Idealizations

The Real You

One thing I’m always asked by guys is “How do I switch from a Beta loser to and Alpha winner?” There’s always a lot involved in how a guy can transition from one state to another and to today’s generation of low SMV men if you don’t have their immediate solution you must be selling snake oil. Most guys want a magic formula. They want a mantra to repeat or a set of steps to follow that will shift them from Beta virgin into Alpha cad. 

Well, maybe not ‘cad’. Most guys still cling to their Blue Pill hopes and attempt to see what the Red Pill presents to them as a key to getting to their Dream Girls. As I’ve pointed out countless times, a majority of men’s (80% Beta) only real problem is finding that one girl that fits their sexual strategy as ideal. In The New Polyandry I touched on this a bit; the Blue Pill conditions men to expect the old social contract of monogamy to be his default setting, even if he’s a high SMV man and could actually pursue a non-exclusive sexual strategy.

However, real change takes time. I know that sounds cliché, but part of that change almost always involves some kind of reassessment of one’s life during that process – and that’s always hard for the TL;DR generation. One of the more daunting aspects of unplugging a guy from the Matrix is that the goals he had while he was Blue Pill conditioned and ‘plugged in’ tend to fall away once he’s shifted to a Red Pill aware mentality. The “girl of his dreams” loses her veneer of desirability. The previous goal state that was defined for him by Blue Pill ideals is no longer the end he wished to achieve when he started his transformation. I think this is sometimes the hardest aspect of ‘awakening’ for guys to accept. Anger at oneself for wasting so much time and so much potential for not grasping the truth sooner is part of that process. So too is a sense of helplessness, if not hopelessness, that accompanies the realization that a man might not have what it takes (at the moment) to achieve what he’d like in life in this Red Pill paradigm.

There was a time when I was 21-22 and I first began playing in the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80s that I had one such transformation. By the time I was 20 I’d already been put through the wringer by my cheating ex-girlfriend from high school – who I was sure would be my eventual wife. I was Beta in the extreme, and thoroughly Blue Pill conditioned at that point, but I was going through what I termed the “Break Phase” in the timeline I created in Preventive Medicine.It took me about a year to shift from that mental state to one of making myself my Mental Point of Origin. Once I had – and once I’d decided I wanted to experience sex with hotter women – I found that through trial and error I could direct the path of what my personality would be, and what was going to be acceptable or not. I’d been emancipated from the expectations of being a Nice Guy as Game to essentially not caring what I was supposed to be doing to placate women. I figured out what worked for me.

I finally got into a ‘real band’ at 21. I played clubs every Friday or Saturday night between the ages of 21 and 25. I honestly only left my parents home because it was less convenient to bang a girl I’d met at a club on the weekend. But with that new identity came a new access to sex with women I could only fantasize about in a Hustler or a Penthouse magazine. The pivotal point came when one of my girlfriends (I had a rotation of about 4-5) was a bonafide swimsuit model. I thought I had finally ‘arrived’ at that point because my head was still measuring success by what the 15 year old version of myself thought was ‘it’. She was hotter and more fun in bed than any girl I’d gotten with previously. But my mindset was still mired in my Blue Pill ideals. According to those ideals she was the goal. And she was, until I managed to pull a centerfold who happened to live near me in Southern California. (Ask me about it sometime).

The point I’m making here is that a guy has to reconsider what his conditioning has taught him he should consider success based on the foundation of that conditioning. It wasn’t so much that I’d made myself my Mental Point of Origin, rather it was that I simply wanted to make the most of that time of my life and to do so meant that I needed to change my mind about who I wanted to be. I had transitioned from one personality to another and I liked it. I was rewarded with women’s genuine sexual desire and this served to further reinforce that new me as the genuine me. This begs the question, what is authenticity when it comes to ‘just being yourself’?

Later in my twenties I made the dangerous decision to involve myself with a woman who was clinically, psychologically disturbed. Of course she never wore a t-shirt that said “I’m insane” and I had wound myself up in her neurosis over the course of about four years. You can read the details about this relationship in Borderline Personality Disorder, but one thing I don’t get into in that essay is how I willingly became someone else – fundamentally changing my personality again – in order to solve this girl’s problems because I believed that who I was when we met was so flawed it was causing her neurosis. Now granted, I didn’t understand what I was involving myself in, but my point again is that who I was had shifted, but my core, internalized belief set was still very much informed by my Blue Pill conditioning. 

People who ride hard on the Personal Responsibility belief love to think that something so damaging must be self apparent. No one’s really a victim because they should’ve seen it coming – as they believe they would – but the reality is we want to believe that the Blue Pill ideals we’ve been raised with can come true. We want to believe that the ideals we internalized since five years old and on into our adulthood are in fact a possibility. In all my writing I make the case for a need to unplug oneself from the Matrix that is this Blue Pill conditioning. That’s what Red Pill awareness is; an awareness of the false existence we used to live out according to what others – often well meaning others – would like us to believe is true, because they want it to be true for themselves too. When I allowed myself to change my personality for my BPD girlfriend I had no idea that I was even doing so because I wanted to believe that she represented the ideal that the Blue Pill had raised me to think would be possible. A woman who fucked like a pornstar and looked like a swimsuit model and “loved me as much as I loved her”. And this came after I’d already check a swimsuit model and a centerfold off of my bucket list.

Personality is malleable, in fact it’s so malleable we often don’t realize we’re forging a new one. In both of these instances I’ve described that shift in personality was not by my conscious choice. I knew what I wanted to do; even in the worst case scenario with my BPD my shift was prompted because I thought if I changed my personality her own psychosis would resolve itself. My Blue Pill conditioning exacerbated this because it always teaches men that any problem a woman has with a guy is due to his own lack of investment, support, sensitivity or not giving enough of themselves. This is a very damning aspect of the Blue Pill and it’s also one that guys will reinforce in themselves and with other men because they believe their sacrifices are what women appreciate.

Beneath all this was my Blue Pill subroutine manifesting itself. Hell, even when I was on top of my game in the Hollywood clubs I still wanted to find a ‘good girl’ to be my girlfriend. I had changed my personality to succeed in getting what I wanted, but my root programming was still Blue Pill. Many a famous PUA has come to the conundrum of trying to make his Blue Pill idealistic dreams come true because he learned how to reliably ‘get the girl’. Good Game doesn’t make a man Red Pill aware. It’s certainly the gateway to understanding women’s nature and the nature of intersexual dynamics, but killing the Beta is a long term project.

So how do you shift from Beta Nice Guy to Alpha Cad? These are euphemisms usually meant to disparage the whole idea of changing yourself into something better. Most people don’t have it within themselves to even have the insight to think they’d ever want to change their nature. It’s easier to trot out “Just be yourself” when someone has that introspect. People don’t want you to change. Your predictability gives them comfort. You’re an easy element to deal with so they think that if you act in some new way you’re not being authentic. You’re a wannabe, a poseur, and they need you to behave predictably because it gives them a sense of control over you. Others want to pigeonhole you. They want to categorize you into immutable personality types or astrological designations that make them feel better about dealing with you. Again, if they can categorize you, if they can make you believe they know the truth of it, you’re just that much easier to control. Humans have a need to see patterns in their environment. The world is a chaotic place so it comes natural to us to think we can set some kind of willful order on it.

Eventually, after I’d finally torn myself away from my BPD girlfriend I returned to that Alpha personality that had been so successful for me, only this time I had finally realized that I needed to make myself my Mental Point of Origin. I looked back on all the women I’d applied the Blue Pill set of rules, ideals, hopes and dreams with. I was 26 and had nothing to show for all the potential that people kept telling me I had. I had done everything according to the old set of books; I was supportive, kind, sensitive, uplifting and empowering to every woman I’d been in a relationship with because I thought that was what would make me desirable. But as I looked back on all of that I realized I had done so at the expense of myself – at the expense of my potential. That sacrifice will alwayslead a man to his own destruction. I thank God it didn’t lead to my own.

It was at this point in my life that I realized that I had to unfuck my life and that meant a radical reimagining of who I wanted to be going forward. I get asked a lot about how I became unplugged and my usual answer is that it was a gradual process. This is true, but it was at this point I had to reject all the lies and idealistic fantasies that I’d been raised to believe in; to invest my ego in. I made a point to spell out to guys in A New Hope that you will never achieve Blue Pill ideals with Red Pill awareness and this is where that comes from. Unplugging, killing the Beta, reinventing who you are is not only possible for you, but it’s necessary to sustain you in a life of your own imagining. This doesn’t happen just by reading a book or going to a seminar, ultimately you have to live it and internalize that new you. You have to do this in spite of friends who want you to be ‘authentic’ and stay the old you so you’ll be comfortable to them.

