Positive Masculinity

Chumps I’ve Known

It’s amazing the sheer amount of guys I know or have known who I’d classify as being AFCs. I’d like to say that pretty much every guy I’ve known has been an AFC with a handful of notable exceptions. Some grew out of it with experience, others were partially Game-aware or simply naturals who backslid and devolved into AFCs, and still others have been “lifers”; men who still don’t get it into their old age.

I was having a discussion about the legion of AFCs that most women have to sift through with my assistant where I work. She’s an attractive (HB7.5-8) young woman of 26 who’s been dealing with an AFC long distance and non-exclusively for well over a year now. Her frustration comes from the multitudes of Betas she meets in her dating life – in fact after working with me for over 2 years she instantly identifies guys as AFCs. She’s familiar with the mindset now; the lack of decisiveness, the neediness, the wish-washy yet possessiveness, and all the other Qualities of the AFC. All of this got me to thinking about the AFCs I know or have known and their individual circumstances.

Dave L
Dave L. is perhaps the most pitiable of AFCs I’ve known. His story, as he tells it, began with his very overbearing and domineering mother. He came from a very strict Baptist family and so dealt with a very guilt-conscious mother for the better part of his life. Interestingly he transitioned from an authoritarian mother to an authoritarian wife. He’d only ever slept with one woman, Sue, whom he met in the military in his 20s. She was a sexually abused (by her uncle) single mother of 2 delinquent sons who saw in Dave L. what she never did in the other men in her life – a guy she COULD control. They’ve been married over 25 years now and had a daughter. In this time he has been little more than a slave to her. Their history is one of a constant brow-beating by her as he perpetually tries to find ways pacify her in the exact way he tried to pacify his mother’s insecurities. Every decision he’s ever made has been to appease her and has never been “good enough”.

When I met Dave L. his daughter had learned from her mother how to control him just as strictly. It was as if she had been passed his leash so she too could learn how to discipline him, and to keep him in check. When we first met I used to butt heads with both his daughter and his wife (and unwittingly so) because I would openly challenge their authority over him by questioning his autonomy as a man. They of course instantly jumped to his defense and maintained he was a “real man” and I would be too if only I would defer to women’s authority.

Ron
For a time Ron was one of my best friends and not a guy you’d really want to arouse to anger. He had my back in a lot of bad situation and I was his confidant and counselor for many years. But for as in control and assertive as he could be, Ron was an AFC. He had the Bad Boy posture that women loved, but he defeated himself with his soulmate-ONEitis mythology. He married Kris at 19. They met in the Navy, and he got her pregnant fairly early which prompted the marriage. Kris was beautiful and one of 3 women Ron had ever been with. He “did the right thing” and married her, and they stayed married, having 2 more children throughout their 20’s. Gradually, Kris left Ron to himself and the kids more and more as she felt she’d missed out on her 20’s and spent more time with her single girlfriends in the evenings. She began to resent Ron, who by now had let his physique go while she stayed in good shape. Ron didn’t see the signs, because he’d been progressively pushed into a position of having to qualify to his wife and internalized the thinking that it was “the right thing for a man to do.”

Ultimately at 29, Kris cheated on him. I was on the other end of the phone with him after he’d been searching all night through the town in which they lived for her car – with their children in the back of their mini-van. As melodramatic as all this sounds, he’d tracked her down to a motel and had been waiting in the parking lot since 4am for her to come out so he could kill her. I managed to talk him out of that, and he tried to “make it work” after the incident for another 4 years, but this was really last stop before toll. At present, she’s planning on marrying another lover she had and their family/children is in shambles.

While Ron wasn’t the cause of this, his AFC responses, progressive beta-ness, rationales and inaction only contributed to his present condition.

Dave B
Dave B is a textbook example of insanity – repeating the same mistake over and over. His first wife was his ONE, so was the second, so was the GF between wife 2 and 3 and so was the third. With wife #1 he had two daughters. After their divorce she gained custody of them and was awarded spousal and child support. Wife #2, another daughter, but only after they’d divorced once, made up, had the ubiquitous make-up sex and she got pregnant “by accident”, then they divorced for good. She too was awarded spousal support and child support for a daughter he never sees. After #2 Dave “met the ONE” again and moved her and her son and daughter from 2 different fathers into his home. After the teenage son was picked up for burglary of some neighborhood homes he got into a verbal argument with the GF. Dave B made the mistake of merely snatching the keys to the car, the car he’d given her, away from her hands. That was enough to have him restrained from entering the home he was paying for, driving the car he was paying for, and Dave B went to live with mom & dad for a spell until that was sorted out. Now Dave B is on wife #3; another single mother of 2 daughters. In the meantime wife #1 self- destructed and he was order by the court to assume custody of his first 2 daughters (which is what he wanted anyway) after they’d been abused by their stepfather and wife #1 turned up to be a meth addict. Turns out all that money he’d been paying for years went to feed her habit and the habit of the abusive step-father.

Shawn
Shawn is a guy I know who basically ONEitised on EVERY girl who EVER dated him. He’d been married for about 2.5 years to a fairly religious girl who told him she “wanted to be a pastor’s wife” only to have her eventually cheat on him with a guy who was the Bad Boy and ended up in Las Vegas. Shawn went on to get a master’s in education, and moved to a string of the “coulda been” girlfriends, who’d date him for about 2-3 weeks, figure out his Disneyesque views of love, LTRs and men & women in general. He was a very good songwriter until he found himself in one of these “coulda been” ONEitis spells. Then every song was about the girl he thought was his “gift from above” and he proceeded to smoother her in his clingy-ness and idealize her on a pedestal.

