The Real "Happily Ever After"

It’s rare that I run across anything Red Pill friendly over at HuffPo, but  the other day I came across a very telling post from a blogger, Martha Lyles.  She is essentially writing a letter to herself, from her modern perspective as a wife and mother and grandmother to the 20 year old woman she was, who was so excited about her Big Party.  Ironically, this was in the “Religion” section, not the “Women”, “Weddings” or “Divorce” sections (and note there is no “Men” section...and the Democrats wonder why more men don't vote for them...) It’s entitled “Letter To A Young Bride After 43 Years Of Marriage”, and it’s a wonderful retrospective on her marriage (as opposed to her “wedding”).

 I’ll let you read the whole thing – it’s quite poignant – but there is one quote I want to hone in on:

“...The same goes for being a wife. You'll marvel at Dick's unswerving commitment. You'll learn to put him first and -- believe it or not -- you'll delight in doing so. You'll see your role as his helpmate and cheerleader. You'll pack his bags for business trips, tucking love notes under ties. You'll view all the joys in your life as gifts from above, like the six wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked grandkids who clamor for your cookies and your kisses. And you'll sense, time and again, the grace conferred in your wedding Mass sustaining you as husband and wife.”

Religious sentiment aside for a moment, consider the perspective: “You’ll learn to put him first and – believe it or not – you’ll delight in doing so.”

This is not, as you might think, a “see, I toldya so!” about male dominance in a relationship.  This is a “see, I toldya so!” about how you don’t get divorced.

It's also a glimpse into the real, Red Pill reality of Happily Ever After (HEA), the romantic nirvana that inspires romance novels, mommy porn, and soap operas.

When you want to study how to do something, the two areas you focus on are “successes” (to establish a base-line metric) and “failures” (to determine how deviations from protocol derail successes).  Athol spent a considerable time in marriage forums preparing for his book, and if you have to then you can see how learning from other people's failures can be valuable for avoiding hasty divorce.  However, if you want to know how to keep your marriage going, it's a good idea to not just focus on the failures but spend some time looking at successes to inform your marital toolkit.

After all, what is a “successful marriage”?  Certainly, one in which you aren’t getting divorced has to be held as a basic standard.  That doesn’t mean that your marriage is a success if you aren’t divorced, it just means that it’s “failing”, not “failed”.

When women in their youth begin to form their True Love inspired Happily Ever After fantasy, it rarely includes things like packing suitcases for their husband’s business trips or struggling through childbirth alone while your husband is on deployment.  Or the ugly reality that is early childhood development.  For many modern young women, the idea of “having kids” is so abstract and glamorized and sanitized for them by our culture that they don't understand the level of involvement necessary to keep them from becoming willfully ignorant drains on society.



To young women today, it's as if children were a status symbol, not a new life, merely an option like a new car with leather interior, and not a life-long personal commitment.  They are allured by the feminist ideal of “equality” and "equal opportunity", which means that they see family and children (and eventual divorce and remarriage) as part of the expected checklist -- and their dedication to "equality" means they expect that whatever poor Beta chump they marry will handle all the details.  (Or, conversely, that she will marry well enough to have servants to care for them like her favorite celebs.)  "Happily Ever After" is a gauzy  vague cloud of ill-defined bliss that follows the Honeymoon to them, the natural and inevitable conclusion to "True Love".

But True Love, Red Pill style implies a host of boring, mundane, petty little compromises that do little to empower you as a woman or see you reach “your full potential” in the feminist sense.  I recently read another screed at HuffPo (not important enough to hunt down the quote) about how Michelle Obama shouldn’t have said “Being a Mother is my most important job”, because that put too much pressure on everyone to reproduce and emphasize their children over their career elements.   She offered instead “Being a Woman is my most important job”, with motherhood and relationships and such secondary to her solipsistic “all about me” perspective.  She didn’t even mention a husband, except as an annoyance that got in her way.  Motherhood, to feminism, is a bother, a needless distraction away from the self-indulgent achievement-based Matrix climb for fame, cash and prizes. 

And the term “wife” is anathema to feminists.  When a feminist reflexively uses the term, it’s almost apologetic.  “Husband” is often used with a proud sense of ownership, like she just got a great lease on a car, but a feminist woman rarely describes herself as a “wife” unless she’s in trouble.  And a feminist has very little, if any, ideological instruction on being a wife save how to end the practice.   Feminism celebrates divorce and punishes success when it comes to marriage.

Now, if you’re a long-term carousel rider with a fat trust fund, then sure, a string of wealthy ex-husbands while you assert your feminist privilege doesn’t hurt anyone but those poor chumps.  Such childless, often sexless unions in the UMC have been a social bloodsport for decades.  But once you start getting kids involved, shit gets real.  You aren’t just splitting up the CD collection when you divorce, you’re splitting up a family with people who depend on you, and that’s got jack to do with your self-important career goals.  The feminist approach to "family" in general is little better than their approach to "marriage".  Gentlemen, you are warned.

But back to the successes.  As I was saying, it’s important, if you want to avoid divorce, to study what goes right, as well as what goes wrong.  This wonderful article is by a woman with a 43 year track record willing to impart some cosmic wisdom on you, ladies.  Listen up.  This is what Happily Ever After looks like, not three ex-husbands and a lonely condo full of cats in Miami.

