Purple Pill

The Mystery of the Red Dress

Today’s quote is from the Biography of Steve Jobs. I did read the book in its entirety in 2010, but recently had this bit sent to me from a reader as an example of ‘How an Alpha should treat a Gold-digger‘. Mmm? No.

As an example of “alpha behavior” or an illustration of equal justice I can see why this incident might be construed as such, but there’s a much more valuable lesson to be learned in this exchange. The incident took place between Steve Jobs and singer Joan Baez, a woman who Jobs eventually had a relationship with.

In 1982, Jobs was introduced to Joan Baez by her sister Mimi Farina. He was 27 and she was 41. “It turned into a serious relationship between two accidental friends who became lovers,” said Jobs. Some of his friends believed that one thing that drew Jobs to Baez was the fact that she used to date Bob Dylan. “Steve loved that connection to Dylan,” said Jobs’ college friend Elizabeth Holmes.” The relationship fizzled out when it became clear that Jobs wanted children and Baez did not. 

Rolling Stone, 2011

Using a Red Pill Lens on this situation, we see a few apparent truths. The age difference was definitely a factor, but Jobs was well-known for what was called his “Reality Distortion Bubble“. In effect Steve Jobs had an intrinsic understanding of himself as his Mental Point of Origin. A lot of Type-A personalities have this in common – they innately make themselves the first thought they have in virtually all decisions they make. For some this can border on sociopathy, but most people we consider successes or geniuses had this sense of self as their starting point. Let me make this clear, you don’t have to be a sociopath or a solipsist to make yourself your Mental Point of Origin, but that is where these states begin.

Practically every very wealthy man I’ve ever worked for, or with, had himself in mind before a thought was give to anyone else’s consideration in his decision making process; family, spouse, employees, friends, we’re subordinate to his Mental Point of Origin. For most the process would start and end with themselves and their interests. These were the sociopaths. For a few that process started with themselves and ended with the consideration of others, but the process was a pragmatic one that facilitated a maintaining of power balance. As I’ve said in the past, I’m a proponent of enlightened self interest: I cannot help others until I help myself. Nor can I help others as effectively as when I help myself first. It’s not that you ought to become a selfish prick – you should think of the interests of others – but only after you’ve considered yourself in the scope of your own interests and how your interests facilitate the interests of others.

Now that this is settled, let me say that by this metric, Steve Jobs was none of this. According to the people he worked with, his family and friends, Jobs had all the characteristics of a solipsist. Yes, men can be solipsists too, though it’s more of a learned process rather than the innate proclivity women have to be solipsistic. From a business perspective, from a single-minded determination perspective, Jobs was certainly an Alpha. His mindset was that of an Alpha. His relationship history, however, was grossly influenced by Blue Pill idealism. One commonality you’ll find among men we consider great innovators, inventors, discoverers and entrepreneurial geniuses is they are almost invariably Blue Pill idealists with respect to their romantic lives. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two current examples of this commonality. Argue their greatness if you like, their personal lives are classic examples of what happens to the Nerd, the autist, the high IQ guy, who’s afforded the money and success to live out their Blue Pill fueled impression of what a relationship with a woman should be like. And predatory women, with the savvy to understand (and have the patience for) the nature of Beta men, make these guys their bread and butter.

“There’s a beautiful red dress there that would be perfect for you.”

I’m not sure I would describe Jobs as an autist, or being on the Asperger’s spectrum, but he was certainly on the sociopath spectrum. Try not to conflate ‘sociopath’ with something negative in this instance. Sociopathic behaviors and character attributes can equally be attractive survival traits as they are evidence of megalomaniacal tyranny. Sociopathy is really by order of degree. Jobs most certainly began and ended his thinking with himself in mind.

My Red Pill Lens read on this is as follows: Something in Steve Job’s subconscious was testing Joan Baez for genuine desire.

I’m fairly certain most of my readers will understand the ovulatory shift implications of a red dress being the item in mention here, but there is a method to Job’s madness in this.

“I said to myself, far out, I’m with one of the world’s richest men and he wants me to have this beautiful dress.”

Joan doesn’t get it from the start here. She presumes that a rich man would want to purchase her affections via the transaction of a gift. Not uncommon for even 41 year old women, and yes, her thinking here is exactly the solipsistic mental point of origin women have a natural default for. Indignant guys will call her a Gold Digger, which is accurate, but moreover you have to look at the process here. She presumes that rich men buy expensive gifts for the women they’re interested in. But in typical Jobs fashion Steve flips the script without knowing that’s what he’s doing.

When they get to the store Steve points out the dress and says, “You oughta buy it.” She looked a little surprised, said she couldn’t really afford it, he said nothing and they left.

“Wouldn’t you think if someone (a rich man) had talked like that the whole evening they were going to buy it for you?”

It would be easy to dismiss this part as default female entitlement, but remember this was 1982, and while women (particularly attractive and famous women) did expect things from well-to-do men, the entitlement levels weren’t anything like they are now. I think she was genuinely confused. She really didn’t get it.

“The mystery of the Red Dress is in your hands. I felt a bit strange about it.”

He would giver her computers, but not a dress, and when he brought her flowers he would be sure to say they were leftover from an event in the office.

“He was both romantic, and afraid to be romantic.”

This end part is Baez’s last attempt to explain why an ‘eccentric‘ rich man wouldn’t buy her a dress he thought she’d look good in. I’m often asked how to go about vetting a woman for a long term relationship, and I’ve written essays about how most men simply never actually have the luxury of holding (much less developing) standards by which to ‘vet‘ a woman’s commitment-worthiness. Most men are not rich men, most men are Betas. Fewer still have the sense of self-value, or the access to so many optional women, as to presume to test a woman’s interest in him in any meaningful sense. Steve Jobs was not a necessitous man, he had, or could easily realize options when he wanted to. But even though he was idealistic in a Blue Pill conditioned sense, his subconscious wanted something it couldn’t buy – genuine desire from Joan Baez.

It’s easy to dismiss the Red Dress Incident as just another quirky personality flaw of a borderline sociopath who didn’t have the Game or the social intelligence to know he was offending or turning off a girl he kind of liked. Indeed, Joan tries to insert her own pop-culture psychoanalysis of Steve in the end; He was afraid to be the romantic she just knew he wanted to be. I expect this kind of rationalization from women who miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to optimize Hypergamy. But what if Steve wasn’t afraid? What if it was a form of his shit testing Joan to determine her genuine desire for him?

As I said, most men don’t have the luxury to shit test women at all. For low SMV men, which is to say most men, the thought of experimenting with testing a woman for desire, much less long term suitability is never a consideration. Most guys can’t believe their luck that a woman actually expressed interest in him because they’ve lacked romantic options for most of their lives. So to consciously experiment with determining honest signals from a woman seems like tempting fate. The Thirst is such that most men would do damn near anything not to screw things up with a girl who’s showing interest in him. Just be thankful your ship’s finally come in, right?

I’ll add again here that most women, particularly in this social media era, are well aware that most men will never vet them for anything beyond baseline arousal and sexual availability. Thirst serves the Feminine Imperative very well, but what about men who are Blue Pill idealists, that can actually afford the options? Men for whom money and access are no object, but still persist in the fairytale the Blue Pill told them was possible?

What I see happening here is Jobs’ request for Baez to buy the dress for herself was a test of her genuine desire for him. Steve could’ve easily bought her the dress, even the whole store, but that wasn’t the point. What Steve wanted was for her to want to please him. His expressing a like for the dress was his subconscious testing her desire to please him.

“I think you’d look good in this; It’s perfect for you” isn’t an offer, it’s a request. Will you sacrifice something to please me? 41 year old Joan Baez, could’ve afforded the dress. Hell, Ralph Lauren would have probably given it to her. But she expected Steve to buy it for her; that was her expectation then and it was the source of her confusion right up to Jobs’ biography interview. Her affinity for Jobs was transactional, not based in genuine desire. She failed the test.

Whether subconsciously or by design Steve wanted what most well-conditioned Blue Pill men want today: a genuine connection with a woman based on genuine (preferably unmitigated) desire. The Desire Dynamic is synonymous with The Rational Male. You cannot negotiate genuine desire is a foundational principle of both my work and all Red Pill awareness that follows from it. Steve’s ego wouldn’t allow him to negotiate for Joan’s real desire. His Mental Point of Origin and marginally sociopathic nature wouldn’t conceive it. But consciously or unconsciously he would test her (and other women he was involved with) for her desire to please him.

What is Your Red Dress?

It’s a cliché now for wealthy men to test women’s true interest in them. “Does she love me for me or because of my money/fame/status?” is a Blue Pill fantasy script for Beta men. This has been the plot of many popular stories and movies for centuries now (Coming to America with Eddie Murphy), but it’s a cliché because it accurately describes men’s subconscious coming to terms with women’s mating strategies and opportunistic concept of love. Women don’t fall in love with who a man is, they fall in love with what that man is. If a woman ever falls in love with who a man is it’s only after loving him for what he is first.

That’s some real cognitive dissonance a man has to confront in his life. The indignation that dissonance produces is very much the Red Meat most low SMV men love to wallow in, and commiserate in.

“She doesn’t love me! She loves what I can afford her! She’s a Gold Digger, I knew it!”

We love having women’s duplicity confirmed for us as men. It means we dodged a bullet by not investing in, and wasting our reproductive potential with, a woman who would be a bad bet for our future paternity. It provides the same chemical exhilaration and relief women feel when they think they’ve figured out a man’s “true” nature (Alpha Cad/Beta Dad). In the same way women get off on the indignation of discovering of men’s attempts to deceive women’s existential fear of false signals, so to do low SMV men get off on the indignation of discovering a woman only wants him for his money – not the real him.

What our subconscious truly wants is a pairing with a woman who has a genuine desire for us. Hot, unmitigated, Darwinistic monkey-sex is usually the manifestation of that genuine desire, but there are many more nuanced ways our male psyches will try to determine it. In past essays I’ve had men and women run me up the flagpole for suggesting a man never buy lingerie for his girlfriend or wife.

“How’s she supposed to know what I like if I don’t buy it for her?”
“I love getting something sexy from my man, sucks to be you.”

