I’m writing this post on the day before I head off to this year’s 21 Convention and I thought I’d just do something a bit freeform to get a few ideas on the page and let you all know where my head is at these days. I generally don’t make a habit of using The Rational Male as a sounding board for my personal thoughts. Most of what you read here is what I can best describe as crafted essays. Last week’s post was a good example of that. I took about 2 weeks to to write that essay, but the the germ of the idea for building an essay on body language and implied meanings was something I’d had percolating for almost 6 months. When you write about what I do for as long as I have I’ve learned it pays to be thorough, and I enjoy the building process.
Now that I’ve said all that, I’m going to break this rule today and do a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing here now.
One thing I’ve learned since I decided to write intentionally is that I’m never off-duty. I’ve always been an artist and I’ve always kept sketchbooks with me to scribble down ideas for larger work, but it wasn’t until I started really writing that I began to keep notebooks for my posts and then my books; and now my talks. I presently have 4 small notebooks that I put ideas in. I just finished filling one up and now I need another one. I was never that Emo writer kid who was so artsy and self-absorbed he had to write a diary because he thought people must find him fascinating. In fact, I’ve always thought of art as something temporal.
Now this is changed for me. I find it an absolute necessity to keep notebooks with me to capture ideas in. I think my brain has changed somewhat since I began being a ‘serious’ author. My mind now works in a way where I get ideas that don’t stay for long, but the internal conversations I have to flesh out those ideas can get pretty involved. I’ve freaked my wife out on more than one occasion when I got up to take a piss in the middle of the night, had an idea and then had to go write it down knowing that it would fade from memory by the morning. I think I’m kind of torn between being a creative thinker and a deductive thinker as a result of applying myself to writing .
I guess that makes me a writer, but I still don’t know what I am in that respect. I do know I have an obsessive compulsion to write, but not so much to write as an author of books but a capturer of ideas. Occasionally I read about authors’ writing processes and rituals and it sounds really artsy. Honestly, I think a result of the self-publishing revolution is that it created a lot of writers who just wanted to be writers. Like they just revel in the identity and love to say ‘I’m special, I’m a writer‘. The same thing happened in desktop publishing when computers started replacing all the analog ways of graphic design. Everyone you knew was a ‘graphic designer’ because anyone could do it then.
I think it was Stephen King who said writing for him was like excrement. Not in the way that his writing was shit, but rather it was something that just came out of him, something he excreted like hair or fingernails. I think I understand that now. I never set out to be a writer, I’m an ideas man. Sometimes those ideas are great and help change men’s lives. Then sometimes I think maybe I’m a messenger for something that just needs to be conveyed in this day and this time.
The Rational Male, my first book, just turned 5 years old on October 1st. Granted, it still needs to be cleaned up and I’m in the process of a reedit with the help of two editors now. Nothing will change as far as content is concerned, but lets be honest, the font size needs to be kicked up a couple points and there are a fair amount of grammatical errors that need to be corrected. So, I’m reading back through the whole book these days and in doing so I almost can’t believe that the voice is my own. Although the book was published in 2013 all the material is from essays I wrote as far back as 2002, and a lot of that was from conversations and debates I’d had on SoSuave from back in the day. Re-reading it is like having a conversation with myself from when I was 34 years old.
The book is important in so many ways to so many people now. That’s something I have to keep in mind today. The Rational Male is a living text. It’s not a book you you read once and put on a shelf. Readers keep returning to it when the need to be reminded of a relevant truth that they’re experiencing in life.
A year ago, when I was at the 21 Convention the thing that struck me the most was signing men’s copy’s and seeing how well-worn they were. Every one had liner notes and highlighted in at least 2 different highlighter colors. It was then I realized this book was something more than a self-published book turned out from the print-on-demand mill.
I’m sure I’ll see the same this year and it makes me happy to have been the instrument to bring these truths to men. I still get chills when men tell me it saved their lives or it fundamentally changed them for the better. I re-read my work and think ‘who is this guy?’ I wonder how my grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren, will see what I was about. And this is what concerns me most when I consider the ease with which I could be erased from the online world.
I would be lying to say that recent social events haven’t flustered me. The fact that Roosh’s books could be so casually deleted from all of his distribution sources is unsettling. He wrote about this, prophetically, about five years ago in The Most Insidious Method of Control Never Devised. Roosh has had his bread taken from him. And yes, I understand, his right to ‘free speech’ hasn’t been impinged, he still has the right to say what he thinks, but this is a reminder that for all the high-minded talk about being ‘anti-fragile’ we’re all more fragile than we think.
I don’t know what Roosh’s revenue situation looks like, I know he’s put Return of Kings on indefinite hiatus, but I wonder what men who’ve made the manosphere their sole source of income will do when their ability to generate revenue from it dries up. This is the main reason I advise men against becoming revenue-dependent on the manosphere. It’s too easy to have their convictions compromised for the sake of profit, but it’s also one keystroke away from being deleted by platforms they depend on for that revenue.
