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.
In last week’s comment thread Not Born This Morning shared an interesting quote that got me to thinking about Frame in a larger, meta perspective. I’m going to riff on it a bit here as I go, but I think it’s important to understand that the concept of Frame applies in many different circumstances in a man’s life. I’ve covered this idea in Frame as the first Iron Rule of Tomassi, as well as in Blue Pill Frame and in an interview of Mark Baxter and Carl from Black Label Logic.
The concept of Frame is one of the most often discussed Red Pill ideas – especially with guys newly unplugging from their old Blue Pill conditioned lives. Most men tend to think that controlling or owning their own Frame is the key to changing their lot in life, and to an extent this is true. What they most often overlook is how to establish that ownership and developing their personalities around a confidence that comes from it. It doesn’t happen overnight in some magical process of simply changing one’s mind about themselves. Proponents (and marketeers) of the power of a Positive Mindset tend to oversimplify what I believe should be a developmental process of coming into a strong sense of a man’s Frame.
I say that because Frame in a larger perspective isn’t something a man can compartmentalize and make specific from one arena in his life and not in another. My last three essays State Control, Submission, and Family Integrity are really explorations in this Meta Frame ownership. A lot of quick-hit Game proponents, as well as ‘Life Coaches’ like to repeat the mantra of how women are attracted to confidence in a man, but what they’re really selling is the idea of a man owning the Frame of his life. Confidence with his career, family life, friends, his status and confidence in understanding the base nature of women from a Red Pill aware, and how to use it to his advantage, are really all aspects of a strong Frame control.
Confidence is the result of having real, actionable options, and/or the self-understanding that a man’s past, provable, successes mean he can regenerate new options for himself. Confidence is certainly an aspect of solid Frame, but it is not Frame itself. Neither is confidence the result of one simply convincing himself he ought to feel more confident by thinking positively. Confidence is the result of having developed a mastery to successfully generate realizable options, and from that understanding comes solid Frame control.
The comment thread began here if you want to read it in full context, but the salient point I’ve quoted here:
The following excerpt is well worth sharing with everyone here at Rational Male as it pertains to the questions we debate, and ask ourselves, considering men, women and the inevitable sexual social dynamics. At first consideration you will likely think I am even more full of crap than I am, but it is wise to be patient and think about the following seriously. What I am about to tell you dovetails with my most recent comments, there is wisdom herein on the most fundamental level concerning all this.
“Fooled?” is an excerpt (verbatim) from the book entitled “What is the name of this book?” written by Raymond M. Smullyan.
Chapter 1 – “Fooled?”
My introduction to logic was at the age of six. It happened this way: On April 1, 1925, I was sick with grippe, of flu, or something. In the morning my brother Emile (ten years my senior) came into my bedroom and said: “Well Raymond, today is April Fool’s Day, and I will fool you as you have never been fooled before!” I waited all day long for him to fool me, but he didn’t. Late that night, my mother asked me, “Why don’t you go to sleep?” I replied, “I’m waiting for Emile to fool me.” My mother turned to Emile and said, “Emile will you please fool the child!” Emile then turned to me and the following dialog ensued:
Emile “So, you expected me to fool you didn’t you?”
Raymond “Yes”
Emile “But I didn’t, did I?”
Raymond “No”
Emile “But you expected me to, didn’t you?”
Raymond “Yes”
Emile “So, I fooled you, didn’t I ?!”
Well, I recall lying in bed long after the lights were turned out wondering whether or not I had really been fooled. On the one hand, if I wasn’t fooled, then I did not get what I expected, hence I WAS fooled. (this is Emile’s argument.) But with equal reason it can be said that if I was fooled, then I DID get what I expected, so then, in what sense was I fooled? So, was I fooled or wasn’t I?
End of excerpt.
So, how does the forgoing excerpt pertain to sexual gender dynamics? And how does it dovetail into the subject of my previous comment?
When we model our sexuality with women in the fashion of a “game” being aware of red pill “truths” and applying strategy accordingly, we do so at an invitation to operate within the dynamic of the feminine MO. It is imperative to comprehend that Red Pill “truths” are actually nothing more than stratagems which only effectively become “truth” when they are respected as such.
I’ll note here that I disagree that Red Pill truths are stratagems in and of themselves. What may be considered stratagems (depending on how applied) are Game techniques and contingencies. I would argue that Red Pill awareness and truths are fundaments and concepts that exist apart from, but inform, Game stratagems.
They are only manifested into reality when they are effective. They are each like terms of a contract, each of which is a term offer of how the relationship will be defined. Their real manifestation is only possible when both parties accept them to be “true”. Accepting them and respecting them can only be done by submitting to the frame within which they are cast. You make their truth become your truth only by subverting yourself to the idea that they are in fact universally true. You make them false by not subverting yourself to them. Ignore them.