He went through about 3 or 4 of these while I knew him until he met his 2nd wife. Mary was a single mother of one son and technically his step-cousin (his step-fatehr’s, brother’s daughter). She’d “accidentally” gotten pregnant by a black guy on the college basketball team and according to her very strict (and notably racist) father had disgraced the family, but they being religious, she had the baby and began her life as a single mom. Shawn adopted the Cap’n-save-a-ho persona and started this whirl wind ONEitis crusade to “do the right thing” and not only marry her, but legally adopt her son. Mary of course was happy to have the help, but saw Shawn for what he is; desperate and a romantically idealistic AFC. Mary was actually a pretty good friend of Mrs. Tomassi for a time and she’d confide in her that she wished he had the ambition and drive that I had. The short version was that she wanted a Man she could respect – similar to her authoritative father – and while Shawn was welcome help, she just wasn’t hot for him. Now Shawn is legally bound to her and the child he never fathered and has little respect for him. After 8 years of marriage they still haven’t had the child(ren) that Shawn wants.

 

Recounting the stories of AFCs we’ve known is educational in that it illustrates the commonalities of conditions these guys (sometimes ourselves included) face and the mindset that accompanies them. It’s very easy to go all self-help-motivational on people and tell them what they ought to do and ought to believe about themselves, but stories like this make the conditions real for us. I’d encourage commenters to relate the stories of some of the AFCs they’ve known in the comment thread.

I wont argue the merits of bolstering your self-esteem and taking action to make a positive improvement in yourself toward becoming a capital ‘M’ Man. There are hundreds of blog threads in the community that address this, but recounting the wreckage of lives that AFCism (for lack of a better term) puts the reasons why a guy needs to “improve” in sharp perspective. It’s like seeing the emaciated starving children in 3rd world countries on Unicef commercials as a prompt to do something.

I didn’t start this post as a warning sign for AFCs, nor did I start it point out what not to do. It’s an illustration of the sheer scope of the problem and the very real impact it has not just on men’s lives, but their families, the women they paired off with, their children, their friends, etc. That might seem negative, but it’s reality. I could’ve just as well posted about PUAs I’ve known (which would’ve been a lot shorter), or glossed my own marriage in an effort to point AFCs in the right direction, but powder-puff enthusiasm tends to only come off as conceit. And in the end, the AFC still thinks his best course to a fulfilled LTR/marriage is doing exactly what he is already doing – only more so. The more you suffer the more it shows you really care, right?

Generation AFC

I have gone on in several different threads about “men” I’ve know who’ve become married AFCs and older guys involved in LTRs where they allow themselves to become the passive/submissive partner in the relationship. From experience I can relate the stories of guys who laugh when they tell us how fortunate they are to have a gal who ‘allows’ them to watch Hockey or Football or men who make their own rationalizations for ‘obeying’ their Women’s insecure natures. Just recently I was reviewing the Qualities that make an AFC  when I came to realize that the condition we include that characterize what we term as AFC, change and evolve as we age.

The Beta mindset or AFCism (for lack of a better term) and all of its inherent frustrations are a disease, and like any disease, if left untreated, it will mutate into different forms as it progresses until it kills or debilitates the host. Most ‘advice’ threads online approach dating, love, personal relationships from a very short-sighted, dare I say, juevenile point of view. We’re fortunate in the manosphere community to have a broad spectrum of insight including the perspectives and related experiences of older gentlemen. This is a gift in that it helps to lend credence to the philosophies that seem counterintuitive to the newly unplugged and Game-aware. Most others see things in short term behavioral patterns and only very rarely from a truly mature life-long perspective.

Mature Advice

Needless to say, making short term decisions with long term consequences is hardly a way to live. I know far too many 40-60 y.o. men and women who internalize and put into practice the advices of 20-30 y.o.s who have entirely too immature realtional/social skills to be giving advice. When I read a 22 y.o. girl going into explicit detail about dating advice for a 45 y.o. divorcee “getting back into the game” I can only cringe. So desperate for help is this person that they’ll disregard the maturity of the source.

This all brings me to the idea that mature AFCism, if left unchecked, will evolve into behaviors that will have lasting consequences not only for the AFC, but also for the people who’s livelihoods depend on him. This degree of AFCism filters down into many aspects of his own life and the lives of others either directly or indirectly. Bear with me while I illustrate this with some personal experiences.

One of the men I presently work with is a 66 y.o. AFC. He is a very successful, millionaire with many financial endeavours and a credit to his sense of business. That said, every success he has achieved was prompted by his need for feminine approval, women (and one in particular) have always been the PRIZE to him. He has built a small financial empire based on this AFCism that many other people are dependent upon. He constantly drops what he thinks are pithy comments about how “women are the power behind the throne” or how men will “never understand women”, all completely oblivious to his own personal status. I constantly see his business decisions colored by this very AFCism and I think about how people are dependent on this man for a paycheck.

When I lived in Nevada I had a 63 y.o. man I counseled who had spent the better part of his life trying to find the ‘key’ that would make his wife of almost 30 years be intimate with him. Both in their 60’s, she had gradually become indifferent to him and only held him as a concern when he was between jobs. When times were good he would buy “them” toys they couldn’t afford – boats, ATVs, vacations – and in thin times it was nothing but constant bickering. This situation didn’t develop because she was materialistic, but rather because he perceived this as a method to buy her affections and she became conditioned to it. At 63 the guy is bawling his eyes out since he’d reach the end of his rope. He’d run out of AFCideas that would appease her. It was when I suggested he “Man-Up” and start implimenting some positive-masculine behaviors and developing this mindset he said, “I could never do that, it’s just not me. She’d leave me for sure if I got tough.”

AFCism isn’t just for kids. The fallout and long term consequences carry over into middle and old age. One element to this is the notion that the last few generations of men have been brought up in a greater concentration by single mothers, absent fathers and negatively masculine/AFC fathers who themselves were brought up similarly. This is an easy mark, but observing and sorting out AFC behaviors of mature men and the complex dependencies they bear on others around them is tougher. I wish I could say that AFCism was an indication of failure and would be gradually weeded out of the mental schema gene-pool so to speak, but I can’t. There are many successful men who still cling to AFC mentalities and in some cases are more driven than positively masculine Men.

