Free To Be . . . A Man.

I can pinpoint, almost to the day, when I started chugging Blue Pills in my youth.  It was the day I saw Free To Be You And Me in elementary school, back in the 1970s.  It was the pro-feminist brainchild of Marlo Thomas, a project of the Ms. Foundation for Women, and it was designed to make everyone feel it was okay to be different things: girls could be construction workers, boys could be nurses and carry dolls, black kids and white kids could play together, etc.  The basic concept was to encourage post-60s gender neutrality, promoting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one's identity (as long as you were a girl or a gay guy). A major thematic message was that anyone—whether a boy or a girl—can achieve anything.  But mostly girls.  It was notable for catchy pop tunes and lyrics, and for having the (young and black) Michael Jackson, Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Diana Ross, and Rosey Grier, among other stars.  Rosey told us "it's all right to cry".  I was cool with that.

I was also cool with the emphasis on boys looking forward to being fathers, and encouraging them to think of child care and interaction with their future kids as positive male things (okay, "positive things", they essentially downplayed the whole "male" idea).  But the subtext was clear: dudes will enjoy being good fathers to their kids, and it's something that you should look forward to.  And I did.  It made me use fatherhood as one of my prime motivating factors in searching for a bride, and I had and continue to have a very close relationship with all of my kids, just as my Dad did with his sons.  That's not where I take issue with the program.

I take issue with the program because it was loaded with anti-masculine imagery and took the approach that, basically, all things patriarchal were evil and oppressive, and all things feminist were inherently good.  It told me, in other words, that I was Free To Be pretty much anything in the world I wanted . . . except a masculine Man.

I can see trying to move past Agricultural Age stereotypes that no longer fit the socio-economics of the post-War period, much less the coming Post-Industrial period.  I mean, after Rosie the Riveter it was damn hard to make a case that women were incapable of working most of the same jobs as men, and the post-war need for expansion and industrialization almost required a doubling of the existing pre-war workforce, just to keep the paper moving.

But Free To Be You And Me fucked me up.  Bad.  It taught me that it WAS NOT OKAY to be a "boy", that MEN were universally overbearing and insensitive jerks whose only role was to dictate and oppress, and that my ONLY HOPE for moral and social acceptance in this brave new plastic world was to hand my testicles over to Marlo and forget I ever had them.

Because that's what FTBYAM represented to me: a clear choice between whether to become a feared and hated MAN, or a gentle and caring boy who eschewed violence and oppression in favor of fat-free yogurt and kittens.  FTBYAM probably contributed the most to my fucked-up ideas about women and men.  Because while Marlo And Friends were singing about how you could be anything you wanted when you grew up, I was looking around me at the time (mid-70s) and seeing that what most boys and girls apparently wanted to be when they grew up was DIVORCED.

FTBYAM made me ashamed of my gender, ashamed of my culture, ashamed of my history.  It made me ashamed of my father for not deferring to my mother in all things.  It gave all the credence the young feminist teachers in charge of me needed to castigate me for the slightest boyish infraction.  It gave all my young feminist peers all the ammunition they needed to not just reject me, but call me "creep" and other male-bashing tripe, and the sad fact was that if I reported them, it was I who got sent to the Principal's office.

Any attempt at asserting any kind of "traditional" masculinity was stomped on (by the younger teachers -- the older ones still remembered Segregation, they had other issues).  The younger teachers, the ones with feminist fervor in their eyes, seemed to delight in correcting a boy if he said he wanted to be a fireman or a policeman or a soldier or a race car driver, telling him instead that it was perfectly okay to be a nurse or a daycare provider instead.  Funny, she didn't mention the wonderful starting salaries of those perfectly okay positions, or how to raise a family on them.  The subtext was clear: such passively Beta, overly-feminized career choices were the only ones they were going to promote.  To boys.

The fact is, FTBYAM may have promoted "freedom", but in the process to make children who were "unencumbered by stereotypes", FTBYAM ended up merely creating new ones: the timid Beta (and soon to be divorced) dad, the overbearing Alpha (soon-to-be-step) dad, the successful marital "partnership" that was about as useful a guide to actual marriage as a bicycle manual is to a carp, the "empowered" young woman who could do anything, the "understanding" young man who was expected and obligated to let her do anything, and absolutely no room within the feminist pantheon for a dude who wanted to be free to be a dude.  You took the Blue Pill or you got kicked out as a troublemaker.  Period.

I bring this up today because I read over at HuffPo a lovely little post from Marlo about bullying.

You see, bullying is what happens when one kid is mean to another kid, and it really is a bad thing.  My son has been bullied.  My daughter has been bullied.  Both have witnessed severe bullying.  And it's clear that, for some individuals, the emotional strain of bullying is too much.  Pointless suicides or runaways have resulted from bullies and inattentive parents.  I have to agree with Marlo, this is a majorly important topic to discuss with our kids.

But the irony is killing me.

Thanks to FTBYAM and its clones, adherents, and attitudes, I and thousands of boys like me were institutionally bullied by feminists throughout our childhoods.  Our schools and our teachers were working with the intention of removing the dangerous "masculine" characteristics that might interfere in the feminist paradigm -- say, like getting married and wanting your wife to stay at home with the kids, or pursuing a "typical" and "traditional" male career path that might block some enterprising young woman from having that job.  FTBYAM epitomized feminism's subtextual message to men: YOU ARE USELESS AND EVIL AND IN OUR WAY.  

Not "equality", not "level playing field", regardless of their intentions the result was a generation of self-loathing boys who resented girls and women for their perceived privileges  even as we felt powerless and at the mercy of the whims of the adult women in our lives.  Moms who didn't give a damn what you thought about your new step-dad after a hypergamous divorce.  Teachers who -- no lie -- told my six-year-old brother Lester in kindergarten that "it doesn't matter if your mommy and daddy love each other, they're just going to end up divorced".  (That fucked Lester up for decades.) Neighborhood ladies, mostly divorced themselves, who kept trying to give my mother good reasons to leave my dad even though they admired his fathering skills (he was the only intact father in the neighborhood) and discouraged her from getting us boys involved with Scouting because it was "sexist".

And then there was school.  Female, feminist teachers who "lost" my applications for special programs, or failed to recommend me or other male students for honors in favor of girls.  If it hadn't been for my History teacher, bless her heart, I never would have won my first essay contest.  My English teacher was a feminist who told me, to my face, that despite the fact that my essay was chosen blindly (no names or other identifying characteristics) that the school didn't feel comfortable submitting so many boys and not enough girls.  So out of the five boys and two girls who were selected locally, one boy and two girls were recommended by her.  But my History teacher didn't like her, she did like me, and she recognized talent.  She submitted me on her own and I won.

And then there was the feminist guidance counselor in high school who desperately tried to use my boyish teenaged angst as leverage to get me to go to a small private liberal arts college instead of the local, internationally-known public research university nearby I favored because (as I found out later) her gender-based numbers were off: she had too many boys were going to big State and technical universities, while too many girls were going into the small liberal arts colleges and "traditionally female" schools.  She went so far as to call my folks and try to persuade them that I'd be "better off" someplace less challenging.  Of course, if that meant that another woman could take up my spot at the university, that was just gravy, but . . .

The upshot is that between my third grade year, when we had a school-wide assembly featuring FTBYAM, and my first year of college, I and my brothers were subjected to what can only be described as pervasive, gender-based institutional bullying.  And we did tell our parents.  And they did complain.  And no one cared one bit, because we were merely male.

FTBYAM was followed up with Free To Be A Family, which took the anti-masculine bias of FTBYAM and mixed it with some massive rationalizations about how much fun it was to be a kid from a divorced household.  In Marlo's own words, "I also wanted to dispel the idea that there is such a thing as a "broken" family. A family is a place that you come home to where people love you and support you and miss you and can’t wait to find out what you did today."

Well, that's great . . . except it was directly counter to the experiences we were having in the 1980s, when she was promoting the Murphy Brown, UMC Professional divorcee ideal of family and we were seeing kids our age becoming alcoholics because of the stress divorce, hypegamy, infidelity, and all the other wonderful hallmarks of feminism brought us.  Oh, what bounty!  My friend Marty shot himself at 17 because his mother had refused to let him even lay eyes on his father in three years.  My friend Chris had four step-dads in five years and eventually got into heroin.  My friends Mark and Tony were exiled to the shed in the back yard so their new stepsisters could each have their own room (in defense, it was a very nice shed).  Their sisters went to college, their mom and step-dad paying for it all.  Tony went to one semester of community college his grandmother paid for, and then joined the Army, and Mark ended up working retail for decades because their step-dad didn't want to pay for some other man's kids' college . . . and didn't think his wife should either (she felt it was more important to give the girls a head-start, since life was "against them" just because they were women).

