The New Paternity

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment.

Law 32, The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene

I was reminded of this quote as I listened to a woman talk over me on the Pat Campbell show a couple weeks ago. I’ve written several essays regarding the uglier aspects of Paternity and by discussing them I’ve discovered that the evolved realities of how men and women regard paternity is always a touchy subject. I’ve given a lot of thought as to why this is recently.

Before I dig into why I want to throw out a quick caveat. I’m likely going to make people uncomfortable with this. A lot of ego investment is involved in our sexual strategies and the beliefs that underpin them. That means when someone is critical of them it’s hard not to take it as an attack. Robert Greene was right, anger does follow disenchantment when you strip the veneer off beliefs you built a lifestyle on. Just know my intent here is not to attack anyone with what follows. I only want to explore some sensitive material.

As of this writing I’m half way through reading the book, Promiscuity by Tim Birkhead. If you’re a Red Pill evo-psych wonk like me I highly recommend it, but be prepared. If you still cling to comforting Blue Pill idealism about monogamy this material will challenge your presumptions about the nature of men and women’s sexual strategies. It’s a clinical, evolutionary, exploration of the mechanics of promiscuity in animals, however, it explains a lot of unpleasant truths about men and women. What I’ve read thus far confirms a lot of what the Red Pill has been considering for almost two decades now, and this is the objectuve stuff critics like to paint as “negativity”.

If you lean towards the nihilism of the so-called Black Pill this book will give you all the fodder you need to sink deeper into your coma of hopelessness – so be warned. Personally, I’ve found it fascinating and it’s pulling threads for me that I didn’t even know needed unraveling. However, in doing so, just my voicing the mechanics of how promiscuity is intertwined with men’s existential fear of paternity is enough to get me into trouble with people who’d rather not think about such things. Both libertine hedonists and virtuous conservatives will have a problem with the questions the book asks.

Men and women’s sexual strategies are fundamentally antagonistic towards the other.

A long time ago I was asked to write a post about whether I believed Game was Adversarial. And while I don’t think Game necessarily needs to be adversarial (seduction requires a willing participant), the existential fears of men and women are at odds with the other.

Men’s biological, masculine, imperative is to spread the seed – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Men’s compulsion for pornography (over centuries actually) is the most obvious confirmation of this. I’ve made this observation a few times before; men’s sexual strategy, as a result of our biology, is inherently ‘r‘ selected. Because men can potentially reproduce thousands of times per ejaculation, and because men’s investment costs is far lower than women’s in reproduction, men’s most pragmatic, inherent strategy is an innate drive for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.

Women’s sexual strategy is inherently ‘K‘ selection because women’s reproductive investment costs are so high. Gestation, nurturing, provisioning and protection of offspring are a few of the evolutionary imperatives driving women’s innate sexual strategy. Thus, Hypergamy becomes a woman’s prime directive in that strategy. For most of a woman’s life she is the sexual selector while the male is the performer. This selection priority changes as a woman’s sexual market value decays and a man’s value increases, or as defined by her circumstances, but the innate presumption that ‘men perform, women choose’ is the evolved framework in play.

But women’s sexual strategy is dualistic in nature. Women are far more promiscuous than most men would idealistically like to believe. Women evolved to consolidate reproductively on the best genetic potential in men and the best parental investment potential. In the Red Pill we euphemistically refer to this dynamic as Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks. This is the foundation of women’s sexual strategy; ideally pairing in the long term with a man who definitively satisfies both sides of the Hypergamous equation.

The main themes in Promiscuity are sperm competition, the prevalence (and concealment) of female promiscuity (men’s is pretty well expected) and the evolutionary expediency cuckoldry. All of these themes are considered in animals ranging from worms to human beings, but also in respect to general evolutionary function in these themes. My interest in this stems from how it relates to a Red Pill understanding of intersexual dynamics.

My first consideration: sperm competition is a highly contested theory and I’m not a microbiologist. People have a variety of ego invested beliefs riding on whether theories hold up on either side of the sperm war debate. This is a contentious arena of science that’s had social influences try to cover up inconvenient truths or redirect focuses to avoid unraveling those ego-investments. I’m laying this out here because I have no doubt critics will try to dismiss even the questions that point to ugly truths that don’t align with their ideals.

That said, there are many interesting evidences that imply an evolved function in sperm competition. For instance, there are studies showing that men who return to a pair bonded woman after a long separation tend to produce more ejaculate and higher sperm count when they copulate after that separation. This then dovetails into another theory; in the case of multiple male copulations with a female, the last male to copulate with her tends to be the one to successfully conceive with her. If you’re interested in the hard evidence for why human beings are not naturally monogamous, this is your book. Monogamy is a social adaptation that has the latent function of (ostensibly) ensuring male paternity.

Most of the concepts surrounding sperm competition point to one thing – sperm competition in men evolved as a contingency to women’s sexual selection process and their need for concealed promiscuity to pragmatically effect it. As I said, men and women’s sexual strategies are antagonistic towards the other. When one’s evolved interests gains the dominant position the other adapts a contingency. In a Red Pill perspective I see the advent of Game in the age of mass communication as one of those contingencies. There are many others older than Game though.

All of this points to the fundamentals I outlined in Sexual Selection & The Existential Fear: insuring paternity is men’s evolutionary prime directive, even at the biological level. Women’s cuckoldry of men (in its various forms) is an evolutionary adaptation to insure that women’s sexual strategy – ultimately unlimited access to the best genetics and the best provisioning – supersedes men’s strategy. Socially enforced monogamy is also a strategic positioning of men’s reproductive greater good; though, in today’s sexual marketplace, that old advantage has become a crippling liability for men. Legally enforced monogamy (i.e. marriage in its various forms) has been transitioned to an insurance of women’s provisioning needs.

This is the nuts & bolts of the antagonistic nature of out competing sexual strategies. However, in later stages it is in our evolutionary best interests to parentally invest in our offspring. For men this entails the risky prospects of investing in children they didn’t sire. The antagonism between intersexual strategies is more easily observed before pair bonding (in your single days) in a couple, but these strategy conflicts persist into the formation of a long term relationship. The Red Pill adage, “Marriage is no insulation from Hypergamy” has never been more accurate.

Ideally, a pair bond would be found in a long term union of a man and a woman where the compromising of either’s sexual strategy serves to ensure the survival of the offspring created by the two. As I’ve always said, men and women are better together than we are apart, but nature, it seems, prepares us for a less than mutually beneficial union. We have evolved reproductive failsafes that are influential in our belief sets.

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

This is an important maxim to keep in mind here. Even when a loving couple consciously prioritizes their relationship, parenting and family above their visceral natures, that nature pragmatically adapted for a conflict between strategies. In The New Polyandry I proposed that in our present gynocentric social order. women’s sexual strategy is the socially preeminent one. That is to say, we are taught to consider the fulfillment and support of women’s sexual strategy to be the ‘correct’ one for both sexes to prioritize.

On the surface this seems like the most progressive, socially stabilizing strategy to follow. Who’s going to argue against family creation being the foundation of a functioning society? We’re conditioned to think that fulfilling women’s strategy should also be men’s priority because it serves this noble end – family creation – but there’s a lot more to it than what we’re expected to focus on.

In contrast, men’s sexual strategy and even the idea that men’s interests would be a consideration, is demonized in gynocentric society. As a result men’s adaptive strategies are manifested covertly in other ways.

Provider Dads

Prior to the Sexual Revolution a woman having a child out of wedlock was scandalous. The stigma of becoming a single mother was something of a deterrent against the worst effects of women’s Hypergamous nature. Social and religious mores were a check and balance against ‘illegitimate’ births and incomplete families.

Today 40% of children are born out of wedlock. All the stigma of the prior generations have been replaced with women embracing single motherhood as a badge of honor. On a social scale heroism replaced shame, and women laid claim to a right to motherhood irrespective of whether a father was present or even necessary in the formation of a family. Child rearing shifted from a marriage based model to a child support based model.