Feminists can often manage to get married . . . they can rarely manage to stay married.  And very, very few can be said to be in "happy" marriages (marriages in which both parties can consistently say that they are happy with the way things are going).  And part of the reason has nothing to do with ideology -- it's because they don’t know how to be married.  In attempting to re-write the social rules of marriage, feminism's built-in escape hatch made the effort to work on a marriage a lot harder than ending it.  Feminists can become brides pretty easily, thanks to the power of pussy.  They can just as easily become ex-wives, with a stroke of a pen.  They rarely become "wives" (under the Rectification of Names).  So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife.

That, of course, fuels hypergamy and divorce and other crap, but the plain fact is that feminism has rejected the Happily Ever After in favor of the EPL divorce, and now we have a nation of women bellyaching that they STILL aren't happy, despite getting everything their heart desired for 40 years.  They want their Happily Ever After, but they aren't willing to do the work required.  And Happily Ever After requires a lot of work.  Just ask Martha Lyles.

This woman was a wife.  She had a husband.  She didn’t have a co-equal partner in her relationship, she had a captain of her ship to whom she was loyal and respectful.  She did things for him that a feminist considers demeaning: packed his suitcase, quit school, ended her career aspirations for his benefit, raised his children, cooked his meals.  She deferred to him in important ways, and often in unimportant ways, not because the custom or religious rite demanded it, but because that’s how successful marriages work.

She doesn't write about the sacrifices her husband may have made -- that's his story, not hers.  She doesn't write about how hard it was and how regretful she is of her missed opportunities.  She writes of the sacrifices of a woman in her marriage, but she also writes of the rewards.  The Happily Ever After.  Grandchildren, a big happy family, and a great husband she adores and looks up to.  And she doesn’t just mention he’s a “great husband”, she describes an important attribute of his greatness in his devotion and thoroughness in helping her fight cancer.  No mere domineering chauvinist is likely to do that.  He repaid her sacrifice and devotion with his loyalty and steadfastness, not merely providing practical support during her struggle, but being her unwavering rock to which she clung as she wrestled with her own mortality.


Any of your weak-willed Beta future ex- husbands going to do that, feminists?  Good luck.

The important thing to take away from this success story is simple: the author was not merely extolling the virtues of marriage, but she was demonstrating the necessary dedication to fulfilling Happily Ever After.

You don’t ever plan to get cancer in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong and resilient Prince Charming willing to stand over your wounded body with a sword, keeping the monsters at bay.  You don’t imagine that you’ll get piles of diapers and bills and bad report cards and problem children in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong, disciplined father to keep order and enforce policy among your children until they can do it on their own.  You might conceivably envision grandchildren in your Happily Ever After, sitting around rosy-cheeked and respectful of you.  But you probably don’t understand how to get to that point – and truly appreciate it – because you have to first raise your own brood to adulthood and steer them toward their own productive relationship before you get rosy-cheeked grandbabies.

 For those feminists who feel they can have a “co-equal partnership” with a man, while secretly exerting feminine privilege as a means of manipulating and controlling your husband until you lose all respect and desire for him, you are forever denied this Happily Ever After.  Because you refuse to do the work and be a wife to your husband.  You get the EPL version, in which you marry a billionaire after spending your ex-husband’s money on eating, praying, and loving.  Oh, and good luck with that billionaire – I hear there are simply scads of them around.

(Or was that cats?)

But it's not just a bust for single feminist career gals.  It works both ways.

For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way.  But you, too, are exempt from this Happily Ever After.  In truth, you may change your mind at some point, when you are older and your perspectives change.  Our sperm is viable into our 70s, and a mid-life family has a lot of advantages.  But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community.


Marriage is by no means for everyone.  But it is not, as some would contend, not for anyone.  It’s a trade-off, an exchange of commitments and obligations and sacrifices and dedications and courtesies and fears and delights and secrets and trusts and weaknesses and power and – yes – financial considerations and sex, and if you are not prepared to indulge in that kind of personal commitment and dedication (and few 20 year olds of this generation are) then I encourage you to avoid the issue entirely.  Believe me, it will take the pressure off to not have to worry about marriage and family.

So put “Happily Ever After” away in your mind not as "mythical" but merely as forever out of reach.  Substitute some government-subsidized retirement plan at a tropical resort where you’ll expire on the golf course or in your sleep . . . alone.  Imagine a world in which you are by yourself at age 50 and the doctor mentions cancer and you realize that since your sister died you have no one in the world to call and talk to about it.  That’s the "swinging single" alternative to Happily Ever After.  When you’re writing up your last will and testament, and you realize that everything you own and collected and cared for will go to your niece in nephew who live in another state and who might pass you in the grocery store without recognizing you, that’s what you get when you’ve lost Happily Ever After.  The real Happily Ever After.

Because Happily Ever After doesn’t mean a blissful paradise of champagne and strawberries and anniversary dinners in four-star restaurants.  It doesn’t mean kinky hotel sex and romantic walks on the beach as a matter of course.  There are few diamonds in for-real HEA.  You want the truth?  Happily Ever After can be brutal, as anyone’s life can be brutal.  But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations. 

When you’re surrounded by your wife and your children and their spouses, all deeply concerned about your well-being and quality of life when your body betrays you, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your daughter-in-law enlists the aid of experts and researches the furthest reaches of medical science on your behalf, motivated by love and pure, unadulterated respect for the only father she has left, that’s Happily Ever After.

When an entire community floods your house with calls assuring their support, based on their deep respect for who you are and what you’ve done to touch their lives, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your wife holds your hand and cries so you won’t have to when you tell the doctor to go ahead and take the leg, that’s Happily Ever After.

