I’ve had a lot of my YouTube subscribers tell me that my admittedly “long form” live stream videos are being chopped off at the 2 hour mark. I’ve been aware of this problem for a month now and as much as I’d like to suspect it’s YouTube/Google censorship, it’s really a compiling error between StreamYard (my streaming app) and how YouTube saves the video after it streams. I had to search for a fix right after the Will Smith / Jada Pinkett breakdown video I did was likewise chopped at the beginning. That was easily my most popular and best watched video on the channel and people wanted the whole damn thing.
I discovered a workaround. I noticed the entire video was in fact compiled on YouTube when I opened it in their editor software. However, the playback was limited to only 2 hours from the end of the clip back up to wherever the 2 hour mark was. The fix was simple: delete about 6-10 seconds of the silence before the intro music starts and then resave/recompile the video. Presto! The whole video is now watchable. Well, not exactly Presto!, it takes about half a day to recompile a 2:45:00 video on YouTube’s very slow encoders.
Needless to say, this is kind of frustrating when I dig into videos like Will Smith and now my dissection of Tomi Lahren’s dating/men ragequit video. Tomi’s fem-screech has been all the rage du jour in the Manosphere and on ProRevenge doompill YouTube since last Wednesday. You just can’t pass on that kind of Grade A, USDA Choice, Red Meat. Even Trad-Con women holding “legitimate” opinionist positions at some of the bigger news aggregate blogs had to put something out about raging Tomi’s meltdown. And as expected they were either piling on with her frustration about men not “living up to the responsibility of being Real Men®“ or else it was more unwitting anti-feminist feminism; the same thing Tomi has suffered from since she was 20.
Even with that ‘fix’ of recompiling the original video I’m still getting guys emailing/Tweeting to me that they can’t watch the whole thing on various formats (mobile, web, tablet, etc.). Maybe that’s because they need to clear their video cache, I don’t know, but I’ve taken it upon myself to host the full video on my own server here. This is the whole analysis of Tomi’s PSA to Boyish Men.
The Empress has no Clothes
This task gave me an occasion to review the whole thing in a better light. There’s so much going on in this video it’s hard to sum it up. Tomi’s will be 28 this month (August 2020). She’s right on schedule for her Epiphany Phase, and as a Farm League celebrity who happens to be reasonably attractive the end of her 20s are weighing heavy on her ego. For the record, I’ve been privy to some DMs from guys in my and Jon MLD’s communities who’ve dated (banged) Tomi and had some interesting details as to what prompted her to this ragequit. I’m not going to make these public. Honestly, it’s TMZ style salaciousness, but these conversations confirmed my initial assessment: Tomi is barreling headlong into the Epiphany Phase and it’s not pretty.
In the video I mention that Tomi needs to find some kind of humility. She’s arrogant, entitled, self-aggrandized and completely oblivious to the fact that her opinions of herself and her “attractive” girl-friends are in fact the product of the feminism she claims to despise. Insight, humility, grace and poise are among the many conventionally feminine characteristic the women of Tomi’s generation (and older) desperately lack. I’m sure Tomi and Co. would disagree, but increasingly more men today are realizing the Empress has no Clothes. Women today like to believe they already have these feminine traits – this is part of the Fempowermentnarrative that teaches women they uniquely hold the attributes that make a woman a Qualitywoman, while also possessing all the best traits that make men admirable and respectable.
As mentioned in An Essay for Women, feminist ideology and gynocentrism has conditioned four generations of women to believe they can be the embodiment of the best of both genders. Self-fulfilling, independent and needing for nothing outside themselves (“You are enough girl.”), the women of Tomi’s generation are now discovering that the elite men they desire the most have the least use for them. Why would they? I’m not talking about MGTOW here, I’m talking about high SMV men in the global sexual marketplace who are in the Game and would like to eventually start a family with a devoted wife who needs him. If the best a woman of can be is a self-fulfilled, ego-assured, independent thing with no needs outside herself, why would she ever seek out an elite man? Why would a man be attracted to a woman who screeches at the top of her lungs,…
“It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I EVER CHASE A MAN!”
By definition, high value men – the men with their “shit together“, the men with a plan, the men who “value value” – have no attraction for a woman who publicly expresses she doesn’t need him. Now, Tomi and her Sisters doth protest too much. Her frustration with men is the result of her inability to accept that she does, in fact, need men; and her standards would predictably crumble given the right incentives. Granted, Tomi correctly assesses that the men of today are increasingly more effeminate, pussified, rudderless and apathetic than any generation that came before them. But ironically, she misses that the sad state of men today should make her even more hyperaware that her bitchy, self-entitled and decidedly masculinized sense of self is unattractive to the elite men she believes she and her sisters deserve.
The prime directive of feminism is:
Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.
Since the post-Sexual Revolution rise of gynocentrism, this feminist maxim has played well with women’s empowerment messaging. There was a time (from the late 60s to late 90s) when men identifying with the feminine – getting in touch with their emotions – was a form of Game. Misguided as it was, men were taught that by supporting, identifying with, and empowering women they would be adapting to that era’s sexual marketplace. Today, this is old order thinking, but the legacy of those generations’ beliefs about women are what is causing such frustration in Tomi’s generation.
It’s too easy to just dismiss her as another entitled, stuck up bitch heading for her date with the Epiphany Phase and the Wall. The problem, and the solution to it, is right in front of her generation’s face. No man needs a woman who has no need for him. Men and women evolved to be complements to one another. This Complementarity and gender interdependence is one of the greatest adaptive strengths of our species, yet the surest way to debase and destroy it is to foment the idea of autonomous, androgynous, independence of one sex.
Tomi Lahren is a Feminist in the truest sense of the term. In one breath she screams men are trash, and in the next she claims to love men. This is the cognitive dissonance that generations of feminism embeds in women. Years of socio-psychological upbringing trains them to distrust, despise and emancipate themselves from men, while at the same time their evolved, biological, mental firmware cries in frustration for a need of men to love, protect, provide and sexually satisfy them.
This inner conflict becomes more and more stressful as this generation of young women approach the Epiphany Phase. One conflicting shift I see among this crop of young women is a greater, and earlier, awareness that they will be less likely to optimize Hypergamy with an acceptable, elite, man they are taught to believe they all deserve. Settling for anything less than optimal is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman ideal; settling for a suboptimal man is the main source of inner conflict for the Equal-but-Better expectations women place on today’s admittedly lacking men.
