Articles from November 2018

Male Authority – Provisioning vs. Duty

I’ve been watching Outlaw King on Netflix recently. There’s a part where the wife of Robert the Bruce says ‘Power is making decisions, and whatever course you are charting, I choose you, my husband’ It struck me that my own wife had said almost these same words to me in 2005. When I’d decided to take a job in Orlando that would uproot us from family and friends. There was no “,…but what about my friends, career, etc.?” from her and I had no hesitation to consider anything but taking the position. She said, “You are my husband, I go where you go.”

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

There’s also the male perspective to consider in this. Most men approach their marriage and long term relationships from what is ostensibly an egalitarian perspective. “Equality”, playing fair, being an “equal partner” a pretense of egalitarianism, is all a cover story for a power dynamic that is truly based on resource dynamics. In a ‘modern marriage’, male authority, even just the idea of it, is ceded by default to the woman. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Today’s marriage stats and the socioeconomic variables within marriage point to a very cold truth; if you make less money than your wife, statistically, your marriage is far more likely to dissolve. In couples where a woman outearns her husband divorce rates increase. Virtually every article written about this power dynamic attempts to paint the men involved as ‘feeling threatened‘ by their wives’ success, but the visceral truth can be distilled through the process of women’s Hypergamy. As you might guess, our feminine-centric social order can never allow for an unflattering picture of women, thus men must look like ridiculous, insecure, man-babies – this is another piece of the puzzle – but the stats don’t lie, only the reasoning for them misleads us culturally.

In an “egalitarian” marriage it is actually financial considerations that imbalance that idealistic fantasy of a “coequal partnership”. Men and masculinity are made to look ridiculous, insecure, potentially violent and incompetent on a social scale. This effort to delegitimize anything male has been going on since the late 1960s. The social impact of this has resulted in several generations whose default impression of men in general is one of distrust. Either distrust based in men’s potential for abusiveness, or largely more a distrust based in a default presumption of incompetence. Women cannot trust a man with her life because a majority of men are ridiculous buffoons, no better than big children and now we add that almost 40% of them are outearned by their wives.

Is it any wonder women have no default respect for a man’s course for their lives? In fact, given these modern circumstances, fantasies of an egalitarian marriage being the ideal notion are really the only way to justify marriage at all for women. Thus, we’ve crafted a new ideal of marriage that furnishes women with legal and social failsafes to make what looks like a really horrible, life-long attachment to a buffoon or an abuser just palatable enough to have women believe things might work out for them. Don’t worry ladies, the egalitarian ideal, that any potential husband worth your consideration will subscribe to wholesale, provides you not only with options that will absolve you of all responsibility for his (and your own) failures, but you’ll never have to really do anything he says. The law is on your side, and the very premise of an egalitarian marriage frees you from ever having to go along with one of his half-baked life plans for the both of you. In fact, as long as you make more money than him, you’ll almost surely be doing the ‘course’ setting for the both of you.

Needless to say this is not conducive to women entertaining a default deference to men’s authority. If women’s baseline impression of men is one of incompetence, ridiculousness and distrust, and then you combine it with the fact that over a third of them wont be earning the same financially we begin to see the reasons for the decline in marriage today. If the default perception of men is one of expected incompetence, why would a woman ever want to get married?

This is kind of a quandary. In marriage, a man’s authority today only extends to this monetary wealth – there is no inherent authority associated with being male despite what feminist bleat about ‘male privilege’. Wealth enforces will, but women still seek to find ways around accepting that authority by assuming control of that wealth. This is one reason why “financial abuse” has been fashioned into a form of spousal abuse, but there are many other means of emotional control that mitigates male authority-by-wealth.

Even when a man is the primary breadwinner his means to authority in his marriage is still mitigated. A man’s provisioning for his wife and family has always been considered a ‘manly duty’. Even the most masculinity-confused, Vichy Males are still conditioned to assume providership as a masculine trait that is ‘non-toxic’ and approved by their teachers. In most Trad-Con thought a man isn’t even to be considered a “man” unless he can prove his competence in generating more resources than he needs for himself. The direction of every aspiration he has must be applied to providing for a future wife, their children, likely their (her) extended family and then extended to society. By the old set of books a man can’t even be given the title of “man” (or “a real man”) unless he can prove he’s prepared himself to be a good husband, father and community leader.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong desire to fulfill this provisioning agenda, the men who do accept this as their “manly duty” are conditioned to only see their sacrifices as their expected responsibility. They are actively discouraged from ever assuming any authority might be forthcoming in exchange for their sacrifices. Not even a man’s wealth is a guarantee of authority; certainly not if he’s been conditioned to believe that an egalitarian marriage is an ideal, much less a possibility.

