From the time boys are about five years old, we’re taught self-control. Anyone with a young son understands the challenge in this, but for the most part the control we teach our boys differs from what we teach (or don’t teach) our girls. For the most part, this control is necessary to curb boys’ natural proclivities to take risks, but in a feminine-primary social order this inhibiting risk comes from a need for female security . Our young minds, boys and girls, lack the capacity for abstract thought. In fact, our brains continue to develop to their fullest potential right up to 20-21 years of age.
For millennia, adult men, fathers, mothers, the Village that is our larger social order, understood the need to place limitations on boys innate impulsiveness – usually for their own good. While these restrictions and discipline have always been a needed part of boys’ upbringing, today that self-control is taught in the context of how a young man can be more ‘correct’ by his female teachers. In the time of our old social contract teaching young men self-control and self-discipline was a means to self-mastery as an adult man. In the new social contract our gynocentric education system (and socialization) teaches boys discipline in the hopes that they will provide the security that women need.
And the way this is taught is by embedding a deep sense of shame and self-loathing of the male gender into ever-younger generations of future men. Mental Point of Origin is a constant theme in all of my literary work. I want to stress here that crushing any sense of self-priority or self-importance from boys and young men is the prime directive of a gynocentric education system. Last Saturday we discussed the “worshiping of women” on our new show Rule Zero. In this episode I pointed out that men are taught to place womankind on a pedestal from an early age. This meta-pedestalization of the feminine begins when boys are taught self-abasement as part of self-control. Essentially, all control becomes for boys is reducing themselves while aggrandizing (supporting) girls and later women. This is the main reason why wrapping your head around Mental Point of Origin is so difficult for men later in life. Their Blue Pill conditioning taught them to be servants as a means of proving their self-control.
Most women, certainly all feminists, will do their best to convince us that it’s still little girls who are taught to repress their naturally boyish natures. But it’s a cliché now to believe that little girls would be every bit as ‘curious about how the world works’ if not for a nebulous society that represses their passion for discovery. Since the Sexual Revolution our social order has done its damnedest to reverse gender roles – boys are taught to emulate the feminine, girls emulate the masculine. The Disney corporation has been the most active social agent in western culture in fomenting this reversal. Every story across all genres follows the same plot; a repressed little girl would make an even better boy if not for these Patriarchal rules she must break from. The story of Mulan is a good example. The girl Mulan must impersonate a boy in order to prove herself as a masculine equal – and to get closer to the Alpha male she naturally wants to pair with. Our popular fiction today all follows a similar teaching; girls need to break away from self-control to be more empowered.
The notion that little girls are ever taught to repress their natures is laughable in real life. If little boys are taught like they’re defective girls, then girls today are taught that they can literally do anything – and be free of any lasting consequences. In fact any restrictions, any pretense of a girl/woman requiring a degree of self-control is immediately associated with repression. This old order idea of female repression is a favorite trope for the Fempowerment narrative. The most marginal, well-meaning, criticism of women or the feminine is always steeped in ‘judgmentalism’. Being ‘judged’ is always a concern for women. For the past 3-4 generations of women, being freed from ‘repression’ is also to be free from judgement. They have an entitlement to avoid consequence.
Abasement
On last week’s Rule Zero episode we asked a question: why is it so many men will abase themselves with women? If you’ve been Red Pill aware for a while it’s easy to just dismiss these guys and think they’re all just low self-esteem losers, but the belief is endemic to the 80% of Beta men. The combination of having been raised to prioritize the concerns of women above his own interest, and the notion that doing so will make him a better romantic catch in the eyes of women (who already feel entitled to him being a useful servant) turns self-abasement into a form of Beta Game.
Why does a man get down on one knee to propose marriage to a woman? Surely this old social contract form of abasement was an expectation of men. It’s in practically every romantic story ever told.
Under the old social contract a man was presumed to be above a woman in status. The old intersexual hierarchy of love followed from the man to the woman and then later to the child(ren). It was a natural, understood, dominance hierarchy prior to the Sexual Revolution. In all the old stories Disney has ever retold the presumption of this hierarchy defines the plot of the story. Of course now we’ve grown accustomed to gender swaps and expectation swaps in these retellings, but when a woman gets down on bended-knee to propose to a man – as her empowering teachers have taught her is acceptable – there’s something awkward when a woman abases herself to a man.
One of the prime directives of feminism is this:
Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.
Anything a woman might do just to please a man is abasement. It smacks of the repressiveness little girls are told still holds them back in spite all the world’s attempts to advantage them. Doing something, wearing something, being something or behaving in a way that might intentionally please a man is the antithesis of the Strong Independent Woman® ideal. But yet, women are taught that they should expect to live in Sadie Hawkins’ World where they should feel empowered to ask the man on a date and ask him to marry her if he merits it. Again, it’s all part of the gender reversal we’re expected to embrace.
But when you see it, when a woman is doing the proposing, it doesn’t feel empowering. It feels awkward, backwards. Social constructionism says that awkwardness is the result of society teaching you stereotypical gender norms; but those norms haven’t been the standard for at least 4 generations. Disney’s taught us different for some time now. But it still looks weird. The man is supposed to initiate. The man is supposed display and she is supposed to choose. The man is supposed to abase himself, right?
Male abasement is a sign of submission in an age that expected him to be an Alpha already. There used to be a time when men were expected to be the masters of their lives. Men understood their Burden of Performance and built a life around creating (conquering) their own worlds. Certainly this achievement was motivated by finding a wife, but more so because of his innate sense of idealism.
The Ideal Man
The old social order expectations of men are still what women feel entitled to in the new order:
Superior Physicality: He must be more than her equal in height and strength. Muscularity is an ideal in men. Women hold far more strict and static ideals of male beauty than men have ever held for women.
Superior Dominance: He is respected, deferred to and sometimes feared by his peers. He holds status, power (in the traditional sense) and honor that is confirmed and reinforced by others – but only insofar as it can be useful to a woman. Women tend to have an immature understanding of the nature of power.
Superior Confidence/Competence: He must be more innovative and competent than herself. Competence is directly tied to the Hypergamous doubt – “Is he the best I can do?” If she is more competent (or she believes she is) than he is it upsets the natural intersexual dominance hierarchy and ultimately his Frame control. Confident competence is the foundation of a woman’s need for long term security.
Superior Mastery: He must be a master of himself and the world he directs. Again, this is tied to a woman’s need for security which he must ensure in the long term; even into his old age. He must “Just Get It” with her and understand women in general – this is derived from experience and being supremely desired by other women.
For all of this mastery the ideal man is expected to possess, the fantasy is that he must abase himself to her due to her uniqueness. The power of love is what he must defer to. Even today, in a post Sexual Revolution era, this chivalric ideal is still an unspoken expectation. That ideal is a superior man who abases himself to her, and only to her. This is the Beauty and the Beast archetypal story. The fantasy ideal man is only beholden to her particular charms. Men conquer worlds, women conquer men.
A few years ago (2012-13) I did a series of posts about the chivalric ideal. In those essays I proposed that the western concepts of chivalry, bastardized by the influence of ‘courtly love’, were an extension of power by the feminine. Essentially chivalry was feminism 1.0 in that it leveraged men’s obligations of honor to benefit the Feminine Imperative. Chivalry was a Male Space into which women inserted themselves (via courtly love), assimilated the principles and rewrote the rules to better fit themselves. We still see vestiges of this today when women post something on Facebook or Twitter stating that “only a ‘real’ man does the things that benefit me, my sexual strategy and my ensured survival and happiness.”
Male sacrifice now extends to a man abasing himself for an entitled benefit of womankind. It’s no longer just an expectation of undying love and commitment, it’s a surrendering of his evolved imperatives.
“Women don’t care about the struggle. They wait at the finish line and fuck the winners.”
Rich Cooper
This is a popular belief in the Manosphere today. Hypergamous stress is so intense that women have turned into mercenaries with respect to vetting the men they’ll accept to plan a future with. I’ll admit, a lot of well-meaning Red Pill men believe women’s Hypergamous Filter is necessarily amoral if not overtly cruel. The ill-informed critics of Hypergamy believe in a binary extreme. They presume that all those Red Pill guys are self-defeated by the idea that all women are prostitutes and only “out to get theirs“. This is simplistic ignorance of the concept of Hypergamy meant to dissuade the curious from Red Pill truths that they refuse to process. But do they kind of have a point though?
