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January 25, 2016

Ovulation & Dread

I had an interesting study brought to my attention recently (ht/ Robert Burriss) and I thought I’d get back to a nuts and bolts post with something useful I found in it.

Women Selectively Guard Their Desirable Mates From Ovulating Women.

As you might expect, much of the findings in this study reinforce many Red Pill principles founded in evo-psych, but there are a few new angles to consider here. Before I start to riff on this study, bear in mind that the concept of female mate guarding behavior centers on what the researchers define as ‘desirable mates’ to women. This subjective assessment of desirability will play into all this analysis.

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women’s mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women’s fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women’s romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but only when their own partners were highly desirable. Exposure to ovulating women also increased women’s sexual desires for their (highly desirable) partners. These findings suggest that women can be sensitive to subtle cues of other women’s fertility and respond (e.g., via social exclusion, enhanced sexual attention to own mate) in ways that may facilitate their mate retention goals while not thwarting their affiliative goals.

Right from the start here we have two Red Pill foundations confirmed; the influence that perceptual SMV plays in women’s sense of passive Dread and the fundamental influence that menstruation dictates to sexual arousal and concurrent motivations for sex appeal during women’s ovulation phase.

I’ve previously gone into the dynamics that play out between men and women with regard to perceived SMV of a partner versus the other partner’s self-perception of their own SMV and how this determines secure vs. insecure attachment. This post was more of an outline of results of SMV imbalance rather that the motivations for the characteristics of those personal attachments. This study illustrates these underlying motivators very well.

Anyone who’s heard my Man in Demand talk on Hypergamy understands the (menstrual cycle) biological root for women’s personal and sociological behavior, and this study provides yet another confirmation of it. I’ve also written in the past about men’s propensity for mate guarding and the behavioral cues women, both subtly and not so subtly, display that prompts them to mate guarding. However, I’ve yet to explore women’s mate guarding behaviors.

I’m bringing up the SMV ratios and Mate Guarding posts here because it’s important to bear in mind the subjectivity that perceived SMV plays in regard to motivating mate guarding. Depending on that balance (or imbalance) one partner will be more motivated to mate guard than the other. Which of course then brings us back to the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. Mate guarding impulse is contextual to the comparative value of both individuals and the value of others in their social environment (potential sexual competitors).

Thus, it is a significant challenge for women when other women attempt to poach their partners. For instance, over 50% of women admit to attempting to poach another woman’s partner, and over 80% of men admit to having been the object of another woman’s poaching—with about half of men admitting to “going along” with the poaching attempt (e.g., Schmitt et al., 2004; Schmitt & Buss, 2001). Women have good reason, then, to mate guard.

I’m going to encourage readers to take the time to, at the very least, read the introduction, premise and results of this comprehensive study. Naturally there will be incredulous women who will insist that men tend to overestimate the displayed sexual interests of women towards them. This is a common social convention that serves a very specific purpose for women; plausible deniability.

If the common group-think is that men are egotistical, think they’re “all that” and stupidly believe they’re seeing sexual cues from women because “that’s just how men are”, then we have a pre-established condition in which women can believably deny interest. Thus, should a man not find a woman attractive, or opt for another, this then serves as a rejection buffer as well as a precondition for her own rejection of a man should he make an approach and not be found attractive.

The Schmitt & Buss studies account for this, but even if they didn’t there would still need to be a functional reason for women’s mate guarding behavior. That reason puts the lie to the social convention of women presuming men aren’t as perceptive of their sexual cues as they’d like to believe.

[…] whereas men have at times physically isolated and sequestered their female

partners to restrict other men’s access to them (e.g., in harems), women may analogously socially isolate their partners from potential poachers—keeping them apart so as to preclude potentially costly competition for their romantic partners.

The usefulness of this strategy depends on women being able to identify those who might be likely and effective mate poachers, and then excluding them (but not others) from their social circles. If a woman indiscriminately distances herself and her partner from potential poachers (i.e., all other women), she is assured of his fidelity but at the cost of eliminating her access to the numerous benefits of female–female friendships.

Spoiler alert: The study confirms that women will covertly exclude themselves and their lover’s company from women who A.) outclass them in comparative SMV (hotter women than they perceive themselves to be) and B.) happen to be in the proliferative phase of ovulation.

This indicates that not only are women subconsciously (if not consciously) aware of intrasexual rivals ovulatory states – as evidenced by dress, ornamentation, vocal intonation, scent, sexual proceptivity, etc. – but they are aware enough to orchestrate covert methods to protect their sexual investments in a ‘high value’ male while ensuring future intrasexual friendships.

That may seem like an overly scientific way of saying women watch out for other women slutting it up, but the subcommunications of ovulation are so subtle that women’s subconscious, peripheral awareness of those cues evolved for a sensitivity that goes beyond the obvious slut. That’s how important retaining a better-than-self SMV optimal mating choice is to women in an evolutionary scope. That sensitivity is part of women’s psychological firmware.

[…]In addition, if a woman were to consistently and indiscriminately exclude other women from her own and, by extension, her partner’s social circle, she might gain a reputation for being non-communal and non-nurturing, and thus, for being an undesirable friend. This might not only thwart her ability to form future friendships with other women, but might also lead her partner to perceive her as highly difficult, uncooperative, controlling, and non-trusting.

Thus, on one hand, the costs of indiscriminately avoiding other women are high because women reap important benefits from making new same-sex friends, On the other hand, women can and do mate poach with frequency, and those women deeply embedded in one’s social circle may have increased access, motivation, and ability to poach successfully.

There’s a few things to unpack here before we can make this information Red Pill / Game applicable. The most important metric that female mate guarding indicates is her genuine assessment of a man’s SMV and how valuable his participation and investment in their LTR (or even STR sexual value) is to her.

I’ve seen this mate guarding play out in my own relationships before, both as a Red Pill husband who happens to work with beautiful women in the liquor industry and prior to my Red Pill awareness of it in my libertine 20s. Back then it was easy to pass off as ‘bitches be crazy’ when a girlfriend or a short term sex partner “just got jealous”. But in hindsight the timing of those fits of jealousy seemed a bit to regular.

I’m going to suggest that developing an awareness of a woman’s bouts of jealousy or her subtle timing in wanting to spend time alone with you, or her being more sexually proceptive (she wants to fuck more) with you at times you may think odd. These are Alpha or Beta Tells. A woman’s preoccupation with guarding you from other women is a prime indicator of your SMV worth to her. It stands to reason that only ‘desirable’ men deserve the effort of her mate guarding.

This is an important Red Pill sensitivity to have as it also allows you to determine a woman’s unspoken understanding of where she and you stand in relative SMV comparison. As I was saying in the introduction here, that ‘desirability’, that SMV ratio, that Alpha impression that makes you worth mate guarding is subjective to what a woman’s self-perceived SMV is in respect to your own. When we interact with women in the long term it’s very easy for men to lose sight of this balance and think that their frumpy wife is the best they can do. There is a definitive psychological game that women of low SMV will play with men they know are of higher value – they will continually devalue that man as a form of mate guarding.

That devaluation may take the form of browbeating, nagging or accusing him of being attracted to other women in an effort to get her higher value LTR man to self-limit his being poached by endlessly qualifying himself to his low SMV wife/girlfriend. It’s far easier, and far lower an investment of resources if a low SMV woman can convince her higher SMV man to mate guard himself.

Just as an aside here, there may be a few readers who’ll think women will rationally consider that their long term provisioning is virtually assured in a feminine-primary social order. Alimony, child support or pro-female government will assure her and her offspring a baseline of security, so why mate guard any man?

The answer of course is that women’s psychological firm ware didn’t evolve to acknowledge these considerations. Once again T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed, he wants to hunt. So even with the logical consideration that provisioning is assured women’s limbic (particularly on an Alpha Fucks short term breeding assurance) still wants those environmental and behavioral cues that indicate they have that security.

Passive Dread

So with all of this to digest how do we put this knowledge of women’s limbic desire for ensuring a mate’s exclusive sex and provisioning to use for us?

The obvious answer is in the title of this post – developing that awareness of your SMV worth to a woman is a good starting point from which you can subtly employ a passive form of Dread.

I’ve gotten a lot of grief for just my acknowledging Dread, much less using it beneficially for both a man and whatever woman he chooses (long or short term). It’s always about how horribly manipulative it is, or it’s just an unsustainable game of brinksmanship between a couple that destroys trust. But what these (usually female) critics never recognize is that Dread is already an integral part of every relationship by order of degree.

The fact that both male and female mate guarding behaviors are evidential facts of both sex’s hindbrain function should be proof enough that Dread, the concern of loss of investment, and the subconscious, comparative evaluation of SMV is something that’s always an operative. It’s inherent to our conditions as evolved human beings.

My advice in this instance is for men to become sensitive to the indicators of that ovulatory mate guarding dread and use that insecurity to promote a better, genuine desire in that woman. Suggesting this will seem counterintuitive to a Blue Pill mindset. The conditioned response will be to allay that woman’s fears (the ones she’s subconsciously aware of but will hate you for making her acknowledge) and provide her with comfort and familiarity.

But comfort and familiarity are anti-seductive and kill the genuine desire, the genuine need to fuck you in order to keep you and show her appreciation for your higher SMV. Why does a woman compete for what she is constantly comfortably assured she already has?

The trick to employing soft or passive dread is making yourself sensitive to the opportunities to use it and then gently provoke it in as covert and indirect a way as possible. One of the better ideas the early PUAs had was mastering the art of the Neg, or the backhanded compliment. The idea was to casually knock a woman’s self-image down to a manageable degree in order to get her to qualify herself the the PUA. Passive dread operates on a similar principle.

