Back in July of 2019 I was approached by a Dutch documentary team from VPRO (Dutch Public TV) who asked me if I would be open to doing an interview with them. I gave them a tentative yes, but I was really hesitant to trust ANY source that looked like the mainstream media. When they said they’d be at the 21 Convention I actually cancelled on them. I no longer want any association with their lack of integrity.
The director/producer, Nordin, kept on me though. He convinced me to do the interview because the “documentary would be incomplete” without me. I was still really sketchy about doing it because I know how these things go. It’s their game and they can easily make you look like a monster or an idiot if they want to. Nordin was really upfront with me, but so were a lot of other “journalists” I’ve dealt with.
I’m glad to say my concerns were unfounded. This documentary was the first real ‘fair assessment’ of the ‘sphere that I’ve ever seen. I’m in the ranks with the likes of Dr. Warren Farrelland Hannah Rosen in this and I think they did a good job of presenting the topics fairly.
You’ll have to get past the psychotic look of Elliott Hulse on the thumbnail though 😄
Half of this is in Dutch but it’s still very watchable if you don’t speak the language. All the English speakers are subtitled in Dutch so it’s pretty good as-is. As soon as an English subtitled version is up I’ll swap out the links.
Have a look at this and tell me what you thought. My segment comes in around the 30:30 mark, but well worth a watch of the whole thing to get some context. I will likely do a longer review post of this video in the coming weeks.
A consistent criticism I’ve received over the years is that the Red Pill is so negative. Why cant the Manosphere just sweeten up? Its truth is definable and self-evident, but why can’t Rollo adjust the ‘tone’? I’ve lived and written through several waves of newcomers to the ‘sphere and in each generation the same want for a ‘kinder, gentler’ Red Pill is always there. The idea is that if you just changed the delivery of the truth it would somehow make it more palatable to a wider audience.
Who’s It For?
I want reiterate here that it’s never been my goal to write for an audience. Whether it’s writing on this blog, my books or when I’m discussing things on various podcasts my only imperative is to convey the information I think is relevant to the topic of intersexual dynamics. My obligation is to picking apart and considering as close as I can get to an objective truth. And I don’t do this by way of some sense of duty to objectivism – it’s just the way that’s always seemed most efficient to me to come to a usable truth. It’s pragmatism on my part, not dedication.
Yes, I know, true objectivism is impossible for human beings. Yes, I also know that even biases we’re unaware of will subconsciously influence our rationality. Spare me the classicist intellectualism, I’ve been at this long enough to have considered all that. But the fact that objectivism is never perfect doesn’t mean we should strive for our best attempt at it – nor replace it with moralism.
I don’t write for an audience. I write about what I see going on around me and I connect dots. Writers today, of all medias, will tell you to “give your readers what they want” if you want to be successful. Writing about uncomfortable truths that rattle people’s cages is counterintuitive to the write-for-success mindset. If you want to sell books, if you want to monetize blogs, if you want to get more channel subscribers you gotta give the folks what they want, right? That’s how most churches work today; cater the message to the congregation if you want the tithe checks to stay consistent.
And always write to appeal to emotions too. People don’t enjoy thinking, but boy do they ever love feeling something – particularly in an age when female emotiveness is the order of the day.
When I began writing regularly it was in a forum environment. We hashed out many ideas and weren’t afraid to get ugly. It was a necessary part of the process. There was no pretense of appealing to an audience for money, traffic or readership. The sole focus was debating the truth about a dynamic. That debate was always a hot kitchen, but the results were something greater than the process.
As a result my essays carried over a lot of the heat from the SoSuave days kitchen. I wasn’t writing to impress readers or increase traffic to the blog it was just to document and codify the objective truths I came to. There is no monetization and the comment threads have never been moderated (besides spam and trolls). Almost 8 years later my charter is still about the same objective debate.
The drawback to this commitment to objective truth is that it rarely appeals to emotionalism. No, it’s not the ‘tone‘ or the feel of the information being related that’s so off-putting – it’s the information itself, and how it makes one feel, that determines whether it’s perceived as positive or negative.
Feels Before Reals
Most people who are still plugged into the proverbial Matrix are living in a world that prioritizes feels before reals. The purpose of consuming really anything is to judge it by how it makes us feel; and especially so in an era defined by the female experience. Emotion always comes before reason in women’s natural, unlearned, interpretive processes. This is also extended to men who’ve been conditioned to prioritize emotions before reason. And this is exacerbated by their need to be better feelers, better emoters, than those other ‘typical’ guys if they want an emotional woman to ever bear their children at some point.
Anything that prioritizes reason before emotion will always run the risk of being perceived as negative. Even if the sum of the information is positive, the fact that you had to come to the truth by way of reason rather than emotion will make it negative.
If you used your head instead of your heart to figure something out, in Girl-World, at best it’s bad form. At worst, you’re a negative pessimists or a cynic.
Usually those designations are reserved for the men who make a habit of using reason to the exception of emotion to relate an objective truth that’s unflattering to the feminine. Again, it’s the information, not the tone, that’s offensive to the emotions-first prioritization. To the Blue Pill mind, any strong idea that conflicts with this prioritization is an affront to the personal investments they’ve made in ideas that it challenges.
So, understand, I’m not a negative person by nature. I’m an artist. Few people know that my 2nd degree is a BFA. I draw, I paint, I play four instruments, I used to do Shakespearean stage acting – I’ve even done children’s theater.
I fully embrace the emotional as a necessary part of the human experience – Hell, half of Red Pill awareness is acknowledging and confronting emotions. I’m certainly not a cynic or a pessimist. Anyone thinking so usually hasn’t read my work. I’m very much an optimist when it comes to creating a New Hope for men in a Red Pill paradigm. I don’t just stop at clinical realism and leave men hanging. I don’t subscribe to the ennui of the “Black Pill” – I’m certainly not absolutist or a determinist.
However, I also have a commitment and an obligation to objective truth in everything I write. Trust me, there are times I wish I could use my wife and my marriage as a ‘proof of concept’ example of how a Red Pill aware guy can make a relationship work today. But the objective truth would make me look like a charlatan if I tried to convince a man that marriage was at all a good idea in its present state.