Again, I disagree. Red Pill truths exist in spite of a belief in them or whose Frame, male or female, a man or woman is operating in. Blue Pill idealism, replete with all of the hope-filled delusions of what behaviors and thinking should produce mutual genuine desire, is unproductive because it conflicts with the evolved, base nature of human beings. Red Pill awareness is hard to accept for most men because it is counterintuitive to what Blue Pill conditioning has hammered into their heads, but it is enlightening once a man understands the latent purpose of Red Pill truths. Those truths exist no matter whose Frame a man plays into.
A woman can experience her full attraction to a man only when she respects him (this does not mean she must be frightened of him). To gain respect, you must remain outside their frame entirely. As a consequence, you will gain control of those who cannot lure you into this morass, their relentless test is to see if you can be baited or if you are already conscripted. Understand this and you will gain great power over all women, feminists included. Psychological dominance is established primarily by the explication of not taking the bait, rather than only an implication of not taking the bait. And actions speak louder than words. The test results cannot be faked for long because you may be able to fool some people all the time and all people some of the time but you cannot fool all people all the time.
As I’ve mention countless times, Hypergamy is based on a fundamental doubt for women – is this guy really the best she can do? That doubt exists outside of whoever’s Frame is the dominant one. It is a mistake to think that a woman’s testing a man is always intrinsically malicious. Shit testing a man is only “bating” him when a woman is self-aware enough to realize that she is consciously doing so. In this case I might be inclined to agree that it is her Frame that is defining a man’s reality, assuming he’s unaware (or refuses to believe) he’s honestly doing so.
For the most part, women’s insistence on their Frame being the dominant one is largely something they’re unaware of. The Hypergamous doubt, the subconscious decision making, the influence of ovulatory shift in their libidos, the reason they shit test, and many other behaviors and rationales for them are aspects of women’s natures they have no reason to have any insight about.
When Raymond accepted Emile’s invitation to Emile’s contest of being fooled or not, Raymond entered a frame that was predefined, created and controlled exclusively by Emile. Emile was the absolute omniscient emperor of this frame and all its tenants including Raymond. There is a profound lesson offered here. Those who learn from it, know that Raymond’s only proper response would have been to simply state: “Emile, you cannot fool me.” A lack of response (MGTOW) is as cowardly as an agreement, no matter the terms of the agreement (Alpha-Beta or Macho-Musho). The most desirable masculine men are the ones who cannot be fooled. You are either free or you are tamed, wild or domesticated, master or slave.
Whether or not Emile predefined a truth for Raymond doesn’t erase the fact that there is an objective truth that exists apart from both of them. That is the root of Red Pill awareness and the reason why learning and acknowledging it is so productive for men – with women and in life. I agree that rejecting someone else’s subjective truth is a primary element in unplugging, but so is acknowledging the objective truth surrounding you and using it to one’s benefit.
Authenticity
Not Born This Morning has a tendency to return to the question, ‘whose meta-frame are men really operating within?’ If women control the larger social dynamic as to how men will define every term of engagement, up to and including men’s own existences (to say nothing of sexual strategies) then they are not acting or thinking ‘genuinely’ as Real Men® should.
This is a MGTOW classic now, and it’s a tough hurdle for most of them to get past. The more militant will say that any engagement at all with women is acquiescing to the female meta-frame. I think some distinction needs to be made between an individual woman insisting on her own dominant Frame and the larger, meta-social narrative that women in general should always expect to have men relinquish Frame because it is women’s correct and entitled position.
I don’t believe Not Born This Morning falls into that MGTOW category since he is directly engaging women in direct Game. I discussed this in my first interview with Allen Roger Currie and had some very insightful comments about direct vs. indirect Game. You can look them up, but essentially the MGTOW approach distills to Direct = Genuine, Indirect = Disingenuous or ‘unauthentic’ if you prefer. The idea is that if you feel like you need to be indirect or communicate on women’s terms, or women’s preferred form of communication, you are surrendering to women’s meta-frame.
In such a case you may be able to ‘fool’ a woman of your authenticity as a “man” but it wont be a permanent impression on her in the long term. In this line of thinking you literally can’t “fake it till you make it” you must first “make it” and then act in an authentic way that reflects you operating from an uncompromisable position of your own male meta-frame.