All of this takes time, persistence and introspection, but it starts with an act of will on your part. You will only get what you have gotten if you keep doing what you have done. I can teach you Game. I can teach you the habits that would make others believe you’re a self-sufficient Alpha success, but only you can change your authentic personality. This is where a lot of guys lose the trail when it comes to being Red Pill aware. They read my books, they open their eyes, but they don’t know what to do with the information. Rich Cooper once told me that reading The Rational Male was like drinking from a firehose. There’s a lot to digest and a lot to confront with regards to how that information shows you, convicts you, of how you lived your life up to this point. But what do you do with it? Knowing is half the battle, the other half is action. The other half is implementing that knowledge to your own advantage.

Ever since I started writing I’ve always referred to myself as a Lesser Alpha. Some people think that’s self-deprecating, others think I’m just a married Beta with delusions of Alpha. Whatever. Either way, I’m a guy who took this knowledge and applied it to serve my own best interests and forge a truly authentic personality based on what I understand of what we call the Red Pill. I created a me of my own volition based on a realistic understanding of intersexual dynamics, but also of a better understanding of myself in that Red Pill paradigm as a result of it.

So, who is the real you? Who decides what your real personality is and what is authentic for you? What is the estimate that your  personality is based on? I get sick of hearing women and men talk about finding themselves. Women love the idea of a journey of self discovery. This is a fantasy of Blue Pill idealism meant to, again, keep one in a state of helplessness and hypoagency. Women use this garbage as a convenient rationale meant to excuse their past bad decisions. 

Red Pill men don’t find themselves, they build themselves. 

They forge themselves  into a creation of their own choosing based on realistic assessments of themselves, their conditions and the world that challenges them not to build himself. I wrote this essay to encourage you, but also to warn you that this building takes time, and you will meet all manner of resistance to the masculine project that is you.

The Golden Ticket

Imagine, if you will, that you buy a lottery ticket and you win. After taxes the payoff is $2 million. Not an exorbitant amount by today’s standards, but still quite a lot of money for the average paycheck to paycheck person. For some it may be what could be described as Fuck You Money, easily enough for most people to retire on very comfortably.

How would this newfound fortune change your life? How would it change your family and your friend’s dealing with you? Would they be happy for you? Maybe jealous? Would you be able to manage the changes in your daily routine? If you were accustomed to one lifestyle and then switched to a more affluent lifestyle would it be a good change? Or would you become someone else?

Now lets say you could possibly win $100 million if you made an almost certain bet. There were still some risks involved, but nothing that would threaten your life in the short term. How would winning this kind of money reflect on your daily routine? Would it be different than your winning $2 million? Money would cease to be an object for you for the rest of your life and likely the lives of your children, maybe even grandchildren and all you really had to do was make a smart bet that you believed would pay off.

What if you only won $1 million or $500,000, but you were only making $36,000 a year and scraping by the best you could? Again, all you have to do is look for the best opportunity to make a short term sacrifice and the money would be yours. Would you compromise your ‘principles’ (assuming you have any) temporarily to change your life in the long term more significantly?

Imagine you had a Golden Ticket that had a potential to win you $70,000 per year or if you played things right it had the potential to earn you $10 million per year if you were wise enough to capitalize on it. How would that change your outlook on life?

What rationales would that prompt you to in order to reconcile that other people might not have the same potential for cashing in –without really earning it – that you do?

Here’s your Ticket

Okay, got that in your head now? Good. Now imagine that you’re given this Golden Ticket at the tender age of 12 years old. It’s handed to you and you’re told, “Keep this ticket with you forever. You can redeem it for more money while you’re young, but the longer you hold on to it the less it will be worth. Even still, it should be valuable for most of your life if you can manage to hold on to it.” And even after you’ve cashed the ticket in you can still retain it for a time, because some people have been able to trade one prize for a larger one by taking the ticket back and redeeming it for a better prize later.

Now you begin to believe that you deserve the biggest prize because, well, you’ve been deprived of things. You’re special; special enough to know you deserve the very best after having been deprived of these things as one of a long line of people who’ve also been deprived of things – the best things – or so they’ve told you.

You could always earn some money and get the things you and your people have never been able to reliably get, at least, again, that’s what they’ve told you. You have a lot of personal potential, you’re independent, you have a lot of respectable strengths, so you know you could always merit the things you deserve. But you still have this Golden Ticket in your hand, why wouldn’t you use it? You could earn some money, maybe a lot, but it will never be as reliable or as much as the money the Golden Ticket could net you – if you know just when to redeem it.

Stipulations

All that said, there are going to be a few stipulations to this lottery, but still, they’re not as steep when you compare them to having to actually earn a similar prize.

The first stipulation: You must stay physically fit. In fact, the better you look the better your potential prize could be. As you age this potential decays, but even still, you occasionally see some people cash out their ticket for great prizes despite their age. They just had to apply themselves more in the gym to get it.

The second stipulation: You must be agreeable, accommodating, even a bit flirty. You must put forward the impression that you are someone who genuinely deserves the best prize that the ticket might offer to a special person like you. You must give the perception that the experience of you deserves the highest potential prize imaginable.

The third stipulation: You must position yourself in social situations where the potential for the biggest payout for your ticket can be maximized. Sometimes, not always, but often these settings might make you uncomfortable, but hey, you wanted to make the most of the ticket, right? This stipulation really isn’t all that discomforting when you realize that once you have cashed in your ticket you’ll be the one deciding where you live and who you’ll choose to associate with anyway. At least that’s what the lottery organizers would have you believe.

There are a few more minor stipulations, but, for all of this, you still deserve the biggest prize that opportunity might bring your way. So, while the best thing would be for you to stay in shape and be ready for a big prize, the people playing the same lottery as you – most with the same potential – will tell you none of this really matters. They insist that you just being you is enough for you to win a big prize. Or it should be.

It’s almost as if they want you to believe that you can dismiss all the stipulations and still make out pretty good. In fact they praise you for going against the stipulations. They complain about how unfair these rules are and that for people as deprived as themselves, and for as long as they and their predecessors have been deprived, they should simply be given the highest, best and most secure forms of the prize – all irrespective of the very minimal stipulations as they are.

This is the Golden Ticket! How dare anyone place prerequisites on us to get the prizes we so thoroughly deserve. How dare anyone make us earn our birthright. But for all this discontent, the rules of the game still apply, and the people who embrace and master the stipulations largely seem to get the biggest and best prizes. And the ones complaining about the stipulations only seem to drag down the people with the same Golden Ticket, and their prizes are usually nothing compared to the people who take the stipulations to heart.

The Agreement

Finally, and maybe most importantly, there is one last detail of this lottery to consider. In order to keep the biggest and best prizes you have to sign a very loose and totally non-binding contract that only benefits you and ensures you will continue to be paid dividends should you decide to renege on the agreement and take your ticket back to use it again. The contract can be broken by you at any time, and even when you do you’ll still receive a substantial percentage of your original prize in monthly installments and usually for the rest of of your life.

Still, your signing this contract will limit your capacity to play this lottery in the future. If you see the potential for a better prize after you’ve signed the contract of limitations you’ll be less able to capitalize on it. However, the way that the contract is written it doesn’t necessarily exclude you from winning and even bigger prize should the opportunity arise. Your ticket reserves the right to be redeemed for other prizes if you make some wise bets.

So, at the end here, we get to the larger point of this metaphor; how would this ticket change the way you live your life? How would it influence your future decisions? How would the ticket affect your personal relationships with your best friends, some of whom have tickets themselves? How would the subconscious knowledge of the ticket alter your dealings with a husband, a wife, the children you may have or your immediate family?

Would the ticket define who you will become in life?

Love and Ambition

I’m a psychotherapist working with couples, especially men who get left by their wives. I’ve studied your material for over a year now and the hypergamy stuff is dead on. I just wanted to share and maybe talk with you about the red pill rage that results — women love opportunistically yes, but many men who comment on your material are missing a component I believe. And it’s not one I’ve heard you allude to much either.. When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship. When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

I had this sent to me recently. It’s actually a pretty standard trope for Trad-Con women who want to justify their leaving a husband or having left an old lover/baby-daddy. They like to pretend they’re ‘red pill’ and so the only men who might qualify for their expired sexual market value will be Red Pill men who meet their new qualifications. One thing I’m seeing more and more of in this sub-section of the manosphere (really femosphere) is aged-out divorcé women who want to rebrand the ‘red pill’ to justify their unmarried, unpaired, state in the new sexual marketplace. As you might imagine, their solipsism gets combined with what they convert into a convenient rationale about what Red Pill men ought to be like. The lack of ‘real men’, real ‘red pill’ men is ostensibly why they’re still single – no man is actually ‘red pill’ enough to satisfy their hamstering and thus, it’s not they who have the problem, but rather the men who lack the balls to live up to those expectations.

