Unplugging

Crisis of Motive

woman-pulling-puppet-strings

I had an interesting conversation with a cocktail waitress recently about how she wore the sexy outfits she did because they reaffirmed who she was.

“I do it for me.”

“Really? Lingerie, high heels, push up bra, that’s all for you?”

“Of course. I’m my own woman.”

“So, it’s not about the attention and affirmation you get from the men around you.”

“Well, that’s nice, if it’s coming from the right kind of guy, but I don’t wear what I do for them.”

“So if I came over to your house unannounced at like, 4 in the afternoon, you’d be wearing all this while you were vacuuming the house and not in sweatpants and a t-shirt?”

“Well,..no, but that’s not the point, I’m more comfortable in sweats,..”

“I see.”

It was far too easy to box her into the corner she was painting herself into, but I wont be too hard on her since this crisis of motive is also found in men. I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard guys at Gold’s tell me the same thing as to why they workout.

“I do it for me! Yeah, of course, chicks check me out more now that I’ve dropped the fat and bulked up, but this is all for me man.”

I’ll admit, I was that guy at one time. For a guy it makes sense to cop the story of singularity of purpose since it implies that he’s his ‘own man’ and not improving himself to become more acceptable to the women he observably and admittedly wants to get with. This is the paradox of self-improvement – are you doing it for yourself or because you want to others to respond more positively to you? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both.

There are certainly many side benefits to bodybuilding – improved health, attitude, lower stress, life-preserving function that results from increased muscularity, etc. but the minute we drop ‘a better sex life’ into that equation then we have to qualify it all with the “I do it for me” standby; as if our motivating desire to get laid is any less important than all of that. I’ll tell you right now, with 25+ years of lifting on my record, while I enjoy a lower life/health insurance premium as a result, I enjoy sex far too much to ever let myself become a fat ass. I do it for me and I do it because Mrs. Tomassi (and other women) responds positively to it and I enjoy the results.

This is a fundamental question guys swallowing the red pill and adopting a new Game-aware life have to answer – who are you doing it for?

There are a lot of traps involved in answering this question; traps that other AFC crabs in the barrel will use to pull you back in, traps that will attempt to convince you that you’re ‘being someone you’re not‘ and traps that will flatter you for your insightful desire to improve yourself, but only insofar as it serves feminine purposes. This is a common tar pit for men on the edge of accepting Red Pill truth:

From the Unbearable Triteness of Hating:

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Whether he was intending to or not, Roissy was of course responding to exactly this crisis of motive. I don’t specifically agree or disagree with all the tenets of men who identify as MGTOW (I understand the reasoning), but I must point out that, from what I read, the crux of their beliefs are rooted in this same motive crisis. Is what you do, who you are, what you believe, a genuine, organic result of your own decision making (doing it for you) or is all you are the result of a latent purpose to better please a woman (or the Feminine Imperative for that matter)?

Introspect

Aunt Giggles had a post about a week ago lauding all the introspective men concerned with their own self-improvement. Bravo! Bravo introspective Beta, dig down deeper and embrace your inner white knight. While it may range between ego-flattering to self-evincing, true introspection is only useful in the light of why  you’re being introspective in the first place. You may get a pat on the back from the Feminine Imperative for introspectively aligning yourself with the Beta model it’s conditioned you for, or you may get a well needed cold bucket of Red Pill awareness splashed in your face as the result of your introspection, but the question is still who or what are you being introspective for?

With a crisis of motive, it’s very easy to not only cast doubt about the motives of others when they don’t agree with our own, but also to reaffirm our own faith in our own decision making. How many times have Game denialists said something like “those red pill guys are just misogynists, only interested in getting laid as much as possible”? This belief-disqualifier is based on the the presumption that sex is a red pill Man’s only, true, motivator – not himself, not for his own enlightenment, not of his own genuine volition. Red pill guys believe what they do to get laid and therefore dance to the tune women (or their sexual impulse) are playing for them. Distilled down to it’s base, the message is they aren’t acting as individual rational agents, but as robotic slaves beholden to external influences (in this case women or their sex drives). In other words, someone or something is controlling their decisions for them.

That’s some powerful affirmation for the one making accusations of disingenuousness, because it confirms for himself that not only is he a ‘genuine’ actor, but his insight must necessarily be more valid than the guy he’s judging. The problem with this, as I’m sure most are now aware, is that the accuser is already molded by outside influences himself. Thus, his motivation for accusation is suspect of a crisis of motive.

I understand this is some heady shit to take in, but I think it’s important to consider for guys on the cusp of Game-awareness, doubting their genuine want for changing themselves, as well as for guys falling back on motive crisis reasonings in order to justify why other men might disagree with them. I think an important question Men need to ask themselves is why am I changing my belief, my customs, my interpretations? It may be that it comes as a result of introspection, or a new awareness brought to them from an outside influence (the manosphere), but the answer to the question of who do you do it for is both yourself and the outside motivator.

So what made you change? Was it something I or another blogger wrote? Was it a traumatic experience that shocked you into awareness? Or were you just getting what you’d always gotten by doing what you’d always done?

