parenting

What Makes a Man?

When I was compiling the material I was going to use for my second book, Preventive Medicine, I chose to use the essay Vulnerability in the hopes that I might be able to dispel one of the more egregious fantasies about masculinity – that vulnerability is in some way a strength for men. At the time I was rebutting the Mark Manson claim that men’s vulnerability was a necessity in whatever it was he used to consider Game, or the idea that a lot of Purple Pill hacks like to cling to about men’s vulnerability being some foundation upon which a “healthy” relationship ought to be built on. This trope is pulled straight from the Oprah / Dr. Phill handbook and really the belief that a man’s vulnerability is in someway a strength is part of a Blue Pill conditioned belief set that young boys are taught from a very early age.

Go to any woman’s dating advice for men blog today and you’ll likely read some variation of it. It’s actually part of our pop-psychology social consciousness – transvaluation is a very common theme; reversing weakness with strength has been the order for feminizing men and masculinizing women since the Sexual Revolution. I can remember hearing this ‘advice’ since the late 80s on any number of daytime talk shows. Reading this pabulum coming from ‘dating coaches’ with any association to the Red Pill was enough for me to want to dispel the notion. That, and the need for men to get in touch with their Jungian feminine sides as a means to better identifying with women and thus eventually getting laid by all the women who supposedly swooned for vulnerable, sensitive and emotionally available men (also known as ‘Beta Orbiters’).

However, as I was editing that essay for inclusion in the book I realized that what I was considering wasn’t so much the transvaluation of vulnerability and strength, but the model upon which the Feminine Imperative would like to convince men is appropriate and best suited for women’s needs in a relationship. The provable fact that women’s Hypergamy predisposes them to being aroused by men who display the most opposite aspects to this vulnerability (Dark Triad traits for example) doesn’t seem to matter; vulnerability is only beneficial to women seeking comfort and security in a long term partner.

In that essay I outlined a few things about what masculinity has become in a post-Sexual Revolution female-primary social order:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

I returned to this essay today because I think that over the past six months we’re seeing a strengthening push from the Feminine Imperative to clamp down on what we’re to believe should be an acceptable expression of masculinity. In essence the imperative (or the Village if you like) has been using every mass shooting tragedy to reiterate what masculinity should mean to men. And, failing this, the hope is still that men will be confused as to what conventional expressions they can subjectively define it in, in a more female-correct way.

The Feminine-Correct Paradigm

Since the most recent school shooting in Florida, the focus on what constitutes masculinity has come to the forefront of our social consciousness. What exactly is masculinity they keep asking, and then provide definitions that only have meaning to a social order that’s founded on female social dominance. They are definitions that most men heard repeated constantly as boys from their overwhelmingly female-taught and feminine-primary educations. Since the beginning of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of Fempowerment boys and men are expected to grow up into a female-defined masculinity. Boys are acculturated in contexts that feminize them, yet we are meant to believe that all the horrors of Patriarchal masculinity are still being taught to them today:

Two decades ago, the psychologist William Pollack wrote that boys start out sensitive but through a “shame-hardening process” — told to stop crying, to be a man — they learn to hide what they really feel. And if they don’t know or understand their own feelings, how can they care about anyone else’s?

This has become something of a cliché. And the truth is, there’s no single culture of boys, but many. In my memories of adolescence, beneath the constant ribbing and occasional pyromania, we had tremendous affection for one another. And we longed to connect with women with an intensity that was difficult to contemplate.

This was a quote from Real Men Get Rejected Too. It’s a good illustration of the paradox masculinity presents to parents and educators. The idea that boys are these sensitive delicate souls who, through the evils of their Patriarchal (typically male) upbringing, are conditioned to become ‘macho’ violent men is a popular trope. After Nikolas Cruz killed 17 kids at school it was the go-to rationale. “Boys are brought up to be violent gun-loving beasts thanks to a perpetuated misogynistic culture of men” or some variation of this is common. It’s an easy, digestible, info-bite that sounds right because we’ve heard it for so long. If only boys we’re taught more like girls to get in touch with their emotions and were vulnerable in expressing them we could avoid these male-created tragedies.

That’s the pretense we’re supposed to believe – and it’s important that a larger society does believe in the inherent evilness of masculinity if the Feminine Imperative is to maintain social dominance. But the truth is boys have been systematically feminized for the past 3-4 generations. Boys are taught like defective girls. Since the 1970s it is increasingly women who have dominated academia from kindergarten to doctorate degrees. The entire western education system is founded on a feminine-primary, feminine-defined teaching methodology. In the process of advantaging girls to the utmost efficiency in school (to fempower adult women) the educational atmosphere had to be defined by what best served girls. School and teaching became ‘for girls’ and the educational landscape shifted to teaching styles that girls were most benefited in.

In that shift the idea that boys might be disadvantaged had little bearing, but overtime the conditions of teaching ‘to girls’ defined the teaching style as the correct style. In fact, teaching in a way that girls learn best, and disciplining boys for not learning this way, is no longer a style – it is just the way children are taught. Boys and men today are the product of female teachers who actively advantage girls at the expense of boys. So normalized is this teaching that boys disrupting the advantaging of girls in class is something we’ve decided needs to be medicinally curbed. Boys being boys is diagnosed as an illness and drugs are prescribed so as to sedate them long enough for the girls to learn.

This focus on empowering girls isn’t limited to the classroom. In every form of early childhood through adolescent media, music, social networks and social exchanges this theme is continued; girls have the future in their reach, boys are potential rapists and criminals if they don’t fall in line with female-correct way of how things just are. I get asked a lot about what I think defines Blue Pill conditioning and I’d say this ambient social theme of fempowerment is a strong basis for it. Boys are not taught this old-school, much-feared Patriarchal masculinity, they are bombarded with themes of how masculinity is incorrect, laughable, and a shameful ‘act’ that boys have to put on to cover the ‘real’ female-correct versions of their sensitive selves. Boys are taught from the earliest age that being a boy is an incorrect mask, while being a girl, learning like a girl, emoting and relating like a girl is ‘real’ and the correct way of developing a personality.

Who would ever want to be a boy when so much is rewarded and praised about being a girl? There’s so much more advantage to be had if you’re a girl. As early as five years old boys are deliberately taught to loathe their own gender, but they are also being taught a redefinition of what a female-correct form of masculinity should be for them. The best they could do would be to become female to the best of their ability. They learn they must agree and support girls’ empowerment, identify with the feminine and above all, despise the parody of masculinity they are shown is ‘illegitimate’ and inauthentic.

Boys are systematically taught to make women and womankind their Mental Point of Origin. This is why it is so difficult for men to unplug and abandon their old Blue Pill selves; feminine-primacy was literally conditioned into them since they were kids.

Nikolas Cruz, like many other teenage shooters is the product of this feminine-primary education system, not a Patriarchal “teach boys not to cry” machismo school. He is a monster of their creation; one taught to cry on demand and emote like a girl. He’s the result of a participation trophy mentality that demonize men and masculinity to the point that he never learns how to bounce back from defeat, rejection or simply life’s adversities. No men and no masculinity is available to teach that kid how to harden up and be resilient, or how that masculine discipline is not bullying or hazing, but a necessary part of a boy’s maturation into a masculine man.

