Uncategorized

Commodifying Love

commodity

Dalrock gave me something to chew on recently:

In my first post of 2014 I introduced the topic of the ugly feminist.  As I explained at the time, this is an old charge but is typically aimed at the superficial instead of the core problem.  Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.  Several commenters pointed out that this is a devastating charge against feminism, as they could see no viable counter argument for it.

I’m not going to try to offer a counter to Dal’s assertion because in essence I think he’s correct. However I will suggest that this ugliness is the result of a commodification of love (and with it sexual access) that’s resulted from the unfettering of women’s Hypergamy. Love and caring is the commodity women’s Hypergamy uses to fulfill their dualistic sexual strategy.

To this day my most contentious post (and chapter in the book) on RM is Women in Love. This is primarily due to first time readers taking my assertions to their literal extreme. Women’s concept of love stems from opportunism, men’s concept stems from idealism. Most women and Blue Pill men take this to mean that women cannot actually love a man, and absolutist men angry with themselves for having never understood it think much the same thing, “My God! I knew it all along, women cannot actually love a man.”

I assert neither of these positions (really the same position) in that post, nor any of the followup post (that no one seems to want to read once they make up their minds), but what I do assert is:

Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In prior posts I’ve also made the case that men’s idealistic perspective of love stems from an unending need for performance to merit a woman’s opportunistic love. It’s not that men want an unrealistic, unconditional love, but rather they want a woman’s love to be a refuge from having to perform up to, above and beyond the requirements of satisfying an unending optimization of her Hypergamy. It’s not unconditional love they idealize, it’s a love that’s not predicated on their burden of performance.

What frustrates this love idealism is that men are popularly sold the idea that women’s love is based on a mutually similar model. From Disney movies to romantic comedies, to Shakespeare and epic stories, to popular music and the daily talk shows, the message is that love (if it’s real love) is omniscient, conquers all and overcomes all odds. It’s a very seductive message of hope for men whose lives and existences are evaluated on constant performance.

“Could she really love me despite all of my glaring inadequacies?”

“Does she love the real me or is it my money and the lifestyle I provide for her?”

The fact that these themes are a constant in human history illustrates the subconscious, peripheral awareness we have of the differing models of love each sex bases their understanding of love on.

The Commodity

What this selling of idealistic love does for men is keep them in a state of perpetual hope that this idealism is shared by both sexes and they can realistically achieve that ideal goal of a love not founded on his performance. It’s important to note here that this performance isn’t necessarily something a man must make a constant effort to maintain (though this is the usual case), but rather what he represents, not who he is personally. It may be that his effortless looks or inherent status represents a cue for a woman’s optimal hypergamous satisfaction, or it may be the result of years of dedicated performance effort – either way it’s what that man represents; remove the factors a man possesses that satisfy a woman’s Hypergamy and her opportunistic model of love will reveal itself.

Feminists are ugly because the philosophy of feminism is ugly. It is based on avoiding caring for others and being miserly with love.

Dalrock’s observation here is profound in that it illustrates exactly the state of opportunism on which women base their concept of love. On some level of consciousness women understand the inherent value their love, concern, attention and caring has for men. It’s repression or expression is a commodity that has reward value for men who also have an awareness that their performance is what merits a woman’s love.

The popular criticism is that this want for an idealistic love is really a man’s preoccupation with his need for sex, but this is to be expected from a fem-centric culture that needs women to ration love and caring for men in order to ensure its social dominance. And God forbid a man express his desire for a performance-less based love and caring; he’s ostracized for wanting a mother’s love (Freudian), being necessitous (thus powerless) and revealing his deficiency in performance.

As Open Hypergamy becomes more proudly embraced and normalized in society, so too will women’s sexual strategy be laid more bare. And in laying that strategy bare, so too will women’s opportunistic model of love become more apparent to men. This new apparentness is already conflicting with the old-order messaging that kept men hopeful of realizing their idealistic love state.

Women cannot sell Open Hypergamy and the love-conquers-all ethereal ideal love at the same time.

Dal is correct, the philosophy of feminism is ugly, but it’s important to consider that feminism is just the current social operative of the Feminine Imperative today. For the moment women can be miserly with love and caring. They can even express resentment for having to be so with men who they doubt are meritorious of it, or for those who don’t measure up to the rigors of an increasingly open and increasingly demanding Hypergamy.

They can do this because they understand that the hopeful, idealistic love they have men convinced can be achieved is still a commodity to men.