And now we come full circle – the promulgation of an egalitarian ideal in marriage, in gender equity, in the retribution and restitution that feminism is based on, all of this and more has the latent purpose of stripping men of any concept of authority, while enforcing the ideal of male responsibility. In The Second Set of Books I made the case that most (Beta) men today live by, or would like to live by, an old social contract that on the surface seems noble. They believe in an anachronism that promises them that honor, duty, chivalry and a default respect of women will, sooner or later, be appreciated by a woman with the “quality” enough to appreciate it and show that appreciation by accepting him for her intimate attentions. Only later do they come to realize that their dedication to that anachronism is misplaced and the exchange of duty for authority is not only erased, but he’s perceived as a “toxic” monster or a ridiculous “macho” fool for ever expecting that exchange. The world is actually playing by a second set of books that expects all of his ‘honor-bound’ beliefs are his responsibility, but nothing he sacrifices grants him any authority.

Last week I hosted a Special Edition of the Red Man Group in which we discussed whether a married man today is by default Blue Pill or Beta.

RMG_Patriarchs_Title_defaultIt’s almost impossible to broach this topic without accusations of bias or personal circumstance coloring a man’s perspective of marriage – and that’s from either side of the topic. I wasn’t endorsing marriage in this; if anything I made a case against marriage based on the same questioning of men’s authority I’ve explored in this essay. By today’s standards, marriage is far too dicey a prospect for me to ever advocate for. But how far are we willing to take this abandoning of dominance hierarchies in intersexual relationships? I recently got into a debate as to whether monogamous relationships – outside formal marriage – were even beneficial for men today. In that discussion we dissected the history of monogamy and in human relations it’s at least somewhat accepted that monogamy and two-parent investment in offspring was a dynamic that’s been beneficial to our own and some other species. I think that in the past, when social circumstance was different, the concept of monogamy and the institution of marriage were instrumental in our advancement and largely beneficial. All that’s changed now and much of the second set of books I referred to in this essay is predicated on an egalitarianism that has erased male authority and placed it on the shoulders of women who are ill-equipped (and honestly not wanting) to use that authority.

This last sentence here is going to seem like heresy to those invested in blank-slate, egalitarian equalism and fempowerment, but the truth is evident and unignorable that an evolved patriarchal authority has progressed us to an age where we’ve become prosperous enough to entertain thoughts of abandoning it. Stripping men of authority while still expecting a default, and total, responsibility is a really good summation of the two sets of books – the conflict between the old and the new social contract. And yes, I’m aware of the all the arguments that this state of disempowering men is by some political design. Destabilizing the family starts with delegitimizing male authority and confusing generations of men about the aspects of masculinity. Doubt and self-loathing are key in men policing other men for presumptions of authority. It’s crabs in the bucket – when one man presumes authority there need to be ten more to pull him back down into confusion and doubt.

So where do we go with this from here? Even the most ‘Con’ of Trad-Con women will still default to their fempowerment conditioning when presented with a default male authority they are supposed to follow. Can a man be a leader in his own home anymore? MGTOWs will tell you no, and they’d be right. You can’t out-Alpha the state. But the state is still comprised of men and women with their own preconceptions and belief-sets. Our evolved firmware still predisposes us to conventional gender roles, and that predisposition is also one of women expecting  male competence, decisiveness and dominance. Women still want a man to follow in spite of their conditioning to distrust men’s competence. Maybe a new form of monogamy is in order. Egalitarianism is a dead end, it only defaults to 100% female authority and 100% male responsibility. But perhaps at some point, when things get so bad that women are forced to take a chance on the men they think are potential buffoons and abusers, a new kind of “marriage” can come out of the morass that egalitarianism has made of marriage.

