Men and women

Solipsism I

solipsism

“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children.” – Hillary Clinton

I had planned on using Hillary’s now infamous quote for an upcoming post outlining the distinction between women’s innate solipsism and an acculturated narcissism, but fate delivered me a much more profound use for this quote last week (we’ll get to that in part II).

Before I dig in here I feel it’s kind of incumbent upon me to point out that I in no way align with, nor endorse Hillary’s political or ideological perspectives, and I think it should go without saying that I diametrically disagree with her feminine-primary social agendas.

That said, if you ever need a better quote to explain the realities of feminine solipsism I think I’d be at a loss to give you one. A lot of men, even Red Pill aware men, have a hard time understanding how solipsism fits concretely into the feminine psyche. The social conditioning and upbringing that predisposes us towards an egalitarian equalist mindset rebels against thinking women and men would have different psychological firmware. Equalism teaches us to expect that men and women’s needs share mutual origins and our impulses are so similar that any difference is insignificant.

That egalitarian frame predisposes us to consider that ‘not all women are like that‘ or to disassociate the idea that men and women could be anything but functionally equal agents. As a result we get convenient distractions to confuse our looking for comparatives to should anyone (or thing) challenge an equalist answer.

Simply put, we get rationales like “Oh well, men do it too”, or worse, or any opposite comparison that leads us away from considering the truth that men and women are psychologically, biologically and sociologically different; with different motives and different strategies which they employ to meet their different imperatives. And often these imperatives are at odds with the best interests of the other sex.

Separating Differences

The Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

It is the fundamental differences in either sex’s imperatives, acculturation and biology that creates this conflict. Of course, men and women have come together for each other’s mutual benefit (and love, and enjoyment) to create families and sustain our race for millennia, however, this mutually beneficial union does not originate from mutual imperatives or sexual strategies.

When I explain how women hold an opportunistic concept of love, while men hold an idealistic one, the resistance to accept that observable, behavioral, reality is rooted in a blank-slate belief that men and women are fundamentally the same. So, when we read a statement from a woman (to say nothing of a high status one) such as Hillary’s, we either scoff at the oblivious audacity of it because it is so counter to our (male) imperative’s interests, or we nod in ascension in the feminized belief that what best serves the female imperative necessarily is the best interest of the male imperative.

This is an illustration of the fundamental difference in the interpretation of experience between the sexes.

From a solipsistically oblivious female perspective what Hillary is expounding on here is entirely true. From a perspective that prioritizes feminine Hypergamy above all else, these three sentences make perfect, pragmatic sense. The idea that men losing their lives in warfare would make them victims at all (much less the primary victims) isn’t even an afterthought; all that matters is the long term security and continued provisioning of women and their imperatives.

Solipsism, not Narcissism

A lot of newly Red Pill aware men get confused at my using the term ‘solipsism‘ when I refer to this female-specific obliviousness to any concern – or lesser prioritized concern – of anything outside their immediate existential needs. The confusion comes from men who want for a similar justice to the one I outlined in Our Sister’s Keeper. Self-importance or narcissism would seem to be a more appropriate term for this dynamic, but I disagree.

Female solipsism in and of itself is not necessarily a net negative in the larger scope of human survival and evolution. On the surface that may seem a bit outrageous, but it’s only outrageous insofar as women’s solipsistic natures come into conflict with the biological and social imperatives of men. This solipsism is the necessary result of a feminine survival instinct that’s helped preserve women and their offspring in a violent, chaotic and uncertain evolution.

Recognizing the importance of feminine solipsism is not an endorsement of the anti-social, and often cruel, byproducts of it.

No doubt, men who’ve been on the sharp end of this will grind their teeth at the inevitable narcissism that becomes an extension of women’s solipsism. I’ll agree. Socially we’re living in an era of unprecedented (western) narcissism manifested in a vast majority of women.

At no other time in history have women become more accustomed to perceived entitlements of personal security, ubiquitous social control and relative assurances of optimizing Hypergamous imperatives. At no other time have women’s sexual strategies been of such primary importance to society. However, this narcissism is the result of an acculturation and learned social priorities that predispose women to expectations that border on arrogance. Over recent generations that narcissism has become learned and fostered in women to the point that narcissism is openly embraced as a feminine strength – women believe it’s their due after a long suffrage.

Women’s solipsistic nature however is an integral part of their evolved psychological firmware. Solipsism is the evolved, selected-for result of self-preservation necessities that ensured the survival of our species. As men we get frustrated by this intrinsic nature; a nature that puts women’s imperatives as their primary mental point of origin. As any newly aware Red Pill man will attest, coming to this realization is a very hard truth to accept. It’s cruel and contrary to what the First Set of Books have taught him he should expect and build his life around.

Furthermore, it’s cruel in the respect that this solipsism neither aligns with the romantic, Blue Pill hopes he’s been raised to accept, but also the egalitarian, equal and level playing field ideology he’s been conditioned to believe he should alter his priorities to accommodate for women; and in turn he can expect from women. As I stated earlier, coming to terms with men and women’s differing concepts of love is a tough disillusionment, but this difference in concept is simply one of many a man must come to terms with.

When I wrote Empathy I got taken to task about women’s capacity to feel empathy to a greater degree than do men. It’s not that women cannot feel empathically (a shared experience), my argument was that the idea that women feel a ‘greater’ empathy than men was a social convention with the latent purpose of masking women’s innate solipsism.

That wasn’t a very popular idea. The notion that women are the mothers and nurturers was predictably spelled out, but with regards to empathizing and caring for men the primary concern of women was worry over their own and their children’s well being before that of their men should they become incapacitated. Again, this is a cruel truth, but also a pragmatic and survival based one.