Before I close, I’m going to give you a bit of Red Pill hope (again). Men and women can and do love each other intensely and genuinely. They can and do see past each other’s deficiencies and their love endures. My point with this essay is to reveal how this love develops and the conditional environments it comes together in. In spite of the strongest bonds, there is a threshold at which men’s loving idealism and women’s performance requirements can test, stress and break that bond.

Men’s idealistic love can be strong, as can women’s opportunistic love – the two models are not mutually incompatible, and it’s my belief that the two are even complementary to each other. Neither is a right or wrong way to love, and neither is the definition of real love. Bear in mind these are models that predicate a condition of love, what happens after that is up to the individuals.

Where these models become incompatible is when one commodifies and exploits the condition of love that the other holds. In an era of unapologetic feminine primacy and unignorable open Hypergamy, this commodification undeniably rests with the feminine.

For further reading see the Love series of posts:

Women in Love
Men in Love
Of Love and War
Burden of Performance
Love Story

We’ll Do It Live! (again…well, sorta)

doitlive

Just a brief announcement here, I’ll be a guest on The Real Christian McQueen Show this Saturday. I’m not exactly sure when Christian and Dagonet will be posting the podcast, but I’ll be on with the guys at 4pm PST this coming Saturday. We’ll be discussing topics from The Rational Male book – which was publish one year ago this month – as well as questions from readers, the red pill subreddit forum and twitter.

If there’s some topic or question you’d like to suggest you can tweet Christian @RealCMcQueen, Dagonet his co-host @TheQuestFor50 or myself @RationalMale

There’s also a TRP subreddit thread you can post questions to, and of course feel free to drop suggestions in the comments here.

I don’t do many interviews, but I’m kind of looking forward to this. SInce the book was published I’ve had about six invitations to do an interview, but I’m kind of particular about who’s show I go with. I’d honestly rather be writing about what I do than talking about what I write, if that makes any sense.

This isn’t my first rodeo, but my last interview was for a SoSuave video podcast three years ago. I can’t vouch for that link still being active, but you get the idea. It should be fun.

Game and Circumstance

circumstance

“Don’t be mad E. It’s not our fault you were born without the sport fucking gene, come on.”

 

At the start of July, 2011 (a month before I began this blog in earnest) I took a backpacking trip through the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. This was due to my desire to unplug, go off the grid and get back into the real face-to-face world. It was only for 10 days but well worth burning 10 days of PTO for.

It was an educational experience meeting people, most of whom have very little online presence beyond using Twitter or FaceBook occasionally. I didn’t have cell service for most of the hike. The people I met along the way, and I’ll put this politely, were “salt of the earth” people. Some were other hikers, others were people who lived and worked in the few surrounding communities. It was good to reaffirm my ability to survive on my own and realize that there is a whole world of Men out there who live well, far beyond the influence of “men” who’ve never mowed their own lawns, much less lived by their own wit in the country. Guys who build muscle by working outdoors, not in a gym. I met beautiful women who worked in small diners you’ll never hear of. I fished rivers and streams, for dinner some nights, and I saw fireflies for the first time (I grew up in southern California, it’s a novelty).

At some point I think Men need to get back to their primal natures, they need to embrace it fearlessly and without shame. We’re far too insulated by the Buffers of technology. Even the more belligerent rednecks I encountered still preferred to text their girlfriends and came off as pussified for doing so.

I guess what I’ve come to realize is that we tend to view what we ‘know’ about men and women from the experiences we have reported to us from all over the world on blogs, forums, the manosphere  – and I still endorse the purpose of it’s unwritten mission – however, this trip reaffirmed for me that there is no substitute for real interaction. Game will work equally well with the cute blonde serving coffee in a rural diner as it would with the club girl in NYC. Both are equally given to the same feminine fundamentals we’ve untangled about women in the ‘sphere for over a decade, but the one we tend to use as a female archetype is the typical club girl for our examples. Daisy Duke is still subject to hypergamy, she just applies it differently.

I’m not turning into Roosh, but I’m considering burning a couple months doing the entire Appalachian trail all the way to Maine.

In my day to day life I deal with a lot of rich men. Every patron or boss, every general manager I’ve dealt with for the past 15 years has been a millionaire. The primary owner of one of my liquor brand is that many times over. None of the “business friends” I shoot golf with have weeded their own lawns or installed a radiator in 20+ years. When I was on the trail I thought about how ridiculous it would be to see a guy like that or some PUA guru having to dig his own toilet and take a dump in the woods, or hoist his pack in a tree so the damn bears don’t eat the only food he’s got for the next 3 days. These guys are insulated.