You need to see the opportunities for its use, and women’s propensity for mate guarding men they find ‘desirable’ is a reasonably predictable opportunity. See those chances for other women’s casual flirtations with you, look for those unsolicited opportunities for easy social proof, and don’t dissuade your woman’s initial mate guarding response. Casually push back on the mate guarding impulse, don’t jump to the reassurances of your undying love and interest.

See that opportunity for what it is – a chance to restate whose Frame she’s chosen to be a part of. She wants to merit your value. Take that effort away from her and you become valueless to her.

237 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread, dread game, dread in relationships, female mate guarding, feminine imperative, hypergamy, intergender relations, Mate Guarding, passive dread, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, social conventions, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Biomechanics, Game, Hypergamy, Operative Social Conventions, Relationship Game, Sexual Market Value, The Red Pill

January 24, 2016

Red Pill Monthly

By Rollo Tomassi

As I mentioned in the prior comment thread, I’ll be testing out a once a month(ish) livestream podcast with Niko Choski for a while. This talk is meant to be an informal discussion of topics I go into on The Rational Male, as well as what’s trending in the manosphere. It’s also to give guys an opportunity for some feedback and exchange in the live comments.

Some of my regular readers may be wondering why I didn’t advertise this first trial more and the answer is I wanted to use this one as a test to see the initial response. I’ll be promoting future livestreams more aggressively, but I knew this one would be less than polished. I deliberately tried to keep it to an hour to make it more digestible, but we did go a little over to answer questions.

In this cast we discussed my article on The Red Pill balance and how a Red Pill awareness is not just vital to a man’s personal development with women, but how it can help in various other aspects of his life. We discuss the differences of that Red Pill perception in the MGTOW community that Niko has recently divided himself from.

You can of course comment on the YouTube feed, but I’m going to take open comments here about what you thought of the discussion and even my engaging in a once a month talk like this. I expect more than a few from the MGTOW communities will find there way here, but I’m more interested in what you thought about the idea of us doing this.

I’ve been asked for a while as to why I don’t just do a solo podcast myself, but I don’t really like to do things off the cuff with regard to what I write and explain. I prefer to approach things from all angles in my writing before I hit the publish button. That said I do see the value in a discussion like this when it’s about topics I’ve already covered or perhaps something going on in mainstream society or the ‘sphere.

So let me know what you think. The comment thread is open so if you want to tell me it’s a bad idea, fine. If you like it, great. If you want to chime in on any of what we discussed feel free to.

40 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, feminine imperative, hypergamy, manosphere, rational male, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, sexual market value, social conventions | posted in Hypergamy, The Red Pill

January 18, 2016

A Teachable Moment

By Rollo Tomassi

While I’d had another post on deck for today I simply couldn’t let Divided Line’s most recent comment go unanswered. I was going to riff on his comment in that thread, but it occurred to me that his concerns would be educational for many new readers and what I tell him here might give even my regulars something new to think about.

This is the part I can’t get. I can look back and see how my beta behaviors made it impossible for my ex to respect and love me. I see those behaviors for what they are, but what I can’t do is internalize a competing value system, or a competing idealism, one which would allow me to judge myself in the way you’re judging yourself here. I still get stuck on “but she *should* have loved me for those behaviors,” even if I understand on an intellectual level why she didn’t. Even if I game myself into believing I feel differently about it, I know that on some level, I’m still going to be hoping that every girl I get involved with will prove to be capable of fulfilling that blue pill idealism. I fully expect to just fall back into oneitis and needy supplicating behaviors whenever I meet somebody. they just creep up on you without you even realizing it.

When I go into the intricacies of men’s innate sense of idealism this is what I mean. In a Blue Pill context there will always be an expectation of some possibility of an ideal state with a woman. The problem here isn’t men’s idealism, but rather the conditioning of it to expect an idealized Blue Pill outcome.

From a strictly deductive standpoint DL’s ex should have loved him for the idealized, pro-social, pro-family, pro-parental investment, pro-providership and pro-egalitarian that were some of the most integral parts of his life’s Blue Pill conditioning.

The reality is that he’d been convinced of a Blue Pill social order founded on an Old Set of Books.

Let’s get real about it. It’s not like women have good reason to behave the way they do. Whatever evo-psych explanation we can come with, it doesn’t provide them with an excuse. They’re not stewards of the gene pool, there is no greater good that is served by hypergamy. In a modern context it’s a liability, not an asset. At the limbic level they’re screening for traits that would have been advantageous 20,000 years ago, not in a modern industrial or post industrial society. Should I try to convince myself otherwise and judge myself according to my evolutionary fitness or something? It seems absurd.

When I wrote Our Sisters’ Keeper I delved into the question of whether it could be expected of women to take responsibility for their own decisions, moral or otherwise. It generally comes down to a question of the seeming determinism that Hypergamy represents, and the deductive male-logic that, idealistically, expects women to take personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

In this respect Hypergamy doesn’t provide women with an excuse for the consequences, but the question of personal responsibility still doesn’t change the the underlying motivators, incentives and influences that Hypergamy exerts over women. The ~~devil~~ biology made me do it is the same alibi for Hypergamy as it is for men’s Selfish Gene.

While the software may change with the environment, our firmware and our hardware are still very much based in the evolution that benefitted our prehistoric predecessors. What measure you personally choose to judge yourself by is up to you, but again, the hardware and the firmware doesn’t change.

Under our modern social environment women have an unprecedented, virtually unilateral, stewardship of the gene pool. So much so in fact that women’s sexual selection strategy, Hypergamy and feminine social primacy are enforced by law and ensaturated into our social fabric. Whether this is for ‘the greater good’ or not all depends on who’s agenda defines what ‘good’ is.

For a very long time men had at least some measure of being able to direct the course that the gene pool was going. Men’s influence today is only as potent as women’s legislated sexual selection will allow them.

Women aren’t dogs, they’re human beings. They’re perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – anybody who can think at an abstract level should be. Women are unaware of themselves because the bar is so low for them, because they are profoundly privileged and everything is handed to them on a silver platter, not because they’re incapable of treating men in a way that would have made the blue pill equality ideal possible.

It really just boils down to a profound form of inferiority, their unwillingness to empathize or give a shit. They don’t care because they don’t have to. It’s a fundamental hollowness at the core of their character.

You’re presuming an egalitarian inspired similarity between men and women, and once again I’ll refer you to what I proposed above; you’re expecting software to override firmware and hardware. There are simply evidential and provable physical and cognitive differences between men and women.

I believe you’re correct – women are perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – however, this is not women’s firmware directive. It is not their initial mental point of origin.

True, women can learn to be empathetic, learn to be idealistic, and yes, learn to sublimate their innate solipsism, but their capacity to learn to override their firmware doesn’t erase the root conditions they must learn and practice to override.

And yes, we’ve reached a (western) social order that prioritizes and privileges women by setting the bar very low for them, thus making this ‘learning’, or even the desire to learn, to override their neural firmware not just a challenge, but entirely unexpected of them.

The capacity fro women to realize that Blue Pill ideal is there, but what this does is pit women’s innate dispositions against what men think would be an ideal state for both sexes, and then holds women personally responsible for not ‘learning’ to override their firmware.

Dalrock has a series of posts about feminism that blames men for the failures of feminism. Feminism would work if not for uncooperative men; the same is true for Blue Pill men – Blue Pill idealism would work if not for uncooperative women. Both blame the failures of their goal-states on the other sex’s personal / social character flaws without consideration of the hindbrain, firmware that always rebels against those states.

How do you just accept that and blame yourself for being beta? I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m saying I want to be able to do the same thing. I just can’t access that mindset.

What was so terrible about the blue pill equalism really? We all regard it with contempt, but we’re just being pragmatic, since it’s unworkable, a cruel lie we were all fed from birth. I get all that. But in and of itself, what was so terrible about it? Had it been possible – which it is not – would the idea been worthy of such contempt? I can’t convince myself of that.

Again, men’s idealistic root note wants some kind of cooperative Blue Pill harmony to exist in a mutually shared, mutually negotiated and mutually agreed upon state between men and women. Yes, Blue Pill equalism seems very pragmatic, that’s what makes subscribing to it so seductive, and potentially so damaging for idealistic men. The Feminine Imperative figured that out a hundred thousand years ago – men are the True Romantics, and that’s been their thumbscrew for millennia.

All I did was treat my ex the way I wanted to be treated. In fact, that’s all I did in any of my relationships. And not even because I was trying to be Ghandi or live according to some conscious code, but simply because that is what came naturally. That’s what made the relationship appealing and worth investing in in the first place. Feeling that way about her cultivated a selfless aspect of myself, one that I actually *like.* I miss feeling that way. I loved her because she inspired me to treat her the way I did, or to want to treat her that way. I can look back on it and see it as beta, and if I regard women like robots running an evo-psych script, I can see that it would have been impossible for her to love and respect me, I guess. So is that what it boils down to? Thinking about women as if they are children or dumb dogs and accepting it?

There is great power in the Golden Rule. I don’t mean that from the sentimentalist, “do unto others” perspective, but rather how available you make yourself to exploitation and manipulation when adopting that mindset. There is no position more vulnerable than an expectation of equal treatment from another for like treatment from yourself. It presumes a mutually shared acknowledgement of how that other would perceive treating you as they would themselves.

