Psychology

Old Lies

Apparently no one has bothered to let this poor sap (I don’t know who he is) know that the “Toxic” masculinity  narrative has now been replaced with “masculinity is toxic“. I find it interesting that when it comes to the mainstream societal understandings of what masculinity once was and what it is now – or what the mainstream believes it should be now – much of these interpretations are based on fanciful, anachronistic, ideas of what contributed to our understanding of masculinity now. I’ve gone into my own definitions of what constitutes ‘conventional’ masculinity for men many times before so I won’t belabor it now, however, as the popular narrative changes I’ve noticed some very common presumptions that masculinity critics like to use and are repeated over and over.

The first of these, and the most common, is the deliberate misconception that a boy’s learning to be masculine never left the 1950-60s. In the wake of the Nikolas Cruz shooting this rationale surfaced quite a bit. It still is. The idea is that boys are born as these tender, delicate souls, all naturally ready to emote and sensate like precious little girls – that is until the nebulous evil ‘patriarchy’ gets ahold of them and batters them into “being tough”, not crying and told to stop being such pussies. This is the old anachronism that presupposes western society never left the ‘macho tough guy’ preconditioning of boys to raise them to be these future murderers, wife beaters and misogynists.

This is, of course, the “boys are broken” narrative I addressed in Good Humans. It’s kind of ironic when you think that this narrative would have us believe boys naturally wanting to be boys is a net social negative and it takes some strong intervention in their upbringing to turn them into good humans. So what is it? Are boys being their natural selves by wanting to be rambunctious, risk taking, shit-giving, masculine boys, or are they naturally these tender little emo-beings coming fresh out of the womb only to have their ‘genuine’ sensitive emotional souls crushed by “hyper-masculine” fathers, male teachers and school coaches. This is one of the more stupid, but deliberate, paradoxes the Village and the Feminine Imperative conveniently switch between as circumstances require yet one more anti-masculine response.

Lies for Boys

You can see this confusion in the above Tweet.

Our society teaches boys to “toughen up”.

Actually no, the feminine-primary social order that has been systematically feminizing boys into feminine-identifying men for the past 50 years does nothing of the kind. Since the mid-seventies the cultural narrative took a hard turn to the feminine-correct in raising boys into pacified ‘harmless’ men. We’re going on five generations of telling boys it is incumbent upon them to get in touch with their mythical feminine sides if they want to evolve beyond ‘traditional masculinity’. There is no ‘toughening’ being taught to boys in a female primary education system that teaches boys in a manner that presumes they are defective girls.

…which is okay, but not okay when “toughening up” also means suppressing feelings.

Feelings are perhaps the only thing boys are being taught to prioritize in their feminine-primary educations today. This fact deserves a bit of explanation here. Male and female humans process emotions differently. Women in particular process negative emotions in a much different way than men. Men tend to prioritize information through a filter of rational discernment first and then sort out how they feel about that information in an emotional context. Women are much the opposite; girls process information through an emotional filter first and then sort out what the information actually means to them (and after that, how it might affect others). If this sounds like the essays I’ve written about how men’s and women’s communications methods differ you’re not too far off. Men prioritize the content (information) of a conversation while women prioritize the context (the feels she gets) from a conversation. This is how our brains work, and when one method isn’t socially favored above the other both methods can be complementary to the other.

But in a feminine-primary social order this is not how things work. As I mentioned, for the past 50+ years our educational system has shifted to favor the learning methodologies of girls at the expense of boys. This ‘girls style’ teaching has been the standard for so long now that we largely take it for granted that it is the only correct style of teaching. Today, men account for less than 25% of all teachers in the United States. In the UK it’s 25% and n Canada only 17% of elementary school teachers are male. Teaching is a female dominated profession and especially for younger kids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers, are men. How do you think stats like these affect the learning methodologies applied to boys and girls?

Yet still this lie that boys are the victims of some overwhelming toxic masculinity in their upbringing is the first reflexive explanation we hear from women and feminized men when a kid commits a criminal act. Why?

Lies for Equalism

Because it sounds right. It sounds like it should be right. The presumption is that boys are, in fact, girls; or at least they should be a functional equivalent of girls when it comes to educations. Over the past 50 years the baseless presumptions of blank-slate egalitarian equalism has not only inserted its lies into our social consciousness, but also into our presumptions about educating kids. I’ll repeat, men and women are biologically and psychologically different and boys and girls are equally different. The ways they learn are distinct to their sex. Yet for the past 4 generations egalitarian equalism has convinced (mostly female) educators that boys and girls are functional equals and gender differences are learned rather than innate.

While equalism informs (mostly female) teachers that boys and girls are the same, the teaching methodology that works best for girls and women is the predominant one today and for the recent past generations. The only way to justify this method as the universal one is to presume that boys are the same as girls – just ‘defective’ girls that must be taught to quash their innate maleness. If boys and girls are presumed to be blank-slate equals then it must follow that boys are just as emotion-prioritizing and sensitive as any girl, and it is through a process of an imagined patreo-misogyny social conditioning that boys psychologically cover over their “true” natures – that of precious little (defective) girls. In essence the equalist belief is that all babies are born as little equal blank-slates, but the ideal template for those blank-slates is a female nature irrespective of the sex of the child.

When a boy’s real, masculine, inborn nature expresses itself the first thing it meets in this equalist-but-feminine-primary education is derision and shame. For as much as boys would be boys they are taught that they aren’t good for being so. They’re encouraged to self-repress, self-deprecate their gender and self-police their brothers. They’re taught that the correct way to think is to emote like girls because that’s correct for the template of a “good human”. Despite the female-centric teaching boys innate nature still find ways for boys to be boys and when this happens an egalitarian (feminine-primary) social order presume the ‘bad behavior’ must be the result of the influence of an evil patriarchy that truly hasn’t existed in the way they believe it does for 50 some odd years.

 

As I’ve detailed in past essays, society only sees fathers as tolerable and superfluous when it comes to raising boys. Single mothers are celebrated as super-human and in the equalist lie that would have us believe that women can not only ‘have it all’ but they can ‘do it all’ we rarely question the necessity of a masculine influence in a child’s life. We give it lip service and parrot back the need for a man to “step up and take responsibility as a parent”. The message to dads is always “do better”, because the pretense for fathers is that they are inherently irresponsible and ‘broken’ just like all boys are.

The Village might even concede that a father is some advantage to a child, but ultimately he’s superfluous – that is until that kid is involved in some kind of criminality. Then the questions become “Where was this kid’s father? Why wasn’t he around to teach this kid some discipline and respect for human life?” The children of single mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be come involved in criminality, but we don’t look at her half-measure parenting as a possible cause. Remember, she’s a super-hero and blameless, so any blame for this kid’s acts fall on the shoulders of a weak or absent father. Then fathers are necessary. Then the kid needed to ‘toughen up’ and dad should’ve taught it to him. And all of this comes full circle and feeds into the idea of father’s inherent incompetence again.

Lies for ‘Defective Girls’

The next lie is that boys can be,…

…both tough and fragile, vulnerable and resilient. Being vulnerable doesn’t affect your manliness.

I’ve written a lot about the lie of transvaluation and  Vulnerability in the past, but this was really in terms of how women perceive men and require strength and dominance. Another aspect of masculinity that is encoded into women’s mental firmware is to seek out men with superior competency. A woman just is, a man must become is the first maxim of a man accepting his Burden of Performance. Part of this masculine competency involves strength, know-how and determination; all things that have been replaced with feminine-primary emotionalism and naval gazing for boys.

Men are expected to know how to do everything and what they do not know, what they are not competent in is one criteria of how they are judged by women. A lot of guys might think, “So the fuck what? I don’t base my self-worth on the opinions of women.” As well you shouldn’t, but it doesn’t change the truth that if you don’t know how to change a tire when you get flat, or you need another man who does know how to do it to change it for you, a woman sees you as less competent – and by extension less capable of providing her with the security she needs from a masculine ideal. Women evolved to see men as a Jack of all trades, master of some.

A man’s vulnerability (taught to him as a child by his female-primary teachers) most definitely affects his manliness. Vulnerability is, by definition, a weakness. It is a flaw in the design, a chink in the armor and vulnerabilities will be exploited by enemies and rivals to ensure that man fails while a stronger one succeeds in all things. This is Darwinism so simple that to question it seems illogical, but in our equalist utopia toughness and fragility find no contradiction; vulnerability and resilience are bed partners. Again, we must consider that this illogical balance can only exist in the female ‘good human’ template and the idea that everything is learned and nothing is innate about male and female humans. Promoting the idea that ‘vulnerability doesn’t affect manliness’ presumes that the person declaring it is in some way an authority on a manliness that has been already demonized and conditioned out of our boys today.

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. A kid like Nikolas Cruz was bound to happen in a world that teaches boys to prioritize feelings above rationality. He was taught like a defective girl. He never learned the masculine inspired discipline, determination and resiliency because all that conflicts with the lie that vulnerability is ever a strength. All that conflicts with his feminine-primary upbringing.

