male space

The Unbearable Rightness of Being Female

unbearable

The following post quote has been making the rounds in professional circles. It’s from Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, an investment firm dedicated to helping women with financial investment (no jargon, no ‘playing’ stocks for sport, no mansplaining, you got this). She’s also the “chair” of Elevate Network, a global professional women’s network. I’m adding this here to make a later point, but it’s important to understand how normalized it’s become for women to create a sexually exclusionary organization for women who will simultaneously complain about men’s sexism for not accommodating their (presumably successful) business culture to the interests of women. More on that later.

I thought I’d riff on this click-bait for, I assume, professional women because I expect we’ll see more of this prefabricated outrage in the coming years as a response to what will undoubtedly be the suffering of the Trump era in America. I’ll be the first to admit I was surprised by Trump’s win, but the denial of the First Female President® into the White House will be the cause du jour for every jilted woman who believes she’s a “professional”. Even if Clinton had won the mainstream would’ve been inundated with how ‘we still have a long way to go’ stories, however, with Trump in the Presidency the same tired narrative of systemic male sexism will get reinvigorated in the coming years.

From, A Letter to young women, in the age of Trump:

When I was your age, I thought it was over. My mother was a feminist, so I wanted to call myself anything but a feminist. And anyway, I seemed pretty welcome at work. Even though it was Wall Street, my analyst class was about a third women. We weren’t just on our way — we’d arrived.

But then…there were the inappropriate pictures left on my desk. The guy miming a sex act when my back was turned. I wasn’t given the great assignments; the more senior woman I worked with was likewise dismissed as “lightweight” (and, lest you think that might have been true, that woman was Safra Catz, now the co-President of Oracle). Then the women started to fall away in their 30s…more in their 40s. But the worst of it, I thought was over.

And now Trump has made it clear to everyone that the battle for us women is not over.

In femopshere there will always be an ‘us’. As I’ve outline in many prior essays, the Sisterhood will always take precedence above religion, politics, personal conviction and even family affiliations for women. Largely this is due to women’s evolved propensity for collectivism among their own sex. In our hunter gatherer beginnings women had an interdependent need for collective support for keeping tribal cohesion as well as child rearing.

This intrasexual collective support has carried over into what’s become the Sisterhood today. If you look at the interactions of young girls and their social group interdependence you begin to see that nascent tribal collectivism naturally come through. In terms of larger societal scope this collectivity becomes about acknowledging a shared experience of an imagined oppression by men. Between all women there is a gestalt understanding of “the plight of women” and a presumption of an endemic sexism no matter how culturally or socioeconomically dissimilar those women are.

As I mentioned, Trump is now a universal icon of that presumption of sexism and oppression. Granted, it could’ve been any man who displaced a woman in the history books, but the fall back presumption is that whoever ‘he’ is, he becomes emblematic of a ready narrative of sexism irrespective of merit. We presume sexism, we presume a guy would mime a sex act behind a woman’s back and leave ‘inappropriate’ pictures on a woman’s desk despite decades of workplace harassment legislation. We believe it because it sounds right; it sounds like something a typical sexist guy would do.

I can’t stop thinking about this and what we can / should do:

Remember that gender bias in the workplace is not a thing of the past. I’m sorry if I didn’t act when I should have. I thought we had left sexism behind us by the time I was in more senior roles. After all, we had complaint hotlines and diversity plans and requirements for diverse slates of candidates for every job. But now I’m remembering one of the members of the senior leadership team who would kiss younger women on the cheek at the beginning of meetings. Creepy, right? I now wonder what was being said when I wasn’t in that room.

What’s creepy is that in spite of years in a professional field that’s been the domain of men she’s just now remembering this fact. Would it have been less creepy if he’d kissed only his age-appropriate women on his leadership team? Professional women’s default presumption is that it is always sexism that is holding them back from breaking through a mythologized ‘glass ceiling’, but as is women’s solipsism, their first thought is that their problems are caused by externalities. Never is there an insight that they may simply lack the skills or that they don’t perform at their peak in a job they were told should be rewarding to them.

Gender biases will never be a thing of the past because to suggest they ever might be so is to presume a default state of egalitarian equality between the sexes. The gender biases in the workplace are most evident in the peer selection and peer evaluations of women – not some secret group of guys getting together in a private office room to expressly talk about a their co-workers’ tits.

As it stands in today’s modern office men are scared shitless every time they are called to cooperate with a woman on work projects for fear of being accused of sexism or harassment:

“In a lawsuit-happy culture, where claims can be made on a ‘he said/she said’ basis, men are now trying to ensure their actions are always covered by a third party witness”

“The terror of being accused of sexual harassment is now so common it has its own term, ‘backlash stress”

There’s a reason HR departments are largely staffed by women, because they want to be positioned in a way that they can execute policy. HR departments no longer exist to serve the company with regards to employees, rather they exist in order to protect that company from lawsuits and enforce feminine-primary conditions in the workplace.

Ask tough questions, and call the guys out when necessary. I recently asked my best guy friend: “Do guys really talk like Donald Trump and Billy Bush behind closed doors?” His response: “No, but…” And the “but” was that the conversations are more along the lines of: “Boy, she has great legs,” or “she’s a looker” or “Whew. Wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.” When I asked him how he responded to this, he said he didn’t say anything; after all, he has to work with these folks.

