positive masculinity

Positive Masculinity – Now on Audible

Okay, okay, spare me the ‘better late than never’ jokes. The third installment of The Rational Male series – Positive Masculinity – is now available for purchase and download from Amazon / Kindle. The book is once again narrated by Sam ‘The Voice’ Botta and as with the other two books I’m sharing the royalties with him to help him with his absolutely insane medical expenses due to his injuries sustained from his hit & run “accident”.

The book logs in at 23.7 hours and is presently $29.99. A lot of work has gone into making this title the best we could make it. In addition to Sam’s medical challenges ACX / Amazon has really stepped up their quality assurances requirements with respect to the audio quality. We went through several rounds of edits and approvals, but the end result is really something worth the wait I think. In audio time alone this book exceeds The Rational Male.

Now, all that said, and with the time and effort we put into this title I need to ask my readers & listeners a special favor. If you are starting a new Audible subscription with this audio book, it is imperative that you use the link here to start your sub.

The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity

In August Amazon/ACX altered the bounty payment structure they have with their content providers, authors and narrators. Prior to August of 2018 content providers were guaranteed $50 per each new subscription. Essentially Amazon rewarded it’s best authors for helping them create what is now the biggest self-publishing monopoly ever known, and authors could rely on the popularity of Amazon to help promote their own work. As of August, all this changed and not for the better. Now ACX pays a bounty of $75 per subscription, which on the surface seems like a great deal, but now authors/narrators only get that bounty if the sale comes exclusively through this affiliate link – the one I’ve posted here.

This isn’t a big deal for most low-volume self-publishing authors, but it’s a huge deal for authors (like me) who sell a good number of audio books because this is primarily how men consume Red Pill media. Men tend to like listening above reading this material. They listen on their commutes to work and in the gym when they’re working out. I’ve always stressed purchasing the print copy; it’s not as ‘deleteable’ as the digital versions, it can be passed on to men who need the books and a lot of men tend to highlight and liner-note their well-worn copies. That’s great and it’s exactly what I always intended. However, my subscriptions bounties for Audible went from about 160 per month to around 20 now that this new program – which is being sold to authors as a big advantage – went into effect.

This affiliate link switch has also been applied to all my titles, so if you’re looking to start a new subscription with The Rational Male or Preventive Medicine please use these links. I’ve also switched the links to the Audible files in my side bar too.

For more info on this please read this article: ACX The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

All that said, please pick up the Audible version and let me know what you think about the audiobook here in the comments.

 

Thanks Sam, and thanks to all of you who make this and all my projects possible.

 

Rollo Tomassi

Male Authority – Be a “Man”

How women and a feminine-primary social order control men by reserving the title of “manhood” for men who comply with female primacy.

In the Manosphere we often discuss the dynamic of men holding the burden of 100% responsibility yet are conferred 0% authority when it comes to intersexual relationships. This didn’t used to be the case. There was a kind of default authority imbued in men that was part of simply being a male under the old social contract. A lot of western societies still presumes this is the case in fact. It’s one reason popular culture presumes such a thing as ‘male privilege‘ exists today. They may even have a case with respect to the Old Set of Books; being a “man” inferred that a male had some degree of power, authority and decision making capacity over the course his life would take, as well as the lives of any women or children or extended family members who were dependent upon him being a “man”.

Responsibility is what defines men to this day, but the utility in this being hammered home into the psyches of men has become something the Feminine Imperative has found very useful in consolidating power in the hands of women. We’re ceaselessly told that responsibility is something men need to assume, but under the old set of books the incentive for a man assuming that responsibility came with a commensurate portion of authority (power). That was what used to earn a man the title of “manhood”; men were expected to possess the competency to produce surplus resources, enough to ensure the security and survival of his immediate and extended family, and then his tribe, his clan, his nation, etc. We still call this “being a productive member of society”, but now the incentives of a default authority that made assuming that responsibility a reasonable exchange have been stripped away along with all the grounding that a family name or tribal identity used to mean to men. In their place is all the same expectation of responsibility, but not even the pretense of male authority that stems from it.

In prior posts I’ve defined power thusly:

Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.

How many men today have real power; power to direct the course of their own lives? As we commit to various aspects of life, family, business, the military, a woman, we incrementally exchange power for responsibility. Wealth often enforces will, but unless we can be one of the moneyed outliers in life there is no true authority granted to men now in exchange for that responsibility. A man who would even presume to use an authority that might still be implied in these exchanges is labeled a tyrant; a vestige of a Patriarchy that’s now painted as a net negative to society. And that’s just the societal level. In a legal sense that man has no authority with respect to his power over virtually every aspect of his interactions with women or a wife. A gynocentric social order’s prime directive has been to remove all vested male authority and by extension almost all power the man has to dierct the course of his own life.

There are numerous ways a feminine-primary social order removes the teeth from male authority today. First and foremost is the social pretense of blank-slate equalism. A default presumption that men and women are coequal agents in every aspect – physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual – is the cover story necessary to remove an authority that was based on the conventional differences between the sexes. To the blank-slate equalist gender is a social construct, but gender is only the starting point for a social constructionist belief set. Social constructionism is a necessary foundation upon which blank-slate equalism is built, but ultimately it’s a means of control. By denying each sex its innate differences social constructionism denies men their innate advantages and strengths. Once this became the normalized social convention it was a simple step to remove male authority.

In order to destroy that authority it was necessary to destroy men’s grounding in the identity of their own gender. The first step was to deliberately confuse men about the evolved nature of conventional masculinity. Thus, masculinity became subjective. Never has the idea of being a ‘man’ more reviled, obfuscated, blurred, ridiculed, demonized and loathed by men themselves. Wait for the “masculinity is toxic” articles to follow the next mass shooting incident. The worst shame, the worst clichéd vitriol, will come from male authors stepping up to apologize to women on behalf of all men for the violent ignorance of what they think is a learned toxic masculinity. It’s these Vichy men who’ve been taught that gender is a social construct, so there’s really no definitive answer to what makes a man a Man. These ‘men’ who’ve been conditioned in their feminine-primary upbringing who are so confused or gender-loathing with respect to masculinity that they feel compelled to believe they speak for all of ‘mankind’ when they apologize for all of us.

Blank-Slate Equals

But none of this works unless men and women are blank-slate equals. One reason a guy like James Damore is hammered down and erased with such zealotry for suggesting men and women are inherently different is because so much of gynocentrism rides on the social belief in the blank-slate. What’s offensive about it isn’t the idea that men and women might be prone to innately different strengths or weaknesses so much as it’s about the entire system scaffolded by the falsity of equalism.

You see, the confusion, the subjectification of masculinity has a design underneath it. This confusion is a means of control; a means of not just denying men authority, but to systematically remove anything inherently male from the whole system. I’ve detailed this removing the man in prior essays so I wont dig into it here, but it’s a means of control in an age when men are expected to know their utility and their role in women’s sexual and life strategies.

As we progress towards a social order based on a consolidated gynocracy it becomes more important that men not only be confused about masculinity, but also that men be dispersed and isolated. Men who would challenge this social order must be made into suspects and the suspicious of an “outdated masculinity” – a masculinity that pretends to be about innate authority based on evolved gender differences. Male Spaces must be outlawed, ostensibly for the misogyny they will surely lead to, but actually because men gathered together as men is a threat to a gynocentric power base. This is why the Manosphere and events like the 21 Conventions are so egregious to the feminine-primary social order; they connect men and their experiences about women. So men must be taught to be suspicious of each other. While masculinity might be loathed or confused, men gathered together can only mean homosexuality – because what other purpose could men exclusively gather for other than to fuck one another?