As such, these ‘defective girls’ are unequipped to handle the rejection of a girlfriend. The participation trophy generation, the one where everyone’s a winner and no one ever has to deal with defeat, never teaches these ‘defective girls’ what to do when they finally do taste a bitter defeat. They never learned how to come back from it because that would mean admitting that vulnerability and emotionalism (the female-correct way to handle it) are in fact weaknesses. So, predictably, a ‘defective girl’ like Nikolas Cruz does what any petulant teenage girl would – he has an emotional outburst. Only his outburst consists of gunning down 17 kids with an assault rifle.

The answer to incidents like this doesn’t lie in gun control or further feminization of boys. It lies in reimagining how we educate boys and how we see masculinity as a net positive that can deter exactly this kind of emotional outburst. If you truly want these shootings to stop it’s time we embrace real men teaching real toughness and resilience in our boys. It’s time we teach boys like they will become tough, strong, invulnerable young men we may need to provide future generations with a much needed security. And the time where we’ll need them is coming faster than anyone today really thinks.

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.

 

Submission

When I was talking with Anthony Johnson last week we came upon a topic I’m not sure I’ve adequately detailed before. That is the topic of submission in a relationship. One of the more hotly debated subjects I hear and read coming from evangelical Christian women is about a wife’s duty to submit herself to her husband. Anyone who’s familiar with my take on the state of the mainstream church and how feminism and feminine-primary doctrines have assimilated it can also understand why the topic of a wife submitting to her husband rubs many of them the wrong way.

My intent here isn’t dig into something that would be more aptly covered by Dalrock’s blog, but I begin my analysis of women submitting to men in a Biblical context because a wife’s submission to her husband, or in other cases a male family member, is something fundamental to Abrahamic religions. In the interests of social control women were simply told that it was God’s will that she submit to her husband and that was that. Granted, there were some stipulations to that submission for the man involved, but essentially the doctrine was one that placed a man and men’s decisions above that of a woman.

Naturally, Christian feminists and the Feminine Imperative the pervades the modern church (even amongst the men) want to dance around or prequalify this ‘commandment’ such as it is. It’s a very testy subject for a pastor or a speaker to consider because it risks alienating women in the church who for the better parts of their lives have been raised on the narrative of Fempowerment and equalism. It’s my belief that this part of doctrine is so troublesome due to the socialized want of an ideal equalism between men and women in the church.

From a male perspective, and for all of the secular influence of feminism in the church, men in the church have largely become men women simply aren’t comfortable submitting to. Issues of the church aside, women in general are ’empowered’ today to believe they can be self-sufficient and self-satisfied without any male influence. When we combine this ideology of female self-sufficiency with the sad (and ridiculed) state of what passes for masculine identity it’s easy to see that the 80% Beta men in society aren’t men any woman’s hindbrain is going to register as someone she can submit herself to.

When a woman submits herself to a man it reinforces the idea that her doing so is imparting him with something of value. Very few women can completely submit themselves to a man’s authority. I overheard a conversation between a mother and her adult daughter once. They were discussing the details about how and why she decided to marry her father. The adult daughter was dating and Mom was offering her matronly wisdom. In the course of the conversation it was apparent to me that although she’d been married for almost 25 years Mom was an Alpha Widow. What she said to her daughter was interesting, she said, “I love your Dad very much, but there are parts of me he will never know.”

What she was saying is that, although her husband was a great guy, he wasn’t the guy who she could totally submit herself to. After 25 years of marriage she knew that he would never be the man to make her feel comfortable in total trust, but also he would never know the sides of her she keeps reserved (usually sexual) because he’s not the kind of man who can bring it out in her.

Much of the modern divorce-porn (Eat, Pray, Love) narrative centers on exactly this dissatisfaction in women. The hope that’s sold to women is that it’s not too late to divorce your boring husband and fly off to the Bahamas to meet the kind of guy whom she can completely submit herself to. Even if it’s never the case that she takes action on the fantasy the popularity of that fantasy speaks volumes about the state of women and their submitting to men.

In the manosphere we have a maxim that states women hunger after a dominant masculine man. It’s a Red Pill tenet that it’s exactly this masculine dominance that women want to submit themselves to. It’s a large part of what contributes to the tingle effect of women’s arousal, but masculine, confident dominance also stimulates the desire to submit herself to a man who will know how to take care of her and any potential kids. Just as there are two primary aspects of women’s Hypergamous filter, so too does masculine dominance attract and arouse both the short term sexual and long term provisioning aspects.

Why do women hate anal?

This was a question I saw posted on the Ask the Red Pill sub-forum on Reddit recently. Of course, you get the troll answers to it, but I stopped or a minute to consider why it was a woman would be so resistant to have anal sex with a guy. Some guys stated that their girlfriends were into it and obviously anal sex is a very popular niche in pornography. So it wasn’t so much that women hate anal as it is they only consider it with certain men.

Anal is about total submission to a man. It is all about his pleasure and her discomfort in the act. If that man isn’t 100% an ideal dominant Alpha to her, her sexual interest is mitigated by order of degrees. Her genuine desire to initiate sex, and her imaginativeness in sex, will be the metric by which you can judge where she perceives your sexual market value to be. It’s my belief that women’s sexual hesitancy with a man is inversely proportional to her subconscious appraisal of his sexual market value.

Women’s hindbrains will not allow them to submit totally to a man it perceives is less than Hypergamously optimal. Anal is one thing, but does she swallow, is she averse to your fluids (sperm and saliva), does she initiate, does she flirt with you, or is sex something you have to negotiate, make appeals to her comfort (mental satisfaction) or some non-sexual qualification? I got into this topic in Saving the Best, but was she a wild and fun lay back in her college days yet lack-luster in bed with her husband?

Submission by a woman to a man is a reflection of her hindbrain acknowledgement of that man’s SMV. I also explored this in detail in SMV Ratios & Attachment. The greater the disparity in SMV between a couple the more or less likely a woman is to partially or totally submit herself to him. In a modern equalist perspective men and women are conditioned to believe that all-is-one and men and women are no greater or lesser than another in all respects. The idea is that an SMV ratio of 1:1 makes for an ideal relationship. Naturally, I disagree with that assessment, but what equalists don’t like to consider is that there are categoric differences between men and women and one of those differences is that women want to submit to a worthy man’s direction and influence. This is an intrinsic gender difference that not only defines an individual personal relationship between women, but also on a larger societal scale. There are many sociological studies of “egalitarian” cultures where the populations still opt for gender normative roles. And even in sexually fluid relationships there is always a dominant and submissive partner.

It’s my belief that women can instinctively determine a man’s SMV within moments of meeting him. There’s an old saying that a woman knows within five minutes of meeting a guy if she’ll sleep with him. I disagree. I would say that a woman knows if she wont sleep with a man within five minutes of meeting him. That’s the key. Preselection and some other variables help, but her hindbrain knows the external cues and triggers. The more a man must sell himself as a potential sex partner is inversely related to a woman’s hindbrains instinctual uncertainty of his potential to satisfy her Hypergamy. In a nutshell, this is how women’s sexual filtering processes work in sexual selection.

Nature & Nurture

A man’s value to a woman is derived from both an evolved sensitivity to arousal cues, but is also influenced by her acculturation to perceive a man as attractive. Evolved cues are generally what women’s mental firmware make them physically respond to in arousal. It bears repeating here that arousal is not the same thing as attraction. The two sides of Hypergamy are looking for different (sometimes conflicting) aspects in a man. The first is short-term sexual, good breeding potential in a man. Ovulatory shift, visceral arousal and sexual urgency is what defines this side of Hypergamy. Submission comes easy for the right candidate in this sense, and it’s submission born of necessity. If a sexual partner’s investment is something she knows will be fleeting, there’s less to be concerned with in submitting to him and enjoying the experience.

On the other hand, there is also a learned aspect to attraction. There are learned social cues, status markers, cultural cues that imply a good potential for provisioning and parental investment. All this builds up to the attraction side of Hypergamy. For years the manosphere has raised awareness of the fact that women’s provisional side of Hypergamy is largely accounted for by social influences, a larger educational base, and programs that essential transfer men’s resources to women. We can add to this the break down of the conventional family and the disenfranchisement of men’s participation in it while still making them accountable to it and we can see how women’s primary focus in Hypergamy leans heavily to the side of short-term breeding opportunities (Alpha Fucks).

As such the short-term necessity for submission becomes something a woman sexualizes and conflates with that side of Hypergamy. There’s been an ongoing debate for years now about how a man earning less than his spouse is a recipe for divorce. Even though women have their provisioning needs met in various ways, the want, the expectation, is that a man’s long-term value is directly connected to his earnings, status and to a lesser degree his education. Since Hypergamy always seeks a better-than arrangement with regards to SMV, a woman’s capacity to submit herself to a man is bound by what she believes is her better-than due. That isn’t to say a man who excels in the Alpha Fucks side of things can’t maintain a woman’s complete submission to him. Good sex is still good sex, and it’s a strong glue for an otherwise imbalanced relationship, but when a woman bemoans the lack of any ‘good’ men to marry her, it’s this expectation by which she judges an acceptable man. Is he someone she can submit to.