But so do we. And breaking us down to our body parts or our appearance dehumanizes us in some way. Maybe it’s only in some small way. But it’s clear that for some years, we (and by we, I mean I) were likely too complacent about the inevitability of gender progress in the workplace and relaxed perhaps just a bit too much.

It’s funny and irreverent when all the girls in the office get together for drinks or a male revue strip show after work, but it’s dehumanizing when men do the same. I’ve known very few men who would ever comment on a woman’s anatomy in a workplace environment. I have known men who would scold other men for staring a little too long at a female co-worker. I have known women to actively flirt with guys and wear inappropriate outfits to get attention from them. I’ve known women who’ve called me and other men I’ve worked with their “work husbands”.

I’ve worked in the liquor and casino promotion businesses for two decades now. I see some pretty wild behavior on the part of women who are not unlike the poor victimized dears Krawcheck describes going to work on Monday mornings.

The modern workplace culture has conditioned men for fear of women thanks largely to strict codes of conduct, but also because these men have been raised from birth to be dutiful Betas and White Knights who look for every opportunity to correct a ‘typical man’ for his sexist and rude behaviors. They look for these backroom boys clubs where women are rated on their looks so as to expose their heinous misogyny and institutionalized sexism, but they are disappointed when they don’t actually find it. So instead they contribute to an atmosphere of fear in some lame form of Beta Game they hope will be recognized and rewarded for by workplace women.

If you’re in a bad work situation, it’s ok to quit. So many women think that it’s a “failure” if you quit your job; and you know how hard we females take failure. But sometimes it’s not us: it’s them.

I recently left the board of a non-profit that I LOVE. I had been on it for years (and years). At nearly every meeting I asked how much we were spending on our investment managers, in comparison to the return we were getting. Meeting after meeting I was told that the answer was complex, it was hard to calculate, it would take a lot of work – and why did it matter anyway? It was really the net returns that matter, regardless of how much we paid for them. And then, last spring, before I could bring up the topic, one of the men did; and all the other guys eagerly agreed with him, that we need to keep an eye on fees because those are really all we can control.

I quit the next week.

Life is too short, and I can have a lot more impact with the week-a-year I get back instead of being ignored in meetings.

I know not everyone is in the position to quit; I wasn’t earlier in my career. So the onus is also on those of us who are more senior to be more supportive of women who leave these situations. I am hopeful that an outcome of this election will be greater understanding of this.

If it had been a woman who’d made the same suggestion would we be hearing about this? Shit like this happens all the time in the workplace. One reason The 48 Laws of Power resonated with men so well is because it was relatable to exactly this kind of situation. Law 7: Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit for it yourself. Sallie sees this as sexism because it happened to be a guy who pulled it on her, but would she have quit the non-profit had it been a woman who outplayed her?

This is the reality of even the most seemingly benign of companies. They are defined by the interplay of power dynamics, but when women are bested in it the sexism narrative is ready on standby to comfort and explain their failure. So it becomes OK to quit, because the environment is always sexist. The business environment is one defined by competition and this grates on women’s expectation of it to be cooperative and collective. Women like Sallie expect recognition for merit, but wish for things to be easier rather than developing the skills to play the game better.

Get yourself a senior, successful – preferably female – mentor, who can help you navigate the politics of your company. This includes the gender politics. Can’t find one on your own? Speak to HR about helping you find one; this is their job, after all.

Your company doesn’t have a senior, successful female? Get the hell out of there.

Really the only sexism I’m seeing in this piece has been one coming from and endorsed by Krawcheck. She bemoans a lack of gender equity and then suggests a female mentor would be preferable to a male one. Her sexism is blatant here – the only definition of a solid reputable company is one that ensures it has a senior, successful female in it. Since most HR departments are staffed primarily with women it’s their job to help you find a senior, successful and female mentor? I’m not a business insider, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t their job.

I made this point in Male Space, but what happens when women insert themselves into a traditionally male dominated domain is that the enterprise becomes about accommodating the female influences rather than the enterprise itself. This entire article is an indictment of this. Again, the solution to a woman’s problem of not being successful is sought externally.

Do your best to make sure that your success is quantified. Be it a sales goal, a client satisfaction rating, an output metric, a quality target. Numbers count here because they’re black-and-white, cut-and-dried. Were you successful or not? I recommend this even if you work in a “normal” company, because implicit gender biases and expectations still exist for all of us.

Solid enough advice, but it’s couched in the context of an expectation of gender biases (at least the type of bias Sallie finds unacceptable). There’re implicit gender biases, but the ones we see dominate even ‘normal’ companies are ones that favor a feminized workforce.

Think about starting your own thing. This is what’s exciting; we have the ability to start our own businesses today, in a way we didn’t in the past. Why not take our marbles to our own playgrounds and build great businesses and cultures? Our mothers couldn’t do this because the cost was so high – but the costs of everything-about-starting-a-business, including technology, people (i.e., freelancers), real estate (co-working spaces) and support services are coming down. And then no one can relegate you to the less-interesting jobs.

Women are taught that they deserve the luxury of interesting jobs. In fact this is the sole reason for even wanting to enter the workforce most times – a rewarding career that’s fulfilling, but as I wrote in She’s Unhaaapy… that fulfillment is always elusive. Therefore it must be that uncooperative men are holding women back from this happiness.

