The Red Pill

The Best Of The Rational Male – Year 5

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Well another year has come and gone. I generally view the end of August as my year marker for The Rational Male. I didn’t add a page for year 4 since I’m not sure I want to clutter up the top of my blog layout with links pages, but I may yet combine the best of years 4 and 5 into one page.

A lot has happened in this span, I began the Red Pill Monthly talks with Niko Chosky. I still think I sound like a nasally teenager when I hear my voice, but the feedback has been nothing short of amazing on these so I believe we’ll continue with them for the foreseeable future.

Right after my year 4 best-of I did my first liv appearance in Vegas with Christian, Goldmund and Tanner Guzy at The Man in Demand Conference. I’ve discussed doing another one with Christian McQueen and we’re looking into venues for 2017. This was just an overwhelming experience to meet up with my readers in person, do the talk and have dinner at Sinatra’s. This was the first time for me to do an on premise event and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a nervous wreck the night before, but every guy in attendance just impressed me to no end and the whole thing was something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

I went through the process of having the audio mastered (courtesy of Sam Botta) to make it available via DigiRAMP for anyone to get a hold of now too.

Probably the biggest TRM news of 2016 was the release of the audio book of The Rational Male. It was a long time coming, but I think well worth the wait. I’ve come to believe that a book needs a time to mature into what its overall reception will be. The Rational Male book continues to sell very well and my focus has always been on emphasizing the printed book above all else since I feel that medium is the best to spark discussions and pass along to men who need it at the right time. That said, Sam Botta convinced me that men listen to books more than they read them so I thought the time was right and he’d just gotten back in the saddle so to speak after his debilitation in a hit & run car incident.

The book has exceeded any expectation I ever had for it and I still receive emails and tweets about how it’s changed men’s lives in the best possible way. The Rational Male, Preventive Medicine is also doing far better than I’d hoped if not eclipsing the first book. Sam and I are now in the process of doing the audio for TRMPM and I expect it will go live in early 2017.

The blog traffic continues to grow too.

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As most readers know, I do very little self-promotion for TRM and I only advertise the book on the TRP reddit forum and posting occasional Amazon reviews on Twitter. I always want the the message of this blog and my work to be relayed by the men who read and contribute to it. I’m a believer in the bottom up plan for improving men’s lives and ultimately the social order we find ourselves. I’m glad to see men passing on what they learn here. I’m happy to be able to focus on my ideas and have men spread the word for me.

I’ve done art direction and brand management for over two decades now. It’s what I do for a living so it wouldn’t be a stretch for me to convert TRM into a similar commercial success, but that’s never been my goal. From the outset I wanted to just do what I do and talk about the ideas I’ve come to or the dots I’ve connected. That isn’t to say I don’t appreciate making a little money from it, but I’ll never compromise my message to sell more books or start a Patreon site.

I’ve had guys tell me I should quit my day job and write full time, but I’ve never really needed to be an author for my livelihood. I do quite well for myself and not being beholden to being an official author allows me the freedom to do what I do without the concern of having to write ‘for’ anyone. I know there are guys whose schtick is to treat their writing like a product and they tell you to write for what your audience wants to read, but I think this inherently compromises the authenticity of the real message.

My goal isn’t to sell books, it’s to genuinely change men’s lives for the better with the tools and truths I present in my work. The Rational Male isn’t a ‘product’ for salesmen to sell, it’s a collection of ideas that, really, we’re all responsible for authorship of. Ideas are a hard thing to suppress, and they last far longer than the men who conceived them.

Honestly, when I started this blog back in 2011 I never imagined it would grow into what it’s become today. I have some plans now to do a site redesign. I’ve never really focused on the look of the blog, I just poured myself into its content, but I think after 5 years I’ll freshen the look up soon. I’m also in the middle of the first round of edits for my third book, the working title being The Rational Male, The Red Pill. That may change, but the primary focus will be on defining what the Red Pill is from an intersexual dynamics perspective. As a matter of policy I generally refrain from being too prescriptive for individual men to apply their Red Pill awareness, but in the new book I’ll break this rule and provide some generally applicable ways to live in a Red Pill paradigm.

Red Pill parenting and family interactions in a feminine-primary social order will feature prominently. Yes, it will include selections from the blog again, but with each I’ve added what I believe are general solutions to Red Pill problems, plus more new content.

Well, that’s it. I continue to be humbled by the response and reception of The Rational Male and I want to extend my true gratitude for everyone’s input, participation, reading my ideas and helping me do what I do – even the critics and detractors make me a better Red Pill author. So here’s what I thought represents the best posts from year 5.

Let me know what your favorites were in the comments and let me know how TRM has helped you as well.

 

With much gratitude,

Rollo Tomassi

 

The Rational Male Audio Book

Interviews

Red Pill Monthly

The Red Pill Monthly

The Red Pill Monthly

A Man in Demand Radio – Talk 3

The Red Pill Monthly – Frame

The Feminine Imperative

Solipsism I

Solipsism II

Damaged Goods

Good Girls, Bad Girls

Mansplaining

Sugar Babies

Losing My Religion

Parenting

The Red Pill Parent

Hypergamy Knows Best

Red Pill Parenting – Part I

Red Pill Parenting – Part II

Neofemininity

Red Pill / Game

Christian Dread

Ovulation & Dread

The Purple Pill

Don’t Hate the Beta

The Red Pill Balance

The Pareto Principle

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies

Positive Masculinity

Tribes

Hypergamy

Open Cuckoldry

Open Relationships

Evolving Hypergamy

Plan B

Late Life Hypergamy

Social

Storytelling

Empathy 2016

The War Brides of Europe

The Warrior Princess

Gamer Girls

Fempowerment

Ghosts in the Machine

Losing My Religion

Losing

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll admit I’ve had this post in my drafts folder for some time now. As always, standard caveats apply with regard to my policy on posts about religion, politics, and socioeconomics. I don’t delve into the particulars of these subjects, but I will dissect how they coincide with intersexual dynamics.

It’s no secret that I’ve been a regular follower of Dalrock’s blog for over five years now. Along with Dal I also consider Donalgraeme and a few other bloggers in the ‘Christo-Manosphere’ Red Pill colleagues if not friends. I’ve always held Dalrock as a sort of Red Pill brother since both our blogs came up around the same time. I’ve quoted and credited him in both my books.

I do so because there was a time I considered pursuing a path in my writing that would follow the same Red Pill critique of religion, (Christianity for Dal) at least in some occasional sense. After reading Dalrock’s very insightful early posts I decided against it. Dal has earned the respect of the manosphere for his Red Pill lens of contemporary Christianity for good reason – he’s a consummate statistician and researcher, and he’s what I’d call “embedded” well within modern (I presume mostly evangelical) church culture. He does it better than I could hope to do that part of the manosphere justice.

I never go into any detail about my own faith for a couple of reasons, the first being it’s only peripherally relevant in my writing. Secondly, it’s always been my position that the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally areligious and apolitical. That said, I am familiar enough with ‘Churchian’ culture and the psycho-social side of mainstream religion to understand it through my own Red Pill lens.

When I analyze Red Pill principles within social contexts I always have a hard time with religion. It grates on me because I’m of the opinion that one’s religious leanings, one’s interaction with existence and life, one’s consideration of the spiritual, ought to be something personal and private if it’s in anyway genuine. As such, and for some, it can be a source of real vulnerability and exploitation which is really nothing new to anyone. It’s one thing to be even agnostic and trapped in a Blue Pill world, but it’s quite another to have been raised to adulthood in a religious context and coming to terms with having some very deep ego-investments shattered by a new Red Pill awareness.

If you ask anyone steeped in the Blue Pill conditioning of the Feminine Imperative about how this exploitation operates in an intersexual context you’ll likely get the standard answer that religion is largely a “social construct designed to maintain the Patriarchy.” And I have no doubt that in a Judeo-Christian sense this was likely the case for millennia. I won’t dig into how much of this had the latent purpose of controlling for Hypergamy in this post, but in the generations since the sexual revolution and the rise of feminine social primacy this maintaining the Patriarchy is a failing distraction on the part of the Feminine Imperative.

Creating Religion in the Image of the Feminine Imperative

For the past five generations, there has been a concerted re-engineering of religion (and not just limited to Christianity) to better suit the ends of the Feminine Imperative. Just as men are sold the idealism of the old set of books while living within the social context that confounds them, religion has been coopted by the feminine. The old books religion has either been replaced wholesale by a feminine-interpreted, feminine-directed religion that places women as its highest authority, or it’s been restructured and rewritten to serve the same feminine-primary objectives.

For going on six years now, Dalrock has masterfully documented and rightly criticized these shifts in Christianity. Although I’m focusing on western Christiainty here, this re-engineering of modern religion is not limited to just Christianity. A Red Pill perspective reveals a lot of uncomfortable truths, one of these is how well the Feminine Imperative has succeeded in supplanting any and all masculine influence in religion.

I expect there will be female critics who’ll cite that, in most of church culture, it’s still predominantly men who control churches and religious organizations, but in the era of feminine social primacy, it’s not who executes the control, but whose beliefs control the executors. Pair this with the commodification of religion and we can see the spheres of true feminine control and feminine-primary purpose.