I want to run, and fight, and fuck, as well as I deal with the ‘civilized’ things I do. Imagine a guy like Mystery wringing out the sweat and filth of his clothes in a stream somewhere. Now, that’s some funny shit.

Game and Circumstance

I start off with this today because this experience wasn’t just humbling, but it also taught me that what I experience day to day isn’t at all what a majority of men experience. My past, my N count, my 18 year marriage, and what I do professionally sets me apart in a way that I sometimes don’t appreciate or take into consideration when I’m advising men.

It’s also very humbling and affirming when I receive emails or comments from men living in countries I’ve only seen in pictures who nevertheless share a common male experience that reinforces many of the things I write about – but even within that commonality, I have to remember, my circumstance is not theirs.

I walk through a casino almost every day now and I see the same people. Not the fun glamour you see in commercials or ads about Las Vegas (that’s usually night promos), but the real people, the overweight, housekeeping and table crew, the geriatric spending their savings and social security on a hope they’ll win something significant, the desperate and the people just looking for distraction.

I walk by some of these men and think “how is Game going to help a guy like that?” While I do believe that Game is universally beneficial on many levels (primarily between the sexes, but not exclusively) there’s a point where that improvement is going to be limited by a guy’s circumstance, where he is in life and what he’s made of it so far. It’s a manosphere cliché now, but most men aren’t ready for the red pill. The red pill awareness is simply too much for them to accept within the context of their circumstances.

That circumstance isn’t based on age or a particular demographic, but Game is only going to be as liberating for a man in as far as he’s willing to accept it in terms of his own circumstance.

Not Just Sex

Game gets a lot of misconstrued criticism in that ignorant critics presume Game only ever equals PUA and that “those guys are only interested in fucking as many low self-esteem sluts as humanly possible.” It’s much more difficult for them to confront that Game is far more than this, and applicable within relationships, in the workplace (with women and men) and even in their family dealings.

That’s kind of a scary prospect for men comfortable in living within their own contexts and circumstance. Sport fucking isn’t what most men think it is because they’ve never experienced anything beyond serial monogamy, nor is it what most (80%+ Beta) men even have the capacity to actualize for themselves. But, as Game has evolved, it isn’t just about Spinning Plates, or sport fucking, it’s more encompassing than this.

Game is, or should be, for the everyman.

“He only wants me for sex” or “I need to be sure he’s interested in me and not just sex” are the admonishments of women who really have no introspective interest in how a majority of men really approach becoming intimate with women. Oh it makes for a good rationale when women finally “want to get things right” with a provider, but even the excuse belies a lack of how most men organize their lives to accommodate women’s schedules of mating.

Mostly to their detriment, the vast majority of men follow a deductive,but anti-seductive, Beta Game plan of comfort, identification, familiarity and patience with women in the hopes that what they hear women tell them is the way to their intimacy will eventually pan out for them. Their Beta Game plan is in fact to prove they “aren’t just in it for the sex” in order to get to a point of having sex with a particular woman.

I always find it ironic when men tell me that their deductive plan for getting after it with a woman is to prove he’s not actually trying to get after it with her. However, this is what most men’s Game amounts to; deductively attempting to move into a long term monogamy based on what women, saturated in a presumption of gender equalism, tell him he ought to expect from himself in order to align himself with her intimate interest.

I could use the term “appeasement”, but that’s not what most men want to call it. Most men call it being a better man (for her), better than “other guys” who wont align themselves accordingly. It becomes their point of pride in fact.

Male Long Term Security

Most men, average men – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – want a form of security.

Most men are designed, perhaps bred, to be necessitous. To be sure , men need to be constant performers, constant qualifiers, in order to mitigate hypergamy. In the past, and to an extent now, this performance simply became a part of who he was as a man and didn’t require a constant effort, but increasingly, as male feminization has spread, men have been made to be necessitous of security.

I would say that desire for long term security differs significantly from women’s Beta Bucks side of hypergamy need since the drive to secure provisioning is an innate part of women’s firmware. The security average men need is rooted in a need for certainty in his ability to meet with a woman’s performance standards – and ultimately avoid feminine rejection.

In today’s feminine-centric social order, men are ceaselessly bombarded with masculine ridicule, ceaselessly reminded of their inadequacies, and endlessly conditioned to question and doubt any notion of how masculinity should be defined – in fact ridicule is the first response for any man attempting to objectively define it.

It’s this doubt, this constant consideration of his own adequacy to meet the shifting nature of women’s hypergamic drive, from which stems this need for security. The average man needs the certainty of knowing that he meets and exceeds a woman’s prerequisites in a social circumstance that constantly tells him he never will – and his just asking himself the question if he ever will makes him that much less of a man.

