Positive Masculinity

As most of my readers know I have my third book in the Rational Male series coming up soon (very soon, promise). When I began this new book I had an initial working title – The Rational Male, The Red Pill – however, as I progressed I shifted this to Positive Masculinity. I spoke briefly about this in my last two interviews, but there came a point in my compiling, writing and editing where I’d taken a different path in the purpose of the new book. Where I had wanted to explain and / or defend the initial, intersexual, definition of what the term ‘Red Pill‘ has increasingly been distorted away from, I found myself leaning more into expressing ways in which this Red Pill awareness could benefit men’s lives in many ways in and apart from intersexual dynamics.

I’d hit on this in my Red Pill Parenting series from a couple years ago and I knew I wanted to revisit and make that series a prominent part of the book. As it sits now, it accounts for a full quarter of the book’s content, but as I moved into my writing more I decided that the best way to really define ‘The Red Pill” as I know it was to go into the various ways men might benefit from redefining masculinity for themselves in a conventional, Red Pill aware sense.

When I finished the parenting section I realized that I was really laying out general, if not prescriptive, ideas for ways men might better raise their sons and daughters in a feminine-primary social order that’s determined to condition them. My purpose with both the series and section was to equip fathers with Red Pill aware considerations in making their sons and daughters Red Pill aware themselves in order to challenge a world that increasingly wants to convince us that fathers’ influence is superfluous or dangerous.

It was from this point that I’d made a connection; what I was doing was laying out a much-needed reckoning of sorts with regard to what conventional, positive masculinity might mean to future generations of Red Pill aware men. Since my time on the SoSuave forums and the inception of this blog I’ve used the term positive masculinity. I’ve even had a category for it on my side bar since I began too. From the time I began writing I’ve always felt a need to vindicate positive, conventional masculinity and separate it from the deliberately distorted “toxic” masculinity that the Village of the Feminine Imperative would have us believe is endemic today.

In Vulnerability I described this deliberate, but calculated, confusion thusly:

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.

From my very earliest writing I’ve always seen a need to correct this intentionally distorted perception of masculinity with true, evolved, biologically and psychologically inherited aspects of conventional masculinity.

As you may guess this isn’t an easy an task when a Red Pill man must fight against many different varieties of this masculine distortion. We live in an age where any expression of conventional masculinity is conflated with bullying or ‘hyper-masculinity‘. The Blue Pill teaches that inherent strength ought not to be considered “masculine”, if a boy acts in a conventionally masculine way he’s to be sedated, and boys as young as four can decide their gender to the extent that doctors are chemically altering their physiologies to block hormones and transition them into (binary) girls.

To the Blue Pill Village, a definition of masculinity is either something very obscure, subjective and arbitrary or it’s something extraordinarily dangerous, ridiculous and toxic. As I said, even the most marginal displays of anything conventionally masculine are exaggerated as some barbaric hazing ritual or smacks of hyper, over the top displays of machismo. With so much spite arrayed against masculinity, and with such an arbitrary lack of guidance in whatever might pass for a form of masculinity that feminine-primary society might ever find acceptable, is there anything positive about the masculine at all?

There is only one conclusion we can come to after so much writing on the wall – there is a war on conventional masculinity that’s been going on in progressive western societies for generations now.

I found it very hard to describe what exactly a Positive Masculinity  might mean to Red Pill aware men. One of the more insidious ways that Blue Pill conditioning effectively neuters masculinity is in the recruiting of men to effect their own emasculation. Usually these men themselves have had no real guidance in, or embrace of, conventional masculinity precisely because this Blue Pill conditioning has robbed them of maturing into an understanding of it. Blue Pill fathers raise Blue Pill sons and the process repeats, but in that process is the insurance that Blue Pill sons are denied an education in what it means to be a man.

Thus, we get masculine apologists like The Good Man Project who think ‘real’ masculinity can be found in an egalitarian parity between men and women – rather than our evolved, complementary gender roles. This is a manifestation of years of gender-loathing indoctrination. If men would just apologize for their maleness and all the negative aspects that it’s characterized and defined by, all can be made well. These are the Nice Guys who are accused of using their niceness as a ploy to win over women’s sexual favor. These are the male feminists, who never acknowledge that they are, but who still place the “divinity of the feminine” above their own self-loathed gender identity.

Next we get the men who are all made of honorable intent. These are the guys for whom a rational, firm, no-nonsense appeal to a woman’s reason should be enough to not only convince her of his quality, but he expects her attraction to be based on it. These are largely Red Pill aware men who still hope that old books virtue is something they might parlay into some form of attraction with women.

These tend to be the long game kind of men. When a guy is given to aspirations of virtuousness-as-game they’re generally cut from Beta cloth. I’m very familiar with this from my younger days. I too believed in the Boy Scout 12 point law: a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. In and of themselves these are noble aspirations, and ones that an old books / old social contract rightly endorsed. The problem is that none of them translate into an ounce of arousal for women.