These, and more like them, are usually efforts in remaining self-ignorant of never having experienced genuine desire from a woman. If a woman has genuine desire for you she will be interested enough in you, and have the desire enough, to know how to please you without you explaining it to her. Genuine, organic desire is the foundation of all healthy relationships between men and women. Women who have genuine, unobligated desire for a man don’t ask him if they can go to Vegas for a girl’s weekend – her desire is for her man. Plates don’t require an active ‘spinning‘ on your part when she has real desire to be part of that man’s life. Women will eagerly share a worthy Alpha (rather than be saddled to a faithful Beta) if she has genuine desire for him.

…and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

Genesis 3:16

When a woman has genuine desire for a man she Just Gets It when he suggests that a Red Dress would be “perfect for her” and she buys it, borrows it or steals it to wear it for him.

If Steve Jobs had purchased the Red Dress for Joan Baez, every time she wore it she would be wearing it for her, not for him. Something inside Steve knew this, and something in you does too.

Why We Fight

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

In the almost nine years of of this blog I have only hit upon violence on a couple of occasions. I’ve only been in a physical altercation a handful of times in my life. And by that I mean real fights; the kind of violence that requires you to physically harm another person. I’ve been in lots of sparring fights and martial arts tournaments, mostly when I was in my 20s and 30s. While I’ve been hurt and caused hurt to my opponents, I can appreciate that there is a qualified difference between competitive sport fighting and real violence. The one mutual interest my younger brother and I had when we were growing up was beating the shit out of each other. By the time I got to high school I was no stranger to taking a fist to the chops or various headlocks and “wrassling” holds.

Most of the times I’ve been in real fights were in high school. It’s interesting just how Darwinistic our teenage years really are –we’re just too immature to appreciate it then. Unless you grow up in a sheltered family, learning about sex and violence is usually part of our adolescent experiences. After high school I got into a few fights when I was playing gigs in the late 80s-90s Hollywood scene. Depending on where we played and who we happened to piss off, those kind of fights were something you had to keep in the back of your head as being a possibility. Usually you had friends or bandmates who had your back, but not always.

Of those scuffles most of them were versus a drunk guy who presumed he could kick my ass, or my bandmate’s ass, because, well, we weren’t exactly the most physically imposing guys to be honest. And a lot of those fights were initiated in one of two ways; the guy was fed up with guys like us because the women (usually in some sexy outfit) preferred to fuck guys like us – or, the fight was provoked by a woman and the guys fighting were coming to blows over who’d fucked whose girlfriend. Often enough it was the girl herself who’d later admit she “made a mistake” and one or the other found out.

All of that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. Things have definitely changed with respect to how violence is initiated, normalized and respected (or delegitimized) today, but the basis of that violence will never change. Violence is part of human nature. We do ourselves no favors in denying this simple fact. I can remember in 2001-02 when I did casino promotions for this new ‘sport’ called King of the Cage. It was the forerunner for today’s MMA fighting, but back then it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it is now. I believe Nevada was one of the only states that could legally host such an event. The outcry then was that it was an underground ‘bloodsport’ and legitimizing it as a true sport was the first step towards degenerate social savagery. Or something like that. People used to be appalled by it.

Now MMA fighting is something I’ve seen some Evangelical Christian churches use as a draw to get their men to attend a ‘masculine revival’ weekend. Warriors for Jesus with a ‘saved’ MMA fighter speaking about using his sport as a ministry. I think there’s a primal, evolved side of men’s nature that makes violence attractive. And like love and respect, violence is another aspect of the human experience where men and women’s approach and understanding is innately different.

Boys and men are innately drawn to competition, combat and violence. We make ‘guns’ out of our fingers. We craft weapons from scraps we find in the garage to defeat our ‘foes’. We love our plastic army men and G.I. Joes, our cowboys & indians, and we play ‘war’ with our friends. Our video games from the first coin operated arcades to our immersive virtual reality consoles are about combat and strategy. Even sports have been called a “proxy for war”. Team sports are a facsimile of tribal competition. Human males’ physiology, by and large, evolved for combat and physical stresses. I realize that might be hard to believe by today’s standard of masculinity, but the evidence is there.

The male Burden of Performance began with a need for testing that performance against our primal environments and some very real opponents. I have read some interesting research that suggests human beings are innately risk averse. Most humans would rather avoid conflict than voluntarily engage in a fight that they could very well lose, if not die from. The logic is that humans’ success as a species is at least partly due to our evolved sense of caution for life and limb. If you cooperate and play it safe it’s likely your risk-averse genes would propagate into future generations.

Of course the flip side to this can summed up in an old Latin proverb,…

Fortune Favors the Bold. 

There’s also research that shows men experience a spike in testosterone levels after defeating a rival in combat, and/or killing their opponent. This doesn’t even have to be actual violence; some studies show men experience a similar spike when their sports teams win a significant game. So, while in some instances avoiding conflict and backing down from a dangerous engagement has survival benefits, risk taking and enacting one’s will by force also has some reproductive benefits. 

For as much as they rail to the contrary, women do have an affinity for violent men. Women get turned on by men with a capacity for violence. Modern psychology attempts to pathologize this arousal prompted by dangerous men (hybristophilia), but, by order of degree, women evolved to select for men with at least the perceived capacity to do harm to another man. I would speculate that this attraction stems from women’s evolved need to seek security and protection from men, and sympathetically, men evolved an innate protectionist aspect to our own evolved firmware. Competing with rival men for sexual access, sometimes violently, is part of our ancestral programming. As we developed into a more ‘civilized’ species that competition shifted to contests of performance between men, but the old violent firmware is still part of humans’ starting package.

Let’s You and Him Fight

On Twitter and a few past livestreams, I’ve pointed out that women today have developed a false sense of security with respect to the potential of real violence. This is equally a result of the masculinization of women as it is our accommodating the Feminine Imperative in mainstream cultures. In the age of social media, as the globalization of women’s entitlements have spread, so too has women’s entitlement to personal safety. 

One very real downside to the Fempowerment narrative is that it has convinced women that the fantasy of the “strong female” is something they can aspire to personally. This is what I’ve called the Warrior Princess fallacy: Over the course of generations our feminine-primary social order has convinced women that they can realize the same warrior role as men. Via storytelling in various media the ideal that physical differences in men and women are relative, and women can be “just as tough and dangerous as men” is pervasive. This is a dangerous precedent, and one that is a direct result of old order beliefs in, and popularization of, Blank Slate equals. 

In the idealized fantasy society of equalism, masculinized Amazon Warrior Princesses can give as good as they get from any man. But in the real world, men evolved for physical performance, competition and combat; women evolved to endure the rigors of childbearing and nurturing. And as the introduction of transgendered biological males into biologically female sports divisions is proving, the realities of our physical differences is unavoidable.

However, the idea that women are always entitled to physical protection in the new order presents some interesting dichotomies. Women mix an entitlement to personal safety with an expectation of clichéd female bravado. Remember, this all happens in the context of women’s innate solipsism; add a bit of alcohol and the social posturing of a group of women all vying for attention on a Friday night and you begin to see the volatile potential. Today’s women have grown accustomed to initiating or escalating inherently unsafe circumstances for themselves – to say nothing of the men they’ll involve.

Women have a limbic understanding that, for the most part, they can be violent with relative impunity. If a male ever strikes a female, even in self-defense, she can be assured that a mob of random males, following their evolved protectionist directive, will spontaneously form to beat the shit out of the guy. In today’s Blue Pill engineered society, even the most passive male waits for an opportunity to prove his quality to womankind by becoming ‘justifiably’ violent in defense of a woman. It’s what most men are conditioned for for most of their lives.

“Sorry babe, I don’t know what came over me. I just can’t abide by any man assaulting a woman!”

The old, vestigial, evolved response of violence is something our male hindbrains know will trigger ‘gina tingles in women. The primal ideal of the nobleman with the capacity to unleash justifiable fisticuffs is Blue Pill conditioned psychological red meat. That the woman provoked or escalated an unsafe situation isn’t even an afterthought – the guy raised a hand to a woman, opportunities to prove a legitimate capacity for violence are rare for low SMV men.

As such, women presume safety. Women will raise hell about feeling unsafe around men. They’ll bleat about fantasies of enforcing a ‘male curfew’ (only for undesirable Betas of course) out of safety concerns. We’ll hire security staff to walk a woman across a dark parking lot and install emergency call boxes on college campuses. But in social situations (particularly when drinking) will escalate inherently unsafe situations knowing that men will play by the old order rules.

There is an old PUA maxim that picked up on women’s penchant to provoke men to violence. It was called the Lets You and Him Fight dynamic. Whether women are aware of this and deliberately provoking a fight between men, or, their subconscious motivates the conflict is a debate that’s been around for a while. But the LYHF dynamic is a shit test women will use in assessing a man’s Alpha status. Women need indignation as it is, but in this dynamic is a woman’s hindbrain wants a visceral response from a man.

I first became aware of the LYHF shit test when a friend had told me how annoyed he was by his girlfriend starting fights with guys that she expected him to finish. She would honk the car horn from the passenger seat if someone had even slightly cut them off in traffic. Even flip off other drivers if the opportunity presented itself. She would start fights with other women which would provoke their boyfriends to step in on their behalf and he was tacitly expected to kick their ass to defend her provoking them. “What are you a pussy? Go beat his ass!”

I’ve tackled the subject of shit tests numerous times on this blog so I won’t belabor them here, but this test plays upon some very deep, evolved, intersexual and intersocial dynamics. On some level of consciousness a woman wants to know her man can get violent. Most Blue Pill men find that suggestion appalling. We’re supposed to be “above all of that”, right? For the most part I’m sure the majority of men would rather not be put into a position of taking a fist to the face. As such we build social conventions and rationales around not engaging physically in a real sense. So, to consider a woman might desire a man with a predilection for violence prompts them to qualify that woman for his own safety.

Intrasexual Competition

“Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

When a group (tribe) of primates reaches a certain number of members the potential for ‘hostile takeover’ by lesser males becomes almost a certainty. Beta male primates form coalitions to overthrow an existing Alpha leader. Most dominant Alphas instinctively cull this coalition building to ensure their position. A smackdown, abuse, punishment for anything that looks like a challenge to his position from lesser male troop members is something Alphas do to infrequently teaming up on him. Partially this is a display of dominance (social proof reinforces it), but it is also a curbing function.

Eventually the Alpha becomes weaker and less effective at enforcing his dominance, and the Betas grow in number until such time that they can band together and depose him. Then the cycle repeats with the most dominant male among them assuming the Alpha role. He gets access to the most fertile females, kills off his rivals’ offspring (which prompts the females into estrus) and reproduces for as long as he’s able to remain in that position.