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.

It’s Their Game

george-3

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/why-do-girls-date/5154ae1878c90a511200016b

As glad as I am to see George from 3rd Millenium Man grab the manopshere colors and go to the front lines, I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed with this. Roosh has predicted 2013 will be the year the manosphere goes mainstream, but my concern is less about the exposure and more about the representation. The MSM is the feminine imperative.

I understand the host here is contracted to the Huff-Po so the context begins in terms of what entertains women’s need for indignation. No indignation, no audience. George is hamstrung from the outset: we have the ubiquitous 50+, “I’m ok with the beta provider I married after fucking my spell of bad boys and learned my lesson so you gals should learn from my mistakes” woman (aka the Aunt Giggles, Kay Hymowitz archetype). Next we have the prerequisite “clinical psychologist” who looks like one of the mothers on Dance Moms, and rattles off the feel good humanist psychology truisms clichéd in the 1990’s. After that we have Nathan the self-identified White Knight who’s only purpose is to bolster both women’s feeble positions to better identify with any woman in the hopes that she might be watching and, God willing, anonymously seek him out to potentially hook up with him for being such a team player.

That’s a tough cast to work with so I will commend George on his effort, however, his dropping the ball here is less about his grasp of red-pill wisdom (I know and read his blog regularly), and more about the context that the MSM will allow the manosphere to be represented in. Learn this now red-pill literati before you venture into the MSM – the feminine imperative will gladly make you the red meat for the indignation that sells their advertising to women.

As I said, Roosh predicts that the manosphere will surface in the MSM this year, and I will concur, the manosphere will come to the attention of the greater whole of western society, but don’t think for minute it will be for the positive. With any luck it will reach out to a few blue pill men ready to realize the truth, but my trepidation is about the overall image the manosphere will be molded to by the Feminine Imperative. Men are simply not allowed to have any legitimate insight into intergender dynamics – as I’m sure George is realizing now. In girl-world, women are the sole arbiters of relationship wisdoms – men are simply foils for their legitimacy, even in the best of pretenses.

I don’t write too much specifically about the manosphere with good reason – the ‘enlightenment’ is still evolving. As I’ve been quoted many times before, unplugging guys from the Matrix is dirty work. It’s triage, and the greater majority of men aren’t ready or even in a mental position to be unplugged when you’re in a personal, one-on-one context. So when you extrapolate that to a larger context it’s easy to see how the feminine imperative will readily use men’s default lack of legitimacy for its own purpose. The greatest Threat to the Feminine Imperative is men becoming self-aware of their own sexual market value and the dissemination of information about how the imperative uses this lack of awareness to perpetuate itself.

The first recourse to prevent this is male-specific ridicule and derision for even attempting to explain the social constructs of the feminine imperative.

In a large public forum like this Huff-Po video we don’t see the underlying feminine social urgency and anxiety about men becoming aware of the mechanisms of the feminine imperative because for decades women’s unknowability has become synonymous with the feminine mystique. So it’s made laughable by default that any man would have a legitimate understanding of women – they are just unknowable, so men’s perspectives and insight about the psychology of women starts from a position of ridicule, even when it patronizingly agrees with women’s perspectives.

But underneath the Dance Mom psychological snark, underneath the accusatory tones 50+ woman uses to burn interview time, underneath the attempts at hopeful beta white knight feminine identification, even in the overall context the host uses to broach the topic, red pill men can see the nervous tension of the possibility of the rational exposure of the underpinnings of the feminine imperative.

When you’re in an isolated social setting, it’s a dangerous topic to venture into – like religion or politics – but you can make an effort without too much social repercussion. You can speak red pill truth and endure the wrath of women (who’ll likely fuck you after the fact) and white knights, but you’ll make a point. You may even open the eyes of a few men. However, the larger, meta-scale feminine narrative will use and distort your red pill awareness to make advertisers rich.

Women sustain themselves on indignation and nothing stimulates that better than a man who publicly declares he knows how women think. The Atlantic has made a very profitable business model for a dying form of media based solely upon this feminine-satisfying indignation. This host, the Huff-Po, are simply following the model. So yes, Roosh is right, the manosphere will go mainstream this year, to the overwhelming adulation of the media that’s discovered this type of feminine imperative indignation is extremely profitable.

The IKEA Effect

ikea

 

Before I launch in here, yes, yes, I already know that CH scooped me on this topic last week, but he took a different bent than I had in mind. Heartiste took the perspective that I expected in relating this psychological phenomenon to principles long established in Game by PUA’s – women who invest in a man are more likely to stay invested:

Pick-up artists have a term called compliance, which is a game tactic designed to raise a man’s value relative to the woman’s value, and to gauge a woman’s interest level. The concept is simple: You make a request of a girl, and if she complies you know that she is attracted to you. Furthermore, the very act of complying with your request will cause her to feel more attracted to you.

Investment as a means to attachment isn’t a new idea in psychology, but the PUA application of it is a new twist on it. However the problem with the Ikea Effect is that it can cut both ways.

