emotional vulnerability

Surrender

Most of my readers are aware of my stand on the myth of male vulnerability. Weakness is not strength, but the Village of the Feminine Imperative, would have us believe that the more a man displays honest signs of vulnerability the more endearing he’ll be to women. The Blue Pill conditions men to believe that crying, or being more emotionally sensitive, or really anything that makes him identify with the feminine in his personal character is a form of this endearing vulnerability that women can (by appealing to equalist reason) be expected to respect in a man. While adopting this mindset may open a man up to ridicule (and unspoken disgust on the part of women), this is not true vulnerability. The Village might try to convince a man he’s being brave by avoiding conventional masculinity, but this emasculating vulnerability is nothing compared to what a man has to lose from real vulnerability.

What I think most men, certainly all Blue Pill men, miss is that the ultimate form of vulnerability a man can engage in is ‘catching feelings’ for, or emotionally investing himself in, any particular woman. And this is especially so if that man’s Blue Pill conditioning makes him oblivious to the risks of that vulnerability.

Nothing leaves a man more vulnerable in life, love, family, career, finances and really power over the direction of his life than to invest himself in a woman. The very act, the very thought, of surrendering his life’s imperative to the trust that a woman wont exercise the unimaginable control and potential for damage she has in his life is a vulnerability no woman will ever recognize or acknowledge; nor will the sacrifices that come from this vulnerability ever be something she has a capacity to appreciate.

Even in the best case scenarios, where a man’s investment is reciprocated, or a somewhat idyllic relationship grows between a man and a woman, such is the state of our modern sexual marketplace that a potential for a man’s ruin still colors that relationship. Our feminine-primary social order has, through legislation and social pretense, made the proposition of any man navigating the sexual marketplace one of inherent vulnerability. Women rarely understand the vulnerability a man is opening himself up to because our social order makes that potential for his harm invisible to her. In fact, if he resists opening himself up to potential ruin he’s considered to be insecure, and this in turn is attributed to his maleness.

I have no doubt there will be women reading this last paragraph and think, “Well, women are putting themselves at risk too, we have to be vulnerable too.” No, you really don’t. Since the beginning of the Sexual Revolution every potential aspect of vulnerability for women in the SMP has been meticulously compensated for, or insured against the worst. Whether that’s the grossly female-weighted divorce and custody laws, or legal abortion, or arbitrary consent laws that only serve women, or the special dispensation for women academically or vocationally, any and all vulnerability risk is mitigated for you. The emotional vulnerability you believe is so costly pales in comparison to the risk and consequences that vulnerability represents to men. Men commonly have more to risk, more to lose and invest more of themselves into that risk proposition.

True vulnerability, the kind that opens you up to life-destroying consequences, is when a man’s idealism for women, despite knowing all the very likely, very destructive, consequences is something he willfully ignores. For a Blue Pill man, his vulnerability is rarely ever recognized. Thanks to his life-long preconditioning he believes in a romanticism that insulates him from ever acknowledging the risks and the all-downside potential of that vulnerability. This obliviousness – keeping a Beta-in Waiting blind – is a primary goal of Blue Pill conditioning.

Idealizing Surrender

Women would rather be objectified than idealized. The reason for this really gets back to evolved gender differences; women want a man who other men want to be and other women want to fuck. In other words, women want to be the object of desire of a worthy man. When a man surrenders himself to the primacy of the feminine, when he makes a woman his mental point of origin, when he alters the course of his life to accommodate her, that’s when he ceases to be someone for whom she’ll willingly submit to. When she becomes his center he knowingly surrenders Frame.

It is, however, the innate idealism that predisposes men to outward thinking, to the belief in what could be realized, that also predisposes them to idolizing women on whole and idolizing a woman at once. A man’s idealism makes a lot of things possible for him, but it also puts him at terrible risk with regard to being truly vulnerable. Furthermore, men’s fundamental romantic nature is also attributed to our innate what-is-possible idealism. The Feminine Imperative has used this idealism to its benefit for millennia, but the most common (seemingly sensible) utility of it results in men’s surrender of self to the feminine.

When we read through the romantic poetry of the ages – almost all of it written by men – the most common reoccurring theme is that of a helpless ‘surrender’ to the love a man bears for a woman. From Ovid to Shakespeare to Byron the dialog and sentiment is the same; that of the inherent ‘correctness’ of a man surrendering his soul to the love – requited or not – of a woman. If there is a psychological root to the disorder of ONEitis it can be found in this poetic idealism.