Families in the 1980s were a post-apocalyptic disaster, and worrying about whether or not a kid felt "accepted" by his peers for his family life was laughable.  We were all just trying to survive the feminist-inspired wave of "I'm not HAAAApppy!" divorces, or the mid-life crises-inspired cheating that wrecked our families.  Kids in general, to the Baby Boomers who fueled the idealistic and unrealistic FTBYAM and FTBAF, were accessories and status symbols, mere points of contention in a divorce settlement and a useless and ungrateful waste of child-support money -- believe me, we knew that.  We got told that by our culture every day.

Especially if you were a boy, the consensus opinion of the women in your life (and in popular culture) was that you were either effeminate and ineffectual to the point of terminal Betatude (which they despised but accepted) or that you were an angry, violent male chauvinist intent on perpetuating the oppressive nature of the Patriarchy and therefore merited their disgust.  And if you tried to claim to be the former, they did everything but demand you castrate yourself before they'd admit it.

FTBYAM and FTBAF taught two generations of boys to loathe themselves and hate their own gender.  It taught us that that women were smarter than men, women were better than men, that women had better promise and better sense than men, and -- most importantly -- women were just more important than men . . . and particularly young men who weren't even cute boys anymore.  Yech.

By the time my generation hit our teenage years, crawling into a popular culture of disaffected youth and wailing androgyny was all we could do to survive this pervasive, intentional attack on masculinity.  The institutional bullying by "tough, smart, independent women" in our public and private institutions, not to mention the culture at large, taught us to fear women, not trust them in the slightest, and it didn't do a damn thing to make us less resentful.  It just showed us that, for men, feminism was about revenge and suffering, not about equality and fair play.  We could take a look around at the social carnage of divorce and hum a few bars of one of the songs with tragic irony and KNOW that it was bullshit . . . but bullshit that was Industry Standard.  The families we saw were chaotic messes who mostly just argued, drank, fought, and went to counseling until it was time for a divorce.  Few of the kids I knew ever had a place that you come home to where people love you and support you and miss you and can’t wait to find out what you did today."  That was a sick fantasy, compared to what was actually happening to "family" in America in the 1980s.  Mostly their parents yelled at them about homework, asked them pointless questions and didn't wait to hear the answer, and then went off on their own little head-trips about their own failing relationships.

Of course there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then.  We've had two generations of catastrophic hypergamic divorce to look back on, two generations of weekend-or-absent dads, two generations where men didn't feel comfortable trying to talk to their sons at all, lest they be accused of "spreading sexism".  The original children of divorce have overcome the stigma enough to rack up three or four divorces and step-families of their own, now.  The Patriarchy has well and truly fallen, and now only the Puerarcy remains.  Two generation of anti-social Betas too battered by feminist combat dating and no firm social rules has had an effect someplace other than the Glass Ceiling.  I have seen Scout troops filled with boys from single-mom homes, and gosh, they didn't look nearly as happy, secure and fulfilled as those from two-parent households.

Because almost thirty years after Free To Be, we can measure its results, and those results are mixed at best.  While it's true that you have empowered, intelligent, highly-motivated young women willing to devote a decade and a half of their best reproductive years to climbing the corporate ladder, at the end of that climb they discover that their reproductive options (what we use to call "husbands") don't want a thing to do with them.  Feminists may make decent bosses and great co-workers, but they make cruddy wives and mediocre mothers, with a few notable exceptions.

You can chalk up at least a bit of the "marriage gap" (the age at which couples get married for the first time -- it was about 19 in 1960, it's 28 and rising here and now) to women focusing more on career interests . . . but you can explain a lot more of it if you consider that the dudes out there just don't want to get married at all, anymore, and particularly not to women who are more concerned with corporate bonuses than childcare.  Dads (and potential dads) are, indeed, a lot more involved and sensitive to their reproductive issues today (thanks, feminism!), and because of that those men who do put thought and effort into their fatherhood, including good wife selection, wouldn't marry a feminist on a bet.  The likelihood of catastrophic failure is just too high, especially when there are plenty of better options out there.  Foreign brides, "traditional" girls, or women who see themselves as mothers and (gasp!) wives rather than employees or competitors are all better bets than your average feminist, for the men of America.

(Free To Be . . . A Spinster!)

As for me, I'm going to take Marlo's advice: I'm going to be Free.  To be.  Free to be . . . a Man.  A big, hairy, thoughtful, considerate Patriarch far more concerned about my children's emotional welfare than whether or not my daughter can make partner before she's 30.  A Man, unafraid of women and disdainful of feminist shaming rhetoric.  A Man who understands that violence, power, money, and ingenuity are all tools at my disposal, not reasons to loathe who I am.  A Man who feels no shame at looking and lusting at women for fear of offending their "rights" not to feel afraid of me.

I was afraid of women for thirty years.  Female fear is just not a high priority for me.

But, thanks to Marlo, I'm Free.  Free to Be.

I'm free to be a Man who takes a wife (who knows and understands that "wife" doesn't mean "equal and temporary domestic partner", but WIFE) and raises his kids without fearing Marlo's ire.  A Man who feels no pity at the struggle of young women trying to find a job in this economy because there was damn little pity demonstrated to me during the last economic recession    I'm free to be a Man who can stick his tongue out at the gigantic shit test that is feminism and ignore it, because it just isn't working for me anymore (and, I see, it never really was).  I'm free to be a Man who doesn't feel compelled to sacrifice the futures of my sons in order to elevate my daughter's.  Sure, they're free to be whatever the hell they want . . . but they also understand that that freedom is dependent, partially, on their accepting my guidance, or they'll be free to slug it out on their own. I'm free to be a Man who delights in the sight of naked boobs and the hum of precision machinery, who doesn't consider the expression of my sexuality an attack on femininity, who demands respect -- yes, demands it -- or I won't play anymore.

And that's where Marlo And Friends really went wrong for half of the audience they were shooting for.  They managed to inject the idea of gender-free economic and social empowerment, but they did so in such a way that promoted the active and willful disrespect of masculinity and male authority.  And while that would make any real feminist cream her jeans just hearing about, the sad, Red Pill fact is that when you promote disrespect for masculinity in a culture, you do not automatically increase respect for femininity.  You just get a lot of sullen, pissed-off, uninvested men who can't wait until the feminists are out of the room so that they can tell that joke.

And a lot of strong, independent, empowered women who can't get two dates in a row with the same dude, much less a commitment, a ring, or a family.  Women who traded in their reproductive future and betrayed their genetic destiny for the promise of a respect that never was fulfilled.  Those poor women, thanks to feminism, are Free To Be single for the rest of their lives and die alone, childless, and unloved by men.  They get to stamp their feet in rage as the dudes they once dated and tried for years to get to commit end up getting married to much younger women (often in a matter of months) from the Philippines or Korea or Brazil or Siberia and start popping out kids like it's double coupon day.  These strong, independent women who were told there would be PLENTY of dudes waiting for them when they were done Being Free To Be are now realizing, to their horror, that they've been sold a bill of goods.  They're Free To Be a corporate drone with a vagina that's increasingly losing the attention she craves and increasingly getting frustrated at all of the guys who are just not real damn impressed with how well they've done.

But that's okay, Ladies.  Because it's all right to cry.  We should know.  We've been doing it behind your backs since 1974.

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Forming A Proper Response To Hearing "Man Up!" From Your Wife

Once again, Athol at MMSL has made an intriguing post that inspired a response that grew to post-length itself.  So once again I'm using it for my own blog, because it's so damn pertinent.

The focus of the post was the insidious admonition to "Man Up" that we've been hearing steadily for two decades, and how it's often used as a shaming technique to get men to do stuff that is not necessarily in their best interests.

This is a bigger deal than most men realize.

One of the hardest things about taking the Red Pill is accepting responsibility for your own actions as a man and the head of your household (even if you are the only member of that household). It’s easy to be a Blue Pill dude and defer responsibility to other people — your wife, the government, someone else — but when you take the Red Pill and make that commitment to yourself that you will deal with the universe the way it is, and not the way it’s idealized to be, then things get complicated. And hard.

Athol’s absolutely right: when someone is telling you to “Man Up”, they’re invoking shame and using your own masculinity against you. 