Although the equalist boilerplate would have us believe that house-husbands are sexy and perfectly viable, the stats show that women don’t want to submit themselves to a man who earns less than her, is less educated and whose status is below what she believes her own is. If that sounds like a power struggle you’re not to far off. Equalism teaches women to resist submitting themselves, much less ever doing anything for men. Even the word “submission” sounds like slavery, but in spite of all that there is a root level desire to willingly submit themselves to a worthy man. Romance literature is rife with exactly this submission as its main formula.

“Hell Yes!”

When I was speaking with Anthony last week I answered a question regarding how men might determine the genuine desire of women they’re engaging. I mentioned the “Hell yes!” dynamic as one way. I believe it was Mark Manson who said whenever you propose a date or a drink or some other interaction with a woman the answer you’re wanting to hear from her is “Hell yes!” Whatever the proposition you make with a woman you want her to say “Hell yes I do!” Unsolicited enthusiasm is a very good sign from a woman, and one that can help you determine her genuine desire as well as her capacity to submit to you.

When you get this response from a woman it feels like it’s magic. It’s active anticipation and a real drive to submit. When I go into issues that deal with a man maintaining Frame much of that comes from a woman’s genuine desire to submit to that man’s authority. A woman’s got to submit in order to enter a man’s reality.

If we use the “Hell yes” response as the upper end of a woman’s interest, what follows from there is, by order of degrees, lesser interest. From the “Hell yes” on down any hesitancy on a woman’s part is lesser capacity to submit, all down to “Hell no”. It’s those in between degrees of interest that trip men up. They make poor decisions due to a woman’s Luke-warm desire. They keep driving at spiking interest, calibrating and then reassessing a woman that had only marginal desire for them. In itself this isn’t a bad thing, most PUA Game centers on this process, but it all has a purpose of arriving at a woman’s submission to Frame.

 

Sublimation

One question I was asked in my recent interview with Christian McQueen came from a read Cheryl:

Why don’t men find out a little info about the girl he’s going to have sex with?

Seems simple enough, right? I mean, hell, I got into all kinds of trouble for suggesting ways men might use in the vetting process of determining a woman’s suitability for a long term investment (however you want to define that). I can certainly understand the criticism. I seem to run into two extremes in this respect. On the one hand I get run up the flagpole for even suggesting men might qualify a woman for anything more than a pump & dump. The danger is too great and the more hardline MGTOW a guy might be, the more misleading he thinks my suggesting guys vet a woman is.

On the other extreme, there are the guys who tend to preemptively White Knight for themselves. In this perspective his standards (according his Red Pill awareness) require the utmost scrutiny for any woman to be considered worthy of his attention. In fact, just that he would consider a woman suitable ought to be flattering for her.

Now, those are two ends of the bell curve, but it’s the guys in the middle who, as Cheryl says, seem to give very little thought about a girl he wants to bang. This is a fairly innocuous question, but it has many answers.

First and foremost, it is biological. There are aspects about women that trigger a sexual response for men. We evaluate sexual potential and sexual availability of a woman all in a matter of seconds. He’s found out all he needs to know about a woman he wants to have sex with by whether or not he gets an erection with her. I think it was Roosh who dubbed this the boner test. In polite society this is the vulgar answer, but a man’s unconscious sexual response is the result of millennia of pragmatic and efficient evolution.

All sexual response in humans has evolved to be so autonomous you don’t notice it functioning in your mental processing. That’s one reason appealing to sexuality in commercial advertising is so reliable and ubiquitous – the response is always running as a background subroutine in our hindbrains. In our evolutionary past it served men best to hone their sexual evaluation and response to a woman within moments because anything less, any over-investment in that assessment, had the potential of his being killed by a rival for whom he might be competing with intrasexually.

Assessing sexual availability and suitability evolved to be an instantaneous and subconscious process for men because men also had the lowest investment requirement in reproduction. I often delve into explaining the mechanics of raw female Hypergamy on this blog, but it’s important to consider how women’s fundamental sexual strategy forces men’s own strategies to adapt. What we call ‘pump & dump’ now was a very pragmatic, often life-preserving reproductive strategy for men to follow in our prehistory. Since Estrus is largely concealed in human females it made sense for men to adopt a sexual strategy, and consequentially evolve a physical sexual response, based on immediacy.

Men’s sexuality is ‘always on’. Men are aroused sexually far quicker and with much less prerequisite cues and stimuli than are women. You have to work a woman up to sexual arousal. In some instances that may be an easy task (if the guy is an idealized Alpha for instance), but by comparison healthy men’s sexual response is far more responsive than that of women. You might think, “well duh, Rollo, everyone knows women need foreplay and an emotional kick (good or bad)”, but this is one of those “well duh” moments we need to review in order to understand why men don’t apply themselves more to sexual qualification of women.

Now carry this dynamic into the present. This immediate sexual evaluation and response  was a great evolutionary adaptation benefit for prehistoric men – assess it, hit it and run – but in today’s world, it’s largely a disadvantage because social and environmental conditions have changed. Our mental subroutines are the same our ancestors had, but the environment they evolved in is largely gone and forgotten. However, the vestiges of this evolution are something we need to contend with today. I think it’s ironic how ready we are to accept that our bodies process and prioritizes calories of certain foodstuffs as a result of how food scarcity in our evolutionary past made for a more efficient physical machine. Today, food is plentiful, but our physiology still processes food as if food was scarce. As a result we see epidemic obesity rates.

Mind Over Matter

That’s easy to understand, but what our social and physical conditions demand from us now is us exercising self-control over the consequences of those evolved vestiges. Largely we think a fat guy is weak for not having restraint with food and prioritizing exercise (and exercise he needed for survival in the past), but what we don’t like to accept is that our physical nature is what sets our operative conditions today.

We expect much of the same modern day self-control over our evolved sexual response too. The more noble, higher-order thinking aspects we value today are really mechanisms intended to sublimate evolved aspects of ourselves that used to be the most pragmatic and efficient means of solving the problem of reproduction and survival. Mind (or spirit) over matter doesn’t preclude the influences of these evolved motivators – nor does it (or should it) absolve men of consequences of his behavior.

In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.

Sigmund Freud believed that sublimation was a sign of maturity (indeed, of civilization), allowing people to function normally in culturally acceptable ways. He defined sublimation as the process of deflecting sexual instincts into acts of higher social valuation, being “an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life”. Similar views state that sublimation is when displacement “serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions”.

In short, sublimation is a result of restraining those evolved aspects of ourselves and channeling that motivation and impetus to other endeavors. I think one of the key understandings that Red Pill men need to grasp is how these underlying motivators operate in themselves as well as how they affect women. Game is greatly enhanced by a real good understanding of how a woman does or does not sublimate certain aspects of herself. In fact, I would argue that since the time of the Sexual Revolution, and the social unfettering of Hypergamy, women have systematically changed how they sublimate their evolved impulses. The rise of our feminine-primary social order has been molded by how women have been absolved of the consequences of realigning this sublimation, or unapologetically dropping it altogether.

Simultaneously, this social order has increased the liability for men who cannot or will not adopt the forms of sublimating their own impulses according to feminine-primacy. As you might guess, this coincides with the Male Catch 22, men’s Burden of Performance and men being held to old order social contracts while also being expected to respect new order social mandates. Men are held accountable for any marginal lack of self-control (sublimation of evolved imperatives), while women are socially absolved of, and sometimes rewarded for a lack of control over their Hypergamous impulses.

Roissy once stated that the goal of feminism is to remove all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality. How we reward and punish either sex’s capacity to sublimate their feral natures is how this is effected.

Devil in the Details

Yet the bewilderment persists, why don’t men vet the women they want to bang more? What the question presumes is men ought to have a capacity to sublimate their sexual desire in order to make better decisions for themselves. What the question presumes is men’s sublimation should align with the sexual strategies of women and to their ‘correct’ benefit. It also presumes women’s sexual strategies are in no way intended to confuse or capitalize on a man’s value to her. I don’t mention this to be mean or imply judgement, rather that arousal and attraction don’t happen in a vacuum. I’ve made this analogy before, but,…

T-rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress sixty-five million years of gut instinct.
– Dr. Grant, Jurassic Park

Sexuality, families, and men did not come about because of society. To the contrary, sexuality, families, and men are what made society possible in the first place. – Pook

Men’s brains evolved to sexually objectify women. In order for this assessment to take place the mental construct of perceiving women as objects was a necessary evolutionary step. The simple truth is that it’s part of men’s neurological firmware to see women’s bodies as objects. It’s a well studied fact that when men see an arousing woman’s semi-nude body it triggers the same area of our brains associated with tool use. Sexual objectification is a survival feature for men, not a bug. Furthermore, studies show that men’s brains will prioritize sex even above food acquisition.

None of these facts absolve men of personal responsibility for their actions – however, men making less than wise decisions with regards to sex are following their evolutionary directive. Today’s women feign some ignorance of this, but what they don’t appreciate is that their own directive, the dualistic nature of Hypergamy, is not the same as men’s. And yet again we become victims of the teachings of equalism that wants us to believe men and women are the same, and as such men ought to be able to sublimate themselves in the same manner as women.