I half agree with Not Born This Morning in the sense that men ought to own their own worlds and be ‘made’ to the point that a directness about it becomes a man’s default approach. It would be nice if men could understand objective Red Pill truths (in all aspects of intersexual dynamics), internalize it, cast off their old Blue Pill misgivings and then make that a part of his own authenticity. It would be great if guys could go from Red Pill school to Game practice as a matter of course, but that’s not always practical for guys. Owen from RSD has made a very lucrative business on the idea that Game practice and action should come first, Red Pill understanding of why it works second. As you might guess I disagree with that because most guys who’ve been deprived of women’s sexuality and intimacy for most of their lives only care about driving the car and care nothing about how it was built or how to repair it. They get trapped in the process and are discovered to be inauthentic in the long term if they don’t make the Red Pill connection and understand the larger meta-Game going on around them.
That said, I disagree with the idea that authentic masculinity can’t be learned. In terms of attraction that may eventually be the case, but in terms of arousal and triggering it in women, it can very much be learned, and indirect approaches can prove just as effective as direct ones. Lets not lose sight that arousal (short term sexual) and attraction (long term provisional) are two sides of Hypergamy and either can set the prioritization of the criteria a woman has for a man – and modified by her physical and maturation states. Women’s attraction/arousal triggers can most definitely be fooled, the real question is how long can you hold up the impression of being an “authentic” (as defined by MGTOWs or whoever) man while you sort out whatever that ought to mean in terms of a controlled meta-frame?
One Tomassi maxim has always been that women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life and never the focus of it. That idea is only profound, only controversial, to men because it conflicts with the feminine-dominant social meta-frame men are taught to accept as part of their Blue Pill conditioning. Blue Pill men are raised to believe in female social dominance – a default female frame – but are comforted by a belief that it’s all about equalism. When you suggest that it is in fact men’s meta-frame that women ought to respect and acknowledge; that is men’s meta-frame that comes closest to objective Red Pill truth, that is when the fighting starts.
I’m of the opinion that guys ought to have a more balanced approach – Red Pill theory and Game practice with the end result being a man coming into a solid meta-frame for himself and understanding where women’s proper place should fit into it. We often repeat that women require masculine dominance from men; I would offer that this dominance should be the result of a man owning his Frame and genuinely being in control of the ‘world’ he expects a woman to voluntarily enter. That makes sense.
If you’re a fraud in the long term (meta-male Red Pill aware authenticity), all of the short term attraction, arousal and dynamism you offered her at the outset only exacerbates a woman’s disappointment in a man. Game is great; it gets you the ‘Dream Girl’ you couldn’t fuck before you learned it, but once you’re “found out” in the long term and it’s clear that – despite all your Game skills – you’re really Blue Pill and subscribe to all the failings it conditions into men, this only serves to anger a woman for having invested her Hypergamous trust in you.
Now, of course, the refrain will be, “But Rollo, who gives a fuck what women want in the long term? It’s my world, take it or leave it.” If your long term goal is simply a lot of short term lays I can completely concur. When men begin to get concrete results with women they’d never had before it’s easy to understand this sentiment, but it doesn’t change the objective fact that even in spinning plates women eventually want to presume that a man is implying a more long term monogamy at some point. So, while it may be that a man’s only immediate plan for ‘his reality’ is to include short-term, non-exclusive sexual relationships, Hypergamy still has two sides to it and your plans will not alter women’s innate reality.
In the next post I will discuss this and the latent purposes of both men and women’s competing sexual strategies and the social conventions that facilitate or limit those strategies.
If youtube isn’t your thing you can get the audio archive here.
I managed to get some time with Niko once again yesterday. He was kind enough to stay up late and get a talk in for another installment of our semi-regular podcast The Red Pill Monthly (more like bi-monthly recently).
I really liked this one because we delved into some new stuff about Frame and the importance of establishing and maintaining a solid sense of self and purpose in all aspects of a man’s life, but focusing on the interpersonal and intersexual importance of Frame.
The concept of Frame is not my original idea, it’s actually derived from interpersonal psychology. However, way back in my early days at SoSuave I made the connection to the psychological principle and what PUAs of the time were advocating as a means to control in seduction. I begin my Iron Rules of Tomassi with Frame because I’ve always felt that everything else in seduction, and life in general, hinges upon the realities we create for ourselves.
The pop-cultural term for it today is ‘mindset’, but I feel the concept of Frame extends beyond what’s generally a retreading of The Power of Positive Thinking that’s being promoted as mindset now. It certainly plays a part in the entirety of holding Frame, but the overall establishment of Frame with a woman, with other men, with your family or with your employer requires an art that extends past just how one thinks of himself.
Iron Rule of Tomassi #1
Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.