The fundamental differences between men and women (idealistic vs. opportunistic love concepts) virtually ensure that a conflict will occur when you pair this expectation of equal treatment and equal appreciation with the cardinal rule of sexual strategies:

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

Men’s predilection for idealism make them the logical candidates for this compromise or abandonment of their own imperatives, however, in doing so they fall prey to self-sacrifice in the hopes of mutual appreciation, earning relational equity and all while idealistically affirming for themselves their own righteousness of that sacrifice. The more you suffer the more it shows you really care, right?

The problem then becomes one of women fundamentally lacking the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate her own reality.

And thus we come back to the software vs. firmware conflict again.

This is what I mean when I say that women are “awful.” I don’t even have words for it. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get past the contempt or sense of being wronged. You can tell yourself “stop being beta, bro. Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better, etc.,” or anything you like, it doesn’t change the reality or the fact that I recognize the reality. It’s like trying to convince yourself that 2+2=5.

My idealism was co-opted to serve the FI, but what is competing idealism? Stoicism and being a badass who can take it? Beating myself up for being beta and striving for what? It’s like I’m supposed to improve myself, but I can’t see anything that I would actually regard as an improvement, just traits that would appeal to women’s hunter gatherer libido.

The first step is giving up hope on the Blue Pill ideals you’ve been conditioned to believe are desirable, much less achievable. You need to accept that Blue Pill idealism will never be achieved in a Red Pill paradigm.

The next step is to accept that you can create new hope and a new ideal founded on Red Pill awareness rather than succumbing to a nihilistic despair that’s based on the hope for Blue Pill falsehoods.

Men’s idealistic nature can either be his greatest vulnerability or the source of his greatest strength and drive. It’s the context and conditioning of that idealism that makes it a danger or a boon. Stoicism is a practical measuring of that idealism based on self-knowledge and a truthful understanding of the state in which a man lives (Red Pill awareness).

Why are we so much more idealistic and imaginative in our youth? Because we have very little life experience with which to measure that idealism against. This is exactly why the Feminine Imperative must condition men from an early age – to direct that idealism to its own Blue Pill ends before a man learns enough about his reality to reject the imperatives’ ends in favor of his own.

And that is why undiluted, uncompromised Red Pill awareness being widely available is a threat to the Feminine Imperative.

730 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread game, feminine imperative, feminized men, hypergamy, rational male, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, sexual market value, social conventions | posted in Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill

January 14, 2016

Women ‘Improving’ Men

By Rollo Tomassi

“I’d honestly love if the manosphere would actually focus on helping men in relationships and self-improvement.”

I had this comment offered in a recent thread. It’s a common gripe from women who believe they’re in some way Red Pill and want to divert their new acceptance of Red Pill truths to serve the same tired ends of the Feminine Imperative. The operative, of course, is always whose definition do we base the measure of ‘improvement’ on? For most women the term ‘improvement’ always aligns with whatever best serves a female sexual strategy – because from a feminine-solipsistic perspective whatever serve women should necessarily serve men.

As with most uneducated women’s concerns I’d already addressed this long ago in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

A lot gets made of the Dark Triad or the Dark Side of Game where a skillful player can sadistically use his newly learned red-pill super powers for evil instead of for the greater good of mankind. Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, Hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” –an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

In her trolling ignorance she fails to understand that she and many “Red Pill Women” before her all want a better Beta. They want a Beta with a side of Alpha – in essence a better slave; one that’s just ignorant enough of female nature and the consequences that ignorance represents, but one who also Just Gets It and satisfies their need for amused mastery, masculine dominance (when it’s convenient and affirming), and ‘just gets women’ so well he never needs to be made aware of women’s nature.

The difference in this case is that the ostensibly “Red Pill” woman now looks to the manosphere’s best and brightest to provide them with such men via some distortion of Red Pill social proof. Not only that, but, in their entitled hubris, they are all too willing to pander to exactly the male idealistic nature I described in the last post. Their appeal is to Red Pill aware men’s sense of duty, honor or integrity in mentoring other Blue Pill Beta men (the ones they hope to improve) in an acceptable Purple Pill fashion – just enough ‘self-improvement’ to serve women’s sexual strategies, but just enough watered down ignorance of women’s feral nature to serve as what they believe would be their ‘right guy’.

You’re just not a “Man” if you don’t promote a feminine reviewed and approved version of the Red Pill to other men.

Many of the wives and women that participate in formerly Red Pill married forums follow this invasion into that previously male space and then turn it to similar ends.

The worst part of this bastardization of course is that they only need to encourage the parts of Red Pill awareness that serves their ends. They feel entitled to Red Pill men educating the plugged-in in how to become the ‘improved’ men they believe they deserve. Thus it’s an easy bandwagon to get aboard so long as their redefinition of what actually is Red Pill jives with what they feel is their due in men.

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

The ideal situation for Red Pill women here is to have a group of respected Red Pill men educate the next generation of plugged-in men to provide the attractive aspects of this awareness while stifling the uncomfortable threatening aspects that might require women to actually prove their own worthiness of those men.

Sexy Psychopaths

My good friend Dagonet had a bit of a misguided hope in this tweet today:

If you want women to desire good, honest men, you need a society that truly values those men and confers status on them. Women will follow.

— Dagonet (@TheQuestForever) January 12, 2016

Once again, male idealism gets the better of one of our own. I wish it were in fact the case that women’s innate, evolved Hypergamy could be overridden so they would find men’s higher-order virtues and ideals to be arousing and attractive. This, however, is not the reality we are dealing with.

Reader Gregg brought up an interesting, and as you’ll read timely, comment about why Dag is in error:

Men think that women want “confident, strong” men. Why do we think that way? Because women told us so, or we have read it in some “wise” 500 pages psychology book. Our old provider needs to believe this, so that he has some “noble” manly goal he can pursue. Of course it is very beneficial for women to have STRONG, CONFIDENT slave that protect her. Put aside our male ego, our goals and aspirationas when we want to understand women. They know that our male ego will side with them, will help them in their game. Unhampered by ego, woman can easily enslave man like that.

Male ego tells us – we have to be strong and confident..cos it is “manly”, it’s “respectable” and women SHOULD respect that! So it is a given that they respect that! While in reality…nothing is further from the truth. She wants strong and confident men as her protecting slaves but she tingles and craves for emotionally unstable man. Like attracts the like. Is Tyler Durden a strong, confident man? He is unstable, knows weak spot of women, he can live in a moment, is more unpredictable than woman. He is emotionally intelligent, more so than typical women. He behaves more like a woman than like a man. Therefore he HAS POWER over them! Is Mystery a strong, confident man? Anyone who’s read “the Game” knows how he was driven mad by one, single chick.

What are the traits of men, women are madly enslaved to? Is it confidence, is it strenght? NOPE. It is unpredictability, unstability, emotional COLDNESS, psychopathy! In this case he is more unstable than her, so SHE is trying to fix the relationship, she is trying to give them some rules, some stability, some “security”. She must do all the work, otherwise there is nothing. She fills the void. He who cares less…..

We still do not want to confess hard, dark truth about women and about ourselves. We still talk about this burden of performance, confidence, strenght, emh..POSITIVE masculinity. We still discuss with women, try to persuade them with logic, try to impress them with our “performance”, knowledge, experience. So can our man with innate need to perform rule/care less about, the realtionship? How? He is enslaved by his very need to perform which performance will be judged by women!

Ultimate lotharios are neither strong, nor confident. They behave more like women than like men. They do not feel the need to perform, to protect, to build, to be confident, to answer, to be responsible. Take Charlie Sheen as an example. This man is emotionally damaged, unstable, irresponsible, weak. Majority of women are much more stable than him. Yet he has fucked more then 5000 of them. You think it is due to his fame? I am sure each of us know weak men, psychopatic men with no fame, yet with harems of women.

It is still the same…discussion of slaves how to be worthy of women. Maybe mentality, maybe genetics, do not know which one more. And new generations of lambs arises…primed for slaughter as the last. We are loosing my friends, big time.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll drop a two of the responding comments before I do. YaReally provides some counterbalance here:

YaReally:

And here we come to two different results because Gregg isn’t entirely inaccurate that a lot of fucked up damaged dudes are catnip for girls (and not just damaged fucked up girls, hi madonna/whore complex). Whenever we get two different results we have to drill deeper to find the commonality.

It comes down to the guy having an emotional impact on the girl. It doesn’t matter whether you make her feel good or bad emotions (ideally you make her feel both at various times), all that matters is that you have emotional impact on her. The damaged basketcase hot & cold guy who treats her like a princess one minute then tells her to fuck off because his life is falling apart the next is giving her a full range of emotions. So is the super confident guy with his shit together who’s running push/pull on her.

The biggest thing no one will talk about because it sets guys on a bad path is how fucked up and falling apart your life can really BE and you can still attract and keep hot poon around. Ideally we want men to go the TRP route where they build their careers and hit the gym and don’t booze it up etc. But the reality is you can be a fucking MESS and still get hot girls, as long as you have emotional impact on them. It’s why chicks will whore themselves out for ugly pimps and go back to abusive relationships, and on the flip side it’s why they’ll leave dependable boring guys who give them an emotional flatline day to day.

Personally I think that in the old days a chick had a baby at an early enough age to fulfill her need for crazy emotional impact drama to keep her happy and not craving it, but these days since they don’t want kids till they’re 30+ they fill that voice with the cock carousel, cats, Eat Pray Love adventures, hundreds of hours of Netflix (shows/movies full of emotional ups and downs), fucking guys like me, etc.