The Epiphany Phase Revisited

One of the best things about the Red Pill being a praxeology is that nothing’s set in stone. Like any good science there’s always room for reinterpretation and updating ideas per new information, or sometimes it’s simply something or some observation that seemingly went overlooked that adjust an old interpretation. Reader Playdontpay brought something to light in an old post, Three Strikes:

I agree with the 3 Strike rule for younger chicks of 30 and under but once she hits about 32 something seems to flip in their heads, women of this age and up seem determined to hold out longer even if they want to fuck.

It’s probably because at this age her clock is ticking and she doesn’t have time to “waste” on flings that would won’t lead to commitment, so she re-invents herself as a “quality woman” in the hope of convincing you that she is LTR/ marriage material.

It’s up to you to decide if you can push the envelope to 5-6 dates max but I would only do this if I was sure it was her ASD holding her back and not down to a low interest level.

If you wait to date 5-6 and the sex is sub par, don’t stick around waiting for it to improve as you’ve been sold a lemon and the juice ain’t worth the squeeze!

This seemingly innocuous comment made me think a lot about some of my older material and how newer readers might interpret it. There’s actually quite a bit to unpack in this short response, so with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight I thought I might riff on it.

“…once she hits about 32 something seems to flip in their heads, women of this age and up seem determined to hold out longer even if they want to fuck.”

Any long time reader of this blog will immediately associate this phenomenon with the Epiphany Phase women enter when the reality of their lessened capacity to compete intrasexually with their younger sisters becomes unignorable. Generally this phase comes at or around the ages of 29-31, however, depending on circumstance this may come sooner for some women (those whose attractiveness is already understood to be suboptimal), and sometimes much later for others (women who bought into the lie that their attractiveness is subjective and indefinite). I’ve written many essays about this phase and dedicated two sections of Preventive Medicine to it. It’s very recognizable, and very understandable when you have a good grasp of how women prioritize the ‘needs’ of their sexual strategy as they mature.

The Epiphany Phase is really a woman’s subconscious knowledge of The Wall coming into her cognitive acknowledgement. However, what’s not so easy to grasp is why a woman who’s come to this phase would actually make it more difficult for a prospective long-term, parentally invested, hopefully idealized, mate to become intimate with her?

On several occasions I’ve proposed just the opposite; that Hypergamy cannot afford to wait for 100% perfect confirmation of a man’s Alpha status before she has sex with him. This Hypergamic bypass is actually one vulnerability women have with respect to well calibrated Game. Even for women in the luteal phase of ovulatory shift, (when by all means she ought to be seeking the provisioning, comforting and rapport of more Beta men’s attentions) women will be prompted to sexual immediacy and urgency when presented with the prospects of fucking – and hopefully locking down – what she sees as an Alpha man. It is entirely possible to bypass women’s natural, ovulation-induced, Hypergamy when you present yourself as the right Alpha incentive to her (I’ve done this myself). This is the prioritization women’s natural sexual strategy has, and in reality, a woman faking an orgasm for a perceived Alpha, or having proceptive sex with him in her luteal phase only confirms the urgency women’s natural Hypergamy has with regard to locking down an optimal man.

But why would a woman who, for all intents, knows her capacity to attract men is waning be so insistent on delaying her becoming intimate with him? This seems counterintuitive, particularly in light of the fact that most women in their younger, Party Years eagerly had sex with men for whom they made little or no ‘rules’ for in order to become sexual with them. It’s a common enough idea in the manosphere that women will ride the ‘cock carousel’ in their 20s until they realize a lessened capacity to attract guys and then seek to cash out of the sexual marketplace before or around 30. Usually this ends up with a girl settling for a Beta in waiting.

But why would the rules and prerequisites be something she insists on now but didn’t while she was in her sexual peak years?

Vaginas and Moral Compasses

There was a recent article on the HuffPo quoting Cate Blanchett saying “My moral compass is in my vagina“, and while this might be the red meat clickbait the HuffPo relies upon for revenue, it adequately sums up how Hypergamy, a woman’s sexual agency and a woman’s capacity to utilize it throughout her life directs women’s intrinsic and extrinsic priorities throughout their lives. I realize this wasn’t how Cate intended her comment to be taken; she wanted to express some inherent guiding principle for women in an era she believes women are still repressed in, but in doing so she illustrates the real compass women have with regard to moral interpretations of their ideas and behaviors. If something gratifies, optimizes or otherwise benefits a woman’s driving impulse of Hypergamy, it sets a rationale for moral interpretation by her. Or in other words, if it’s good for what optimizes Hypergamy, it’s good for women.

As men we want the easy answer to be the best answer. So it seems obvious to us that a woman making arbitrarily ‘new’ rules of intimacy for her prospectively long-term suitors would follow some epiphany where she comes to her senses, realizes the error of her ways and strives for being some new ‘quality woman’ to represent herself as. As such, her quality should symmetrically be matched by a man’s quality. And that quality should logically take some time to determine. This is, in fact, most women’s self and public rationale for making a ‘quality’ man wait for her sexually when in the past she had no such obstacles for the hawt guy she met on spring break in the Cancun foam cannon party.

We want to believe this because we’re taught to expect such reasonings from a girl who now, at 29, wants to get right with God or “start doing things the right way” with guys. Social conventions abound that condition us to expect that once women, “get it out of their systems” (by following the Sandbergian sexual strategy) she’ll realize the errors of her youthful indiscretion and magically transform into a “Quality Woman”. We want to believe it, and it’s in women’s best interests that we do believe it.

Most Beta men (and not a few self-described Red Pill men) want to believe in a woman’s Epiphany about herself. They love nothing better than the idea of the reformed porn star who’s finally “grown up” and come to her senses about the error of her youth’s indiscretions with the guys they grew up to hate as an archetype. Better still, they’ll feed that rationale/fantasy in the hope that her Epiphany will include her saving her best sex for him since now she’s come to understand that it’s been the ‘nice guys’ all along she ought to have been getting with if not for ‘society’ convincing her otherwise.

The reformed-slut-with-epiphany archetype is a trope Beta men want to forgive because it represents vindication for their self-image, Blue Pill conviction and perseverance (they never gave up on her). Women with the pasts that make them good candidates for eliciting this rationale know men well enough to see the utility it has in securing Blue Pill men’s resources and long term security.

Socially, she’s got countless sources of ‘go grrrl’ moral reinforcement from both men and women. In fact, as a Man, just my bringing this to light makes me guilty of being “judgmental” in popular female-defined culture. And that’s the insurance women will always have in their Epiphany Phase – whether it’s a reformed slut coming to terms with the Wall at 29, or the ex-wife who frivorced her dutiful (but unexciting) Beta to have her own epiphany and discover herself a la Eat, Prey, Love, the social net of feminine-primacy is there with easy rationalizations to catch any and every woman’s Hypergamous fall.

Holding Out

Yet still she hesitates in giving herself to that Beta provisioner.

We excuse this hesitation by claiming it’s because, now, she wants to be extra sure about him. The Alpha men she so effortlessly gave herself to were all, of course, wolves in sheep’s clothing (e.g. men are evil) and in her epiphany she must exercise caution. And if you think it’s because of anything else, well, you’re a misogynist, so shut up.

A woman holding out on a guy during this phase of her life really isn’t about any moral epiphany, it’s really her hindbrain coming to terms with having to make herself become sexual with a type of guy whom previously she would never have naturally flowed into having sex with. We like to think a now ‘quality woman’ is deserving of putting a man through a set of qualifying tests, that seems like appropriate prudence, but in fact her reservation about fucking him comes from a deep seated, subconscious understanding that, while the guy might make for an excellent parental investment, he’s not going to be someone she feels a sexual urgency to fuck.

Later she’ll bemoan that she’d rather cry over an asshole than date a guy who bores her, but in the Epiphany she has to force this subconscious understanding down in order to better insure her Hypergamous security into the future.

This latent, limbic sexual uncertainty has nothing to do with vetting the ‘perfect guy’ for the ‘quality woman’ it’s about a woman, who likely for the first time in her life, is presented with the challenge of having to bypass her hindbrain Hypergamy in order to secure her long term security. Thus, we see this demographic of women make even more rules for a Beta to deserve her intimacy, while a more Alpha tingle-generating man she was more than willing to break rules to get to bed with.

It’s important that we focus on the idea that a man, any man, ought to be deserving of a woman’s sexual ‘gift’. We get this rationale from the affirmations of even the most well meaning of men. Even though the concept of Hypergamy is regularly proven through her Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks strategy prior to her epiphany, the Beta mindset is always ready to do more and expect more from men who would get with his ‘quality woman’. A woman on the expiration of her SMV likes nothing more than to be told, and to encourage the idea in men, that “she deserves better” in spite of her past decisions.

Yet still she hesitates having sex with the ‘perfect’ guy who is ready to overlook all of it.