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/737234578432233472

After almost six years of following the religious aspects of the Red Pill, I think it’s high time men acknowledge that modern Christian culture simply does not have men’s best interests as part of its doctrine anymore. Christianity, in particular, is by women, for women – if not directly executed by women, though even that is changing.

Church culture is now openly hostile towards any expression of conventional masculinity that doesn’t directly benefit women and actively conditions men to be serviceable, gender-loathing Betas. The feminist narrative of “toxic masculinity” has entirely replaced any semblance of what traditional masculinity or manhood once was to the church. Any hint of a masculinity not entirely beholden to a now feminine-primary purpose is not only feared, but shamed with feminine-interpreted aspersions of faith.

I recently read a study that our current generation is the least religious in history and I think as far as men are concerned much of that disdain for religion is attributable to a church culture that constantly and openly ridicules and debases any male-specific endeavors or anything characteristic of conventional masculinity. It’s no secret in today’s church franchisement that reaching out to, and retaining the interests of, men is at its most difficult.

Again, this is attributable to a generation of feminized men being raised into a church culture, and eventual church leadership, that has been taught to prioritize and identify with the feminine and reinforced with articles of faith now defined by the Feminine Imperative. The modern church has trouble reaching men because the church no longer has a grasp of what it means to be ‘men’.

To be clear, that’s not an indictment of the genuine faith itself, but rather a fairly measured observation of the way a feminine-primary church culture has shaped that faith. In the future, any man with a marginal capacity for critical thought will avoid the contemporary Christian church and religion for the obvious misandry it espouses; the only religious men you will find will be those raised into a life of religiously motivated Beta servitude – or those dragged to the feminine-directed church by wives who hold authoritative ‘headship’ in their relationships.

And even in what some consider to be pro-masculine or “macho” churches, we still find the Paper Alpha leaders preach from a mindset that defers wholesale to the feminine’s “Godly perfection” as they attempt to AMOG other male member to greater devotion to qualifying for, and identifying with, the feminine influence that pervades their church.

Religious men will be synonymous with a Beta mindset.

It’s gotten to a point where it’s better to look after your self-interests and repent of the sin later than commit to an institution that openly seeks to indenture you. I realize that might be anathema to the more determined religious man, but just understand that this is the pragmatic, deductive future that the contemporary, western-feminized church is presenting to men. The social contract of marriage from a religious perspective has shifted into the ultimate leap of faith for men. They literally risk everything in marriage – child custody, sexual access, any expectation of true, male authority or respect, long-term financial prospects, etc. – but this leap of faith comes with a metaphysical price tag.

Men declining to participate in faith-based marriage decline an aspect of a faith reset to serve women; women who are held as a higher order of sinless being than men by this new church. For the agnostic or areligious man, discarding a Blue Pill social conditioning for a Red Pill awareness is a difficult task, but for men raised to believe that their only doctrinally approved path to sex with a woman is abstinence until marriage, that man’s only hope is to accept his fate and stay the Beta a feminized church has conditioned him to be.

And once he gets to marriage and his approved expression of his sexuality, the “Christian” man finds that the feminized church, even the male elders, expect endless qualifications to women and his wife’s unceasing appeasement in exchange for that approved sex. It’s a tail-chasing that holds men to the old books social order expectations while absolving women of all accountability and expecting him to also make concessions for a new (feminized) social order that’s ensaturated the church.

SeventiesJason from Dalrock’s blog:

And then we have “Christian marriage” divorce rates which are only a few paltry percentage points lower than the secular world……..men like Chandler will blame “men” for not leading, not being ‘holy’ enough, not bold n’ biblical enough, not going to bed exhausted every night….and a pile of other excuses for why she “had no choice” but to end the marriage.

We have a whole cottage industry of ‘christian counseling’ and self-help books, usually written for and by women. We have conferences, TV channels, broadcast networks, podcasts, radio stations, outreach, plenty of churches in this country……..the Internet. A ton of resources. Books……every pastor great and small today is “working on” or has written a book.

How on earth did the early church survive under the penalty of death? Persecution. Seclusion, and outright shunning? How did it grow? How did it survive?

We are told over and over by pastors that “God has an amazing plan for your life!” and then to sell men in the world this ‘churchian’ ploy that you are somehow not as holy, balanced, ready, equipped, or mature to handle this amazing plan….ah, but your wife to be is! The unspoken consolation prize is “but…..hey, you get to have sex….and that’s the only thing men need or think about and want!”

That seems to be given begrudgingly today (in my men’s group…..goodness, so many of the married guys complain that their wives never want sex)

How did the early church turn the world upside down? All God did was send a few men, and they made it happen. We have so many tools today…..and we’re “helpless” and we tend to think a “building program” will help everything and if we let the men fix things on the property they will feel “useful”

For over five generations now, the modern church has become a Beta farm existing only to produce the same masculinity-confused men that the secular world has perfected today. In our idealism I think too many (even well-meaning Red Pill) men believe that the church is some insulation against the worst of the Feminine Imperative when it is in fact an institution that produces the same men we hope to free from the Matrix.

Dean Abbot had an excellent post about this dynamic in his critique of another post by Mark Braivo:

In spite of what you might hear in the media about how terrible and retrograde evangelicals are, the entire movement, even the “conservative” end is thoroughly feminized.

The central Christian teaching that ALL people are sinners gets glossed over. Instead, the notion that men are somehow worse by nature than women is everywhere, sometimes stated overtly, often in the subtext.

At the same time, women are elevated to a position of moral and spiritual superiority. Women’s sin is often excused in light of a man’s failings. I remember hearing a very well known evangelical leader tell a story about how his wife freaked out and started smashing all their dishes. What was his point? That she did this because he had been neglecting her. See, she is not an adult beholden to practice self-control, but rather an innocent, sweet victim driven to outlandish behavior by his shortcomings.

“Toxic masculinity”, any masculinity inconvenient to a feminine-correct purpose, is a sin both actively and retroactively in today’s church.

With every successive generation of Beta pastors that are produced by this farm you get more and more men whose only experience of that religion is one of servile deference to a faith that’s been fundamentally altered to the utility of women and feminine-primacy. Women love to complain that it’s largely men who do the preaching and decision making in church, but what they ignore is that these men are the developed implements of the Feminine Imperative.

I will wager that in the next 10 years Christianity will be unrecognizable from its prior tenets of well defined conventional masculinity and the faith itself will expressly be centered on deference to the feminine.

Culture Informs Faith

I’ve had several critics tell me that the problem with the modern church is really one of its culture and should be considered apart from the ‘genuine’ faith, however it is church culture that ultimately informs and restructures doctrine and articles of faith. When that culture is informed by the Feminine Imperative, open Christian feminists, and a feminine influence posing as doctrinally sound egalitarianism, this fundamentally recreates an old order religion in the image of a new order, female-primary, imperative.

This and endless variations of the feminization of religion across every denomination and sect is why contemporary religion is openly hostile to any semblance of conventional masculinity. Church is no place for a single man and is just a formality for the man married to a religious woman at this point in time. All considerations of faith aside, I cannot fathom an adult man with any self-respect finding anything attractive about the modern church. Either there is nothing for him there or he is despised and denigrated, openly in a faith altering way or discreetly in resentment, or in pandering ridicule of his juvenilized maleness.

I don’t type this without a sincere sense of what’s been lost, particularly for men genuinely seeking existential answers for himself. My observations here will undoubtedly be thought of as some attack on a genuine faith, but my issue here isn’t with religion per se, but rather the thoroughness with which the Feminine Imperative has either subverted wholesale or covertly influenced really all modern religion.

Yes, I realize that faith is something personal that should be set apart from churchy social influence, but the culture is a manifestation of the doctrine and collective belief system. That culture ultimately modifies and informs the faith itself, thus with every successive generation that social influence becomes an article of the faith for the next.

Better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, especially when the ‘saints’ are the priestesses of the Feminine Imperative.

The Red Pill lens in today’s church is a scary prospect.

Another commenter, The Question, had a good comment about this:

You’re absolutely right about the state of the Church in the West.

What makes it so dangerous for a Blue Pill man is that it is ground-zero for girls entering the epiphany phase. The single men who remain in the church are the ones will be pressured to fulfill their role in that strategy and will be treated with hostility if they don’t. I personally anticipate a renewed church “man up” campaign somewhere in the near future as the next wave of twenty-somethings near 30 and beyond.

I’d say the only reason to go is to meet cute single young women and that’s if the church actually has them and its theology isn’t wholly intolerable. College town churches like mine have quite a few young single ladies which is why I go.

I will admit, putting aside conscience and morality, the modern (‘Relevant’) church would be a veritable untapped gold mine for a PUA savvy of christian culture. Churchianity’s already got the perfect social architecture installed for pick up. Christian women aching for sexy Alpha dominance in a sea of preconditioned christian Beta “good guys”, high intrasexual competition anxiety for both sexes, instant reconciliation and sin forgiveness for women, hell, you can even talk a woman into an abortion without her having any accountability for killing her child at this point. What’s not for a PUA to like? Feminine-primary churchianity has been waiting for christian-savvy players for years now.