If this sounds familiar – like maybe a feminist spouted off a version of it – you’re right. I wrote about this rationalization back in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, Hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” – an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

Red Pill Women – A Convenient Rationale

I wrote this back in 2012. Some of my earliest posts were about predicting exactly this phenomenon in the future. The more Red Pill aware a woman is – or I should say, the more she consciously acknowledges it – the greater the need will be to find fault in men for not living up to what they redefine as ‘red pill’ canon. The more widespread Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics becomes, and the more accepted it is, the more it will serve as an alibi for women trying to rebuild a life they destroyed themselves. It becomes a Red Pill man’s ‘duty’ to forgive their indiscretions and help them recover too.

Over the years Dalrock has gone into how women detonate their marriages as a result of divorce porn fantasies. I’m not sure he really dissects the aftermath of their divorces. And this is only one way in which women may find themselves single around middle age. In Preventive Medicine I detail how women go through at least to periods of crisis level Hypergamous doubt during a marriage. Women’s prerequisites for attraction (not arousal) shifts radically once she reaches the Epiphany Phase (29-31). She becomes far more compromising in terms of physicality in exchange for aspects of a man she finds desirable for long-term prospects of security. Whereas she may have only dated banged guys 1-2 inches taller than herself in her Party Years, now she’s willing to entertain the idea of banging dating a guy slightly shorter than herself so long as he has a capacity for success and provisioning for her.

This is an interesting phase to pick apart because it’s likely the first time in a woman’s life that she’s considering a relationship with a guy based on transactional sex as opposed to the prime directive of validational sex she’s been pursuing for most of her Party Years (18-26). For the first time her long-term attraction is based on different aspects of a man’s Burden of Performance.

During the Epiphany Phase a woman plays a complex game of internalized mental gymnastics. Her hindbrain understands that her sexual market value has been decaying for at least a couple of years prior to this conscious recognition of it. The enjoyment of the Party Years has to be weighed against the fact that she’s progressively losing the attention of the men she would like to have ‘enthusiastic’ validational sex with, and the necessity of a long-term security with a long-term partner. Thus, the rationalization engine kicks into overdrive. She must convince herself that the less exciting (arousing) but better provisioning guy who’s happy to have her at 30 represents the type of guy she ‘should‘ have been with all along.

This is a self-bullshitting contrivance of course, but in her mind the guy who she’s marrying or pairing long term with must be an example of a ‘good prospect’. This is when she does the self-conditioning of turning her necessity into a virtue. She was “so crazy in college, but now she’s matured and not like that anymore.” Or she’s “Getting right with God” or she’s “Learned her lesson in dating banging those Bad Boys” who’ve characterized her intimate life up until this point.

Those are the easy self-contrivances; what’s more difficult is convincing her hindbrain (that desperately wants the exciting validational sex with the Bad Boy) that the unexciting ‘Good Guy’ is really what’s best for her. This is where women like to rearrange what’s really important to them in a man.

This is the internal conflict that takes place in the Epiphany Phase, but what happens to the woman who never gets to consolidate on the ‘Good Guy’? For a variety of reasons (mostly overvalued evaluation of their SMV) more and more women find themselves ‘never marrieds’ and/or they follow the timeline in Preventive Medicine and find themselves divorced of their own doing. In either case, women still work through a similar series of self-rationalizations with respect to what they’re looking for, and what they feel they are entitled to, in a man around 38 to 45, sometimes as late as 50.

And this is where the Red Pill feeds that female entitlement schema. The logic goes like this:

If I’m a Red Pill woman and I agree with all of these Red Pill men who, despite all my misgivings, align with my (self-defined and sanitized) definition of what it means to be “red pill”, then these men owe it to me to unplug from their Blue Pill delusions and see me for the jewel in the rough that I really am.

I think the time a woman is most likely to discover she’s a “Red Pill Woman” is conveniently at the point in her life when she’s at her most necessitous. You will almost never find a girl of 22 who’d want to identify as a Trad-Con “Red Pill” woman – the incentives to do so simply don’t exist at this age. The fact that it is predominantly Traditional Conservative women who are either just pre-Wall or post-Wall, single-mothers, never married spinsters, divorcés or married-to-lesser-Betas who wish to redefine ‘Red Pill’ to use as a litmus test for the type of men they believe they’re entitled to is no coincidence.

Message to the ladies: Men don’t owe you shit. If you happen upon a man who shares your entitlement belief-set, a man willing to forgive your past indiscretions and marry you despite a ruthless marriage/divorce industrial complex arrayed against him, then thank whatever God you pray to and fuck that guy’s brains out to keep him happy, but don’t pretend it’s because either you or he is “Red Pill”. The fact that he would entertain the idea of a relationship with you disqualifies him from being “Red Pill”.

If you find yourself single, never-married at 38 and it “just never worked out for you” it’s time you look past your solipsism and find some real introspect. The problem begins and ends with you.

Love and Opportunism

Now, all that said, the ‘psychotherapist‘ who sent me this does have some legitimate points.

When a man isn’t pursuing his dreams and highest self, the woman oftentimes interprets that as a lack of love for her, as though continuing to stay competitive and strong in the world shows her that he is invested in the relationship.

First of all this is flat out false; I’ve written several posts that illustrate exactly this perspective. From Setting the Rules:

Once a woman understands the gravity and legitimacy of your purpose / passion, only then can she come to appreciate the significance of you foregoing or postponing the dictates of that purpose for her. She will never feel more important to you than when you (occasionally) lift her above that legitimate, verified purpose.

Women will never appreciate a relationship that is a Man’s greatest ambition.

That’s an old (obscure?) post I wrote some time ago, but the basic principle is that a man must be fearless in his pursuit of his passions both before and after he’s entered into some kind of committed exclusivity. In Acing the Test I point out that women tend to shit test for different things while single and when in an LTR. In a long term relationship these test are characterized by the need to quell the Hypergamous doubt that she paired with a guy who is, or has the potential for competency. In other words her Hypergamous hindbrain wants to know it made its best ‘bet’ on you.

And while that’s all fine and well, her hindbrain’s insecurity wars with the need for you to retain your ambition and your being emotionally available for her. When these two aspects come into conflict it is up to a man to retain the world, the Frame, he’s established in which she feels comfortable and yet uncomfortable enough to know he’s competent to be powerful in directing his own course in life.

When men get lazy women actually feel discarded. The pain and the love is real – it isn’t so simple as jaded men think.. that women are blood thirsty gold digging monsters. The female design feels unloved and devalued when her man is not on fire for his own life..

Again, this is a perfect illustration of the differences in the concepts men and women each independently hold when it comes to love. Men love Idealistically, women love Opportunistically and this quote spells this out in no uncertain terms – in fact it’s so ironic I’m not sure the woman relating this to me even realizes what she’s doing. Women intimately associate a man’s ambitiousness, his drive for mastery and power, his want for dominance, with her Opportunistic concept of love. She’s correct here, when men get lazy women feel discarded. However, this is because a man contenting himself with how things are and dropping all ambition confirms what her Hypergamous nature fears most – he’s really incompetent.

This is especially salient when a man trades his ambitions (assuming he had them) for a relationship with her. This reverses the Burden of Performance to her and as a result she feels unloved because her concept of love is founded on his capacity for competence. She feels unloved because opportunism defines her concept of love; and he only confirms his worthlessness by abdicating his Burden of Performance.

From Love Story:

Men are expected to perform. To be successful, to get the girl, to live a good life, men must do. Whether it’s riding wheelies down the street on your bicycle to get that cute girl’s attention or to get a doctorate degree to ensure your personal success and your future family’s, Men must perform. Women’s arousal, attraction, desire and love are rooted in that conditional performance. The degree to which that performance meets or exceeds expectations is certainly subjective, and the ease with which you can perform is also an issue, but perform you must.

A lot of this relates to the standard Mental Point of Origin conversation.

Blue Pill men are conditioned to think two things:

1 When they get married their troubles are over with respect to the sexual marketplace. Because they believe women share their own idealistic concept of love for love’s sake that it shouldn’t matter how they perform now. The Burden of Performance, if they ever accepted it, gets replaced by the idea that she’ll love him “for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer” and therefore he doesn’t consider it as a prerequisite for her love and intimacy.

What he fails to ever grasp or accept is that men and women have different concepts and approaches of love. His Pollyanna Blue Pill Disney preconditioning leads him to believe in happily ever after and his failings and vulnerability and fears will not only be accepted by his wife, but will be a source of their marriages strength and intimacy. This is exactly why the transvaluation of vulnerability-is-strength is so dangerously wrong in modern LTRs.