This is an internal conflict between what her psyche knows she needs to do to ensure her security, and what her hindbrain wants in an exciting Alpha lover. What “flips” in a woman’s head is her inability to resolve her sexuality with her self-consciousness in having to force it to be with a man who likely doesn’t merit it for her – but this meriting her sex, up to now, has always been a process she left to her hindbrain to decide. In a sense it is quality control, but not for the self-righteous rationales we’re supposed to believe it is.

There is a lot of inner negotiation on the part of women entering their Epiphany Phase, trying to reconcile the long term security needs of her Super Ego and the visceral short term sexual needs of her Id. At some point, what sexualized qualities satisfies a woman’s Id she no longer has the capacity to maintain so there comes an inner conversation of negotiation over what available man represents the best compromise depending on her need and her acknowledgement of it – and her true capacity to satisfy her long term security with or without him.

Now introduce a Beta man into this inner negotiation; one who’s been preparing his whole life to be the best, most dependable provisioner that his conditioning would make of him. His influence enters the negotiation process, but her Id can never find satisfaction. Thus, the negotiation becomes one of her Ego negotiating with her Id trying to convince it to refigure it’s visceral Alpha Fucks needs to accommodate this guy since he represents just such long term security as the Super Ego needs.

There’s a bit more to this reevaluation of the Epiphany Phase I may do soon in another post. However, I think I should add here that a lot of not-so-genuine confusion on the part of well-meaning guys about why a woman would so easily break her own rules to fuck an Alpha guy while require them to jump through hoops to get to a mitigated sexuality with her is primarily due to a woman’s hindbrain expectation about what sex should be like with either type of guy.

I’ve related in the past how women will gladly engage in a same night lay with a guy they see as a hot Alpha sex opportunity, but would never consider if she saw the guy as “relationship material”. This situation is a clichéd joke now – we laugh at it as “chick logic”, but the more Blue Pill men become aware of the Myth of the Good Guy the more these quandaries will give them pause to think about the women whose pasts they’re ready to excuse and the women they’re simply never going to consider “relationship material” themselves. They’ll think twice about the social order that’s encouraging them to “man up and marry those sluts”.

The Power of Emotion

boxitup

Science fiction has always sought to portray human emotion as a weakness to be overcome.
Some have gone further to express the notion of our physical being as a limiting factor. This is notably seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m aware this is fiction, but I just want to reinforce the point from my earlier post that we don’t have to be held to eternal hostage by nature. We can strive to be better.
A quote from Terminator 2, sums it up admirably.

T-800 to John Connor: “I now know why you cry. But it is something, I can never do.”

While emotions are a part of our experience as human beings, Red Pill aware men need to understand the functionality of emotional responses. Rationality is, of course, the charter of this blog and my books, and while I make my best efforts to approach each aspect of what I write from as objective an origin as I’m able to, I also understand that there are limitations to remaining completely objective. I’m human like anyone else reading this (chatbots excepted) and I’ve always been fully aware that my emotional state, my own ego-investments and biases, as well as the observer effect are all something I need to make a conscious effort to account for while I’m writing about a new idea or observation I’m connecting dots with.

In a few prior posts I’ve made an effort to account for a balance between rationality and emotionalism. I say “emotionalism” because I think there needs to be a separation between the physical experience of emotion and the significance our fem-centric social order would have us place on those experiences. There is a difference between emotional response (evolved stimulus-response adaptations) and the ideologies that elevate human emotion to a metaphysical state (emotionalism).

Seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, panic and play are what are commonly recognized as primal emotions. I didn’t make this list up myself, these are just the most base-level imperatives from which more complex experiences of emotion are distilled. All of these root-level emotional experiences have been studied extensively and can be stimulated chemically and neurologically today. An easy example of this biological connection to emotional experience can be triggered and observed in the ‘roid rages’ experienced by the users of anabolic steroids.

Have you ever been “Hangry“? The feeling of anger / aggressiveness due to being overly hungry is an evolutionary survival adaptation. You’re far more motivated to kill and eat something if the feeling of hunger, prompted by its chemical triggers, also stimulates feelings of aggression. In today’s era that aggression may be inconvenient or anti-social, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors found it both acceptable and useful.

There are dozens of other examples I can give for the connection between our environmental, physical and chemical conditions and our emotional state. Similarly, there are chemical (dopamine) and behavioral prompts we associate with a particular emotional state. I don’t imagine this is anything revelatory to most Red Pill aware readers, but reviewing the objective aspects of emotion is necessary in order to separate it from the social influence of emotionalism.

Testosterone is well known to stimulate feelings of aggression and sexual arousal, but did you know that the chemical make up of testosterone is actually an inhibitor of the chemicals that prompt sadness and crying? When considered in this respect and the fact that human males produce 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone females do, is it any coincidence that men may feel less compulsion to cry over things? Yet, men are shamed for “holding back” tears. This is an example of the connection between our physical experience of emotions and the importance to which our social order places on (primarily female) emotionalism. There are a lot of complexities that make up our emotional state and the more we study the influences of our own biologies the better we can make a connection between the evolved, survival-beneficial, effect these emotions elicit in us.

The nuts and bolts science of emotions demystifies the more magical, romanticized association we like to apply to them. And at the risk of prompting any kind of nihilism, it’s important that we consider our emotional state in terms of the concrete physical stimulus that’s provoking our emotional states. It’s easy to get into the science of emotions when we’re trying to solve a problem like clinical depression and the feelings and potential behaviors it evokes, but it’s much harder to look at upsetting an elated feeling of happiness. If it ain’t broke there’s no reason to think about fixing it.

But what sets us off about really coming to terms with the science of emotion is it tends to kill our gods. Up until advent of our understanding the cause and effect influences of emotion we’ve applied a lot of metaphysical importance to our emotions. Historically, our emotions have inspired us to create some of the greatest cultural and artistic masterpieces, and they’ve urged us to some pretty ugly atrocities too. Even today, western cultures raise emotion to a mythical grandeur. We romanticize and apply great significance to how we feel. We prioritize expressing emotions to being some enlightened state and the repression or control of them as some kind of horrible evil or some form of retardation.

Emotionalism

The Washington Post (I know, I know,…) recently published the findings of a study outlining how “sexist” men have psychological problems:

Researchers then identified 11 norms considered to be “traditionally masculine” — desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status — and looked to see whether they were associated with particular mental health outcomes.

In general, the men who stuck more strongly to these norms were more likely to experience problems such as depression, stress, body image issues, substance abuse and negative social functioning. They were also less likely to turn to counseling to help deal with those problems. The effect was particularly strong for men who emphasized playboy behavior, power over women and self-reliance.

As you might expect, what’s defined as “toxic” masculinity today is decided by people invested in a mindset that confirms the Feminine Imperative. This article follows along with what will likely be the Trump-era narrative for masculinity – anything remotely considered “traditionally” masculine will be conflated with a psychological disorder. The cure to which is, of course, ego-investing men in feminine-primary mental states; effectively feminizing men.

If we look at the norms identified by this study we are expected to nod in agreement about the negative, potentially damaging, connotations these traditionally masculine aspects imply. But they are only negative because the objective environment we are supposed to interpret them from is one of feminine primacy. Anything that can be considered an impediment to female societal control, any aspect of men’s intrinsic natures that lessens the same potentials of women is considered “toxic”.

Desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status – by orders of degree these are the foundational aspects of masculinity that’s been responsible for the advancement of humanity for millennia now. I’m not entirely sure what ‘playboy lifestyle’ entails, but consider the problems these aspects of male nature evolved to solve for men. Each one of these characteristics has a functional prompt; they didn’t evolve in a vacuum. These parts of masculinity were and are functional benefits to men. Only in a society that defines supremacism of women and the primacy of female-correctness do these aspects become negative.

I doubt it will come as any surprise to the Red Pill aware that all of these traits used to have a higher social value in virtually all social orders prior to our present one. It’s not enough to make female social interaction the preeminent one, masculinity and its conventional aspects must be pathologized. They must become a sickness if gynocentrism is to sustain itself.

I’m exploring this here because the female way of socialization is founded upon emotionalism. I think it’s important for Red Pill men to understand that the defining of what particular emotional states are acceptable is intimately linked to what those states mean to the Feminine Imperative. In the past 60 years western(ized) culture has become one in which the feminine defines the predominant cultural narrative with regard to intersexual communication, correctness and the psychological values we are meant to infer from it. This discourse is one that is primarily informed by women’s high priority on an investment in emotionalism.

In past essays I’ve outlined how men and women’s brains are neurologically wired for different, yet complementary functions. Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” Mendrek added, who is also an associate professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychiatry.

Yet for all of these very evident physical differences in men and women’s experience of emotion, it is women’s experience, and a feminine priority for the ‘correctness’ of that experience we apply to men. I would suggest that much of this is primarily due to women’s innate solipsism, but we’ve normalized women’s experience of emotion as the common and correct one in terms of intersexual communication and social dynamics.

Emotionalism and the applying of metaphysical meaning to the feminine-correct experience of them has pervaded our social consciousness since the time of the sexual revolution. This elevated importance of emotion has been a part of popular culture for millennia of course, but until the rise of a socially mandated importance of female Hypergamy we haven’t had female emotionalism direct the course of society as it has for over sixty years now.