However, there is nothing that makes a man more vulnerable to a woman, to the feminine, than his idealist’s nature. The Feminine Imperative knows this thumbscrew of men. One hallmark of the conditioned Beta mind is an eagerness to put themselves into a state of surrender to the feminine. I go into this a bit in Pre-Whipped:

These are the men I call pre-whipped; men so thoroughly conditioned, men who’ve so internalized that conditioning, that they mentally prepare themselves for total surrender to the Feminine Imperative, that they already make the perfect Beta provider before they even meet the woman to whom they’ll make their sacrifice.

But what should predispose men to so eagerly want this surrender? Certainly there’s an element of a (false) belief in the possibility of a mutual concept of love between that man and a (potential) woman. It’s what he believes should be possible.

What else? There’s the pre-conditioned belief that this surrender is his masculine duty. Countless Blue Pill pastors make a living belaboring the narrative that men can’t be Men until they mold themselves over the course of a lifetime to be a (once convenient) a woman’s ideal. Literally, manhood is denied to him until he surrenders to the feminine.

The Family Alpha made this observation last week:

Many men have given the power over their inner self entirely to the women of their lives.

While I completely agree, what I’m wondering is why this need to surrender self is an intrinsic aspect in men? The majority of men (80% Betas) are pre-whipped to expect a need to surrender to the women in their lives. Their abdication is so matter of fact that it becomes something subconscious for them.

Is this a characteristic that separates Betas from Alphas? I’d like to think so, but then a distinction needs to be made between being a Strong Independent Alpha who lives up to a positive, pro-social, conventionally masculine role (despite a world arrayed against it) and the same who, though still respectively Alpha, surrenders his sense of self to the woman he idolizes.

SFC Ton had a great comment about this surrender:

“Women do not really have more power……The first step is to realize that this is indeed the case. Men cede power. Men are taught to cede power. Men look for opportunities to cede power. Women just take advantage of men’s largess. A man does not have to be full on Alpha to get this, or to use it to his best advantage in life.”

One thing to consider is how much power have men ceded and to what effect. The surrender is real, both individually and socially. Reclaiming the power ceded in that surrender will be fought in many different scopes. In The Family Alpha’s article, the concern is two fold: the ceding of a man’s inner self, the surrender of identity to the approval of the feminine, and what the consequences are for men once they reclaim or recreate an identity apart from what he allowed the feminine to create for him.

This a significant thing to ponder for men. One reason I believe men become so despondent, so nihilistic, after some trauma that shook them into Red Pill awareness is that their identity, their sense of self, was a result of this ceding of power to women. They literally do not know what to make of themselves once they are cut free from that paradigm, but moreover they must confront the fact that who they are now (at the time of their unplugging) is, in large part, due to that self-surrender. Prior to their unplugging this surrender may have been involuntary for them, but still perhaps not. Their vulnerability and the true potential of permanent damage from it is put out in the open for them and others to realize.

It’s easy to think of men having difficulty getting over their Exes as in some way damaged. Family Alpha’s point was to encourage men to get back on the horse and back in the game and be competitive again, and that’s what I believe is most beneficial for these men. I also believe that it does men no service to prolong feeling sorry for themselves, but again, that’s part of the process of recreating a man. The risk then becomes a sort of new surrender wherein men drop out and isolate themselves aways from the system that held them and caused them to believe in, and then confront the consequences of their first vulnerability and surrender to the feminine. Isolation becomes their new form of surrender.

However, it’s also important that they recognize the potential for damage that surrendering, that ceding power, to the feminine represents to them. Red Pill aware men should acknowledge that their real vulnerability will be implied in any relationship they enter into beyond a perfunctory pump & dump. That knowledge should be a source of power that prevents them from overextending themselves once again into surrender to the feminine. They are aware now and that awareness now implies a responsibility to it. It demands that they keep their heads out of the sand and make calculated risks according to that awareness.

Your new Red Pill self has no more excuses of ignorance – your life’s been handed back to you with the full knowledge of the system you’re a part of.

No surrender.

The Red Pill Balance

Before you move on to reading today’s post, please take 14 minutes and listen to Niko Choski’s latest here Man:the being made of stone, it’ll be relevant in the second half of this post.