Men with a well defined Red Pill lens, having the sensitivity to understand the subcommunications of what’s going on around them in church, should be rightly horrified.

This is one reason Men like Dalrock are vilified by Christian women who understand he’s wise to what’s transpiring in the church – the Feminine Imperative has taken the Lord’s name in vain by presuming to promote its agenda and socially engineer generations of men to support it by claiming it’s God’s will.

Read the Fempowerment narratives of any ‘Christian women’s ministry speaker’, they will defend the sisterhood above any tenets of faith. They’ll tolerate blasphemy of the faith, but never the Feminine Imperative. They’ll rationalize abortion as a man’s sin, but never accept accountability for it and any man to attempt to rebuke them (for anything really) is counter-shamed for male chauvinist judgementalism. And being judgemental of any woman is the most mortal of sins a man can make in the new church

In the feminine-primary church, the Holy Spirit is the Feminine Imperative, what she says is an article of faith. Men who become aware of this via the Red Pill are a danger to it.

The Key Masters

keymaster

In last week’s comments Not Born This Morning dropped this comment in the last thread:

It has been said and it seems fairly well established as a presumed reality that “Women are the gate keepers to sex and men are the gate keepers to commitment”. This model of gender specific “gatekeeping” seems to be the most widely accepted model in the red pill community and the general culture accepts it readily. This model seems rational enough, it significantly forms our frame of understanding about gender dynamics upon which we base our interpretations of behavior & intents, and our decisions to act. But is it the best model to explain what is really going on? Could this model be inferior in that it fails to account for an underlying more fundamental motivator? Is there a more accurate explanation for women’s intents and behaviors? Could this model be potentially deceptive?

The sex side of this model is simple and easy to understand. It is very clear and specific to the fundamental biologic. It is inarguable, not negotiable. The primary drive motivating the sexual aspect is not political or social. It is biological. This is not the case with the commitment side. The commitment side is primary to the political and social realm. “Commitments” are always components of contracts written or otherwise.

To comprehend what I’m about to explain, we must first agree on the primary definition of commitment. As I understand it, a commitment is a pledge to do something, a proclamation to perform certain action (or inaction) within a specific context for the benefit of another usually in exchange for some consideration. In the sexual context women seek “commitment” from a man primarily for provisioning and sexual exclusivity. The man “commits” to the woman that he will abandon his freedom and not enter into sexual relations with other women. He pledges himself financially and sexually to her exclusively. Realistically, this form of “commitment” includes the man abandoning his options. If he becomes sexually involved with another woman, it is widely considered that he has “broken his commitment” and he is dishonored by her and society for “breaking the commitment”. But, has he really broken any commitment other than a self denigrating pledge to forgo his freedom and abandon his options? Since obviously the male imperative is polygamy and spreading his seed, then isn’t the imposition to “commit” in the first place really a dishonor of his sexuality and a dishonor to him? If so, isn’t “commitment” in this context nothing more than a form of enslavement?

So by saying men are the “gate keepers of commitment” aren’t we really saying that men are the “gatekeepers of their own enslavement”?

I’ve read this line of thought from various MGTOW hardliners in various iterations and I’ve even written a post on the concept of commitment  and what it does or doesn’t mean to a man. The idea is to equate committing to a woman with some irrational agreement to self-induced slavery. However, the problem most men have with commitment is that the old set of books has a social mandate for men to keep their word or honor an agreement. It’s what men do. Say what you mean and stick to it, but as with most every uniquely male custom, Honor among men has been one more useful distortion of the Feminine Imperative.

As I mentioned in the Paradox of Commitment, men don’t have nearly the fear of commitment our feminized social order would have us believe. Men aren’t “commit-o-phones” when it comes to military service or dedicating themselves to a business. These are the areas the women’s magazines conveniently overlook when it comes to comparing men’s commitment with committing to women in monogamy. I’m bringing this up because it’s important to see how men commit to things other than fidelity to a single woman.

If we’re going to equate monogamous fidelity to a woman with slavery we also need to see how other commitments can be viewed as being, or not being, slavery. Is the commitment of military service slavery? Particularly if you know have a pretty good idea of what to expect from that commitment? Are you volunteering for slavery if you start a business and become financially beholden to it?

From  the Paradox of Commitment:

You can even take marriage out of the equation; if I’m in a committed LTR with a GF and over the course of that relationship I realize that she’s not what I’m looking for (for any number of reasons, not just sex), even though she’s 100% faithfully committed to me and the LTR, should I then break that commitment? If I do, am I then being unethical for having broken that commitment irrespective of how I break it? Should the commitment to my own personal well being and future happiness be compromised by another commitment?

What’s my obligation; neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?

It’s my take that commitment ‘should’ be a function of genuine desire. Ideally, commitment should be to something one is so passionate about that the limiting of one’s own future opportunities that come from that commitment is an equitable, and mutually appreciated trade. This is, unfortunately, rarely the case for most people in any form of commitment because people, circumstance, opportunity and conditions are always in flux. A commitment that had been seen as equitable sacrifice at one time can become debilitating 5 years after it depending upon circumstance.

Under the old social contract, the idea that a man would compromise his sexual strategy to fulfill a woman’s (Hypergamy in the long term) had a presumed exchange – sexual access, parental investment, companionship, a good, supportive feminine role example for the kids, etc. – that made the commitment of marriage at least somewhat appealing, if not entirely equitable. I supposed a case could still be made that even under the old order of conventional gender roles and expectations men were still committing themselves to a downside bargain. But in our new, feminine-primary social order, with our broader communication, it’s certainly signing up for slavery of a sort in comparison to the options available being single.

A lot of guys think that by my advising men to spin plates and remain as non-exclusive as possible that its sole purpose is to free them up to indiscriminately bang as many women as possible. While sexual variety maybe an upside to non-exclusivity, there are many more freedoms and options that a non-exclusive man can invest himself in where committed men cannot, or wouldn’t even think to.

So yes, from a male sexual strategy perspective, and considering the terms of that commitment and consequences of breaking it are all glaringly apparent, signing up for that commitment might be assigning yourself to a kind of slavery. Under our present social conditions, staying single might be as good as it gets for men.

However, that said, there is still an undeniable, idealistic, hope that men can make the best of a marriage. Most men (see the 80% Beta men) still remarry in far greater margins than women, even after horrific divorces. We can attribute that to the sustainability of men’s sexual market value lasting longer than women’s, but the desire to want for a lasting monogamy is what I’m getting at. Even in light of the fact that women are hardwired for Hypergamy, and in light of women’s inability to appreciate the sacrifices men must make to facilitate their realities, men still, sooner or later, have a desire to lock down or otherwise wife-up a woman he idealizes. I have read the testimonies of men who will go to any length to stay in a marriage if even the outside hope of it improving exists.

I think this desire might be both a conditional and innate drive in men.

In Mrs. Hyde I quoted a study by Dr. Martie Haselton from Why is muscularity sexy? :

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

It’s entirely possible that a man’s sexual strategy is the simple result of his adapting to his circumstance.

Under the old social order, prior to the upheaval of the sexual revolution and feminine social primacy, investing heavily in one’s mate made good sense if the guy wanted to procreate. As men, I think we still want to apply more value to our commitment in this respect. I think it gets back to the fallacy of relational equity, but because most Blue Pill men believe that there is value in their committing to a woman, and they falsely think that women have the capacity to appreciate it, we tend to build more into it as some kind of mutually understood relationship leverage.

Gatekeepers

Back before Roosh began making his necessities into virtues, he had a pretty good insight about women being “gatekeepers” of both sex and commitment:

A popular manosphere saying is that women are gatekeepers to sex and men are gatekeepers to commitment. I wish this was an absolute truth, but it’s not. As a collective, women are often gatekeepers to both sex and commitment. Most men reading right now can surely attest to their failed attempts to secure commitment from women they slept with, and if you poll the entire population of men, you may find that they are the initiators of monogamous relationships more often than women. It only makes sense for this to be true: it is way more damaging for a man to have his woman sleep with another man and get cuckolded than the other way around. The 0.5% of the population who are skilled players and have more say with commitment don’t put a dent into this common reality. As a sex, men have very little say in determining the relationship dynamic.

[…]It would be a nice fantasy for us men to believe that we have a say in relationships and sex. It’d be nice to think that our “alpha” behavior and our game determines how a relationship can proceed, but often it doesn’t. We’re just giving the girl what she has already decided on. Do you really think you’re selling televisions to customers who came into the store with the intent to buy bicycles? The girl who falls in love with us wanted to fall in love with us, the girl who had fun with us wanted to just have fun with us, and so on. And even when a girl wants a bicycle, she still wants a certain kind of bicycle. This is why game is a numbers game, because girls are incredibly picky even when they are sexually available. The horniest girl in the club who decided on having sex will still have her pick of the litter and opt to get the best that she can.

From the perspective of men using Game to secure some kind of commitment with a woman, I’d agree, it is a numbers game. But, in general, most men aren’t learning PUA/Game to settle into an LTR and most Red Pill aware men (should) understand the nature of women well enough to leverage Game if (ever) they do look for commitment.