This month, Papa Ironwood got an up close and personal look at the stark nature of Happily Ever After . . . and compared to the alternative, he considers himself a very blessed man.  I think it made the decades of sacrifice and effort and toil to keep his marriage and his family a going concern worthwhile.  Whether or not you agree with him, well, let's just say that he's got the benefit of experience to support his position.

But then, he's always been wiser than the rest of us.  He wanted Happily Ever After . . . so he built it for his wife and kids, one hug, one kiss, one drop of sweat and one tear at a time.

Read more »

A Married Man's Courage

Athol Kay, author of Married Man's Sex Life Primer 2011 and How To Answer "Do These Pants Make My Ass Look Fat?" and other popular and profound utterings on the matter of Married Game and the Red Pill announced this weekend that he is about to quit his Day Job to focus full time on writing and being The Married Man.  That's a huge step for a new author, and deserving of note and praise.  Here's what I told him:

Congratulations, Athol. You’ve graduated.

When you commit to being an author of something — literally an authority — at first it feels fake, like someone is going to come in and bust you for pretending to be something you’re not. Often you have either vision or talent, but not both, and you barely understand your craft. Not a damn word you write seems worthy, and trying to attract attention to what you, yourself, feel is mediocre almost feels like fraud. After all, who the hell are you? Why should people pay attention to what you have to say?

But the difference between a pro and an amateur is more than whether or not you get paid. It’s whether you persevere, whether the potency of your vision or the abundance of your talent can push you beyond your own mediocrity, encourage you to perfect your craft, and whether or not your own passion can sustain you in times when it really seems like the whole world is just waiting for your next Big Fail. The Caucasian mountaineers having a saying: “Courage is hanging on for one moment more.” In every writer’s life you face moments where you stare at the screen and you have the very real choice of giving up or persevering, and it takes real, manly Courage to force yourself to go on when your Muse is off smoking pot with her friends somewhere and left you with a whiny baby.

Then . . . you don’t suck so much. People pay attention. You get fans. You get (!) money. You also get stalkers and tax issues and challenges you never dreamed of. But success breeds success, and it only takes a moment to glance at popular culture to realize just how low the bar for “success” is. Thanks to Kindle, you can make a living now without an agent and a publisher, and that’s everything. Pushing ahead while you’re successful, while you still have that Day Job to fall back on, that’s easy.

Jumping off of a cliff by quitting that Day Job and trusting in the Fates and your own native Will to carry you and your family to safety . . . that takes Courage. That takes balls.  That takes a Man. Not a guy, not a dude, not a Puerarch. When you are “going your own way” and you have no one but yourself to care about, that sort of thing is easy. When you are going your own way, Captain of your own ship, and you have three crew members who depend on your ability to keep it afloat and on course . . . that’s HARD. That’s a kind of courage a single man without children cannot know. It’s the kind of Wolf Alpha bad-ass move that makes Bull Alpha bullshit like running with the bulls or cliff jumping look like the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

You graduated, Athol. You have my respect and my admiration, but the truth is, you don’t really need it. You’ve grasped your life by the balls, and you are in control. And the truth is, only a few of us can really appreciate just what a profound act of courage and bravery it is to stand on the value of your own words for your bread and butter.

Well done, sir.

P.S.: Take all the time you need on the next one, Athol.  Remember that God is in the details . . . but also remember that no great works are ever finished, only abandoned.

Read more »

The Difference Between Leading And Dragging

A very revealing post over at MMSL ("Our House, Is A Very Very @#$%ing House")

inspired this.  The question concerned the all-too-common issue of a young couple in the early part of the "Oughts" investing in more house than they could afford.  

Essentially the wife presses for a bigger house and presents all sorts of compelling reasons why, and the husband relents under the pressure, Beta-outs, and five years later someone’s laid off and they’re fighting foreclosure.  This happened to millions of folks, and with a mortgage industry that was feverishly talking everyone into upgrading (appeal to the wife with a nicer house, appeal to the husband with a sound investment) it was very easy to let the Great Rationalization Hamster talk us into it.  Something like that happened to Athol.  Hell, it's happened to about half of the people I know.

I’m going to bat for Athol on this, because it seems in his particular case that the upgrade in question wasn’t too terribly unreasonable, the reasons were compelling, and the world looked a lot different eight years ago.  I give him tremendous credit.  When faced with a hard, stressful situation he handled it.  He doesn’t blame his wife for pushing for a better home.  She doesn’t blame him for not being a super-provider.  They handled it like grown-ups.  Together.  As Captain and First Officer of the same ship.

And that points out an essential difference between Single Game and Married Game.  In Single Game the focus is the acquisition of short-term sexual partners through using a bold Alpha presentation and being able to close and move on without serious entanglements.

But in Married Game, the goal is much different: to work in a high-sex functioning partnership that promotes the happiness and well-being of all involved.  That requires significant changes to Game.  For one thing, Beta becomes very important to the process.  But so does leadership. 

It’s one thing to lead a woman to drop her panties and squeal with delight.  It’s quite another to lead a woman through the morass of everyday life, the mountain of bureaucracy, budgeting, and financial worries that every adult in our modern society is heir to.  Single Game is focused on being the captain of your own little dinghy and letting a girl ride for a while.  Married Game means you’re the godsdamned CAPTAIN of the leaky-ass ship with a permanent crew that is utterly dependent on your ability to get shit done.