Now, if that comes from a man then it can be seen 
as an invitation to remember your masculine power, qwitchyerbitchen, and do the job at hand. When men tell other men to “Man Up” (usually) they are trying to improve the condition of the other man. In the Male Social Matrix men are generally encouraged to help each other like that as part of the process of turning a Guy in to a Man . . . or simply providing moral support for a difficult issue. While the emphasis in the MSM is overtly on competition between men, a long list of masculine codes, from basic sportsmanship to battlefield chivalry, are designed to mitigate that competitive nature by tacitly providing assistance to less-able men.

While men are highly competitive, they also (as a class) tend to be dedicated to using their success and position to elevate other men even if it means that they are sacrificing a little competitive edge to do it.  Because while winning is vitally important to men, winning unfairly cheapens the effort.  And if your competitors are not at their best, then your best doesn't mean much.  An Olympic sprinter at a Middle School track meet isn't going to find much meaningful competition.  Any "wins" he makes there are going to be suspect -- not because he cheated, but because of the mediocre nature of competition.

Since men thrive on competition as the cornerstone of the Male Social Matrix, then the only way that the most successful competitors are going to experience real satisfaction with their success is to ensure that the competition is as challenging as possible.  When an Olympian goes to the games, the focus is not on "I'm going to win a Gold!" it's "I'm going to face the best athletes on the planet and I'm going to be shown -- in front of the entire world -- how I stack up."  So the impetus in the MSM is to improve your competition as much as you can without making them better than you.  It's the old "I taught him everything he knows . . . but I didn't teach him everything I know!" saw from the older, more experienced man referring to a competitive protege.

When a man tells another man to “Man Up” he’s offering both support and criticism, acknowledging the difficulties of the issue but also declaring his belief that the other man has within him the capability and testicular fortitude to get the job done despite his own fears and insecurities about the issue. Since all men have fears and insecurities, a quiet, private discussion about them with another dude who acknowledges those fears and insecurities but also expresses his belief in your ability to deal with them is a gift from another man.

And that's how most men take that kind of admonishment . . . from other men.  As constructive criticism and just enough shame implicit to be motivating.  The few times when another man has told me to "Man Up", "Sack Up", or "Cowboy Up", it has been a straight-up reminder that I'm a dude, I've got big hairy balls, and the way to properly approach a problem or challenge is not from a place of fear and insecurity, but from a place of confident determination, and I've been (in retrospect) grateful to the men who said it to me.

But when it comes from a woman, it’s the nastiest sort of insult. On par with the “C-word”.

When a woman says “Man Up”, she’s not offering constructive criticism wrapped in a masculine-flavored coating of support. She’s calling into question his masculinity and his ability to get the job done, and expressing her doubts about her dude in the most insidious of ways. 

Don't believe that ladies?  Think that telling your man to "Man Up" is no big deal?  Let me explain it to you like this: it’s the moral equivalent of presenting yourself to your husband before an important formal occasion after three hours prep on hair, make-up and wardrobe only to have him wrinkle up his forehead and say “You mean you’re going to wear that? In public?” Devastating.

In that situation, the asshole-in-question is undermining not just your confidence, but your ability to properly interpret and react to a complex social situation, which is the cornerstone of the Female Social Matrix.  In a very real way he's attacking your femininity, not through an overt assault on your sexuality or appearance or the other stuff that feminists get torqued up about, but by questioning your ability to navigate the FSM.

So when you ladies tell your man to "Man Up" in just about any situation, you are taking a well-aimed kick at his unprotected testicles.  And since it's coming from you, who knows him better than just about anyone, it's orders of magnitude worse than had it come from a stranger.

The Red Pill doesn’t banish fears and insecurities — if anything, once you know all of the things that can go wrong with your life, your wife, and your relationships, it can make you a little paranoid. But what the Red Pill can do for you is give you the space to acknowledge your own fears and insecurities and handle them. The Red Pill doesn’t say you have to be an indestructible, invulnerable, and emotionally-distant man in order to thrive. But it does give you just enough security and belief in yourself to push back when you get the shit-testing “Man UP!” from a woman.

So how does a Red Pill man, especially one working the MAP hardcore, respond to such a shrewish and inconsiderate request?

First, consider the context of the situation.  Carefully evaluate the objective challenges you face.  If it's a work issue, for example, and you understand how precarious your company is positioned in these uncertain economic times, then responding to your wife's request that you "Man Up" and demand a raise from your boss when the company is contemplating lay-offs demonstrates her lack of knowledge of the situation and suggests an appropriate, quietly-delivered response:

"Have you noticed it's not your name on my paycheck?  This job is my responsibility to navigate, and if I don't think this is an opportune time to push back, then you're just going to have to fucking trust me that I know what the hell it is I'm doing.  Because as delicate as things are, having someone who doesn't know what the hell she's talking about offering me bad advice about how to run my career isn't going to be doing me any favors."

And yes, use profanity.  Don't use insulting language or name-calling . . . but there is a time and place to display your command of invective to your woman, and this qualifies.

Or, if it's a tangled social situation -- for instance, stumbling across evidence that a male friend of yours is cheating on his spouse -- then an admonishment to "Man Up" from your woman is actually a nasty way for her to try to shame and manipulate you into feminine-behavior under the auspices that it's the "right" thing to do.  That is, when your wife wants you to "Man Up" and rat on your friend to his wife, what she's really trying to do is drag you into the uncleansed bowels of the Female Social Matrix and use you as her surrogate bitch.

Women often feel that they are the keepers of moral and ethical behavior in our society, which is Hamstereese for selectively using morality to increase their position in the FSM (or, conversely, to tear down another woman's).  Part of this can be blamed on the relative powerlessness women enjoyed in the pre-industrial era, when their only legitimate way of using power was through their men.  But now they can't use that excuse -- trying to drag a man into the FSM for your own purposes by shaming his sense of masculinity is nothing more than blatant manipulation.

So how do you respond to her "Man Up!" in this case?

"You know, it's been said that learning to mind your own business is 80% of all human wisdom.  This is a volatile situation that has the possibility of messing up a lot of people's lives,  and since it concerns something that's clearly none of our fucking business, then I'm going to 'Man Up' and exercise my masculine prerogative for wisdom by keeping my mouth shut and strongly encouraging my gossipy wife to do the same.  The fact is, we don't know all the facts.  We don't know what kind of private intimate relationship those two have, no matter how close we might be to them.  And stirring a turd of this size is just going to cover everyone in shit so . . . if you think me unmanly because I'm unwilling to destroy someone else marriage willy-nilly, then buy me a tutu and call me Fifi, Babe, because clearly I'm not man enough to do it."

Presented in a growling, obviously-judgmental tone of voice, this should shut down all future discussion on the topic, unless she's Batshit Crazy or, conversely, so tied into the FSM that your wishes on the matter do not matter to her.  Which implies you have much, much bigger problems on your hand that idle gossip.


Of course, the hardest time to hear "Man Up" from your woman is when it involves your own family.  Especially your relationship with your mother.  A wife/girlfriend and her mother-in-law is always a rough relationship, no matter how cordial it might seem.  In a very real way your woman and your mom are fighting for control over you, and both of them can use the "Man Up" as a shaming technique in their FSM power struggle.  This is particularly hard to take, and it can put you in a particularly bad spot.


When your wife tells you to "Man Up" when it comes to your mother or father, then once again objectively evaluate the context of the situation.  Usually that kind of fight comes when your parents are trying to get you to do something that your woman sees as a threat to your relationship or her power.  And while the last thing you want is your mother dominating your relationship, it's just as bad to have your wife dominate your relationship with your mother.  Hearing your mother tell you to "Man Up" in regards to your wife is just as bad, and calls for the same level of response.


In a Blue Pill marriage what usually happens is that the Beta in question gets in the middle and tries to act as an obsequious intermediary, inserting himself into the feminine power struggle in a particularly masochistic and unhelpful way.  The result is often increasing frustration on the part of both your mother and your woman, purposeful misunderstandings and overly diplomatic language, with no real resolution in sight.  The Beta just wants everyone to get along, and he will bust his ass in a fevered sweat trying to appease both wife and mother.

This rarely, if ever, works to his advantage and ultimately sets him up for innumerable future problems stemming from his lack of backbone.  By the time "Man Up!" is heard from either party, Mr. Blue Pill has usually already traded the last shreds of his testicles for magic beans or somesuch, and the impact of the command is lessened simply because Mr. Blue Pill has long given up on his own masculinity in an attempt at negotiating domestic harmony.  Ten years later he's often divorced and bitter because both his wife and his mother lost respect for his lack of Alpha.  (Yes, your Mom is a woman, too, and responds to your Alpha just like any other woman.  Don't get all Oedipus-creepy about this, though.  Your mother's perspective on your masculinity is only sexual in the most obtuse sort of way.  She's looking for validation that she produced a strong male worthy of providing her descendants).