I’m not sure opening another gourmet cupcake eatery counts as contributing to the status of women in business, but I would say that women ought to be encouraged to start up their own businesses rather than rely on the proven successes of established ones to prove their business acumen. Carly Fiorina and Sheryl Sandberg are not innovators in any sense. Neither started a company from scratch, but they are lauded as powerful businesswomen because they supposedly had the moxie to compete with the big boys and their sexist enterprises – not actually as a result of their companies wanting to present a feminine-correct public image.

I would love to see women’s organic business successes despite themselves, but my guess is that every failure or setback would have some tinge of external sexism attached to them. The truth is there are very few women who actually create something of worth because the easier path to success is to create a social convention that shames men for not including women in their own successes. It will always be easier for women to appropriate the success of men rather than create anything for themselves.

I am going to go out of my way to support other women. It’s clear now: we can’t do this alone. Another woman who is promoted or celebrated or funded clears the way for another. I am actively looking to buy from women-owned businesses, which is much easier these days — Glossier, Outdoor Voices, and Project September are just a few of a new wave of startups led by women — and avoid companies that remain all-men. I’m just so over supporting them.

And here we have yet more fem-centric sexism in a piece decrying male sexism. Weren’t we just reading about how surprised Sallie was about gender bias not being a thing of the past in the workplace? Because Trump won the election she calls for a boycott from buying anything from male owned companies?

One thing I’ve always found ironic about women’s call for collective, gender-exclusionary support for other women is that women are often guilty of even worse infighting than men are in the workplace. Lets face it, women hate other women to a degree that most men are unaware of. Their capacity for sub-communication and psychological warfare among themselves makes intra-sexual competition more brutal than having to deal with any so-called sexist male co-worker. From women’s collectivist perspective one would think that women’s intra-sexual support of other women would make them all outstanding successes in business, but we find the opposite is true. Women have a very hard time making an all-female enterprise a success. Naturally this is blamed, again, on men’s sexists brinksmanship and outmaneuvering them, but by and large it’s internal conflict that destroys all-female run enterprises.

Invest. Having spent my career on Wall Street and now being the founder of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women, I know I’m a broken record on this topic. But men invest to a greater extent than women do, and it costs us. Indeed, I believe investing is the best career advice women aren’t getting. Think about it – are you more able to tell your boss to take this job and shove it if you have more money or less money?

That’s what I thought. At the end of the day, money is the real key to gender equality.

Of course we get the sales pitch at the end. Women don’t invest because it’s not sexy. It requires a degree of commitment and a depth of insight that goes well beyond what an average woman has any interest in. I do find it entertaining that Sallie finally gets to the real reason for a gender inequality she claims she wants to see abolished. Money is most definitely a key to establishing social dominance and that creates a fundamentally unequal condition between men and women.

Businesses, successful ones, are founded on competition, not cooperation. This is the fundamental conflict we are experiencing in today’s corporate culture; women’s collectivism promotes what they believe should be a successful enterprise based on egalitarian cooperation while men largely see the enterprise as competition. Sometimes this is a win-at-any-cost type of competition, other times it may be more subtle, but the crux is that women’s propensity to want for a more collectivist approach to a successful enterprise is at odds with men’s competitive approach. Success in business is fundamentally unegalitarian, there are winners and losers, not co-equal participation trophy winners. But as women continue to insert themselves into the unegalitarian male spaces of enterprise we will see this push for cooperative hopes for business success fundamentally alter the purpose of these businesses as we attempt more and more to accommodate them.

Tribes

tribes

I received this email some time ago, but I felt it needed some serious consideration to give the concept the justice it deserved.

Rollo — You’ve been a major help to my understanding the underlying dynamics between men and women. I’ve observed them in bits and pieces over the years but never really understood the whys behind them or how to turn them in our favor.

It seems like one mid-term focus you have is on male-male dynamics, specifically fathers and sons. But I also wonder whether you’d consider writing more about bonding and support between men and how those relationships can anchor men’s lives at a time when male relationships are regarded with skepticism by larger society. Lately it’s struck me that men tend to innately trust the men they know and distrust those they don’t (and that it’s often the reverse for women). This inclines us to believe women when they decry the “assholes” who have mistreated them in the past while women are empathetic and credulous toward women whose character they don’t know and whom they’ve never met.

Many of us out here are lacking strong male relationships, and our small social circles translate to fewer men we innately trust and more men we innately don’t. Women seem to regard male friendships as a luxury at best–we should be focusing on career, family, and her needs–while women’s friendships are seen as a lifeline in their crazy, have-it-all world. Indeed, a man discouraging his SO’s friendships is widely seen as a sign of emotional abuse, whereas the reverse is “working on the relationship.”

This strikes me as a deep but largely untapped Red Pill well and could provide essential guidance for men looking to live a proud, constructive Red Pill life however women and children might fit into it. I’d definitely welcome your insights in future entries.

Look forward to every post!

Back in February Roosh proposed (and attempted to initiate) a worldwide event that would be a sort of ‘gathering of the tribes’ with the intent of having men get together in small local gatherings to “just have a beer and talk amongst like-minded men.” My impression of the real intent of in putting this together notwithstanding, I didn’t think it was a bad idea. However, the problem this kind of ‘tribes meeting’ suffers from is that it’s entirely contrived to put unfamiliar men together for no other purpose than to “have a beer and talk.” The problem with unfamiliar men coming together simply to meet and relate is a noble goal, however, the fundamental ways men communicate naturally makes the function of this gathering seem strange to men.

Women talk, men Do.