The difference will be recognized instantly by any married man – even if he shrinks from the responsibility and flakes out, letting his wife take control.  When you are the Captain of not just yourself but a whole crew, you not only have the authority to order and decide policy, you also have a personal responsibility for the safety and well-being of everyone in your crew, beginning with the First Officer.  This is the “burden of command” that is so prevalent in military literature.  Because the fact is, as Captain, when the ship hits an asteroid or the crew is unhappy regardless of whether or not it’s your fault it is still your responsibility.

The analogy is not inappropriate, when used to represent a marriage and a home.  The great R. Buckminster Fuller called houses “Machines for living in”, not unlike a space ship.  When you, as Captain, are deciding on whether or not to upgrade to a bigger ship, the needs and desires of the crew should be taken into account, of course.  But first the needs of the Mission need to be seen to.  And while you might be Captain and she the First Officer, the Red Pill reality is that the Mission is decided by consensus.

In my marriage both Mrs. Ironwood and I have busy, successful, interesting careers.  We’ve both devoted communal resources and made sacrifices on the basis of those careers.  But our careers are not the Mission.  The Mission is to successfully create three happy, hyper-capable, highly competent adult human beings who will successfully give us lots of grandchildren.  That’s the mutually-agreed Mission we both signed up for, and our careers are means to that end.  A sacrifice for a career or any other reason that has an effect on the Mission is a cause for suspension of the regular Captain/First Officer roles and mutual re-assessment of the Mission parameters.  Call it a Red Alert, if you want to be dramatic.

The ship (house) we currently have is vitally necessary to fulfilling the Mission, so when we went house-hunting when we discovered that Baby Ironwood #3 was coming, we very calmly and rationally had what could be termed (to torture the metaphor further) a “Mission Assessment”. 

We figured out how much we could afford to spend based on our jobs at the time.  We made a detailed list of requirements, desired amenities, and luxuries, as well as a list of deal-breakers.  And we made certain that neither one of us would push for a house the other did not find acceptable.  We listened to the glowing recommendations of the real estate people who pointed out just how much we could profit from buying and then selling in a few years (and their rosy figures were embarrassingly optimistic).  They gave us a number they told us we could afford.  We dropped it by a third and told them to look in that region.  Our requirements were far more important to the Mission than potential investment return.  We had to raise our kids there, for goddess’ sake, not fund our retirement. 

We lucked out and a friend of my mother-in-law’s who was an agent found us the perfect place, well within our price range, that fit 99% of what we wanted (no hot tub . . . yet): stately Ironwood Manor.  But the point of the story is that Mrs. Ironwood and I together agreed what the Mission would be, and then we pursued it together, as a team.  Had we been foolish or unfortunate enough to get in over our heads, we would have dealt with the consequences as a team – based entirely on what was best for the Mission.

Which brings me back to my title: there is a difference between Leading, as the Captain, and dragging your wife through your marriage.  Leadership is providing an ordered set of options for consideration, soliciting practical input, and then making a decisive policy choice that allows your First Officer and rest of the crew to cheerfully follow.

Dragging is when you make a decision with little or not consultation with your crew, you refuse to listen or take under consideration objections and concerns, and then forcing the issue past the point of dominance and to the level of dictate.  Dragging is when you see any resistance to your will as a Shit Test, and respond with stubborn authority.  And Dragging is when you refuse to acknowledge that you, as Captain, royally fucked up something important and refuse to deal with it.

There are times when such forceful tactics are helpful: earthquake, hurricane aftermath, fire, zombie apocalypse – but they are temporary assertions of absolute authority in an emergency situation.  When the Klingons are blasting away is no time to have a committee meeting on Mission Assessment.  But when you’re cruising along, day-to-day ship operations require a more artful hand.  Part of leadership is knowing when to relax and let your First Officer do what she needs to, and not get in her way as she does so.  You have to lead . . . and give your wife the time and room to follow.

Consider it in sexual terms: if you present an active Alpha presentation all the time, and keep stimulating your wife’s desire to have sex with you . . . but then you don’t give her time to respond before you pile on yet more Alpha, you will end up frustrating her.  Stimulus-response is a great thing, but you have to let her give the response before you give her more stimulus. 

And when you do make a mistake that imperils the Mission (say, buying more house than you can afford) then blaming the First Officer for a decision that you, as Captain, made is poor art and bad Red Pill practice.  She may have persuaded you to buy it, and you may have accepted her rationalizations for any number of reasons.  But it’s your name on the damn mortgage, and blaming her for the situation – even if she nearly bullied you into it – is no excuse for you trying to avoid the moral responsibilities of leadership. 

One of the reasons I so dearly love Mrs. Ironwood is that one of her favorite phrases is “It Is What It Is.”  I usually geekify the expression myself, saying Takada Na Gai (“it can’t be helped”, Japanese from the Red Mars trilogy.  Made my Nerd Roll!)  It’s her Red Pill mantra, an acknowledgment that blame and recriminations are inherently non-constructive, and that facing the realities of the situation is the only pragmatic and responsible course forward.  It’s a repudiation of her Rationalization Hamster.  It’s one of the things that makes her an outstanding First Officer, as well as an adept administrator, outstanding mother, and delightful wife. 

But it also means that she won’t let me get away with any bullshit, either.  While the Captain has a responsibility to set policy and then hold the First Officer to account, the First Officer has a responsibility to point out when the Captain has Really Fucked Up About Something Important, in a constructive way.  “Constructive” meaning without wholesale blame, without name-calling, without expressing anger (even when felt). 