So how does the Red Pill man respond to his wife and/or mother telling him to "Man Up!" in regards to the other party?  Simple.  He drags both of them into the same room and he makes them be silent for ten minutes while he chews both of them out for their juvenile and disrespectful behavior.

And that's the general key to all such "Man Up!" commands.  If you have a hard time evaluating a complex situation enough to give a cogent and eloquent response, then a prompt and direct expression of your own sense of masculinity, delivered forcefully and meaningfully, should be sufficient to a) get her off your back and b) do so in such a way that's pure Alpha, and not Beta (which is what she's accusing you of) in the slightest.

Here's a few practice lines:

WOMAN: ". . . and I don't know why you let this happen all the time.  God, sometimes I just wish you would Man Up and just handle it!"

MAN: 

Gentle response:  "Honey, I can appreciate what your saying, and I understand your position.  However, if you call my masculinity into question even once more during this conversation, it will be over, we'll be having another, altogether different discussion, and there will be unpleasant consequences and repercussions.  Is that understood?"

Moderate response (Set Sarcasm controls to "disintegrate"):  "Gosh, thank you ever so much for your opinion of my masculinity.  I'm terribly sorry you see it as so deficient, but since you don't happen to own a pair of fucking testicles and I do, I think I'm going to have to be the judge of that.  Just because I'm not doing what you want me to doesn't mean I'm unmanly, it means I'm a man with my own fucking brain, which also means I don't take poorly-contrived, selfishly-motivated juvenile crap like 'man up' lightly, even from a woman who is supposed to me on MY fucking team.  Now maybe you should disappear for a little while, because if you were trying to piss me off and get me angry, you succeeded . . . and right now it would be in the best interests of our relationship if I wasn't being reminded of that."

 Severe Response (USE WITH CAUTION): Unzip pants, drop them to your knees.  Grasp and brandish your genitalia in a crude and threatening way.  Approach your wife, never taking your eyes off of her.  Get well within her comfort zone of "personal space" until you can feel her exhaled breath on your face.  Your intensity and determination in this case is key.  She should be shocked, nervous, and maybe even a little frightened.

 Say, very quietly with just a hint of menace in your voice, "If you need a reminder of my masculinity, that can be arranged.  But until your balls are bigger than mine, then I'd count it as a personal favor if you would shut the fuck up about my masculinity, lest I take it as an invitation to prove it to you.  Because that's perhaps the most insulting and disrespectful thing you've ever said to me.  Really, that's the kind of shit I'd expect to hear out of a brainless teenager's mouth, not a grown and allegedly mature woman.  So don't even speak, don't say a fucking word to me right now, because I'm teetering on the edge of a serious and very masculine blow-up and I'm really exerting a lot of effort to avoid that.  If you were a man who said that to me like that, we'd already be fighting.  Since you're not, I'd strongly recommend you retreat from my presence and reconsider your advice.  Then after I've calmed down, if you still think my actions aren't 'manly' enough for your tastes, then we can arrange for that demonstration.  Now I'm going to put my large, hairy nutsack away, and I'm going to walk away, and I don't want to hear another fucking word from you until you're ready to sincerely apologize to me for your profound rudeness."  

Turn, walk away, and carefully replace genitalia in pants without accidentally zipping up your scrotum. (Writhing on the ground clutching your crotch in pain after that particular speech is going to seriously kill your credibility.)

All three of the above responses should be sufficient, but the over-all rule-of-thumb about this is that when a woman challenges your masculinity with "Man Up", you respond with unabashed, balls-in-your-face unmitigated and unwatered ALPHA.  That's the essential nature of this shit-test, and the only appropriate and beneficial response is a strong Alpha Move.

It's like when your kid criticizes you about something in a particularly rude way.  Regardless of whether he's right or wrong, the disrespect and the rudeness become the issue, and that has to be handled first, and quickly, before the merits of the criticism are addressed.  When your woman tells you to "Man Up", it doesn't matter what the issue is -- the first order of business for a Red Pill man is to correct the bad behavior and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that her "suggestion" has now taken center stage, regardless of how serious the other issue might be.  


When you allowed her into your boat and under your command, then it was with the tacit understanding that she would be supportive of you and respectful of your masculinity -- as respectful as you are to her femininity.  Telling you to "Man Up" isn't good First Officer advice, it's tantamount to mutiny, and it should be treated as such.  An attack on your masculinity like "Man Up" is a direct violation of the Rules of Engagement as a kidney punch, and should be treated accordingly.

Whatever you do, don't let the remark pass un-noted.  Indeed, the proper response is good ol' fashioned masculine righteous anger -- you might be making the wrong decision or taking the wrong attitude for the situation, but the simple fact of the matter is that it's YOUR FUCKING JOB to make decisions, and you and you alone are the proper judge of your own sense of masculinity.  Your woman gave you the endorsement and validation of her perspective on your masculinity when she got onto your boat.  There should be no questioning that in your marriage until she gets off your boat -- voluntarily or not.  Basically, if you're the kind of man who will put up with that kind of shit from her, then you deserve the consequences of that.

I'm lucky: Mrs. Ironwood has used that particular tactic less than a handful of times, and all within the first few years of our relationship.  Once she realized that I'm open to plenty of constructive criticism, but my sense of masculinity was off the table and not up for her review, she backed off the tactic as unproductive.  And since one of the last times she pulled it landed her in marital counseling for a couple of uncomfortable weeks, she grew to understand that this is a generally unproductive tactic to take.

Convince your woman that it's unproductive in the most forceful of terms, and she'll back off the "Man Up" shaming language, too.    But it's your responsibility as a Red Pill husband to enforce that rule.  It sucks, it might get you into an even bigger fight, but if you don't win this one then winning all the others isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.

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Dude . . . Got A Minute?

Dude.

Can I call you dude?  Do we have a 'dude relationship'?  You know, that kind of dude-at-the-next-urinal relationship where I can tell you something, one dude to another, without the bullshit?   Will you trust me -- just for the next couple of paragraphs -- to give you the straight shit?  I don't know you, you don't know me, we're just a couple of dudes, both doing our thing, and I have no vested interest in your relationship.

I'm just a dude.  Like you.  So, if you have a few minutes, let me lay some cosmic wisdom on you.  But let me distract you with an image of a tastefully sexy girl doing something refreshingly domestic to maintain your attention, first.

Did that help you focus?  I thought it might.  After all, we're both dudes.

If you are reading this, it is because your wife, girlfriend, best friend, brother-in-law, sister, or someone else close to you, who both cares for you and who has a good working knowledge of your relationship (and who may have used a dummy e-mail address), thinks that it would benefit you to read this particular blog post on this particular blog.  Why?  It could be any number of reasons, but let's assume that a good friend who doesn't want to be gauche enough to say it to your face thinks you and your relationship would benefit from the following piece of advice:

You're doing it wrong.

That is, the relationship/marriage you are in, which at casual inspection seems "perfectly fine", is suffering, and someone you know can see that.  That may come as a shock to you, or it may not.  Why is it suffering?  More than likely,the root of the problem is the fact that you aren't being All That You Can Be in the whole manhood department.

Whoa!  Don't freak out -- this is (probably) not a prelude to divorce or a relationship ultimatum.  This is a gentle reminder, a casual hint, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge dude, you need to pay attention to this! sort of thing.  The relationship that you think is so stable and mutually beneficial and strong?  Someone thinks that it could be better.  Someone thinks that you would benefit from learning something important about your relationship that, perhaps, you just weren't aware of.

You're doing it wrong -- but it's really not your fault.  I mean, how could it be?  People have been telling you how you're supposed to be doing it for years -- but they were wrong, and so now you're doing it wrong.

You see, when you got into your relationship with your current woman, she was HOT for you.  I mean, when she thought about you, her stomach flip-flopped, her eyes got all dreamy, her ladyparts got all dewy, and there was nothing -- nothing --that she thought about more than you.

But . . . well, it's been awhile, and while you're still a perfectly good dude -- don't get me wrong, in places you probably border on greatness -- there's this one area where you're just not quite getting the job done.

It's actually not one certain thing -- it's a bunch of related things, but they all come down to you needing to step-up, "man up", grow a pair, and quit acting like such a pussy when it comes to your woman.