Roosh was correct about men not really being gatekeepers of commitment though. I think there’s a definite want on the part of guys to believe that they have some sort of leverage in the ultimate scheme of things. The Feminine Imperative constantly conditions men to think that their commitment to a woman is something insanely valuable to women. Thus, we see shaming tactics designed to call men out for avoiding commitment irrespective of men’s reasons for wanting to take precautions. This has the effect of conditioning men to think that they are the gatekeepers of something valuable.

In a sense, commitment is something valuable to a woman, however, in the age of Open Hypergamy and Strong Independent Women®, the writing is on the wall for men with regard to the convenient need for that commitment at the end-game phase of a woman’s sexual market value. So yes, a man’s commitment to monogamy with a woman has inherent value, but men are hardly the gatekeepers of it when it is a woman who does the deciding as to whether any one guy’s commitment makes any difference to her.

So, we come to a question of comparative equity with regard to men “signing up for slavery” and how inherently valuable his commitment (as convenient as it’s needed) really is to a woman. I have no doubt there are several women reading this right now who are in “relationship limbo” with a guy they desperately want to commit to them in some official capacity. And no doubt they’ll drop a story in the comments personalizing it to be typical of men, but I would argue Roosh’s point that men are the initiators of monogamous relationships far more often than women. Ironically, commitment only has value to a woman when it’s denied to her by a man who’s SMV outclasses her own.

For obvious reasons, highly desirable women, women at the peak of their sexual market valuation, are always the least concerned with men’s capacity to commit. They largely have the luxury to be selective, but furthermore the time at which women are at their highest SMV is usually the point at which men are still building upon their own. Eventually, commitment only has an appreciable value to a woman when she is most in need of it; when her SMV is in decline.

I should also point out that men, the majority being Blue Pill Betas, are the most necessitous of a woman’s commitment when she is at her highest, his is an unproven commodity, and he appreciates the value of a woman’s commitment. Thus, most men look for a stable monogamy in their early to mid 20s, while more mature men who’ve had time to build their SMV into their mid to late thirties tend to be less concerned with monogamy. This is why we hear the constant drone of women bemoaning that highly valuable, supposedly peer-equitable men’s unwillingness to commit and settle down with women aging out of the sexual marketplace. Women are far less concerned with the commitment-readiness of young, unproven men who themselves would commit to even a women in the mid-range of her SMV.

At the end here, I think it’s time Red Pill men disabuse themselves of the idea that they are the ‘gatekeepers’ of commitment, and rather employ their internalized Red Pill awareness and Game to be the ‘key masters’ of women. While I have no doubt that commitment can be a carrot on the stick for some women, the problem really lies in how that commitment is in anyway valuable and balance that knowledge with the fact that commitment, once given, becomes valueless and taken for granted when it’s established. The fact that you’d commit to a woman isn’t something that carries a relationship, no matter how badly she wanted it from you before.

There really is no quid pro quo when it comes to commitment or value in believing you’re a gatekeeper of it.

Law 20
Do Not Commit to Anyone

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

The Red Pill Monthly – Frame

If youtube isn’t your thing you can get the audio archive here.

 

I managed to get some time with Niko once again yesterday. He was kind enough to stay up late and get a talk in for another installment of our semi-regular podcast The Red Pill Monthly (more like bi-monthly recently).

I really liked this one because we delved into some new stuff about Frame and the importance of establishing and maintaining a solid sense of self and purpose in all aspects of a man’s life, but focusing on the interpersonal and intersexual importance of Frame.

The concept of Frame is not my original idea, it’s actually derived from interpersonal psychology. However, way back in my early days at SoSuave I made the connection to the psychological principle and what PUAs of the time were advocating as a means to control in seduction. I begin my Iron Rules of Tomassi with Frame because I’ve always felt that everything else in seduction, and life in general, hinges upon the realities we create for ourselves.

The pop-cultural term for it today is ‘mindset’, but I feel the concept of Frame extends beyond what’s generally a retreading of The Power of Positive Thinking that’s being promoted as mindset now. It certainly plays a part in the entirety of holding Frame, but the overall establishment of Frame with a woman, with other men, with your family or with your employer requires an art that extends past just how one thinks of himself.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #1

Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are. 

The concept of “frame” is yet another ephemeral idea that had need of a term in the very beginnings of the great masculine awakening that’s become the ‘community’. If memory serves I think it may have been Mystery who first picked up on what’s really a very rudimentary and well established psychological principle. In psych terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced. One’s capacity for personal decisions, choices for well-being, emotional investments, religious beliefs and political persuasions (amongst many others) are all influenced and biased by the psychological narrative ‘framework’ under which we are most apt to accept as normalcy.

Rather than go into too much depth here I’ll just encourage you to listen to the podcast and we’ll have an open comments thread about Frame. I think it’s good to review some older principles, not just for the benefit of newly Red Pill aware men, but also because I think it’s good to reconsider these ‘standards’ from a perspective of time and where we are as a Red Pill community today.

Frame, and understanding its importance, is the foundation of dozens of other Red Pill principles and applications. As most of my readers know, I try to avoid specific prescriptive advice. I’m not in the business of telling men how to live their lives with formulaic step-by-step Red Pill templates. The Red Pill isn’t one-size-fits-all and men need to interpret their Red Pill awareness according to their personalities, cultural context, social situations and personal beliefs.

That said, in the coming months I will be offering some more generalized, prescriptive ideas or suggestions as to how I feel men might apply certain Red Pill principles in their lives. The 9 Iron Rules are about as close as I come to prescriptive advice, and while I’m not in the business of making ‘Rational Male Men’, after reviewing them with Niko I think that some generalized advice according to Red Pill awareness might be something in the offing.

So, let me know what you think about this ideas as well as any questions or input you have about Frame once you’ve listened to our talk. It runs about an hour and a half. I’m also toying with the idea of discussing each of the Iron Rules in the coming RPM podcasts. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in listening to.

Enjoy!

rollo_t

Trust Issues

I was driving with a friend of mine and his wife to a promo last month. The parking at this particular gig was packed so it made sense to take one car and as I sat in the back seat I observed the behaviors and connected them to the conversation his wife and he were having while we drove. He was driving as well as any other guy I know; observant, careful, efficient, casual, basically a good driver, I didn’t even give his driving much mind. However, judging from the nervousness and fidgety behavioral tics of his wife you’d think he was drunk and reckless.

She clung tightly to the “oh shit” handle you see above the passenger-side window in most SUVs today. Her body language was one of fear trying to maintain polite composure, but every time we’d slow for traffic or a stop she would gesture with her hands as if she were bracing herself for impact. She simply did not trust her husband in the driver’s seat. She’d insist he switch lanes miles ahead of a turn so as to be ready to make the turn, or she’d coyly ask him to slow down when we were on the highway.

I see this a lot in couples where the power dynamic is one where the woman is the tacit authority of the relationship. These two were a textbook example. The buzz word term for it is ‘passive aggressive’ behavior, but that behavior is prompted by a root-level influence of women’s security need. My friend, being the Beta he is, made every attempt to calm his wife’s fears by accommodating her passive (and some not so passive) posturing and requests. It still wasn’t enough. She simply doesn’t trust the man she’s been married to for 10 years with her safety – regardless of his actions.

Now, from a Red Pill perspective, it’s important to bear in mind that women are always looking for an emotional rush whether positive or negative. I detail this in Indignation but in the absence of indignation, women will actively create it for themselves. Any PUA worth his salt knows that leaving an emotional impression on a woman is a key to seduction. Some men can do this effortlessly and often unaware depending on the social context and circumstances he surrounds himself with. These are guys we think are ‘naturals’ even though the learning process and the trial, error, reward mechanisms of it for him are just an internalized part of his personality. However, making this emotional impression can be learned, expressed ‘naturally’ and it can be internalized.

When we look at the dual nature of Hypergamy we tend to focus primarily on the Alpha Fucks side of women’s sexual strategy. For obvious reasons, it’s the part guys tend to have the most interest in, and since seduction is the key to STRs and LTRs, it’s also the part guys need to develop most. It’s tough for most Blue Pill men to behave counter to what their conditioning has taught them. Just like my friend’s driving here, most guys believe that comfort, trust, rapport, friendship, appeasement, and generally self-sacrificing are what’s at the heart of a good relationship. All of course based on the mystical “open communication” trope.

Selfish vs Self-Interest

Vox Day had an interesting back and forth with Kitten Holiday about this dynamic this weekend:

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/762307577560563712

For men who’ve been conditioned to believe that the key to success with women is to play nice and solve women’s problems for them with patient understanding, suggesting selfishness is attractive to women is counterintuitive. However, agreeableness and humility in men have been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners. So is it selfishness that makes a guy attractive or arousing?

I’ve suggested in the past that it is actually men who dare to place themselves at the center of their lives who make the most significant emotional impact upon women. This emotional impression is a byproduct of men who make themselves their first priority and when this prioritization becomes an internalized second nature to a man we say that he’s made himself his Mental Point of Origin.