This Fathers Day the predictable denigration of negative biological father caricatures versus the noble step-father ‘manning up’ to save a single mother’s family were in full effect on Twitter. In a post-SexRev world, in a gynocentric society, the (Beta) male who consolidates and fulfills a woman’s sexual strategy by accepting the parental investment responsibilities of another man’s children is lauded as a hero.

And that’s the connection I’m making in reading Promiscuity; women’s sexual strategy is the socially preeminent one in an era that’s expanded a local sexual marketplace to a global one. Unfettered Hypergamy, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks free from consequence, is what has defined our gender narrative since the late 60s, but in doing so it’s cunningly raised 2-3 generations of men to seeing their participation in women’s reproductive imperatives as a form of Game. In Beta Game and the Adaptations series I outlined how men will adapt social and behavioral contingencies to improve their chances of reproduction (getting laid). Men will readily adopt new methodologies to meet new reproductive challenges presented to them by women. However, there is also an adaptive, self-convinced, belief set that results from the conditioning presented to men in that adaption.

A prime illustration of this ‘programming’ just occurred last weekend. In this era Father’s Day has become an occasion to lift up single motherhood to reinforce the idea that a mother is the only parent necessary in the development of a well rounded child-to-adult. We no longer celebrate fathers. Instead we hold up single mothers and by association the heroic men who “stepped up and became a better father than any biological father was willing to be.” These heartwarming tales of the dutiful Beta who assumed the parental investment responsibilities of irresponsible or abusive ‘biological fathers’ abound on Fathers Day.

This narrative serves two purposes; first, it reinforces the blamelessness of the single mother’s complicity in bearing the children of the horrible biological father. At the same time it builds her up as a wise matron for choosing the dutiful Beta who was willing to fulfill the parental investment / provisioning role that the biological (Alpha) father would not.

Secondly, it reinforces the social convention that prompts Beta men to see fulfilling that role as a means to his own reproduction. The gynocentric social order loudly broadcast, across all forms of media, the idea that men who assume the parental investment responsibilities of other men – men who single mothers chose to breed with – are the highest form of hero. The provider “dad” to celebrate far above that of the male who only provided his sperm is the necessary element to maintaining Hypergamy as the socially correct sexual strategy.

I’ve proposed in the past that women no longer look for, nor expect to find, the man who best embodies the ideal aspects of Alpha Seed and Beta Need. There are only two types of men in the global sexual marketplace: the man women wish to reproduce with and the men women wish to be the provider of their security with. As social media and a feminine-primary social consciousness expands this distinction between Cad and Dad becomes more defined. In response to this reproductive reality men willingly settle into these roles as an adaptive sexual strategy.

Strategic Pluralism Theory

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

from Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

Men today are adapting to the New Polyandry by adopting the role and the rewards inherent in accepting themselves as either breeder or provider male.

This is the new Beta Game then; forgive and absolve a single mother of her sexual strategy and the consequences of it if it means a higher likelihood of reproducing with her in the future. The price for potentially siring offspring with a single mother is assuming the parental investment responsibilities of a (Alpha) man who can exercise his own sexual strategy successfully. For some men this entails the risk of never passing on his genes to the next generation. It means the man we are supposed to hate on Fathers Day will have his genetic legacy ensured by the same Beta males who vilify him at the expense of their own reproduction.

When I’ve made these ugly facts apparent to men and women on Twitter I’m told how callous I am for viewing things so viscerally. “I think it’s noble for a guy to adopt a single mother’s children” is the basic idea. But why do we believe this is a noble, humane, act on the part of a man?

Just 60 years ago single mothers were to be avoided. Providing for ‘bastard’ children was a shame until the Brady Bunch made the idea a bit more popular. Now we hold up being a supportive step-dad above the status of an actual biological father. Why?

Because our social order has successfully convince 2-3 generations (in only 60 years) that fulfilling a woman’s sexual imperatives is the highest good a man can do in his life.

This is one example of how our feminine-primary social order effects women’s sexual strategy (and life strategies) in a societal scope. Mothers provide sexual access to the Beta Provider who completes her reproductive imperatives sometimes at the cost of his own reproductive interests.

In the next essay in this series I’ll be exploring another “new” social convention that effects women’s reproductive imperatives.

Raiders of the Lost Covenant

I hate to begin an essay with an apology, but I feel like one is in order this time. For the past year and a half I’ve been invested in writing my fourth book, The Rational Male – Religion. This required a degree of perseverance, dedication in research, feedback, interviews and general behind the scenes dialoging that I’ve never had to involve myself in before. As a result, I’m less able to devote myself to writing this blog as well or as regularly as I believe I should. For that I’m apologizing here for skipping a week more often than I should.

I’m enjoying every minute of the work I’m putting into the new book, but it is taxing. A criticism I always get is that my books are just re-edits of this blog’s essays, and “Why should anyone buy your books if they can get it all for free here?” Ironically, these are also the critics who berate me for selling out, or they assume pushing my Red Pill books is all I do for a living [insert eye-roll here].

Well, not this time. This time the book will be (almost) entirely fresh material and this takes time, effort and concentration. There will be some material from a handful of past essays, but about 85% of the book is new material.

This process began prior to my publishing Positive Masculinity in July of 2017. I knew then, while still writing my third book, I wanted to do a book on how the Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics intertwined with religions and religious mindsets for the series. I began to do some casual research in Spring of 2017 as an aside to the third book. This quickly snowballed into a part time job for me. Now, add this to my schedule with:

  • The Red Man Group
  • My own YouTube presence
  • A few regular live spots and interviews I do
  • Red Pill 101 I do with Pat Campbell every Sunday
  • The keynote talks I’ll be giving at three 21 Conventions in 2019
  • Producing a new liquor brand for my real job this year

Anyway, that’s my way of saying I feel bad for missing a week or two on this blog. The Rational Male will always be my comfortable place to come home to and I want to let you all know, just because I’m posting less in the comments doesn’t mean I don’t read every one. In fact, this is one of the only forums, among dozens, I make a point to keep up with consistently.

Covenant vs. Contractual Marriage

Since digging into the new book I’ve gotten in the habit of comparing notes with various religious personalities who I think might give me a better perspective into how aspects of the Red Pill dovetail into religion. Everyone from Jewish Rabbis to Greek Orthodox ministers (?), to the Muslim faithful, to Evangelical pastors have been on my discussion list for two years now. One notable of late was Dr. Everett Piper, the recently retired president (chancellor?) of Oklahoma Wesleyan University.

Dr. Piper has a regular segment on the Pat Campbell radio show that comes on a half hour before I go on with Pat every Friday morning at 9:05am EST. The link to all our archives is in the sidebar.

Listen to the full discussion here

Last Friday Dr. Piper and I had a discussion about the state of marriage today. I’m loathe to call it a proper “debate” because there’s a lot that he and I agree on with respect to the value of marriage for men and women – at least, the value of what marriage had in the past and should mean to men and women going forward. Marriage is always going to be a persistent hot button issue in the Manosphere. Depending on what your personal, moral and/or rational beliefs are, marriage is something to be actively avoided or something only to enter into with the most serious degree of vetting and caution. Today’s marriage is defined by the dangers it poses to men. Unfortunately, this caution is rarely a consideration for most Blue Pill conditioned, Beta men.

Another area that Dr. Piper and I (and the Manosphere) agree on is the ‘feels before reals‘ priority our feminine-primary social order has embedded in our social consciousness. Today, the “correct” way to address a decision is to lead with our emotions, but it’s exactly this ‘feelings first’ idea that leads men to disregard the life-damaging potential that modern marriage poses to them.

I took the pro-avoidance side of this discussion. And, as usual, I always have to qualify my doing so first; Yes, I’ll be married for 23 years in July. Yes, I’m still happily married to the same woman and have never been divorced, nor have I ever considered divorce. My marriage’s success is directly attributable to my Red Pill awareness and putting it into practice. Mrs. Tomassi and I are still very much in love, we’ve raised a gorgeous and smart daughter to adulthood, and I think my marriage is as close to most people’s ideal as can be.

And yes, I would still never remarry were I to find myself single tomorrow – I simply cannot endorse marriage, as it exists today, as a good idea for any young man. Remember, this is coming from a guy with a damn good marriage. As MGTOWs are fond of saying, endorsing marriage today is leading the lambs to slaughter. I agree. It is simply, statistically, the worst decision a man can make in his life at present, yet so many men want to believe they won’t be one of those statistics.

