paternity

The Existential Fear – Men

You need to understand WOMEN HATE BETAS in fact they hate them so much that they would prefer to work soul destroying jobs to support themselves than attach themselves to a Beta provider that wants to fuck them and impregnate them with his shitty beta genetics.

Incubus Rising

This was a comment that I meant to include in last week’s essay, but I’m glad I saved it for today’s article. It serves as a good starting point for men’s Existential Fear. If there’s one buzz-term that’s been bandied around by women since the rise of feminism it is “fear“. Men fear this. Men fear that. Men feel “threatened” by a strong woman. More recently it’s, “Men fear working with women today over concerns of workplace sexual misconduct.” So, I want to state here from the outset that I’m using the term fear in both these essays for lack of a better one. But what really gets the point across?

“Rollo, why does it destroy my soul to imagine my ex-wife / ex-girlfriend banging another man? I can’t sleep because I’m imagining her giving up herself sexually to a new guy.”

Some variation of this question is something I get a lot from guys I counsel who are going through a breakup or divorce. Sometimes it’s from men who’ve been separated from the woman for a long time. This is to be expected from Blue Pill conditioned men, but even guys who are Red Pill Aware will still feel the rage of infidelity even after the breakup has been official for years. Guys will tell me they wont even go out socially or associate with friends so as not to be in the same space as their ex for fear that they would do something rash if they saw her with another guy. There’s just something in their DNA that’s unsettling about imagining their ex giving herself willingly to another man – and they’re conflicted because the fem-centric world tells him he’s “insecure in his masculinity” for his possessiveness.

I can remember the same anxiety after I’d mercifully split from my BPD girlfriend. Even years after it was all over I’d still have nightmarish dreams about her. What the hell was that all about? What is our subconscious trying to get across to us with this?…

“Why am I so jealous and suspicious of my wife / girlfriend cheating on me? Should I feel bad that I root through her texts and IMs? Am I just ‘insecure in my masculinity’ if I feel like that? Why am I so possessive?”

This is another common one I get from men I counsel. I detailed a bit of this in Gut Check. Our subconscious mind has a way of warning us when our ‘aware’ mind is unaware of, or ignoring, the inconsistencies in our peripheral awareness. We’re actually much more aware of our environment than we appreciate, we simply refuse to acknowledge these inconsistencies. More often than not that denial is conditioned into us for purposes that aren’t always in our best interests. And sometimes it’s outright manipulative of male nature.

In Gut Check I related a time in my life where I had instinctively been suspicious of my wife because my instinctual awareness turned on the warning lights in my head. I had no rational reason to believe my wife was cheating on me, but I had a very real, evolutionary, reason that my instinctive mind would be suspicious of infidelity. Millennia of evolution has written anti-cheating failsafes into our mental firmware.

“Why are DNA tests illegal in some countries? Why is it illegal for a doctor or their staff to tell a “father” that the child he thinks is his own really isn’t biologically his? Why do we legally protect women’s cuckoldry?”

More and more we are seeing feminine-primary social conventions and legislation crop up that can only have one purpose – the systemic disempowerment and disenfranchisement of men’s interests in the reproductive process. The cover story for this Removing of the Man from any semblance of reproductive authority is what I call the Cult of the Child. I’ll be publishing a full essay on this soon, but the short version is that anything that serves women’s sexual strategy is always deemed to be “in the best interests of the child.” The interests of children has become the shield of what is really the interests of women’s sexual strategy.

For decades now, feminist ideology has successfully convinced most western societies that what serves the female reproductive interests is always what serves the a child’s interests. Men are superfluous at best, and pose a danger to the child at worst. This presumption is rooted in the Duluth Model of feminism, but women’s sexual strategy always comes at the cost of the reproductive interests of the man/father. I wrote about this in Children of Men. There is an open war on paternity today, but as with all intersexual conflict we need to look deeper to determine what the latent purpose of that conflict is all about. What interests are served in unilaterally disenfranchising men from the reproductive process?

Existential Fear

The answer to all of these questions finds their root in men’s Existential Fear – All men have an evolved need to determine and ensure his paternity.

Ascertaining paternity, and ensuring his parental investment is vested in perpetuating his genetic legacy, is the prime directive of men’s existence. This is a male imperative that virtually all higher order animals share.