Mental Point of Origin

Women’s mental point of origin begins with their own self-importance, and the overriding importance of their own and their offspring’s survival. I’ve had women readers lambast me that they couldn’t possibly be so influenced by solipsism because they put their children’s wellbeing before their own. However it is just this solipsism that predisposes women to seeing their children as extensions of themselves and their own identities. And the good news is that this dynamic is one reason the human species has been so successful.

The following was a comment from Starve the Beast on the TRP subredd:

Women are bad at reasoning, but good at rationalization.

Let that sink in for a minute. One cannot rationalize without the faculty for reason. So are women really bad at reasoning? No, actually they’re great at it.

The difference is that women don’t place as much value on Truth as they do upon self-preservation, and therefore their reasoning processes do not abort when self-contradiction is reached. They’ll just rationalize their way out of that too, if exposed.

Ultimately, the so-called hamster reflects an underlying difference in value systems more than in reasoning ability.

Women can learn to sublimate their solipsism. In fact, cultures and progressive societies have been founded on sublimating female solipsism. Women can and do learn critical thinking quite regularly. Women can learn and function within a society that forces them to compromise their sexual strategies and mitigates the worst abuses that solipsism would visit on men (and themselves). Women can learn to be empathetic towards men as well as live within a social order that looks like mutual justice and fairness.

But the fact that these civil dynamics should need to be something a woman learns only reinforces the biological and evolved influences of female solipsism as women’s mental point of origin. The parallel to this is men’s learning to sublimate intrinsic parts of themselves – primarily their sexuality – to reinforce prosocial interaction in society. 

Women dislike the idea that their experience is colored by solipsism. It sounds bad, and it runs counter to what they believe are sacrifices on their own part to help others. That may be so, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to discount those investments, but they come from a learned compassion that must overcome an innate solipsism. That ‘me and my babies first’ mental point of origin isn’t necessarily a bad thing either – it’s only when that learned compassion and humility are superseded by it that anti-social behaviors and hubris arise.

I expect the predictable criticism will be that men are also self-important, and / or all humans are intrinsically selfish fucks. In part II I’ll elaborate more on this, but for now it’s important to grasp that female solipsistic nature is less about selfish individualism and more about pragmatic survival.

Many a male reader of my Hierarchies of Love series grated against the idea that a conventional model of love would progress from Men to women, women to children, children to puppies, etc. That model is a direct reflection of a uniquely female solipsism that seemingly discards men’s reciprocal emotional investment in women. However it is also the same dynamic that predisposes women to desire men who can decisively control their environment as well as dominate them sexually and emotionally.

In part II I’ll outline more examples of feminine solipsism, how it’s reflected on the individual and societal level and how a man might best use an understanding of it to his advantage.

The Remedial Red Pill

feminism-men-300x300

As of this post there are now 400 essays on Rational Male. And if there’s one thing that writing for as long as I have in what’s now known as the manosphere has taught me is the difficulty of having to initiate new readers to old concepts. When we get down and dirty in the commentary on a particular topic I tend to assume most commenters are familiar with at least the core concepts I’ve presented over the years and those who aren’t usually ask me for a link they probably could’ve found just by perusing the sidebar links, categories or a quick term search to see what I’ve post about a particular topic.

Still, this doesn’t seem to placate the disease of attention deficit disorder common to people who want to find whatever fault they can to defend the narrative they’ve invested themselves in. The problem then becomes one not unlike playing whack-a-mole where I’ve got to post links in comments or tweets I can only hope the critic will actually have the temerity and patience to read. Usually it comes back to TL;DR and they never really consider a rebuttal to their ‘Gotcha’ that I covered, in some cases, a decade ago.

As the manosphere and Red Pill awareness go more mainstream I expect this intellectual lethargy to increase on the part of those who are ego-invested in the continuance of a feminine-primary social order. As I’ve posted before,…ahem, the Red Pill is a Threat to the comfort and certainty of men and women conditioned to be dependent on its continuance:

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

I’m proud to say that the comments in the last post reached a record high of over 700. And while I’m appreciative of that it does have the unfortunate effect of burying some really interesting commentary deep in the thread. Towards the 5th page of comments I got the following post from a commenter going by the handle ‘Alpha Female’. The consequent posts were a screed of what even the newest of Red Pill men can recognize as standard Gender Studies Major boilerplate.

I can’t say as I was surprised to see ‘Alpha Female’s’ comment on this week’s post since I was already aware of her previous foaming rant on the Women in Love post under the telling monicker of ‘The Best Thing You’ll Never Have’.

Against my better judgement I’m going to pick her comment apart here for this week’s discussion. Just so you know, I’m fully aware this is feeding a blatant troll. I also understand that Ms. Alpha lacks the critical thinking skills and curiosity to make even a cursory attempt to search for any of the 399 prior posts (a third of which I wrote for SoSuave over a decade ago) that might actually give her pause to think I’d covered them before.

Try not to think of this as a courtesy to Alpha Female, her argumentative style is one of presuming personal truths that fit her ego centered reality are the universally accepted ones. Think of this as more of a remedial lesson in Red Pill theory/ideology/practice and background for those new to Red Pill awareness.

Feel free to pick apart any or all of her initial list below in the comment thread. You can pick up the old thread to see where her rabbit hole goes here, but as you’ll probably expect most of the conversation revolves her own personal experiences and veers off into “ooh ooh, men do it too” and “people are all different, society sucks” tangents. Like most bad debaters, she flits from one issue to another when a snare she wasn’t expecting to conflict with her ‘correct’ reality holds her on that challenge for too long.

1. Equalitarian and “female-primary” social orders are not synonymous nor interchangeable. I assume you know the definition of equalitarian, yet you are using the term interchangeably to mean a female dominant social order. First example of flawed reasoning in this article.