This confuses a lot of people. Fundamentally, I think the institution of monogamous marriage has been one of the bedrocks of success for western civilization. Marriage is a good idea; it’s how we execute it in the late 20th and 21st centuries that makes it one of the worst prospects imaginable for men. So, I’m technically not anti-marriage; I’m anti-never-saw-it-coming-Pollyana-how-could-she-do-this-to-me?-hypergamy’s-doesn’t-care marriage.

This was my position going in to this talk with Dr. Piper. Have a listen to the whole segment if you have the time, but what we distilled it down to is the idea of a Covenant Marriage vs. a Contractual Marriage. This was the premise used to describe the divide between marriage how it should be done – religiously, personally, devotionally, how it was done in the past – and the way marriage is now – the worst contractual liability a man can enter into. Needless to say a lot of qualifications followed this.

By my understanding a Covenant marriage presumes a mutual religious reverence and understanding of what is expected of a man and a woman before they enter into marriage. It is founded on the agreement of two individuals who believe they are better together than they are apart. On paper this sounds good, but it presupposes quite a bit – particularly on the part of that woman today. I’ll detail the reasons why in a bit, but I take the Covenant definition of marriage to mean that there’s a mutual understanding between the man and woman that they are marrying for love in accordance to what they believe is their religious and monogamous obligation. Fine. We’ve got a model for marriage that is set apart from the Contractual model.

The Contractual marriage is one based on mutual support and an insurance that this support will continue even if the marriage itself dissolves. MGTOWs liken this to a bad business contract that, were it not marriage, no right-thinking man would ever agree to sign off on.

Contractual marriage is the standard for today. Dr. Piper sees this model as the “what can I get from my partner marriage“, but you can decide for yourself if you listen to the discussion. I think this is a bit disingenuous since it implies that men’s only consideration for agreeing to what amounts to a bad business contract would in any way make sense due to a desire for getting what he can out of what’s already a bad deal. Why marry at all if what you’re taking away from it is nothing you can’t get outside of marriage without the risk?

Essentially, Contractual marriage is the marriage-divorce-support structure that men are wisely hesitant about today. Dalrock once noted that sometime after the Sexual Revolutionwe moved away from the marriage model of child rearing and into the child-support model of child rearing“, and I think the Contractual model of marriage becoming the default was an integral part of this.

If you’ve ever watched the documentary Divorce Incorporated you can see the machinations of the Contractual form of marriage at work. This is just a taste of some of the real world consequences that accompany Contractual marriage’s liabilities. However, I think going in – and with the emphasis on leading with our feelings – most men have idealistic, Covenant marriage, expectations for their marriages.

It sounds pretty good, right?

And for the premarital sex mindset it’s the only game in town if they want sexual access. So, it serves a purpose to convince oneself that a man’s spouse is necessarily on the same page as they are with respect to his idealistic concept of love (versus a woman’s opportunistic concept of love). This is where most Beta men get themselves into trouble. They presume their ‘bride‘ to be shares his mutual idea of love, and combined with a potent cocktail of dopamine and endorphins, he leads with his Emotional Process rather than his Rational Process.

Off the Books Marriage

While we also discussed the issue of Responsibility vs. Authority in marriage, what got me was his marching back the question about separating a ‘Covenant’ marriage from the ‘Contractual’ marriage. This is something I’ve discussed with MGTOWs occasionally. Would marriage work if you removed the state and any entitlement to the cash & prizes liabilities from the equation?

I brought this up because this “private ceremony”, off-the-books unofficial marriage is what saved my friend Anthony Johnson from losing his ass in his own divorce. He wasn’t wise enough to see through his ex’s deceits, but he was smart enough not to involve the state in his marriage.

I was genuinely surprised to hear Dr. Piper disagree with the idea of separating the marriage models we’d discussed at the time, but to have him state that he wasn’t willing to somehow give up on the heroic fight to reform the ‘Contractual’ marriage was, in hindsight, kind of disingenuous. In both instances, with respect to headship and authority, and the reluctance to let go of the contractual definition of marriage (especially after making such an impassioned case for a covenant marriage) I can only come to the conclusion that Dr. Piper’s position on marriage is influenced by the feminist undercurrent prevalent in the church today – and without his really realizing it too.

Once again the fiscal considerations of not offending women’s (feminist influenced) sensibilities comes to the fore in another religious leader. This has been a constant theme among the Pastors and church leaders I’ve been interviewing since I started the fourth book.

Churches are business franchises today and if you want to keep the tithe checks forthcoming in order to keep the lights on pastors and church leaders need to prioritize the sensibilities of the primary consumer in the western world – women. It’s gotten to the point now that church leaders have internalized that women’s eyes and ears will be judging their words minutely in sermons and public appearances to ensure their Pastor is on ‘team woman’. This is why opposing a separation of Covenant marriage vs. the Contractual is literally a ‘no brainer’ for these men. They don’t ever think about it any other way because they’ve already adopted the feminist zeitgeist that’s assimilated their churches. To endorse that separation is to deny women their potential for cash & prizes if a man displeases God by making them unhappy.

I think maybe I expected more from Dr. Piper. I was hoping to find some common ground, but I think he may be committed to a doctrine that panders to the Feminine Imperative without realizing it. When we got to the part about headship (Corinthians) he came right out the gate with pre-qualifying headship vs. being a domineering asshole. I’ve come to expect this from a female-primary church that deemphasizes male authority. In fact, it redefines that ‘authority’ as responsibility before you get to discuss any other aspect of what women might allow as “headship”.

It’s like a mental illness with these people. If a wife isn’t perfectly happy and beautiful it’s the husbands fault.

It’s a disgusting view of marriage which can only increase unhappiness for the average Christian couple because there’s no way to keep a woman happy all the time, and, age means women are going to get old. It’s part of life, and it is enough for a woman to age gracefully without these Pastors trying to brainwash men into thinking that any lack of beauty is their fault.

7817 dalrocks Blog

Imperfect Men Vet Imperfect Women for Imperfect Marriages

The “You should’ve vetted better” or “You should’ve married a ‘real’ Christian woman” excuses are something I encounter a LOT from Christian church leaders. Dr. Piper also used this one too. It’s really the Christian version of the Quality Woman dilemma.

As I’m working my way through my fourth book and on The Red Pill & Religion this is one cop out I get regularly. Apparently no ‘real’ Christian woman would ever initiate divorce and if men were only Godly and wise enough to discern from the outset of ‘courting’ that their “bride” wasn’t a fully devoted woman of Christ then it’s their fault for marrying her – or their fault for screwing up God’s perfect plan for his married life later in the marriage. This is ex post facto rationalization that reinforces moralistic beliefs, but also justifies the reaming you’re going to take in divorce court for not being wise and Godly.

It’s basically another play on the No True Scotsman logical fallacy. “They not ‘real’ Christians/Muslims/Jews/Krishnas/etc.” should be the subtitle for my new book, I’ve heard so many times.

Deus Vult

When it comes to debating church leaders I simply cannot win the “God says so” clause. This is another obstacle to discussing Red Pill ideas in a religious context. It’s an appeal to faith that is always the go-to response to issues I bring up that they have no real answer to. That, or they don’t want to answer for fear of offending the Feminine Imperative in the church today.

Contractual” marriage is an all-downside proposition for men today. I tried to make my best case for why men shun it in the discussion. Naturally, there’s a common impulse for Publicity Pastors to AMOG from the pulpit and shame men for avoiding marriage, but they can’t argue against the marriage stats and the life-destroying fallout of divorce for men. It’s all too verifiable. The marriage & divorce rates today are unignorable, so men deductively go with the pragmatic response and avoid marriage or go MGTOW.

All that means nothing to the faithful Christian mindset. “It doesn’t matter if contractual marriage is one of the worst decisions a man can make today – “God says you should marry.”

What about the incentive of cash & prizes women have in divorce?

Doesn’t matter, God said get married

So I can’t argue with the divine creator of the universe. God says jump, so you jump. That’s the absolutist-moralist win button for any rational argument to the contrary.