Despite what many blank-slate academics still promote, men and women are different. Contemporary thinkers would have us believe the sexes are more alike than not, but the truth of it is we are different in fundamental ways that most equalists are uncomfortable admitting. Yes, we are the same species, but the fact remains that our differences, and in particular our sexual strategies, conflict in profound ways.

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

In last week’s essay I outlined the the Existential Fear women hold in their evolved unconscious – that of the Hypergamous doubt. “Is this guy the best I can do?” is the question that their hindbrains ask. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution, and the systemic Fempowerment that followed, women have collectively used this authority to ensure the preeminence of their sexual strategy (Hypergamy) in our social order. I outlined many of the resulting social changes we see were the result of this in last week’s post, but this preeminence came at the cost of men’s interests and influence in the larger, meta-conflict of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies.

Men’s evolved reproductive interest is very simple; ensure that the child a woman bears to him is his actually his own. Up until the last 60 or so years patriarchy, true, legitimate patriarchy has always been the order of society. Despite the ignorance of feminists protesting it, patriarchy has been a beneficial aspect of our advancement as a species since we formed tribal hunter-gatherer bands millennia ago. But that patriarchy depended on a simple doubt that formed men’s base sexual strategy – ensure his genes were passed into the next generation.

There are two ways a man can achieve this outcome. In The New Polyandry I explained men’s Strategic Pluralism Theory:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

Essentially, men follow an ‘r’ or ‘K’ reproductive strategy according to their (perceived) sexual market value (SMV). Since a majority of men fall on the low SMV side of the reproductive equation social conventions that served those men’s reproductive interests had to be developed and standardized. The resolution of men’s Existential Fear needed to be instituted and standardized to ensure the largest number of men could be relatively certain that the children they sired were indeed their own.

A lot is made of women’s reproductive costs in academia. In a fem-centric social order it pays to focus on women’s suffrage/victimhood narrative. But, men bear reproductive costs in this equation as well. Men’s biological imperative is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Our best shot at sending our genes into the next generation is ‘spreading the seed’. Our biological hardware is made to do just this, but there are costs and obstacles to solving the reproductive problem. And the easiest solution for men has always been exercise their direct control over women’s sexual strategy. Imposing our natural strength (in many forms) on women has historically ensured that it’s women who were the ones to compromise their sexual strategy in favor of men.

Patriarchy & Monogamy

Socially enforced monogamy was the least barbaric of those compromises, but in this century destroying that monogamy has been a priority for the Feminine Imperative. In theory, socially enforced monogamy was the most beneficial mating strategy for largest number of (low SMV) men to solve their reproductive problem. But the fact remained that it was still an exercise of control over women’s Hypergamous natures. In essence, monogamy worked for men, and it was beneficial as a compromise in parental investment for women, but it also assumed direct a control over women’s sexual selection process.

Patriarchy and monogamy answered a woman’s Hypergamous doubt for her, and that is the crux of women’s Existential Fear – to have the control of her Hypergamy, her selection process, and ultimately the cost associated with that choice determined for her. This fear is exactly why the primary goal of feminism has always been the maximal unlimiting of women’s sexuality and the maximal restricting of men’s sexuality. It seeks to replace the social-scale compromise of the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies with the total capitulation of the male strategy. Today, the Gynocracy has achieved this almost entirely.

But for one sex’s strategy to succeed, the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. For a gynocentric social order, only men’s abandonment of their own strategy is acceptable – and this abandonment insists men deny the evolved imperative of their own Existential Fear – insisting on paternity.

In the evolved scheme of things men’s reproductive best interest involves sacrifices. When a man commits to parental investment with a woman he takes on sunk cost risks. The time he spends investing himself committed to one woman and the children they produce comes at the cost of reproductive opportunities with other women. Women’s sexual strategy necessitates he compromise or abandon his biological imperative. Naturally, both men and women have adapted ways to circumvent monogamy to optimize their sexual strategies (infidelity, short-term breeding schema), but the basic equation is the same; if a man is invested in one woman it limits him from seeking other (potentially better) reproductive opportunities. If you want to know why Plate Theory irks women so much look no further.