Actually the only error is in AF not having searched the term “equalism” here, but keep that in mind, it’s going to come up often in this post. I’ve covered egalitarian equalism both here and here.

She is correct though, they shouldn’t be synonymous or interchangeable, but unfortunately the Feminine Imperative, and its predominant social arm of feminism, has conflated them both to serve a purpose for going on 70 years now. Universalism and Equalism have been the cover story to sell a feminine-primary social order since the late 60s.

It would be very simple if, as she constantly parrots, the definition of equalitarianism was only limited to a belief in ‘equal rights’ for all. Very few people are going to argue against that ideology, but the fact is that her ego-preferred definition has been contorted to be a useful tool of the Feminine Imperative.

The social veneer of ‘equalism’ was a necessary social convention in recruiting men to disavow their conventional masculinity (which later would be redefined by the feminine for them in later generations to better fit women’s dualistic sexual strategy) as well as their self-interests and adopt the idea that a nebulous ‘society’, and more specifically a Patriarchal one, was the source of gender roles they were told they should find oppressing.

Thus the synonymous association of a ‘faux equalist’ equalitarianism was paired with feminine social primacy. Equalism is simply the religion of feminism because it can hide the more egregious aspects of its agenda (unfettered Hypergamy for instance) behind a social convention that very few people would want to ‘be against’ – those who are are easily ostracized as “backwards” anachronisms by way of that definition. So the “flawed reasoning” really comes down to the semantics of the fluid definition the Feminine Imperative has prepared for women like AF to use and the observable facts of the utility it serves the Feminine Imperative.

Feminism has never been concerned with true egalitarian equality. Feminism has only ever been an effort in retribution and restitution. Our present social state of Open Hypergamy and feminist triumphalism is an indictment of that fact.

2. “The most popular trope is that ideas of gender are a social construct and that women and men are comparative equals and only their physical plumbing makes them different in form only.” There is evidence that exactly this is true.

This is interesting, because she cites no evidence. That’s because there is exactly zero evidence this is the case and increasingly science is proving exactly the opposite, much to the ideological discomfort of “equalists”. Men and women’s brains are literally wired differently (if she’d had the curiosity to look at this link I provided in the post she found so offensive she’d know this).

But we don’t even need those studies to grasp this most basic of human truths – we already know that men and women’s biochemistry and endocrinology work and affect their respective sex’s bodies and minds differently. Whether it’s the dominant presence of estrogen, progesterone and oxytocin in women or the dominant presence of testosterone in men, the body state – behavioral effects and emotional stimulus of those hormones make us fundamentally different beings – and that’s a good thing.

Complementarianism benefits women and men.

Furthermore, each sex evolved into different gender roles according to these biological predilections. We can split hairs as to which sex should be more suited for higher order vocations based on intellect and personal merit, but the obvious fact that men are more physically suited to certain tasks, and women are also similarly suited to other tasks – yet both complement the other – is inescapable.

Part of the evolved male neurological firmware is a natural aptitude to accurately and forcefully throw an object from a very early age – an evolved behavior necessary for survival and hunting. Yes, girls can be taught to throw as or more effectively than a boy with the right training, but it’s the natural unlearned aptitude boys have that puts the lie to the “we’re all born the same” blank slate trope.

So the question then becomes one of determining which sex’s strategy stands to benefit most from advocating for a belief that all humans are a blank slate, biology is meaningless and all gender is a social construct. Which sex has their interests served in lowering the bar and “leveling the playing field” to become more like the other?

Examine how being transgender impacts someone’s gender. You believe in a heteronormative gender binary which clouds your judgment and makes you incapable of understanding how gender relates to power dynamics in society. Until you can grasp that gender is defined by more than genitals, you will continue to write this complete and utter tripe that disparages women for the sake of helping you feel superior (which a truly superior person would not do).

Transgenderism is a mental disorder:

In the vast majority of cases, children who say they’re transgender and act that way change their minds about being the opposite sex—if you just leave them alone.According to a recent Hastings Center report, gender dysphoria does not persist into adulthood in up to 73 to 94 percent of cases  (citing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which noted dysphoria continuing in only 6 to 23 percent of boys and 12 to 27 percent of girls.)

[…] Heyer’s blog cites a national survey of more than 6,500 transgenders that asked the question, “Have you tried to commit suicide?” Forty-one percent answered, “Yes.” That’s astonishingly more than the national average of less than 2 percent. Virtually all people who attempt suicide are suffering from some form of mental disorder or depression. So it should seem clear that blaming society for that depression will not address the dysphoria and depression an individual feels.

The term “heteronormative” is a common trope taught by Gender Studies academia with the latent purpose of canonizing a new definition of the term by demonizing and marginalizing the fundamental truth that gender finds its ‘normative’ condition in an evolved ‘hetero’sexual biology – and yes, that is a binary, one from which you cannot escape. Just ask the 41 precent of depressed and suicidal transgendered people about their attempts to escape it.

The roots of gender are written into your DNA.That hetero normative state is responsible for producing you. Try as you may to convince yourself socially or psychologically it’s otherwise, you will never escape the biomechanic foundation that influences your motivations as a man or a woman.

With regard to how gender influences social dynamics, the Red Pill is the direct result of, and logical contingency to the feminine-primary social engineering the Feminine Imperative has instated into society over the last 70 years. If it weren’t for that foundational recognition of feminine-primary social power by the Red Pill you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

I do agree on this, gender is far more than genitals. Once an ideologically ‘correct’ form androgyny and egalitarian equalism enter the public sphere, the biological influences on gender determines who will play the perpetual victim and who must play the role of victimizer.