Niko is MGTOW, and from what I know is fairly highly regarded in that sphere. I did an interview with him back in August and since then have become a semi-regular listener of his youtube channel. We’ve occasionally bounced ideas off one another since the interview and I hold Niko in the highest respect for his intellectual approach and insights.

So it’s with that in mind that I’m going to use his latest offering here as a contrast to what I’m going into today.

Reader Divided Line stopped me in my writing tracks on another post with this comment from the last post thread. Not the least of which because I’d just finished listening to Niko’s audio here, but also because it was an interesting juxtaposition to what I’d planned to go into today. I’m going to quote Divided Line here and riff a bit as I go (emphasis mine):

@reloadedbeats

A lot of what you’ve said here echos my own thinking to such a degree that it’s as if you read my mind. I agree 100%.

What you’re talking about here, I think, is the inherent value of goodness or justice. I think Plato took up this question in the Republic and nailed it better than most.

In the beginning of the dialogue the question is “what is justice?” But it quickly transforms into “what is the value of justice?” In other words, if goodness wins us no reward, then what value does it have? Is it valuable in its own right? Would it have value even if it cost us something, or indeed cost us everything?

Glaucon puts the question like this (paraphrasing): “What if the perfectly just man is seen by everyone as perfectly unjust, while the perfectly unjust man is seen as perfectly just?” He then puts it on Socrates to effectively prove that, even in this scenario, justice would be worth it.

We could gender this question and simply ask “what if the perfectly good man is seen as perfectly unattractive to women, while the perfectly evil man is seen as perfectly attractive?”

Is goodness worth it even if it isn’t profitable sexually or socially? It’s the same question.

Why be a ‘good’ man when what we consider good by both personal and social measures isn’t rewarded (or only grudgingly rewarded), while what we consider ‘bad’ is what is enthusiastically rewarded with women’s genuine desire and intimacy? In other words, Hypergamy doesn’t care about what men consider good or bad.

It seems like this is the predicament red pill awareness puts us in when we have to consider the value of our formerly beta self. What makes the beta the beta is his weakness, of course, but it is simultaneously his civility. We’re not defective people for wanting or even needing the possibility love, empathy, truth, friendship, kindness, and – above all else – trust in our lives. It just makes us human. If we project our deeply rooted desires for these things and treat others the way we want to be treated, wouldn’t society be better off for it? And isn’t this what the supplicating, loyal beta does when latches on to a woman he believes to the “the One?”

No Quarter Given

In my post (and book chapter) Of Love and War I quote a reader who summed up this want for relief from men’s inherent Burden of Performance:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to

When I consider Niko’s perspective alongside this I begin to see a stark paradox; mens’ want for a relief or a respite from that performance burden tends to be their undoing. I wont get too deep into this, but one reason I see the MGTOW sphere being so seductive is the hopeful promise of that same relief. Simply give up. Refuse to play along and reject the burden altogether. Japan’s herbivorous men crisis is a graphic example of the long term effects of this.

However, this is the same mistake men make in their Blue Pill, Beta conditioning. They believe that if they meet the right girl, if they align correctly with that special ONE, then they too can give up and not worry about their performance burden – or relax and only make the base effort necessary to keep his ONE happy.

The Beta buys the advertising that his Blue Pill conditioning has presented to him for a lifetime. Find the right girl who accepts you independent of your performance, and you can let down your guard, be vulnerable, forget any notion of Red Pill truths because your girl is a special specimen who places no conditions on her love, empathy, intimate acceptance or genuine desire for you.

And this is also very seductive and inuring for the Beta who’s been conditioned to believe there can realistically be a respite from his burden.

That’s how it seemed to work in my own life. Looking back on it, I was so grateful to my ex, who was easily the most attractive girl I’d ever been with, that I would have taken a bullet for her. I didn’t want anybody else. I didn’t even think about other girls – the first time that had ever happened to me in a relationship. I can remember thinking that even if she gained weight, lost her looks, and got old, I’d still want her. I would have “loved” her forever. I was good and ready to cash in my chips, exit the SMV, and retire. I would have arranged my whole life around making her happy and would have felt lucky to have had the privilege.