Seriously -- it pains me to say it, but that's the fact, Jack.  You wouldn't be reading this otherwise.  When your woman does something, wants something, says something . . . you fold like a cheap card table and do your damnedest to make it happen, no matter how difficult or unreasonable.  You're whipped.  Maybe not even in an obvious way, but it's there.  Everyone knows who's in charge of your household, your relationship.  Even your woman -- and it's killing her.

No, really.  Every time she gives you an unreasonable ultimatum and you don't call her on it, her love for you dies a little.  Every time you kiss her ass so that she'll like you, despite what she says, the opposite is true.  Believe it or not, she likes it when you show some backbone.  In fact, that makes her panties wet -- and when was THAT ever a bad thing?

The truth is, YOU used to make her panties wet, just by being you.  And that was great -- really.  The infatuation, the courtship, the maelstrom of feelings that compelled you to go after this particular girl, she felt it too.  It wasn't fake.  It wasn't your imagination.  You had a real connection, some chemistry.  You were a manly man, and she found great value in that.

Only now . . . not so much.  

Oh, sure, she still likes you.  She even loves you.  But is she breathlessly checking her phone every five minutes to see if you've texted?  Is she still making mistakes at work because she's thinking about you?  Of course not.  You're past that point now, aren't you?  You're in the comfortable part of the relationship, when you can both just "be", without pretense or illusion or obfuscation.  She can "get to know the real you" and appreciate and love you just for being you.  And she is.  Only . . .

. . . well, you know that infatuation stage?  It's amazing, isn't it?  You've probably been coasting along on the strength of that for years -- if you're married, certainly since your wedding day, haven't you?  And that's cool -- you aren't a kid anymore.

But now you have to keep in mind that the woman who made you giddy with desire the moment someone mentioned her name is also remembering those times fondly, and she's wondering where the fuck they went?   I mean, things have been fine, sure . . . but things have been "fine".  Maybe even a little friction, a fight, a "discussion", something . . . but the fact is, "fine" isn't what she signed up for.  She signed up for "amazing", and she's dealing with "fine", but the first time she see's "amazing", you have to wonder . . . is she going to be happy enough with "fine" to not even consider pursuing "amazing"?  How about the second time?  The third?

Dude, not trying to scare you here, just trying to give you a clue.  Your woman, whether she knows it or not, whether she's the one who sent you here or not, your woman wants you to step up and take charge.  She wants you to lead her.  She wants to be in awe of your masculinity.  She wants to gush to her girlfriends -- not about the manly way you take out the trash or pick up her dry-cleaning, but how you dazzle her on a daily basis with your wit and charm.  She wants to feel the chemistry that attracted her to you in the first place.  But she can't say that.  It sucks, but the fact is, if she has to ask you to take charge, then you aren't really "taking charge".

She can't give you permission to take the lead.  You have to just take it, on your own initiative, or it doesn't count.  Forget for a moment whether or not she's going to get pissed off, because if you do it right, she just might be a little pissed off at first -- and that's not a bad thing.  You have to understand that, that's essential: you may have to piss her off a little to keep her engaged in the relationship.  Why?  Because, to paraphrase Feris Bueller, "you just can't respect a man who kisses your ass all the time".

And you're getting dangerously close, Dude, or you wouldn't be reading this.

Let's pause for a moment, look at another sexy, tastefully erotic picture of a pretty girl, and marshal our resources before we move on.

See how well that calms your mind and improves your focus?  Now back to the message.

It's not a lost cause -- there's still some time to turn things around before someone does or says something stupid and things get fucked up.  Nobody wants that.  All you need it step up your game a bit, take command, and start remembering who the fuck you were before you started being blinded by her puss--- ah, her femininity.

That's key: finding the masculine Dude in your soul.  The Dude who once looked across the room, sized her up, and said, "yeah, that's worth hitting", and you went for it.  That's the dude she wants to see.  The dude who struts, who thinks he's hot shit.  The dude you were before you met her.

So show a little backbone in the future.  If you aren't having sex with her at least once every five days or so (that's six times a month, for you liberal arts majors) then she's probably not really intrigued with you the way that's ideal.  If you aren't kissing her at least once or twice a day -- not a bullshit peck on the cheek, but a sudden, come-from-behind, press her against the wall, and plant a good ten-second smooch with tongue and dry humping and hard nipples, then you're doing it wrong.   If you aren't the dude all of her girlfriends want to sleep with in a moment of drunken weakness, then you're doing it wrong.  If you walk across the room naked, fresh from the shower and Mr. Happy bouncing around in front of her and she doesn't at least look up and bite her lip . . . you're doing it wrong.

Look, I know it's not all you.  You got complacent, she got complacent.  You both relaxed into a mutual comfort zone while you enjoyed the emerging fruits of your relationship, and . . . stuff just sort of slipped away.  On your side, you probably aren't getting laid as much as you like, and when you do get laid it's nothing to blog anonymously about.  Hell, you might be whacking off more now than when you met her.  She's just not responding to you the way she used to, but you've just . . . accepted that.

And that sucks.  Because both of you want essentially the same thing, you just don't know how to go about it.  You've been told for your entire life about how you need to respect women, listen to women, treat women as equals.  And that's great, as far as it goes, but when it comes to your relationship, believe it or not, your woman doesn't want you to treat her as an equal when it comes to certain aspects of your relationship.  She wants you to be strong, firm, and decisive.  She wants you to know what you want, and go after it -- even if she doesn't approve.  She wants you to be the dude every chick in the room wants to bang, but the one she's lucky enough to be going home with.

That's a tall order, I know.  I mean, how do you go from "I respect you too much to do that" to "Hell, yeah, I want a blowjob baby!" without sounding like a complete idiot?  The fact is, it isn't easy -- at first.  But either is realizing that your woman's panties don't get wet because of your decent job and neatly-trimmed yard, your willingness to watch chick flicks or buy tampons for her.  All the things you've been doing for her so she'll like you enough to fuck you, those are BETA skills, and while they're important for a long term relationship . . . well, Betas don't get much play.  Nice guys don't get wildly fucked by passionate women.

This looks like another good spot for a Pretty Girl break.  Just bear with me . . . we're almost done.

Now that's how they did it in Grandad's day!

And that's something to consider, as well: your grandfather likely had an entirely different take on how to manage his relationship than you do -- and while the rules of the game have changed dramatically since then, the players -- men and women -- still desire the same basic things.  Your grandad knew how to handle himself around women back then, and it wasn't by kissing their asses.  You don't have to completely dick out -- don't get me wrong.  But here are a few things that your granddad probably would tell you that you need to change, and right now:

Don't apologize unless you are genuinely at fault, or there is a dead animal involved.  Seriously, if she has a bad day at work, don't say "I'm sorry you had a bad day".  Say "that really sucks, baby.  Why don't you tell me the high points, and then we can take steps to help you forget about it?"

When she makes an inherently unreasonable request -- say, calling you from across the house to hand her a pair of scissors that's less than four feet away -- then refuse to do it on general principal.  I mean, if you don't value your time enough to get upset when she pulls some unreasonably flaky shit like that, then what's stopping her from doing that all the time. . . and loving you a little less for how willing you are to kiss her ass?   You have to respect yourself before she can respect you, and if you're kissing her ass all the time in the remote hope for pussy, then that demonstrates a lack of self-respect.

Sure, every woman wants a devoted man in her life, but they don't want to be in a relationship with a pussy.  Being devoted means that you bring her flowers unexpectedly, you check her oil without being asked, and you'd rather take her out on Saturday night than any other girl in town . . . not that you wait on her hand-and-foot and make her every desire manifest.

Seriously, Dude, even if you've invested heavily in the "equality" meme, then recognize that you two can't even be equals if you're deferring to her constantly.  Tell her NO when she makes an unreasonable suggestion.  No elaboration, no "I'm sorry, Honey, but . . . ", just tell her "no, that doesn't work for me."  Put yourself back into the equation of your own relationship.  She's not going to give you permission to disagree with her -- that defeats the purpose.

Here's something you need to try out: be decisive.  You know what kills your chances of nookie probably more than anything else?  The words, "I don't know, Honey, whatever you want to do is fine."  That's it.  Sure, you're trying to be deferent  and considerate, putting her needs, wants and desires before yours, out of your deep and abiding respect for the dignity of her womanhood blah, blah, blah, but the simple fact of the matter is that she wants you to take a fucking stand and tell her where you want to go -- no equivocation, no second-guessing, no picking what you think she wants.  Just.  Pick. A. Fucking. Restaurant.  Seriously.