That’s tough for me. I have had to hold back from posting pictures of my beautiful wife and daughter to prove something to truly negative naysayers. Ladies, you want me to write something positive about women? I love my wife dearly. She’s been a net benefit to my life for all of 23 years now. My daughter is a model. She’s feminine to a fault and she’s smart and ambitious. I would die for her, gladly.
But I never use my personal life as an example in my work for their protection, but also because I don’t want to lead men astray by in anyway implying that what I have is possible for them. And I’ve had men tell me that, “I want what you have.”
But I don’t make value calls. I consider information, I try to interpret it, and I present it in such a way that it’s useful to men where they’re at. I want to give you tools to use to build your own life, not mine.
Truth & Hustle
Admire the Hustle. We read this a lot in the Manosphere among the guys who fancy themselves entrepreneurs. I think one reason critics think the Red Pill is negative is because all they see is the Hustle. The Hustle has a way of becoming the whole point of anything.
I’m an abortion doctor, but I make six figures and I’m the best at what I do. No one will out-work me. Admire the Hustle baby.
When the selling is more important the the product itself, then you have problems. When the truth is less important than the Hustle inevitably our truth becomes the Hustle. There needs to be a balance and that’s getting harder and harder to find now.
We’re at a moment in the Manosphere where the truth is starting to get lost in the Hustle. I’m accused of it, or I’m accused of associating with ‘too much Hustle’. Well-meaning colleagues with too much perception and not enough information are feeling that salesmen care more about the sale than the product.
I hear you.
Let me finish here by reiterating that my obligation to objective truth will always be my motivation for doing anything I put my name on. It always has been. However, I have worked for amazing companies who sold things that people loved and enjoyed only to watch them crumble and die because the sales team assumed control of the ‘product’. The selling became more important than what was being sold.
My books, my blog, my appearances, every aspect of The Rational Male is my art. I craft each essay. It’s what I care about most. I will never allow the truth to be compromised by the Hustle. The Hustle is important, particularly when it’s about disseminating the truth, but it is secondary to the truth – even to the exception of the Hustle. Sometimes the truth doesn’t sell.
This Is Important
We are rapidly entering a time when our ideas will be vilified. Very soon the objective, life-saving, praxeology that is the Red Pill will be used as a label, as a synonym, for negative ideologies that never had anything to do with the Red Pill. And people who are all about the Hustle will gladly abandon the truth they’re selling now if it means the public opinion of it would compromise their Hustle. It’ll be less about what we’re discussing than how influential and how many followers the person we’re discussing it with has.
Others, those who were appropriating the ‘brand’, will throw the Red Pill under the bus to save their own necks. The coming storm is going to test the resolve of people who are all about the Hustle and all about the Red Pill. I know where my obligations lie, they’ve never changed.
Once again it’s time to announce the dates and locations of this year’s 21 Conventions. By now I’m sure most of my readers know I’ve been getting myself ‘out there‘ a lot more and this year is no exception. The one event I’m doing with any regularity is the 21 Conventions (yes, there are others in the offing). I think I’ve been somewhat instrumental in helping Anthony Johnson reform these events into the Red Pill Summits they’ve become. There’s really nothing that comes close to the scale and comprehensiveness of these gatherings and I only expect them to grow into something the mainstream will soon be unable to ignore. The 21 Conventions have gone from what I can only refer to as Purple Pill to being the only real Red Pill event in existence.
For the last couple of years I’ve been a silent partner in these events. Many of the speakers are men I’ve had some personal connection with over the years. Most of them my readers will be familiar with from my mornings on The Red Man Group, but it’s been my mission to see that the roster of men speaking at these events are on message with respect to intersexual dynamics. While the upcoming Patriarch’s Edition is focused more on family, fathers and leadership, the two other conventions slated this year have something for every man – even the guy who’s newly unplugged.
Unlike certain Men’s Rights conferences (primarily organized by women), the 21 Convention is for men, by men.
The conventions are about men, not just “men’s issues” or a lot of top-down awareness raising. They are also not fluffy, “feel good” pep rallies with more hype than information. You get real content, not a lot of hype.
My involvement in this convention has had only one goal; to give men the nuts & bolts, actionable information they need to conceive and develop the lives they want to lead. Lives that align with the truths that Red Pill awareness represents. If you’re looking to get laid, we’ve got that covered. If you’re trying to resolve a sexless marriage, we’ve got you covered. If you’re looking to become the best version of yourself, you want to be a Red Pill father, you want to fight feminism? This convention is the only event that delivers ‘real content’ based on the difficult truths men need to acknowledge in their lives.
I get it. That seems like a hard sell. But there needs to be some kind of gathering of minds in this sphere. I will continue to put my name on this event until it ceases to be about the charter or shifts to a different message. My constant concern is ensuring that this convention stays committed to objectivism. Critics want to claim that the Red Pill is only a cult. It’s only interested in “ideological purity”. This is a false narrative. The Red Pill is obligated to objective truth. It only seems ‘culty’ when that truth clashes with the ego-invested beliefs of ideologues.
The 21 Conventions serve as a TED Talk for the Manosphere. At no other venue will you hear these topics and pro-masculine information discussed. We live in an era where free speech is limited by platform and the ideological bent of its owners. It’s long past time we developed a forum where Red Pill awareness can be discussed free from censorship – this is it. The only way to test the strengths of an idea is in the crucible of open debate. And that debate requires an open marketplace of ideas in which to test them.
OI’m pleased to announce my first European talk will be delivered this year in Warsaw, Poland. I can’t stress enough how this venue is the ideal location for a Red Pill discourse. Given the sociopolitical state of most of Europe today, it’s probably the only country that would welcome honest perspectives on gender, intersexual dynamics, conventional masculinity and men’s personal development.
Although I’ve been to several European countries, Poland will be a first for me. This will be a personal pleasure for me also as I also have a Polish translation of The Rational Malethat I’m very proud of. I’ve been working with my Polish team for 2 years now and it will be an honor to finally meet up with these guys.
