the rational male book

The Real You

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.

Remove the Man 2019

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:

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.

The New Polyandry

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.

from Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis

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.

State of the Manosphere 2018

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.

Body Language

I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in trouble with this post. One thing I’ve learned from sixteen years of writing in the manosphere is that people take the issue of Looks are very personally. I think there’s something engrained in how our minds evolved to make us aware of where we fit in as far as image is concerned. I think maybe that’s the root of where we get the idea of leagues with respect to sexual market value. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my belief that everyone is keenly aware of their personal conditions on some level of consciousness and how we look to others is part of that awareness.

My friend Tanner Guzy wrote a great book this year titled The Appearance of Power and I learned quite a bit from it with respect to the, often derided, subconscious choices we make in how we present ourselves to others. A lot goes into what we think is the very simple task of dressing ourselves each day and the message we’re conveying to other men, women, our families, our coworkers, our church, etc. We all have at least a peripheral awareness of what we’re communicating with our clothes, our behaviors and our speech.

Another great book I’m presently reading is the new title from Joe Navarro, The Dictionary of Body Language. Joe was one of the speakers at last year’s 21 Convention and I had the pleasure of talking with him for a bit there. For 25 years he worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and this book is a very good resource for a lot of reasons. I’m not sure Joe likes being affiliated with the manosphere, but there’s no doubt that what he’s studied and written about for so long can be an invaluable tool for reading the sub-communications of women in Game applications. 

Way back in 2011 I wrote a brief essay called Learn to Read. At that time my focus was on emphasizing the need to be aware of the information a guy could glean from his surroundings, understanding the social environment and also the sub-communications a woman might be relaying to him in that moment. We tend to take it for granted, but there is a lot of information our brains need to process in social settings. For the most part our subconscious minds push out the background noise and less important information to our peripheral awareness so our conscious minds can focus on what we think is most important. Sometimes the part we take for granted, the information that our subconscious processes can be at least as important as what our consciousness is sorting out.

I’m calling attention to this process (as well as Joe’s work) because I want to stress the importance our Instinctual Process plays in interpreting what we see with respect to social interactions, but more importantly for our purposes, when we see men and women interact with one another. For the past 12 years my career in the liquor and gaming industries has put me in the unique position of being able to people-watch and study the unspoken communications that goes on between men and women in settings where they’re primed to apply their interpersonal skills (or lack of). However, it wasn’t until I started contrasting what I was seeing with what I understood about behavioral psychology, evo-psych and the sexual strategies men and women evolved for.

And this, this is the part where I get myself in trouble. In that time I think I’ve developed a pretty good ability to read what men and women are communicating with their clothing, expressions, posture, physical positioning, etc. and interpreting it with a Red Pill Lens. I get in trouble with this because, like I said, people tend to take my reading into things very personally. Even if I’m reading the photograph of a couple they know nothing about they associate something in the image that with how they perceive themselves.

Most of us were taught from an early age never to “judge a book by its cover.” We were taught it’s wrong to be judgmental and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. This has never really sat well with me, but you run the risk of sounding catty when you judge a person by their looks or whatever it is they’re doing in a picture. They say you sound like a gossipy woman, or else it’s supposedly some indication that you’re projecting your own insecurities onto whoever it is you might be critical of. This is unfortunate because our Instinctual interpretive process makes judgment calls all the time in our peripheral awareness. We all make comparisons in our hindbrains, it’s just impolite to give voice to them. This does nothing to help us objectively assess what sub-communications are taking place.

So, fair warning, I’m going to make some reads on some pictures here and if what I interpret seems a little self-serving or judgmental just know that I’m doing my best to stay objective.

For the past 3 months I’ve gotten into the habit of reading the images of various couples that guys on Twitter have been sending me. If you want a brief primer for this I talked about it with Tim Wenger last August here. For the most part these guys wanted me to determine what they were seeing were Alpha Tells or Beta Tells in the body language between the couple. In the majority of these shots, the Beta male body language was fairly evident even to the untrained eye. What was less evident was what the woman’s sub-communications were conveying.