And don't just hesitantly pick it -- when she asks you "so where do you want to eat tonight?" you tell her "I want Golden Corral tonight.  I'll meet you there at 7:30.  Order me a Coke if you get there first."  Done and done.  Don't worry about picking the "wrong" choice -- be a man and take the risk.  In fact, when it comes to your relationship it's far, far more important to be certain than it is to be right.  Really.  Trust me on this.  Take a stand and stick by it.

What if she doesn't like it?  Tell her, "well, can you make a compelling argument for that decision?" and then shut up and let her talk.  Give her an opportunity to persuade you, instead of direct you.  Put the issue in doubt, and if she feels strongly enough about it, she'll speak up.  She's not your mother, and she hates feeling like your mother.  She really wants you to be the Man, in that rugged, traditional, rugged and determined sort of way, despite what you may have heard her say to the contrary.  She wants you to be a Rock Solid Authority -- but open to her suggestions.  Hell, if you really do have no opinion on the matter, pick something at random and defend it dickishly until she does persuade you.  Make her work for it a little.  Don't over-do it, but nothing says "dry panties" like "I dunno, whatever you want is fine, I guess."

And that brings us to the subject of the sex . . . yes, you like that part!  I bet that got your attention!  Sex was like, one of the best things about your woman, back when you met her, remember?  You LOVED the sex.  So does she, at least theoretically.  But can you honestly say that your sex life now is as hot as it was when you first met?

How about another girly pic while you're considering that question:

I mean, just between us dudes . . . when was the last time you really rang her bell?  Is there a certain complacency, a certain habitual nature of how you two knock boots?  Ten minutes of foreplay, three positions, twelve and a half minutes, she cums twice, you do your thing, God that was great, snore . . .

Sound familiar?  Sound depressing?

Or does it actually sound a lot better than things actually are?

Let me tell you about something my father told me about: the Penny Jar.

When a young man marries a woman, for the first year of their marriage he should quietly put a penny in a jar on his dresser for every time he and his new bride make love.  Then, after their first anniversary, he should start taking a penny out of the jar every time they have sex.

If you  have a typical Blue Pill marriage . . . the jar never gets emptied.

("Blue Pill"?  That's a Manosphere expression that means "the idealistic and mistaken way you think things work; illusion", like in the Matrix (the good one).  "Red Pill" means "the pragmatic way things actually work."  We use this term usually in connection with relationships and over-all male-female gender relations.   And if someone sent you a link to this blog post, then someone thinks you have a typical Blue Pill marriage.  Your Penny Jar, in other words, will never get emptied.)

Why?  It's pretty simple, actually -- all that bold shit you did to attract your woman and persuade her to get humpity with her in the first place?  That went away once you and she started being "serious".  It's not entirely her fault -- the fact is, you wanted to "make her happy" and so you started doing whatever you thought she wanted you do so she would still hump you silly.  Only . . . well, all that nice stuff you did to make her feel comfortable and happy also made her . . . well, kinda bored.

God, she'd never say anything -- maybe send her dude a link via anonymous email account, at the most -- but she'd never want to hurt his feelings by telling him that he's not, y'know, the Man.  That would be awful -- even she knows that!  And maybe she's dropped a few hints you haven't picked up on, but the end result is the same . . . Dude, you really need to step it up.

And that goes for the bedroom, too.  Quit being so . . . gentle.  I mean, she's already decided to screw you -- you don't have to worry about her scampering off (unless you try to surprise her with something . . . y'know, too kinky without prior notice).  So if she's there, she's ready, she's naked, as soon as you think it's right you get on top of her and you go CONAN on her ass.  Do her like it's the night before your four-year prison sentence begins.  Do her like they're revoking your cock for thirty days.  Do her like you fucking mean it . . . because if you don't, then she thinks you don't.  And that's never a good thing.

Another babe, while you think about that:

Sweet, huh?  But not very "respectful".  But then, the idea that women value respect over admiration and desire is a relatively new phenomenon, and despite some claims to the contrary, there are plenty of women who want less respect and more passionate desire in their lives.  Even if that means accepting the fact that you are the Man, and forgetting all about equality for a while.

Consider, Dude: what's the most popular book on Amazon.com?  It's not "How to gently make love to your lady wife", it's 50 Shades of Grey -- and if you haven't been paying attention, this little trilogy of mommy porn books isn't filled with tender moments and hand-holding . . . it's filled with raw, poorly-written, highly unlikely emotionally charged Bondage & Discipline and Sado-masochistic sex between a dark and handsome billionaire (of course) and his sweetly submissive -- I mean, pathologically submissive -- beautiful college student chew toy.  The "tender moments" usually involve neckties and spanking.  There is a lot of really raunchy, poorly-written sex.  Believe me, I write erotica, and the sales of this book are not based on its literary merit.

But this thing is selling like batteries at a convent -- so the idea that your woman wants gentle, mutually-pleasurable, overly-consensual sex all the time is crap.  If current marketing trends are any indication (and when are they not?) then there is a deep, often-hidden vein of submission within the soul of the American woman that is screaming to get out.  There is a part of her that wants to feel owned, possessed, commanded -- and if you aren't the commander, someone else eventually will be.  Pay attention to what she does, not what she says, and you'll start tuning into just how much she wants you to -- occasionally -- just throw her on the bed and rip her clothes off.  Heck, get some neckties from Goodwill and go all-out.  The point is, she's fucking bored with the way you're doing it, and if she doesn't get interested soon, there's no telling

Of course there's a lot more to it than that.  If light bondage and a few extra grunts were enough to fix the problem, then it would be easy.  But it's not.  What you need to do is TAKE CONTROL of your life, and your relationship, before you find it out of control.  You can't do that with a few casual tricks.  It takes dedication, willpower, courage and devotion to the idea that you -- yes, you, Dude! -- are a masculine prize worthy of contention, a champion striding the earth, the Captain of your own destiny . . . and she is with you because of that, not because of how sharp the lawn looks this week.

Time for another picture.  Focus:

So wake up, Dude.  Someone is trying to tell you something.  You're doing it wrong, and now is the time to correct your course, before you steer into the iceberg.  You need to seriously look at your relationship and decide whether or not you are an "equal partner" in all things, or if you are the Man who takes charge, gets things done, and appeals to his woman on the basis of his masculinity, not his income potential.  Don't be the dude who finds himself listening to his wife tell him "You know, this just isn't working out.  I'm just not happy" a few years down the road.

Oh, sure, that would never happen to you and your devoted woman . . . but I could list a hundred guys off the top of my head who thought the same thing, and ended up single because of it.

There are resources out there to help you -- a collection of blogs and discussion groups known as the Manosphere, filled with your fellow dudes trying to work this shit out just like you are.  There are tons of places where you can learn how to manage your woman and your relationship in a way that will benefit you both in the long run.  You can learn how to handle her emotional outbursts, interpret what she's saying, and learn how to appeal to her sexually without resorting to expensive gifts or whining.  You should, of course, take much of what you find in the Manosphere with a grain of salt, because all of these dudes have slightly different issues than you do, so their solutions might work for them but not for you.  But on the other hand, there are lots of dudes who have tons of insight on how the female mind works.  Really works, that is, not how they want us to think it works.  That's one of the points of the Manosphere, to help you learn how to deal with the woman in your life without considering the benefits of the monastic life.  We're here to help.

But even if you don't want to jump into the deep end of the Manosphere yet, you need to realize that someone thought you were doing it wrong, and needed a "word to the wise".  So consider it given.  You might not get another.  Believe it or not, this isn't a slam -- there are plenty of dudes in your boat.  And there's still hope, and room to fix it.  Just don't ignore it.

One last picture, to kind of clean up:

I'm glad we could have this little talk, Dude.  I hope you took it how it was intended. We need to watch each other's backs, after all . . . because it's not like our woman will do that for us.

Don't forget to flush.

signed,

Ian Ironwood,

A FELLOW DUDE

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The Red Pill Isn't Pandering, It's Power

A fun little expedition into Emily Nagoski's blog last week led to another blogger, 30soemthingandbreakingup, to post a short little cry of dismay at the idea of "changing himself" in order to get more sex.  He clearly misunderstands the Alpha-Beta dynamic, so I thought I'd set him straight.  His post went like this:

“He (Ian Ironwood) seems to be implying that in order to gain success, we all need to became an “alpha male”.
Hang on a moment, if I attempt to change to become something (the bad boy) in order to get more sex, am I not then pandering to women’s demands and falling straight into the trap that he seems to be insisting we must climb out of?”