At the time, all of that felt noble and brave, but looking back on it, it just seems pathetic and pathological, the result of my neediness. But the thing is, what if she had reciprocated it? Wouldn’t it have been a relationship worth having? Had she reciprocated it – if any woman was capable of reciprocating that – it wouldn’t have been Disney movie bullshit, but the real thing. We’re supposed to think such a thing is possible and that’s what keeps us playing along. The Red Pill is really about recognizing its impossibility, I think. There is no possible equity. To be sure, a woman can be loyal and dedicated to you, in theory, but she’ll only give that loyalty to the guy who needs it least. It’s like a cruel, cosmic joke.

Such as it is, that girl lied to me, ran for the hills the moment I showed weakness and needed her the most, and cheated on me. Big surprise, right? With a red pill awareness now I can see how predictable that result was, but at the time I was blindsided by it. I never saw it coming. I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing when I’d invested so much in her, when I was so willing to give her all the things I’d always wanted most. I assumed she wanted the same things – men and women are the same, right? That’s what the egalitarians tell us. I couldn’t understand how those things could be so valueless to her that she would just throw it all away like that. She didn’t value them at all.

On occasion I’ve suggested that men watch the movie Blue Valentine. You can check out the plot summary on the IMDB link there, but you really need to watch the movie (on Netflix) to appreciate what I’m going to relate here. The main character suffers from the same romantic idealism and want for a perfected, mutually shared concept of love between himself and the single mother he eventually marries.

It follows along the same familiar theme of Alpha while single / Beta after marriage that most men experience in what they believe is their lot. More often than not the Alpha they believed their wives or LTR girlfriends perceived they were was really just a guy who’d do for their needs of whatever phase of maturity she found herself in.

By itself this would be enough for me to endorse the movie, but the story teaches a much more valuable lesson. What Dean (Ryan Gosling) represents is a man who idealistically buys the Blue Pill promise that men and women share a mutual love concept, independent of what their sexual strategies and innate dispositions prompt them to. Because of this misbelief Dean gives up on the burden of his performance. He drops his ambitions and relaxes with his ONE girl, contenting himself in mediocrity, low ambitions and his idealistic belief in a woman sharing and sustaining his romanticized Blue Pill love ideal – performancelessness.

He relaxes, lets his guard down and becomes the vulnerable man he was taught since birth that women would not only desire, but require for their false, performanceless notions of mutual intimacy. The men of this sphere who don’t find themselves divorced from their progressively bored wives are often the ones who trade their ambitions and passions for a life of mediocrity and routine,…so long as the security blanket of what they believe is a sustainable, passable semblance of that love (but not desire) exists in their wives or girlfriends.

Their burden of performance is sedated so long as their women are reasonably comfortable or sedate themselves. That false sense of contentment is only temporary and leads to their own ruin or decay.

No Quarter Expected

I’ve since watched something similar happen to a friend not once but twice. It’s textbook, standard shit. AWALT.

Cultivating these unrequited beta aspects of somebody’s character, if we did it on a mass scale, creates a society worth living in. It’s a civilized society where these things are most possible and it’s a truly worthwhile relationship where both parties regard each other this way and can full expect it to be reciprocated. It requires faith and trust, but we all know better. Our survival depends on knowing better, post sexual revolution. Women were never worthy of such trust and they’re entirely incapable of it. They were never capable of it. We were just supposed to think they were and cultivate the better aspects of our natures in order to be worthy of them.

The ugly truth of it is that women were never worthy of us.

Women’s sexuality doesn’t reward justice or goodness – if it did, reciprocity would be the norm and none of us would be confused about relational equity. Women reward not goodness, but strength. And strength is amoral, meaning it can be either just or unjust, good or bad. The guy with strength can either be the villain or the hero – it makes no difference to women. They can’t tell the difference and in truth don’t care anyway.

There is a set of the Red Pill that subscribe to what I’d call a ‘scorched earth‘ policy. It’s very difficult to reconcile the opportunistic basis of women’s Hypergamous natures with men’s hopeful, idealistic want for a love that’s independent from their performance burden. So the idea is again one of giving up. They say fuck it, women only respond to the most base selfishly individualistic, socio or psychopathic of men, so the personality they adopt is one that hammers his idealism flat and exaggerates his ‘Dark Triad‘ traits beyond all believability.

It’s almost a vengeful embrace of the most painful truths Red Pill awareness presents to us, and again I see why the scorched earth PUA attitude would seem attractive. Women do in fact observably and predictably reward assholes and excessively dominant Alpha men with genuine desire and sexual enthusiasm.

