Miscellaneous Feeds

Games are (usually) on Thursday nights sometime after 5:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

This week's pizza was the usual staple of a Meat Lover's pizza with the Pepperoni out and Philly Steak added. Suggestions anyone?

PART 1.

++++ SYNOPSIS ++++

Several years ago in Player time the characters Junkbot, Fundisha, and Gerry had been kidnapped by some Efreet (a type of Genie) who were, enacting revenge for an even earlier event some Player years before that. You may have seen the listed at the bottom of these summaries for as many years as they have been kidnapped.

The current adventure is the Party's attempt to rescue them.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

A few more administrative matters regarding who bought what last week and where they are kept. Meaning I have to skip forward to the end of the session, because the Player for Jacko wanted to dispose of his prize of the Silver Throne and it's 666 embedded gemstones. Apparently the whole throne was detected as Magical and became difficult to dispose of. There is little Legend Lore nor Identify on it since it is unique.

However the remainder of the Player group had already left for the night, so we will revisit this at the beginning of the next session.

Back to the beginning of the session.

The Party had located itself In the town of Noob (thirty or forty miles southeast of the Regent of the Mines) and decided to head to the Mortuary and Crematorium where it was discovered in a previous session the crematorium's furnace was actually a gate to the Plane of Fire. Just before they made it to this Mortuary there appeared out of nowhere (poof) a Type I Demon and attacked the Party. As soon as they killed it off another Demon (albeit a Type II) also appeared out of nowhere and attacked the party. After some time they also killed it.

Then coming down the path toward the Mortuary they had yet another encounter.

D'Vine the Druid.

(I had pulled up a Retired character out of my hat.) Numrendir, Huang, & Honda exchanged greetings because they had worked together before. She came armed with a Scimitar and something strapped to her back that looked like a Techno-Weapon from the City of the Gods (module DA3).

Having carte blanche with no appointment neccessary, the Party went through the furnace door of the Mortuary.

They found themselves in a relatively hot dry barren landscape at about 120 degrees Fahreinheit. Everyone had prepared themselves with Rings of Fire Resistance, so they were not uncomfortable. And at least it was as they say, "a dry heat". Nearby there was a metal cadaver cart which led to a small perpetual flaming pit. This was apparently the true location for the city's "crematorium" that allowed for a furnace that required no fuel.

About one-hundred yards away down a path, the ground seemed to move and change color. It moved at a constant rate of .75 miles per hour compared to the ground next to it. Stepping upon it, the party noted it was stepping on what appeared to be metal made of ... (drum roll) "Brass". While it looked perfectly smooth, the party also notice it was pockmared here and there with bits of other terrain, such as pools of flame, or piles of dirt. It was also dusty, which may account for the dirt.

About 20 miles in the distance the party could see what appeared to be a city on a mountain. (Since the plane of fire is not a planet, there was no "horizon" per se, only the limit of distance they could see through varying stages of haze.)

And would you know it, where the party stepped on was a path, a road as it were leading toward the city. Clearly marked with double painted lines on the brass surface.

So the party moved on foot.

Several hours into the journey, they were approached by eight mounted riders on what appeared to be huge fur matted elephants (Fire Mammoths).

GM's Note: You'd think fur and large size would be an anomaly in this heat, but they're native to the plane so who knows? It's just a game.

The riders were two Efreeti and six Fire Trolls.

At first the riders attempted to negotiate, with a simple "Come with us or else."

The party chose "Else" and battle ensued.

Without going over the details highlights of the battle as follows:

Jacko still had contractual cooperation of the six extraplanar Icosahedrons by contract 27B/6 and attempted to use their poison gas attack. It failed on all but one.

One of the rider/mammoths attacked D'Vine and she took 49 points of damage and didn't blink an eyelash. (The rest the players took note that D'Vine was a convenient "meat shield"). She responded by pulling out her Techno Weapon (a.k.a. "Boom Stick") and blasted her opponent.

Grok attempted a Charm Person spell on the Efreet leader. This appeared to work well and the Efreet failed its saving throw. I was about to call the battle because the lea when it was remembered that the spell only works on humanoids man-sized or smaller.

It was getting late so I called the game for the night.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

BT

BBBB

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
Felipe the Dwarf, a third level Sigil (Chosen One subclass of Cleric).
Grok the Dwarf, a third level Doughboy (Battlemage subclass of Magic User).
Jacko, an Albino Dork Elf, a Infiltrator (subclass of Thief).
Aerys, an Elvariel, a Fingersmith (Thief class).
Baronet Huang - a Master of the West Wind of the Stone Tiger Order, (Monk class).
Numrendir - a human Conjurist (a Conjuror, Magic User subclass) - Gone off to
D'Vine - the67

NPCs:
Count Elefus, a human Abbot of Heimdall (Cleric class). RETIRED
Baronetess Honda - a Human Datai Samurai, Steward of Catan (formerly Temple of the Frog)
Gnomex, a Gnome Brother of Geardal Ironhand (Cleric class.)
Tanzen - a Fae-Born first level Exciter. (Fourth level Invoker, a Magic User subclass).
Six Icosahedrones. (27B-stroke-6 contractors)

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Junkbot Jackson - a human Tracker/Adept (a Ranger, Fighter subclass and Cleric).
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus.
Fundisha - a half-Elf Swordsperson/Tout (Fighter and Infiltrator, a Thief subclass).

MISSING CHARACTERS
Sir Weasel, human Guild Soldier, Warlock, & Champion (Thief, Magic User, & Fighter classes) he stayed back in BlackMoor.
- and nine Pilgrim henchmen of various levels. (They wear hoodies.)
Slade Wilson - Dwarven Professional (a Bounty Hunter, Fighter subclass) Left behind at Catan.

BT

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/f...php?fid=13
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

​
​​

--

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

tweetbutton: Tweet

Games are (usually) on Thursday nights sometime after 5:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

This is a consolidated report over several weeks. We did not do very much due to various illness, absences, and the fact is we are between adventures.

++++ START OF SESSION(S) ++++

The party started the next few sessions with administrative matters. Since it was the end of the adventure, they decided to cash in their chips (shares).

Jacko made a special mission back to the ruins of the Temple of Existential Evil to retrieve the Demoness' Silver Throne embedded with 666 gems of various varieties. Either the Orb of Abyssal Death still operated the elevator down to her throneroom, or the vertical shaft was still navigable. Jacko simply put it into his Portable Hole and departed.

For the remaining sums of treasure, they also consolidated their sums into Platinum and made deposits into the Bank of Blackmoor. Aerys put 25 percent of her sum into the local bank of Nulb, called "Your Money or Your Life".

Speaking of 'Nulb' the party also renamed the town 'Noob'.

Elefus retired back to his Monastery in the North. His followers had been missing him anyway. He took his pet Gargoyle (a convert) with him.

Vixine also cashed in her shares and retired. (The Player moved out of town, we only kept the character along because characters can't simply disappear for no reason and the character didn't die in an 'accident'.)

When Jacko made his deposit, he also produced a damaged "coin" that had micro-metallic filaments that the Players could only describe as being "Dwarf pubes". The cashier asked him to stand aside and "wait".

(This concluded one week, we skipped a week and picked this episode up the 2nd week.)

After waiting what seemed like two weeks without going to the restroom, Jacko was then "interviewed" by a black leather clad man also wearing a black leather hat. He could only be described as Englebert von Smallhausen from the old British TV series 'Allo 'Allo. The man only asked Jacko "where did you get that coin?" Which after a short explanation by Jacko, he was thanked "for your cooperation" and the interview was over. Answer: It was Numrendir who gave him that coin when at about the time Jack was first introduced. (Other Party members had similar coins given by Numrendir, but they didn't break.)

Aerys had concluded that he needed to go and retrieve the rest of his family while the party decided what to do. So she packed up and made an overland trip to Tharp via Noob. (I placed Nulb, err now Noob, just a few hexes Southeast of the Regent of the Mines for you Blackmoor fans.) But Aerys hadn't just left yet so...

The party was still thinking what to do next. However the Player for Huang and Honda had some unfinished business. His other characters Junkbot and Fundisha, had been kidnapped by some Efreet on their way to liberate the Duchy of Ten several adventures back. It goes back even further than that, as Junkbot and Fundisha (with other party members) had earlier defeated some Efreet that were allied with another character named Rahl. They had banished said Efreeti, so the Efreet waited the requisite 1001 days and came back to exact revenge. The Efreeti also kidnapped Gerry Castagere (from module DA4).

The Party (as it was back then) decided to put off the rescue of Junckbot, Fundisha, and Gerry from the Efreet because the liberation of the Duchy was more important. Now that the Party (as it is) no longer has any more pressing matters of state from Blackmoor, they're technially on sabattical and decided to effect their rescue.

The next question was, how does the Party get to where the Efreet had taken the Kidnappees? A casual study at the University of Blackmoor hinted towards the Efreet capital called the City of Brass on the Elemental Plane of Fire.

The Party also remembered (rather coincidentally and conveniently), that the Mortician at the town of Noob had a crematory furnace that never seemed to need any fuel. They decided to go back there and check it out.

Aerys was going that way anyhow so she came along.

Using land travel and just a fortnight later (Elefus and Jacko's ex-girlfriend were no longer with the party so they had to get used to overland travel again due to the lack of Teleportation spells), they arrived in Noob. They went straight for the Mortuary and waiving all appointments with the proprietor checked out his furnace. (They had been previously been awarded the key to the city for their past good deeds so they had carte blanche everywhere in Noob.) Since Jacko had magical protection due to his possession of the Orb of Abyssal Death, he entered the furnace and returned with a positive report that that there was more to the furnace than just fire, it was an active gate to another (and very hot) world.

The Party decided this must be an entryway to the Elemental Plane of Fire and decided to undertake (no pun intended) the journey. Aerys refused however, stipulating the dry heat would ruin her fairy wings in no time.

[For Game purposes this mean that Player's character was out of the rescue. I made Aerys' Player my Assistant for the duration.] For the record, that Player was going to take that journey to Tharp and back and relocate her family consiting of her house-huband and kids. Some kind of Mom she is, always running off risking her life in adventures. But she is the bread-winner after all.

[Another game week passes.]

Preparing to go to the Elemental Plane of FIre, the Party also went back to Blackmoor. They made sure everyone had appropriate foot-gear such as Red Dragonhide boots and also everyone purchased Rings of Fire Protection with their winnings. Even Jacko, (in case his Orb gave out). The Party then hired a Magic User to cast some Legend Lore spells, learning firstly, that all prisoners of the Efreet are (yes confirmed), taken to the City of Brass. Secondly, they are put on trial in the Hall of Transgressors if found guilty, they are either given to the Blood Cult as slaves or are cast into the Great Rift about 200 miles Southeast of the City. (The party presumes Junkbot and Fundisha were found guilty.)

Then the Party made it back to Noob, which is about a week after Aerys made it back from Tharp. Meanwhile she had settled in. While the Party was gone, Aerys bought up all the unowned and abandoned properties in Town seeing as there were so many townsfolk that had been taken to the Temple of Existential Evil and and disappeared there.

[Now I'm just waiting for the group to get it's act together and go.]

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

PART 2.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

CHARACTERS
Felipe the Dwarf, a third level Sigil (Chosen One subclass of Cleric).
Grok the Dwarf, a third level Doughboy (Battlemage subclass of Magic User).
Jacko, an Albino Dork Elf, a Infiltrator (subclass of Thief).
Aerys, an Elvariel, a Fingersmith (Thief class).
Baronet Huang - a Master of the West Wind of the Stone Tiger Order, (Monk class).
Numrendir - a human Conjurist (a Conjuror, Magic User subclass) - Gone off to

NPCs:
Count Elefus, a human Abbot of Heimdall (Cleric class). RETIRED
Baronetess Honda - a Human Datai Samurai, Steward of Catan (formerly Temple of the Frog)
Gnomex, a Gnome Brother of Geardal Ironhand (Cleric class.)
Tanzen - a Fae-Born first level Exciter. (Fourth level Invoker, a Magic User subclass).
Six Icosahedrones. (27B-stroke-6 contractors)

CAPTURED CHARACTERS (both PCs and NPCs)
Junkbot Jackson - a human Tracker/Adept (a Ranger, Fighter subclass and Cleric).
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus.
Fundisha - a half-Elf Swordsperson/Tout (Fighter and Infiltrator, a Thief subclass).

MISSING CHARACTERS
Sir Weasel, human Guild Soldier, Warlock, & Champion (Thief, Magic User, & Fighter classes) he stayed back in BlackMoor.
- and nine Pilgrim henchmen of various levels. (They wear hoodies.)
Slade Wilson - Dwarven Professional (a Bounty Hunter, Fighter subclass) Left behind at Catan.

BT

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/f...php?fid=13
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

​​

--

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

tweetbutton: Tweet

In a couple of weeks I’ll be making my first and only personal appearance this year at the 21 Convnetion in Orlando, Florida. This event will be unique in a number of ways. To my knowledge, this convention will be the first large-scale gathering of Red Pill writers, bloggers, podcast hosts and thought-leaders ever organized. I’m truly appreciative of Anthony Johnson in being open to my suggestions for speakers. It was a collaborative effort in this regard and over the course of this year we did our best to collect a group of speakers who would represent many different aspects of Red Pill intersexual dynamics. My only regrets are that we couldn’t fit more speakers in to the schedule and some men I highly respect were unable to attend this year.

It was my hope that this ‘new and improved’ 21 Convention might eventually be an annual Red Pill summit of sorts. This build up hasn’t been without a bit of controversy from the previous Purple Pill speakers who used the 21 Convention’s prior events as a platform for their blogs and coaching businesses. That was to be expected just as the same tired criticisms of the Red Pill were too. I have no doubt that the previous ‘life coaches’ taking issue with this event’s Red Pill turn sincerely believe they have some valuable insights to help men become ‘better men’. The problem, however, becomes one of how these coaches would direct men according to the Blue Pill preconditioning they have never been able to disabuse themselves of.

I understand the necessity these guys must feel with regards to discrediting the Red Pill as a praxeology. The dots we connect in Red Pill awareness are often at odds with their deeply held Blue Pill ego-investments and hopes, as well as a threat to their (often LARPy moralistic) “Man Up but not too much” profit model. In fact, even just the idea that the Red Pill should be a praxeology of men’s collective experiences about intersexual dynamics is enough to make them want to disqualify it. Their criticism is that, as a praxeology, the Red Pill is long on explanations and short on solutions – solutions you can presumably get by signing up for their email blasts and coaching sessions.

The praxeology that is the Red Pill is inconvenient for them because it tears away the veneer of their Blue Pill idealism about women and reveals some very unflattering truths about them and the feminine on-whole which they still largely have on a pedestal in their heads. Red Pill awareness has a way of exposing the pretty lies that make for the good marketing material that most Purple Pill coaches depend on for their livelihoods. I mean, when 80%+ of men are Beta, who wouldn’t want to buy the secret 12 point list of things a man must do to be a real man and get the woman of his dreams?