3. “It fundamentally denies the separation, from an evolved biological / psychological perspective, that men and women experience life in different ways.” All people experience life in different ways. You are overvaluing the common experiences that you have with men and undervaluing the common experiences you have with women. The binary that you use to define your superiority is again hampering your ability to understand that you are not defined by gender and your experiences will never perfectly align with any other human being’s experiences and that you share lots of common experiences with BOTH men and women.

AF’s out of context quote only makes my preceding point for me:

I’ve written countless posts on the evidential and logical fallacies that make up gender equalism, but the important thing to be aware of is the conflict inherent within that belief – equalism expects men and women’s existential experiences to be the same, while also pleading that we embrace the differences it purports we don’t actually have.

I found this interesting considering that it entirely contradicts point 2 – if gender is self or socially assigned and we’re all alike (blank slate) independent of biology this then precludes independent differences since we’re all supposed to have some ‘enlightened’ higher-self capacity to rise above them. In other words all people should be inherently bisexual and born with the capacity to fluidly transition from one set of arousal cues to the opposite in any given environment. Androgyny should be the normative in that model. Yet we find that in nature androgyny and homogeny lead to evolutionary dead ends

But if that’s true then homosexuals, and heterosexuals aren’t born the way they are, they’re behaviorally conditioned into their sexual alignments and gender roles by “society“, right?

Individuals do experience life in different ways, but each of those individuals are still subject to their biologically determined physical influences and the environments they find themselves in.

4. Hypergamy is conflated in your mind with gender, when it is absolutely normal for people in both genders (and not all people in either gender) to branch swing from one mate to the next based on perceived value or sexual attraction. Males engage in this behavior all the time. Not withstanding the obvious mountain of evidence you have at your disposal to verify the fact that I’m stating, it is indisputable that the incidence of infidelity in males is higher than in females, yet you claim women cannot “love” a man in the same way that a man “loves” a woman.

Hypergamy is the biologically influenced normative state of females to prefer men of a sexual market value above their own perceived sexual market value.

This metric is determined (again) by the inescapable biological realities of the influence women’s hormonal and menstrual cycles, and the evident behavioral effects play on their sexual selection strategies. The influences of women’s innate ovulatory shift behaviors and preferences define the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks sexual strategy on both the personal and societal level.

Remember the usefulness of the “equalitarian” term as defined by the Feminine Imperative we discussed above? Women’s innate, biologically determined and sex-specific Hypergamy is where that conflation finds its purpose. AF makes the same comparison to men’s sexual selectivity being itself a form of hypergamy because she fundamentally clings to her ego-investment that ‘all are equal’ and men’s sexual strategy serves the same purpose as women’s. It is not and it does not, and any basic knowledge of parental investment theory as well as the biological realities of men’s reproductive methods once again put the lie to her assertions. Men quantity, women quality, and no one’s ugly after 2am.

Women cannot sell Open Hypergamy and the love-conquers-all ethereal ideal love at the same time. Neither can they sell Open Hypergamy and the premise of egalitarian equalism – particularly when AF’s feminine-primary boilerplate is refuted by statistics taken after the advent of unilaterally feminine controlled hormonal birth-control.

You see, it’s was a useful trope that men cheat more than women when Hypergamy was more socially concealed, but in an age of unrestricted, socially mandated Open Hypergamy the only question that remains is whether a man will choose to be cuckolded before or after he’s invested himself personally, emotionally and financially in monogamy with a woman who’s looking for an “equal partnership” (now that she’s less able to arouse the Alpha bad boys she’s happy to tell him about).

But, wait, if we’re all ‘equal’ and the plumbing doesn’t matter, wouldn’t men and women cheat equally?

5. ‘“I can’t believe men can live in a state like this” were her exact words. She was just beginning to get a taste of what men experience and control in their own skins 24 hours a day and it was unsettling for her.’ And yet asexual men exist, which directly contradicts the anecdotal evidence you use to support your non-fact based argument that men are simply horny all the time and are therefore experiencing a condition that women cannot even begin to fathom. I mean when you write this tripe, you are well aware of the many logical fallacies that you use to justify your beliefs, are you not? I hope you are. And if your response is “Well those asexual men are just exceptions to the rule” or “hyper sexual women are the exception to the rule” is simply to say that “I know my theory has been disproved but I would rather ignore the facts and evidence that do not support my claim in favor of plowing on so that I can continue to demean females with my outdated 15th century mindset.”

Put an ‘asexual’ man in the private room at the Spearmint Rhino in Vegas and we’ll see how ‘asexual’ he really is. Again, ‘asexuality’ is an evolutionary dead-end. Only in our present social state of enlightenment do we entertain the “equalist” notion that an ‘asexual’ person in anyway represents anything significant to human development.

However AF still doesn’t grasp that the ‘anecdotal’ example I give here has been repeated in every woman who’s taken anabolic steroids, and every woman ever proscribed hormone therapy to aid her flagging libido and mood swings after menopause. It’s a good thing gynecologists and endocrinologists don’t share her opinion that we’re all the same except for the plumbing. It’s interesting that we’ll prescribe hormone therapy for menopausal women and transexuals, but we’re expected to accept that ‘asexuality’ is normative and not an ill.

I should also add that AF has very poor debate skills.

6. “So it should be an easy follow to deduce that how a woman experiences love, as based on her Hypergamic opportunistic impulses, is a fundamentally different experience than that of a man’s.” Your logic is inherently flawed, [presuming the condition] and then you make an assertion that there should be a logical conclusion that the assumptions you have not and cannot prove [already present in the post] should mean that all women experience relationships in exactly the same way [what part of individuated experience did I lose you on?] .