2 This is the husband who lives in a Blue Pill fantasy land, so rattling his cage about the visceral realities of Hypergamy and telling him his wife never shared what he believes is a mutual, universal concept of love is like telling him God is dead. When Beta/Blue Pill husbands enter into marriage their singular goal is ensuring his wife’s satisfaction and happiness. He still suffers from never making himself his Mental Point of Origin and making womankind his reflexive mental priority.

He makes her his world. If he had a sense of his Burden of Performance he diminishes or replaces his own ambitions with the ambition of making his wife ‘his world’ – and God forbid anyone tell him anything counter to the “you gotta work to keep things fresh” mantra he learned about marriage throughout his single years. Telling him he needs to be more self-important is the antithesis to this conditioning, but it’s exactly the catalyst that will cause his divorce. Women don’t want to marry their Beta orbiters, so how would you expect them to feel when the man they’re supposed to live the rest of their lives with turns into an orbiter. But he’s been taught to sacrifice EVERYTHING to keep the relationship “healthy”.

From Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

The Goddess Movement

Six years ago I wrote a post outlining what the PUA community referred to then as “Chick Crack“. It was a pretty straight forward post that I delved into just to explain why playing to women’s propensity to believe in the spiritual – or what women would consider spiritual – is an effective technique in Game. I always thought it was funny how accurate this presumption about women was when I came across it.

Of all the strippers I’d ‘dated’ in the past every one subscribed to some form of non-mainstream spiritualism. This girl Angie I used to bang kept Tarot cards in her pink lady’s devotional Bible, another professed to be a psychic; in fact the only people I’ve ever known who self-seriously wanted me to believe they were in fact psychic were all women.

[…] For the stripper set this seems to be par for the course, but I wish I could say this chick-crack phenomenon was limited to just women who had some vacuous spiritual/emotional hole in their lives to fill. No, all women (yes I said all) are predisposed to the intrigue that metaphysical imaginings sparks in them. If it smacks of secret, covert knowledge, privy only to a chosen few, then you’ve got an attentive listener in a woman. UFOs, palm reading (always a classic), psychic premonition, ‘gifts of prophecy’, really anything that hints at knowledge beyond the ordinary is fair game. Chick Crack is not just limited to off-brand spiritualisms either, you’ll find that far more women than men will develop (conveniently) an affinity for, and are more invested in, religion than men.

In the wake of the Anthony Bourdain “suicide“, and the scramble to absolve Asia Argento of any complicity in his decision to hang himself, I came across this post about Asia’s penchant for Witchcraft. Apparently Wicca is somewhat more than a hobby for her. As you look at these pictures it’s important to remember that this is a 42 year old woman (and her friends) who sincerely believes in this stuff.

In Chick Crack I also made reference as to why I believe women’s being predisposed to beliefs in the supernatural is a desire for secret power from an innate position of female powerlessness.

Feminine Mythology

Women’s natural pull towards the mysterious and metaphysical has its roots in the sex’s historical characterizations. In keeping with the very useful associations of women’s unknowability and feminine mystique, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we find most mythologized representations of women and femininity cast as brooding, fickle, rapacious and often as a temptress, possessing secret knowledge that foolish men (the mere mortals) are neither capable of, nor encouraged to understand. Sometimes childlike, often conveniently eroticized, women are literally cast as forces of nature – whether sexualized nymphs or tempestuous witches, each characterization relies on women possessing some form of secret or forbidden connection to the metaphysical. Even the commanding presence of Joan of Arc, while leading the armies of France, had a connection to something otherworldly. By their very nature, feminine mythology, by default, presumes women are more in tune with the nature of reality, while surpassing the ignorance of brutish men.

Women revel in their mythology. Since covert forms of communication are the preferred language of women, their affinity for secret information is a natural fit. Ever wonder why gossip seems to be uniquely endemic to women? Look no further than women’s innate impulse to acquire secret knowledge. Take away the Vampires and Werewolves – the metaphysical component – from the Twilight series and what you’re left with is a relatively bland romance novel. Add the otherworldly and you have a runaway hit popular with every female age demographic, from tweens to octogenarians.

In women’s evolutionary past, concealment meant everything. Confusing a man as to the true genetic heritage of his children was often a matter of life or death. Pursuing pluralistic sexual strategies depends upon creating a characterization of women as legitimately unknowable, thus the feminine mystique is instituted. Ergo, the sociological PR campaign over the course of millennia has been to perpetuate the mystery of woman.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that physically weaker tribal women would seek some sort of mastery over the men in their lives who could punish or kill them and their offspring at will. As I’ve covered in many essays, women are biologically and psychologically more attuned to deeper communication and the emotive states of other people. Women have a far greater capacity to understand subcommunications and subcommunicate themselves among their own sex. This is borne out by multiple brain scan studies and research on the architecture of men and women’s brains.

To the blunt, overt, relatively nuance-less interpretive processes of men this subcommunication can be both frustrating and mysterious. It’s the mysterious part that women learned to reinforce and exploit in their dealings with men long ago. This is where we get the idea of the seductress or the ‘keeper of mysterious secrets’ archetype (witch, midwife, nature goddess) for women. It’s less important that women would actually be more in tune with the supernatural, but rather it’s more important that they believe it’s a general truth about all women. Men might be skeptical, or they may buy into that mystique, revere it and encourage other men to believe something similar. Usually how a man adopts or rejects that archetype is determined by his own self-understanding and his Game according to it and his sexual market value.

There are a lot of derivative character archetypes that stem from the basic ‘mysterious woman’ root. That might be anything from a healer, nurturer, mother type rooted in what used to be the mystery of women’s life-giving capacity, to the force of nature sorceress, to the eroticized sexual seductress (nymph, siren) or even the high-priestess of the holy temple of prostitution (an ancient brothel madame). Over the course of history, since our hunter-gatherer beginnings, this means to influence and power for women has coalesced into what we popularly imagine about women’s mysterious nature. Only today we call it a ‘woman’s intuition’ and we make appeals to fortune and fate when a guy get’s “lucky” and a woman favors him with her sexuality. It’s all socialized solutions to evolutionary problems, but if we add an element of ‘magic’ to the equation it makes explaining failures and appreciating successes that much easier.

Today, the belief in this nature is still very much reinforced in society. Thus, we get women subscribing to what amounts to a collective pathology – they are encouraged to believe in their ‘magical’ sensitivities to spirits and forces beyond the sensitivities of (ostensibly) “powerful” men. To fight the mythological Patriarchy women rely on a mythological tool. In Chick Crack I made mention of a stripper I used to have as a friend-with-benefits who was very attuned to the “spirit world”. As such the whole gamut of the supernatural was free game for her to use. She’d read my Tarot cards, my palm, throw in some eastern mysticism and wash it all down with a read through her pink ladies’ devotional Bible. Granted, ‘Angie‘ was an extreme case, but all women are in someway, or say they are in someway, privy to metaphysical understandings which men are not. And today we read and listen to male leaders in mainstream religions adopt and parrot back this “women are closer to God than men” mantra which is directly linked to the ‘spiritual women’ mystique.

The old trope of a Woman’s Intuition is an example of this belief in something beyond the ken of men. And this is also an important aspect of boys’ Blue Pill conditioning – girls/women possess some unearthly connection to God or something supernatural which further cements the idea that they should to defer authority to girls and women if they want to “please God the Goddess”. You might think this hard to believe in our age of technology, but only the context of the supernatural has shifted. Even the most objectively rational boys and men strongly believe in the ‘soul mate myth‘ despite atheism or agnosticism. This belief of the faithless is directly related to the unknowability of the female. Even modern atheists have a tendency to fall prey to the “someone for everyone” religion when it comes to connecting with the opposite sex.

It’s my belief that this presumption of a greater sensitivity to the supernatural is an aspect of women’s evolved mental firmware. Regardless of how false it may be, a woman with the disposition to encourage men to believe that she has some otherworldly connection despite the world or circumstances around them, one that would lead men to venerate her in the long term, would’ve been a powerful social adaptation in ensuring her and her children’s security. No doubt women readers will trot out the reflexive “Well men have been shamans and soothsayers and the patriarchal leaders of churches too”, and this is true, but those men lacked the female elemental advantage in their believability. Even their own belief sets encompassed the ‘spiritual woman’ tropes for better or worse. The wise old wizard is definitely an archetype, but that wizard lacks the feminine mystique and the sexual components only women possess in exercising that power.

Modern Witchcraft

Today we see a distinct falling away from the old order of acknowledging the supernatural. Less and less people subscribe to religion in its conventional sense. The Millennial generation wants nothing to do with “organized religion”, yet they still seek the structure to life it used to provide. So instead we hear the compromise about being “spiritual, but not religious” as if accepting the possibility of the metaphysical is something expected, but the taint of the “religious” is left for older generations. Even in what passes for contemporary religion the influence of the Feminine Imperative is ever-present. The spiritual, the metaphysical, the religious, all are still useful tools for women to consolidate power with. As men abdicate more authority to the feminine, as they themselves are the products of a continuous social feminization, we see a wholesale handover of the spiritual to the direction of women. The male leadership of mainstream religions is itself compromised with the imperatives and priorities of women who are already presumed to be “more in tune with God or the supernatural”. As such they exercise the Feminine Imperative and assimilate women’s stake on the spiritual by being proxy agents for women’s authority.