The only way this compromise of sexual strategy can be advantageous to men is if he can be relatively assured that the child he’s raising is his own. This is where men’s Existential Fear of paternity fraud begins. He cedes his own strategy and the sunk opportunity cost for reproduction in exchange for the certainty that he’s invested in a child that bears his name and his blood.

I call this men’s Existential Fear because denying men the certainty of paternity presents the same existential anxieties as a woman’s control of Hypergamous doubt taken from her. Women fear the idea of being forced to birth and raise the child of a suboptimal man not of her choosing, while men fear the idea of being deceived into raising a child not of their own genetic lineage. And until the advent of DNA testing only a woman could be certain that the child was her own.

This is root level stuff here. So important was the determination of paternity for men that an obsessive concern for it was written into our mental firmware. The risks of falling for paternity deception was that important, and the men who evolved this compulsion were selected-for. The reason we Mate Guard, the reason our hindbrains default to jealous suspicions, the reason we cannot bear the thought of another man mating with our woman is rooted in the fear of investing ourselves in a child not our own.

In the previous essay I mentioned the natural revulsion response humans have towards things that are inherently harmful to us. A reservation or revulsion of snakes, spiders, feces, rot and necrosis are part of the evolved firmware we’re born with. I would also argue that the revulsion women feel towards “creepy” (low SMV, Beta) men and the revulsion men feel towards “slutty” women is part of this. Both these revulsions are adaptational protections against our respective Existential Fears. Each represents our Instinctual Interpretive Process letting us know what our ancestors had to avoid.

The Mentor

“But Rollo, isn’t it a noble thing to adopt or mentor a child that is not your own?”

I get this response a lot when I discuss this, and yes, it absolutely can be when the choice to do so is of your own making. In fact, the reason adoption/mentoring seems such a noble undertaking is exactly because it requires a man to repress his natural concern for his ow paternity. Kinship affinity will always play a role in men and women’s relationships with the next generation. Human beings are innately tribal and familial because tribalism promotes the advancement of selected genes. So repressing this innate predisposition is exceptional, maybe even noble depending on the social context, but it is so because it requires a man to ignore his natural wiring. For what it’s worth, I think multi-generational mentorship in Red Pill awareness is going to be a new imperative in the coming decades.

It’s just this pushing past our natural, evolved, concerns about paternity that’s been the operative dynamic of the Feminine Imperative in consolidating power. The human revulsion response can be molded. Usually this is through some form of operant conditioning. Revulsion can even be conditioned to be associated with pleasure. The Feminine Imperative has been remolding men’s evolved need for paternity to its own ends for some time now.

The popularization of ‘Poly Relationships‘ is one of the more recent redirects of men’s paternity need. As I mentioned above, the goal state of the Feminine Imperative is ensuring that women’s sexual strategy – and anything that foments it – is the socially ‘correct‘ imperative. Men must become more like women if they want to be accepted by a social order defined by women’s experiences. Men’s sexual strategy is only acceptable when it serves a woman’s purpose, so men’s existential imperative of ensuring paternity is always going to be in conflict with women’s strategy. A man insisting on his own paternity and the perpetuation of his name is in direct conflict with women ensuring she chooses to breed with the best specimen and be provided for by the best male she can lock down.

This being the mechanics of it, it comes as no surprise that the social conventions of this era encourage men to abandon that evolved need. We make “heroes” of men who marry the single mother and assume the parental investment costs of the man she chose to breed with. A fem-centric society makes this a noble responsibility – “He Manned Up for the loser who wouldn’t take that responsibility” – all while ignoring the simple fact that this ‘hero’ is only completing women’s Hypergamous imperative. And it’s come to the point that a man abandoning his sexual strategy is part of women’s expectations and entitlements of Beta men.

For the men who insist on their own strategy, the message is one of shame. Only a man who’s “insecure in his masculinity” would think that a child would need to be his own. In fact, the very title of “father” is offensive to a social order based fulfilling women’s imperatives. Father’s Day must become, ‘special persons’ day‘. Men should never insist that a wife assume his last name. And of course, DNA testing to determine paternity (even in light of life threatening illness) is to be discouraged if not outlawed.