How do we get back to a state of male authority based on a woman’s trust of her husband? I would like to believe I have this with my wife today, but I know that this is tenuous from the perspective of true, actionable authority. I once came down hard on a pastor who was advising the women of his congregation to “allow” their husbands to lead them. He was basically asking the women to stand down and trust God that their husbands we’re actually worthy of their trust. He didn’t know it, but his entire premise stemmed from women already acknowledging that they had ultimate authority over their husband as a given. Most pastors are pussy-whipped, so this default authority is usually presumed as a sexual threat-point women will exercise over their husbands. What he didn’t understand was that women’s authority is his default for a much deeper, more socially expansive reason. So even to ask women to allow their husbands to exercise ‘headship’ is ludicrous – it’s something even those women have no power to do because the presumption of authority is always in their favor. They can’t allow their men authority over them because the social paradigm they live in wont allow them to allow it.

The Myth of Sexual Peak

The following is a re-blog from the archives of the (unfortunately) defunct aggregate blog The Spearhead. I want to archive this on my own blog because I think it was a fantastic exposé for its time and Chuck Ross deserves props for it too.

by CHUCK ROSS on NOVEMBER 16, 2009

A common myth is that men hit their sexual peak at the age of 18 while women hit theirs at 30-35. Despite literally no scientific support for this theory, this meme has become “common knowledge” in our society.

The myth never sat well with me. And to be clear, this myth is no straw-man concocted by this writer. It has entrenched itself in our culture to the point that most believe it is true without considering the implications or reasons for such an illogical development.

“Well we all know…” is a precursor heard before recitation of the myth. I worked with three 30-something women as a bank teller. Their excuse for their child-like antics, raunchy sex-talk, and monthly vibrator parties was that they were at their sexual peak. They said it as if they had a moral obligation to live up to their billing as sex-crazed mynx. While I’m not proud of it, when I was 20 or 21 I had a year-long sexual relationship with a 30 year-old woman whose fiance couldn’t keep up with her horniness. She justified her behavior by saying she was at her sexual peak and had a right to satiate her hunger. I got into an argument the other day with a female Bulgarian friend of mine who off-handedly recited this meme. The myth has infiltrated the Eastern bloc. I’ve had many encounters with the myth; I’m sure most readers have too.

I’ve never understood why our creator – natural selection – would put men and women at their sexual peaks at such different points in their lives. More importantly, why would women be at their peaks and more horny when they were less fertile? Every thing we know about evolution and sexual behavior indicates that natural selection has made it easy peasy for our genes to be passed on through sexual reproduction – why throw a wrench in the system by making horniness levels – or “desire to copulate” levels – incongruent between the sexes and less conducive to reproduction? Since women are most fertile from the ages of 20-24, it would make sense that they would desire sex more than when they were a decade older and half as fertile.

Those purveyors of the myth don’t account for Dr. David Schnarch’s dichotomy between genital prime and sexual prime. As spouted by the masses, the myth advocates the notion that these women want sex more rather than the more plausible argument that they are more experienced and comfortable with sex. If the myth is fully perpetuated, it grants 30-something women sexual liberation while offering nothing to men of the same age.

From Dr. Schnarch’s book Passionate marriage:

“Most textbooks on human sexuality, adolescent development, and family life teach that men reach their sexual prime before they even hit their twenties. Women supposedly reach their prime several years later…and therein lies our problem. Health-care providers make the same mistake as the rest of us: We’ve confused genital prime with sexual prime.

Genital prime occurs when a person has fully developed sexual organs and are most fertile. This occurs during adolescence and shortly after for both men and women. The myth holds men to the genital prime model while holding women to the other; it doesn’t compare apples to apples. This has the effect of making 30-something female sex some sort of animalistic expression rather than a more mature concept of sex that men of the same age achieve. The widely-accepted meme of late female sexual peak is a false dichotomy.

So why has this meme succeeded in entrenching itself so deeply in our collective mythology? First, it prevents us from being able to call 30-something sexually-peaking women sluts. Saying that a 30-something woman is at her peak is a PC way of saying she’s a slut. But given that “slut” implies something bad (and we know that a woman doing what she wants with her body can never be bad) those myth-sustainers prefer to say she is peaking. A peak implies something grandiose and wonderful. Peaks are achievements of milestones deserving rewards and ticker-tape parades. When the sexual prime myth is used to encourage and support these womens’ shady sexual behavior, it violates Schnarch’s dichotomy. Myth-purveyors seek to use the genital peak behavior of men at the age of 18 to condone womens’ slutiness at later ages by citing the need for equality of opportunity to express sexuality.

