The Red Pill

Ladders & Snakes

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All men are created equal. What you do from there is up to you.

Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but always take the credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you an aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

When I was first introduced the the 48 Laws of Power the seventh was the one I had the most trouble accepting. I should really say I have trouble ’employing’ this law, because I’ve spent my entire life as an artist in some capacity and I’m very particular about the integrity and character of what it is I create. Obviously we have rights management and plagiarism laws to ensure against the more blatant ‘stealing’ of ideas, but a lot of what accounts for taking unwarranted credit occurs in more nuanced social situations.

It’s usually in these social circumstances that the average person makes use of Law 7. It’s hardly a law at all considering how naturally humans will use it. In a purely ethical sense it’s kind of a no-brainer; don’t assume credit that you’re undeserving of, but bending the perceptions of what we base our estimates on is where the real art comes in.

On a personal level, my investment in what I create and how that creation is received is what matters most to me. I understand the want for a quick reward, but I’m more concerned with a cheap imitation of what I’ve created debasing the quality and effort it took to create it. For instance, I’ve spent the better part of my career creating products and brands for people with a lot of money who really had no real investment in what it was I was making for them. All they wanted was a “product” that they could promote and sell.

Naturally the quality and integrity of that brand or product had to be something they could get behind (the horse must at least look like it could win), but not be held too personally accountable should that product end up being less than ideal. That’s a nice way of saying most salesmen I’ve known love a widget if it’s something that sells, but they’re never really on the hook for if it sucks – that accountability rests with the creator.

While we were dining after the Man in Demand conference we had discussion about exactly this dynamic. I make an effort to keep my business endeavors as businesslike as possible, but there are brands and things I create that I will personally invest myself into. I have to be very careful of this because it took me a long time (and more than a few failed attempts) to develop the discernment to know what’s worth putting myself into. However, it is especially satisfying for me to travel to another country and see one of my bottles in the duty-free stores at the airport and then be at a bar & grill somewhere on vacation and see one on the backbar.

I explained to the guys that what I create (and own) are not “products” to me. I dislike that term in that sense. I understand the utility of that word to salesmen; product is an easy unit of measure, but to the person creating that thing it’s a measure of the quality of their idea. To refer to that creation as a product impersonalizes that creation and allows the seller to remain at arms distance should the creation be wildly popular or a horrible failure.

That pride of ownership or the abandoning of it is a convenience for someone only invested in promoting that thing, but on some level it is never really theirs with the same responsibility as the one who created it. So ultimately the noncommittal position of selling, promoting, endorsing, etc. becomes an arrangement of convenience since the creator’s idea is where the ‘product’s’ strengths lie – and also where the real accreditation should too.

I’ve occasionally been accused by the ignorant on Twitter of being dependent on The Rational Male for my revenue. Most of my regular readers know what I do for a living and understand why that’s silly, but I don’t think it’s any real secret that what I write here and in the books is something very personal to me. The Rational Male has always been something I’ve invested myself in for obvious reasons, but I’ve always resisted turning it into a brand per se. There wont be any TRM T-Shirts coming in the foreseeable future.

I’m proud to be responsible for what I do here and I will never be beholden to making what I create into a ‘product’ for others to sell. One of the best things about being in the position I am is being anti-fragile enough to write what I believe is important while still keeping myself solvent on what I do apart from it. This allows me a much greater freedom than needing to write something to stay solvent.

Bargain Debasement

You’ll have to forgive my intro here, but it got me to thinking about a larger point I had in mind about how and why a man invests himself in various endeavors in life. I’ve worked hard to get to a point in life where I can say my personal successes (and failures) are my own and not the result of others’ funding or some fortunate dispensation, but rather based on the strength of ideas and responsibly owning them as the creator. Yet another reason I have a problem with Law 7; for as much as you may gain by employing it you rarely develop the insights that failing of your own accord teaches you. Experience teaches harsh, but it teaches best.

I think one of the reasons men find the popularized, feminist, social convention of ‘male privilege‘ so disingenuous is because we want to be appreciated for the sacrifices and perseverance needed to even have what looks like a meager, hand-out, kind of privilege. An atmosphere of default privilege debases what men have honestly invested themselves in. I’ve always held that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate their feminine-primary reality, but that’s not to discount men’s want to still be appreciated for them.

Whether that’s manifested in financial wealth, personal freedom, status or earned wisdom there’s a fundamental want for an appreciation that is rarely ever forthcoming. One reason I believe many men have a self-fulfilling definition of what it is to be Alpha is because they feel they’ve earned that identification through hard work and playing by a set of rules everyone else should, but get frustrated when their efforts go unappreciated, if not outright exploited. Again, Law 7. It’s galling to see others rewarded for exploiting what you think should be appreciated.

There’s a subset of MGTOW reader/writers who question every man’s motive for doing what it is he does thinking that appeasing women is at the root of every effort. Nothing is a genuinely inspired passion if the end result is women’s affectations. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, but what exactly is a genuine motive in that sense? If the byproduct result of my genuine interests is having sex with gorgeous women and/or a beautiful wife and a couple of well adjusted kids should that then discredit my unique talents and interests in what I do?

What if, after all a man does, he seeks an appreciation that will only rarely be unsolicited on his part? It’s one thing to command respect; it’s quite another to demand it.

Institutionalized Success

In this sense I think what is most egregious about the present state of marriage is that, for the greater part, all of the personal equity a man invests in himself over the course of his lifetime is only a divorce settlement away from being halved for him (if not more so). A man’s personal equity (not to be confused with relational equity) is only one false rape allegation away from ruin. This is the institutionalization of Law 7: that a woman can largely and legally get a man to do all the work and then take (at least half) the credit from his own success – or at least that’s the social expectation.

Granted, a woman can also be on the hook for her lack of character judgement should she pair with a man who becomes a burden to her. There are rare instances when a woman may find herself financially beholden to a bad choice in marriage, but then it’s a situation of that man’s genuine achievements in life and usually an inability to take his burden of performance and make the most of it. For the most part, the role of support falls to the man in societal expectations; women and feminized men are the ones supported.

In fact, it’s a point of shame for men to be supported in such a fashion. Whether that’s warranted of not, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves than what they started with. A needed provisioning from women only puts his achievements’ validity in question. Like it or not, men should avoid the perception of themselves not pulling their own weight.

Doing More

A while back I was asked why the Burden of Performance should be called a “burden” at all. Should it not be a “challenge” or a “opportunity”? All optimist semantics aside, it is uniquely men whose character is judged on what he started with and what he made of himself.

I’m sure equalist critics will want to cast women into the same performance role, but in a uniquely male sense, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves. To be a ‘man’ is to produce in excess of what you consume – thus having the potential to support a family, an extended family, ensure security, give back to his community and/or reinvest that excess in greater endeavors or passions. While it may be part of the Feminine Imperative’s media campaign to popularize the character of the Strong Independent Woman® there is still room for women to expect the best out of a man while being provided for herself. In other words women have both the option to strive for independence while also retaining the option to be provided for by her husband or an LTR. And failing either of these, they retain an institutional right to Law 7.

Men must be independent resource providers, they must make more of themselves than what they began with, independent of dispensations or special privilege. There is no safety net, no other socially acceptable option to be provided for and still retain his being definitively a ‘man’. One of the hesitations I have with endorsing the Red Pill idea of going ‘Monk Mode’ is less about the isolation and more about the motivation men need to find within themselves to better themselves.