Virtually every extreme of MGTOW and the Mens Rights Movement have some open variation of how Hypergamy is a straight jacket and
“Why bother with a woman for anything other than a short term fuck if her Hypergamous nature will just predispose her to jumping ship to the first guy who comes along with a bigger dick or a bigger wallet?”
I covered all of these is detail in Hypergamy – The Misconceptions a while ago in case you’re curious as to why these are unfounded, and more often deliberate, misunderstandings of women’s nature. And no, that doesn’t mean I’m backpedaling on anything I’ve ever written about Hypergamy.
A couple weeks ago I got wrapped up in a Twitter exchange about the conflict between whether women indeed wait for the winners at the finish line or they make calculated bets about a man’s future potential.
Women are not investors when it comes to men. They are not going to waste time with someone “going places”
They are capitalists, they will find a guy who already made it and jump on that band wagon instead
— Wall Street Playboys (@WallStPlayboys) May 12, 2019
From a pragmatic point of view I’m very much inclined to agree with this assessment. Yes, it makes women seem overly mercenary with respect to Hypergamy, but I’ve said it as much myself in any number of prior essays:
Women can only willingly want to please a man whose Frame is the dominant one. You’ve got to have that world established that she wants to enter and become a complementary, supportive (of you) and willing participant in. This world-building takes time. Women evolved to seek competency in men. Hypergamy cannot afford to bet all of a woman’s genetic legacy on a guy who has “potential” – they want the proven commodity. This is one reason women look for men older and taller than they are. More importantly, you need a woman who is playing on your team, not against you. And sadly this is the state of marriage promoted by the Feminine Imperative today. Egalitarianism doesn’t promote complementary cooperation, it promotes an adversarial state of competition between husband and wife.
In a purely evolutionary context it’s true; because a woman’s sexual market value – and ultimately her only agency with men – is perishable Hypergamy cannot afford for a woman to waste her time on a ‘good bet‘. This truth is a basic, Darwinistic, rule for women’s sexual strategy.
Despite all the social conventions to make them believe otherwise, women’s hindbrains know that their sexual agency and prime fertility window in life is limited. This creates a degree of urgency in a woman as she gets closer to, or ages past, the Wall. This understanding necessitates tradeoffs, but optimally a woman would prefer not to take chances with her reproductive future – and ultimately her life’s future.
For the more nihilistically inclined men of the ‘sphere, this Darwinistic determinism seems like a reproductive death sentence. If women only fuck the winners at the finish line, and you’re a loser, you may as well give up and go jerk off, right? This defeatism is a core tenet of the Black Pill.
All that said, a lot of people disagree with this assessment:
Jack knows I love him, but he is living with a girl much younger than himself. While I think that’s cool, and proof of Red Pill concept, he is actually living out the point being made here. Statistically, women tend to prefer men who are 5 to 7 years their senior. Another aspect of women’s evolved mental firmware is the natural attraction to older men as prospective long term mates. Women know that it takes men longer to mature into the genuine value that her Hypergamous Filters test for. An older rich man is always more believable than a younger rich man. Women tend to pair with a man their senior because Hypergamy doesn’t need to wait on his potential when he’s already a proven commodity.
Most of the criticism in this thread centers on exaggerating the age of “marriageable men” to the point of absurdity, but women do look for long term security as a prime requisite of the men they hope to pair for life with. There is a root-level presumption in women, correct or not, that an older man will have established the status and resources a woman needs in a long term partner. In fact, our feminine-primary social order shames men for not preparing to assume this role of security provider for women by a certain age (usually 30ish).
Alexander is also a good friend, but I’m going to disagree with half of his assessment. Women don’treadily recognize potential in men. In fact most of them are piss poor at it. This is because they’ve been socially conditioned to focus more on themselves (and exacerbated by their innate solipsism) than be concerned with making a good assessment of men’s potential for future success.
Now, before you think I’m siding with the Hypergamous nihilists, this did give me pause to step back and assess my stance on women reading men’s potentials to provide for their future security. And that last part is the most important because women’s sexual strategy has two parts: Alpha Fucks – short term sexual needs – and Beta Bucks – long term provisioning and security needs. It’s the latter that we’re discussing in this debate.
Women want to fuck the winners in the short term, but they will also assess a man’s potential for the long term.
Hypergamy cannot afford to wait for 100% perfect confirmation of a man’s Alpha status before she has sex with him. This Hypergamic bypass is actually one vulnerability women have with respect to well calibrated Game.
The Existential Fear in women is that their innate, Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.
Making Choices
All of this presumes that a woman is in some way testing for a man’s potential. Even women’s autonomous shit testing is a confirmation of this. So yes, women do look for potential in men. Some better than others. The Hypergamous Filter is an imperfect tool which is exactly why women needed to mystify their feminine intuition in popular understanding. Men had to be kept in the dark as to a woman’s motives because their filters have always been intuitive guesswork. This is a vulnerability that men might exploit – with good Game for instance – if women were ever honest about it.
Not all women can fuck the winners so they have to make calculated bets on men. This is also a reason women rely on social proof and the preselection cues of other women. If other women find a guy to be a ‘good bet’ it provides her a short cut to getting to intimacy. Again, Hypergamy cannot afford to miss out on a socially confirmed ‘good bet’. And yes, this is also a vulnerability in women’s vetting process that men with good Game regularly exploit.
So, the tradeoff is this: when a woman is at her peak sexual market value (SMV) she has the leisure to fuck the winners at the finish line. The more her SMV decays the fewer her options become, and the more likely it is that her necessity requires her to make a ‘bet’ on a man’s future potential. This is the primary reason women opt for the Beta in Waiting around her Epiphany Phase. Necessity forces her to go with good potential.
One of the ways feminism and female-primacy sabotages women’s ability to vet for good potential is in the mythology surrounding their sexual viability as they get older. Social conventions constantly reinforce the false idea that a woman’s SMV is indefinite – and by extension her agency over men should also be indefinite. This is why Blank Slate idealism and Social Constructionism are a preferred mythology for women. Without the Blank Slate a woman would be forced to accept the evolved realities of her sex. The Blank Slate is a prime source of women’s solipsistic denial of her own nature.
Turnkey Men
Do women care about the struggle? Do women ever appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate their own realities? I explored this topic a long time ago in Appreciation and I’m still going with my old assessment, no.
It may be that a man of Rich Cooper’s age, affluence and status only attracts the ‘finish line girls’ because he’s already a made man. He’s an attractive catch because he’s already a proven commodity. Thus, he tends to attract women who are looking for a ‘Turnkey’ man with an established world into which they want to move.
I should also add that most middle aged women, past their sexual prime and well past any long term potential they may’ve had themselves universally look for the ‘Turnkey’ man – once they’re done playing cougar immediately after their divorce. This is another illustration of women’s sexual strategy from the post-Wall side. Alpha Fucks – Beta Bucks never changes, only the context does. Post divorce women go through a second Epiphany Phase right after the divorce. Play cougar and fuck the fun college guys if they can because it’s easy, but be on the lookout for a ‘Turnkey’ winner who’s still ignorant of his Blue Pill conditioning at 45.
Whether it’s a woman in her late 20s or a post-Wall ‘mature woman‘ a man’s struggles to become her ideal is largely irrelevant to her. WHile women are speculators with respect to men it’s the end result of those struggles that’s the operative for her. Almost every woman who disagreed in the Twitter thread above all had some success story of how their brilliant feminine intuition led to them investing in the man they’re so proud to call a husband now. None of them were about how they made a horrible mistake in betting their future on a losing horse. So it’s important to see how the results skew for women.
Women will readily make claims on Relational Equity as an insurance against his leaving her later, once he’s achieved that potential. His struggle and her bearing through it with him is only important in that it produced the positive results she’d hoped for. That ‘dedication’ of seeing it through is her relationship insurance. It’s why women despise and reinforce the “trophy wife” meme. It’s prime indignation to have a man betray her speculation on him by rewarding a younger, hotter, tighter woman at the finish line.
Your struggle is her burden despite you having to bear it under duress of her abandoning you if you failed. Women will never appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to facilitate a reality, her sexual/life strategy, she believes was always her due. You just did what you were supposed to do as a man. Women believe it is their due to pair with a man who is worthy of her social media inflated ego. If that sounds harsh remember that women regularly bemoan the lack of men who are their “equal partners” in both money and education well after their prime SMV years are past.