The best male friends I have share one or more common interests with me – a sport, a hobby, music, art, fishing, lifting, golf, etc. – and the best conversations I can remember with these friends occurred while we were engaged in some particular activity or event. Even just moving a friend into his new house; it’s about accomplishing something together and in that time relating about shit. When I lived in Florida some of the best conversations I had with my studio guys were during some project we had to collaborate on for a week or two.

Women, make time with the express purpose of talking between friends. Over coffee perhaps, but the act of communication is more important than the event or activity. Even a ‘stitch-and-bitch’ is simply an organized excuse to get together and relate. For women, communication is about context. They are rewarded by how that communication makes them feel. For Men communication is about content and they are rewarded by the interchange of information and ideas.

[…]From an evolutionary perspective, it’s likely that our hunter-gatherer tribal roles had a hand in men and women’s communication differences. Men went to hunt together and practiced the coordinated actions for a cooperative goal. Bringing down a prey animal would have been a very information-crucial effort; in fact the earliest cave paintings were essentially records of a successful hunt and instructions on how to do it. Early men’s communication would necessarily have been a content driven discourse or the tribe didn’t eat.

Similarly women’s communications would’ve been during gathering efforts and childcare. It would stand to reason that due to women’s more collectivist roles they would evolve to be more intuitive, and context oriented, rather than objective oriented. A common recognition in the manosphere is women’s predisposition toward collectivism and/or a more socialist bent to thinking about resource distribution. Whereas men tend to distribute rewards and resources primarily on merit, women have a tendency to spread resources collectively irrespective of merit. Again this predisposition is likely due to how women’s ‘hard-wiring’ evolved as part of the circumstances of their tribal roles.

From this perspective it’s a fairly easy follow to see how the tendency of men to distrust unfamiliar (out-group) men might be a response to a survival threat whereas women’s implicit trust of any member of the ‘sisterhood’ would be a species-survival benefit to the sex that requires the most parental investment and mutual support.

Divide & Conquer

In our post-masculine, feminine-primary social order it doesn’t take a Red Pill Lens to observe the many examples of how the Feminine Imperative goes to great lengths to destroy the intrasexual ‘tribalism’ of men. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution the social press of equalism has attempted to force a commonly accepted unisex expectation upon men to socialize and interact among themselves as women do.

The duplicity in this striving towards “equality” is, of course, the same we find in all of the socialization efforts of egalitarian equalism; demasculinizing men in the name of equality. A recent, rather glaring, example of this social push can be found (where else?) at Harvard University where more than 200 female students demonstrated against a new policy to discourage participation in single-gender clubs at the school. You see, women were very supportive of the breaking of gender barriers when it meant that men could no longer discriminate in male-exclusive (typically male-space) organizations, but when that same equalist metric was applied to women’s exclusive organizations, then the cries were accusations of insensitivity and the banners read “Women’s Groups Keep Women Safe.”

That’s a pretty fresh incident that outlines the dynamic, but it’s important to understand the underlying intent of the “fine for me, but not for thee” duplicity here. That intent is to divide and control men’s communication by expecting them to communicate as women do, and ideally to do so on their own accord by conditioning them to accept women’s communication means as the normatively correct way to communicate. As I’ve mentioned before, the most effective social conventions are the ones in which the participants willingly take part in and willingly encourage others to believe is correct.

Tribes vs. The Sisterhood

Because men have such varied interests, passions and endeavors based on them it’s easy to see how men compartmentalize themselves into various sub-tribes. Whether it’s team sports (almost always a male-oriented endeavor), cooperative enterprises, cooperative forms of art (rock bands have almost always been male space) or just hobbies men share, it is a natural progression for men to form sub-tribes within the larger whole of conventional masculinity.

Because of men’s’ outward reaching approach to interacting with the world around him, there’s really no unitary male tribe in the same fashion that the collective ‘Sisterhood’ of women represents. One of the primary strengths of the Feminine Imperative has been its unitary tribalism among women. We can see this evidenced in how saturated the Feminine Imperative has become into mainstream society and how it’s embedded itself into what would otherwise be diametrically opposed factions among women. Political, socioeconomic and religious affiliations of women (various sub-tribes) all become secondary to the interests of ‘womankind’ when embracing the collective benefits of being women and leveraging both their victim and protected statuses.

Thus, we see no cognitive dissonance when women simultaneously embrace a hostile opposition to one faction while still retaining the benefits that faction might offer to the larger whole of the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood is unitary first and then it is broken down into sub-tribes. Family, work, interests, political / religious compartmentalizations become sublimated to fostering the collective benefits of womankind.

While I can speculatively understand the socio-evolutionary underpinnings of how this psychological dynamic came to be, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out just how effective this unitary collectiveness has been in shaping society towards a social ideal that supports an unfettered drive towards women’s gender-coded need to optimize Hypergamy. This unitary, gender-primary tribalism has been (and is) the key to women’s unilateral social power – and even in social environments where women still suffer oppression, the Sisterhood will exercise this gender-tribalism.

Threat Assessments

Asserting any semblance of a unitary male tribalism is a direct threat to the Feminine Imperative. In The Threat I began the essay with this summation:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When I wrote this essay I did so from the perspective of women feeling vulnerable about interacting intimately with men who understood their own value to women and also understood how to leverage it. One of the reasons Game is so vilified, ridiculed and disqualified by the Sisterhood is because it puts this understanding into practice with women and, in theory, removes women from the optimization of Hypergamy. Red Pill awareness and Game lessens women’s control in that equation, which is sexy from the standpoint of dealing with a self-aware high SMV man, but also threatening from the perspective that her security depends on him acquiescing to her Frame and control.