This is where the facade of blank-slate equalism conveniently slips when it suits the purpose of gynocentrism. Men and women can be innately different, but only on the occasions when innate differences would prove that men are violent, abusive, potential rapists, sex addicts or incorrigible homosexuals. On those occasions, the occasions when it serves the Feminine Imperative, women will gladly agree that Boys will be Boys and men are naturally beasts. Through this caveat in the blank-slate society men can be justifiably hated for being men if only because some nebulous male-chauvinist ‘society’ taught them to be so. So the clichés and the old lies get perpetuated because only a belief in the ‘masculinity-is-toxic’ narrative can justify teaching the next generation of boys to hate their own sex and sustain a gynocracy.

Men must be taught to hate themselves for their maleness. Thus, a form of institutionalized gaslighting of men about the nature of masculinity became necessary, and it is primarily men who sustain it. When men are conditioned to be both gender loathing and suspicious of the worst aspects of ‘masculinity’ in other men the result is a self-perpetuating cycle of policing ones thoughts while policing the thoughts of other men. There’s a default belief that this policing is part of identifying with the feminine that will make these Vichy Males more attractive to women of the gynocracy.

But what makes a man a Man in this social order?

As we’ve moved from a blank-slate basis of gender to an ambiguous, subjective definition of what a man is the Feminine Imperative has found a utility in assigning the title of ‘manhood’ to whichever man best exemplifies this utility to the gynocentric social order. In other words, the more a man meets the shifting needs of women the likelier he is to merit the title of being a “man” or a “real man”. In fact we hear this last one all the time in the memes that serve the Feminine Imperative. A “real man” does [insert whatever serves women’s long term sexual strategy] and Betas gleefully retweet it to prove their quality. In our feminine-correct paradigm, the authority that was inherent in masculinity which allowed men to declare what qualities make a ‘man’ has been casually assumed by women to be tossed around as whim and necessity makes convenient.

In Rites of Passage I elaborated on how, to an older conventional masculinity, Manhood was something merited and conferred onto a boy by his adult male peers. There were rites of passage, rituals, tests and qualifiers that transitioned boys into the world of men. This was a part of his grounding in a tribal belonging that used to at least somewhat direct his purpose in life. To be a ‘Man’ was to be a part of a sum whole – E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. It was the collective of men who conferred manhood onto another. How this actually played out in real life and the integrity of that collective was always particular to the character of the tribe, but prior to the rise of gynocentrism conferring manhood on an individual was something unique to masculinity.

Today, the Feminine Imperative’s efforts to disempower and subdue men means destroying the legitimacy of the tribal aspects of all this. As I mentioned earlier, men gathering together, and pretending to authority is something threatening to a gynocentric power structure. Destroying, shaming, ridiculing, etc. the whole of men, keeping them dispersed and isolated, meant usurping the authority men had in assigning ‘manhood’ to one another.

Aspects of the old masculine social order, including men’s natural inclinations towards duty and honor amongst each other, have always been dynamics that could be turned to the uses of the Feminine Imperative.

From The Honor System:

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.

In a gynocentric social order both the concept of honor and masculine responsibility is set by whatever is ‘correct’ for feminine utility. If that means only ‘real men‘ do something to satisfy women’s imperatives, it implies that men who don’t are ‘false men’. Those men are outside the tribe called ‘men’ as well as being unacceptable for reproduction, intimacy and love.

It also implies that only women have the authority to bestow ‘Manhood’ on men, and then only for performing specific behaviors or believing correct beliefs as set by womankind. It’s as if women uniquely hold the ‘medal of manhood‘ to give exclusively to men who can qualify for her wanton needs. The authority men used to claim innate legitimacy of in the past is now only legitimate when a woman wields it.

Men need to retake this authority and own it as is their birthright once again. I realize that sounds kind of LARPy but it’s the best way I can put it. One thing the Red Pill has made men aware of is the social machinations of the Feminine Imperative. Amongst Traditional Conservative ‘thought leaders’ a popular idea is that we find ourselves in the intersexual conditions we do today because men have dropped the ball. Men have shirked their manly responsibilities and women are the way they are because not enough men care to correct women’s behaviors. This argument fails on two counts. The first is that it presumes women bear no moral or behavioral agency and as such cannot be blamed for their own participation in our social condition. This presumption, I should add, is actually indicative of exactly the manipulation of honor I mentioned above.

And secondly, more importantly, it presumes men hold an authority they simply don’t have. Even claiming masculine authority would smack of misogyny today. Churchy, moralists pretend that men have a headship / authority that our gynocentric social order empirically contradicts. To paraphrase the MGTOWs, your headship counts for shit when all a woman has to do is call 911 and police will physically remove what you think is your authority from the family home, no questions asked. This is a result of the Duluth Model of Feminism which I’ll be covering in an upcoming part of this series on Male Authority, but the short version is feminism’s design is to remove men, maleness, masculinity from our social consciousness and this begins and ends with which gender has an enforceable authority.

There are guys who’ll challenge this idea of female authority. Red Pill thought emphasizes men disconnecting their sense of identity from a female-correct paradigm. In my own work I’ve stressed that the most important aspect of Red Pill awareness is men making themselves their Mental Point of Origin and this necessitates a realigning of oneself as his first priority. It’s easy to make declarations about how your self-worth begins and ends with you and that no woman can influence that image, and in a way that seems liberating. Like you’re taking at least that much authority back for yourself. But it’s another thing entirely to wrestle with a social order that’s now founded on a consolidated female-primary authority.

In the coming series I’ll get more into this question as well as what men can do to take back the authority of assigning manhood. Thanks for reading, more to come.

The Advantages of Now

As of this writing my second talk at last year’s 21 Convention is now available for free public viewing on 21 University. I worked this ‘talk’ a bit differently as you’ll see. I find that I can address what most of my readers are concerned with most in and open discussion rather than my delivering a sermon from the stage. I think I’m more comfortable with this as I’ve been aggregating information with other men in a forum style discourse for so long. My time at SoSuave really taught me the value of that back and forth exchange of information, and it’s really what led to so much of the material I’ve covered on the blog for almost 7 years now.

For the sake of clarity, this talk was the second I did and took place a day after my first, Hypergamy, Micro to Macro. I had originally intended to cover aspects of my third book, Positive Masculinity, since it had been released about 2 months prior. I had an extensive lecture all ready to go, but I decided to switch up my talk that morning. The day and night before I had gotten into at least 8 different “sub-conferences” with spontaneous groups of about a dozen guys that went on for any where between 20 minutes to an hour. It occurred to me then that the best way to address my topic would be to have an open discussion about masculinity with the guys I was talking to just a few ours before.

As much as I liked the first talk – and I still feel understanding Hypergamy in its entirety is a keystone element in understanding intersexual dynamics – I think this talk was much more personal. I’ve always felt that the Red Pill should remain ‘open source’ and be an aggregate of the experience of men from all over the world. To this end I’ll always feel that a roundtable discussion style is the best way to encourage men not just to put in their two cents, but also as the best way for men to learn. I am first a writer and then a speaker, but my speaking will always be better when a man is expressing his concerns, problems, critiques and experiences within a group of men focused on untangling Red Pill awareness. I’m always humbled when an interviewer calls me one of the Godfathers of the Red Pill, but the truth is there is no father of the Red Pill. For as much as some writers would like us to believe they fathered the manosphere, Red Pill awareness is the result of a consortium of men who came together, offered their input to the whole and made it something greater than it was before.

I got to watch both my talks before the post-production and release, and while I was reviewing them it occurred to me how fortunate this generation is to have access to such information today. I’m from a generation that didn’t have the internet when I was in my early 20s. There were no Game Gurus and the only “how to pick up girls” books we’re only available from mail order ads you found in the back of a Penthouse or Hustler magazine. I did read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell in 1993, but other than that book there was nothing about the nature of women that would ever be published by the major publishing houses then.