Two Complaints

There are generally two common complaints I read coming from Purple Pill life dating coaches. The first is easy, and one I’ve refuted so many times I wont bore you with repeating myself, and that’s the presumption that Red Pill awareness must be false or detrimental to a guy because it makes guys so angry with women. This is the easiest dismissal for critics because it is true; men do go through a phase of anger when they unplug from the Blue Pill illusions they’ve been so convinced of for the better part of a lifetime. And yes, some get stuck in this phase and some do become despondent because they don’t want to face the abyss it represents to them. Some go MGTOW, some turn into Purple Pill coaches themselves because they don’t want to accept the whole of what Red Pill awareness means. But most men go through this phase and come to an acceptance that there is hope in a Red Pill paradigm for them. They come to see their new awareness as a safety net and boldly embrace rebuilding themselves into better men based on this full awareness.

So the sales pitch then becomes, “Don’t be angry with women like those Red Pill guys. You can still live in Blue Pill happiness and harmony with a loving unicorn ‘Quality‘ woman by following these 5 simple steps to make yourself into the man women want you to be.”

What the Purple Pill anger critics (deliberately) refuse to get is that the Red Pill isn’t (and was never) intended to get men to hate women, but rather to inform men about the inherent nature of women so they wont hate women for what they can never be to them. This is the disillusionment that men who still cling to Blue Pill idealism can’t seem to get past – they cannot abandon those Blue Pill hopes that they believe women are capable of fulfilling for him, but the Red Pill disabuses him of. So they get angry. They get angry at themselves for ever having believed in them. They get angry for having wasted so much time investing themselves in them. They get angry, most importantly, because they realize that women simply aren’t built to fulfill the hopes his Blue Pill conditioning made him believe should be possible.

The Purple Pill coach believes that this Red Pill realization leads to men hating women. The second complaint I read from them is that Red Pill awareness gives men some license to feeling like victims. This criticism is deductive to coaches for two reasons; it serves his ‘get-rich-quick-on-the-internet-by-selling-sunshine’ man-up and do better to qualify for women blog template, and it discourages men seeking answers from becoming Red Pill aware in a way that crushes their still Blue Pill belief set.

For the record, and as boldly as I can put this, if you are Red Pill aware man and still believe you are a victim of some sort because of your previous Blue Pill indenturement to pedestalizing women or the Feminine Imperative, you are only a victim of your own lack of vision. Red Pill awareness has set you free – free from the blur and distraction that a feminine-primary social order would pull over your eyes, free from the delusional Blue Pill hopes that are only greater shackles for a man, and free from never seeing the intersexual pitfalls you were prone to fall into before. But Red Pill awareness comes at a cost; the truth may set you free, but it doesn’t make it pretty. If you have a responsibility as a Red Pill aware man it’s that you are never allowed to play the victim. You now know the rules of engagement. Play it well, change the rules if you can, but you are no longer allowed to say you didn’t know the score.

Most Purple Pill coaches know this victim complex is bullshit, so they deliberately conflate Red Pill awareness with MGTOW or the MRM or even the “flip side of feminism” in an effort to muddy the waters and dissuade men, who are genuinely hurting and seeking answers, away from the real life-changing influence that the Red Pill represents.

When I petitioned my readers to leave a testimonial as to why they thought the Red Pill represented more confidence or a ‘safety net’ to them I got much more than I anticipated from that comment thread. I had been looking for some good quotes to add to the back cover of Positive Masculinity, but what I got was over a thousand revelations about the power that Red Pill awareness has in changing men’s lives for the better. These are men who took what the Red Pill had shown them and transformed their lives with that knowledge. They did this because Red Pill awareness empowered them, gave them the tools, to implement changes in themselves and how they interacted with women and a feminized world. They did so without anger or feeling like victims, and they did so without a Purple Pill hack trying to coax them back onto the plantation and into their failed, and false, Blue Pill belief sets.

And this is what scares the coaches; that a free and open source Red Pill praxeology is responsible for more men taking the initiative and bettering themselves than anything their ‘coaching’ has been responsible for.

Personal Development

I am not now, nor have I ever been a motivational speaker, a ‘guru’ of any stripe, a psychotherapist or a personal development coach. Though I’m humbled to be counted among the Godfathers of the Red Pill, I have never claimed ownership of the Red Pill. It’s always been my belief that the Red Pill – the true Red Pill that has always been about intersexual dynamics – should be an ‘open source’ community. Decentralization is one of its strengths, but it also allows for bastardization from men and women who want to define it.

In each of my books and on this blog I’ve made things plain about my non-approach to men and their own personal development; I’m not interested in making better men, I’m interested in men making themselves better men. I am not interest in making men “Tomassi Men” or in anyway selling them on a template for what I think a real man ought to be. My life and my interpretations of it are not going to be a template for anyone else to follow. Red Pill awareness, based on the praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the personal and social realms, will save and/or improve your life, but that life has to be lived by you as an individual.

That said, of course I realize that men seeking answers will want a codified system of guidelines for their own personal development. I’m not the guy who’s going to give that to you, neither is that Purple Blue Pill life coach with the 12 point plan, neither is the motivational speaker selling you the same tired power of positivity message that’s been around since the 1930s. You are going to come up with that plan, you are going to take what the Red Pill makes you aware of and you are going to apply it to how you live your life. And you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your personal development and the successes (and failures) that came from it authentically came from your own plan and according to your judgement, not someone else’s vision or template.

I wanted to take a moment in this post to preface the 21 Convention by addressing the ways in which men come to unplug themselves from their old, Blue Pill conditioned way of life and reconstruct themselves. Reader Blaximus added this in a recent comment thread and it sums things up well:

Fourth: there is no ‘ system ‘ for teaching or learning Game. None. The process is highly individualized and virtually no two guys will learn at the same rate, or achieve the exact same level of understanding or real world application. No cheat sheets in game. You either get it and apply it and internalize it, or you don’t. It’s not about picking up chicks in clubs. That’s PUA. Game picks up chicks at a funeral. Lol. True game will be disliked by the masses.

Far too many Purple Pill dating coaches don’t want to get this in their heads. They think that because the Red Pill is a praxeology it implies it’s a cop out on developing real solutions for guys. They either don’t understand the necessity for men’s individual needs to personally develop Game for themselves, or they need a convenient dismissal of the Red Pill as ‘those angry guys have no answers’.

I have stressed in more essays than I care to recount the importance of combining what the Red Pill informs Game about with what Game informs the Red Pill about. One is the theoretical, the other is the practical, and neither is complete without the other. Yes, it is entirely vital that you, as a Red Pill aware man, get out into the field to employ the ideas, and test the practicality of how the Red Pill relates to your situation in your environment according to your strengths and gifts. That field may be a night club, or day Game on the street, in a social circle, with your wife of 10 years or in your churches singles’ group. The fact remains, Red Pill awareness is applicable through Game in a variety of environments, social and cultural contexts.

Game Works, but it only works if you turn off the computer and do something. How do you learn from a book? You put it down and you go outside (and yes, that counts for my books too). Investing oneself in Red Pill awareness as a praxeology is not a cop out for coming up with real solutions – it gives men a toolset from which they can create their own solutions. What frightens Purple Pill coaches is that men’s individual solutions, often enough, don’t affirm their Blue Pill romanticizations, their pretenses of morality, or their idealistic inability to look at the abyss and find hope on the other side of it. They want solutions, but they want their solutions to be affirmed by a Red Pill awareness that contradicts their ego-investments.

When your revenue depends on not getting it it’s hard to convince a Blue Pill man otherwise.

I will be discussing aspects of this essay at the 21 Convention in just two weeks. If you are attending I’d like to take this opportunity to extend you a personal invitation to talk with me at the convention and possibly have dinner with my colleagues and I at the event. On the topic of just getting out there in the field and doing it, I know that my friends Christian McQueen and Goldmund will be heading out into the wilds of the Orlando nightlife and I will be accompanying them on at least one of these outings.

Lastly, if you are in the Central Florida area, or if you want to make the drive in for the weekend, and you really really want to attend the convention, but just can’t come up with the funds, hit me up via email, Twitter or leave a message on my About page here and I will personally see about getting you some kind of hardship discount. Remember, this is only if you’re truly desperate to attend.

See you in two weeks.

Filed under: Game, Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, The Red Pill, Unplugging

Peterson drops the ball in a couple of forgivable instances here. First, many contemporary studies show that women do in fact enter an estrus state. Secondly, while he is entirely correct about women’s Hypergamy never seeking its own level, he implies here that it is singularly a man’s capacity to produce and share resources that forms the basis for women’s attraction. This is an interesting overlook when you consider how often he’s made reference to how women primarily look for sexual dominance in men. From the Beta Bucks, provisioning, side of women’s sexual strategy, a man’s capacity for production and sharing resources is certainly an attraction cue, but it is only a cue insofar as it applies to women’s long term security needs. From the Alpha Fucks, short term mating perspective, it is a man’s capacity for sexual arousal and his sexual availability to her that is the basis for assessing a man’s SMV.

I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Peterson. I count him amongst the greatest minds of Red Pill awareness, however, his analysis is often subject to a Blue Pill conditioning that predisposes him to a default belief in the inherent ‘goodness’ of the female psyche. That isn’t to say women are inherently ‘bad’, but it is to say his objectivity is colored by a want to see the feminine on a pedestal. Peterson tends to pepper in a Blue Pill conditioned masculine ridicule into his observations about men when he’s detailing gender differences and it’s his habit to presume the best from women. He accurately makes the case here for how men are continually driven by an existential crisis when it comes to being accepted by (‘perfectly well-intended’) women in passing on their genetic material, but falls into the trap of believing that women would only, logically, want to breed with men who have good long term prospects for providing and sharing resources. There’s a 30+ year body of evo-bio / evo-psych research that contradicts his presumption.

However, in this instance, Peterson hits upon the fundamental reasoning as to why men are by nature more competitive than women. Over the millennia of human evolution, the stresses of men’s breeding strategies and realities has become hardwired into the male mental firmware, and as such it has selected-for men having a more competitive nature than women. I would go so far as to suggest that competitiveness is a primary aspect of conventional masculinity – and one that requires a constant effort to socialize out of modern males today.

On the female side we have to consider how women evolved, socially and psychologically, in hunter-gatherer, foraging tribes, and how the environmental stress of maintaining a social collective shaped women’s mental firmware. It’s my belief that women’s intense need for long term security (as well as Hypergamous doubt) is directly descended from the need to hedge against the environmental uncertainties of our evolutionary past. The rigors of gestation, carrying a child to term, child birth and then rearing that child to puberty – all while gathering food and resources and defending that child and the collective against external (and sometime internal) threats selected-for women with a collectivist / cooperative mental firmware. While the men of the tribal society were off hunting game or defending the tribe, it would follow that women would develop a more unitary, collectivist social order of intrasexual cooperation in order to survive and, as Dr. Peterson points out, ensure that the genetic material of the men they selected (or were selected by) survived for posterity.

In several essays, and in my latest book, I describe women’s natural social order as the Sisterhood Über Alles. That is ‘women above all else’, and from an evolved psychological perspective this solidarity, collectivism and cooperative bent is the mental vestige of an evolution that demanded women to be so in order to survive. Evolution doesn’t care how women breed and survive, just that women breed and survive. Flash forward to modern times and we see women of every and any social, political, religious and racial stripe preempt any conviction inspired by them with the concerns of womankind.

There are several studies that indicate that collectivism is a characteristic of women’s mental firmware. When presented with the distribution of a common wealth (or resource) it’s women’s predisposition to mete those resources out to the familial, feminine-primary social group (tribe) in as even a distribution as possible, or by an individual’s most pressing needs. Again, this is convincing evidence of a mental framework that leans towards a collectivism that finds its roots in our evolutionary past.

This fundamental prioritizing of the survival, needs and best interests of women as a collective is what now forms the basis of, and drives, what I commonly refer to as the Feminine Imperative. And from the Feminine Imperative, combined with a male-permissive social structure that has allowed for women’s social primacy, we have largely developed into a feminine-primary social order that is founded on the evolved, collectivist social structure that women’s mental firmware naturally predisposes them to.

Collectivism, socialism, is a fundamental aspect of the female psyche. In a social order that prioritizes female interests above all else we see the rise and perpetuation of an egalitarian equalism that finds its roots in women’s natural predisposition for collectivism. I would argue here that the egalitarian equalism we contend with today is really a convenient cover-term for female social primacy, and one that is a result of women’s collectivist nature.

Male Dominance Hierarchies

As Dr. Peterson briefly details in this clip, it is primarily men’s performance burden (and a man’s capacity to share the fruits of it) that has historically been the basis of women’s selection criteria for the long term provisioning aspect of women’s Hypergamous natures. And as I mentioned, this only covers half of what makes for women’s true assessments of men’s sexual market value. DNA mapping of our foraging ancestors reveals the real story about the importance sexual arousal and strategic pluralism played in women’s sexual selection. Historically, only 20% of men bred with 80% of women. If we only look at this fact from Peterson’s perspective we’re left to conclude that this 20% looked like good long term prospects with resources to share, rather than consider the uglier side of Hypergamy and women opportunistically breeding with the best physical specimens they had access to and, proactively or retroactively, cuckolding the ‘good provider’. The mental schema of mate guarding didn’t develop in a vacuum – there are very good evolutionary reasons why men developed a subconscious, peripheral sensitivity to the behaviors that indicate women’s ovulatory phase.

Hypergamy doesn’t care, but it did indeed play a part in the evolution of men’s dominance hierarchies as Peterson suggests. Whether the criteria for selection was physical prowess or provisional prowess, the breeding pressures placed on men by women’s sexual strategy is responsible for a great deal of what we consider the male nature and conventional masculinity itself. While it may be a pleasant fiction for men to apply terms like strength and honor and fidelity to male-kind, those concepts exist outside the evolved male-competitive nature. Kings and emperors had breeding rights to harems while their subjects, by order of degree, had sexual access to progressively diminishing opportunities with women.

One aspect I think Peterson didn’t get around to explaining in this clip is that women have only had unilateral sexual selection opportunity in the past century due to the social and physical unfettering of Hypergamy. Being a king may’ve meant that man had more breeding opportunities than that of his lessers, but it in no way made him the best, or even the willing, choice for the women he bred with. Up until the rise of feminine social primacy, men have always had social, moral, ethical and yes, physical, means of exerting their own control over Hypergamy.

Competitiveness is what defines masculinity for every generation of men. While it may be part of women’s mental firmware to consider the collective first with regard to resource distribution, it is most definitely an evolved characteristic of men to accrue resources in order to be considered a good prospect for women’s long term security needs. When we consider the criteria women have in order for a man to represent an optimal Hypergamous prospect, it makes pragmatic sense that an innate competitiveness would be part of men’s psychological firmware. Nature would select-for a natural competitiveness in men. As such we observe that men consider merit and performance first in distributing resources (rewards) in order to recognize, in theory, an exceptionality in men. Even if it is within our selfish-gene nature to want to retain as much for ourselves (and thus make ourselves better prospects for Hypergamous optimization) we still recognize merit, or lack of it, in men’s burden of performance.