Back in July of 2019 I was approached by a Dutch documentary team from VPRO (Dutch Public TV) who asked me if I would be open to doing an interview with them. I gave them a tentative yes, but I was really hesitant to trust ANY source that looked like the mainstream media. When they said they’d be at the 21 Convention I actually cancelled on them. I no longer want any association with their lack of integrity.
The director/producer, Nordin, kept on me though. He convinced me to do the interview because the “documentary would be incomplete” without me. I was still really sketchy about doing it because I know how these things go. It’s their game and they can easily make you look like a monster or an idiot if they want to. Nordin was really upfront with me, but so were a lot of other “journalists” I’ve dealt with.
I’m glad to say my concerns were unfounded. This documentary was the first real ‘fair assessment’ of the ‘sphere that I’ve ever seen. I’m in the ranks with the likes of Dr. Warren Farrelland Hannah Rosen in this and I think they did a good job of presenting the topics fairly.
You’ll have to get past the psychotic look of Elliott Hulse on the thumbnail though 😄
Half of this is in Dutch but it’s still very watchable if you don’t speak the language. All the English speakers are subtitled in Dutch so it’s pretty good as-is. As soon as an English subtitled version is up I’ll swap out the links.
Have a look at this and tell me what you thought. My segment comes in around the 30:30 mark, but well worth a watch of the whole thing to get some context. I will likely do a longer review post of this video in the coming weeks.
Does she surprise you with acts of kindness and appreciation?
Does she inherently know that your success is her success?
Does she admire you? How does she show it?
Does she know what you need before you know it yourself?
Does she plan ahead to ensure you’re taken care of?
Does she care to know who, not just what you are?
Does she take time to learn about or participate in the things you are passionate about?
Does she look forward to having sex with you?
Does pleasing you please her?
Does she do any of these things with genuine desire or is she fearful of your displeasure?
Or
Is your woman ‘high maintenance’?
Is pleasing her or avoiding her discomfort your mission in the relationship?
Is your relationship defined by how well you measure up to her expectations?
Is your woman’s success more important than your own?
Are you the sentimental one in the relationship?
Do you plan ahead to ensure she’ll be in the right mood?
Do you perform chores in the hopes that it will make her amenable to you sexually?
Do you believe your relationship is (or should ideally be) an equitable one?
Does her family take priority over your own at holidays?
Is your relationship based on quid pro quo?
Is she ever surprised by your anger?
Is your relationship perpetually a “work in progress”?
Is your relationship’s success defined by qualifying to her metrics?
Do you measure the quality of your relationship by how well you meet her needs?
These are tough questions for most guys. I’m often asked how to vet a woman for a relationship or marriage and the hard part of coming up with a list of qualifications is that you have to actually be in a relationship with that person to really judge a woman’s suitability for a long term commitment. Hot sex is a great ‘up-sell’ for women to convince a man to commit, and it’s usually at the top of a guy’s list of must-haves for his commitment, but you don’t really understand her motivations or genuine desire until you are already in a relationship. Now you have emotional investment in her (caught feelings) at the same time you’re realizing she’s really not the person you thought you were vetting her for.
The ‘Asshole Alpha’
A hard thing for most Blue Pill, Beta men to appreciate is the genuine desire a woman has for an Alpha man. When that guy sees a relationship that’s based on a woman’s dedication to please her Alpha man, his Beta Hamster goes into action. A lot of things don’t line up with what he’s been conditioned to believe about women and how a relationship should go.
His first presumption is that the Alpha guy is a ‘manipulative asshole’ and if he ‘respected’ her she would be better off for it. It’s certainly not how he would treat her. Default respect for women plays well for a Blue Pill mindset. If you read through my first set of questions above the most common impression a feminized mind will have is that I’m implying a woman ought to be beholden to an Alpha man. While it’s true that, ideally, a solid conventional relationship is founded on a man’s ambition and success, and his woman sharing that mission, she has to want to be a part of it. Forcing a woman to be a part of a man’s world is actually the methodology of a Beta man.
Monogamy can occur either because a female chooses to be faithful to a male, or as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.
Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead
Exploring the Desire Dynamichas been a key feature in all of my writing. Understanding that genuine desire cannot be negotiated is usually one of the toughest parts of the Red Pill to accept when a guy is just coming into it. It’s hard because most men already realize the principle; they’ve just been building lives around the contingencies, and forming deep rationales, to avoid accepting it. I have readers tell me all the time that what I put forth in my books and essays is stuff ‘they already knew in the back of their heads‘, they just didn’t have the words to articulate it. Your relationship sucks, or your marriage is soul-destroying not because you can’t seem to live up to a false ideal (which is true), but because your woman has no genuine desire to be a part of your world. Modern marriages fail, not because of trust issues, or security, or even ‘her needs not being met’ – they fail due to a lack of genuine desire.
Most women today are in monogamous relationships as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.
Blue Pill men have a hard time with this as well. A relationship based on a woman’s choice to be faithful to a man, based on her genuine desire, looks a lot like what he’s been taught a lopsided manipulative relationship is all about. The prime-directive of feminism (the female Blue Pill) is that a Strong Independent Woman® should “never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.” Part of a Blue Pill man’s lifelong conditioning is to think like a feminist woman thinks.
Most Blue Pill men are male feminists by default. Whether they vocally identify as one is largely a formality; Blue Pill men think like feminist women, because their social education came from feminist women.
When a Blue Pill male encounters the rare conventional relationship – one based on a woman’s genuine desire and a man’s Frame and ambitions – and he sees a woman doing things for the express pleasure of an Alpha man, his first impression is that she is with him by coercion. That conventional relationship model doesn’t fit with what his female teachers taught him was the egalitarian ideal. Thus, rationalizing that a beautiful woman would only feel obligated to please an asshole is because she has low self-esteem, she’s forced to please him because she’s destitute, she’s codependent, he overtly uses Dreadon her, etc. This becomes his ego defense of his Blue Pill conditioning. His default presumption is that she is with that guy as a consequence of a particular lifestyle. It never enters his thought process that she is with that Alpha by choice.