I’m clarifying this here because it’s easy to conflate ‘enlightened self-interest’ with “selfishness”. A common criticism among the MGTOW set is that a man investing himself into anything with the express purpose of attracting women is vanity or wasted effort. However, it’s defining the point where this personal investment in oneself crosses over into having the effect of being an attractive trait to women that needs some more clarification. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, and unfortunately, it’s a line that’s subjective to the man who’s invested himself in virtually anything that uniquely benefits him and is attractive/arousing for women.

So we have two countermanding imperatives here. Men are conditioned, personally and publicly, to believe that niceness, comfort, and trust are the keys to success with women (whom we are told will have an affinity and appreciation for it). All of these Blue Pill qualities are pro-social attributes, yet in practice, in the real world, we observe men with anti-social, ‘selfish’ interest are rewarded with women’s attention. Self-interested men make a more significant emotional impression.

When we contrast this with the two aspects of women’s sexual strategy we see that the Blue Pill (pro-social) traits align with the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, while the ‘selfish’ (anti-social) aspects align with the arousing Alpha Fucks desires of women. For the Blue Pill invested man, it’s baffling to see how ‘selfish’ men are rewarded with intimacy, genuine desire, and sex. What they lack is a complete understanding of women’s dual sexual natures.

“So I gotta be an asshole to get women to notice me? Chicks really dig jerks?”

I’ve been reading this response from newly unplugged nice guys for as long as I’ve been writing. It’s the binary response I’ve come to expect from guys still on the fence with regard to Red Pill awareness, but it goes back to the negative associations they have with making themselves their own mental point of origin. It’s ‘selfishness’ not self-interest and this is exactly the opposite of what they’ve been taught will resolve problems for them.

This then comes back to my first point about women’s need for security. I’ve been married for over 20 years now, and for as good a marriage as I have, I still have my doubts that Mrs. T trusts me implicitly with her life.

It’s ironic because I actually saved her life when we were first married. There was a very swift moving river we used to walk our dogs along when we lived in Tahoe. It was spring and the river was high from snowmelt runoff, and it was cold – as in take your breath away before you’re paralyzed cold. One of our dogs had spied a few ducks on the opposite side of the river and bolted into it to go after them. About half way across he realizes it was a stupid idea and turns back. He couldn’t make it and the river swept him downstream. We both ran down the river after him to a point where he’d pass and Mrs. T jumped in to catch him. She goes numb in seconds, but she caught the dog by the collar. I know I’m going to have to go in to get them now so I prep in my head what to do. I get in now and grab the dog and bodily throw him up on the steep bank. Then I do the same with Mrs. T right before the water is so cold I can barely move. I managed to grab a large tree root in the bank I’d seen earlier to haul myself out.

In spite of that very memorable event, I’m not sure I have my wife’s implicit trust in this respect. I know that sounds bad, but even after all of that, there was no acknowledged appreciation for it. I was just doing what a man is expected to do. In many other aspects, I have my wife’s trust, but I wonder if the want for an emotional impression isn’t buffered by a need for security.

In my friend’s case, this lack of trust is manifested in his wife’s demeanor and interactions with him. The more Beta the man a woman’s paired herself with the more evident her need for security becomes a part of their relationship. Remember that security comes in many different forms. It’s entirely possible for a dutiful Beta to be a great provider, but still not be trusted with his decision making or his capacity to protect his woman from harm.

Women today are already raised to never put their trust in men as it is. Men are at best lovable buffoons, at worst untrustworthy incorrigible players. Popular culture directs women to only rely on themselves, to only trust in their own, implicitly correct decisions and directions – and then absolve them of any negative consequence of those decisions. Thus, we have several generations of women who claim the authority role in their LTRs and relegate their men to only marginally trusted companions.

All of that said, I would suggest that men opt to not concern themselves with so-called “trust issues” with women. Women’s feral nature is founded in Hypergamy and part of that nature will always be to doubt the quality of the man she’s paired herself with. It may seem ‘selfish’, but placing yourself as your first priority will be far more appreciated and accepted than a man attempting to endlessly earn the trust from a woman that can only be temporal at best. Your lack of concern over her status of trusting you will have much more impact than trying to appease her for it.

Beta men are endlessly told that a woman’s trust and rapport, her comfort level with a guy, is essential to her being intimate or sexual, or having a good relationship. Those are the guys who feel the sting the most when they see a woman at her feral best fuck the hot guy she met the same night who made a significant emotional impression on her. The guy who invested his interests in himself and she happened to be along for his ride.

Trust is just a convenient term used by women to vet for Beta men. ‘Trust’ only amounts to a list of prerequisites and rules for a Beta who believes it’s his duty to fulfill them, which are never an afterthought for women with more Alpha men.

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies

monogamy

When I first began writing on SoSuave over a decade ago I used to get into what I consider now some fairly predictable arguments about monogamy. It was an interesting time since it was around then I was getting into some heated arguments in my behavioral psychology classes in college.

I had just written what would later become my essay, There is no One and a good majority of my classmates and all of my teachers but one were less than accepting of the theory. I anticipated most of the women in those classes would be upset – bear in mind this was around 2001-02 and the Red Pill was yet to be a thing – what I was surprised by was how many men became hostile by my having challenged the soulmate myth.

I got a lot of the same flack from women then that I get from uninitiated women when they read my work now; “Aren’t you married? Isn’t she your soulmate? Don’t you believe in love? You must’ve got burned pretty bad at some time Mr. Hateful.” Those were and are what I expect because they’re the easy subroutine responses a Blue Pill ego needs to protect itself with. There was a time I probably would’ve mouthed the same. That’s how the conditioning works; it provides us with what we think ought to be ‘obvious’ to anyone. And at the same time, we feel good for ‘defying the odds’ and believing in what we take for granted, or common sense.

This is how deep the subconscious need for assuring our genetic heritage goes. For women this assurance is about optimal Hypergamy, for men, it’s about assurances of paternity. In either case, we need to believe that we will reproduce, and so much so that we will attribute some supernatural influence to the process of doing so. The fulfillment of your own sexuality is nothing less than your battle for existence, and on some level, your subconscious understands this. Thus, for the more religious-minded it gets attributed to fate and faith, whereas for the more secular-minded it’s about the romanticized notion of a soulmate.

Monogamy & ONEitis

I contemplated the idea of ONEitis for a long time back then. I’d most certainly been through it more than once, even with the BPD ex-girlfriend. By then I understood first hand how the belief absorbs a Beta and how it is an essential element, effectively a religion, for a Blue Pill life experience. I didn’t realize it then, but I was maturing into a real valuation of myself and I had the benefit of some real-world experiences with the nature of women to interpret and contrast what I was learning then.

Honestly, I had never even encountered the term ‘ONEitis’ prior to my SoSuave forum days. I referred to the soulmate myth in my writing as best I could, but it wasn’t until (I suppose) Mystery had coined the term. Outside the ‘sphere people got genuinely upset with me when I defined it for them.  Back then I attributed this to having their ego-investment challenged, and while that’s part of it, today I believe there’s more to it than this.

The old social contracts that constituted what I call the Old Set of Books meant a lot in respect to how the social orders prior to the sexual revolution were maintained. That structuring required an upbringing that taught men and women what their respective roles were, and those roles primarily centered on a lifetime arrangement of pair bonding.

It’s interesting to note that the popular theory amongst evolutionary anthropologists is that modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years. Needless to say, it’s a very unpopular opinion that human beings are in fact predisposed to polyamory / polygyny and monogamy is a social adaptation (a necessary one) with the purpose of curbing the worst consequences of that nature. We want to believe that monogamy is our nature and our more feral impulses are spandrels and inconveniences to that nature. We like the sound of humans having evolved past our innate proclivities to the point that they are secondary rather than accepting them as fundamental parts of who we really are.

Women, in particular, are far more invested in promoting the idea of ‘natural’ monogamy since it is their sex that bears the cost of reproductive investments. Even the hint of men acknowledging their ‘selfish gene’ nature gets equated with a license to cheat on women. This is an interesting conflict for women who are increasingly accepting (if not outright flaunting) of Open Hypergamy.

I’ve attempted in past essays to address exactly this duplicity women have to rationalize with themselves. The Preventive Medicine book and posts outline the conflict and how women internalize and ‘hamsterize’ the need to be both Hypergamously selective, but to also prioritize long-term security at various stages of their lives. Ultimately a woman’s position on monogamy is ruled by how she balances her present Alpha Fucks with her future prospects of Beta Bucks.

Seed and Need

It might be that women would rather share a confirmed Alpha with other women than be saddled with a faithful Beta, but that’s not to say that necessity doesn’t eventually compel women to settle for monogamy with a dutiful Beta. In either respect, the onus of sustained, faithful monogamy is always a responsibility placed upon men. The indignation that comes from even the suspicions of a man’s “straying”, a wandering eye, or preplanned infidelity is one of the most delicious sensations a woman can feel. Women will create syndicated talk shows just to commiserate around that indignation.

But in an era when the likes of Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to fully embrace their Hypergamous natures and expects men to be equally accepting of it, it takes a lot of psychological gymnastics to reconcile the visceral feelings of infidelity with the foreknowledge that a less exciting Beta will be the only type of man who will calm her suspicions.