Finally, the reason the finish line metaphor is apt is because more women than ever are postponing marriage in the expectation that ‘Turnkey’ made men will be waiting and available when they hit 31-33 years old, rather than investing in men with good potential in their early to mid 20s. Doing so would mean sacrificing their peak SMV Party Years when someone like Sheryl Sandberg convinces them to wait for the ‘Right Guy‘. It’s simple pragmatism for a woman not to bet her reproductive future on an unproven commodity so early in life. If she does, and it works out for the best, she’s practically sainted by the Sisterhood for her prudence and sacrifice for him. Behind every great man is a woman, right?
But if she chooses unwisely and her life goes to hell she’s wasted her own potential on a bad bet. Social conventions can mitigate this of course. Men can always be blamed for her downfall, but she’s still saddled with the consequences of that bad bet. And it is exactly these consequences of a bad Hypergamous choice that the Feminine Imperative will bend all its power to legally and socially insure against for women (i.e. legal abortion, child support laws, #MeToo, the Duluth Model of feminism).
All of this is why women are pushing their decision to marry, if at all, back to older and older ages. The average age of first marriage today is 27-28 for women, and the overall marriage rate has been in free-fall for decades now. This is why. This evolved dynamic is conflicting with our present age’s social imperatives for women and the falsehoods they are conditioned to believe about their sex from the earliest ages.
If you liked this topic you can also listen to my discussion about it with Donovan Sharpe here:
One of the primary perspectives of the Red Pill as a praxeology in understanding intersexual dynamics is evolutionary psychology. Even the ‘Classic Era‘ pickup artists referenced evo-psych, often without realizing it, in explaining various aspects of Game. Mystery Method itself was fundamentally rooted in the understanding of women’s (and men’s) evolutionary ‘circuitry’ as a basis for developing modern Game techniques. These were the first forays into women’s evolved mental firmware as a means to understanding the mating game we experience today – and how to use it to our best advantage as men.
However, that was really just the starting point. The Red Pill is much more dynamic than Game applications. As I’ve developed in other essays (and talks), the fundamentals of how the sexes relate with one another follow our biological realities, but also the environmental and social realities of our ancestral past. We’re still using the same circuitry in this era that our ancestors did in the past, only the context has changed. Today I want to explore the influences the legacy of this ancestry places on men and women, and also attempt to answer some questions as to why men and women fear certain aspects of the other’s evolved nature.
In my last article I made a distinction between our ancestral, localized, sexual marketplace versus the globalized SMP we find ourselves in today. This is a good starting point. In our hunter-gatherer beginnings our potential mates either came from within our tribal groups, or, when our tribe managed to overwhelm another tribe, we took war brides to breed with. This is what defined our localized SMP in the past. In fact I’d argue that a deficit in ‘marriageable’ females from within a local tribe was actually a prime motivator for going to war with an outside tribe. This is an important distinction because a lot of those same motivational dynamics are reflected today’s global SMP, and how modern intersexual dynamics have evolved.
A Need for Control
A lot of the need for social control we see coming from women and feminism today is part of an ancestral, evolved desire on the part of women to seek security in a chaotic world. Ever since the advent of unilaterally female-controlled contraception, the Sexual Revolution, and the rise of the Gynocracy, an unprecedented power over the birthing process of the human race has been transferred to only one of the two sexes necessary to perpetuate our species.
“Abortion is Eugenics” (or dysgenics) is a saying I’ve been seeing on Twitter recently. Since the Sexual Revolution we’ve not just ’empowered’ women, but men have systematically ceded any claim to our own paternity while at the same time presumed that women should, by default, be trusted with knowing what’s best for the human birthing process and raising new generations. But it’s not just abortion that is eugenics, it’s also Hypergamy and the dozens of other aspects of intersexual dynamics that western societies just presumes women should know best how to proceed with. We took the women of the Baby Boom generation at their collective word that they’d be more merciful rulers than men if we just gave them the option to be sexual with us. We foolishly believed women would police the worst aspects of their own sexual strategy after we willingly ceded power in exchange for sexual access.
Last month a reader sent me a link to a story about how Ireland had just ceded more of its own authority over their country’s reproductive fate to women by legalizing abortion. The very Catholic island of Celts has made Hypergamy its ruling motive after many years of feminist pressure. Irish women celebrated the decision to allow them to kill their unwanted children. In fact many Catholic countries all over South America are in various stages of legalizing abortion. But the sentiment about abortion in this decade is no longer one of it being a necessary evil as it was in the time of Roe vs. Wade. Today it’s cause for overt celebration among women and men alike.
Before I get run up the flagpole by critics here, my opposition to abortion does not (primarily) stem from moral reasons, it stems from objectively following the power dynamics involved and the latent purpose for abortion. Abortion is eugenics; it is the ceding of any claim to influencing paternity that men may have had for the past 100,000 years of human evolution.
So, why will women fight tooth and nail for the ‘right’ to free and safe abortion over the course of multiple generations? Why is the right to end her (and the father’s) child’s life in utero such an imperative for women?
Ask women and the feminist boilerplate answer is always “My body, my choice!“, but why is it so important to cut men entirely out of the reproductive process? What is the motivation for legally disenfranchising men from even 1% of a say in a child that is at least half his genetic legacy? This is also one of the greatest of offenses to women; that a man might have some control over women’s bodies. “Hands off my uterus!” that too is another rallying cry, but why is it such an abhorrent thought that men might have some influence in who gets born and who doesn’t?
Existential Fears & The Hypergamous Filter
There are certain fears that human beings are born with. Our evolved mental firmware is highly attuned to our own survival. That may seem simple, but we’re born with certain instinctual reservations about our environments. Snakes, spider, animals with sharp pointy natural weapons are critters we don’t have to be taught to stay away from. That fear, that caution, is part of our onboard system when we leave the womb. The same is generally true of heights and tight confined places. We also have a very defined natural instinct for revulsion. There’s actually an entire area of evo-psych study devoted to the human revulsion response. Part of our innate firmware makes us disgusted by feces, dead carcasses and putrefaction. If it’s unsanitary and might make us sick or diseased ourselves we’re repelled by it – unless we’re conditioned not to be.
The above are some pretty basic existential fears most people have. We have evolved inbuilt firmware that does its best to keep us alive, but there are other, more complex fears and accompanying revulsions that look out for our wellbeing too. The one I want to focus on here is what the Red Pill refers to as the Hypergamous Filter. That’s kind of a loose way of saying women have innate revulsions and distrusts of men who would otherwise like nothing better than the experience of having sex with them.
From our ancestral past right up until the Sexual Revolution in the mid-1960s a woman having sex was fraught with dangerous consequences. For about 100,000 years evolution wrote a breeding subroutine into the hindbrains of every human female – always doubt a man’s quality.
The Hypergamous Filter has many ways of determining quality. Last week I mentioned that women universally use a man’s height as a physical qualification for arousal/attraction. That’s one obvious criteria; check the height box, move on. I have mentioned in other essays that Hypergamy is always based on doubt – doubt that a man is the best she can do – but also the doubt as to whether that guy will stick around and stay committed to parental investment.
This Hypergamous doubt is an existential fear for women.
“What if he’s faking it?” “What if he really isn’t who he claims to be?” “Will he stick around after sex?” “What if I get pregnant with his child?”
These questions are asked beneath a woman’s cognition, and as such they comprise part of an unconscious Hypergamous filtering process that is linked to both the revulsion instinct and genuine sexual desire. This is a risk aversion instinct that has very real, life-threatening, implications to it. This is a self-preservation skepticism on the limbic level and it is the primary existential fear a woman has. And women will do anything to alleviate it. Women will do anything to ensure they have failsafes against the life-threatening consequences of having that Hypergamous filter deceived.
Why is there a ceaseless effort to criminalize PUAs approaching women on the street? Because it implies a deception of a Beta male impersonating an Alpha male for the purposes of sex. This is a crime against the Existential Fear.
The Existential Fear in women is that their innate Hypergamous Filter, their Feminine Intuition, might be fooled, and by being fooled she may either die or have her reproductive potential compromised for her lifetime by bearing and raising the child of man who is a suboptimal Hypergamous choice for her – a man who exerted his will over her Hypergamous choosing filters.
In our ancestral past, pregnancy, and/or parental investment, could be a death sentence if a woman’s Hypergamous Filter wasn’t supremely sensitive and obsessively refined. The Hypergamous Filter also evolved as a contingency against men’s biological imperative – unlimited access to unlimited sexuality.
That’s not to say pair bonding wasn’t a feature of our ancestral past, it was also a foundational aspect of mating, but it is to say that a man’s investment cost was much lower than a woman’s when it came to reproduction. That’s simple biology defining a sexual strategy for men. Pair bonding would usually last as long as it took for that child to reach survival autonomy (4-7 years). And that’s not accounting for men’s proclivity to seek extra-pair mating opportunities while pair bonded. I’ll explore this in the next essay.