Second, older women HATE HATE HATE younger women. Sex is power. Younger women have held it in spades over their elders. Being that everyone desires to wrench power out of the hands of people who hold it, older women and those soon to be of that demographic have an incentive to glamorize the twilight years.

Says sex and relationship expert Pepper Schwartz:

“The bottom line for me: The evolution of the cougar concept is good for every woman and her partner. It keeps sexual possibilities and eroticism alive. And that continued capacity for passion creates lifelong desirability to younger men, older men, or anyone who can recognize a vital spirit when meeting one.”

The myth has sustained because it gives women hope as they venture into the twilight of their ability to be incubators of seed and the commensurate degradation of their looks. Sex is power, and attaching that power to women of ever-increasing ages allows women to hang on to it longer. Older women have declared war on younger women. Through wishful thinking they seek to destroy every benefit and short cut that younger, prettier women have even though they benefited from the same attitudes at an earlier point in their lives. We see this by observing the attitudes towards female celebrities who act in sexual ways. When Madonna was younger, she was considered a slut. Her book Sex was considered raunchy and disgusting. Now that she’s old and in her “sexual prime” she is given a free pass to perform in sexually-suggestive ways. Her behavior today, while not as risque as that when she was younger, is lauded as empowering and even artistic.

Young starlets are hazed by a certain segment of the population for capitalizing on their sexiness, but that same segment glorifies Demi Moore, Susan Sarandon, Madonna, Cher, Jennifer Aniston, and Halle Berry for rocking it at older ages.

We can easily see that the sexual peak meme is widely touted for the empowerment it gives to older women. Rather than being a quirky feature of our sexuality, the myth that 35 year-old women are on the same level as 18 year-old boys attempts to allow women to hold more leverage over men. As feminism achieves its goal of female economic empowerment, we begin to observe “peak inflation”. The peak shifts upward as women delay marriage and children and seek to have fun of the sexual variety at increasing ages. Cougars are a case in point. These women are over 40. Even though the myth hasn’t explicitly increased the age range of women at their peak, the cougar phenomenon idolizes women’s sexual power at these late ages and glorifies their sexuality as empowering.

You see, the sexuality-as-power lobby wants to shift the reins of control from men to women and from younger women to older ones. Younger women are fulfilling their biological imperative thereby submitting themselves to men or to a scheme that plays into men’s strategies. Older women expressing their sexuality is a way for them to hold sway over the purse strings to power. They are having sex on their own terms rather than due to some ingrained chore or obligation. The sex peak myth is a catalyst for creating sexual autonomy.

In terms of species propagation, men and women are most horny whenever they are most fertile; their genital peak occurs at a young age. Both men and women reach their “sexual peak” – their mental maturity – at later ages. The key here is that each maturity occurs at similar ages for both sexes; the myth loses its power when we realize this. The first maturity is biological while the second is social. The myth of the late female peak says that women are hornier in their thirties by trying to equate the 30 year old’s behaviors and urges to that of an 18 year old man. This is simply a perversion of Dr. Schnarch’s dichotomy. Both sexes have had many years of sexual experience and they have had more time to rid themselves of debilitating sexual hang-ups and phobias. They aren’t hornier at later ages, they’re just more relaxed with the ideas of sexuality and have thus reached “sexual prime”. The late sexual prime myth is a convenient tool that excuses perverse sexual behavior in older women. Sex is power, and it is used as a weapon to pry control from those that have traditionally held it; men and young, beautiful women. By ratcheting up the expectations of older females’ sexual inhibition, they wrangle pawns to line their battlefield.

While I feel this is one of the better outlines of the Myth  of Sexual Peak, there’s a few thing I think Bob didn’t touch upon. What prompted me to dig this article up from Wayback Machine was a Twitter exchange I had about the recent New York Times article outlining a study on the ages of peak desirability for men and women. This article raised the hackles of online women in precisely the same way that this myth has always triggered women. The Myth of Sexual peak for women is a social convention that refuses to die since it was created in the free-love era to now. Even Bob’s piece here is almost a decade old. And yet, in spite of the statistical evidence that damns the myth, the next generation of women don’t even realize they are parroting back the same tropes their mothers did in their day.