Alternative link to the interview is here

Discussion at Dalrock’s Blog

Sexual Selection & Existential Fear

Way back in the early years of this blog I wrote a post flipping a common feminist trope on its head. In Women’s Physical Standards I laid out the case that it is women, not men, who hold the most stringent and static standards for ideal male beauty.

…from a purely physical perspective, it is women’s idealized masculine form that hasn’t changed in millennia. While there may have been a Rubenesque period when men loved the fatties of the 1600′s, no such era ever existed for women’s physical preferences. The classic broad chest, wide shoulders, six-pack abs and squared jaws of greco-roman athleticism are still the idealized male form that has graced EVERY romance novel cover in existence. I’m still waiting for someone to post me a link for a dating site that caters exclusively to women’s fetish of BBMs – Big Beautiful Men – average to good looking, fit, women specifically looking overweight men. Executive Introductions caters to women seeking affluent, influential men, but women just looking for overweight men, that site doesn’t exist.

I wrote this essay in a time well before apps like Tinder and Bumble became household names. Since then (September, 2011) the sexual marketplace has fundamentally shifted to exactly the state I saw it going to then, and all it took to prove it was a handful of fuckingdating’ apps to facilitate Hypergamy. In 8 years women have proven they are every bit as viscerally motivated by men’s physical appeal as I spelled out in this post. Back then I was run up the flagpole for suggesting women were the ones with “unrealistic beauty standards”, now it seem matter of fact.

Of course, the double standard has gotten much worse with respect to men having any sexual selection standards. In Maryland we have the instance of high school boys being pilloried on a global stage for daring to rate their female classmates’ looks on a 1 to 10 scale. Ironically, the the same teen girls who took such offense to this will think nothing of swiping left or right on a potentially lover on Tinder in just a few short years. In fact, they’ll think it’s normal for a woman to base her sexual selection on the physical, yet the same is sexual objectification for men to do the same. Certainly, men will never be allowed to voice their physical preferences without the fear of personal destruction in our Global Village.

About 5-6 months ago, Pat Campbell, my co-host on Red Pill 101, linked me to a pair of stories about how offensive some social justice warriors found it that young men were avoiding trans-gender ‘girls‘ as potential dates. The logic was that more evolved heterosexual young men should feel attraction towards a trans-gender, biological male, if he was presenting himself as a female. The natural sexual selection process for those young men, and by extension all men, was being circumvented by the social imperatives of others.

Pat also linked me to a story where a popular, heterosexual, high school quarterback accepted the Homecoming Dance proposal of another homosexual young man. As expected, the story was written as a heartwarming victory for modern progressivism and a young man “secure in his masculinity” praised as a hero for essentially accepting a social control over his sexual selection process. Naturally, the predictable hate to overcome would be from ‘less evolved’ guys alleging the quarterback was really gay.

This is the pre-written script we expect will follow (the clichéd triumph over homophobia), but the real story here is that a young man’s sexual selection process has been removed from his direct control. If the quarterback had refused the proposal the best he could hope for would be that no story would be written about it – but the more likely story would be him having to defend himself against his homophobia. In essence, the threat of a global online mob ruining his future makes accepting the proposal a necessity.

In 2019 men’s control over their sexual selectivity is something women don’t want to hear about. Part of ensuring that Hypergamy is the defining social dynamic today includes exercising as much control over men’s sexual selection process as possible. As fluid as men’s selection naturally is, it’s still out of women’s total control. The method to that control is social pressure. Women’s need to insure against their own Existential Fear of pairing with an unacceptable guy is so obsessive they will resort to social engineering.

Tinder and Bumble are social engineering programs as much as they are facilitators of women’s Hypergamy. Body Positivity / Fat Acceptance (exclusively for women) is equally a social conditioning effort. But for these and more the latent purpose is the same – convincing men to repress their evolved sexual selection proclivities in favor of accepting women’s selection process as the ‘correct’ one. The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies states that for on sex’s strategy to succeed the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. In today’s feminine-primary social order, the Feminine Imperative wants nothing less than complete abandonment from men – and it will use every social and political means available to insure men do.

Men must be raised up and conditioned from the earliest age to accept women’s strategy and their role in it as the only acceptable one. Men’s selection of a mate must be made for him according to women’s standards. Many times I’m asked how to go about “vetting for a wife”. I’m asked what the criteria, what aspects, what traits should a woman possess to make her “marriage material”. From a Red Pill perspective a lot of what I lay out seems highly offensive to the sensibilities of men and women conditioned by the Feminine Imperative. But the qualities, and the reasons I define them being desirable, are nothing any man who is invested in his own sexual strategy wouldn’t find mundane.

It’s not difficult to figure out what attributes in women would make for a good pairing – what’s offensive is that a man would ever have the temerity to require a woman to possess them at all.

It’s offensive to feminized sensibilities for a man to speak aloud the things he wants from a woman. How dare he ever have the presence of mind to create a list of acceptable qualities for a potential long term mate. Who is he to make demands? Has he not learned that Hypergamy and women’s needs now define his existence?

I’ve written in the past about how women commodify their own sexuality. We’ve pandered to the security needs of women for so long they feel entitled to their being met. We’ve developed a social order that’s prime directive is to insure against women’s Existential Fear of ever having to worry about a bad Hypergamous decision. We ensure that they can voluntarily reproduce at will via sperm banks and frozen eggs. We demand that men find them arousing no matter what their physical condition and in spite of 100,000 years of evolved arousal cues. Gynocentrism demands men be nothing more than willing participants in women’s sexual / life strategies.

A day ago I posted this quote on Twitter:

Women only see men as breeding stock or draft animals.

Women and their ‘allies’ lost their collective minds. Follow that link, see for yourself. It’s a litany of middle school blathering and presumption about my motives for making public what most of these feminists confirmed. All the responses are the predictable boilerplate you’d expect from a generation of women used to parroting back what the Village has taught them to respond with for so long.

But what is my observation revealing here? Nothing that we don’t already know – women define the reproductive process in western culture. And again, most of these feminists proudly agree with the observation. They say, “Yeah, as it should be”, while their oblivious male ‘allies’ seek affirmation.

The boys at the Maryland high school got caught in the gynocratic gears. They weren’t properly conditioned to know their place. They did what most guys in high school do, they compare notes, they make comparisons, because they still believed they might be allowed to have a preference of who they want to date, bang, have for a girlfriend, have for a wife. How dare they!

When the Beta Bucks / provisioning side of the Hypergamous equation is more or less accommodated for by the social order the only thing left is Alpha Fucks. This is Hypergamy on a meta-scale. Why would any woman bother with the notion of Value Added to make herself more ‘marriageable’? Men aren’t allowed to have preferences. They should feel lucky that a woman would date them in the first place. Feminism has taught her that if she is to be the ideal Strong Independent Woman® she is “never to do anything for the express pleasure of a man.” And besides, the exciting guys, the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys who she does swipe right on; those guys don’t care about ‘value added’ – they care about fucking.

The New Polyandry I described is an extension of ensuring women’s Existential Fear is always compensated for on a societal level.

The goal of feminism is to remove all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

Roissy

I’ve quoted this in other essays. Usually I’m asked why this would at all be feminists goal?

“You think feminism is all about controlling your dicks?”

In essence, yes, but really it’s about affording women unilateral control over their Existential Fear and absolving them of any consequences for the bad decisions made in controlling for it. In the last essay I stated that Abortion is Eugenics, but isn’t affording women total control of human reproduction eugenics? Isn’t socially engineering and conditioning men’s behavior to accept women’s sexual strategy as the “correct”, normal one eugenics as well?

I would say yes, except, the Sisterhood doesn’t have a ‘master race’ planned. There is no uniform conscious direction to this eugenics. It’s all driven by women natural, evolved mental firmware and impulses – all facilitated by the power afforded to them by men. We’ve unfettered Hypergamy. We’ve allowed women to do something unprecedented in human history, we’ve given women the reins of the direction of human reproduction.

