independence

The Isolationists

isolation

Pandora at Sosuave has a conundrum for us to solve today:

It seems there are two contradictory schools of thought on dating:

1.) You hear from one side of the argument to pursue your interests in life and women will come to you. This is what the MGTOW movement espouses. Im not sure if men can even be totally indifferent to the power of pussy. But some believe the total indifference is the key to a fulfilling love life. I have found that if you are indifferent then you will get nothing and be celibate. This doesn’t sound very good.

2.) The other argument is that you should not be indifferent at all. This school of thought says that dating is purely a numbers game. Its similar to sales. The more women you meet the higher the likely hood of one of these women liking you. The more approaches you do the more lays you get. Simple statistics. This school of thought is the opposite of indifference. This is the way i personally go about dating and i have had mediocre results. This is represented by the NEXTING mentality.

Not sure which one to choose or which one is correct. I do know that i am tired of being a slave to vagina. I do OK but it takes a ton of work to get one mediocre lay. Its not good for your self esteem either. Being rejected or toyed with mentally is unhealthy for your psyche. Most of my friends are also slaves to getting laid. Roosh V made a post about how ” His Boner is his master”.

So is it ” Pursue your interests in life and women will take care of themselves” vs ” Go out and do the field work”..which one will lead to a more fulfilling life?

Before we get down to nuts and bolts here let me address this last part first. There is no such thing as a “fulfilled” life. God forbid you reach fulfillment in life. The human state is one of a perpetuated discontent, and so long as that discontent is constructively pursued, this is a good thing. When anyone presents you with a plan or an abstract for life fulfillment, understand that they are selling you something based on the very human want for a better life.

That said, the rest of the question makes for some interesting debate. I often read a common thread in the manosphere about how men should develop some mental disposition of “outcome independence.” I understand the sentiment and why it would be beneficial for any guy to simply shrug his shoulders and say “either way, yes, no, I’m good with it”, but what this really boils down to is another indirect Buffer against real rejection.

I’ve read some ‘life coaches’ rattle off something similar. The idea is that if you put yourself out there, just by doing so, a woman will appreciate the inherent risk of rejection in your approach and at least give you merit points for trying when she does reject you. It’s a flawed idea because it presumes the women you’d approach would have any capacity to recognize that risk, much less reward the effort. It presumes that women would have that rational insight in the moment and think “well, he must have confidence for just trying to hit on me” and add that to some subconscious list of pros and cons for accepting or rejecting him.

And of course when it comes to light that the majority of women don’t have any concept of the approach-risk appreciation they’re supposed to have, that’s when a guy is told he’s hitting on the wrong kind of woman – they’re not the “quality” women they should be risking themselves with.

So the next deductive step becomes one of insulating oneself against that rejection preemptively. Thus, outcome independence becomes not just a mindset, but also a (misguided) Game strategy. Therein lies the conflict; is outcome independence who you are or is it a strategy disconnected from yourself which you rely on to Buffer rejection?

I touched on this in Vulnerability:

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

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

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

In a larger scope, there is no real outcome independence. Even making the effort to adopt that IDGAF mindset is itself an investment in an outcome. If you were truly indifferent to the outcome of a situation there would be no discussion about it.

Being truly indifferent to whether or not a woman accepts or rejects you implies a disinterest in that woman’s interests in you. There are certainly ways to insulate oneself against a negative outcome, but outcome independence is not Game itself. You will learn more from your failures than from your successes.

With that in mind Pandora raises some interesting propositions here:

1.) You hear from one side of the argument to pursue your interests in life and women will come to you. This is what the MGTOW movement espouses. I’m not sure if men can even be totally indifferent to the power of pussy. But some believe the total indifference is the key to a fulfilling love life. I have found that if you are indifferent then you will get nothing and be celibate. This doesn’t sound very good.

I think for the most part this want for indifference gets pushed to extremes. As I’ve stated many times, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it. However, that doesn’t mean a complete dissociation from women is healthy. For a woman to be a complement to your life you’ll need interact with, and understand the nature of, women.

Roissy summed this position up well in the 16 Commandments of Poon:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

What this commandment doesn’t presuppose is that there isn’t a woman in a man’s life to be superseded by his mission. It’s not all mission, no woman. The MGTOW branch of the manosphere is made up of a diverse set of guys. From my experience not all MGTOWs are interested in complete indifference to women; most would be happy to have women be interested in them enough to make an effort to associate themselves with them, they just don’t see the point in making a direct effort to make those connections. Others simply resign themselves to isolation and meeting their physical needs with porn or escorts while they ‘enjoy’ life and pursue their own interests absent of women.