Michelle Drouin, a developmental psychologist who focuses on technology and relationships, was not surprised by the new study — in part because they “align with evolutionary theories of mating” in which youth suggests fertility, she said.

Dr. Drouin pointed out, though, that there are also theories that suggest that “men are just less interested in earning potential or power, and more interested in physical attractiveness.”

When I first published my now infamous SMV Graph in 2012 I took a lot of heat for allegedly not being thorough enough in my  estimation process. Honesty and hindsight, I was a lot more intuitive than informational then, but I knew I had it right; at least from the visceral physicality of it from an evolutionary perspective. Since 2012, I’ve had study after study and correlation after correlation sent to me by readers, or simply fall into my lap, that corroborated the bell graphs, time lines and circumstances I had a basic inkling of. While I think that women peaking at 18 and men peaking at 50, as per this study, might be somewhat exaggerated for outrageousness, it still, once again, confirms the basic form I set out in my original graph.

One issue I think Bob didn’t touch upon is the evolutionary logistics of why this myth is timed conveniently at the stage in life that women’s sexual market value (SMV) is in decline. He’s correct about about older women wanting to compete with younger women, but there’s a hindbrain understanding that women’s only real agency in this life is their sexuality. The Myth of Sexual Peak is a tool in this competition, but it is squarely directed at shaming men for their evolved preference for youth and fertility in women. In a raw, evolutionary reality, men only really need women to reproduce, thus, the most desirable age for this in women stays relatively the same. Conversely, women need men with different qualities for different, and opportunistic, reasons at various stages of their lives and how their necessity dictates. Thus, women can find men desirable to fulfill those purposes at ages from 15-50. And before you give me a ration of shit about including 15 year old boys in that mix I’ll point you to the rash of mid twenties female teachers on trial for banging their high school students.

All women (yes, all) have an innate understanding of their sexual agency, and all understand its perishable nature. However, there’s a trade-off inherent in balancing this agency with optimizing Hypergamy. The longer a woman waits the more that agency declines, but the longer she has to consolidate on a man (or men) who represents her Hypergamous ideal. The reason the social convention of women’s “sexual peak” is set at the age of 30-35 is because it attempts to create an artificial sexual value for men. It pretends that their later age makes them better sexual experiences than women 22-24 years old. It’s a disqualification of those women for men’s long term provisioning considerations, but it also plays on male-shame while simultaneously (artificially) inflating women’s self-image. This is why the myth is so pervasive – it satisfies a lot of insecurities. It’s ’empowering’ for women to believe that men are too infantile to appreciate the better sexual experience they believe they represent.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to argue against because it seems plausible and it’s almost entirely based on how women feel about themselves sexually. What a tragic joke that evolution should make women’s sexual peak occur when she least able to make it work for her, right? Wrong. In fact it’s comical when you see how a study that finds women’s peak age of desirability is 18 and mens should be 50 – almost the inverse of what the myth wants us to believe; that 18 year old men and 30 year old women are at their sexual peaks.

Positive Masculinity – Now on Audible

Okay, okay, spare me the ‘better late than never’ jokes. The third installment of The Rational Male series – Positive Masculinity – is now available for purchase and download from Amazon / Kindle. The book is once again narrated by Sam ‘The Voice’ Botta and as with the other two books I’m sharing the royalties with him to help him with his absolutely insane medical expenses due to his injuries sustained from his hit & run “accident”.

The book logs in at 23.7 hours and is presently $29.99. A lot of work has gone into making this title the best we could make it. In addition to Sam’s medical challenges ACX / Amazon has really stepped up their quality assurances requirements with respect to the audio quality. We went through several rounds of edits and approvals, but the end result is really something worth the wait I think. In audio time alone this book exceeds The Rational Male.

Now, all that said, and with the time and effort we put into this title I need to ask my readers & listeners a special favor. If you are starting a new Audible subscription with this audio book, it is imperative that you use the link here to start your sub.