So, with regard to the bigger societal picture, what we’re seeing in our egalitarian equalist social experiment of today is not just a conflict in men and women’s social approaches, but also a fundamental conflict in which sex’s sexual strategy will be the socially predominant one. In a social sense it is a conflict in the Cardinal Rule of Sexual Strategies. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution the answer has been clear; it is women’s sexual strategy that has been allowed to define our social order.

Brotherhood

Jack Donovan had a great post back in February titled We are not Brothers. I entirely cosign his sentiment in this essay – today men bandy around the term Brother without really considering the deeper implications that true, in-group, exclusively male, brotherhood entails. It’s a good essay, but I think one reason Jack is sensitive to the term losing its meaning is due to the efforts the Feminine Imperative has made in destroying men’s understanding of conventional masculinity. It’s deliberate, so Brotherhood means whatever the feminine feels comfortable in allowing it to mean, and it can effect control over its significance for as long as it can continue to confuse men about the sacrificial nature of conventional masculinity.

Men’s dominance hierarchies and breeding strategies predispose men to maverick independence (sigmas) or intrasexual rivalries within a fraternal group (tribes). Men’s collective, cooperative social structures – traditionally, exclusive male spaces – existed in spite of this intrasexually competitive nature. Even amongst the most steadfast, cooperative and loyal of brotherhoods there will always be intrasexual rivalries for breeding opportunities. And as Jordan B. Peterson notes, it is women’s Hypergamy that gives rise to male dominance hierarchies, but moreover it has led to the necessity for developing an evolved predisposition for men’s being competitive.

It is precisely this competitive mental firmware in men which makes it next to impossible for their to ever be a Brotherhood Über Alles – and in an age where men are shamed for masculinity, an age in which women will force themselves into male space as overseers, an age where men will adaptively define masculinity to mean whatever suits their weakest proficiencies, it’s easy to understand the difficulties in men cooperatively coming together to enforce their own collective best interests as men. In ages past, when masculine cooperation determined the fate of a tribe, a people, a nation, etc. this fraternity was a much more imperative concept for men.

It’s been noted before that in earlier eras formalized monogamy was a social adaptation with the latent purpose of solving men’s evolved imperative to ensure his own paternity. Whether this adaptation was (is) a successful hedge against women’s Hypergamy is debatable, but the relative insurance a man was afforded by formal monogamy was that he could send his genetic material on to successive generations. From an evolutionary perspective, men’s primary existential crisis is reproduction, and in order to successfully solve this problem women’s Hypergamy must be controlled for. As this push for male control superseded women’s imperatives it’s made for a social guarantee that a man would reproduce with a lessened need for competition and a lessened burden of performance for men. While high SMV men were guaranteed reproduction, the monogamy adaptation meant that, theoretically, only the lowliest of men wouldn’t find a mate.

That was the latent socio-sexual contract prior to the Sexual Revolution. Today, we see parallels for this struggle between men and women’s sexual strategies and women’s own social push to unilaterally control and institutionalize Hypergamy. Now the script has been flipped to socially create and enforce a new feminine-primary structure that has the latent purpose of ensuring even the lowest SMV woman can fulfill Hypergamy to a greater degree. Just as formal monogamy sought to ensure men could solve their reproductive purpose in spite of his performance burden, now we have women as the primary beneficiaries of a society structured to, theoretically, ensure they have access to both the best genes (Alpha Fucks) and the best provisioning (Beta Bucks) – all to the point that men are conscripted into doing so.

As women have less and less need of men who can (directly) produce and share resources the concept of masculine cooperation in enforcing their best interests becomes a farce at best, a ‘hate crime’ at worst. The more women can produce and/or consume resources, or conscript men to involuntarily produce and share, the more women lean towards the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy in prioritizing their sexual selection. As a result, male dominance hierarchies will continue to develop around the short term sexual breeding criteria of women. In the past, as per Dr. Peterson, that hierarchy may have been centered on long term provisioning; today it is all about women’s pleasure in accessing the best genetic material her evolved hindbrain determines is in her best interests.

Yet still we hear women bemoan a lack of marriageable, long term producer/sharers who are their (perceived) status equals or better (always better). The evolved need for that security providing, competent male is still part of her mental firmware, no matter what the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative are telling her conscious self. And in a pragmatic, adaptive response, men will continue to define masculinity for themselves, continue to prioritize short term sexual arousal above long term attraction, and continue to be befuddled or embarrassed by the ideas of forming Brotherhoods with any deeper meaning than what pop culture will define them for men as.

Filed under: Alpha, Biomechanics, Hypergamy, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

Immediately this one was better than Nomads, and thank goodness for that. This was reminiscent of the first two books, full of adventure and action. I really enjoyed the journey and the prose was pretty good this time.

There were some twists and turns in the story but nothing you don't see coming from a pasang away. I was moved by some of the conflicts the characters faced and got quite attached to some minor characters. There was one surprise I didn't expect, they certainly fooled me there.

The glimpse into the Gorean slave trade was interesting, especially the way they are trained. This book made the Gorean slavery lifestyle sound more appealling and less barbaric than in the other books. There wasn't really anything that made me cringe in this book, unlike in Nomads when some events made me feel queasy. The events that happened during kajuralia made me laugh, turnabout is fair play after all!

It felt like the story went at a good pace, with a lot more polish then 'Nomads'. I enjoyed the main characters persistence and courage and swashbuckling-ness.

I'm looking forward to reading Raiders, but I don't even know her!

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With apologies to my regular readers and commentariat, I’m mid-stream through crafting my next essay and what do I see in the comment feed from last week’s post? Our (our soon to be formerly) Purple Pill friend Mitch returning to give us all an update on what was supposed to be his inevitable married bliss. Rather than allow Mitch’s saga get buried under pages of comments I thought I’d post the continuation of his in-progress unplugging here for others to benefit from. Be sure you read the first case study before you dig into his update below:

Hello Gentlemen,

It’s good to be back here reading your insightful, intelligent, funny, actionable posts. I’ve been away for awhile. Glad to see Rollo’s blog and books doing so well. Congratulations sir, and I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my purple-but-slowly-turning-red heart for your work. I am now eating my previous words about this being ideological and cult-like. lol. Some might remember that I was the eponymous subject of one of Rollo’s posts on purple pill, and the ensuing discussion about whether I was setting myself up for slaughter in marrying a Ukrainian I’d met online. I (basically) said I’m a big boy now at 50, and know what I’m doing with women, and would let ya’ll know how it worked out. Not that anyone gives a rat’s ass after all my bullshit, but whatever, here I am.

Funny thing is that I’d been thinking about posting this update a few days ago, after reconnecting with TRM blog, and I would have said something along the lines of: she has been here almost 9 months, we been married for 5, going reasonably well, regular and enjoyable sex, she cooks everything from scratch and takes good care of me and the house; she’s diligently studying english, meeting people, etc, seems mostly happy; without fail she packs my lunch every night – once she woke up at about 1 am and remembered she had not made my lunch for work next day, and even though I told her not to worry about it, she got up, and went downstairs and *cooked* me lunch. Her responsibility, she said. She also genuinely likes me, and is very loving and affectionate and passionate in bed. We’ve had some conflict, and I’ve mostly held my ground, but made some fairly key concessions in the spirit of playing fair (since she has, in actuality at this point, zero leverage in this relationship), and accommodating her wants and needs.

And hypergamy doesn’t give a fuck.

Lo and behold, yesterday the computer is open and I see a ‘Hi’ come across the screen from Skype from a male. Open the Skype window and she’s been chatting with this dude from New Hampshire or some shit, not long, but the kind of bare bones swapping of details – the guy’s on hunt for a wife, and she’s asking about the size of his town, and what’s the weather like, how many kids, etc. As the blood drains from my face, the veil parts, I see it for what it is, and I realize without a shadow of a doubt, this shit is real. Complete with the subsequent hamstering and total lack of accountability following.

I don’t believe she was actually interacting with this guy with any conscious intent to find someone else, but clearly she thinks about it, and is willing to “play” with the idea, even at a time when she has sooo much to lose. I could withdraw my petition to get her a green card in two seconds, and she’s done. I think she was/is bored and enjoys the attention and validation, and sense of (diminishing) power that she has over men.

So now I need to figure out what to do. i am beyond grateful for Rollo’s work, this blog, and forum, and having internalized RP to the limited extent that I have, and know I need to do A LOT more. It’s pretty humbling to be 50 and need to be totally schooled in something so basic. It’s fricking amazing that I have managed to hide myself from this knowledge for so long.

Thank you.

[…]

I meant to also say that I have learned a ton from you guys, and really appreciate the time and energy that many of you spent last fall trying to get me to get my head out of my ass. What can I say, I need to learn the hard way. Truth is, though, you guys were so vehement about it, that it definitely helped me to keep myself in reserve and react a bit more strategically to her.

Just to preface here, my intent isn’t to be cruel or pop of with ‘I todja so’, but I think it’s very important for guys in the various stages of unplugging to see Mitch’s situation as a clinical example. I’m not trying to flame you or pillory you Mitch, but your situation does serve as a good example.

As I mentioned in the first post about Mitch, there is a visceral desire on the part of Purple Pill men to force fit the parts of Red Pill awareness into Blue Pill idealisms and personal convictions because they simple cannot face the abyss of what a full Red Pill awareness presents to the belief set that the Blue Pill has conditioned them for. It is truly awful to be confronted with unflattering truths about the nature of women as well as a man’s coming to realize he’s got to drop all of his previous idealism and create a new, positive, paradigm for himself based on Red Pill awareness. For a lot of men inured by the Blue Pill it’s just too horrible to let go of those hopes based in a false awareness of their experience.

Thus, we get tropes like “well, the Red Pill is true, but it’s okay to have ONEitis for a girl because my new awareness insulates me from the worst effects of it.” Mitch even began his first entreaty by claiming this woman was “the ONE.”

I’d like to encourage men who still want a good wife to look East. As in, Russia, Ukraine and other former USSR counties. I cannot begin to tell you how encouraged and revitalized I am by this woman I met – and by most of the women I met and interacted with before I found “the One.”

Shades of Purple

I’m beginning to see that there are two varieties of Purple Pill men; the first is the guy whose revenue and wellbeing depends on his only accepting what the Red Pill presents to him in half-measure. These are the Man-Up, do the right thing moralists who only ever marginally warn against the nature of women while believing that the self-improvement imperative that the Red Pill represents to men will more than compensate for the very real dangers of a man not fully killing his inner Beta. These are usually the guys who at one time were solidly Red Pill and used that awareness to their personal benefit with women (and life), but at some stage their life’s circumstance demanded that they “change their ways” and shift back to believing that Blue Pill ideals can be had with Red Pill means. These are the men who follow The Script.

The second type of Purple Pill man is the one who never fully unplugged. I believe this was where Mitch was when I outlined his situation in the first essay. There is a certain class of men who simply cannot ignore the truths that the Red Pill presents to them, and they eagerly endorse the tenets and the understanding of women’s visceral natures. Hypergamy doesn’t care, they get the dynamics of Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, they even believe they’ve come to terms with their own (often Beta) nature and what it is they believe is necessary to effect a change in their lives; yet there are aspects of that Red Pill awareness that they desperately want to reconcile with their long-held Blue Pill idealistic hopes. So, as a result, they attempt to discard or ignore whatever aspect of the Red Pill that isn’t conducive to making those old Blue Pill dreams come true.

For as long as I’ve been writing in the Manosphere I’ve always made a point of telling men never to use my marriage (or other Red Pill married men’s marriages) as some kind of template or goal to be had with Red Pill awareness. I realize that my own Red Pill marriage seems like some ideal to strive for, but what I think most unmarried single men need to consider is that, for the vast majority of men who’ve been able to unplug, remake themselves and employ an internalized understanding of Red Pill awareness within their marriages and in their families, these men do so in spite of themselves.

Very few men I know of, whom I’d say are Red Pill aware husbands and fathers, did not set out to be so. I have no doubt that in the future I’ll encounter men who were formerly Blue Pill and Beta who changed themselves, unplugged, became Red Pill aware, internalized it and used it to enter into a marriage wherein his Frame was always the primary and his wife intrinsically recognized it and was attracted to him because of it. I do hope this is eventually the case for some men, but as it stands now, the far more common occurrence is the Blue Pill, Beta husband who was “awakened while married” and turned his marriage back from the brink – if indeed that is the case at all. Even more commonly it is divorced men put through the ringer who unplugged post-divorce.

As I mentioned in the first case study about Mitch is his story is engaging because it so faithfully follows the progression of rationales Purple Pill men will use in order to hold fast to their old, comfortable mindset – in this case it’s the Blue Pill dream of an idyllic marriage had through Red Pill means.

One danger I think should be apparent to Red Pill men having to deal with a Purple Pill guy who’s hostile and resistant to what they’re trying to tell him is the potential disaster a Purple Pill man is setting himself up for in his inability to really stare at the abyss, work through the anger and hopelessness, and then recreate himself. This, I feel, is where that resistance stems from. It’s not so much an inability to acknowledge the truth of what real Red Pill intersexual dynamics is showing him, but rather how he will internalize, process and use that to create a better life for himself. So you get anger, not at the message as much as the messenger, when you tell him his sincere hopes are based on a Blue Pill interpretation of what a ‘good marriage’ is:

Lol…you guys can go fuck yourselves. I appreciate where ya’ll are coming from, though. Trying to save me from myself. And i appreciate how naive my post must sound to a bunch of hard core red pillers like yourselves. However, I am not nearly as inexperienced with women and LTR’s as ya’ll assume. I have learned a lot from red pill in general and this site in particular – it’s very insightful and helpful, and I’ve adjusted my attitude and posture toward women because of it. At the same time, though, it strikes me that many of you are taking on red pill ideas as a kind of ideology, and that’s its own kind of danger. The absolute certainty that ya’ll think you know all you need to know about me and my woman and my relationship from that very brief post is what I mean. As if red-pill theory, or whatever it is, completely and concisely explains the total dynamic between a man and woman. Red pill explains a lot of things really well, but certainly not the totality of the mystery that is between a man a woman in a marriage.

And yet, it does and it did.

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, then I feel sorry for you. Red pill helps me tremendously in seeing more clearly what is going on. I totally get that I am a beta provider for her, that a large part of my appeal is what I can provide, and I get that she is turned on by alpha traits. Both of these things can coexist in the same person. Understanding this and what’s behind it makes me feel less anxious and insecure about that, because I’m more clear about what to do.

Also, being a beta provider does not make me a bitch. Providing for my woman and family is a large part of what makes me a man, and I derive great satisfaction and pride in doing so.
Also, I am not in any way “settling” for a 44 yo woman. Younger women were/are available to me, but that is not what i choose.