If you live in Europe and haven’t had the opportunity to come to the U.S. conventions this will be your event. At the time of this posting the registration is already moving rapidly, so please don’t hesitate to register now. Please use my affiliate link in the banner above to register. This is how I get credited for the attendees.
At the time of this posting the speaker’s list for Poland is:
Rollo Tomassi
Anthony Johnson
Andrew ‘Cobra’ Tate
Jack Donovan
Richard Grannon
Nick Krauser
George Bruno
Socrates
Ivan Throne
Jack Murphy
Alexander AJ Cortes
Kyle Trouble
Steve Williams
Johnathan (MLD)
Thats the confirmed list and it’s likely to expand before the event
This is the main U.S. event. In 2018 the convention sold out and attendance more than doubled from 2017. 2019 will see this event is even larger. Anthony has also added independent workshops by individual speakers on a variety of relevant topics for attendees to the main conference talks. Check the 21 Convention site for more info on these workshops, but these side talks are part of the registration and an added value for attendees.
And these workshops are in addition to the offsite, after hours meet ups, dinners and extra-curricular events that will be going on over the extended four-day convention. No matter which convention you attend I make it my job to engage with every man I meet at the conferences. You will have personal time to discuss the matters that concern you most. This is my favorite part of doing these events.
Again I need to stress that the registration goes quickly for these events. The way it works is that the price progressively escalates to regular attendance prices the long you wait as the event date nears. I used to think this was a clever pricing scheme to get men to commit to attend, but now that the convention has become the ‘Woodstock of the Manosphere‘ it’s even more important that you get on these registrations as soon as possible before they sell out.
Please use the link in the Orlando banner above to get to my affiliate account. Again, this is how I get credit for my attendees.
Orlando is the main event and the list of speakers for the four-day event is truly awesome:
Rollo Tomassi
Anthony Johnson
Elliott Hulse
Hotep Jesus (Bryan Sharpe)
Jack Donovan
Ed Latimore
Dr. Robert Glover
Dr. Shawn Smith PsyD
Hunter Drew
Tanner Guzy
Donovan Sharpe
Goldmund Unleashed
Rian Stone
George Bruno
Socrates
Texas Dom
Ivan Throne
Jack Murphy
Alexander AJ Cortes
Steve Williams
And that’s the list of speakers we have confirmed at this time. As you can see, there is no other Manosphere gathering that compares to this event. It’s not just the TED Talk for the ‘sphere, it’s the friends you’ll make and the men you’ll connect both inside and outside the conference. The 21 Convention is much more than the men speaking or the workshops about the issues and topics that are important to you, it’s about the experience of sharing ideas with other men that no other venue allows for.
Finally, there will be discount codes for both events:
All men 25 or younger – U25
Military (active & retired) – MILITARY
Law enforcement and firefighters (active & retired) – LEO
These codes will get you 25% off the registration, including the VIP upgrades. These codes do not stack.
My goal for these conventions is enabling men to get access in any way possible. Some critics claim the price is too restrictive or it’s overpriced for what they believe is men “selling their snake oil to unsuspecting dupes”. This is also my concern. I want you to have access, but obviously the conferences can’t be ‘free admission’. A lot goes into bring together a convention of this magnitude. But “Why go at all when all the information is free on your blog Rollo?” Why indeed? If the cost is too prohibitive for you then you can always read my material here for free. I encourage you to do so in fact. I consider the Red Pill to be open source, so please, don’t put yourself into financial difficulties if attending would do so.
But also know that if the 25% discounts above aren’t enough for you, I will find a way for you to attend using one of my limited discounts, getting you on the volunteer staff, or some other way. That’s how important I think these events are for men. So if you’re struggling financially, but you really want to attend, hit me up in my email or Twitter or the comments on my About page here and I’ll make a way to make it happen.
And if you think it’s “all just salesmen hawking snake oil”, I will also find a way to get you a discounted registration on my dime so you can attend and see for yourself what these events are really all about.
I joke with Anthony that my ‘workshops’ start the moment I enter the hotel lobby. I’m guaranteed to lose my voice before the the end of the 3rd day, but it’s worth it to me to give you the most of what you’re paying for. That’s my commitment to you. I know that most men only have finite resource, and only get so many weeks a year for vacation. That is the foremost thing on my mind when I’m speaking at these conventions. I want you to get the most of your investment in a weekend that’s guaranteed to change your outlook on life. And I’m confident all my fellow speakers feel the same.
On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.
I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.
But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.
One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.
Good morning gentlemen.
There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.
First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.
If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.
As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.
When I met Anthony I was skeptical.
That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.
This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend.
All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.
I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order.
I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.
As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe.
I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.
So, here I am.
What is the Manosphere?
For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.
For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous.
To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications.
Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.
The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere – all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.
Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women.
Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.
It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement.
Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined).
Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel.
Or maybe they find my blog and books.
Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.
Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives.
And this is what I’m talking about.
Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more.
It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.
Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.
The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.
As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.
As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.
In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order.
We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.
Now things have changed.
The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.
Gender Warfare
Do you understand what I’m saying?
This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today.
Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).
You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media.
There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.
“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved”
These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.
Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.
Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.
This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.
But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.
I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.
As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.
You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.
My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps.
To get “me too’d” is now a verb.
Segregation
The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men.
So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.
These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.
The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.
Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.
How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?
I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.
They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.
If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.
And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.
I’m writing this post on the day before I head off to this year’s 21 Convention and I thought I’d just do something a bit freeform to get a few ideas on the page and let you all know where my head is at these days. I generally don’t make a habit of using The Rational Male as a sounding board for my personal thoughts. Most of what you read here is what I can best describe as crafted essays. Last week’s post was a good example of that. I took about 2 weeks to to write that essay, but the the germ of the idea for building an essay on body language and implied meanings was something I’d had percolating for almost 6 months. When you write about what I do for as long as I have I’ve learned it pays to be thorough, and I enjoy the building process.
Now that I’ve said all that, I’m going to break this rule today and do a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing here now.