Leaning In

Of the more than a hundred shots I read, the number one most common position for men was the lean in. This posture is something Roissy once called attention to as the hallmark of a Beta subconsciously manifesting his mindset in his body language:

The lean-in is easily identifiable, and while I don’t think it is always a Beta Tell (depends on context) it’s certainly the starting point for other manifestations of men with a necessitous subconscious. What I mean by that is that the lean-in is a physical display that illustrates how a man’s subconscious has decided that his woman’s Frame is the dominant one in the relationship. He feels the compulsion to put himself into her space as his natural impulse.

It’s also important to bear in mind that when we are photographed with others, in this case women, we are, or would like to be intimate with, there is a subconscious recognition that anyone viewing the image will infer a relationship context. More on this later, but for now keep in mind that some of these inferences will be related to mate guarding behaviors.

The reflexive critique of this lean-in is usually “Well, that’s just that one shot” or “The photographer told him to lean in” to which I can only say that the predominance of couples shots, candid and staged alike, most consistently pose a man as the leaner.

Lean out

The counter to this leaning-in is a woman leaning out or away from the man. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken conflict of hindbrains going on. A (Beta) man leans in to find inclusion and acceptance in a woman’s Frame while her own hindbrain instinctively reacts and attempts to lessen any inference of intimate acceptance to a larger audience.

Above are some examples of the lean-out. In some of these the latent message the woman’s hindbrain is conveying is almost “Get him offa me!”, but with a smile so as not to be too obvious. Also notice the positioning of the free hand in most of these pictures. We’d like to rationalize this as a gesture of affection after the fact, but in the context of these shots the unspoken message is a defensive one against the man’s lean-in. Again, this is one more manifestation of a war playing out between the couple’s subconscious.

The Eyes Have It

I also want to draw attention to the facial expressions of these women. Notice the commonalities in gaze direction and the message their eyes and expressions are sub-communicating. Women are keenly aware of the permanency of an image and what that image communicates. I’ve pointed out in many a prior essay that women’s brains evolved to give them a much fuller capacity for communication and a sensitivity to nuances than men. Men prioritize the content (information) of communication while women prioritize context (feeling) of communication. This is a truth we have to consider when we analyze the expressions and physical communication of women in photos.

I joked with the guy who sent me the second image here that she looks like she wants to bang me, not the guy doting on her. There’s more than a bit of truth in that assessment. Women today are hyperaware of how an image can be used to facilitate or handicap their sexual strategy. It’s no accident or casual glance when a woman directs her attention towards the viewer. It’s not a person behind the camera that she has in mind when she knows she being photographed, it’s the potential audience – an audience that’s grown exponentially in the age of social media. 

In all these shots the woman’s attention is on how she will be perceived by any viewer of the shot. In some other images I was sent the woman’s focus was on anything other than the men whose only focus was her. In advertising there’s a presumption that when two or more people appear in an ad the one with the presumed dominance is always the one looking away or out at the viewer. The submissive party was the one whose attention is directed at the dominant person. The dominant person is the one telling the story in the ad. A common complaint among feminists about magazine ads in the 60s through the 80s was that it was women who were always disempowered as a result of being posed in subservient positions where they focused on a male in the ad image. The only exception to this was in what feminists still refer to as the Male Gaze wherein the dominance a woman was afforded was limited to her sexual viability and her capacity to hold the attention of any men in the ad and men viewing the ad. 

These concepts are an interesting contrast to the millions upon millions of photos girls and women post of themselves on social media every day. Think of the gender power dynamics in all these shots. It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but the reflexive impulse a majority of women default to is one of advertising themselves for potentially better options in the sexual marketplace.

Whether or not this is a practiced or unconscious tact, the latent purpose of women’s responses to their men’s Beta Tells is to advertise their sexual availability to the audience. Some guys have said that women default to these expressions as a means of ego aggrandizement and I’m willing to accept that there’s undoubtedly an element of egoism (certainly solipsism) involved. No doubt women often enjoy the envious attentions of other women on Instagram in the right context. However, these ‘ego shots’ almost universally center on the woman in the power dynamic. In each of these images the power belongs to the woman.

Mate Guarding

Another common Beta Tell is the death grip pose many men will opt for in their couple’s photos. This is a position where the man locks an arm around his woman or drapes an interposing forearm barrier between the viewer and the woman who is trying to coyly escape his mate guarding message. 