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests. Solution: turn hard toward the asshole energy. Men understand the rules of engagement with women and they know Game well enough to capitalize on it so why not capitalize on that mastery of it?

The dangers of this are twofold. First, it lacks real sustainability and eventually becomes a more sexualized version of MGTOW. Secondly, “accidents” happen. MGTOWs will warn us that any interaction with a woman bears a risk of sexual harassment or false rape claims, but for the scorched earth guy a planned unplanned pregnancy on the part of a woman attempting to lock down her Alpha is far more likely to be his long term downfall. Emotional and provisioning liabilities for a child tends to pour cold water on the scorched earth guy.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that women are philosophically, spiritually, and morally stunted. They have a limited capacity for adherence to higher ideals and this is why they don’t know or care what actual justice or goodness is. Like Schopenhauer said, they “mistake knowledge for its appearance.”

It took me a long time to be able to accept this. That is women’s true inferiority – and women are profoundly inferior. And I take no pleasure in recognizing that, as if I’m somehow touting the superiority of team men. It’s awful, in fact. Dealing with it is the ultimate burden of performance for us as individual men, but also as a society. At some point we’re simply going to have to confront women’s moral inferiority. If we look at our institutions, the very same that are crumbling now all around us, we can see that previous generations of men already figured this out. We just forgot what they knew.

So what’s the answer? Is justice valuable for its own sake? All of us would probably on some level want to be able to say yes and argue the case, but I don’t know if I can do so convincingly.

I’m with you on this, part of me thinks “Fuck this. It can’t be like this.” But it is. I wish I had the answer.

Niko attempts to redress the assumption that men feel some necessity to be someone they really aren’t. In Vulnerability I go into how the Feminine Imperative is only too willing to exploit this self-doubt by labeling men as existential posers and their conventional masculinity is a ‘mask’ – a false charade – they put on to hide the real vulnerability that lies beneath.

Unfortunately many men accept this as gospel. It’s part of their Blue Pill upbringing and is an essential aspect of their feminine ‘sensitivity training’ and gender loathing conditioning. When masculinity is only ever a mask men wear the only thing real about them is what real women tell them it should be.

What we don’t consider is the legitimacy of our need for strength, independence, stoicism, and yes, emotional restraint. That need to be bulwark against women’s emotionality, that need to wear psychological armor against the Red Pill realities of women’s visceral natures is legitimate and necessary. If a man’s vulnerability is ever it’s because his display of it is so uncharacteristic of his normal impenetrability. The woman’s demeanor, and the narrator’s voice, in the last post’s Campbell’s soup commercial is an example of the weak, vulnerability women expect from lesser child-men – and a commensurate expectation of him to just get that he needs to be strong.

That’s the inconsistency in women’s Hypergamous nature and the narrative of the Feminine Imperative’s messaging. Be sweet, open, vulnerable; it’s OK to cry, ask for help, be sick and weakened, we’re all equal and empathetic – but, Man Up, “what, you need your mommy?”, assert yourself, the asshole is sexier than you, where’s your self-discipline? – but, your masculine identity is a mask you wear to hide the real you,……

I play many roles in the male life I lead today, and I’ve played many others in my past. I’m Rollo Tomassi in the manosphere, I’m a father to my daughter, a husband and lover to my wife, a brilliant artist and pragmatic builder of brands in my job, an adventure seeker when I’m on my snowmobile and a quiet contemplator of life and God when I’m fishing. All of those roles and more are as legitimate as I choose to make them. Do I have moments of uncertainty? Do I waiver in my resolve sometimes? Of course, but I don’t let that define me because I know there is no real strength in relating that.

The Red Pill Balance

Red Pill awareness is both a blessing and a curse. The trick is balancing your Red Pill expectations with your previous Blue Pill idealism. It’s not a sin for you to want for an idealistic reality – that’s what sets us apart from women’s opportunism. You do yourself no favors in killing you idealistic, creative sense of wonderment of what could be. The trick is acknowledging that aspect of your male self.

KFG had a comment to this point:

If men did not hold heroism as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.
If women did not hold survival as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.

This was precisely the dynamic I was referring to when I wrote Idealism.

Men’s idealism and idealistic concepts of love are the natural counterbalance to women’s pragmatic, Hypergamously rooted opportunism and opportunistic concepts of love and vice versa. Those differing concepts can be applied very unjustly and very cruelly, or very judiciously and honorably, but they are the reality of our existence.