And finally I’m going to paraphrase SJF’s comment here for another perspective:

What makes you think “lothario” is the kind of man some of us want to be? (although I’m not sure if you are advocating being one or not.) A lothario is an unscrupulous seducer of woman. Unscrupulous means having or showing no moral principles; not honest or fair.

Just because a man has an innate desire (not need) to perform, doesn’t mean he is enslaved. The Rational Male certainly confesses/explicates/describes truths about women and ourselves. Some of us aren’t shackled by knowledge of the burden of performance and having confidence, strength and positive masculinity. Some of us have found that not to be a burden. To be a low hurdle to real power. With low downside and potentially huge upside.

As an aside here I would also point out that Gregg’s focus on men’s Burden of Performance is entirely on serving women’s interests rather than a natural order of male idealism. This is a common mindset among Blue Pill, plugged-in men, they can’t imagine an existence where their finding of an idealistically male purpose or passion in life is set in a context that doesn’t relate to how women perceive it. It’s a logical trap that most MGTOWs find themselves in – they want a world where their performance burden is removed with regard to women, but still refuse to accept that this burden exists independent from women’s perceptions.

In other words they can’t exit the Game, the fundamental rules persist; whether they choose to play or not the Game proceeds in spite of their involvement.

That being what it is, I’ve set these two concepts together here for a reason. First we have a set of Red Pill women seemingly desirous of Red Pill aware men that serve their imperatives within their acceptable frame of what “Red Pill” ought to be for them. Second we have a parallel between Gregg’s take and YaReally’s take on what women are honestly seeking in an ‘improved’ man – a more perfected slave; one who can embody the worst contradiction to positive masculinity (from Gregg’s perspective), and one who despite his performance burden is really only required to provide emotional polarity to generate tingles and genuine desire.

Toxic Masculinity

Liz’s comment from the last thread (emphasis mine):

Masculinity is not bad, it is good.

The poster responded that toxic masculinity refers to behaviors that cause distress (telling a son not to cry and so forth). I didn’t go further into the argument with her, we didn’t see eye to eye enough to really engage anyway […]

Juxtapose this with the feminine way of going things. He is told everyone has his or her own unique specialness and he just needs some encouragement.

Sometimes I think our idea of “bad” and “good” are skewed, and that’s just feminist poisoning.

Toxic masculinity is yet another narrative buzz word the Feminine Imperative has made endemic in the same way it repeats the “rape culture’ meme. By adding the term ‘culture’ to any article you find offensive you make that article an endemic phenomenon – Rape ‘culture’, Bro ‘culture’, a ‘Culture’ of Corruption, etc.

‘Toxic’ Masculinity is another such exercise. It presumes a universally agreed upon definition of what exactly is toxic – very similar again to the good and bad uses of Game in the Dark Art / Dark Triad associations I made at the beginning of this article. And in Liz’s exchange that definition is whatever male-specific behaviors women find “distressing”.

However as we see in Gregg’s example of ideal masculinity, those distressing attributes are in fact the most arousing attributes of men. I’ve used this example before, but the most pussy I’ve ever enjoyed, the most freely given and most genuinely sought after of myself by women was when I was virtually penniless. I didn’t need to signal parental investment and provisioning cues to get women’s sexual interest, I just need to fit the bill for what YaReally defines as the “fun guy” – or as Sheryl Sandberg agrees, “the bad boy, the crazy boy, the cool boy, and the commitment-phobic boy in order to prompt a woman’s genuinely inspired sexual best.

Women & Altruism:

Altruism plays a role in mate choice, particularly in women’s preferences and in long-term (LT) relationships. The current study analyzed how these preferences interacted with another important mate choice variable, physical attractiveness. Here, female participants were presented with photographs of men of varying levels of physical attractiveness, alongside descriptions of them behaving either altruistically or not in different scenarios. The results showed women preferred altruistic men, particularly in LT relationships and that this interacted with physical attractiveness such that being both attractive and altruistic made a man more desirable than just the sum of the two desirable parts. Also, being altruistic made low attractive men more desirable but only for LT relationships. Finally, men who were just altruistic were rated more desirable than men who were just attractive, especially for LT relationships. Overall, these findings are discussed in terms of the role of altruism in mate choice, particularly in LT relationships and directions of future research.

There’s subsection of Red Pill thought (Athol Kay in particular) that believes that Beta attributes align with the effects oxytocin has on men and women. I’m adding this here to provide a balance to that misguided idea:

It has been suggested that the degree of compassion—the feeling of warmth, understanding and kindness that motivates the desire to help others, is modulated by observers’ views regarding the target’s vulnerability and suffering. This study tested the hypothesis that as compassion developed to protect vulnerable kinships, hormones such as oxytocin, which have been suggested as playing a key role in ‘tend-and-befriend’ behaviors among women, will enhance compassion toward women but not toward men. Thirty subjects participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject study. Following administration of oxytocin/placebo, participants listened to recordings of different female/male protagonists describing distressful emotional conflicts and were then asked to provide compassionate advice to the protagonist. The participants’ responses were coded according to various components of compassion by two clinical psychologists who were blind to the treatment. The results showed that in women and men participants oxytocin enhanced compassion toward women, but did not affect compassion toward men. These findings indicate that the oxytocinergic system differentially mediates compassion toward women and toward men, emphasizing an evolutionary perspective that views compassion as a caregiving behavior designed to help vulnerable individuals.

Those example might seem a bit abstract, but I’m putting them up here to make the point that women’s sexual selection filtering is a two-fold prospect rooted in the dual nature of women’s Hypergamy. What best serves Alpha Fucks is contradicted by Beta Bucks.

Thus we have notions like the attributes that make up “Toxic Masculinity” being arbitrarily whatever aspects of the male nature women find themselves most lacking in men. And by way of that we get a definition that fluctuates according to the Feminine Imperative’s needs. Because of this women, Red Pill or otherwise will never be honest arbiter of ‘improving’ men’s states of masculinity.

397 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, dread game, feminine imperative, feminized men, hypergamy, intergender relations, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale, women | posted in Biomechanics, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill, Unplugging

January 6, 2016

The Red Pill Balance

By Rollo Tomassi

Before you move on to reading today’s post, please take 14 minutes and listen to Niko Choski’s latest here Man:the being made of stone, it’ll be relevant in the second half of this post.

Niko is MGTOW, and from what I know is fairly highly regarded in that sphere. I did an interview with him back in August and since then have become a semi-regular listener of his youtube channel. We’ve occasionally bounced ideas off one another since the interview and I hold Niko in the highest respect for his intellectual approach and insights.

So it’s with that in mind that I’m going to use his latest offering here as a contrast to what I’m going into today.

Reader Divided Line stopped me in my writing tracks on another post with this comment from the last post thread. Not the least of which because I’d just finished listening to Niko’s audio here, but also because it was an interesting juxtaposition to what I’d planned to go into today. I’m going to quote Divided Line here and riff a bit as I go (emphasis mine):

@reloadedbeats

A lot of what you’ve said here echos my own thinking to such a degree that it’s as if you read my mind. I agree 100%.

What you’re talking about here, I think, is the inherent value of goodness or justice. I think Plato took up this question in the Republic and nailed it better than most.

In the beginning of the dialogue the question is “what is justice?” But it quickly transforms into “what is the value of justice?” In other words, if goodness wins us no reward, then what value does it have? Is it valuable in its own right? Would it have value even if it cost us something, or indeed cost us everything?

Glaucon puts the question like this (paraphrasing): “What if the perfectly just man is seen by everyone as perfectly unjust, while the perfectly unjust man is seen as perfectly just?” He then puts it on Socrates to effectively prove that, even in this scenario, justice would be worth it.

We could gender this question and simply ask “what if the perfectly good man is seen as perfectly unattractive to women, while the perfectly evil man is seen as perfectly attractive?”

Is goodness worth it even if it isn’t profitable sexually or socially? It’s the same question.

Why be a ‘good’ man when what we consider good by both personal and social measures isn’t rewarded (or only grudgingly rewarded), while what we consider ‘bad’ is what is enthusiastically rewarded with women’s genuine desire and intimacy? In other words, Hypergamy doesn’t care about what men consider good or bad.

It seems like this is the predicament red pill awareness puts us in when we have to consider the value of our formerly beta self. What makes the beta the beta is his weakness, of course, but it is simultaneously his civility. We’re not defective people for wanting or even needing the possibility love, empathy, truth, friendship, kindness, and – above all else – trust in our lives. It just makes us human. If we project our deeply rooted desires for these things and treat others the way we want to be treated, wouldn’t society be better off for it? And isn’t this what the supplicating, loyal beta does when latches on to a woman he believes to the “the One?”

No Quarter Given

In my post (and book chapter) Of Love and War I quote a reader who summed up this want for relief from men’s inherent Burden of Performance:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to

When I consider Niko’s perspective alongside this I begin to see a stark paradox; mens’ want for a relief or a respite from that performance burden tends to be their undoing. I wont get too deep into this, but one reason I see the MGTOW sphere being so seductive is the hopeful promise of that same relief. Simply give up. Refuse to play along and reject the burden altogether. Japan’s herbivorous men crisis is a graphic example of the long term effects of this.

However, this is the same mistake men make in their Blue Pill, Beta conditioning. They believe that if they meet the right girl, if they align correctly with that special ONE, then they too can give up and not worry about their performance burden – or relax and only make the base effort necessary to keep his ONE happy.

The Beta buys the advertising that his Blue Pill conditioning has presented to him for a lifetime. Find the right girl who accepts you independent of your performance, and you can let down your guard, be vulnerable, forget any notion of Red Pill truths because your girl is a special specimen who places no conditions on her love, empathy, intimate acceptance or genuine desire for you.