Now You Know

In The War on Paternity I explored a lot of the ways our feminine-primary social order ensures women’s sexual strategy stays the operative one. Our divorce laws, our child support and custody laws all center on one thing – making sure women’s imperatives supersede men’s need for paternity certainty. Even when a child is not biologically a man’s, he has no right to know the truth, but he has every expectation to be financially and emotionally responsible for the “best interests of the child.”

Going forward I think the Red Pill aware man must embrace his existential need for paternity – and do so fearlessly. If a new beneficent patriarchy is to take root then men will need to reject the social conventions that insist a woman’s sexual strategy be the preeminent one. I think mentorship of the next generations of young men should also be emphasized, but I think this needs to be a conscious decision of the men doing so. Today we have the decision to be a ‘cuckold’ made for us proactively and retroactively by women and a feminine-primary social narrative. If you’re an adoptive father then I salute you, but understand, at least you had the decision to make yourself. Most men’s decisions to be the step-dad only amounts to him acquiescing to supporting the decisions of women. 43% of births today are out of wedlock, either electively or based on a bad decision by that mother. We also call single mothers ‘heroes’.

My advice to men today is to be aware of the game you’re involved in with respect to how your need to know paternity is being used against you. That need is well known to the Feminine Imperative and has always been a threat to its interests. Make your own decisions to mentor based on that knowledge and never marry a single mother. If you do so understand that your sacrifices of this paternity need will never be appreciated by women. You may believe it’s the “right thing to do”, the moral choice, but in doing so you absolve both the woman who made her decision for you and the biological father of their total responsibility (and the underlying evolutionary reasons) to consequences of that decision.

Remember,…

WOMEN HATE BETAS in fact they hate them so much that they would prefer to work soul destroying jobs to support themselves than attach themselves to a Beta provider that wants to fuck them and impregnate them with his shitty beta genetics.

Are you really willing to accept that your paternity need counts for so little? Are you willing to accept this truth and fulfill a woman’s life strategy in spite of it because you believe it’s your moral imperative to do so?

State of the Manosphere 2018

On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.

I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.

But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.

One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.

Good morning gentlemen.

There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.

If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.

As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.

When I met Anthony I was skeptical. 

That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.

This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend. 

All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.

I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order. 

I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.

As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe. 

I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.

So, here I am. 

What is the Manosphere?

For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.

For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous. 

To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications. 

Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.

The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere –  all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.

Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women. 

Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.

It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement. 

Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined). 

Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel. 

Or maybe they find my blog and books.

Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.

Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives. 

And this is what I’m talking about.

Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more. 

It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.

Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.

The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.

As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.

In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order. 

We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.

Now things have changed. 

The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.

Gender Warfare

Do you understand what I’m saying? 

This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today. 

Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).

You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media. 

There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.

“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved” 

These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.

Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.

Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.

This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.

But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.

I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.

As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.

You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.

My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps. 

To get “me too’d” is now a verb.

Segregation

The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men. 

So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.

These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.

The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.

Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.

How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?

I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.

They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.

If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.

And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.

The War on Paternity

One of the most pressing imperatives human males (really most primates) have evolved is a need for certainty in their own paternity. Up until the last century with the advent of DNA testing it has been an imperative that has really been at the control of any female with whom a man copulates with. Indeed, even today a ‘father’ is really whomever’s name a woman puts on a birth certificate, generally no questions asked (and no information relayed) of that mother by the OBGYN doctors. Prior to the Sexual Revolution and the millennia leading up to it social and religious controls were instituted to keep rampant Hypergamy in check. An argument could be made that, even in a post-agrarian social order, ubiquitous monogamy and marriage were socially mandated as a way to not only control for women’s Hypergamous impulses, but were also the only practical means of control over certifying that a man’s child was of his own genetic line. And even this had its flaws.

Up until the advent of genetic testing the only practical, somewhat assured failsafe for knowing paternity was long term, pair-bonded monogamy and the social conventions that were instituted around it. Men’s sexual strategy (our masculine imperative) is scattershot. Our biology functions such that we can father countless children with each ejaculation and continue to do so well into our later years of life. This strategy is a counterbalance to women’s quality-over-quantity approach to their own sexual strategy. For each environmental obstacle one sex’s reproductive imperatives poses, the other will evolve contingent strategies to compensate for it.

To understand this conflict all we need to consider is the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies – For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. 

