life coaches

She’s Not Yours

My colleague and friend, Rian Stone, took it upon himself to breakdown the brilliant simplicity of a common Manosphere idiom:

She was never yours, it was just your turn.

This phrase has been around since the earliest days of the Pickup Artists’ (PUA) online communities. And like many of the old wisdoms of that time the reasoning for it gets distorted by the various factions of what’s become the Manosphere today. In 2020 the more extreme end of MGTOW communities – Black Pill, Doomers, and VolCels – are what most mainstream audiences conflate with Red Pill. What they, along with Success Porn niche marketers, have done is pick and pull the parts of Red Pill praxeology that resonates with their personal beliefs and circumstances and demonize what doesn’t. Both factions have an interest in misconstruing what the Red Pill has taken 20 years to develop. It doesn’t really serve the ends of either perspective to spend too much time thinking about a contentious Red Pill principle when misrepresenting it is more valuable in confirming their belief sets – especially when doing so generates views, subs and ad revenue.

To the Doomer mindset She’s not yours… is confirmation of women’s duplicitous, fickle or evil nature. That’s not to say the nihilistic perspective doesn’t approach women’s nature from an objective Red Pill understanding, it just means they focus on surrendering to it and giving up on women. This confirmation bias also gets mixed up in the Doomer understanding of Hypergamy. Hypergamy resonates with them because it confirms the idea that all women will dump a guy at the first sign of his losing an Alpha Frame veneer; an act which he must constantly maintain in a world of endless options and online attention for women. Slip up once too often and at the first opportunity she’s gone. It’s the fallacy of Hypergamy as a straight jacket, and She’s not yours… justifies the defeatism. You will never find a lasting contentment with a woman because she holds first right of refusal in any intimate relationship (i.e. Briffault’s Law). Ergo, sooner or later your turn will be over and all the effort, time and emotion you invested in her will be for nothing (i.e. Sunk Cost, Relational Equity). In fact, it may be worse than nothing when you consider the opportunity cost of having bothered with trying to make her yours in the first place. While the juice might taste really good in the short term, it’s never really worth the squeeze in the long term. This conclusion is what really upsets the Success gurus because it’s a hard logic to refute – at least from their own Man Up! perspective.

That’s the Doom Pill interpretation. It’s based on reflexive, immutable binary extremes – the default reaction of this generation – because it confirms a hopelessness that defines them. Ironically, it was the very PUAs of the 2000s they despise so much who originally coined the phrase. Back then it served as a reminder to guys to never get too attached to one particular woman while dating several women concurrently. It was almost a mantra to ward off ONEitis because they were spinning plates and “catching feelings” for one girl tended to end up destroying them. It was a maxim that worked best as a preventive medicine since most practitioners of Game saw it as a means to achieve the monogamy their Blue Pill social conditioning convinced them was possible. Average men build lives around serial monogamy; it’s always been the surest way to solve the average man’s reproductive problem. So when you open them up to an abundance of sexual/intimate potential via Game they tend to use it to get their Dream Girl and ignore what the Red Pill says about women’s nature.

In today’s ‘sphere, She was never yours, it was just your turn is a salve for guys who’ve already invested in a woman and she dumped or divorced them. The presumption is that despite all their best Blue Pill qualifications or their Game savvy, Hypergamy gets the best of all women and she’ll move on to the bigger and better deal. This perspective presupposes a stable monogamy, not spinning plates, is the goal-state for every guy. Notice the maxim here is cast in the past tense. She was never yours,…At some stage a man believes she is his (or should be) and she no longer is now. Thus, She was never yours becomes a post-facto rationalization to the guy who’s probably feeling gutted by his breakup. The real issue is the guy’s want for a permanent solution to his desire for intimacy. We see this all the time among simps who spend small fortunes (monthly) to achieve some kind of virtual intimacy with his favorite OnlyFans cam-girl. In this case, She was never yours is reconfirmed for simps over and over as they move from one cam-girl obsession to the next.