We look down on men who are dependent on women. Whether that’s financially, emotionally or physically, there is no option for dependence. One of the primary complaints professional, educated, independent women bemoan is their inability to pair off with a man of ‘like’ (or above) status. They’ll make euphemisms to characterize the men who would be their ‘equals’ who wont date them, but what they fail to acknowledge is the fundamental, root level truth of men’s burden of performance. For all the high-minded hopes of equalism, women’s Hypergamy still wants to filter for both sexual and provider acceptability in men.

Back in 2012 I based a post on Creative Intelligence from a study about how improvisational skills and creativity factored into a woman’s Hypergamous considerations. I wont quote it in length here, but suffice it to say that there is a measurable difference in how women perceive men with a trained or innate ability to improvise in, and overcome, times of adversity. As might be expected a man with a proven capacity to produce more than he consumes – especially when he’s had to come back from failure or misfortune – tends to be a more attractive mate choice that the man who chances into his own affluence.

Bear in mind that attraction and arousal are different sides of the Hypergamy coin (AF/BB), but many cross-cultural studies suggest that a capacity for creative, innovative, adaptive intelligence has been an evolutionarily selected-for socio-sexual trait in men – much less so in women. That’s important for the MGTOW critic to remember, it’s not as simple as a feminine-primary social order dictating men being slaves to their burden of performance. Just as gender is primarily biological, and not a social construct, neither is women’s evolved, Hypergamous sexual filtering.

Filters

Now, with the evolutionary basis of attraction in mind, it’s also important to consider that in our evolutionary past women evolved to take calculated risks in optimizing their Hypergamous sexual selectivity. The utility such Red Pill concepts as social proof, dread, Game, amused mastery, etc. are evidenced because they work with (or sometimes against) this Filter.

From The Curse of Potential:

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes.

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

As I’ve mentioned in many prior posts, Hypergamy demands assurances. In fact so paramount is that need for Hypergamous certainty that women have evolved peripheral awareness to be sensitive to psychological and socio-sexual cues that confirm a man’s Hypergamous acceptability to her. Furthermore, so important is this need of assurance that in a society founded on feminine social primacy, the Feminine Imperative will legislate legal institutions to prevent men from misrepresenting themselves as a more optimal Hypergamous choice – as well as legislate penalties that insure women against both Hypergamous fraud and less than optimal mating choices.

As you might guess, the development and evolution of Game is one such psycho-social contingency men refine and use to workaround this Hypergamous filtering; and one that the imperative is still making efforts to restrict. However this doesn’t discount the way men have, in the past, built themselves up based on both social expectations, but also genuine interests and passions. Naturally, if a man is the genuine article and as a byproduct attracts women as a result of it, that might be preferable to ‘faking it till you’re making it’ – but if that’s the route you go be sure that you do in fact ‘make it’ because it’s what you feel passionate about.

Warnings

The primary reason I wrote Preventive Medicine was to help men avoid having women’s institutionalization of Law 7 ruin their long term personal efforts and achievements. Many critics want to lock horns with me as to when a man’s Peak SMV generally occurs in life. That’s fine, but whether or not you agree with my accuracy in this regard the fact remains that it takes much more concentrated, long term effort to reach that peak than women’s fast-burn peak SMV. I don’t just mean this in terms of his professional status, but also his maturity, his acquired wisdom, his judgement of others’ character, the lessons learn from the bruises of his failures and near misses.

All of this requires an investment in oneself that simply the having of resources handed to you will never satisfy. That personal investment in oneself, as it should, amounts to a lot of internalized equity – an equity that will never be appreciated by women whose Hypergamy is looking for a pre-made man. Hypergamy doesn’t care about the effort and perseverance required to achieve the status you (should) enjoy at your SMV peak.

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to short term sexual selection, the most wanton sex I had was at the time in my life when I was the poorest. As an underemployed semi-rockstar I used hit it with the best of them, and from a purely sexual perspective, it’s true, criminal and Alpha cads will still fuck 80% of women. But there’s more to the worth of a man than just his notch count. Sexual experience constitutes a very important measure of that, but a man should want more for himself as a man, as a father, as leader, as a creator, even as a cad.

Life experience and the benefits that a man should draw from it are personally valuable. In fact, men feel the equity of these efforts are so valuable that men will commit suicide at 5 times the rate of women; and in particular between the ages of 45-49. Why do you suppose that is? What assurances of long term security does the common man have for himself? What is he faced with when the plan he sets forth for himself in his life is destroyed in one precarious instance?

Once again, using the male deductive logic, it may seem a better option for him to hit the reset button than to be faced with having his life’s equity, his largest investment, his creation, stolen from him. This is a graphic illustration of men’s Burden of Performance, a burden women simply don’t face.

Open Relationships

Functional_cuckoldry

During the last post’s comment thread I sort of went back in time to when I’d first heard the term ‘open relationship’. It was back in the mid 80s and I’d heard it being proposed to me by my first girlfriend when I was around 19 and she’d grown bored of my predictable Beta perfection. Needless to say this moment preceded my semi-pro rock star 20s and the natural Alpha-ness I matured into. So at the time I was thoroughly steeped in the dutiful Beta conditioning of believing that ‘going steady’ monogamy and only banging the ONE girl was the right thing to do.

I also believed that women’s motives were reliably based on what they said rather than what their behaviors implied (and their contradicting behaviors were the result of being confused by nebulous ‘society’s’ unfair expectations of women). So it was with a great deal of confusion that I was forced to wrap my head around exactly why my ‘girlfriend’ would want to retain me as an intimate orbiter while she pursued other guys to bang and become potential intimates with.

She suggested an “open relationship” – all the same non-sexual intimate expectations with no expectation of reciprocal sexual fidelity –  an idea she’d no doubt been familiarized with from her former hippie ‘free love‘ parents. And not unlike the simpering Beta in today’s cartoon, I too was uncomfortable with sharing my 18 year old girlfriend with any other guy. Looking back it was quite the conflict to my 19 year old, Beta conditioned mind. On one hand I was taught to respect the independence of a woman and didn’t want to be the guy to tell her what she could or couldn’t do, but I also bought into the Disneyesque sacrifice all for true love narrative.

I suppose now I owe her some gratitude since my rejecting this “I want to play the field” episode was instrumental in setting me on a course for my Alpha 20s and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude that unintentionally served me so well with women then.

Today there are cutesy synonyms like ‘poly’ to describe a woman who believes it’s in her multiple lovers’, as well as her own, mutual interests that they obligate themselves to what really amounts to her attention, emotional and sexual needs independent of each guy who fulfills that role for her. The problem arises in the degree of investment those men believe that an above board ‘poly’ woman will be able to appreciate. I had this situation presented in last weeks’ comments:

Why does an open relationship favor women and not men? It’s only cuckoldry if you don’t approve of it. If you agree to an open relationship for both of you, then it seems like an equal footing.

The cuckoldry Devil is in the details; and in this case that Devil is in the perceived ‘agreement’ and who’s doing the agreeing. Contemporary Open Cuckoldry and the social conventions of ‘free love’ era faux-idealisms in ‘open relationships’ work in tandem today to promote the sexual selection strategy of women’s Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry, in its most visceral, Hypergamous sense, favors women because there is no margin for error on a man’s part. Bear in mind that an ‘open’ relationship only serves a woman’s sexual imperative because she benefits from comfort, rapport, security and likely provisioning of the primary man with whom she’s come to this agreement with. In all honesty I’ve rarely met a guy in an open relationship who wasn’t a Beta at the mercy of his wife or LTR’s proliferative phase, Alpha Fucks, Hypergamous impulses.