Beta by Design

I think in most men’s beginnings, adopting an AFC schema is viewed not so much as a path of least resistance as it is a path of least risk. Children are the sum of what both parents contribute to their development and an understanding of gender roles is crucial in this learning. A personality is the result of seeing examples set for them. If a father is an abusive alcoholic and a mother’s a meek, submissive victim, the model for masculinity and femininity is shaped by this. Likewise if a mother is an domineering bitch and a father a soft-spoken cuckold this also colors perspectives on gender. Taking this a step further, if one parent is absent this creates a gender role vacuum and the child either has to seek it from outside sources or from the existing parent, and this is where it gets real dicey.

When that parent is required to provide their interpretation of the opposite gender, all of their misinterpretations and misgiving become imprinted on that child. This works for both sexes. The pensive, brooding & resentful mother teaches her son “how to be a man” by insisting he pee sitting down (to leave the lid down) and to be passive/submissive. The other side is she expects him to be an overbearing parody of masculinity since this was the example set for her. Either situation is unhealthy.

The Path of Least Risk

Since we’re discussing the development of an AFC schema, this example of masculinity had to be set for a man. It had to have been reinforced often enough (by both men and women) that it becomes an ego-investment in his own personality. This investment gets to the point where anything counter to it becomes foreign. He has to defend it with rationalizations and usually ridicule of positive masculinity because anything opposite to his understanding is an attack on his personality. This is why it is soooo difficult to break a guy with a heavily invested sense of beta-self out of the Matrix.

The AFC mentality is comfortable because it involves the least chance of risk of rejection. One of the hardest obstacles a recovering AFC has to get over is approaching and initiating, because for more than half his life he’s avoided doing this for fear of rejection. This is what led to his AFC status and now he’s got to confront it. I should also add this is why serial monogamists chosse this option – there’s safety from random rejection in monogamy, regardless of how miserable their monogamy is. Miserable monogamy is perceived as preferable to risking random rejection, and over time a personality is welded to this subconscious understanding. “I’m just a shy guy”, “I’ve never been ‘lucky’ with the ladies”, and “I guess us men will never figure women out” are the catchphrases of this mentality.

As the AFC ages, gets married to a woman that’ll settle for him, or marries the single Mom who needs a provider, he lays on even more cement to this ego-investment. It’s not enough that he can’t figure out why he’s miserable, he needs affirmation from other guys that they’re just as lost as he is. And when the Man comes around who is even peripherally critical of his lot he falls back on his learned rationalizations and ridicule, while his wife’s eyes dialate, her cheeks get flushed and she gets wet listening to the Man give her husband some masculine advice.

You Be the Boy

The following is a poem by Marie Howe that I recently became aware of from an NPR ‘Fresh Air’ interview:

Practicing

BY MARIE HOWE

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.

Before you get titillated by this or think “WTF Rollo?” read the poem again. Despite reader compliments, I wish I could say I was more of a poetry aficionado; and yes Howe fits the man-jawed, womyn’s studies archetype to the letter, but after hearing this I had to look up the poem and read it for myself to really get the message. This is a message that I’m not even sure if Howe is really aware of, or intended communicating – You be the boy.

I’ve written in the past about sexual fluidity and the brilliance of it becoming the redefined, reinvented social convention du jour of feminization. I say ‘brilliant’ because it so deftly and conveniently places the inadequacies of its ideology on the backs of the men who wont (really can’t) play along in affirming women’s primacy. Men’s evolved biological predilections and sexual strategies simply refuse to be unengineered into complying with feminized utopian ideals. This has always been the bugbear of feminism. Empowered single mommies can raise a boy to pee sitting down, to leave the toilet seat down, but he still finds he has a natural compulsion to want to take a piss standing up, and seat be damned. It takes half a lifetime of psychological conditioning to repress the male sexual experience.

Similarly, sexual fluidity doctrine also gives the aging spinster a new outlook in her post-Wall years. “Never mind that men wont man up to our your mythologized standards, it appears you’ve been a lesbian all these long years and didn’t know it! But don’t worry, masculinized lesbians make for better ‘men’ than men.”

From Sexual Fluidity:

If you read through the article Why Women are Leaving Men for Other Women, you can’t help but notice the commonalities of the testimonies coming from otherwise feminine women being attracted to more dominant, masculine women. Often these come from long married-with-children women who’ve divorced their beta husbands in favor of a more dominant, butch, Alpha lesbian.

Ironically—or not, as some might argue—it is certain “masculine” qualities that draw many straight-labeled women to female partners; that, in combination with emotional connection, intimacy, and intensity.

“Men can’t understand why I want to be with Jack, a lesbian, when I could be with a biological man,” says Gomez-Barris. “And at first I thought it would be threatening, but I have a rebellious spirit. He’s powerful, accomplished, and appealing. And in some ways, the experience is better than in heterosexual sex.

So what are we seeing here? Heterosexual women, still crave the masculine dominance that men cannot or will not provide her.

Uncle Roosh has an uncanny knack for posting complimentary articles around the same time I’m contemplating a topic, and this offering was no exception. One thing his study on Eastern European women seems to have a consensus on is a lack of masculinity in feminized men (see: American Betas). Roosh’s article provides an interesting contrast to the sexual fluidity convention in illustrating a natural dominant/submissive dynamic that is an in-born imperative for women.

Hypergamy prompts a natural contradiction for women – security and provisioning versus sexual impulse and genetic preselection – this is the root of women’s evolved pluralistic sexual strategies, get the Alpha seed, get the long term provisioning. In the past I’ve gone into detail outlining the innate compulsion women have for desiring security (and parental investment) in the long term, but I think the idea of what represents security to women needs a better explanation.

Case Study

My friend Dave was a stereotypical beta chump and his shrew of a wife was the typical ballbusting so-con feminist who was only too willing to browbeat reminders of it into him constantly. In other respects Dave was a great guy, the sole provider for his family, a great handyman who renovated his home with his own hands (he even built me a nice wood guitar rack for my guitars), but to anyone who’d see him and his wife together it was clear that he was on the receiving end of what I’d consider borderline abuse. He essentially married his mother, who was also a domineering bitch over his father, which is ironic since his wife was already a single mother of two boys when they wed. They had a single daughter who, in her teenage years, took her cues from her mother and picked up the browbeating when mom wasn’t available.

