What Makes a Man?

When I was compiling the material I was going to use for my second book, Preventive Medicine, I chose to use the essay Vulnerability in the hopes that I might be able to dispel one of the more egregious fantasies about masculinity – that vulnerability is in some way a strength for men. At the time I was rebutting the Mark Manson claim that men’s vulnerability was a necessity in whatever it was he used to consider Game, or the idea that a lot of Purple Pill hacks like to cling to about men’s vulnerability being some foundation upon which a “healthy” relationship ought to be built on. This trope is pulled straight from the Oprah / Dr. Phill handbook and really the belief that a man’s vulnerability is in someway a strength is part of a Blue Pill conditioned belief set that young boys are taught from a very early age.

Go to any woman’s dating advice for men blog today and you’ll likely read some variation of it. It’s actually part of our pop-psychology social consciousness – transvaluation is a very common theme; reversing weakness with strength has been the order for feminizing men and masculinizing women since the Sexual Revolution. I can remember hearing this ‘advice’ since the late 80s on any number of daytime talk shows. Reading this pabulum coming from ‘dating coaches’ with any association to the Red Pill was enough for me to want to dispel the notion. That, and the need for men to get in touch with their Jungian feminine sides as a means to better identifying with women and thus eventually getting laid by all the women who supposedly swooned for vulnerable, sensitive and emotionally available men (also known as ‘Beta Orbiters’).

However, as I was editing that essay for inclusion in the book I realized that what I was considering wasn’t so much the transvaluation of vulnerability and strength, but the model upon which the Feminine Imperative would like to convince men is appropriate and best suited for women’s needs in a relationship. The provable fact that women’s Hypergamy predisposes them to being aroused by men who display the most opposite aspects to this vulnerability (Dark Triad traits for example) doesn’t seem to matter; vulnerability is only beneficial to women seeking comfort and security in a long term partner.

In that essay I outlined a few things about what masculinity has become in a post-Sexual Revolution female-primary social order:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

I returned to this essay today because I think that over the past six months we’re seeing a strengthening push from the Feminine Imperative to clamp down on what we’re to believe should be an acceptable expression of masculinity. In essence the imperative (or the Village if you like) has been using every mass shooting tragedy to reiterate what masculinity should mean to men. And, failing this, the hope is still that men will be confused as to what conventional expressions they can subjectively define it in, in a more female-correct way.

The Feminine-Correct Paradigm

Since the most recent school shooting in Florida, the focus on what constitutes masculinity has come to the forefront of our social consciousness. What exactly is masculinity they keep asking, and then provide definitions that only have meaning to a social order that’s founded on female social dominance. They are definitions that most men heard repeated constantly as boys from their overwhelmingly female-taught and feminine-primary educations. Since the beginning of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of Fempowerment boys and men are expected to grow up into a female-defined masculinity. Boys are acculturated in contexts that feminize them, yet we are meant to believe that all the horrors of Patriarchal masculinity are still being taught to them today:

Two decades ago, the psychologist William Pollack wrote that boys start out sensitive but through a “shame-hardening process” — told to stop crying, to be a man — they learn to hide what they really feel. And if they don’t know or understand their own feelings, how can they care about anyone else’s?

This has become something of a cliché. And the truth is, there’s no single culture of boys, but many. In my memories of adolescence, beneath the constant ribbing and occasional pyromania, we had tremendous affection for one another. And we longed to connect with women with an intensity that was difficult to contemplate.

This was a quote from Real Men Get Rejected Too. It’s a good illustration of the paradox masculinity presents to parents and educators. The idea that boys are these sensitive delicate souls who, through the evils of their Patriarchal (typically male) upbringing, are conditioned to become ‘macho’ violent men is a popular trope. After Nikolas Cruz killed 17 kids at school it was the go-to rationale. “Boys are brought up to be violent gun-loving beasts thanks to a perpetuated misogynistic culture of men” or some variation of this is common. It’s an easy, digestible, info-bite that sounds right because we’ve heard it for so long. If only boys we’re taught more like girls to get in touch with their emotions and were vulnerable in expressing them we could avoid these male-created tragedies.