Up to this point, Game has represented an individualized threat to women’s Hypergamous control, but there has always been a larger majority of men (Betas) who’ve been easily kept ignorant of their true potential for control. However, on a larger social landscape, the Feminine Imperative understands the risks involved in men forming a unitary tribe – a Brotherhood – based solely on benefitting and empowering men. The manosphere, while still effectively a collection of sub-tribes, represents a threat to the imperative because its base purpose is making men aware of their true state in a feminine-centric social order.

As such, any attempt to create male-specific, male-empowering organizations is made socially synonymous with either misogyny (hate) or homosexuality (shame). Ironically, the shame associated with homosexuality that a fem-centric society would otherwise rail against becomes an effective form of intra-gender shame when it’s applied to heterosexual collectives of men. Even suggestions of male-centered tribalism are attached with homosexual suspicions, and these come from within the collectives of men themselves.

tribalism_1a

The above picture is from an “academic” conference (class?) Mediated Feminisms: Activism and Resistance to Gender and Sexual Violence in the Digital Age held at UCL in London. There’s quite a bit more to this than just collecting and codifying the sub-tribes of the manosphere, more can be found here.

Now, granted, this conference is replete with all of the uninformed (not to mention willful ignorance) concern to be expected of contemporary feminists, but this does serve as a current example of how men organizing for the exclusive benefit of men is not just equated with misogyny, but potential violence. As a unitary collective of men, the manosphere terrifies the Feminine Imperative. That fear, however, doesn’t stem from any real prospective violence, but the potential for a larger ‘awareness’ in men of their own conditions and the roles they are expected to play to perpetuate a feminine-centric social order. They fear to lose the control that the ‘socially responsible’ ignorance of men provides them with.

Men’s predisposition to form sub-tribes and intrasexual competition (“lets you and him fight”) has always been a means of covert control by women, but even still the Feminine Imperative must insert its influence and oversight into those male spaces to make use of  them. Thus, by assuring that feminine primacy is equated with the idea of inclusive equalism, all Male Space is effectively required to be “unisex space” while all-female sub-tribes must remain exclusively female. For an easy example of this, compare and contrast the reactions to Harvard’s unisex institution of campus club equalism to the worldwide reactions to, and preemption of, the “Tribe” meetings only attempted to be organized by Return of Kings in February.

Making Men

By controlling men’s intrasex communications with each other the Feminine Imperative can limit men’s unified, collective, understanding of masculinity and male experiences. Feminine-primary society hates and is terrified of men defining and asserting masculinity for themselves (to the point of typifying it as potentially violent), but as connectivity progresses we will see a more concentrated effort to lock down the narrative and the means of men communicating male experiences.

I’ve detailed in many prior posts how the imperative has deliberately misdirected and confused men about a unified definition of masculinity. That confusion is designed to keep men guessing and doubting about their “security in their manhood” while asserting that the feminine-correct definition is the only legitimate definition of healthy, ‘non-toxic’, masculinity. This deliberate obfuscation and ambiguity about what amounts to ‘authentic masculinity’ is another means of controlling men’s awareness of their true masculine potential and value – a potential that they rightly fear will mean acquiescing to men’s power over their Hypergamous social and personal control. Anything less than a definition of masculinity that fosters female primacy and fempowerment is labeled “toxic masculinity” – literally and figuratively poisonous.

This is the real, operative reason behind the obsessive, often self-contradicting, need for control of male space by the Feminine Imperative. Oversight and infiltration of male sub-tribes and instituting a culture of self-policing of the narrative within those sub-tribes maintains a feminine-primary social order.

Building Better Betas

Since the time in which western(izing) societies shifted to unfettering Hypergamy on a social scale there has been various efforts to demasculinize – if not outright feminize – the larger majority of men. Today we’re seeing the results of, and still persistent efforts of this in much starker contrast as transgenderism and the social embrace of foisting gender-loathing on boys becomes institutionalized. A deliberate promotion of a social constructivist narrative about gender identity and the very early age at which children can “choose” a gender for themselves is beginning to be more and more reinforced in our present feminine-primary social order.

As a result of this, and likely into our near future, today’s men are conditioned to feel uncomfortable being “men”. That discomfort is a direct result of the ambiguity and misguidance about conventional masculinity the imperative has fostered in men when they were boys. This feminization creates a gender loathing, but that loathing comes as the result of an internal conflict between the feminine-correct “non-toxic” understanding of what masculinity ought to be and the conventional aspects of masculinity that men need to express as a result of their biology and birthright.

Effectively, this confusion has the purpose of creating discomfort in men among all-male sub-tribes. These masculine-confused men have difficulty with intersocial communication within the sub-tribes they’re supposed to have some sort of kin or in-group affiliation with.  Even the concept of “male bonding” has become a point of ridicule (something typical of male buffoons) or suspiciously homosexual , so, combined with the feminine identification most of these men default to, today’s “mangina” typically has more female friends and feels more comfortable communicating as women communicate. These men have been effectively conditioned to believe or feel that male interaction or organization is inherently wrong, uncomfortable or contrived, possibly even threatening if the organizing requires physical effort. Consequently, interacting as a male becomes ridiculous or superficial.