My main fear is that the vital work I’ve done with The Rational Male might be casually undone through the ignorant vindictiveness of a feminist critic somehow made an authority over what men should and should not read in digital publishing. My fear is that the men’s lives who might be saved by my book would be prevented access to it. I made a joke on Twitter a few years ago; I said, ‘there will come a day when The Rational Male will have to be read in secret, by candle light among secret societies of men like Christians in Mao’s China had to do. I don’t laugh at that prophecy anymore.
I’ve always encouraged men to buy the physical, print copy of the book. Mainly this is because I’ve always hoped men would in fact discuss it among themselves. It was meant to be a conversation (debate) starter because I’ve always believed in the bottom up approach to making people think in new ways. I want men to physically pass the book on to the next guy they think will need it. I make the least amount on royalties from the print book, but it’s what I think is most important – but also because it is a permanency that digital books cannot insure.
The Red Pill community has grown exponentially since I began writing almost 20 years ago. While I don’t believe we’ve hit critical mass just yet I do think we’re becoming too big to ignore now. The Red Pill forum on Reddit was ‘quarantined’ last week, and unsurprisingly the latent message sent in that act was one that aligned with a pseudo-concern over what an appropriate expression of masculinity is. Ironically, the redirect from the quarantine was linked to the ‘masculinity studies’ department of Stony Brook University – every bit the Vichy male plantation for men to align with the definition of masculinity approved for them by the Feminine Imperative – and led by, the now condemned for sexual assault allegations, Michael Kimmel.
What the Red Pill reveals is dangerous and threatening to a gynocentric world order. As the #MeToo movement evolves into the opportunistic weapon of social and political control, our online presence and our message stand out in sharp challenge to its false foundations. I can remember when I wrote Fem-Centrism and The Feminine Reality and the hostility those posts generated among critics. It’s always been a man’s world they said; how dare I suggest women were the true power behind the throne. That was 7 years ago. I had a new WordPress blog and although I was semi-well known on SoSuave I was just another blogger who wrote about this new thing called the ‘Red Pill’.
The Gestalt Feminine vs. The Gestalt Masculine
In 2018 the stakes are much higher, the game has changed and the tolerance for challenges to an ideology intrinsic to our feminine-primary social order is at its breaking point. There is now a presumption of authority to go along with the presumptions of entitlement for women and default guilt for men. The very platforms that made our coming together possible are ruled by the world views we’ve always warned against.
I once wrote a post called Appeals to Reason and in it I made a rational case as to why it is never in a good idea for a man to try to reason his way into intimacy or sex with women. Most Beta men subscribe to a very literalist mindset. Our Rational Interpretive process evolved to make men natural, deductive, problem solvers. As such, we evolved different strategies and different communication methods apart from those of women. We believe in the statistics, the empirical data, the proven methods, the ‘science’ behind the processes to make informed decisions. We prioritize information when we communicate.
To the contrary, women prioritize the context of communication – they feel the communication before they apply a rational interpretation to what’s been communicated. Even when confronted with a succinctly reason position founded on empirical facts, their first priority is to personalize how that data makes them feel. Their Emotional Interpretive Process is their evolved default.
What I see happening today on a larger meta-social scale is a collective gestalt of the masculine trying to assert their deductive reasoning to assess the disposition of the meta-female gestalt which is firmly founded in how issues of monumental social importance make the whole of the feminine feel.
In Appeals to Reason I used a guy’s petition of women as an example of this. The kid had created a list of questions for women to fill out as to why they didn’t want to go out with him on a date and to assess what it is that women want. This is classic male deductive reasoning. For millennia men have tried to apply reason to dealing with women only to find themselves confounded by what women say and what they do. The same is now true in a social scope and about decisions that have global importance today.
However, in today’s scenario it is women who presume an authority that is just on the cusp of totalitarianism. It’s like we’re collectively, as Beta, Blue Pill conditioned men, attempting to logically deduce what it is women want in order to satisfy their desire for a total authority. And when that woman doesn’t get what she wants, when men try to reason her into bed, she reacts like a violent child having a tantrum. She says what she feels, not what she needs.
And the gestalt of men turn on one another and blame the other for setting her off. “If only you assholes would give her what she wants we wouldn’t be in this mess” they say. Then to make matters worse we pander to her tantrums, we believe her insanity, we take her feelings as facts and the other half of the gestalt masculinity wonders why the other can’t see the real story while the other is swept up in female hysterics.
Then the gestalt female is pandered to so thoroughly that we come to the point that we follow their Emotional Interpretive process as the only measure of legitimate discussion. This is where we are today, only, to compound things, we’ve collectively approved for the gestalt feminine a universally effective means of destroying the parts of the gestalt masculine who would dare to challenge their feelings, their emotional priorities. We’ve given the feminine the power to wish us away to the cornfield if we upset the child.
And so here we are, at the figurative mercy of the gestalt feminine (and their Vichy male “allies”) keeping our collective heads down for fear that they’ll deny us our bread if we upset the insane, collective female Id.
There will be more to this essay in my address at the 21 Convention this Friday. I will also be doing various videos from Orlando on my Periscope, Twitter and possibly my new YouTube channel. I hope to see you there.