One thing I’ve learned since I decided to write intentionally is that I’m never off-duty. I’ve always been an artist and I’ve always kept sketchbooks with me to scribble down ideas for larger work, but it wasn’t until I started really writing that I began to keep notebooks for my posts and then my books; and now my talks. I presently have 4 small notebooks that I put ideas in. I just finished filling one up and now I need another one. I was never that Emo writer kid who was so artsy and self-absorbed he had to write a diary because he thought people must find him fascinating. In fact, I’ve always thought of art as something temporal.
Now this is changed for me. I find it an absolute necessity to keep notebooks with me to capture ideas in. I think my brain has changed somewhat since I began being a ‘serious’ author. My mind now works in a way where I get ideas that don’t stay for long, but the internal conversations I have to flesh out those ideas can get pretty involved. I’ve freaked my wife out on more than one occasion when I got up to take a piss in the middle of the night, had an idea and then had to go write it down knowing that it would fade from memory by the morning. I think I’m kind of torn between being a creative thinker and a deductive thinker as a result of applying myself to writing .
I guess that makes me a writer, but I still don’t know what I am in that respect. I do know I have an obsessive compulsion to write, but not so much to write as an author of books but a capturer of ideas. Occasionally I read about authors’ writing processes and rituals and it sounds really artsy. Honestly, I think a result of the self-publishing revolution is that it created a lot of writers who just wanted to be writers. Like they just revel in the identity and love to say ‘I’m special, I’m a writer‘. The same thing happened in desktop publishing when computers started replacing all the analog ways of graphic design. Everyone you knew was a ‘graphic designer’ because anyone could do it then.
I think it was Stephen King who said writing for him was like excrement. Not in the way that his writing was shit, but rather it was something that just came out of him, something he excreted like hair or fingernails. I think I understand that now. I never set out to be a writer, I’m an ideas man. Sometimes those ideas are great and help change men’s lives. Then sometimes I think maybe I’m a messenger for something that just needs to be conveyed in this day and this time.
The Rational Male, my first book, just turned 5 years old on October 1st. Granted, it still needs to be cleaned up and I’m in the process of a reedit with the help of two editors now. Nothing will change as far as content is concerned, but lets be honest, the font size needs to be kicked up a couple points and there are a fair amount of grammatical errors that need to be corrected. So, I’m reading back through the whole book these days and in doing so I almost can’t believe that the voice is my own. Although the book was published in 2013 all the material is from essays I wrote as far back as 2002, and a lot of that was from conversations and debates I’d had on SoSuave from back in the day. Re-reading it is like having a conversation with myself from when I was 34 years old.
The book is important in so many ways to so many people now. That’s something I have to keep in mind today. The Rational Male is a living text. It’s not a book you you read once and put on a shelf. Readers keep returning to it when the need to be reminded of a relevant truth that they’re experiencing in life.
A year ago, when I was at the 21 Convention the thing that struck me the most was signing men’s copy’s and seeing how well-worn they were. Every one had liner notes and highlighted in at least 2 different highlighter colors. It was then I realized this book was something more than a self-published book turned out from the print-on-demand mill.
I’m sure I’ll see the same this year and it makes me happy to have been the instrument to bring these truths to men. I still get chills when men tell me it saved their lives or it fundamentally changed them for the better. I re-read my work and think ‘who is this guy?’ I wonder how my grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren, will see what I was about. And this is what concerns me most when I consider the ease with which I could be erased from the online world.
I would be lying to say that recent social events haven’t flustered me. The fact that Roosh’s books could be so casually deleted from all of his distribution sources is unsettling. He wrote about this, prophetically, about five years ago in The Most Insidious Method of Control Never Devised. Roosh has had his bread taken from him. And yes, I understand, his right to ‘free speech’ hasn’t been impinged, he still has the right to say what he thinks, but this is a reminder that for all the high-minded talk about being ‘anti-fragile’ we’re all more fragile than we think.
I don’t know what Roosh’s revenue situation looks like, I know he’s put Return of Kings on indefinite hiatus, but I wonder what men who’ve made the manosphere their sole source of income will do when their ability to generate revenue from it dries up. This is the main reason I advise men against becoming revenue-dependent on the manosphere. It’s too easy to have their convictions compromised for the sake of profit, but it’s also one keystroke away from being deleted by platforms they depend on for that revenue.
My main fear is that the vital work I’ve done with The Rational Male might be casually undone through the ignorant vindictiveness of a feminist critic somehow made an authority over what men should and should not read in digital publishing. My fear is that the men’s lives who might be saved by my book would be prevented access to it. I made a joke on Twitter a few years ago; I said, ‘there will come a day when The Rational Male will have to be read in secret, by candle light among secret societies of men like Christians in Mao’s China had to do. I don’t laugh at that prophecy anymore.
I’ve always encouraged men to buy the physical, print copy of the book. Mainly this is because I’ve always hoped men would in fact discuss it among themselves. It was meant to be a conversation (debate) starter because I’ve always believed in the bottom up approach to making people think in new ways. I want men to physically pass the book on to the next guy they think will need it. I make the least amount on royalties from the print book, but it’s what I think is most important – but also because it is a permanency that digital books cannot insure.
The Red Pill community has grown exponentially since I began writing almost 20 years ago. While I don’t believe we’ve hit critical mass just yet I do think we’re becoming too big to ignore now. The Red Pill forum on Reddit was ‘quarantined’ last week, and unsurprisingly the latent message sent in that act was one that aligned with a pseudo-concern over what an appropriate expression of masculinity is. Ironically, the redirect from the quarantine was linked to the ‘masculinity studies’ department of Stony Brook University – every bit the Vichy male plantation for men to align with the definition of masculinity approved for them by the Feminine Imperative – and led by, the now condemned for sexual assault allegations, Michael Kimmel.
What the Red Pill reveals is dangerous and threatening to a gynocentric world order. As the #MeToo movement evolves into the opportunistic weapon of social and political control, our online presence and our message stand out in sharp challenge to its false foundations. I can remember when I wrote Fem-Centrism and The Feminine Reality and the hostility those posts generated among critics. It’s always been a man’s world they said; how dare I suggest women were the true power behind the throne. That was 7 years ago. I had a new WordPress blog and although I was semi-well known on SoSuave I was just another blogger who wrote about this new thing called the ‘Red Pill’.