But to throw society off the trail a false narrative of hyper-masculinity ruining our otherwise feminine-correct boys is perpetuated. When the next school shooting takes place the Village will again want the public to believe it’s masculinity and men’s fault for what is really his emotional outburst. The Village will attempt to place the responsibility on men, on fathers, while in the meantime perpetuating the idea that men/fathers are superfluous at best, a societal burden at worst. Men are useful catspaws in so many ways, and in perpetuating this narrative the Village reinforces the female-correct theme for grown men too.

Masculinity is what they say it is, or else

In the Honor System I proposed the following:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

It’s important to review this premise if we want to understand the real intent the Feminine Imperative has in redefining masculinity for men. Aspects of conventional masculinity are useful for women, and masculine duty (appeals to men’s “honor”) is a means to access it while avoiding the aspects that would in any way advantage men over women. Conventional masculinity is largely disparaged and parodied in order to disenfranchise men, but men are still needed to save women from natural disasters and protect them from physical harm (so long as they never expect sex for it). On some level of consciousness women understand the transactional and validational aspects of sex. They know that men’s serviceableness comes with an implied transactional cost, so to circumvent this women had to be put in charge of defining what masculinity should mean to men.

Masculinity as defined by men is almost always illegitimate and inauthentic in a feminine-primary world order. The presumption is that “macho man” ridiculous masculinity is a mask that men wear. That mask is meant to cover their true feminine-correct selves; because men cannot be authentic in any other context than the taught, feminine-correct context. So, of course, men can only be fakes or insecure of their masculinity (the masculinity defined by the feminine) and can never ‘really’ be that strong, dominant male apart from the permission the Feminine Imperative gives him.

Because the Feminine Imperative controls the overall context for what should be correct for men this has the effect of making women the sole deciders of what is masculine. In effect, and in this Blue Pill context, women become the gatekeepers of manhood. If masculinity imbues men with manhood (literally being considered a man) a ‘man’ is only whom a woman will designate as such within her presumed, feminine-correct context. In other words, do the imperative’s bidding and it dubs you a ‘man’.

Breaking the Cycle

As you might’ve guessed, this social dynamic conflicts with women’s Hypergamous imperatives. A Beta who thinks he’s a ‘man’ and presumes entitlements because of that is a woman’s worst fear. A Beta transgressing into a manhood that the imperative didn’t give him is the making for a guy being considered a sexual predator. However, an Alpha man, a man of high sexual market value still needs to accept the feminine-correct social frame, but he must also know his role within that frame. I’ve made the comparison in the past that women only see men as either draft animals or breeding stock. In a feminine-correct paradigm the breeding stock must know that his conventionally masculine aspects mean different things to a woman (Alpha Fucks sex) than the draft animal’s masculine aspects (Beta Bucks service). As such, masculinity and a designation of being a man becomes a constant qualifier for a Beta male. Manhood becomes a carrot he follows to pull the feminine-correct cart.

In fact, Beta men hold their female-correct ‘man’ designation as an unwitting point of pride. Examples abound of self-righteous Betas AMOGing other men for not being ‘real men’ (according to the imperative) like themselves. What they’re ignorant of is that this self-righteousness is defined by how well they conform to the masculinity that the imperative tells him is useful – and avoiding the ‘toxic’ masculinity it also defines for him – all according to his role in the scheme of a woman’s sexual strategy.

Should a man awaken from this Blue Pill conditioning and coronate himself as a ‘man’ outside the approval of womankind, this is when he’s ridiculed as an old school Patriarch and an anachronism of the old male-incorrect social paradigm. This is the control the imperative has against men stepping out side this female-controlled masculinity. The first response any female critic has for men who make themselves their mental point of origin is to remove that status of manhood.

Because they don’t accept feminine-primacy this disqualifies them from ‘real’ manhood.

One of the most difficult aspects men face in unplugging and living in Red Pill awareness is the social stigma that follows when they remove womankind from the pedestal and make themselves their mental point of origin. He gets called an asshole, he gets called selfish, he gets called a misogynist, but he’s also “less of a man” because he no longer conforms to the definition of masculinity that the Feminine Imperative has taught him from his earliest memories. Learning to redefine his mental image of what makes a man a man in his own Red Pill aware state is tough. Most of what he considered the very limited and controlled aspects of an ideal masculinity are a big part of the Blue Pill idealism he was raised on. This transition to conventional masculinity is also hampered by a deep learning of shame and gender loathing for finding anything positive in masculinity.

These are some important things to keep in mind if you are moving into a Red Pill awareness and learning to live in a new paradigm based around a conventional understanding of masculinity that isn’t inherently evil. It’s hard to do, but that old mental model of masculinity your teachers (all of them) convinced you was incorrect is something you must unlearn and cut yourself away from. Know that women don’t just long for that dominant masculinity, they need it for the health of their own life experiences. They need the protection, the comfort, the security and the discipline that masculinity balances their lives with.

Women ask, “where have all the ‘real’ men gone?”, but they exist outside the presumed, feminine-correct paradigm they mistakenly believe they have a secure control of. They don’t want to let go of that, so they will fight you to maintain a control over masculinity (which by definition can be chaotic as well as comforting) that they never really had – even with all the social engineering.

 

Yes I know my enemy, they’re the teachers who taught me to fight me.

 

Family Integrity

As most of my readers know I have my third book in the Rational Male series coming up soon (very soon, promise). When I began this new book I had an initial working title – The Rational Male, The Red Pill – however, as I progressed I shifted this to Positive Masculinity. I spoke briefly about this in my last two interviews, but there came a point in my compiling, writing and editing where I’d taken a different path in the purpose of the new book. Where I had wanted to explain and / or defend the initial, intersexual, definition of what the term ‘Red Pill‘ has increasingly been distorted away from, I found myself leaning more into expressing ways in which this Red Pill awareness could benefit men’s lives in many ways in and apart from intersexual dynamics.

I’d hit on this in my Red Pill Parenting series from a couple years ago and I knew I wanted to revisit and make that series a prominent part of the book. As it sits now, it accounts for a full quarter of the book’s content, but as I moved into my writing more I decided that the best way to really define ‘The Red Pill” as I know it was to go into the various ways men might benefit from redefining masculinity for themselves in a conventional, Red Pill aware sense.

When I finished the parenting section I realized that I was really laying out general, if not prescriptive, ideas for ways men might better raise their sons and daughters in a feminine-primary social order that’s determined to condition them. My purpose with both the series and section was to equip fathers with Red Pill aware considerations in making their sons and daughters Red Pill aware themselves in order to challenge a world that increasingly wants to convince us that fathers’ influence is superfluous or dangerous.

It was from this point that I’d made a connection; what I was doing was laying out a much-needed reckoning of sorts with regard to what conventional, positive masculinity might mean to future generations of Red Pill aware men. Since my time on the SoSuave forums and the inception of this blog I’ve used the term positive masculinity. I’ve even had a category for it on my side bar since I began too. From the time I began writing I’ve always felt a need to vindicate positive, conventional masculinity and separate it from the deliberately distorted “toxic” masculinity that the Village of the Feminine Imperative would have us believe is endemic today.