That’s the pretense we’re supposed to believe – and it’s important that a larger society does believe in the inherent evilness of masculinity if the Feminine Imperative is to maintain social dominance. But the truth is boys have been systematically feminized for the past 3-4 generations. Boys are taught like defective girls. Since the 1970s it is increasingly women who have dominated academia from kindergarten to doctorate degrees. The entire western education system is founded on a feminine-primary, feminine-defined teaching methodology. In the process of advantaging girls to the utmost efficiency in school (to fempower adult women) the educational atmosphere had to be defined by what best served girls. School and teaching became ‘for girls’ and the educational landscape shifted to teaching styles that girls were most benefited in.

In that shift the idea that boys might be disadvantaged had little bearing, but overtime the conditions of teaching ‘to girls’ defined the teaching style as the correct style. In fact, teaching in a way that girls learn best, and disciplining boys for not learning this way, is no longer a style – it is just the way children are taught. Boys and men today are the product of female teachers who actively advantage girls at the expense of boys. So normalized is this teaching that boys disrupting the advantaging of girls in class is something we’ve decided needs to be medicinally curbed. Boys being boys is diagnosed as an illness and drugs are prescribed so as to sedate them long enough for the girls to learn.

This focus on empowering girls isn’t limited to the classroom. In every form of early childhood through adolescent media, music, social networks and social exchanges this theme is continued; girls have the future in their reach, boys are potential rapists and criminals if they don’t fall in line with female-correct way of how things just are. I get asked a lot about what I think defines Blue Pill conditioning and I’d say this ambient social theme of fempowerment is a strong basis for it. Boys are not taught this old-school, much-feared Patriarchal masculinity, they are bombarded with themes of how masculinity is incorrect, laughable, and a shameful ‘act’ that boys have to put on to cover the ‘real’ female-correct versions of their sensitive selves. Boys are taught from the earliest age that being a boy is an incorrect mask, while being a girl, learning like a girl, emoting and relating like a girl is ‘real’ and the correct way of developing a personality.

Who would ever want to be a boy when so much is rewarded and praised about being a girl? There’s so much more advantage to be had if you’re a girl. As early as five years old boys are deliberately taught to loathe their own gender, but they are also being taught a redefinition of what a female-correct form of masculinity should be for them. The best they could do would be to become female to the best of their ability. They learn they must agree and support girls’ empowerment, identify with the feminine and above all, despise the parody of masculinity they are shown is ‘illegitimate’ and inauthentic.

Boys are systematically taught to make women and womankind their Mental Point of Origin. This is why it is so difficult for men to unplug and abandon their old Blue Pill selves; feminine-primacy was literally conditioned into them since they were kids.

Nikolas Cruz, like many other teenage shooters is the product of this feminine-primary education system, not a Patriarchal “teach boys not to cry” machismo school. He is a monster of their creation; one taught to cry on demand and emote like a girl. He’s the result of a participation trophy mentality that demonize men and masculinity to the point that he never learns how to bounce back from defeat, rejection or simply life’s adversities. No men and no masculinity is available to teach that kid how to harden up and be resilient, or how that masculine discipline is not bullying or hazing, but a necessary part of a boy’s maturation into a masculine man.

But to throw society off the trail a false narrative of hyper-masculinity ruining our otherwise feminine-correct boys is perpetuated. When the next school shooting takes place the Village will again want the public to believe it’s masculinity and men’s fault for what is really his emotional outburst. The Village will attempt to place the responsibility on men, on fathers, while in the meantime perpetuating the idea that men/fathers are superfluous at best, a societal burden at worst. Men are useful catspaws in so many ways, and in perpetuating this narrative the Village reinforces the female-correct theme for grown men too.

Masculinity is what they say it is, or else

In the Honor System I proposed the following:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

It’s important to review this premise if we want to understand the real intent the Feminine Imperative has in redefining masculinity for men. Aspects of conventional masculinity are useful for women, and masculine duty (appeals to men’s “honor”) is a means to access it while avoiding the aspects that would in any way advantage men over women. Conventional masculinity is largely disparaged and parodied in order to disenfranchise men, but men are still needed to save women from natural disasters and protect them from physical harm (so long as they never expect sex for it). On some level of consciousness women understand the transactional and validational aspects of sex. They know that men’s serviceableness comes with an implied transactional cost, so to circumvent this women had to be put in charge of defining what masculinity should mean to men.