And this is also very seductive and inuring for the Beta who’s been conditioned to believe there can realistically be a respite from his burden.

That’s how it seemed to work in my own life. Looking back on it, I was so grateful to my ex, who was easily the most attractive girl I’d ever been with, that I would have taken a bullet for her. I didn’t want anybody else. I didn’t even think about other girls – the first time that had ever happened to me in a relationship. I can remember thinking that even if she gained weight, lost her looks, and got old, I’d still want her. I would have “loved” her forever. I was good and ready to cash in my chips, exit the SMV, and retire. I would have arranged my whole life around making her happy and would have felt lucky to have had the privilege.

At the time, all of that felt noble and brave, but looking back on it, it just seems pathetic and pathological, the result of my neediness. But the thing is, what if she had reciprocated it? Wouldn’t it have been a relationship worth having? Had she reciprocated it – if any woman was capable of reciprocating that – it wouldn’t have been Disney movie bullshit, but the real thing. We’re supposed to think such a thing is possible and that’s what keeps us playing along. The Red Pill is really about recognizing its impossibility, I think. There is no possible equity. To be sure, a woman can be loyal and dedicated to you, in theory, but she’ll only give that loyalty to the guy who needs it least. It’s like a cruel, cosmic joke.

Such as it is, that girl lied to me, ran for the hills the moment I showed weakness and needed her the most, and cheated on me. Big surprise, right? With a red pill awareness now I can see how predictable that result was, but at the time I was blindsided by it. I never saw it coming. I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing when I’d invested so much in her, when I was so willing to give her all the things I’d always wanted most. I assumed she wanted the same things – men and women are the same, right? That’s what the egalitarians tell us. I couldn’t understand how those things could be so valueless to her that she would just throw it all away like that. She didn’t value them at all.

On occasion I’ve suggested that men watch the movie Blue Valentine. You can check out the plot summary on the IMDB link there, but you really need to watch the movie (on Netflix) to appreciate what I’m going to relate here. The main character suffers from the same romantic idealism and want for a perfected, mutually shared concept of love between himself and the single mother he eventually marries.

It follows along the same familiar theme of Alpha while single / Beta after marriage that most men experience in what they believe is their lot. More often than not the Alpha they believed their wives or LTR girlfriends perceived they were was really just a guy who’d do for their needs of whatever phase of maturity she found herself in.

By itself this would be enough for me to endorse the movie, but the story teaches a much more valuable lesson. What Dean (Ryan Gosling) represents is a man who idealistically buys the Blue Pill promise that men and women share a mutual love concept, independent of what their sexual strategies and innate dispositions prompt them to. Because of this misbelief Dean gives up on the burden of his performance. He drops his ambitions and relaxes with his ONE girl, contenting himself in mediocrity, low ambitions and his idealistic belief in a woman sharing and sustaining his romanticized Blue Pill love ideal – performancelessness.

He relaxes, lets his guard down and becomes the vulnerable man he was taught since birth that women would not only desire, but require for their false, performanceless notions of mutual intimacy. The men of this sphere who don’t find themselves divorced from their progressively bored wives are often the ones who trade their ambitions and passions for a life of mediocrity and routine,…so long as the security blanket of what they believe is a sustainable, passable semblance of that love (but not desire) exists in their wives or girlfriends.

Their burden of performance is sedated so long as their women are reasonably comfortable or sedate themselves. That false sense of contentment is only temporary and leads to their own ruin or decay.

No Quarter Expected

I’ve since watched something similar happen to a friend not once but twice. It’s textbook, standard shit. AWALT.

Cultivating these unrequited beta aspects of somebody’s character, if we did it on a mass scale, creates a society worth living in. It’s a civilized society where these things are most possible and it’s a truly worthwhile relationship where both parties regard each other this way and can full expect it to be reciprocated. It requires faith and trust, but we all know better. Our survival depends on knowing better, post sexual revolution. Women were never worthy of such trust and they’re entirely incapable of it. They were never capable of it. We were just supposed to think they were and cultivate the better aspects of our natures in order to be worthy of them.

The ugly truth of it is that women were never worthy of us.

Women’s sexuality doesn’t reward justice or goodness – if it did, reciprocity would be the norm and none of us would be confused about relational equity. Women reward not goodness, but strength. And strength is amoral, meaning it can be either just or unjust, good or bad. The guy with strength can either be the villain or the hero – it makes no difference to women. They can’t tell the difference and in truth don’t care anyway.

There is a set of the Red Pill that subscribe to what I’d call a ‘scorched earth‘ policy. It’s very difficult to reconcile the opportunistic basis of women’s Hypergamous natures with men’s hopeful, idealistic want for a love that’s independent from their performance burden. So the idea is again one of giving up. They say fuck it, women only respond to the most base selfishly individualistic, socio or psychopathic of men, so the personality they adopt is one that hammers his idealism flat and exaggerates his ‘Dark Triad‘ traits beyond all believability.

It’s almost a vengeful embrace of the most painful truths Red Pill awareness presents to us, and again I see why the scorched earth PUA attitude would seem attractive. Women do in fact observably and predictably reward assholes and excessively dominant Alpha men with genuine desire and sexual enthusiasm.

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests. Solution: turn hard toward the asshole energy. Men understand the rules of engagement with women and they know Game well enough to capitalize on it so why not capitalize on that mastery of it?

The dangers of this are twofold. First, it lacks real sustainability and eventually becomes a more sexualized version of MGTOW. Secondly, “accidents” happen. MGTOWs will warn us that any interaction with a woman bears a risk of sexual harassment or false rape claims, but for the scorched earth guy a ~~planned~~ unplanned pregnancy on the part of a woman attempting to lock down her Alpha is far more likely to be his long term downfall. Emotional and provisioning liabilities for a child tends to pour cold water on the scorched earth guy.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that women are philosophically, spiritually, and morally stunted. They have a limited capacity for adherence to higher ideals and this is why they don’t know or care what actual justice or goodness is. Like Schopenhauer said, they “mistake knowledge for its appearance.”

It took me a long time to be able to accept this. That is women’s true inferiority – and women are profoundly inferior. And I take no pleasure in recognizing that, as if I’m somehow touting the superiority of team men. It’s awful, in fact. Dealing with it is the ultimate burden of performance for us as individual men, but also as a society. At some point we’re simply going to have to confront women’s moral inferiority. If we look at our institutions, the very same that are crumbling now all around us, we can see that previous generations of men already figured this out. We just forgot what they knew.

So what’s the answer? Is justice valuable for its own sake? All of us would probably on some level want to be able to say yes and argue the case, but I don’t know if I can do so convincingly.

I’m with you on this, part of me thinks “Fuck this. It can’t be like this.” But it is. I wish I had the answer.

Niko attempts to redress the assumption that men feel some necessity to be someone they really aren’t. In Vulnerability I go into how the Feminine Imperative is only too willing to exploit this self-doubt by labeling men as existential posers and their conventional masculinity is a ‘mask’ – a false charade – they put on to hide the real vulnerability that lies beneath.

Unfortunately many men accept this as gospel. It’s part of their Blue Pill upbringing and is an essential aspect of their feminine ‘sensitivity training’ and gender loathing conditioning. When masculinity is only ever a mask men wear the only thing real about them is what real women tell them it should be.

What we don’t consider is the legitimacy of our need for strength, independence, stoicism, and yes, emotional restraint. That need to be bulwark against women’s emotionality, that need to wear psychological armor against the Red Pill realities of women’s visceral natures is legitimate and necessary. If a man’s vulnerability is ever it’s because his display of it is so uncharacteristic of his normal impenetrability. The woman’s demeanor, and the narrator’s voice, in the last post’s Campbell’s soup commercial is an example of the weak, vulnerability women expect from lesser child-men – and a commensurate expectation of him to just get that he needs to be strong.

That’s the inconsistency in women’s Hypergamous nature and the narrative of the Feminine Imperative’s messaging. Be sweet, open, vulnerable; it’s OK to cry, ask for help, be sick and weakened, we’re all equal and empathetic – but, Man Up, “what, you need your mommy?”, assert yourself, the asshole is sexier than you, where’s your self-discipline? – but, your masculine identity is a mask you wear to hide the real you,……

I play many roles in the male life I lead today, and I’ve played many others in my past. I’m Rollo Tomassi in the manosphere, I’m a father to my daughter, a husband and lover to my wife, a brilliant artist and pragmatic builder of brands in my job, an adventure seeker when I’m on my snowmobile and a quiet contemplator of life and God when I’m fishing. All of those roles and more are as legitimate as I choose to make them. Do I have moments of uncertainty? Do I waiver in my resolve sometimes? Of course, but I don’t let that define me because I know there is no real strength in relating that.

The Red Pill Balance

Red Pill awareness is both a blessing and a curse. The trick is balancing your Red Pill expectations with your previous Blue Pill idealism. It’s not a sin for you to want for an idealistic reality – that’s what sets us apart from women’s opportunism. You do yourself no favors in killing you idealistic, creative sense of wonderment of what could be. The trick is acknowledging that aspect of your male self.

KFG had a comment to this point:

If men did not hold heroism as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.
If women did not hold survival as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.

This was precisely the dynamic I was referring to when I wrote Idealism.

Men’s idealism and idealistic concepts of love are the natural counterbalance to women’s pragmatic, Hypergamously rooted opportunism and opportunistic concepts of love and vice versa. Those differing concepts can be applied very unjustly and very cruelly, or very judiciously and honorably, but they are the reality of our existence.