Most of them understand their optionless condition and resign themselves to the women they’ve committed to, wanting to, and acting on fucking more suitably, conventionally, masculine men than themselves. Arguably, most stay at home fathers fall into a sort of contextual form of an open relationship for much of the same reasons even if their wives are only getting a vicarious Alpha ‘fix’ by working among higher status men who haven’t abdicated on their burden of performance by adopting the feminine support role.

What About Those Assholes?

Now I am aware of the often domineering men who insist on fucking women outside of their commitment to a monogamous lover. I also understand that the reverse can and does apply. I’m also aware that when a man’s SMV exceeds a woman’s it places her into a similar position to that of the Beta men I’ve just described.

Bear in mind that the issue I’m on about here isn’t one of fault, but rather how an effectively polygamous relationship serves the interests of either genders’ sexual strategy.

It’s vitally important to consider how both of these ‘open relationship’ formats are popularly perceived in a cultural context. For a woman, being ‘poly’ may hold some stigma to it. She may be considered a de facto slut in some sense – remember she’s maintaining the pretense that she’s committed to one or more men, rather than a booty call where there is no pretense of exclusivity – but the social (not to mention legal assurance) efforts being made to ‘normalize’ what amounts to her cuckoldry of that ‘primary’ partner is reinforced because it seemingly serves as some kind of new-age feminine-primary family unit. And after all, he too is ostensibly free to exercise his sexual strategy in this arrangement. A win-win, right?

In the case where the ‘primary’ partner is the woman and the high SMV man leaves her no choice but to adopt his sexual strategy as the dominant one in the relationship, that ‘open relationship’ is considered dysfunctional and socially frowned upon. He’s a cad or a philanderer at best, and an abusive self-absorbed inconsiderate monster at worst. Reverse the sexes in today’s cartoon and imagine what the feminine-primary social response might be.

Force Fitting Sexual Strategies

What we’re observing in a modern interpretation of ‘poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is a conflict between the normalization of unilateral control of sexual strategy within a monogamous relationship context. I know that sounds like a mouthful but consider…

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

No doubt many Blue and Purple Pill readers will (in the interests of “equality”) remind us that there was a time when it was socially expected of (high socio-economic status) men to “keep” a mistress (or use prostitutes) as well as a wife, or even have many wives. All socio-economic Apex Fallacies aside, this being an outlier rather than a norm, those arrangements still put that man into a position of maintaining support for both (all) women in order to satisfy his sexual appetites as well as the relative wellbeing of them.

In the modern instance where western(ized) women are a protected class in a feminine-primary social order, the priority of sexual strategy changes hands. I cover this exchange in the Adaptation series of posts, but to paraphrase, Free Love, open relationships or now, ‘poly’, has really become an increasingly acceptable methodology for women to optimize both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy while still enjoying a semblance of the security that old order monogamy provides for women’s emotional needs.

Now lets review The Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

In an economic state where women are less financially dependent on (or autonomous from) men, the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy will take priority. That’s not to say the Beta comfort and rapport appeal becomes worthless as an emotional investment, but it’s less likely for a woman to need to prioritize that aspect while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect. Beta comfort and security have a value, but that value requires less urgency than pursing Alpha sexual experience (functional breeding opportunities).

Consider the poor Beta symp in the cartoon. That caricature is of a Beta conditioned man struggling with the Old Set of Books, with the old order ruleset expectations from a woman who will never recognize them because she’s never needed to. It’s his investment in her, his necessitousness, his optionlessness and his inability to see it’s the source of his frustration and his anxiety. He needs her, expects more from her, than she needs him.

The lie inherent in the humor of the cartoon is that women possess the capacity to compartmentalize their emotional investments. The Medium is the Message; women can only compartmentalize their feelings for men they don’t see as Hypergamously optimal men (i.e. Alpha, higher than their own SMV men). For men who embody that optimization, women simply cannot afford to feel anything more than submission (a submission to a dominant man they innately desire) to him and are thus unable to consider anything like compartmentalizing their emotions for him.

And from Schedules of Mating:

For a female of any species to facilitate a methodology for breeding with the best genetic partner she’s able to attract AND to ensure her own and her offspring’s survival with the best provisioning partner; this is an evolutionary jackpot.

‘Open’ relationships, and the social narrative reinforcement of the concept, are one such adaptation to facilitate this methodology.

All of this may seem a bit pervasive coming from the guy who advises men to spin plates and date non-exclusively for as long as it takes (if ever) to attain the depth of experience to become a relatively good judge of women’s innate nature, and then if he so chooses, decide how best to pair and parent with her.

The difference in this approach is characteristic of the differences in men and women’s sexual strategies. In Plate Theory, while there is an above board implication of non-exclusivity, there is never an implication that a woman is (or should be) more than a non-exclusive dating opportunity. There should never be any pretense of there being an established, invested relationship as we see in the ‘poly’ concept of women.

In fact this is the primary distinction in non-exclusivity; who’s Frame is the predominant one? In a woman’s ‘poly’ Frame there is a retainership implied in what she believes should be an accepted non-exclusivity.

Ask yourself this, why would a man persist in an ‘open’ relationship? What unique advantages does he get in this arrangement that he couldn’t by simply staying single, practicing Game and spinning plates? Then ask yourself what unique benefits does a woman receive from the same ‘polyamorous’ arrangement?

When you’re contemplating this, try to divorce yourself from the emotional investments and focus on cold hard evolved Hypergamy and how it would function for either sex in that arrangement. Keep in mind that as far as feminized society is concerned, and for all of the triumphalism of independent women, the onus of committed relationship responsibility still defines the worth of a man.

Beta “Manhood”

From MoodyPrism had an interesting observation about the social acceptance of cuckoldry:

I’ve seen men make the mistake of mentioning that they would never raise another man’s child on FaceBook. Shit storms ensued. The usual shaming tactics were trotted out such as manning up. Interestingly enough I’ve heard a woman (on one of those absolutely dreadful day time talk shows such as the View) say that a woman in a relationship with a man with his own kids was a fool for wasting her time on his kids instead of hers. The framework for open cuckoldry is already there, we just need to see the push that makes it completely socially acceptable.

Open Cuckoldry is already in its developmental stage in a social respect. When you consider the Sandbergian plan for Open Hypergamy, the logical implication of this is what’s described here – prioritizing the sexual selection and Hypergamous optimization of women on a societal level while maximally restricting (via social shaming and disapproval) the sexual strategies that would ever serve male interests,…so long as that male is anything less than an optimal Alpha.

Open Cuckoldry has many euphemisms now, but in the Red Pill aware perspective it’s just a matter of time until the social plan of prioritized Hypergamy and outright cuckoldry becomes a social norm.

TuffLuv also presented me with a related question in the last comment thread:

A little too black and white on this stuff Rollo. Sure cuckoldry, as you call it is becoming the norm.. the euphemism being “mixed family”. But I see the majority of instances not being a chick who had the child of some alpha bad boy, or even alpha good boy.. I just see fickle chicks who dumped the baby daddy cuz she either found something better or went looking for something better. The poor dad is just an every day average guy who got his heart broken by the bitch.

So, ponder if you will, if there is a difference between a man raising another man’s child(ren) where the bio father is less alpha (possibly by far) than the new suitor, and a beta man raising the child of one of the woman’s former studs.. I think in the real world you find the former far more than the latter, except in cases where the married or committed woman actually went out and cheated and got pregnant with another man’s child. Maybe that happens a lot but that is not *open* cuckoldry.. That’s classic cuckoldry, and perhaps the only thing that should be called cuckoldry.