Yet for all the domineering and all the derision she was so comfortable in laying on Dave, she would rip into anyone who would think he was less than a man. She could call him a pussy, but anyone saying the same would be met with a list of his manly credits to such a degree that you’d hardly think you were talking about the same person in the room. She would defend his manliness with the same zeal she had in abusing it. For all of Dave’s wife’s invectives she couldn’t allow anyone to think that the man she was paired with was anything less than the ideal of manhood. On some level of consciousness she wanted him to be dominante even if that meant she had to manufacture the appearance of it for people who knew them.

You be the Boy

The impetus that brought this post about has been the recent discussion thread about Rational reader Ted D’s situation at home. He’s been stuck for some time over at Hooking Up Beta, but his story, and others like it are all too common in a fem-centric socialization that encourages equalism in favor of complimentarianism. It’s the triumph of blank slate ideology that men should be shamed out of a natural position of dominance that women’s own in-born need for security has need for. It’s tragic that it’s been conditioned to the the point that men have internalized equalism to such an extent that the desire to assume a necessary position of dominance, even a marginal position of guidance or leadership is equated with a tyranny. Even the word ‘dominance’ is conflated with power and control in a negative context.

From the first Iron Rule of Tomassi:

What these men failed to realize is that frame, like power, abhors a vacuum.  In the absence of the frame security a woman naturally seeks from a masculine male, this security need forces her to provide that security for herself. Thus we have the commonality of cuckold and submissive men in westernized culture, while women do the bills, earn the money, make the decisions, authorize their husband’s actions and deliver punishments. The woman is seeking the security that the man she pair-bonded with cannot or will not provide.

There is no such thing as egalitarian equality. Even for homosexuals, there is a dominant and submissive partner. It doesn’t make one an evil controller, nor the other a complacent doormat, it’s just that someone has to drive the car. Either you trust that person to drive or you take that control away from them. Someone has to be the boy.

Power abhors a vacuum, if you are unable or unwilling to be in control of the frame, a woman’s innate need for security will compel her to control it for you – in spite of her subconscious need for you to be the boy. You can be the Dom or the Sub, just know that you’ll only be the Sub for as long as it takes her to find a Dom to drive the car. This is the paradox of Hypergamy; that her desire for the best genetic/provisional partner would conflict with his ability to dominate her, all while professing a desire for equality masquerading as control just in case he can’t or wont take the driver’s seat.

Violence

There’s an interesting dynamic with regards to women and male vs. male violence. I have some interesting stories that address this.

When I was dating my wife I was a blue belt in [a martial art that will go nameless in order to avoid the inevitable debate on which is ‘the best’] and was just getting into competitive sparring. As a date idea I once asked her if she would come with me to Sacramento for a tournament and later we could hit a sushi bar I knew of down there. Instead of the standard “oh I think violence is just terrible/juvenile/men with insecurities stuff” line I would expect from 90% of women, and to my surprise, she enthusiastically agreed. When it came time for my sparring events I beat everyone in my pool that day and placed first for my belt class – trophy in hand. I don’t say this to gloss myself (since I generally had my ass handed to me pretty regularly), but I just happened to win this day and I even took out the last guy with a 3 point head kick and unintentionally drawing a little blood from his nose in the process. To make a long story short, we never made it to the sushi bar that evening – we were too busy fucking like rabbits back at the motel room, she wouldn’t even let me shower! My girlfriend (now wife) worked me 7 way to Tuesday in bed and this is still some of the most memorable sex I’ve had with her.

Next story – As some of you know, I used to be the art director for a major casino in Nevada. We had on two occasions a King of the Cage (UFC/MMA early incarnation) event there. In both instances the women in my department would go nuts over this. Most of these guys are in very good shape physically, but the fighting dynamic is what puts them into a real frenzy. These women would look forward for months to these events, not because of the sport of fighting, but their attraction to the personas of the fighters we did promos and PR with (“I’d jump so-and-so and do him all day, etc.”). Understand that none of these women had any idea of what these guy’s personalities were like, they just lusted after the idea of what they were.

At the last event, a group of guys who were the boyfriends of a few of these women, went to the King of the Cage matches, and got into a street fight in the parking lot later after the event was over on their way back to their cars. When the girls related this story to the rest of us the next day, they emphatically decried how shocked and disappointed they were with their boyfriends for resorting to violence. They then began characterizing ‘men’ as just big children, and ‘brutish’ and ‘typical’.

Now, do you see the contradiction here? There is a definite sexual attraction to a man who can ‘handle himself’ by women. I don’t think I need to reiterate my posts on the attraction of the Alpha thug appeal. For the most part women will ardently deny this to no end so as not to seem to condone violence, while at the same time reward the man, the soldier, etc. who can take care of ‘business’ – who goes off to war – with her intimacy and sexuality so long as he fits her mental archetype of the guy who deserves it. Even if you disagree with this assessment, you have to see the paradox and the confusion it creates for a man. Be a gentleman, but don’t be a gentle man. And again, this all comes back to her intrinsic need for security and ‘strength’ in a man, while at the same time verbally denying she is attracted to it. Society tells her she should be disgusted with the man who punches the guy who disses her at the bar, but in practice, she takes the guy home and fucks his brains out or fantasizes about the hot fighter in the ring who would do the same.

A capacity for at least measured violence in a Man stimulates a woman’s desire of fantasy, sexual submission, physicality and security.

One thing I’ve learned about fighting is you don’t go looking for shit, because you’ll find it. Not only that, but if it seems like you’re looking for it, women think you’re an automatic asshole and/or are using that bravado as an overt message to directly to trigger this appeal for her. But if you’re careful, and the opportunity presents itself in such a way that you end up the hero, and whether or not you get your ass kicked, chicks will give it up faster than for any other reason or motivation. If your motives are even peripherally noble, the situation allows for indirect social proof and you actually have the confidence to put your face in the path of someone’s fist, regardless of circumstance or even the outcome nothing spreads a woman’s legs faster. However, you have to be seen as positive, not the aggressor.