In a lot of these the woman often has her hand on his hand as if trying to pry him off to release her. It seems like a reciprocation of affection – similar to the hand on the chest pushing him away – but this is afterthought rationalization. Death grip is a clingy positioning, but again the battle between his and her subconscious centers on the guy mate guarding and her own subconscious desire to broadcast her sexual availability in spite of him.

I Love Mommy

In almost all of these images the male is focused intently on the woman. From a Red Pill perspective, I see this as a manifestation of how these men have been Blue Pill conditioned to make their women their Mental Point of Origin.  Even in the images where the man is looking at the camera his sub-communication is one of clear abasement to, or guarding of, his most important priority.

However, the most disturbing trend I’ve seen in couple’s photos is what I’ve dubbed the I Love Mommy pose. Maybe it’s my instinctual interpretation of it or maybe its’ an obvious Freudian connotation, but in these shots the Beta assumes and almost childlike position of kissing on his woman. 

Okay, so the last one is a press shot, but you get the idea. You can see the I Love Mommy positioning in a few of the prior photos above as well.  I could probably dedicate an entire essay to all of the psychological implications of this phenomenon. I had one critic on Twitter ask me if I genuinely thought this tendency was due to unresolved issues these men had with their mothers; it wasn’t until later he admitted he had a tendency to do the same and was honestly concerned. 

I’m sure the possibility exists, but more importantly I think this habit is due to men internalizing the myth that vulnerability is endearing to women. There’s this persistent lie that accompanies the vulnerability myth. That’s the lie that men can let their guard down and ‘relax’ around the woman they feel securely paired with. As a result they mentally revert to the boy who didn’t need to qualify himself for his mother’s love and they regress to a subconscious comfort in that vulnerability they believe will endear them to their woman. They sub-communicate all this in the I Love Mommy position.

I’ll have to return to this Mother Issues concept in a future essay, but for now, how do you suppose a woman’s hindbrain imperative for Hypergamy will perceive this habit, particularly in light of how image conscious women are in the Instagram generation? My first impression is that it would be one of revulsion, apprehension and resistance. Nothing turns off a woman more than a man indicating that he’d rather be her child than her lover or husband.

Alpha Tells

So, if all of this reads like the overly-critical projection and nitpicking I told you most critics will accuse me of earlier, maybe I can assuage your own judgment by presenting some Alpha sub-communications examples here. Finding these examples can be a tall order in an age where any man photographed in a position not entirely focused on his woman runs the risk of being called ‘toxically’ masculine. Today, men who are confident enough to default to body language that communicates they are their own mental point of origin get accused of ‘abuse’ or at least being self-centered. But as you’ll see this isn’t such a bad thing.

The best example of Alpha Tells in couples photos focus on the man being the center of importance in the shot. Yes, this is Vincent Cassel (51) and his wife Tina Kunakey (21). I have no doubt some hater will come up with some reason in the comments why Vince doesn’t align with whatever their interpretation of Alpha is, but for our purposes these images illustrate the opposite of a lot of the Beta sub-communications we just went through. So try to look past the celebrity and see what’s being displayed here.

First off, notice how Tina’s focus of attention is always on Vince. Women who hold genuine admiration for their men consistently make them the story in photos. Even in the shot where they look at each other her focus is on him. It’s not difficult to assess the power dynamic in their relationship, but you can also feel a genuine desire emanating from Tina.

Also, women who genuinely admire their men are unconcerned that their actions in a shot might be read as subservient or ego-abasing by women’s audience. I’d go so far as to suggest that the attention a woman receives from a man her Hypergamous hindbrain confirms as Alpha is far more valuable to her ego than any lower quality attention she might temporarily enjoy by appeasing her audience. Much of this observation is rooted in the Desire Dynamic. Hypergamy cannot afford to have a high SMV man be confused about her desire or motives. A woman who is proud of the association with man she’s paired with is less concerned about the perception other women might have of her actions – in fact, she’ll convert any disparaging opinion of them into a point of pride, if that man is above her own sexual market value.

When a little girl thought a little boy on the playground was cute her reflexive response to him was not something she had learned to consciously control at that age. That response is often reflected in the expressions of adult women when when their peripheral awareness of an attractive man connects with their Hypergamous hindbrain. The biting of the lip, the beaming admiration, the laser eye focus and the hopeful smile followed by a coy embarrassment of what she’s doing when she regains her composure are all the physical cues of a woman whose primary concern is the man she’s with.