“Imagine that, you know, you built a table,” said Daniel Mochon, a Tulane University marketing professor, who has studied the phenomenon. “Maybe it came out a little bit crooked. Probably your wife or your neighbor would see it for what it is, you know? A shoddy piece of workmanship. But to you that table might seem really great, because you’re the one who created it. It’s the fruit of your labor. And that is really the idea behind the Ikea Effect.”

From a male perspective it’s easy to see the compliance utility of such a phenomenon when employed with women, however, when you combine this dynamic with a beta (or God forbid an omega) AFC mindset you can begin to understand how it molds the ego of a person ego-invested in reciprocity or Relational Equity.

Most of us intuitively believe that the things we labor at are the things we love. Mochon and his colleagues, Michael Norton at the Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely at Duke University, have turned that concept on its head. What if, they asked, it isn’t love that leads to labor, but labor that leads to love?

I’ve counseled countless guys who are miserably “in love” with BPD women, women who’ve cheated on them, women who by their actions have no capacity for appreciating any effort the guy has made towards relational equity, yet they’ll say “I dunno man, I just love her.”

In a series of experiments, they have demonstrated that people attach greater value to things they built than if the very same product was built by someone else. And in new experiments published recently, they’ve discovered why it happens: Building your own stuff boosts your feelings of pride and competence, and also signals to others that you are competent.

There is an insidious element here: People made to feel incompetent may be more vulnerable to the Ikea Effect. On the other hand, Mochon has found, when people are given a self-esteem boost, they appear to be less interested in demonstrating to themselves and to others that they are competent.

Consider the degree of competence most beta men feel about their lack of (or limited) success with women. They tend to look for convenient excuses for their limited experience with women. They’ll appeal to fate – “I’m just not lucky with the ladies” – or they’ll make comparisons of inadequacy – “Chicks only dig jerks and I’m not like that” – or they’ll disqualify women – “I’m not looking for a skank.” So with all of this at work, imagine the degree of competence a beta guy must feel when he meets with some limited success with a woman. He’ll feel vindicated to be sure, but more so he’ll invest himself in those feelings of adequacy. He’ll be ‘in love’ because of the labor that led to it, and the labor that he feels is necessary to maintain it.

To take this a step further, imagine our now competent beta considering the prospect of losing his ‘loved’ investment, and returning to his former state of incompetence. Combine this with the false expectations of an appreciated relational equity, together with a socialized feminine-primacy conditioning, and likely a marginal social intelligence, and you just begin to see the formula for a potentially violent frustrated chump.

 

Nice Like Me

NGOKC

Lib Arts Major:

“Generation AFC” has done a great job of producing Brevik, Cho, Laughner, Sodini, Holmes, and now recently Lanza among scores of others who never got a bodycount high enough to make the news.

Here’s to a new generation of defects.

Or should I say products working as intended?

Furious Ferret:

This is just standard way of tearing down beta males. Most of the guys that are nice are geniuely nice guys but being guys they still want to fuck. They were taught by women that being nice and respectful lead to being attractive so they were brought up to behave this way. It’s no uniqueness or virtue for a woman to call ‘nice guys’ as really horrible digusting perverts while rewarding the bad boy.

Mumtaz elaborates in response to a female commenter:

‘ From my own personal experiences, I’ve found that being nice does not equate to attraction from men. ‘
Actually, it’s being nice man that doesn’t equate to attraction from women. Nice woman means sweet and pleasant , that is attractive.

‘ Nice is boring. ‘
That’s exactly what women think.

‘ And the average person appears to NEED drama or kaybe just more vivacity. ‘
No , it’s average WOMAN who seeks drama . For a man , coming home after day of hard work , drama is the LAST thing he wants…

‘ It seems that a lot of men look to women for something akin to entertainment ‘
Again, swap sexes and it rings true.
Also notice anecdotal evidence…

When I wrote Play Nice I elaborated upon the recent fem-centric trend of ridiculing self-professed Nice Guys. The notion of Nice Guys only using the monicker as a ruse for an assholish reality has been a staple response for Alpha-burned women for decades now. However, an interesting threshold is being crossed when a globalized internet society begins a campaign of mass ridicule of Nice Guys.

Nice Guys of OK Cupid is one such effort.

While I’ve come to expect women’s rationalizations about Nice Guys as foils for their attention needs, what NGOKC illustrates is an escalation in beta male in-fighting. Some have called this ridicule cyber-bullying on a global scale, but there’s more to this than that. The progression from rebuking forum white knight to online attack blogger is evidence of a new comfort level the femosphere has in sowing discord amongst the beta orbiters they rely on for fem-centric male affirmation.

NGOKC is really a clever new twist on Dalrock’s proposition of “lets you and him fight.” In viscerally exposing OKC Nice Guy profile pictures and pairing them up with subjectively contradicting statements about being ‘nice guys’, NGOKC is (perhaps unwittingly) attempting to define what makes a guy genuinely “nice” based on the terms that indicate feminine supremacy.