After I reviewed my video here I watched a TED talk given by Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, and in it he recounted all of the dead end jobs and life experience he’d accrued up to around 1996 when a friend of his fronted him $30,000 to keep him going while he wrote the book. He’d always wanted to be a writer, but until the mid 2000s publishing was locked by a monopoly of a handful of ‘traditional’ publishing houses. Even the 48 Laws of Power had to get past their review processes. Now I think Robert Greene is one of the greatest minds of our time in his articulating power dynamics, I attempted to model my own writer’s voice on his example, but there was a time when anything resembling Red Pill awareness or truths that would be less than flattering to the status quo would never have seen the light of day. Print on demand and digital publishing (eBooks) wasn’t even a dream at that time, but today we take them for granted.

I never had a childhood dream of being an author, writing is just something I’ve always done as one more outlet for my creativity. I never thought I’d be a published author of one book, much less three. Nor did I imagine I’d have audio versions of them (book 3 is coming soon Sam promises). But now is the time. With digital publishing anyone can be an author so long as their ‘content’ is good.

We are living in an era in which certain things we take for granted are the only time in history that they could occur. That might sound self-evident, but think about it; our technology today is such that certain ideas that could never have been brought into popular consciousness could only be considered because of that technology. We have an advantage of now. It’s kind of humbling in a way – having witnessed the transition from a time when all of the dynamics we invested so much of ourselves in then are now made common, cheapened in some cases, and the legitimacy of having earned them is lessened as a result.

In my rock star 20s it took 4-5 months of all of the guys in my band to scrape together enough money to pay for a 3 song demo tape (no CDs for us then) in a recording studio, and that was with us having friends in the industry. Today I can do everything that very expensive studio could on my iMac. I have tools now to create the dreams I’ve had since I was in high school, but the challenge is no long the access, but the ideas themselves. We live in an age when access to the tools and means of creation has never been greater, but the ideas, the imagination, the abstract unrefined concepts is what I think is lacking today. We can produce masterpieces of music in our homes, but today music is only getting worse.

I’ve seen videos of brilliant instrumentalist virtuosos on YouTube. Kids not older than ten playing complex pieces of music they learned and absorbed themselves online, yet few could actually create an original song with any expressiveness themselves.

We also live in an age where access to information has never been more ubiquitous. We have access to the knowledge of all human history in a device that we can put in our pocket, yet we’re still too lazy to actually use the search feature or cite an easily had source. We have a connectivity today that spans the globe, yet we readily factionalize and atomize our social networks according to ideological biases.

A lot of this disconnect from real genius, from true creativity, I want to chalk up to the constant distractions we’re bombarded with daily. It’s really the price we pay for having unlimited access to information and the tools of creation. Paraphrasing the late Chris Cornell, there are no more writers like Shakespeare because all he had was a table, a candle, a pen and some paper. Today, learning to avoid distractions and focus on a single task is an art itself, but there’s another reason for this lack of honest genius and that is we’re gradually seeing a new generation of men and women who are themselves the product of a social order that has never known a time or condition where this access didn’t exist.

I think it was Dave Grohl who said something like kids today think rock stars are generated from talent shows on TV. Even with all the easy access to creative expression there’s still this idea that the process is somehow out of their control.

So why am I freestyling this post just to introduce my next talk video? Because I want my readers to get some insight about the radical nature of the information that the Red Pill presents today. I’ve written essays about how the 1990s really represented the pinnacle of the Feminine Imperative’s social influence. This was due to the limitations of information inherent in that time. In those essays I wanted to stress just how influential the Imperative was on western culture, but more importantly just how ignorant we were of ever perceiving it then. Today, the jig is up.

The internet has exposed the influences of feminism and it’s opened up a dialog – one that the controllers of the means of it would like to censor – in which it can no longer hide its true intent. The nature of women, the mechanics of intersexual dynamics, the good, the bad and the ugly of everything the Red Pill makes us aware of is increasingly expanding. It’s expanding so much that I fear we’re reaching a point where the means to explore new ideas in the ‘sphere are being limited by the means itself.

When you watch this video, any Red Pill aware video, when you read the latest essay here or anywhere else, keep in the back of your mind that knowing this information is only possible in this time. I wrote Preventive Medicine in response to men telling me how they’d wished they’d had this information back when they were younger and didn’t know better so they could make better, informed decisions. The truth is that the information I’ve been spreading since 2002 could only be realized in this age. Some will say, “yeah, but ancient scholars (and deified psychologists) knew this stuff a long time ago”, to which I’ll say ‘no, they didn’t’. Not to the extent we do today. Not with the degree of accuracy we know now. Only now is this possible, and only later will we have an even greater understanding of the Red Pill – for better or worse.

You are fortunate to be here in the now. Some of what you’re made aware of will frustrate and anger you, some of it will depress you and some of it will bring you to that “Ah Ha!” moment. The Red Pill can enlighten you or stifle you, but you are better off knowing it now in an age where this is finally possible.

The Emotional Process

Of the three cognitive, interpretive processes it is the Emotional process that people are most familiar with, and yet it’s also the most glorified when it comes to determining reality and truth. I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this essay – people invest a lot of themselves in their emotions. The reason for this is because for a very long time we’ve been taught to deify (sometimes literally) the importance of emotion to the human experience. We want to impart our emotions with a metaphysical quality to the point that understanding those feelings is something we expect our omniscient Gods to have a relation with. This is the mythic apex of the grandeur with which we regard emotion, but on a visceral level, the opposite end of that understanding, emotion is something very understandable and very ‘knowable’.

We interpret stimuli via the Emotional process, but we also express our emotional state through art and personal means. And this is the dual nature of emotion; it’s interpretive, but those interpretations are subjective to an individual. As such, these interpretations and expressions become part of our personality and identity. I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in many prior essays. A person can invest themselves so much (ego) into personal beliefs that they become a component part of who they are. Thus, an attack on the belief is literally an attack on the ego, but’s important to point out that those investments are integrally linked to the Emotional process. Emotion is not just an important filter through which we interpret the world, but its effects often shape us as individuals. So because of this subjective, ego-investment dynamic it’s hard not to step on a few toes or challenge the emotionally-inspired belief sets by considering emotion in an objective way.

As with most other aspects of Red Pill awareness. parsing out the nuts and bolts of how and why emotions work, how they evolved and the important survival functions they serve often has a way of dispelling the magic we apply to emotions. From a biological perspective we can prompt certain emotions (or buffer them) by creating the stimuli that evokes them. We can chemically induce an emotional response. We can alter moods with drugs and we can chemically compare the endorphins released into our bloodstream when we experience the ’emotional’ effects of love, lust and infatuation. There are many studies comparing love to addiction, and the effects of a breakup being comparable to ‘withdrawal’ symptoms.

Emotion has prompted virtually all of mankind’s greatest art, music, literature and so many more cultural effects it’s hard to think that emotion doesn’t define us as a species. Emotion has started wars, prompted self-sacrifice, moves us to mercy, ensures that our children are nurtured and sees that we care and cooperate with each other. Emotion is a blessing and a curse as environment and circumstance demand, but for all of that the Emotional process is a result of our evolved biology. Emotion is firmly rooted in our evolved capacity to experience and interpret our environment and circumstances. Emotion is rooted in the physical. And while it inspires us to acts that may seem divine or diabolic the fact remains that emotion is very much dependent on our evolved capacity to physically experience it.

I begin this essay stressing this point because the concept (not the process) of emotion has been elevated to such a mythic degree of importance in our present times that it supersedes almost all other considerations in life. We’re largely taught and conditioned to prioritize the importance of our emotional states above both the Instinctual and Rational processes, so to reduce emotion to a physical dynamic runs counter to what we feel it should mean to us. Unless we’re dealing with a clinical, physical depression we rarely consider that emotion is an interpretive process. We want to apply meaning to emotion rather than see it as the evolved tool it is to human beings.

