In last week’s comment thread Not Born This Morning shared an interesting quote that got me to thinking about Frame in a larger, meta perspective. I’m going to riff on it a bit here as I go, but I think it’s important to understand that the concept of Frame applies in many different circumstances in a man’s life. I’ve covered this idea in Frame as the first Iron Rule of Tomassi, as well as in Blue Pill Frame and in an interview of Mark Baxter and Carl from Black Label Logic.
The concept of Frame is one of the most often discussed Red Pill ideas – especially with guys newly unplugging from their old Blue Pill conditioned lives. Most men tend to think that controlling or owning their own Frame is the key to changing their lot in life, and to an extent this is true. What they most often overlook is how to establish that ownership and developing their personalities around a confidence that comes from it. It doesn’t happen overnight in some magical process of simply changing one’s mind about themselves. Proponents (and marketeers) of the power of a Positive Mindset tend to oversimplify what I believe should be a developmental process of coming into a strong sense of a man’s Frame.
I say that because Frame in a larger perspective isn’t something a man can compartmentalize and make specific from one arena in his life and not in another. My last three essays State Control, Submission, and Family Integrity are really explorations in this Meta Frame ownership. A lot of quick-hit Game proponents, as well as ‘Life Coaches’ like to repeat the mantra of how women are attracted to confidence in a man, but what they’re really selling is the idea of a man owning the Frame of his life. Confidence with his career, family life, friends, his status and confidence in understanding the base nature of women from a Red Pill aware, and how to use it to his advantage, are really all aspects of a strong Frame control.
Confidence is the result of having real, actionable options, and/or the self-understanding that a man’s past, provable, successes mean he can regenerate new options for himself. Confidence is certainly an aspect of solid Frame, but it is not Frame itself. Neither is confidence the result of one simply convincing himself he ought to feel more confident by thinking positively. Confidence is the result of having developed a mastery to successfully generate realizable options, and from that understanding comes solid Frame control.
The comment thread began here if you want to read it in full context, but the salient point I’ve quoted here:
The following excerpt is well worth sharing with everyone here at Rational Male as it pertains to the questions we debate, and ask ourselves, considering men, women and the inevitable sexual social dynamics. At first consideration you will likely think I am even more full of crap than I am, but it is wise to be patient and think about the following seriously. What I am about to tell you dovetails with my most recent comments, there is wisdom herein on the most fundamental level concerning all this.
“Fooled?” is an excerpt (verbatim) from the book entitled “What is the name of this book?” written by Raymond M. Smullyan.
Chapter 1 – “Fooled?”
My introduction to logic was at the age of six. It happened this way: On April 1, 1925, I was sick with grippe, of flu, or something. In the morning my brother Emile (ten years my senior) came into my bedroom and said: “Well Raymond, today is April Fool’s Day, and I will fool you as you have never been fooled before!” I waited all day long for him to fool me, but he didn’t. Late that night, my mother asked me, “Why don’t you go to sleep?” I replied, “I’m waiting for Emile to fool me.” My mother turned to Emile and said, “Emile will you please fool the child!” Emile then turned to me and the following dialog ensued:
Emile “So, you expected me to fool you didn’t you?”
Raymond “Yes”
Emile “But I didn’t, did I?”
Raymond “No”
Emile “But you expected me to, didn’t you?”
Raymond “Yes”
Emile “So, I fooled you, didn’t I ?!”
Well, I recall lying in bed long after the lights were turned out wondering whether or not I had really been fooled. On the one hand, if I wasn’t fooled, then I did not get what I expected, hence I WAS fooled. (this is Emile’s argument.) But with equal reason it can be said that if I was fooled, then I DID get what I expected, so then, in what sense was I fooled? So, was I fooled or wasn’t I?
End of excerpt.
So, how does the forgoing excerpt pertain to sexual gender dynamics? And how does it dovetail into the subject of my previous comment?
When we model our sexuality with women in the fashion of a “game” being aware of red pill “truths” and applying strategy accordingly, we do so at an invitation to operate within the dynamic of the feminine MO. It is imperative to comprehend that Red Pill “truths” are actually nothing more than stratagems which only effectively become “truth” when they are respected as such.