For men, in a social order founded on monogamous pair-bonding, this means abandoning his scattershot sexual strategy and adopting the strategic goals of women’s strategy. What were looking at here for men is exactly the type of evolved contingent strategy I mention above – abandoning his sexual imperative to essentially bet his genetic legacy on one horse, rather than diversifying his odds with, potentially, many sexual opportunities. This is a very important distinction for Red Pill aware men to make with regards to their own sex; opting in for long-term monogamy over a man’s evolved sexual strategy (scattershot) represents adopting a woman’s (ultimate) sexual strategy as his own. This dynamic is defined by what’s called strategic pluralism theory:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

If we consider that men are overwhelmingly (80%+) rated as unattractive by women today we begin to see the adaptive logic of strategic pluralism for men. Less opportunity equals less potential to follow a man’s sexual imperative. Solution: invest all your sperm and all your efforts into one long-term bet; reproduction with one or relatively few sexual partners – and if you can build social and moral conventions around this adaptive strategy to reinforce it, so much the better.

If men can compel intrasexually competing men, and women (whose strategy might be compromised by adopting it), to believe that monogamy is a social and moral imperative, then they increase the odds that they’ll successfully circumvent what would otherwise be the natural limitations of their own reproduction.

As you can probably guess, this adaptation for singular parental investment imposed a much higher premium on men’s need for certainty of their own paternity. To be sure, the Alpha Males of most primates have a habit of killing the offspring of any prior Alpha that had access to fertile females in a group prior to his own breeding with them. This infanticide is yet another adaptive insurance that a male primate can be certain that any resources, protection and parental investment he put into any progeny would be of his own paternal line. If it can be assumed that the importance of paternity is a primary, evolved drive in primates, how much more imperative must it be for human males adopting a sexual strategy of singular investment? How much more imperative must it be for women to collectively confuse paternity within a social collective (tribe) and protect against a perceived threat of infanticide or loss of resource provisioning if left on their own?

Even in our march towards ‘civilization’ we find this anti-paternity bias in the killing of male members of a social collective while preserving fertile females for potential breeding purposes. Today we may not be killing the sons of rival clansmen, but we can certainly see the paternity bias in how we regard kin affiliation above out-group affiliation in our personal dealings. Concerns of paternity, for men, evolved to be part of our mental firmware – and certainty of it became of paramount importance.

Strategic pluralism, however, is not without its own counter contingencies. Even within a social and moral environment that restricts Hypergamy, women are still psychologically compelled to optimize their own sexual strategy to its fullest. 8,000 years ago 17 women reproduced for every 1 man – and this was after the advent of agriculture. There’ve been other studies that reduce this number to a 5 to 1 ratio, but still the fact remains that even in a social order that (ostensibly) prioritizes pair-bonded monogamy, women have provably found ways to optimize Hypergamy and confuse paternity to a socially stable degree. Thus, we see counter-adaptations in behavior on the part of men to mate guard, to once again, insure certainty of paternity. Even in the relative stability of monogamy, men’s psychological imperative for paternity supersedes the social environment.

Cuckoldry by Any Other Name

As I’ve mentioned in prior essays, cuckoldry deserves a much broader definition today; one that goes beyond the obvious duplicity of birth fraud. Women have found that by tweaking the social conventions that would limit their own sexual strategy they can circumvent the monogamous side of sexual pluralism socially enforced by men. Thus, we get new feminine-primary social conventions that celebrate, socially reward and positively reinforce men’s acceptance of the parental investment responsibilities of other men who fathered children with a woman they’ve pair-bonded with. Step-dads get the big thumbs up and we rejigger the positive reinforcement to downplay father’s day and replace it with special person’s day.

Now, consider this with respect to the potential for infanticide that a woman’s hindbrain believes men are capable of. That fear of infanticide represents a root-level limbic part of women’s evolved need to optimize Hypergamy and the great potential for loss of having optimized it in her offspring. So imperative is this to the female psyche that it became necessary to socially condition men’s evolved paternity need out of them once women and the Feminine Imperative became the dominant social driver.