If you peruse the sampling of ‘nice guy’ case subjects on the blog you’ll begin to see a pattern form. A, most likely out of context, declaration of ‘Nice Guy-ness’ paired with some horribly incongruent statement about expectations of women’s legs being shaved or men being the head of the household. The social experiment that NGOKC is involved in starts with its efforts in qualifying ‘Nice’ as being compliant with what best serves the feminine imperative. Do you like the feel of a woman’s smooth legs that she painstakingly shaves 7 times a week? You’re not a Nice Guy. Do you believe that men should be confident, decisive, heads of the household? You’re not a Nice Guy either. In fact if you indicate on your profile any belief that is inconsistent with absolute, equalitarian gender neutrality, you’re not a nice guy.

For all the semantics debates the manosphere gets into over the proper usage of “Nice” for men, the binary nature of the femosphere is definitive; if a belief is contradictory to the feminine imperative, it is decidedly “not nice”.

Beta Fights

Being that beta men constitute the vast majority of men in modern society, one of the larger problems of being an abject beta is the sheer volume of sexual competition they experience from other betas. When a beta chumps is AMOG’d by an Alpha there’s an almost tacit understanding by the beta that the Alpha held an advantage over him. The Alpha had the physical, Game and status tools the beta does not. However, put two (or more) betas in contention with each other and they will resort to ever escalating feats of greater beta qualification amongst each other. When all you know is Beta Game, only more intense applications of that game is the natural response to competition within Beta Game.

NGOKC is one such escalation in the Beta Game arms race. From Enter White Knight:

Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism.

By essentially doxxing the Nice Guys on OKC, NGOKC is a blog dedicated to beta white knights attempting AMOG other betas while the women of the femosphere egg them on. The social impetus behind the blog is one of beta men jockeying for feminine approval by ever increasing declarations of being more suitable, more feminine identifying betas, than the so-called fraudulent Nice Guys they hope to expose. They’ve made a game of qualifying for the approval of the femosphere by looking for chinks in their competitor’s beta armor:

“I’m a nice guy,..”

“Charlatan! You want to oppress women by expecting to be the head of the household! I’m the real nice guy,..”

“STFU rape apologist, says here you’re open to first date sex, and what type of guy has tats and piercings like that? Rapists, that’s who! I’m the real nice guy,..”

“Misogynist, looks like you expect women to shave their legs,…FOR YOU!,..only fucking patriarchs think women should make themselves ‘acceptable’ for men,..I’m the real nice guy,..”

The feminine influence naturally loves the beta dystopia between guys they’d never want to fuck otherwise because it primes their need for indignation while simultaneously satisfying a woman’s need for attention and affirmation of her own imperative.

Obligation

One of the things that solidified this beta in-fighting for me was reading Hugo Schwyzer’s Jezebel endorsement of NGOKC.

Hugo Schwyzer has a rightly earned reputation in the manosphere for being a manboobed captain amongst the vichy males feminization has made so common through its selective breeding efforts . The lengths to which he’s ego-invested his life, career and personality into a feminine identification schema is truly grandiose. Hugo’s gender self-loathing is a monument to the dictates of the feminine imperative – he is what feminized men would ultimately become in a society defined by the feminine imperative.

While I have patience for the likes of Manboobz and even the information deficient members of the PUA Hate forums, Hugo is a step beyond their simple mockery.

What’s on offer isn’t just an opportunity to snort derisively at the socially awkward; it’s a chance to talk about the very real problem of male sexual entitlement. The great unifying theme of the curated profiles is indignation. These are young men who were told that if they were nice, then, as Laurie Penny puts it, they feel that women “must be obliged to have sex with them.” The subtext of virtually all of their profiles, the mournful and the bilious alike, is that these young men feel cheated. Raised to believe in a perverse social/sexual contract that promised access to women’s bodies in exchange for rote expressions of kindness, these boys have at least begun to learn that there is no Magic Sex Fairy. And while they’re still hopeful enough to put up a dating profile in the first place, the Nice Guys sabotage their chances of ever getting laid with their inability to conceal their own aggrieved self-righteousness.

Nice Guys of OkCupid provides an excellent opportunity to reiterate a basic truth: there is no right to have sex.

This represents the basic disconnect that a feminine conditioned male like Schwyzer can’t grasp. He’s very concerned that self-avowed Nice Guys harbor this endemic, deep expectation of obligatory sex in lieu of ‘being nice’, yet remains willfully ignorant of the nature of exchange inherent in the sexual marketplace. Of the hundreds of self-professed nice guys I’ve known or counseled, not one of them expressed an expectation of reciprocal sex. In fact the genuine ‘nice guys’ are so self-sacrificing that the idea of a social contract of reciprocal sex is alien to them.