And yes, I’m aware of the theory that pro-social Alphas that build loyalty-exchanges among other males, and display a willingness to share resources with females, tend to make for better ‘leaders’ within a tribe. What most of that research conveniently leaves out is the element of envy and jealousy that develops (even among primates) in the Beta male population until the sentiment reaches a point of challenge. Even the good-guy, prosocial Alpha has to watch his back.

As you might guess, many of these behaviors are paralleled in humans. Alpha displays of violence, even if by proxy, are ‘sexy’, but mostly we manifest male prowess in social displays. Athletics, resource acquisition, peacocking, conspicuous consumption, really any costly signaling of high sexual market value. To compete with these Alpha displays, lesser males must either: 

  • Increase their own value, and learn to display it effectively, 
  • Find ways to convince other men, (coalition building) and reproductively viable women, that those displays are worthless, while propping up his own displays as more valuable.

In the age of social media and mass communication Beta males are constantly reminded of their lesser positions. There’s no respite. Even the most well-meaning, prosocial Alpha’s presence is a reminder of Beta male inadequacies. High school bullies and ‘Jocks vs. Nerds’ is a constant theme across human cultures because the evolved human male experience is always one of competition and a Burden of Performance. To be male is to compete, and as such there will be winners and losers.

Deposing, or disqualifying, an Alpha – much in the same way primates do – is also a constant theme in human cultures. Beta males enacting ‘justice’ on an ‘evil’ Alpha or an Alpha proxy has always been a teenage fantasy for boys. Spiderman, Captain America, the wimp who incredibly transforms into a powerful Alpha himself will prove to the world how that Alpha power should be ethically used. The geek who gets the girl because she magically sees his superior quality that aligns with the terms he’s establishing as valuable is also a fantasy. All of these cast the Alpha as ‘oppressor’.

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” – Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Why is using strength, displaying value and exercising will an act of ’tyranny’? Why is restraint of power a moral imperative? How did we come to disqualifying value displays? I’ve seen a few talks by Jordan Peterson where he promotes the idea that a real man is a dangerous one who possesses the capacity for violence and oppression, but has the strength of will not to use it. This then begs the question, how does anyone know a man even possesses this capacity if he’s not to display it? Concealing strength is awesome, but it is, by definition, indistinguishable from weakness. No one knows if you’re a black belt or a white belt until you get in the ring and fight. However, the moral consensus is that it’s unacceptable for men to display value.

This then is the global, social coalition that was formed by the majority of lesser men. To continually disqualify the merits of superior men is individually taxing and makes lesser men look worse for doing so. But build a social order around men self-policing their displays of value; then you have higher value men doing the heavy lifting for lesser men. You may be powerful, but the social mores of the time (created to serve the majority of lesser men) will tell you to conceal it. In fact, they’ll build social conventions to convince the whole of men that displaying vulnerability, not strength, is a display of value.

Most of what I’m digging at here is old order thinking. Socially enforced monogamy has primarily served the greatest number of Beta men. And while it’s definitely been a stabilizing factor for civilization, I can’t ignore that the social expectation of monogamy is also the result of society-wide coalition building among lesser men to ensure that greater men wouldn’t out-breed them. Most male-specific social conventions are designed to control men’s innate directives. Their latent purpose is to teach rules that limit displays and usage of strength.

And in the new order we see this old order intersexual competition struggle to keep pace with a global sexual marketplace that centers on women’s innate mating strategies reseting context of intersexual dynamics. Open Hypergamy incentivizes men’s overt displays of higher value – and now on a worldwide scale. In response, men form online coalitions to disqualify those displays in an attempt to devalue the strengths of men they couldn’t hope to compete with in the old order. Meanwhile, women in the global sexual marketplace continue to reward men who display genuine value according to their mating strategy’s needs. 

Unconscious Contempt

Today’s essay was inspired by the lead image you see here and the subsequent exchange I had on Twitter about it. What you see here is a rather nebbish looking husband, I presume post-surgery, recovering from his vasectomy in bed. He is surrounded by cutesy post-it note jokes his wife left him (kind of like the notes your mom might put in your school lunch when you were a child) on a plethora of sugary snacks from the pantry.

The number of kids we’ll be having in the future – Zero

Forgive me if I Snicker

Sorry your dong got dinged

Good-bye to your swimmers

Mini Nonuts

Your berries got crunched

These are just a few of the ‘jokes’ his wife spent an awful lot of time creating.

Beta men and their wives joking about their vasectomies has become the meme du jour on all the usual social media sites where women congregate to appease their egos, gloss their girlfriends’ and commiserate about their fates of being wives and mothers. Before I dig in here I think I need to point out the utility that social media has evolved to serve in most women’s lives now. There was a time when a woman’s indignation needs could be met by daytime television, talkshows and romance novels when living vicariously through their girlfriends’ lives wasn’t sufficient. Today, women’s innate need for indignation is provided on-tap courtesy of the internet, social media and cutesy-but-insulting images of a husband are almost passé. I know, I’ve discussed this topic on a few podcasts, but it’s becoming increasingly more important for a man to understand what social media is providing to women’s nature and how their relationships are indirectly influenced by the exchanges their wives and girlfriends are having online.

I’ve seen a few of these “I got a vasectomy and my wife thinks it’s funny” social media posts before this one. Creating little post-it note jokes to apply to the snacks in the pantry might seem cute, but why is this even a thing? Why is it women/wives think it’s cute to publicly ridicule their partner about the impotence he elected to have? Amongst the Facebook and Instagram shots of her life, amongst the motivational quote memes, and among the complaints about kids, marriage and domestic life a moment of ridiculing their husband seems par for the course. And it’s all acceptable so long as the context is one of being ‘all in fun’.

Marriage today is a dicey proposition for men. I talk and write a lot about the overwhelmingly high risks of life and livelihood men should consider when it comes to how we do legal marriage in this era. MGTOW or not most men understand that marriage is basically for women now – at least with respect to the legal protections and the win-win incentives that are advertised for women. If all a woman ever did was read about marriage from social media and popular culture one would have to wonder why she would ever want to sign up for a lifetime of dealing with a husband, or the caricatures of average men, at all. The contempt for men, even in the most good natured, humorous, ways is palpable on most social media. It’s entirely acceptable, even expected, to deprecate the foibles of men in marriage. We literally can’t do anything right in a ‘female correct’ online world.

And like the “child-in-a-man’s-body” that women complain about, most of these average husbands are okay with being the butt of the joke. In fact, most are enthusiastic about their self-deprecation because they’ve been conditioned to think that doing so endears them to the women who married them and proves they’re “secure in their masculinity”.

Can’t you take a joke?

The first thing any woman, and any Beta male, will say is, “C’mon Rollo, it’s all in fun. Imagine being so humorless as not to get this? Who hurt you?” I think there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the passive aggressiveness that inspires this ‘humor’. When a comedian like Dave Chappell throws caution to the wind and does a 90 minute comedy routine that is funny as hell, but attacks the unassailable ‘correctness’ of our present social narrative we laugh along knowing the latent message of the humor. So, what is the latent message of making a man’s (elective) impotency a joke?

Imagine what the outrage would be on social media were you to make ‘cute’ jokes in the same way about your wife’s uterine ablation or tubal ligation. At the very least women wouldn’t think it was funny. No one tells women, “Lighten up. What, are you so insecure in your femininity that you can’t take a joke?” When a woman is rendered infertile it doesn’t occur to anyone to make light of it, but for a man to be neutered – and at the mutual agreement with his wife – we find the hit to his masculinity hilarious. Why is this?

I realize I’m focusing on one incident here in this image posted on r/funny, but this is an example of a larger dynamic. It’s socially acceptable to ridicule the impotency of Beta men. As I detailed in Selective Breeding, women will openly attack men’s genitals as a reflexive response to the possibility that a lesser man might try to fool her Hypergamous filters. A guy getting kicked in the nuts by a woman is always funny.

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her.

In Selective Breeding I made the argument that women’s existential fear is the possibility of having her Hypergamous filter (feminine intuition) fooled by a Beta male and becoming saddled with his shitty genetics for the rest of her life. This is a primal, evolved, fear for women that manifest itself, often unconsciously, in many of women’s behaviors that we either take for granted or we have social conventions that accommodate them. Decidedly gynocentric societies will legally mandate against this existential fear.

But what about women who are already married or pair-bonded with men that their evolved subconscious knows is a suboptimal choice for her? What about women who are trapped in a marriage with a guy that her hindbrain confirms is not the ‘best she can do’? How does that primal fear of being saddled with a faithful Beta manifest itself? 

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Sigmund Freud

Unconscious Contempt

I would argue that women today have never been more comfortable in expressing their contempt of the men they married. My recent essays on Polyamory and the deconstruction of men’s Paternity imperatives have been an exploration of how a feminine-primary social order is reimagining itself with respect to how men and women will come together and form families in the future. People will claim that women’s lack of respect for the masculine is the result of generations of men not living up to some old-school ideal. That might be so, but women have no respect for the masculine, the male experience, simply because they have no need to. 

Why do women feel comfortable – to the point of taking it for granted – in expressing contempt for their husbands? We can argue the basis of where this passive-aggressiveness comes from, but why is it okay to veil this contempt in humor?

Before I get run up the flagpole for being a humorless boor let me reiterate that I’m not saying men ought to read more into things like this. My point is the bigger picture here; why do we find this funny at all? I believe it’s a form of anxiety release for women who’ve committed to a lifetime of parental investment with a man that her hindbrain knows is less than what she believes is best for her.

These images were pulled from an Instagram account called Motherhood Through Letterboards. What’s interesting about this is the contempt for fathers and husbands that bleeds through what we should probably have a sense of humor about. You can have a look at some of these to get the context, but the latent purpose of this exercise is a release of the anxiety created by women’s pairing and reproducing with men that their hindbrains cannot accept as Alpha.

Again, we talk a lot in the Manosphere about how social media contributes to the gross overinflation of women’s sense of self. It’s easy to see how women overestimate their sexual market value, and then conflate it with their personal value, but there’s more to this than just the woman on OKCupid who thinks she’s a 9 when she’s really a 6. There comes a time when that woman with the overblown sense of self must “settle” on a man who her hindbrain believes isn’t the best she could do. The metric by which she judges what is the best she can do is also subject to this ego-overinflation.