The average man will look for, or create his own rationales to salve this necessitousness. He’ll create his own ego in the image of what he thinks he embodies best as being “Alpha” or he’ll adopt the easy doctrines of equalism which tell him women and men are fundamentally the same rational actors and convince himself he’s not subject to the capricious whims of feminine hypergamy because men and women are more ‘evolved’ than that– but that nagging doubt will manifest when the right circumstances and right opportunities present themselves.

Changing Your Programming

I mention in the book that I am not a motivational speaker, I’m not anyone’s savior and I would rather men be the self-sustaining solutions to becoming the men they want and need to be – not Rollo Tomassi’s success stories, but their own success stories.

That said, let me add that I would not be writing what I do if I thought that biological determinism, circumstance and social conditioning were insurmountable factors in any Man’s life. Men can accomplish great things through acts of will, they can be masters of their circumstances and most importantly masters of themselves.

With a healthy understanding, respect and awareness of what influences his own condition, a Man can overcome and thrive within the context of them – but he must first be aware of, and accepting of, the conditions under which he operates and maneuvers.

You may not be able to control the actions of others, you may not be able to account for women’s hypergamy, but you can be prepared for them, you can protect yourself from the consequences of them and you can be ready to make educated decisions of your own based upon that knowledge.

You can unplug.

You can change your programming, and you can live a better life no matter your demographic, age, past regrets or present circumstances.

The Rational Male – Kindle Update

Just a brief announcement, I’ve had the Kindle version of The Rational Male professionally formatted and the new edition is now available from Amazon.

I have to apologize for the first version. I’m a designer by trade and my initial effort was intended for a well laid out print version that could be loaned to, or bought for men who readers felt might benefit most from it. Unfortunately my freshmen effort never really converted from the PDF to an ePub the way I had intended.

I understand now that readers primarily wanted Kindle / eReader versions for themselves so I took the time and committed the money to have the text professionally formatted. The eBook is now ready for primetime. It’s essentially the same book, just everything is now in place, with links embedded.

I’ve also expanded the distribution to Kindle Select now, so readers in Mexico, Brazil and Japan have direct sales access.

Also, I’m currently having the book translated into Spanish, and have a couple of irons in the fire to convert the book into an Audible format.

Something to Look Forward to

The good news is that I’ll be taking all of this learning and applying it to the next book I began last week. I’d already begun The Rational Male: Volume II in February, however, as a result from the most recent Preventative Medicine series I’ve put this on hold while I flesh out an expanded version of this series into the new book. Furthermore, since my essays and graphs detailing contemporary SMV seem to generate so much interest (and rage, and general distortion) both inside and outside the manosphere, I’ve decided to expand this new book with SMV / SMP specific material to support the expanded  Preventative Medicine detailing.

After sifting through my past SMV related material I’ve found I have more than enough for a ‘real’ book – so, yes there will be both a (well formatted) Kindle and a printed version. While I will be using some prior posts, as well as detailing the Preventative Medicine timeline more expansively, I’ll also be including new related writing that I haven’t published on Rational Male. So the answer to the obvious question is, no, it wont all be just reprints of past essays – and even the ones I choose to will be expanded.

The purpose of this effort, like anything I write really, will be along the same intent as the Preventative Medicine series – a work to better help men prepare for, and become SMV / SMP and Game aware.

Once this book is completed I’ll be back to Rational Male: Volume II. My hope was to publish by October 1st, but that may get pushed back a month depending on the Preventative Medicine (working title) book’s publication.

And finally, amongst all of this, my stupid-hectic work schedule/travel, publishing for the blog and trying to be a husband and a father, I’ve also begun copy edits for a new edition of the printed book. I’ll be hiring a pro copy editor to help out and make corrections, but this new edition will address the formatting and copy issues in the first printed edition. The material will not change.

Thanks for all your support. I write for my readership, so if there’s a suggestion you have for any of these upcoming projects or some topic or inclusion you’d like to see, please feel free to let me know about them in the comments or with an email (address on the About page).

RT

SMV – Is it Real?

I’ve never reblogged any post before, but in light of all the attention my SMV graph has been receiving recently this was too good not to. The reason the SMV graph agitates critics so much is because upon first glance (usually the only consideration it’s given) it angers those with strong ego-investments in an equalist / feminized mindset. Because of this, critics jump to the presumption that I’m in someway implying the intrinsic worth of a man or a woman based on where they fall on this graph without any consideration given to the intent of why I created it or its objective purpose. It’s “tl;dr, people are people, he’s a perv who wants to bang 12 year olds, etc. etc. where’s the science?”