The new popularity of Nice Guy demonization that Hugo and the predictable, gender trend vultures piling on at The Atlantic isn’t about expectations or entitlements it’s about the underlying and unspoken reciprocal nature of the sexual marketplace being exposed. When a ‘nice guy’ does express some angst over his sexless and solitary life, or does bring his Savior Schema to the surface in a public fashion it becomes an ugly reminder for the feminine that the SMP is actually that, a marketplace. A fem-centric society doesn’t like the idea of a visceral resource exchange, because it ruins its humanist/equalist social pretense. Solution? Ridicule and marginalize the one doing the exposing.

Besides the near-universal sense that they’ve been unjustly defrauded, the great commonality among these Nice Guys is their contempt for women’s non-sexual friendship. They rage about being “friendzoned,” and complain about the hours spent listening to women without being given so much as a hand job in return for their investment.

Because Hugo has been so well conditioned by his feminization he lacks any frame of reference to understand the reflexive rage these “false-flag nice guys” experience. This rage response isn’t the disappointment of some societal masculine influence convincing these guys of a sex-debt obligation, it was the entirely feminized influence which convince them of myth of Relational Equity:

…I’ve repeatedly read men relate to me when they say how unbelievable their breakups were. As if all of the investment, emotional, physical, financial, familial, etc. would be rationally appreciated as a buffer against hypergamy. The reason for their shock and disbelief is that their mental state originates in the assumption that women are perfectly rational agents and should take all of their efforts, all of their personal strengths, all of the involvement in their women’s lives into account before trading up to a better prospective male. There is a prevailing belief that all of their merits, if sufficient, should be proof against her hypergamous considerations.

For men, this is a logically sound idea. All of that investment adds up to their concept of relationship equity. So it’s particularly jarring for men to consider that all of that equity becomes effectively worthless to a woman presented with a sufficiently better prospect as per the dictates of her hypergamy.

Hugo’s preoccupation with the sex-debt obligations for being ‘nice’ is a convenience for his inability to address the concept of relational equity. In a sense he’s correct, men should never presume that anything they do, any personal sacrifice, any emotional investment they make for a woman will EVER be appreciated, much less reciprocated, because hypergamy doesn’t care about any of it.

If these ‘nice guys’ are guilty of anything, it’s in their ego-investment in the lie that any woman might have the capacity to appreciate his investments in them. That rage isn’t about the disappointment of not getting an expected lay, it’s the self-rage associated with the disillusionment of a belief in a relational equity that women (often times the same women they want to become intimate with) continue to convince them of. It’s a rage that comes from the loss of investment and being ridiculed for ever having invested by the same women who convinced them to invest.

So thank you Hugo, you’ve unwittingly made the manosphere, Game and red pill wisdom all the more attractive for ‘nice guys’ with your exposé. The obvious moral to this story is to drop the pretense of being a ‘nice guy’ and embrace a self-concerned Game perspective. In other words, unplug. Drop any expectations of a mutual respect, shared purpose or infantile visions of an idealistic love – because you have no ‘right’ to something women fundamentally lack the capacity to reciprocate. Your idealized relationship doesn’t exist in a feminine frame, it only exists in a positive masculine frame of your making. The only thing ‘nice guys’ have to lament is not embracing these truths before they posted their profile pic on OK Cupid.

Awareness and Intent

coma

 

My good friend DJ Damage had an interesting question regarding last week’s post and the time-tested classic LJBF rejection:

Hey Rollo would you say that women consciously know what they are doing to their male friends?! I mean lets take the AFC out of the equation for a moment and focus on the women. When a woman lays the LJBF’s line on her “male friend” doesn’t she realises that this AFC who is standing before her wanted to fuck her for the longest time?! Doesn’t she see anything wrong with the fact that in her eyes its not ok for a man to reject the LJBF’s line yet its ok to string a man along, pepper him with false hopes and some physical contact and then be surprised (or act surprised) he may want more??!!

Or is it just to accept the fact that women are women and you shouldn’t worry about their predictable behaviour but rather accept it and follow the rules of engagement.

I think it kind of depends on the individual, but to varying degrees I’d think no. As I stated in Playing Friends, the LJBF rejection has been so provably time-tested that it’s entered into a standardized feminine consciousness. In other words, it doesn’t need a formal teaching to understand how it’s useful. It’s simply demonstrated in so many different ways (media, personal interactions, etc.) that it becomes subconsciously learned. 12 y.o. girls don’t sit around at slumber parties discussing the best way to deliver a LJBF rejection to boys that like them. They learn the convention from TV, their big sisters, their mothers, etc. examples.

This is what makes it all the more jarring for a woman to have what’s always been a useful social tool explained to them. And of course the fail-safe for it is the risk of social ostracization on the guy’s part for outright rejecting her LJBF, making it far less likely an occurrence.

Now, that said, you’re really asking two questions. The second is, does the LJBF girl know the “friend” wants to bang her? I’d say most definitely. Not that any woman would admit it, because in doing so it puts the burden of her being straightforward with him on her. It’s plausible deniability. It’s far easier to deny, what by early adolescence girls know (boys want to fuck them) than to accept responsibility for leading him on. Bear in mind, attention is the coin of the realm in girl-world, but the guy also bears a good amount of responsibility for his own illusions.