In Vulnerability I described this deliberate, but calculated, confusion thusly:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

From my very earliest writing I’ve always seen a need to correct this intentionally distorted perception of masculinity with true, evolved, biologically and psychologically inherited aspects of conventional masculinity.

As you may guess this isn’t an easy an task when a Red Pill man must fight against many different varieties of this masculine distortion. We live in an age where any expression of conventional masculinity is conflated with bullying or ‘hyper-masculinity‘. The Blue Pill teaches that inherent strength ought not to be considered “masculine”, if a boy acts in a conventionally masculine way he’s to be sedated, and boys as young as four can decide their gender to the extent that doctors are chemically altering their physiologies to block hormones and transition them into (binary) girls.

To the Blue Pill Village, a definition of masculinity is either something very obscure, subjective and arbitrary or it’s something extraordinarily dangerous, ridiculous and toxic. As I said, even the most marginal displays of anything conventionally masculine are exaggerated as some barbaric hazing ritual or smacks of hyper, over the top displays of machismo. With so much spite arrayed against masculinity, and with such an arbitrary lack of guidance in whatever might pass for a form of masculinity that feminine-primary society might ever find acceptable, is there anything positive about the masculine at all?

There is only one conclusion we can come to after so much writing on the wall – there is a war on conventional masculinity that’s been going on in progressive western societies for generations now.

I found it very hard to describe what exactly a Positive Masculinity  might mean to Red Pill aware men. One of the more insidious ways that Blue Pill conditioning effectively neuters masculinity is in the recruiting of men to effect their own emasculation. Usually these men themselves have had no real guidance in, or embrace of, conventional masculinity precisely because this Blue Pill conditioning has robbed them of maturing into an understanding of it. Blue Pill fathers raise Blue Pill sons and the process repeats, but in that process is the insurance that Blue Pill sons are denied an education in what it means to be a man.

Thus, we get masculine apologists like The Good Man Project who think ‘real’ masculinity can be found in an egalitarian parity between men and women – rather than our evolved, complementary gender roles. This is a manifestation of years of gender-loathing indoctrination. If men would just apologize for their maleness and all the negative aspects that it’s characterized and defined by, all can be made well. These are the Nice Guys who are accused of using their niceness as a ploy to win over women’s sexual favor. These are the male feminists, who never acknowledge that they are, but who still place the “divinity of the feminine” above their own self-loathed gender identity.

Next we get the men who are all made of honorable intent. These are the guys for whom a rational, firm, no-nonsense appeal to a woman’s reason should be enough to not only convince her of his quality, but he expects her attraction to be based on it. These are largely Red Pill aware men who still hope that old books virtue is something they might parlay into some form of attraction with women.

These tend to be the long game kind of men. When a guy is given to aspirations of virtuousness-as-game they’re generally cut from Beta cloth. I’m very familiar with this from my younger days. I too believed in the Boy Scout 12 point law: a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. In and of themselves these are noble aspirations, and ones that an old books / old social contract rightly endorsed. The problem is that none of them translate into an ounce of arousal for women.

Dean Abbot tweeted this recently:

https://twitter.com/DeanAbbott/status/857236074493603841

I would argue that since the rise of our feminine-primary social order and the dissolution of the family in terms of conventional (and evolved) gender roles, even with a family, men have little idea of the impact their influence makes. As I’ve written before, women fundamentally lack the capacity to ever appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate a woman’s reality. Few, if any, women understand just how their lives are made possible by the ceaseless efforts men make directly or indirectly to ensure their safety, provisioning, security, ambitions and support. This is only exacerbated in a social order that entitles, coddles and overemphasizes women as the gender whose imperatives define our social context.

Family isn’t what defines men’s virtue or integrity, ideally it ought to be a result of it. However, I tend not to deal in “what ought to be” on this blog, I deal in what is. The fact remains that Virtue is only valued and estimated by men on an individual basis.

“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

A lot of well-meaning Red Pill aware men want the old order, old books noble aspects of men to have a reinvigorated worth today. As we make Red Pill awareness applicable in a broader perspective in men’s lives we get to an impasse over what a ‘legitimate’ use of that knowledge ought to be. I believe we get a couple of extreme positions in this respect. I touched on this in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaining the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

I think it’s important that we not allow ourselves to fall into a similar trap with regards delineating what is appropriate use of the Red Pill advantage we have. This isn’t an endorsement for or against ethics in the Red Pill – I’ve already written that post – but it is to emphasize that I think objectivity should precede any pretense to what may or may not be on or off limits in Game or Red Pill awareness.

The Red Pill Moralist

On one end of the spectrum we get men who’ve accepted Red Pill awareness and the truths it presents as a guiding influence to varying degrees. I think it’s a mistake to think the Red Pill moralists are always an ‘Old Married Guy’ who wants to justify his decision to ‘do the right thing’ (no matter how disastrous his personal outcome may be). There are an increasing number of younger idealists who believe the Red Pill aware man has a civic duty to use that awareness in an ethical way that promotes the reinstitution of the conventional family. That may be a noble cause, but I don’t think it should be a straightjacket for Red Pill objectivity.

For the Red Pill Moralist, proper application of the Red Pill is to use that knowledge to vet women for a marriage suitability and a prospective family. With full knowledge of the inherent downsides and liability risks of modern marriage, the moralist takes it as his masculine duty now for the future to still assume the “sucker’s bet”. Needless to say this masculine social-sacrificial position seems more like men running back to the plantation of marriage for unresolved Blue Pill rationales, but I would argue that in a post-Red Pill awareness the belief is that a strong, dominant Red Pill aware Frame control can make the difference to offset the overwhelming risks. The core notion is that reestablishing the conventional family as a man’s civic duty warrants the almost certain prospect of a man’s own detriment.

The moralists have a tendency to disdain or moralize any other application of Red Pill awareness that would facilitate a self-serving or hedonistic purpose. Usually this comes after their living their own lives hedonistically, but also because they were “awakened while married” or just post-horrible divorce. This mirrors a Trad-Con position of encouraging men to “Man-Up” and volunteer for their own fleecing and disdaining the trappings of anything that doesn’t serve women’s imperatives for their own lives – but again as a kind of self-imposed noble duty of masculinity.

This is the flip-side of moralist’s position might be the self-serving use of the Red Pill solely for individual pleasure or gain. This is characterized by the PUA, Game-is-all, guy whose only purpose ends with himself. To the moralist, this use of Red Pill awareness is furthering the destruction of a family archetype that seems to be a solution to societal decay. The Rational Male comment threads are no stranger to the debates of PUAs whose pass or fail, Alpha or Beta benchmark for success rides on what would likely be considered sitting poolside while the world burns.

The last hurdle most men still refuse to get over is that they want women to meet them half way because, despite their Red Pill awareness, they still believe in egalitarian equalism. The most intelligent men still think that women use the same operating system that men do. They don’t, and that’s why these otherwise great men fail with regard to their approach to women. They believe women have the functional capacity to understand men’s motives as if they were any rational being’s motives and agree and comply with them. They simply do not, but unlearning the programming that women should have the capacity to reach some mutually acceptable bargain between men and women’s sexual imperatives is something intelligent men can’t seem to factor.