Now, contrast these images with the earlier ones in which the men are clearly the hangers-on of the women in those photos. I’ve mentioned before that a natural Alpha man is almost never aware of his own Alphaness and that’s what really stands out in these photos – the men aren’t trying to evoke the reflexive responses of the women. They fluidly (almost Zen-like) prompt these reaction in women. There is no pretense or the obvious mugging for the audience that you see in shots where the Frame is clearly being directed by the woman while the hapless Beta tries to prove how in love he is by kissing on her while she finds something more interesting to occupy herself with. When a woman admires her man he is literally all she can think about.

In closing here I want to reiterate that I’m aware that all of this is going to come off as self-serving or catty. It’s impossible to objectively interpret body language without someone resorting to point & sputter insults about how they think you’re just being petty or you’re jealous of some celebrity’s life. Be that as it may the discouraging of anyone attempting to understand sub-communications only serves the the party that has the most to gain from a larger ignorance of them. So I hope this breakdown has provided at least some useful references to consider your own, or your woman’s, default behavior when the cell phone cams come out at a party.

But if you learn nothing else from this post, and you need one take-home message, please, whatever you do, don’t be this guy in your next couples shot.

The Golden Ticket

Imagine, if you will, that you buy a lottery ticket and you win. After taxes the payoff is $2 million. Not an exorbitant amount by today’s standards, but still quite a lot of money for the average paycheck to paycheck person. For some it may be what could be described as Fuck You Money, easily enough for most people to retire on very comfortably.

How would this newfound fortune change your life? How would it change your family and your friend’s dealing with you? Would they be happy for you? Maybe jealous? Would you be able to manage the changes in your daily routine? If you were accustomed to one lifestyle and then switched to a more affluent lifestyle would it be a good change? Or would you become someone else?

Now lets say you could possibly win $100 million if you made an almost certain bet. There were still some risks involved, but nothing that would threaten your life in the short term. How would winning this kind of money reflect on your daily routine? Would it be different than your winning $2 million? Money would cease to be an object for you for the rest of your life and likely the lives of your children, maybe even grandchildren and all you really had to do was make a smart bet that you believed would pay off.

What if you only won $1 million or $500,000, but you were only making $36,000 a year and scraping by the best you could? Again, all you have to do is look for the best opportunity to make a short term sacrifice and the money would be yours. Would you compromise your ‘principles’ (assuming you have any) temporarily to change your life in the long term more significantly?

Imagine you had a Golden Ticket that had a potential to win you $70,000 per year or if you played things right it had the potential to earn you $10 million per year if you were wise enough to capitalize on it. How would that change your outlook on life?

What rationales would that prompt you to in order to reconcile that other people might not have the same potential for cashing in –without really earning it – that you do?

Here’s your Ticket

Okay, got that in your head now? Good. Now imagine that you’re given this Golden Ticket at the tender age of 12 years old. It’s handed to you and you’re told, “Keep this ticket with you forever. You can redeem it for more money while you’re young, but the longer you hold on to it the less it will be worth. Even still, it should be valuable for most of your life if you can manage to hold on to it.” And even after you’ve cashed the ticket in you can still retain it for a time, because some people have been able to trade one prize for a larger one by taking the ticket back and redeeming it for a better prize later.

Now you begin to believe that you deserve the biggest prize because, well, you’ve been deprived of things. You’re special; special enough to know you deserve the very best after having been deprived of these things as one of a long line of people who’ve also been deprived of things – the best things – or so they’ve told you.

You could always earn some money and get the things you and your people have never been able to reliably get, at least, again, that’s what they’ve told you. You have a lot of personal potential, you’re independent, you have a lot of respectable strengths, so you know you could always merit the things you deserve. But you still have this Golden Ticket in your hand, why wouldn’t you use it? You could earn some money, maybe a lot, but it will never be as reliable or as much as the money the Golden Ticket could net you – if you know just when to redeem it.

Stipulations

All that said, there are going to be a few stipulations to this lottery, but still, they’re not as steep when you compare them to having to actually earn a similar prize.

The first stipulation: You must stay physically fit. In fact, the better you look the better your potential prize could be. As you age this potential decays, but even still, you occasionally see some people cash out their ticket for great prizes despite their age. They just had to apply themselves more in the gym to get it.