And we’ve done this at the same time we’ve maximally restricted male sexuality. Dr. Jordan Peterson once predicted that in the future any expression of male sexuality will be illegal. I would amend that: any Beta male expression of sexuality will be deemed offensive or illegal.

The Existential Fear – Men

You need to understand WOMEN HATE BETAS in fact they hate them so much that they would prefer to work soul destroying jobs to support themselves than attach themselves to a Beta provider that wants to fuck them and impregnate them with his shitty beta genetics.

Incubus Rising

This was a comment that I meant to include in last week’s essay, but I’m glad I saved it for today’s article. It serves as a good starting point for men’s Existential Fear. If there’s one buzz-term that’s been bandied around by women since the rise of feminism it is “fear“. Men fear this. Men fear that. Men feel “threatened” by a strong woman. More recently it’s, “Men fear working with women today over concerns of workplace sexual misconduct.” So, I want to state here from the outset that I’m using the term fear in both these essays for lack of a better one. But what really gets the point across?

“Rollo, why does it destroy my soul to imagine my ex-wife / ex-girlfriend banging another man? I can’t sleep because I’m imagining her giving up herself sexually to a new guy.”

Some variation of this question is something I get a lot from guys I counsel who are going through a breakup or divorce. Sometimes it’s from men who’ve been separated from the woman for a long time. This is to be expected from Blue Pill conditioned men, but even guys who are Red Pill Aware will still feel the rage of infidelity even after the breakup has been official for years. Guys will tell me they wont even go out socially or associate with friends so as not to be in the same space as their ex for fear that they would do something rash if they saw her with another guy. There’s just something in their DNA that’s unsettling about imagining their ex giving herself willingly to another man – and they’re conflicted because the fem-centric world tells him he’s “insecure in his masculinity” for his possessiveness.

I can remember the same anxiety after I’d mercifully split from my BPD girlfriend. Even years after it was all over I’d still have nightmarish dreams about her. What the hell was that all about? What is our subconscious trying to get across to us with this?…

“Why am I so jealous and suspicious of my wife / girlfriend cheating on me? Should I feel bad that I root through her texts and IMs? Am I just ‘insecure in my masculinity’ if I feel like that? Why am I so possessive?”

This is another common one I get from men I counsel. I detailed a bit of this in Gut Check. Our subconscious mind has a way of warning us when our ‘aware’ mind is unaware of, or ignoring, the inconsistencies in our peripheral awareness. We’re actually much more aware of our environment than we appreciate, we simply refuse to acknowledge these inconsistencies. More often than not that denial is conditioned into us for purposes that aren’t always in our best interests. And sometimes it’s outright manipulative of male nature.

In Gut Check I related a time in my life where I had instinctively been suspicious of my wife because my instinctual awareness turned on the warning lights in my head. I had no rational reason to believe my wife was cheating on me, but I had a very real, evolutionary, reason that my instinctive mind would be suspicious of infidelity. Millennia of evolution has written anti-cheating failsafes into our mental firmware.

“Why are DNA tests illegal in some countries? Why is it illegal for a doctor or their staff to tell a “father” that the child he thinks is his own really isn’t biologically his? Why do we legally protect women’s cuckoldry?”

More and more we are seeing feminine-primary social conventions and legislation crop up that can only have one purpose – the systemic disempowerment and disenfranchisement of men’s interests in the reproductive process. The cover story for this Removing of the Man from any semblance of reproductive authority is what I call the Cult of the Child. I’ll be publishing a full essay on this soon, but the short version is that anything that serves women’s sexual strategy is always deemed to be “in the best interests of the child.” The interests of children has become the shield of what is really the interests of women’s sexual strategy.

For decades now, feminist ideology has successfully convinced most western societies that what serves the female reproductive interests is always what serves the a child’s interests. Men are superfluous at best, and pose a danger to the child at worst. This presumption is rooted in the Duluth Model of feminism, but women’s sexual strategy always comes at the cost of the reproductive interests of the man/father. I wrote about this in Children of Men. There is an open war on paternity today, but as with all intersexual conflict we need to look deeper to determine what the latent purpose of that conflict is all about. What interests are served in unilaterally disenfranchising men from the reproductive process?

Existential Fear

The answer to all of these questions finds their root in men’s Existential Fear – All men have an evolved need to determine and ensure his paternity.

Ascertaining paternity, and ensuring his parental investment is vested in perpetuating his genetic legacy, is the prime directive of men’s existence. This is a male imperative that virtually all higher order animals share.

Despite what many blank-slate academics still promote, men and women are different. Contemporary thinkers would have us believe the sexes are more alike than not, but the truth of it is we are different in fundamental ways that most equalists are uncomfortable admitting. Yes, we are the same species, but the fact remains that our differences, and in particular our sexual strategies, conflict in profound ways.

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

In last week’s essay I outlined the the Existential Fear women hold in their evolved unconscious – that of the Hypergamous doubt. “Is this guy the best I can do?” is the question that their hindbrains ask. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution, and the systemic Fempowerment that followed, women have collectively used this authority to ensure the preeminence of their sexual strategy (Hypergamy) in our social order. I outlined many of the resulting social changes we see were the result of this in last week’s post, but this preeminence came at the cost of men’s interests and influence in the larger, meta-conflict of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies.

Men’s evolved reproductive interest is very simple; ensure that the child a woman bears to him is his actually his own. Up until the last 60 or so years patriarchy, true, legitimate patriarchy has always been the order of society. Despite the ignorance of feminists protesting it, patriarchy has been a beneficial aspect of our advancement as a species since we formed tribal hunter-gatherer bands millennia ago. But that patriarchy depended on a simple doubt that formed men’s base sexual strategy – ensure his genes were passed into the next generation.

There are two ways a man can achieve this outcome. In The New Polyandry I explained men’s Strategic Pluralism Theory:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

Essentially, men follow an ‘r’ or ‘K’ reproductive strategy according to their (perceived) sexual market value (SMV). Since a majority of men fall on the low SMV side of the reproductive equation social conventions that served those men’s reproductive interests had to be developed and standardized. The resolution of men’s Existential Fear needed to be instituted and standardized to ensure the largest number of men could be relatively certain that the children they sired were indeed their own.

A lot is made of women’s reproductive costs in academia. In a fem-centric social order it pays to focus on women’s suffrage/victimhood narrative. But, men bear reproductive costs in this equation as well. Men’s biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Our best shot at sending our genes into the next generation is ‘spreading the seed’. Our biological hardware is made to do just this, but there are costs and obstacles to solving the reproductive problem. And the easiest solution for men has always been exercise their direct control over women’s sexual strategy. Imposing our natural strength (in many forms) on women has historically ensured that it’s women who were the ones to compromise their sexual strategy in favor of men.

Patriarchy & Monogamy

Socially enforced monogamy was the least barbaric of those compromises, but in this century destroying that monogamy has been a priority for the Feminine Imperative. In theory, socially enforced monogamy was the most beneficial mating strategy for largest number of (low SMV) men to solve their reproductive problem. But the fact remained that it was still an exercise of control over women’s Hypergamous natures. In essence, monogamy worked for men, and it was beneficial as a compromise in parental investment for women, but it also assumed direct a control over women’s sexual selection process.

Patriarchy and monogamy answered a woman’s Hypergamous doubt for her, and that is the crux of women’s Existential Fear – to have the control of her Hypergamy, her selection process, and ultimately the cost associated with that choice determined for her. This fear is exactly why the primary goal of feminism has always been the maximal unlimiting of women’s sexuality and the maximal restricting of men’s sexuality. It seeks to replace the social-scale compromise of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies with the total capitulation of the male strategy. Today, the Gynocracy has achieved this almost entirely.

But for one sex’s strategy to succeed, the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. For a gynocentric social order, only men’s abandonment of their own strategy is acceptable – and this abandonment insists men deny the evolved imperative of their own Existential Fear – insisting on paternity.

In the evolved scheme of things men’s reproductive best interest involves sacrifices. When a man commits to parental investment with a woman he takes on sunk cost risks. The time he spends investing himself committed to one woman and the children they produce comes at the cost of reproductive opportunities with other women. Women’s sexual strategy necessitates he compromise or abandon his biological imperative. Naturally, both men and women have adapted ways to circumvent monogamy to optimize their sexual strategies (infidelity, short-term breeding schema), but the basic equation is the same; if a man is invested in one woman it limits him from seeking other (potentially better) reproductive opportunities. If you want to know why Plate Theory irks women so much look no further.