Today I was linked a story about how Episcopalians have begun to Remove the Man from their religion. Apparently this marks the beginning of rewriting the doctrine of this religion by erasing all masculine pronouns for God. Of course I expect the predictable retorts that Episcopalians aren’t real Christians, but theirs is just one of the more glaring examples of how the feminization of religion progresses. The latent purpose is a wholesale removal of anything conventionally masculine from religion, and/or placing the feminine as the primary connection with the supernatural. Whether it’s mainstream religion or psychic reading, a woman is at the center of that mysticism. If you want a perspective into the things to come for a female-led mega-religion look no further than the teaching of Rev. Shannon Johnson Kershner (dual surname noted). God is not male is the clarion call of the priestesses (and their male ‘ally’ priests) of this new religion.

Why should we view God as female? Well, it’s so that little girls can become pastors, with Kershner saying, ““I wanted to make sure that little girls knew that God could call them to be pastors, too.”

For the MeToo / Time’s Up generation God is female, the supernatural is more aligned with the feminine. I’ve made this observation before (before the #MeToo moral panic arrived) but there’s been a growing push on the part of men to relinquish any spiritual authority from a masculine perspective for decades now. The largely secular impetus of the MeToo movement is now finding its way into a religious environment that has been primed and ready for it (largely due to its acquiescing, complicit, and thoroughly Blue Pill male leadership) for a long time. MeToo was a natural fit for a feminine-primary church that needed its push to consolidate power even in the most patriarchal of religions. MeToo has given women license to finally be overt in their design on religion and spirituality – not unlike Open Hypergamy has been embraced in the mainstream.

In celebration of this conversion of religion to feminine-primacy we get the feminist Beyoncé “worship” services in formerly traditional cathedrals. Millennials may be falling away from the old church, but they fill the new church to overflow-capacity when ‘god’ is female.

The take home message for this essay is this; womankind has been intimately aware of the complicity of men in granting them a default connection to the supernatural. While we may not profess a formal belief in such, men are eager to accommodate female power in this arena – especially if in doing so it endears women to the men who play along with it. Professing a belief in the supernatural is simply good Game. The early PUAs picked up on this and used it to their advantage. However, this abdication of moral authority – an authority founded in masculine pretenses – goes far beyond getting your palm read by an earthy stripper you want to bang. This compromising of moral authority to the feminine by men is just the next phase in conceding all social and political authority to the Feminine Imperative. If God or a ‘higher power’ is the foundation of moral authority, and women are universally presumed to be more in touch with that higher power, the next step is to cede that authority to the sex that has a more direct line to that power.

What prompted me to consider writing this essay was a link I was sent in response to the story about Asia Argento’s involvement in modern day Wicca. I listened to a bit of a podcast by Vox Day recently in which he was asked his thoughts about modern paganism. He said, and I paraphrase, “Paganism today is just kids LARPing to the idea of old world religions. They’re role playing something akin to Dungeons and Dragons with no real belief.” I thought this was interesting in light of the article I was sent on Neo-Paganism and the Feminist Spirituality Movement:

However, some women were not willing to identify themselves as “witches”, and there arose a form of Goddess worship without any of the trappings of witchcraft. As Nevill Drury explains, “Although some Goddess-worshippers continued to refer to themselves as witches, others abandoned the term altogether, preferring to regard their neopagan practice as a universal feminist religion, drawing on mythologies from many different ancient cultures.” This has been called “Goddess worship” and the “Goddess movement”. These terms are frequently used interchangeably with, but should be distinguished from, “feminist spirituality”, which includes the Goddess movement, but also feminist Christianity, feminist Judaism, etc.

[…]

The principal beliefs of the Goddess movement are that the Goddess is a radically immanent deity and she can be experienced directly. The Earth is seen as the body of the Goddess and women are understood to connect to the Goddess through their experience of their own bodies, as well as the “body” of the earth. Goddess feminists also believe that the Goddess is constantly changing, manifest in the changing of the seasons and the human life-cycle, and perpetually self-renewed.

The Goddess movement offers women a new self-image and facilitates women finding their own innate goodness and natural divinity. It enables women to redeem and revalue the “feminine principle” and offers them positive images and symbols of female empowerment.

It may seem easy to dismiss the influence of the feminine on what is re-evolving into a new feminine-world order of spirituality, but I think it would be foolish dismiss the influences of the Feminine Imperative – the Goddess Movement – that is manifesting itself incrementally in the power vacuum left by the abdication of masculine moral authority to the feminine. We read that Millennials may not be “as religious” as previous generations, but that doesn’t mean they don’t seek out ‘spiritual, but not religious’ metaphysical connections. They seek direction, and connection in religion, but they seek it in the secular, gynocentric terms they’ve been conditioned to believe they should define themselves by. A similar parallel exists on the masculine side too. One of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is his ‘ministering’ to a generation of “lost boys” seeking direction in life. He is every bit one of the Lords of the New Church in the same way that the Goddess Movement speaks to another demographic of lost souls who seek absolution in the “divine feminine” – also a term Peterson is fond of.

Big Fish

It’s likely readers here have been following my twitter threads about the Anthony Bourdain suicide and I’ve been discussing the particulars about his death on Pat Campbell’s show and the Red Man Group for almost 2 weeks now. As readers know I’ve personally dealt with two suicides under circumstances  like this and I’ve picked apart dozens more over the years I’ve been writing. I’ve got a pretty good idea why old Beta guys off themselves.

But the Beta part is only one aspect of the story. Anthony being a ‘paper alpha’ is certainly an aspect too, but the more I dig into the background of the “love of his life”, Asia Argento, the more the puzzle pieces fit together. This bitch was a piece of work. If you watched the Red Man Group last Saturday I explained why I don’t think she was a BPD case (borderline personality disorder), but after reading this thread I’m beginning to change my mind:

So, she’s a witch. A literal witch, and all of her ‘sisterhood’ are witches are too. You can digest that however you feel is necessary, but this is a 42 year old woman who practices literal witchcraft – which is an extension of feminism with a pagan spiritual  woo woo magical thinking whipped into the mix. I really need to do a more expansive post on Chick Crack soon.

But, even this isn’t what I want to confront you with. What I want to raise your awareness to is something I’ve never really had an occasion to explore until now; Anthony Bourdain was a very big fish.

Anthony Bourdain (AB) was a long term, life-long, Beta. He was every bit of what I call a ‘terminal Beta‘. Yes, he had the Bad Boy thing working for him and if you want to get a more complete idea about his past Black Label Logic has a great piece on his blog you really ought to read. But, with respect to Bourdain’s understanding of intersexual dynamics he was very much a Beta.

People immediately gave me shit for naming him such. That was expected. He’s Anthony-fucking-Bourdain and I’m just some “half-assed self-published Red Pill writer, what the fuck do I know, right?” Well, I knew enough to recognize the profile of a Contextual Alpha who’d been plugged into his Blue Pill conditioning for 61 years and the huge mark he put on himself by being so publicly co-dependent on the idea of the soul mate myth. Anthony had been through 2 wives. The most recent one cheated on him with her MMA fighter / personal trainer he no doubt was paying to “train” his soon-to-be ex wife. I have no doubt AB would’ve attempted to lock down Asia Argento because this is what overly possessive, perpetually mate guarding Beta men do when a woman approaches his “dream girl” ideal. His social media was rife with declarations about how happy he was to have finally met his ‘kindred spirit’ soul mate (and self-avowed Wiccan) Asia Argento. AB sincerely believed his ship had come in. The woman who would finally complete him (this time) was at last in his life.

In every Instagram image, every Tweet, AB was gushing about how he’d never been happier as he cuddled with Asia like a boy who loves his mother. Intermixed with these images were many others with him in classic possessive-Beta encroaching posture – interposing arms like an affectionate headlock, while she looked away wistfully, or directly at the camera with the look of a woman who knows the Beta she’s with is deadweight to her Hypergamy.

Big Fish and the Cookie Lady

There is a larger dynamic at play in all this, one I probably could add an addendum to in my second book, Preventive Medicine. An aging Beta male, and particularly one with a notable amount of money, success, fame or status is a big fish for a necessitous woman. A woman who’s long practiced in using her sexual agency to its best advantage with men knows a prime target in an older man who’s never unplugged himself from his Blue Pill conditioning. Bourdain was one such big fish, and his Blue Pill conditioning, his eager white knighting and immediate deference to the feminine, his soul mate idealism would’ve been instantly recognizable to a 42 year old woman long accustomed to being the center of orbit for many a prior Beta.