As such, we see that men “getting in touch with their feminine sides” is really a concerted effort to repress their natural experience of emotion as a male, and to attempt to force their own emotional states into ones females can identify with. As I mentioned above, there are literally biological limitations for a man to experience emotion as a woman as well as his impulse to want to prioritize those feelings as women do. The presumption is that a man is emotionally stunted if he feel that repressing his emotions is what he ought to do. “Boys don’t cry” is a sickness when it is women’s experience and importance of emotionalism that drives our social discourse.

Women bemoan men’s stereotypical lack of “emotional availability”, and we put a religious importance upon our capacity to express our emotions in some way, but all of this is constrained to the box that is women’s correct experience and importance of emotion. This is not what men’s brains are naturally wired for, and in a Red Pill context this is not what women’s hindbrains want from men.

It’s important for Red Pill men to understand that our feminine-primary social order is founded up the importance women place on the God of emotion. Part of your Blue Pill conditioning was to convince you, as a young boy, that the way women emote and the importance they put on emotion is what you needed to accept as the healthy, normal way of experiencing and expressing it. The truth is you are not wired to experience emotion as a woman will. That isn’t to suggest you deny or repress your feelings, but to understand that you shouldn’t feel bad for not feeling as a woman feels. This kind of goes back to the point I was making in Empathy; while it may be possible for a woman to sympathize with your feelings, she will never be able to empathize with them as a man would experience it.

Furthermore, it should be part of men’s unplugging to come to terms with the metaphysical importance women place on (largely their own) emotional states. They remove the functional aspect of emotion and elevate it to something only women have a unique sensitivity to understand. Separating yourself from this self-induced, self-applied belief in emotion can be a very powerful tool for a Red Pill man in his dealing with women – and not just the ones he’s intimately involved with. Separating your ego from the religion of emotion and coming to terms with the science of emotion is a very difficult step for Blue Pill invested men to make. As I said, it’s like killing your gods, but it’s also killing the notion of the emotionalism you think you need to identify with in order to connect with a woman.

The Unbearable Rightness of Being Female

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The following post quote has been making the rounds in professional circles. It’s from Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, an investment firm dedicated to helping women with financial investment (no jargon, no ‘playing’ stocks for sport, no mansplaining, you got this). She’s also the “chair” of Elevate Network, a global professional women’s network. I’m adding this here to make a later point, but it’s important to understand how normalized it’s become for women to create a sexually exclusionary organization for women who will simultaneously complain about men’s sexism for not accommodating their (presumably successful) business culture to the interests of women. More on that later.

I thought I’d riff on this click-bait for, I assume, professional women because I expect we’ll see more of this prefabricated outrage in the coming years as a response to what will undoubtedly be the suffering of the Trump era in America. I’ll be the first to admit I was surprised by Trump’s win, but the denial of the First Female President® into the White House will be the cause du jour for every jilted woman who believes she’s a “professional”. Even if Clinton had won the mainstream would’ve been inundated with how ‘we still have a long way to go’ stories, however, with Trump in the Presidency the same tired narrative of systemic male sexism will get reinvigorated in the coming years.

From, A Letter to young women, in the age of Trump:

When I was your age, I thought it was over. My mother was a feminist, so I wanted to call myself anything but a feminist. And anyway, I seemed pretty welcome at work. Even though it was Wall Street, my analyst class was about a third women. We weren’t just on our way — we’d arrived.

But then…there were the inappropriate pictures left on my desk. The guy miming a sex act when my back was turned. I wasn’t given the great assignments; the more senior woman I worked with was likewise dismissed as “lightweight” (and, lest you think that might have been true, that woman was Safra Catz, now the co-President of Oracle). Then the women started to fall away in their 30s…more in their 40s. But the worst of it, I thought was over.

And now Trump has made it clear to everyone that the battle for us women is not over.

In femopshere there will always be an ‘us’. As I’ve outline in many prior essays, the Sisterhood will always take precedence above religion, politics, personal conviction and even family affiliations for women. Largely this is due to women’s evolved propensity for collectivism among their own sex. In our hunter gatherer beginnings women had an interdependent need for collective support for keeping tribal cohesion as well as child rearing.

This intrasexual collective support has carried over into what’s become the Sisterhood today. If you look at the interactions of young girls and their social group interdependence you begin to see that nascent tribal collectivism naturally come through. In terms of larger societal scope this collectivity becomes about acknowledging a shared experience of an imagined oppression by men. Between all women there is a gestalt understanding of “the plight of women” and a presumption of an endemic sexism no matter how culturally or socioeconomically dissimilar those women are.

As I mentioned, Trump is now a universal icon of that presumption of sexism and oppression. Granted, it could’ve been any man who displaced a woman in the history books, but the fall back presumption is that whoever ‘he’ is, he becomes emblematic of a ready narrative of sexism irrespective of merit. We presume sexism, we presume a guy would mime a sex act behind a woman’s back and leave ‘inappropriate’ pictures on a woman’s desk despite decades of workplace harassment legislation. We believe it because it sounds right; it sounds like something a typical sexist guy would do.

I can’t stop thinking about this and what we can / should do:

Remember that gender bias in the workplace is not a thing of the past. I’m sorry if I didn’t act when I should have. I thought we had left sexism behind us by the time I was in more senior roles. After all, we had complaint hotlines and diversity plans and requirements for diverse slates of candidates for every job. But now I’m remembering one of the members of the senior leadership team who would kiss younger women on the cheek at the beginning of meetings. Creepy, right? I now wonder what was being said when I wasn’t in that room.

What’s creepy is that in spite of years in a professional field that’s been the domain of men she’s just now remembering this fact. Would it have been less creepy if he’d kissed only his age-appropriate women on his leadership team? Professional women’s default presumption is that it is always sexism that is holding them back from breaking through a mythologized ‘glass ceiling’, but as is women’s solipsism, their first thought is that their problems are caused by externalities. Never is there an insight that they may simply lack the skills or that they don’t perform at their peak in a job they were told should be rewarding to them.

Gender biases will never be a thing of the past because to suggest they ever might be so is to presume a default state of egalitarian equality between the sexes. The gender biases in the workplace are most evident in the peer selection and peer evaluations of women – not some secret group of guys getting together in a private office room to expressly talk about a their co-workers’ tits.

As it stands in today’s modern office men are scared shitless every time they are called to cooperate with a woman on work projects for fear of being accused of sexism or harassment:

“In a lawsuit-happy culture, where claims can be made on a ‘he said/she said’ basis, men are now trying to ensure their actions are always covered by a third party witness”

“The terror of being accused of sexual harassment is now so common it has its own term, ‘backlash stress”

There’s a reason HR departments are largely staffed by women, because they want to be positioned in a way that they can execute policy. HR departments no longer exist to serve the company with regards to employees, rather they exist in order to protect that company from lawsuits and enforce feminine-primary conditions in the workplace.

Ask tough questions, and call the guys out when necessary. I recently asked my best guy friend: “Do guys really talk like Donald Trump and Billy Bush behind closed doors?” His response: “No, but…” And the “but” was that the conversations are more along the lines of: “Boy, she has great legs,” or “she’s a looker” or “Whew. Wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.” When I asked him how he responded to this, he said he didn’t say anything; after all, he has to work with these folks.

But so do we. And breaking us down to our body parts or our appearance dehumanizes us in some way. Maybe it’s only in some small way. But it’s clear that for some years, we (and by we, I mean I) were likely too complacent about the inevitability of gender progress in the workplace and relaxed perhaps just a bit too much.

It’s funny and irreverent when all the girls in the office get together for drinks or a male revue strip show after work, but it’s dehumanizing when men do the same. I’ve known very few men who would ever comment on a woman’s anatomy in a workplace environment. I have known men who would scold other men for staring a little too long at a female co-worker. I have known women to actively flirt with guys and wear inappropriate outfits to get attention from them. I’ve known women who’ve called me and other men I’ve worked with their “work husbands”.

I’ve worked in the liquor and casino promotion businesses for two decades now. I see some pretty wild behavior on the part of women who are not unlike the poor victimized dears Krawcheck describes going to work on Monday mornings.

The modern workplace culture has conditioned men for fear of women thanks largely to strict codes of conduct, but also because these men have been raised from birth to be dutiful Betas and White Knights who look for every opportunity to correct a ‘typical man’ for his sexist and rude behaviors. They look for these backroom boys clubs where women are rated on their looks so as to expose their heinous misogyny and institutionalized sexism, but they are disappointed when they don’t actually find it. So instead they contribute to an atmosphere of fear in some lame form of Beta Game they hope will be recognized and rewarded for by workplace women.

If you’re in a bad work situation, it’s ok to quit. So many women think that it’s a “failure” if you quit your job; and you know how hard we females take failure. But sometimes it’s not us: it’s them.