The second stipulation: You must be agreeable, accommodating, even a bit flirty. You must put forward the impression that you are someone who genuinely deserves the best prize that the ticket might offer to a special person like you. You must give the perception that the experience of you deserves the highest potential prize imaginable.

The third stipulation: You must position yourself in social situations where the potential for the biggest payout for your ticket can be maximized. Sometimes, not always, but often these settings might make you uncomfortable, but hey, you wanted to make the most of the ticket, right? This stipulation really isn’t all that discomforting when you realize that once you have cashed in your ticket you’ll be the one deciding where you live and who you’ll choose to associate with anyway. At least that’s what the lottery organizers would have you believe.

There are a few more minor stipulations, but, for all of this, you still deserve the biggest prize that opportunity might bring your way. So, while the best thing would be for you to stay in shape and be ready for a big prize, the people playing the same lottery as you – most with the same potential – will tell you none of this really matters. They insist that you just being you is enough for you to win a big prize. Or it should be.

It’s almost as if they want you to believe that you can dismiss all the stipulations and still make out pretty good. In fact they praise you for going against the stipulations. They complain about how unfair these rules are and that for people as deprived as themselves, and for as long as they and their predecessors have been deprived, they should simply be given the highest, best and most secure forms of the prize – all irrespective of the very minimal stipulations as they are.

This is the Golden Ticket! How dare anyone place prerequisites on us to get the prizes we so thoroughly deserve. How dare anyone make us earn our birthright. But for all this discontent, the rules of the game still apply, and the people who embrace and master the stipulations largely seem to get the biggest and best prizes. And the ones complaining about the stipulations only seem to drag down the people with the same Golden Ticket, and their prizes are usually nothing compared to the people who take the stipulations to heart.

The Agreement

Finally, and maybe most importantly, there is one last detail of this lottery to consider. In order to keep the biggest and best prizes you have to sign a very loose and totally non-binding contract that only benefits you and ensures you will continue to be paid dividends should you decide to renege on the agreement and take your ticket back to use it again. The contract can be broken by you at any time, and even when you do you’ll still receive a substantial percentage of your original prize in monthly installments and usually for the rest of of your life.

Still, your signing this contract will limit your capacity to play this lottery in the future. If you see the potential for a better prize after you’ve signed the contract of limitations you’ll be less able to capitalize on it. However, the way that the contract is written it doesn’t necessarily exclude you from winning and even bigger prize should the opportunity arise. Your ticket reserves the right to be redeemed for other prizes if you make some wise bets.

So, at the end here, we get to the larger point of this metaphor; how would this ticket change the way you live your life? How would it influence your future decisions? How would the ticket affect your personal relationships with your best friends, some of whom have tickets themselves? How would the subconscious knowledge of the ticket alter your dealings with a husband, a wife, the children you may have or your immediate family?

Would the ticket define who you will become in life?

Year Three

year_3

August 18th was the 3 year anniversary for The Rational Male. My apologies for not having dropped this post sooner, but I held off until September because I wanted to post the most accurate numbers I could for August. That, and I think I needed to hammer out the concepts of the past 3 weeks topics before they escaped me.

So here it is readers, three short years ago I finally decided to motivate myself to commit almost 10 years of SoSuave forum posts and all of those concepts into a unified blog – and then dare to write a book.

This has been an interesting and contentious year for me. In August of 2013 I had just returned to Nevada after living in Florida for the past 8 years. My work and living situation changed drastically, but now in hindsight, for so much the better. My relocation couldn’t have come at a worse time as I was about half through the first book I’ve ever attempted writing and had to delay it month after month as I basically rebooted my life and the lives of my wife and daughter.

I officially published The Rational Male on October 1st, 2013 and it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. It certainly wasn’t easy and I’ve got a new edition, with better editing coming on the heels of the next volume of Rational Male.

Once the book published it allowed me to step back a bit from my blog writing to see how these core principles fit into a larger whole of where I wanted the blog and possibly the next book to go.

In just under 9 months the response has been truly humbling for me. That probably sounds like some standard bullshit an author is supposed to say – even calling myself an “author” still feels kind of strange – but when I receive emails and comments, or read reviews on Amazon about how what I’ve written in the book and blog has changed people’s lives, helped them to understand both women and themselves better, and even prevented suicides, ‘humbling’ is the only word I can muster.