Objects of Desire
Most men are uncomfortable with being the object of genuine desire. Even the idea of having a woman do something inspired for his express pleasure makes them feel like they’re falling into the role of Asshole Alpha. Promise Keepers in particular hate this impression of themselves and will go to great efforts to quash it in themselves, by deriding it in other men.
If you read the first list of questions above and thought, “Damn, that sounds harsh or manipulative. What about her needs?” this is your Blue Pill training coming to the surface of your consciousness. Just the thought that, as a man, you might ever be truly desired by a woman gets conflated with ‘abuser’ status. Either that, or the first consideration is to default to Bank Slate thinking – “What about her?” This is the egalitarian, presumption of ‘equal-and-opposite’ as the ideal thinking.
Most Blue Pill conditioned men, and virtually every Fempowered woman, defaults to “What about her?” as their Mental Point of Origin. Guys do this because it’s been hammered into their brains since grammar school that ‘putting women first’ is the surest way to gaining their intimate favor. As such, the idea that they might ever ‘come first’ with a woman becomes an alien thought to them. Not only that, but they see the hypothetical Alpha I mentioned above as the villain to defeat in order to prove his quality. That ‘quality’ is based on his ‘putting women first’, so an Alpha Asshole becomes a golden opportunity to display how well he’s learned his Blue Pill lessons from his female teachers.
Without the Red Pill, without the insight to question his conditioned belief-set, this mindset is impossible to break in a guy. For the most part he’s attached his Game – his hope of solving his reproductive problem – to that Blue Pill, Village training. Some guys may never break the cycle. They never see the code in the Matrix. Most men fall into a grind of constant qualification to women because they have never, and will never, be the object of genuine desire of a woman. Their mental models prevent them from ever being that object to a woman. They would feel awkward, dirty, for making anything about them.
When a man’s Burden of Performance can be directed towards qualifying himself to women, men will begin to conflate their masculine identities with how well they can ‘put her first’.
The religious Trad-Con mindset revels in this, but the ideal comes from the same source – feminine primacy. Directionless, purposeless, men find a purpose in making the pleasing of a “quality woman” ideal the metric by which they measure their manhood. The Feminine Imperative figured out how to make women’s security the measure of a man long ago. It was written into men’s sense of duty and his Gods’ will. They must become less so she becomes more. It didn’t always used to be that way, but since the advent of romantic love as an ideal, it’s been the game men were told they had to play. And now, men’s natural competitiveness is channeled to outperforming his rivals in how better he can serve the Feminine Imperative.
IV. Don’t play by her rules
If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest.
16 Commandments of Poon, Roissy
I can make appeals to men to make themselves their Mental Point of Origin, but few actually wrap their heads around the concept. Fewer still will give themselves permission to do so. The reason for their difficulty is that their reproductive success was pinned to the Blue Pill mindset they’d had beaten into their psyches a long time ago.
The equal partnership ideal is antithetical to how men and women evolved to be complements to the other. That ‘equal’ partnership is predicated on a man endlessly proving his dedication to ‘putting her first’ that his hindbrain believes will lead to a woman’s genuine desire for him. His hope, his understanding, is that if he works at his relationship long enough, if he puts her first, eventually she will appreciate him and desire him based on his efforts and performance. But it is just this priority in his life – the priority he’s linked to what little sense he allows himself to have of his manhood – that defeats his ever getting to that state of a woman’s genuine inspired desire.
“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 Fempowermentnarrative 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 Slateequals.
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 Fightdynamic. 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 orderthinking. 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.
Respect comes very cheap today. In the last essay i made the case that there are gendered forms of Respect, each with their gendered understanding of what a universal idea of respect should entail. The same misunderstanding applies to our gendered concepts of Love; each sex presumes the other accepts and acknowledges their own ideals about love – men approaching love from outwardly expressed idealism, while women’s is rooted in inwardly (though increasingly outwardly) expressed opportunism.
For the most part this division of approaches to Love is something both sexes hold personally, and unless that person is an artist or a poet the expression of that approach to love is something we reserve for those we come to love. Love, like religion, is usually something we have a personal belief about, but it’s generally something we don’t broadcast to those we don’t love.
Respect is different. Our ideas of what defines respect is something we will broadcast because that ideal for Respect is something that’s socially expedient in getting the things we want. The first time I was told, “You don’t respect women!” was when I was 19. Even then, in my Blue Pill delusions, I saw a contradiction. The women (and sometimes men) who were telling me I didn’t Respect women were almost always after something. No one tells that you ought to be more respectful because they want you to be a better person, nor are you corrected because the ideal of respect was even a primary concern. No, people tell you to show respect when they want something or they have an interested invested in you deferring respect to the person or thing they believe you ought to be paying respect to.
Pay Tribute or Pay Respect?
In fact, the idea that one ought to “pay” respect to something or someone else really sets the context for the utility that Respect represents to them. You “owe” respect to an ephemeral ideal in the same way you “pay your dues”, like a personal debt that someone insists you owe because you want to be reverent of the concept of Respect. And this basis for Respect is why I say Respect has been cheapened today.
Even when I was 19 and women would attempt to shame me into deference to women with Respect, I saw the contradiction between women and men’s concepts of Respect. My male idea of Respect was one of the few things my father had imparted to me. So, naturally, I questioned the idea, “What do women actually do that’s worthy of my respect?” Respect was earned. Lord knows I hadn’t done much to deserve anyone’s respect at 19, but I did know that deeds and acts were something a man had to do to gain respect – and maybe somewhere along the way acquire integrity (another container word). My smart ass response was “I don’t know any women who deserve my respect.” And that was true, but every Blue Pill conditioned guy I knew then would tell me, “You’ll never get girls to like you with that attitude mister.”
So, basically, if I wanted a girl to be intimate with me I had to feign respect for her because she’s a girl? The Blue Pill teaches men, yes, and the better you are at pretending it the more a woman will appreciate you. This is where the debasement of Respect (as an ideal) in our feminine-primary social order begins. Unmerited respect for women only reinforces the Women are, Men must become principle. Men must become, men must qualify, men must perform. As such, male respect is something that is almost always in flux. Women’s respect just is, and thereby female respect is something more static.
Respect for the Sake of Respect
In a gynocentric society the predominant definition of respect, the one that is transferred to virtually all aspects of that social order, is the female concept. Automatic, deferential, but ultimately unmerited respect simply for being – female respect – is considered a useful tool, but cheapens the ideal of respect and what makes a person respectable.