The Gestalt Feminine vs. The Gestalt Masculine
In 2018 the stakes are much higher, the game has changed and the tolerance for challenges to an ideology intrinsic to our feminine-primary social order is at its breaking point. There is now a presumption of authority to go along with the presumptions of entitlement for women and default guilt for men. The very platforms that made our coming together possible are ruled by the world views we’ve always warned against.
I once wrote a post called Appeals to Reason and in it I made a rational case as to why it is never in a good idea for a man to try to reason his way into intimacy or sex with women. Most Beta men subscribe to a very literalist mindset. Our Rational Interpretive process evolved to make men natural, deductive, problem solvers. As such, we evolved different strategies and different communication methods apart from those of women. We believe in the statistics, the empirical data, the proven methods, the ‘science’ behind the processes to make informed decisions. We prioritize information when we communicate.
To the contrary, women prioritize the context of communication – they feel the communication before they apply a rational interpretation to what’s been communicated. Even when confronted with a succinctly reason position founded on empirical facts, their first priority is to personalize how that data makes them feel. Their Emotional Interpretive Process is their evolved default.
What I see happening today on a larger meta-social scale is a collective gestalt of the masculine trying to assert their deductive reasoning to assess the disposition of the meta-female gestalt which is firmly founded in how issues of monumental social importance make the whole of the feminine feel.
In Appeals to Reason I used a guy’s petition of women as an example of this. The kid had created a list of questions for women to fill out as to why they didn’t want to go out with him on a date and to assess what it is that women want. This is classic male deductive reasoning. For millennia men have tried to apply reason to dealing with women only to find themselves confounded by what women say and what they do. The same is now true in a social scope and about decisions that have global importance today.
However, in today’s scenario it is women who presume an authority that is just on the cusp of totalitarianism. It’s like we’re collectively, as Beta, Blue Pill conditioned men, attempting to logically deduce what it is women want in order to satisfy their desire for a total authority. And when that woman doesn’t get what she wants, when men try to reason her into bed, she reacts like a violent child having a tantrum. She says what she feels, not what she needs.
And the gestalt of men turn on one another and blame the other for setting her off. “If only you assholes would give her what she wants we wouldn’t be in this mess” they say. Then to make matters worse we pander to her tantrums, we believe her insanity, we take her feelings as facts and the other half of the gestalt masculinity wonders why the other can’t see the real story while the other is swept up in female hysterics.
Then the gestalt female is pandered to so thoroughly that we come to the point that we follow their Emotional Interpretive process as the only measure of legitimate discussion. This is where we are today, only, to compound things, we’ve collectively approved for the gestalt feminine a universally effective means of destroying the parts of the gestalt masculine who would dare to challenge their feelings, their emotional priorities. We’ve given the feminine the power to wish us away to the cornfield if we upset the child.
And so here we are, at the figurative mercy of the gestalt feminine (and their Vichy male “allies”) keeping our collective heads down for fear that they’ll deny us our bread if we upset the insane, collective female Id.
There will be more to this essay in my address at the 21 Convention this Friday. I will also be doing various videos from Orlando on my Periscope, Twitter and possibly my new YouTube channel. I hope to see you there.
As of this writing my second talk at last year’s 21 Convention is now available for free public viewing on 21 University. I worked this ‘talk’ a bit differently as you’ll see. I find that I can address what most of my readers are concerned with most in and open discussion rather than my delivering a sermon from the stage. I think I’m more comfortable with this as I’ve been aggregating information with other men in a forum style discourse for so long. My time at SoSuave really taught me the value of that back and forth exchange of information, and it’s really what led to so much of the material I’ve covered on the blog for almost 7 years now.
For the sake of clarity, this talk was the second I did and took place a day after my first, Hypergamy, Micro to Macro. I had originally intended to cover aspects of my third book, Positive Masculinity, since it had been released about 2 months prior. I had an extensive lecture all ready to go, but I decided to switch up my talk that morning. The day and night before I had gotten into at least 8 different “sub-conferences” with spontaneous groups of about a dozen guys that went on for any where between 20 minutes to an hour. It occurred to me then that the best way to address my topic would be to have an open discussion about masculinity with the guys I was talking to just a few ours before.
As much as I liked the first talk – and I still feel understanding Hypergamy in its entirety is a keystone element in understanding intersexual dynamics – I think this talk was much more personal. I’ve always felt that the Red Pill should remain ‘open source’ and be an aggregate of the experience of men from all over the world. To this end I’ll always feel that a roundtable discussion style is the best way to encourage men not just to put in their two cents, but also as the best way for men to learn. I am first a writer and then a speaker, but my speaking will always be better when a man is expressing his concerns, problems, critiques and experiences within a group of men focused on untangling Red Pill awareness. I’m always humbled when an interviewer calls me one of the Godfathers of the Red Pill, but the truth is there is no father of the Red Pill. For as much as some writers would like us to believe they fathered the manosphere, Red Pill awareness is the result of a consortium of men who came together, offered their input to the whole and made it something greater than it was before.
I got to watch both my talks before the post-production and release, and while I was reviewing them it occurred to me how fortunate this generation is to have access to such information today. I’m from a generation that didn’t have the internet when I was in my early 20s. There were no Game Gurus and the only “how to pick up girls” books we’re only available from mail order ads you found in the back of a Penthouse or Hustler magazine. I did read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell in 1993, but other than that book there was nothing about the nature of women that would ever be published by the major publishing houses then.
After I reviewed my video here I watched a TED talk given by Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, and in it he recounted all of the dead end jobs and life experience he’d accrued up to around 1996 when a friend of his fronted him $30,000 to keep him going while he wrote the book. He’d always wanted to be a writer, but until the mid 2000s publishing was locked by a monopoly of a handful of ‘traditional’ publishing houses. Even the 48 Laws of Power had to get past their review processes. Now I think Robert Greene is one of the greatest minds of our time in his articulating power dynamics, I attempted to model my own writer’s voice on his example, but there was a time when anything resembling Red Pill awareness or truths that would be less than flattering to the status quo would never have seen the light of day. Print on demand and digital publishing (eBooks) wasn’t even a dream at that time, but today we take them for granted.