The concept of “frame” is yet another ephemeral idea that had need of a term in the very beginnings of the great masculine awakening that’s become the ‘community’. If memory serves I think it may have been Mystery who first picked up on what’s really a very rudimentary and well established psychological principle. In psych terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced. One’s capacity for personal decisions, choices for well-being, emotional investments, religious beliefs and political persuasions (amongst many others) are all influenced and biased by the psychological narrative ‘framework’ under which we are most apt to accept as normalcy.
Rather than go into too much depth here I’ll just encourage you to listen to the podcast and we’ll have an open comments thread about Frame. I think it’s good to review some older principles, not just for the benefit of newly Red Pill aware men, but also because I think it’s good to reconsider these ‘standards’ from a perspective of time and where we are as a Red Pill community today.
Frame, and understanding its importance, is the foundation of dozens of other Red Pill principles and applications. As most of my readers know, I try to avoid specific prescriptive advice. I’m not in the business of telling men how to live their lives with formulaic step-by-step Red Pill templates. The Red Pill isn’t one-size-fits-all and men need to interpret their Red Pill awareness according to their personalities, cultural context, social situations and personal beliefs.
That said, in the coming months I will be offering some more generalized, prescriptive ideas or suggestions as to how I feel men might apply certain Red Pill principles in their lives. The 9 Iron Rules are about as close as I come to prescriptive advice, and while I’m not in the business of making ‘Rational Male Men’, after reviewing them with Niko I think that some generalized advice according to Red Pill awareness might be something in the offing.
So, let me know what you think about this ideas as well as any questions or input you have about Frame once you’ve listened to our talk. It runs about an hour and a half. I’m also toying with the idea of discussing each of the Iron Rules in the coming RPM podcasts. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in listening to.
Establishing and internalizing a strong sense of Frame is one of the most fundamental aspects necessary for a man’s personal success. I’m hesitant to use the word “success” here because it subjectively means so much to men on an individual basis. “Success” is a relative term, but I intentionally began the Iron Rules of Tomassi with Frame because an understanding of this principle applies to so many different arenas in a man’s life.
It’s far too easy to conflate Frame (and the hoped-for success that can come about from it) with a power-of-positive-thinking motivational vibe. Developing, maintaining and internalizing a personal Frame isn’t derived from motivational thinking. That’s not to say it doesn’t help, but Frame can align either on realizable realities informed by Red Pill awareness or it can be founded on deeply ingrained investments in Blue Pill conditioning.
For some men, a Blue Pill mindset, and the conditioning principles that formed it, is the foundation of what they convince themselves is a very strong, very ‘correct’, establishment of Frame. It quite literally is the reality into which they expect a woman will want to be a part of and will want to readily cooperate within. The problem, of course, is that the Frame they’ve developed is informed by Old Rules/Blue Pill goals that mischaracterize the truer natures of women and what their motivations are.
This insistence of women adapting to a Blue Pill Frame is the root of many a Beta man’s downfall when a woman has finally run out of Alpha Fucks options during her Party Years and she’s “turned over a new leaf” in the necessitousness of her Epiphany Phase. Women aging out of the sexual marketplace are only too happy to appear to be a Beta man’s Blue Pill ship that’s finally come in.
Behold, Camelot
I have heard many times, from well-intended Blue Pill men, some variation of the Just Be Yourselfself-righteous expectation that women should want to enter into his Frame. “If a woman can’t accept me for who I am, she’s not the right (quality) woman for me” is the standard refrain. The Frame is strong, the expectation is (seemingly) strong, but the Blue Pill foundation it’s built upon is flawed because it is influenced and conditioned by the Feminine Imperative that always expects him to focus outwardly instead of making himself his own mental point of origin.
If they were honest, these are the guys who will Beta Hamster their Blue Pill ideal of the ‘right’ girl being any one who acknowledges his Blue Pill Frame.
There’s usually some self-evincing rationale that sounds similar when a Blue Pill guy has his Frame challenged by a woman unwilling to play along with his “world”. Whether he comes to this by rejection or simply observing women’s solipsism and duplicity, the reasoning is never about the validity of what his Frame is based on, but rather the disqualification of a woman who contradicts his ego-investments in it (i.e. they become “low quality women” to him).
However, many a White Knight will have what, for all purposes, is a very strong personal Frame. This dedication to a Blue Pill conditioned mindset is central to their ego-investments and it’s a big reason why it’s so difficult to unplug a man from it apart from some trauma that shakes his investing his personality in it. And even then, it’s far easier to disqualify the women who want nothing to do with his Frame than it is to get him to reconsider his fundamental, Blue Pill, old books belief-set.