The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity

In August Amazon/ACX altered the bounty payment structure they have with their content providers, authors and narrators. Prior to August of 2018 content providers were guaranteed $50 per each new subscription. Essentially Amazon rewarded it’s best authors for helping them create what is now the biggest self-publishing monopoly ever known, and authors could rely on the popularity of Amazon to help promote their own work. As of August, all this changed and not for the better. Now ACX pays a bounty of $75 per subscription, which on the surface seems like a great deal, but now authors/narrators only get that bounty if the sale comes exclusively through this affiliate link – the one I’ve posted here.

This isn’t a big deal for most low-volume self-publishing authors, but it’s a huge deal for authors (like me) who sell a good number of audio books because this is primarily how men consume Red Pill media. Men tend to like listening above reading this material. They listen on their commutes to work and in the gym when they’re working out. I’ve always stressed purchasing the print copy; it’s not as ‘deleteable’ as the digital versions, it can be passed on to men who need the books and a lot of men tend to highlight and liner-note their well-worn copies. That’s great and it’s exactly what I always intended. However, my subscriptions bounties for Audible went from about 160 per month to around 20 now that this new program – which is being sold to authors as a big advantage – went into effect.

This affiliate link switch has also been applied to all my titles, so if you’re looking to start a new subscription with The Rational Male or Preventive Medicine please use these links. I’ve also switched the links to the Audible files in my side bar too.

For more info on this please read this article: ACX The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

All that said, please pick up the Audible version and let me know what you think about the audiobook here in the comments.

 

Thanks Sam, and thanks to all of you who make this and all my projects possible.

 

Rollo Tomassi

Male Authority – Be a “Man”

How women and a feminine-primary social order control men by reserving the title of “manhood” for men who comply with female primacy.

In the Manosphere we often discuss the dynamic of men holding the burden of 100% responsibility yet are conferred 0% authority when it comes to intersexual relationships. This didn’t used to be the case. There was a kind of default authority imbued in men that was part of simply being a male under the old social contract. A lot of western societies still presumes this is the case in fact. It’s one reason popular culture presumes such a thing as ‘male privilege‘ exists today. They may even have a case with respect to the Old Set of Books; being a “man” inferred that a male had some degree of power, authority and decision making capacity over the course his life would take, as well as the lives of any women or children or extended family members who were dependent upon him being a “man”.

Responsibility is what defines men to this day, but the utility in this being hammered home into the psyches of men has become something the Feminine Imperative has found very useful in consolidating power in the hands of women. We’re ceaselessly told that responsibility is something men need to assume, but under the old set of books the incentive for a man assuming that responsibility came with a commensurate portion of authority (power). That was what used to earn a man the title of “manhood”; men were expected to possess the competency to produce surplus resources, enough to ensure the security and survival of his immediate and extended family, and then his tribe, his clan, his nation, etc. We still call this “being a productive member of society”, but now the incentives of a default authority that made assuming that responsibility a reasonable exchange have been stripped away along with all the grounding that a family name or tribal identity used to mean to men. In their place is all the same expectation of responsibility, but not even the pretense of male authority that stems from it.

In prior posts I’ve defined power thusly:

Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.

How many men today have real power; power to direct the course of their own lives? As we commit to various aspects of life, family, business, the military, a woman, we incrementally exchange power for responsibility. Wealth often enforces will, but unless we can be one of the moneyed outliers in life there is no true authority granted to men now in exchange for that responsibility. A man who would even presume to use an authority that might still be implied in these exchanges is labeled a tyrant; a vestige of a Patriarchy that’s now painted as a net negative to society. And that’s just the societal level. In a legal sense that man has no authority with respect to his power over virtually every aspect of his interactions with women or a wife. A gynocentric social order’s prime directive has been to remove all vested male authority and by extension almost all power the man has to dierct the course of his own life.

There are numerous ways a feminine-primary social order removes the teeth from male authority today. First and foremost is the social pretense of blank-slate equalism. A default presumption that men and women are coequal agents in every aspect – physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual – is the cover story necessary to remove an authority that was based on the conventional differences between the sexes. To the blank-slate equalist gender is a social construct, but gender is only the starting point for a social constructionist belief set. Social constructionism is a necessary foundation upon which blank-slate equalism is built, but ultimately it’s a means of control. By denying each sex its innate differences social constructionism denies men their innate advantages and strengths. Once this became the normalized social convention it was a simple step to remove male authority.