Relationship Game – A Primer

I had a request from a comment thread to breakdown the function of Game within the confines of a marriage or LTR so at the risk of coming off as Athol on Married Man Sex I thought I’d elaborate a bit on maintaining a Game mindset into an LTR today.

Going Alpha

Before I dig in here I think it’s important to bear in mind that the principles of Game do not change in an LTR, only the context does. Every behavior set, every frame control tenet, every aspect of amused mastery and even PUAs skills like Cocky & Funny are all vitally necessary, if not more necessary in an LTR. One of the greatest failings married men begin their nuptials with is starting from a position of Betaness. I’ve encountered, and counseled, far too many men with the same story; they entered into their LTR or marriage from a default position of being the “supportive” submissive partner only to discover Game later in their relationship and then fight the very uphill battle of convincing their spouse that they’ve ‘genuinely’ experienced a radical shift in their outlook and personalities.

If all she’s ever known is the Beta you, convincing her you’ve gone Alpha is a tough road to hoe. An Alpha shift in an LTR is threatening to a woman who’s built a lifestyle around the predictability of the Beta guy she committed to. It stirs up the competition anxiety she’s been numbed to for a long time, and while that’s beneficial in prompting her genuine desire for you, it also upsets her sense of security. It’s for this reason that Beta men are reluctant to experiment with being more dominant; they carry over from their singlehood the same mistaken belief that women require comfort, familiarity and security in order to become intimate or “feel sexy”. They still fail to grasp, even in marriage, that sex by definition requires anxiety to be grounded in genuine desire. Sexual tension requires urgency.

So from the outset it’s important to acknowledge that going Alpha from a Beta default is going to require a measured, practiced effort. The ideal position is to begin an LTR from an incorrigible, irrationally self-confident, Alpha frame and encourage the belief in your partner that it was she who ‘mellowed’ you. It’s ingratiating and ego-flattering for a woman to believe that she has the capacity to charm the savage beast with her feminine wiles.

The Outline

If you are presently in an LTR, considering one or believe that you might be spinning a particular plate that may have that potential, I urge you to read through the Chateau’s 16 Commandments of Poon. This is one of Roissy’s seminal posts and should be required reading for every 18 year old young man upon graduating high school. This may seem like an odd place to begin relationship Game, but these tenets are not only the basis for good Game, but the foundations of a good, masculine primary LTR.

I’ll have been married for 16 years in July and in that time I can honestly say I’ve practiced every one of these tenets to varying degrees. However, I’ll focus on a few of the more contentious articles and explain the premises behind them:

II. Make her jealous
Flirt with other women in front of her.
Women don’t want a Man to cheat, but they love a Man who could cheat. Naturally you don’t want to appear to be seeking the flirtation – that would be OVERT – but rather playing along with it. I have encouraged or played along with casual flirtations with my wife present that leave her with the impression that other women find me desirable. When you’ve been together long enough and a strong emotional bond has formed, you will be surprised at how many shit tests and hypergamous evaluations you can avoid just by her perception of you being a commodity that other women are attracted to. Mrs. Tomassi has told me on at least a dozen occasions that she finds it flattering that other women would find me attractive. Always remember that your attractiveness to other women is an associative reflection on your spouse’s attractiveness to hold your sexual interest in the long term.

The trick to this is how you follow up after flirting. She has to be made to feel as though she’s still the one you choose to be with even though you have obvious, provable options. Women are always unconsciously evaluating the men they are with. Her self-worth is associated with his value. This is exactly why women in the stablest of relationships will still shit test. There are precious few ways for a Man in a long standing LTR to establish social proof and demonstrate higher value better than flirting, or reciprocating a flirt with other women. Nothing stimulates a tired LTR like suspicion and jealousy. Her Imagination is the most important tool in your DJ tool box. The hamster doesn’t stop spinning after marriage, but it’s incumbent upon you to make sure it keeps up the pace.

Far too many guys are too fearful to even attempt this because they subscribe to a scarcity mentality (see Rule 16)

This then dovetails nicely into,…

VII. Always keep two in the kitty
Never allow yourself to be a “kept man”. A man with options is a man without need.

I understand this may be a very tall order for most men, particularly those with scarcity mentalities. However, I would interpret this less as spinning plates while in an LTR and instead replace it with keeping your options open. One reason to flirt in front of your LTR is to establish the suspicion that you have those options, and then allay those fears. Again this goes back to being a man who could cheat, but chooses not to. Men think that their dependability and steadfastness makes for a sexualized woman – it doesn’t.

Particular to relationship Game is this idea: Never allow yourself to be a “kept man.” Don’t make the mistake that I’m promoting infidelity by this, but rather think of it as maintaining an ambient, unspoken cognisance that, while she is a compliment to your life, she is not the focus of it.

I’ll be very clear, I’ve never cheated on Mrs. Tomassi, but I do know I could be balls deep in pussy if we ever did split. I know this because I experience the receptiveness of women to whom I do flirt with. I realize this sounds like conceit, but even if I were completely in error about that receptiveness I do know I’m in better shape, have more Game and possess higher status and value than 90% of the men in my peer group. So keeping two in the kitty for me is knowing that I CAN generate options if necessary. This may or may not be your particular reality, but it needs to be your mental state.

V. Adhere to the golden ratio
Give your woman 2/3 of everything she gives you.

This isn’t hard once you internalize it. Too many guys think Game is a waste of time because it means a constant memorization of scripts and gestures that they can never hope to master in every situation for every eventuality. And they’d be right – if all they did was try to commit everything to rote memorization. But as any good teacher will tell you, that’s not learning. Once the golden ratio becomes part of who you are it’s effortless and becomes your default response. Remember this is an outline. I don’t think aloud to myself “hmmm, well Mrs. Tomassi gave me 3 kisses this morning, I must remember to give her only 2 when I get home from work.” It’s an outline for a principle that you need to get the ‘feel’ for. The point isn’t trying to keep some scorecard of tit for tat exchanges. The effect you’re establishing is,..

it establishes your greater value by making her chase you, and it demonstrates that you have the self-restraint to avoid getting swept up in her personal dramas. Refraining from reciprocating everything she does for you in equal measure instills in her the proper attitude of belief in your higher status.

