One of the most influential books I’ve ever read I picked up from my father’s home library when I was about 25. That book was Dr. Warren Farrell’s Why Men Are The Way They Are. At the time it didn’t strike me as odd that my father would have this book in his collection – my clinically depressed, 3rd wave feminist, aging hippy of a step-mother had eventually roped him into reading it for some Unitarian book club they belonged to in the early 90s. I still have it. It’s even got her penciled-in liner notes scribbled in the margins with all the feminist outrage I imagine it must’ve inspired for her. It’s sort of a cosmic irony that the book she raged over would be instrumental for my own writing and online persona.
People always ask me when my point of unplugging came about, but if I’m honest, it was a gradual process that required a lot of bad experiences to learn my way out of the Matrix. However, Farrell’s book was a turning point for me. I’ve since had to reassess my opinion of Dr. Farrell – he’s still very much Blue Pill and will likely go to his grave never making the connection that a belief in egalitarian equalism (as taught to him by early feminism) is what’s kept him blind to really accepting Red Pill awareness. But if I had a moment of unplugging I’d say it was directly attributable to this book.
I think what got me the most about it at the time were the many stories of the men Farrell had done ‘men’s group’ sessions with while doing his research for the book. It was published 1986 (about 7 or 8 years before I read it) so it was already kind of dated when I read it, but for the most part these men sort of had these sit-ins with other men to relate with each other. If you’ve read my essay Tribes you’ll understand why these new-agey get together seem very contrived to me, but the stories these guys were relating in the early to mid 80s were about what I’d expect coming from my own Dad.
They all did everything right. Some were the products of the free love generation or the hedonistic 70s, but overall these guys were caught in the perfect storm of still clinging to the old books Beta-provisioning social contract and the expectation of 3rd wave feminists that they be ‘evolved males’. More than a few were attending these men’s groups at the behest of their empowered wives in the hopes that they’d learn to get in touch with their feminine sides or at least find some better way to meet their “needs”. I could see my father as one of these men.
Papa Tomassi was a very confused man with regard to women as it was, but to be caught on the cusp of an era when feminine social primacy coming into its own and still being part of the ‘do everything right’ social contract and the belief system that was doomed to fail in the decades to come, I can understand a lot of that confusion. One man in the book described it thusly:
“I feel like I’ve spent 40 years of my life working as hard as I could to become somebody I don’t even like.”
Each one of these guys related a similar frustration. They busted their asses for decades to fulfill the old books social contract, the one that had been the way you did the right thing in order to have a life with a woman, a family, kids, maybe grandchildren, and all of that was no longer working for men. The 24 year old Rollo Tomassi reading this book didn’t know what Hypergamy really was back then, but as I recount these men’s confusion today I can see that it was a result of being the first men to realize that institutionalized Hypergamy was erasing that old social paradigm for them.
Bad Investments
I’ve covered the fallacy of Relational Equity in a prior post, but I think it’s necessary to revisit the idea here to understand how it still undermines men in an era of Open Hypergamy and feminine social primacy. These men, most of whom are likely into their 70s now, had a preconception of what it meant to ‘do everything right’; to play by an understood rule set that women were supposed to find attractive, to acknowledge and honor. Furthermore, they were taught to expect a degree of mutual reason from these new, empowered and evolving women. If needs weren’t being met, well, then all that was necessary was a heart to heart and open communication and negotiation would set things back on track because women could be expected to be the functional equivalents of men. This was the golden, egalitarian, sexual equality, future that feminism promised the guys in the 70s and 80s.
Relational Equity is the misguided belief that ‘doing everything right’ would necessarily be what ultimately attracts a woman, kept a woman, a wife, an LTR, from both infidelity, and was an assurance of her continued happiness with her man. Needless to say, the collected experiences of men that’s led to the praxeology of what we know as Red Pill awareness puts the lie to this – but as men, we expect some kind of acknowledgement for our accomplishments. Rationally, in a male context, we expect that what we do will at least be recognized as valuable, if not honored, by other men. So by extension of our equalist social contract, women, whom we are told we should expect to be co-equal agents with men, should also be expected to see past their emotional Hypergamous natures and make a logical conclusion to be attracted to men who are good fits in a mutually understood sense.
This, of course, is nonsense for the same reason that expecting genuine desire can be negotiated is nonsense, but essentially this is essentially the idea the shifting social contract of the time was trying to convince men of. And as you might expect, those men, the ones with the insight to recognize it, saw it for the opportunism it really was. Even if they ended up at 40 hating who they’d become.
From Relational Equity:
This is a really tough truth for guys to swallow, because knowing how hypergamy works necessarily devalues their concept of relational equity with the woman they’re committed to, or considering commitment with. Men’s concept of relational equity stems from a mindset that accepts negotiated desire (not genuine desire) as a valid means of relationship security. This is precisely why most couples counseling fails – its operative origin begins from the misconception that genuine desire (hypergamy) can be negotiated indefinitely.
When we become Red Pill aware there is also a kind of Relational Equity we need to acknowledge and manage. Once we’ve unplugged it’s easy to get caught up in thinking that because we know the game, because we’ve gone through the trials, because we know we’re higher value men – if for no other reason than that we no longer subscribe to the misgivings of out Blue Pill conditioning – because of that awareness we tend to think that this should be consciously or tacitly appreciated by a wife, a girlfriend or the women we’re sarging in the club.