Fast Times in the 21st Century
Now lets fast forward the Existential Fear and the Hypergamous Filter up to the last 60 years or so. One of the most socially destabilizing inventions of the 20th century was affording women the option to invest herself, or not, in the choices she made about her own sexuality. Unilaterally female-controlled birth control was effectively the greatest Hypergamous failsafe ever invented. It released women from the responsibility of a bad Hypergamous decision. But what it didn’t do is erase that filtering process from women’s psyches. We take it for granted, but HBC (hormonal birth control) unfettered Hypergamy for the first time in human history. And as a result men ceded more and more of their paternal interests in the human reproductive process over to women in exchange for the promise of pregnancy-free sexual access. Ostensibly, unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. Needless to say this also exacerbated women’s sexual strategy to tactically filter out unwanted males and emphasize sex with chosen males.
But the greatest sexual bargain of the 20th-21st century catastrophically backfired on men because, for all the boons of HBC, it couldn’t rewrite 100,000 years of evolved Hypergamy. And, if anything, it exacerbated women’s desire for failsafe’s against the Existential Fear of having her Hypergamous Filter fooled by deceptive men.
The social and political power men ceded to women in the wake of the Sexual Revolution has been used for one unitary purpose by women – to ensure against the Existential Fear. Why is abortion now something to be celebrated rather than mournfully accepted as necessary evil of this century? Because it alleviates the Existential Fear of bearing and raising the product of a bad Hypergamous choice.
Why did no fault divorce morph into the misandrous divorce industry we have today? It alleviates the Existential Fear. A one-sided divorce industry ensures security, support and resources that would’ve otherwise been her undoing in times before the pill. Why are the stigmas of single motherhood that existed just 60 years ago now replaced with rewarding women for their choice to become single mothers? It alleviates the Existential Fear.
When women were afforded unprecedented power and influence their first order of business was directed at changing laws to alleviate the Existential Fear. Virtually every social change, every political change, every egoistic “you go gurl” self-entitlement since the Sexual Revolution that women have initiated has had one latent purpose – alleviating the Existential Fear.
And finally, why is it that Red Pill awareness, practicing Game, a united Manosphere, and yes, even MGTOW, are perceived as an existential threat to the Feminine Imperative?
Because it all threatens to upset the security that women believe they’re entitled to in creating failsafes for women’s Existential Fear. Exposing the machinations of the Blue Pill and teaching men to unplug from a system that makes them a utility in a female-correct social order is an intolerable threat to women’s security from the Existential Fear, but it is also a new challenge the power base that security is built upon.
Before I launch into today’s essay I want to throw out a few caveats. The first is a reminder of my long-time policy of dealing with issues of race, politics and religion; and that’s to say it’s my practice leave these topics to other blogs and other writers unless those topics cross over into intersexual dynamics that are pertinent to Red Pill awareness. I feel like I need make this clear as I’m going to get into issues of race and how intersexual relations are modified by these issues today. It’s always been my belief that the shared input and related experiences of men of all races, cultures and nationality is one of the greatest strengths of the Red Pill. So it’s with this in mind that I think we need to address some of these experiences.
What got me on to this topic was the video I’ve linked above here today. As most of you know I’m not a proponent of the idea of a “Black Pill”. That is the ‘black’ part of understanding the harsh realities of what Red Pill awareness opens men’s eyes to. Accepting the uglier nature of intersexual dynamics and how it plays into today’s sexual marketplace is often something that drives some men to a kind of despondency. It can be really depressing to have Red Pill awareness destroy your long-held Blue Pill ideals – particularly when those ideals helped to give you a sense of hope in spite of your instincts telling you something different.
When I was at the 21 Convention last October I had a discussion with Dr. Shawn Smith about the nature of the Blue Pill. His question to me was something like “Don’t you think that some guys need at least a little Blue Pill to keep them going?” I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ve actually touched on this in a few prior essays. In essence, it should follow that human beings can’t handle too much ‘reality’. This is why we look for escapisms and turn our otherwise rational minds to something like faith. The human mind tries to remain hopeful in the face of dire realities; which also follows evolutionarily. Those humans who stayed optimistic in the face of crushing reality didn’t off themselves in despair and consequently passed on their genes.
That’s the nuts & bolts of it (yes, I know there’s more to it), but is this a feature or a bug in today’s realities? Willfully choosing conscious ignorance while your rational mind knows the truth can lead to despondency and depression. It’s the observer effect – observing a process will change that process – only, you’re playing that game with yourself. So, is a little bit of our Blue Pill conditioning a good thing if it gives us a hope that keeps us alive?
I’d have to say no. Because once you unplug from the Matrix going back to that ignorance is really impossible. Something in your hindbrain knows the truth about the fantasy you construct for yourself. Again, it’s playing the observer effect on oneself. And it’s just this simple truth that makes a lot of guys who are unprepared for the anger and nihilism that comes from Red Pill disillusionment to come up with things like a ‘Black Pill’.
But this essay isn’t about dealing with that despondency. I’ve already written that essay inA New Hope. This essay is about one of those ugly truths that Red Pill men have to evolve new adaptations for. You see, there is no ‘Black Pill’ – there is only the space in between a man dealing with his despondency about a harsh Red Pill truth and his crossing the abyss to accepting that truth and doing something with that information to better his life.
Local vs Global SMP
Watch the video I linked here. It’s by Black Pill 101, a channel that specializes in exactly the harsh realities of Red Pill awareness I mentioned above. It doesn’t pull any punches and for that I’m in agreement with them. Men deserve the unvarnished truth; without it they founder. This video outlines the innate difficulties Asian men face in the Global Sexual Marketplace. One of the most common requests I get for counseling is from Asian or Indian men asking me to help them improve their game. Many of them believe I have some Game solution to their getting laid with an SMV 6-7 they know from work. Many of them think they might have a chance with a modest SMV 6 if they either had some specialized technique or they could simply earn another $250K annual salary.
I honestly feel for Asian/Indian men in this respect. When I read about Aziz Ansari’s #MeToo’ing I read with morbid fascination watching his story play out with another ‘cute’ (SMV6-7) white girl. This is the stereotypical interaction. With my Red Pill Lens I saw a girl conflicted by her attraction to Aziz’s social proof (celebrity) with her visceral reaction to becoming intimate with a guy she simply wasn’t all that aroused by. This is just my personal experience, but I’ve counseled Indian (and a few Asian) men who all share a very similar frustration – they really want to get with a white American girl but they are sexually invisible to the vast majority of them.
Black Pill 101 lays out this frustration from Asian men’s perspective. If you happen to be an Asian or Indian man I’d encourage you to add your own experiences in the comments here. But from my own interactions with these men the story revolves around their investment in locking down an average white woman. They aren’t looking to spin plates. They want an LTR with a girl and most of them tend to fixate on one they know from work or a friend of a friend. Maybe that lean towards monogamy is a cultural thing, but they all seem to set their sights on the average, seemingly attainable, American girl. And almost universally they are relegated to the ‘friend zone’ or the go ‘Black Pill’ in frustration.
I’m going to look at the bigger picture here while I try to answer why this is so commonly case. In our tribalist, hunter/gatherer ancestral past our naturalistic sexual marketplace was limited to what a very localized group of individuals had to offer. We might’ve lived in groups of 100-150 ‘natives’ of our tribe. In that tribe maybe there were 10-12 females who would’ve been potential breeding/pairing candidates for a young man.
There are general arousal cues that are universal to all humans across cultures. Natural cross-culture beauty standards is something that’s been widely studied since the mid seventies – globalized beauty standards and physical prowess cues – however, the context in which those cues are expressed are (were) buffered by whatever that localized sexual marketplace (SMP) can realistically manifest.
Example: Height in men something universally agreed on as attractive/arousing for women. This is a globalized attraction cue in women. Girls all over the world overwhelmingly prefer a man to be taller than they are. This is an evolved preference because the survival implications are that a taller man is (generally) an easily identifiable aspect of physical prowess. Height implies a capacity for protection, an imposed dominance, and is a signifier of presence in a male dominance hierarchy. Whether this is the actual case is irrelevant. All that matters is that a woman’s preference for tall men to breed and pair with.
The average height of a Filipino man is around 5′ 4″. Prior to the Spanish colonizing the Philippines all Filipino women knew of men was that 5′ 4″ man. And to the 4′ 11″ average Filipino woman that was attractive. A 5′ 6-7″ man was a giant by the local SMP standards.