“Constructive” also means offering suggestions for corrective action, agreeing that the problem is a mutual problem, and offering whatever support or resources possible to aid in that correction.  And “constructive” means, ideally, offering support by voicing confidence in the Captain’s leadership even in light of the Important Thing that got Fucked Up.  As in, “Honey, we’re screwed.  But I know that we’ll find our way out.  I have every confidence in you.”  That one phrase can do more to help the situation than a spontaneous blowjob.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerate . . .

To summarize, the Captain/First Officer dynamic is not a simple “Me Alpha, You Jane” play, like Single Game.  Married Game requires a more sophisticated application of Alpha and Beta, and in general a more complex tool kit than Single Game.  Both are Red Pill roads: they require an awareness of the realities of the situation and a willingness to take needed action, even when unpleasant.  But Married Game in its ideal form also requires you to work in concert with your wife as part of a team on the same Mission, leading, not dragging her through life.  And that takes patience, art, and humility as much as confidence, authority and discipline.

It's the difference between being Fred and Wilma . . . and Fred and Ginger.

Read more »

Anatomy of the Perfect Red Pill Date: Phase VIII Coda

Continued from Phase VII Sex And Stuff

Coda

It's all to simple to want to sit back and rest on your laurels after pulling off the perfect Red Pill date.  I mean, after buffing your SR through the roof and then spending several passionate hours enjoying the fruits of your labors may seem like sufficient recompense for your expense and time.  And if this was a one-night-stand or a booty call, you might be right.

But this is my wife -- the woman who will someday likely drive me to the doctor four times a week for treatment for whatever is going to kill me when I'm 80.  You can't pump and dump your wife -- it's poor form and reduces your SR.  Even just soaking up the vibe of fulfilled contentment, while alluring, isn't what you need to do the next morning.  When you're married, after all, the date is still going on.

I got up the next morning at a ridiculously early hour for a weekend, but I had a mission yet to accomplish.  With Mrs. Ironwood still snoring contentedly away, I snuck out to the kitchen and began making her breakfast in bed.

Aww, I can hear you saying, How trite, contrived and cliched!

Well, yeah.  But there's a reason it's trite, contrived, and cliched -- it works.  And as with so many things, it's really about how you do it.

I took our leftovers out of the fridge and began preparations.  First the coffee -- and for this morning I chose a recent Honduran coffee which won the SCAA's Golden Cup award.  Now you might prefer Duncan Donuts brew (It's not bad -- 100% Sumatran Organic) but I wanted something special, and I knew the man who roasted it, personally.  And while the coffee was brewing, I began an omelet.

Now, a lot of men are intimidated by the omelet, mostly because it is reputed to be a difficult and elaborate dish.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  Omelets are easy, if you know a few secrets.

First, start with eggs as close to room temperature as possible, so get the eggs out BEFORE you make the coffee.  Then beat three eggs well with a wisk or fork in a bowl.  Add 1-2 tsps. of COLD WATER.  The rule goes, if you want eggs that are fluffy, add milk (protein).  If you want your eggs to coalesce and remain intact as you fold it around like you do with an omelet, you use cold water to thin the proportions of protein.  

Next, get out whatever you're going to stuff the omelet with.  This can be just about anything you like with eggs, but I wanted to reprise the night before, so I grabbed Mrs. I's leftover steak (the one with the Roquefort and balsamic vinegar glaze) and sliced it as thin as I could.  Then I sauteed it in a pan with some mushrooms, onions, a few jaunty asparagus tips, splashed in a tsp. of white wine to deglaze, and a 1/4 tsp of white truffle oil before I took it off the heat and set it aside.

NOTE: Truffle oil, white or black, is for my money the single easiest way to impart a mad amount of flavor to a savory dish without incurring a big fat/sugar penalty.  You'll spend about $10-$15 on a bottle, but you'll only use it occasionally and it should last you at least a year.  But the aroma and the flavor it adds to any dish is amazing.  I've put a few drops in plain Kraft Mac & Cheese to take to a function and had people RAVE about my incredibly wonderful fare.  Truffle oil is such a strong but delicate flavor it's hard to go wrong with it.

Now, to the omelet: Stir up your egg mixture a bit, put a saute pan or omelet pan on the stove on Med-High heat, and spray with a non-stick cooking spray, and as soon as it's hot, dump the egg mixture in and turn the heat to MED.  Then wait a few minutes.  You'll notice, of course, that the eggs around the sides get hard and cooked pretty quickly, but that there's a huge pool of liquid egg still in the center.  So you take your spatula and you gently pry-up the edges of the omelet as it cooks and allow that liquid to seep under the cooked egg, where it will cook and add itself to the omelet one layer at a time.  You continue doing this around the edge of the dish until there is almost no liquid left.  

Then you dump all of that stuff you sauteed earlier onto one side of the circular egg disc in the pan.  In my case it was really good steak, mushrooms, onions, and asparagus.  I also added about 2 oz. of chevre goat cheese -- it's like cream cheese only much, much better.  At this point, one side of your omelet should look like a pizza, kinda, and the other should be bare.  This is where you gently force your spatula under the empty side and flip it up over the top of all of the stuffing.  Let it cook a few moments while you're preparing to plate it up.

Getting an omelet out of the pan without destroying it's essentially sandwichy nature is actually pretty easy.  Instead of screwing around with a spatula in an effort to lift the entire thing to a plate intact, try inverting the plate over the pan with the folded omelet, then flipping both until the more-cooked side of the omelet is on the plate -- voila!