I never had a childhood dream of being an author, writing is just something I’ve always done as one more outlet for my creativity. I never thought I’d be a published author of one book, much less three. Nor did I imagine I’d have audio versions of them (book 3 is coming soon Sam promises). But now is the time. With digital publishing anyone can be an author so long as their ‘content’ is good.
We are living in an era in which certain things we take for granted are the only time in history that they could occur. That might sound self-evident, but think about it; our technology today is such that certain ideas that could never have been brought into popular consciousness could only be considered because of that technology. We have an advantage of now. It’s kind of humbling in a way – having witnessed the transition from a time when all of the dynamics we invested so much of ourselves in then are now made common, cheapened in some cases, and the legitimacy of having earned them is lessened as a result.
In my rock star 20s it took 4-5 months of all of the guys in my band to scrape together enough money to pay for a 3 song demo tape (no CDs for us then) in a recording studio, and that was with us having friends in the industry. Today I can do everything that very expensive studio could on my iMac. I have tools now to create the dreams I’ve had since I was in high school, but the challenge is no long the access, but the ideas themselves. We live in an age when access to the tools and means of creation has never been greater, but the ideas, the imagination, the abstract unrefined concepts is what I think is lacking today. We can produce masterpieces of music in our homes, but today music is only getting worse.
I’ve seen videos of brilliant instrumentalist virtuosos on YouTube. Kids not older than ten playing complex pieces of music they learned and absorbed themselves online, yet few could actually create an original song with any expressiveness themselves.
We also live in an age where access to information has never been more ubiquitous. We have access to the knowledge of all human history in a device that we can put in our pocket, yet we’re still too lazy to actually use the search feature or cite an easily had source. We have a connectivity today that spans the globe, yet we readily factionalize and atomize our social networks according to ideological biases.
A lot of this disconnect from real genius, from true creativity, I want to chalk up to the constant distractions we’re bombarded with daily. It’s really the price we pay for having unlimited access to information and the tools of creation. Paraphrasing the late Chris Cornell, there are no more writers like Shakespeare because all he had was a table, a candle, a pen and some paper. Today, learning to avoid distractions and focus on a single task is an art itself, but there’s another reason for this lack of honest genius and that is we’re gradually seeing a new generation of men and women who are themselves the product of a social order that has never known a time or condition where this access didn’t exist.
I think it was Dave Grohl who said something like kids today think rock stars are generated from talent shows on TV. Even with all the easy access to creative expression there’s still this idea that the process is somehow out of their control.
So why am I freestyling this post just to introduce my next talk video? Because I want my readers to get some insight about the radical nature of the information that the Red Pill presents today. I’ve written essays about how the 1990s really represented the pinnacle of the Feminine Imperative’s social influence. This was due to the limitations of information inherent in that time. In those essays I wanted to stress just how influential the Imperative was on western culture, but more importantly just how ignorant we were of ever perceiving it then. Today, the jig is up.
The internet has exposed the influences of feminism and it’s opened up a dialog – one that the controllers of the means of it would like to censor – in which it can no longer hide its true intent. The nature of women, the mechanics of intersexual dynamics, the good, the bad and the ugly of everything the Red Pill makes us aware of is increasingly expanding. It’s expanding so much that I fear we’re reaching a point where the means to explore new ideas in the ‘sphere are being limited by the means itself.
When you watch this video, any Red Pill aware video, when you read the latest essay here or anywhere else, keep in the back of your mind that knowing this information is only possible in this time. I wrote Preventive Medicine in response to men telling me how they’d wished they’d had this information back when they were younger and didn’t know better so they could make better, informed decisions. The truth is that the information I’ve been spreading since 2002 could only be realized in this age. Some will say, “yeah, but ancient scholars (and deified psychologists) knew this stuff a long time ago”, to which I’ll say ‘no, they didn’t’. Not to the extent we do today. Not with the degree of accuracy we know now. Only now is this possible, and only later will we have an even greater understanding of the Red Pill – for better or worse.
You are fortunate to be here in the now. Some of what you’re made aware of will frustrate and anger you, some of it will depress you and some of it will bring you to that “Ah Ha!” moment. The Red Pill can enlighten you or stifle you, but you are better off knowing it now in an age where this is finally possible.
If you’re a regular reader here you probably know that I’ll be giving two talks in Orlando, Florida this week at the 21 Convention with my fellow Red Pill alumni Christian McQueen, Goldmund, Tanner Guzy and so many more guys from the manosphere. I do have plans to do some quick hit Periscope feeds to and at the event so check my Twitter for updates.
Furthermore, in the interests of fairness and objectivity, I will be doing a no-punches-pulled review of the convention is a similar fashion to the one I did for the Man in Demand Conference I did in Vegas two years ago. As I’ve related in a few prior posts and some live interviews, I was reluctant to accept a speaking spot for the 21 Convention because I felt that it had a reputation for toeing the Purple Pill line for much of its years of existence. I’m happy to say that, with a few exceptions’ the lineup this year is far more ‘red’ than this conference has ever been.
There’s a lot more to the reasons why Anthony Johnson, the convention founder and organizer, has made this shift. Primarily it’s been his experience with what any guy with a peripheral Red Pill Lens would’ve seen as a high-functioning BPD woman who was his unofficial wife. If you want more information on this experience you can see his seminar talk about exactly this here.
As a result of this, and consequently digging into my books and blog material, his true unplugging has given him a new Red Pill awareness. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve had a fairly regular correspondence with Anthony about his unplugging and have counseled him through some of my own material. This really prompted a new perspective for him and this is manifesting itself in his drawing more Red Pill speakers to this convention than I think have ever been assembled in one place.