I recently left the board of a non-profit that I LOVE. I had been on it for years (and years). At nearly every meeting I asked how much we were spending on our investment managers, in comparison to the return we were getting. Meeting after meeting I was told that the answer was complex, it was hard to calculate, it would take a lot of work – and why did it matter anyway? It was really the net returns that matter, regardless of how much we paid for them. And then, last spring, before I could bring up the topic, one of the men did; and all the other guys eagerly agreed with him, that we need to keep an eye on fees because those are really all we can control.

I quit the next week.

Life is too short, and I can have a lot more impact with the week-a-year I get back instead of being ignored in meetings.

I know not everyone is in the position to quit; I wasn’t earlier in my career. So the onus is also on those of us who are more senior to be more supportive of women who leave these situations. I am hopeful that an outcome of this election will be greater understanding of this.

If it had been a woman who’d made the same suggestion would we be hearing about this? Shit like this happens all the time in the workplace. One reason The 48 Laws of Power resonated with men so well is because it was relatable to exactly this kind of situation. Law 7: Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit for it yourself. Sallie sees this as sexism because it happened to be a guy who pulled it on her, but would she have quit the non-profit had it been a woman who outplayed her?

This is the reality of even the most seemingly benign of companies. They are defined by the interplay of power dynamics, but when women are bested in it the sexism narrative is ready on standby to comfort and explain their failure. So it becomes OK to quit, because the environment is always sexist. The business environment is one defined by competition and this grates on women’s expectation of it to be cooperative and collective. Women like Sallie expect recognition for merit, but wish for things to be easier rather than developing the skills to play the game better.

Get yourself a senior, successful – preferably female – mentor, who can help you navigate the politics of your company. This includes the gender politics. Can’t find one on your own? Speak to HR about helping you find one; this is their job, after all.

Your company doesn’t have a senior, successful female? Get the hell out of there.

Really the only sexism I’m seeing in this piece has been one coming from and endorsed by Krawcheck. She bemoans a lack of gender equity and then suggests a female mentor would be preferable to a male one. Her sexism is blatant here – the only definition of a solid reputable company is one that ensures it has a senior, successful female in it. Since most HR departments are staffed primarily with women it’s their job to help you find a senior, successful and female mentor? I’m not a business insider, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t their job.

I made this point in Male Space, but what happens when women insert themselves into a traditionally male dominated domain is that the enterprise becomes about accommodating the female influences rather than the enterprise itself. This entire article is an indictment of this. Again, the solution to a woman’s problem of not being successful is sought externally.

Do your best to make sure that your success is quantified. Be it a sales goal, a client satisfaction rating, an output metric, a quality target. Numbers count here because they’re black-and-white, cut-and-dried. Were you successful or not? I recommend this even if you work in a “normal” company, because implicit gender biases and expectations still exist for all of us.

Solid enough advice, but it’s couched in the context of an expectation of gender biases (at least the type of bias Sallie finds unacceptable). There’re implicit gender biases, but the ones we see dominate even ‘normal’ companies are ones that favor a feminized workforce.

Think about starting your own thing. This is what’s exciting; we have the ability to start our own businesses today, in a way we didn’t in the past. Why not take our marbles to our own playgrounds and build great businesses and cultures? Our mothers couldn’t do this because the cost was so high – but the costs of everything-about-starting-a-business, including technology, people (i.e., freelancers), real estate (co-working spaces) and support services are coming down. And then no one can relegate you to the less-interesting jobs.

Women are taught that they deserve the luxury of interesting jobs. In fact this is the sole reason for even wanting to enter the workforce most times – a rewarding career that’s fulfilling, but as I wrote in She’s Unhaaapy… that fulfillment is always elusive. Therefore it must be that uncooperative men are holding women back from this happiness.

I’m not sure opening another gourmet cupcake eatery counts as contributing to the status of women in business, but I would say that women ought to be encouraged to start up their own businesses rather than rely on the proven successes of established ones to prove their business acumen. Carly Fiorina and Sheryl Sandberg are not innovators in any sense. Neither started a company from scratch, but they are lauded as powerful businesswomen because they supposedly had the moxie to compete with the big boys and their sexist enterprises – not actually as a result of their companies wanting to present a feminine-correct public image.

I would love to see women’s organic business successes despite themselves, but my guess is that every failure or setback would have some tinge of external sexism attached to them. The truth is there are very few women who actually create something of worth because the easier path to success is to create a social convention that shames men for not including women in their own successes. It will always be easier for women to appropriate the success of men rather than create anything for themselves.

I am going to go out of my way to support other women. It’s clear now: we can’t do this alone. Another woman who is promoted or celebrated or funded clears the way for another. I am actively looking to buy from women-owned businesses, which is much easier these days — Glossier, Outdoor Voices, and Project September are just a few of a new wave of startups led by women — and avoid companies that remain all-men. I’m just so over supporting them.

And here we have yet more fem-centric sexism in a piece decrying male sexism. Weren’t we just reading about how surprised Sallie was about gender bias not being a thing of the past in the workplace? Because Trump won the election she calls for a boycott from buying anything from male owned companies?

One thing I’ve always found ironic about women’s call for collective, gender-exclusionary support for other women is that women are often guilty of even worse infighting than men are in the workplace. Lets face it, women hate other women to a degree that most men are unaware of. Their capacity for sub-communication and psychological warfare among themselves makes intra-sexual competition more brutal than having to deal with any so-called sexist male co-worker. From women’s collectivist perspective one would think that women’s intra-sexual support of other women would make them all outstanding successes in business, but we find the opposite is true. Women have a very hard time making an all-female enterprise a success. Naturally this is blamed, again, on men’s sexists brinksmanship and outmaneuvering them, but by and large it’s internal conflict that destroys all-female run enterprises.

Invest. Having spent my career on Wall Street and now being the founder of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women, I know I’m a broken record on this topic. But men invest to a greater extent than women do, and it costs us. Indeed, I believe investing is the best career advice women aren’t getting. Think about it – are you more able to tell your boss to take this job and shove it if you have more money or less money?

That’s what I thought. At the end of the day, money is the real key to gender equality.

Of course we get the sales pitch at the end. Women don’t invest because it’s not sexy. It requires a degree of commitment and a depth of insight that goes well beyond what an average woman has any interest in. I do find it entertaining that Sallie finally gets to the real reason for a gender inequality she claims she wants to see abolished. Money is most definitely a key to establishing social dominance and that creates a fundamentally unequal condition between men and women.

Businesses, successful ones, are founded on competition, not cooperation. This is the fundamental conflict we are experiencing in today’s corporate culture; women’s collectivism promotes what they believe should be a successful enterprise based on egalitarian cooperation while men largely see the enterprise as competition. Sometimes this is a win-at-any-cost type of competition, other times it may be more subtle, but the crux is that women’s propensity to want for a more collectivist approach to a successful enterprise is at odds with men’s competitive approach. Success in business is fundamentally unegalitarian, there are winners and losers, not co-equal participation trophy winners. But as women continue to insert themselves into the unegalitarian male spaces of enterprise we will see this push for cooperative hopes for business success fundamentally alter the purpose of these businesses as we attempt more and more to accommodate them.

She’s Unhaapppy,…

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Do women seem more or less happy to you? It’s kind of hard to quantify/qualify what happiness means to men, but when it comes to women’s state of happiness or contentment I think most guys have a tendency to expect women’s experience of happiness to be measured on a similar scale to their own. From a strictly evo-psych / evo-bio perspective it’s important that any metric of happiness between the sexes be measured by first considering each’s innate psychological firmware and what contributes to men and women feeling a degree of happiness.

Because men and women rate their experiences differently per their own interpretations of what contribute to it  happiness becomes a really subjective evaluation. As you might guess, what makes for a happy woman is not always what makes for a happy man. It’s a similar contrast to men and women’s differing concepts of love. Men tend to approach love from an idealistic perspective, and women base their emotional investments on opportunistic contexts. We’re conditioned from an early age to believe men and women share a mutual concept of love thanks to an ever-present presumption of egalitarian equalism between males and females, and this is where a lot of intersexual problems find their root.

Likewise, our egalitarian presumptions also condition men and women to believe that we share mutual concepts of what should and shouldn’t make either sex happy in a long term sense. In this case it is women who are largely misled by the equalist narrative. For more than sixty years women have been conditioned to believe they can meet their own idealistic goal of ‘having it all’ if they can only “empower” themselves into being Strong Independent Women®. Increasingly women are coming to the conclusion that this pro-woman life plan has been nothing but feel-good advertising, and now, after having invested their most productive years in this narrative they find that they are largely unhappy with the results its brought into their lives.

You see, equalism (the religion of feminism) would have women believe that what makes men happy must necessarily be what makes women happy – or would make them happy in the long term if only the “patriarchy” would allow women the same opportunities to experience it. If we are all blank-slate equals, what makes women and men happy must be mutually shared, thus men are encouraged to be women and craft their identities around feminine-primacy, but also, women must become men and craft their personas around the masculine ideals that bring men so much power, and by way of it happiness.