The main reason most women agonize over the question of whether she should “settle” for Mr. Good Enough is rooted in this Hypergamous conflict that usually comes at a time in her life where her SMV and her options with men are decaying. Today, the reason we see the age of first marriage being pushed later and later in life for women is due to women prolonging this indecision. She knows she can do better than the less-exciting Beta who seems like her best option in her Epiphany Phase because she’s had better in her Party Years. She also knows she can do better because social media and a constant steeping in the new Global Sexual Marketplace has convinced her she’s actually a 9, not a 6, and anything less than perfect is a waste of her potential. All of this plays on women’s primal, Existential Fear of pairing with a suboptimal mate choice – for life.

But now she’s committed. She married the only guy who would date her in that phase of her life given her circumstances. She married the Beta in Waiting, who’s overjoyed that he’s finally found his Quality Woman who appreciates his type. He’s thanking God for bringing him a woman who tells him “I’m done with the Jerks” and wants to do the ‘right’ thing now – while her hindbrain is contending with her existential fear becoming reality due to her own necessity. Now add 1-2 children into this mix (his or not) and you get this passive-aggressive manifestation of her existential angst.

Fortunately for her there’s an unending number of women experiencing exactly the same unconscious contempt for the men they married online in dozens of popular social media groups. The desire to “punch him in the face” is always tempered with “love”, humor and platitudes about relationships always being “hard work”.

End Note: Vasectomies

I feel it’s incumbent upon me to address what will be the predictable binary responses of literalist critics here:

• No, I’m not saying don’t get a vasectomy.

• No, I’m also not saying that if you did get a vasectomy you’re a pathetic loser Beta.

I will however point out that when I see stories about how a Beta husband did come to the decision to get a vasectomy there are always a lot of subconscious reasonings that go along with it. For all the notions of egalitarian marriages and self-praise for being rationally evolved above the hindbrain interpretations, on some level of consciousness a man electing to sterilize himself is a confirmation of the value he puts in his masculinity. This is why women think it’s funny to ridicule your impotency. Her hindbrain has 100% confirmation that you know your reproductive viability has no value.

A man’s reasons for getting a vasectomy may be valid and in some ways empowering for him. I imagine there’s at least some confidence to be derived from knowing you wont be held responsible for any “accidental” pregnancies. I get why men would opt for it, but the way a woman’s feral brain interprets a man sterilizing himself is what I’m getting at here. You may think, “Well, I don’t give a damn what women think about it.” Fine. Totally valid, but I’m outlining a woman’s instinctual response to a man permanently preventing his own reproduction. There is a subcommunication underneath this decision that denotes emasculation, and this is what women resent.

In some ways I see wives celebrating their husband’s vasectomy for reasons that have nothing to do with improving their sex lives. In the original Twitter thread I had men tell me that they got a vasectomy at the suggestion of their wives, believing it would lead to greater sexual frequency (or any sex in a sexless marriage) only to admit that it never improved anything for them. So, why the goading to get a vasectomy? The dots I keep connecting are a subconscious desire on the part of women to geld a husband to ensure he never reproduces with other women. It’s almost like a service she’s doing for the Sisterhood. She’s making sure that her mistake never becomes any other woman’s mistake.

Selective Breeding

Why is it okay to kick a Beta male in the balls on TV or in the movies?

The cocky Beta who gets his comeuppance with a swift kick to the nuts from a Strong Independent Woman® archetype has been standard fare for comic relief in action-adventure movies for some time now. Why is this socially acceptable? In the most recent Avengers movie Starlord (Chriss Pratt) gets kneed in the groin when he – the lovable, humorous Beta male archetype – tries to reconnect with his ‘true love’ interest Gamora after she’d been killed in the prior movie. This is just one example, but so long as the character is definably a Beta (in comparison to definably Alpha male archetypes in the story) permission is granted to ridicule him by exploiting his greatest weakness; a kick in the nuts.

We see the attacking of men’s genitals as humorous because it conveys and confirms sexual selection cues. Only Beta men deserve to have their balls kicked as a confirmation of their sexual selection status. Attacking a woman sexually is tantamount to rape, so flipping the gender script in this instance is a non-starter with comparisons in the movies. In fact, men even speaking critically of women’s bodies is regularly used as an illustration of misogyny or presented as the typical abuse women must endure from body-shaming chauvinist men.

 If we look at the popular fiction of this era – the Avengers or Star Wars franchises for example – we can see the death of conventional masculinity played out in the erasure of Alpha male characters. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Steve Rodgers (Captain America), Han Solo, etc. are systematically removed from popular consciousness. Even Thor is a has-been alcoholic who’ll now be replaced by his female incarnation in the next “Thor” movie. And this is the model of masculinity that’s left for us. Laughable Beta males and Strong Independent Woman® who step up to fill the vacuum of powerful male characters that’s been written for them to fill.

Manspreading

Earlier this year I read a story about a staged protest by a Russian feminist girl who poured what we were told was a mixture of bleach and water onto the crotches of men who were manspreading on a subway train. With a critical eye you can sort of tell this was staged. Guys were sitting by themselves with no one else in an adjoining seat and she’d go up to them and pour a water bottle on their crotches. I’ve see similar protests before, and if you look at the linked video here today you can see how this ‘man spreading revenge’ fantasy plays out, even in commercials. 

Recently there was another woman who’s won some sort of design award for a chair she designed to discourage men from naturally spreading their legs when they sit. And, of course, she designed a companion chair that encourages women to spread their own legs. The male chair forces men to sit like a “proper lady” should. While some men try to defend this posture as the natural way guys just sit, I read a lot of commentary about how men’s sitting posture is an arrogant display of toxic masculinity because men were somehow taught to, or feel they must, take up more space when seated. Women’s frustration is ostensibly about the space men take up with their posture, and the more militant women presume it’s a behavior grounded in some unconscious sexism. “I’m more important as a man so I need to take up space.”

But manspreading isn’t about space. It’s about a display of genitals. Men with legs spread is a natural, often subconscious, Alpha posture. It’s a hindbrain signaling of confidence in men. Now, before you write me off here, think about this; if women’s primary concern was about men taking up space, then why attack a man’s genitals to force him to close it up? Why not simply ask him to close up a bit? Why is pouring water (bleach) on his crotch an acceptable punishment? Why is a hit to the balls a reflexive retaliation?

Women’s existential fear is having their Hypergamous filters bypassed by a clever Beta male impersonating an Alpha, breeding with him, and thereby saddled for a lifetime of support with the child of his inferior seed. Women’s evolved sensitivity to this filter extends to subconscious cues men display in their posture. Ergo, a man ‘spreading’ is perceived by a woman’s hindbrain as a false signal of Alpha by a Beta male. This triggers the existential fear response, thus attacking his manhood is doing all of womankind a favor by humiliating him for his attempt to deceive women’s filters.

I’m sure there’ll be some women (and their ‘allies’) who’ll think this is a stretch, but then, why is it acceptable to kick a man in the nuts when he’s spreading? Why is it that Starlord gets kicked in the balls and we laugh? Because a Beta male tried to pass himself off as an Alpha and retaliation was due. If a guy like Jason Mamoa was sitting spread-legged on a bus it would serve as an arousal cue for most women. Alpha status recognition is an automatic subconscious subroutine, fine tuned over millennia of evolution, in women. Women’s subconscious awareness instinctively reads SMV status and prompts behavior accordingly.

She Doesn’t Want Your Shitty Last Name

Or your shitty genetics for that matter. Patrilinear surnames are a symbolic stamp of ownership for men. They give a name to his genetics – a surname is associated with a specific genetic line. A man’s legacy is his genes and those genes need an identifier. One of the more controversial topics I debate online is the refusal of men’s surname by their wives. Women keeping their last names or hyphenating them in marriage is now a common sign of their independent spirit. Marriage is only acceptable to the Strong Independent Woman® when it looks more like an egalitarian business arrangement rather than a complementary pairing of a man and a woman who understand (and accept) the nature of their own gender. Traditional marriage looks too much like “ownership” for feminist wives and nümale husbands.

Blue Pill conditioned men are far more likely to be okay with their wives’ decision to keep her name, hyphenate it, or even take her name. After all, it’s the progressive thing to do and most believe on some level of consciousness that his accepting her independence in this way will make him more appreciated by her. The truth is this: his acquiescing to her in this way only reinforces what her hindbrain has already confirmed – she’s paired with a Beta male who wouldn’t give an afterthought to insisting his genetics bear his name. He confirms the low quality of his genetics to her hindbrain.

There are a lot of convenient social conventions that come along with a woman’s insistence on keeping her surname. Just like the excuse of men “taking up space” warrants terms like “manspreading”, women and nümales will appeal to pragmatism:

“She’s a doctor, lawyer, soon-to-be-famous-person and she need to maintain her identity for public relations reasons. Otherwise she’d totally take my last name dude.”

“I don’t want her to have a crummy last name like ‘Butts’ or something.”

“Taking a man’s last name is an antiquated symbol of patriarchal ownership of women. Haven’t we evolved past this yet? Are you so insecure in your masculinity that you’ll insist on her taking your name?”

These are a few of the cover stories, but the latent purpose is the same; women’s hindbrains must hedge their Hypergamous bets with men they know are Beta before pretending to commit to a lifetime of breeding and parental investment with them. For a woman marrying a man whom her subconscious acknowledges as Alpha, not assuming his name isn’t an afterthought to her. Women paired with a man who is a confirmed Alpha will often say “I didn’t want children, but I wanted to have his babies.”

The Alpha man inspires her to breed for his benefit.

We’re getting into sexy sons theory here, but the idea is that a significantly high SMV male can inspire women to become submissive/supportive wives and mothers. See my essay on Alpha Widows for more about this.

A woman in a good Hypergamous pairing accepts – desires – his authority, but also his genes. She doesn’t just want children, she wants his children. This then is signified (codified?) in his name passing on to her and their children. Even in ostensibly egalitarian marriages the kids generally retain the name of the male who fathered them (unless single-mom throws useful step-dad a bone and the kids change their name to his). Human beings are innately tribalistic (sorry Jordan). This tribalism is expressed in Selective Breeding practices extending from the personal to the social.