When I outlined the difference between male and female concepts of Love, one of the first things men do is get indignant. They don’t like the idea that women don’t share their own ‘love for the sake of love’ idealism. My point was that women “fundamentally lack the capacity to love a man in the way he thinks should be possible for her.” This is difficult for a Blue Pill conditioned guy to wrap his head around. Much of who they are was built on the premised goal that women will “love him as much as he loves her”, so to suggest that this isn’t possible for him means that “women fundamentally lack a capacity to love men, period.” They conclude that if women cannot share his idealistic approach to Love then they cannot legitimately love him. His concept should be the only acceptable concept and therefor rejecting his concept is rejecting its legitimacy.
This same singleminded interpretation applies largely to women and their form of respect. If men would hold a woman to a merited, male, standard of respect, rather than a default deference to respecting her for no measurable reason, then those men don’t believe inRespect at all. It’s her way or it isn’t real.
Most men are afraid to appear disrespectful to women. This fear is compounded by the mass effect of a globalized sexual marketplace
When I was 19 I was concerned that I’d done something wrong. Why would women presume I didn’t respect them? I was perceived as a Jerk and I just knew that that wasn’t what women really wanted. I didn’t know it then, but this was a shaming tactic being used to keep me in line as a prospectively useful Beta. In a way I suppose it was a meta-shit test. An Alpha man wouldn’t care if women thought he was respectful. A sure sign a guy is Beta would be reflected in how he responds to being accused of disrespect of women (really ‘womankind‘).
In truth, a default respect for women is really worthless from a male perspective. I’m sure that just my typing this out will be enough to trigger most women, but if you are triggered, it’s more important to consider why you are. A default respect for females may seem like a socially correct perspective for an “upstanding leader of men” Blue Pill Alpha archetype, but it is men who adopt the attitude that women must qualify themselves to him who engender genuine respect among women.
Flipping the Respect Script
This is an important lesson in Game as well. One of the first things many of the old school PUAs would teach an AFC (Average Frustrated Chump) is to flip the script with respect to who is qualifying whom. The natural presumption for most Blue Pill men is that they must always qualify to a woman. Usually this entails proving his quality in various ways (buy her a drink, pay for dinner, carry the conversation, etc.), but the operative assumption is that she is the one whose Frame he is entering into. The PUA fundamental then was to flip this ‘natural‘ script; to get her to pursue him. In doing so, her subconscious confirms his high value – why else would she pursue? If a guy could cleverly tease this pursuit out of her it then creates a perpetuating feedback loop about him [until he fucks it up somehow by reverting to qualifying to her].
Flipping the qualification script with a woman presents one very difficult hurdle for the AFC: he must risk offending the social convention that tells him he mustnever disrespect a woman. This is where the larger, social, respect dynamic becomes apparent.
From a Beta male, Respect is cheap. Most Betas’ attention comes for free and is steeped in the idea that he must never upset the respect dynamic. But just like love, attention and interest, women don’t value Respect that is easily had. Too much circulation makes the price go down, and scarcity makes the price go up. We constantly tell men to make, and consider, themselves ‘the Prize‘, but to do this a man must risk offending a default female respect to shift the Frame to a default male respect. This is counterintuitive part of unplugging and learning Game.
That deference is what is expected. To respect women is common. What is uncommon is a lack of female respect. Therefor a default respectful deference is basic and plain to a woman. But it is the man whose respect a woman must earn who make the most significant impact and inspire the greatest emotional investment on her part. As I’ve stated in many essays, never deny a woman the satisfaction of believing she’s figured you out with her feminine intuition. Women expect a worthy Alpha to command respect amongst his peers, but also to expect her to earn his respect. And in her meriting it, she then holds a new respect for him.
Respect, as social dynamic, is an attempt to govern the terms of communication. Respect also has its utilities. It’s a rational for an easy dismissal of uncomfortable facts. For instance, Mansplaining presumes a lack of respect for women by a man who is trying to define what ought to constitute respect. It is a means of controlling a narrative. A “lack of respect” is an easy way to poison the well in any debate and also serves as the basis of a lot of straw man arguments.
Higher Love
Respect is defined by the party who decides what it is, and who should have it. In this way Respect is intimately linked with Frame, and since women’s form of respect is the socially predominant one today, the starting point of most intersexual exchanges begins with the presumption that a woman should control the Frame by means of a default, unearned respect. And to some hopelessly Blue Pill men who invariably mix that conditioning with religion, this respect then becomes a form of Reverence for the female.
God is Love […] I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience.
To which a commenter left me this in the comments thread:
“God is love”. Rollo, this is just one more on the heap of things I am struggling with regards to my “christian faith”. I am very much looking forward to reading Alpha God and eventually your 4th book.
Unconditional love is the main message of the new testament. Could it be that Christianity is really that feminized not just by “the village” and feminized church today but actually? Could the New testament be a watering down of the old Jahve Religion?
Zoltan
While I’m not planning on exploring Red Pill concepts of “unconditional love” on this blog, I will be picking apart the implications of how men and women’s differing concepts of love come to define, or set the understanding of an ideal of a ‘higher love’ (don’t sing the song, don’t sing the song,…).
So what does this have to do with Respect?
Everything if you consider the gender whose definition of what Respect should be is the socially predominant on at any point in history. Performance defines men’s existences. Performance determines respectability for men and earning one’s way into Heaven might be the highest form of respect, right?
Thank you for your patience in my absence. I’ve been focusing intensely on the 4th book for the past 2 months and I will be for the foreseeable future. The good news is I’m ‘in the zone‘ so to speak. I have the ability to occasionally get myself into a flow state where an idea I was originally working on branches off into other ideas that I have to follow or else I risk losing the branch altogether.
This is just how my mind works. Regular viewers of my podcasts understand this in real-time. I can start off with a solid premise – often one I’ve been considering (repeating) since the early days – and as I’m making it I consider how it affects other ideas and I have to follow that thread. I know, it’s annoying sometimes, but I do my best to organize my thoughts once they’re all out on the table.