I think there should be another designation for the former case. It’s still a bit shameful, but not nearly as much as the latter, eh?

Definitely something to consider, but this situation also implies a change in conditions or context with regard to the woman doing the cuckolding. The fundamentals don’t change – that woman may have bred with a less than optimal man, but the Hypergamous sexual selection impulse still drives her to seek out the Alpha fucks aspect of Hypergamy. She’s Making Up for Missing Out and still she has the provisioning and support she needs in order to pursue the opposite side of the Hypergamous equation she missed out on courtesy of the Beta father.

Open Cuckoldry

forever

During the Q&A section of the Man in Demand talk I gave back in September I was asked about where I believed the social dynamic of Open Hypergamy would lead. In specific the idea was proposed, and I agree, that the logical next step for a social order founded on feminine Hypergamy and one that prioritizes the female sexual strategy as preeminent would lead to a state of openly accepted cuckoldry.

Although I can’t say it’s an accepted social dynamic as yet, there are many social indicators that are revealing this push towards a normalized cuckoldry. I’ll explore these for a bit in this essay, but for now these indicators are about a move away from conventional monogamy in the hopes that a ‘soft cuckoldry’ might be a precursor to instituting a more accepted open cuckoldry.

I think it’s also important to keep in mind a couple of primary principles about this shift. First is the fact that, initially, an openly accepted state of feminine-controlled cuckoldry will never be called ‘cuckoldry’ proper. If we use the example of a socially accepted (if not celebrated) open Hypergamy as a model, open cuckoldry will be sold as a more logical, more humane sexual strategy for men and women in light of divorce statistics, romantic boredom and other sexual studies that indicate men and women weren’t evolved for monogamous commitment.

The second is that open cuckoldry is the extension of a unilaterally feminine controlled Hypergamy. That is to say that as Hypergamy becomes more normalized as a social imperative that sexual strategy will extend to optimizing Hypergamy across genders. If that optimization is taken to its logical end it will require men not just to adopt cuckoldry as a norm, but to socially reward them for advocating it among their own sex.

Cuckoldry By Any Other Name

As I said, it wont be called ‘cuckoldry’; the connotations are negative, so a redefining will be made in order to make the practice more socially palatable. The Feminine Imperative wont recruit the very men it needs to perpetuate cuckoldry as their own sexual strategy if the term is derogatory. Thus we’ll get euphemisms for alternative lifestyles, ‘open marriages’ or a “Designer Relationship“:

We live in an era when everything is customizable. Relationships are no exception. Some people will continue to practice their grandparents’ form of monogamy, and others, probably the majority, will be serially exclusive and pair-bonded. Still others will explore some form of non-monogamous expression that encompasses one or more of the facets we’ve discussed or may flow in and out of being exclusive based on what the relationship requires. (We’ve done this ourselves.) Having the ability to customize a relationship means having the freedom to respond to life’s vicissitudes.

The first time I came across the concept of ‘soft polygamy’ I was in a behavioral psychology class exploring the practices of modern marriage and contrasting them with the long term sexual behaviors of men and women. As you might imagine the context of the study focused entirely on the ‘bad behaviors’ of men who essentially transitioned from serial monogamy to serial marriage. The idea was that in the process of moving from one LTR to another men were establishing a soft form of polygamy.

In a social respect, men have far more to lose from serial marriages than do women. The financial liabilities of divorce are well known to the manosphere, but so are the emotional and familial accountabilities. So from a strictly male perspective, serial LTRs are a dicey prospect, but from a female perspective, in a feminine-primary social order, institutionalized Hypergamy and the soft polygamy that results from the Sandbergian sexual strategy, soft cuckoldry becomes pragmatic in optimizing Hypergamy for women.

At this point we should consider the Heartiste maxim about feminism again:

The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality

Institutionalized cuckoldry is the logical means to restricting male sexuality, but we have to consider what function that restriction serves for women. From an Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks perspective the plan is simple; restrict that sexuality as women find need for a particular man’s service.

Diamonds and Rust

While I’m reluctant to prognosticate, my guess is that future generations of men will be conditioned to accept their role in this cuckoldry as part of their socialization. The above Forevermark diamond advertisement is one illustration of this. Open Hypergamy and its acceptance has already made its popular debut in mainstream media and advertising, and likewise open cuckoldry is just now finding a social foothold.

It takes the Red Pill Lens to appreciate the efforts as they’re being made by a large society. The Forevermark ad is intended to be funny or cute, but it belies a deeper, more poignant truth about Alpha Widows, Hypergamy and the long term sexual strategy Plan and roles women expect men to play in it.

I was made aware of this ad being circulated from a reader on Twitter and at first thought it was a reworked joke. It is however legit and billboards with this campaign are up in major cities. Without the benefit of a Red Pill Lens I can see how most men would laugh it off or women might giggle sardonically about it, but the the fact remains that a clever copywriter is aware of the sexual dynamics that make it funny.

I pulled the following quote from Deti on one of Dalrock’s more recent post:

“I think what we will continue to see is growing disengagement.”

Yeah, this has been discussed here and elsewhere in the almost 5 years I’ve been around here.

I think that what will happen is that things will continue sliding in the same direction they’re going now, until a critical mass is reached. I don’t know what that critical mass is, what will trigger it, or when it will be reached.

We live in a mostly free society with a hybrid of capitalism and socialism. We have maximum freedom and autonomy right now, with both sexes being free to pursue pretty much whatever they want, however they want to. That is the prime characteristic driving the current circumstance — that, and up to now, there’s been enough money taxed, borrowed and stolen to pay for it.

A growing number of men are not getting as much sex as they want. A growing number of women aren’t getting commitments in the form they want — when they want or from the men they want.

So things are going to keep sliding that way. More and more men will walk away and direct what energies they have left elsewhere — into work, or beer/bros/Xbox/porn, or travel/leisure. (Oddly enough, this might make many of them more attractive to women, since they’re spending less time directing their attentions to women.) More and more men will earn just enough to support themselves, since they don’t plan on marriage, and fatherhood is out of the question. They will lack the skills to improve their lives. They will not get nearly as much sex as they want, but they will learn to live with it — mostly through porn, the occasional hookup, and the even more occasional prostitute. The price of prostitutes will skyrocket as demand increases; and a few more women will go into high-end call girl work to earn side money.

More and more women will direct their attentions into their work, travel/leisure, and having children without men. (This will definitely make more of them less attractive to men except as on again, off again sex partners.) They will not get the commitments from men they want, but they will learn to live with it. They will complain about it with increasing volume and shrillness, but they’ll learn to live with it.

Until something happens to cause the tides to turn. Again – don’t know what, or when, or how. But something will happen to cause a hard reset. And it will be exquisitely painful for everyone. I don’t want it to happen, nor do I relish it. It’s not something to desire or look forward to because of the pain it will bring. But I do think it will happen. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime or my kids’ lifetimes. We could easily slide like this for another 50 to 100 years.

I think one consequence of this separation of the genders will include a socially normalized institution of cuckoldry. To take hold it will need to be termed something different, but in effect the process of women conceiving with one man and then expecting another man to parentally invest himself in that child will be a casual expectation of women. With so many men effectively (if not intentionally) going their own way, the idea that any man wouldn’t be expected to serve as a surrogate parent will become commonplace.

Genders divided by feminism or feminine social primacy will need a ‘customized’ form of cuckoldry that allows for the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy to be reconciled with the Beta Bucks side by enlisting different men for either purpose.