The only way this compromise of sexual strategy can be advantageous to men is if he can be relatively assured that the child he’s raising is his own. This is where men’s Existential Fear of paternity fraud begins. He cedes his own strategy and the sunk opportunity cost for reproduction in exchange for the certainty that he’s invested in a child that bears his name and his blood.

I call this men’s Existential Fear because denying men the certainty of paternity presents the same existential anxieties as a woman’s control of Hypergamous doubt taken from her. Women fear the idea of being forced to birth and raise the child of a suboptimal man not of her choosing, while men fear the idea of being deceived into raising a child not of their own genetic lineage. And until the advent of DNA testing only a woman could be certain that the child was her own.

This is root level stuff here. So important was the determination of paternity for men that an obsessive concern for it was written into our mental firmware. The risks of falling for paternity deception was that important, and the men who evolved this compulsion were selected-for. The reason we Mate Guard, the reason our hindbrains default to jealous suspicions, the reason we cannot bear the thought of another man mating with our woman is rooted in the fear of investing ourselves in a child not our own.

In the previous essay I mentioned the natural revulsion response humans have towards things that are inherently harmful to us. A reservation or revulsion of snakes, spiders, feces, rot and necrosis are part of the evolved firmware we’re born with. I would also argue that the revulsion women feel towards “creepy” (low SMV, Beta) men and the revulsion men feel towards “slutty” women is part of this. Both these revulsions are adaptational protections against our respective Existential Fears. Each represents our Instinctual Interpretive Process letting us know what our ancestors had to avoid.

The Mentor

“But Rollo, isn’t it a noble thing to adopt or mentor a child that is not your own?”

I get this response a lot when I discuss this, and yes, it absolutely can be when the choice to do so is of your own making. In fact, the reason adoption/mentoring seems such a noble undertaking is exactly because it requires a man to repress his natural concern for his ow paternity. Kinship affinity will always play a role in men and women’s relationships with the next generation. Human beings are innately tribal and familial because tribalism promotes the advancement of selected genes. So repressing this innate predisposition is exceptional, maybe even noble depending on the social context, but it is so because it requires a man to ignore his natural wiring. For what it’s worth, I think multi-generational mentorship in Red Pill awareness is going to be a new imperative in the coming decades.

It’s just this pushing past our natural, evolved, concerns about paternity that’s been the operative dynamic of the Feminine Imperative in consolidating power. The human revulsion response can be molded. Usually this is through some form of operant conditioning. Revulsion can even be conditioned to be associated with pleasure. The Feminine Imperative has been remolding men’s evolved need for paternity to its own ends for some time now.

The popularization of ‘Poly Relationships is one of the more recent redirects of men’s paternity need. As I mentioned above, the goal state of the Feminine Imperative is ensuring that women’s sexual strategy – and anything that foments it – is the socially ‘correct‘ imperative. Men must become more like women if they want to be accepted by a social order defined by women’s experiences. Men’s sexual strategy is only acceptable when it serves a woman’s purpose, so men’s existential imperative of ensuring paternity is always going to be in conflict with women’s strategy. A man insisting on his own paternity and the perpetuation of his name is in direct conflict with women ensuring she chooses to breed with the best specimen and be provided for by the best male she can lock down.

This being the mechanics of it, it comes as no surprise that the social conventions of this era encourage men to abandon that evolved need. We make “heroes” of men who marry the single mother and assume the parental investment costs of the man she chose to breed with. A fem-centric society makes this a noble responsibility – “He Manned Up for the loser who wouldn’t take that responsibility” – all while ignoring the simple fact that this ‘hero’ is only completing women’s Hypergamous imperative. And it’s come to the point that a man abandoning his sexual strategy is part of women’s expectations and entitlements of Beta men.

For the men who insist on their own strategy, the message is one of shame. Only a man who’s “insecure in his masculinity” would think that a child would need to be his own. In fact, the very title of “father” is offensive to a social order based fulfilling women’s imperatives. Father’s Day must become, ‘special persons’ day‘. Men should never insist that a wife assume his last name. And of course, DNA testing to determine paternity (even in light of life threatening illness) is to be discouraged if not outlawed.

Now You Know

In The War on Paternity I explored a lot of the ways our feminine-primary social order ensures women’s sexual strategy stays the operative one. Our divorce laws, our child support and custody laws all center on one thing – making sure women’s imperatives supersede men’s need for paternity certainty. Even when a child is not biologically a man’s, he has no right to know the truth, but he has every expectation to be financially and emotionally responsible for the “best interests of the child.”

Going forward I think the Red Pill aware man must embrace his existential need for paternity – and do so fearlessly. If a new beneficent patriarchy is to take root then men will need to reject the social conventions that insist a woman’s sexual strategy be the preeminent one. I think mentorship of the next generations of young men should also be emphasized, but I think this needs to be a conscious decision of the men doing so. Today we have the decision to be a ‘cuckold’ made for us proactively and retroactively by women and a feminine-primary social narrative. If you’re an adoptive father then I salute you, but understand, at least you had the decision to make yourself. Most men’s decisions to be the step-dad only amounts to him acquiescing to supporting the decisions of women. 43% of births today are out of wedlock, either electively or based on a bad decision by that mother. We also call single mothers ‘heroes’.

My advice to men today is to be aware of the game you’re involved in with respect to how your need to know paternity is being used against you. That need is well known to the Feminine Imperative and has always been a threat to its interests. Make your own decisions to mentor based on that knowledge and never marry a single mother. If you do so understand that your sacrifices of this paternity need will never be appreciated by women. You may believe it’s the “right thing to do”, the moral choice, but in doing so you absolve both the woman who made her decision for you and the biological father of their total responsibility (and the underlying evolutionary reasons) to consequences of that decision.

Remember,…

WOMEN HATE BETAS in fact they hate them so much that they would prefer to work soul destroying jobs to support themselves than attach themselves to a Beta provider that wants to fuck them and impregnate them with his shitty beta genetics.

Are you really willing to accept that your paternity need counts for so little? Are you willing to accept this truth and fulfill a woman’s life strategy in spite of it because you believe it’s your moral imperative to do so?

State of the Manosphere 2018

Tonight at 10pm eastern my State of the Manosphere address goes live. I’ll be answering question in real time in the chat, but once this is up and on the 21 Convention You Tube channel I’ll be answering Q&A primarily on the comment thread of this post.

As I’ve mentioned in my last few posts, much of what I predicted to come for the next two years, with respect to our gender politics landscape, has come to pass far sooner than I expected. I fully expect the 2019 Super Bowl advertising to be a parade of misandrous hate directed at what the Feminine Imperative perceives as their ideological and political enemies – conventionally masculine men.

Furthermore, the scope of the APA’s guidelines about masculinity is revealing itself to be much more extensive with respect to ideological purity than any real science.

The APA ruling ‘traditional’ masculinity as a psychological disorder is also proving itself to be a part of a much larger coordinated attack on who the #resistance and #MeToo believe will be their primary opposition in the coming election cycle. The Gillette agitprop video and the PETA video were only the opening salvos to build the groundwork against conventional masculinity. I’ve seen damn near every article decrying ‘toxic’ masculinity since the beginning of the new year refer to the APA guidelines as a kind of Papal bull for their believers. Expect to see more media use this as a basis for their further demonizing men as we move into the election cycle.

Speaking of which, in the first 3 weeks of 2019 we’ve also seen an almost entirely female set of candidates declare themselves as running for their party’s nomination. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Karen Gillibrand, and a few others couldn’t wait for the clock to strike midnight on December 31st, 2018. This was also something I alluded to in our December 29th episode of The Red Man Group; a vagina will be a prerequisite for consideration for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Anyway, those were just a few things I saw coming last Fall. Let me know what you think about this talk. A lot of convention attendees told me it was one of my best. I hope you think so too.