Yet in our modern western(izing) world we find that the equalist effort to socially engineer androgyny into society has had the opposite effect in engendering happiness in women. Article after article and study after study show that women’s perceived happiness is at an all-time low since researchers have been collecting data on it. Women are living longer lives and at no point in history have they enjoyed more access to the means of more success than in the now. Mainstream feminine-primacy sees that more women are college educated than men, while men fill our prisons at 12 times the rate of women, yet for all of this women express feeling less satisfied with the quality of, and happiness in, their lives.

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

And, as would be expected, women’s dissatisfaction with their lives is always traced back to uncooperative men and their reluctancy to make feminism the roaring success they just know it could be if men would simply accept their diminishing importance and superfluousness. What Today’s Woman has been sold is that the careerism, status seeking and ambitiousness that’s driven men to their sense of happiness-through-accomplishment (with all the prerequisite sacrifices needed to get there) is necessarily the same path to women’s sense of happiness and fulfillment.

But men and women are in fact different, and while the social experiment that is equalism continues to destroy lives by insisting they aren’t, women are coming to find (often too late in life to correct) that happiness for themselves comes as a result of satisfying needs that are innate to their nature as a female. As such, equalism and feminism fluidly redefine what “should be” happiness for men and women – men should always find fulfillment in making women happy in an ‘equalist’ utopia – yet that contentment for women will always be elusive and thus, a need to make men the culprits in that unending oppression of happiness comes into play.

Worst Case Scenario

Virtually every woman I’ve ever come into contact with in my lifetime shared a common mindset – each one subscribes to what I call the ‘worst case scenario’ mindset. I expect this from a mother or matronly relative, maybe even an overprotective sister, but to some degree all (and yes I mean all) women share a sense of risk aversion. That may not be in all aspects of a woman’s life, and certainly there are instances where this can be overridden – usually ones that imply an optimized Hypergamous opportunity – but I find that it’s part of women’s psychological firmware to obsessively want to mitigate risk of loss. Whether that’s risk of injury or resources or something that has a potential for providing her with security, the innate female subroutine is to play things safe.

In an age of mass media and instantaneous communication (women’s domain) this risk aversion gets combined with women’s primary, evolutionarily derived, need for a sustainable long term security and an existence-level sense of doubt. I’ve covered in prior posts about how Hypergamy is rooted in doubt and demands a constant reverifying of its being optimized in a man or a man with whom a woman has the potential of becoming intimate with. What results from this root level doubt and a hindbrain need for security is a continual preoccupation with the Worst Case Scenario.

Every possibility for the worst is thought through, contemplated and anticipated by women. There are very few women known for their genuine optimism or faith in a better outcome than what could possibly be the worst case. Yes, there are women who are saccharine motivational speakers, women’s ministry leaders and “make it a great day” believers in the magic powers of positivity, but even when it is genuine it comes as the result of wanting to mitigate the risks of the worst case scenario for their own (or women’s) lives.

As I wrote in Imagination, a man’s best tool in his Game toolbox is a woman’s imagination. That may be well for Game, but it also comes with the drawback of women’s imaginings of the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Throw women’s evolved sense of solipsism into this mix and it’s the worst possible thing that could happen, to her. On one hand, Dread is useful because of this innately female dynamic, but when you must contend with what amounts to a never ending battery of ‘what if’ doubts and reassurances then you begin to see the downside of that imagination. You begin to understand why women default to blaming men for not providing them with a sustainable happiness.

Women, being the life-bearing, nurture-giving sex with the most to lose in their investment in selecting a mate and gestating a child, have evolved to seek a sustainable security above all else – a security that guarantees her individuated happiness. That conventional, evolved sense of wellbeing used to be dependent upon the provisioning and the excitement that could only be provided by men. This is a subconscious expectation of women. Even women who subscribe to sexual fluidity often seek a similar security from their masculinized dominant partner.

Social Security

As a result of our equalist social narrative, women have been conditioned to believe that they can find this security and happiness in some untapped well they have hidden in their psyche if only they can be Strong and Independent enough to access it. In prior essays I’ve made the case that the ultimate goal of our feminine-primary social order has been to facilitate women’s optimizing Hypergamy by essentially outlawing men’s influence on that process. Every gender-based law that’s come into being since the time of the Sexual Revolution; from sexual consent, to what constitutes sexual harassment, to father’s (lack of) rights, to divorce settlement has been motivated by this deep seated female need for an enduring security. This was a security unique to men, but in an ‘equalist’ paradigm it is no longer required of, nor is it expected to be found in, men.

Yet for all of this handwringing, for all of the great efforts needed to legislate men’s direct or indirect financing of this security, and despite every social dispensation intended to empower women to provide this soul-gnawing need for security, women are still not happy.

The masterful Pook once said that the surest way to make a woman unhappy is to give them everything they want. I recently got into, yet again, another debate about the merits or non-merits of Choreplay and whether the idea of women getting hot for guys who do dishes was really a thing,…or not. This time the spin is that women will cheat on their husbands if they don’t do more chores.

As I was requoting myself for this debate I realized how long the Choreplay dilemma has been playing out – the first time I took it on was 2008. Men are deductive problem solvers. We want to make women happy as a means to getting sex, keeping the peace, sustaining intimacy, security, and just making a woman happy. The problem with that is that nothing a man can do will make a woman happy in the long term. In fact, just the whack-a-mole attempt to intentionally try to make a woman happy is itself a display women read as coming from a man who Just Doesn’t Get It.

The majority of men (Betas) would like nothing more than to sustain a woman’s happiness. They’re taught that relationship are always ‘hard work’ and his work will ultimately never be good enough. Even the most dutiful Beta can’t make a woman happy, but their efforts become a process of him negotiating for a woman’s desire. Whether that’s earning the ‘happiness’ of his mother, his sister, his female co-worker or his wife, the effect is the same.

We’ve made women’s happiness a litmus test for how successful a man or his relationships are. The common refrain of a woman leaving a man due to her being “unhaaaaaapy” is almost a cliché in the manosphere now. But if it’s a cliché it’s because this is the go-to reasoning we’ve heard from pop-psychologists, marriage counselors and mommy bloggers for the 70%+ of divorces initiated by women. We are expected to put a premium on women’s sustained happiness in a feminine-primary social order. Women’s happiness has become the prime directive and the metric for a relationship’s success. Any concern for men’s happiness is either a sign of his weakness or his problematic misogyny.

From Perfecting the Fantasy:

Here’s a secret – there’s no such thing as contentment.

Being content implies that life is static; it’s not, and to be honest, how boring would that be anyway? Life consists of varying states of discontent: why else would you bother doing anything? But the good news is that it’s more fun and more beneficial to manage discontent than to endure contentment (which you can’t anyway since it’s transitory at best). The trick is to understand that there are 2 kinds of discontent – creative and destructive discontent. What you choose to do with that discontent makes all the difference in the world. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done. Don’t allow yourself to fall back into old destructive habits of dealing with discontent. Don’t bother with anti-depressants and self-help books when a good hard workout at the gym would serve you better.

The truth is I’m always discontent, but constructively so. The minute you can look yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you see you’re sunk. You can always improve, even after achieving things that were once very important and difficult to attain. Happiness is a state of being, it’s in the ‘doing’ not the ‘having done.’ It’s not about endlessly chasing your tail, it’s about being better than you were the day before.

I agree with Gorilla Patriot, women’s default is for unhappiness, but I’d qualify this by saying it’s more of a predisposition of discontent. That is to say there is no real neutral disposition for a woman. Even in a state of indifference, a woman’s conditioned expectation from men will always originate from a preconception of disappointment. The worst case scenario is what is subconsciously planned for to the point that, even a man whom a woman loves and trusts, a woman’s first expectation from him is failure.

A lot of this comes from a lifetime of having male role models portrayed as default failures, social ignoramuses or just ridiculous because of their maleness. Women have had an endless education that only their unique femaleness can solve men’s problems of maleness, and they solve it in spite of themselves. Women are quite literally taught to expect failure, discontentment and unhappiness from men from a very early age.

The great tragedy of this ‘education’ is that it teaches women to empower themselves to find some life satisfaction as a result of their independence from men, but yet they can’t get around the want to find happiness with men. This teaching seeks to create some equalist semblance of happiness based on what men define for themselves as happiness.

They’re taught that a real enduring security is somehow possible in an intrinsically unsafe and chaotic world. So they limit men, they mandate laws and social mores to mitigate the risks that men, in their idealism, would naturally be drawn to take. They keep the kids safe, tell them to walk on one side of the sidewalk, tell them not to jump on the bed, tell them not to ride a bike without a helmet and knee and arm pads, and to prepare for the most damaging possibility imaginable. And men, who’ve always been bigger, more dangerous children to them, must comply with this risk aversion by law or by shame.

Women are unhappy because they expect unhappiness. They’ve been taught that the security they sought in men was a weakness; one they need to compensate for. They were conditioned to feel shame for that need, that masculine comfort, even when they know security is never going to be guaranteed in the best of possible cases. They’re unhappy because they were taught that men’s happiness is better than women’s happiness and that’s the path they ought to follow no matter the sacrifice, no matter the damage to the family. They were taught that feminist pride and equalist hubris were a better substitute for a family – they believed the lie that they would just be ‘happy captives’.