investment in oneself crosses over into having the effect of being an attractive trait to women that needs some more clarification. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, and unfortunately, it’s a line that’s subjective to the man who’s invested himself in virtually anything that uniquely benefits him and is attractive/arousing for women.

So we have two countermanding imperatives here. Men are conditioned, personally and publicly, to believe that niceness, comfort, and trust are the keys to success with women (whom we are told will have an affinity and appreciation for it). All of these Blue Pill qualities are pro-social attributes, yet in practice, in the real world, we observe men with anti-social, ‘selfish’ interest are rewarded with women’s attention. Self-interested men make a more significant emotional impression.

When we contrast this with the two aspects of women’s sexual strategy we see that the Blue Pill (pro-social) traits align with the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, while the ‘selfish’ (anti-social) aspects align with the arousing Alpha Fucks desires of women. For the Blue Pill invested man, it’s baffling to see how ‘selfish’ men are rewarded with intimacy, genuine desire, and sex. What they lack is a complete understanding of women’s dual sexual natures.

“So I gotta be an asshole to get women to notice me? Chicks really dig jerks?”

I’ve been reading this response from newly unplugged nice guys for as long as I’ve been writing. It’s the binary response I’ve come to expect from guys still on the fence with regard to Red Pill awareness, but it goes back to the negative associations they have with making themselves their own mental point of origin. It’s ‘selfishness’ not self-interest and this is exactly the opposite of what they’ve been taught will resolve problems for them.

This then comes back to my first point about women’s need for security. I’ve been married for over 20 years now, and for as good a marriage as I have, I still have my doubts that Mrs. T trusts me implicitly with her life.

It’s ironic because I actually saved her life when we were first married. There was a very swift moving river we used to walk our dogs along when we lived in Tahoe. It was spring and the river was high from snowmelt runoff, and it was cold – as in take your breath away before you’re paralyzed cold. One of our dogs had spied a few ducks on the opposite side of the river and bolted into it to go after them. About half way across he realizes it was a stupid idea and turns back. He couldn’t make it and the river swept him downstream. We both ran down the river after him to a point where he’d pass and Mrs. T jumped in to catch him. She goes numb in seconds, but she caught the dog by the collar. I know I’m going to have to go in to get them now so I prep in my head what to do. I get in now and grab the dog and bodily throw him up on the steep bank. Then I do the same with Mrs. T right before the water is so cold I can barely move. I managed to grab a large tree root in the bank I’d seen earlier to haul myself out.

In spite of that very memorable event, I’m not sure I have my wife’s implicit trust in this respect. I know that sounds bad, but even after all of that, there was no acknowledged appreciation for it. I was just doing what a man is expected to do. In many other aspects, I have my wife’s trust, but I wonder if the want for an emotional impression isn’t buffered by a need for security.

In my friend’s case, this lack of trust is manifested in his wife’s demeanor and interactions with him. The more Beta the man a woman’s paired herself with the more evident her need for security becomes a part of their relationship. Remember that security comes in many different forms. It’s entirely possible for a dutiful Beta to be a great provider, but still not be trusted with his decision making or his capacity to protect his woman from harm.

Women today are already raised to never put their trust in men as it is. Men are at best lovable buffoons, at worst untrustworthy incorrigible players. Popular culture directs women to only rely on themselves, to only trust in their own, implicitly correct decisions and directions – and then absolve them of any negative consequence of those decisions. Thus, we have several generations of women who claim the authority role in their LTRs and relegate their men to only marginally trusted companions.

All of that said, I would suggest that men opt to not concern themselves with so-called “trust issues” with women. Women’s feral nature is founded in Hypergamy and part of that nature will always be to doubt the quality of the man she’s paired herself with. It may seem ‘selfish’, but placing yourself as your first priority will be far more appreciated and accepted than a man attempting to endlessly earn the trust from a woman that can only be temporal at best. Your lack of concern over her status of trusting you will have much more impact than trying to appease her for it.

Beta men are endlessly told that a woman’s trust and rapport, her comfort level with a guy, is essential to her being intimate or sexual, or having a good relationship. Those are the guys who feel the sting the most when they see a woman at her feral best fuck the hot guy she met the same night who made a significant emotional impression on her. The guy who invested his interests in himself and she happened to be along for his ride.

Trust is just a convenient term used by women to vet for Beta men. ‘Trust’ only amounts to a list of prerequisites and rules for a Beta who believes it’s his duty to fulfill them, which are never an afterthought for women with more Alpha men.