I do this in my ideation process when I’m writing too. Right now I’m looking at no fewer than eight notebooks (9 if you count my gym log) that I keep to return to when I’m exploring ideas. Two of these are full. The oldest I’ve had since my first book was published, but I keep returning to it because I scribbled down ideas regarding religion and the Red Pill back then. This was from an era when I was much more active on Dalrock’s blog and I was hammering things out with a lot of guys struggling with Red Pill awareness, and reconciling it with their religious convictions. It was then I came across an unpublished reconsideration of the concept of Respect. I titled it Respect Reconsidered with the intent of coming back to an essay I wrote in 2012 called Respect. This original essay was inspired by some of my earliest conversations on the venerable SoSuave forums circa 2002-2010. I still think it holds up pretty well, but my reinterest in the topic of respect has come anew from my working on this fourth book.
So, at the risk of giving away a little bit of book 4, I’m going to delve into the concept of respect today.
God is Love?
Book 4 is about squaring Red Pill praxeology (deal with it) with religion. As a part of this I’ve had to re-outline my original premise on Love and how men and women approach love from different concepts. I wont bore you with reiterating it here (there’s a whole category on love in the side bar), but suffice to say that men and women come to love, and have an understanding of love, based on gendered ideals that are specific to our biological and psychological differences as men and women. Most intersexual conflicts between men and women are rooted in the presumption of a mutual, commonly understood concept of what love is to both sexes. The truth is men and women hold differing mental models of what legitimate “real” love means to them. Each sex arrives at this understanding as a result of their experience as a man or a woman, and then molded by outside influences and innate idealism.
This was an important distinction to consider while I’ve been exploring the way men and women idealize the concept of divine love from a god or some metaphysical source. Each sex has a gendered concept of love that they believe the other sex shares with them, but in fact doesn’t naturally come to without some education or experience. It’s this presumption and misunderstanding that is the source of conflict between men and women and how they expect the other to Just Get Itwith respect to how they’d have the other sex love them.
But if men and women have different, innately gendered concepts of love is it possible that there are other higher concepts they might not share the same ideas about, but presumes the other sex just gets? I believe so, and Respect is at the top of the list of those higher concepts.
Respect is earned?
When I was having my now infamous discussion with Andrew Tate a month ago we (quite unintentionally) hit upon the concept of respect and how men and women view it differently. A lot of my female viewers – particularly the newer female viewers – despised the truths that we were discussing about the nature of women:
“No woman would ever agree to ‘share a hot Alpha’! Any woman who would must not respect herself.”
“No woman wants to have sex with a guy she doesn’t respect! If she’s not fucking you with any real desire it’s because she doesn’t respect the guy she’s with.”
“You can’t expect a woman to submit to a man she doesn’t respect.”
These were a few of the comments and responses that got me thinking; Respect is an idea that men and women hold different concepts of as a result of our innate sexual differences. The criteria that would prompt respect in a woman is not the same that prompts it in a man.
A lot gets made about mutual respect being a keystone of a good relationship. It’s one of those sayings like “Open communication is the basis of a healthy relationship” or “Relationship take a lot of work.” Respect is another truism that sounds right. Because it’s so ambiguous, and it’s generally only legitimized according to one sex, it’s easy (mostly for women) to use a “lack of respect” as leverage or an alibi to excuse behavior or a misunderstanding between men and women.
The concept of respect today is cheap. We use it far too readily to explain away why we, or someone we identify with did what they did. We use a convenient, subjective understanding of respect as a qualifier for describing what we agree or disagree with. And we use this cheapened “respect” to grade a person’s integrity according to what we think others should agree or disagree with – usually by how it aligns with our own interests.
Male Respect is not the same as Female Respect
The popular concept is that Respect is something that should be a default setting. People deserve respect. Disrespecting someone, or ambiguously implying a ‘dis‘ might be enough to get your ass kicked. Today’s globalized concept of respect is the subjective female concept – respect is always on. This is a respect based on ‘grace‘, it just is, and it should be freely given to discourage the idea that anyone is greater or lesser than another. We all deserve respect is very much a collectivist form of respect.
At first I thought that maybe Respect was something being confused with common courtesy, but no. There are two main dictionary definitions of what respect is, and this is where we will see the gendered difference between these concepts:
Respect
1. A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
2. Due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.
Courtesy
1. The showing of politeness in one’s attitude and behavior toward others.
Courtesy and the feminine form of Respect (2.) are very similar. Today’s global respect is rooted in the feminine form. I’ll explain this below, but a default respect based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, religion and other aspects of human diversity is the feminine concept; unearned and by default always ‘on’.
Women just are. Men must become.
This is an old Manosphere maxim. I’ve used it many times to describe the male Burden of Performance. To be a human male is to exist in a dominance hierarchy until your last day. Men must perform. In fact, it is part of our inborn nature to want to perform for women because it is the most deductive way to solve men’s reproductive problem. When a young boy sees a pretty girl for the first time his natural impulse is to find a way to draw her attention. Ride a wheelie down the street on his bicycle or some other, usually risk taking, feat to prove physical prowess and a capture her attention. Most male animals do some form of this showing off to get a female interested in eventually breeding with him. The PUA concept of Peacocking and why it’s effective finds its roots in this dynamic. Call that being a Dancing Monkey if you like, but performance comes naturally to men.
Competence, physical prowess, creative intelligence, dominance, social proof and preselection are the metric by which we rate a man’s respectability. The Burden of Performance is not only about women determining who they’ll choose to mate with, it’s also about men’s merit-based ranking of respectability and admirability. This applies to all social interactions (family, career, military, athletics, etc.). It is afeeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements that makes a man respectable. How we define this respectability by context of cultural, moralistic or personal metrics is the topic for the next essay in this series.
Male Respect is for Male Space
Of course, this definition can apply to exceptional women, but this concept of respect is male in origin. This male form of respect is part of a male dominance hierarchy. Women can insist on being included in this definition, but it rarely works out in their favor – at least not in the same way that a default female form of respect works for women. One reason women (the Feminine Imperative) insists on assimilating Male Space is in order to restructure it to have access to this male form of respectability. The problem is that in restructuring that space to accommodate their deficits, women fundamentally alter the nature of that male form of respect.
TheWarrior Princessstrong female lead mythology that Hollywood writers think is empowering to women isn’t believable because our hindbrains understand the deception that’s being played on it. We’re supposed to respect this fictitious archetype in a male form of respectability, but it falls short for us because 100,000 years of evolution prevents our hindbrains from suspending our disbelief.