Dean Abbot tweeted this recently:

https://twitter.com/DeanAbbott/status/857236074493603841

I would argue that since the rise of our feminine-primary social order and the dissolution of the family in terms of conventional (and evolved) gender roles, even with a family, men have little idea of the impact their influence makes. As I’ve written before, women fundamentally lack the capacity to ever appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate a woman’s reality. Few, if any, women understand just how their lives are made possible by the ceaseless efforts men make directly or indirectly to ensure their safety, provisioning, security, ambitions and support. This is only exacerbated in a social order that entitles, coddles and overemphasizes women as the gender whose imperatives define our social context.

Family isn’t what defines men’s virtue or integrity, ideally it ought to be a result of it. However, I tend not to deal in “what ought to be” on this blog, I deal in what is. The fact remains that Virtue is only valued and estimated by men on an individual basis.

“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

A lot of well-meaning Red Pill aware men want the old order, old books noble aspects of men to have a reinvigorated worth today. As we make Red Pill awareness applicable in a broader perspective in men’s lives we get to an impasse over what a ‘legitimate’ use of that knowledge ought to be. I believe we get a couple of extreme positions in this respect. I touched on this in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaining 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.

I think it’s important that we not allow ourselves to fall into a similar trap with regards delineating what is appropriate use of the Red Pill advantage we have. This isn’t an endorsement for or against ethics in the Red Pill – I’ve already written that post – but it is to emphasize that I think objectivity should precede any pretense to what may or may not be on or off limits in Game or Red Pill awareness.

The Red Pill Moralist

On one end of the spectrum we get men who’ve accepted Red Pill awareness and the truths it presents as a guiding influence to varying degrees. I think it’s a mistake to think the Red Pill moralists are always an ‘Old Married Guy’ who wants to justify his decision to ‘do the right thing’ (no matter how disastrous his personal outcome may be). There are an increasing number of younger idealists who believe the Red Pill aware man has a civic duty to use that awareness in an ethical way that promotes the reinstitution of the conventional family. That may be a noble cause, but I don’t think it should be a straightjacket for Red Pill objectivity.

For the Red Pill Moralist, proper application of the Red Pill is to use that knowledge to vet women for a marriage suitability and a prospective family. With full knowledge of the inherent downsides and liability risks of modern marriage, the moralist takes it as his masculine duty now for the future to still assume the “sucker’s bet”. Needless to say this masculine social-sacrificial position seems more like men running back to the plantation of marriage for unresolved Blue Pill rationales, but I would argue that in a post-Red Pill awareness the belief is that a strong, dominant Red Pill aware Frame control can make the difference to offset the overwhelming risks. The core notion is that reestablishing the conventional family as a man’s civic duty warrants the almost certain prospect of a man’s own detriment.

The moralists have a tendency to disdain or moralize any other application of Red Pill awareness that would facilitate a self-serving or hedonistic purpose. Usually this comes after their living their own lives hedonistically, but also because they were “awakened while married” or just post-horrible divorce. This mirrors a Trad-Con position of encouraging men to “Man-Up” and volunteer for their own fleecing and disdaining the trappings of anything that doesn’t serve women’s imperatives for their own lives – but again as a kind of self-imposed noble duty of masculinity.

This is the flip-side of moralist’s position might be the self-serving use of the Red Pill solely for individual pleasure or gain. This is characterized by the PUA, Game-is-all, guy whose only purpose ends with himself. To the moralist, this use of Red Pill awareness is furthering the destruction of a family archetype that seems to be a solution to societal decay. The Rational Male comment threads are no stranger to the debates of PUAs whose pass or fail, Alpha or Beta benchmark for success rides on what would likely be considered sitting poolside while the world burns.

The last hurdle most men still refuse to get over is that they want women to meet them half way because, despite their Red Pill awareness, they still believe in egalitarian equalism. The most intelligent men still think that women use the same operating system that men do. They don’t, and that’s why these otherwise great men fail with regard to their approach to women. They believe women have the functional capacity to understand men’s motives as if they were any rational being’s motives and agree and comply with them. They simply do not, but unlearning the programming that women should have the capacity to reach some mutually acceptable bargain between men and women’s sexual imperatives is something intelligent men can’t seem to factor.

In Moral to the Manosphere I wrote this:

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should’ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. If you think it means something more, then that’s your own subjective perspective – even in marriage there’s ‘maintenance sex’ and there’s memorable, significant sex – but it’s a mistake to think that the totality of the physical act must be of some cosmic significance.

It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.

While I do think that whatever becomes the Red Pill family unit needs to have some structure similar to that of conventional gender roles, I think it’s important to understand that the new Red Pill ‘family’ will live or die by men’s capacity to accept and apply their awareness of intersexual dynamics. This is one very important difference between an idealized, pre-sexual revolution family and what will evolve in a post-feminist social awareness.

Pickup, Game, really the use of any aspect of Red Pill awareness that isn’t bent to the reconstitution of what I assume would be a Red Pill family unit, is an illegitimate use in the moralist perspective. I think this also goes too far in that Red Pill awareness shouldn’t be limited to what anyone might consider a pro-social purpose for it. Much of what I go into in the parenting section of the new book centers strongly on a man, a father, a husband applying his broader understanding of intersexual dynamics to create a better marriage and family for himself; but I think it needs to be said that all of that Red Pill awareness comes to those men courtesy of the hedonists who wanted to simply crack the code of how to get laid. Too much of either will lead to an imbalance.