In Moral to the Manosphere I wrote this:

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should’ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. If you think it means something more, then that’s your own subjective perspective – even in marriage there’s ‘maintenance sex’ and there’s memorable, significant sex – but it’s a mistake to think that the totality of the physical act must be of some cosmic significance.

It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.

While I do think that whatever becomes the Red Pill family unit needs to have some structure similar to that of conventional gender roles, I think it’s important to understand that the new Red Pill ‘family’ will live or die by men’s capacity to accept and apply their awareness of intersexual dynamics. This is one very important difference between an idealized, pre-sexual revolution family and what will evolve in a post-feminist social awareness.

Pickup, Game, really the use of any aspect of Red Pill awareness that isn’t bent to the reconstitution of what I assume would be a Red Pill family unit, is an illegitimate use in the moralist perspective. I think this also goes too far in that Red Pill awareness shouldn’t be limited to what anyone might consider a pro-social purpose for it. Much of what I go into in the parenting section of the new book centers strongly on a man, a father, a husband applying his broader understanding of intersexual dynamics to create a better marriage and family for himself; but I think it needs to be said that all of that Red Pill awareness comes to those men courtesy of the hedonists who wanted to simply crack the code of how to get laid. Too much of either will lead to an imbalance.

Red Pill Parenting – Part I

Red Pill Parenting

“If I’m not going to have children, she told herself, then I’m going to have lovers.” – Robin Rinaldi, The Wild Oats Project.

In last week’s essay I put an emphasis on men’s understanding women’s rudimentary doubt of their Hypergamous choices with regards to rearing children and the overall health of a family. There are a great many social factors in our westernized feminine-centric social structure that encourages women to delay both marriage and becoming a mother well past their prime fertility windows.

In the Myth of the Biological Clock I detailed the misconceptions women hold with have with regard to their own capacity of having children later in life:

Popular culture likes to teach women and, by association, unenlightened men that there is an innate biological clock inside each woman that slowly ticks down to a magical period where her maternal instincts at long last predispose her to wanting a child. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, this coincides perfectly with the Myth of Women’s Sexual Peak as well as conveniently being the age demographic just post or just prior to when most women hit the Wall.

[…]I wont argue that women actually possess maternal instincts, I will argue that their understanding of when they manifest has been deliberately distorted by a feminine-centric cultural influence. If women are “angry” about the revelation their inability or difficulty to conceive in their post-Wall biological conditions presents, their anger is misdirected. Rather than come down from the heady pedestal of ego-invested female empowerment psychology, they’ll blame men for not being suitable fathers, or lacking a will to “play-by-the rules” and satisfy the dictates of the feminine imperative by whiling away their time in porn and video game induced comas.

The “have it all” mentality popularized by feminism has led to some very bad social effects for women on whole. While a great deal of “having it all” is couched in messaging that appeals to enabling ’empowered®’ women get a similar deal from career life that men are supposedly enjoying, the subtext in this message is one of never settling for a less than Hypergamously optimal (better than, not equal) monogamous pairing with a man.

The “have it all” advertising is about life fulfillment from a distractingly equalist perspective; meaning an ostensibly equitable or better fulfillment than the Feminine Imperative would have women expect that men are getting from life. Women want to be men. Thus the push for female college enrollment that imbalances men’s enrollment, etc., but in so doing the life course women are directed to by the imperative also limits their Hypergamous optimization efforts by putting unrealistic expectations upon it.

As a result women either delay childbearing until ages that put them and any offspring at a health risk, or they simply forego marriage altogether and birth a child with the foreknowledge that the father (though maybe an adequate provisioner) will never be a contender to quell her doubts of his Hypergamous suitability.

If Momma Aint Happy, Aint Nobody Happy

I’m fleshing out this aspect of Hypergamy here because I believe, as with all thing female, that a broad understanding of Hypergamy is essential to a man’s life and has far reaching effects that go beyond just learning Game well enough to get the lay on a Saturday night when a woman is in her ovulatory peak phase.

A byproduct of the societal embrace of Open Hypergamy is the degree to which women are largely disposed to delaying commitment until what I call their Epiphany Phase and then transitioning into a need for security once their capacity to attract and arouse men decays and/or is compromised by intrasexual competition (a.k.a. The Wall). I detail this child-birth postponement process in Preventive Medicine where I outline women’s Party Years through their Epiphany Phase, however it’s important for men to understand that this phase is largely the result of women believing they should have a similar window as a man in which they can have both a career and find the “right guy” to partner in parenting with.

Equalism’s fundamental flaw is rooted in the belief that men and women are both rational and functional equals, separated only by social influence and selfish imperatives (uniquely attributed to men). The grave consequences women accept in this belief is that their sexual market value declines with age, both in terms of intrasexual competition and fertility.

As such, we entertain the bemoaning of generations of women frustrated that they were unable to consolidate on a Hypergamous ideal because they believed they had ample time to do so while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect of their Hypergamy in the years of their prime fertility window.

Furthermore, they believe that the men who are available and ready to fulfill the Beta Bucks aspect of Hypergamy simply don’t measure up to their socialized, overinflated, sense of Hypergamous entitlement (and particularly in comparison to the men who made them Alpha Widows in their Party Years).

So distressing is this prospect, and so keenly aware of it are women that they are beginning to mandate failsafe measures in anticipation of not being able to optimize Hypergamy – such as preemptive egg freezing and legislating that men pay for their infertility while married in alimony settlements.

It’s come to the point where the ages of 29-31 are no longer being considered a crisis point for women with regard to child bearing. With the cultural popularization of the false hope in frozen ovum extending a woman’s birthing timeframe, now, even 35-38 years old seems to magically grant women some bonus years in which to secure a man for parental investment. The question is no longer one of a woman making herself suitable for a man’s parental investment (by his late 30’s no less) – her default suitability is inherent in her femaleness according to the Feminine Imperative – but rather, she believes, a magical-thinking proposition of waiting out the Hypergamously right father for her children.

Parental Precautions

I’m stressing these points here before I move on to Red Pill parenting ideology so men who are, or want to become fathers, husbands, LTR boyfriends, understand the import that Hypergamy plays in any family arrangement they hope to create.

Just to head off all the MGTOWs reading first; don’t get married. Under contemporary western circumstances there is no advantage for men in a state of marriage and 100% advantage for women. Unfortunately, as things are structured, marriage will always be a cost-to-benefit losing proposition while women insist on making marriage a legalistic contract of male-only liabilities.

That said, also remember that an entire world steeped in feminine-primary social imperatives is arrayed against your efforts in being a positively masculine father to your kids. Those anti-father efforts start with women’s own fem-centric conditioning that leads them to both manically push for Hypergamous optimization personally and societally, but yet they will delay that optimization until all opportunities for her have been exhausted. If you are considering marriage and starting a family with a woman between the ages of 27 and 31, statistically this is the situation and mentality that woman is likely experiencing.

I’m presenting these things to you as a father or potential father, because it’s important for you to discern what women have been conditioned to believe and expect from men and for themselves. In the coming weeks I will post an essay on the complementarity both sexes have evolved for to make our species what it is today; and that conventional complementarity is something idealistic equalism would distort. However, for now it’s important to realize that women have been thrust into this zero-hour, jump-at-the-last-second, cash out of the sexual marketplace schedule of mating that their very biology rebels against.