As I was picking apart the conditions that lead to a man like Steve from last week’s post to becoming what he is, I found it’s important to highlight the determination with which most men will defend their Blue Pill investments and defend the investments of other Blue Pill men with whom it aligns with.
Every random chump within earshot of your conversation about Game, about your ‘changed’ way of seeing inter-gender relations, about your most objective critical observations of how women ‘are’, etc. – understand, that chump waits everyday for an opportunity to “correct” you in as public a way as he’s able to muster. That AFC who’s been fed on a steady diet of noble intent, with ambitions of endearing a woman’s intimacy through his unique form of chivalry; that guy, he’s aching for an opportunity to prove his quality by publicly redressing a “villain” like you for your chauvinism. Even under the conditions of relative anonymity (like the internet), he’ll still cling to that want of proving his uniqueness just on the off chance that a woman might read his rebuff and be fatefully attracted to him.
The more invested a Blue Pill man is in his Frame, the more ardent a White Knight he’s likely to be. The problem in all of this is that his dedication to that Frame, and the expectation that ‘quality women’ will rationally and deductively appreciate it, is in error. Women fundamentally lack the ability to fully realize, much less appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to facilitate their reality. Even the most enlightened, appreciative woman you know still operates in a feminne-centric reality.
It’s easy to spot (and get annoyed with) a White Knight when he comes to the aid of M’Lady on an internet forum, but the defender-of-the-faith behavior also extends to other men, like himself, given to the same Blue Pill Frame and ideals. From a Red Pill perspective we know this is virtue signaling, but it’s also indicative of reaffirming a White Knight’s dedication to a Frame and belief-set that requires a constant reassurance in the face of so much observable contradiction.
Blue Pill Frame / Red Pill Awareness
In the manosphere, there’s a tendency to characterize the Blue Pill mindset with non-assertive “people pleaser” men conditioned from an early age to defer to women and sublimate themselves to the Feminine Imperative. For the most part, that generalization fits, but I think it’s important to understand that it’s entirely possible for otherwise very Alpha men to invest themselves in Blue Pill paradigms and then build Frames up around them.
While I was writing this, reader Softek had a very good take on how Frame can be applicable from both an Alpha and a Beta perspective:
Steve’s relationship is PERFECT.
It is in EXACT ALIGNMENT with his Frame.
His Frame, which he voluntarily maintains, is that of a Beta male. Weak, submissive, and priming him perfectly to be cuckolded.
Similarly, my relationship with my GF is perfect.
It’s in exact alignment with my Frame.
This is how it always works. It’s the only way it CAN work. Your Frame is your reality, period, end of story. I’m sticking to this idea of women having no Frame, because I think it can help men to realize that the man’s Frame – as far as the man is concerned – is the only thing that matters.
I’m going to stop here because this is one of his few assertions I don’t entirely agree with. Women’s innate sense of Frame is informed by their fundamentally solipsistic nature. How that solipsism is expressed can take different forms, but in all instances it places the experience of the woman as being central to her own importance.
The easy example is the Frame grab I outlined in The Talk where a woman (consciously or otherwise) seeks to assert her experience as being the primary Frame or when a man abdicates his Frame to satisfy a woman’s need for long-term security. The other side of this is that even when women are considered ‘powerless’, and they are acted upon (hypoagency), their solipsistic experience is still central to the nature of any Frame because that presumption of powerlessness informs her solipsism and she builds her Frame around it.
Women most definitely have a Frame; it is informed by solipsism and its state is determined by what her need for optimizing Hypergamy demands at any phase of her maturity and how well she is likely to consolidate on it. I understand what Softek is getting at here, but just observe Beta men who are trapped in submissive roles to their dominant wives and you’ll see how he’s acted upon within her Frame.
If your Frame is what you really want it to be, you’re all set. You will simply not put up with BS, so it won’t be necessary to calculate what kind of BS or shit tests are being thrown at you, because you’ll automatically pass them without even being conscious of them.
At a deeper level, there is no your reality vs. her reality, or who has more power in the relationship.
It all goes back to your relationship with yourself. Your Frame. You decide what you accept in your life, and what you don’t accept.
Everyone has been telling me to get out of my relationship. Why? Their Frame is different. Maybe they have more self-respect. Maybe they have more confidence. But ultimately, their Frame is different.
They would not put up with half the BS I’ve put up with. They would’ve been gone a long, long time ago and onto greener pastures.
I’m getting what I deserve. I’m getting the relationship that is PERFECT for me, which means it’s perfectly aligned with my [current, malleable, changeable] Frame.
Frame isn’t set in stone. It’s ours to control, and ours alone, because it belongs to us each individually.
If I want a different relationship, I need to change my Frame. What do I want? What am I willing to accept? What am I not willing to accept?