Let me make a correlation. [I reject your reality and replace it with my own] I am reading misogynistic psychobabble from overly emotional men [projecting bias] that demeans women and places them in a position beneath men [implied nowhere in the essay, and in fact I concede that women do love deeply based on their opportunistic criteria] based solely on their genital composition [“equalist’ binary presumption and again not implied in the post] , so I conclude based on this evidence (and my evidence is actually supported so it is very different from your flawed premise [support that is never supplied and expected to be presumed as valid] ) that all men view women as inferior beings that are not worthy of equal treatment. [presuming a truth. treatment is not to be conflated with expectations of stimulus to predicted behavior]

That is the logic you use, and it is absolutely worthless. [straw men always nod their heads in agreement with your reality] The saddest thing about it is that people with this mindset purport to be pseudo-intellectuals and use junk science to support their claims [still waiting on your non-junk science] while men of lower intellect just eat it up because it makes them feel all rough and tough and superior for a while. [yes, because spending hours a day reading a blog is a better high than getting drunk or going out to do something productive]

Group think is a terrible and scary thing, [you’re right about that] as this blog proves time and time again.

Final note: I realized in the time it took to compile this that Alpha Female is really an comment thread attention whore who’s need for catharsis over her sadly Hyena-like marriage motivates her to write stream-of-consciousness diatribes to support truths she needs to support her ego-investments and self-image.

Intimacy

intimacy

Bad Painter had a great question a few months ago:

What exactly is intimacy? What does that look like in a Redpill context?

I used to think I knew what intimacy was, in a blue pill way at least. And I have come the realization that intimacy is either not worth shit, or I simply don’t get it. What I do know is that those times were I was informed intimacy had been achieved were not correlated with my feeling comfortable, more secure or less anxious rather it was the opposite.

This is a good question.

In my writing I use the term ‘intimacy’ as a sort of confirmation of a woman’s genuine interest, but I don’t think I’ve ever really defined it.

Strictly from a PUAs sense I would say intimacy is a woman’s sexual availability – in no uncertain terms it’s confirmation of her intimate interest and acceptance of you, but then again, in my own sexual past I’ve had more than one fuck-buddy with whom I really didn’t share any real intimacy with.

In those instances I was (at least perceived) a point or so above these women’s SMV and enjoyed all the Alpha benefits that arrangement afforded me, but beyond the sexual, I had no real interest in any kind of intimacy, shared or not.

In a sense, I actually had a much deeper intimacy with the three fuck-buddies I would bang in my 20’s than the women with whom I’d invested myself with in more “meaningful” relationships. You see, with my fuck-buddies all pretense of caring about what they thought of me personally (and certainly from a long-term investment) was simply a non-issue. I was free to express as much or as little of myself as I wanted because I wasn’t actively qualifying for their future investment in me. My Frame was dominant from the outset – sex-on-call is a pretty strong indicator of dominant Frame.

When I was writing the final edits of the Wait For It? post for the Rational Male book I felt that I needed to add a caveat towards the end of that section to account for a sense of intimacy for red pill men, who by conviction or otherwise, weren’t comfortable with actually fucking a woman to confirm genuine desire.

The point of that being that sex isn’t necessarily a determinant of intimacy, but rather the real desire for that person and the want for a mutual connection (to be consummated by sex) creates a condition of intimacy.

Zenpriest on intimacy:

“When one considers that one must “game” a woman, even your wife, in order to keep her around, then it also means that you must always be operating at a “higher level” than her. It totally negates the whole notion of having a “soul-mate” and means that on many levels, a man will always be alone.” 

That is probably the most important lesson a man can ever learn.

Intimacy with a woman is impossible if you have any interest in being her lover. If you are fine with being one of her grrrlfriends, and don’t mind the stupid messed up games women run on them, then you can share to your heart’s content – and will always be on the LJBF ladder.

The fundamental problem with today’s concept of marriage is that it seems both men and women expect their spouse to be all things to them – lover, confidante, helpmate, “soulmate”, co-housekeeper, and co-wage-earner. With so many role demands, it is inevitable that everyone will fail at some of them. That is why the old division of roles worked fairly well for most people – each could concentrate on a few things they were good at, and leave the rest to the other person.

Zenpriest outlines one of the fundamental differences between a forced egalitarian equalist approach to relationships with the natural complementary approach – intimacy between two autonomous, self-sufficient, self-reliant individuals is an impossibility in a sustained relationship. If there is a complete self-sustaining independence between both partners (an eqaulist idealized state) then there is no true purpose for intimacy between the two.

Buena Vista:

I have been the Alpha Fucks, the Beta Bucks, and I have been both at the same time. Civil marriage requires a man, as Deti notes by inverse example, to commit to permanent Game. Permanent Game rarely involves true intimacy. This is the reality of the Plan B Nice Guy in marriage.

Eon:

It seems that intimacy, like love, is only possible if you are greater than (and thus truly independent of) the object of your love.

Softek:

In my opinion, intimacy is unchanged by the red pill. It’s the ideas and perceptions about it that are changed.

There’s a lot of dichotomy: sex, attention, and affection are all thought of as needs, but at the same time, if you’re not getting any of those things, the only way to get them is to take on the mindset of having an abundance of them.

And the guys who seem to have free access to all of those things have access to them because they don’t care if they have access to them or not.

I have to consider these perspectives of intimacy and cross reference it with the Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

Although in an extreme this may seem manipulative to the uninitiated, this balance exists in every relationship irrespective of whether one party is intentionally using that power or not. In fact the most frustrated men you’ll ever meet are those whose women aren’t intentionally using the power his qualifying for her intimacy bestows upon her. He wonders why he can never merit her intimacy, while she, obliviously, wonders why he keeps trying to merit it.

As I illustrated in my fuck-buddies example, I was free to be as intimate as I chose with them because I literally had nothing to lose by doing so. And in that state of outcome indifference they wanted those occasions of intimacy far more than any woman I’d held in a high enough esteem to think I needed to qualify for their intimacy.