I would encourage any critics of this graph to read the entirety of Navigating the SMP, SMV in Girl-World and The Curse of Potential. Until you do you’ll have an incomplete understanding of it.

In Sex, Lies and Statistics I mentioned that the SMV squares very well with existing studies (links provided) but this iconic men post is another excellent example. I have no doubt that every critic will take issue with the source in an attempt to disqualify it, but consider that my graph was drawn as an objective illustration based on an aggregate of male experiences and observations without the aid of the numbers presented here. Again, it reflects these trends with scary accuracy.

 

Late Edit: Also too good not to include Why Women Lose the Dating Game

As Good As It Gets

goodasitgets

On several occasions I’ve gone into the pro’s and cons of marriage. I tend to get a couple of standard reactions to my take on marriage; the first is usually the binary, all or nothing response that virtually all women, and a significant number of feminized men, will throw at me after having only a cursory skim through a few of my articles. It usually goes something like,

“WTF?!! You misogynist asshole! So ALLLLLLL marriages are one-sided affairs for men, doomed to failure once a woman gets fat after pregnancy, greedy or bored and her hypergamy kicks in? My folks, grandparents, aunt & uncle et. al. are still together after ___ years so that proves that love can conquer all and you’re fulla shit.”

This is the usual response I get from deep blue-pill men and women still relying on their, feminine conditioned, ready dismissals so as not to have to actually dig any deeper into what I’ve  written about the truths of contemporary marriage and have their precious (and fragile) idol of a loving marriage challenged, and possibly destroyed.

Frames of Reference

The other reaction I get is the one I covered in Fidelity, which usually goes something like,

“Dude, how can you be a red pill Man and be married? It’s contradictory to everything you write, fuck you charlatan, I’m going back to (insert URL of PUA, MRA, MGTOW, christo-manosphere, etc. etc. site) and read up on the latest approaches.”

Again, this is usually the result of a guy without the patience to really read what I’ve posted here for the past two years, and developed in my writing over the past ten. If it seems like it’s TL;DR material  it probably wont resonate with an attention deficient reader.

Obviously in both these instances the responses come from a lack of understanding the totality of my personal history, life, Game and female experiences – which of course is what I hope readers will get a better grasp of when the book is released. I’ve had sex with over 40 women in my past, during a time when there was no such thing as formalized Game. I apply elements of Game in my line of work – the liquor, nightclub and gaming industries to be specific – and use it to my professional advantage with the women I work around and who work for me. I use aspects of Game with my daughter (Amused Mastery) and set myself as an example of the type of Man she should associate herself with – of the boys she likes we both make a point of distinguishing the chumps from the more confident and dominant guys. I observe elements of Game while reconditioning greyhounds. I’ve even recently used an AMOGing technique to get a better interest rate and price on a new car I purchased this year – and I only did it to see if it would work.

The Measure of Game

There is an element in the manosphere that will tell you that the only real form of Game, the only legitimate, measure of Game is how many women you’ve successfully banged in your pursuit of perfecting Game for yourself.

I agree with this assessment.

The real measure of Game is only truly tested by how well it gets you laid. You can use your understanding of Game to improve your life, your career, your family interactions, etc. You can use your grasp of Game to destroy a feminist’s arguments and you can use it to literally save a man from suicide, but the real test is in how well it provably functions in getting you to intimacy with a woman.

Roosh recently had a series of articles and tweets regarding the present legitimacy of Game. Among his concerns is the claiming of Game authority by men who have never really used Game to get laid. A couple years ago Matt Forney had a similar post on the old In Mala Fide site titled something like “Never trust the advice of guys who aren’t getting laid”. In the years I’ve spent on the SoSuave forum I’ve seen this concern come and go; it’s interesting to see these sentiments get recycled, but the concern is the same. When late-term virgin men feel they have the Game savvy to authoritatively give other virgins (self-inflicted or not) Game advice it delegitimizes Game as a whole.

On the internet we are who we say we are. I’ve been getting laid (and for the better part the old-fashioned way) since I was 17. I’ve also been married for the last 17 years. Both my sexual and relationship past, as well as my marriage have benefitted me with a comprehensive understanding of Game principles. Furthermore my studies in behavioral psychology and over a decade of involvement in the manosphere have made me a pretty good connector of dots when it comes to behaviorism, sociology and psychology with regards to gender dynamics. I’m not trying to prove my pedigree here, what I’m driving at is that while Game has more to it than just getting laid, if you aren’t getting laid (or laid more with your wife) then your Game is untested and not as legitimate as someone who has put their own Game into successful practice.