The Pink Pill

I want to end here with an essay I read recently on the fallout of the new female form of Viagra:

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realized what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restore without really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

To develop drugs to boost libido is like ‘giving antibiotics to pigs because of the shit they’re standing in’

The American psychologist Christopher Ryan argues that the institution of modern marriage – meaning an exclusive couple bound by romantic love – is antithetical to long-term excitement. Ryan is best known for Sex at Dawn (2010), a book authored with his wife Cacilda Jethá, that makes the case that sexual monogamy is deeply at odds with human nature. He is among a growing number of researchers suggesting that the rift between women’s purportedly limitless sexual potential and their dulled actuality might owe to the circumstances of intimacy. Accordingly, the conjugal bed is not only the scene of dwindling desire, but its fundamental cause. The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust. While love angles toward intimacy, desire flourishes across a distance.

The entire article is very insightful if not a bit depressing, but with the Red Pill Lens we can begin to understand the latent purpose behind the message. I’ve gone on record about the pushback against clearing the pink pill for use as being a direct threat to women’s control of their own Hypergamy. The concern, ostensibly, is that a libido stimulating drug might be used to induce a woman into having sex that her otherwise sober sense would prevent; effectively it could be a ‘rape’ drug.

What’s finally being addressed in this article however is what I’ve been saying since I was aware of the drug’s trials – a chemical that induces libido in women removes an element of their control in sexual selection and compromises Hypergamy. I’m not entirely sure the author was aware of the points she was revealing in this, but she succinctly makes the case for both institutionalized cuckoldry (or certainly a ‘customized’ soft polygamy for women) and advocates for women maintaining control of their Hypergamy unclouded by a drug that would remove that control by chemically inducing them into sex that isn’t of their own choosing.

The ‘cure’ to women’s low libido is holistic, not biological. Women’s sexual deficiencies are presumed not to be the result of a ‘broken’ biology, but rather a lack of proper motivation. I should point out that all of this validates all the points I was making about Dread in marriage last month on Biblical Gender Roles – maintaining a condition of proper motivation (i.e. Dread), the holistic cure, is exactly what even femosphere authors are tacitly advocating.

The elements that strengthen love – reciprocity, closeness, emotional security – can be the very things that smother lust.

Yet now, even when a pharmaceutical solution to the lust problem is made available the ‘cure’ is rejected. Why? Because on a root, limbic level women’s hindbrains know that Hypergamy cannot be optimized with a drug that removes Hypergamous choice. The real solution has never changed and women are now put into a position of having to openly acknowledge that for all of the pretense of “mismatched libidos” or “sex just declines after marriage” social conventions, men’s cuckoldry is the real plan for Hypergamy.

When presented with a pill that will make them sexual, when given a cure to their low sex drives with the men who’ve made lifetime commitments to them, women will still refuse to take it. Hypergamous doubt can’t be quelled with a pill.

The Tyranny of Biomechanics

biomechanics

Well, dammit, I had a very insightful article warming up in my drafts folder about Open Cuckoldry (it’s still coming, promise), but I felt compelled to riff on the new Pirelli Tyre calendar photoshoot first. The calendar art is replete with a semi-nude Amy Schumer sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, “tastefully” rendered in greyscale (the calling card of an ‘artiste’ as a opposed to just a ‘photographer’) and the doughy eyed stare of a comedienne who grasps the ludicrous seriousness of how her image will be received and delivered by a feminine-centric society.

I’ll be honest, I don’t much care for Schumer as a comedian or an actress, and if you read here with any regularity I’d expect you don’t either. She characterizes, with triumphantly unwarranted hubris, everything the Feminine Imperative would like generations of women to celebrate as a victory over the evil “Patriarchy” that, by design, is never entirely defeated. In a post-End of Men society, fat, goofy women will be the banner bearers the imperative will have dance on the symbolic corpse of the “Patriarchy” that will never die or be unuseful to it.

The irony here is that Amy’s naked girth is being lauded by the usual media suspects as “brave” and “stunning”. Calling a woman of this physique “stunning” is like telling the retarded kid he actually ran the football back for a real touchdown to win the big game. Perhaps Amy is self-aware enough to realize this, but her participation in her own humiliation tells the bigger story. The fact that she rationalizes her nudes as being “authentic” as opposed to ridiculous verifies this.

Now before I go much further here, I’ll remind readers that I’m entirely aware that this “groundbreaking” photoshoot of “real” women is little more than a publicity effort, nominally on Pirelli Tyres (are they a British brand?), but mostly for photographer Annie Leibovitz and her feminist triumphalisms (she also shot ‘Woman’ of the Year, Caitlyn Jenner).

Since the inception of this blog I’ve always gotten props for the pictures I select as my lead-ins to what I’m writing. This talent is really the result of my having worked in advertising and brand development for years, and having to be the de facto photographer and photo editor for more than 20 years. Trust me, I get the language of imagery, and it’s not difficult to see the train that Leibovitz is riding here.

At the launch of the calendar on Monday, Leibovitz explained that none of these photographs had been conceived with the male gaze in mind. Williams’s photo was “not a nude but a body study”, she said, while Schumer’s was a comic conceit: “The idea was that she was the only one who had not got the memo about wearing clothes.”

The ‘Male Gaze” card is disingenuous when the stated intent of the shoot is an,…

…arty soft-core ode to pinups produced by the Italian tire manufacturer,…

The Bigger Narrative

There’s a much larger story being sold here than a fat comedienne’s rationalizing her nude form as championing “authenticity” or “realness”. What we’re observing, yet again, is the frustration of women being able to optimize their inherent Hypergamy against what our evolved biology dictates for them.

I’ve written extensively on the conflict between an idealized Equalism and human beings’ evolved predilection for Complementarity. Whenever there is a new ‘outrage’ over “body shaming” or “fat shaming”, with a Red Pill lens we can see what this conflict represents: The frustration women experience, and the anxiety of insecurity they feel when presented with the prospect of not being able to optimize their Hypergamous impulses because simple biology selects them out based on their physicality.

No doubt Leibovitz believes in her rationalization that she’s shooting artful nudes without the mythical ‘male gaze’ in mind, but she knows on a visceral level the form of every nude woman in art throughout history has been rendered with the intent of replicating a beauty that inspires arousal (thus the ode to the pin-up). The simple hard-coded fact of nature is that the form of a semi-nude woman, by order of degree, stimulates the area of the male brain associated with tool use and thereby objectification. On a limbic level, sex with beautiful, arousing women is literally a problem to be solved by the male brain.

Leibovitz gets this. In fact she banks money on instigating the deliberate contradiction that human biology poses to her own (and a larger society’s) ego-investments in blank-slate Equalism. The root of this prefabricated indignation rests in women’s existential doubt of optimizing Hypergamy. That doubt conflicts with the uncertainty of establishing a social order that will force men to act and be influenced by idealized Equalism rather than their evolved biology.

In other words, the latent purpose of this social order is to force men to comply with women’s sexual strategy, irrespective of their evolved sexual arousal cues.

The ostensible want for an ideal Equalism, or a dubious gender parity, is really the cover story for the want of 100% consolidated control over their ability to optimize Hypergamy by literally controlling the sexual selection choices men are able to make for themselves.

Schumer apparently earns the label of “real” because a few rolls around her midsection are on display – because her body is less than perfect by pop culture standards. Would she be any less “real” if she didn’t allow her body to be consumed in this way? Can’t all bodies count as “real”, no matter what they look like and who lives in them and whether or not they choose to show themselves – clothed or naked?