Remove the Man 2019

In October of 2017 I wrote an essay titled Male Control. It was actually the second time I’d covered the topic of how a feminine-primary social order (a Gynocracy if you will) seeks to control its male population by deliberately sowing confusion about masculinity into multiple generations of boys, and later men. Prior to this I’d written another seminal post titled Remove the Man in which is outlined the ways in which that Gynocracy makes efforts to systematically remove men from our language. Usually this takes the form of ‘erasing’ the letters m-a-n from the English language wherever it appears in an official capacity (i.e. state bylaws, universities, legislative documents), but also in gender-neutral translations of the Bible now. The only real constant in all of this the deliberate erasure of ‘man’ and/or ‘men’ from that language.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

I wrote Remove the Man back in 2013 in response to one such effort by the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who passed a bill to make state laws gender neutral. The effort actually began in 2007, but in 2019 a simple search for ‘gender neutral language’ will show you the extent and scope of this much larger effort. This essay served and the starting point for a larger awareness for me – that of the push to remove men and masculinity from more than just our language, but rather the removal of all things conventionally masculine. As Orwell states here, the thought, the thinking, about masculinity and men is the focus of the corruption.

But language is only one way that the concept of what is masculine is distorted for a purpose.

Today the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with boys/men’s. In it the concept of conventional (traditional) masculinity is outlined as ‘harmful’.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.

It would be easy to refute this basic presumption with countless examples of how all of these traits, most of which are innate parts of men’s evolved mental firmware, have been key in developing a civil society as well as healthy masculine identity. But what we’re seeing in this is a corruption of language that is leading to the standardization of the corruption of thought.

Stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are evolved aspects of the male psyche that have served men for millennia. To the Red Pill aware man this is self-evident. What is less evident is the new context in which these ‘educated’ men apply meaning to these terms. Academia has been so thoroughly assimilated by the Feminine Imperative that the men making official decrees about psychological principle no longer have the insight to understand that their perspective is informed by ‘female-correct‘ thought.

There are two presumptions being made here:

First, is that men’s predisposition for stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are the results of a patriarchal societies adverse influence on boys and men.

The belief is founded in blank-slate social constructionism. I addressed this in Old Lies:

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. 

Now, granted, the men responsible for these psychological practices and their standardization tried to walk back the idea that conventionally masculine attributes weren’t “all bad”. This is expected because an aspect like stoicism can still be considered useful to a feminine-primary social order. It’s just that the larger social order wants the aspects of masculinity to manifest on its own terms and serving a female-centric utility.

A determined hard-driving man is what they want when the floodwaters start rising and women need to be carried to safety, but when a man uses that aspect of his masculine nature for his exclusive benefit, or a purpose that conflicts with feminine primacy, that’s when the aspect is defined as dangerous. However, the overall preconception is that there is some sinister influence of an old-school chauvinistic patriarchy teaching boys and men to be ‘toxically’ masculine. I addressed this fallacy in Old Lies, but this is one more example of how fem-centric society must cling to a clichéd parody of how boys must be being taught in order to cover the fact that boys are raised like defective girls today.

What is glaringly ignored is that these traits, and many more, are endemic parts of men’s evolved nature. Our emotional natures are not the same as that of women’s. Our brains are not wired the same as women’s. Men and women process emotions differently from the other, particularly negative emotions. This is a feature of the male brain, not a bug. But today the APA has decided unilaterally that men’s way of dealing with emotion is “incorrect”. Incorrect because the only correct way would be one that aligns with the women’s interests they’ve been conditioned to believe are only beneficial to larger society. To the APA, masculinity itself is a bug.

Secondly, this deliberate misconception relies entirely on social constructionism and almost entirely ignores the biological factors that contribute to masculine gender identity. I’m presently working on another essay that explores the dependency on blank-slate equalism as the basis for virtually every presumption the mainstream has about gender identity, so I don’t want to give too much away. However, the whole presumption of gender in humanist psychology depends on the falsehood that men and women are functionally coequal.

Accepting that failed notion of blank-slate equalism is what scaffolds the entire premise of this standard of masculinity. Masculinity is something that cannot be removed from society if its source is something that is unique to only men by virtue of their biology. They cannot ensure female-correctness as a societal standard if men and women are different. People like those in authority at the APA know this. It’s why merely talking about those innate gender differences is deemed a hate-crime today. Inspiring doubt in the blank-slate standard risks destroying the scaffolding for all their preconceptions of gender.

In the end this is one more, I think significant, effort in removing men and conventional masculinity from our collective thought. This standardization of how men should be ‘dealt with’ in therapy, or colored by in just considering men’s role in psychology is an ideological power play. Modern psychology officially doesn’t ‘get men’ anymore.

The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) will now officially list ‘traditional’ masculinity as a hazard or a disorder for male humans. They can’t be called ‘men’ because that would gender them.

I read a few Twitter threads about this change to the DSM and I think they’re worth reading to get a better grasp of the gravity of this standardization:

On December 29th, 2018 I made some pretty ominous predictions about what I thought the manosphere and men in general could expect to see in 2019-2020. We’re not eve a week into the first month and a lot of what I expected is starting to develop. The gender divide is now a gender ‘Cold War’ and going forward I see the polarization between the sexes becoming even uglier than the 2016 election cycle.

This issuance from the APA is a foundation for how psychology – our Lords of the new church – will define what is acceptably ‘male’ and what is not. Furthermore it defines what aspects of masculinity is officially hazardous based on social constructionism and science denial.

Going forward I think Red Pill aware men will have to view mainstream psychology with even more suspicion than we do already. My Red Man Group colleague, Rian Stone, has mentioned that this equivalent of a “Papal Bull” from the APA represents a call to action for the Red Pill community and the manosphere in general to help men understand that conventional, “traditional” masculinity is not a disorder.

The Red Pill saves lives. I can only see this standardization as a net negative for men who are already five times more likely than women to take their own lives. Men seeking psychological help will only find their problems compounded by psychologists trained to believe masculinity is inherently toxic. And as a result we need to be prepared to help our Blue Pill brothers unplug and show them their inherent worth as conventionally masculine men.

Red Pill 101 – Ep. 6: The “Rules”

Do you feel like you’re playing by by one set of rules while everyone around you seems to be playing by another? Do all the women you interact with seem to have a restrictive set of hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for their intimacy while they eagerly break their own rules for a different type of guy? Do the married guys you know still cling to their wives rules like their sex live depend on it?

The rules that a woman creates for a man she perceives as Beta carry over into that man’s LTR and marriage. A marriage/LTR usually retains whomever’s Frame that relationship had when the couple first became intimate. A lot of Beta men (and even some well-meaning Red Pill men) carry over this need for female (their Mother’s) approval into their relationships, proudly integrating their personal beliefs into how well they satisfy a woman’s rules and plans for his own life.

Are the ‘old set of books’ social agenda really the same set of personal rules women have for their own approval for Beta men?

Pat and I will discuss these issues and how to help men avoid the most common problems that lead to dead-end and damaging relationships for men.

Bonus: Why ‘Promise Keepers’ issues are really mommy-issues not daddy-issues.

Relevant Links:

Promise Keepers

Men in Love

The Second Set of Books

Blue Pill Frame

Male Authority – Provisioning vs. Duty

I’ve been watching Outlaw King on Netflix recently. There’s a part where the wife of Robert the Bruce says ‘Power is making decisions, and whatever course you are charting, I choose you, my husband’ It struck me that my own wife had said almost these same words to me in 2005. When I’d decided to take a job in Orlando that would uproot us from family and friends. There was no “,…but what about my friends, career, etc.?” from her and I had no hesitation to consider anything but taking the position. She said, “You are my husband, I go where you go.”

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

There’s also the male perspective to consider in this. Most men approach their marriage and long term relationships from what is ostensibly an egalitarian perspective. “Equality”, playing fair, being an “equal partner” a pretense of egalitarianism, is all a cover story for a power dynamic that is truly based on resource dynamics. In a ‘modern marriage’, male authority, even just the idea of it, is ceded by default to the woman. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Today’s marriage stats and the socioeconomic variables within marriage point to a very cold truth; if you make less money than your wife, statistically, your marriage is far more likely to dissolve. In couples where a woman outearns her husband divorce rates increase. Virtually every article written about this power dynamic attempts to paint the men involved as ‘feeling threatened‘ by their wives’ success, but the visceral truth can be distilled through the process of women’s Hypergamy. As you might guess, our feminine-centric social order can never allow for an unflattering picture of women, thus men must look like ridiculous, insecure, man-babies – this is another piece of the puzzle – but the stats don’t lie, only the reasoning for them misleads us culturally.