Red Pill awareness isn’t just about understanding women’s innate natures and behaviors, it’s also understanding your own male nature and learning how it fits in to that new awareness and living in a new paradigm. Is something like justice valuable for its own sake? I’d say so, but that concept of justice must be tempered (or enforced) in a Red Pill understanding of what to expect from women and men. Red Pill awareness doesn’t mean we should abandon our idealism or higher order aspirations, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should just accept our lot in women’s social frame because of it. It does mean we need to balance that idealism in as pragmatic a way with the realities of what the Red Pill shows us.

803 Comments | tags: dread game, emotional vulnerability, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, genuine change, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, masculinity, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, the rational male, therationalmale, vulnerability | posted in Foundations, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Positive Masculinity, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill

January 1, 2016

Empathy 2016

By Rollo Tomassi

The Campbell’s Soup Company was founded in 1869. In those 147 years the company developed a reputation as a wholesome staple of brands to the point it’s been considered Americana – even Andy Warhol considered Campbell’s emblematic of the American experience.

But in the space of a 30 second commercial the Feminine Imperative and the feminist narrative has managed to corrupt, if not overtly destroy a brand identity that took 147 years to establish.

Last week I outlined how the imperative assimilated the Star Wars intellectual property and franchise; arguably another example of Americana. Monday I detailed how it is in women’s innate interests individually and in the Feminine Imperative’s interests on a meta scale to appropriate the works and fruits of men’s labors as a result of their Burden of Performance. And, once again, here we have another glaring example of the imperative’s appropriation of a storied brand identity to use as a vehicle for its narratives.

The gold of course is in the comments on the YouTube page. And as you might expect there’s a lot of predictable outrage swirling around how ‘not all women are like that‘ (NAWALT) and “wow, what a bitch.” The commercial message was even overt enough to trigger the average man to risk to consider, “flip the genders and look how this commercial reads.” But that’s just it, there is such a comfort with the Feminine Imperative in being this overt that even plugged in Blue Pill men cannot ignore the message.

What exactly is that message? In this case it’s the degree to which the imperative is comfortable in revealing truths about the nature of women. I’ve been calling attention to this comfort level for almost two years now. Open Hypergamy is almost a given at this stage. Open cuckoldry is beginning to establish a foothold in being socially acceptable, and later socially expected. In the coming years I believe we’ll begin to see an even larger degree of comfort the imperative has in revealing and reveling in innate feminine nature. This commercial, from a storied brand of comfort food no less, is the first illustration of this trend.

While this commercial and the hashtag associated are intended to shock, it’s important to understand the message that Campbell’s Soup Company is aligning itself with. Bear in mind that a board of executives, brand directors and marketing directs had to approve the message and budget needed to deliver this message. The fallback of course will be that the intent was humor, but they understand very well the latent message in the humor they will hide behind when the publicity backlash occurs.

No doubt the Jezebel set of the femosphere will either embrace the commercial’s message by parroting the trope that women hate to be men’s mothers, or they will decry it as portraying women as being heartless, careerist bitches – they just can’t win. In either interpretation the louder buzz will be as it always is, women being victims.

In a Red Pill perspective we see a lot of what we already know about women’s innate, visceral natures.

From Empathy:

Women cannot bear to see a Man experiencing negative emotions such as extreme anger, rage, fear, despair, despondency or depression for extended periods of time. You say you want to “be there” for your Man; but you cannot do it. If it goes on long enough, it kills the attraction; it sets off your hypergamy alarms; and subconsciously causes you to start hunting for a replacement Man.

A woman seeing a Male go through the above will seek to replace that Male immediately.

Women cannot listen to Men talking about or working out their dating/mating/relationship issues or problems. Women reflexively view a Man discussing such issues as “whining” or “complaining” or “bitterness” or “sour grapes” or “well, you just chose poorly, so sucks to be you” or “suck it up, no one wants to hear you bitching about it”.

As to both of the above principles; when a Male is involved, ratchet up by a factor of 5 the disdain and repulsion a woman experiences when seeing a Male do or experience the above.

I took a lot of shit from indignant women when I published Empathy. Yet here we have what was likely a half million dollar budget commercial graphically confirming exactly the premise of my post.

As a bonus this message also overtly confirms much of what I wrote in Vulnerability:

Vulnerability is not something to be brandished or proud of. While I do believe the insight and acknowledgement of your personal vulnerabilities is a necessary part of understanding oneself (particularly when it comes to unplugging oneself), it is not the source of attraction, and certainly not arousal, that most men believe it is for women.

From the comfort of the internet and polite company women will consider the ‘sounds-right’ appeal of male vulnerability with regard to what they’resupposed to be attracted to, but on an instinctual, subconscious level, women make a connection with the weakness that vulnerability represents.

A lot of men believe that trusting displays of vulnerability are mutually exclusive of displays of weakness, but what they ignore is that Hypergamy demands men that can shoulder the burden of performance. When a man openly broadcasts his vulnerableness he is, by definition, beginning from a position of weakness.

Yes ladies, I understand you’re not like this. I fully anticipate the “not in my experience” personalization each of you will attempt to adopt to placate any bad juju and your solipsistic mental point of origin. Just remember that this is the messaging your gender’s imperative is fostering. This is the message that Campbell’s Soup will stake its 147 year brand reputation on because it believes it will sell more soup.

It may seem that I’m being unduly critical of the narrative of this commercial, but remember that this narrative exists for a reason. I have no doubt women will chime in about how it’s an exaggeration, but what message is being exaggerated? What is the message that the medium is conveying here? For as much as the narrative would like men to be sensitive and open up about their feelings, for as much as it wants men to be vulnerable, all it takes is a 30 second commercial to confirm that men expressing weakness isn’t strength, and Hypergamy doesn’t care if your Mommy made you soup when you were sick as a child – stop expecting Strong Independent Women® to be your Mommy.

Keep in mind the contradicting message this commercial conveys here. This is the same degree of ruthlessness and insensitivity that the Feminine Imperative expects from, and finds attractive in, men.

687 Comments | tags: dread game, feminized men, hypergamy, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

December 28, 2015

Ladders & Snakes

By Rollo Tomassi

All men are created equal. What you do from there is up to you.

Law 7: Get Others to Do the Work for You, but always take the credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you an aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

When I was first introduced the the 48 Laws of Power the seventh was the one I had the most trouble accepting. I should really say I have trouble ’employing’ this law, because I’ve spent my entire life as an artist in some capacity and I’m very particular about the integrity and character of what it is I create. Obviously we have rights management and plagiarism laws to ensure against the more blatant ‘stealing’ of ideas, but a lot of what accounts for taking unwarranted credit occurs in more nuanced social situations.

It’s usually in these social circumstances that the average person makes use of Law 7. It’s hardly a law at all considering how naturally humans will use it. In a purely ethical sense it’s kind of a no-brainer; don’t assume credit that you’re undeserving of, but bending the perceptions of what we base our estimates on is where the real art comes in.

On a personal level, my investment in what I create and how that creation is received is what matters most to me. I understand the want for a quick reward, but I’m more concerned with a cheap imitation of what I’ve created debasing the quality and effort it took to create it. For instance, I’ve spent the better part of my career creating products and brands for people with a lot of money who really had no real investment in what it was I was making for them. All they wanted was a “product” that they could promote and sell.

Naturally the quality and integrity of that brand or product had to be something they could get behind (the horse must at least look like it could win), but not be held too personally accountable should that product end up being less than ideal. That’s a nice way of saying most salesmen I’ve known love a widget if it’s something that sells, but they’re never really on the hook for if it sucks – that accountability rests with the creator.

While we were dining after the Man in Demand conference we had discussion about exactly this dynamic. I make an effort to keep my business endeavors as businesslike as possible, but there are brands and things I create that I will personally invest myself into. I have to be very careful of this because it took me a long time (and more than a few failed attempts) to develop the discernment to know what’s worth putting myself into. However, it is especially satisfying for me to travel to another country and see one of my bottles in the duty-free stores at the airport and then be at a bar & grill somewhere on vacation and see one on the backbar.

I explained to the guys that what I create (and own) are not “products” to me. I dislike that term in that sense. I understand the utility of that word to salesmen; product is an easy unit of measure, but to the person creating that thing it’s a measure of the quality of their idea. To refer to that creation as a product impersonalizes that creation and allows the seller to remain at arms distance should the creation be wildly popular or a horrible failure.

That pride of ownership or the abandoning of it is a convenience for someone only invested in promoting that thing, but on some level it is never really theirs with the same responsibility as the one who created it. So ultimately the noncommittal position of selling, promoting, endorsing, etc. becomes an arrangement of convenience since the creator’s idea is where the ‘product’s’ strengths lie – and also where the real accreditation should too.

I’ve occasionally been accused by the ignorant on Twitter of being dependent on The Rational Male for my revenue. Most of my regular readers know what I do for a living and understand why that’s silly, but I don’t think it’s any real secret that what I write here and in the books is something very personal to me. The Rational Male has always been something I’ve invested myself in for obvious reasons, but I’ve always resisted turning it into a brand per se. There wont be any TRM T-Shirts coming in the foreseeable future.

I’m proud to be responsible for what I do here and I will never be beholden to making what I create into a ‘product’ for others to sell. One of the best things about being in the position I am is being anti-fragile enough to write what I believe is important while still keeping myself solvent on what I do apart from it. This allows me a much greater freedom than needing to write something to stay solvent.