That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t pass this whole conference through the same level of scrutiny that I gave the Man in Demand conference. So, I’ll be doing some quick hit updates throughout this and next week’s blog posts and highlight the best and not-so-best parts of the convention as things transpire, and then summing things up at the end of it all. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for updates, high-lights and some Periscope videos too. The hashtag for the convention is #21Con.
In the meantime,…
I took some time away from my talk preparations to do an interview with Craig James from Masculine By Design to discuss the main aspects of my third book Positive Masculinity as well as some general Red Pill discussion. Craig is starting to make a name for himself as a manosphere podcaster now, filling the unfortunate vacuum left by the departure of Mark Baxter from his own show. Craig primarily focuses on married Red Pill issues and parenting. I probably don’t align perfectly with his perspective on a few things, but on whole he’s got a solid Red Pill blog and podcast that I think will only gain more traction in the manosphere and particularly among more mature men and the “awakened-while-married” set of Red Pill readers.
Do check it out. We went for a bit over two hours and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the discourse. Much of what we discuss will be key aspects of my second 21 Convention talk on Positive Masculinity.
But wait, there’s more,…
And finally, I also did about a two and a half hour interview with the Hanging Chads podcast. This was a great interview as well and much more casual and fun than most of the interviews I’ve done. Be warned, they have a political bent to their material, but the material we covered was Red Pill from an intersexual dynamics perspective (as you might expect from me). The audio wont drop until Thursday, but check back here or there when it does. I’ll update this post when it goes live.
So, there you have it. If I’m meeting you for the first or second time at the convention, please, come up and introduce yourself. There’s a lot going on at this event outside the talks themselves so there’ll be plenty of time and opportunity to pick my brain while we’re there. And yes, I’ll see about getting some candid video of the dinners and social meet ups too. Watch this space.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be making my first and only personal appearance this year at the 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. This event will be unique in a number of ways. To my knowledge, this convention will be the first large-scale gathering of Red Pill writers, bloggers, podcast hosts and thought-leaders ever organized. I’m truly appreciative of Anthony Johnson in being open to my suggestions for speakers. It was a collaborative effort in this regard and over the course of this year we did our best to collect a group of speakers who would represent many different aspects of Red Pill intersexual dynamics. My only regrets are that we couldn’t fit more speakers in to the schedule and some men I highly respect were unable to attend this year.
It was my hope that this ‘new and improved’ 21 Convention might eventually be an annual Red Pill summit of sorts. This build up hasn’t been without a bit of controversy from the previous Purple Pill speakers who used the 21 Convention’s prior events as a platform for their blogs and coaching businesses. That was to be expected just as the same tired criticisms of the Red Pill were too. I have no doubt that the previous ‘life coaches’ taking issue with this event’s Red Pill turn sincerely believe they have some valuable insights to help men become ‘better men’. The problem, however, becomes one of how these coaches would direct men according to the Blue Pill preconditioning they have never been able to disabuse themselves of.
I understand the necessity these guys must feel with regards to discrediting the Red Pill as a praxeology. The dots we connect in Red Pill awareness are often at odds with their deeply held Blue Pill ego-investments and hopes, as well as a threat to their (often LARPy moralistic) “Man Up but not too much” profit model. In fact, even just the idea that the Red Pill should be a praxeology of men’s collective experiences about intersexual dynamics is enough to make them want to disqualify it. Their criticism is that, as a praxeology, the Red Pill is long on explanations and short on solutions – solutions you can presumably get by signing up for their email blasts and coaching sessions.
The praxeology that is the Red Pill is inconvenient for them because it tears away the veneer of their Blue Pill idealism about women and reveals some very unflattering truths about them and the feminine on-whole which they still largely have on a pedestal in their heads. Red Pill awareness has a way of exposing the pretty lies that make for the good marketing material that most Purple Pill coaches depend on for their livelihoods. I mean, when 80%+ of men are Beta, who wouldn’t want to buy the secret 12 point list of things a man must do to be a real man and get the woman of his dreams?
Two Complaints
There are generally two common complaints I read coming from Purple Pill life dating coaches. The first is easy, and one I’ve refuted so many times I wont bore you with repeating myself, and that’s the presumption that Red Pill awareness must be false or detrimental to a guy because it makes guys so angry with women. This is the easiest dismissal for critics because it is true; men do go through a phase of anger when they unplug from the Blue Pill illusions they’ve been so convinced of for the better part of a lifetime. And yes, some get stuck in this phase and some do become despondent because they don’t want to face the abyss it represents to them. Some go MGTOW, some turn into Purple Pill coaches themselves because they don’t want to accept the whole of what Red Pill awareness means. But most men go through this phase and come to an acceptance that there is hope in a Red Pill paradigm for them. They come to see their new awareness as a safety net and boldly embrace rebuilding themselves into better men based on this full awareness.
So the sales pitch then becomes, “Don’t be angry with women like those Red Pill guys. You can still live in Blue Pill happiness and harmony with a loving unicorn ‘Quality‘ woman by following these 5 simple steps to make yourself into the man women want you to be.”
What the Purple Pill anger critics (deliberately) refuse to get is that the Red Pill isn’t (and was never) intended to get men to hate women, but rather to inform men about the inherent nature of women so they wont hate women for what they can never be to them. This is the disillusionment that men who still cling to Blue Pill idealism can’t seem to get past – they cannot abandon those Blue Pill hopes that they believe women are capable of fulfilling for him, but the Red Pill disabuses him of. So they get angry. They get angry at themselves for ever having believed in them. They get angry for having wasted so much time investing themselves in them. They get angry, most importantly, because they realize that women simply aren’t built to fulfill the hopes his Blue Pill conditioning made him believe should be possible.
The Purple Pill coach believes that this Red Pill realization leads to men hating women. The second complaint I read from them is that Red Pill awareness gives men some license to feeling like victims. This criticism is deductive to coaches for two reasons; it serves his ‘get-rich-quick-on-the-internet-by-selling-sunshine’ man-up and do better to qualify for women blog template, and it discourages men seeking answers from becoming Red Pill aware in a way that crushes their still Blue Pill belief set.