But the global SMP standards are simply ‘taller men are more attractive’. So when the Spanish/Western peoples came to the island it introduced Filipinas to a new standard: the 5′ 7″ Spanish man. Now the globalized SMP began to modify the local SMP. Then, eventually, along came the first 6 foot tall Caucasian European guy. Then the first Black man, etc. Gradually the localized (previously tribally-defined) SMP to include the new possibilities of women breeding/pairing with men outside their own tribe.
Localized Contingencies
This is only one easy example of how a globalized standard of what defines the whole of the sexual marketplace redefines, and often replaces, the localized standard of attraction/arousal for women. There are many other ways this out-tribe influence introduces a new global standard for the SMP. This can include force as well as by invitation or local social norms shifting to accommodate the new global SMP. When a tribe is conquered by another it forcibly alters the other’s sexual marketplace standards (War Brides).
As such, societal standards shifted to favor social practices that defended the local SMP integrity of that tribe. This is nothing groundbreaking – tribalist humans have been creating social and religious contingencies to buffer agains women’s Hypergamy, and to solidify the integrity of the local SMP for millennia. And these norms affect both the men and the women of that culture.
Cultural norms that forbid intermarriage (really interbreeding) of women with out-tribe men are common, but there are also:
Prearranged Marriages
Guarding/Prioritizing Virginity
Buffering Against Hypergamy
Socially Enforced Monogamy
I should also add that there is the Samson Contingency which is a buffer set against (powerful) men taking out-tribe wives. It may’ve been acceptable to have sex with out-tribe women (rape or prostitution), but for the integrity of the tribe, that man was only to form lasting bonds (via marriage) from within that tribe. This kept vital resources within that tribe.
A Modern SMP
In an upcoming essay I’ll be exploring the deeper reasons why Blank-Slate Equalism is so difficult to purge from our present-day social order. However, I need to detail a bit of this now. We live in a feminine-primary social order (the Gynocracy), but without the Blank-Slate much of the preconception of it collapse. One reason Blank-Slate Equalism remains a social norm (despite a world of empirical proof that destroys it) is because it serves to disguise the ugly realities of a sexual marketplace defined by human evolution. Particularly so in an age of expanding SMP globalism. It’s not just culture, politics, ideology and socioeconomic considerations that are tied to globalization; a global scale sexual marketplace is following among all of this.
In the age of global mass communication our localized (tribal) SMPs are replaced with a global standard. That global standard destroys the old local SMPs, but it also selects-out the men who don’t measure up to its standards. This is something I think most MGTOWs and all Incels instinctively know: according to the global SMP selection criteria there are some men who will simply not be selected-for. If the Black Pill 101 video about how Asian women don’t select Asian men for mating opportunities is any indicator, I think Asian and Indian men are facing this head on today.
Now, I expect the first rebuttal to this proposition will be that the present, global SMP is a reflection of Westernized beauty standards and horribly distorted expectations. Asian/Indian men seem to want nothing to do with the native women who are ruthless in expressing that they want nothing to do with them. What globalized demographic is really left for these men? The same might be said about socially inept white men seeking an easier sexual marketplace in Asian women. All of this is simple deductive adaptations men will naturally resort to when it comes to solving the problems of sex and reproduction.
I’m totally accepting that there is a societal influence in all of this. However, I think the incentives to look into the opportunities that a larger global SMP offers is still based on Darwinistic principles. Even Western romanticism is still founded upon natural female arousal cues that define the larger SMP. The global SMP is rooted in the naturalistic, evolved (not socialized) elements that trigger arousal, incentivize parental investment and play off women’s dualistic sexual strategies (Alpha Seed/Beta Need).
The Global Social Order
Finally, I want to point out that while our expanding globalization has given rise to a global SMP, that expansion is rooted in Gynocentrism. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution an unfettered, unconstrained Hypergamy has dictated this global sexual marketplace. The world-scale SMP is driven by women’s prime-directives, not men’s. As women are afforded more authority to direct society, their reproductive interests are what defines the global SMP. And all unchecked and unbalanced by any male interests. This is important to consider when we see the old tribalist, local SMPs decay to extinction. The checks and balances on Hypergamy that existed in the past were the creations of a smaller localized SMP. One that was familiar with the risks and results of allowing men and women of that particular tribe to reproduced without thought to the integrity of the tribe.
This is why Blank-Slate Equalism, as big a lie as it is, is so necessary to maintaining the unfettered Hypergamy that the global SMP is based on. Without its social constructionism, without its presumption of coequal agency, the Gynocentric power base is replaced with conventional, evolved gender norms that would favor men’s influence in the global SMP. Gynocentrism needs Blank-Slate Equalism to disguise its authority and influence. Notions of ‘Equal Value’ and social constructionism are needed to cover the ugly Darwinsim that unchecked Hypergamy thrives in.
One thing I’m always asked by guys is “How do I switch from a Beta loser to and Alpha winner?” There’s always a lot involved in how a guy can transition from one state to another and to today’s generation of low SMV men if you don’t have their immediate solution you must be selling snake oil. Most guys want a magic formula. They want a mantra to repeat or a set of steps to follow that will shift them from Beta virgin into Alpha cad.
Well, maybe not ‘cad’. Most guys still cling to their Blue Pill hopes and attempt to see what the Red Pill presents to them as a key to getting to their Dream Girls. As I’ve pointed out countless times, a majority of men’s (80% Beta) only real problem is finding that one girl that fits their sexual strategy as ideal. In The New Polyandry I touched on this a bit; the Blue Pill conditions men to expect the old social contract of monogamy to be his default setting, even if he’s a high SMV man and could actually pursue a non-exclusive sexual strategy.
However, real change takes time. I know that sounds cliché, but part of that change almost always involves some kind of reassessment of one’s life during that process – and that’s always hard for the TL;DR generation. One of the more daunting aspects of unplugging a guy from the Matrix is that the goals he had while he was Blue Pill conditioned and ‘plugged in’ tend to fall away once he’s shifted to a Red Pill aware mentality. The “girl of his dreams” loses her veneer of desirability. The previous goal state that was defined for him by Blue Pill ideals is no longer the end he wished to achieve when he started his transformation. I think this is sometimes the hardest aspect of ‘awakening’ for guys to accept. Anger at oneself for wasting so much time and so much potential for not grasping the truth sooner is part of that process. So too is a sense of helplessness, if not hopelessness, that accompanies the realization that a man might not have what it takes (at the moment) to achieve what he’d like in life in this Red Pill paradigm.
There was a time when I was 21-22 and I first began playing in the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80s that I had one such transformation. By the time I was 20 I’d already been put through the wringer by my cheating ex-girlfriend from high school – who I was sure would be my eventual wife. I was Beta in the extreme, and thoroughly Blue Pill conditioned at that point, but I was going through what I termed the “Break Phase” in the timeline I created in Preventive Medicine.It took me about a year to shift from that mental state to one of making myself my Mental Point of Origin. Once I had – and once I’d decided I wanted to experience sex with hotter women – I found that through trial and error I could direct the path of what my personality would be, and what was going to be acceptable or not. I’d been emancipated from the expectations of being a Nice Guy as Game to essentially not caring what I was supposed to be doing to placate women. I figured out what worked for me.
I finally got into a ‘real band’ at 21. I played clubs every Friday or Saturday night between the ages of 21 and 25. I honestly only left my parents home because it was less convenient to bang a girl I’d met at a club on the weekend. But with that new identity came a new access to sex with women I could only fantasize about in a Hustler or a Penthouse magazine. The pivotal point came when one of my girlfriends (I had a rotation of about 4-5) was a bonafide swimsuit model. I thought I had finally ‘arrived’ at that point because my head was still measuring success by what the 15 year old version of myself thought was ‘it’. She was hotter and more fun in bed than any girl I’d gotten with previously. But my mindset was still mired in my Blue Pill ideals. According to those ideals she was the goal. And she was, until I managed to pull a centerfold who happened to live near me in Southern California. (Ask me about it sometime).
The point I’m making here is that a guy has to reconsider what his conditioning has taught him he should consider success based on the foundation of that conditioning. It wasn’t so much that I’d made myself my Mental Point of Origin, rather it was that I simply wanted to make the most of that time of my life and to do so meant that I needed to change my mind about who I wanted to be. I had transitioned from one personality to another and I liked it. I was rewarded with women’s genuine sexual desire and this served to further reinforce that new me as the genuine me. This begs the question, what is authenticity when it comes to ‘just being yourself’?
