State of the Manosphere 2018

On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.

I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.

But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.

One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.

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Good morning gentlemen.

There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.

If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.

As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.

When I met Anthony I was skeptical. 

That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.

This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend. 

All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.

I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order. 

I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.

As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe. 

I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.

So, here I am. 

What is the Manosphere?

For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.

For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous. 

To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications. 

Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.

The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere –  all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.

Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women. 

Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.

It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement. 

Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined). 

Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel. 

Or maybe they find my blog and books.

Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.

Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives. 

And this is what I’m talking about.

Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more. 

It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.

Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.

The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.

As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.

In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order. 

We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.

Now things have changed. 

The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.

Gender Warfare

Do you understand what I’m saying? 

This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today. 

Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).

You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media. 

There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.

“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved” 

These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.

Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.

Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.

This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.

But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.

I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.

As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.

You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.

My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps. 

To get “me too’d” is now a verb.

Segregation

The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men. 

So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.

These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.

The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.

Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.

How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?

I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.

They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.

If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.

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And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.