For the record, and as boldly as I can put this, if you are Red Pill aware man and still believe you are a victim of some sort because of your previous Blue Pill indenturement to pedestalizing women or the Feminine Imperative, you are only a victim of your own lack of vision. Red Pill awareness has set you free – free from the blur and distraction that a feminine-primary social order would pull over your eyes, free from the delusional Blue Pill hopes that are only greater shackles for a man, and free from never seeing the intersexual pitfalls you were prone to fall into before. But Red Pill awareness comes at a cost; the truth may set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. If you have a responsibility as a Red Pill aware man it’s that you are never allowed to play the victim. You now know the rules of engagement. Play it well, change the rules if you can, but you are no longer allowed to say you didn’t know the score.
Most Purple Pill coaches know this victim complex is bullshit, so they deliberately conflate Red Pill awareness with MGTOW or the MRM or even the “flip side of feminism” in an effort to muddy the waters and dissuade men, who are genuinely hurting and seeking answers, away from the real life-changing influence that the Red Pill represents.
When I petitioned my readers to leave a testimonial as to why they thought the Red Pill represented more confidence or a ‘safety net’ to them I got much more than I anticipated from that comment thread. I had been looking for some good quotes to add to the back cover of Positive Masculinity, but what I got was over a thousand revelations about the power that Red Pill awareness has in changing men’s lives for the better. These are men who took what the Red Pill had shown them and transformed their lives with that knowledge. They did this because Red Pill awareness empowered them, gave them the tools, to implement changes in themselves and how they interacted with women and a feminized world. They did so without anger or feeling like victims, and they did so without a Purple Pill hack trying to coax them back onto the plantation and into their failed, and false, Blue Pill belief sets.
And this is what scares the coaches; that a free and open source Red Pill praxeology is responsible for more men taking the initiative and bettering themselves than anything their ‘coaching’ has been responsible for.
Personal Development
I am not now, nor have I ever been a motivational speaker, a ‘guru’ of any stripe, a psychotherapist or a personal development coach. Though I’m humbled to be counted among the Godfathers of the Red Pill, I have never claimed ownership of the Red Pill. It’s always been my belief that the Red Pill – the true Red Pill that has always been about intersexual dynamics – should be an ‘open source’ community. Decentralization is one of its strengths, but it also allows for bastardization from men and women who want to define it.
In each of my books and on this blog I’ve made things plain about my non-approach to men and their own personal development; I’m not interested in making better men, I’m interested in men making themselves better men. I am not interest in making men “Tomassi Men” or in anyway selling them on a template for what I think a real man ought to be. My life and my interpretations of it are not going to be a template for anyone else to follow. Red Pill awareness, based on the praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the personal and social realms, will save and/or improve your life, but that life has to be lived by you as an individual.
That said, of course I realize that men seeking answers will want a codified system of guidelines for their own personal development. I’m not the guy who’s going to give that to you, neither is that Purple Blue Pill life coach with the 12 point plan, neither is the motivational speaker selling you the same tired power of positivity message that’s been around since the 1930s. You are going to come up with that plan, you are going to take what the Red Pill makes you aware of and you are going to apply it to how you live your life. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your personal development and the successes (and failures) that came from it authentically came from your own plan and according to your judgement, not someone else’s vision or template.
I wanted to take a moment in this post to preface the 21 Convention by addressing the ways in which men come to unplug themselves from their old, Blue Pill conditioned way of life and reconstruct themselves. Reader Blaximus added this in a recent comment thread and it sums things up well:
Fourth: there is no ‘ system ‘ for teaching or learning Game. None. The process is highly individualized and virtually no two guys will learn at the same rate, or achieve the exact same level of understanding or real world application. No cheat sheets in game. You either get it and apply it and internalize it, or you don’t. It’s not about picking up chicks in clubs. That’s PUA. Game picks up chicks at a funeral. Lol. True game will be disliked by the masses.
Far too many Purple Pill dating coaches don’t want to get this in their heads. They think that because the Red Pill is a praxeology it implies it’s a cop out on developing real solutions for guys. They either don’t understand the necessity for men’s individual needs to personally develop Game for themselves, or they need a convenient dismissal of the Red Pill as ‘those angry guys have no answers’.
I have stressed in more essays than I care to recount the importance of combining what the Red Pill informs Game about with what Game informs the Red Pill about. One is the theoretical, the other is the practical, and neither is complete without the other. Yes, it is entirely vital that you, as a Red Pill aware man, get out into the field to employ the ideas, and test the practicality of how the Red Pill relates to your situation in your environment according to your strengths and gifts. That field may be a night club, or day Game on the street, in a social circle, with your wife of 10 years or in your churches singles’ group. The fact remains, Red Pill awareness is applicable through Game in a variety of environments, social and cultural contexts.
Game Works, but it only works if you turn off the computer and do something. How do you learn from a book? You put it down and you go outside (and yes, that counts for my books too). Investing oneself in Red Pill awareness as a praxeology is not a cop out for coming up with real solutions – it gives men a toolset from which they can create their own solutions. What frightens Purple Pill coaches is that men’s individual solutions, often enough, don’t affirm their Blue Pill romanticizations, their pretenses of morality, or their idealistic inability to look at the abyss and find hope on the other side of it. They want solutions, but they want their solutions to be affirmed by a Red Pill awareness that contradicts their ego-investments.
When your revenue depends on not getting it it’s hard to convince a Blue Pill man otherwise.
I will be discussing aspects of this essay at the 21 Convention in just two weeks. If you are attending I’d like to take this opportunity to extend you a personal invitation to talk with me at the convention and possibly have dinner with my colleagues and I at the event. On the topic of just getting out there in the field and doing it, I know that my friends Christian McQueen and Goldmund will be heading out into the wilds of the Orlando nightlife and I will be accompanying them on at least one of these outings.
Lastly, if you are in the Central Florida area, or if you want to make the drive in for the weekend, and you really really want to attend the convention, but just can’t come up with the funds, hit me up via email, Twitter or leave a message on my About page here and I will personally see about getting you some kind of hardship discount. Remember, this is only if you’re truly desperate to attend.