All the bleating sounds popularized by the post-Wall demographic of women about how there are precious few available men with the capacity to Man-Up and be the high status Men they’re entitled to find their root in this principle. For all the ramblings of the equalists they still betray their true desires in their own complaints – women DEMAND a man of higher status than themselves.

I add this at the end of this primer to address the criticism that will inevitably follow; “So, a wife should just be your doting slave then Rollo?” No, and neither should a man be his wife’s self-convinced slave. If you get anything from my blog it should be this – I am always focused on the Desire Dynamic. A slave might behave in ways that please you, but you cannot negotiate genuine desire, nor can you extort genuine desire. Freewill is an interesting topic, especially in terms of intergender relations, but understanding the dynamics that promote genuine, unobligated desire is paramount to a good relationship.

Free Lunch

“Rollo talks a lot about shaming tactics from women, and one I’m hearing now is that if the man doesn’t pay for the date, he is actually being feminine and passive, and is attracting more masculine, ball-busting like girls because he’s giving his role of pursuer up, and feminine women will be repelled by men who don’t pay for their drinks/dinner/dates etc.

To me, it just sounds like women being afraid of losing an advantage they’ve always had, free stuff.

How do you see it? First date is coffee, do you pay for that? Does she pay for her own? Do you look cheap if you buy that first cup? Do you look needy if you buy that first cup?”

Law 40: Despise the Free Lunch
What is offered for free is dangerous— it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price— there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.

Read this again, what has worth is worth paying for. The feminization of culture has simultaneously distorted the formality of a man paying for a date into a form of masculine control while still being a required masculine obligation. It’s a Catch 22 – screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t, and there are two conflicting perspectives for this.

As I’ve expressed on a few occasions; as a man in this life, you will ALWAYS pay for sex in one form or another. That may be buying coffee, drinks, dinner, a concert ticket, a wedding ring or a mortgage payment, but always trust that there is going to be a cost associated with you and sex. Whether it’s with your nebulous ‘Quality Woman’ or the prostitute you picked up off the Trail for half an hour – you’re going to pay.

The second perspective is the ‘Chivalry’s not dead’ approach. Nothing has served the feminine imperative better over the years than to convince the male populace at large that it’s his codified moral obligation to prove his provisioning capacity to her in an effort to qualify for her intimacy. This point of view has had a long history of perpetual requisites for a man, but the holdover, and starting point today is paying for the drinks / date / etc based on a traditional, gender specific, obligation.

In light of that, if it makes you feel a sense of completed duty in paying for a woman’s drinks / meal, then by all means continue to do so, but not because a woman’s convinced you of a moral obligation. My approach is to recognize this ‘tradition’ for what it really is. You’re a Man. Men of power despise a free lunch; not from business associates and certainly not from a woman he intends to make his pleasure.

What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit.

You also stay clear of obligation. There can never, and will never, be an egalitarian equality between the sexes: we are different. The good news is this is the way women want it in spite of their feminization conditionings. Covertly, women want a Man who initiates, approaches, drives, and yes, pays the tab. However, when overtly pressed about ‘paying her way’, she is forced into a position of denying this because her conditioning has taught her “she is her own person” and the expectations of her day say she should at least pay half, not be afraid to approach a man, initiate a date herself, etc. Make Sadie Hawkins proud.

These are masculine expectations, and much like the “virtues” of the professional woman, feminine masculinization conditions her to equate her value on masculine terms, while still being a woman. The fallacy being that a Man ‘should’ be attracted to the same masculine traits she finds attractive. And predictably, innate gender nature continues to contradict this.

So yes, pay for the drinks, date, etc., just know what you’re paying for. What has worth is worth paying for – is she worth the payment? You are the Prince, your attentions have value, does she appreciate them? Have a plan, make the decisions, direct the course of the date. If she’s unresponsive or only luke warm in her reciprocation – NEXT! Hypergamy makes ALL women opportunists by order of  degree; accept that, it’s simply how the world works. Golddiggers are women who overtly acknowledge this opportunism in word and behavior; they’re not too hard to recognize if you want to see them.

You’ll know more about her the morning after you bang her brains out than you ever will on a casual, comfy dinner date.

I want you to want me

,..but, Rollo I want it to be because of who I am, not what I can pay for.

This is an uncomfortable truth, and a lot of guys don’t like to hear it, but your capacity to pay is PART of who you are.

Your accomplishments, your career, your passions, your aspirations, your physique, are all PART of you. There are parts of you that are more attractive than others, but the sum is what makes you who you are. There was a thread on the SoSuave forum a week ago regarding career choices and how this relates to life and women etc. I realize this may be an unpopular opinion on this, but what you choose to do as a vocation is part of who you are. It may not be your source of personal identity, but for better or worse, your vocation and it’s associations become a part of your identity. It’s similar to how you look physically is part of you. It’s a comfortable fiction to think that women are less interested in a man’s physique, or should be attracted to a guy unbiased by what he does – but these are all part of a whole.

Egalitarian Equalism is self-defeating; it leaves a vaccuum of power or responsibilities to be filled by either sex in the wrong instances; for instance, expecting a man to possess the equitable feminine qualities he’s lacking yet still holding him accountable for them. In other words, if a wife feels her husband is incapable of providing for her and the kids with the decisive, confident security of leadership she will feel compelled to assume the role of the husband and he will be relegated to the role of being the passive, submissive wife. In the egalitarian model this is acceptable, socially reinforced and passed on as learned behavior to their children. And in this generation (and perhaps the one prior) it’s not a stretch to assume that contemporary male submissiveness was in fact taught to them by their own parents.This may seem like I’m being overly analytical, but look at this framework from the perspective of paying for a date / drinks / events etc. from the beginning stages of an LTR or even just spinning a plate. This egalitarian model has filtered into the male social identity to the point that a guy thinks it common place for a woman to initiate and approach him with a date proposition. He thinks it normal for a woman to want to pay the tab, open doors for him, etc. These are traditionally Men’s behaviors that AFCs believe women think are empowering and attractive in women.