Now I could have stopped there, but I also had a half a cantaloupe and fresh strawberries.  I served the latter with a dollop of sour cream and sugar -- really, try it.  Add some whole wheat English Muffins and the coffee, and you've got a highly impressive breakfast in bed in about as much time as it takes to whip up some scrambled eggs.  

So I woke up Mrs. I the next morning with a steak-and-asparagus omelet, fresh fruit, and coffee.  Needless to say, I was greeted in heroic fashion.  I elected to sit with her while she ate (I rarely eat breakfast) and enjoy my truly exquisite coffee while we discussed the details of the previous evening.

Now, why did I bring her breakfast in bed when I already got my cookies?  Well, for one thing the goal was to inflate my SR and keep it inflated, and by re-engaging her the next morning I quickly kill any idea that I just wanted to get my cookies, and I did, in fact, have an incredibly good time going out with her.  

The other advantage to this is that its a great DHV if done properly and unexpectedly.  She knows I can cook and it's hard to impress her with that.  But taking dinner leftovers and re-inventing them as breakfast, that impressed her.  Enough to decide after breakfast (and an extended period in the bathroom) that she was ready for more cookies.

By Noon (yes, Noon -- Pagans don't usually make it to Church on Sunday) we were both thoroughly sated in body, mind, and spirit.  She managed to call four girlfriends, her sister and her mother while I was cleaning up the kitchen, informing them all of her incredible evening, and getting gasps of envy from her best friends.  Her single friends were incredibly jealous, but so were her married friends.  As a mutual friend of ours just mentioned yesterday, "Dude, you done fucked it up and raised the bar for every married man here!".

Preselection and Admiration Buffs: SR +4 (reaction of friends and relatives)

Alpha Wolf Buff: SR +1 (reaction of MY friends)

By treating her thus, I raised Mrs. Ironwood's personal status within her female peer group significantly.  While that group does include more ostensibly attractive women, as well as other women in relationships and plenty of single women, the fact that I a) romantically dated my wife b) spent a LOT of money on the date and c) was not hesitant in the slightest about bragging about it to my male friends (too often as men we feel discouraged about bragging about our romantic conquests, particularly if we are married and there is only one "land" you can legally conquer -- brag about your romantic prowess to your fellas in front of your wife and you get additional points for alphatude), nearly every woman in her group has to admit that her current relationship is not, in fact, that successfully romantic.  Which means I look that much better, and so does she.

But inflating her status and SR was one of the goals -- because as long as she feels good about the date and it meets with the approval of her female peers, then the likelihood she will respond positively to future sexual advances goes up significantly.  

IN CONCLUSION: The Hooker Math

Now, some of you might be literally shitting bricks over the idea of spending $500 on a date -- not a whole weekend, but one date.  It seems outrageously extravagant, and I'm sure you think I'm being a chumpish ATM about the whole thing.  But to use the venerable Athol Kay's concept of "hooker math" (dividing the number and types of sex with a woman by the amount of money you spent on her, adjusted to conform with the price list of the median price of said sex acts by local professionals for the same service), I stand behind my investment.  Because you can't just count one night into the occasion.

It has now been over two weeks since the Big Date.  But it is still paying dividends.

The weekend after, we ended up going to a semi-formal PTA auction, and reprised our outfits from the previous week.  We both looked hot, I in particular got some attention (we have more single mommies than single daddies at our elementary school) which added to my preselection buff, and it certainly helped Mrs. I's status with the other mommies by having me on her arm, and bragging about the previous week's date.  This brought back a complete reprise of the feelings of the previous weekend, and we spent another post-date evening rutting like crazed weasels.  And this time it cost me about $15 in drinks and the purchase of a custom-made hula hoop.

But wait, there's more . . . 

This past Saturday, we had yet another series of events.  First the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet, and later that evening a friend's 40th birthday party.  Again we reprised the outfits, re-lived the date, and got all warm and fuzzy again.  Again I caught a lovely preselection and admiration buff.  And, yet again, there was a lot of sex involved, inspired by the date.

So as far as Hooker Math goes, after putting $500 into it, I essentially quintupled the value of my money.  So for an evening out I arguable got over $2500 worth of hot, steamy married-people sex and a wife who thinks the sun rises and sets in my ass.  It wasn't the money -- hell, that was one of the points of this exercise, to do a date without worrying about money.  It was the experience.  I wanted to do it, I made it happen, and I reaped the consequential rewards -- and continue to do so.

Factoring that into the equation . . . that was one of the best $500 I ever spent.

Read more »

Alpha Move: Initiate Sex. A lot.

I always know that I've got a good idea for a blog post when one of my comments gets too long for the blog's limitations.  This happened today over at MMSL to Athol's answer to a question about initiating sex and making a move.  So here it is, in expanded form, because it's worth another glance.

Actually, it's pretty fundamental to Game.  Perhaps one of the most important aspects.  But let's start with the initial question of whether or not you should initiate or wait for her to initiate.

It's interesting, once you get this down, just who is "initiating" becomes cloudy.

Athol's point about female sexuality being responsive to male sexuality is dead on, and that's a foundation of Game Theory.  Especially within a marriage or LTR, once you understand this point instinctively you become far more aware of the subtleties leading up to actual initiation.  And once you do understand it, and your wife begins reacting to you more regularly, then patterns evolve in which SHE will let you know that she's interested in you initiating sex through some small symbolic gesture, phrase or mannerism.  It might be as mild as a playful dig or discussing someone at work's sex life, but if you carefully observe her behavior then you'll start to pick up on these cues. 