We know what usually happens when women are called to measure up to a male Burden of Performance. Today, transgender male athletes competing and dominating in female-division sports are a sharp reminder of this performance-to-respect distinction in gender. The gynocentric element that squawks the loudest about gender being a social construct is the same element that complains about male athletes putting female athletes to shame in the same sport or activity while masquerading as female. As a result, we don’t respect men who pretend to be women, and then outclass them in competency, in order to appeal to a male form of performance-based respectability. Our hindbrains, men and women’s, reject the legitimacy of what we’re expected (by a gynocentric social order) to respect by merit.
Men earn no admiration from beating girls, but women always are afforded admiration for defeating men. Why? Because our hindbrain presumes a state of performance superiority on the part of men.
Female Respectability
Women’s respectability comes by default.
Respect by virtue of just being female is due to all women, irrespective of performance. In a gynocentric social order this form of respect is the common one applied to social forms of respect. I’m still on the fence as to whether common courtesy is a part of this form of respect. As I mentioned above, default courtesy and respect are due to any and all based on race, creed, religion, etc. This is the due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others. So it could be that courtesy is the expression of this default respect when we’re talking about larger narratives of respect (race, religion, culture, etc.) In either instance, respect is unmerited and really cheapened in a feminine-primary context.
But for women, just to be a female is to be entitled to respect; and only in the circumstance of intra-sexual competition among women is this form of respect ever challenged. Default respect for women is utilitarian for virtually all women. The entitlement to respect is constantly leveraged for advantage and special dispensation among women with men.
Women just are, is the premise here. Female respectability is never merit based, though it can be lost if a woman is convinced that she “has no respect for herself” or if someone casts that woman as self-loathing, but this is only effective when it comes from other women. In a feminine-primary social order men can never challenge a woman’s respectability without the risk of incurring some social backlash or damage to his own performance-based respectability. And labels of sexist, misogynist and chauvinist await any man who would challenge the default respect that is due to women.
Chivalry, Virtue and Female Respectability
A lot of this impression is the result of the old social contract and men’s evolved instinct to protect women. This protector instinct will also be the topic of another essay, but suffice to say that the evolved imperative to protect women (sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive) crosses over into the chivalrous notion of protecting the honor of a lady. At various points in human history (western and eastern) this protector instinct has crossed over into societal practices. During the era of Courtly Love a woman’s virtue became something to defend – and by defending that virtue a man merited respect by earning a woman’s favor. I’ve detailed this dynamic in prior essays; the romanticized form of Chivalry was a means to female power in an epoch when the entire social order was effectively a Male Space. Romanticized Chivalry was the feminism of its time.
The Feminine Imperative understood the protector tendency in men and exploited it in the practices of courtly love or romantic love being elevated to a requisite criteria for male respectability. The social pedestalization of women that forms the basis of the old social contract we know today was started in the ideals of romanticized chivalry. A big part of men’s Burden of Performance under the old social contract was his dedication to protecting a woman’s honor if he himself was to be respectable in the male form of respect.
Feminists will of course bleat that “In the past women were treated like property“.
Yet at some point along the way, even while a woman was a man’s ‘property’ (arguable) she was still held above the male form of respect and a female form of respect became her due. Even in the old Patriarchal Abrahamic religions wives and most in-group women were held in high regard and served as role model archetypes for female respectability. The only way to really lose this due-respect was to be a prostitute or an adulterous woman – both bad bets for men’s parental investment trade-offs and ensuring his own paternity in the long run. Being a nag was also something a respectable woman would avoid, but the operative here is that, default respect for women didn’t require anything like the male Burden of Performance.
Respect Your Elders – “Okay, Boomer,…”
One last point to note is that respect for one’s elders used to be included in this default form of respectability. This is no longer the case today, at least for men. My theory is that by virtue of being older the presumption was one of attained wisdom. Maturity implies mastery, or at least it used to. So, a default respect for one’s elders entered into religious canon. Honor thy father and mother, for instance, is a reflection of this default respect.
But in today’s gloablizing social media marketplace being old is a weakness and a liability unless what makes that man respectable is relatable to his prior performance. And even then respect is just a courtesy if it appears at all. Default socialized respect for women is generally a given in gynocentrism, but mature men are held to the performance burden of young men, because we have such access to seeing this performance difference in real time today.
There is a similar questioning of respect based on a position of authority for men. School teachers, martial arts instructors, policemen, civil authorities and military officials are examples of this diminishing respect. There is a saying that even if you don’t respect the man you should respect the office, but today this is no longer the case. Position no longer indicates respectability the way it used to under the old social contract.
Next week, I’ll be publishing part two of this series.
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?
why do we as a society normalize hating your partner wow i am so bothered this morning pic.twitter.com/gbdcu5Ddmd
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 ThroughLetterboards. 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.
Hypergamy is a dualistic mating strategy. Women have two conflicting mating strategies. I wonder how many of you have stopped and actually considered what that’s like for a woman?
It’s not easy, and it’s even worse for those who are aware of it because knowing it doesn’t change it. Like she can’t help it that the thug makes her wet…
Society constrained women from pursuing their short term, Alpha Fux urges in many ways. But it doesn’t now. So all women pursue the hottest guys, the guys who turn them on the most and now that they can earn and support themselves, why the fuck not?
If you were a woman, would you strap in with some chode for the duration cuz he was “steady”? So what he can’t make you cum, I mean that’s not all there is to life, right?
Get this – women were trapped with men they didn’t want to be with in many situations in the past.I know, bringing up a female POV is always verboten here. But in fact, the Red Pill has made me much more empathetic to what it’s actually like for women. You see, if you spend a lot of time with different women, having sex with them, they open up. They tell me how they feel about being monogamous at all. Many young women do not want children at all. And why not? Because it doesn’t serve men? That’s the point – they want to serve their impulses and their needs.
I don’t say it’s good. I don’t think we are headed in a good direction. But I also understand why women behave the way they do. And I don’t feel ill-served by it because it suits my mating strategy.
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For what it’s worth, it’s never been verboten to discuss women’s perspectives on this blog. On the contrary, I think sussing out why women are the way they are is essential to understanding intersexual dynamics. Despite some guys yelling, “Who cares what women think!”, understanding women’s innate motivations is key to understanding intersexual dynamics.