For the Success Porn guru, all this is grist for the mill. On one hand, men struggling with confidence (see social skills), achieving intimacy/sex and finding purpose are their bread and butter. On the other hand, what they’re usually selling is the Blue Pill ideal of a sustainable contentment for otherwise discontent men. That contentment includes the hope that a permanent, loving and monogamous relationship with one woman is not only possible, but is also a sign of his authentic manhood. When Dr. Phil sells this hope we write him off as a naive Pollyanna and old order thinker. However, this same Blue Pill hope is repackaged and sold online as a return to masculine virtue by today’s Life Coaches in the Hustle Economy. The permanence of your contentment amounts to your ability to qualify for it and sustain it with their (usually repackaged) concept of masculine virtue. Any discontent on the part of the client is reflective of his own lack of determination or hard work to achieve it. 80’s Televangelists and 90’s Multi-level Marketing hustlers used similar graft. It’s really a monetized version of the philosophy of personal responsibility — which has always been a darling of traditional conservatism and now a staple of personal development. Any failure of the concept is always attributable to the man’s deficient effort and investment, which can then be attached to his character. This isn’t to say that all personal development guys are unscrupulous hustlers, just that the true responsibility of education rests with the student.

She’s not yours, it was just your turn, and other unignorable truths that the Red Pill makes men aware of, defeats the self-reinforcing circular logic of the personal responsibility hustle. It forces the hustler to admit that something outside men’s control might have an effect on a their lives. Rather than accept this and work within the framework, the response is more of the same; deny the phenomenon exists, or presume that even acknowledging it is indicative of a defeatist mentality – thus, a shirking of personal responsibility which completes the circular logic.

This is the origin of the “Truthful Anger” fallacy. Around 2015 the instructors working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD) started getting a lot of questions about the material in The Rational Male from students attending RSD seminars. At some point they had to address these questions, but to do so would mean acknowledging the validity of the concepts in my book – concepts that challenged the positivity grift they were rapidly converting over to during this time. The solution was to acknowledge the truth in my work, but tacitly disqualify it by presuming it came from a place of anger. They then cautioned against internalizing it at the risk of becoming angry or bitter against women — both presumptions commonly used by mainstream gynocentric norms. It was misconstrued as “truthful anger”; poignantly true, but best not to dwell on it if a guy wants to be happy. In other words, would you rather be happy or would you rather be right? Happiness is always easier to sell than truth.

Now that we understand the opposing sides of the impermanence of women debate, we also have to consider the Lie of Individuation that usually gets thrown into the mix to dismiss the She’s not yours maxim. The Individuation Fallacy is most easily understood as:

“People are all individually special cases; each a unique product of their environments and experiences, and are far too individually complex to understand via generalizations according to sex, etc.”

The individual supersedes any commonalities attributable to biology or evolution, and usually focuses solely on social constructionism and personal circumstance as a basis for motivating behavior, developing personality and influencing others accordingly. The supremacy of the individual is the natural extension of an underlying belief in The Blank Slate. When you start from a belief that we’re all functional equals everyone is an angel or a devil according to the choices they made. But depending on the person’s circumstances they can be forgiven or damned for the consequences of those choices according to how we interpret their character as individuals. This is how we get rationales like, not all women are like that and “People are too complex to categorize” to dismiss the unignorable commonalities we see in men and women in the information age. No one likes to think they aren’t in some way unique as much as they don’t like to think determinism has influenced (in some way) what they think makes them unique. And since I’m sure you’ve made this connection already, yes, the Individuation Fallacy dovetails nicely into a doctrine of personal responsibility.

When we read some example of a woman opting out of a relationship (or sex) with one guy to take up with another, the reflexive response is to individualize her behavior according to her individualized circumstances. She’s damaged, she’s got Daddy Issues, she’s insecure because you weren’t Man Enough, etc. — any and every consideration that points away from categorizing her actions as commonalities in women’s innate nature are the reflexive thought process. She’s not yours, it was just your turn defines her actions in a concrete visceral understanding of women’s nature that conflicts with the Blank Slate‘s individualism. In this case the maxim is a description, not a prescription.