Red Pill awareness isn’t just about understanding women’s innate natures and behaviors, it’s also understanding your own male nature and learning how it fits in to that new awareness and living in a new paradigm. Is something like justice valuable for its own sake? I’d say so, but that concept of justice must be tempered (or enforced) in a Red Pill understanding of what to expect from women and men. Red Pill awareness doesn’t mean we should abandon our idealism or higher order aspirations, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should just accept our lot in women’s social frame because of it. It does mean we need to balance that idealism in as pragmatic a way with the realities of what the Red Pill shows us.

 

Vulnerability

achilles_heel-1

One of the most endemic masculine pitfalls men have faced since the rise of feminine social primacy has been the belief that their ready displays of emotional vulnerability will make men more desirable mates for women.

In an era when men are raised from birth to be “in touch with their feminine sides”, and in touch with their emotions, we get generations of men trying to ‘out-emote’ each other as a mating strategy.

To the boys who grow into Beta men, the ready eagerness with which they’ll roll over and reveal their bellies to women comes from a conditioned belief that doing so will prove their emotional maturity and help them better identify with the women they mistakenly believe have a capacity to appreciate it.

What they don’t understand is that the voluntary exposing of ones most vulnerable elements isn’t the sign of strength that the Feminine Imperative has literally bred a belief of into these men.

A reflexive exposing of vulnerability is an act of submission, surrender and a capitulation to an evident superior. Dogs will roll over almost immediately when they acknowledge the superior status of another dog.

Vulnerability is not something to be brandished or proud of. While I do believe the insight and acknowledgement of your personal vulnerabilities is a necessary part of understanding oneself (particularly when it comes to unplugging oneself), it is not the source of attraction, and certainly not arousal, that most men believe it is for women.

From the comfort of the internet and polite company women will consider the ‘sounds-right’ appeal of male vulnerability with regard to what they’re supposed to be attracted to, but on an instinctual, subconscious level, women make a connection with the weakness that vulnerability represents.

A lot of men believe that trusting displays of vulnerability are mutually exclusive of displays of weakness, but what they ignore is that Hypergamy demands men that can shoulder the burden of performance. When a man openly broadcasts his vulnerableness he is, by definition, beginning from a position of weakness.

The problem with idealizing a position of strength is in thinking you’re already beginning from that strength and your magnanimous display of trusting vulnerability will be appreciated by a receptive woman. I strongly disagree with assertions like those of various Purple Pill ‘life coaches’ that open, upfront vulnerability is ever attractive to a woman.

The idea goes that if a man is truly outcome-independent with his being rejected by a woman, the first indicator of that independence is a freedom to be vulnerable with her. The approach then becomes one of “hey, I’m just gonna be my vulnerable self and if you’re not into me then I’m cool with that.”

The hope is that a woman will receive this approach as intended and find something refreshing about it, but the sad truth is that if this were the attraction key its promoters wish it was, every guy ‘just being himself‘ would be swimming in top shelf pussy. This is a central element to Beta Game – the hope that a man’s openness will set him apart from ‘other guys’ – it is common practice for men who believe in the equalist fantasy that women will rise above their feral natures when it comes to attraction, and base their sexual selection on his emotional intelligence.

The fact is that there is no such thing as outcome independence. The very act of your approaching a woman means you have made some effort to arrive at a favorable outcome with her. The fact that you’d believe a woman would even find your vulnerability attractive voids any pretense of outcome independence.

Hypergamy Doesn’t Care About Male Vulnerability

When I wrote Women in Love and the followups, Men in Love and Of Love and War, I described men’s concept of love as ‘idealistic’.

Naturally, simple minds exaggerated this into “men just want an impossible unconditional love” or “they want love like they think their mothers loved them.” For what it’s worth, I don’t believe any rational man with some insight ever expects an unconditional love, but I think it’s important to consider that a large part of what constitutes his concept of an idealized love revolves around being loved irrespective of how he performs for, or merits that love.

From Of Love and War:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to.

The concept of men’s idealistic love, the love that makes him the true romantic, begins with a want of freedom from his burden of performance. It’s not founded in an absolute like unconditional love, but rather a love that isn’t dependent upon his performing well enough to assuage a woman’s Hypergamous concept of love.