Both Instinct and Reason influence and modify the Emotional process, and like both, Emotion is interpretive and functional. If we look at base emotions we can make inferences as to what their latent purposes might be. In the first post of this series I drew the lines between the effect of oxytocin inspiring feelings of trust and caring, and how the environmental prompts that trigger this hormone have a practical ‘real world’ function. We can speculate that the instinctual prompts that trigger the oxytocin then lead to the emotional processing of the feeling of trust/caring which then prompts physical behavior (nurturing a child, etc.) Hunger is another good example. Our physical state of hunger prompts feelings of anger or discontent which then compels us to action. In our evolutionary past this anger prompt would’ve been beneficial in that it motivated us to seek/kill food.

Those are just a couple of the many different basic prompts for the Emotional process, but emotion is much more complex and nuanced than this. The Emotional process is multi-layered, so when you combine various emotional interpretive processes with emotional responses you get various new iterations of emotion which then builds into more complex emotions. While instinct is the fastest of these processes, emotion can be more time intensive. Base emotions are relatively quick interpretations (though slower than instinct), but the more complex, compound emotions take time to interpret, build and then reinterpret. Because of this compositing process humans have a tendency to fixate on the emotion itself as being of primary importance; often forgetting or dismissing entirely the stimuli that originally prompted it. Furthermore, we forget or dismiss the latent purpose of that initial emotional interpretation that caused that composite cascade of emotions.

An understanding of this emotion compositing is necessary to understand why we tend to imbue emotions with such importance and power. While base emotions are linked to the ‘fast-twitch’ Instinctual process, the more complex emotions – the ones we subconsciously craft over more time – tend to be the ones we build belief sets around. This is very important to Red Pill awareness because it explains the motivations for, and foundations of, feminine-primary belief sets of both men and women, as well as the feminine-primary social order that is a result of those belief sets.

Gender Differences

Despite all the protestations of egalitarian minds, men and women are fundamentally different. Biologically, neurologically, endocrinologically and psychologically our gender-specific differences are significant. This isn’t a revelation to my Red Pill aware readers, but it’s a radical statement for the past generations who are emotionally invested in the idea of a blank-slate parity between the sexes they’ve been conditioned to believe is true. As I mention above, an ego-investment is component part of the personality of the individual so invested. To attack the investment, the belief, the ideology, the educated-but-misinformed opinion, is to attack the person. That belief set, like the emotions that compounded to develop it, is subjective to the individual experiencing the emotions that led to it.

One presupposition that has been a part of the manosphere for as long as I’ve been a part of it is that women put “feels before realz”. In several essays I’ve made a case for women’s innate communication style being context based – women focus on how the communication makes them feel; the information conveyed is secondary. For men this is reversed; men prioritize the content (the information) of the communication and the context is secondary. I’ve written a lot about how each sex evolved into their communication priorities, but down to the biological level, per our sex, the answers can be found in how our brains differ.

There are many multivariate studies that reveal similar findings and brain imaging, and the uncanny complementarity between men and women’s brains. For the most part studies indicate that women tend to prioritize the Emotional interpretive process above the Rational interpretive process and vice versa for men. That is not to say women are entirely incapable of reason, nor does it imply that men are emotionally stunted. What I’m suggesting is that our innate, biological predispositions prioritize our interpretive processes to emotion in women and rationality in men. Women can be taught to prioritize reason over emotion and, as I’ll illustrate next, men most definitely can be taught conditioned to prioritize emotion above their innate reason.

There are also numerous studies on how these interpretive prioritization function as a result of neurological gendered differences in men and women. Women process negative emotions differently than men. Men largely lack the brain architecture (wiring) to process emotion in the same manner and with the same degree of prioritization as women do. This is simply how we’re built, but before any woman pops off about their ‘superior’ emotional capacity, bear in mind, women’s brains are not wired for the rational and spatial tasks men’s brains are more suited to. Out of the womb, a boy is predisposed to throw an object with greater force and more accuracy than a girl. And that’s just one easy illustration of the mental firmware men are born with.

None of this, however, is about one sex being superior to the other’s innate predispositions. It’s not a contest, it’s just about which disposition is better suited to a task. But still, the first inclination today is to presume women’s greater emotional capacity should be the normative in our present-day feminine-primary social order. For the past 60+ years we’ve lived in a social condition that has made every attempt to feminize men; to get them more in touch with their emotions – to condition men, despite their brain wiring, to prioritize the Emotional process above both instinct and reason.

To reiterate, women are not necessarily handicapped because the Rational process isn’t their innate, predisposed preference, but neither are men handicapped for lacking the interpretive hardware to prioritize the Emotional process as women do. That said, for the past 4-5 generations we’ve lived in a social order that has presumed a blank-slate equalist perspective of men and women. We live in a time when men not emoting like women is a disorder to be treated and conditioned. We presume today that boys are defective girls because they don’t prioritize the Emotional in their communications or their interpretive process. Today the Emotional process that women innately prefer is the ‘correct’ way for all, egalitarian, blank-slate equals to prioritize their interpretations of the world and each other with.

As most of my readers already know, I see the presumption of equalism as being little more than a cover story for feminine primacy. For several generations now, and especially since the Sexual Revolution, the pretense of gender equality has been the vehicle for female social primacy. At first it was subtle and inoffensive, but today this social engineering effort is out in the open. And with more and more empirical evidence mounting that proves the sexes are far less “equal” in nature than prior egalitarian doctrines would allow anyone to accept, we see an intensifying effort to retain the social narrative on the part of equalist. Only now it’s focused on the innate ‘wrongness’ of masculinity by demonizing and pathologizing anything conventionally masculine. This new intensive effort is only able to find legitimacy because prior feminized generations base their belief sets on the the inherent ‘correctness’ of prioritizong the Emotional process – a process that is fundamentally, biologically linked to women’s preferences in interpreting the world around them.

So today we look at men as if they’re stunted and ‘wrong’ for communicating with other men in a way that prioritizes information before how it makes them feel. We still today implore men to get in touch with their feminine sides – the last vestige of Car Jung’s bastardized and now disproven animus theories – but pity men for lacking the hardware to emote ‘correctly’ like women. We don’t teach boys emotional control because in our emotional-prioritizing social order anything that looks like control seems like masculine oppression of emotional expression. Instead we create new, more intense, ways of discouraging men of ever embracing or “getting in touch” with their masculine sides. We discard masculine discipline for emotional pretense. We teach boys at younger and younger ages to fear and despise their innate masculine selves. We create programs to cure masculinity as if it were a health crisis. This effort will only intensify as gender differences become more and more unignorable and the social engineering of the last 60 years becomes more obvious.

As a basis of that cure is the fundamental presumption that interpreting our world through the filter of Emotion should supersede or entirely disqualify the Rational interpretive process. As you might guess, men’s innate predisposition is to interpret our world through Reason. Today we live in a world where feelings trump both instinct and reason. This is why the current generation makes the Emotional process and their feelings more important than any other consideration – they are the cumulative result of having prioritized women’s emotional preferences above all else, while simultaneously engineering consecutive generations of feminized men to facilitate it for the last seven decades.

In the next and final installment in this series I’ll be addressing the Rational interpretive process and how we might imagine better future generations based on seizing and instituting a social order founded on masculine reason.

Old Lies

Apparently no one has bothered to let this poor sap (I don’t know who he is) know that the “Toxic” masculinity  narrative has now been replaced with “masculinity is toxic“. I find it interesting that when it comes to the mainstream societal understandings of what masculinity once was and what it is now – or what the mainstream believes it should be now – much of these interpretations are based on fanciful, anachronistic, ideas of what contributed to our understanding of masculinity now. I’ve gone into my own definitions of what constitutes ‘conventional’ masculinity for men many times before so I won’t belabor it now, however, as the popular narrative changes I’ve noticed some very common presumptions that masculinity critics like to use and are repeated over and over.