There is an inherent problem in this latter MGTOW preference, they build a fortress around themselves:

Law 18: Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself— Isolation is Dangerous
The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere— everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from-it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

You cannot entirely remove yourself from the Game. You can cede the governance of your participation in intersexual dynamics to whatever or whomever you think may control it, but you cannot recuse yourself from its influences. This is a foundational truth I think some MRAs and the more isolationist MGTOWs believe they can in some way buffer for themselves. They believe that not playing the Game is a preferable situation to “dealing” with the means and efforts necessary to “succeed” with women.

The natural progression then becomes one of self-affirmation in the belief that they’re not ‘dealing’ with women, and any guy who is is little more than a slave doing the bidding of women by even his interest in applying an effort to understand and interact with them. Even the most marginal effort becomes ‘pussy begging’.

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

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

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

The problem with the ‘pussy begging’ rationale becomes one of defining what degree of interest a man ought to have with women. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; the women who accommodate this level of (dis)interest become ‘quality women’ while those who don’t align with that impression serve as convenient proof of their isolationist belief. The latent rationale becomes one of sour grapes, disdain the things you can’t have while making necessity a virtue. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.The logic then becomes circular.

The opposite extreme, and one intersexual isolationists like to promote, is that it’s all a numbers game with regards to any “success” with women. If you throw enough spaghetti against the wall something will stick. Isolationists would have us believe that even what sticks is rarely worth the effort (sour grapes), but if you play the game often enough what you get is due more to persistence than any real accuracy of applied Game.

So is it ” Pursue your interests in life and women will take care of themselves” vs ” Go out and do the field work”..which one will lead to a more fulfilling life?

I’d say a measured balance of both. I don’t believe for a moment that any man is functionally indifferent to the influence of women. Men are the True Romantics; we want our idealistic impression of love to be impossibly reciprocated. We look for ways to buffer the frustration of trying to make our concept of love and female acceptance fit women’s when we don’t understand that each sex adheres to separate ideals. Outcome independence, isolationism, are ways some men think they can enforce our ideal as the standard for women.

With the Feminine Imperative in social ascendance women enforce a Hypergamous ideal that imbalances intergender dynamics, but that doesn’t mean men are powerless to effect their own interests and draw women into men’s Frame. The solution isn’t one of ‘taking all your toys and going home’ to wait for women to come around to appreciate men. It’s going to take a learned interaction.

The real pussy begging comes from demanding a woman to come over to your perspective unbidden and unmerited. Make your mission not your woman your imperative, but in that mission be the Man a woman will want to be associated with. I always stress the importance of Frame control – it’s the first Iron Rule of Tomassi – but this presupposes you have command of that frame to begin with. She enters your reality, you don’t enter hers, but you must have a reality a woman wants to enter into before you can maintain it.

The Brand of Independence

independence

The archetype of the Strong Independent Woman® has been culturally reinforced over the last half century in virtually every imaginable media. Whether it’s Disney’s capable Princesses ready to save themselves from certain doom – as well as their quirky, hapless but handsome male heroes – or the now clichéd ‘tough bitch’ of action movies and video game protagonists who measures herself by how well she can kick ass and /or swear as the culturally contextual equal of “any man”. Her template-crafted character is strong, confident, measuredly aggressive, decisive (but usually only when shit gets serious so as to prove to the audience she’s ‘digging deep within herself to discover her yet unrealized resolve), judicious, loving to those loyal or dependent on her (immediate family, children and female friends), capable of solving problems with little more than the feminine intuition men magically lack – but above all, she’s independent.

As this cultural archetype is broadcast to society at large, the want then is to find parallels of this Strong Independent Woman® in the ‘real’ world. The media character is only marginally believable now thanks to endless revisions and replications, so we look for the examples of independent women equalling and exceeding the, paltry-by-comparison, achievements of the unenlightened ignorance of their male “oppressors.” High ranking company CEOs are usually the first rock star independent women to nominally shine (often undeservedly) in such a role, but then, by order of degrees, we can move down the economic social strata and cherry-pick or conveniently create the match of any mediocre man. As most men are, or have been conditioned Betas it’s not too difficult.

It really is the End of Men you see. You’re no longer necessary because, well now, there is nothing men can collectively and uniformly do that women cannot find some individual example of matching and / or exceeding. Women don’t need men anymore, they’re independent.