There’s a lot more to life than fucks and bucks, but if that’s all it is for you, then this is the type of woman you will attract. In a relationship, what you get is what you are. If I can’t find a way to live with an open heart, then I don’t know what the fucking point is. But, to each his own.

So, here we are. And again, it’s hard for this not to come off as a big ‘I toldja so’, but I think it’s even more important for Red Pill men who have it in them to want to help a Blue Pill guy unplug, or hell, just to even recognize the reasons why he’s in the personal circumstances he is, to remember that the Purple Pill guy is only lashing out because he fears the totality of the truth that Red Pill awareness brings into his life. As I always say, unplugging guys from the Matrix is dirty work, but I am genuinely glad to have Mitch back on track and hopefully he’s learned something from the experience. I think other Red Pill men should adopt the same spirit of welcoming a Blue/Purple Pill prodigal son back into the fold.

So that’s my take, but please feel free to comment on Mitch’s situation in the comments thread.

Filed under: Case Studies, Relationship Game, The Red Pill, Unplugging

I'm willing to bet few, if any read my the URL for my byline. But Today is my once a year posting for one of the text based games that I manage. EMPIRE5.

Empire5 is regenerated once a year, and all you need is to do is Telnet to it. Once connected, enter HELLO PLAYER.EMPIRE5 and you're in. It will ask for your nation, (just make something up) and create a password. (You can also use PUTTY, but turn echo or duplex off. Control-H is backspace, and arrow keys don't work.) There are other versions of this game converted to Graphical Interfaces, but they don't always have the charm of plain ASCII Text. EX is for exit and logs you off.

As a text based game, any command can be prefixed by the word HELP and the command name. Of course the trick is knowing what the commands are. For that, enter COMMAND and you'll get a list. (There's a web page at the same URL so it shouldn't be too hard to find examples.)

The game lasts a year and accumulates time for each Island you occupy. With the year long game you get zero time points at the beginning. So once you've logged on you may have to wait a day or so to get any time points. (There are shorter games but I need to regenerate them. EMPIRE4, ..3, ..2, & ..1)

The picture shown is a typical Island. Unoccupied spaces are dashes, the letter D is a dock, M are Mining sectors, E produces Explosives, A produces Artillery, plus signs (+) are AIrports, the letter P produces aircraft. The quotes (") are occupied Mountains. Unoccupied mountains would be a caret (^). Blank spaces are water sectors. All these letters over time produce components to make a formidable forces to challenge other players. Occupied sectors all have civilians and military, although you can draft 100% of the civilians and convert them to military. However only civilians reproduce, military does not.

In Docks you can build various types of ships, Liners, Transports, Destroyers, Mine Layers, Cruisers, Battleships, Aircraft Carriers, Submarines and others. You can use these to colonize and invade other Islands.

The typical announcement for this game is as follows:

Full Length EMPIRE5 has been regenerated, it lasts 1 year and expires THU, AUG 23, 2018

High Scores for the previous game are posted at:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/highscores/empire5.html

To connect, use Telnet or VT to: empire.openmpe.com

The log on command is HELLO PLAYER.EMPIRE5

Game parameters are:
- 999x999 sector grid
- 255 islands, starting island is random
- build and movement points accumulate every 60 minutes
- 0 starting time units
- ship movement is updated every 12 hours
- 255 Player limit
- Player identification is created on first log on
- Game is always open, no sign ups required
- Normal information hiding

This message generated by a batch job on the Empire machine.

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

Last weekend (August 19th) this blog entered into its seventh year, and once more it’s time to do the blog retrospective.

The Books

First and foremost last month I released the third installment in the books’ series, The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity. It’s about a month since its release now and I’ll admit it’s already exceeded my hopes and expectations. I know, everyone says that, but as I’ve learned, most authors struggle to match their earlier successes.

While this is still true of the first book (it still stands as the best seller and most popular) Positive Masculinity seems to resonate quite well with readers. I’ll admit I had some hesitation about focusing a quarter of the book on Red Pill Parenting, but this, it turns out, is exactly what’s catapulted it to a best seller in the Fatherhood and Parenting Boys sections on Amazon. For the initial four and a half weeks the book has held the number one best seller rank in Fatherhood and the number two and number five spot in  Parenting Boys. And for the first week and a half it held the number one best seller spot in Self Help.

At the risk of sounding like I’m glossing myself here, this is an incredible response when you consider the impact this book, written from a Red Pill perspective, might have in a mainstream reading world. It’s a great honor, but also a bit scary considering the social backlash of recent events. All the books continue to make inroads with men (and women) unfamiliar with Red Pill awareness, but the response to Positive Masculinity has been very promising so far. That said, the book is about much more than just parenting – which also adds to its overall appeal – so I’m hoping it will open some new eyes with regards to Red Pill awareness.

As things stand today, Sam Botta is finishing up the reading and mixing of the second book, Preventive Medicine. Sam is still struggling with medical complications due to his hit and run injuries (I’ll let him explain them in the comments), but the hope is still to have the Audible version of book two available in time for the 21 Convention at the end of September. For the audio of Positive Masculinity I’m still deciding as to whether I’ll do the read myself for this one, but my goal is to have it available in Q1 of 2018.

I should also add that the first book has seen its second retranslation. Beginning in Q4 The Rational Male will be available in Polish as well as the previous Korean version. I get a lot of readers asking for translations into Spanish and German (possibly Dutch too). This will be a priority for me in the coming year, so if you are a translator or know one who would like to partner with me to publish these translations please leave me a message on my About page.

Finally, I do have plans in the works to do a re-edit of the first book to address syntax, grammar and spelling issues. Contextually nothing will change, but once this revision is done I’ll be publishing a hardback version of The Rational Male through Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing format.

Blog Traffic

The blog continues to grow with regard to audience. 2016 had a slight decline from the previous year, and 2017 is on track to eclipse it, but the reach of The Rational Male still continues to grow.

I know Alexa.com isn’t the best metric, but it’s largely what most bloggers in the Manosphere use. These are the stats as of August 22, 2017 and I daresay these rankings are respectable for a Red Pill blog that’s never been monetized or advertised in six years. These numbers put me in good company amongst the most notable writers in the ‘sphere (as well as a few Purple Pill ‘life coaches’) and the blog continues to average just under half a million views per month. My general focus for the blog has always been as a delivery device for the message of Red Pill awareness, Game fundamentals and the unmoderated debate of intersexual dynamics. I’m pleased to see that in six years this discussion has proceeded in the same vein for all of them. Furthermore, I find it very encouraging when I’m told by Manosphere outsiders that The Rational Male is the best (sometimes their only) source for rational debate about Red Pill awareness and intersexual dynamics. I am not now, nor will I ever be interested in a Red Pill echo chamber/hug box and for six years the comment section has proven to be a ‘hot kitchen’ in which both critics and advocates can (largely) hash out the Red Pill details.

A lot has been made of free speech advocacy in the ‘sphere for a few years now. My stand has always been one about the free exchange of ideas. The only way an idea’s strength and merit can be tested is in the crucible of open debate. There are a great many Manosphere celebrities banging the gong about free speech who nonetheless block, edit and censor opinions they disagree with on their own forums. One purpose that this blog has is a free and open debate and (with the exception of spam and blatant trolling) will always be open to counterarguments.

The 21 Convention

As most of my regular readers are aware, I’ll be making my only in-person appearance at this year’s 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida, September 28 through October 1st. For more information on this event have a look at my rundown of it here. Furthermore, I’ve done a couple of interviews with 21 Convention founder Anthony Johnson about my participation and the talks I’ll be giving here and here.

If you haven’t made plans or purchased a weekend ticket I would encourage you to do so soon. The convention is getting close to being sold out, but if you have some issue with cost or you have some kind of hardship consideration and you really want to go, please contact myself or Anthony and we’ll work something out for you.

It bears repeating that I was less than enthusiastic about appearing not just publicly, but at this convention in particular. It’s always been my impression that the 21 Convention was a collection of largely Purple Pill dating coaches and not really in line with what (sometimes ugly) Red Pill awareness reveals to men. However, I’ve come to change my view of this convention in light of Anthony’s much more Red Pill focused line up for this 10th anniversary meet up. I’ll admit I had a hand in helping Anthony get what will amount to a Red Pill summit arranged. I really think this weekend will be a seminal event for Red Pill aware men and it’s my hope it will be something to help men change their lives.

This then is my very brief rundown of the 2016-2017 year for The Rational Male.

So here’s what I thought represents the best posts from year 6.

Let me know what your favorites were in the comments and let me know how TRM has helped you this year.

With humility and gratitude,

Rollo Tomassi

 

THE BEST OF THE RATIONAL MALE 2017

Interviews

Live with Obsidian & Alan Roger Currie

Mark Baxter, Ed Latimore & Rollo Tomassi

Anthony Johnson & Rollo Tomassi

Christian McQueen & Rollo Tomassi

Mark Baxter & Rollo Tomassi

 

Hypergamy

Stalling for Time

For Better or Worse

False Equivalencies

The Epiphany Phase Revisited

 

Series

The Reconstruction – I

The Reconstruction – II

The Reconstruction – III

The Reconstruction – IV

The Utility of Beta Men – I

The Utility of Beta Men – II

 

Social

The First Female President®  (Personal Favorite 2017)

Sexual Zoning

The Something Else

Transitioning

The Unbearable Rightness of Being Female

The Anger Bias

 

Red Pill / Game

Please, Breakup with Me

The Awareness

Submission

Confidence and the Safety Net  (Most Commented 2017)

Misperceptions of the Red Pill

 

Personal Development

Rites of Passage

Positive Masculinity

Teaching Slaves to Read

Family Integrity

Kill Your Idols

Filed under: Positive Masculinity, The Best of The Rational Male, The Red Pill, Unplugging

One of the most common criticisms of “those Red Pill guys” I read today is the misperception that any guy devoting any headspace to the nature of women, how to go about changing his outlook in intersexual dynamics or really understanding intersexual mechanics is only applying himself in order to get laid. Old school Roissy addressed this as a common form of Red Pill hate long ago:

From The Unbearable Triteness of Hating:

12. Fallacy of Misdirected Obsession Hate

Hater: A guy who spends his life obsessing over how to get women is a loser.

A guy who spends his life obsessing over climbing the corporate ladder to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over mastering guitar and playing in a rock band to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over pursuing financial rewards and acquiring resources to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who….. ah, you get the point.

I made an effort to address this in Crisis of Motive as well, however, that essay took a more general look at the reasons people behave as they do.

A common (often deliberate) misdirection is that the only purpose men apply themselves to when considering Red Pill truths is that it’s all about PUA and chasing pussy. From there the argument becomes one of men becoming ‘pussy beggars‘ because they mistakenly believe this is all that studying intersexual dynamics is good for.

I get this a lot from MRAs as well as MGTOWs and trad-con guys who believe men shouldn’t ever bother themselves with the nature of women or the underlying mechanics, and focus themselves on whatever ‘higher-order’ principles or ambiguous virtues their belief set predisposes them to valuing. Usually these tend to be old books, old social contract ideals that they believe men need to return to.

Then the focus centers on how unburdened they’ve become with women, because they’ve either given up or have otherwise dissociated themselves from caring enough to understand the nature of women. Then, a sort of self-righteous AMOGing follows in some feigned pity about how other men are stuck following their penises instead of applying themselves to whatever it is they think ought to be valued. It’s a very convenient cop out for guys who’ve either attempted to understand Red Pill truths or applied Game and failed in some capacity, or for Blue Pill men unwilling to let go of the idealism it’s taught them, but still see some undeniable truth in the Red Pill.

I find this kind of ironic when I consider how hard-line PUAs tend to value the practice and repetition of Game above (not necessarily to the exclusion of) really looking under the hood and understanding why theses same intersexual mechanics make a man fully Red Pill aware. These are the “just get out there and do it” guys, and I do see the necessity of practice and learning. However, in either instance, it becomes all too easy to dismiss a man’s interest in understanding these mechanics as being motivated by hedonistic impulses. This is half the reason Red Pill awareness is shunned in religious contexts. A good part of understanding the fundamental nature of women aligns directly with old-school doctrine, but the disqualifying concern is that men would use it for their own self-important pleasures. It’s easy to presume that all the Red Pill is about is facilitating men’s obsession with getting laid because men are taught that this is all men think about. But whether it’s in a religious context, or an old books ‘man up’ context, the element of shaming and pathologizing men’s sexual impulse to promote an ideologic bent is always there.

That’s the heart of this misperception; the belief that the Red Pill is only about banging women or it’s in some way giving men reasons to encourage them to give up on women in despair. It’s only about building a man’s life around women (pussy beggars) to the exception of all else or it’s wasting one’s life trying to understand something not worth the effort. Those are the binary rationales attached to accepting the truths that the Red Pill reveals to men. These are usually the result of some irreconcilable conflict between that truth and an ego-investment in his Blue Pill idealism.

Ostensibly, the concern stems from some ideal of personal responsibility and that Red Pill awareness is in some way encouraging guys to ignore anything like responsibility and just following their most base impulses. Anyone who’s been involved in the Red Pill as a praxeology of intersexual dynamics understands this is a wrong impression, however, it does serve to stroke the egos of guys who need an easy dismissal of the truths they’re uncomfortable with. In a sense it becomes a new form of Game to them; AMOGing those pussy beggars by being maverick examples of a guy who is enlightened above his animal sexual nature. The belief is not unlike Blue Pill men’s dedication to their identifying with the feminine as a means to make himself unique and “not like other (typical) guys.”

There are a lot of different variations of this ‘Game’. Maybe it’s the tough-guy pastor who adopts just enough Red Pill awareness to pretend he’s got the masculine experience to tell men how they ought to ‘man up’ – while absolving women of any personal responsibility in their own natures. Sometimes it’s the Power of Positive Thinking guru who plays a similar, though secular, game with his flock – if you just ‘think differently’ you’ll be unique and have no reason to “chase pussy”. Then there’s the trad-con “authority” who also perpetuates the “nothing’s sexier” myth about men who ‘do the right thing’ by accepting their own indenturement to women, but are also ‘above it all’ enough to never have to worry about the risks men put themselves into by doing so.

The Importance of Hypergamy

A lot gets made about a perceived over-emphasis on Hypergamy. While Hypergamy serves as a very important foundation to many Red Pill truths it’s not the straightjacket critics want to make of it. However, the misperception critics like to harp on is that just the simplest most basic understanding about the mechanics of Hypergamy are too paralyzing for most men. Again, it’s something believed to be deterministic to the point that a lot of men simply throw up their hands and give up. It would be better for them to stay totally ignorant (or less aware) of how Hypergamy influences not just their personal lives, but also their work, social, family and political lives. In being ignorant of Hypergamy a guy might develop some irrational self-confidence in spite of its influence that would help him.