In order to destroy that authority it was necessary to destroy men’s grounding in the identity of their own gender. The first step was to deliberately confuse men about the evolved nature of conventional masculinity. Thus, masculinity became subjective. Never has the idea of being a ‘man’ more reviled, obfuscated, blurred, ridiculed, demonized and loathed by men themselves. Wait for the “masculinity is toxic” articles to follow the next mass shooting incident. The worst shame, the worst clichéd vitriol, will come from male authors stepping up to apologize to women on behalf of all men for the violent ignorance of what they think is a learned toxic masculinity. It’s these Vichy men who’ve been taught that gender is a social construct, so there’s really no definitive answer to what makes a man a Man. These ‘men’ who’ve been conditioned in their feminine-primary upbringing who are so confused or gender-loathing with respect to masculinity that they feel compelled to believe they speak for all of ‘mankind’ when they apologize for all of us.

Blank-Slate Equals

But none of this works unless men and women are blank-slate equals. One reason a guy like James Damore is hammered down and erased with such zealotry for suggesting men and women are inherently different is because so much of gynocentrism rides on the social belief in the blank-slate. What’s offensive about it isn’t the idea that men and women might be prone to innately different strengths or weaknesses so much as it’s about the entire system scaffolded by the falsity of equalism.

You see, the confusion, the subjectification of masculinity has a design underneath it. This confusion is a means of control; a means of not just denying men authority, but to systematically remove anything inherently male from the whole system. I’ve detailed this removing the man in prior essays so I wont dig into it here, but it’s a means of control in an age when men are expected to know their utility and their role in women’s sexual and life strategies.

As we progress towards a social order based on a consolidated gynocracy it becomes more important that men not only be confused about masculinity, but also that men be dispersed and isolated. Men who would challenge this social order must be made into suspects and the suspicious of an “outdated masculinity” – a masculinity that pretends to be about innate authority based on evolved gender differences. Male Spaces must be outlawed, ostensibly for the misogyny they will surely lead to, but actually because men gathered together as men is a threat to a gynocentric power base. This is why the Manosphere and events like the 21 Conventions are so egregious to the feminine-primary social order; they connect men and their experiences about women. So men must be taught to be suspicious of each other. While masculinity might be loathed or confused, men gathered together can only mean homosexuality – because what other purpose could men exclusively gather for other than to fuck one another?

This is where the facade of blank-slate equalism conveniently slips when it suits the purpose of gynocentrism. Men and women can be innately different, but only on the occasions when innate differences would prove that men are violent, abusive, potential rapists, sex addicts or incorrigible homosexuals. On those occasions, the occasions when it serves the Feminine Imperative, women will gladly agree that Boys will be Boys and men are naturally beasts. Through this caveat in the blank-slate society men can be justifiably hated for being men if only because some nebulous male-chauvinist ‘society’ taught them to be so. So the clichés and the old lies get perpetuated because only a belief in the ‘masculinity-is-toxic’ narrative can justify teaching the next generation of boys to hate their own sex and sustain a gynocracy.

Men must be taught to hate themselves for their maleness. Thus, a form of institutionalized gaslighting of men about the nature of masculinity became necessary, and it is primarily men who sustain it. When men are conditioned to be both gender loathing and suspicious of the worst aspects of ‘masculinity’ in other men the result is a self-perpetuating cycle of policing ones thoughts while policing the thoughts of other men. There’s a default belief that this policing is part of identifying with the feminine that will make these Vichy Males more attractive to women of the gynocracy.

But what makes a man a Man in this social order?

As we’ve moved from a blank-slate basis of gender to an ambiguous, subjective definition of what a man is the Feminine Imperative has found a utility in assigning the title of ‘manhood’ to whichever man best exemplifies this utility to the gynocentric social order. In other words, the more a man meets the shifting needs of women the likelier he is to merit the title of being a “man” or a “real man”. In fact we hear this last one all the time in the memes that serve the Feminine Imperative. A “real man” does [insert whatever serves women’s long term sexual strategy] and Betas gleefully retweet it to prove their quality. In our feminine-correct paradigm, the authority that was inherent in masculinity which allowed men to declare what qualities make a ‘man’ has been casually assumed by women to be tossed around as whim and necessity makes convenient.