Masculinity as defined by men is almost always illegitimate and inauthentic in a feminine-primary world order. The presumption is that “macho man” ridiculous masculinity is a mask that men wear. That mask is meant to cover their true feminine-correct selves; because men cannot be authentic in any other context than the taught, feminine-correct context. So, of course, men can only be fakes or insecure of their masculinity (the masculinity defined by the feminine) and can never ‘really’ be that strong, dominant male apart from the permission the Feminine Imperative gives him.

Because the Feminine Imperative controls the overall context for what should be correct for men this has the effect of making women the sole deciders of what is masculine. In effect, and in this Blue Pill context, women become the gatekeepers of manhood. If masculinity imbues men with manhood (literally being considered a man) a ‘man’ is only whom a woman will designate as such within her presumed, feminine-correct context. In other words, do the imperative’s bidding and it dubs you a ‘man’.

Breaking the Cycle

As you might’ve guessed, this social dynamic conflicts with women’s Hypergamous imperatives. A Beta who thinks he’s a ‘man’ and presumes entitlements because of that is a woman’s worst fear. A Beta transgressing into a manhood that the imperative didn’t give him is the making for a guy being considered a sexual predator. However, an Alpha man, a man of high sexual market value still needs to accept the feminine-correct social frame, but he must also know his role within that frame. I’ve made the comparison in the past that women only see men as either draft animals or breeding stock. In a feminine-correct paradigm the breeding stock must know that his conventionally masculine aspects mean different things to a woman (Alpha Fucks sex) than the draft animal’s masculine aspects (Beta Bucks service). As such, masculinity and a designation of being a man becomes a constant qualifier for a Beta male. Manhood becomes a carrot he follows to pull the feminine-correct cart.

In fact, Beta men hold their female-correct ‘man’ designation as an unwitting point of pride. Examples abound of self-righteous Betas AMOGing other men for not being ‘real men’ (according to the imperative) like themselves. What they’re ignorant of is that this self-righteousness is defined by how well they conform to the masculinity that the imperative tells him is useful – and avoiding the ‘toxic’ masculinity it also defines for him – all according to his role in the scheme of a woman’s sexual strategy.

Should a man awaken from this Blue Pill conditioning and coronate himself as a ‘man’ outside the approval of womankind, this is when he’s ridiculed as an old school Patriarch and an anachronism of the old male-incorrect social paradigm. This is the control the imperative has against men stepping out side this female-controlled masculinity. The first response any female critic has for men who make themselves their mental point of origin is to remove that status of manhood.

Because they don’t accept feminine-primacy this disqualifies them from ‘real’ manhood.

One of the most difficult aspects men face in unplugging and living in Red Pill awareness is the social stigma that follows when they remove womankind from the pedestal and make themselves their mental point of origin. He gets called an asshole, he gets called selfish, he gets called a misogynist, but he’s also “less of a man” because he no longer conforms to the definition of masculinity that the Feminine Imperative has taught him from his earliest memories. Learning to redefine his mental image of what makes a man a man in his own Red Pill aware state is tough. Most of what he considered the very limited and controlled aspects of an ideal masculinity are a big part of the Blue Pill idealism he was raised on. This transition to conventional masculinity is also hampered by a deep learning of shame and gender loathing for finding anything positive in masculinity.

These are some important things to keep in mind if you are moving into a Red Pill awareness and learning to live in a new paradigm based around a conventional understanding of masculinity that isn’t inherently evil. It’s hard to do, but that old mental model of masculinity your teachers (all of them) convinced you was incorrect is something you must unlearn and cut yourself away from. Know that women don’t just long for that dominant masculinity, they need it for the health of their own life experiences. They need the protection, the comfort, the security and the discipline that masculinity balances their lives with.

Women ask, “where have all the ‘real’ men gone?”, but they exist outside the presumed, feminine-correct paradigm they mistakenly believe they have a secure control of. They don’t want to let go of that, so they will fight you to maintain a control over masculinity (which by definition can be chaotic as well as comforting) that they never really had – even with all the social engineering.

Yes I know my enemy, they’re the teachers who taught me to fight me.