Later in my twenties I made the dangerous decision to involve myself with a woman who was clinically, psychologically disturbed. Of course she never wore a t-shirt that said “I’m insane” and I had wound myself up in her neurosis over the course of about four years. You can read the details about this relationship in Borderline Personality Disorder, but one thing I don’t get into in that essay is how I willingly became someone else – fundamentally changing my personality again – in order to solve this girl’s problems because I believed that who I was when we met was so flawed it was causing her neurosis. Now granted, I didn’t understand what I was involving myself in, but my point again is that who I was had shifted, but my core, internalized belief set was still very much informed by my Blue Pill conditioning.
People who ride hard on the Personal Responsibility belief love to think that something so damaging must be self apparent. No one’s really a victim because they should’ve seen it coming – as they believe they would – but the reality is we want to believe that the Blue Pill ideals we’ve been raised with can come true. We want to believe that the ideals we internalized since five years old and on into our adulthood are in fact a possibility. In all my writing I make the case for a need to unplug oneself from the Matrix that is this Blue Pill conditioning. That’s what Red Pill awareness is; an awareness of the false existence we used to live out according to what others – often well meaning others – would like us to believe is true, because they want it to be true for themselves too. When I allowed myself to change my personality for my BPD girlfriend I had no idea that I was even doing so because I wanted to believe that she represented the ideal that the Blue Pill had raised me to think would be possible. A woman who fucked like a pornstar and looked like a swimsuit model and “loved me as much as I loved her”. And this came after I’d already check a swimsuit model and a centerfold off of my bucket list.
Personality is malleable, in fact it’s so malleable we often don’t realize we’re forging a new one. In both of these instances I’ve described that shift in personality was not by my conscious choice. I knew what I wanted to do; even in the worst case scenario with my BPD my shift was prompted because I thought if I changed my personality her own psychosis would resolve itself. My Blue Pill conditioning exacerbated this because it always teaches men that any problem a woman has with a guy is due to his own lack of investment, support, sensitivity or not giving enough of themselves. This is a very damning aspect of the Blue Pill and it’s also one that guys will reinforce in themselves and with other men because they believe their sacrifices are what women appreciate.
Beneath all this was my Blue Pill subroutine manifesting itself. Hell, even when I was on top of my game in the Hollywood clubs I still wanted to find a ‘good girl’ to be my girlfriend. I had changed my personality to succeed in getting what I wanted, but my root programming was still Blue Pill. Many a famous PUA has come to the conundrum of trying to make his Blue Pill idealistic dreams come true because he learned how to reliably ‘get the girl’. Good Game doesn’t make a man Red Pill aware. It’s certainly the gateway to understanding women’s nature and the nature of intersexual dynamics, but killing the Beta is a long term project.
So how do you shift from Beta Nice Guy to Alpha Cad? These are euphemisms usually meant to disparage the whole idea of changing yourself into something better. Most people don’t have it within themselves to even have the insight to think they’d ever want to change their nature. It’s easier to trot out “Just be yourself” when someone has that introspect. People don’t want you to change. Your predictability gives them comfort. You’re an easy element to deal with so they think that if you act in some new way you’re not being authentic. You’re a wannabe, a poseur, and they need you to behave predictably because it gives them a sense of control over you. Others want to pigeonhole you. They want to categorize you into immutable personality types or astrological designations that make them feel better about dealing with you. Again, if they can categorize you, if they can make you believe they know the truth of it, you’re just that much easier to control. Humans have a need to see patterns in their environment. The world is a chaotic place so it comes natural to us to think we can set some kind of willful order on it.
Eventually, after I’d finally torn myself away from my BPD girlfriend I returned to that Alpha personality that had been so successful for me, only this time I had finally realized that I needed to make myself my Mental Point of Origin. I looked back on all the women I’d applied the Blue Pill set of rules, ideals, hopes and dreams with. I was 26 and had nothing to show for all the potential that people kept telling me I had. I had done everything according to the old set of books; I was supportive, kind, sensitive, uplifting and empowering to every woman I’d been in a relationship with because I thought that was what would make me desirable. But as I looked back on all of that I realized I had done so at the expense of myself – at the expense of my potential. That sacrifice will alwayslead a man to his own destruction. I thank God it didn’t lead to my own.
It was at this point in my life that I realized that I had to unfuck my life and that meant a radical reimagining of who I wanted to be going forward. I get asked a lot about how I became unplugged and my usual answer is that it was a gradual process. This is true, but it was at this point I had to reject all the lies and idealistic fantasies that I’d been raised to believe in; to invest my ego in. I made a point to spell out to guys in A New Hope that you will never achieve Blue Pill ideals with Red Pill awareness and this is where that comes from. Unplugging, killing the Beta, reinventing who you are is not only possible for you, but it’s necessary to sustain you in a life of your own imagining. This doesn’t happen just by reading a book or going to a seminar, ultimately you have to live it and internalize that new you. You have to do this in spite of friends who want you to be ‘authentic’ and stay the old you so you’ll be comfortable to them.
All of this takes time, persistence and introspection, but it starts with an act of will on your part. You will only get what you have gotten if you keep doing what you have done. I can teach you Game. I can teach you the habits that would make others believe you’re a self-sufficient Alpha success, but only you can change your authentic personality. This is where a lot of guys lose the trail when it comes to being Red Pill aware. They read my books, they open their eyes, but they don’t know what to do with the information. Rich Cooper once told me that reading The Rational Male was like drinking from a firehose. There’s a lot to digest and a lot to confront with regards to how that information shows you, convicts you, of how you lived your life up to this point. But what do you do with it? Knowing is half the battle, the other half is action. The other half is implementing that knowledge to your own advantage.
Ever since I started writing I’ve always referred to myself as a Lesser Alpha. Some people think that’s self-deprecating, others think I’m just a married Beta with delusions of Alpha. Whatever. Either way, I’m a guy who took this knowledge and applied it to serve my own best interests and forge a truly authentic personality based on what I understand of what we call the Red Pill. I created a me of my own volition based on a realistic understanding of intersexual dynamics, but also of a better understanding of myself in that Red Pill paradigm as a result of it.
So, who is the real you? Who decides what your real personality is and what is authentic for you? What is the estimate that your personality is based on? I get sick of hearing women and men talk about finding themselves. Women love the idea of a journey of self discovery. This is a fantasy of Blue Pill idealism meant to, again, keep one in a state of helplessness and hypoagency. Women use this garbage as a convenient rationale meant to excuse their past bad decisions.
Red Pill men don’t find themselves, they build themselves.
They forge themselves into a creation of their own choosing based on realistic assessments of themselves, their conditions and the world that challenges them not to build himself. I wrote this essay to encourage you, but also to warn you that this building takes time, and you will meet all manner of resistance to the masculine project that is you.
In October of 2017 I wrote an essay titled Male Control. It was actually the second time I’d covered the topic of how a feminine-primary social order (a Gynocracy if you will) seeks to control its male population by deliberately sowing confusion about masculinity into multiple generations of boys, and later men. Prior to this I’d written another seminal post titled Remove the Man in which is outlined the ways in which that Gynocracy makes efforts to systematically remove men from our language. Usually this takes the form of ‘erasing’ the letters m-a-n from the English language wherever it appears in an official capacity (i.e. state bylaws, universities, legislative documents), but also in gender-neutral translations of the Bible now. The only real constant in all of this the deliberate erasure of ‘man’ and/or ‘men’ from that language.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
I wrote Remove the Man back in 2013 in response to one such effort by the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who passed a bill to make state laws gender neutral. The effort actually began in 2007, but in 2019 a simple search for ‘gender neutral language’ will show you the extent and scope of this much larger effort. This essay served and the starting point for a larger awareness for me – that of the push to remove men and masculinity from more than just our language, but rather the removal of all things conventionally masculine. As Orwell states here, the thought, the thinking, about masculinity and men is the focus of the corruption.
But language is only one way that the concept of what is masculine is distorted for a purpose.
Today the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with boys/men’s. In it the concept of conventional (traditional) masculinity is outlined as ‘harmful’.
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.
It would be easy to refute this basic presumption with countless examples of how all of these traits, most of which are innate parts of men’s evolved mental firmware, have been key in developing a civil society as well as healthy masculine identity. But what we’re seeing in this is a corruption of language that is leading to the standardization of the corruption of thought.
Stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are evolved aspects of the male psyche that have served men for millennia. To the Red Pill aware man this is self-evident. What is less evident is the new context in which these ‘educated’ men apply meaning to these terms. Academia has been so thoroughly assimilated by the Feminine Imperative that the men making official decrees about psychological principle no longer have the insight to understand that their perspective is informed by ‘female-correct‘ thought.
There are two presumptions being made here:
First, is that men’s predisposition for stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression are the results of a patriarchal societies adverse influence on boys and men.
The belief is founded in blank-slate social constructionism. I addressed this in Old Lies:
They hate the very idea that a boy might act in accordance with an inborn masculine proclivity. They hate the idea that a boy might learn to be tough and resilient at the expense of a vulnerability (weakness) because it contradicts the equalist belief set. They hate the idea that boys and girls have innately, biologically, different ways of dealing with emotions that don’t align with their belief in a blank-slate. To force them to accept this would be to force them to abandon deeply ego-invested beliefs that they themselves had conditioned into them by the same feminine-primary education.
Boys don’t naturally emote like girls, but when they refuse to align with the female-correct way of emoting we say that some patriarchal macho man, somewhere, in some movie, in some song, in some household taught that kid not to feel. He somehow learned that allowing his emotions to rule over him, to be vulnerable, to prioritize his feelings above his sense of rational self is what it actually is – a weakness that in our evolutionary past was far likelier to get him killed than to earn the praise of his equalist teachers.
Boys are simply not as emotional as girls – our brains did not evolve that way – but because we value the feminine above the masculine today we say this kid is doing it wrong. We say he learned to be an asshole from his macho dad or he learned to love firearms because of the latest rap song or a toxically masculine society that doesn’t exist.
Now, granted, the men responsible for these psychological practices and their standardization tried to walk back the idea that conventionally masculine attributes weren’t “all bad”. This is expected because an aspect like stoicism can still be considered useful to a feminine-primary social order. It’s just that the larger social order wants the aspects of masculinity to manifest on its own terms and serving a female-centric utility.
A determined hard-driving man is what they want when the floodwaters start rising and women need to be carried to safety, but when a man uses that aspect of his masculine nature for his exclusive benefit, or a purpose that conflicts with feminine primacy, that’s when the aspect is defined as dangerous. However, the overall preconception is that there is some sinister influence of an old-school chauvinistic patriarchy teaching boys and men to be ‘toxically’ masculine. I addressed this fallacy in Old Lies, but this is one more example of how fem-centric society must cling to a clichéd parody of how boys must be being taught in order to cover the fact that boys are raised like defective girls today.
What is glaringly ignored is that these traits, and many more, are endemic parts of men’s evolved nature. Our emotional natures are not the same as that of women’s. Our brains are not wired the same as women’s. Men and women process emotions differently from the other, particularly negative emotions. This is a feature of the male brain, not a bug. But today the APA has decided unilaterally that men’s way of dealing with emotion is “incorrect”. Incorrect because the only correct way would be one that aligns with the women’s interests they’ve been conditioned to believe are only beneficial to larger society. To the APA, masculinity itself is a bug.
Secondly, this deliberate misconception relies entirely on social constructionism and almost entirely ignores the biological factors that contribute to masculine gender identity. I’m presently working on another essay that explores the dependency on blank-slate equalism as the basis for virtually every presumption the mainstream has about gender identity, so I don’t want to give too much away. However, the whole presumption of gender in humanist psychology depends on the falsehood that men and women are functionally coequal.
Accepting that failed notion of blank-slate equalism is what scaffolds the entire premise of this standard of masculinity. Masculinity is something that cannot be removed from society if its source is something that is unique to only men by virtue of their biology. They cannot ensure female-correctness as a societal standard if men and women are different. People like those in authority at the APA know this. It’s why merely talking about those innate gender differences is deemed a hate-crime today. Inspiring doubt in the blank-slate standard risks destroying the scaffolding for all their preconceptions of gender.
In the end this is one more, I think significant, effort in removing men and conventional masculinity from our collective thought. This standardization of how men should be ‘dealt with’ in therapy, or colored by in just considering men’s role in psychology is an ideological power play. Modern psychology officially doesn’t ‘get men’ anymore.
The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) will now officially list ‘traditional’ masculinity as a hazard or a disorder for male humans. They can’t be called ‘men’ because that would gender them.
I read a few Twitter threads about this change to the DSM and I think they’re worth reading to get a better grasp of the gravity of this standardization:
The link below will take you to the new APA guidance document that defines "traditional masculinity" as unhealthy for men. I encourage you to read it and to evaluate its arguments & suggestions. This matters and I will explain why. https://t.co/1KAwizWfQy
On December 29th, 2018 I made some pretty ominous predictions about what I thought the manosphere and men in general could expect to see in 2019-2020. We’re not eve a week into the first month and a lot of what I expected is starting to develop. The gender divide is now a gender ‘Cold War’ and going forward I see the polarization between the sexes becoming even uglier than the 2016 election cycle.
This issuance from the APA is a foundation for how psychology – our Lords of the new church – will define what is acceptably ‘male’ and what is not. Furthermore it defines what aspects of masculinity is officially hazardous based on social constructionism and science denial.
Going forward I think Red Pill aware men will have to view mainstream psychology with even more suspicion than we do already. My Red Man Group colleague, Rian Stone, has mentioned that this equivalent of a “Papal Bull” from the APA represents a call to action for the Red Pill community and the manosphere in general to help men understand that conventional, “traditional” masculinity is not a disorder.
The Red Pill saves lives. I can only see this standardization as a net negative for men who are already five times more likely than women to take their own lives. Men seeking psychological help will only find their problems compounded by psychologists trained to believe masculinity is inherently toxic. And as a result we need to be prepared to help our Blue Pill brothers unplug and show them their inherent worth as conventionally masculine men.
About five years ago I wrote a post called You Need Sex. In that essay I asserted a few key points about the importance of a healthy sex life for men. If I’m honest I kind of expected most of the reactions I got from that post and even now it remains one of my more contentious pieces. Even when I was in my Blue Pill youth in the 80s and 90s I’d run across the guys who always wanted to deemphasize sex in some reverse-psychology effort to get women to believe that they were deeper than the guys who just wanted to bang them. These were the guys who’d listen to a girl say something like, “I don’t see why sex is such a big deal to guys” or “Am I just a piece of ass to you?“, they’d take it to heart, and then construct some kind of personalized Game around how they respected women and wanted to really relate with them ‘beyond the sexual’.
That’s exactly what the Blue Pill teaches guys; they should always defer to, empathize with and identify with the feminine. This is Blue Pill conditioning at its most basic. It is a boy/man’s imperative to place women’s existence as more important than his own – and with men’s innate protection instincts for women this Blue Pill training is key to establishing a gynocratic social order.
But guys also have to find some way to set themselves apart from the competition in the Blue Pill sexual marketplace. They have to find someway to make themselves unique in how unlike ‘typical‘ guys they are. The miscalculation is, of course, the belief that the more alike, the more they identify, with (as?) women the likelier a woman would select them for intimacy and reproduction.
Men are natural problem solvers. It’s part of our evolved firmware to look for solutions to challenges in our environment. This makes us constructive, creative, often innovative and more ready to take risks. It also makes us competitive and that competitiveness extends to the sexual marketplace. So it’s not too much of a stretch to see how Blue Pill conditioned young men might look for creative ways to outdo one another in the ‘female-identification olympics.
One way this identification competition gets pushed to new heights is in how well a man might better devalue and abase his own sexual strategy to better accommodate that of the woman he believes will appreciate it. Taken to the binary extreme this means finding some way to devalue all men’s sexual natures. What better way to set oneself apart from other guys than to not be a guy? What better way to empathize with the feminine than to tear down the gender women say they despise?
Does all that seem kind of ridiculous? I used to think this way when I was younger. There was a time I might’ve even jumped on the “masculinity is toxic/confusing/outdated/outmoded/ridiculous” train because I truly believed it was the way to a woman’s vagina heart and mind. Even in the 80s and 90s this was a popular misconception. It wasn’t until I’d been through my first bad breakup that I realized the truth. Then I had nothing to lose by making myself more important than the women I was idealizing and behold! The women I wanted, wanted me – sexually to be sure, but they wanted to lock me down in commitment.
In my 20s I had unwittingly shifted from one sexual strategy to another, and I liked the change. It didn’t happen overnight. I had to learn to adopt the attitude, the swagger, the character that would get me laid, but I found that the most important part of playing the game well was putting my own desires well above those of any woman.