Pushing Back

What then is to be done about this conditioning? For all the efforts to destroy or regulate male tribalism, the Feminine Imperative still runs up against men’s evolved predispositions to interact with the outside world instead of fixating on the inside world of women. Below I’ve pieced together some actionable ideas that might help men come to a better, unitary way of fostering the male tribalism the Feminine Imperative would see destroyed or used as a tool of soci0-sexual control:

  • While it is vitally important to maintain a male-specific mental point of origin, together men need a center point of action. Women talk, men do. Men need a common purpose in which the tribe can focus its efforts on. Men need to build, coordinate, win, compete and problem solve amongst themselves. The ‘purpose’ of a tribe can’t simply be one of getting together as like-minded men; in fact, groups with such a declared purpose are often designed to be the most conciliatory and accommodating of the Feminine Imperative. Men require a common, passionate purpose to unite for.

 

  • Understand and accept that men will naturally form male hierarchies in virtually every context if that tribe is truly male-exclusive. There will be a reflexive resistance to this, but understand that the discomfort in acknowledging male hierarchies stems from the Feminine Imperative’s want to make any male authority a toxic form of masculinity. Contrary to feminine conditioning male hierarchies are not necessarily based on Dark Triad manipulations. That is the ‘fem-think’ – any male created hierarchy of authority is by definition evil Patriarchy.

 

  • Recognize existing male sub-tribes for what they are, but do so without labeling them as such. Don’t talk about Fight Club, do Fight Club. As with most other aspects of Red Pill aware Game, it is always better to demonstrate rather than explicate. There will always be an observer effect in place when you call a male group a “male group”. That tribe must exist for a passionate reason other than the express idea that it exists to be about men meeting up. Every sub-tribe I belong to, every collective interest I share with other men, even the instantly forming ones that arise from an immediate common need or function, all exist apart from “being” about men coming together.Worldwide “tribe” day failed much for the same reasons an organization like the Good Men Project fails – they are publicized as a gathering of men just “being” men.

 

  • Push back on the invasion of male space by being uncompromising in what you do and organize with passion. Make no concessions for women in any all-male space you create or join. There will always be a want to accommodate women and/or the fears of not being accommodating of feminine-primary mindsets within that all-male purview. Often this will come in subtle forms of anonymous White Knighting or reservations about a particular passion due to other men’s Blue Pill conditioning to always consider the feminine before considerations of themselves or the tribe. It is vitally important to the tribe to quash those sympathies and compromising attitudes as these are exactly the designs of the Feminine Imperative to destroy a tribe from within.Make no concessions for competency of women within the tribe if you find yourself in a unisex tribal situation. Even the U.S. military is guilty of reducing combat service requirements for women as recently as this month. If you are a father or you find yourself in a role of mentoring boys or young men it is imperative that you instill this no-compromise attitude in them and the organizations that they create themselves.

 

  • The primary Red Pill / Game tenets that you’ve learned with respect to women are entirely applicable in a larger scope when it comes to resisting the influences of the Feminine Imperative. Frame and a return to a collectively male-exclusive Mental Point of Origin are two of the primary tenets to apply to non-intimate applications of resistance in terms of aspects of society. Observations and the Red Pill Lens should inform your interactions with women and men on a social scale.

 

Finally, I want to close by restating that my approach to resisting the influences of the Feminine Imperative on a meta-social scale is the same bottom-up approach I used with unplugging men from their Blue Pill doldrums. Once men have taken the first steps in Red Pill awareness this new perspective has a tendency to expound into greater social understandings and a want for applications beyond hooking up with desirable women. That Red Pill awareness becomes a way of life, but moreover, it should inform us as men, as tribes, about how best to maintain ourselves as masculine-primary individuals and organizations.

Gamer Girls

Girl-Gamer

I got an interesting comment from regular reader Hollenhund about 2 weeks ago and rather than reheat that thread I thought it deserved a post. I’ll get to that comment in a bit, but the original topic was how Red Pill awareness, or really the Red Pill Lens, applies in different social contexts. I think there’s a misconception about how relevant a Red Pill understanding is in different social environments, ethnic cultures, religious cultures or even what might seem niche or “alternative” subcultures.

It’s no secret I post on a few of the Christo-Manosphere blogs, but this is really just one social subset of the Red Pill. This is just one of a myriad of other social situations I put myself into with a Red Pill perspective. To be honest my natural default is to use a Red Pill lens in most social environments and I consistently use that awareness as a starting point for judging the character of new people I meet.

As a result of my career I’m often asked to organize or make an appearance at promos or product launches in social settings that would likely never occur to me to be a part of. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy them; I certainly love to do my ‘observational studies’ of intersexual interactions at, say, a martini fest in South Beach, but I don’t think doing a promo at a Goth club around Halloween would occur to me if I weren’t working the event.

However, I’ve found that in all of these very diverse social settings I consistently see the same Red Pill truths, behaviors and motivations predictably play out among the people I work and interact with despite their being bikini models in cocktail dresses or rednecks in wife-beaters and Daisy Dukes. It’s very easy for guys new to Red Pill awareness and Game to think that because the more notable PUAs they see in videos at various clubs are where they’re most successful that they too must emulate this by thrusting themselves into a social environment they’re never going to feel comfortable in.