I’ll note here that I disagree that Red Pill truths are stratagems in and of themselves. What may be considered stratagems (depending on how applied) are Game techniques and contingencies. I would argue that Red Pill awareness and truths are fundaments and concepts that exist apart from, but inform, Game stratagems.
They are only manifested into reality when they are effective. They are each like terms of a contract, each of which is a term offer of how the relationship will be defined. Their real manifestation is only possible when both parties accept them to be “true”. Accepting them and respecting them can only be done by submitting to the frame within which they are cast. You make their truth become your truth only by subverting yourself to the idea that they are in fact universally true. You make them false by not subverting yourself to them. Ignore them.
Again, I disagree. Red Pill truths exist in spite of a belief in them or whose Frame, male or female, a man or woman is operating in. Blue Pill idealism, replete with all of the hope-filled delusions of what behaviors and thinking should produce mutual genuine desire, is unproductive because it conflicts with the evolved, base nature of human beings. Red Pill awareness is hard to accept for most men because it is counterintuitive to what Blue Pill conditioning has hammered into their heads, but it is enlightening once a man understands the latent purpose of Red Pill truths. Those truths exist no matter whose Frame a man plays into.
A woman can experience her full attraction to a man only when she respects him (this does not mean she must be frightened of him). To gain respect, you must remain outside their frame entirely. As a consequence, you will gain control of those who cannot lure you into this morass, their relentless test is to see if you can be baited or if you are already conscripted. Understand this and you will gain great power over all women, feminists included. Psychological dominance is established primarily by the explication of not taking the bait, rather than only an implication of not taking the bait. And actions speak louder than words. The test results cannot be faked for long because you may be able to fool some people all the time and all people some of the time but you cannot fool all people all the time.
As I’ve mention countless times, Hypergamy is based on a fundamental doubt for women – is this guy really the best she can do? That doubt exists outside of whoever’s Frame is the dominant one. It is a mistake to think that a woman’s testing a man is always intrinsically malicious. Shit testing a man is only “bating” him when a woman is self-aware enough to realize that she is consciously doing so. In this case I might be inclined to agree that it is her Frame that is defining a man’s reality, assuming he’s unaware (or refuses to believe) he’s honestly doing so.
For the most part, women’s insistence on their Frame being the dominant one is largely something they’re unaware of. The Hypergamous doubt, the subconscious decision making, the influence of ovulatory shift in their libidos, the reason they shit test, and many other behaviors and rationales for them are aspects of women’s natures they have no reason to have any insight about.
When Raymond accepted Emile’s invitation to Emile’s contest of being fooled or not, Raymond entered a frame that was predefined, created and controlled exclusively by Emile. Emile was the absolute omniscient emperor of this frame and all its tenants including Raymond. There is a profound lesson offered here. Those who learn from it, know that Raymond’s only proper response would have been to simply state: “Emile, you cannot fool me.” A lack of response (MGTOW) is as cowardly as an agreement, no matter the terms of the agreement (Alpha-Beta or Macho-Musho). The most desirable masculine men are the ones who cannot be fooled. You are either free or you are tamed, wild or domesticated, master or slave.
Whether or not Emile predefined a truth for Raymond doesn’t erase the fact that there is an objective truth that exists apart from both of them. That is the root of Red Pill awareness and the reason why learning and acknowledging it is so productive for men – with women and in life. I agree that rejecting someone else’s subjective truth is a primary element in unplugging, but so is acknowledging the objective truth surrounding you and using it to one’s benefit.
Authenticity
Not Born This Morning has a tendency to return to the question, ‘whose meta-frame are men really operating within?’ If women control the larger social dynamic as to how men will define every term of engagement, up to and including men’s own existences (to say nothing of sexual strategies) then they are not acting or thinking ‘genuinely’ as Real Men® should.
This is a MGTOW classic now, and it’s a tough hurdle for most of them to get past. The more militant will say that any engagement at all with women is acquiescing to the female meta-frame. I think some distinction needs to be made between an individual woman insisting on her own dominant Frame and the larger, meta-social narrative that women in general should always expect to have men relinquish Frame because it is women’s correct and entitled position.