The first of these, and the most common, is the deliberate misconception that a boy’s learning to be masculine never left the 1950-60s. In the wake of the Nikolas Cruz shooting this rationale surfaced quite a bit. It still is. The idea is that boys are born as these tender, delicate souls, all naturally ready to emote and sensate like precious little girls – that is until the nebulous evil ‘patriarchy’ gets ahold of them and batters them into “being tough”, not crying and told to stop being such pussies. This is the old anachronism that presupposes western society never left the ‘macho tough guy’ preconditioning of boys to raise them to be these future murderers, wife beaters and misogynists.

This is, of course, the “boys are broken” narrative I addressed in Good Humans. It’s kind of ironic when you think that this narrative would have us believe boys naturally wanting to be boys is a net social negative and it takes some strong intervention in their upbringing to turn them into good humans. So what is it? Are boys being their natural selves by wanting to be rambunctious, risk taking, shit-giving, masculine boys, or are they naturally these tender little emo-beings coming fresh out of the womb only to have their ‘genuine’ sensitive emotional souls crushed by “hyper-masculine” fathers, male teachers and school coaches. This is one of the more stupid, but deliberate, paradoxes the Village and the Feminine Imperative conveniently switch between as circumstances require yet one more anti-masculine response.

Lies for Boys

You can see this confusion in the above Tweet.

Our society teaches boys to “toughen up”.

Actually no, the feminine-primary social order that has been systematically feminizing boys into feminine-identifying men for the past 50 years does nothing of the kind. Since the mid-seventies the cultural narrative took a hard turn to the feminine-correct in raising boys into pacified ‘harmless’ men. We’re going on five generations of telling boys it is incumbent upon them to get in touch with their mythical feminine sides if they want to evolve beyond ‘traditional masculinity’. There is no ‘toughening’ being taught to boys in a female primary education system that teaches boys in a manner that presumes they are defective girls.

…which is okay, but not okay when “toughening up” also means suppressing feelings.

Feelings are perhaps the only thing boys are being taught to prioritize in their feminine-primary educations today. This fact deserves a bit of explanation here. Male and female humans process emotions differently. Women in particular process negative emotions in a much different way than men. Men tend to prioritize information through a filter of rational discernment first and then sort out how they feel about that information in an emotional context. Women are much the opposite; girls process information through an emotional filter first and then sort out what the information actually means to them (and after that, how it might affect others). If this sounds like the essays I’ve written about how men’s and women’s communications methods differ you’re not too far off. Men prioritize the content (information) of a conversation while women prioritize the context (the feels she gets) from a conversation. This is how our brains work, and when one method isn’t socially favored above the other both methods can be complementary to the other.

But in a feminine-primary social order this is not how things work. As I mentioned, for the past 50+ years our educational system has shifted to favor the learning methodologies of girls at the expense of boys. This ‘girls style’ teaching has been the standard for so long now that we largely take it for granted that it is the only correct style of teaching. Today, men account for less than 25% of all teachers in the United States. In the UK it’s 25% and n Canada only 17% of elementary school teachers are male. Teaching is a female dominated profession and especially for younger kids. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers, and 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers, are men. How do you think stats like these affect the learning methodologies applied to boys and girls?

Yet still this lie that boys are the victims of some overwhelming toxic masculinity in their upbringing is the first reflexive explanation we hear from women and feminized men when a kid commits a criminal act. Why?

Lies for Equalism

Because it sounds right. It sounds like it should be right. The presumption is that boys are, in fact, girls; or at least they should be a functional equivalent of girls when it comes to educations. Over the past 50 years the baseless presumptions of blank-slate egalitarian equalism has not only inserted its lies into our social consciousness, but also into our presumptions about educating kids. I’ll repeat, men and women are biologically and psychologically different and boys and girls are equally different. The ways they learn are distinct to their sex. Yet for the past 4 generations egalitarian equalism has convinced (mostly female) educators that boys and girls are functional equals and gender differences are learned rather than innate.

While equalism informs (mostly female) teachers that boys and girls are the same, the teaching methodology that works best for girls and women is the predominant one today and for the recent past generations. The only way to justify this method as the universal one is to presume that boys are the same as girls – just ‘defective’ girls that must be taught to quash their innate maleness. If boys and girls are presumed to be blank-slate equals then it must follow that boys are just as emotion-prioritizing and sensitive as any girl, and it is through a process of an imagined patreo-misogyny social conditioning that boys psychologically cover over their “true” natures – that of precious little (defective) girls. In essence the equalist belief is that all babies are born as little equal blank-slates, but the ideal template for those blank-slates is a female nature irrespective of the sex of the child.

When a boy’s real, masculine, inborn nature expresses itself the first thing it meets in this equalist-but-feminine-primary education is derision and shame. For as much as boys would be boys they are taught that they aren’t good for being so. They’re encouraged to self-repress, self-deprecate their gender and self-police their brothers. They’re taught that the correct way to think is to emote like girls because that’s correct for the template of a “good human”. Despite the female-centric teaching boys innate nature still find ways for boys to be boys and when this happens an egalitarian (feminine-primary) social order presume the ‘bad behavior’ must be the result of the influence of an evil patriarchy that truly hasn’t existed in the way they believe it does for 50 some odd years.

 

As I’ve detailed in past essays, society only sees fathers as tolerable and superfluous when it comes to raising boys. Single mothers are celebrated as super-human and in the equalist lie that would have us believe that women can not only ‘have it all’ but they can ‘do it all’ we rarely question the necessity of a masculine influence in a child’s life. We give it lip service and parrot back the need for a man to “step up and take responsibility as a parent”. The message to dads is always “do better”, because the pretense for fathers is that they are inherently irresponsible and ‘broken’ just like all boys are.

The Village might even concede that a father is some advantage to a child, but ultimately he’s superfluous – that is until that kid is involved in some kind of criminality. Then the questions become “Where was this kid’s father? Why wasn’t he around to teach this kid some discipline and respect for human life?” The children of single mothers are overwhelmingly more likely to be come involved in criminality, but we don’t look at her half-measure parenting as a possible cause. Remember, she’s a super-hero and blameless, so any blame for this kid’s acts fall on the shoulders of a weak or absent father. Then fathers are necessary. Then the kid needed to ‘toughen up’ and dad should’ve taught it to him. And all of this comes full circle and feeds into the idea of father’s inherent incompetence again.

Lies for ‘Defective Girls’

The next lie is that boys can be,…

…both tough and fragile, vulnerable and resilient. Being vulnerable doesn’t affect your manliness.

I’ve written a lot about the lie of transvaluation and  Vulnerability in the past, but this was really in terms of how women perceive men and require strength and dominance. Another aspect of masculinity that is encoded into women’s mental firmware is to seek out men with superior competency. A woman just is, a man must become is the first maxim of a man accepting his Burden of Performance. Part of this masculine competency involves strength, know-how and determination; all things that have been replaced with feminine-primary emotionalism and naval gazing for boys.

Men are expected to know how to do everything and what they do not know, what they are not competent in is one criteria of how they are judged by women. A lot of guys might think, “So the fuck what? I don’t base my self-worth on the opinions of women.” As well you shouldn’t, but it doesn’t change the truth that if you don’t know how to change a tire when you get flat, or you need another man who does know how to do it to change it for you, a woman sees you as less competent – and by extension less capable of providing her with the security she needs from a masculine ideal. Women evolved to see men as a Jack of all trades, master of some.