Bargain Debasement

You’ll have to forgive my intro here, but it got me to thinking about a larger point I had in mind about how and why a man invests himself in various endeavors in life. I’ve worked hard to get to a point in life where I can say my personal successes (and failures) are my own and not the result of others’ funding or some fortunate dispensation, but rather based on the strength of ideas and responsibly owning them as the creator. Yet another reason I have a problem with Law 7; for as much as you may gain by employing it you rarely develop the insights that failing of your own accord teaches you. Experience teaches harsh, but it teaches best.

I think one of the reasons men find the popularized, feminist, social convention of ‘male privilege‘ so disingenuous is because we want to be appreciated for the sacrifices and perseverance needed to even have what looks like a meager, hand-out, kind of privilege. An atmosphere of default privilege debases what men have honestly invested themselves in. I’ve always held that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make to facilitate their feminine-primary reality, but that’s not to discount men’s want to still be appreciated for them.

Whether that’s manifested in financial wealth, personal freedom, status or earned wisdom there’s a fundamental want for an appreciation that is rarely ever forthcoming. One reason I believe many men have a self-fulfilling definition of what it is to be Alpha is because they feel they’ve earned that identification through hard work and playing by a set of rules everyone else should, but get frustrated when their efforts go unappreciated, if not outright exploited. Again, Law 7. It’s galling to see others rewarded for exploiting what you think should be appreciated.

There’s a subset of MGTOW reader/writers who question every man’s motive for doing what it is he does thinking that appeasing women is at the root of every effort. Nothing is a genuinely inspired passion if the end result is women’s affectations. I covered this in Crisis of Motive, but what exactly is a genuine motive in that sense? If the byproduct result of my genuine interests is having sex with gorgeous women and/or a beautiful wife and a couple of well adjusted kids should that then discredit my unique talents and interests in what I do?

What if, after all a man does, he seeks an appreciation that will only rarely be unsolicited on his part? It’s one thing to command respect; it’s quite another to demand it.

Institutionalized Success

In this sense I think what is most egregious about the present state of marriage is that, for the greater part, all of the personal equity a man invests in himself over the course of his lifetime is only a divorce settlement away from being halved for him (if not more so). A man’s personal equity (not to be confused with relational equity) is only one false rape allegation away from ruin. This is the institutionalization of Law 7: that a woman can largely and legally get a man to do all the work and then take (at least half) the credit from his own success – or at least that’s the social expectation.

Granted, a woman can also be on the hook for her lack of character judgement should she pair with a man who becomes a burden to her. There are rare instances when a woman may find herself financially beholden to a bad choice in marriage, but then it’s a situation of that man’s genuine achievements in life and usually an inability to take his burden of performance and make the most of it. For the most part, the role of support falls to the man in societal expectations; women and feminized men are the ones supported.

In fact, it’s a point of shame for men to be supported in such a fashion. Whether that’s warranted of not, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves than what they started with. A needed provisioning from women only puts his achievements’ validity in question. Like it or not, men should avoid the perception of themselves not pulling their own weight.

Doing More

A while back I was asked why the Burden of Performance should be called a “burden” at all. Should it not be a “challenge” or a “opportunity”? All optimist semantics aside, it is uniquely men whose character is judged on what he started with and what he made of himself.

I’m sure equalist critics will want to cast women into the same performance role, but in a uniquely male sense, it is men who are expected to make more of themselves. To be a ‘man’ is to produce in excess of what you consume – thus having the potential to support a family, an extended family, ensure security, give back to his community and/or reinvest that excess in greater endeavors or passions. While it may be part of the Feminine Imperative’s media campaign to popularize the character of the Strong Independent Woman® there is still room for women to expect the best out of a man while being provided for herself. In other words women have both the option to strive for independence while also retaining the option to be provided for by her husband or an LTR. And failing either of these, they retain an institutional right to Law 7.

Men must be independent resource providers, they must make more of themselves than what they began with, independent of dispensations or special privilege. There is no safety net, no other socially acceptable option to be provided for and still retain his being definitively a ‘man’. One of the hesitations I have with endorsing the Red Pill idea of going ‘Monk Mode’ is less about the isolation and more about the motivation men need to find within themselves to better themselves.

We look down on men who are dependent on women. Whether that’s financially, emotionally or physically, there is no option for dependence. One of the primary complaints professional, educated, independent women bemoan is their inability to pair off with a man of ‘like’ (or above) status. They’ll make euphemisms to characterize the men who would be their ‘equals’ who wont date them, but what they fail to acknowledge is the fundamental, root level truth of men’s burden of performance. For all the high-minded hopes of equalism, women’s Hypergamy still wants to filter for both sexual and provider acceptability in men.

Back in 2012 I based a post on Creative Intelligence from a study about how improvisational skills and creativity factored into a woman’s Hypergamous considerations. I wont quote it in length here, but suffice it to say that there is a measurable difference in how women perceive men with a trained or innate ability to improvise in, and overcome, times of adversity. As might be expected a man with a proven capacity to produce more than he consumes – especially when he’s had to come back from failure or misfortune – tends to be a more attractive mate choice that the man who chances into his own affluence.

Bear in mind that attraction and arousal are different sides of the Hypergamy coin (AF/BB), but many cross-cultural studies suggest that a capacity for creative, innovative, adaptive intelligence has been an evolutionarily selected-for socio-sexual trait in men – much less so in women. That’s important for the MGTOW critic to remember, it’s not as simple as a feminine-primary social order dictating men being slaves to their burden of performance. Just as gender is primarily biological, and not a social construct, neither is women’s evolved, Hypergamous sexual filtering.

Filters

Now, with the evolutionary basis of attraction in mind, it’s also important to consider that in our evolutionary past women evolved to take calculated risks in optimizing their Hypergamous sexual selectivity. The utility such Red Pill concepts as social proof, dread, Game, amused mastery, etc. are evidenced because they work with (or sometimes against) this Filter.

From The Curse of Potential:

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes.

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

As I’ve mentioned in many prior posts, Hypergamy demands assurances. In fact so paramount is that need for Hypergamous certainty that women have evolved peripheral awareness to be sensitive to psychological and socio-sexual cues that confirm a man’s Hypergamous acceptability to her. Furthermore, so important is this need of assurance that in a society founded on feminine social primacy, the Feminine Imperative will legislate legal institutions to prevent men from misrepresenting themselves as a more optimal Hypergamous choice – as well as legislate penalties that insure women against both Hypergamous fraud and less than optimal mating choices.

As you might guess, the development and evolution of Game is one such psycho-social contingency men refine and use to workaround this Hypergamous filtering; and one that the imperative is still making efforts to restrict. However this doesn’t discount the way men have, in the past, built themselves up based on both social expectations, but also genuine interests and passions. Naturally, if a man is the genuine article and as a byproduct attracts women as a result of it, that might be preferable to ‘faking it till you’re making it’ – but if that’s the route you go be sure that you do in fact ‘make it’ because it’s what you feel passionate about.

Warnings

The primary reason I wrote Preventive Medicine was to help men avoid having women’s institutionalization of Law 7 ruin their long term personal efforts and achievements. Many critics want to lock horns with me as to when a man’s Peak SMV generally occurs in life. That’s fine, but whether or not you agree with my accuracy in this regard the fact remains that it takes much more concentrated, long term effort to reach that peak than women’s fast-burn peak SMV. I don’t just mean this in terms of his professional status, but also his maturity, his acquired wisdom, his judgement of others’ character, the lessons learn from the bruises of his failures and near misses.

All of this requires an investment in oneself that simply the having of resources handed to you will never satisfy. That personal investment in oneself, as it should, amounts to a lot of internalized equity – an equity that will never be appreciated by women whose Hypergamy is looking for a pre-made man. Hypergamy doesn’t care about the effort and perseverance required to achieve the status you (should) enjoy at your SMV peak.

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to short term sexual selection, the most wanton sex I had was at the time in my life when I was the poorest. As an underemployed semi-rockstar I used hit it with the best of them, and from a purely sexual perspective, it’s true, criminal and Alpha cads will still fuck 80% of women. But there’s more to the worth of a man than just his notch count. Sexual experience constitutes a very important measure of that, but a man should want more for himself as a man, as a father, as leader, as a creator, even as a cad.

Life experience and the benefits that a man should draw from it are personally valuable. In fact, men feel the equity of these efforts are so valuable that men will commit suicide at 5 times the rate of women; and in particular between the ages of 45-49. Why do you suppose that is? What assurances of long term security does the common man have for himself? What is he faced with when the plan he sets forth for himself in his life is destroyed in one precarious instance?

Once again, using the male deductive logic, it may seem a better option for him to hit the reset button than to be faced with having his life’s equity, his largest investment, his creation, stolen from him. This is a graphic illustration of men’s Burden of Performance, a burden women simply don’t face.

298 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminized men, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Foundations, Operative Social Conventions, Positive Masculinity, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill

December 21, 2015

Storytelling

By Rollo Tomassi

“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – East of Eden

About 3 months ago there was a very interesting side conversation of the main article topic in the comments. The movie 300 came up and how it was or wasn’t a good illustration of conventional masculinity. I’ll just say that from a purely pulp fantasy perspective I loved the movie. And as a fantasy it was great, but both men and women like to romanticize various times and stories in history to suit their desires, as well as reinforce their beliefs.

I think many retromasculinty subscribers get caught up in what YaReally calls LARPing – live action roleplaying – with regards to how these fantasies become romanticized ideals that were neither true of that period, nor are they really relevant for contemporary times. With today’s communication and ubiquitous movie animation it’s all too simple for the less socially savvy to latch on to old books heroic ideals.