That's one thing that the feminist revolution really messed up.  In promoting the idea that women could initiate a sexual relationship and have sex without it having been initiated by men, it spread the erroneous idea to men at the time that since these fully-empowered, sexually active women could initiate sex without being condemned for it, that they would naturally start initiating sex roughly half the time.

That took a lot of pressure off of dudes, because the less they initiate, the less they get rejected.  But after the novelty of early sexual exploration wore off and young couples had to face the intricacies of a day-to-day sexual relationship in a long term relationship, men continued to expect the more aggressive sexuality of their woman's single years, i.e. she initiates sex about half of the time, whereas their women usually lapsed back into the monogamous pattern of waiting for their men to initiate, as Nature programmed in us.  And when the menfolk just didn't, because they took the feminists at face value and backed off dominant tactics, frustration and anxiety set in on both sides.

The problem is that feminism has put such a stigma on male sexuality that women are brought up to both desire male sexual attention and fear it.  That sucks for them.  And we dudes were brought up being taught that aggressive sexuality -- which included attempting to initiate sex -- was inherently disrespectful of women, and that the proper thing for a good little boy to do was kiss your woman's ass until she decided she was ready to have sex with you (the Betaization), because to manfully initiate sex like your forefathers was an affront to the inherent spirit of independence and person-hood of women as human beings, and yadda yadda yadda after that we just kind of stopped listening.  We got the message.  

Oh boy, did we get the message.

Between the fear of divorce, sexual harassment suits, and diversity training classes, the men of Generation X were taught to fear and respect female sexuality.  They were also taught that women could initiate sex and not be considered sluts.  In fact, they were pretty much instructed exactly what hoops had to be jumped through in order to have a pristine, politically-correct sexual experience complete with two condoms and a signed indemnification form.  For all practical purposes, we were taught that Nice Boys didn't initiate sex . . . they stood there and waited for it to happen by the grace of womanhood alone.

Big problem with that, though.  Sex doesn't work that way.  Because it's pretty clearly understood that women are designed to be sexually reactive, and men are designed to be sexually proactive.  Even Emily Nagoski the Sex Nerd, noted feminist scholar of human sexuality, is perfectly willing to admit this.  She pretties it up by demanding that women tend to have "responsive desire", while men tend to have "spontaneous desire", but it comes down to the same thing: men are proactive about sex, women are reactive.  If a man doesn't act, the woman can't react.  She hedges her bets by pointing out the usual NAWALT argument that spontaneous and responsive desires are not gender-dependent and vary greatly from individual to individual -- all perfectly true -- but as my old physics teacher always said, "the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . . but that's the way to bet."  So if you want to qualify the statement, you can always get away with "Men, in aggregate, tend to manifest Spontaneous Desire more often and more easily, while women, in aggregate, tend to manifest Responsive Desire more often and more easily."

In other words, "In general, women don't start getting hot and thinking about having sex until a man comes along and gives them a reason to."  That doesn't mean that she won't have lusty, nasty thoughts at any given hour of the day . . . but in terms of acting upon those thoughts, it's  less likely even in this egalitarian day-and-age that she will initiate sex of her own accord without first being approached by a man.

An ironic point about Emily's post is that she pitches this idea as a feminist demand for acknowledgement that women are different and special creatures by pointing out that she's tired of sex researchers using the language  and standards of male sexuality to evaluate and judge female sexuality.  And while her point is well-taken -- male and female sexualities appear to be very different in make-up and mechanism, and sex researchers have traditionally been male and used male paradigms for evaluating female sexuality -- it also undermines the feminist approach to sex in which male and female are theoretically equal in all important ways (which leads to the pragmatic result of women becoming more dominant in their personal relationships by default, as men ceded the initiative under the blistering attack of feminism on their masculinity).  

It's a feminist axiom that men and women ideally enter into a marriage or relationship as an "equal" partnership.  In the feminist marriage, there is no implied obligation or expectation of sex on either party's part -- under feminism, sex cannot be institutionalized in any way without damaging the independence of women as individuals.  If it happens, it is by the grace of the woman to bestow it, regardless of the man's behavior, and she alone controls access to it by custom, if not by law.  Any less than enthusiastic and willful participation by the woman is tantamount to a non-consensual tryst, goes the theory.  In some extremes, she can even change her mind about her consent after the fact, and let the hamsters fall where they may.  

But all of that lovely ideology falls apart when the rubber hits the well-traveled road.  If biology demonstrates that women tend to have "Responsive Desire" -- and that is held up as a proud difference between male and female sexualities by one of the noted feminist researchers -- then it's really very difficult to argue any pretense that the goal of "equality" in a sexual relationship, especially in a marriage, is contrary to our biology.

That may make little difference to the "gender is a social illusion" crowd, who push to have gender concepts in general stripped away from our culture in the interest of fairness.  But for the rest of us, the ones who are actually going out and trying to get laid, this is a vital and fundamental fact that cannot be ignored by pretending it would be better if we all just acted like it didn't matter to anyone if we were boys or girls.  Because when you do that . . . well, you stop getting laid.  Androgyny occasionally slips into our culture as a novelty, but when it comes down to it we persist in recognizing the pretty clearly-established fact that there are bigger differences between men and women than our choice of position when we urinate.