However, from a Red Pill perspective, I think the idea that “real” intimacy requires a constant effort of Game is in error. I’ve shared an enduring intimacy with Mrs. Tomassi for 19 years because Game and Red Pill awareness are simply part of who I am now. Game, if that’s even the right word for it, becomes effortless once you’ve made Red Pill truths an intrinsic part of who you are.

I still think Buena’s right though, permanent Game rarely involves true intimacy, but only if that Game is a constant act a man feels he needs to make believable to sustain his relationship. This then comes full circle to wanting to fulfill Blue Pill idealisms of intimacy with applied Red Pill awareness.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

Most men’s concept of intimacy, like love, is shaped by his Blue Pill conditioning. The key to real intimacy is understanding how it can grow and be sustained in a Red Pill context. Chasing after an intimacy defined by the feminine suffers from the same misdirection of presuming women’s concept of love (opportunism) agrees with men’s (idealism).

So, weekend discussion questions:

How do you define intimacy?

Do you think men and women share the same concept and definition of intimacy?

Is ‘true’ intimacy only achievable when you have nothing to lose and nothing invested in a woman?

 

End Note: I’m well aware that intimacy has far broader inferences than just the relations between men and women, and I’m not attempting to pigeonhole the entire concept. There is intimacy with your family, your God, your pets, yourself and a variety of other things. However, even in those instances there is still a power dynamic at play.

Intersexual Hierarchies – Part I

One of the withdrawal symptoms of unplugging from the Matrix is usually an overwhelming nihilism that results from being torn away from the previous blue pill preconceptions a man has been conditioned to for most of his life. It’s my hope that in the future red pill men will make the necessary interventions and apply what they’ve learned from their unplugging and red pill truths in general towards their sons (and daughters) as well as other men they know or are related to. Until then, the process of breaking away from that conditioning is usually going to begin as the result of a traumatic breakup, a divorce, or having had the relational equity he thought he’d built a long term relationship on proved worthless in the face of hypergamy.

It’s a sad reality of unplugging that it most often starts as a result of emotional anguish, but to pour salt in those wounds is then having to live with the harsh realities that the red pill makes men aware of – that more or less everything they’d held as an ego-investment up to that point was founded on a feminine-primary conditioning. I summed this up in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Try to keep this last part in mind as you read what I propose in these next two posts. I read a lot of guys in various forums getting despondent after having the red pill make sense to them, but that despondency is really a simple lack of not having a path already preset for them to follow. Instead of the easy answers and prerequisite responsibilities that the blue pill and the Feminine Imperative had ready for him to follow, now in his new awareness he’s tasked with making a new path for himself, and that’s both scary and exciting at the same time.

Love Styles

In almost 3 years of blogging and a book written, my three most popular posts have been the Love series – Women in Love, Men in Love and Of Love and War. Though my SMV graph gets the most link backs, these are easily the most viewed posts on Rational Male. Unfortunately they’re often the most misquoted and misunderstood.

One of the toughest revelations of the red pill is coming to terms with the difference in experience and concept that men and women apply to love. The core principle in Women in Love is often misunderstood. For different reasons, deliberate or otherwise, both men and women critically misunderstand the main premise of that post:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

Most critics of my differing assessment of how either sex interprets and considers love tend to blow past this last part. They oversimplify my meaning and sputter out something to the effect of, “That Tomassi guy thinks that women can’t ever really love men, what preposterous crap!”

Of course that isn’t my assertion, but I understand the want to dismiss this notion, particularly for men and women invested in the ideal of equalitarianism. It’s a threat to the ego-investment that men and women are anything less than fully equal and rational agents who come together for each other’s mutually agreeable benefit. The simple fact of women’s innate hypergamy puts the lie to this presumption, as well as confirms the relevancy of women’s constant, qualitative conditionality for whom (really what) they’ll love. I think it’s ironic that the same people who disparage this concept are among the first to readily embrace the pop-psychology notion of Love Languages.

I get why that premise pisses off women (and feminized men); it’s very unflattering to be accused of loving men from a position of opportunism. However, it’s important to understand that I don’t make this observation to condemn the way women approach love – although I’m sure it will follow, my point isn’t to presume a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for women to love men or vice versa. There are beneficial and detrimental aspects of both women’s opportunistic approach to love, and men’s idealistic approach to love. That said, I happen to believe that the differing ways men and women love each other evolved to be complementary to the other and for the betterment of our species.

For all the “OMG I can’t believe this red pill asshole thinks women can’t really love men” misdirection, I should point out that well intentioned men, especially the newly red pill, are also guilty of the same oversimplification. Theirs is an attempt to find validation in the (usually recent) trauma of having been cut away from their prior blue pill conditioning. A similar, “Rollo says women can’t really love men, of course, it’s all so clear to me now” satisfies a simplistic need for confirmation of their former condition.

And again, it’s not a right or wrong way of loving, it’s the lack of recognizing the difference and being on the punishing side of that lack. Most men will want to apply their concepts of honor or justice in assessing how ‘right’ men’s idealistic love is, while women will still see the inherent value in loving what a man is as a prerequisite for loving who a man is. Hypergamy doesn’t care about men’s idealistic expectations of love, but neither does men’s rationality make concessions for what facilitates women’s opportunistic approach to love.

Romantic Souls

From The Red Pill subreddit:

My whole life, I’ve had it nailed into me that I would be able to find true love if I was honest and hardworking. As I grew older it was, “If I’m somewhat fit and have a good job making 60k-80k a year, I’ll find that beautiful girl that loves me as I love her“.

As I’ve stated on many occasions, it is men who are the True Romantics. Granted, it’s the unthoughtful result of centuries of evolved ‘courtly love’, but in the realm of what qualifies as a true act of romance, it’s men who are the primary actors; it’s men who ‘make’ (or want to make) romance happen. And of course therein lies the problem, a man cannot ‘make’ romance happen for a woman.