It’s important to also contrast this with the socialization efforts to make women both victims and blameless. As I mention in the last post, men who lack the appreciation of the necessity to prepare for a sustained monogamy with a woman are considered ‘kidults’ or prolonging their adolescence. They are shamed for not meeting women’s definition of being mature; that definition is always one that centers on the idea that men ought to center their lives around being better-than-deserved, faithful, monogamous potentials for women’s long-term security and parental investment.

On the other hand, women are never subject to any qualifications like this. In fact, they are held in higher regard for bucking the system and staying faithful to themselves by never marrying or even aborting children along the way to do so. So once again, we return to the socialization effort necessary to absolve women of the consequences that the conflict Hypergamy poses to them – they become both victims and blameless in confronting a monogamy they expect from men, but are somehow exempt from when it’s inconvenient.

Pair Bonding

Arguably, pair bonding has been a primary adaptation for us that has been species-beneficial. It’s fairly obvious that humans’ capacity for both intra- and inter-sexual cooperation has made us the apex species on the planet. However, the Feminine Imperative’s primary social impetus of making Hypergamy the defining order of (ideally) all cultures is in direct conflict with this human cooperativity. A new order of open Hypergamy, based on female primacy (and the equalist importance of the individual), subverts the need for pair bonding. There is no need for intersexual interdependence (complementarity) when women are socialized and lauded for being self-satisfying, self-sufficient individuals.

Add to this the conditioning of unaccountable victimhood and/or the inherent blamelessness of women and you get an idea of where our social order is heading.

Both sex’s evolved sexual strategies operate counter to the demands of pair bonded monogamy. For millennia we’ve adapted social mechanisms to buffer for it (marriage, male protectionism of women, etc.), but the cardinal rule of sexual strategies still informs these institutions and practices:

 

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

In this respect, it is men who are expected to make the greater compromise due to an evolved sense of uncertainty about paternity and the social mandate to accommodate women’s sexual strategy.

The counter to this is that women have always borne the responsibility of parental investment if they chose a father poorly (or didn’t choose), but in our post-sexual revolution social order, the consequences of this responsibility have been virtually eliminated. In fact, those consequences are now viewed as evidence of women’s independent strength.

Even aborting a child is a source of pride now.

Men bear the greater effect of compromising their sexual strategies to accommodate and resolve the strategy of women. When we account for the normalization of open Hypergamy, soft cuckoldry, and the legal resistance to paternity testing (ostensibly centering on the emotional wellbeing of the child in question) it is much clearer that men bear the most direct consequences for compromising their sexual imperatives.

From Warren Farrell’s book. Why Men are the Way They Are (h/t to SJF):

Why are men so afraid of commitment? Chapter 2 explained how most men’s primary fantasy is still, unfortunately, access to a number of beautiful women. For a man, commitment means giving up this fantasy. Most women’s primary fantasy is a relationship with one man who either provides economic security or is on his way to doing so (he has “potential”). For a woman, commitment to this type of man means achieving this fantasy. So commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. — P.150

Men who “won’t commit” are often condemned for treating women as objects — hopping from one beautiful woman to the next. Many men hop. But the hopping is not necessarily objectifying. Men who “hop from one beautiful woman to another” are usually looking for what they could not find at the last hop: good communication, shared values, good chemistry. — P.153

The meaning of commitment changed for men between the mid-sixties and the mid-eighties. Commitment used to be the certain route to sex and love, and to someone to care for the children and the house and fulfill the “family man image.” Now men feel less as if they need to marry for sex; they are more aware that housework can be hired out and that restaurants serve meals; they are less trapped by family-man image motivation, including the feeling that they must have children. Increasingly, that leaves men’s main reason to commit the hope of a woman to love. — P.159

Dr. Farrell is still fundamentally trapped in a Blue Pill perspective because he still clings to the validity of the old order books/rules, and the willfully ignorant hope that women will rationally consider men’s sexual imperatives as being as valid as their own.

That said, Farrell’s was the germ of the idea I had for the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies, he just didn’t go far enough because he was (and still is) stuck in Blue Pill idealistic hopes of monogamy. Bear in mind, Farrell’s book is based on his intrasexual understandings of everything leading up to its publication in 1986, however, this does give us some insight into how the old order evolved its approach to monogamy then into an open, socially accepted form of Hypergamy now.

He relies on the old trope that men are afraid of commitment by reasoning that men only want to fulfill a fantasy of unlimited access to unlimited sexuality – all shallow, all superficial, while women’s priority of commitment is correct, selfless, valid and blameless. Farrell also reveals his Blue Pill conditioning by making the presumption that men only Game women in the hope that they’ll find a unicorn, and they’re endlessly fucking women for no other reason than to find a woman with good communication, shared values, good chemistry, etc.

I sincerely doubt that even in the mid 8os this was the case for men not want to commit to a woman, or essentially compromise his sexual strategy to accommodate that of women’s. Farrell never came to terms with dual nature of women’s sexual strategy and how it motivates women over time because he believes men and women have, fundamentally, the same concept of love and mutually shared end-goals.

Mandates & Responses

In the decades since this publication, the normalization and legal mandates that ensure men will (by force if necessary) comply with this compromise is something I doubt Farrell could’ve ever predicted. Legal aspects, social aspects, that used to be a source of women stigmatization about this compromise have all been swept away or normalized, if not converted to some redefined source of supposed strength. Abortion rights, single parenting (almost exclusively the domain of women), postponing birth, careerism, freezing women’s eggs, sperm banks, never-marrying, body fat acceptance and many more aspects are all accepted in the name of strong independence® for women.

Virtually anything that might’ve been a source of regret, shame, or stigmatization in the old order is dismissed or repurposed to elevate women, but what most men never grasp (certainly not Dr. Farrell) is that all of these normalizations were and are potential downsides to a woman’s Hypergamous decisions.

MGTOW/PUA/ The Red Pill, are all the deductive responses to this normalization, but also, they’re a response to the proposition of the compromise that the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies presents to men in today’s sexual marketplace.

In all of these ‘movements’ the fundamental, central truth is that they all run counter to the presumption that men must compromise (or abandon) their sexual imperatives – long or short term. Thus, these ideologies and praxeologies have the effect of challenging or removing some of the total control of Hypergamy women now have mandated to them. Even just the concepts of MGTOW/PUA/TRP are equatable to removing this control.

However, it is still undeniable that there is a necessity for monogamy (even if it’s just temporary) or some iteration of pair bonding that ensures men and women raise healthier, stronger, better-developed children. We are still social animals and, despite what equalism espouses, we are different yet complementary and interdependent with one another. Mutual cooperation, tribalism, monogamy and even small-scale polygamy have been beneficial social adaptations for us.

Gynocentrism and the respondent efforts against it defeat this complementary cooperative need.

Gynocentrism / egalitarianism defeat this cooperation in its insistence that equalism, self-apart independence, and homogeny ought to be society’s collective mental point of origin in place of the application of differing strengths to differing weaknesses.

So we come to an impasse then. It’s likely it will require a traumatic social event to reset or redefine the terms of our present social contract to ever make monogamy a worthwhile compromise for men again. We can also contrast this ‘raw deal’ compromise against the Cardinal Rule of Relationships: In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least. It’s easy to think women simply have no need of men when their long-term security is virtually assured today, but fem-centrism goes beyond just separating the sexes by need. It wasn’t enough to just separate male and female cooperation, fem-centrism has made men’s compromise so bad that they must be made to despise their sex altogether. Men had to be made not only to accept their downside compromise but to feel ashamed for even thinking not to.

Are You Experienced?

ontheroad

About three weeks ago I was made aware of an article on the New Republic blog called Bros Before Homes and a few of my followers on Twitter asked me for my take on it then. I did feel it merited more than 140 characters so I figured I’d build a post on it. Honestly, I had more than a couple irons in the fire for blog posts ahead of this, but in hindsight now I’m glad I waited a bit before digging too far in.

I am going to riff on it here, but before I do I’d like to point out that my posting Sugar Babies, before this post was a strategic decision on my part. You’ll understand why a bit later, but keep in mind the general premise of that post – women’s commodification of intimacy dynamic – and the priority of self-importance women place on themselves with regards to what men must pay for and why women believe they’re worth men’s having to pay for it.

I’m asking readers to keep this in mind because Bros Before Homes will contrast starkly next to Sugar Babies.

From the tone of the article you probably won’t need to look up Phoebe Maltz Bovy‘s portfolio to understand her clichéd feminist bias. It’s all of the self-importance and the prerequisite solipsism you’d expect from ‘journalists’ of her stripe, but try to read past the snark she thinks is interesting. Her sarcasm only highlights women’s duplicity with regards to men freeing themselves from the Feminine Imperative and women commodifying their intimate interests in ‘acceptable’ men.

The gist of Bovy’s fabricated angst is how offensively sexist it is for men to prioritize life experience, exploration, self-betterment, hobbies and the virtue signaling she sees inherent in men when they actually go their own way. Men cutting themselves free from the expectations of the Feminine Imperative and a feminine-primary social order always imply the threat of them coming to realize their own value.