In 2019, and in the reproductive aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, these tribal distinctions are now left to women to determine in a confusing global sexual marketplace. Men’s innate drive for paternal certainty falls away in this environment. The existential fear and frustration that manifests from that drive still persists in men, but the practice of it gives way to women being the primary influencers in selective breeding – and how it will or won’t be expressed. It’s now a common practice for a woman to change the surname of children of a genetic ‘asshole’ father to that of the adoptive step-dad-who-stepped-up. Or the noble Promise Keeper son and holy protector of his single mom (and by extension all of womankind) who changes his last name to something else. 

But why? Why bother to go to that trouble if names are unimportant? If paternity doesn’t matter anyway, why go to the trouble of changing a name?

What Happens When She’s the One Who’s Out of Options?

As I mentioned, women’s existential fear is pairing herself with a Beta male who, through guile and deceptions, convinced her he’s an Alpha. But what happens when that woman runs out of options in her  Epiphany Phase? What happens when she’s forced to settle on the good-enough Beta (the guy Sheryl Sandberg assured women “nothing’s sexier”) because she can’t lock down the Alpha whose babies she wants to have?

She can continue searching indefinitely. The social conventions established by the Feminine Imperative convinces women that their sexual market value (SMV) is unending and imperishable. Those conventions also combine with others that shame men for being so infantile in preferring women who are ‘younger, hotter, tighter’. This shaming gets extended to convincing Beta men they should “align their dating strategies” to prefer mature women who “now have their heads on straight”. The idea that an older woman is more mature and therefore ought to be considered more desirable by men is conveniently positioned in women’s Epiphany Phase – so is the Myth of the Biological Clock.

Or she can settle for the less-than-ideal Beta male she’d never have opted for in her Party Years. Women have various psychological and sociological mechanisms in place to help them rationalize this settling on a Beta in Waiting.

  • Plan B: There’s always a fallback guy. Generally this is one Beta for another, better positioned Beta though. If one were “alpha” he’d already be the Plan A. (Be the A Guy). It’s important to note that if the Plan B Beta eventually ‘alphas up’ in some perceivable way, this generally throws a woman into a psychological conflict.
  • She convinces herself that ‘settling’ is really who she is in that moment. Most women genuinely believe in their Epiphany Phase rationales. Most would probably pass a polygraph test if you asked them if they genuinely felt the way they do about their decisions during this time of their lives. However, Hypergamy and its fundamental rules don’t change for women even when they believe something new about themselves. And often enough that ‘genuine’ belief is motivated by their subconscious understanding about their state n life as a result of their mating strategy.

Make Rules for Betas – Break Rules for Alphas

This is a fundamental understanding for Red Pill awareness. It’s one of the easiest indicators men can use to determine a woman’s interest in them, or her subconscious understanding of your status as a man. Is she making more rules for you to obey, more hoops for you to jump through in order to qualify for her ‘love’ (i.e. sexual access)?  She probably sees you as a Beta. Is she breaking her rules, the rules she believes she needs to follow in her new (Epiphany) phase of life, in order to get into situations where she can facilitate sex with you? Is she putting off responsibilities in order to enjoy herself with you? She probably sees you as Alpha.

This rule-setting or breaking is a basic litmus test for genuine desire. Women’s hindbrains grasp this  too. If a woman is setting rules for a man, her subconscious understands that he’s predominantly Beta. Because she needs to set rules, because it seems like logic to refuse his surname (another rule) and because he accepts these rules – even encourages them in himself and other men – his status is confirmed as a Beta. Only a Beta would need rules. Only a Beta would comply with those rules.

I should add that this is the basis of all transactional relationships. Jump through hoop (obey rule), get sex. An Alpha, by nature, would have options to replace a woman who made rules for him. Furthermore, it wouldn’t occur to a woman to issue rules with an Alpha man whose babies she wants to have. Hypergamy can’t afford to issue rules to Alpha men.

The Inner War

If women’s existential fear is being tricked into reproducing with a Beta male, then forcing herself to settle on a suboptimal man must inspire an inner conflict in her. There are lots of controversial self-help books published by women on both sides of this conflict. Some argue for women to accept a Beta guy and just make the best of it, others (especially religious books) argue that a woman should never compromise herself and wait for the best man (the ‘soulmate’ husband God has preordained for her) to present himself to her. There are more than a few Purple Pill “relationship experts” who cater to this demographic of women, and they do very well marketing new age magic and cutesy aphorisms to resolve this inner war.

I characterize this war as a conversation between a woman’s Id and her Ego. 

The Epiphany Phase forces her sensualism-seeking, ‘hawt’, short-term sexual (breeding) opportunism to come to terms with the necessity of her long-term security needs. Alpha Fucks (her Id) wars with Beta Bucks (her Ego) in her head – and all with the urgency of knowing that her SMV is decaying to the point where she must either take action or convincingly rationalize why she doesn’t need to take action. Her Ego knows her SMV is in decline and long-term security / parenting / family is becoming less and less available to her. But her Id still wants what it wants; ‘hawt’ sex with ‘hawt’ guys. And she’s still ‘hawt’ too – the feminine-primary world says it all the time “Never Settle Gurl!” – she ‘deserves’ only the best.

Thus, the conversation leads to varying degrees of compromise to outright self-delusions prompted by outside influences (i.e. social media). Plan B is a compromise. Refusing his last name is a compromise (or hedging of her Hypergamous bets). Making rules for, and endlessly testing, a Beta to assuage the Hypergamous doubt (“is he the best I can do?”) is a compromise.

And Choreplay, that’s just sexual filibustering.

Today, the new fascination with ‘Poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is also one more methodology women are using to make a compromise between the Alpha Fucks her Id needs and the Beta Bucks her Ego knows is necessary for her future security and happiness. “Alternative relationship strategy” is the latest euphemism for Poly, but it really distills down to a means for women to find a way to balance the Hypergamous equation. She’ll marry the Beta, but it should necessarily mean she has to have sex with him. Poly relationships are a compromise.

Ideally women would love to give themselves to a worthy man. To follow his plan for their lives,…and she’d like to feel the kind of attraction to him that would inspire the trust that he would do so for her and her children’s benefit. 

“I wanted to have his babies.” — this is Hypergamy balancing Alpha Seed with Beta Need perfectly.

Today though, women wait too long. They believe the lies of their own Blue Pill, that their SMV is never depleted. They don’t look for this balance anymore. They don’t even expect to find it; one man is for a same night lay, the other is boyfriend material. 

Masculine by Design Interview

If you’re a regular reader here you probably know that I’ll be giving two talks in Orlando, Florida this week at the 21 Convention with my fellow Red Pill alumni Christian McQueen, Goldmund, Tanner Guzy and so many more guys from the manosphere. I do have plans to do some quick hit Periscope feeds to and at the event so check my Twitter for updates.

Furthermore, in the interests of fairness and objectivity, I will be doing a no-punches-pulled review of the convention is a similar fashion to the one I did for the Man in Demand Conference I did in Vegas two years ago. As I’ve related in a few prior posts and some live interviews, I was reluctant to accept a speaking spot for the 21 Convention because I felt that it had a reputation for toeing the Purple Pill line for much of its years of existence. I’m happy to say that, with a few exceptions’ the lineup this year is far more ‘red’ than this conference has ever been.

There’s a lot more to the reasons why Anthony Johnson, the convention founder and organizer, has made this shift. Primarily it’s been his experience with what any guy with a peripheral Red Pill Lens would’ve seen as a high-functioning BPD woman who was his unofficial wife. If you want more information on this experience you can see his seminar talk about exactly this here.

As a result of this, and consequently digging into my books and blog material, his true unplugging has given him a new Red Pill awareness. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve had a fairly regular correspondence with Anthony about his unplugging and have counseled him through some of my own material. This really prompted a new perspective for him and this is manifesting itself in his drawing more Red Pill speakers to this convention than I think have ever been assembled in one place.

That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t pass this whole conference through the same level of scrutiny that I gave the Man in Demand conference. So, I’ll be doing some quick hit updates throughout this and next week’s blog posts and highlight the best and not-so-best parts of the convention as things transpire, and then summing things up at the end of it all. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for updates, high-lights and some Periscope videos too. The hashtag for the convention is #21Con.

In the meantime,…

I took some time away from my talk preparations to do an interview with Craig James from Masculine By Design to discuss the main aspects of my third book Positive Masculinity as well as some general Red Pill discussion. Craig is starting to make a name for himself as a manosphere podcaster now, filling the unfortunate vacuum left by the departure of Mark Baxter from his own show. Craig primarily focuses on married Red Pill issues and parenting. I probably don’t align perfectly with his perspective on a few things, but on whole he’s got a solid Red Pill blog and podcast that I think will only gain more traction in the manosphere and particularly among more mature men and the “awakened-while-married” set of Red Pill readers.

Do check it out. We went for a bit over two hours and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the discourse. Much of what we discuss will be key aspects of my second 21 Convention talk on Positive Masculinity.

But wait, there’s more,…

And finally, I also did about a two and a half hour interview with the Hanging Chads podcast. This was a great interview as well and much more casual and fun than most of the interviews I’ve done. Be warned, they have a political bent to their material, but the material we covered was Red Pill from an intersexual dynamics perspective (as you might expect from me). The audio wont drop until Thursday, but check back here or there when it does. I’ll update this post when it goes live.

So, there you have it. If I’m meeting you for the first or second time at the convention, please, come up and introduce yourself. There’s a lot going on at this event outside the talks themselves so there’ll be plenty of time and opportunity to pick my brain while we’re there. And yes, I’ll see about getting some candid video of the dinners and social meet ups too. Watch this space.

See you in Orlando!

To Each His Own

In a couple of weeks I’ll be making my first and only personal appearance this year at the 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. This event will be unique in a number of ways. To my knowledge, this convention will be the first large-scale gathering of Red Pill writers, bloggers, podcast hosts and thought-leaders ever organized. I’m truly appreciative of Anthony Johnson in being open to my suggestions for speakers. It was a collaborative effort in this regard and over the course of this year we did our best to collect a group of speakers who would represent many different aspects of Red Pill intersexual dynamics. My only regrets are that we couldn’t fit more speakers in to the schedule and some men I highly respect were unable to attend this year.

It was my hope that this ‘new and improved’ 21 Convention might eventually be an annual Red Pill summit of sorts. This build up hasn’t been without a bit of controversy from the previous Purple Pill speakers who used the 21 Convention’s prior events as a platform for their blogs and coaching businesses. That was to be expected just as the same tired criticisms of the Red Pill were too. I have no doubt that the previous ‘life coaches’ taking issue with this event’s Red Pill turn sincerely believe they have some valuable insights to help men become ‘better men’. The problem, however, becomes one of how these coaches would direct men according to the Blue Pill preconditioning they have never been able to disabuse themselves of.