I’ve had more than a few readers ask me if I’ll ever take up writing full-time, and I think the answer is always going to be ‘no’. I never set out to make a book or even writing my livelihood. I make a good living doing what I do, so I don’t need to write a book to supplement my income. I write because I feel it’s important to reveal how things work in intergender dynamics to help men avoid the traps and life altering decisions most make because they simply had no one expose what’s under the hood with respect to women and how the Game is played.

I also feel it’s important for me to stay in the game so to speak. To an overwhelming degree what I write is the result of the experiences I’ve had being long employed in various industries that keep me out in the world in a social context. I’ve had the unique experience of both being “in the field” and observing behavior while also being a married Man and father. Honestly, one of the reasons I decided to move back to Nevada was to maintain this situation. My place isn’t behind a desk (at least not Thursdays – Saturdays), it’s out in the world doing something, creating things and moments, and learning from them.

In three years I have never monetized the Rational Male, nor do I have any plans to do so. As my blog numbers have steadily risen I’ve had several opportunities to do just this, but this blog has never been just about me. I’ve always been pretty upfront with my numbers at Rational Male and as they’ve climbed I’ve always believed this was a watermark of how the manosphere on whole has expanded into popular consciousness. The rise you see in these numbers represents the growing awareness of the Red Pill, Game and men coming to understand the realities of the social and psychological landscape of intergender relations that they find themselves in.

Personally I find this very encouraging.

The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine

My most immediate plans for the rest of 2014 is to complete the next volume of The Rational Male – Preventive Medicine. I had initially planned this book to be a quick hit one-off ebook with an expanded focus on the Preventative Medicine series of posts I published this spring, but the rewriting and compiling fluidly blew up into enough material for a whole new volume.

This book, while still incorporating some past posts, has a deliberate purpose of helping men (both red pill and the uninitiated) to understand modern feminine nature so as to help them avoid the worst of the most common life-decisions with women as well as to aid them in understanding what’s happened to them in past, and what possibly awaits them in future relationships.

This will be the primary focus of the new book. The Rational Male I consider the core-work, but Preventive Medicine will build upon this core with a direct purpose. Preventive Medicine will be the answer for the men who “wished they’d had all of this information before” they made the choices they made, and to help them understand why they did.

Moving Forward

Lastly, I’d like to state now that this blog has been, and will continue to be the testing ground for red pill / Game concepts. It will continue to be an unmoderated forum, and as such, as a marketplace of ideas, sometimes this means considering blue pill dissent and occasionally outright trolling. I’ve always felt the benefits of open discourse outweigh the nuisance of simple myopic hating, and more often than not I’ve been rewarded with having my commenters make the same counterpoints to these individuals I would’ve made myself. This is a wonderful gauge of how well men (and some women) understand and internalize the ideas I’ve offered here, as well as educating me of things I may not have considered about those very same ideas.

I should also add that despite the occasional suggestion that I moderate the comments I’ve found that in 3 years my commenters really moderate themselves and others. I think this is a testament to the sincerity and genuineness of interest in those commenting over the years. I’d like to thank you all for keeping this standard of commenting. One of the best compliments I get is when a newly unplugged guy lets me know that he benefitted as much from the level of discourse in the comments as he did from a particular article that brought him to The Rational Male.

The message and purpose of The Rational Male will never be watered down, and certainly never for the sake of my personal betterment. The unvarnished, sometimes difficult truths of the red pill will continue to be this blog’s priority. The purpose of this blog isn’t affirming anyone’s relationships or dogma, or compromised by anyone’s individual circumstance; neither is it meant to discourage those relationships or foster a hopeless nihilism – the purpose is education.

What anyone takes from that education I leave to the individual. I will continue to provide my own insights and what I may think are ‘best practices’ with regard to what this education represents for men (and I encourage others to do so as well in the commentary), but ultimately what works best for myself or others may not be what works best for someone else.

As I’ve stated before, I don’t want to show you how to become a better man, I want you to show you how to be a better man. What’s discussed here will often show you solutions or give you actionable information about how to make yourself a better man, but in the end it must come from you.

Thank you all for your involvement in making this blog a better collective experience for everyone.

Here’s to another year of Rational Male.