A man’s vulnerability (taught to him as a child by his female-primary teachers) most definitely affects his manliness. Vulnerability is, by definition, a weakness. It is a flaw in the design, a chink in the armor and vulnerabilities will be exploited by enemies and rivals to ensure that man fails while a stronger one succeeds in all things. This is Darwinism so simple that to question it seems illogical, but in our equalist utopia toughness and fragility find no contradiction; vulnerability and resilience are bed partners. Again, we must consider that this illogical balance can only exist in the female ‘good human’ template and the idea that everything is learned and nothing is innate about male and female humans. Promoting the idea that ‘vulnerability doesn’t affect manliness’ presumes that the person declaring it is in some way an authority on a manliness that has been already demonized and conditioned out of our boys today.

They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.

Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.

Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist. A kid like Nikolas Cruz was bound to happen in a world that teaches boys to prioritize feelings above rationality. He was taught like a defective girl. He never learned the masculine inspired discipline, determination and resiliency because all that conflicts with the lie that vulnerability is ever a strength. All that conflicts with his feminine-primary upbringing.

As such, these ‘defective girls’ are unequipped to handle the rejection of a girlfriend. The participation trophy generation, the one where everyone’s a winner and no one ever has to deal with defeat, never teaches these ‘defective girls’ what to do when they finally do taste a bitter defeat. They never learned how to come back from it because that would mean admitting that vulnerability and emotionalism (the female-correct way to handle it) are in fact weaknesses. So, predictably, a ‘defective girl’ like Nikolas Cruz does what any petulant teenage girl would – he has an emotional outburst. Only his outburst consists of gunning down 17 kids with an assault rifle.

The answer to incidents like this doesn’t lie in gun control or further feminization of boys. It lies in reimagining how we educate boys and how we see masculinity as a net positive that can deter exactly this kind of emotional outburst. If you truly want these shootings to stop it’s time we embrace real men teaching real toughness and resilience in our boys. It’s time we teach boys like they will become tough, strong, invulnerable young men we may need to provide future generations with a much needed security. And the time where we’ll need them is coming faster than anyone today really thinks.

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.

 

Good Humans

As was expected this week, there’s been an extensive and eager effort on the part our feminine-primary social order to once again further shifting the narrative of “toxic” masculinity to ‘masculinity is toxic. I addressed this in Male Control. Directly after the Las Vegas mass shooting we began to see articles from the femosphere decrying the evils of masculinity as being the cause of the violence.

It is no longer enough to foster the falsehood of varieties of masculinity as being “toxic” or “hyper”– now, any masculinity is a disease to society. The Feminine Imperative is all too ready to conflate any semblance of conventional masculinity with mass murder, rape, violence, harassment and any other social malaise that might viably be wiped off on men ‘being’ men. And in the wake of every new tragic act of violence this narrative shift will be more adamantly promoted by misandrist authors.

I covered a lot of this in Positive Masculinity and the Red Pill Parent series of essays, but even when I wrote these the cultural narrative was still promoting a distinction between what was acceptable masculinity and what was ‘toxic’ masculinity. This is what the Village has been instilling in our boys for some time now. Before the loss of Hillary Clinton and the Future is Female militancy took root there was some concession as to what might be considered an acceptable form of masculinity.

Naturally that ‘good’ masculinity was always defined as something uniquely benefitting the feminine. Before this cultural shift the Feminine Imperative still recognized the need it had for a masculinity that could be exploited for its purposes. There was still a need for men to Man Up and Shut Up. To be sure, boys were (and are) still taught by the Village as if they were defective girls. Boys had to be conditioned to hate their own gender in order to grow up into compliant and feminine-identifying men, but there was still a utility in masculinity that the Village recognized. Thus, there was a need to foster some kind of hopeful appreciation in men ‘being of service’ to women’s needs. There still needed to be a carrot for the mule to follow if men were to accept the old books social contract and that was the hope that their usefulness might ever be appreciated and rewarded.

The ‘Broken Boys’

Selling men on the old social contract while playing by the new set of rules worked for the Feminine Imperative throughout the late 80s, 90s and the early 2000s. However, what this narrative shift represents is a turning point in women acknowledging men as no longer (as) useful to their imperative. By 2012 it was the beginning of the End of Men, and there was little doubt, even back then, that we’d have the First Female President in office right after Obama’s exit. In the wake of that obsolescence the idea that masculinity was in any way beneficial to the Feminine Imperative, and maintaining the facade that masculinity in men might have some redeeming aspects, is no longer necessary. The feminine meta-frame has no reason to prompt men into believing their gender has anything ‘good’ to contribute to society. And thus we see the shift from qualified forms of ‘bad’ masculinity – toxic, hyper, Patriarchy, “culture of ____” – to the intended, non-qualified form of all masculinity being bad.

For the moment gyonocentrism must content itself to capitalize on human tragedies to emphasize its new masculinity = bad narrative. The Las Vegas shooting was the first paradigm shift in this respect. Once the obligatory, and now entirely boring, gun control sermons are published as a reason for the carnage, then the demonization of masculinity can be served up.

However, in the case of the most recent Nikolas Cruz shooting the Feminine Imperative gets a double bonus. The message is not only are men and masculinity the reason for all violence ever, but our boys are being taught to be these violent psychopaths because some outdated (and entirely mythical now) macho masculinity is making them so. Our boys, they say, are “broken”.

“Comedian” Michael Ian Black had a rash of post-shooting tweets that sum this narrative up:

Black is a perfect example of a Blue Pill conditioned ‘ally’ of the Feminine Imperative, but his sentiments here sum up exactly the tact that the femosphere has been using for a while now. There will always be a utility in appealing to the old male social contract as a horrible, chauvinistic, misogynistic, insensitive facade of what masculinity should be. It serves the imperative well if the Village can convince the larger populace that boys are still being taught by horrible masculine men and a society that hasn’t existed for 50 years which bully them into being potential Nikolas Cruzs.

They say boys are broken because it’s the only easy explanation that vaguely sounds right in the face of the Village systematically feminizing boys for the past four generation. Boys are “broken” because of an “outdated masculinity” that was replaced with a feminine-primary educational system decades ago. They’ll blame men for perpetuating that lie, and in the next breath blame men for not being “men” enough to engage with these young men so as to deter them from tragedies like this. The Village has been so effective in blurring conventional masculinity that its adherents themselves have no idea what masculinity entails.

When the 2018 Women’s March took place I, and a lot of other men in the sphere, noticed a common theme in the protest placards that mothers were creating for their sons. The message for girls was the standard “girls can do anything” pablum, but for boys the message was all the same:

“BOYS WILL BE BOYS   GOOD HUMANS”

The message of today’s Village is that Boys are never to be boys, never to be male, never to be masculine in any positive aspect,…boys are born as not ‘good humans’. At least, boys are not good human beings until they acquiesce to the Village that is teaching them and to the authority of The Future is Female paradigm. In order to create the genderless, masculine-less, gelded men of the future they must get to boys earlier and earlier in their development.

In the interests of full disclosure I’ve had a handful of women defending this ubiquitous messaging tell me that it’s meant to teach boys not to blame their “shitty behavior on just their being male” – boys will be boys – but what even its defenders don’t recognize is the deeper message that boys of this age register; and particularly in an acculturation process that considers them defective girls.

But this is where we’re at in the intersexual environment today. To the imperative men are no longer men today, they are “allies”. This is the next logical step in Removing the Man from our social context. Boys are no longer ‘boys’, and they can only ever be ‘good humans’ so long as they continue their Blue Pill conditioning to become ‘allies’ later.

 

The following is a reblog of Josh Ishiro Finney’s A Letter to Boys & Young Men of America. Josh had this post and his blog attacked in the wake of the school shooting in Florida this week and I felt it was impactful enough to warrant a reblog here. Having written many a post on the war on conventional masculinity – and really the better part of my book Positive Masculinity – I wanted to extend my support for his commentary.

A response to mass shooting in Florida.

The bodies aren’t even cold yet and already you are being blamed.

Yes you.

All of you.