Single Moms and “Good” Fathers

It’s also important for men to understand that, while there is a constant ‘Man Up’ beratement of fathers for their lack of willing involvement in a child’s life, men are simultaneously presented with the female ’empowerment’ meme. That meme proposes these fathers’ parental involvement is effectively superfluous to that child’s maturation because Strong Independent Women® can reportedly fulfill a fathers’ role equally as well as any man (the equalist narrative).

For all the public awareness campaigns extolling fathers to be fathers, the message is always one of being “better” fathers and placing them into a default position of being less than ‘good’ by virtue of their maleness. In fact a ‘good’ father is a rarely appreciated commodity because that ‘good’ quality is always tied to a man’s never ending and ever shifting burden of performance.

On the other side, the single mother empowerment meme is endemic. However it’s important to use our Red Pill Lens with this meme because the message is one that forgives women of their inability to make themselves appropriate prospects for men’s parental investment. At the same time this meme also foist the blame for men’s unwillingness to parentally invest squarely on men’s presumed responsibility to women optimizing their Hypergamy to their satisfaction:

I’m Stupid Picky.

In my 15 or so years of dating, I’ve been around. I don’t mean that to sound skanky, but … it’s not like I haven’t given love a chance. The problem? Out of all the men I’ve ever dated, there has only been one or two that I felt a genuine connection with. It is a rare thing indeed for me to meet someone I feel like I could picture spending forever with. Sadly, I can’t even remember the last time I met a man who gave me butterflies. It’s definitely been years.

I Want the Fairytale.

There are very few relationships I’ve witnessed in my life that I would actually want for myself. Which begs the question, what do I want? Well, I want a man who is great with kids and totally open to adopting a houseful with me. I want a man who is smart and driven, sexy and hilarious. One who gets me, and who challenges me, and who makes me weak in the knees. Basically … I want everything. And I’m not sure the image I have in my head of what love should be is something that actually exists in real life.

My Daughter Will Always Be Priority Number One.

If you think my expectations of what I want for me are implausible, we probably shouldn’t even discuss my expectations of what I want for the man who steps into that paternal role for my daughter. Truthfully, as much as I want that father figure for her, I am also absolutely terrified of choosing wrong, of messing up our dynamic by choosing a man who isn’t worthy of being her father.

This article’s entire checklist reads like a manifesto for the Strong Independent® single mother with no consideration given to how men, potential fathers or husbands might interpret it. As expected, Campbell perpetuates the ‘put your kid first’ religion of motherhood here, but after reading through her single-mom rationalizations, and then combined with men’s presumptive servitude to the beneficiaries of the Feminine Imperative, it’s easy to see why most, if not all men, might be hesitant to sign up for their expected duty.

Preparations

My point here isn’t to dissuade men from wanting to be fathers, but rather that they enter into being a parent with their eyes open to how Hypergamy, and a cultural imperative that’s built around it, influences women’s life choices today. I mentioned earlier in this essay about women between the ages of 27 and 31 experiencing the first harsh realities of the consequences their choices have predisposed them to. Understand, as a man, your desire, your potential, for parental investment puts you into a position of being very sexually selective. So much in fact that the Feminine Imperative has long-held social conventions to pre-established with the purpose of convincing men they are not only obligated to fulfilling women’s Hypergamous strategy, but should feel lucky to do so.

The truth is that it is women who are at their most necessitous of men during this phase of their lives – thus placing men with the means and desire to become a parent into a prime selector’s position. Feminine social conditioning has done all it can to predispose Beta men to wait out and forgive women their short-term Alpha Fucks indiscretions during their Party Years, but as Red Pill awareness becomes unignorable the pressures of maintaining the image of being the prime selector will wear on women.

That said, I’ve had many men ask me how best to go about becoming a Red Pill parent. I’ve had many men express that the only advantage to marriage is in creating a healthy, hopefully complementary, environment in which to raise children. However, I’m not sure even women would concur with this assessment in the face of a social narrative that tells them they can raise a child as well as any father can. Yet, by the definition of the Feminine Imperative, a ‘good’ father is one who will sublimate his masculinity and assume a feminine, subservient gender role, thus making his superfluous whether he’s available or not.

In the last essay I emphasized establishing a strong, dominant, yet positive masculine Frame. This is the vital starting point for any long term relationship a man might hope to raise children in. The next imperative a man must confront is the Herculean obstacles he faces in a western culture that devalues him as a father, but obligates him to be an involved ‘good’ father who can only ever qualify himself to the mother of his children (who should place them above his interests) and qualify himself to a society that’s been conditioned to hold him to her standards.

Finally, a potential father needs to understand the circumstance in which women’s never ending quest to satisfy their Hypergamous doubt places them in at various phases of their maturity. For Red Pill men, a lot gets made of ‘vetting’ women for personal attributes and character to make them contenders for being the mother of their children. While this is important, I can’t stress enough how important it is to account for the Hypergamous choices women make prior to his consideration, as well as the consequences she should be held accountable for, yet attempts to avoid by his obligated graces.

In Part II I will expand on what to expect when raising sons and daughters from a Red Pill perspective.

 

Hypergamy Knows Best

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One of the most basic Red Pill principles I’ve stressed since I began writing is the importance of Frame. The dynamic of Frame stretches into many aspects of a man’s life, but in a strictly intergender sense this applies to men establishing a positive dominance in their relationships with women. In a dating context of non-exclusivity (plate spinning) this means, as a man, you have a solid reality into which that woman wants to be included in. Holding Frame is not about force, or coercion, it’s about attraction and desire and a genuine want on the part of a woman to be considered for inclusion into that man’s reality.

Being allowed into a man’s dominant, confident Frame should be a compliment to that woman’s self-perception. It should be a prize she seeks.

This is a pretty basic principle when you think about it. The main reason women overwhelmingly prefer men older than themselves (statistically 5-7 years difference) is because of the psychological impression that men older than a woman’s age should be more established in his understanding of the world, his career, his direction in life and his mastery over himself and his conditions. From an Alpha Fucks perspective, the ambience of mastery makes an older man preferable, while a Beta Bucks older man represents the prospect of dependable provisioning.

In our contemporary sexual marketplace I think this perception – which used to hold true in a social climate based on the old set of books – is an increasing source of disappointment for women as they move from their post-college party years into the more stressful Epiphany Phase.

And once again we also see evidence of yet another conflict between egalitarianism vs. complementarity. Because all things should be equalized, equalism espouses that this age preference should make no difference in attraction, yet the influence of this natural complementary attraction becomes a source of internal conflict.

Women’s self-perception of personal worth becomes wrapped up in a tight egotistical package that’s tells her men – the men she’s convinced she deserves – should be attracted to and aroused by her based on whatever nebulous personal conviction she has, fat-acceptance approved ideas of what men should be hot for, and he ought to be ready to settle into a coequal parental ‘partnership’ when she’s finally ready to do the right thing.