Men have an evolved need to know paternity. Unhindered by social strictures or women’s Hypergamous filtering men would opt for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality as our innate and preferred mating strategy. I’ve written a lot about this so I wont belabor it here, but a majority of men, over the course of history, will never be able to actualize this strategy. Ergo, socially enforced monogamy became the best mating strategy compromise for men as modified by the selection pressures of women’s mating strategies. The risk in this compromise is the assurance of paternity. If a man is going to compromise mating opportunities with many women to parentally invest in one woman, the deal must come with one condition: the child must be his genetic stock or the compromise invalidates his existence (evolutionarily speaking). To ensure this men evolved a mental firmware that predisposes us to jealousy, mate guarding and desire to possess a woman. This is why we develop a A Sense of Ownership with our girlfriends, wives and children. The dynamics of Kin Selection and Kin Altruism all find their root in men’s imperative to ascertain their paternity and protect their genetic legacy.

The need to control women’s sexuality is nothing less than men’s evolutionary compulsion to ensure that their compromise in parental investment is not for nothing. In a social order where masculine responsibility to wife and children was balanced with a commensurate masculine authority to enforce those responsibilities, men could nominally control the reproductive process. Part of that process included possessing a woman. This was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative.

Every man loves a slut, he just wants her to be his slut.

In today’s gynocentric social order the thought of owning a woman is an affront to the female-primary sensibilities that stem from individuation. Feminism and gynocentrism have conditioned generations of women to believe they are autonomous ‘things‘ with no need for anything outside themselves – least of all men – to find true contentment. They are Strong Independent® women who believe their fulfillment comes from self-ownership. Eschewing a man’s surname in marriage, or even marriage at all, is a sign of independence and stiff middle finger to the idea of passive femininity or notions of ever submitting to a man’s authority. The evolved complementarity between men and women is replaced with the social contrivance of an idealized egalitarianism. Husband and wife is replaced with “Equal Partners“.

For women, the problem with this equalist fantasy is biology and evolved impulse are excused, if not encouraged, in a social order that prioritizes women’s mating strategies. Literally anything goes when the worst consequences of women’s Hypergamy can (enthusiastically) always be attributed to men’s inability to accept them as individuals.

The problem for men is that we still have an innate want to possess a woman to ensure our paternity and invest in our genetic legacies. As mentioned, this desire for permanency with one woman was both an evolutionary imperative and a social imperative in a patriarchal social order. In a gynocentric social order the evolutionary imperative to possess a woman still remains, but the social imperative says…

She was, is, will, never be yours, it was just your turn.

And that is why this maxim rubs so many men the wrong way.

Masculine by Design Interview

If you’re a regular reader here you probably know that I’ll be giving two talks in Orlando, Florida this week at the 21 Convention with my fellow Red Pill alumni Christian McQueen, Goldmund, Tanner Guzy and so many more guys from the manosphere. I do have plans to do some quick hit Periscope feeds to and at the event so check my Twitter for updates.

Furthermore, in the interests of fairness and objectivity, I will be doing a no-punches-pulled review of the convention is a similar fashion to the one I did for the Man in Demand Conference I did in Vegas two years ago. As I’ve related in a few prior posts and some live interviews, I was reluctant to accept a speaking spot for the 21 Convention because I felt that it had a reputation for toeing the Purple Pill line for much of its years of existence. I’m happy to say that, with a few exceptions’ the lineup this year is far more ‘red’ than this conference has ever been.

There’s a lot more to the reasons why Anthony Johnson, the convention founder and organizer, has made this shift. Primarily it’s been his experience with what any guy with a peripheral Red Pill Lens would’ve seen as a high-functioning BPD woman who was his unofficial wife. If you want more information on this experience you can see his seminar talk about exactly this here.

As a result of this, and consequently digging into my books and blog material, his true unplugging has given him a new Red Pill awareness. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve had a fairly regular correspondence with Anthony about his unplugging and have counseled him through some of my own material. This really prompted a new perspective for him and this is manifesting itself in his drawing more Red Pill speakers to this convention than I think have ever been assembled in one place.