This is a very important point, to understand that Steve’s relationship is PERFECT….for him. A complete match with his Frame.
If you dig into WHY he’s in this relationship, it’s for that reason and that reason alone: it resonates with his Frame. It resonates with the perception he has of himself, and the rules he’s laid out for himself in his life.
He is doing exactly what an Alpha does: living 100% by his Frame.
It’s just that his Frame is weak and submissive instead of strong and self-serving.
It’s funny when you look at things like this. When you realize you’re already “Alpha” in the sense that you know how to live 100% in your Frame….what’s stopping you from changing your Frame?
You already know what it’s like to hold Frame. Not everyone can stay in an abusive, sexless relationship. It takes a pretty extreme Beta to put up with all that. I am a fucking Beta God. I will put up with more abuse than any man on this planet. I’m the most abject Beta in the world.
(I’m being deliberately hyperbolic here, bear with me)
The most abject Beta is simply the other side of the Apex Alpha coin.
Both stubbornly hold to their Frame. The Beta holds to his Frame to his inevitable cuckolding and destruction; the Alpha holds to his Frame to his self-gratification regardless of who tries to shame him or bring him down.
We need to stop thinking “Beta Bad” and “Alpha Good” and realize that Frame is subjective.
I may not agree with some of this, and considering Softek’s dependence on maintaining his relationship it’s easy to see why he feels this way, however, he does touch upon some foundational aspects of Frame. Yes, women get the men they deserve, or in this case, women enter into relations with the men who align with what they’ve created.
As I mention in Frame, yours should be a world women will want to enter or you will be entering her Frame. That said beware the motives of the woman who would eagerly embrace a Beta’s Frame. Those motives are rooted in necessity and not genuine desire. Just ask Saira Khan.
Understanding that a solid sense of Frame – literally creating a reality in which you live and expect others to interact within – is central to success is not a difficult concept to grasp for most men. Whether or not they feel an ownership of that Frame, or a motive to employ it, is what defines men’s understanding of it. And this discomfort men have in insisting upon a solid, active, Alpha Frame is precisely what the Feminine Imperative has sought to condition into men for going on five generations now.
Recently I’ve been commenting on yet another article of feminist triumphalism, glorying in the statistics that women are far happier after a divorce. This is standard feminist boilerplate, but the bloody handed cruelty of articles like this always ignore that the “men” they denigrate are the direct results of a generational conditioning that leads men to swallow Blue Pill idealism and abdicate Frame in the name of a nebulous egalitarian equalism.
As 39% more menput a gun in their mouths after a divorce, women will bemoan a generation of men the Feminine Imperative created to abdicate their Frame. So yes, when it comes to men becoming despondent and suicidal after having their Blue Pill idealistic ego-investments destroyed by the same imperative that invested it in them, yes, “Beta Bad” and “Alpha Good”.
I had an interesting conversation this week with my good friend Ray and a couple of my designers, Sadie and Sam (names changed to protect the innocent). Just a little background first; Sadie is the Japanese woman I mention in Mental Point of Origin. She’s been divorced once and her relationship history is one punctuated by her involvement with Beta men.
She’s is the definition of the opportunistic concept of female love, but her frustration comes from never having been able to consolidate on an optimized Hypergamy – she simply doesn’t have attractiveness or feminine pleasantry to generate the Alpha interest that would satisfy her. Thus, she attracts Beta orbiters looking for some low hanging fruit, and force-fits them into a contextual Alpha frame. In other words, she opportunistically entertains the Betas with provisioning potential and hopes they’ll man up into dominant Alphas. Thus far she’s been disappointed.
Sam is a gay man in his early 30s who makes a good living afforded by not having children and possessing a high calibre technical skill set. He’s got the outgoing, “look at me, I’m special because I’m gay” exuberance I expect from gay men, but he’s not flamboyant and can still be professional when he has to be. He’s been “dating” a new guy for a while now and has moved this guy into his home recently. He took part in our conversation because the issues of sharing resources, money and picking up half the rent (in his case mortgage) in a relationship came up.
Ray has been one of my best friends for over 15 years now and he’s the guy I mention in Good Girls Do. He’s worked for me directly or indirectly for most of that time and he’s notorious for starting conversations like this when we have downtime. He’s a firestarter, it’s what I like about him, and among the three he’s the only one who knows my online reputation. Ray is Red Pill aware so he knows how to prompt a controversial conversation with me when we’re in mixed company.
Ray: “RT, hypothetical question…”
RT: “Do I have to?”
Ray: “Let’s say you move your girlfriend in with you…”
RT: “Let’s say I don’t and I would never do that. End of hypothetical.”