The boys and young men who will grow up to become one half of America’s future.
Once again, due to society’s failure to raise you, to teach you, to properly guide you on your path to manhood, your mere existence is being held responsible for seventeen more deaths—this time in Florida, and once again, at a school. The headlines of the last few days say it all:

  “Guns don’t kill people; men and boys kill people, experts say”
  -USA TODAY

  “Michael Ian Black reacts to Florida shooting: Boys are broken”
  -New York Daily News

  “How Gun Violence And Toxic Masculinity Are Linked, In 8 Tweets”
  -The Huffington Post

  “Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life”
  -Salon

  “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
  -The Boston Globe

  “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
  -Harpers Bazaar

  “Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men”
  -Politico

In the handful of decades I’ve been alive, I’ve seen America shift from a culture of responsibility to one of blame. We don’t solve problems anymore. We cry, we pray for, we seek to find closure, and then finally, slaughter a sacrificial lamb for our sins. When I was young and Columbine happened, that lamb was Marilyn Manson and video games. Before that, it was D&D and Twisted Sister. These days, though, as body counts continue to rise and excuses continue to vanish, the lamb America has chosen to sacrifice is you. Rather than take responsibility for the seeds we’ve sown, the culture we built, and the disaster you’ve been left to inherit, we as a nation have chosen to lie to ourselves. To listen and believe those who claim that the answer is simple: “Boys are simply born bad.”

As an aging Gen Xer watching this tragedy unfold, I can’t help but look back at my youth and realize we were the dry run for this “crisis of masculinity” as the media likes to call it.

In my time I’ve watched as fathers were pushed out of the home, separated from their children, and their role in society debased and devalued. Like you, I was taught male behavior was bad behavior. That I was broken and needed to be fixed. Drugs, therapy, mass socialization were required to save me from my most innate instincts—

—the need compete.

—the drive to create.

—the urge to protect.

—the desire for female affection.

Like you, I was told these instincts were not only wrong, but dangerous. That due to my Original Sin of being born a boy, I was destined to mature into a lustful monster and an oppressor of women. All this was burned into me before I even reached college, where campus policy actually assumed all men to be rapists waiting to happen.

It isn’t hard to see how we got here, to an age when America is more than willing to sacrifice its boys. To quote Fight Club, “We’re a generation of men raised by women.” And the women who raised my generation had a saying: All men are pigs. But there’s another saying those same women were enamored with and that is: The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

So here we are, coming close to fifty years of single mothers raising their boys as if they were animals. Two generations of young men raised to believe they’re broken, immoral, and dangerous. That their natural state, if left unchecked and unmedicated, is a sexual ticking time bomb of rape and abuse. Half a century of academia peddling a grim version of history that holds your gender personally responsible for all the wrongs ever to have happened in the world. And a press, that at this very moment, is blaming YOU for every school shooting to have ever occurred.

After all this, how could there not be a crisis of masculinity?

So to the boys and young men of America, believe me when I say it isn’t you who should be apologizing for the state of our world today. This mess was set in motion long before you were born.

You are not bad.

You are not broken.

You are not inherently evil or a sexual abuser in waiting.

You are boys who were robbed of your right to be men.

All your life you’ve been told to act, think, and behave like women. To suppress your passions, your pride, your need to compete and drive to achieve.

Now society is crumbling around us.

Feminizing boys didn’t make better men. It’s resulted in broken homes and shattered families and record suicide rates. It’s destroying any notion of a healthy partnership between men and women, and is pushing us ever closer to total collapse of gender relations.

Boys, we don’t need you to be like women, the world has plenty of women, already.

What the world needs now more than ever is for you to be men.

For you to grow-up, to grow strong, and do what men do.

For it is men’s strength and determination that tamed the wilderness, built civilization, and has kept the world fed despite all predictions we’d all die starving before the year 2000. It’s men’s curiosity that lead us to explore the oceans, to conquer space, and peer into the tiniest of microcosms of the human body. It was men who built the cities we inhabit, the luxuries we enjoy, the medicines that keep us alive. Men built the road, the plumbing, the electrical grid, the phone in your hand, the internet it’s connected to.

Men have always been innovators, explores, defenders, and leaders.

But most importantly, men have always been fathers.

So to the boys and young men of America, please read this and take every word to heart.

The world needs you.

No Prescriptions

On Saturday I had a great discussion with Anthony Johnson, Rian Stone (Married Red Pill Reddit) and “Carl” from Black Label Logic. The topic was a critique of the impact Dr. Jordan Peterson is having on a society of ‘lost’ (mostly) young men and how his message is affecting this generally rudderless generation of men. It’s a little over two hours long, but from the overwhelming response on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other forums it’s definitely struck a nerve. As an aside here, I’m considering making this meet up video format something I may do semi-regularly (like every other week) with some of the men I consider peers in the manosphere.

You can watch this talk at your leisure, but it has taught me a few things. As I mentioned in the chat it’s next to impossible to have any disagreement or critique of people whom other’s believe are your betters. As Rollo Tomassi it’s impossible for me to be critical of any high profile guy in the sphere without the accusations of professional jealousy or sour grapes being the first reflexive response from haters. I got that, but I’ve learned the conversation is more important that trying to convince anyone of it being genuine. In fact, I think it belies a bigger problem when they are above critique.

That aside, I think it was good to finally parse where Red Pill awareness and what Peterson is advocating have some overlap and where we differ. Peterson is a fountain of hope for the ‘lost’ boys, so anything critical of his message is going to sound like it’s endorsing an “enjoy the decline” mentality. I can’t expect everyone to have read up on my own opinion about that, but the short version is that I’ve never been convinced of some inevitable decline and fall of western civilization. In other words, I think it is possible to turn the ship around; where I may differ is in how that might be done.

For the record here I want to say that I have a great respect for Dr. Peterson. I think he’s what the sphere has needed for a while and I think he fits the role of ‘champion’ that a generation of young men have wanted to place on someone. Ideologically I agree with about 85-90% of what he advocates and there’s no doubt that he’s got definite skin in the game. In fact I really hate it when people use that as some catch phrase to disqualify men today. As a man we all have skin in the game now. How much and to what degree may be debatable, but we all live in a feminine-primary social order and as such we all have a lot to risk whether we acknowledge this or not.

Where I differ with Peterson is in his very Trad-Con solutions to turning the ship around. I wasn’t shocked to see him endorsed in videos for Prager University. In some ways what he proposes resonates with young men looking for a direction because their fathers and generations of Blue Pill men haven’t been able to deliver a way out of Hell for them. I go into this in more detail in our talk here, but here are some of my issues with Peterson’s take on things:

• Life is suffering and sacrifice: In every video I’ve watched Dr. Peterson’s founding (zen-like) premise is that life is suffering and the best men can do is to find ways to minimize that suffering. Men (and I’ve yet to see a video addressing women) must sacrifice parts or all of themselves in order to qualify for “genuine” manhood. The degree of that self-sacrifice is relative to how high a status that man can achieve.

I fundamentally disagree with this premise though I do understand why it’s so appealing to a ‘lost generation’ of young men. From my own perspective, life is based on a perpetual discontent, but how a man deals with that discontent – creatively or destructively – is the measure of him. Furthermore, I would argue that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make in order to facilitate their reality.

• Blue Pill conditioning seems to define his perspective of women: Essentially the archetype he has for women was formed for him as a 7 year old boy when he first developed a soul-mate ONEitis for his wife. His reluctance to acknowledge the Alpha Fucks side of women’s Hypergamy in any video (beyond his repeated use of 50 Shades of Grey as a humorous example) leads me to the impression that he defaults to women as innately ‘good’ and above too much criticism. As such he focuses almost entirely on the good provider / parental investment / Beta need side of Hypergamy. This is unsurprising as it follows the same Trad-Con interpretations of women being “closer to God than men” and men must qualify themselves, and sacrifice themselves for women’s (wives) intimate approval. Dalrock has covered this dynamic among male “complementarian” Christian leaders quite extensively.