On a larger social scale, one that is defined by a post-Sexual Revolution, feminine-primary social order, the answer is simple and total; men must be convinced to completely abandon their biological imperative of parental certainty before they commit to a monogamous relationship with a woman. Socially, we make paper heroes of men who will accept the parental investment responsibilities of a child he didn’t sire. That ‘heroism’ of the guy who accepts his assigned role as a retroactive cuckold is short-lived, but the archetype of that guy who ‘man’s up’ and adopts the children of a single mother is now embedded into our modern folklore.

I would also argue that a large part of the Blue Pill conditioning of men for the past 5 generations can find its roots in women’s need to optimize Hypergamy while ensuring the security that once she does a provider-male will step in to fulfill his role as a dutiful cuckold. In order to achieve this, free from the fear of infanticide, boys and men must be conditioned to unequivocally revoke any need for certainty of their own paternity.

A few years ago I outlined the next step in Open Hypergamy would be transitioning to a state of normalized and accepted Open Cuckoldry. Wrapped into this transition is also the social efforts to normalize a feminine-controlled form of polyamory – one in which primarily a woman is presented with the options and control of exercising both the short-term sexual, and long-term provisional, sides of Hypergamy. Today this is what’s termed a polyamorous relationship with male partners representing Alpha seed and Beta need. In moving from a normalized state of Open Hypergamy to Open Cuckoldry there are a series of social changes that need to occur and find acceptance in the general population of men. One of these changes is a large scale, socialized effort to get men to accept that their biological imperative to ascertain paternity – even the questioning of paternity – be equated with “toxic” masculinity.

The War on Paternity

Increasingly we are seeing a push on the part of the Feminine Imperative to delegitimize the innate need of men to ensure their paternity. It’s actually an aspect of a war that’s been going on since the Sexual Revolution to redefine masculinity and fatherhood. As I mentioned in Positive Masculinity the definition of what makes a father is becoming more and more ambiguous, while fathers become increasingly more superfluous. In order to complete this delegitimization of masculinity men must be convinced that their innate need to know paternity, and the importance they inherently place on it, is something to be ashamed of.

Every social mandate we see today puts the interests of the mother and child well above that of any father. This is why paternity is rarely ever a factor in issues of child support; even for children that a man didn’t father but is held legally liable for. Socially, even religiously, any importance of paternity for men is being systematically erased. From doctors being gagged from informing cuckolded fathers of genetic tests, to limiting their access to DNA tests themselves, to encouraging men to ‘man up’ and marry single mothers as a moral imperative, paternity for men is now some sort of shameful insecurity.

Why would the Feminine Imperative seek to root out what has been a fundamental, evolved, part of men’s mental firmware since the time of our hunter/gatherer beginnings? Because Hypergamy needs security. Hypergamy needs assurances to quell the doubt that a woman has optimized both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of her sexual strategy. I would argue that men’s psychological need for certainties in his paternity is on par with the need women have of certainties in their need for optimizing Hypergamy.

All this war on paternity amounts to is an ensuring that women’s unquestioned, unilateral control over Hypergamy is baked into men on a societal level. Convincing men to abandon any claims on certainty of paternity, and at the same time shaming men who put any importance on it, is an effort on the part of the Feminine Imperative to get men to surrender their sexual strategy by abandoning it wholesale, while praising them for playing a willing role in fulfilling women’s sexual (and life) strategy. Even when that sexual strategy is one where a man acknowledges his lesser sexual market value and seeks to put all his investment into one woman, the push to delegitimize men’s need for paternity circumvents this strategy.

Delegitimizing men’s need for paternity cancels any and every upside that long-term monogamy had for Beta men using this sexual strategy. Thus, a return to a scattershot, some would say ‘less civilized’ sexual strategy becomes the only obvious alternative for men who want parental certainty.

Erasing the importance of paternity for men is literally the last nail in the coffin that is now contemporary marriage. It reduces men to little more than draft animals and livestock for women’s breeding purposes by erasing any claim a man may have to know his children are his own.  Most well-conditioned Blue Pill men adopt this archetype unquestioningly. There are no ‘Fathers’ anymore; all men are interchangeably either breeding stock or simply childcare workers in this new social framework. And boys and young men’s pre-acceptance of this state of men is part of their Blue Pill conditioning.

To fully effect Open Cuckoldry the goal of the Feminine Imperative is to have men define masculinity as accepting parental investment as separate and apart from evolved concerns of paternity.