It’s an interesting paradox. On one hand she’s expects a Hypergamously better than equitable pairing with a self-made man who will magically appreciate her for her self-perceptions of her own personal worth, but also to be, as Sheryl Sandberg puts it, “someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.” In other words, an exceptional, high SMV man, with a self-earned world and Frame she wants to partake of; but also one who will be so smitten by her intrinsic qualities (the qualities she hopes will compensate for her physical and personal deficits) that he will compromise the very Frame that made him worthy of her intimacy, and then reduce himself to an equality that lessens him to her.

The Red Pill Father – Frame

The reason I’m going into this is because of a basic tenet of Frame: The Frame you set in the beginning of your relationship will set the tone for the future of that relationship. That isn’t to say men don’t devolve from a strong Alpha frame to a passive Beta one, but the Frame you enter into a relationship with will be the mental impression that woman retains as it develops. Your establishment and maintenance of a strong control of Frame is not just imperative to a healthy relationship and interaction with a woman, but it’s also vital to the health of any family environment and the upbringing of any children that result from it.

At the Man In Demand conference I was asked about my thoughts on the influence family plays in conditioning boys/men to accept a Beta role in life. Mainly the question was about a mother’s dominant influence on her children’s upbringing and how an unconventional shift in intersexual hierarchies predisposes her to imprinting her Hypergamous insecurities onto her children. It gave me a lot to think about.

A common thread I’ve occasionally found with newly Red Pill aware men is the debilitating influence their domineering mothers and Beta supplicating fathers played in forming their distorted perception of masculinity. I made an attempt to address this influence in the Intersexual Hierarchies posts, however, I intended those essays to provide an outline of particular hierarchical models, not really to cover the individual health or malaise of any of them.

From Frame:

The default pedestalization of women that men are prone to is a direct result of accepting that a woman’s frame is the only frame. It’s kind of hard for most ‘plugged in’ men to grasp that they can and should exert frame control in order to establish a healthy future relationship. This is hardly a surprise considering that every facet of their social understanding about gender frame has always defaulted to the feminine for the better part of their lifetimes. Whether that was conditioned into them by popular media or seeing it played out by their beta fathers, for most men in western culture, the feminine reality IS the normalized frame work. In order to establish a healthy male-frame, the first step is to rid themselves of the preconception that women control frame by default. They don’t, and honestly, they don’t want to.

Post LTR Frame
In most contemporary marriages and LTR arrangements, women tend to be the de facto authority. Men seek their wive’s “permission” to attempt even the most mundane activities they’d do without an afterthought while single. I have married friends tell me how ‘fortunate’ they are to be married to such an understanding wife that she’d “allow” him to watch hockey on their guest bedroom TV,…occasionally.

These are just a couple of gratuitous examples of men who entered into marriage with the frame firmly in control of their wives. They live in her reality, because anything can become normal. What these men failed to realize is that frame, like power, abhors a vacuum.  In the absence of the frame security a woman naturally seeks from a masculine male, this security need forces her to provide that security for herself. Thus we have the commonality of cuckold and submissive men in westernized culture, while women do the bills, earn the money, make the decisions, authorize their husband’s actions and deliver punishments. The woman is seeking the security that the man she pair-bonded with cannot or will not provide.

It is vital to the health of any LTR that a man establish his frame as the basis of their living together before any formal commitment is recognized.

The primary problem men encounter with regard to their marriages is that the dominant, positively masculine Frame they should have established while single (and benefitting from competition anxiety) decays to a Beta mindset and the man abdicates authority and deference to his wife’s feminine primary Frame. This is presuming that dominant Frame ever existed while he was dating his wife. Most men experience this decay in three ways:

  • A decline to his wife’s Frame via his relinquishing an authority he isn’t comfortable embracing.
  • An initial belief in a misguided egalitarian ideal that redefines masculinity has him surrender Frame
  • He was so pre-whipped by a lifetime of Blue Pill Beta conditioning he already expects to live within a woman’s Frame

Of these, the last is the most direct result of an upbringing within a feminine-primary Frame. I think one of the most vital realizations a Red Pill man has to consider is how Red Pill truths and his awareness of them influences the meta-dynamic of raising and instructing subsequent generations.

As I’ve intoned in many a post, Hypergamy is both pragmatic and rooted in a survival-level doubt about its optimization. When a woman’s insecurity about her life-determining Hypergamous decisions are concretely answered by the positively, conventionally, masculine Man who is both her pair-bonded husband and the father of her children, that doubt is allayed and a gender-complementary environment for raising children proceeds from that security.

In a positively masculine dominant Frame, where that woman’s desire is primarily focused on her man, (and where that man’s SMV exceeds his wife’s by at least a factor of 1) this establishes at least a tenable condition of quieting a woman’s Hypergamous doubt about the man she’s consolidated monogamy and parental investment with.

In a condition where that husband is unable or unwilling (thanks to egalitarian beliefs) to establish his dominant Frame this leaves a woman’s Hypergamous doubt as the determinant of the health of the overall family. That doubt and the insecurities that extend from Hypergamous selection set the tone for educating any children that result from it.

In the last post I made the case that deliberately single, primarily female, parents arrogantly assume they can teach a child both masculine and feminine aspects equally well. In the case where a wife/mother assumes the headship of family authority, both she and the Frame abdicating father/husband reverse this conventional gender modeling for their children.

That woman’s dominant Frame becomes the reality not just her husband must enter, but also their children, and also their family relatives. That feminine dominant Frame is one that is predicated on the insecurities inherent in women’s Hypergamous doubts.

“Is he really the best she can do?”

Play Don’t Pay had an observation from the last post:

I think this “putting the kids first” phenomenon is very simple to explain. She DOESN’T WANT TO FUCK YOU!
She is using the kids as a shield, a barrier to deflect your UNWANTED BETA SEXUAL ADVANCES.
It is generally accepted that women are only interested in the top 20% of men, and if you are talking about as marriage partners I would agree with this.

However if you are talking about as SEX partners that they are genuinely hot for I would estimate this percentage to be north of 5% add in the frame required to maintain her SEXUAL interest in a marriage / LTR and your probably closer to 1-2%.
It’s really that simple! the women that are with these top tier men, the top 1-2% don’t need to be told to put them before the kids, they do it because he IS more important to her than her kids, because if he leaves she will never be able to replace him with another top tier man now she has his kids in tow.

Top tier men don’t raise other mens children and she knows this instinctively.
If you think you can mitigate this by being top 20% and reading a few articles on frame and dread game then I think you will be disappointed.

Sure you can improve your relationship but your probably not going to be able to command the visceral raw desire that women have for the top tier men that makes the do this shit naturally under their own violation.

“Is he really the best she can do?”

In a feminine-primary Frame, that question defines every aspect of that family’s life and development together. It’s important for Red Pill aware men to really meditate on that huge truth. If you do not set, and maintain, a dominant masculine Frame, if you do not accept you role in a conventional complementary relationship, that woman will feel the need to assume the responsibility for her own, and her children’s, security. Women’s psychological firmware predispose them to this on a visceral, limbic, species-survival level.