When you think about it, it’s really a self-perpetuating cycle. Guy wants to qualify for girl’s intimacy, girl knows this, but isn’t attracted to the guy for the exact reason he is qualifying himself. Girl should be forthright with the “non-interest” guy, but still enjoys the attention and the affirmation that comes with it. Girl plays ‘friend’ and only becomes flirtatious when the attention flow breaks to reestablish it. Guy gets to make-or-break point, initiates intimacy and girl falls back on LJBF. Guy believes he still needs to qualify more and the cycle repeats.

Now, is any of that a conscious process? If a girl says ‘yes’, she’s a self-serving, grand manipulator, and this causes a cognitive self-image conflict. Due to a  fear of ostracization from attention she can’t exactly cop to a foreknowledge of the process. But that’s OK because there are many other feminine social conventions she can fall back on to avoid this. The feminine prerogative (she can change her mind) being the most useful, or The Feminine Mystique (women are unknowable) being a close second .

If the answer is no, and she’s not aware of the process, our social sense of personal responsibility takes over; she’s naive or at least immature. However, even in this event she’s also excused from culpability.

Regardless of whether a woman is aware of her own motives, it’s up to men to see her behavior as the only reliable indicator for them. As I’ve said before, there are no mixed messages, women will tell you exactly what their intent is. You just need the ability to read the behavior. As I’ve said before, the medium IS the message. The LJBF IS the message. Women with a high interest level don’t get to this point with a guy they want to fuck.

Awareness

I sometimes get critics telling me that what I reveal at Rational Male is very negative or disproportionately biased against women. I understand that perception, but it’s not my intent to do so. I’ve stated on several occasion that all I do is hold up a mirror, you’ve got to want look – and the main trouble with women (and men in some instances) is that after having been immersed for a lifetime in a fem-centric , feminine primary reality they don’t really like what’s being reflected back at them. It’s a very foreign experience for most women to see the root motivators of their own behavior, so the natural reflexive response is to demonize the one illustrating them, or really even making an attempt to understand and educate others about them. When the feminine Matrix is your most favorable and comfortable environment, it follows that attempts to unplug someone from it are met with considerable resistance.

From Moral to the Manosphere:

“,..when I wrote War Brides, it was in response to men’s common complaint of how deftly and relatively unemotionally women could transition into a new relationship after they’d been dumped by a GF or wife. I wanted to explore the reasons how and why this functioned, but from a moralistic perspective it is pretty fucked up that, due to hypergamy, women have an innate capacity to feel little compunction about divesting themselves emotionally from one man and move on to another much more fluidly than men. If I approach the topic in a fashion that starts with, “isn’t it very unjust and / or fucked up that women can move on more easily than men?” not only is my premise biased, but I’d be analyzing the moral implications of the dynamic and not the dynamic itself.”

When I explore the War Brides dynamic, the amoral aspects of Hypergamy or any of the more moralistically uncomfortable dimensions of Game, people want to apply their own perceptions of justice or moral sensitivity to what are sometimes very inhumane conditions. I realize that’s going to happen, in fact, in the interests of inter-gender civility it should happen – but what gets (sometimes intentionally) confused in coming to those conclusions is the demonizing of the revelations behind what motivates those dehumanizing realities. We want to hold people responsible for the motivators who have no idea what they are in the first place.

Hypergamy has served an evolutionary purpose for the human species; it doesn’t mean we have to like it, but it doesn’t mean we can ignore its influence, nor does it mean the person revealing it or attempting to better understand it is inherently an asshole for doing so. It also doesn’t excuse us from the consequences of being unaware of it.

As DJDamage asked in the beginning of this post, women for the greater part are unaware or casually oblivious to the motivators of their own behavior. Recently some notable ‘red pill women’ have been making what I believe are sincere effort to better understand those motivators as well as the feminine primary social environment that favors and reinforces them. While I’m not sure that they’ll want to throw their lot in with the manosphere wholesale, it’s at least a small step in the direction of better understanding.

Shouting in the Wilderness

Hat tip to reader BoxerRearZenith for bringing this to my attention:

Rollo, I’ve been a reading your blog since it’s inception. I love how eloquently everything is written and presented; therefore, I’d like your written opinion on this following Youtube video, if possible. It’s from ESPN First Take that was shown yesterday and Stephen A Smith was discussing Red Pill rhetoric (Being Anti-Oprah, lol) on a national platform. It was based off Chad Johnson and his wife Evelyn Lozada. And I had this similar discussion with friends who are also fans of this show and they couldn’t understand Stephen A’s point; even though, he illustrated and demonstrated his points so well. I tried to explain his position and why he went off but I got berated so I let it go. Is there anywhere to simplify his point of view to where my guy friends would somewhat understand? Btw, these are blue pill guys trying to figure why women are the way they are. Basically trying to find the red pill but not knowing to look for it if that makes any sense.