Some critics like to promote the idea that because Red Pill awareness, as a praxeology, doesn’t plainly present hard and fast actionable solutions for men that it is promoting some endemic culture of victimhood. Thus, we get comparisons of men complaining or whining about their own miserable (often sexless) state, or the state of unfairness in a world that is aligned against them. These are the critics who want easy answers and when none come, or the ones that are obvious conflict with the Blue Pill idealisms they refuse to disavow, they believe it’s the Red Pill’s duty to give them some bullet point list that tells them what to do. Thus, the Red Pill doesn’t make it easy enough to be useful.

What they fail to wrap their heads around is that the Red Pill is not one-size-fits-all and that anyone promoting a universal cure-all is selling something dangerously close to Dream Girls and Children with Dynamite. Rather than bothering with the introspection necessary to use what the Red Pill is telling them, they seek simplistic formulas to remedy their conditions. Most critics who believe Red Pill awareness promotes a sense of male victimhood resort to this opinion because they lack the personal investment necessary not just to understand intersexual dynamics, but also the harsh necessity of abandoning their Blue Pill ideals completely.

Often enough what the Red Pill is showing them is requiring that they stare at the abyss of a past life based on Blue Pill fallacies. Solution? Conflate the praxeology, the studying of intersexual dynamics, with complaining and a victimhood belief. Rather than invest the time and attention needed to understand intersexual dynamics it’s far easier to conflate what Red Pill men debate with angry feminists’ easily disprovable rhetoric.

The Scope of the Red Pill

In the linked podcast above I addressed another common misperception with Anthony Johnson; that of the belief that all the Red Pill is about is limited to the personal situations of men. All of the misbeliefs I’ve led up to here are founded on the idea that Red Pill awareness is exclusively compartmentalized to the personal states of men, and beyond that the social and political landscape is caused by social constructionist reasons. The misperception, as I said, is that understanding intersexual dynamism is only about getting laid or complaining about not getting laid. Learning anything more in-depth only indicates some degree of obsession with getting sex.

In The Feminine Mystique I outlined the latent purpose the Feminine Imperative foments in the mythology of women being these fickle, unpredictable and unknowable enigmas to men.

Perhaps the single most useful tool women have possessed for centuries is their unknowablity. I made that word up, but it’s applicable; women of all generations for hundreds of years have cultivated this sense of being unknowable, random or in worse case fickle or ambiguous. This is the feminine mystique and it goes hand in hand with the feminine prerogative – a woman always reserves the right to change her mind – and the (mythical) feminine intuition – “a woman just knows.” While a Man can never be respected for anything less than being forthright and resolute – say what you mean, mean what you say – women are rewarded and reinforced by society for being elusive and, dare I say, seemingly irrational. In fact, if done with the right art, it’s exactly this elusiveness that makes her both desirable and intolerably frustrating. However, to pull this off she must be (or seem to be) unknowable, and encourage all of male society to believe so.

What critics and Blue Pill men do by discouraging a fully developed understanding of what makes for Red Pill awareness in men is a surrender to this unknowable social convention. Either women are unknowable or not worth the bother of men having figured out their nature the effect is the same; keeping men ignorant of how the Feminine Imperative directs their lives. This ignorance has ramifications that go far beyond just the individual man and whether or not he gets laid.

I mention this in the above interview, but what critics don’t want to confront is the far greater scope that understanding the praxeology of the Red Pill implies. Those dynamics stretch from the biological, to the psychological, to the personal and familial, to the political and the global. A man can use Red Pill awareness to get laid, deal with an unresponsive wife, challenge a female boss at work, better understand the sexual marketplace as well as the latent purposes of feminine-primary legislation designed to maximally limit men and maximally unfetter women. However, just understanding this, just discussing it or a want to have a more complete grasp of Red Pill awareness is not an effort in bemoaning a man’s state within it. This is the danger I see coming from some elements within the Red Pill community; there’s a tendency to see the education (or even the want of an education) in Red Pill awareness as some substitute for acting on it. It is not, and it’s high time men in the ‘sphere realize that Red Pill awareness, and making it useful to an individual man, consists of both the theoretical and the practical.

I’ve had critics tell me that the Red Pill is only desperate guys learning to get laid, and to them I’ll point out the recent story of Daniella Greene, the FBI translator who left her military husband to marry the very ISIS fighter she’d been tasked to investigate. Watch the video at this link and then think about how many Red Pill truths this story confirms. Think about the far greater scope and importance an understanding of Red Pill intersexual dynamics has here. Are we just going to say “well, bitches are crazy, she must be damaged” or do we see the mechanics behind her actions with a Red Pill Lens? This is only one example of the scope of the importance a developed Red Pill awareness should mean to men.

Filed under: Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill

Or any other game last night. I'm out of town.

To summarize this week's report, I had an excellent lunch on Sunset Blvd in West Hollywood with an old friend and author at a French restaurant called the "Le Petit Four".

She had Steamed Fresh Mussels in a white sauce and I had the Spinach Quiche with mushrooms.

We both had Flan for dessert.

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

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I'm doing a pre-publication demo of the latest edition of Divine Right at the Guns of August Convention at the Virginia War Museum August 25-27, 2017. 9285 Warwick Blvd. Newport News, Virginia 23607

Expect to run the game on the Saturday afternoon time slot (after lunch). Let's say, 1PM will run to the bitter end.

Since I'm running this demo, this night we did a small play test with my gaming group. There was one item worthy of note:

One guy had the Trolls. He had one ally with the personality that allows only one unit per set up space.

During the course of play he had stacked two units of Trolls with one unit of that ally. All of his other non-Troll stacks were one unit high.

He rolled the epidemic event.

In true rules lawyer fashion, we had an argument.

One player claimed the stack with the Trolls was the largest stack. Player has to loose the one non-Troll unit from THAT stack.

The other player claimed since the Trolls are immune, they don't count towards the largest stack. Therefore since all non-Troll stacks are one unit high, the one unit lost has to be at random.

I have a preliminary finding from the Divine RIght folks but can't say what it is right now.

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

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The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. But when you are inside and you look around, what do you see; businessmen, lawyers, teachers, carpenters. The minds of the very people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of the system and that makes them our enemy.

You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

I apologize for breaking up the continuity of last week’s post with this one today, but I felt it was necessary to address the recent firing of James Damore by his employers, Google, for allegedly breaking company conduct codes for raising many of the issue I and other’s in the Red Pill community and the Manosphere have been dissecting for a long time now. I generally don’t like to get too wrapped up in current events until more information develops about an incident I think is relevant to how the Red Pill (as it correctly applies to intersexual dynamics) is perceived in mainstream society. It’s easy to make mistakes so if I miss anything here please feel free to correct me or add to things in the comment thread.

To the best of what I’ve been able to ascertain James Damore posted what mainstream media wants to define as a 10 page “manifesto” (really a ‘memo’) about why it is he believes certain gender/sexual stereotypes persist in the tech field. After reading it, there is really nothing all that shocking from a Red Pill perspective in his essay. If anything, Damore is still deluded by Blue Pill conditioned idealistic hopes for gender equalism not dissimilar to those held by the MRM. Really there’s nothing in this PDF that the Manosphere and even the sexual sciences haven’t been revealing for over a decade now. Damore just had the balls to post it on what Google promoted as an anonymous inter-corporate intranet forum, ostensibly established to allow their employees to voice their opinions and concerns about the company in anonymity. Google is only one of many multi-national companies to have these forums set up in some lame effort to make it seem as if they value the opinions and engagement of their employees.

Now we see just how private and dangerous these forums really are to the livelihood of their employees. To be fair, I doubt that Damore is the first guy to get fired for expressing himself on one of these forums. I’m sure there’ve been countless other men shown the door by many companies with a lower profile than Google. What made Damore a target wasn’t so much Google from a corporate sense, but rather the ‘progressive’ feminine-primary corporate culture that is endemic to Google. Once Damore had published his very well-thought op-ed about the fundamental biological, psychological and neurological differences between men and women, and how this affects innovation and employment in the tech industry, the intra-corporate witch hunt was on for the guy who anonymously posted. No doubt Google code monkeys would have little problem identifying and doxxing James, but where this witch hunt stemmed from was far more likely his co-workers and fueled by the egalitarian-equalist, postmodernist mindset that pervades Google.

This is a snapshot of the Google corporate culture. The last gal, Danielle Brown is Google’s “Diversity VP”.

The official line from Google is that Damore’s “manifesto” constitutes a breach of Google’s code of conduct. Yet for all of Google’s insisting that they respect the right’s of speech within the company, Damore’s doxxing came from within Google’s corporate culture:

The employee memo — which was up for days without action by Google — went viral within the search giant’s internal discussion boards this weekend, with some decrying it and others defending it. Sources said the company’s top execs have been struggling with how to deal with it and the fallout, trying to decide if its troubling content crossed a line.

Apparently it did. In a memo to employees titled “Our words matter,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the employee — who has been named on Twitter, although his identity could not be verified — had violated its code of conduct. (I am not publishing his name, because he — and others who disagree with him — have been threatened with violence online.)

Well, apparently James was doxxed identified and was threatened with violence both from within and without Google now. Thus, the predictable constitutional excuse that ‘you can say what you want, but you’ll be held accountable’ and Google was within its rights to fire Damore doesn’t hold water when Google promoted its internal forum as an anonymous place for employees to provide their input so the company can get honest feedback. I’m not a lawyer, but I think Google’s got a really sticky situation on their hands in that their actions technically constitute entrapment.

Furthermore, I get the feeling that Google’s campus is not unlike many other large corporate cultures – a core of skilled labor that actually puts numbers on the board as far as productivity is concerned working within a larger bureaucracy of basically superfluous positions that define the company’s corporate identity to the world around it. The writing on the wall now, that this skilled labor pool is seeing, is that this bureaucracy set of the company can have them fired for daring to voice a dissenting reality to their own ego-investments. How long before that talent pool opts for a more secure jobs in a corporate culture that looks less like the “people’s” revolution in China?

Now, all that said, James Damore, unwittingly or deliberately, has fallen into the trust-trap that I outlined back in 2013 in It’s Their Game. And while I think he’s got a pretty good case against Google, he had to have understood to some degree that Google owns his Frame. Perhaps this was his intent all along (nowhere have I seen how long he’d been employed there), but he was either very naive or very cunning in his in publishing his ‘memo’. Maybe he thinks this is his Atlas Shrugged moment, or maybe he actually bought the lie that Google (any company) cared about his employee feedback – that fact remains that the Feminine Imperative has assimilated every aspect of western society. The frame in which the overwhelming majority of men depend upon in their corporate, career, job, lives is one into which the Feminine Imperative seized social control over long ago.

For as much as it seems that standing up to systemic, calculated, postmodern ignorance is a heroic act of Red Pill aware defiance, never forget the insistent frame of the system you find yourself in. A lot of men in the ‘sphere like to tout the virtues of being ‘anti-fragile’ enough to weather the inevitable retaliations of the postmodern herd for their dissenting world view, and that may well be the case for a few men, but remember, everyone, with rare exception, is fragile about something – family, respect, integrity, personal relationships, the people who depend on him as well as his revenue (and the capacity to generate more) all apply.

Feminine Correctness

Every social, religious and corporate institution has been saturated with feminine-correctness. It’s important for Red Pill aware men to make this distinction because it will inform your decision making for as long as you remain in most corporate environments. I know many ideological and political factions like to trot out the idea about how they are against “Political Correctness”. That term, PC, has been with us for a long time now and its definition has been passed back and forth along political lines almost interchangeably for decades. Whatever it is one side isn’t allowed to address in public discourse becomes politically incorrect conversation. However, the distinction that conveniently (calculatedly) goes unnoticed is what I described as the Sisterhood Über Alles in my most recent book. Feminine Correctness permeates both sides of the political spectrum, but this is only one social arena amongst many where the appeasement of women’s perspectives as being the only correct perspective has been saturated.

Anyone who’s read my essay, Losing My Religion regarding how the Feminine Imperative has covertly (and recently overtly) assimilated authority of church culture – and ultimately doctrine – in mainstream religion can get an idea of what I’m talking about here with regard to corporate culture. The corporate workplace, big and small, has similarly been assimilated over the course of over six decades now; to the point that a feminine-primary influence has become a de facto authority under the premise of diversity, gender-neutrality and combating a presumed endemic male-sexism. All of which feed into the default, feminine-correct, presumption of female victimhood. Thus, we see the rise of the ubiquitous, almost universally female staffed, Human Resources departments whose true purpose is not about hiring, company morale or corporate culture, but rather an enforcement of feminine-correct initiatives and bylaws intended to give unquestioned authority to the feminine-correct social narrative.

In our modern corporate culture we’ve seen a meta-scale enforcement of what I termed Overseers in the Locker Room in my essay, Male Space:

Overseers in the Locker Room

The second purpose in the goal of female inclusion into male space is really a policing of the thought dynamics and attitudes of the men in that space. When women are allowed access to the locker room the dynamic of the locker room changes. The locker room can take many different shapes: the workplace environment, the sports team, the group of all-male coders, the primarily male scientific community, the ‘boys club’, the group of gamer nerds at the local game store, even strip clubs and the sanctuary you think your ‘man cave’ is – the context is one of women inserting themselves into male space in order to enforce the dictates of feminine social primacy.

When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting maintaining the former level of interest in the endeavor.

Men unaccustomed to having women in their midst generally react in two ways; According to their proper feminized conditioning, they embrace the opportunity to impress these ‘trailblazing’ women (hoping to be found worthy of intimacy) with their enthusiastic acceptance of, and identification with, their feminine overseer(s), or they become easy foils of an “out moded” way of thinking that the new ‘in-group’ happily labels them with.

Once the feminine-primary in-group dynamic is established a ‘feminine correct’ social frame follows. This feminine correction restructures the priorities of goals, and validates any accomplishments, in terms of how they reflect upon the feminine as a whole. Thus any in-group success is perceived as a feminine success in male space, while in-group failures or simple mediocrity is either dismissed entirely or blamed on out-group men’s failure to comply with, or the rejection of, the Feminine Imperative’s ‘correcting’ influence on the in-group.

In all honesty, Jame Damore’s rationales in his ‘memo’ were very measured, bordering on Blue Pill, in his attempts to preempt what he obviously knew would be a workplace viral insult. However, his experience is a high-profile illustration of how corporate culture has been taken hostage by a mindset fed and raised by the Feminine Imperative. When you consider that this is the corporate culture of a company dubiously responsible for global access to information – ostensibly legitimate, authoritative information by the larger populace – you begin to see the extent to which the imperative as assumed control not just of our social discourse, but the unquestionable authority to direct the acceptability of personal belief and critical thought.

When I wrote The First Female President, I attempted to reveal just how globally extensive the reach of the Feminine Imperative really was. So encompassing is the presumed understanding of feminine-correctness, so ensaturated is it into our societal subconscious that we tend to take its presence for granted until Hillary (the she) was denied the presidency (to the he). Then the societal scale outrage comes to the surface because what was presumed to be correct is not a universally accepted foreknowledge as their social subconscious had presumed was believed.