I don’t want to call it an epidemic, but there is a set of women who look for aging men with resources to befriend and pretend they have a genuine interest in. Men with even moderate means and a Blue Pill conditioned idealism that ‘love springs eternal’ are prime targets for women who can read and assess that man’s state from years of practice. A woman who shows interest in a man who’s been starved for affection, sex and a real connection with a woman (married or not) will seem like more than an oasis in the desert. She’ll appeal to his romantic, idealistic Beta soul; a last chance at ‘true happiness’, a true miracle, as he enters his old age.

My own father was one such target for a woman we called the ‘cookie lady’.

My dad passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s/dementia before he was 72, but before his dementia had really become apparent the ‘cookie lady’ had already made a mark of my dad. My father was also what I’ve called a terminal Beta. He never unplugged to his dying day and lived a life based on the old set of books, being a good provider, dutiful, responsible and he was perpetually disappointed by the women in his life never reciprocating with their intimacy and appreciation the ‘rules’ clearly stated should happen. They never loved him in the way he thought women ought to be capable of loving him. Nevertheless, dad always clung to the (noble?) belief that if he saved his pennies and was of the highest service to women that eventually, one day, his efforts and quality would be appreciated by the right woman. He was a good example of the Savior Schema.

The ‘cookie lady’ understood all of this – all of dad’s Blue Pill conditioning, the way he thought the world and women should work, the old social contract investments, his idealism about women, everything – all of it in less than a week. She really wasn’t all that different from my step-mother in that respect, but at this late in the game, at her age, and noticing the subtle hints of cognitive degeneration in dad, the stakes were much higher for her long term security. I should also add that I would include my own mother in this schema; she’s a lovable loon, but she knew a good opportunity for security back in the 60s, so it may be my father had a knack for attracting this type of woman due to his Blue Pill idealism.

The reason we called this woman the ‘cookie lady’ was because she always brought my dad fresh baked cookies when she was trying to play into his Blue Pill end-of-life last ditch hope for happiness. We never knew her real name and if it hadn’t been for my dad getting very upset with us for preventing him from rewriting the ‘cookie lady’ into his will and power of attorney within the first month of her ‘dropping by’ we may very well have been suckered into her scam too.

Respect Your Elders

It was this incident that opened up a whole new understanding of the Red Pill and intersexual dynamics for me. I think it may be important going forward in Red Pill awareness to consider how intersexual dynamics and the Feminine Imperative affect generations of older men. My brother and I had to really watch out for similar scams to take advantage of my dad’s condition and his Blue Pill mindset that was making him a target. It wasn’t until this incident that I did a bit of research to find out how common this scam really is. In a sense it’s one more angle on the ‘stripper effect’ for younger, desperate, men for whom the feigned attention of the stripper, the kino, the deferent concern, is more seductive than her sexuality. It feeds a deeper emptiness. In a young man, in an Incel, just the possibility for that connection can become an obsession. For an older man, who’s been starved of the same (in or out of marriage) for the better part of his life, it seems like a storybook ending all his Blue Pill conditioning told him was possible. And what would a man like that give for on last shot at that idealistic ‘love’?

When Will We Face the Facts about Suicide in Older Men?

The instance of elderly men’s suicide is something not too many people want to talk about. Much of what I’ve read about it throws out a lot of feminist boilerplate about how old masculine ideals are to blame, but as expected, it uses this ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative to cover the uglier truths. Most men are Betas. Most men spend their lives wondering why all the Blue Pill hopes they sincerely believe are possible just don’t happen for them. They blame themselves, or they blame others, but they never really unplug because their existence was centered on the certainty that Blue Pill dreams come true if they can just work on the relationship harder or they made more money or if they’d only met a more perfect ‘soul mate’ in the story that is their life.

Anthony Bourdain fit this profile to the letter. And while it may not have been Asia Argento’s conscious, forethought purpose to gravy-train him, his Blue Pill, Beta, perspective had to have been apparent to her. On some level of consciousness she knew he had the capacity for self-harm as an extension of this. It’s exactly why she pleaded to the paparazzi who photographed her on the streets of Rome with her far more Alpha lover Hugo Clement, not to publish the photos. For all the guilty foreshadowing from Rose McGowan trying to convince the public who adored Bourdain about their “relationship without borders”, the truth is deathly apparent that Bourdain’s idealism believed otherwise.

Asia Argento didn’t kill Anthony Bourdain, but in what she represented to his Blue Pill mind, her actions were the catalyst that prompted his suicide. Yes, he was depressed. Yes, maybe he was on Chantix (we’ll never know now that his body was cremated unceremoniously, without a toxicology screening and against his family’s wishes). Yes, he was a hard drinker, drug addict and had suicidal thoughts before (after his 2nd divorce), but he killed himself 3 days after the pictures of his “soul mate” and Hugo Clement were published.

I think the bigger lesson here is a wake up call for older men who are still plugged into the Blue Pill Matrix as well as those who’ve become Red Pill aware much later in life. I’m of the opinion that it’s never too late to unplug and live a Red Pill aware life, but I will concede it’s a lot to lay on a guy who’s lived most of his life plugged in. Looking back on decision after decision influenced by a Blue Pill conditioning, influenced by a set of rules you believed others were playing by and then seeing the results of those decisions and wreckage that followed. It’s one thing to be “awakened while married” when you’re in your early 40s, but it’s quite another to realize Red Pill truths when you’re 70 and maybe have another good 10 years to live if you took care of yourself. That’s a rough realization.

In Positive Masculinity I stressed the importance of Red Pill aware men being mentors for boys and younger men and helping to raise them out of the influences of the Feminine Imperative’s Village, but I think it’s going to be important to mentor and protect the interests of older men as they age in a Blue Pill mindset and become Red Pill aware.

The Rational Process

 

One of the most vexing things a lot of Red Pill aware men encounter when they interact with women today is the expectation that women are coequally as rational agents as men. We were taught from the earliest ages by our blank-slate equalist teachers that boys and girls are all the same, having coequal potential for coequal successes in life (as they define them), then primarily focusing on the ‘correct’, female way of educating both sexes. This education isn’t limited to just the classroom; the Village uses many ways (media, pop culture, religion, etc.) to deliver what is fundamentally the same message – boys and girls, men and women, are essentially, effectively, the same with respect to their potentials. Now, that’s the message not the practice. Even when they are forced to recognize definitive differences they simply dismiss them by saying “We’re more alike than different” in the presumption that this should be enough to refocus and reinforce their blank-slate belief set.

So when men and women consider differences in gender, differences in double standards, inequalities in gender-specific issues and pretty much any empirical debate about these and other differences, men presume that the women they are ‘debating’ with are also looking for earnest, equitable answers beginning from the same coequal state of mutual interest. This is almost never the case.

The pretense that’s been embedded into men from the earliest years of their Blue Pill conditioning is since men and women are coequal agents they should both be interested in finding an objective truth together. But the frustration in this ‘debate’ comes from the simple fact that our differences are actually much more significant than the dismissals of equalists would want them to be. The roots of this deliberate misunderstanding are twofold: First, the innate solipsistic self-interest of women, and second, women’s predisposition to interpret information using the Emotional (versus Rational) interpretive processes.

When men and women debate intersexual issues of contention men opt for their innately preferred Rational interpretive process; we look for factual evidence to support a premise. Women opt for the Emotional process and then consider evidence. This difference in processing is where a lot of personal and ideological obstacles come into play between men and women. Our educational priorities of both men and women prioritizes the importance of emotion and its expression before a consideration of the Rational process. We teach boys/men to sublimate their natural proclivity towards reason by replacing it with the Emotional process. Thus, we’ve seen the push to encourage men to get in touch with their feelings or their feminine sides since the late 60s.

As I mentioned last week, women prioritize context (how a conversation makes them feel) in communication while men prioritize content (the information of the conversation); these differences are part of our biological/neurological evolved inheritances. This is where the misunderstanding starts between the sexes; however, calling this a ‘misunderstanding’ is a bit of a misnomer.

I’m sure a lot of readers think this is a longwinded way of saying women’s emotions blind them to the facts that men present to them when they debate. While this is true in a sense, this is shortsighted because, in the interests of simplifying things, most guys will just blow off the dynamics that build up this (often deliberate) miscommunication. Women don’t like the way a Rational-prioritized conversation makes them feel. Often the reality is unflattering to their solipsistically defined egos – but the communication feels wrong because women’s presumption is that men should just know to acknowledge their feelings in that debate (all communication really). On the female side the presumption is that men and women, being blank-slate equals, already know to prioritize the Emotional process, while on the male side men presume women will prioritize the Rational process because, again, we’re all the same, right?