I understand the necessity these guys must feel with regards to discrediting the Red Pill as a praxeology. The dots we connect in Red Pill awareness are often at odds with their deeply held Blue Pill ego-investments and hopes, as well as a threat to their (often LARPy moralistic) “Man Up but not too much” profit model. In fact, even just the idea that the Red Pill should be a praxeology of men’s collective experiences about intersexual dynamics is enough to make them want to disqualify it. Their criticism is that, as a praxeology, the Red Pill is long on explanations and short on solutions – solutions you can presumably get by signing up for their email blasts and coaching sessions.

The praxeology that is the Red Pill is inconvenient for them because it tears away the veneer of their Blue Pill idealism about women and reveals some very unflattering truths about them and the feminine on-whole which they still largely have on a pedestal in their heads. Red Pill awareness has a way of exposing the pretty lies that make for the good marketing material that most Purple Pill coaches depend on for their livelihoods. I mean, when 80%+ of men are Beta, who wouldn’t want to buy the secret 12 point list of things a man must do to be a real man and get the woman of his dreams?

Two Complaints

There are generally two common complaints I read coming from Purple Pill life dating coaches. The first is easy, and one I’ve refuted so many times I wont bore you with repeating myself, and that’s the presumption that Red Pill awareness must be false or detrimental to a guy because it makes guys so angry with women. This is the easiest dismissal for critics because it is true; men do go through a phase of anger when they unplug from the Blue Pill illusions they’ve been so convinced of for the better part of a lifetime. And yes, some get stuck in this phase and some do become despondent because they don’t want to face the abyss it represents to them. Some go MGTOW, some turn into Purple Pill coaches themselves because they don’t want to accept the whole of what Red Pill awareness means. But most men go through this phase and come to an acceptance that there is hope in a Red Pill paradigm for them. They come to see their new awareness as a safety net and boldly embrace rebuilding themselves into better men based on this full awareness.

So the sales pitch then becomes, “Don’t be angry with women like those Red Pill guys. You can still live in Blue Pill happiness and harmony with a loving unicorn ‘Quality‘ woman by following these 5 simple steps to make yourself into the man women want you to be.”

What the Purple Pill anger critics (deliberately) refuse to get is that the Red Pill isn’t (and was never) intended to get men to hate women, but rather to inform men about the inherent nature of women so they wont hate women for what they can never be to them. This is the disillusionment that men who still cling to Blue Pill idealism can’t seem to get past – they cannot abandon those Blue Pill hopes that they believe women are capable of fulfilling for him, but the Red Pill disabuses him of. So they get angry. They get angry at themselves for ever having believed in them. They get angry for having wasted so much time investing themselves in them. They get angry, most importantly, because they realize that women simply aren’t built to fulfill the hopes his Blue Pill conditioning made him believe should be possible.

The Purple Pill coach believes that this Red Pill realization leads to men hating women. The second complaint I read from them is that Red Pill awareness gives men some license to feeling like victims. This criticism is deductive to coaches for two reasons; it serves his ‘get-rich-quick-on-the-internet-by-selling-sunshine’ man-up and do better to qualify for women blog template, and it discourages men seeking answers from becoming Red Pill aware in a way that crushes their still Blue Pill belief set.

For the record, and as boldly as I can put this, if you are Red Pill aware man and still believe you are a victim of some sort because of your previous Blue Pill indenturement to pedestalizing women or the Feminine Imperative, you are only a victim of your own lack of vision. Red Pill awareness has set you free – free from the blur and distraction that a feminine-primary social order would pull over your eyes, free from the delusional Blue Pill hopes that are only greater shackles for a man, and free from never seeing the intersexual pitfalls you were prone to fall into before. But Red Pill awareness comes at a cost; the truth may set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. If you have a responsibility as a Red Pill aware man it’s that you are never allowed to play the victim. You now know the rules of engagement. Play it well, change the rules if you can, but you are no longer allowed to say you didn’t know the score.

Most Purple Pill coaches know this victim complex is bullshit, so they deliberately conflate Red Pill awareness with MGTOW or the MRM or even the “flip side of feminism” in an effort to muddy the waters and dissuade men, who are genuinely hurting and seeking answers, away from the real life-changing influence that the Red Pill represents.

When I petitioned my readers to leave a testimonial as to why they thought the Red Pill represented more confidence or a ‘safety net’ to them I got much more than I anticipated from that comment thread. I had been looking for some good quotes to add to the back cover of Positive Masculinity, but what I got was over a thousand revelations about the power that Red Pill awareness has in changing men’s lives for the better. These are men who took what the Red Pill had shown them and transformed their lives with that knowledge. They did this because Red Pill awareness empowered them, gave them the tools, to implement changes in themselves and how they interacted with women and a feminized world. They did so without anger or feeling like victims, and they did so without a Purple Pill hack trying to coax them back onto the plantation and into their failed, and false, Blue Pill belief sets.

And this is what scares the coaches; that a free and open source Red Pill praxeology is responsible for more men taking the initiative and bettering themselves than anything their ‘coaching’ has been responsible for.

Personal Development

I am not now, nor have I ever been a motivational speaker, a ‘guru’ of any stripe, a psychotherapist or a personal development coach. Though I’m humbled to be counted among the Godfathers of the Red Pill, I have never claimed ownership of the Red Pill. It’s always been my belief that the Red Pill – the true Red Pill that has always been about intersexual dynamics – should be an ‘open source’ community. Decentralization is one of its strengths, but it also allows for bastardization from men and women who want to define it.

In each of my books and on this blog I’ve made things plain about my non-approach to men and their own personal development; I’m not interested in making better men, I’m interested in men making themselves better men. I am not interest in making men “Tomassi Men” or in anyway selling them on a template for what I think a real man ought to be. My life and my interpretations of it are not going to be a template for anyone else to follow. Red Pill awareness, based on the praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the personal and social realms, will save and/or improve your life, but that life has to be lived by you as an individual.

That said, of course I realize that men seeking answers will want a codified system of guidelines for their own personal development. I’m not the guy who’s going to give that to you, neither is that Purple Blue Pill life coach with the 12 point plan, neither is the motivational speaker selling you the same tired power of positivity message that’s been around since the 1930s. You are going to come up with that plan, you are going to take what the Red Pill makes you aware of and you are going to apply it to how you live your life. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your personal development and the successes (and failures) that came from it authentically came from your own plan and according to your judgement, not someone else’s vision or template.

I wanted to take a moment in this post to preface the 21 Convention by addressing the ways in which men come to unplug themselves from their old, Blue Pill conditioned way of life and reconstruct themselves. Reader Blaximus added this in a recent comment thread and it sums things up well:

Fourth: there is no ‘ system ‘ for teaching or learning Game. None. The process is highly individualized and virtually no two guys will learn at the same rate, or achieve the exact same level of understanding or real world application. No cheat sheets in game. You either get it and apply it and internalize it, or you don’t. It’s not about picking up chicks in clubs. That’s PUA. Game picks up chicks at a funeral. Lol. True game will be disliked by the masses.

Far too many Purple Pill dating coaches don’t want to get this in their heads. They think that because the Red Pill is a praxeology it implies it’s a cop out on developing real solutions for guys. They either don’t understand the necessity for men’s individual needs to personally develop Game for themselves, or they need a convenient dismissal of the Red Pill as ‘those angry guys have no answers’.

I have stressed in more essays than I care to recount the importance of combining what the Red Pill informs Game about with what Game informs the Red Pill about. One is the theoretical, the other is the practical, and neither is complete without the other. Yes, it is entirely vital that you, as a Red Pill aware man, get out into the field to employ the ideas, and test the practicality of how the Red Pill relates to your situation in your environment according to your strengths and gifts. That field may be a night club, or day Game on the street, in a social circle, with your wife of 10 years or in your churches singles’ group. The fact remains, Red Pill awareness is applicable through Game in a variety of environments, social and cultural contexts.

Game Works, but it only works if you turn off the computer and do something. How do you learn from a book? You put it down and you go outside (and yes, that counts for my books too). Investing oneself in Red Pill awareness as a praxeology is not a cop out for coming up with real solutions – it gives men a toolset from which they can create their own solutions. What frightens Purple Pill coaches is that men’s individual solutions, often enough, don’t affirm their Blue Pill romanticizations, their pretenses of morality, or their idealistic inability to look at the abyss and find hope on the other side of it. They want solutions, but they want their solutions to be affirmed by a Red Pill awareness that contradicts their ego-investments.

When your revenue depends on not getting it it’s hard to convince a Blue Pill man otherwise.

I will be discussing aspects of this essay at the 21 Convention in just two weeks. If you are attending I’d like to take this opportunity to extend you a personal invitation to talk with me at the convention and possibly have dinner with my colleagues and I at the event. On the topic of just getting out there in the field and doing it, I know that my friends Christian McQueen and Goldmund will be heading out into the wilds of the Orlando nightlife and I will be accompanying them on at least one of these outings.

Lastly, if you are in the Central Florida area, or if you want to make the drive in for the weekend, and you really really want to attend the convention, but just can’t come up with the funds, hit me up via email, Twitter or leave a message on my About page here and I will personally see about getting you some kind of hardship discount. Remember, this is only if you’re truly desperate to attend.

See you in two weeks.

Mitch’s Red Pill

With apologies to my regular readers and commentariat, I’m mid-stream through crafting my next essay and what do I see in the comment feed from last week’s post? Our (our soon to be formerly) Purple Pill friend Mitch returning to give us all an update on what was supposed to be his inevitable married bliss. Rather than allow Mitch’s saga get buried under pages of comments I thought I’d post the continuation of his in-progress unplugging here for others to benefit from. Be sure you read the first case study before you dig into his update below:

Hello Gentlemen,

It’s good to be back here reading your insightful, intelligent, funny, actionable posts. I’ve been away for awhile. Glad to see Rollo’s blog and books doing so well. Congratulations sir, and I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my purple-but-slowly-turning-red heart for your work. I am now eating my previous words about this being ideological and cult-like. lol. Some might remember that I was the eponymous subject of one of Rollo’s posts on purple pill, and the ensuing discussion about whether I was setting myself up for slaughter in marrying a Ukrainian I’d met online. I (basically) said I’m a big boy now at 50, and know what I’m doing with women, and would let ya’ll know how it worked out. Not that anyone gives a rat’s ass after all my bullshit, but whatever, here I am.