I’ve used the end summation of Stephen A Smith’s opinion here just for brevity’s sake, but if you have 15 minutes the entire clip is well worth watching, I’ll start by saying that it’s good to see even a marginally red-pill aware Man make a statement like this. We’re told all the time how football is really the last refuge for masculinity, but I’ve never agreed with this, and Smith’s bold and confrontational words here illustrate exactly how deep fem-centrism has saturated into even the most male of arenas. Smith is attempting to provide just a marginal consideration for a male perspective here and the reactions by Skip and his female co-host Cari Champion are an excellent example of how efficiently the feminine imperative shuts down that perspective. While Smith is obviously agitated and raises his voice, not once is he fumbling for words, nor does he slip and use expletives. He knows his perspective, has done his due diligence and is ready to express it.

And express it he does, but like most Men making public declarations attempting to bring awareness to fem-centrism, Skip and Cari, both obvious Fem-Matrix plug-ins, look at Smith as if he were speaking a foreign language. They can’t believe what’s coming out of his mouth. So saturated into our social fabric is feminine primacy that the thought of expressing a male-centric consideration, even as measured as Smith’s, is alien to those steeped in it.

Even Smith is guilty of this conditioning in his feeling it necessary to constantly footnote his perspective by repeating that he’s not endorsing violence against women. He has to do this because, like any other Man attempting to vocally expose fem-centrism, he’s learned that the first, reflexive response plugins will acuse him of is misogyny. So he must preface his words repeatedly or be dismissed as an evil patriarch. This constant qualification is necessary because the first resource of fem-centrism is to associate any perspective counter to the feminine imperative, no matter how remote, as an act of violence against women itself. Even women expressing a male perspective critical of fem-centrism are subjected to this association.

White Knights of the Feminine Imperative

For all of Smith’s intensity his message is entirely lost on an avowed white knight like Skip Bayless. Skip’s reaction is that of a well conditioned male in the feminine Matrix. As I wrote in Enter White Knight:

Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism.

If you watch the full clip, Skip’s calling Chad Johnson to the carpet about his domestic violence and impending divorce is exactly what I’ve come to expect from white knight Beta Game. Skip’s provocation of Chad isn’t about his desire to ‘get to the bottom of things’, but rather to establish himself as a champion of the feminine imperative – and by association make himself more attractive to women by being the tough male advocate for women everywhere. Guys like Skip look for opportunities to appear like upstanding responsible Alpha men by scolding true Alphas like Chad in as public a way as possible. Essentially they use the same shaming tools of the feminine imperative in an effort to better align and identify themselves with the women they subliminally hope to impress – and yes, even the married ones.

A beta game response is what I’d expect from this mentality, but I think what red pill viewers of this clip need to understand is the subconscious fluidity with which this reflex occurs. Chad was ready to lay Skip Bayless out on the studio floor, but this doesn’t even occur to Skip until after he’s embroiled in the confrontation. White knights seldom realize the real danger they put themselves in until that white knightery backfires on them; that’s how internalized the mentality is, it overrides a capacity to see danger cues.

Redirect

Cari Champion’s reaction is also a predictable, feminine-centric response. Where Skip will fall back on the convenient excuse of wanting to ‘get to the bottom of things’ Cari will do what most women will – presume that any man declaring a male-centric counterargument to the feminine ‘has issues’ with women. He’s “expressing a lot of anger” about women, even when the issue isn’t about women, but the societal circumstances of men. Then, as is the standard feminine reflex, Cari makes attempts to reframe Smith’s point to be individually specific to women. Smith makes a good effort of not allowing this reframe, but notice that in order for him to stay on point he must once again reiterate that ‘he’d never harm a woman’ just so he can get back to it.

Recently there’s been some great discussion over at Sunshine Mary’s blog regarding the validity of the feminine imperative as a concept in and of itself. Unfortunately it’s easier to show examples of the feminine imperative than it is to definitively describe it. I think Smith’s efforts here are an attempt to make plugged-in people understand just what the feminine Matrix is. But no one can tell you what the Matrix is when you’re in the Matrix. So when you see the lone man shouting truths in the wilderness, it isn’t what he’s saying that’s important, but who is listening.

To answer Boxer’s question, I’m not sure there is a way to simplify Smith’s message. Your friends aren’t going to understand it because they have no frame of reference to relate his message to. Everything is fem-centrism for plugins, and the feminine imperative already has long established social contingencies (like the one’s observed in this clip) to dissuade any real awareness of it. I have no doubt that Smith’s inbox was filled with the hatred of countless plugged in men and women arguing for him to seek therapy for his misogyny – which ironically was exactly the point he was trying to make. One of the most effective social conventions the feminine imperative ever established was disqualifying those critical of it from ever having credibility about it.

Unfortunately Boxer, your friends, like most men, will have to learn from harsh experience to ever be open to seeing the feminine imperative as Smith does.

Promise Keepers

I had a 25 year old guy relate to me recently how disappointed with himself he was. He’d gotten together with a new girlfriend, made that commitment of exclusive monogamy, and had all the noble intents most betas assume when they enter that form of pseudo-marriage. The problem was that he’d had a fuck buddy for some months prior to his ‘legitimately’ dating his now girlfriend and regrettably had to cut her out of his life. Predictably, the FB was upset as most become when presented with losing the investment of all those sexual encounters unencumbered with little or no emotional rewards. The guy was determined to honor his arrangement with the new GF, but the FB persisted and became more emotionally invested until they settled upon a ‘just friends’ solution to their prior involvement.