The Branding

If there’s one thing I know, it’s branding. The Strong Independent Woman® caricature has generously earned it’s registered trademark. I sometimes use that ® to emphasize a particularly long-evolved meme; social conventions so embedded into our cultural fabric that they literally have become their own brand. The Strong Independent Woman® is actually one the best examples of this branding. However, to really understand the gravity of so long a cultural branding, you must go to the root of how the brand of the independent woman was originally intended to evolve by the 2nd wave cultural feminists who spawned it. In a way it’s succeeded far better than any feminist of the period really had the foresight to expect.

An Independent Woman was to be independent of men.

While a lot of feel-good aphorisms like confidence, determination, integrity, and the like became associated with this desire for independence, make no mistake, the original long-term feminist goal of fostering that independence in women was to break them off into individuated, autonomous entities from men. That individuation needed to be as positive and attractive to women as possible, so a social pairing of that independence from men, with a sense of strength and respectability, had to be nurtured over time.

Since the beginnings of the sexual revolution, women were acculturated to believe they could ‘have it all’, career, family, a husband (of her optimal hypergamous choosing) and, if she were influential enough, leave some indelible mark on society to be remembered by for posterity. To achieve this she’d need to be an autonomous agent, strong, and above all independent of men. Women would embody and perfect the maverick individualism that men seemed to enjoy throughout history. If she couldn’t manifest ‘having it all’ then she was still, by male force or by personal choice, not independent enough to realize it. Of course, the irony of all this can be found in the marriages of virtually every ‘high profile’ feminist luminary of the time (all the way up to our current time) to the very powerful and influential types of men their stated independence was to emancipate all women from in order to truly be independent.

The Case Against Male Self-Esteem

Matt Forney’s lightning rod post, The Case Against Female Self-Esteem drew a frenzy of internet hate, but at the core of that post was a question that Strong Independent Women® and their male identifiers don’t like be confronted with; do they truly want independence from men? Do the men they want to be independent from even exist, or are they conveniently useful archetypes; vaudevillian chauvinist cartoons from the 50’s, planted in their heads, courtesy of the feminine imperative?

While I can’t endorse a message that would diminish anyone’s self-esteem, male or female, Matt’s post, even so much as suggesting the idea of limiting female self-esteem, uncomfortably turns a cultural mirror back on over 50 years feminist and feminized social engineering. For over the past 50 years the case against male self-esteem, with the latent purpose of emancipating women from dependence on men, began in earnest — not with some anger inducing blog post, but as a progressive social engineering that would run the course of decades to effectively erase men’s inconvenient masculine identity, or even memory of what that identity ever meant to men. The case against male self-esteem has been the social undercurrent of popular culture since the early 1960’s.

I think it’s important for red pill men to internalize the popular idea of feminine independence. The true message that the Strong Independent Woman® brand embodies is independence from you, a man.

Its latent purpose isn’t the actual empowerment of women, or efforts to bolster self-esteem, strength (for whatever loose definition seems convenient), confidence or any other esoteric quality that might flatter a feminine ego. Its purpose isn’t to foster financial or economic independence (as evidenced by ever evolving fem-centric laws, educational and financial handicaps), or religious social parity, or even efforts to achieve its vaunted social equalism between the sexes. What feminine independence truly means is removing the man – independence from men. Feminine independence’s idealized state is one where women are autonomous, self-contained, self-sufficient and self-perpetuating single-gender entities.

If that revelation seems aggrandized and over the top, it should. It’s extreme, because the purpose itself is extreme. When you consider that the sexes have coexisted in relative gender complementarity, to produce our very proliferate species, for a hundred thousand years, the idea and implementation of separating the sexes into independent and solitary entities is extreme. Obviously effecting this independence is an impossibility for a race of social animals like human beings. We’ve relied on cooperative efforts since our tribal beginnings and the species-beneficial psychological hardwiring of that cooperation is one trait that made us so successful in adapting to changing, dangerous, environments.

For most manosphere readers (especially MRAs) I don’t think I need to illustrate the many manifest ways that women are dependent upon the men; if not men’s generated resources and provisioning, then certainly their parental investment, companionship, emotional and sexual interest. We’re better together than we’ve ever been apart – even when the ugly mechanics of hypergamy, or male aggression, or any number of negatively perceived gender dynamics prove useful survival traits for us, there is no true independence between the sexes. There is interdependence.

This is what equalism makes a mockery of. In its striving for a homogenous goal-state of androgynous gender-parity it fails to account for where the species-success that the complementarity of the past 30,000 years has brought us. From a heroic male perspective we generally accept that no man is an island, but feminism and equalism disagree – a Strong Independent Woman® is an island,..or she will be just as soon as a man gives her her due to become so.