Not exactly. Let me break it down for you, my brother:

Alpha and Beta are not in-born absolutes.  They are two sliding controls, like bass and treble, not one knob. The two sides focus on different aspects of masculinity, the ability to attract and inspire a sexual response (Alpha) and the ability to comfort and protect a mate (Beta). Both sides are equally important to the mating process, but you have to know which one is appropriate, and you (even more importantly) have to be self-aware enough to understand just how you, personally, measure up in both realms and adjust accordingly.

In our youth, we rely on our Alpha skills first and foremost to do the stupid thing that attracts some girl’s attention. Then we get into a relationship, have sex, and start settling into a Beta mode (unless we’re unhappy with our selection, in which case we stay Alpha and keep looking for fresh poon). The problem is feminism has encouraged us to downplay the Alpha totally, and accentuate the Beta until it becomes mindless deference to anything with a vagina. Sounds like a feminist dream, no?

Well, no. Instead a woman in a relationship with a Beta starts craving Alpha, and if she doesn’t start getting some she starts agitating for it with shit-tests and demands and disrespectful behavior, ultimately culminating in “I love you but I’m not in love with you” while she’s starting a relationship with a dude with a hot car and a nine-inch tool.

 That is, your subjective sex rank has fallen (she doesn’t think you’re hot any more) and she’s no longer interested. If you’re a Blue Pill dude, you keep giving her Beta in a desperate attempt to appease her, and she either doles out the sex just enough to keep you in the relationship as her willing slave or she stops all together and starts shopping for a more Alpha solution.

So no, not everyone needs to become an “alpha male”, any more than every woman needs to become some pornstar model “alpha female” in order to get laid. But without a well-developed sense of your own Alpha characteristics, and the understanding of Game that allows you to buff either Alpha or Beta at need, you’re going to repeat the Blue Pill cycle until the divorce attorneys start to pile up. If that’s your thing, enjoy.

If not . . . consider the Red Pill.

The Red Pill isn’t a path to becoming a Bull Alpha, it’s the path to balancing — and invoking — the Alpha or Beta at need, in response to her shit tests and genuine requests for assistance. Since most dudes in a relationship suffer from low Alpha and high Beta, the Red Pill usually — but not always — means learning how to demonstrate more Alpha. “Demonstrate” being the key word.

You see, it’s not about necessarily being an Alpha, it’s about triggering a subconscious Alpha response in her. You do this by making DHVs (Displays of High Value — the stuff that proves to her Body Agenda that you’re worth fucking) and taking a subtextually dominant position in your interactions. You aren’t bullshitting her at all. You are revealing your Alpha side to her.

Now, you might consider that bullshitting if you’re a true blue Beta and just can’t manage to do anything but care, share, and go antiquing every Sunday. But if you do occasionally like some poon — and most of us do — then you have the capacity within you, someplace, to access your dormant Alpha characteristics enough to incite her loins. How is that bullshitting?

You aren’t “pandering to her demands” at all. She’s a biological machine, just as you are. If she asks you for a favor while taking off her bra in front of you, regardless of what the hell she’s saying or how pissed you might be, your brain is saying “hey, free boob!” and altering your responsive thinking by pumping you full of lusty hormones. In much the same way, you putting a dominant hand on her shoulder, kissing her aggressively, and standing up to her bullshit invokes an in-born biological response in her that she has no conscious control over. It’s biology, not bullshit. Feminism is the bullshit. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

So quit your moaning and whining about how you’ll reserve your virtue for only women who can “accept you as you are”, because the cold fact of the matter is that if you were that great of a prize as you present yourself to be, you’d be accepted as you are already. 

And change?  You aren’t the person you were five years ago, and five years from now you’ll be different yet — yet you complain about the need to “change”. You’re gonna change anyway, Bub. The Red Pill just gives you some guidance about how to change in such a way as to have a fulfilling sexual relationship at some point in the future. Remember, growth is change.  You can embrace both sides of your masculinity, find the RIGHT woman, one who is a worthy match for you, and you can spend the rest of your life making her happy while she righteously fucks you, OR you can keep taking the Blue Pill, obsess about “being yourself” and “treating her as an equal” and have a string of lackluster relationships that only grow more complicated and frustrating as you repeat the same mistakes over and over again. That way leads to a long, lonely life of masturbation.

Since I work in porn, I’m cool with that. Stroke away.

But in your own best interests, you might want to consider giving the Red Pill a more thorough examination. I’d recommend you start with Athol Kay’s remarkable The Married Man Sex Life Primer 2011. It costs about the same as buying three drinks for three girls who aren’t going to be impressed enough to give you their digits, or the price of a nice dinner for a “nice girl” who isn’t going to give you any play because you respect her too much.

And for Goddess’ sake don’t whine about the “near impossible demands of the modern woman”. It’s unmanly. That’s the WHOLE FRACKING POINT: taking the Red Pill means ignoring her demands (what she says she wants) and instead giving her what you know she needs. And once they get what they need (at least three or four times a week) then it’s amazing how their “demands” become highly optional politely-worded requests.

You’ll get there. Don’t give up.

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Game As A Tool Towards Recovering A Lost Masculinity

Over at Alpha Game yesterday morning I caught a great quote byVox, as he was advising someone on whether or not to return to a woman he’d lost pre-Game for a second chance post-Game.  While that conversation was fascinating enough, the quote is what got me:

I appreciate the positivity from the non-predatory crowd. I would simply say that what I am attempting to do with Alpha Game is to apply the basic principles of Game more broadly to socio-sexuality rather than focusing solely on a particular subset of sexual relations as other Game bloggers do. My interest also tends to be more theoretical, whereas Roissy and Athol, just to give two of the more substantive examples, are both relentlessly practical in their applications of Game to pick-up and marital relations, respectively. This is not a criticism of either of them in any way, as I both appreciate and respect what both men are doing in their tangential areas of interest.

His point is well-taken, and vitally important to the evolution of the Manosphere.  Pay attention:

Right now, Men in our culture are divided into three groups.  One is the group bravely trying to build a family in hostile conditions, against all odds, in the fulfillment of the traditional quest to be a Family Man.  Call them the Old Married Guys.  We’re the ones at the far end of the spectrum, hacking our way through our individual relationships, counting our blessings, and despairing of what’s happening to other men around us and to masculinity in general.  Some of us have been divorced, some are bitter, some are hopeful.  All of us have some unique and valuable insights to share with younger dudes.  Some of us even are younger dudes, men who against all reason got married young and tried to start a family, and who have the wisdom to look to other men for advice and answers. 

I would try to call this group the “Patriarchy”, but that term has been maligned by feminists so long as to be tainted, on the one hand, and the fact is “patriarchy” means “ruled by the fathers”, and let’s face it: fathers haven’t “ruled” in this country since 1970.  So instead call them the Patriologists, “those who study fatherhood (and, by extension, masculinity)”.  While fatherhood isn’t the end-all, be-all of masculinity, it’s a pretty potent defining characteristic. 

But then again so are our dicks.  The single dudes, whether single by choice, circumstance, or by divorce decree, are the second group.  They’re the ones taking advantage of the culture of promiscuity and running Game like it’s a lotto system.  The “PUA” and the “MGTOW”, racking up notches and enjoying the tight, moist fruits of the land while spending their off-hours watching sports, playing fantasy football, and killing at HALO.  These are the “peter pans” that the feminists created but can’t stop bitching about.  The “boys” who wouldn’t grow up. 

And obviously it’s their inherently evil nature that makes them want to indiscriminatingly tap anything in a skirt, according to feminism, and not the fact that most of these dudes had absent or distant Beta fathers who were actively prevented from passing on the mature paternal wisdom that usually allows a young man to “grow up”.  Testosterone is a powerful force, after all, and left unchecked and untempered you get . . . well, you get what we got.  We lost control of masculinity, and let it be defined and regulated by feminism.  The result is not a Patriarchy – they successfully crushed that – but a “Puerarchy”, or “rule by boys”.

That’s not to say these “boys” (some in their 40s) actually “rule”.  In fact, thanks to the wholesale diminution of masculinity in the last forty years, their chances of actually getting to the “halls of power” are slight.  Despite the myth of male privilege they have largely eschewed the “successful self-made man” model – they don’t want power any more.  Money is better..  And who can blame them?  The “rewards” for most of the dudes who make that run are usually divorce court, custody hearings, and a loss of faith in all of womanhood, so why take the risk?  Internet porn, Game-driven hook-ups, and videogames make contemporary life for a single dude in the Puerarchy a kind of techno-Valhalla, if he can keep from damaging romantic entanglements. 