For all a man’s very imaginative, creative, endeavors to manufacture a romance that will endear a woman to him, his ‘trying’ to do so is what disqualifies his intent. For every carefully preplanned ‘date night’ after marriage, there’s a college girl swooning to bang her boyfriend living in a shithole, sheets over the windows, furniture from the dumpster, pounding shitty beer and sleeping on a soiled mattress on the floor. Romance isn’t created, romance just happens, and it’s a tough, but valuable, lesson when men come to realize that a happenstance bag of skittles, or a ring made from a gum wrapper at the right time meant more to a woman than every expensively contrived ‘romantic getaway’ he’d ever thought would satisfy her need for lofty romance.

An important part of the red pill is learning that the most memorable acts of love a man can commit with a woman are acts of (seeming or genuine) spontaneity and never apparently and overtly planned (and yes, that applies to sex as well). This is a source of real frustration for a man since his blue pill conditioning expects the opposite from him, and his romantic nature – the nature that wants her to love him as he loves her – conspires with his problem solving nature, thus prompting him to ever greater romantic planning for what he hopes will be an appreciated, reciprocated love.

The Hierarchy

The true source of a man’s frustration lies in his misdirected hope that a woman’s concept of love matches his own. His ideal is a beautiful girl that loves him the same way he loves her. The presumption (a romantic one perpetuated by the myth of egalitarian equalism) is that his concept of idealized love is a universal one which women share with men in general and him in particular.

Thanks mostly to men’s blue pill conditioning, what most men fail to ever consider is that women’s hypergamic based love always considers what he is, before who he is. For a more detailed explanation of this I’ll refer you to my post Love Story. This is the root of the intersexual hierarchy of love.

Hierarchy1

Before the rise of feminine social primacy, the above ‘flow chart’ of love prioritization would hardly have been an afterthought for a man. Through any number of evolutionary and sociological progressions the base understanding of how Men’s love began from a position of protecting, provisioning for and directing of the lives of both his wife and children wasn’t a concern worth too much of his consideration. Neither was a prevailing desire for a reciprocal model of love an overshadowing concern.

To be sure, a baseline requirement of a returned love, sex, respect and fidelity were important elements, but this wasn’t the originating basis of male desire for being loved; there was no expectation of a woman loving him as he loved her (and by extension their children). To be a man was to have the capacity to provide a surplus beyond his own provisioning.

“A man provides, and he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it, because he’s a man.”

Gustavo’s monologue in my opening video may seem like an anachronism, especially in the light of a red pill awareness of the potential for injustice and the veritable certainty of a provisioning arrangement that will almost always be a one-sided proposition for a man – whether he’s loved, respected, appreciated, married or divorced.

Undoubtedly there’ll be men reading this bristling at the idea of a non-equitable model for love, but I’d argue that the idea of an equitable model is the result of the conditioning an egalitarian equalism has predisposed men to believe is even possible.

Before the rise of feminine primacy, a man’s expression of love through his support and guidance simply weren’t things women or children had the capacity to reciprocate. The advent of women’s independence, real or imagined, has served to strip men of this core understanding of the differences between male and female concepts of love. In the effort to feminize men more fully, and position men in a condition of confusion about what constitutes masculinity, this concept of love was replaced by a feminine-primary model for love.

While a woman’s respect, and a degree of love may flow back to her man, her primary love and concern is directed towards her children. One reason we’re still shocked by women who kill their children (pre or post natal) is due to an inherent acknowledgement of this natural dynamic. Women’s brain function and biochemistry largely evolved to predispose them to bonding with their children, and thus ensure the survival of the species. Beyond the rigors of physically gestating a child, raising children to self-sufficiency required a considerable investment of effort and resources – not to mention a constant attention. Nature selected-for women with an innate capacity to nurture and direct love primarily towards children.

The internal psychology women evolved to vet for men who displayed traits for both Alpha physical prowess and parental investment / provisioning potential are a result of children being a priority for a woman’s love. While a degree of maintaining a man’s continued commitment to the family unit requires her attentions in the form of sex and affections, a woman’s primary love focus is directed towards children.

Granted, not all women are capable of having children (or some even desirous of them), but even in these instances substitute love priorities still supersede directing her primary attention towards a man. It may seem like I’m attempting to paint women’s love as callous or indifferent, but this ‘directioning’ isn’t a conscious act, but rather due to the innate understanding that a man is to direction his love towards her as a priority.

 

This should give readers a bit to chew on for a while. In Part II I’ll detail the alternative hierarchy models prevalent for modern, post-feminine primacy relationships.

Women Talk, Men Do

talk

Towards the end of last week’s comment thread there were some very insightful questions about how Men and women communicate.

Jeremy:

Honestly, [Stingray], I’ve never met a woman who actually wanted…”deep meaningful conversations, often.” I think this is another lie that women tell themselves. What women seem to want, conversationally, is an authority figure. They want someone who can talk for hours about things they have no understanding of. They want to be intellectually dazzled more than participate in a “deep meaningful conversation.”

[…] To be honest, and this will sound like I’m being arrogant, most women I’ve spent any time conversing with are poorly-read, lacking creative thoughts, and have an abysmal understanding of politics and the world at large. Having said that, I still can’t stand it when women say nothing on a date.

Yohami:

”deep meaningful conversations” for a woman, means “emotional stuff about how I feel and what I want”, “reaffirmation and validation of my viewpoints” and of course “entertain me with stories that show me your character and make me feel good about myself for being with you”

So of course they want that often.

jf12:

Yohami, deep doesn’t mean just telling her how you feel about her feelings, it means also helping her to uncover her inner goodness in the way that she agonized for almost a few moments when she betrayed one friend at the expense of another. In other words, you hold your metaphorical conch of an echo chamber to her metaphorical ear and its solipsistic otoacoustic emissions, and she can hear what she wants to hear, deeply.