I find it interesting that an out of shape Vin Diesel is ridiculed for his present physique, or that ‘Dad Bods’ are sardonically described as ‘sexy’ while the over-the-shoulder giggles ensue, but what I don’t expect is for these men to be held as a physical ideal in women’s estimate. There are no photographers, male or female, shooting artful nudes of overweight men, normal “real” men of professional accomplishment, or middle linemen for exclusive calendars. Firemen with rippling abs sell very well, but “real” men? Not so much.

However the difference is that men don’t expect women’s choices of what physically arouses them to shift in favor of their physiques based on expected societal shifts. In fact, we don’t even expect women not to laugh at a naked Seth Rogan or Jonah Hill. The automatic impression is to laugh at them because they don’t come close to women’s physical ideal, so the presumption of intent must be humor. Yet we are expected to perceive a naked Amy Schumer as “real’, “authentic”, “brave” and “stunning”, and to do so with genuflection, devoid of laughter and ridicule.

The uncomfortable truth is that women have far higher, far more static and far more stringent physical ideals for men than men will ever have for women when it comes to basic visceral arousal cues. Yes, I understand there are more variables to attraction than just the physical, but we are talking about representing physical ideals in photos and calendars here. Firemen and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are the standard order for a reason – evolved, practical, efficient biomechanics that have made us what we are today, not pop-culture stereotypes.

T-Rex Wants to Hunt

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

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

These are some excellent examples of the conflict I’ve described above here. The Equalism of Annie Leibovitz – the dubious societal idealism that hopes these fundamental, biological underpinnings can be overridden by a self-defined higher order cognitivism – will always lock horns with the T-Rex that represents human biology. Annie and the rest of the prophetesses of gender equality are only, symbolically, trying to feed the T-Rex of evolved gender dynamics in the hopes he’ll stay in the paddock, behave himself and only occasionally put on a good show for the customers.

However, even in the hopes of that a contrived, idealized gender Equalism will ever pull the teeth of the T-Rex, the same evolved need women have for Hypergamous certainty informs the concept of what that ideal “equality” should look like. The T-Rex is women too.

Attitude Sells

attitude_sells

There are many attitudinal and subtle behavior traits that manifest in men who are presented with options or enjoy even casual social proof. I’m not sure a lot of guys really realize just how sensitive women are to those ‘tells’. You will do things, say things, without thinking about them that indicate on a limbic level what you believe about yourself. Women have evolved to perceive the smallest cues and subtlest of hints – to the point it’s a subconscious subroutine running in their background processing of information about you when they’re not even cognitively aware of it.

They may not be able to consciously put a finger on it, but on some level of consciousness these tells are informing a woman’s limbic understanding of your SMV.

I’ve gone back and forth about covert communications vs. overt communications on this blog over the years. There is a certain school of Game that teaches a bold, direct action wherein a guy overtly inserts himself into that woman’s immediate experience and I can certainly see the merits of it.

Law 28
Enter into action with boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

There is a certain gravitas that accompanies an extroverted approach with women, the trick is not coming off as a ‘try hard’ and overplaying it, thereby overtly confirming your following a script. When you don’t believe it’s you it’s a pretty good bet she doesn’t either.

A lot of proponents of this in-your-face approach will tell you it’s the only way a “real” man should interact with women; boldly and confidently, and entirely on his terms. And while I agree with this, how you go about effecting that can vary depending on context and condition.

When a guy is initially establishing Frame and drawing the woman (women) of his choosing into his reality, that overt, direct approach can be the deciding factor for a woman’s acquiescing to his Frame. Caught up in the moment (such as an ‘insta-date’ or an encounter she wasn’t expecting) and charging her with an immediate rush of endorphins, a woman’s Hypergamous filtering process gets overridden by that excitement. This is the same principle operating behind planning dates with an excitement factor involved (rock climbing, sky diving, are both exaggerations, but you get the idea) – an emotional attachment paired with an endorphin rush associates that ‘feeling’ with you.

There’s a tendency I think for Red Pill aware men to view women’s Hypergamous / Solipsistic natures as hinderances to men effecting their own interests with them. Shit tests, filtering, sexual prospect comparison and a whole host of other conscious and subconscious vetting inherent to women seems like an insufferable waste of effort for men. However, while Hypergamy may define the rules of the game it’s important for men to understand how to work it to their advantage in both a direct approach and in understanding the subtle filtering that women do.

I’ve read more than a few ‘dating gurus’ define this “being direct with her” approach as the only legitimate form of Game. A Real Man® sees what he wants and goes out and boldly gets it. The problem is that this attitude gets tied to The Male Catch 22 and any derivation is compared with unmanliness.

As I said, while I agree there’s merit to this directness, it shouldn’t be done at the cost of understanding how women subconsciously vet and filter to better discern a man’s (perceptively) true sexual market value to her – as well as how she contrasts his SMV to her self-perceived SMV. There is nothing “unmanly” about having a curiosity for how the female mind works and then using that understanding to your advantage.

Maintaining Frame

It’s one thing to draw that woman into your reality and your psychological Frame, it’s another to maintain this Frame once she’s stepped into it.

I went into some of the subtle ‘tells’ about a man’s SMV in Alpha Tells and Beta Tells and the subcommunication messaging that transfers between men and women. In these posts I described the process beneath those tells and what’s being communicated in them. One thing I believe even Red Pill aware men subscribe to is the idea that their Frame can only be maintained by the same overt and bluntly direct means that helped them create it.

This is the root of men’s initial anxiety of having to upkeep their Red Pill “act”; “Red Pill is impossible to float all the time! What? Am I expected to Game my LTR forever?” The answer of course is internalizing Red Pill awareness into one’s personality, but one thing that also goes along with that is the manifesting of behaviors that help maintain your Frame.

Women pick up on behavioral cues, attitude, how things affect you, how you apply yourself to a task, how you deal with adversity and certainly the interplay you engage in with her while playing with her. If you’re thinking that women wanting men who Just Get It is all direct Game and all above board you need to reconsider that quite a bit of women’s filtering occurs when you’re not ‘on‘ and she’s casually picking up on your behavioral cues.

She want’s you to ‘get it’ on your own, without having to be told how. That initiative and the experience needed to have had developed it makes you a Man worth competing for. Women despise a man who needs to be told to be dominant. Overtly relating this to a guy entirely defeats his credibility as a genuinely dominant male. The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because that’s ‘the way he is’ instead of who she had to tell him to be.

Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he’s not the man for her.

Much of a woman’s vetting process takes place in her hindbrain. It’s very easy for most guys in western(ized) culture to presume that hot, but vapid, women are too oblivious to really pay much attention to this process. Lost in their hedonism and self-affirmations it’s easy to believe that those processes aren’t as influential in hook-ups as they might be in a long term arrangement, but trust that even though they might be under the surface they are being processed.

Mindset

It’s a Tomassi Maxim now, but bears repeating; Alpha is a mindset, not a demographic. I’ve explained what I mean by this on many occasions, but when it comes to what I consider the abstraction that is Alpha it can primarily be reduced to a particular mindset of masculine dominance and confidence.

I wont belabor this here again, but suffice to say that while I believe there is a natural component to it, I do think that to varying degrees this Alpha mindset, or something approaching it, is a learnable state for men. That said, I also think men need to use caution when when evaluating how to go about cultivating and internalizing this mindset.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the hope for a magic solution to your problems in life. There’s no shortage of motivational speakers and charismatic ‘self-help’ gurus ready to sell you a book, or a sermon, or some self-styled social movement promising to show you how to develop this “winners’ mindset”. It’s important to bear in mind that any mindset you learn is only as legitimate as the realities that inform it.