• Sacrifice of men is a parallel to men’s disposability: Men will blow themselves up for pussy. From what I gather from his talks Peterson endorses male disposability as a form of Honor. He seems to play on the ‘Man Up / Shut Up’ dynamic I talked about in The Honor System. 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. I’m not suggesting Peterson is accusing men of Patriarchy or Misogyny, rather, like most Trad-Cons, it’s a question of living up to one’s duty as a man in his disposability and his usefulness in that sacrifice.

• “Get your shit together” is also a plea for sacrifice: If a man is less valuable his sacrifice is less meaningful. No one cares about mediocre / average men’s sacrifices, but if a man accepts that he is to improve himself it is so that his sacrifice is more appreciated and important. Thus, the comparisons to Christ’s sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of sacrifice and meaning which Peterson uses in his dissertations on manhood and the Bible. My issue here is that women and a feminine-primary social order lack a capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make because these are taken-for-granted expectations of what a man just “ought to do”.

• Peterson is egalitarian to a fault: The mantra may be for men to sack up and make something of themselves, but this is couched in an egalitarian equalism that’s prevalent today. If I had one question to ask Jordan it would be this; is there a dominance hierarchy in a healthy LTR or marriage? I don’t know for certain. My guess is he would say it passes back and forth between a husband and wife which is to say he falls back on an egalitarian ideal. However, outside the family structure he acknowledges that men and women in a state of egalitarianism choose to adopt traditional gender roles (I think he gave the same example as was covered here).

• Dr. Peterson regularly resorts to shaming language with men, rarely does he do the same with women: This may be a simple question of his delivery, but Peterson is always harder on men than he is with women. In so doing he adopts the AMOGing of only men techniques that a pastor like Mark Driscoll uses from the pulpit. Inso doing he pedestalizes women and absolves them of any consequences of their Hypergamous choices by imploring men to “man up and marry those sluts“. In essence the sacrificial nature of men becomes one that is necessary for the continuance of ‘family’ and western culture in spite of women. I also see how this plays into the idea of women lacking any moral agency, personal responsibility and wiping the bad behavior of women off on the men who have allowed this to happen. Once again it comes back to the hypoagency of women.

• Peterson believes that desire can be negotiated: This is my biggest problem with Peterson’s approach to women. This undoubtedly comes from his being a clinical psychologist, but like most therapists he defaults to the idea that genuine desire can be motivated by a process of negotiation. If there is one example of his lack of experience with women it is this belief. In several of his interviews and podcasts he makes reference to appealing to women’s reason and negotiating terms for acceptable behavior (always a man’s behavior) in exchange for intimacy and/or a stress-free marriage. This is the egalitarian, Oprah Approved, male-sublimated means to achieving transactional intimacy.

As you might guess, I strongly disagree with negotiating intimacy. You cannot negotiate genuine desire. You can obligate a woman to fuck you (now called rape) via negotiation, but you cannot organically inspire genuine desire in a woman. This has always been my main point of contention with the marriage counseling trade for a long time.

What is the Red Pill version of “man-up”?

I had a commenter ask me this in the last comment thread. I think there’s two sides to this question. First, I think there’s a need to keep the Red Pill (in the intersexual sense) as close to an objectivist purpose as possible. That means Red Pill awareness is the result of a continuing praxeology.

I’ve locked horns with a few Red Pill guys recently who seem to think that ‘Red Pill’ is an ideology and it’s just the counter revolt to feminism; basically it is feminism for men. I think that does a huge disservice to everything and everyone that’s brought us to where we are today in Red Pill awareness and all of the work and personal risk that was put on the line to explore what we know as Red Pill awareness now. Not only that it casually devalues the effort and work that’s continuing right now.

Critics and feminists alike want to draw parallels in the manosphere to whatever (fictitious) wave of feminism they think applies to whatever the Men’s Rights Movement is calling Red Pill at the moment. Believing that Red Pill is an ideology is one more casualty of how the term / brand has been bastardized by other ideologies who’ve never had any business referring to themselves as “red pill”.

Presuming Red Pill is just an ideology is juvenile, and unsurprisingly it’s an opinion of some underexperienced men in the manosphere who want for simplistic answers. They don’t want to think about what Red Pill awareness implies on a larger social scale. They want a flag to wave and an easy to understand ideology so they can stick it to their feminist enemies. I get it. They want Red Pill (however they define it) to be that ideology, but to me, I think, and I’ve always said it, the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, areligious and amoral to ensure that it stays true to understanding truth. It needs to remain true to being an aggregate of men’s collected experiences with intersexual dynamics.

What these guys want is a meaning to that truth, but that’s not the Red Pill. Meaning is what men will apply to that truth according to their individual needs, situations and circumstances. This is why Peterson and probably some more personalities to follow him will be popular in the future; they prioritize meaning above truth. If you listen to the first podcast of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson they spend the entire time trying to come to an agreed measure of truth between the two of them so they can move on (in the second podcast) to what is meaning.

You want to know why I don’t do prescriptions on The Rational Male? Because we disempower ourselves when we follow someone else’s path and not our own.

There is a deep need in almost all people to improve or ‘fix’ ourselves in some way. I’ve written essays about it; discontent is is the human condition. That in no way means that life is suffering as per the Peterson (Zen) doctrine, but it is man’s condition to never be satisfied with even the greatest of accomplishments. That is what put us at the top of the species contest on this planet. You can be constructively or destructively discontent, but when you tell me that life is suffering and the only way to lessen that suffering (never to solve it of course) is to sacrifice my way to a better life all that says to me is that you’re out of ideas for a creative solution and you’re all-in on the destructive methods. Either that or you’ll continue naval gazing.

Fuck that.

So, the Red Pill needs to remain a praxeology and it ought to always resist being force-fit into an ideology because it’s always some ideological hack who wants to claim the truth it reveals as proof of his own purpose. The Red Pill has to remain an open source aggregate of men’s experiences. That’s why we’re still here today in spite of the Rooshs who said it would die out 3 years ago – it’s open source and decentralized information.

Now, to the second point, what does ‘Man up’ mean in the Red Pill context? I think this is really for the individual to decide, but I’d say that it would involve a man utilizing and internalizing the awareness the Red Pill represents to him and improving his life with it. In the Safety Net post’s comment thread there are hundreds of examples of how men saved their own lives, often literally. How the Red Pill truth reached them and then manifested in their lives is highly individual. I mentioned the need for a dissociation with ideology because that usually means aligning oneself with the expectations of someone else’s version of truth, not the objective (or as objective as we can make it) truth of the Red Pill.

When I hear ‘man-up’, I identify the context only as derogatory… is there any other definition which is not?

It should, because in almost all contexts imploring a guy to “Man Up” is following someone else’s path, not your own. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not in the business of creating better men, I’m in the business of men making themselves better men. And in today’s world of men seeking direction there is no shortage of personalities who’d like nothing more than to profit from selling men on their paths.

If there is a definition of ‘manning up’ in a Red Pill sense it is living a better way than your previous life that was informed by the falsehoods of your Blue Pill conditioning. Manning up Red Pill is killing off that old Blue Pill-created persona and killing off the false idealisms it taught you. It’s understanding and internalizing that those lies made you a less authentic person because the Blue Pill is firmly an ideology, but one that wears the mask of freedom or choice or individualism. If self-improvement in a Red Pill sense entail some basic tenets, one is that a man cuts himself away from that old Blue Pill paradigm and rebuilds a better life for himself based on a real understanding of intersexual truth on the personal, social and political scales.

Manning up Red Pill begins with rejecting the lies of egalitarian equalism and a commitment to real objective understanding of intersexual dynamics.