That outrage was on a geopolitical social scale, yet it was due to the same presumptions that cause the outrage we see over a kid at Google who dared to say ‘no’ not just to Google’s corporate culture, but to all corporate cultures that have been subsumed by the Feminine Imperative for over 60 years now. That any company would need a Vice President of Diversity is an indictment of how deeply embedded the Feminine Imperative is in corporate culture.

Filed under: Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative, The Matrix, The Red Pill

@Kersus' Appendix N Readings

The Moon Pool
~Abraham Merritt

I had trouble starting this book. The negative reviews kept turning me away. Usually they revolved around the book being dated because current knowledge ruined the plot and while it may have been good in an age of exploration, that time is over. I also struggled with the introduction and the first few pages.

Once I got into it however, those reviews seemed more and more like people who never read The Moon Pool. No current planetary knowledge nor cosmology or even quantum mechanics invalidate this tale.

A third of the way through the story turns. The tense tale from the start becomes something else entirely however the prose remains beautiful. The complexity of the tale rises and becomes more interesting despite having to remember which character is which.

Two-thirds of the way into this dynamic adventure it seems complete and as the reader I wonder why I would read any further. All is well. Then we're presented with another climax, and then another. It may seem elongated however near the end is bar none the best one on one battle of vengeance with such a riveting sequence that I started cheering and yelling at the book in joyous "No way!" type talk. It makes Liam Neeson look like a droopy eyed armless child and Chuck Norris one of the detached limp arms. That scene alone is worth the book but you need the build up as written to gain the effect. In fact this subtle build up to what can only be described as a true reckoning is a masterpiece all adventure writers should read.

What feels like 'true' climaxes end up being buildup to the actual climax and finale. Only in retrospect do you see the genius of Merritt's setup. It really had to be this way.

There is a final moment as the reader, where biting your lip, you know that in the end you will either cry triumphant and feel warmth in the cockles of your heart to sleep peacefully or you will fire the book across the room. Only by reading The Moon Pool in full will you know which.

Very minor spoiler in this paragraph. Merritt's protagonist sees something and states it's not the Bifrost Bridge of myth and then goes on to describe exactly what Bifrost is supposed to look like. Perhaps it was Merritt's way of saying that while one is myth, this bridge is real! Yet after all the fantastical things seen by the protagonist, he suddenly now can not accept the Bifrost Bridge? It struck me as odd, but I'm sure one can rationalize it; probably those complaining about Tycho (moon crater and inside joke).

This tale has in it one of my pet peeves usually seen in the Sword & Planet genre. Here is a fake quote as an example- "We passed some Dwarves holding a hand at their waist, maybe with a weapon hidden. Later I found out it was the Bludip which was used for..." It's when the storyteller explains how he found out all this stuff afterwards, but he is otherwise talking in the now. Now we walk up the slope, years later I found out the slope was named after a blah blah blah. Luckily, The Moon Pool only does this a few times, unlike say Princess of Mars or Tarnsman of Gor.

Some of the descriptions are hard for me to visualize despite the vibrant writing as they describe things so foreign to my senses. Problematic is that I tend to skim through descriptions toward action however in this book I would go back and reread such things. His use of adjectives can occasionally be overwhelming and yet they fill the book with a unique charm.

One thing Merritt does well, is the chase scene. I was reading madly with eyes awide; word after word passing from my eyes into my ever increasingly stressed mind.

He also tends to describe things in action oriented sentences like, "the arch leaped a pit," describing a stationary object.

This isn't a book I read in one sitting. In fact I rarely read more than one chapter at a time. This was mostly due to the prose and wanting to bathe in it's beauty before moving on. I was brought to tears more than once just from the flow of Merrit's words.

In the end it seemed like too much story for one book, which is kind of odd to say as it's not an especially large tome and it's filled with extensive if alien descriptions, however the depth of story is remarkable.

I later found out that The Moon Pool was originally a short story and a separate sequel. This makes sense and it reads like two books combined. See what I did there? Look back six paragraphs.

It's easy to see why HP Lovecraft considered Merritt to be an influence on his work but Merritt combines other flavours of pulp, creepiness, fantasy, narration, purity and more in a unique way using his flowery eloquent prose that while occasionally makes your eyes glaze it ever more often instils powerful emotions.

The Moon Pool feels like it was written in the twenties but in my opinion is superior to other contemporaries and is an essential book for any authentic fantasy reader. This is after all a book from Appendix N; a list of books that influenced the 70s Dungeons & Dragons and all that follow.

Pulp meets Fantasy meets Sword and Sandal/Planet meets Lovecraft meets Tesla meets Disney (before Walt died) meets Gygax.

A bit of a slog at times but so very worthwhile. Public domain and available very cheap and even free!

#AppendixN

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Games are (usually) on Thursday nights sometime after 5:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

Tomorrow's game will be another board game. I got a pre-publication revision of the latest Divine Right game to play test. I'll also be running that as an official sanctioned demo at the Guns of August convention in Newport News Virginia on 25-27 August.

This is a two week report and I don't remember much. (Even though I have typed a lot of content). I have been tired lately. Probably overwork, I don't know. I took an online course at the local community college on network security. Maybe that's what did it. As an old timer I was rather a know-it-all, but it was a good refresher. A little bit of Python programming was included, it reminded me of good old BASIC without the line numbers while certain statements, functions, and libraries that would be verbose for me were assumed. I was disappointed because it wasn't FORTRAN/77. I ace'd the final at 100%, snark, snark. However it wasn't for credit since I took the course for free as a Virginia senior citizen in Audit mode.

I have not forgotten what the pizza was for the first session. It is just that I don't care. The 2nd session we got bumped out of our usual room so rather than take the upstairs suite on a hot day, (even though there was A/C I didn't trust it). We traversed town and gamed at my house. That day we had a conglomerate of fast foods, via Taco Bell and Burger King just to be different.

++++ START OF SESSION(S) ++++

The party made combat with the Grumpy Old Man and the Grand Demoness of the Dungeon.

There was a bit of betrayal from Jacko's demon girlfriend. When asked for data she simply started lying. One of the things I remember was Jacko and his Away Team (select characters) tried to sneak up from behind the curtain in the Grand Demoness' throne room, but there was an impenatrable wall of force. When asked if it could be penetrated she lied about it.

Next I remember she was asked to Teleport the Away Team to the other side of the barrier, but the group ended up in a nondescript room. She claimed not knowing what happened (spell malfunction). But the gamers finally got wind of her duplicity due to telltale signs from the GM and so they killed her off with the six Modron Icosahedones (known to the party as the form 27B-stroke-6 contractors), using their gas attack.

While she was down, Gnomex finished her off.

(If it matters only Jacko and his Away Team were witnesses.)

I can't really say if they "really" killed her or was she just putting on a good show of it. As a powerful demonness, her body upon "death" disappeard off the Prime Material Plane and ended up back on one of the Planes of the Abyss. Either way the party gets the points for her "defeat". Essentially her job was to get the Grumpy Old Man to this level. She did that by letting him shrink in size and hide somewhere. When previously asked to do some "detection" about the Grumpy Old Man, she lied about that too.

Mission accomplished.

Upon her reappearance in the Abyss I think she got a promotion and a medal.

Meanwhile back in the regular battle between the Grumpy Old Man the Grand Demoness and the rest of the Party. Elefus and others (not with Jacko) had been trapped with a Forcecage Spell. (Which is like the old Star Trek's Tholian Web but only a 20 foot diameter size.) Supposed to be like a Cube of Force but spells and weapons can be cast into and out of it.

Within the Forcecage was cast a Fireball, and a Lightning Bolt and maybe another high damage spells by the Grumpy Old Man. The end result on the Party's side, Huang's two remaining Monk followers, the two Mynxes, and Man-Bear-Pig were killed.

Otherwise during the battle there was a miracle of miracles. This kind of puts off all other details of the battle to the wayside.

Aerys flew up to the Grand Demoness and with an ultimate act of bravery, attacked her with a dagger (with the appropriate magic benefits otherwise the Demoness would be immune), and rolled a natural 20 on a 20 sided die.

A critical hit.

Gamewise we have a house rule, one can either roll the official HackMaster critical hit tables or use the House critical hit rules (which we call "Cheese Crits"), on a Cheese Crit, another natural 20 on a 20 sided die is a kill. (It slopes downhill from there.)

So while the Player for Aerys was pondering whether to use the official HackMaster rules or go for "Cheese".

The other Players were shouting "cheese, .. cheese, .. Cheese, .. CHEESE!"

He decided to go for the Cheese Crit, and rolled another 20.

This was of course instant death for the Grand Demoness, the Cause Celebre for this entire module. Of course being from the Abyssal Plane, like the lesser demon above she disappeared in a puff of an unfiltered pack of Pall Malls. Banished to the Abyss where she cannot enter the Prime Material Plane for 99 years (or is it 100? or 666?), whatever.

Meanwhile I was fishing for a GM card that would get her out of it. I couldn't find it. I knew I had it however, but found the card the following game session in this report.

Non-plussed, the Grumpy Old Man continued the fight. Elefus finally cast a Dispel Magic out of his Forcecage (3rd or 4th try I think). Meanwhile Jacko's Away Team figured out where they were and hoofed it back to the main battle. (They discovered they were merely in an adjacent room where the Jacko's dead ex-girlfriend had Teleported them to.)

Someone did something that caused the Grumpy Old Man to finally fail a saving throw and he was "Paralyzed". I think it was the 27B-stroke-6 Modron Icosahedron contractors. I'm sure the Players will remind me.

So the Party was about to deliver the Coup-de-Gras on the Old Man on the next round, and I declared the party still needed to roll for Initiative.

But he's "Paralyzed", said the gamers.

He still gets an "Initiative" roll, says I.

The party realizes there could still be mental things going on with the Old Man.

The Grumpy Old Man disappeared. (Just in case I was also armed with the GM card I couldn't find the week before, which was "Monster Emergency Teleport".) Didn't really need to use it, the Old Man had his own power, really.

Game over.

In the aftermath the Party collected any remaining loot and went up the Throne elevator (that only Jacko could operate with his Abyssal Orb). This is just game accounting and I may accrue it later.

About the same time the Grumpy Old Man would have recovered from his Paralysis, the party was upstairs on the Ground Level of the Evil Temple. The area was hit by an Earthquake, and the Temple started to crumple. Escaping through the broken stained glass window of the Temple as it was falling, the party made its way out of the area of effect. (Which of note was a 160 feet radius, hmmmm..)

Debriefing:

Elefus will retire. His presence as a high level Cleric was to shore up the Party. The Player had left long ago and now runs his own DC Superheroes game in another room. The same group of Players that bumped us out of our room the second session.

Who or what the Grumpy Old Man was, has never been determined. His lack of identity as well as the Grand Demoness that Aerys offed with the Cheese Crit (she had a name), I can only attribute this to Player lack of interest or carelessness in checking for story clues.

Whoever he was, the Grumpy Old Man had the hots for the Grand Demoness. She had been imprisoned and blocked from detection on the Dungeon's 3rd level by powerful spells and the Grumpy Old Man had been searching for her for years. Her death by Aerys' Critical Hit merely relocated her to the Abyssal Plane where the Grumpy Old Man can easily find her.

So you'd think the Grumpy Old Man would simply be grateful for her release? But like the lesser demonness killed by, she is now stuck on the Abyssal Plane for 'x' number of years.

So there is also this little bit of Her and the Grumpy Old Man wanting to dominate the World, well, that will have to be put off for the same number of 'x' years.

So it appears the Grumpy Old Man will be around for awhile to harass the Party.

++++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ++++

I expect the next HackMaster session the Party will be looking for something to do.

++++ CHARACTER ROSTER ++++

PART 2.

CHARACTERS
Felipe the Dwarf, a third level Sigil (Chosen One subclass of Cleric).
Grok the Dwarf, a third level Doughboy (Battlemage subclass of Magic User).
Jacko, an Albino Dork Elf, a Infiltrator (subclass of Thief).
Aerys, an Elvariel, a Fingersmith (Thief class).
Baronet Huang - a Master of the West Wind of the Stone Tiger Order, (Monk class).
Numrendir - a human Conjurist (a Conjuror, Magic User subclass) - Gone off to

NPCs:
Count Elefus, a human Abbot of Heimdall (Cleric class). RETIRED
Baronetess Honda - a Human Datai Samurai, Steward of Catan (formerly Temple of the Frog)
Gnomex, a Gnome Brother of Geardal Ironhand (Cleric class.)
Sum Dum Gai - Brother of the Winds (Monk, Fighter subclass). DECEASED.
Gangnam Bang Mi - Sister of the Winds (Monk, Fighter subclass). DECEASED.
Sum Ting Wong - SheMale Brother/Sister of the Mysteries (Monk, fighter subclass).
Tanzen - a Fae-Born first level Exciter. (Fourth level Invoker, a Magic User subclass).
Vixine Numar, a human Servant (a Chosen One, Cleric subclass). Recently raised a level.
A Dark Enchantress Demon. Grok's new girlfriend who folds her wings over her shoulders to look like a cloak. TRANSFERRED TO ANOTHER PLANE OF EXISTENCE
A Madger, a half humanoid, half badger creature who made a deal to serve with the party. DECEASED (a.k.a. Man-Bear-Pig.)
Two Mynxes, half female humanoid, half cat. They can shape change either way. They went both ways. DECEASED
Six Icosahedrones. (27B-stroke-6 contractors)
One charmed Confusion Beast. WANDERED OFF (It got confused.)

MISSING or CAPTURED CHARACTERS (PCs or NPCs)
Gargoyle (Elefus henchperson, demoted from Sidekick, out of town on business, acting as courier to BlackMoor).
BlackMoor to check his Investment Account.
Junkbot Jackson - a human Tracker/Adept (a Ranger, Fighter subclass and Cleric).
Gerry Castagere, human Fingersmith, (Thief class) and ever loving devotee of Elefus.
Fundisha - a half-Elf Swordsperson/Tout (Fighter and Infiltrator, a Thief subclass).
Sir Weasel, human Guild Soldier, Warlock, & Champion (Thief, Magic User, & Fighter classes) he stayed back in BlackMoor.
- and nine Pilgrim henchmen of various levels. (They wear hoodies.)
Slade Wilson - Dwarven Professional (a Bounty Hunter, Fighter subclass) Left behind at Catan.

BT

BBBB

++++ RECORD KEEPING ++++

PART 3.

This is also posted on three forums, and a blog.
http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/viewforum.php?f=76
http://www.furiouslyeclectic.com/forum/f...php?fid=13
http://www.kenzerco.com/forums/forumdisp...ster-Tales
http://furiouslyeclectic.com/hackmoor/

​

--

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

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What I’m going to get into today is going to be kind of dark. I’m doing this not to exacerbate any guy’s negative feelings, but to shed some light on the reality of how divorce operates in the United States as well as many other western societies. A lot of guys tend to focus on the logistics, the laws, the process of how a divorce proceeds. Much of what I see coming from Men’s Rights advocates about divorce centers on the need for legal and institutional reform of the process in their misguided hopes of creating a more ‘equal’ state between men and women. From what I understand, MRA’s primary hope (for most every issue they address) is that this reform can come from a top-down approach – changing the system to be more fair – rather than confronting the fact that these laws, divorce and others, are manifestations of an endemic social dynamic that is based on a fundamentally unfair, unequal interrelation between the sexes.