I’ve met with countless men making a Red Pill transition in life who’ve related stories about the burdening influence of their domineering mothers and Beta supplicating fathers leading to them being brought up to repeat that Blue Pill cycle. I’ve also counseled guys who were raised by their single mothers who had nothing but spite and resentment for the Alpha Asshole father who left her. They too took it upon themselves to be men who sacrifice their masculinity for equalism in order to never be like Dad the asshole. I’ve met with the guys whose mothers had divorced their dutiful fathers to bang their bad boy tingle generating boyfriends (whom they equally despised) and they too were molded by their mother’s Hypergamous decisions.

And this is what I’m trying to emphasize here; in all of these upbringing conditions it is the mother’s Hypergamous doubt that is the key motivating influence on her children. That lack of a father with a positive, strong, dominant Frame puts his children at risk of an upbringing based on that mother’s Hypergamous self-questioning doubt. Add to this the modern feminine-primary social order that encourages women’s utter blamelessness in acting upon this Hypergamous doubt and you can see how the cycle of creating weak, gender confused men and vapid entitled women perpetuates itself.

Finally, to the guys who are psychologically stuck on the shitty conditions they had to endure because of this cycle, to the men who are still dealing with how mommy fucked them up or daddy was a Beta; the best thing you can do is recognize the cycle I’ve illustrated for you here. That’s the first step. The Red Pill is great at getting you laid, but it’s much more powerful than that; it gives you the insight to see the influences that led to where you find yourself today.

Once you’ve recognized the Red Pill truths behind your Blue Pill conditioning, then it’s time to realign yourself, and recreate yourself in defiance to them. The longer you wallow in the self-pitiful condition that your mother’s Hypergamy and your father’s passive Beta-ness embedded in you, the longer you allow that Blue Pill  schema to define who you are.

The Red Pill Parent

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This week I’ll be exploring a new angle in the Red Pill: how parenting and family relations influence and direct the Blue Pill conditioning of a generation, and what Red Pill aware men can do to redirect this. It was encouraging to see fathers and sons together at the Man In Demand conference. I honestly wasn’t expecting this, but it was a humbling experience to see fathers and sons coming to a Red Pill awareness together. I also met with a few men who told me their sons had either turned them on to my books or that they would be required reading for their sons before they got out of their teens.

One of the greatest benefits of the conference was the inspiration and material I got from the men attending. A particular aspect of this was addressing how men might educate and help others to unplug and in that lay a wealth of observations about how these men’s upbringings had brought them to both their Blue Pill idealisms and ultimately their Red Pill awareness.

I’m beginning this series with some of these observations, but I plan to break protocol and be a bit more proscriptive in the last essay with regard to what I think may be beneficial ways to be a Red Pill parent. In The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine I included a chapter which outlined how men are primarily conditioned for lives and ego-investments in a Blue Pill idealism that ultimately prepares them for better serving the Feminine Imperative when their usefulness is necessary to fulfill women’s sexual (and really lifetime) strategies.

That chapter is only available in the book, but if you have it, it might be helpful to review it after you read this.

Reader (and MiD conference attendee) Jeremy had an excellent observation from Solipsism II:

@Capper

The only thing I take issue with is the advice, from the book that his wife read, which told her to place her husband above her children. Children come first for a mother, and they should for the father too. I’m not advocating to neglect her husband, but he needs to accept some biological facts and not be hurt because of it

What you’re repeating there is actually the first steps of a hostage crisis. That is first-wave-feminism boilerplate response. It is the first redirection in a misdirection perpetuated by women in order to sink any notion that men should have some authority on matters. Think of the children. It’s been repeated for so long, it’s a cliche…

It’s typical crab-basket behavior. Women seek power over their lives and somehow instinctively believe that the only way to achieve power is to take someone else’s power away. So they attack male authority by placing children above the man. This then becomes a stick with which to beat male authority into submission, as the woman is allowed to speak for the needs of the children. This is literally textbook subversion, and plays out on so many levels of human culture it tends to make one consider how boring humanity must look to any alien life that happens to stumble across our unremarkable corner of the universe.

When the children’s needs become the “throne” of the household, and the wife is allowed to speak for the children’s needs, then the authority of the household becomes a rather grotesque combination of immediate child needs and female manipulation. Worse still, the children are now effectively captives of the wife, because at any time she can accuse the husband of anything the law is forced to throw him in handcuffs for, and take away the kids.

What you’re repeating is the first steps in that hostage situation. Equalists will try to convince you of the logic that children come first, that children are the future, that all of that which makes them better is more important than anything else. This is bullshit.

Do you think cavemen sat around in caves all day playing and socially interacting with their babies? Do you think they had some kind of fresh-gazelle-delivery service that allowed him to interact with the children directly? Do you think the mothers were not under exactly the same survival condition, needing to forage for carrots, potatoes, berries, etc, while the men hunted and built structures? Do you think the “children” came first in any other era of humanity? If so, you are very sadly mistaken.

Children are more than capable of getting everything they need to know about how to live simply by watching their parents live a happy life together. This is how humans did things for eons, changing that order and putting the “children first” is frankly perverse and the beginning of the destruction of the family. Children are more than information sponges, they are blank minds that want desperately to be adult. Children want to understand everything that everyone around them understands, which is why a parent telling a child that you’re “disappointed” in them is more effective than a paddling. If you focus on children, you are frankly just spoiling them with attention that they will never receive in the real world. If instead you focus on yourself and your spouse, you will raise children that see you putting yourself as the MPO (as Rollo calls it), and your marriage/partnership as an important part of what you do each day.

Don’t put the children first. That’s essentially like negotiating with a terrorist, they’ll only make more demands on you until the cops storm the plane and lots of people get shot.

Your Mental Point of Origin should never waver from yourself.

American Parenting is Killing American Marriage

Of course, Ayelet Waldman’s blasphemy was not admitting that her kids were less than completely wonderful, only that she loved her husband more than them. This falls into the category of thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me. As with many religious crimes, judgment is not applied evenly across the sexes. Mothers must devote themselves to their children above anyone or anything else, but many wives would be offended if their husbands said, “You’re pretty great, but my love for you will never hold a candle to the love I have for John Junior.”

Mothers are also holy in a way that fathers are not expected to be. Mothers live in a clean, cheerful world filled with primary colors and children’s songs, and they don’t think about sex. A father could admit to desiring his wife without seeming like a distracted parent, but society is not as willing to cut Ms. Waldman that same slack. It is unseemly for a mother to enjoy pleasures that don’t involve her children.
There are doubtless benefits that come from elevating parenthood to the status of a religion, but there are obvious pitfalls as well. Parents who do not feel free to express their feelings honestly are less likely to resolve problems at home. Children who are raised to believe that they are the center of the universe have a tough time when their special status erodes as they approach adulthood. Most troubling of all, couples who live entirely child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home.
In the 21st century, most Americans marry for love. We choose partners who we hope will be our soulmates for life. When children come along, we believe that we can press pause on the soulmate narrative, because parenthood has become our new priority and religion. We raise our children as best we can, and we know that we have succeeded if they leave us, going out into the world to find partners and have children of their own. Once our gods have left us, we try to pick up the pieces of our long neglected marriages and find new purpose. Is it surprising that divorce rates are rising fastest for new empty nesters? Perhaps it is time that we gave the parenthood religion a second thought.