And that disinterest is the first obstacle I think a lot of guys, especially in today’s Manosphere, need to get past in order to figure out what would work best for themselves in the new sexual marketplace. PUAs have always been interested in what makes women tick. Understanding their motivations and mating strategies is key to solving a reproductive problem. MGTOW and others may feign indifference to those motives, but even their ‘solutions’ are still rooted in knowing why women do what they do.
For the most part, my blog has been dedicated to understanding the mechanics of how both sexes go about solving their reproductive problem. My critics seem to think that just asking questions about those mechanics or coming to a consensus about them based on the dots I connect is negative and/or bitter. And I get it from both sides. There are the guys who’ll say the Red Pill is obsessed with getting laid, and therefore is pointless because it gives women an undue importance in a guy’s life. And then there are the guys (and a lot of women) who’ll say “Rollo, all you ever do is focus on men, why isn’t there a Rational Female book you’re working on?“
When I get asked about writing a book for women my first impulse is to suggest they just read the The Rational Male first. I have no plans to write a female specific book in the future (nor will I be participating in any misguided convention marketed a “making women great again”) because I think that what I outline in all my books is, or should be, equally relevant to female readers. Women will complain about ‘tone‘ and why can’t I just wrap up this information in a nice pink-covered edition of the book, but it’s the content that’s important. Women are innate solipsists and would love nothing more than to read about themselves and their own natures – if for no other reason than to get off on the indignation I might inspire – but they really don’t want a rational discourse about it. They want an emotional delivery.
And this is the difficulty I’m facing in coming to this part of my series; most women really don’t want to learn anything objective about themselves. It doesn’t feel good. In this essay I’m going to outline a few things women can do to make themselves a better catch in the sexual marketplace. So, yes ladies, this is finally a Rational Male post directed at you.
If you read the the six simple directives Rich Cooper enumerated in his tweet from the last essay you’ll already be ahead of the curve. However, I understand I am committing a Red Pill sin here in that I am attempting to appeal to your reason. Despite the accusations of misogyny I do, in fact, believe women can use a capacity to reason – and therefore do have agency – it’s just that reason is always downstream from emotion in women’s mental firmware. And I should add that the larger social narrative of feels before realsis a direct result of this prioritization of women in a female-centric social order.
Women don’t wanna be told shit.
There’s even a cute name for when men try to explain something to a woman her ego doesn’t want to acknowledge – Mansplaining. This is the next obstacle. The Fempowerment narrative (really an effort in social engineering) has conditioned generations of women since the Sexual Revolution to presume an inherent correctness in whatever it is that satisfies the Feminine Imperative. If something benefits womankind it musttherefor be the correct solution for a woman personally and society on whole. I sometimes refer to this as The Sisterhood Über Alles. The cultural meme The Future is Female is a recent example of this.
This resistance to acknowledging anything even marginally objective or unflattering about female nature (or even that humans might have an innate nature) is the primary reason I rarely bother with trying to explain anything Red Pill to women. Women don’t wanna be told shit, and when I get a request for a female-focused approach to something it’s because women want to feel something (usually indignation), not learn anything. Even in a social scope women refer to their organizations and movements as the resistance. This cultural meme is an extension of women’s personal edicts as taught to them by Fempowerment.
Asking women to drop their own, learned, hubris is the first hurdle to educating them. The next is confronting their innate solipsism. In Girl-World everything is about them. This proclivity for self-importance and self-aggrandizement in women has been ruthlessly exploited by commercial and ideological interests for almost two centuries now. It is also the key component in the spread of feminism and the embedding of feminist ideological ideas in our social fabric.
A Blue Pill for Women
In a few videos I’ve detailed how there is a similar effort in western(izing) culture to condition women to fit a new social contract. Feminism and the Fempowerment narrative is just one aspect of this Blue Pill for women. But the next hurdle for women to understand a Red Pill praxeology can be distilled to one message Fempowerment teaches women:
Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.
A woman’s Blue Pill conditioning is founded on the 70s feminism era notion of the Strong Independent Woman meme. She don’t need no man. She is independent – independent of what? She is not dependent on any man, and anything she might do to specifically please a man is antithetical to that independence. To please a man is to participate in their own “oppression” by the Patriarchy.
That’s the origin of the mechanics of the meme we now take for granted. Ladies, from the time you were five years old this independence of men message has been hammered into your psyche by everything from popular culture, to your schooling, to your religion, to your single mothers and your Blue Pill conditioned fathers.
The present-day social segregation of the sexes I keep harping on this year is a direct result of this independence meme being baked into women’s souls from the earliest ages for generations now. I have to laugh when I read women tell me how ‘little girls are so repressed still today’ when a Fempowered social order has eliminated even the thought of not giving girls and women every form of advantage and special dispensation imaginable for over 50 years now.
So, ladies, you must unlearn that which you’ve learned. Understand that solipsism is in your mental firmware.
Understand that you’ve been conditioned to feel that men and any opinion they have are irrelevant to your being. Men should serve you and be thankful you gave them the opportunity to do so.
Understand that this social order is predicated on the female experience superseding, and being more legitimate, than the male experience.
Understand that Hypergamy and your innate self-interest are being fed by a social order that profits on your self-absorption – only to discard you when you figure out the game too late in life.
Understand that there are social conventions established at every phase of your life to explain away why you aren’t living the life of strong independence that narrative conditioned you for since the age you started watching Disney Princess movies.
Most importantly, female reader, understand it’s okay that you should want to do something for the express pleasure of a man. It’s okay to appreciate the masculine for the sake of it. This is the number one thing you have to unlearn. Men and women are different. Our natures are complements to each other, but we are not equals – and it should be a source of pleasure for you to appreciate and enjoy those differences.
Yes, a man must live up to his Burden of Performance in order for you to evaluate his merits. I’m in no way suggesting that you drop anything with regard to your Hypergamous filtering. I’m saying you need to unlearn the hubris you’ve been conditioned for. Unlearn the ego-inflation that social media has deliberately instilled in you. And most importantly, unlearn the notion, the pride, of independence from men.
Learn this now ladies, you will never get close to the connection you want to feel with a man until you learn to appreciate him as a masculine complement to your feminine nature. You are not his equal, you are his complement, and as Roissy once said, a woman wants to submit to a worthy man’s mission as his complement. We are better together than we are apart. The sum can be greater than the parts, but not if you are the independent, self-fulfilling, autonomous ‘things‘ that feminism and the Blue Pill would have you believe is the key to its fantasy of an egalitarian, androgynous, goal-state for human beings.