This can be kind of tough for an aware man because it’s often something we need to keep latent in ourselves. Being overt about Red Pill awareness with women is almost always self defeating because it exposes the Game. Women want to play the game, they don’t want to be told how it operates. In our everyday lives it’s necessary to reserve and observe or we risk changing the process.
Openly acknowledging the value a man believes he ought to inspire in a woman will alter her perception of that value. Most men who resort to forcing a woman’s hand by laying bare all the qualities of himself (real or imagined) he believes she should recognize and appreciate are only exposing their belief that Relational Equity and an old paradigm mindset is his mental point of origin. In truth, guys who attempt to set themselves apart by listing all the ways they’re valuable and playing by the rules generally get shamed by women in the end because those qualities have become so common place and expected that they’ve become debased.
So you’re a great father to your kids and a devoted husband who built himself into the guy that any woman should be attracted to, who should be a great catch? That’s great, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. And all those things you’re supposed to do, those aren’t what engender a woman’s genuine desire. In a feminine-primary social order – the same order that deliberately misdefines masculinity for men – all men need to do, endlessly, is just a bit more to do everything right.
The Awakening
On both the Married Red Pill and MGTOW Reddit forums there’s been discussed the concept of being ‘awakened while married’. Hopefully I wont butcher that concept too badly here, but I think one aspect of becoming Red Pill aware, whether you’re a young single guy or an old mature married one is that there comes a point when you are awake and aware of the conditioning and the intersexual paradigm you truly live in. Honestly, I envy the younger men who come into this awareness early in life, but I also recognize that theirs is a greater responsibility to the truth for the rest of their unplugged lives. Men awakened while married at least have the excuse of having been deluded by Blue Pill conditioning for most of their lives to that point.
For younger men the Red Pill presents challenges with each new prospective woman a man applies himself with. For the awakened married man, his challenge is reinventing himself in a Red Pill aware paradigm with a woman who is already intimately aware of his persona, possibly for decades. We always say that once you’ve become Red Pill aware there is no going back. Even for men who go into total denial and choose to live with the cognitive dissonance of what they know about their own Blue Pill conditioning and the socio-sexual game going on around them there will always be reminders of Red Pill awareness he’ll notice on his peripheries.
For a man awakened to his condition while married, his state is a never ending reminder of what his Blue Pill indenturement has made of him. Like the guy in Farrell’s men’s group, the Blue Pill husband has spent most of his life trying to become someone he may or may not like, but that process of becoming was prompted by his Blue Pill conditioned existence. Once that man becomes Red Pill aware he’s now faced with two problems – how will he remake himself and how will his wife accept that remaking?
From the earliest posts of this blog I’ve always stressed that a man’s dominant Frame in his relationship is vital to the function of that relationship. Unfortunately, most men who were awakened while married began their relationships with a strong Beta perception for their wives. We can debate as to whether just the commitment of marriage itself makes for a predominantly Beta perception of a man, but in an era of masculine ridicule, Open Hypergamy and Alpha Widows it’s a good bet that women’s impression of their husbands is rarely one of reserved Alpha confidence.
This is a tough position for a Red Pill aware husband to confront. Sometimes a wife’s impression of his Beta-ness is too embedded, or she’s built a relational framework around expecting him to be a hapless Beta. Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. I should add that this expectation of predictability isn’t just limited to a wife’s perception of her Beta husband. That can, and often does, extend to a man’s family or friends who also expect him to be the Beta he’s always been. This then presents another challenge in remaking himself into something new, dominant and respectable in his Red Pill awareness.
Many of the men I used to do peer counseling with back in the early 2000s only wanted one thing; they wanted their wives to have a genuine desire to fuck them with either an enthusiasm they’d never known (but believed was possible) or they hoped to re-experience (and hopefully sustain) a genuine sexual desire they’d enjoyed with their wives while they were dating. None of them wanted (at least at first) to abandon their marriages, they just wanted to do thing right so their wives would fuck them, love them, respect them. They really wanted things to work, and so much so that they would overtly ask their wives “what do I have to do to get you to love/fuck/respect me and I’LL DO IT!” Which of course was precisely the thing that turned their wives off even more.
Their overtness and desperation was only more reinforcement and confirmation of these men’s wives perception of their Beta statuses. However, these men are the descendants of the generations that convinced them that ‘open communication’ solves all relationship problems, but here they were, being open, direct, expecting a rational, negotiable solution to their problem only to have it drive their disgusted wives further from them.
Hypergamy doesn’t care when a woman’s lasting impression of a man is his Beta status. How a man’s Red Pill awareness and the changes it brings in him will be accepted depends largely on his predominant condition. What husbands want is a sea change in their wives’ impression of them once they adopt a Red Pill / Game aware way of life. Most husbands have to weigh their emotional and personal investments in their wives with the reality that their wives’ impressions of them may simply never change. Becoming Red Pill aware forces husbands into a position of having to judge whether their marriages are even worth the considerable effort of trying to improve.
In the next part of this series I’ll be exploring the challenges an ‘awakened while married’ man has to face while weighing his wife’s impression of him with the impressions women outside his marriage have of him.