Suddenly I discovered I could easily nail the girls I could only jerk off to in my younger years. I can remember the time I first had sex with a girl I thought was the apex of hotness when I was in my teens. She was the best friend of the girlfriend of the drummer in the band I was in then. Both were swimsuit models and I thought I’d finally reached the goal. It wasn’t until after I dumped her to get with a centerfold model that I knew I’d set my sights too low.
Does that sound like a humblebrag? If you’re still held back by a Blue Pill mindset it probably will. I mentioned on a podcast recently that a majority of men will never know sex as anything but a mitigated, compromised transaction. They’ll never know what it’s like to have a woman lust after them. They’ll never experience the dilated eyes of a woman that would give anything to please him in that moment. Not because she’s obligated, but because her ego is validated at the same time her body is aching to have sex with him.
Strategic Pluralism Theory
According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.
From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.
The latter quote here is a simple outline of Hypergamy, but the first part, Strategic Pluralism Theory is what I want to focus on today because this is where the “sex is no big deal” cop out derives from for men.
The first sexual strategy, the one in which a higher SMV (sexual market value) male can enjoy the sexual experience of many women is a strategy predicated on what our most basic, evolved, biological instinct directs us to. It served ancestral men better to ‘hit it and quit it’ and move on to the next girl as expediently as possible for a variety of reasons. This is also a reason why women’s Hypergamous filtering is a base part of women’s sexual selection process today. The investment cost of becoming pregnant was so high that it became part of women’s evolved firmware to be hypersensitive to reproduction cues as well as parental investment cues (provisioning resources) to ensure survival of herself and her offspring. If you ever wonder why rape is such an existential fear for women you have to understand that this fear is written deep into women’s evolved mental firmware because of men overriding this filtering process by violence.
The first archetype of Strategic Pluralism Theory we could day is the Alpha archetype. This is the guy who has the luxury, by effort or genetic lottery, to pursue what I’d speculate was our ancestors’ pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer sexual imperative. This is what guys like to call the “Natural” with women. Thanks so any number of intersexual advantages (looks, Game, social proof, preselection) it serves him best to spread the seed and women are only too happy to enjoy him as well. He represents the 20th percentile in the 80/20 Pareto distribution of the sexual marketplace.
This side of Strategic Pluralism Theory reflects the r aspect of the r/K reproductive theory. A lot of well meaning Red Pill theologians seem to think that r/K reproductive selection is only limited to the female side of the equation. I’d also point out that this applies to the male side as well. Hypergamy is women’s evolved sexual strategy, however, I would argue that men’s innate, default sexual strategy is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. This r strategy is manifested today in our base predilection for pornography. Untempered by societal restraints, Alpha sexual strategy is what men a majority would default to if given the choice.
More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring.
I’m establishing this perspective to better illustrate the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism Theory. For sake of convenience I’m labeling men who fall into the ‘more attractive men’ category as Alphas. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch for most of my readers, but if you have a problem with this just consider the statistics laid out in the book Dataclysm. A majority of women rate 80-85% of men as “unattractive”. That last 15-20% are our ‘more attractive’ Alphas here.
This then leaves the remaining ‘less attractive men’ as the Beta cohort.
…the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.
This then is the Beta mating strategy and if it sounds like the conventional idea of monogamy you’re not too far off. This is the K side of the r/K selection theory. Before I continue I want to stress that monogamy or non-exclusivity is not a value judgement in this essay. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks has male sexual strategy implications beyond women’s Hypergamy. I refer to Alpha and Beta as placeholder terms here.
For the Beta side of Strategic Pluralism the reproductive strategy is one that, in part, aligns with one side of Hypergamy. The 80% of ‘less attractive’ men find it necessary to compromise their biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality) in order to successfully reproduce. This is the nuts & bolts of what is today being called “enforced monogamy”. While this idea is taken to absurd extremes by critics, the premise is rooted in Strategic Pluralism. Since monogamy serves the largest block of men’s reproductive efforts it follows that it would be the institutionalized standard for ‘civil’ society.
Monogamy is Beta
Monogamy is a social norm, if not an evolutionary norm. A lot has been written about how monogamy in its present incarnation – one man, one woman – is really the result of a post-agrarian social order that optimized the sexual strategy of Beta men. In essence socially-enforced monogamy serves the largest population of Beta males.
However, the tradeoff for women was long term provisioning, protection (in as far as the man was capable) and parental investment – all thing conducive to sustainable futures for women and their children. All that was expected of women was a compromise on the Alpha arousal side of Hypergamy. And naturally, Alpha men and most women found ways to circumvent this socio-sexual adaptation that benefitted women in spite of Beta men.
Monogamy serves Beta men. Alpha men still get sex, broke or not.
I had the above video passed along to me by a Twitter follower about 2 weeks ago. I think he expected me to take issue with how she was defending ‘gold-diggers’ but, ironically, she unwittingly detailed the basics of Hypergamy and Strategic Pluralism Theory. She’s not wrong. Women’s sexual strategy is optimized in conditions of polygamy and polyandry, while men’s sexual strategy – the Beta sides anyway – is optimized in a condition of socially enforced monogamy.
What’s really ironic is that this girl discounts what so many men discount when they consider Hypergamy. She couches her total perspective on the Beta Bucks, long-term provisioning side of Hypergamy while conveniently omitting the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy. The only consideration she has is for resource transfer – again perpetuating the Beta sex experience – and ignoring the fact that even poor men still get to bang women like her if they’re “hawt’. ‘Monogamy is made to benefit men‘, no it’s made to benefit Beta men; Alpha men solve the reproductive problem irrespective of (in spite of) socially enforced monogamy. ‘Broke men don’t get women‘,…unless they’re hot broke men.
I’ve seen Jordan Peterson and more than a few notable evo-psych professors make a similar mistake. They deliberately make Hypergamy solely about the Beta Bucks side of a dualistic mating strategy. Mostly this misdirection is due to personal bias or a want to present the feminine in a positive light. But likewise we also tend to see focus of men’s sexual strategy centering on what long term resources a man has to measure his worth by. Historically, women have generally been the losers in a social order based on a monogamy that tries to ensure that the most men (majority Beta) are solving the reproductive problem. Because women lacked the same resource generating capacity of men, because up until 50 years ago women needed men to solve the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy, monogamy was a at least a workable solution to their own reproductive problem.
In 2018 this is no longer the case. For all of the bleating of women wanting a ‘good man’ once they exit the cock carousel, the reproductive problem they’re trying to solve isn’t founded in the Beta Bucks side of Hypergamy it’s on the Alpha Fucks side. For as much as the women in this video tried to defend their mercenary sexual strategy of being justifiable gold diggers they really didn’t need to. All of the provisioning needs side of Hypergamy is relatively provided for for women in western cultures today.
The monogamous priority – the one that tried to ensure that most Beta men reproduced – that priority has now shifted to a neo-polyandry. This new social mechanic attempts to solve the Alpha Fucks side of the reproductive problem for the largest number of women. Just as patriarchal monogamy attempted to aide men who wouldn’t otherwise reproduce, the new polyandry seeks to ensure that even the lowest SMV women are entitled to breed with an Alpha male of their choosing.
Once all social stigma and religious buffers were removed from Hypergamy (since the Sexual Revolution) it has been a rapid shift from a male-beneficial monogamy that’s been the social norm for millennia to a form of polyandry that benefits the female sexual strategy.
I’ll be continuing this post in the next essay, but before I leave this essay let me reiterate the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies: For one sex’s strategy to be fulfilled the other’s must be compromised or abandoned. Think of this on a sociological meta-scale.
On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.
I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.
But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.
One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.
Good morning gentlemen.
There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.
First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.
If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.
As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.
When I met Anthony I was skeptical.
That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.
This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend.
All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.
I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order.
I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.
As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe.
I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.
So, here I am.
What is the Manosphere?
For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.
For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous.
To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications.
Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.
The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere – all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.
Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women.
Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.
It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement.
Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined).
Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel.
Or maybe they find my blog and books.
Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.
Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives.
And this is what I’m talking about.
Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more.
It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.
Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.
The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.
As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.
As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.
In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order.
We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.
Now things have changed.
The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.
Gender Warfare
Do you understand what I’m saying?
This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today.
Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).
You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media.
There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.
“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved”
These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.
Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.
Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.
This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.
But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.
I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.
As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.
You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.
My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps.
To get “me too’d” is now a verb.
Segregation
The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men.
So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.
These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.
The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.
Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.
How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?
I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.
They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.
If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.
And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.