In Rites of Passage I elaborated on how, to an older conventional masculinity, Manhood was something merited and conferred onto a boy by his adult male peers. There were rites of passage, rituals, tests and qualifiers that transitioned boys into the world of men. This was a part of his grounding in a tribal belonging that used to at least somewhat direct his purpose in life. To be a ‘Man’ was to be a part of a sum whole – E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. It was the collective of men who conferred manhood onto another. How this actually played out in real life and the integrity of that collective was always particular to the character of the tribe, but prior to the rise of gynocentrism conferring manhood on an individual was something unique to masculinity.

Today, the Feminine Imperative’s efforts to disempower and subdue men means destroying the legitimacy of the tribal aspects of all this. As I mentioned earlier, men gathering together, and pretending to authority is something threatening to a gynocentric power structure. Destroying, shaming, ridiculing, etc. the whole of men, keeping them dispersed and isolated, meant usurping the authority men had in assigning ‘manhood’ to one another.

Aspects of the old masculine social order, including men’s natural inclinations towards duty and honor amongst each other, have always been dynamics that could be turned to the uses of the Feminine Imperative.

From The Honor System:

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.

In a gynocentric social order both the concept of honor and masculine responsibility is set by whatever is ‘correct’ for feminine utility. If that means only ‘real men‘ do something to satisfy women’s imperatives, it implies that men who don’t are ‘false men’. Those men are outside the tribe called ‘men’ as well as being unacceptable for reproduction, intimacy and love.

It also implies that only women have the authority to bestow ‘Manhood’ on men, and then only for performing specific behaviors or believing correct beliefs as set by womankind. It’s as if women uniquely hold the ‘medal of manhood‘ to give exclusively to men who can qualify for her wanton needs. The authority men used to claim innate legitimacy of in the past is now only legitimate when a woman wields it.

Men need to retake this authority and own it as is their birthright once again. I realize that sounds kind of LARPy but it’s the best way I can put it. One thing the Red Pill has made men aware of is the social machinations of the Feminine Imperative. Amongst Traditional Conservative ‘thought leaders’ a popular idea is that we find ourselves in the intersexual conditions we do today because men have dropped the ball. Men have shirked their manly responsibilities and women are the way they are because not enough men care to correct women’s behaviors. This argument fails on two counts. The first is that it presumes women bear no moral or behavioral agency and as such cannot be blamed for their own participation in our social condition. This presumption, I should add, is actually indicative of exactly the manipulation of honor I mentioned above.

And secondly, more importantly, it presumes men hold an authority they simply don’t have. Even claiming masculine authority would smack of misogyny today. Churchy, moralists pretend that men have a headship / authority that our gynocentric social order empirically contradicts. To paraphrase the MGTOWs, your headship counts for shit when all a woman has to do is call 911 and police will physically remove what you think is your authority from the family home, no questions asked. This is a result of the Duluth Model of Feminism which I’ll be covering in an upcoming part of this series on Male Authority, but the short version is feminism’s design is to remove men, maleness, masculinity from our social consciousness and this begins and ends with which gender has an enforceable authority.

There are guys who’ll challenge this idea of female authority. Red Pill thought emphasizes men disconnecting their sense of identity from a female-correct paradigm. In my own work I’ve stressed that the most important aspect of Red Pill awareness is men making themselves their Mental Point of Origin and this necessitates a realigning of oneself as his first priority. It’s easy to make declarations about how your self-worth begins and ends with you and that no woman can influence that image, and in a way that seems liberating. Like you’re taking at least that much authority back for yourself. But it’s another thing entirely to wrestle with a social order that’s now founded on a consolidated female-primary authority.

In the coming series I’ll get more into this question as well as what men can do to take back the authority of assigning manhood. Thanks for reading, more to come.

Rollo Tomassi & Elliott Hulse

I’m presently working on a new essay series, the first of which will publish this week, but for now I’m proud to announce that the video I did with Elliott Hulse (about 4 months ago) is now up for viewing. This was a great discussion and I think both our audiences will get a lot of value from our meeting of the minds.

Let me know what you think about this. Would you like to see more of these in the future? Was there something you’d have liked me to cover? Do you have any questions about what we did discuss?

Let me know in the comments.