Ray: “No, I know, but, say you did, and let’s say your rent is $1,000 a month. Would you tell your girlfriend ‘Hey the rent is $1,000 a month how about you pay $300 and I’ll pay $700 or would you say 50/50?”
RT: “No. I’d pay it all myself. I’d also be sure that only my name was on the lease.”
Sadie:”What? Why, that’s silly?”
Ray: “You wouldn’t expect any contribution?”
RT: “No. I wouldn’t turn it down if she took it upon herself to contribute, but I wouldn’t expect it from a girl I (foolishly) brought into my living arrangement.”
Sadie: “You wouldn’t expect her to pay half?”
RT: “No. If I can’t provide my own $1,000 rent or food, or to keep the lights on, I have no business bringing a woman into that arrangement. If I have more than enough for myself I don’t need her paying. Besides, if she’s that into living with me, she’ll want to contribute in other ways and I wont have to ask.”
Sam: “You don’t think it should be an equal split? Maybe that’s a man and a woman thing…”
RT: “Yes and no. I’m sure between you and your boyfriend there’s a more dominant personality right?”
Sam: “Yeah, me.”
RT: “And you probably make more money too. So there’s really no ‘equality’ when it comes down to it.”
Sadie: “I expect my boyfriend to pay half the rent.”
RT: “Of course you do, because women think in terms of equality when it works to their advantage. What if your ‘boyfriend’ could pay for all the rent, utilities and most of everything else? Would you still try to pay half?”
Sadie: “Yes of course.”
RT: “What if he only paid just half and you knew it was a better deal for him?
Sadie: (tentative) “Yes,…”
RT: “I doubt that, but what you’re saying is that you’d limit improving your way of life to maintain a belief in equality.”
Sadie: “All the guy’s I’ve lived with have been mooches.”
RT: “Which explains why you’re not living with them any more. It goes both ways, women don’t respect men they need to support. All this stuff about equality in relationships is nonsense.If your boyfriend could easily make rent while you struggled to come up with it you’d resent him for it. There is no equal division.”
Sam: “I guess I see what you’re saying, but the expectation is still the same even for me and [boyfriend].
RT: “There is no equality in a relationship, but there can be complementarity where either person’s benefits can offset the needs of the other.”
Ray: “So you and Mrs. T aren’t 50/50?”
RT: “Ray, I make about 4 times the money that she does, how is there ever going to be anything like equality with that kind of balance?”
Ray: “But what about chores and shit?”
RT: “I take care of the outside of the house, she takes care of the inside. I do the smelly dirty jobs, she keeps the fresh cleaning ones, it’s not rocket science.”
Sam: “Sounds like you just want to stay in the power position.”
RT: “Yes, but it’s only a power play if you’re exploiting your partner. Women like to say they want an equal partner, but they don’t, do they Sadie? They want someone to respect and look up to. So when that comes down to numbers, to money, what’s really holding you together? Love? Mutual interests? (at Sam) Right now you can’t help but be the more dominant one in your relationship. So do you stop being so just to balance things? Do you expect [boyfriend] to pick up the slack more?
In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.
This principle isn’t so much about ‘power’ as it is about control. This might sound like semantics, but it makes a difference. It’s very easy to slip into binary arguments and think that what I mean by the cardinal rule of relationships is that one participant must absolutely rule over the other – a domineering dominant to a doormat submissive. Control in a healthy relationship passes back and forth as desire and need dictate for each partner. In an unhealthy relationship you have an unbalanced manipulation of this control by a partner. Although control is never in complete balance, it becomes manipulation when one partner, in essence blackmails, the other with what would otherwise be a reinforcer for the manipulated under a healthy circumstance. This happens for a plethora different reasons, but the condition comes about by two ways – the submissive participant becomes conditioned to allow the manipulation to occur and/or the dominate initiates the manipulation. In either case the rule still holds true – the one who needs the other the least has the most control. Nowhere is this more evident than in interpersonal relationships.
When I was writing this post many years ago I hadn’t fully considered how this rule interacts with, and contradicts, many of the tenets of egalitarian equalism. The idealistic state of that equalism is one in which two co-equal, yet independent people come together in a perfect union of balance. In theory that balance should account for resources, emotional investment, family considerations, as well as intellectual and social status aspects of either partner.
These considerations alone should be enough to illustrate equalitarianism as the manipulative farce it is, however, all we really need to do is take into account the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. It’s very easy to be accused of being controlling when you embrace the truth of this rule – and particularly so when the reigning social undercurrent is one in which everyone ought to be co-equal rational actors.