That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t pass this whole conference through the same level of scrutiny that I gave the Man in Demand conference. So, I’ll be doing some quick hit updates throughout this and next week’s blog posts and highlight the best and not-so-best parts of the convention as things transpire, and then summing things up at the end of it all. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for updates, high-lights and some Periscope videos too. The hashtag for the convention is #21Con.

In the meantime,…

I took some time away from my talk preparations to do an interview with Craig James from Masculine By Design to discuss the main aspects of my third book Positive Masculinity as well as some general Red Pill discussion. Craig is starting to make a name for himself as a manosphere podcaster now, filling the unfortunate vacuum left by the departure of Mark Baxter from his own show. Craig primarily focuses on married Red Pill issues and parenting. I probably don’t align perfectly with his perspective on a few things, but on whole he’s got a solid Red Pill blog and podcast that I think will only gain more traction in the manosphere and particularly among more mature men and the “awakened-while-married” set of Red Pill readers.

Do check it out. We went for a bit over two hours and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the discourse. Much of what we discuss will be key aspects of my second 21 Convention talk on Positive Masculinity.

But wait, there’s more,…

And finally, I also did about a two and a half hour interview with the Hanging Chads podcast. This was a great interview as well and much more casual and fun than most of the interviews I’ve done. Be warned, they have a political bent to their material, but the material we covered was Red Pill from an intersexual dynamics perspective (as you might expect from me). The audio wont drop until Thursday, but check back here or there when it does. I’ll update this post when it goes live.

So, there you have it. If I’m meeting you for the first or second time at the convention, please, come up and introduce yourself. There’s a lot going on at this event outside the talks themselves so there’ll be plenty of time and opportunity to pick my brain while we’re there. And yes, I’ll see about getting some candid video of the dinners and social meet ups too. Watch this space.

See you in Orlando!

To Each His Own

In a couple of weeks I’ll be making my first and only personal appearance this year at the 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. This event will be unique in a number of ways. To my knowledge, this convention will be the first large-scale gathering of Red Pill writers, bloggers, podcast hosts and thought-leaders ever organized. I’m truly appreciative of Anthony Johnson in being open to my suggestions for speakers. It was a collaborative effort in this regard and over the course of this year we did our best to collect a group of speakers who would represent many different aspects of Red Pill intersexual dynamics. My only regrets are that we couldn’t fit more speakers in to the schedule and some men I highly respect were unable to attend this year.

It was my hope that this ‘new and improved’ 21 Convention might eventually be an annual Red Pill summit of sorts. This build up hasn’t been without a bit of controversy from the previous Purple Pill speakers who used the 21 Convention’s prior events as a platform for their blogs and coaching businesses. That was to be expected just as the same tired criticisms of the Red Pill were too. I have no doubt that the previous ‘life coaches’ taking issue with this event’s Red Pill turn sincerely believe they have some valuable insights to help men become ‘better men’. The problem, however, becomes one of how these coaches would direct men according to the Blue Pill preconditioning they have never been able to disabuse themselves of.

I understand the necessity these guys must feel with regards to discrediting the Red Pill as a praxeology. The dots we connect in Red Pill awareness are often at odds with their deeply held Blue Pill ego-investments and hopes, as well as a threat to their (often LARPy moralistic) “Man Up but not too much” profit model. In fact, even just the idea that the Red Pill should be a praxeology of men’s collective experiences about intersexual dynamics is enough to make them want to disqualify it. Their criticism is that, as a praxeology, the Red Pill is long on explanations and short on solutions – solutions you can presumably get by signing up for their email blasts and coaching sessions.

The praxeology that is the Red Pill is inconvenient for them because it tears away the veneer of their Blue Pill idealism about women and reveals some very unflattering truths about them and the feminine on-whole which they still largely have on a pedestal in their heads. Red Pill awareness has a way of exposing the pretty lies that make for the good marketing material that most Purple Pill coaches depend on for their livelihoods. I mean, when 80%+ of men are Beta, who wouldn’t want to buy the secret 12 point list of things a man must do to be a real man and get the woman of his dreams?