In an “egalitarian” marriage it is actually financial considerations that imbalance that idealistic fantasy of a “coequal partnership”. Men and masculinity are made to look ridiculous, insecure, potentially violent and incompetent on a social scale. This effort to delegitimize anything male has been going on since the late 1960s. The social impact of this has resulted in several generations whose default impression of men in general is one of distrust. Either distrust based in men’s potential for abusiveness, or largely more a distrust based in a default presumption of incompetence. Women cannot trust a man with her life because a majority of men are ridiculous buffoons, no better than big children and now we add that almost 40% of them are outearned by their wives.

Is it any wonder women have no default respect for a man’s course for their lives? In fact, given these modern circumstances, fantasies of an egalitarian marriage being the ideal notion are really the only way to justify marriage at all for women. Thus, we’ve crafted a new ideal of marriage that furnishes women with legal and social failsafes to make what looks like a really horrible, life-long attachment to a buffoon or an abuser just palatable enough to have women believe things might work out for them. Don’t worry ladies, the egalitarian ideal, that any potential husband worth your consideration will subscribe to wholesale, provides you not only with options that will absolve you of all responsibility for his (and your own) failures, but you’ll never have to really do anything he says. The law is on your side, and the very premise of an egalitarian marriage frees you from ever having to go along with one of his half-baked life plans for the both of you. In fact, as long as you make more money than him, you’ll almost surely be doing the ‘course’ setting for the both of you.

Needless to say this is not conducive to women entertaining a default deference to men’s authority. If women’s baseline impression of men is one of incompetence, ridiculousness and distrust, and then you combine it with the fact that over a third of them wont be earning the same financially we begin to see the reasons for the decline in marriage today. If the default perception of men is one of expected incompetence, why would a woman ever want to get married?

This is kind of a quandary. In marriage, a man’s authority today only extends to this monetary wealth – there is no inherent authority associated with being male despite what feminist bleat about ‘male privilege’. Wealth enforces will, but women still seek to find ways around accepting that authority by assuming control of that wealth. This is one reason why “financial abuse” has been fashioned into a form of spousal abuse, but there are many other means of emotional control that mitigates male authority-by-wealth.

Even when a man is the primary breadwinner his means to authority in his marriage is still mitigated. A man’s provisioning for his wife and family has always been considered a ‘manly duty’. Even the most masculinity-confused, Vichy Males are still conditioned to assume providership as a masculine trait that is ‘non-toxic’ and approved by their teachers. In most Trad-Con thought a man isn’t even to be considered a “man” unless he can prove his competence in generating more resources than he needs for himself. The direction of every aspiration he has must be applied to providing for a future wife, their children, likely their (her) extended family and then extended to society. By the old set of books a man can’t even be given the title of “man” (or “a real man”) unless he can prove he’s prepared himself to be a good husband, father and community leader.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong desire to fulfill this provisioning agenda, the men who do accept this as their “manly duty” are conditioned to only see their sacrifices as their expected responsibility. They are actively discouraged from ever assuming any authority might be forthcoming in exchange for their sacrifices. Not even a man’s wealth is a guarantee of authority; certainly not if he’s been conditioned to believe that an egalitarian marriage is an ideal, much less a possibility.

And now we come full circle – the promulgation of an egalitarian ideal in marriage, in gender equity, in the retribution and restitution that feminism is based on, all of this and more has the latent purpose of stripping men of any concept of authority, while enforcing the ideal of male responsibility. In The Second Set of Books I made the case that most (Beta) men today live by, or would like to live by, an old social contract that on the surface seems noble. They believe in an anachronism that promises them that honor, duty, chivalry and a default respect of women will, sooner or later, be appreciated by a woman with the “quality” enough to appreciate it and show that appreciation by accepting him for her intimate attentions. Only later do they come to realize that their dedication to that anachronism is misplaced and the exchange of duty for authority is not only erased, but he’s perceived as a “toxic” monster or a ridiculous “macho” fool for ever expecting that exchange. The world is actually playing by a second set of books that expects all of his ‘honor-bound’ beliefs are his responsibility, but nothing he sacrifices grants him any authority.

Last week I hosted a Special Edition of the Red Man Group in which we discussed whether a married man today is by default Blue Pill or Beta.

RMG_Patriarchs_Title_defaultIt’s almost impossible to broach this topic without accusations of bias or personal circumstance coloring a man’s perspective of marriage – and that’s from either side of the topic. I wasn’t endorsing marriage in this; if anything I made a case against marriage based on the same questioning of men’s authority I’ve explored in this essay. By today’s standards, marriage is far too dicey a prospect for me to ever advocate for. But how far are we willing to take this abandoning of dominance hierarchies in intersexual relationships? I recently got into a debate as to whether monogamous relationships – outside formal marriage – were even beneficial for men today. In that discussion we dissected the history of monogamy and in human relations it’s at least somewhat accepted that monogamy and two-parent investment in offspring was a dynamic that’s been beneficial to our own and some other species. I think that in the past, when social circumstance was different, the concept of monogamy and the institution of marriage were instrumental in our advancement and largely beneficial. All that’s changed now and much of the second set of books I referred to in this essay is predicated on an egalitarianism that has erased male authority and placed it on the shoulders of women who are ill-equipped (and honestly not wanting) to use that authority.

This last sentence here is going to seem like heresy to those invested in blank-slate, egalitarian equalism and fempowerment, but the truth is evident and unignorable that an evolved patriarchal authority has progressed us to an age where we’ve become prosperous enough to entertain thoughts of abandoning it. Stripping men of authority while still expecting a default, and total, responsibility is a really good summation of the two sets of books – the conflict between the old and the new social contract. And yes, I’m aware of the all the arguments that this state of disempowering men is by some political design. Destabilizing the family starts with delegitimizing male authority and confusing generations of men about the aspects of masculinity. Doubt and self-loathing are key in men policing other men for presumptions of authority. It’s crabs in the bucket – when one man presumes authority there need to be ten more to pull him back down into confusion and doubt.

So where do we go with this from here? Even the most ‘Con’ of Trad-Con women will still default to their fempowerment conditioning when presented with a default male authority they are supposed to follow. Can a man be a leader in his own home anymore? MGTOWs will tell you no, and they’d be right. You can’t out-Alpha the state. But the state is still comprised of men and women with their own preconceptions and belief-sets. Our evolved firmware still predisposes us to conventional gender roles, and that predisposition is also one of women expecting  male competence, decisiveness and dominance. Women still want a man to follow in spite of their conditioning to distrust men’s competence. Maybe a new form of monogamy is in order. Egalitarianism is a dead end, it only defaults to 100% female authority and 100% male responsibility. But perhaps at some point, when things get so bad that women are forced to take a chance on the men they think are potential buffoons and abusers, a new kind of “marriage” can come out of the morass that egalitarianism has made of marriage.

How do we get back to a state of male authority based on a woman’s trust of her husband? I would like to believe I have this with my wife today, but I know that this is tenuous from the perspective of true, actionable authority. I once came down hard on a pastor who was advising the women of his congregation to “allow” their husbands to lead them. He was basically asking the women to stand down and trust God that their husbands we’re actually worthy of their trust. He didn’t know it, but his entire premise stemmed from women already acknowledging that they had ultimate authority over their husband as a given. Most pastors are pussy-whipped, so this default authority is usually presumed as a sexual threat-point women will exercise over their husbands. What he didn’t understand was that women’s authority is his default for a much deeper, more socially expansive reason. So even to ask women to allow their husbands to exercise ‘headship’ is ludicrous – it’s something even those women have no power to do because the presumption of authority is always in their favor. They can’t allow their men authority over them because the social paradigm they live in wont allow them to allow it.