For a few years there’s been some acrimony between the first two camps over the definition of masculinity and the role of Game in it.  Their goals are slightly different.  The Patriologists want to see family life made less challenging for men, and re-claim some of the respect and legitimate prerogatives of mature masculinity and fatherhood, as well as improve their marital lives so that they get laid more.  The Puerarchy wants to get laid more, too, but it doesn’t see the advantage of being an OMG and often treats such men as either sell-outs or willing dupes.  Both have very definite ideas about what Masculinity is.  Unsurprisingly, both have an especial emphasis on Getting Laid, whether it’s by their wives or a succession of hot young gullible girls.  But don’t discount the bonding possibilities of sexuality – we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Then there’s the third group: the Blue Pill dudes who don’t have a clue.  There the ones who bought into the idea that Marriage is an equal partnership between you and your soon-to-be ex-wife.  They “respect” women, that is, they defer to them at every turn regardless of their own interests.  They’re the Chumps.  The vast, vast sea of Betas who are the grist for the divorce mill.  They have unrealistic expectations of marriage, not just because they’ve bought into the “Twu Wuv” one-itis meme to the point where they get blinded by pussy, but because they really believe in all of that “union of equals” crap without understanding that “equal” in that context means that their wives are always more equal than they are.  Without good fathering, they don't know any better.  There's no one left in their lives who feels comfortable passing along that kind of valuable information.  Until the Manosphere.

And for that sacrifice, for which they believe they will receive the divine feminine favors (i.e., getting laid more), they instead find that their wives don’t respect them, resent them, and eventually actively despise them for doing exactly what they’ve been told by women is what women really want.  They put their own interests and issues at the lowest priority for fear of being accused of being a chauvinist or something.  They’re far more concerned with being liked and not respected by their women.  Keeping the woman happy is their primary focus, whether it’s her request for more security, more affluence, or more “emotional support” (that is, agreeing unconditionally to every thing she says).

They are, in other words, completely divorced already . . . from their own masculinity.

Between the Puerarcy and the Patriologists lie these true Beta Lost Boys.  Despite their age and apparent maturity they will, indeed, remain “lost” to manhood in their hearts and their lives.  They might become Adults, but they won’t ever be real Men.  That’s because their self-loathing ideas about manhood and masculinity have been tainted by feminine and feminist critique for so long that they’ve abandoned all hope of controlling their lives, and have descended to merely managing their lives . . . and usually doing a piss-poor job of it.  And an almost universal element of masculinity, across culture, is the idea that a fully-formed Man is in control of his life.

Those poor Blue Pill Betas are the ones who need the Manosphere the most.  They need to be taught that it’s not just okay to be male, it can be fucking fantastic if you quit worrying about what women think and approach it from a masculine perspective -- 'cause that Blue Pill perspective just leads to misery and depression.  That’s the Red Pill message.  The Red Pill is nothing less than the attempt of Men in our culture to consciously revalorize masculinity.

“Revalorize” is an obscure word, I admit.  It was coined by Mircea Eliade, one of the great Religious Studies scholars of the 20^th century, based out of the University of Chicago.  He used it to mean taking a term, idea, or meme from the past and reconstituting the traditional with new and more useful meaning.  In this context, the Red Pill revalorization of masculinity is vital and necessary if we don’t want to see the mistakes of the past four decades promulgate into our sons’ futures.  Or our daughters: things are looking just as grim for our girls as our boys.

The current popular ideal of masculinity, ala the Blue Pill, is essentially “a person who just so happens to posses an XY chromosome and lives to serve women”.  Bereft of all the “bad” masculine qualities (which also happen to be all the Alpha qualities women get their panties wet over) – honor, bravery, aggression, anger, stubborn determination, leadership, and yes, violence – Blue Pill masculinity leaves “good provider” and “has a functioning penis” intact at the expense of all the rest, and the latter isn't even really required. 

Now there are plenty of feminists who have no problem with this definition, and don't think that seeing two generations of miserable men is too high a price for their trouble.  They don’t want a new masculinity to include, well, masculine traits.  If aggression and achievement are considered “masculine”, then they don’t feel like they can play with the boys properly.  If they re-define masculinity to include a bunch of Beta skills and get rid of all of the Alpha skills, then they have an opportunity to control the balance of gender-based power in our society.  Which is essentially what they’ve done for two generations.

The problem is, it doesn’t work.  Not for men, at least, and not for our kids.  When you allow women to define masculinity for men, you get what we have now: a generation of men largely bereft of maturity and wisdom, growing up without dads, with overbearing mothers who encouraged them to hate their own gender, and feeling shame and guilt about those natural inclinations towards traditional masculinity that inevitably arise.  Particularly around sex and violence. 

As a culture under the influence of feminism we have been taught since birth that men are all secret sexual predators one step away from brutal abduction-and-rape, and we should therefore despise all aggressive male sexuality or we’re essentially condoning rape.  We’ve also been taught that men are all power-hungry despoilers or ignorant idiots messing up the world – that is, the world women live in – by killing and exploiting everything in sight at every chance.  We’re the ones responsible for all of the wars (that we fight and die in).  The level of guilt about this has been raised to such a high degree in an attempt to remove the violent impulse from men that it has left us with a bunch of unassuming Betas who honestly feel, in the depths of their hearts, that they are bad people just because of their penis, and nothing they can do – however much they try – is ever going to make up for that.

The intriguing thing about the evolving Manosphere is that the Patriologists and the Puerarchy, while they’ve been learning various aspects of Game from each other (because our common goal, to have more sex, is truly universal) have also been revalorizing masculinity.  Most of the essential nuggets of Game theory are re-hashings of old masculine paradigms long discredited under feminist dogma, after all.  And while the two groups have been volleying Game back and forth, some of those poor Blue Pill Beta bastards have started to notice, hey, why are these guys having so much more sex than I am?  What is their secret?  Teach us, oh Wise Ones!

The desire and even yearning for the Red Pill is out there, but it isn’t just about Game.  Game is the vehicle, because Men are motivated by sex, and Game is about how to get laid.  But the things that Game teaches us go far beyond managing our sex lives.  Game informs our new definition of masculinity by returning to the essentials of our mating toolkit instead of talking about our feelings with our woman until she’s so bored she’s sleeping with the pool boy.  Beyond that, it gives us a medium through which to pay respect to each other for our masculine achievements. 

Hard-core Alphas in the Puerarchy can learn, for example, that getting married doesn’t have to mean the end of your sex life and the beginning of servitude, it can become an empowering and richly masculine experience.  Conversely, the Patriologists can learn from the Puerarchy that the apparent solid wall of feminist thought that seems to dominate the intellectual landscape is actually made up of a new generation of very, very fallible young women who are just as frustrated with the mess their mothers made of things as we are – and that in a relationship its more important that your woman be attracted to you than that she like you.

But between them both you have a sea of Betas who are staring at the single dudes getting laid with a single text message and the OMGs getting laid like tile by their wives like it’s a porn movie and running their stable households the way their grandfathers did, and they’re starting to wonder: what do those guys know that I don’t? 

And that’s the secret we need to tell them: the Manosphere means it’s not only Good To Be A Man, once you quit deferring to the women in your life, but that it doesn’t matter which end of the spectrum you prefer – both fatherhood and eternal hook-ups are two sides of the same masculine coin.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Nor is Game the end-all, be-all to masculinity, it’s just the beginning.  A man who learns Game (single or married varieties) and learns it effectively will soon find himself much-improved, spiritually, and that’s not just all the sex talking.  In a re-defined masculinity, Game is an essential tool, but it’s not your only one.  You need to talk to other men, have solid male friendships, enjoy a solid culture of masculinity by learning from the old dudes and teaching the young dudes, and accept in your mind that while men and women might be technically equal under the law, that doesn’t mean we are the same.  Our differences define us.  Men have their own interests and issues, and we have just the same rights as women to pursue them . . . just as aggressively.  We, not women, and certainly not feminists, are the ones responsible for defining what masculinity is in the 21^st century.

And the most important thing the Betas need to discover?  They don’t need any damn woman’s permission to take the plunge, swallow the Red Pill, and rediscover their own masculinity.

And heck . . . we’re willing to help.

So if there is one thing I’d like to see the Manosphere accomplish, it’s to inspire a Revolt of the Betas.  Because if a significant portion of the men in the West were to learn Game on the way towards embracing our own masculinity, then collectively we might be able to improve things for all men.  Once they are convinced to stop working against their own masculine interests, realize their own value in society, and give them the tools to recognize that, then we’re going to see a lot more Red Pills going down the hatch.  And that’s a good thing for everyone.

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