Two Complaints

There are generally two common complaints I read coming from Purple Pill life dating coaches. The first is easy, and one I’ve refuted so many times I wont bore you with repeating myself, and that’s the presumption that Red Pill awareness must be false or detrimental to a guy because it makes guys so angry with women. This is the easiest dismissal for critics because it is true; men do go through a phase of anger when they unplug from the Blue Pill illusions they’ve been so convinced of for the better part of a lifetime. And yes, some get stuck in this phase and some do become despondent because they don’t want to face the abyss it represents to them. Some go MGTOW, some turn into Purple Pill coaches themselves because they don’t want to accept the whole of what Red Pill awareness means. But most men go through this phase and come to an acceptance that there is hope in a Red Pill paradigm for them. They come to see their new awareness as a safety net and boldly embrace rebuilding themselves into better men based on this full awareness.

So the sales pitch then becomes, “Don’t be angry with women like those Red Pill guys. You can still live in Blue Pill happiness and harmony with a loving unicorn ‘Quality‘ woman by following these 5 simple steps to make yourself into the man women want you to be.”

What the Purple Pill anger critics (deliberately) refuse to get is that the Red Pill isn’t (and was never) intended to get men to hate women, but rather to inform men about the inherent nature of women so they wont hate women for what they can never be to them. This is the disillusionment that men who still cling to Blue Pill idealism can’t seem to get past – they cannot abandon those Blue Pill hopes that they believe women are capable of fulfilling for him, but the Red Pill disabuses him of. So they get angry. They get angry at themselves for ever having believed in them. They get angry for having wasted so much time investing themselves in them. They get angry, most importantly, because they realize that women simply aren’t built to fulfill the hopes his Blue Pill conditioning made him believe should be possible.

The Purple Pill coach believes that this Red Pill realization leads to men hating women. The second complaint I read from them is that Red Pill awareness gives men some license to feeling like victims. This criticism is deductive to coaches for two reasons; it serves his ‘get-rich-quick-on-the-internet-by-selling-sunshine’ man-up and do better to qualify for women blog template, and it discourages men seeking answers from becoming Red Pill aware in a way that crushes their still Blue Pill belief set.

For the record, and as boldly as I can put this, if you are Red Pill aware man and still believe you are a victim of some sort because of your previous Blue Pill indenturement to pedestalizing women or the Feminine Imperative, you are only a victim of your own lack of vision. Red Pill awareness has set you free – free from the blur and distraction that a feminine-primary social order would pull over your eyes, free from the delusional Blue Pill hopes that are only greater shackles for a man, and free from never seeing the intersexual pitfalls you were prone to fall into before. But Red Pill awareness comes at a cost; the truth may set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. If you have a responsibility as a Red Pill aware man it’s that you are never allowed to play the victim. You now know the rules of engagement. Play it well, change the rules if you can, but you are no longer allowed to say you didn’t know the score.

Most Purple Pill coaches know this victim complex is bullshit, so they deliberately conflate Red Pill awareness with MGTOW or the MRM or even the “flip side of feminism” in an effort to muddy the waters and dissuade men, who are genuinely hurting and seeking answers, away from the real life-changing influence that the Red Pill represents.

When I petitioned my readers to leave a testimonial as to why they thought the Red Pill represented more confidence or a ‘safety net’ to them I got much more than I anticipated from that comment thread. I had been looking for some good quotes to add to the back cover of Positive Masculinity, but what I got was over a thousand revelations about the power that Red Pill awareness has in changing men’s lives for the better. These are men who took what the Red Pill had shown them and transformed their lives with that knowledge. They did this because Red Pill awareness empowered them, gave them the tools, to implement changes in themselves and how they interacted with women and a feminized world. They did so without anger or feeling like victims, and they did so without a Purple Pill hack trying to coax them back onto the plantation and into their failed, and false, Blue Pill belief sets.

And this is what scares the coaches; that a free and open source Red Pill praxeology is responsible for more men taking the initiative and bettering themselves than anything their ‘coaching’ has been responsible for.