Oh, the Humanity!

As the true romantics, and because of the performance demands of Hypergamy, there is a distinct want for men to believe that in so revealing their vulnerabilities they become more “human” – that if they expose their frailties to women some mask they believe they’re wearing comes off and (if she’s a mythical “quality woman“™) she’ll excuses his inadequacies to perform to the rigorous satisfaction of her Hypergamy.

The problems with this ‘strength in surrender’ hope are twofold.

First, the humanness he believes a woman will respect isn’t the attraction cue he believes it is. Ten minutes perusing blogs about the left-swiping habits of women using Tinder (or @Tinderfessions) is enough to verify that women aren’t desirous of the kind of “humanness” he’s been conditioned to believe women are receptive to.

In the attraction and arousal stages, women are far more concerned with a man’s capacity to entertain her by playing a role and presenting her with the perception of a male archetype she expects herself to be attracted to and aroused by. Hypergamy doesn’t care about how well you can express your humanness, and primarily because the humanness men believe they’re revealing in their vulnerability is itself a predesigned psychological construct of the Feminine Imperative.

Which brings us to the second problem with ‘strength in surrender’. The caricaturized preconception men have about their masculine identity is a construct of a man’s feminine-primary socialization.

The Masks the Feminine Imperative Makes Men Wear

To explain this second problem it’s important to grasp how men are expected to define their own masculine identities within a social order where the only correct definition of masculinity is prepared for men in a feminine-primary context.

What I mean by this is that the humanness that men wish to express in showing themselves as vulnerable is defined by feminine-primacy.

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

“The Mask You Live In” by director Jennifer Siebel Newsom (dual surname noted) is the perfect example of this perpetuation. You have a woman deciding for a larger public in a documentary what the male experience is and then solving the problem (i.e. the tired trope of men needing to get more in touch with their emotions) for men.

Men are ridiculous posers. Men are socialized to wear masks to hide what the Feminine Imperative has decided is their true natures (they’re really girls wearing boy masks). Men’s problems extend from their inability to properly emote like women, and once they are raised better (by women and men who comply with the Feminine Imperative) they can cease being “tough” and get along better with women. That’s the real strength that comes from men’s feminized concept of vulnerability – compliance with the Feminine Imperative.

Ironically Newsom is still oblivious to the fact that she can only create such a documentary in an environment of feminine-primacy. No man could produce this and be taken seriously in our contemporary social climate.

It’s indictment of the definers of what masculinity ought to be that they still characterize modern masculinity (based on the ‘feels’) as being problematic when for generations our feminine-primary social order has conditioned men to associate that masculinity in as feminine-beneficial a context as women would want.

They still rely on an outdated formula which presumes the male experience is inferior, a sham, in comparison to the female experience, and then presumes to know what the male experience really is and offers feminine-primary solutions for it.

From The 16 Commandments of Poon:

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest. When she grasps for a pillar to steady herself against the whipping winds or yearns for an authority figure to foil her worst instincts, it is you who has to be there… strong, solid, unshakeable and immovable.

True vulnerability is not a value-added selling point for a man when it comes to approaching and attracting women. As with all things, your vulnerability is best discovered by a woman through demonstration –never explaining those vulnerabilities to her with the intent of appearing more human as the feminine would define it.

Women want a bulwark against their own emotionalism, not a co-equal male emoter whose emotionalism would compete with her own. The belief that male vulnerability is a strength is a slippery slope from misguided attraction to emotional codependency, to overt dependency on a woman to accommodate and compensate for the weaknesses that vulnerability really implies.

I know a lot of guys think that displays vulnerability from a position of Alpha dominance, or strength can be endearing for a woman when you’re engaged in an LTR, but I’m saying that’s only the case when the rare instance of vulnerability is unintentionally revealed. Vulnerability is not a strength, and especially not when a man deliberately reveals it with the expectation of a woman appreciating it as a strength.

At some point in any LTR you will show your vulnerable side, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is the overt attempt to parlay that vulnerability into a strength or virtue that you expect that woman to appreciate, feel endearment over or reciprocate with displays of her own vulnerability for.

A chink in the armor is a weakness best kept from view of those who expect you to perform your best in all situations. If that chink is revealed in performing your best, then it may be considered a strength for having overcome it while performing to your best potential. It is never a strength when you expect it to be appreciated as such.