This presuming that one sex sees the same way as the other is endemic in our time. I had a reader pose me with a similar example:

I had a conversation with my LTR at dinner tonight where I did a thought exercise with her. I asked her to imagine what it would be like if people visually saw different colors when they looked at various objects but had consistent names for those colors in their own minds. For example, person A sees what person B calls Blue, but it looks like what would be called green if person A could peer into person B’s mind. The point was we can’t know what colors actually look like from an individual subjective perspective. Although I tried several times to walk through this, she couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to explain. I then realized that this exercise involved imagining a first person conscious experience from multiple perspectives. This test could be a proxy test for (women’s) solipsism.

This thought experiment is a good way to illustrate solipsism in women, but it’s an even better example of the default presumptions men and women have of each other in other areas. As it stands today, in our feminine-primary social order, the Blue Pill conditions us to default to cognitive models that are defined by the female experience. Thus, whatever best satisfies a female-primary purpose is always considered the correct purpose. The way women think, the way women prioritize their Emotional interpretive process, is the right way for men to think – and the mutual presumption is that men already do (or should) think and process stimuli like women do. Anything else, anything that would recognize a difference in men from women, always feels wrong.

This default presumption of a female-correct way of interpreting and experiencing the world isn’t limited to our differences in communication. This misalignment of interpretive differences also extends to the false presumption that men and women approach the concept of love from a mutually understood perspective. Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically, yet men’s presumption is that both men and women approach love from the Disneyesque idealism they believe women are capable of. Men too believe that women see the same colors they do and have the same names for those colors. In this case those colors are the concepts and approaches women have towards love. I may write a new essay outlining this dynamic soon, but I’ve already written many prior posts on this experiential difference.

Rationalism vs. The Rational Process

As a result of pushing the Emotional process as the correct way of interpreting our world the Rational process necessarily gets demonized today. It feels wrong to a social order predicated on the Emotional process, so the truths that the Rational process reveals seem cruel, biased or vindictive when they refute the interpretations of the Emotional process. The importance of Emotion has been elevated above an interpretive process to where it’s now entered a metaphysical realm. This is where the Emotional process becomes Emotionalism. In the light of this, the Rational process is overshadowed and sublimated in importance. But the Rational process is what exposes emotionalism for what it is: Emotion is an evolved, biological interpretive process that serves our species well, but the feelings it generates are biological responses to environmental stimuli, not evidence of some higher consciousness or mythic existential importance that goes beyond anything in the physical realm.

The Rational process throws a cold bucket of truth on lofty emotionalism. As a result, and because emotionalism has been a basis of our social order for millennia now, the Rational process had to be debased in importance.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5

This scripture is an example of the conflict between emotionalism and the rationalism that popular social consciousness would like to apply to the Rational interpretive process. The Rational process is based in our collective and subjective intelligence. Healthy men and women both have the mental hardware to use the Rational process well, but where we differ is in our gendered mental firmware. When we collectively prefer one process to the other, this is where we decide which gender’s process will define our social order. In order for emotionalism to supersede rationality and ensure its preeminence appeals to the emotional above the rational have to be popularized.

If we could depend on an unbiased, unadulterated form of reason the Rational process would be a superior methodology. But as I stated before, rationalism is dependent on intelligence and that intelligence takes time. In some ways the Rational process is sensitive to both instinct and emotion, in other’s that reasoning is painfully, sometimes fatally slow. The world happens fast and vacillating in the reasoning process might easily kill an individual. Fortunately we have instinct and emotion to carry us through. The Rational process requires time because it requires learning, contemplation, theorizing and any number of high-order thinking processes to be effective. And even then, that effectiveness depends on reasoning’s accuracy. For the past three or four hundred years we’ve increasingly had the luxury to develop our Rational process, but for all the advancements it’s given us, when it comes to intersexual dynamics emotion is still the priority.

We have placed such importance on emotion at the expense of reason that we’ll risk personal safety in our ‘right’ to express it. No doubt most men are familiar with repressing their emotional responses, but it’s interesting to consider that even with this self-control and even with our innate predilection to process emotion differently than women, men are the ones accused of failing to be ‘in touch with their emotions’. On first glance Robert Greene’s quote here appears to be wisdom (I think it is) – self-control, mastery of one’s emotional state, is a virtue. Yet, in our emotional-primary social order we’ll hear women complain that men are less emotionally available. And this conflict illustrates again that whatever is expedient to the female imperative is what is to be considered ‘correct’ at that moment.

Empiric reason is the foundation of what humanity has made of itself. Setting aside emotionality and considering challenges in a Rational interpretive process is fundamental to understanding the emotional and instinctive process and their advantages and weaknesses. For the record it’s my belief that all of these interpretive processes in union are are necessary elements in the human experience, but my focus on these processes is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of them. It’s easy to get caught up in the demonization of the instinctual and the rational when the emotional is defining what’s bad or good for our collective experiences.

When I wrote Appeals to Reason I was exploring the futility of expecting women to transition into a logical reasoning of why she should logically be with a guy who was more than happy to embody all of the aspects she stated she wants in a man. The manosphere idiom is “no woman was ever reasoned or logicked into bed with a guy”, women don’t follow the Rational process when it comes to interrelating with men. It’s all Instinctual and Emotional, and usually in that order. A man might be able to use his rational facilities to better understand women’s evolved instinctual and emotional responses, and what prompts them, but reason itself isn’t the key to that interrelation.

Appealing to women’s logic and relying on deductive reasoning to sort it out is the calling card of a Beta mind. There is nothing more anti-seductive for women than appealing to her reason. Arousal, attraction, sexual tension, subcommunication of desire, all happen indirectly and below the social surface for women. It’s not that women are incapable of reasoning (hypergamy is one logical bitch) or are crippled by their emotion-based hindbrains, it’s that if you’re asking her how to be more attractive you don’t Get It. It’s in the doing, not the asking.

If you’ve stuck with me to the end of this series I want to say thanks. I really felt that these interpretive processing models needed to be fully outlined as what I’ll get into in the coming months will need this as a basis for it.

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.

 

No Prescriptions

On Saturday I had a great discussion with Anthony Johnson, Rian Stone (Married Red Pill Reddit) and “Carl” from Black Label Logic. The topic was a critique of the impact Dr. Jordan Peterson is having on a society of ‘lost’ (mostly) young men and how his message is affecting this generally rudderless generation of men. It’s a little over two hours long, but from the overwhelming response on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other forums it’s definitely struck a nerve. As an aside here, I’m considering making this meet up video format something I may do semi-regularly (like every other week) with some of the men I consider peers in the manosphere.

You can watch this talk at your leisure, but it has taught me a few things. As I mentioned in the chat it’s next to impossible to have any disagreement or critique of people whom other’s believe are your betters. As Rollo Tomassi it’s impossible for me to be critical of any high profile guy in the sphere without the accusations of professional jealousy or sour grapes being the first reflexive response from haters. I got that, but I’ve learned the conversation is more important that trying to convince anyone of it being genuine. In fact, I think it belies a bigger problem when they are above critique.

That aside, I think it was good to finally parse where Red Pill awareness and what Peterson is advocating have some overlap and where we differ. Peterson is a fountain of hope for the ‘lost’ boys, so anything critical of his message is going to sound like it’s endorsing an “enjoy the decline” mentality. I can’t expect everyone to have read up on my own opinion about that, but the short version is that I’ve never been convinced of some inevitable decline and fall of western civilization. In other words, I think it is possible to turn the ship around; where I may differ is in how that might be done.

For the record here I want to say that I have a great respect for Dr. Peterson. I think he’s what the sphere has needed for a while and I think he fits the role of ‘champion’ that a generation of young men have wanted to place on someone. Ideologically I agree with about 85-90% of what he advocates and there’s no doubt that he’s got definite skin in the game. In fact I really hate it when people use that as some catch phrase to disqualify men today. As a man we all have skin in the game now. How much and to what degree may be debatable, but we all live in a feminine-primary social order and as such we all have a lot to risk whether we acknowledge this or not.

Where I differ with Peterson is in his very Trad-Con solutions to turning the ship around. I wasn’t shocked to see him endorsed in videos for Prager University. In some ways what he proposes resonates with young men looking for a direction because their fathers and generations of Blue Pill men haven’t been able to deliver a way out of Hell for them. I go into this in more detail in our talk here, but here are some of my issues with Peterson’s take on things:

• Life is suffering and sacrifice: In every video I’ve watched Dr. Peterson’s founding (zen-like) premise is that life is suffering and the best men can do is to find ways to minimize that suffering. Men (and I’ve yet to see a video addressing women) must sacrifice parts or all of themselves in order to qualify for “genuine” manhood. The degree of that self-sacrifice is relative to how high a status that man can achieve.