I don’t believe Not Born This Morning falls into that MGTOW category since he is directly engaging women in direct Game. I discussed this in my first interview with Allen Roger Currie and had some very insightful comments about direct vs. indirect Game. You can look them up, but essentially the MGTOW approach distills to Direct = Genuine, Indirect = Disingenuous or ‘unauthentic’ if you prefer. The idea is that if you feel like you need to be indirect or communicate on women’s terms, or women’s preferred form of communication, you are surrendering to women’s meta-frame.
In such a case you may be able to ‘fool’ a woman of your authenticity as a “man” but it wont be a permanent impression on her in the long term. In this line of thinking you literally can’t “fake it till you make it” you must first “make it” and then act in an authentic way that reflects you operating from an uncompromisable position of your own male meta-frame.
I half agree with Not Born This Morning in the sense that men ought to own their own worlds and be ‘made’ to the point that a directness about it becomes a man’s default approach. It would be nice if men could understand objective Red Pill truths (in all aspects of intersexual dynamics), internalize it, cast off their old Blue Pill misgivings and then make that a part of his own authenticity. It would be great if guys could go from Red Pill school to Game practice as a matter of course, but that’s not always practical for guys. Owen from RSD has made a very lucrative business on the idea that Game practice and action should come first, Red Pill understanding of why it works second. As you might guess I disagree with that because most guys who’ve been deprived of women’s sexuality and intimacy for most of their lives only care about driving the car and care nothing about how it was built or how to repair it. They get trapped in the process and are discovered to be inauthentic in the long term if they don’t make the Red Pill connection and understand the larger meta-Game going on around them.
That said, I disagree with the idea that authentic masculinity can’t be learned. In terms of attraction that may eventually be the case, but in terms of arousal and triggering it in women, it can very much be learned, and indirect approaches can prove just as effective as direct ones. Lets not lose sight that arousal (short term sexual) and attraction (long term provisional) are two sides of Hypergamy and either can set the prioritization of the criteria a woman has for a man – and modified by her physical and maturation states. Women’s attraction/arousal triggers can most definitely be fooled, the real question is how long can you hold up the impression of being an “authentic” (as defined by MGTOWs or whoever) man while you sort out whatever that ought to mean in terms of a controlled meta-frame?
One Tomassi maxim has always been that women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life and never the focus of it. That idea is only profound, only controversial, to men because it conflicts with the feminine-dominant social meta-frame men are taught to accept as part of their Blue Pill conditioning. Blue Pill men are raised to believe in female social dominance – a default female frame – but are comforted by a belief that it’s all about equalism. When you suggest that it is in fact men’s meta-frame that women ought to respect and acknowledge; that is men’s meta-frame that comes closest to objective Red Pill truth, that is when the fighting starts.
I’m of the opinion that guys ought to have a more balanced approach – Red Pill theory and Game practice with the end result being a man coming into a solid meta-frame for himself and understanding where women’s proper place should fit into it. We often repeat that women require masculine dominance from men; I would offer that this dominance should be the result of a man owning his Frame and genuinely being in control of the ‘world’ he expects a woman to voluntarily enter. That makes sense.
If you’re a fraud in the long term (meta-male Red Pill aware authenticity), all of the short term attraction, arousal and dynamism you offered her at the outset only exacerbates a woman’s disappointment in a man. Game is great; it gets you the ‘Dream Girl’ you couldn’t fuck before you learned it, but once you’re “found out” in the long term and it’s clear that – despite all your Game skills – you’re really Blue Pill and subscribe to all the failings it conditions into men, this only serves to anger a woman for having invested her Hypergamous trust in you.
Now, of course, the refrain will be, “But Rollo, who gives a fuck what women want in the long term? It’s my world, take it or leave it.” If your long term goal is simply a lot of short term lays I can completely concur. When men begin to get concrete results with women they’d never had before it’s easy to understand this sentiment, but it doesn’t change the objective fact that even in spinning plates women eventually want to presume that a man is implying a more long term monogamy at some point. So, while it may be that a man’s only immediate plan for ‘his reality’ is to include short-term, non-exclusive sexual relationships, Hypergamy still has two sides to it and your plans will not alter women’s innate reality.
In the next post I will discuss this and the latent purposes of both men and women’s competing sexual strategies and the social conventions that facilitate or limit those strategies.