It’s also that the very idea of experiences mattering more than things is a way of valorizing the stereotypically masculine. “While men are conditioned to dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity—women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants,” she wrote.

Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences. While the enjoyment of domestic life, of stuff, isn’t inherently negative, it is dismissed precisely because of its associations with the feminine. An orientation towards stuff over experiences, moreover, gets cast either as recklessly materialist or, as Tony perceives it, an impediment to enjoying life. The only constant is that what women prefer, or are imagined to prefer, is thought inferior.

[…]We’re meant to admire the experience-lovers for their indifference to stuff, which implies they’ve got their priorities straight: to live life to the fullest. It’s no coincidence, though, that these experience-lovers are so often male, as it’s a stereotypically male aspiration not to be “tied down”—that is, not to have domestic responsibilities. But these men do have roofs over their heads. The bourgeois life they’re rejecting is simply one they’ve outsourced. After all, Tony hasn’t rejected the material life. He’s just got a woman—his mother—tidying up after him.

Bovy’s presumptions here smack of her reaching for some way to denigrate men’s pragmatically eschewing materialism or being tethered to what would otherwise be considered “grown up” responsibilities and looking for something more personally meaningful for themselves. As with all femosphere journalists you get a bonus 10% on your women’s studies essays if you can find a way to sneak the word’s “sexism” or “misogyny” in a piece.

Bros Before Homes is really nothing novel in the manosphere. MGTOWs have been advocating this reward-for-independence from women for as long as there’s been a movement. What is novel is that this return to a man being his own mental point of origin and prioritizing life experiences as his first priority is a result of an awareness that’s now filtering into the mainstream. It’s very easy to criticize men for being juvenile about foregoing what popular culture would have us believe is preparing ourselves for adulthood, but when this new idealism affects the men women hope will be well-positioned Betas when they’ve reached the end of their Party Years, then there’s cause for concern.

As a side note here, I should also say that it’s interesting to see how fluidly the progress of feminism comes full circle in Bovy’s thought process. She uses the same ambiguous tropes of a regressive society expecting women to resign themselves to domesticity and tidying up after men as if 60+ years of Fempowerment “leveling the playing field” never occurred. This is the same, very tired, cover story that second wave feminism used in the sixties.

The underlying irritation here is that men’s new prioritizing of experiences above materialism is a thorn in the side of women who’ve been given carte blanche to their Hypergamous whims. Bovy cries sexism because she presumes men are unable to engage in all this experience seeking without a support team of mothers and house-bound women, but what really makes her sore is that men doing the seeking reminds women of their natural predilection for materialism and the base of opportunism their concept of love is founded upon.

Bovy’s first mistake is that she’s statistically inaccurate.

The Blue Pill conditioning of the past 60 years has done everything but teach men to “dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas”. That particular conditioning is reserved for women playing along with the Eat, Pray, Love narrative. If anything it’s just the opposite. From education to family to church, men are conditioned for servile Beta-hood and lambasted for not ‘Manning Up’ and being supportive of women’s empowerment at the cost of their own. Conversely, women and womankind have been lifted to unrealistic idealism in pursuing their own interests at the cost of childbearing and monogamous domesticity. Apparently, Bovy’s never read Lean In or even watched a Disney princess movie in the last 50 years.

Off the Reservation

What worries women is that all the Blue Pill conditioning men have endured for the past several decades might be undone if men were to actually make themselves their mental point of origin. What worries the representatives of the Feminine Imperative is that Betas might see the pragmatism in following the example of men who put themselves first. Men who eschew the trappings of building their lives around the materialism women seek when their looks fade and their need for men’s resource security is a better prospect than having to compete for men with their sisters. When marriage is an easily recognizable sucker’s bet to the point that even Betas can see the sense in avoiding it, that’s when the Feminine Imperative must shift to a new tactic.

Open Hypergamy makes for aware Betas. Men aware of the game they are expected to play must either tamp that understanding down into denial or they simply refuse to play. That refusal can come in many examples, but the reasoning is the same. The deductive, pragmatic response is for men to go their own way and put themselves at the beginning of their thought processes and goals.

The success of women’s sexual strategy depends on ignorant Betas being prepared to meet (or wait for them) at the time at which their need for security is the greatest. This expectation of Betas in Waiting is part of a Hypergamous plan; it is the consolidation of an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks prioritization (also known as the Sandberg Plan). Bros Before Homes is an offense to this plan.

This then becomes a paradox for the Feminine Imperative. A man’s life experiences are generally a wellspring of attraction if not arousal for a woman. Experience is the source of a genuine Amused Mastery and a man’s self-serving experience is usually a prime indicator of an Alpha mindset. My Red Pill brother Goldmund is a perfect example of how personal, self-asserted, self-initiated experiences can be parlayed into a very effective Game.

Be that as it is, the proposition of any and every Beta going MGTOW in various ways, hitting the open road and regaling women with the stories of their exploits presents a problem to Hypergamy; Hypergamy wants certainty and a well-traveled Beta is still a Beta. Furthermore, living for the experiential implies less investment in Beta men developing skills, status, affluence and the personal equity that make them good prospects for Beta providership when they reach the critical age at which women need their cooperation in fulfilling their Hypergamy. At least, that’s the implied concern for women. Men with a sense to educate themselves from experience are usually all the better for it – even when that experience is a nightmare.

I should add here that prioritizing experience above other consideration needn’t be limited to Bovy’s silly impressions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.  What concerns the feminine is that men would devote the lion’s share of their personal efforts on anything unrelated to meeting women’s future or present security needs. It’s not just men wanting to scale Mount Vesuvius, it’s men having any self-import at the expense of women. When men’s ambitions are centered on satisfying themselves  and not about developing equity that’s useful to women, that’s when those men (and those who would encourage it) are shamed for not being an adult. They are shamed for not manning up or growing up to meet the needs of women and thus not living up to “adult responsibilities”.

Responsible Adults

It’s not an accident that society conflates men’s servitude with qualities of adulthood – it’s the design.

As such, women begin to get nervous that their future provisioning and security are their own responsibility. How those needs are met are a discussion for various other threads I’ve written, but the social expectations of men qualifying for ‘manhood’ by assisting women to fulfill their own Hypergamous imperatives are at the root of the “sexist” accusations on Bovy’s part. To her, it’s sexist not to plan one’s life according to women’s ‘correct’ sexual strategy.

Bovy actually shares a lot with contemporary Christianity. Ensaturated by feminine primacy, the modern church has made efforts to convince men that their servitude to women is both an article of faith and a prerequisite for responsible adulthood. In a reversal of traditional faith, men aren’t men until they’ve established themselves as being capable of providing for both themselves, but for women as well. Any man shirking this is shamed for “prolonging is adolescence”. All life priority and preparation is presumed to revolve around supporting a future wife irrespective of her own decisions and the results that come from them. The contemporary church is a Beta production institution as it is, but it’s interesting to see how both Bovy and modern Christianity align on the position of men’s proper roles.

This is an interesting parallel when you consider the lengths to which women have gone to emancipate themselves from (ostensibly) being dependent upon men’s influence and provisioning. Western culture has evolved around the strong independent woman stereotype, yet it’s sexist for men to emancipate themselves from the worst of women’s sexual strategy. Bovy’s perspective relies heavily on the Old Books rules set in the misguided belief that women are still beholden to roles of domesticity and repression in an era of triumphantly embraced Open Hypergamy.

Materialism

As I mentioned in the opening, it’s important that we contrast this concern for Betas leaving the plantation with the blatant soft prostitution of the Sugar Babies dynamic. In the light of women’s naked opportunism, and with that opportunism’s materialistic purpose, it’s easy to see how patently false Bovy’s premise is here.

In an era where we develop successful apps to aid women in setting their price on a basic date, it’s easy to recognize Bovy’s disingenuousness. MGTOW and its Red Pill aware derivatives are really just practical, logical responses of men protecting themselves from an Open Hypergamy women are all too ready to educate them about. The End of Men is also the eventual end of women’s expectations of long term provisioning. If Bros aren’t interested in homes the old social contract is put in jeopardy and Open Hypergamy only serves to expedite this shift. Women at the Epiphany Phase looking for the “equal partner” that Sheryl Sandberg assures her sisters will be waiting for them find that men have declined to play along.

The old joke is that if women would have sex in a cardboard box men would never buy a house. The joke’s played out now because women are happy to fuck an Alpha in much less, and now they’re proud enough to tell Betas all about it.

Blue Pill Frame

BluePillFrame

Establishing and internalizing a strong sense of Frame is one of the most fundamental aspects necessary for a man’s personal success. I’m hesitant to use the word “success” here because it subjectively means so much to men on an individual basis. “Success” is a relative term, but I intentionally began the Iron Rules of Tomassi with Frame because an understanding of this principle applies to so many different arenas in a man’s life.

It’s far too easy to conflate Frame (and the hoped-for success that can come about from it) with a power-of-positive-thinking motivational vibe. Developing, maintaining and internalizing a personal Frame isn’t derived from motivational thinking. That’s not to say it doesn’t help, but Frame can align either on realizable realities informed by Red Pill awareness or it can be founded on deeply ingrained investments in Blue Pill conditioning.