The New Monogamy

I recently got a PM from a reader, Emperor Lu Bu, wanting some input from me on a blog post he’d written contrasting the modern ‘horrors’ of marriage and the white knight apologists’ rationales for endorsing marriage:

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that piece, primarily because I seem to recall you saying that you were yourself married (employing some sort of complicated “marriage Game” to remain so).

I must admit, I’m curious as to whether you found an Eastern wife, or whether you just rolled some particularly dangerous dice and took a Western one for yourself.

As I stated in Fidelity, I’m not anti-marriage, I’m anti- uninformed, pollyanna, shoulda’-saw-it-coming, ONEitis fueled, shame induced, bound for bankruptcy, scarred my children for life, hypergamy’s a bitch, marriage. I could very easily detail the aspects of my 18 year relationship with Mrs. Tomassi that would sound like my marriage is a one-of-a-kind white knight miracle, but it will only come off as some naive rationale similar to the social conventions Lu Bu lists in his post. However, I assure you Mrs. Tomassi is a pretty, thin, blonde American, any Game I do run has long passed the point of being a very uncomplicated subconscious part of who I am, and I’m well aware of how hypergamy, the feminine imperative and western matrimonial laws collude to make marriage a dangerous prospect. Caveat emptor.

In contrast with this, Dalrock had another post from the other side of the divorce spectrum this week in quoting an interview with Kate Bollick:

…for people who want to have kids and raise them with someone else, I wonder what the next alternative for love/sex/reproduction is. Because it seems like for women there’s currently two options: Option A, which is dating, marriage, kids (and divorce and remarriage, etc.), or Option B, which is every other nontraditional alternative, where it’s everyone for him/herself, trying to figure out what fits. Option A being pretty clear, and Option B being wide open.

As you can see the future looks pretty bleak for anyone rooting for team marriage. From the extreme manosphere perspective marriage is akin to Russian roulette with 5 rounds in a 6 shot revolver. From the Jezebel / Bollick side of the equation, the SMV navigation plan is no longer in need of any pretense or concealment; women are now comfortable in admitting the plan actually is to cash out of the SMP casino between 27-28 years of age and to take the beta provider schlub to the cleaners for future cash & prizes. Even for Athol Kay, his MMSL is an effort in after-the-fact marriage damage control.

As Good as it Gets

So where does that leave us? Back in 2003 Tom Leykis once had a great rant about how being an unmarried man, spinning plates in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties, was as good as it gets. I’m beginning to think this was more than a bit prophetic. I’ve written six individual post about the various aspects of Plate Theory, and although I presented the options for both a continued plate spinning plan and a path, at least, towards monogamy from plate theory, I’m starting to wonder if a continued, indefinite, commitment-ambiguity isn’t simply as good as it gets for men today.

For as much as Aunt Giggles would have anyone believe that both men and women want to be married – “want’s” got nothing to do with it. A desire to be married and live in an idealized and secure state of mutual love and respect with someone is really a no-brainer. The whole Minter affair (literally and figuratively) in July superimposes the idea that even the most anti-marriage guy still wants to be married, but it’s not the getting where the problem starts, it’s in the having.

I have no doubt that the idealization of marriage, enduring companionship, mutual love and respect are very strong desires for men, but as I stated in my love series, men love idealistically, whereas women’s love is rooted in opportunism. Women get very upset at this proposition because they tend to conflate an unrealistic desire for unconditional love with a love based on a man’s performance for her in order to earn  and keep it. It’s not that men expect some childish form of unconditional love, it’s that a man must continue to maintain that love through performing and meriting it – this is what I mean by women loving opportunistically.

Whether a man comes to terms with how women love them, they still want to get married because they believe in the dream. Despite all the risk, despite every red flag a woman waves, and even despite the bitter disaster of his previous marriages, men still want to be married – they desire the ideal union.

But what if as good as it gets is simply entertaining a succession of non-committed, non-exclusive relationships? In essence, a sustainable plate spinning until such time as a woman demands committed monogamy, and then she’s replaced with a new plate and the cycle continues. I’m sure this would seem manipulative and horribly selfish to women, and furthermore it might contradict what I’ve just written about men’s general want for marriage (or at least an idealized union), but contrast this perpetual plate spinning strategy with the perspective extremes of both the raw deal men and women I mentioned in Lu Bu and Dalrock’s posts.