Personal Development

I am not now, nor have I ever been a motivational speaker, a ‘guru’ of any stripe, a psychotherapist or a personal development coach. Though I’m humbled to be counted among the Godfathers of the Red Pill, I have never claimed ownership of the Red Pill. It’s always been my belief that the Red Pill – the true Red Pill that has always been about intersexual dynamics – should be an ‘open source’ community. Decentralization is one of its strengths, but it also allows for bastardization from men and women who want to define it.

In each of my books and on this blog I’ve made things plain about my non-approach to men and their own personal development; I’m not interested in making better men, I’m interested in men making themselves better men. I am not interest in making men “Tomassi Men” or in anyway selling them on a template for what I think a real man ought to be. My life and my interpretations of it are not going to be a template for anyone else to follow. Red Pill awareness, based on the praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the personal and social realms, will save and/or improve your life, but that life has to be lived by you as an individual.

That said, of course I realize that men seeking answers will want a codified system of guidelines for their own personal development. I’m not the guy who’s going to give that to you, neither is that Purple Blue Pill life coach with the 12 point plan, neither is the motivational speaker selling you the same tired power of positivity message that’s been around since the 1930s. You are going to come up with that plan, you are going to take what the Red Pill makes you aware of and you are going to apply it to how you live your life. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your personal development and the successes (and failures) that came from it authentically came from your own plan and according to your judgement, not someone else’s vision or template.

I wanted to take a moment in this post to preface the 21 Convention by addressing the ways in which men come to unplug themselves from their old, Blue Pill conditioned way of life and reconstruct themselves. Reader Blaximus added this in a recent comment thread and it sums things up well:

Fourth: there is no ‘ system ‘ for teaching or learning Game. None. The process is highly individualized and virtually no two guys will learn at the same rate, or achieve the exact same level of understanding or real world application. No cheat sheets in game. You either get it and apply it and internalize it, or you don’t. It’s not about picking up chicks in clubs. That’s PUA. Game picks up chicks at a funeral. Lol. True game will be disliked by the masses.

Far too many Purple Pill dating coaches don’t want to get this in their heads. They think that because the Red Pill is a praxeology it implies it’s a cop out on developing real solutions for guys. They either don’t understand the necessity for men’s individual needs to personally develop Game for themselves, or they need a convenient dismissal of the Red Pill as ‘those angry guys have no answers’.

I have stressed in more essays than I care to recount the importance of combining what the Red Pill informs Game about with what Game informs the Red Pill about. One is the theoretical, the other is the practical, and neither is complete without the other. Yes, it is entirely vital that you, as a Red Pill aware man, get out into the field to employ the ideas, and test the practicality of how the Red Pill relates to your situation in your environment according to your strengths and gifts. That field may be a night club, or day Game on the street, in a social circle, with your wife of 10 years or in your churches singles’ group. The fact remains, Red Pill awareness is applicable through Game in a variety of environments, social and cultural contexts.

Game Works, but it only works if you turn off the computer and do something. How do you learn from a book? You put it down and you go outside (and yes, that counts for my books too). Investing oneself in Red Pill awareness as a praxeology is not a cop out for coming up with real solutions – it gives men a toolset from which they can create their own solutions. What frightens Purple Pill coaches is that men’s individual solutions, often enough, don’t affirm their Blue Pill romanticizations, their pretenses of morality, or their idealistic inability to look at the abyss and find hope on the other side of it. They want solutions, but they want their solutions to be affirmed by a Red Pill awareness that contradicts their ego-investments.

When your revenue depends on not getting it it’s hard to convince a Blue Pill man otherwise.

I will be discussing aspects of this essay at the 21 Convention in just two weeks. If you are attending I’d like to take this opportunity to extend you a personal invitation to talk with me at the convention and possibly have dinner with my colleagues and I at the event. On the topic of just getting out there in the field and doing it, I know that my friends Christian McQueen and Goldmund will be heading out into the wilds of the Orlando nightlife and I will be accompanying them on at least one of these outings.

Lastly, if you are in the Central Florida area, or if you want to make the drive in for the weekend, and you really really want to attend the convention, but just can’t come up with the funds, hit me up via email, Twitter or leave a message on my About page here and I will personally see about getting you some kind of hardship discount. Remember, this is only if you’re truly desperate to attend.

See you in two weeks.