What I’m going to focus on here is dissecting this process, but doing so from a Red Pill aware perspective. While it may be the purview of the MRM that this process is fundamentally corrupt and in need of reform (I agree), what they willingly ignore is the root level inequalities that are part of men and women’s evolved differences that are the source of this process. This isn’t meant to be some take-down of the MRM; I find their causes worthy enough, but I believe their approach to solving them to be fundamentally flawed due to a refusal to accept the core, evolved differences in men and women and a stubborn refusal to reject the ideals of egalitarian equalism that the feminism they claim to hate is ostensibly founded on.

This system is designed to create conflict, but that conflict is rooted in the presumption that men are always at fault in it. This is why there can never be an equalist solution to correcting the endemic problems of modern divorce procedures.

At present I have a personal friend I’m counseling who is in the opening phases of this process. He and his soon to be Ex are also in ‘marriage therapy’. First thing I ask, “is it a man or woman therapist?” He says woman. I say, you’re fucked; start planning your exit now.

He agrees, but still has that Blue Pill hope he’s not wasting his money (she’s a SAHM) and they’ll be able to negotiate some mutually amicable feigning of her desire for him. When we invest ourselves in something we’ve accepted is supposed to be effective we’ll hold on to hope that it will because there’s a part of us (especially in idealistic men) that doesn’t like to think we are able to be conned. This is a very well studied psych phenomenon. We convince ourselves that we ‘got something out of’ an experience regardless of it being a provably bad investment. We like to believe that in all labor there is profit, but reality shows us, quite often, that this simply isn’t true.

I gave him a list of things to keep in his head as he was going to these counseling sessions, but I also told him the truth that marriage counseling is almost always ‘last stop before toll’ and that he needs to be careful now because his wife will eagerly use this therapist’s testimony to destroy his character at a later date. That’s the profit model for therapists in divorce proceedings. They’re getting paid when you’re coming and going.

I told him she will turn into someone he never thought she could become and most of it will be at the prodding of their therapist and her attorney (who he’ll also be paying). It’s in all of their best interests that they create a monster of him. The male anger bias I write about here will be the primary basis for his character assassination.

Anything even remotely, positively masculine or Alpha is still a ‘man being a man’ and this can always be reinterpreted as potentially aggressive or violent. In a feminine-primary social order where feminized men and women are taught that men are inherently evil and prone to anger and violence (the “culture” of masculinity) there’s an army of women and White Knight sympathizing men who want nothing more than to stick it to the ‘man’ symbolically. And when they draw a paycheck from doing so they’re all the more eager. Add to this that they feel a sense of moral justification in “making the world a better place” by burning him in an effigy of all men and you get to where we are now. We presently live in a social order that presumes any masculinity is “toxic” or “hyper” masculinity. So disassociated from anything positive has society become with regard to conventional masculinity that just the term is now masculinity is a negative connotation.

Needless to say this will be the starting point from which a soon-to-be-divorced man will have his undoing begin. So prevalent is the presumption of abuse on a man’s part that even the most saintly father can be remade into a secret monster. It’s just ‘how guys are’ and this presumption also serves as a point of justification for women, and Blue Pill male sympathizers, to feel okay about pillorying him.

Yes, I understand that there is at least a reportedly higher incidence of men being the abuser in domestic cases, but we also have to understand that the definition of “abuse” has been rendered so ambiguous that most men don’t realize virtually anything they do in a domestic confrontation can fit the definition of “abuse”. Just raising one’s voice is enough to qualify as psychological abuse. Denying a woman access to money also fits a new definition of abuse. I once counseled a guy who had been taken to jail for snatching the car keys away from his drunk wife so as to prevent her from driving drunk. She called the police and, as you likely know, the man is always the party removed from the home by police. Snatching the keys was enough to qualify his removal. 5 months later he’s living with his parents (at 43) and paying rent on a home and car payments on a car only his now ex is allowed to occupy and drive.

I know how my friend’s story is going to end. I’m doing what I can to give him fair warning – it’d be better for him to completely pull up stakes and remove himself from the situation than stick around and ‘try to make it work’ because the longer he lingers the more ammunition she and the therapist potentially get. I think this is also the profit model; keep the Blue Pill chump husband around the house for as long as it takes to build him up as a stereotypical ‘man’ and then escalate the most marginal conflict as a ‘typical’ domestic violence incident and he’s gone. If you watch the above documentary on the divorce industry you’ll see how many lucrative profit opportunities there are at every stage of divorce; and there is no incentive to dissuade divorce profiteers from doing anything different. And, as I stated earlier, there are many ready-made social and moral conventions available to help them justify their profits.

Old Books and New Books

‘No one cares how mean your ex was, how unfair she was to you and so on … at the end of the day, the system can’t right wrongs, they only process your case’

The above and following  quote was from an article in the National Post, Family court advice for men, from one who’s made it through;

I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of notes; on a gender breakdown, probably 80 percent are from men, 20 percent from women.

I’ve heard from family court lawyers, some of whom are angry at my suggestions that fathers get the tough end of the stick in child custody cases (though the actual evidence is reasonably clear that they do), some of whom say “the whole system is B.S … one of the first things out of my mouth when I see someone is, ‘What’s your budget and how much does he/she dislike you?’” I’ve heard from judges and former judges and psychologists and counsellors.

Without exception, they agree that the system is beyond broken.

What we have, fundamentally, in the state of modern divorce is a conflict between old books social contracts serving as the ethical basis of a new books resource transfer from men to women (Thomas Ball even described it as such). Really this conflict is at the root of much of what Red Pill awareness (from the social perspective of intersexual dynamics) describes, but in this instance there’s an entire social complex that influences policy and profit. Judges, attorneys, psychologists and counselors all make a very good living from this fundamental conflict; and if you watch the Divorce Incorporated documentary I linked you’ll see that there’s no incentive to ever change that profitable conflict at any stage.

However, all of the people involved in even a typical western divorce are all subject to the belief sets that the Feminine Imperative has predisposed them to about men and women. We presume a default state of victimhood is to be applied to a woman and the benefit of that victimhood doubt runs deep. We see it evolve into the kangaroo court systems that govern what we’re told to believe is an endemic ‘rape culture’ on college campuses – up to and beyond denying a man his civil rights.

We’re taught that any slight appearance of abuse towards a woman is an opportunity to teach any man doing so a lesson, but should a man be the victim of the same abuse? Well, he probably had it coming. The Feminine Imperative has (and still is in some senses) prepared women and Blue Pill men to believe that women are untouchable; always to be believed, by default, in their victim status no matter the circumstance.

Now we can expand this presumption to every party involved in a divorce proceeding. We get female therapists whose livelihoods depend on following the victimhood of women and demonization of men (and masculinity) script the Feminine Imperative has laid out for them for most of their lives. We get Blue Pill Alphas eager to prove their authority by punishing any man who might remind them of their asshole fathers or who fits their idea of what the imperative has taught him is a “misogynist”. The imperative plays to the natural ‘protector’ impulse of these men. We get well-conditioned attorneys, counsellors and judges ready to follow that same script by legally enacting the retribution and restitution upon which feminism has always been based.

But underneath all of this we have the fundamental inequalities in ideology between what the old books social contract expects of men while the divorce industry enforces, almost unilaterally male, punishment based on a new books social paradigm to better empower women – presumably to right the past wrongs they believe were endemic in that old books paradigm. What we have today are new books divorce and marital laws based on those old books presumptions of men’s evils, indiscretions and addressing the toll it allegedly took on women. The result is a system that is designed to psychologically, financially and personally ruin any man whose idealism led him to believe that men and women share some mutually recognized concept of love; enough to compel him to a lifetime commitment in modern marriage. It is a system calculated to destroy the same Blue Pill conditioned men who will eagerly stand up to defend their ego-investments in it.

The common refrain to this is always “just don’t get married”, and it is precisely this system’s goal to disincentivize long term commitment between the sexes so that this response is the only logical one. Thus, we get women spending small fortunes to freeze their eggs in the hopes that one day some man will be foolishly idealistic enough to look past all the inherent life-threatening risks marriage and divorce uniquely disposes men to. Thus, we get old books moralists berating men for wanting to prolong their adolescence (never mind women doing so is considered empowerment) by avoiding the dangers of marriage that they’ve been smart enough to understand, or have been a party to in one way or another.

In my next essay I’ll be addressing the misguided opinion of some ‘stand up’ Purple Pill moralists that the Red Pill is “just for guys who are obsessed with sex and make getting laid their life’s mission”. I’ll elaborate on why this is simply a distraction from the much larger meta-scope of Red Pill awareness and intersexual dynamics. However, understanding how the divorce industry is based on the same dynamics the Red Pill has described for a decade and a half is a good illustration of why the Red Pill isn’t just about men basing their lives on getting laid. This system is fundamentally unegalitarian and unequal, and the designed imbalances are entirely founded in Red Pill intersexual principles. This is why the MRM will never be successful in their hopes of a top down institution of social change. The laws and the social imperatives that crush men are symptoms of a deeper problem that requires a bottom up changing of men’s minds about women and themselves.

Filed under: Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, The Feminine Imperative, The Red Pill, Unplugging

I’m happy to announce today that The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity is now available on Amazon. The Kindle version is now available too.

Positive Masculinity is the newest supplemental reading in the Rational Male series designed to give men, not a prescription, but actionable information to build better lives for themselves based on realistic and objective intersexual dynamics between men and women.

The book outlines four key themes: Red Pill Parenting, The Feminine Nature, Social Imperatives and Positive Masculinity.

Free of the pop-psychology pablum about parenting today, Red Pill Parenting is primarily aimed at the fathers (and fathers-to-be) who wanted more in depth information about raising their sons and daughters in a Red Pill aware context. While not an instruction manual, it will give men some insight into how to develop a parenting style based on Red Pill principles as well as what they can expect their kids to encounter from a feminine-primary social order determined to ‘educate’ them.

The Feminine Nature is a collection of essays, revised and curated, that specifically address the most predictable aspects of the female psyche. It outlines and explores both the evolutionary and socialized reasons for women’s most common behaviors and their motives, and how men can build this awareness into a more efficient way of interacting with them.

Social Imperatives details how the female psyche extrapolates into western (and westernizing) cultural narratives, social dictates and legal and political legislation. This is the Feminine Imperative writ large and this section explores how feminism, women’s sexual strategy and primary life goals have molded our society into what we take for granted today. Also detailed is the ‘women’s empowerment’ narrative, and the rise of a blank-slate egalitarian equalism masking as a form of female supremacism that has fundamentally altered western cultures.

The last section, Positive Masculinity, is comprised of essays, reformed and expanded upon, that will give men a better idea of how to define masculinity for themselves from a conventional and rational perspective. In an era when popular culture seeks to dismiss, ridicule, shame and obscure masculinity, this section and this book is intended to raise men’s awareness of how fluid redefinitions of masculinity have been deliberately used to disempower and feminize men by a feminine-primary social order.

This book was a long time in the making and a lot of that was due to my wanting to create an organized flow of topics as well as to make sure the grammar and syntax was as perfect as I could make it. Like my two previous books, I’ve returned to my most popular essays and arranged them to speak to different themes in the book.

When I began writing, compiling and rewriting this book I had an initial working title – The Rational Male, The Red Pill – however, as I progressed I shifted this to Positive Masculinity. There came a point in my compiling and editing where I’d taken a different path in the purpose of the book. Where I had wanted to explain and/or defend the initial, intersexual, definition of what the term ‘Red Pill‘ has increasingly been distorted away from, I found myself leaning more into expressing ways in which this Red Pill awareness could benefit men’s lives in many ways, both in and apart from intersexual dynamics.

I’d hit on this in my Red Pill Parenting series from a couple years ago and I knew I wanted to revisit and make that series a prominent part of this book. As it sits now, it accounts for a full quarter of the book’s content, but as I moved into my writing more I decided that the best way to really define ‘The Red Pill” as I know it was to go into the various ways men might benefit from redefining masculinity for themselves in a conventional, Red Pill aware sense.

When I finished the parenting section I realized that I was really laying out general, if not prescriptive, ideas for ways men might better raise their sons and daughters in a feminine-primary social order that’s determined to raise and condition them. My purpose with both the series and section was to equip fathers with Red Pill aware considerations in making their sons and daughters Red Pill aware themselves in order to challenge a world that increasingly wants to convince us that fathers’ influence is superfluous or dangerous.

It was from this point that I’d made a connection; what I was doing was laying out a much-needed reckoning of sorts with regard to what conventional, positive masculinity might mean to future generations of Red Pill aware men. Since my time on the SoSuave forums and the inception of my blog I’ve used the term Positive Masculinity. I’ve even had a category for it on my side bar since I began too. From the time I began writing I’ve always felt a need to vindicate positive, conventional masculinity (as well as evolved conventional gender roles for men and women) and separate it from the deliberately distorted “toxic” masculinity that the Village of the Feminine Imperative would have us believe is endemic today.

I’ve always seen a need to correct this intentionally distorted perception of masculinity with true, evolved, biologically and psychologically inherited aspects of conventional masculinity. This is what I set out to do with this volume. I’m prepared for critics to paint this purpose as some want to return to some pro-masculine glory days of the “chauvinist 1950s”, but the intent is not about building a time machine. Rather, it’s a pragmatic look at how a male-exclusive masculinity has been made ambiguous, distorted or demonized with the deliberate intent of destroying its true, conventional definitions. Furthermore, I layout the evolutionary and biological differences that make masculinity a male-exclusive definition and provide information and encouragement in men’s reclaiming masculinity away from a social order that seeks to destroy it and men.

Some have asked me why I’d title the book Positive Masculinity, worried that it would imply that there is a negative opposite to it. This work sets out to break down the latent purposes of why present day “masculinity” is already considered a default negative, ridiculous or shamed, and how to embrace conventional, evolved masculinity, unapologetically as a source of strength despite a world that wants to erase it.

I hope you’ll benefit from reading it as you have with all my work. It’s been a definite labor of love. The book is a robust 364 pages long. I do have plans for an audio version in about 6 or 7 month’s time.

I’ll be returning to my regular essay postings next week. Thanks for reading.

– Rollo Tomassi

Filed under: Positive Masculinity, The Red Pill, Unplugging

Dumping this here for now. Maybe I'll get around to cleaning it up later.

Tracking: Base target number of 10, check every Adventure Turn. Changing conditions (change in weather, terrain, etc.) triggers a new Turn

Inherent modifiers of creature being tracked (add to TN):
Size: Tiny +8, Small +4, Medium 0, Large -2, Huge -6, Gargantuan -8
Slimy (worms, Viscous Blobs, etc.) -9
Creature alters terrain (Lava Lizard, Basilisk, etc.) -15 (modifier goes away when monster is in unaffected terrain)
Flying or Swimming +20 (This is in here to preclude impossible tracking. I want to keep the possibility of the legendary tracker who can track a swallow in a hurricane.)