Funny thing is that I’d been thinking about posting this update a few days ago, after reconnecting with TRM blog, and I would have said something along the lines of: she has been here almost 9 months, we been married for 5, going reasonably well, regular and enjoyable sex, she cooks everything from scratch and takes good care of me and the house; she’s diligently studying english, meeting people, etc, seems mostly happy; without fail she packs my lunch every night – once she woke up at about 1 am and remembered she had not made my lunch for work next day, and even though I told her not to worry about it, she got up, and went downstairs and *cooked* me lunch. Her responsibility, she said. She also genuinely likes me, and is very loving and affectionate and passionate in bed. We’ve had some conflict, and I’ve mostly held my ground, but made some fairly key concessions in the spirit of playing fair (since she has, in actuality at this point, zero leverage in this relationship), and accommodating her wants and needs.

And hypergamy doesn’t give a fuck.

Lo and behold, yesterday the computer is open and I see a ‘Hi’ come across the screen from Skype from a male. Open the Skype window and she’s been chatting with this dude from New Hampshire or some shit, not long, but the kind of bare bones swapping of details – the guy’s on hunt for a wife, and she’s asking about the size of his town, and what’s the weather like, how many kids, etc. As the blood drains from my face, the veil parts, I see it for what it is, and I realize without a shadow of a doubt, this shit is real. Complete with the subsequent hamstering and total lack of accountability following.

I don’t believe she was actually interacting with this guy with any conscious intent to find someone else, but clearly she thinks about it, and is willing to “play” with the idea, even at a time when she has sooo much to lose. I could withdraw my petition to get her a green card in two seconds, and she’s done. I think she was/is bored and enjoys the attention and validation, and sense of (diminishing) power that she has over men.

So now I need to figure out what to do. i am beyond grateful for Rollo’s work, this blog, and forum, and having internalized RP to the limited extent that I have, and know I need to do A LOT more. It’s pretty humbling to be 50 and need to be totally schooled in something so basic. It’s fricking amazing that I have managed to hide myself from this knowledge for so long.

Thank you.

[…]

I meant to also say that I have learned a ton from you guys, and really appreciate the time and energy that many of you spent last fall trying to get me to get my head out of my ass. What can I say, I need to learn the hard way. Truth is, though, you guys were so vehement about it, that it definitely helped me to keep myself in reserve and react a bit more strategically to her.

Just to preface here, my intent isn’t to be cruel or pop of with ‘I todja so’, but I think it’s very important for guys in the various stages of unplugging to see Mitch’s situation as a clinical example. I’m not trying to flame you or pillory you Mitch, but your situation does serve as a good example.

As I mentioned in the first post about Mitch, there is a visceral desire on the part of Purple Pill men to force fit the parts of Red Pill awareness into Blue Pill idealisms and personal convictions because they simple cannot face the abyss of what a full Red Pill awareness presents to the belief set that the Blue Pill has conditioned them for. It is truly awful to be confronted with unflattering truths about the nature of women as well as a man’s coming to realize he’s got to drop all of his previous idealism and create a new, positive, paradigm for himself based on Red Pill awareness. For a lot of men inured by the Blue Pill it’s just too horrible to let go of those hopes based in a false awareness of their experience.

Thus, we get tropes like “well, the Red Pill is true, but it’s okay to have ONEitis for a girl because my new awareness insulates me from the worst effects of it.” Mitch even began his first entreaty by claiming this woman was “the ONE.”

I’d like to encourage men who still want a good wife to look East. As in, Russia, Ukraine and other former USSR counties. I cannot begin to tell you how encouraged and revitalized I am by this woman I met – and by most of the women I met and interacted with before I found “the One.”

Shades of Purple

I’m beginning to see that there are two varieties of Purple Pill men; the first is the guy whose revenue and wellbeing depends on his only accepting what the Red Pill presents to him in half-measure. These are the Man-Up, do the right thing moralists who only ever marginally warn against the nature of women while believing that the self-improvement imperative that the Red Pill represents to men will more than compensate for the very real dangers of a man not fully killing his inner Beta. These are usually the guys who at one time were solidly Red Pill and used that awareness to their personal benefit with women (and life), but at some stage their life’s circumstance demanded that they “change their ways” and shift back to believing that Blue Pill ideals can be had with Red Pill means. These are the men who follow The Script.

The second type of Purple Pill man is the one who never fully unplugged. I believe this was where Mitch was when I outlined his situation in the first essay. There is a certain class of men who simply cannot ignore the truths that the Red Pill presents to them, and they eagerly endorse the tenets and the understanding of women’s visceral natures. Hypergamy doesn’t care, they get the dynamics of Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, they even believe they’ve come to terms with their own (often Beta) nature and what it is they believe is necessary to effect a change in their lives; yet there are aspects of that Red Pill awareness that they desperately want to reconcile with their long-held Blue Pill idealistic hopes. So, as a result, they attempt to discard or ignore whatever aspect of the Red Pill that isn’t conducive to making those old Blue Pill dreams come true.

For as long as I’ve been writing in the Manosphere I’ve always made a point of telling men never to use my marriage (or other Red Pill married men’s marriages) as some kind of template or goal to be had with Red Pill awareness. I realize that my own Red Pill marriage seems like some ideal to strive for, but what I think most unmarried single men need to consider is that, for the vast majority of men who’ve been able to unplug, remake themselves and employ an internalized understanding of Red Pill awareness within their marriages and in their families, these men do so in spite of themselves.

Very few men I know of, whom I’d say are Red Pill aware husbands and fathers, did not set out to be so. I have no doubt that in the future I’ll encounter men who were formerly Blue Pill and Beta who changed themselves, unplugged, became Red Pill aware, internalized it and used it to enter into a marriage wherein his Frame was always the primary and his wife intrinsically recognized it and was attracted to him because of it. I do hope this is eventually the case for some men, but as it stands now, the far more common occurrence is the Blue Pill, Beta husband who was “awakened while married” and turned his marriage back from the brink – if indeed that is the case at all. Even more commonly it is divorced men put through the ringer who unplugged post-divorce.

As I mentioned in the first case study about Mitch is his story is engaging because it so faithfully follows the progression of rationales Purple Pill men will use in order to hold fast to their old, comfortable mindset – in this case it’s the Blue Pill dream of an idyllic marriage had through Red Pill means.

One danger I think should be apparent to Red Pill men having to deal with a Purple Pill guy who’s hostile and resistant to what they’re trying to tell him is the potential disaster a Purple Pill man is setting himself up for in his inability to really stare at the abyss, work through the anger and hopelessness, and then recreate himself. This, I feel, is where that resistance stems from. It’s not so much an inability to acknowledge the truth of what real Red Pill intersexual dynamics is showing him, but rather how he will internalize, process and use that to create a better life for himself. So you get anger, not at the message as much as the messenger, when you tell him his sincere hopes are based on a Blue Pill interpretation of what a ‘good marriage’ is:

Lol…you guys can go fuck yourselves. I appreciate where ya’ll are coming from, though. Trying to save me from myself. And i appreciate how naive my post must sound to a bunch of hard core red pillers like yourselves. However, I am not nearly as inexperienced with women and LTR’s as ya’ll assume. I have learned a lot from red pill in general and this site in particular – it’s very insightful and helpful, and I’ve adjusted my attitude and posture toward women because of it. At the same time, though, it strikes me that many of you are taking on red pill ideas as a kind of ideology, and that’s its own kind of danger. The absolute certainty that ya’ll think you know all you need to know about me and my woman and my relationship from that very brief post is what I mean. As if red-pill theory, or whatever it is, completely and concisely explains the total dynamic between a man and woman. Red pill explains a lot of things really well, but certainly not the totality of the mystery that is between a man a woman in a marriage.

And yet, it does and it did.

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then I feel sorry for you. Red pill helps me tremendously in seeing more clearly what is going on. I totally get that I am a beta provider for her, that a large part of my appeal is what I can provide, and I get that she is turned on by alpha traits. Both of these things can coexist in the same person. Understanding this and what’s behind it makes me feel less anxious and insecure about that, because I’m more clear about what to do.

Also, being a beta provider does not make me a bitch. Providing for my woman and family is a large part of what makes me a man, and I derive great satisfaction and pride in doing so.
Also, I am not in any way “settling” for a 44 yo woman. Younger women were/are available to me, but that is not what i choose.

There’s a lot more to life than fucks and bucks, but if that’s all it is for you, then this is the type of woman you will attract. In a relationship, what you get is what you are. If I can’t find a way to live with an open heart, then I don’t know what the fucking point is. But, to each his own.

So, here we are. And again, it’s hard for this not to come off as a big ‘I toldja so’, but I think it’s even more important for Red Pill men who have it in them to want to help a Blue Pill guy unplug, or hell, just to even recognize the reasons why he’s in the personal circumstances he is, to remember that the Purple Pill guy is only lashing out because he fears the totality of the truth that Red Pill awareness brings into his life. As I always say, unplugging guys from the Matrix is dirty work, but I am genuinely glad to have Mitch back on track and hopefully he’s learned something from the experience. I think other Red Pill men should adopt the same spirit of welcoming a Blue/Purple Pill prodigal son back into the fold.

So that’s my take, but please feel free to comment on Mitch’s situation in the comments thread.

The Anger Bias

I don’t think it will come as a shock to my readers, or anyone who follows me on Twitter or on the Red Pill Reddit forum, that I’ve gone to bat in recent months to combat the (often deliberate) misperception that self-described ‘Red Pill’ men are inherently angry men. As such, we’re also meant to presume these ‘angry men’ have a potential for violence or at best self-loathing.

The idea, of course, is proposed that “the guys in TRP are just embittered, deeply hurt men who’ve taken the truths that Red Pill awareness has presented to them and converted it to a real, genuine misogyny”. Furthermore, the convention is proposed that these guys cannot come to terms with their own failures and want to blame them all on women, or at the very least an unkind, unforgiving, pro-female world in which they’ve always struggled (i.e. “losers want to blame their losing on women”). Thus, these ‘bitter terpers’ (TRPers) promote either hostility towards women, or they attempt to check themselves out of the sexual marketplace entirely by “going their own way”. In either case, it’s proposed that it’s men’s inherent anger that motivates them to an anti-woman mindset.