I fundamentally disagree with this premise though I do understand why it’s so appealing to a ‘lost generation’ of young men. From my own perspective, life is based on a perpetual discontent, but how a man deals with that discontent – creatively or destructively – is the measure of him. Furthermore, I would argue that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make in order to facilitate their reality.

• Blue Pill conditioning seems to define his perspective of women: Essentially the archetype he has for women was formed for him as a 7 year old boy when he first developed a soul-mate ONEitis for his wife. His reluctance to acknowledge the Alpha Fucks side of women’s Hypergamy in any video (beyond his repeated use of 50 Shades of Grey as a humorous example) leads me to the impression that he defaults to women as innately ‘good’ and above too much criticism. As such he focuses almost entirely on the good provider / parental investment / Beta need side of Hypergamy. This is unsurprising as it follows the same Trad-Con interpretations of women being “closer to God than men” and men must qualify themselves, and sacrifice themselves for women’s (wives) intimate approval. Dalrock has covered this dynamic among male “complementarian” Christian leaders quite extensively.

• Sacrifice of men is a parallel to men’s disposability: Men will blow themselves up for pussy. From what I gather from his talks Peterson endorses male disposability as a form of Honor. He seems to play on the ‘Man Up / Shut Up’ dynamic I talked about in The Honor System. 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. I’m not suggesting Peterson is accusing men of Patriarchy or Misogyny, rather, like most Trad-Cons, it’s a question of living up to one’s duty as a man in his disposability and his usefulness in that sacrifice.

• “Get your shit together” is also a plea for sacrifice: If a man is less valuable his sacrifice is less meaningful. No one cares about mediocre / average men’s sacrifices, but if a man accepts that he is to improve himself it is so that his sacrifice is more appreciated and important. Thus, the comparisons to Christ’s sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of sacrifice and meaning which Peterson uses in his dissertations on manhood and the Bible. My issue here is that women and a feminine-primary social order lack a capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make because these are taken-for-granted expectations of what a man just “ought to do”.

• Peterson is egalitarian to a fault: The mantra may be for men to sack up and make something of themselves, but this is couched in an egalitarian equalism that’s prevalent today. If I had one question to ask Jordan it would be this; is there a dominance hierarchy in a healthy LTR or marriage? I don’t know for certain. My guess is he would say it passes back and forth between a husband and wife which is to say he falls back on an egalitarian ideal. However, outside the family structure he acknowledges that men and women in a state of egalitarianism choose to adopt traditional gender roles (I think he gave the same example as was covered here).

• Dr. Peterson regularly resorts to shaming language with men, rarely does he do the same with women: This may be a simple question of his delivery, but Peterson is always harder on men than he is with women. In so doing he adopts the AMOGing of only men techniques that a pastor like Mark Driscoll uses from the pulpit. Inso doing he pedestalizes women and absolves them of any consequences of their Hypergamous choices by imploring men to “man up and marry those sluts“. In essence the sacrificial nature of men becomes one that is necessary for the continuance of ‘family’ and western culture in spite of women. I also see how this plays into the idea of women lacking any moral agency, personal responsibility and wiping the bad behavior of women off on the men who have allowed this to happen. Once again it comes back to the hypoagency of women.

• Peterson believes that desire can be negotiated: This is my biggest problem with Peterson’s approach to women. This undoubtedly comes from his being a clinical psychologist, but like most therapists he defaults to the idea that genuine desire can be motivated by a process of negotiation. If there is one example of his lack of experience with women it is this belief. In several of his interviews and podcasts he makes reference to appealing to women’s reason and negotiating terms for acceptable behavior (always a man’s behavior) in exchange for intimacy and/or a stress-free marriage. This is the egalitarian, Oprah Approved, male-sublimated means to achieving transactional intimacy.

As you might guess, I strongly disagree with negotiating intimacy. You cannot negotiate genuine desire. You can obligate a woman to fuck you (now called rape) via negotiation, but you cannot organically inspire genuine desire in a woman. This has always been my main point of contention with the marriage counseling trade for a long time.

What is the Red Pill version of “man-up”?

I had a commenter ask me this in the last comment thread. I think there’s two sides to this question. First, I think there’s a need to keep the Red Pill (in the intersexual sense) as close to an objectivist purpose as possible. That means Red Pill awareness is the result of a continuing praxeology.

I’ve locked horns with a few Red Pill guys recently who seem to think that ‘Red Pill’ is an ideology and it’s just the counter revolt to feminism; basically it is feminism for men. I think that does a huge disservice to everything and everyone that’s brought us to where we are today in Red Pill awareness and all of the work and personal risk that was put on the line to explore what we know as Red Pill awareness now. Not only that it casually devalues the effort and work that’s continuing right now.

Critics and feminists alike want to draw parallels in the manosphere to whatever (fictitious) wave of feminism they think applies to whatever the Men’s Rights Movement is calling Red Pill at the moment. Believing that Red Pill is an ideology is one more casualty of how the term / brand has been bastardized by other ideologies who’ve never had any business referring to themselves as “red pill”.

Presuming Red Pill is just an ideology is juvenile, and unsurprisingly it’s an opinion of some underexperienced men in the manosphere who want for simplistic answers. They don’t want to think about what Red Pill awareness implies on a larger social scale. They want a flag to wave and an easy to understand ideology so they can stick it to their feminist enemies. I get it. They want Red Pill (however they define it) to be that ideology, but to me, I think, and I’ve always said it, the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, areligious and amoral to ensure that it stays true to understanding truth. It needs to remain true to being an aggregate of men’s collected experiences with intersexual dynamics.

What these guys want is a meaning to that truth, but that’s not the Red Pill. Meaning is what men will apply to that truth according to their individual needs, situations and circumstances. This is why Peterson and probably some more personalities to follow him will be popular in the future; they prioritize meaning above truth. If you listen to the first podcast of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson they spend the entire time trying to come to an agreed measure of truth between the two of them so they can move on (in the second podcast) to what is meaning.

You want to know why I don’t do prescriptions on The Rational Male? Because we disempower ourselves when we follow someone else’s path and not our own.

There is a deep need in almost all people to improve or ‘fix’ ourselves in some way. I’ve written essays about it; discontent is is the human condition. That in no way means that life is suffering as per the Peterson (Zen) doctrine, but it is man’s condition to never be satisfied with even the greatest of accomplishments. That is what put us at the top of the species contest on this planet. You can be constructively or destructively discontent, but when you tell me that life is suffering and the only way to lessen that suffering (never to solve it of course) is to sacrifice my way to a better life all that says to me is that you’re out of ideas for a creative solution and you’re all-in on the destructive methods. Either that or you’ll continue naval gazing.

Fuck that.

So, the Red Pill needs to remain a praxeology and it ought to always resist being force-fit into an ideology because it’s always some ideological hack who wants to claim the truth it reveals as proof of his own purpose. The Red Pill has to remain an open source aggregate of men’s experiences. That’s why we’re still here today in spite of the Rooshs who said it would die out 3 years ago – it’s open source and decentralized information.

Now, to the second point, what does ‘Man up’ mean in the Red Pill context? I think this is really for the individual to decide, but I’d say that it would involve a man utilizing and internalizing the awareness the Red Pill represents to him and improving his life with it. In the Safety Net post’s comment thread there are hundreds of examples of how men saved their own lives, often literally. How the Red Pill truth reached them and then manifested in their lives is highly individual. I mentioned the need for a dissociation with ideology because that usually means aligning oneself with the expectations of someone else’s version of truth, not the objective (or as objective as we can make it) truth of the Red Pill.

When I hear ‘man-up’, I identify the context only as derogatory… is there any other definition which is not?

It should, because in almost all contexts imploring a guy to “Man Up” is following someone else’s path, not your own. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not in the business of creating better men, I’m in the business of men making themselves better men. And in today’s world of men seeking direction there is no shortage of personalities who’d like nothing more than to profit from selling men on their paths.

If there is a definition of ‘manning up’ in a Red Pill sense it is living a better way than your previous life that was informed by the falsehoods of your Blue Pill conditioning. Manning up Red Pill is killing off that old Blue Pill-created persona and killing off the false idealisms it taught you. It’s understanding and internalizing that those lies made you a less authentic person because the Blue Pill is firmly an ideology, but one that wears the mask of freedom or choice or individualism. If self-improvement in a Red Pill sense entail some basic tenets, one is that a man cuts himself away from that old Blue Pill paradigm and rebuilds a better life for himself based on a real understanding of intersexual truth on the personal, social and political scales.

Manning up Red Pill begins with rejecting the lies of egalitarian equalism and a commitment to real objective understanding of intersexual dynamics.