Just take a look at the phenomenon of "Lesbian Bed Death".  It's a truism that lesbian couples in long-term relationships often just . . . stop having sex, even if they were fairly lustful at the beginning of the relationship.  The "Reactive Desire" idea, applied in this sense, demonstrates that if two people who are both "reactive" are in a relationship, you get a lot of "so do you want to have sex tonight?" "I dunno, do you want to have sex tonight?" "I dunno, it depends on whether or not you want to have sex tonight?" "I could have sex, but it's totally up to you." "Hey, isn't there a This Old House marathon on tonight?" 

Similarly, gay men in relationships tend to have a lot more sex than straight people or lesbians, especially in the heady days of their early 20s when testosterone turns every male into a horny slab of testosterone-poisoned sex-zombie willing to bang anything that doesn't run away fast enough.  When both partners enjoy "spontaneous desire", you can bet that there's a whole lot more DNA flying around.

So the science says women are reactive, men are proactive.  Feminism says to ignore that and focus on human rights issues and universal deference and respect for vaginas, letting them do as they will of their own accord.  After ignoring the custom that supported the science for three decades, and suffering a societal retrenchment of mating customs the likes of which human history has never seen before, eventually the damage got bad enough so that a couple of dudes said "hey, all that stuff about us waiting until the woman says she's ready for sex on her own?  It's really all kinda bullshit!".

And then they went and developed Game, because they realized that if they, as men, didn't take responsibility for attempting to initiate sex 100% of the time, then they got a lot less sex.  When you wait around patiently for the one in the relationship with "responsive desire" to suddenly generate interest in "spontaneous desire", then you're going to be waiting a lot.  And then your woman will quit being attracted to you and start to cultivate other options.  Welcome to Blue Pill Betahood, where they put the 'blue' into 'blue balls'!

Indeed, for most dudes in the Manosphere you can trace back their realization that they just took the Red Pill when they realize that the same sexuality that has been castigated and demeaned all his life is evolutionarily designed for him to try to initiate sex all the damn time as an inherent expression of his masculinity -- it's not a sign of a character flaw or a medically treatable condition.  Dudes are horny, they try to have sex with girls, and that has nothing to do with their deeper political beliefs about the role of women and gender in our society.  And once they realize that -- and accept that if they want sex, they and they alone are responsible for initiating and managing their sexual relationship -- then they can relax, safely ignore all of that crap about the politically correct method of coitus, and get his freak on like Nature intended by initiating sex without fear of judgement.

And yes, he might get judged . . . but the next step on the Red Pill journey is ceasing to give women the power of judgement over you.  Yes, once you realize that to screw them you have to ignore what they say and pay attention to what they do, then what they say even about you gets a lot less credibility.  Case in point: college girl I knew absolutely hated the whole macho Alpha image thing with a passion, to the point where she  would confront jocks and d-bags in the college cafeteria about their alleged douchebaggery and lack of respect for women by these oversexed walking phalluses . . . and then at the end of the semester she was the FB of three dudes on the wrestling team who could care less what she thought about them.  It wasn't her opinion that they were trying to get into.

So the best thing a dude can do is suck it up.  Accept the fact that despite what our popular culture might be saying, in fact the female sex drive tends to be reactive, not proactive, and that you will have to put forth more effort than you'd probably like if you want to improve your sex life.  Deal with it.  Because if you wait for your reactive-desire wife or girlfriend to suddenly develop spontaneous desire, you're going to be there for a while.  With blue balls.  You have to step up and aggressively pursue a consistent strategy of seduction and pursuit or you're locked in Blue Pill Betahood until the divorce.

It's possible to be sexually proactive and not be a douchebag.  Indeed, a lot of happily married couples with long histories figure out ways to do just that, and end up enjoying a long and lusty sex life.  The ideal Red Pill goal is to get to a place where your ability to initiate gets distilled down to a comfortable, easy-to-recognize signal that immediately dampens panties.  

That's the beauty of Married Game, and the difference between it and Dating Game.  In Dating Game, the goal is to establish a relationship that leads to sex with the least amount of effort and expenditure of resources as possible.  Married Game's goal is to establish a pattern of sexual behavior in a relationship that encourages an interpersonal intimacy in which sex is not "if" but "when", with the least amount of effort and expenditure of resources as possible.  In Dating Game you're hunting wild pussy.  In Married Game, you have domesticated pussy available.  But if you don't husband it properly by consistently and aggressively initiating sex with your woman (paying particular attention to her menstrual cycle) and giving her the opportunity to react favorably, then no matter how well the initial domestication went, you're going to have problems on your hands and more porn on your computer.

It can be hard.  Once you take the Red Pill, and understand the realities of the situation instead of focusing on some theoretical ideal of  sexual equality your relationship is supposed to measure up to, then you can accept the idea that initiating sex is your responsibility as a man, not your (plural) responsibility as a couple.  If her sexuality is reactive, and you aren't being proactive, then she's going to sit there in neutral and start doubting her own attractiveness, and therefore the strength of your relationship, and that way lies madness. 

So suck it up.  Forget about how nice it would be if she just came in, dropped her panties, bent over and said "do me, please".  Because the fact is, if you want to cultivate that kind of response the only way it can be done (without recourse to pharmaceuticals of dubious legality) is by cultivating a proactive pattern of sexual behavior in which you do initiate often and enthusiastically enough that she feels confident and secure enough to initiate sex herself without fear of rejection (which women handle and interpret entirely differently than we do) secure in the knowledge that yes, you do find her irresistibly attractive because why else would you be trying relentlessly to nail her all the time?

So suck it up and go make out with your wife.  If you do it right, she'll forget all about who started it.  

Read more »

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.

Read more »