I addressed much of this misguided argument in my essay Anger Management:

But are we angry? I can’t say that I haven’t encountered a few guys on some forums and comment threads who I’d characterize as angry judging from their comments or describing their situations. For the greater whole I’d say the manosphere is not angry, but the views we express don’t align with a feminine-primary society. Men expressing a dissatisfaction with feminine-primacy, men coming together to make sense of it, sound angry to people who’s sense of comfort comes from what the feminine imperative has conditioned them to.

Most of the men who’ve expressed a genuine anger with me aren’t angry with women, but rather they’re angry with themselves for having been blind to the Game that they’d been a part of for so long in their blue-pill ignorance. They’re angry that they hadn’t figured it out sooner.

I understand that a lot of what is written in the manosphere can certainly be interpreted as coming from a source for anger. When I (or anyone else) outline the fundaments of hypergamy for instance, there’s a lot to be angry about for a man. Women get pissed because it exposes an ugly truth that the feminine exhausts a lot of resources to keep under the rug, but for men, learning about the feral reasons for feminine (and masculine) behaviors often enough cause a guy to become despondent or angry. That impression should never be the basis for a Man’s Game, nor is it ever really an aspect of internalizing Game that will benefit him personally.

Anger bias and attribution to men is an easy follow for a social order predicated on empowering and protecting the feminine. From an egalitarian mindset that insists on socially constructed equalism between the sexes it’s ironic that the attribution of a default anger to men, and the conventionally masculine, is something entirely unique to the male sex. To the feminine-primary mindset, all-is-one until a negative trait unique to the male biology serves a purpose, and a positive trait unique to women is flattering for them. Then the ideals of social constructionism are suspended insofar as biology agrees with a feminine-primary social order.

I would also argue that predisposed anger is just one attribute the Feminine Imperative finds useful in men to create operative social conventions. The default presumption of mens predisposition to anger is the basis of most domestic legislation (paternity, domestic violence, child custody, etc.) between men and women.

This is a convenient social constructivism based (ostensibly) on egalitarian equality until a particular emotion or personal quality is predominantly attributable to one sex in the positive or negative; then it’s the ‘differences’, not the similarities, between the sexes that make for social control. It’s funny how we’re all equal, blank-slates until anger is better attributed to “toxic” masculinity and some preternatural capacity for empathy in women are beliefs the Feminine Imperative reinforces in its cultural context.

Anger is a useful emotion for fem-centrism. It’s all too easy to classify men’s propensity for anger (and associated violence) as ‘toxic’ yet women’s anger is something transformative and empowering. This connects back to the social efforts of the past five generations designed to feminize men and masculinize women; the inverse traits that would be conventional to one gender are encouraged as positive traits in the opposite gender.

This may be somewhat remedial for my regular readers, but I’m reviewing this because it illustrates a dichotomy that a Blue Pill mindset is all too ready to accept. To the equalist ideology, biological gender-specific truths are only a minor factor in the human condition – unless the truth of that gender-specific biological fact is something advantageous to the feminine and disadvantageous to the masculine.

For instance, to suggest that women’s evolved neurological capacity for communication makes them more intuitive and sensitive to verbal and nonverbal sub-communication we’re supposed to embrace this biological fact as something that sets women apart as ‘special’ or evidence of women being “more evolved”. But when we suggest that men outclass women in cognitive spatial ability, or neurological gender differences in rational abstract thinking gives men a biological advantage in areas like mathematics, then male professors lose their tenured jobs for expressing these facts publicly. If a biological difference is flattering to women it’s an exception to the blank-slate ideology; if a difference is unflattering to women it’s considered evidence of an institutionalized sexism on the part of men.

For all purposes, a social order founded on the blank-slate ideology of egalitarian equalism (serving the Feminine Imperative) regularly, and ruthlessly, quashes any discourse of biological gender differences – unless those factual differences are flattering to the feminine and/or damning of the masculine.

Anger Bias

One biological difference equalism is happy to promote is the notion that men are biologically predisposed to anger, aggression and violence. The motivating impetus behind this anger is rarely something the equalist mind will consider, but that men are predominantly, naturally, more ‘angry’ than women is a meme that is actively encouraged. If anything, this biological fact is a root basis for the cultural concept of “toxic” masculinity.

However, the fact does remain, healthy men possess 12 to 17 times the biogenous serum testosterone that women do. This naturally predisposes men to be more muscular, hairy, lower voices, libidinous and yes, aggressive. It’s no secret that statistically men are biologically more prone to anger, aggression and potentially violence. In a feminine-correct social context this natural predilection is the basis of all masculine attributes being ‘toxic’, if for no other reason than it presents a threat to women’s social control.

For all this, the male gender-bias towards presumption of anger has a foundation in evolutionary psychology. Men will always be considered more angry than women because of an evolutionary adaptation known as Error Management. And in men’s case, this anger attribution is a species-survival adaptation. The following quotes originate from a study called, Seeing storms behind the clouds: Biases in the attribution of anger. This experimental study, and another similar study (If looks could kill), come to us courtesy of Dr. Martie Haselton and her colleagues in the evo-psych department at UCLA. These studies outline the inherent biases towards anger all humans theoretically harbor subconsciously.

Anger-prone individuals are volatile and frequently dangerous. Accordingly, inferring the presence of this personality trait in others was important in ancestral human populations. This inference, made under uncertainty, can result in two types of errors: underestimation or overestimation of trait anger. Averaged over evolutionary time, underestimation will have been the more costly error, as the fitness decrements resulting from physical harm or death due to insufficient vigilance are greater than those resulting from lost social opportunities due to excessive caution. We therefore hypothesized that selection has favored an upwards bias in the estimation of others’ trait anger relative to estimations of other traits not characterized by such an error asymmetry.

Anger attribution to physical and gender cues is an “adaptive rationality”. In other words, it’s probably better to err on the side of caution and misattribute anger to an individual displaying even marginal cues of a potential for aggression (for instance, they hold implements or tools that could cause physical harm) than to miss that cue and wind up dead or injured.

Moreover, we hypothesized that additional attributes that 1) make the actor more dangerous, or 2) make the observer more vulnerable increase the error asymmetry with regard to inferring anger-proneness, and should therefore correspondingly increase this overestimation bias.

This is an important distinction to make when we extrapolate this theory to a larger social scope. When the actors (men in our case) are made to appear more dangerous, or the observers (women & feminized men) are made to feel more vulnerable there is an increase in the perception that the actors are in fact more prone to anger (asymmetrical error attribution).

Adaptive rationality and error management

The “adaptive rationality” approach contends that the mind was shaped by selection to enhance fitness in ancestral environments rather than to yield accurate judgments. Therefore, human cognition can manifest seemingly irrational biases that are, in fact, “adaptively rational.”

I explored this topic in my essay, Vestiges.

Anger attribution is one domain in which this might occur. Perceivers can commit one of two errors: underestimate an individual’s trait anger (false negative) or overestimate it (false positive). On average, underestimations will have been costlier than overestimations in ancestral populations: assuming that an anger-prone individual was temperate placed the perceiver at risk of assault, whereas assuming that a temperate individual was anger-prone merely led to foregoing potentially profitable interactions. Thus, overall accuracy (i.e., committing false negative and false positive errors with equal frequency) did not maximize fitness over evolutionary time. Rather, in line with error management theory, we hypothesize that selection favored a biased tendency to commit the less costly false positive — overestimating trait anger. Although the same logic applies to the estimations of state anger, our predictions focus squarely on trait anger because traits predict future behavior, and it is costly to underestimate an individual’s anger not only in the moment, but also in future interactions.

For the Red Pill aware, what I’m suggesting is that there is an evolved predisposition to perceive men as generally more prone to anger, and thereby more susceptible to aggression/violence, than may in fact be the actual case with men individually. Largely, as a man, you will always be perceived as potentially angrier than a woman.

Contextual factors can influence this asymmetry, resulting in a concomitant increase in biases in the perception of a given emotion. Anger motivates aggression, hence an important contextual factor in anger perception is the capacity of the perceived individual to inflict harm. The greater the capacity to harm, the more costly it is to underestimate the extent to which the target is angry, and therefore the more that perception should be biased in favor of overestimation.

I would argue here that men’s state in western(izing) cultures is one that grossly exaggerates men’s overall potential for anger, and by extension violence. Presuming that Red Pill men are “a bunch of angry misogynists” is one such error, but it is also a useful one in that it plays upon this overestimation of anger in men on whole. This anger attribution in men will always be an easy method of poisoning the well or creating straw men arguments from which opponents of Red Pill awareness will dismiss valid, factual arguments.

As you might guess, this male anger bias is a simple tool to use – and one I unfortunately see being employed by many Purple Pill dating coaches who’d like to dissuade their clientele from the less marketable aspects of Red Pill awareness. Anything Red Pill that disagrees with their feminine-sanitized advice is conveniently dismissed as “negative” or the rantings of angry, bitter, burned men. It becomes “Truthful Anger”, but their emphasis is always on the anger part rather than the truth that would kick a leg out from under their positivity marketing scheme.

The default state of women and feminized men is one of a presumed vulnerability due to a persistent social characterization of a default female victimhood in popular culture and media. Likewise, men are portrayed as quick to anger – all in spite of generations of effort spent in Blue Pill conditioning of men to be ideally passive, supportive, non-assertive and entirely less masculinized. Despite all that sensitivity conditioning, from the earliest ages, the default presumption that’s still popularly reinforced is that men are always the angry/violent ones. Domestic violence laws presume a man is always the attacker and always the party to be removed from the home because of this preconception.

Both the Feminine Imperative and even well meaning Red Pill men default to this overestimation. I get that this is largely merited on whole as a characteristic of men. This error management is a useful and pragmatic adaptation, but it is also a useful foil for dismissing men on whole. It’s interesting that I’d be pilloried for expressing that the realities of women’s menstrual cycle predispose them to ovulatory shift, as well as anti-social, behaviors, yet were I to explain that testosterone predisposes men to aggression we largely accept this as a given.

My intent in this essay isn’t to say men aren’t as angry as their evolutionary nature makes them. The point is that a feminine-primary social order readily makes this nature a useful tool in dismissing what would otherwise be valid, but uncomfortable Red Pill truth. This anger bias mechanism is a tool for message control.