Triggered
So. Was any of that triggering for you? Illuminating women to the reality of their own conditioning is in some ways even more dangerous and difficult than unplugging guys from their own Blue Pill delusions.
Most women fancy themselves as “Alpha Females” but never really understand that the fantastical Strong Independent Woman® archetype (really it’s a brand) they hold in their heads is actually based on a masculine dynamic. They’re actually alpha males with breasts and a vagina. It’s really hard for women to give that fantasy up, particularly when they live in an era when men are portrayed as vile, stupid, untrustworthy and ‘dependent‘ on women’s powerfulness to save them from themselves.
The female Blue Pill instills this sense of empowerment in women based on false narratives about a straw-man masculinity. Hypergamy is dualistic – Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, Cads/Dads – but half of that desire, the desire for provisioning, parental investment, familiarity and comfort, is rooted in a need for security. Women are the weaker sex. In our ancestral past women (and their offspring) were dependent on men for protection from a chaotic environment. That need for security is still something women seek out in today’s men.
But in this era, men are weak. Bumbling buffoons. “Economically unattractive” and largely incapable of protecting her or her young. This is the message the female Blue Pill teaches little girls and old women. As a result, men cannot be trusted to provide anything like physical protection, and increasingly they can’t be relied upon to help pay the bills. So, women must step up and fulfill their own security needs – often by direct resource transfer from men, but that’s immaterial to the message that Fempowerment embeds in you ladies.
To compound this impression of men, women (and men) are taught that they are in fact blank slate equals of the other. All individuals are really just chaotic, unknowable products of whatever social order constructed them. There are no natures or differences between the genders – and there are at least 68 of those that we know of, right?
The female Blue Pill teaches women that not only are men not to be trusted for security, but that part of that independence from men will be necessary for their own survival. This insecurity about men being capable of providing security is the basis of women masculinizing themselves.
In turn, this is the reason all of what I write here and elsewhere is so triggering for women. How dare I suggest women ought to ‘man down’?! Man can’t be trusted to ‘be men’, just look at them!
This is why women resist the awareness that the Red Pill brings to them. It presumes they must drop all their preconceptions about the nature of men and adopt a femininity that is now alien to them. The Blue Pill will tell you that the discomfort you feel in being more feminine is ‘just how you are‘, but it’s really due to decades of constant social conditioning to make you feel self-conscious in being feminine.
But, most of all, dropping that masculine pretense needed to provide her own security implies she make herself vulnerable to emotionally investing herself in a man who’s dishonest in his own quality. The Existential Fear for women is to invest herself in a man (and his progeny) who tricked her Hypergamous filters into believing he was Alpha when he was in fact Beta. By flipping the Blue Pill script, by suggesting that women drop the masculine pretense and adopt conventional gender complementarity (submission), it is akin to me suggesting she ignore her Hypergamous instincts.
That is why this is triggering you ladies.
Value Added
All that said, how can a woman make herself more valuable to a man once the sexual side of the equation is satisfied? Women constantly complain about being “sexually objectified” by men. They want to be appreciated for more than just being a piece of ass, but in the same world advertise their sexuality as their primary value virtually everywhere. From a very early age women understand that their primary agency in this life is their sexual value to men – and they quickly learn how to leverage it.
Ladies, if you want to be valued for more than your sexuality your going to have to develop actual value beyond your sexuality. Sex is the glue that holds a relationship together. Learn that, accept that. But once you have that down, what else are you to him? What can you do to expressly please him and what can you do to express your appreciation for him?
You must learn the concept of value added. For women this value comes from an inherent understanding of her own femininity and what it offers to the masculine that it cannot provide for itself or does only with greater effort.
If you want a dominant, Alpha, conventionally masculine man to be your boyfriend/husband start by living like a man like that can actually exist in the world. Most guys adapt to whatever it is that will get them laid. When a guy believes in the fantasy of an egalitarian relationship with a woman it’s because he believes it’s the best path to solving his reproductive problem. You can counter this by expecting him to adopt conventional masculinity.
One of the biggest favors my wife did for me was in her expecting me to “be the man” in our relationship and later marriage. Until I met her damn near every woman I was intimate with was convinced that egalitarianism between men and women was ‘natural’, or should be at least. It was a shock to my Blue Pill system when my wife expected me to drive her car when we were dating. From the earliest days of our relationship she insisted that I fill the dominant masculine role and she was going to fill the feminine role. This expectation and our filling those roles modeled masculine and feminine behavior for our daughter who now also has a conventional perspective on gender that most of her peers do not.
New Old Ideas
Learn to cook.
Do laundry.
Keep the home organized and clean.
Stay thin.
Be sexy, learn to seduce him.
Initiate sex with him.
Have genuine sexual desire for him (and let him know when you don’t) and be a genuinely enthusiastic lover.
Wear a dress.
Embrace his family.
Take his surname.
Have a job, but not a career.
Trust him to be your source of security.
Encourage him when you face challenges.
Reassure him.
Play withhim, and play with him
These are just a few of the acts that you can do to manifest your femininity, but they must be part of a genuine desire and willingness to be his complement. You cannot negotiate desire. This primarily applies to sex, but the resentment that comes from obligation also flows over into other aspects of your relationship.
You have to want to be feminine. Just as men eventually need to internalize the Red Pill and make that awareness deeper than just the situational, so too must you want to be his complement. He has to be the guy you want to be feminine for. He must be the man whose babies you want to have for him.
If you find yourself making rules for him, if you make sex a reward for desired behavior, he’s not that guy.
Women make rules for Beta men to comply with. They’re like little ultimatums he must follow, but understand that this is your hindbrain asking that Hypergamous question; ‘Is he the best I can do?’ Recognize this in yourself.
Women break rules for Alpha men. Is your desire for this man so significant that you will break the rules that the female Blue Pill has taught you? Will you break with the conditioning that taught you never to do anything for the express pleasure of a man? Even the most staunch feminists confess to loving a dominant Alpha male who exercises his will over her own. Why do you suppose that is?
Will you break the greatest rule you have for yourself and submit to him because you have the genuine desire to do so? You’ll be happier and healthier if you can answer ‘yes’, but if not, do both him and yourself the courtesy of breaking it off and go sort yourself out before you try again.