Rather than a deliberate or unintentional “marriage strike” perhaps the direction we’re headed is a sustainable series of modular monogamy or perpetuated singleness? Maybe that’s as good as it gets?

The Best of Rational Male – Year Two

As you’ve probably guessed I’ll be making this another permanent page at the top of RM, so don’t worry about bookmarking this one for future reference.

It’s interesting to see the trends in my writing as the year progressed. My focus on Positive Masculinity and personal development seemed to feature more prominently than year one. I’d attribute that to digesting the posts of year one and considering actionable ways men can learn not only to overcome the feminine-primary environment, but to be better men as a result of it.

Casualties (and the followup Soldiers) was my personal favorite this year. I never really appreciated the reach of Rational Male until I was inundated with very personal private correspondence from both active and retired military men relating their struggles with coming to terms with red pill awareness. I’m glad my words and ideas have been a benefit to these guys.

Bear in mind this is a collection of the best rated posts as well as a few I deemed to be the most important. I kind of hate distilling an entire year of posts down to just a summarized list – personally I think they all deserve consideration and there’s probably one from this past year, not on the list, that will personally speak to a reader the most.

The Best of Rational Male – Year Two

Game

Unplugging

Love

Social Conventions

The Feminine Imperative

Positive Masculinity

Hypergamy

Artificial Joy

Of all the scenes in the Matrix, Cypher’s 30 pieces of silver moment here is the one that requires the most suspension of disbelief. Granted, it’s the Matrix, so you’re going in with a lot of suspended disbelief, and I understand Cypher’s Judas moment is central to the movie’s plot, but for as cerebral and philosophically rich as the Matrix is, this scene begs a lot of questions.

First we have to consider how long Cypher’s been cut away from the Matrix – 9 years. His experience of awakening, or something like it, we can presume was much like Neo’s. Shock, disbelief, denial, depression and finally acceptance. The experience Cypher and Neo, and anyone else so unplugged, would somewhat follow a predictable path, and thus the people doing the unplugging have pre-established programs to help those awakened adjust to a ‘real’ life.

What Cypher has here is 9 years of experiencing the harsh reality of the ‘real’. Although he understands it, he wants to forget it. He wants the comfort and bliss that being unconscious and ignorant in the Matrix makes possible for him.

The disbelief we have to suspend here is that the automatons of the Matrix will actually honor their end of the bargain and graciously wipe away all of his memories of being in the real world, to say nothing of actually improving Cypher’s ‘life’, such as it is, once he’s blissfully oblivious of the ‘real’. One would think that after 9 years of watching the Matrix ‘code and understanding how that system works Cypher wouldn’t have been so naive as to think that the system wouldn’t simply kill him once he’d betrayed Morpheus to it.

Still, the want for an escape from harsh realities is certainly an aspect of the human condition. We all have them and for the most part they’re harmless distractions to ease what we can bear of the real world. However, depending upon the personality and the severity of the need to escape, we can find ourselves preferring the fantasy to the reality. This is what can make harmless distractions into compulsive obsessions. It’s easy to on pick MMO games as an illustration, but the ‘addiction’ element of them stems from a personality that prefers the fantasy to the reality of its conditions.

Artificial Joy

Cypher is one such individual. He’s been rejected by Trinity – one of the only two women on his ship – in favor of the (at the time contextual) Alpha of a better looking and less creepy Neo. He resents Trinity’s attraction to Neo and spends his off hours watching encoded Matrix porn (not only a Buffer, but also an escape) and has a direct line to the only alcohol on the ship (courtesy of Dozer). Both of these classic male escapes, and many more just like them, are the characteristic remedy intended to cope with a reality that borders on insufferable. It’s almost prescient that this movie was written and released well before the rise of ubiquitous internet porn.

“If you entirely removed men’s access to porn and booze from society the male suicide rate would increase tenfold.”

I’ve read this comment on a couple of manosphere blogs in the past, and it’s almost a truism when you consider the most visceral of Buffers men turn to in order to escape their realities. Whether or not that guy is lost in his blue pill  mental jail cell or he feels destitute in the perceived  hopelessness of a cruel, but real, red pill existence he’s unprepared for, a man will always look for his escapes – and usually he gravitates, and fixates upon the ones that best satisfy what he’s unable to actualize.

On second thought, maybe we don’t need to suspend any disbelief with Cypher. Once we understand that condition and situation, and the abject lack of an ability to adress it, can drive someone to desperation, to hopeless suicide, acts of violence, to fanciful absorbing escapes, etc., ‘real’ naive beliefs and willful intellectual negligences seem of small consequence by comparison.