But as I said, I loved the movie and I can see how heroic movies in this theme appeal to men frustrated by modern societal circumstance. If that mythological fantasy inspires them to greater aspiration I would say they do serve some purpose – for personal visualization if nothing else.

Unfortunately anything that celebrates masculinity today just becomes a target of ridicule and homosexual shaming for heterosexual men. It’s ironic how a fem-centric society will embrace flagrant homosexuality as normative yet when a heterosexual man celebrates his maleness he’s shamefully suspected of being homosexual himself. This in effect is a way to contain conventional masculinity in something that the Feminine Imperative hopes will control it.

I have on 3 separate occasions at 3 separate evangelical churches seen the ‘going off to war’ scene from 300 used as a ridiculous marketing tool to inspire ‘christian’ men to go to a Christian Men’s weekend retreat. It’s the part where the 300 are ranked up in front of Leonidas and he’s surveying their fitness for battle. The language is in french and the english subtitles are swapped in for some suitably ridiculous dialog between the men and Leonidas and Leo’s wife (whom he refers to as “snuggle bear” or some shit).

This is a good example of the feminine-primary ridicule of masculinity that Churchianity co-opts into Christian Culture. They are all too ready, maybe even more ready, to pander to men’s LARPing instinct while simultaneously ridiculing anything that might hint at men celebrating their maleness – much less finding any realistic empowerment from it. And the real tragedy is that it’s these self-same christian men who are creating these parodies of themselves.

The Imperative Awakens

I’m going to paraphrase a bit here, but there’s an idiom that states if you can control the art and imagination of a culture you can subdue that culture. I may be butchering that, but the drift is that when you supplant an ‘organic’ idealism with the ideological seeds of what you believe ‘ought to be’ you begin by stirring the imagination at an early age.

When we’re in our early youth we’re like intellectual sponges from the age of 5 on into (and beyond) our teenage years. So it should come as no surprise that male idealism finds its most formative roots when we’re kids. Even when our imaginations aren’t fed by myths and stories boys will take up the role of creating them for themselves. The details of exactly what we create and romanticize are less important than how we came to identifying with it and how it influences our identities later in life.

I’m prefacing here with this to give you an understanding of just how easy it’s become for a feminine-primary social order to influence this nascent idealism in boys and later men. The human race is one based on stories. First it was oral histories and later those were recorded in written languages. Telling stories is how we used to learn, and really still do in a more detailed fashion with the rise of technology and global communications. When boys are playing out the roles of characters presented to them they are enacting the ideals of what’s represented in those stories.

SPOILER ALERT – If you haven’t seen Star Wars, The Force Awakens yet, you’ll want to skip this next part until you do.

I recently watched the latest installment of the Star Wars series, The Force Awakens, and as you might guess it’s virtually impossible for me to see any popular media without my Red Pill Lenses on. Going in I had no doubt that I’d be subjected to the messaging of the Feminine Imperative, but I loved the original series and even the much maligned prequels, so I knew I’d want to see this one.

I fondly remember seeing the original Star Wars in the theater when it released in 1977. I was 9 years old and I absorbed the fantasy and mythology of it as you might expect a boy would. Heroism, daring, fighting, and all the comic book bravado I was already steeped in was more than satisfying, but there was also the element of mythology and moralism that crept into the story arc in the sequels.

Of course I couldn’t appreciate it then, but that mythology was a carefully crafted aspect of the original stories. There’s a great book, and I think documentary, called The Power of Myth about the Star Wars series that I later found an appreciation for as I got older and made the connections with the classics I also loved in college.

So with this in the back of my head I went to see The Force Awakens, and with a Red Pill perspective I could appreciate the complete, feminized, bastardization of this original, well crafted mythology.

Granted the story arc carefully followed from the original Star Wars movie; Death Star, small weakness, heroic last minute attempt to destroy it, galaxy saved when the bigger Death Star explodes, the end. The basic plot is essentially the same and left me thinking that this was more of a rewrite than any real progression from the original trilogy.

Overall it felt very hurried. There was the presumption of familiarity with, and between, all of the new characters, but within the familiar formula-theme (you know the Titanic sinks and you know the Death Star explodes) the lack of character development is obviously something the writers will explore in future sequels.

It’s important to keep this copping of the old formula in mind, because what J.J. Abrams does in this effective retelling is important when you begin to see the bastardization and the influence of the Feminine Imperative in the story. For the past decade there’s been a popular push to assimilate old, formulaically successful films and story franchises and retell them from a feminine-primary perspective. Recently that was the Mad Max rehash that casts the main character as an ambiguously masculine woman. In 2016 the ‘all-female-but-don’t-call-it-all-female’ version of Ghost Busters is slated for release. Hell, even 300 got the ‘make it feminine primary’ treatment with its sequel.

It’s no secret that there’s been a dearth of original storytelling in Hollywood for the better part of the 21st century. Thus, the want to return to the old magic that got the last 3 generations inspired. 80’s cartoons, now classic sci-fi and fantasy franchises, and golden era comics serves as a deep well of movie-ready stories, but none are retold without the ubiquitous pervasiveness that the Feminine Imperative requires of its storytellers today.

Killing Heroes in Male Space

I was not shocked in the slightest that the first heroic casualty of the film would be Han Solo; and slain by his neurotic, identity conflicted son no less. It was apropos for a retelling of the classic formula that would see all semblances of conventional masculinity erased from what is intended to be a new classic. Han Solo represented the last of a kind, the brash, self-assured, cocky scoundrel that women cannot resist – the “I love you.” “I know.” brand of rake.

In an earlier iteration Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series held the same old books bravado, and minus the outlaw, anti-hero aspect of Solo, Kirk was essentially the same character (if not with a bit more responsibility). If I had the stomach to do so, it would be an interesting social experiment to do a cross-generational comparative analysis of the characters from the original Star Trek series cast with the Next Generation cast of the early 90s. Even if you only have a cursory understanding of both series, you can see the generational capstones evident in the main characters of each generation, separated by less than 30 odd years.

It might seem a bit foolish to use flights of fancy as archetypes that define the character of a generation, but remember this is science fiction, and that genre describes a want for how that generation sees the future unfolding – even when it is just fantasy. Were it not de rigueur for the franchise I might expect J.J. Abrams to delete the iconic “A long time ago”, part of a galaxy far, far away.

What Star Wars and other long established story franchises represent to the prophets of the Feminine Imperative is twofold. First and foremost they represent familiar vehicles into which the ideological messaging of the imperative can be palatably digested. Second, they represent opportunities of the retribution and restitution for perceived wrongs that feminism has always sought after.

Paint it Pink

As I mentioned earlier, these classic feminine-interpreted remakes are glaring examples of the lack of any truly creative storytelling for some time. I had to laugh a bit when I’d seen that The Mighty Thor (classic conventional masculine archetype) had been “bravely” replaced by a female Thor in the comics recently. The story formula remains the same, but the gender is swapped. Not for nothing, but if Marvel were truly ‘brave’ about a gender swap they’d make Red Sonja a ginger male barbarian who goes around wantonly killing women to prove he’s as good as any woman in combat.

However, the gender swaps, the killing of long established, storied masculine characters, and the appropriation of classic, heroic masculine story formulae (even all-male comedies) all represent the jealous need to retell and rehash in a way that denies and discredits Male Space. The attempts (like Star Wars) are feeble retellings of exactly the same stories with women characters and women’s interests inserted into what formerly accounted for male space storytelling.

Blue Pill readers may read this last assertion and think, well, that’s kind of a stretch, but what you should ask yourselves is why those well established franchises are such attractive, more attractive, endeavors than making the efforts to create a new story to tell that conveys the same, feminine primary, social narrative? Why remake Mad Max as a woman? Why give Thor a sex change rather than create a new character in a new franchise that embodies the same ideals the imperative hopes will ride on the old ones?

Because that ideology, by and of itself, is neither believable nor admirable to men. Those bastardized, contrived notions of feminine empowerment are only legitimized in a world, fantasy or otherwise, that was created by men. So we get a girl Jedi (my guess is Disney will eventually make Rey a princess) who is all things to everything. And we get a bumbling, reluctant male “hero” who’s stumbles along needing her aid at every obstacle. Compare the character of Finn with that of Han Solo and you begin to understand why Solo needs to die when the Star Wars franchise playground passes into the hands of a director who’s been steeped in feminine-primacy for a lifetime.

Now, all of this might seem like an effort in pointing out the obvious for most Red Pill aware men. After all, it was this time last year that I wrote the Red Pill Lens, and even if I hadn’t most Red Pill men are painfully aware of how saturated in the imperative that popular media/culture truly is. Bear in mind, the Disney marketing juggernaut had the entire world aware of all the new characters’ names, the basic plot and a million different co-branding effort in every imaginable, and unrelated, variety since the beginning of June this year.

But all this comes back to the stories we tell ourselves. What flights of fancy we romanticizes and idealize (idolize?) in our youth, as well as the ones we reminisce over later in life. It’s one thing to point out how boys are taught to gender loathe in school or how our teachers instill us with their own ideological bents, but that learning goes far beyond the formal institutionalized kind. Flights of fancy, imaginative storytelling, the games we play as children and adults are indulgences we want to play a part in willingly. We like that kind of teaching, we look forward to it; but even so, feminine-primacy is ready to co-opt that desire for it’s own ends.

And that is how you subdue a culture.

245 Comments | tags: feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, oral history, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, social conventions, Star Wars, storytelling, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, The Feminine Imperative

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