Stingray:

Woman are not good at and hate what men mean by a deep meaningful conversation. The argument and debate, presenting and then criticizing ideas, and the ad hominems (that so often you all can then get up from the table and it is ALL over). That is not our idea of deep conversation at all. Then the feelings are NOT good and most women hate it.

Deti:

And the last thing a woman wants in a “deep, meaningful conversation is for the guy to talk about things important to HIM or, even worse, about HIS feelings. HIS feelings, wants, needs, and desires are the LAST things she wants to talk about because that’s so….beta.

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.

Women talk, Men do.

Josey Wales:

Women typically don’t give a shit about world affairs, history, etc. They just don’t seem interested in pondering, learning about, debating the big issues.

There has to be a bio/evo explanation for this, and my best guess is that women’s concerns/interests have always been more provincial, localized and trivial. Picture a bunch of women sitting around a campfire hen party cluck session in primitive societies… Sharing gossip as they threshed the grain or made clothes.

I’m inclined to agree this. It’s no secret that men and women’s brains are wired differently, but what’s interesting is the complementarity between between both sex’s brains. It’s a mistake to think that women’s neural predilections for emotion and intuitiveness is inherently a weakness or a liability, but it’s equally a mistake to think that men’s dispositions towards rationalism, problem solving and inventiveness.

Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women’s brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, in contrast to men’s brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions.

Ragini Verma, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the greatest surprise was how much the findings supported old stereotypes, with men’s brains apparently wired more for perception and co-ordinated actions, and women’s for social skills and memory, making them better equipped for multitasking.

“If you look at functional studies, the left of the brain is more for logical thinking, the right of the brain is for more intuitive thinking. So if there’s a task that involves doing both of those things, it would seem that women are hardwired to do those better,” Verma said. “Women are better at intuitive thinking. Women are better at remembering things. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved – they will listen more.”

This pretty much confirms men and women’s communicative methods I outlined in The Medium is the Message:

We get frustrated because women communicate differently than we do. Women communicate covertly, men communicate overtly. Men convey information, women convey feeling. Men prioritize content, women prioritize context. One of the great obfuscations fostered by feminization in the last quarter-century is this expectation that women are every bit as rational and inclined to analytical problem solving as men. It’s result of an equalist mentality that misguides men into believing that women communicate no differently than men. That’s not to discount women as problem solvers in their own right, but it flies in the face how women set about a specifically feminine form of communication. Scientific study after study illustrating the natural capacity women have for exceptionally complex forms of communication (to the point of proving their neural pathways are wired differently) are proudly waved in by a feminized media as proof of women’s innate merits, yet as men, we’re expected to accept that she “means what she says, and she says what she means.” While more than a few women like to wear this as a badge of some kind of superiority, it doesn’t necessarily mean that what they communicate is more important, or how they communicate it is more efficient, just that they have a greater capacity to understand nuances of communication better than do men. One of the easiest illustrations of this generational gender switch is to observe the communication methods of the “strong” women the media portray in popular fiction today. How do we know she’s a strong woman? The first cue is she communicates in an overt, information centered, masculine manner.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s likely that in 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 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 predispositions is likely due to how women’s ‘hard-wiring’ evolved as part of the circumstances of their tribal roles.

Men Like Women

When a man attempts to communicate like a woman (context-primary), women associate him with the feminine (i.e. he talks like a woman). This subconsciously indicates to her that a guy is Beta and making concessions of his maleness to better identify with the feminine. When you read about angry women feeling duped by the Nice Guy, who was only ‘playing nice’ in order to earn her intimacies, that deception is rooted in a guy relating to women as a woman would.

As you’re probably guessing, with the rise of social feminization, post-sexual revolution, men have been socialized and acculturated to express themselves increasingly as a woman would. This is part of boys-men’s earliest feminine conditioning; a calculated effort by the Feminine Imperative to train men to communicate as women do. I call this men’s “sensitivity training”, but in essence it’s a social effort to force men to rewire their brains to better accommodate a feminine-primary society. “Get in touch with your feminine side”, is really a plea for men to contort their natural ways of communicating into a feminine aligned mode of communicating.

The results however are very much the same as the faux-nice guy effect I describe. There is a subtle disingenuousness that the feminine mind perceives when a man communicates as a woman would. Alpha Men wouldn’t care enough to accommodate women’s communication preferences.

Incongruent communication styles is a tough obstacle for blue pill men to overcome when transitioning to red pill Game-awareness. The sincerity they hope to convey to women about their intentions is incongruous with how women’s limbic understanding of male communication style works. Men are men, because they talk ‘like men’ and are concerned with what Men are concerned with. Granted, the socialization of men to be more feminine-oriented doesn’t do a man any favors in unlearning this, but overcoming the fear of asserting himself as a Man and communicating to a woman as a Man would is imperative.

As most of the male commenters above will attest, there comes a point (usually for older, mature men with the experience to know) where forcing himself to relate to a woman on her terms is simply exhausting. It becomes mentally taxing to maintain interest – at some point men will want to speak their own language, feminine-primacy be damned, but it’s when he does revert back to his native gender language that he becomes more attractive.

When a Man drops the pretense of catering to the feminine, this is when he sets himself apart as a truly masculine agent. He is unapologetically masculine, and that is the mark of an Alpha – to not bend over into the feminine to better identify himself with the feminine. There is strength(and tingles) in our differences from women. So if you’re a newly red pill Man, start making efforts to consciously identify where you’re aligning yourself, your beliefs, your personality with accommodating the feminine and start unapologetically shifting them to a masculine-primary purpose.