Reinsertion

I’m using Cypher’s character here today thanks to an enlightening post Athol Kay dropped last week. I disagree with his assertion here that red pill men need their occasional blue pill escapisms, but really only in how he’s applying terms. Athol sites this same video and character to illustrate how men have a desire (need?) to regress back into their former ‘magical thinking’ in order to cope with the reality our red pill, our Game awareness, our new ability to make sense of, and confront, our conditioning and the mechanics of fem-centrism now demands of Men.

My main objection is conflating to blue pill ignorance as some sort of escape that a Man might artificially enjoy from time to time in order to balance the harsh, and admittedly cruel truths his new awareness brings to him.

The trouble is, a lot of the Red Pill approach to life assumes a near telepathic assumption of negative intentions in others. Is it often right? Sure it is. But it’s almost impossible to live happily if you are endlessly paranoid and jaded about the intentions of everyone around you. If every woman is a hot mess of whorish desire and nothing else but a lying cunt of a hamster justifying her Alpha male sperm seeking… well it gets tiring being on edge after a while. Likewise every man is a third wheel seeking an opportunity and plots behind your back, pumping you for information about your woman, seeking to make a run into the endzone the moment you blink too slowly.

I read versions of this breakdown from a lot of guys who resist the idea of a red pill or a Game awareness altogether when it’s first presented to them and they acknowledge the basics of it. I addressed this in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill and Bitter Misogynists, but the simple version is that what’s being outlined for red pill men seems too hopelessly nihilistic to actually be true. It sounds so paranoid and attention consuming that it can’t actually be.

From The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Little Lies

The reason most men experience this initial hopelessness is because their only prior frame of reference for the way life works up until then has been that of a blue pill existence. It’s a very difficult aspect of killing the Beta and relearning how to exist in a red pill awareness – most men either reject it in wholesale denial or they turn paranoid and see the signs of the real intent or the underlying motivations for every action a woman or man presents them with as per Athol’s example.

The trouble this presents is one of switching a man’s paradigm from blue pill to red pill. Many transitioning guys tell me how impossible it is to “keep up the act” that they believe a red pill awareness requires of them. They believe so because their operative mindset, the direction they think will work best for them, are still based on the rules and mental framework of their former blue pill existence.

In the blue pill Matrix, everything was set for them, but with a red pill awareness comes the responsibility of doing things for themselves. They’re unprepared and cut away from a comforting system, but they don’t know what to do with that freedom. They understand that the blue pill is really a complex series of little lies meant to soften painful truths, and that they’d tell themselves more little lies to comfort themselves when those truths’ consequences hurt them, but now they know better. They have only themselves to blame for allowing the speeding, red pill train they knew was coming to flatten them. For one so unprepared it seems impossible to avoid.

Internalization

NEO: So what’re you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets?

MORPHEUS: No Neo, what I’m trying to tell you is that when you’re ready, you wont have to.

The problem lies in the assumption that Red Pill awareness is a consuming force in a Man’s life that demands his constant effort and vigilance to defend himself against.

Once this awareness is internalized and becomes a part of a Man’s personality there is no vigilance, just awareness. There is a subconscious understanding of the order of things from a red pill perspective, but that doesn’t mean I suspect the female bank teller I’m making a deposit with is ready to rob me blind the moment I turn to walk out the door.

Neil Strauss hinted at ‘social robots’ in The Game; guys who were nothing but Game all the time and were unable to make real emotional connections. I would argue just the opposite. The real danger inherent in Game and Red Pill awareness is a man using it to fulfill his former blue pill idealisms – that does require a constant effort.

A healthy red pill awareness requires not only a Man’s reassessment and recreation of himself, but also that he abandon his former blue pill paradigm and learn to live in a new, positive, red pill paradigm. It seems like a daunting task when you first come to terms with it, but ultimately your awareness becomes an internalized part of who you are. You can allow that to consume you with a paranoia  rooted in your former blue pill frame, or you can learn to create hope in a new system – one that you not only have more control over, but one that requires you to assume that control.

Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Easier is telling yourself that you actually need the little lies the blue pill provides. Easier is is thinking the blue pill is the sugar that helps the medicine go down. Better is recreating a new, positively masculine, direction for yourself based on the awareness and the opportunity that the red pill provides and requires of you.

*Before I finish here I want to say that this post was in no way a ‘take down’ of Athol’s article. I have nothing but respect for the guy and count him as a valuable peer and colleague. His work with MMSL is a much needed resource in the manosphere, and I can’t say enough good things about his efforts. I simple disagree with his take on a need for blue pill illusion.