Your Grandfather never pondered whether he or your then-to-be Grandmother would get the bill; it wasn’t even an afterthought. He payed the tab and Grandma was appreciative. And that’s what’s at issue – appreciation. Feminization has stacked the deck against a guy to the point where he questions a woman’s motives. Does she appreciate his generosity or does she feel entitled to it?

Why Marriage Needs Men

I’d very much like to leave religion, at least in the organized sense, as a topic for another blog, however, as it applies to Game and intergender social dynamics it’s occurred to me that this isn’t entirely possible. Since its inception the SoSuave community has had a strict policy against threads specifically exploring religious topics. For obvious reasons these tend to get rather heated in terms of discussing theology, and most simply devolve into flame wars with no real purpose. Yet, in terms of how religion and moralism apply to the intergender landscape and sexual marketplace, I think it does a disservice to a fuller understanding of how the sexes relate to one another. In my tenure as a SoSuave forum moderator it pains me to have to delete so many promising threads because the topic strayed form “Game and religion” into “My God can beat up your God.” So my disclaimer for this blog is this; any time I delve into the subject of religion, moralism,  ethics or anything that might be construed as esoterically inspired, understand that I do so in an effort to address how it influences the social dynamics between genders. Never is it an attack on individual beliefs, rather consider it a critical analysis of how those beliefs interact with the reality we live in.

Why men need marriage.

Today’s topic article comes to us courtesy of Pastor Mark Driscoll. I briefly touched upon Driscoll’s pollyanna, socio-religious propositions in Could a Man Have Written This? and reference him in Build a Better Beta. Driscoll’s article, while ostensibly written to advertise his latest book, is really an essay in irony. This irony is literally written into the article’s title, and I’m certain that Mark is entirely oblivious to it. You can go ahead and read his very simplistic overview of modern gender relations; it will scarcely impress all but the most green of noobs in the manosphere that Driscoll is firmly planted in the world created by the feminine imperative. Even in just asserting ‘men need marriage’ we get an appetizer of the gruel of male shaming yet to be served. Sadly, he’s not covering any new ground that Kay Hymowitz and the bleatings of Kate Bollick haven’t already beat him to the punch with.

I don’t think I need to go in to too much detail about Driscoll throwing rocks at the moon to make it go away. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Game can see him for what he is. My concern is that HE doesn’t see himself for what he is. I’m concerned because I think his head is in the right place, but he so lacks any real-world experience with the sexual marketplace that he’s unaware of his participation in promoting a world view he’d otherwise be adamantly opposed to. Driscoll shares in the major failing of Social Conservatives in terms of understanding Game; they are the unwitting instruments of the feminine imperative.

Driscoll’s intent is to see men returned to some semblance of traditional masculinity, with all the benefits and liabilities that antiquated romanticism implies, but he employs the chief ideologies and tools of the feminine imperative to do so. The shaming conventions, implied lethargy, shirking of male-attributable responsibilities, et. al. he uses are the same clichés the feminine imperative has established as the articles of Man-Up! 2.0. Mark is blissfully unaware of the Male Catch 22:

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.

Mark Driscoll’s presumptive starting point is putting men in the subservient role, while expecting them to Man-Up, take control, and be better men all with the idealized goal of becoming more appropriate, more suitable men for women. Marriage is the goal and the cure to prolonged adolescence – in other words better serving the feminine imperative qualifies men to be adults. From Could a Man have Written This?:

In girl-world, what directly benefits women necessarily is presumed to benefit men, so what we’ll see is a new wave of [female] bloggers bastardizing the world-worn ideas that the manosphere has put together and repackaging it in a female context. It’s Man Up 2.0; make a token push to “re-empower” men just enough for them to idealize the romanticism of the responsibilities required for living up to women’s expectations.

Without an afterthought Driscoll titles his diatribe “Why Men NEED marriage” with the presumption that getting married will force men to Man-Up. This is the extent of his critical thought, because he has no realistic frame of reference beyond what his self-righteous Matrix-think conditioning will permit. He’s batting for Team Woman (not unlike another infamous female blogger), but would have us believe it’s for our own good.

Sanitizing Game

Recently there’s been an upswing in a social conservative push to ‘sanitize’ Game; essentially taking the drive and principles of the manosphere and converting them to fit into their doctirnal narrative:

A major illustration of this can be found in the ‘late-to-the-party’ resurgence of masculine ideals in mainstream evangelical christianity today. Like so much else in christian culture, they’re happy to use the popularity of a secular phenomenon and repackage it as kosher, the manosphere is no exception. Hacks like Mark Driscoll and more than few other “relevant” new order evangelical pastors have co-opted manosphere (MRA?) fundamentals – even ‘purified’ forms of Game – as their particular cause du jour for returning men back into their roles of accountability to the female imperative. This of course has an overwhelming appeal to White Knight prone guys, but the push is disingenuous for the same reason ‘pro-men’ female writers are – they still use the girl-world, female imperative rule book to define their outlook.

Rediscovering masculinity is the new black in ‘relevant’ church. It sells very well, and in and of itself it’s not too dissimilar from the perspectives of the manosphere about owning your gender. The similarities end in the application. While it maybe cathartic to beat your chest and pretend to fight like a UFC fighter at some ‘christian’ men’s weekend (evangelicals men have inexplicably embraced MMA fighting in the last 5 years), the takeaway message is still one of apologizing for their testosterone. They can only own their masculinity insofar as it doesn’t upset the feminine imperative.

Never take dating advice, or really any opinion of intergender relations seriously when it’s coming from moralistic guys who’ve never had the benefit of past, first hand experience with women. Evangelical understanding of gender relations is based only upon a very insular and anachronistic perspective. Consequently, what constitutes their understanding is derived from living vicariously through their unchurched friends, romantic comedies, reading statistics that agree with their perspective, all in an effort to make themselves feel better about having married the first girl they met at church camp.