A lot of hate directed at PUAs, motivational speakers, pastors or even your parents can be traced back to their failings in understanding simple evidential realities. Their hopeful formulas for your success end up being frustrations and anxieties when they’ve proven to fail you because you invest yourself in part, or in whole, in them.

Much of what constitutes Blue Pill conditioning is founded in the same misgivings. It’s very easy to hype up and sensationalize Blue Pill idealisms in ‘optimism’ soaked rhetorics, but these hopes are easily dispelled with a Red Pill aware lens. That’s one reason the Red Pill can be bitter – it’s a real buzz kill when you’re high on Blue Pill optimism.

The primary reason I’ve always been reluctant to be prescriptive with Red Pill awareness in practice is because I’ve always believed that the Red Pill is never going to be one size fits all. While Red Pill truths are universal, their application is subjective to the man employing them. How he develops the mindset that best serves him is contextual to his own circumstance.

That said, I think a pragmatic approach based on Red Pill awareness and the fundaments that make it up would serve men best in developing a Red Pill mindset that works for him. You might think that in light of my recent Purple Pill post that I’m alluding to the ‘coaches’ and re-definers of the Red Pill in all this, but lots of “Red Pill” men are actually Purple Pill hoping that some of the old rules might still apply.

While I emphatically recognize the power of positive thought in altering one’s mindset and changing the course of one’s life, I also understand that zeal for change needs to be tempered with a healthy skepticism. If you find yourself being swept up in a tide of super-optimism that’s the time to question the foundations of it. Positive, motivational memes can become clichéd aphorisms when those foundations are proven to be false.

Just Shut the Hell Up

Hello, I’m author Rollo Tomassi.

As one of the 3 ‘R’s of the manosphere, it’s important for me to encourage more men to unplug from the Matrix that is our present feminine-primary social order, but equally important is encouraging more women to sometimes just shut the hell up.

It’s not that men don’t value your thoughts (unsolicited, they often prove our points), it’s just that we don’t value all of them.

The world doesn’t need your opinion on everything. For example, what men should do with their provisioning and catering their lives by ‘Manning Up’ to fit your overblown sense of entitlement after you’ve exhausted your prime fertility window on the Bad Boys and criminals in your 20s. Hush!

Your contrived cries of sexism over the sexiness of who the next popular video game protagonist should be. Zip it!

Whether or not the color of your foundation is called “Sunset Earth” or “Neutral Beige”. Shut Up!

So as a public service I’ve made the following list of things men no longer need to hear women’s opinions on. Please take a moment away from Instagram to jot these down:

  • 50 Shades of Grey
  • Yoga pants
  • The thoroughly disproven 77¢ on the dollar ‘Wage Gap’ lie
  • Giggling about ‘Dad Bods’ being “sexy”
  • Your confusion about where all the good men have gone
  • Fat Acceptance
  • Red Pill Truths
  • ‘Designer cupcakes’ and hand-baked dog treats being examples of ‘female entrepreneurship’
  • Christian patriarchy in an age of feminine assimilation of religion
  • Any sentence that begins with, “As a woman I,…”
  • Pleas for men’s aid in advancing your feminist ideals at the United Nations after claiming not to ‘need’ men
  • Any form of flavored martinis (or boxed wine)
  • 50 Shades of Grey (again)
  • Whether or not your feminine responsibility to engage in traditional Holiday ‘cheer’ is un-feminist
  • And the complete lack of ethics in all forms of journalism

If you can control yourselves and hold back from further expressing your opinions on any of these topics we’ll let you keep weighing in (uh, heh) on important topics like blow job techniques and pole dancing classes for housewives in shape enough to pull it off.

But that’s a huge, big “if”.

Thanks, so much.

The Purple Pill

review

Four years ago I wrote a post titled Could a Man Have Written This? I opened that post with a short, I thought positive, critique of an article by Mona Charen in which she in turn took a then relatively unknown Kate Bolick to task over her All the Single Ladies article. You can read the whole post; it was one of my earliest essays on this blog and, as I’ve come to realize, one of my more prophetic ones too.

My intent in that essay wasn’t to call Charen to the carpet, but rather to illustrate the point that only women are allowed to write an article that criticizes issues specific to women. It is an indictment of, and evidence of, the feminine centric social order we find ourselves in today that any man brazen enough to write verbatim the same offering would be dismissed and passed over as a misogynists at best – lose his long career and personal life at worst.

No man could write this critique and be taken seriously, and therein lies the danger in women co-opting the message the manosphere has been compiling for 12 years now. The environment is such that anything remotely critical a man might offer is instantly suspect of misogyny or personal (‘he’s bitter”) bias, however, couch that message in a female perspective, play Mrs. Doubtfire, and you’ll at least reach the audience beginning with something like validity.

Not surprisingly this element of message delivery is lost on most women. Adopting the male perspective seems novel, something that might set a woman apart in a sea of common fem-speak, but it’s important for Men to understand that anything positive a ‘pro-man’ female author has to offer is still rooted in her female reality. In girl-world, what directly benefits women necessarily is presumed to benefit men, so what we’ll see is a new wave of female bloggers bastardizing the world-worn ideas that the manosphere has put together and repackaging it in a female context. It’s Man Up 2.0; make a token push to “re-empower” men just enough for them to idealize the romanticism of the responsibilities required for living up to women’s expectations.

I daresay this last part is exactly what the manosphere is seeing now. Like any other Male Space the Feminine Imperative makes it its business to ensure that ‘overseers in the locker room’ – in this case the social awareness of the Red Pill –  are emplaced to control a narrative and a condition to suit its purposes. That may sound conspiratorial, but there is no need for a concerted effort when women’s natural, fluid interest in attention and indignation will motivate them to co-opt the narrative of Red Pill awareness.

From Male Space:

Overseers in the Locker Room

The second purpose in the goal of female inclusion into male space is really a policing of the thought dynamics and attitudes of the men in that space. When women are allowed access to the locker room the dynamic of the locker room changes. The locker room can take many different shapes: the workplace environment, the sports team, the group of all-male coders, the primarily male scientific community, the ‘boys club’, the group of gamer nerds at the local game store, even strip clubs and the sanctuary you think your ‘man cave’ is – the context is one of women inserting themselves into male space in order to enforce the dictates of feminine social primacy.

When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting to maintain the former level of interest in the endeavor.

Men unaccustomed to having women in their midst generally react in two ways; According to their proper feminized conditioning, they embrace the opportunity to impress these ‘trailblazing’ women (hoping to be found worthy of intimacy) with their enthusiastic acceptance of, and identification with, their feminine overseer(s), or they become easy foils of an “out moded” way of thinking that the new ‘in-group’ happily labels them with.

Once the feminine-primary in-group dynamic is established a ‘feminine correct’ social frame follows. This feminine correction restructures the priorities of goals, and validates any accomplishments, in terms of how they reflect upon the feminine as a whole. Thus any in-group success is perceived as a feminine success in male space, while in-group failures or simple mediocrity is either dismissed entirely or blamed on out-group men’s failure to comply with, or the rejection of, the Feminine Imperative’s ‘correcting’ influence on the in-group.

It’s very important for Red Pill aware men, manospherean men, to keep this dynamic in mind when they are assessing and evaluating the various messages and intents of the men from whom they’re considering taking advice from.