After a week the guy has doubts about the GF and since he and the FB are ‘still friends’ they get together to discuss said doubts. Needless to say this discussion then leads to comfortable, reliable, “sure thing” sex with the former fuck buddy and now we come to the regret and disappointment he feels about himself. One might think that this is a simple case of a 25 year old sorting out what works for him sexually and his struggle with monogamy in the light of having other actionable options, but his disappointment doesn’t originate in this.

“I feel like a piece of shit because i promised my self over 10 years ago I would never do this. I broke my only promise to my self that I always stuck with.”

I found it interesting that a then 15 year old boy would have the prescience to make some vow of fidelity to a future girlfriend (or wife) to himself. For obvious reasons he didn’t strike me as particularly religious – he didn’t have a ‘promise ring’ on either for that matter. So what was it?

“I can pick up girls and bed them no problem anymore, but when it comes to relationships, I’m lost completely. And yes I do feel like something is missing with my current GF.”

That explains part of it. Alpha while single, beta when monogamous is a very common theme for the feminized, preconditioned youth of today. And of course in light of having (and having had) other sexual options that Alpha-Single / Beta-Monogamous conflict about a girlfriend is to be expected, but that still didn’t explain the promise or the disappointment adequately.

“I felt like a piece of shit. Over 10 years ago when my Dad cheated on my mom, I PROMISED my self i will never be like my father and cheat. I never cheated ever, until tonight. I feel numb, confused, and dont know what to do.”

Slay the Father

One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on fanaticism, with outdoing the life-performance of their asshole fathers. Before I go on further, many of them had legitimately rotten, alcoholic dads, who were abusive to them and their mothers. Others had the perception of their fathers colored for them either by their ‘strong independent®’ single mothers, or by watching their fathers resolve their own beta tendencies in a post-divorce life. Whatever the case, each of these guys had a mission – to be a better man than their father was, protect their mothers, and by extension the future mother their girlfriends and wives would become for them. His father’s personal failings would be his personal triumphs.

The problem inherent in this modern day Oedipus scenario is that the feminine imperative is more than happy to use it to its universal social advantage. Feminization and its blue-pill conditioning of boys to be better “men” is defined by how well that “man” is acceptable to a feminine culture. Thus we get gender blurring, and boys are taught to pee sitting down by single mothers because “your asshole dad always made a mess and left the lid up.” Better ‘men’, uniquely feminine-acceptable men, pee like women.

The father-hating boy becomes the masculine-hating adult beta male. Feminine social conditioning is cruel to be sure, but nothing cements that conditioning in better than a living example of what a man is not to be and then committing your life to not becoming it. As I stated earlier, those considerations may be legitimate, but the end result is the same; a beta who thinks women will categorically appreciate his devotion to the feminine by his promise not to become like “other guys” – like his asshole dad.

This is in fact a very solid extension of Beta Game‘s presumption that women will view him as unique amongst other men for being so well adapted to identify with the feminine. And of course the majority of women who care more about dominant Alpha characteristics, who have no appreciation for his ‘promise to be a better man’ then become “low quality” common women to him.

This then is the root of the conflict the guy in my example is experiencing. He’s coming into a more mature understanding of what his father experienced with his mother and women, and it’s clashing with that adolescent declaration of devoting himself to what he thought, and what his conditioning at the time, was his imperative.

“If I’m a better man than dad I’ll be deserving of love the way I envision it, I’ll be appreciated and hypergamy will be inconsequential due to the equity I’ll invest in our relationship.”

Only at 25 he progressively finds that he is just as human, just as male, as his father was.

Beyond Oedipus

Unsurprisingly this is a very tough psychological schema to dig out of a beta who’s invested his ego in it for so long. Even when he experiences firsthand the trauma of realizing that women aren’t the way he’s always believed they would be and taking the red pill, this ‘promise to be better’ persists. Layer onto this the social reinforcement of the ridiculous / reprehensible male, and compound it with either his mother’s vulnerability or her consistently negative characterization of his asshole father, and you have a recipe for a permanent blue-pill existence.

That said, it’s not impossible to unplug ‘promise keepers’ with enough harsh, experiential reality to awaken them out of their adolescent paradigms. Making them aware is the toughest task, but introspect on their own part is the next step. It’s very important to recount the ways ‘bad dad’, and your reaction to him, has directed and influenced your interactions with women. It is a supremely uncomfortable epiphany for ‘promise keepers’ to realize that Mom is just as common as the women rejecting him, who are helping him realize his adolescent presumptions were wrong. Most ‘promise keepers’ are shaken awake by two sources: the consistently incongruous behavior-to-stated-motivations by women, or by his own internal struggle with keeping his promise in the face of what he can’t quite place is what’s in his best sexual interests.