Driscoll is a fantastic illustration of a guy who’s been entirely out of touch with the social changes and the sexual marketplace since he got married.

***

For further reading Dalrock has an excellent breakdown of this article here.

The Curse of Jung


The sexual revolution represents a far more significant turning point in human events than I think most people living post-sexual revolution will ever fully appreciate. I was born after it, and I would presume most of the influential participants involved in our current gender discourse today were also products of a post sexual revolution acculturation. The vast majority of authors dutifully typing away on both manosphere and feministing blogs are, for the better part, results of the social-gender restructuring that occurred in the late 60s. With this in mind I think it’s important to reflect on the era prior to this to really grasp the significance of that change, and to understand how we’ve come to take certain aspects of our new gender reality as simply matter of fact. It’s hard to believe there was a time when we didn’t need to ask why men were Men.

1950

A lot of critics of really anything pro-masculine today will always fall back on the canard that the ‘misogynist’ author would “love to return to the 1950’s”. The epithet “misogynist” is as useful as “homophobe” for the same reason that it’s an easy throw-away label to help disqualify a dissenting point of view. If it’s hurtful or forces critical thinking that challenges an ego investment it’s far easier to categorize the offender as holding to outdated modes of thinking. Make your opponent’s views an anachronism and your perspective appears more valid simply because it seems the more novel and developed. But were the 1950’s some gilded age of masculism? What about the 30’s or 40’s, or even the 19th century? Feminists and feminized men fondly resurrect the specter of the 1950’s as if the decade were some apex turning point in women’s enslavement; like the Hebrews under Pharaoh’s yoke yearning for the promised land. All the men who held any sway over society are caricatures of white, middle class boors – more Archie Bunker than Ward Cleaver, but even Ward’s benevolence and bearing would be suspect of passive-aggressive patriarchy.

What’s tragic in this silly dismissal of a masculine mindset is that it presumes any man in this, or the past three generations could ever have any realistic frame of reference for life in the 1950’s. This is doubly true for contemporary women using this shaming association, but in recognizing this we have to open up a new pandoras box. What else is the feminine imperative using (deliberate or unconsciously) as “common sense” to rise to prominence?

Modern feminist understanding of gender, and really our feminized society as a whole, is based to it’s very foundations on an anachronism even more outdated than some mythologized chauvinist era when “men had it so good, while women were their doting, unwitting slaves.”

The Curse of Jung

I go into a lot of detail describing feminine social conventions on this blog. Some people think it’s unfair to target just female conventions; there are after all many other social conventions that apply to men as well. I’d agree with this of course, and besides this blog’s focus being given to the social/psychological aspects of Game,  those male conventions have already been (and still are) the subject of, literally, centuries of analysis and scrutiny. However, I’m going to focus on one to illustrate the progression of  the cultural shift that was prompted by the sexual revolution.

Among the many archetypically masculine traits is a man’s reservations of emotion. For various biological and neurological reasons, men are the more rational of the sexes. This isn’t to deny them an emotional element. Indeed I’ve described men as the true romantics, however, classically men have to a better degree than women, been the more reserved gender when it comes to expressing emotion. What I’ve just described here is one of the base tenets of Carl Jung’s school of psychological theory. It’s kind of ironic that Freud would be so vilified by modern feminism, yet find his protege Jung would contribute so much to the fundamentals of the feminization of society.

One of the key elements Jung introduced into western culture’s popular consciousness is the theory of anima and animus; that each individual, irrespective of sex, possesses greater or lesser degrees of association and manifested behavior of masculine and feminine psychological affiliations. In 2012, when you hear a 6 year old girl tell a 6 year old boy “you need to get in touch with your feminine side” in order to get him to comply with her, you can begin to understand the scope to which this idea has been internalized into societies collective consciousness. So long and so thoroughly has this theory been repeated and perpetuated that we can scarcely trace back it’s origins – it’s simply taken as fact that men and women possess varying degrees of masculine and feminine energies. First and second wave feminism founded their psychological premises of gender on Jung’s ideas and so evolved the reasonings for a push towards the social feminization we know today. The seeds for the feminine-centrism we take for granted today were planted by a Swiss psychiatrist in the early 1900’s.

Whether or not there’s merit to Jung’s ideas, there’s little doubt of the impact they had on fem-centrism. Early feminists saw Jung’s theory as the perfect springboard to further a pretense of ‘gender equality’; thus making individual gender balance (i.e. androgyny) a new idealized goal state. Men simply needed to be perfected by exploring their ‘feared’ feminine natures, and women needed to be allowed the opportunity and freedom to masculinize themselves in order to perfect that androgynous balance. Introduce convenient, feminine controlled hormonal contraception and viola, gender equalism was born.

Dangerous Thoughts

I’m going to introduce a radical thought into the gender landscape that’s been manicured by the feminine imperative and Jungian theory for so long; what if it’s a good thing Men should be masculine and women should be feminine? What if it’s beneficial to our species survival that our very biologies are complimentary to our gender? What if we should be teaching our boys to get in touch with their masculine sides? What if gender is actually more nature than it is nurture? What if Jung got it wrong and we’ve allowed the feminine imperative to standardized our perceptions of gender for over a century based on an incorrect presumption?

The prevailing feminist wisdom clings to the Jung inspired notion that gender is a just social creation and one that sustains a Patriarchal hierarchy. All we need do is dress our children in as neutral an environment as possible and society will progress towards a more idealized, more humane, androgynous norm. But this is counter to the new data we find with ever increasing regularity, both in clinical studies as well as a better scientific understanding of neurology and endocrinology and their relation to sexuality and gender identity. In the early 1900’s Jung lacked even a fraction of the knowledge we’ve studied and proved about the human animal in 2012. In addition to this we have over 100 years of advances in fields of psychology that didn’t even exist in Jung’s time. We’ve seen the social impact of over 40 years of feminized Jungian theory – are we seriously going to continue this ideology, oblivious to the long outdated legacy it has on contemporary culture? Are we going to allow the originator of Beta Game to continue defining what constitutes masculinity and femininity in our society?