For some men, a Blue Pill mindset, and the conditioning principles that formed it, is the foundation of what they convince themselves is a very strong, very ‘correct’, establishment of Frame. It quite literally is the reality into which they expect a woman will want to be a part of and will want to readily cooperate within. The problem, of course, is that the Frame they’ve developed is informed by Old Rules/Blue Pill goals that mischaracterize the truer natures of women and what their motivations are.

This insistence of women adapting to a Blue Pill Frame is the root of many a Beta man’s downfall when a woman has finally run out of Alpha Fucks options during her Party Years and she’s “turned over a new leaf” in the necessitousness of her Epiphany Phase. Women aging out of the sexual marketplace are only too happy to appear to be a Beta man’s Blue Pill ship that’s finally come in.

Behold, Camelot

I have heard many times, from well-intended Blue Pill men, some variation of the Just Be Yourself self-righteous expectation that women should want to enter into his Frame. “If a woman can’t accept me for who I am, she’s not the right (quality) woman for me” is the standard refrain. The Frame is strong, the expectation is (seemingly) strong, but the Blue Pill foundation it’s built upon is flawed because it is influenced and conditioned by the Feminine Imperative that always expects him to focus outwardly instead of making himself his own mental point of origin.

If they were honest, these are the guys who will Beta Hamster their Blue Pill ideal of the ‘right’ girl being any one who acknowledges his Blue Pill Frame.

There’s usually some self-evincing rationale that sounds similar when a Blue Pill guy has his Frame challenged by a woman unwilling to play along with his “world”. Whether he comes to this by rejection or simply observing women’s solipsism and duplicity, the reasoning is never about the validity of what his Frame is based on, but rather the disqualification of a woman who contradicts his ego-investments in it (i.e. they become “low quality women” to him).

However, many a White Knight will have what, for all purposes, is a very strong personal Frame. This dedication to a Blue Pill conditioned mindset is central to their ego-investments and it’s a big reason why it’s so difficult to unplug a man from it apart from some trauma that shakes his investing his personality in it. And even then, it’s far easier to disqualify the women who want nothing to do with his Frame than it is to get him to reconsider his fundamental, Blue Pill, old books belief-set.

As I was picking apart the conditions that lead to a man like Steve from last week’s post to becoming what he is, I found it’s important to highlight the determination with which most men will defend their Blue Pill investments and defend the investments of other Blue Pill men with whom it aligns with.

From Enter White Knight:

Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism. Even under the conditions of relative anonymity (like the internet), he’ll still cling to that want of proving his uniqueness just on the off chance that a woman might read his rebuff and be fatefully attracted to him.

The more invested a Blue Pill man is in his Frame, the more ardent a White Knight he’s likely to be. The problem in all of this is that his dedication to that Frame, and the expectation that ‘quality women’ will rationally and deductively appreciate it, is in error. Women fundamentally lack the ability to fully realize, much less appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to facilitate their reality. Even the most enlightened, appreciative woman you know still operates in a feminne-centric reality.

It’s easy to spot (and get annoyed with) a White Knight when he comes to the aid of M’Lady on an internet forum, but the defender-of-the-faith behavior also extends to other men, like himself, given to the same Blue Pill Frame and ideals. From a Red Pill perspective we know this is virtue signaling, but it’s also indicative of reaffirming a White Knight’s dedication to a Frame and belief-set that requires a constant reassurance in the face of so much observable contradiction.

Blue Pill Frame / Red Pill Awareness

In the manosphere, there’s a tendency to characterize the Blue Pill mindset with non-assertive “people pleaser” men conditioned from an early age to defer to women and sublimate themselves to the Feminine Imperative. For the most part, that generalization fits, but I think it’s important to understand that it’s entirely possible for otherwise very Alpha men to invest themselves in Blue Pill paradigms and then build Frames up around them.

While I was writing this, reader Softek had a very good take on how Frame can be applicable from both an Alpha and a Beta perspective:

Steve’s relationship is PERFECT.

It is in EXACT ALIGNMENT with his Frame.

His Frame, which he voluntarily maintains, is that of a Beta male. Weak, submissive, and priming him perfectly to be cuckolded.

Similarly, my relationship with my GF is perfect.

It’s in exact alignment with my Frame.

This is how it always works. It’s the only way it CAN work. Your Frame is your reality, period, end of story. I’m sticking to this idea of women having no Frame, because I think it can help men to realize that the man’s Frame – as far as the man is concerned – is the only thing that matters.

I’m going to stop here because this is one of his few assertions I don’t entirely agree with. Women’s innate sense of Frame is informed by their fundamentally solipsistic nature. How that solipsism is expressed can take different forms, but in all instances it places the experience of the woman as being central to her own importance.

The easy example is the Frame grab I outlined in The Talk where a woman (consciously or otherwise) seeks to assert her experience as being the primary Frame or when a man abdicates his Frame to satisfy a woman’s need for long-term security. The other side of this is that even when women are considered ‘powerless’, and they are acted upon (hypoagency), their solipsistic experience is still central to the nature of any Frame because that presumption of powerlessness informs her solipsism and she builds her Frame around it.

Women most definitely have a Frame; it is informed by solipsism and its state is determined by what her need for optimizing Hypergamy demands at any phase of her maturity and how well she is likely to consolidate on it. I understand what Softek is getting at here, but just observe Beta men who are trapped in submissive roles to their dominant wives and you’ll see how he’s acted upon within her Frame.

If your Frame is what you really want it to be, you’re all set. You will simply not put up with BS, so it won’t be necessary to calculate what kind of BS or shit tests are being thrown at you, because you’ll automatically pass them without even being conscious of them.

At a deeper level, there is no your reality vs. her reality, or who has more power in the relationship.

It all goes back to your relationship with yourself. Your Frame. You decide what you accept in your life, and what you don’t accept.

Everyone has been telling me to get out of my relationship. Why? Their Frame is different. Maybe they have more self-respect. Maybe they have more confidence. But ultimately, their Frame is different.

They would not put up with half the BS I’ve put up with. They would’ve been gone a long, long time ago and onto greener pastures.

I’m getting what I deserve. I’m getting the relationship that is PERFECT for me, which means it’s perfectly aligned with my [current, malleable, changeable] Frame.

Frame isn’t set in stone. It’s ours to control, and ours alone, because it belongs to us each individually.

If I want a different relationship, I need to change my Frame. What do I want? What am I willing to accept? What am I not willing to accept?

This is a very important point, to understand that Steve’s relationship is PERFECT….for him. A complete match with his Frame.

If you dig into WHY he’s in this relationship, it’s for that reason and that reason alone: it resonates with his Frame. It resonates with the perception he has of himself, and the rules he’s laid out for himself in his life.

He is doing exactly what an Alpha does: living 100% by his Frame.

It’s just that his Frame is weak and submissive instead of strong and self-serving.

It’s funny when you look at things like this. When you realize you’re already “Alpha” in the sense that you know how to live 100% in your Frame….what’s stopping you from changing your Frame?

You already know what it’s like to hold Frame. Not everyone can stay in an abusive, sexless relationship. It takes a pretty extreme Beta to put up with all that. I am a fucking Beta God. I will put up with more abuse than any man on this planet. I’m the most abject Beta in the world.

(I’m being deliberately hyperbolic here, bear with me)

The most abject Beta is simply the other side of the Apex Alpha coin.

Both stubbornly hold to their Frame. The Beta holds to his Frame to his inevitable cuckolding and destruction; the Alpha holds to his Frame to his self-gratification regardless of who tries to shame him or bring him down.

We need to stop thinking “Beta Bad” and “Alpha Good” and realize that Frame is subjective.

I may not agree with some of this, and considering Softek’s dependence on maintaining his relationship it’s easy to see why he feels this way, however, he does touch upon some foundational aspects of Frame. Yes, women get the men they deserve, or in this case, women enter into relations with the men who align with what they’ve created.

As I mention in Frame, yours should be a world women will want to enter or you will be entering her Frame. That said beware the motives of the woman who would eagerly embrace a Beta’s Frame. Those motives are rooted in necessity and not genuine desire. Just ask Saira Khan.

Understanding that a solid sense of Frame – literally creating a reality in which you live and expect others to interact within – is central to success is not a difficult concept to grasp for most men. Whether or not they feel an ownership of that Frame, or a motive to employ it, is what defines men’s understanding of it. And this discomfort men have in insisting upon a solid, active, Alpha Frame is precisely what the Feminine Imperative has sought to condition into men for going on five generations now.

Recently I’ve been commenting on yet another article of feminist triumphalism, glorying in the statistics that women are far happier after a divorce. This is standard feminist boilerplate, but the bloody handed cruelty of articles like this always ignore that the “men” they denigrate are the direct results of a generational conditioning that leads men to swallow Blue Pill idealism and abdicate Frame in the name of a nebulous egalitarian equalism.

As 39% more men put a gun in their mouths after a divorce, women will bemoan a generation of men the Feminine Imperative created to abdicate their Frame. So yes, when it comes to men becoming despondent and suicidal after having their Blue Pill idealistic ego-investments destroyed by the same imperative that invested it in them, yes, “Beta Bad” and “Alpha Good”.