I think these quotes outline the dynamic rather well; a method of control women can use to distract and defer away from Beta husbands is a simple appeal to their children’s interests as being the tantamount to their own or their husbands. If the child sits at the top of that love hierarchy and that child’s wellbeing and best interests can be defined by the mother, the father/husband is relegated to subservience to both the child and the mother.

This gets back to the preternatural Empathy myth that women, by virtue of just being a woman, has some instinctual, empathetic insight about placing that child above all else. That child becomes a failsafe and a buffer against having to entertain a real relationship with the father/husband and really consider his position in her Hypergamous estimate of him.

If that man isn’t what her Hypergamous instinct estimates him being as optimal (he’s the unfortunate Beta), then “she’s tolerating his presence for the kids’ sake.” Jeremy was responding to a comment made by Capper about an incident where a woman was being encouraged to put her husband before her kids in that love hierarchy priority. The fact that this is so unnatural for a woman that it would need to be something necessary to train a woman to speaks volumes about the facility with which women presume that their default priority ought to be for her kids.

Most men buy into this prioritization as well. It seems deductively logical that a woman would necessarily need to put her child’s attention priorities well above her husband’s. What’s counterintuitive to both parents is that it’s the health of their relationship (or lack) that defines and exemplifies the complementary gender understanding of the child. Women default to using their children as cats paws to assume primary authority of the family, and men are already preconditioned to accept this as the normative frame for the family.

As with all your relations with women, establishing a strong Frame is essential. The problem for men with even the strongest initial Frame with their wives is that they cede that Frame to their kids. Most men want the very best for their children; or there may be a Promise Keepers dynamic that guy is dealing with an makes every effort to outdo, and make up for, the sins of his father by sacrificing everything, but in so doing he loses sight of creating and maintaining a dominant Frame for not just his wife, but the state of his family.

It’s important to bear in mind that when you set the Frame of your relationship, whether it’s a first night lay or a marriage prospect, women enter your reality and your frame – the same needs to apply to any children within that relationship. Far too many fathers are afraid to embody that strong authority and expect their wives (and children) to recognize what should be his primary place in the family.

The fear is that by assuming this position they become the typical asshole father they hoped to avoid for most of their formative years. Even for men with strong masculine role models in their lives, the hesitation comes from a culture that ridicules fathers, or presumes they are potentially violent towards children. Thus the abdication of fatherly authority, in as positive a tense as possible, is abdicated before that child is even born.

Ectogenesis

At the Man in Demand conference last weekend I had a young guy ask me what my thoughts were about a man’s being interested in becoming a single parent of his own accord. I had this same question posed to me during my second interview with Christian McQueen and essentially it breaks down to a man supplying his own sperm, buying a suitable woman’s viable ovum to fertilize himself, and, I presume, hire a surrogate mother to carry that child to term. Thereupon he takes custody of that child and raises it himself as a single father.

In theory this arrangement should work out to something similar to a woman heading off the the sperm bank to (once again Hypergamously) select a suitable sperm donor and become a single parent of her own accord. It’s interesting that we have institutions and facilities like sperm banks to ensure women’s Hypergamy, but men, much less heterosexual men, must have exceptional strength of purpose and determination to do so.

Despite dealing with the very likely inability of the surrogate mother to disentangle her emotional investment in giving birth to a child she will never raise (hormones predispose women to this) a man must be very determined financially and legally to become a single father by choice. In principle I understand the sentiment of Red Pill men wanting to raise a child on their own. The idea is to do so free from the (at least direct) influence of the Feminine Imperative. However, I think this is in error.

My feelings on this are two part. First, being a complementarian, it is my belief that a child requires two healthy adult parents, male and female, with a firm, mature grasp of the importance, strengths and weaknesses of their respective gender roles (based on biological and evolutionary standards). Ideally they should exemplify and demonstrate those roles in a healthy fashion so as a boy or a girl can learn about masculinity and femininity from their respective parents’ examples.

Several generations after the sexual revolution, and after several generations of venerating feminine social primacy, we’ve arrived at a default collective belief that single mothers can perform the function of modeling and shaping masculinity in boys as well as femininity in girls equally well. The underlying social message in that is that women/mothers can be a one woman show with regard to parenting and thus men, fathers or the buffoons mainstream culture portrays them as, are superfluous to parenting – nice to have around, but not vital. This belief also finds fertile ground in the notion that men are obsolete.

Secondly, for all the equalist emphasis of Jungian gender theories about anima/animus and balancing feminine and masculine personality interests, it is evidence of an agenda to suggest that a woman is equally efficient in teaching and modeling masculine aspects to children as well as any positively masculine man. With that in mind, I think the reverse would be true for a deliberately single father – even with the best of initial intents.

Thus, I think a father might serve as a poor substitute for a woman when it comes to exemplifying a feminine ideal. The argument then of course is that, courtesy of a feminine-centric social order, women have so divorced themselves of conventional femininity that perhaps a father might teach a daughter (if not demonstrate for her) a better feminine ideal than a woman. Conventional, complementary femininity is so lost on a majority of women it certainly seems like logic for a man to teach his daughter how to recapture it.

Raising Betas

This was the trap that 3rd wave feminism fell into; the belief that they knew how best to raise a boy into their disempowered and emasculated ideal of their redefined masculinity. Teach that boy a default deference and sublimation to feminine authority, redefine it as respect, teach him to pee sitting down and share in his part of the choreplay, and well, the world is bound to be a better more cooperative place right?

So it is for these reason I think that the evolved, conventional, two-parent heterosexual model serves best for raising a child. I cannot endorse single parenthood for either sex. Parenting should be as collaborative and as complementary a partnership as is reflected in the complementary relationship between a mother and father.

It’s the height of gender-supremacism to be so arrogantly self-convinced as to deliberately choose to birth a child and attempt to raise it into the contrived ideal of what that “parent” believes the other gender’s role ought to be.

This should put the institutionalized social engineering agenda of the Feminine Imperative into stark contrast for anyone considering intentional single parenthood. Now consider that sperm banks and feminine-specific fertility institutions have been part of normalized society for over 60 years and you can see that Hypergamy has dictated the course of parenting for some time now. This is the definition of social engineering.

I’ll admit that when I got the question of single fatherhood I was a bit incredulous of the mechanics of it. Naturally it would be an expense most men couldn’t entertain. However, as promised, I did my homework on it, and found out that ectogenesis was yet another science-fiction-come-reality that feminists have already considered and have planned for:

Prominent feminists and activists, including Andrea Dworkin and Janice Raymond, have concluded that not only will women be further marginalized and oppressed by this eventuality, but they will become obsolete.

Fertility, and the ability to be the species’ reproductive engine, are virtually the only resources that women collectively control, they argue. And, although women do have other “value” in a patriarchal society–child rearing, for example–gestation remains, worldwide, the most important.  Even in the most female-denigrating cultures women are prized, if only, for their childbearing. If you take that away, then what? This technology becomes another form of violence.

Women already have the power to eliminate men and in their collective wisdom have decided to keep them. The real question now is, will men, once the artificial womb is perfected, want to keep women around?

[…]“We may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,” she writes. “We have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?”

This was a great article and it came at an auspicious time – the time we find women sweating about having their sexual market leverage with men potentially being undercut by sex-bots and/or immersive virtual sex substitutes.