I expected to have that leveled at me in this conversation, but it’s important to bear in mind the real nature of power. By my own definition, power is the degree of control we exercise over the direction of our own lives. As I mentioned, I don’t mind being the more powerful partner in terms of resources in my marriage because I accept that stupid notions of maintaining anything like “equality” is simply infeasible. I know more than a few men who’ve sold their lives’ potential away in the belief that they should lessen themselves in order to support a more balanced, equalist ideal. Ultimately their relationships, marriages and families suffer because they never own that potential – just the idea of owning it is a source of guilt and shame.
For all of the bleating about more equitability being needed between men and women. the fundamental truth is that it’s neither a realistic nor workable state. I’ve used money for my illustration here, but this applies to many other facets of an intersexual relationship. From an equalist perspective this sounds a lot like a want for creating a condition of dependency, but in truth it is an unachievable state of egalitarianism that creates a never-satisfied state of dependency.
Her World or Yours?
If you go back and look at the video from Bachelor Nation you can see the dichotomy that presumptions of “equality” sows in western(izing) women today. Within the first 6 minutes of the video we see the internal contradictions inherent in women. There is a want for an idealized equal pairing, but yet a desire for a man to be a Man. The documentary finds the root of this dichotomy in modern resource imbalances between the sexes, and makes the predictable appeal to men not living up to their burden of performance. The male shame comes in contrasting women’s taking on what should be men’s performance burdens – the male obligation to which ironically flies in the face of anything like true egalitarian equalism.
Stay-at-home dads, house husbands, and anything relatable will always have a stigma attached to them in spite of any weak attempts to make them socially acceptable. That stigma is founded in a limbic-level understanding of men’s burden of performance; to be a Man is not just to produce sustainable resources, but to provide a surplus of those resources.
I recently read a poll sponsored by Forbes magazine that listed men’s top goals in life and for the first time in that poll’s history “a good physique” outranked all personal and financial ambitions for top executives. The predictable shame then followed that men aren’t “Manning Up” any more, and they’ve become vain, self-absorbed narcissists for a new focus on what image they present.
The obvious Red Pill conclusion is of course a realignment with the prevailing social perceptions (courtesy of the Feminine Imperative I might add) that women are out-earning men financially and educationally; thus the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy takes precedent. If America’s top execs are heeding the message of Open Hypergamy, why bother establishing yourself financially, academically, ambition-wise or otherwise?
The problem with this equation is evident in the Bachelor Nation video. I can understand the sentiments of MGTOW; if the opinions expressed by the quality of woman represented in the video are any indicator of a female zeitgeist it makes the idea of abandoning the Game altogether that much more appealing.
That said, and I’m going to dare to get prescriptive here, I believe that establishing yourself as an independent Man should be your top priority. I have no doubt that that sentiment will get convoluted with feminism’s Strong Independent Woman® meme, but lets clarify something first – the ideal that men ought to be strong and independent has always been the precursor to his quality as a man. Independence, self-sufficiency and determined ambitions have always been the hallmarks of a man comfortable with his burden of performance. Only in women is independence a novelty.
Yet now, in men, this independence is not just a novelty, but it’s been distorted into being an obsessive-compulsive sign of a man’s imagined insecurities. The very strength and independence men have always been expected to embody is the domain of women, while any hope for it from men is a sign of a fragile ego.
Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.
I firmly believe Alpha is a mindset. That mindset can get the poorest son-of-a-bitch laid with the right application, tact and circumstance. That’s a tough pill to swallow when you work your ass off in the belief that your affluence and status should be the metric Alpha is judged by and women respond to. That’s also not to say affluence and status won’t get you laid by their own merit, it’s just the context in which that happens that makes the difference. There are many men who’ve found their retroactive cuckolding after having based their personal successes on the presumption that those successes should be the basis of his quality to women.
The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we’re painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame. What concerns us in terms of inter-gender relations however is the way in which frame sets the environment, the ambience, and the ‘reality’ in which we relate with both the woman we sarge at a bar and the relationship with the woman we’ve lived with for 20 years. One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is NOT power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ‘reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender’s internalized concept of frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you’re operating in hers. Also understand that the balance of frame often shifts. Frame is fluid and will find its own level when a deficit or a surplus of will is applied to change it. The forces that influence that lack or boost of will is irrelevant – just know that the conditions of an operative framework will shift because of them.
We can go back and debate the Crisis of Motiveonce again – who do you really do it for? – but in terms of Frame, even if you subscribe to a MGTOW perspective, it’s important for a Man to have a world into which a woman might enter. Not for her sake, but for a Man’s edification.
Establish your world; you shall make your mission, not your woman your priority. Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.