The Purple Pill

In the community, The Purple Pill is a euphemism for men who’ve become Red Pill aware, but for a variety of insecurities have decided to temper the uncomfortable truths of that awareness with their previous Blue Pill hopes. The harsh, ugly truths that the nature of women, the nature of Hypergamy and the natural selection process of intersexual dynamics presents to these guys becomes too much to bear. It’s all encompassing; when a man begins to see his surroundings with a Red Pill lens the difficult truth needs for an optimistic solution to counter what would otherwise be nihilism.

As I detailed in A New Hope, there’s a want for some sort of Red Pill solution in achieving Blue Pill fantasized goals.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

I’ve included as my blog picture the first and last book covers published by former Frat Boy PUA Tucker Max. I could just as easily have used Neil Strauss’ most recent book, or Athol Kay and Married Man Sex Life as an example, but I think Tucker’s covers tell the story better than a thousand words. When women, women’s interests and women’s sexual strategies become an endemic part of that man’s previous message or a male-specific social movement, the fundamental, underlying impetus becomes compromised. It becomes a tool of the Feminine Imperative.

The present condition of the Mens Human Rights movement is a glaring example of this insaturation of feminine influence. At some stage along the evolution of this otherwise laudable movement its leaders recognized that their best messengers – really their only options – for their grievances were women. Our feminine-primary social order only allows women to be critical of other women, thus the only avenue became investing their message in the women who would voice it for them.

Although I’m cautiously optimistic about the production and release of The Red Pill movie in the coming year I have to temper that with the knowledge that a documentary about the MRM will, once again, owe its credibility to a self-identifying feminist, Cassie Jaye, to tell the story for them. For all of the reassurances and promises of objectivity on her part, the subplot of the documentary prominently features her self-doubt and questioning of her own feminist beliefs during the process of her making the documentary.

On the surface this female self-discovery probably seems like a confirmation of purpose to the men of the MRM, but from a Red Pill perspective – the true Red Pill awareness neither she nor the notables of the MRM are willing to acknowledge – this is yet one more example of the innate feminine solipsism we’ve dissected for a decade now. From Eat, Pray Love to Gone Girl, the female self-discovery script is almost cliché now, but I expect that the bulk of the publicity and interviews of Jaye that follow this film will be less about the MRM and more focused on her very predictable “personal growth journey”.

As I stated in Male Space, the purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. This has been a constant bugbear for the Mens Rights Movement, and is the primary reason they must maintain an inclusionary egalitarian / equalist aspect to their message.

The present state of the MRM is just one of the more apparent examples of men’s groups inviting this feminine influence to ostensibly validate their message. There are others. Tucker Max’s most recent venture appears to be selling himself as a reformed cad who followed the romantic comedy script and is now appeasing his wife’s influence by helping men better understand how to better accommodate Hypergamy.

From The Script:

For women, the only thing better than experiencing this script vicariously through movies and stories is to see it happen live. David D’Angelo, Tucker Max are a few manosphere notable who’ve played the come-full-circle surrender to the script. There are far more guys who play it in a more visual sense (the repentant ‘Womanizer’ episodes on the Tyra Banks show comes to mind), but no one really remembers them, and certainly not in the ‘sphere. While there’s a sense of vindication for women to have a guy surrender his anti-social (i.e. anti-feminine primary) lifestyle and beliefs in favor of a feminine paradigm, and “settle down” into a feminine framed, normalized monogamy, surrender is still surrender. Essentially the strong vibrant man who posed such a challenge to her, the one who’s steadfast determination and conviction made him a man she was hot for as well as one she could respect, loses his status.

He’ll say, hey, you don’t know where I’m at in life, you don’t know the experiences I’ve had, life has taught me the value of compromise. Women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate a feminine reality, but if there’s one thing women outright despise, one thing men foolishly believe women should be able to appreciate, it’s a man willing to compromise the beliefs he’s established his reputation and integrity upon in order to facilitate her feminine reality. That’s the definition of a sell-out.

As I said there are many other examples; Athol Kay and the revenue dependence he now has on his pandering to a female audience (and the inclusion of his wife and other women in his message). Evan Mark Katz’s pandering almost exclusively to upper middle class women bemoaning the same tired tropes of  “no good men” that led them to their spinsterhood in the first place. There are more, but in all these cases these men’s financial livelihood depends on their capacity to include a feminine-primary influence into their dubious male space.

This Purple Pill dynamic has also found its way into mainstream religion for much of the same reasoning these ‘Dating Coaches’ find it necessary to cater their message to a feminine-primary audience. Most will season-to-taste just a bit of whatever they’re peripherally aware of about Red Pill truth, but only enough to appear in touch with the burden of men’s performance owed to the women that make up their audiences. Like the Dating Coaches, the Purple Pill Pastor understands that his revenue depends on hold women’s attention and usually this comes in the form of playing to women’s inherent need for indignation.

And finally, there are the apologist,…

This is an old video, but it’s brought to you by the same faction that’s now fronting conferences like the Conscious Men Summit. It pains me to see Dr. Warren Farrell speaking/endorsing this new age masculine apologist movement, especially since he’s a featured interview in The Red Pill movie for the MRM. Farrell has always been an adherent of the same gender-equal fantasy he learned from 70’s feminism, but I do credit him with aiding in my own unplugging when I read Why Men Are The Way They Are.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked, but the masculine apologists of this century also have a need to mix in just enough Red Pill awareness to appeal to, what they hope are the more dominant sensibilities of men. New age (really reheated 70s) masculine apologist still cling to the fallacies inherent in gender equalism, but they transition this into a restitution script they believe women will appreciate in an age where women despise their pathetic acquiescence to the Feminine Imperative they’re oblivious of.

If these guys’ message makes your stomach turn, well, I share in your disgust, but it’s important to remember that in the coming years men like this will attempt to co-opt into their message just enough of what the Red Pill as a collective has developed for the past 13-14 years.

After Roosh decided to set fire to the Red Pill community in an effort to create his own brand in neomasculinity he put out a video in which he laid claim to having ‘fathered’ the Red Pill. Now we have the MRM making similar claims of ownership to this collective with their upcoming documentary. The cover story is of course “only in name, because no one can really ‘own’ the Red Pill”, but their notables understand the conflation all too well. Furthermore we have the influences of the ‘overseers in the locker room’ effect with the likes of Tucker Max and other half-measure Purple Pill fence riders.

Back in 2011 I anticipated women writers co-opting the Red Pill and acknowledging what of it that serves their sexual strategy (Open Hypergamy) and in claiming authorship of the Red Pill they also claim the authority to define it in the ways that most fluidly serve the Feminine Imperative. The Purple Pill pushers will use what ever conveniently complements and reinforces their Blue Pill insecurities while sweeping the ugly, harsh, unflattering truth of the Red Pill aside or disqualifying them as the negativity of misogynistic complainers.

While I am humbled to be accounted as one of the Red Pill’s prominent writers I will never lay claim to having created it. The Red Pill in its truest sense belongs to the collective that has contributed to it as a whole. It belongs to the men who’ve fostered it, who’ve risked their livelihoods and families apart from it to make other men aware; it belongs to those who understand that its objectivity is what’s kept it open and honest, discussable and debatable.

At the Man In Demand conference in Vegas I opened my talk by asking those seated what they believed the Red Pill was. I did so because I believe that in the coming years there will be a concerted effort to claim authorship and definition rights to the “Red Pill”, and it’s important for anyone identifying as being Red Pill aware to acknowledge that what we’re a part of is a collective experience. We are, we become, the developments of a totality of men’s experiences across the world.

Beware of any man or woman attempting to lay claims of ownership of the Red Pill. Beware of anyone defining this awareness, distorting these truths, to accommodate their narratives.