I’ve covered the topic of domain dependence before, and how it behooves a newly unplugged man to see what social context he finds himself in and understand the limitation of never breaking out of his comfort zone. It stifles a growth and maturity, but similarly I can’t expect a guy to really cast off all his reservations and jump cold turkey into alien social environments in the fashion that my work places me in.

The good news is that you don’t really have to begin in a foreign social environment, at least not at first. I know PUAs like YaReally will stress the importance of getting out in the field and practicing Game – and he’s right, there is no substitute for the education you’ll receive from experience (and failure). However, what that ‘field’ looks like to you can be a great variety of environments.

For example, I sincerely doubt that many religious men would feel comfortable hitting the clubs in Vegas or Miami to practice Game. In fact, Game to them would be limited by their religious convictions, but that Game is still informed by the same Red Pill truth and awareness that Tyler Durden is using in his Game. So what’s to do?

Apply that Red Pill lens, awareness and truth to the social environment you already find yourself in. Game to me as a successful 47 year old creative professional isn’t going to be the same Game or social context you as a 25 year old up and coming anti-millennial will apply. And this is a good thing. One aspect of the manosphere I enjoy is seeing the countless ways in which Red Pill men apply themselves in their various circumstances. It’s very inspiring to see a high school kid and a 55 year old divorced man use the same Red Pill knowledge base to better their lives and achieve relatively predictable results because of it.

One subculture that I’ve been very familiar with for the better part of my life has been the ‘gamer’ subculture. Whether it’s been via my own quirky hobbies or the artists and developers I’ve worked with for years, I’ve been intimately familiar with geek or nerd culture for a very long time. The best part of having had this experience is that I’ve been familiar with it when I was both in my Blue Pill plugged in days and in my Red Pill awakening, to say nothing of being one of the foremost writers in the ‘sphere.

Niche SMPs

I started with all this because I believe it’s relevant to the conversation that got started with Hollenhund’s comment here:

It is rather important when you consider that the majority of the audience for films, video games etc. with the warrior princess trope are probably men. One male fantasy among many is the woman that is girly and feminine in appearance and body shape, but isn’t actually interested in girly stuff, and would rather discuss automatic weapons, martial arts, sports cars, military history etc. after draining your balls. She wears stylish clothes, but would rather go to the shooting range than the mall etc. Lara Croft is a typical example.

Definitely.

I’ve found this trope is most common among the gamer/nerd set. They tend to fetishize the non-conventionally hot “Gamer Girl” or “Geek Girl” who genuinely shares their love of war/video/ roleplaying games, cosplay, Dr. Who, comics, anime, etc. It also has an interesting parallel for guys who are devout sports fans and foolishly build their ideals around a woman who can quote sports stats, loves his team(s) and also loves beer and hot wings as much as himself.

This is what I call a niche sexual marketplace (SMP). As I was saying earlier, just like there are various niche social environs in which to apply Game, there are also niche SMPs that develop within those social contexts. Whether it’s sports, Goth, Christian, nerd, music, etc. or any other culture, the Red Pill truths remain a constant, but the context creates an SMP within it.

This Nerd niche SMP is readily exploited by girls who are otherwise outclassed in a larger SMP by girls who are far more sexy and attention holding. It’s important to remember that Nerd-Space used to be a Male Space that was infiltrated and co-opted by the Feminine Imperative. This infiltration is really standard and formulaic when you consider how the Feminine Imperative has co-opted and assimilated social structures as large as contemporary church culture.

Nerd Space

However, Nerd Space has been even more reformed by the imperative than most other traditionally Male Spaces; so much so that the organic girl-world social dynamics have become an integral part of the male subculture within it. You will never find more hostile a Beta White Knight than in Geek Culture because this Warrior Princess mythology is something they’ve been conditioned to evangelize for for most of their lives.

Embracing and pedestalizing Warrior Princesses is a critical component to a geek guy’s form of Beta Game. It’s ALL about identifying with the feminine and celebrating the fantasy that men and women are not just functional equals, but women are unrealized, patriarchally repressed, Warrior Princesses who (through rampant male idealism) necessarily share a mutual concept of what women should love in men who respect that fantasy with them. The nerd’s fantasy girl is one who finds him irresistible because he believes in women’s unrecognized superiority to male-kind.

There’s a very interesting microcosm within geek subculture that unsurprisingly mirrors virtually every intergender dynamic in larger society. As I was saying before this happens in every subculture – the basic, evolved, Red Pill social dynamics manifest themselves in any human collective – but what’s interesting is that geek culture presupposes that the subculture is founded on principles that make it functionally imune to the larger mainstream culture it considers sexist, racist, xenophobic and cruel. If you look at the social utopia that a franchise like Star Trek hoped to promote you can begin to understand it as a fantasized antithesis to the mainstream collective society geeks consider themselves outcast from.

However, even within a geek culture that despises that mainstream cruelty, AF/BB Hypergamy is still the primary order, but the geek microcosm revolves around making women feel good about themselves to such an exaggerated degree that feminism and fempowerment becomes part of ‘Gaming’ women within that subset. It’s Beta Game on steroids with a lot of ego-invested LARPing (live action role-playing, google it) that’s taken very seriously by the overwhelmingly Blue Pill guys who make up most of it.

Gamer Girl-World

It’s really entertaining to see these guys try to outdo each other when a girl enters that nerd space with even the resemblance of an interest in something nerd related. That glimmer of interest is like throwing a starving man a cracker in the desert most times, and the more conventionally beautiful and sexy she is the greater the effort, or the greater the default despair is for them.

I’ve covered male idealism in a generic sense before, however that idealism (the unhealthy kind) when put in the context of a noble nerd’s fantasy girl – who shares his passions, is considerate of his borderline autism and appreciates his non-patriarchal deference to her – she either becomes something he obsesses over (severe ONEits) or she represents the despair that only an unreachable dream can stir in a man.

That said, semi-attractive gamer girls do exist (nothing more than an HB 7.5 by my reckoning), but most fall into the demographic of ostracized weird girl or semi-goth, fuscia-haired outcast who never clicked with the in-group girls in high school.

Nerd culture represents an environment where a girl’s otherness makes them a prized commodity. Girls who find nerd/gamer culture either on their own or via their ‘cool nerd’ (see Emo-Goth) boyfriend soon discover a social subset whose males pedestalize to an even greater degree than the prissy in-group bitch girls who ostracized them enjoy from men. In fact that pedestalization, that identification, that default deference and autonomous sublimation to the feminine is integral to the nerd culture. So when you combine a gamer girl’s nerd-niche SMP dominance with the overblown pedestalizing most nerds will elevate them to, it recreates gamer girls in the contextual likeness of the in-group girls they despised and never got along with.

Most top shelf gamer girls tend to hook up with the elite, usually Emo, guys in the subculture. The exact same intersexual dynamics remain, but the context changes. All of the fundamental aspects of Hypergamy and social ego inflation remain, but now within a domain dependent environment they can finally exercise their sexual strategies in ways they never could in the social set they’ve been cut away from.

Vox Day had an absolutely brilliant breakdown of female characters in fantasy settings, and what struck me the most was how these archetypes mirrored both the idealized and hated archetype women nerd culture caricatures:

There are three types of women in the world of the Gamma Protagonist: The Corrupted, The Damsel, and The Strong Independent Woman. Average women, in terms of appearance, ability, and moral character, simply won’t exist outside of the occasional passing mention.

  1. The Corrupted are the female villains of the story who were once good, but were corrupted by men and are therefore not entirely responsible for their evil actions.
    1. Type one are blonde and athletic who likes athletic, powerful men. They are beyond redemption, and are rude, aloof, and hateful to the GP for no reason.
    2. Type two are voluptuous, dark seductresses. One of the greatest feats in the story will be the GP’s ability to resist the charms of the insatiable seductress. She will desire him to the point of absurd obsession for no discernible reason.
  2. The Damsel is an incredibly attractive women who is generally clueless about how attractive she is even though she is approached regularly by men. There will be half-hearted attempts by the author to include some traits of strength, but eventually she will need to be rescued by the GP. At which point, she will fall in love with him, of course.
  3. The Strong Independent woman is strong and independent. She also finds the GP irresistible because he respects her.
    1. She is the equal or better of the GP in at least one traditionally masculine ability, usually in physical strength and battle prowess.
    2. The GP finds it endearing and attractive that she bosses him around regularly, and she loves the arrangement too.
    3. The love interest of the GP will have large breasts, usually has red hair, and is the one to initiate sex in nearly every instance. She will be perfectly loyal unless corrupted by some sort of magical force or technological device.

I’m dropping this here, because it’s important to understand the Blue Pill analogous truths that manifest in these character types.

The Corrupted represents all the ‘normal’ women who’ve ever rejected or been casually indifferent to the male nerd. The Damsel is generally the foil for the Strong Independent Woman, whose use is only to serve to bolster the SIW’s superiority. The Damsel is also representative of women ignorant of their role under some vaudevillian notion of patriarchy. And the SIW woman is representative of the sexualized ideal that’s been approved for nerd guys to obsess over courtesy of the influences of the Feminine Imperative.

These are the archetypes for idealized (both positively and negatively) women in nerd space. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, these fantasy ideals are challenged by the real-life gamer girls who progressively begin to understand their own sexual market capital within this subculture’s men and, most often, unwittingly feed that beast.

All that said, if this is in fact your cultural subset, and even if not, it’s always important for you as a Red Pill aware man to bear in mind that the same articles of an intersexual marketplace are always present within any social context. Whether you’re in church or the club or your local game/comic book store Hypergamy doesn’t change, the game doesn’t change, only its contextual parameters change. Roissy had a great quote in the 16 Commandments of Poon (emphasis mine):

XII.  Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses

In the betterment of ourselves as men we attract women into our orbit. To accomplish this gravitational pull as painlessly and efficiently as possible, you must identify your natural talents and shortcomings and parcel your efforts accordingly. If you are a gifted jokester, don’t waste time and energy trying to raise your status in philosophical debate. If you write well but dance poorly, don’t kill yourself trying to expand your manly influence on the dancefloor. Your goal should be to attract women effortlessly, so play to your strengths no matter what they are; there is a groupie for every male endeavor. Except World of Warcraft.

Gamer girls may not have been the type to pine for the high school quarterback, but they do pine for his functional equivalent in Nerd Space. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks are equally relevant and equally subject to a woman’s capacity to optimize on them in Nerd Space. Her SMV may be artificially inflated within that context, but the mechanics remain the same. Everything you learn here or on any other Red Pill blog or forum is universally applicable in any social context – it’s up to you as a skilled and aware practitioner to observe the particulars of your environment, contrast it with Red Pill truths and apply Game accordingly.

For further reading see The Contextual Alpha.