External Modifiers (Bonus/Penalty to Adventure)
Terrain (use one)
-Fresh snow +4
-muddy ground, loose dirt +3
-Thick vegetation +2
-Forest, field, dusty floor +1
-Normal ground, wood floor, sparse vegetation 0
-Desert, dry sand -2
-Swampy -3
-Rocky terrain, solid ice, stone floors, shallow water -4

Illumination (use one)
-Sunny day; Light spell 0
-Twilight, light fog, snowing, torch light -1
-Full moon-lit night, day with moderate fog -2
-Overcast night with no moon, dense fog -3
-blizzard, sandstorm -5

Situational Modifiers (use all applicable)
-Every two in group being tracked +1
-Each additional tracker assisting +1
-Every Travel Turn (half day) since trail was made -1
-Every Adventure Turn (hour) of rain, snow, or sleet since trail was made -2
-Creature being tracked attempts to hide trail -3
-Failed Tracking attempt -1 (cumulative for successive failures. Penalty resets with success)
-Two consecutive successes +1 (non-cumulative)

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Games are (usually) on Thursday nights sometime after 5:30PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601.

++++ START OF SESSION ++++

We skipped the Thursday before (June 22nd) as I was the yearly invitational "The Weekend" game convention in Lancaster PA.

This past week the Player for Grok showed up after a long absense yet the Player for Jacko was too tired from overwork, so we merely leveled him up.

We had some spare time afterward so we played the "Kittens in a Blender" card game.

--

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT

NNNN

Presently I’m putting the final touches on my third book, The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity. I’m now going through the final proofing stages of the print version while I await the reformatting for the digital version. As if that weren’t enough, this time of year tends to be my busiest with regard to promo gigs and brand developments stuff for my “real” job. So if my posts for the next couple of weeks seem a bit sporadic that’s why.

In the midst of this, however, I came across a comment by a long time lurker, Logic, that dovetailed so perfectly with the Afterword of the new book so well that I’ve decided to quote parts of it in the book:

I don’t comment a lot in this blog. However, I think it is important to make a comment that many will probably disagree with but is certainly true for me.

If you ask someone what is the greatest benefit he gained by reading Rollo’s articles, I am sure that you will get various responses:

“I finally got laid”

“I managed to successfully spin plates”

“I understood the true nature of women”

“I stopped giving a fuck and focused on myself (and the women came after)”

…etc

I am sure that all of these are true, not the least reason being that I have experienced these benefits myself.

However, if I may suggest an unpopular opinion, the greatest benefit that one gets from reading Rollo’s article is the fact that you are giving yourself a safety net. And the most important thing in my opinion is that you give yourself this safety net EVEN IF you don’t truly believe what Rollo writes.

If I may elaborate briefly, by safety net I mean LITERALLY safety net. The safety net’s purpose is not for you not to fall. It is for you not to DIE after you have fallen. I believe this is an important distinction (and forgive me Rollo if you have touched on this in one of your articles already). At least for me this is HUGE.

There is a nontrivial probability that you ARE going to fall. Unless you really swear to not EVER feel ANY emotional connection with a woman, then it is highly likely that at some point you WILL fall in love with a girl. Sure, I am positive that many guys will consider that this is something that they can control now that they are Red Pill aware, but you MAY at some point fall in love and you WILL lose your “cool” (btw if you don’t want to call it love call it infatuation; there will be a girl whose combination of laughter, looks, mannerisms and personality will produce this to you; if you want to deny it go ahead and you may be right. But as I said this is just MY humble opinion).

So where does the whole “safety net” come into play? Well, it comes into play when things go south. You WILL loose your cool and she might not notice but then again she also may notice. You will think that this girl is different. Again, it is easy to say that AWALT, but you are not dealing with a bunch of 1s and 0s. It is a human being, standing in front of you, with a personality, with a voice, with interests, opinions and the like. So your brain will tell you that THIS one is different.

And when it turns out that she is not, and she goes cold or dumps you, or cheats on you, then my friend you are going to be JUST FINE. Because you have a safety net. I am not saying that you won’t be sad (you will) but you won’t try to throw yourself under a bridge. The safety net is placed there for a simple reason. The reason is that, in the beginning stages of your infatuation, before you started thinking that she is “not like that”, a little voice inside of you said “You have read about this situation in the Rational Male brother. This may be an illusion. Be careful”.

Yes, you muted that voice for a while, but you never killed it. And when the inevitable happened this little voice came back and said ” Oh well. We knew it. Nothing wrong with giving it a shot. Now let’s move on. Hey check out Little Miss Perkytits at the counter.”

I know that many of you will laugh at this but, to me at least this is a big deal. I also think that the analogy of the safety net is pretty accurate. Even if all of Rollo’s writings hadn’t helped me AT ALL with getting laid, improving myself etc and THE ONLY benefit was gaining that safety net, I think that reading Rollo’s articles would have still bee very much worth it.

I thought this metaphor of a safety net was apt. The history that comes after a man has unplugged himself from his old Blue Pill mindset is in some ways more poignant that what a man does while he is still trapped in his old way of thinking. It’s easier to forgive yourself of the decisions you made in Blue Pill ignorance, but when you become Red Pill aware you own those decisions. As Logic points out, you can only read and absorb what I or any other Red Pill author has to relate to you – at some point you’re going to either consciously or not put this new awareness into practice.

As such you’re bound to make mistakes or false starts. No one makes it on their first jump. It takes time and practice along with an educated Red Pill awareness to internalize and transition into a new way of life. One reason I wrote A New Hope was to help newly unplugged men get past the anger and nihilism stages of unplugging, but also to warn them that the want to achieve the old Blue Pill idealistic hopes will be a strong impulse until they come into a new understanding of Red Pill, realistic, hopes for themselves. In that stage, and even after, there will always be mistakes and falls along the way.

The difference now is that you have a new confidence in the knowledge that Red Pill awareness provides for you. Whereas before you struggled with both a lack of understanding intersexual dynamics and the deliberate misdirection of you ever understanding it, now you have the Red Pill Lens. Now you have a perspective that in most ways insulates you from ever thinking your situation is hopeless. Red Pill awareness provides you with a map and a safety net that allows you to make accurate corrections to your Game, to your relationships and to your life no matter if you fall, no matter your temporary setback. Many a disingenuous critic would have men believe the Red Pill is all about anger or fomenting a belief that men are victims of an unfair system, but what they conveniently ignore is the overwhelmingly positive effect Red Pill awareness has in men’s lives. A great source of confidence comes from a man knowing he’s been emancipated from a Blue Pill paradigm that’s conditioned him to blind himself to its influence.

Reader, and long-time friend, Morpheus responded with this:

Exactly right. All of it!

My 2nd marriage recently ended (about 6 weeks ago my wife left me and informed me she was filing for divorce) and to be honest I’ve sort of surprised myself just how emotionally unaffected I’ve been compared to my first marriage ending (which was before Red Pill, Rollo, and Rational Male). I’ve actually had multiple people comment incredulously at just how well I am doing. I’ve recommitted to a much more intense and frequent workout regimen, and am down about 20 pounds in those 6 weeks.

I credit my Red Pill perspective for enabling me to stay relatively stoic about it all, and refocus on something positive. I think it helps that I realize I haven’t lost my “Soulmate” because that is bullshit to begin with, and that women are fungible at least partly. Don’t get me wrong, I really do feel like I lost by best friend and have times of sadness. It certainly helps to realize that “Little Miss Perktits/Tight Ass/Tighter Wetter Pussy” is out there, and I’ll be fucking her soon enough.

I’d add that my Red Pill perspective also clues me in to what awaits my soon to be ex-wife who is 43 going on 53 in terms of her menopausal stage and very overweight (we started dating when she was 32 with the body of a fitness model). Schadenfreude is probably the wrong term since I don’t actively wish her a horrible experience in the SMP, but I do know she is in for a very rude awakening once she tests the dating waters.

But yeah, you are absolutely right. The fact of the matter is many “Red Pill” guys are going to form strong emotional bonds with women, and it will hurt when those bonds are severed unless you are a psychopath who doesn’t feel emotions like love, affection, etc. But the most powerful thing about the Red Pill perspective is knowing you will be JUST FINE and that truly the world is filled with other female options.

Anyone who’s read my post What’s Your Problem? probably has a good idea of what motivated me to write what I do going on 16 years now, but when I read stories like this and I get emails or Tweets to let me know how what I’ve made men aware of has somehow changed or saved a man’s life it’s always a humbling experience. As I’ve stated in both my books, I’m not in the business of making better men, I’m in the business of helping men become better men themselves. No formulas, no Top Ten Ways to,… lists, just actionable intelligence; but that information still requires a man come to applying it to his own life in a way which works for him.

Even if all Logic gets from my work is the sense of confidence that he has the right intel about how he can better direct his life despite any momentary downside I consider that a success of my intent as a Red Pill writer. When you look at the appalling statistics of male suicide and you understand the correlation of it with the rise of a feminine-primary social order that teaches men to loathe their own gender and accept their superfluousness, knowing that the Red Pill can provide some insulation against it is encouraging. My first reflex when I read a story like that of Morpheus is to presume the man is a suicide risk; his response to his situation is an example of how Red Pill awareness is not just an exercise in warning and preparing men of what to expect, but also a safety net in case a man must deal with the worst.

From the 16 Commandments of Poon

VII. Always keep two in the kitty

Never allow yourself to be a “kept man”. A man with options is a man without need. It builds confidence and encourages boldness with women if there is another woman, a safety net, to catch you in case you slip and risk a breakup, divorce, or a lost prospect, leading to loneliness and a grinding dry spell. A woman knows once she has slept with a man she has abdicated a measure of her power; when she has fallen in love with him she has surrendered nearly all of it. But love is ephemeral and with time she may rediscover her power and threaten to leave you. It is her final trump card. Withdrawing all her love and all her body in an instant will rend your soul if you are faced with contemplating the empty abyss alone. Knowing there is another you can turn to for affection will fortify your will and satisfy your manhood.

As I get closer to completing whats become a herculean task of finishing this book (it’s now at 340 pages!) I’m taking some time to reflect on what I’ve done not just with this new book, but what I’ve built in the Manosphere for over 15 years now. I may be one of the 3 ‘R’s of the ‘sphere, some might say I’m the godfather of the Red Pill and my work is required reading for the Red Pill Reddit sub, but I’ll never be comfortable with all that so long as there are guys who are still despondent in their Blue Pill paradigm. The Red Pill is ‘open source’ and its strength lies in its decentralized way of openly debating and testing the strength of ideas. I’m humbled that many men have had their lives changed by what I write, but it’s really a testament to their own resolve – all I do is connect dots, remember?

If it’s not too much to ask, for this week’s comment thread I’d like to get some feedback on how the Red Pill has changed your life. Maybe it’s been my work, maybe it’s due to others in the ‘sphere, but as I get closer to finishing book three I wanted to get men’s Red Pill testimonies, so to speak, to help with the summation of the book.

Thanks.

Filed under: Positive Masculinity, The Red Pill, Unplugging

A while back reader Looking for Zion had a great comment wondering why it is women seem to have such a preoccupation with complaining to men so much:

Yesterday I was listening to a blogger talking about that Antifa Girl, then I saw a video by Camille Paglia on how women need to stop blaming men. By the time I read this essay I was already wondering, Why do women blame men (for everything)?

I mean, for example, no matter how good women have it here in the US, it’s never enough. They say, “We still have far to go.” What the fuck does that mean? They’ve achieved everything except becoming President and Vice-President – and only failed at that cause the worst possible candidate was put up. They’re astronauts, brain surgeons, CEOs, soldiers, pilots, MMA fighters…. I mean, short of a penis, what are they really missing?

Then I read this essay and it dawned on me: Women are biologically programmed to blame men for any and all perceived failures or shortfalls, because for millennia they have depended solely upon men (at the societal, tribal, and family level) for everything, particularly their very survival.

Whether it’s the nagging wife blaming her husband for her unhappiness, or the feminist harpy blaming men for WHATEVER, it is in female DNA and thus beyond their control to stop blaming “men” for anything they perceive to be wrong (in the absence of men standing firm and telling them to STFU). Males are always the scapegoat because men, until recently, were always the protectors and leaders of the female species.

When I woke up this morning, that realization led me to connect another dot: The patriarchy is not some ephemeral construct, or a male conspiracy. The patriarchy is IN WOMEN’S DNA.

From the time that the first single-celled creatures sprang forth from the waters of the Earth, life evolved toward the creation of homo-sapiens. Billions of years of genetic code formed a male dominant human dynamic that feminists and cultural Marxists have tried to re-engineer for a comparatively measly 50-60 years. But social engineering can NOT overwrite biology.

So good luck trying to “smash the Patriarchy” ladies, because the patriarchy is inside you. It was a survival mechanism selected for over eons. The patriarchy will always be there, like a splinter in your mind – unless and until enough time and genetic mutations have passed after men as a whole have given up and let you completely rule the world however you see fit.

With this, Zion is coming into an understanding of the evolved psychological underpinnings of intersexual relations. Women’s innate predilection to complain is just one aspect of women’s evolved nature that socialization or, if you like, “higher order thinking” finds ways to cover up, but never really change. Whether it’s women’s capacity to move on from a former lover (War Brides), women’s subconscious shit testing for men’s fitness, or the uglier aspects of Hypergamy, the underlying motivators for much of what we dismiss as ‘women just being women’ is rooted in how they evolved to interact with men.

Recently I cam across a video of Jordan B. Peterson explaining the evolutionary logistics involved in women’s sexual selection process. You can watch the video here, but the short version confirms exactly what Zion is coming to realize; the seeds of Patriarchy is literally written into women’s DNA, and by extension into larger human society’s social and intersexual make up.

Women’s sexual selection, women’s Hypergamous sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks), is what creates the condition of the male dominance hierarchy. By the social extension of this hierarchy, based on women’s evolved conditions for male Hypergamous acceptability, we see what perceptually looks like Patriarchy. Indeed, this has been the dominant social order – with women creating covert personal and social contingencies to exploit it – up until the time of unilaterally female-controlled hormonal birth control and the subsequent sexual revolution.

As Zion noted, billions of years of genetic code formed a male dominant human dynamic that feminists and cultural Marxists have tried to re-engineer for a comparatively measly 50-60 years. And it’s correct that social engineering cannot overwrite biology. However, that isn’t to say that social and scientific engineering can’t give women more control over their sexual selection process as well as making every effort to absolve them of the responsibilities associated with this new control. If I disagree with anything Peterson asserts in this video it’s that our social order for the last 60-70 years has been one founded on unfettering and insuring women’s sexual strategy and applying the consequences and costs of women’s control over it directly to men. Presently, we live in a feminine-primary social order, but it’s founded on the default presumption of an oppressive, inherently sexist, misogynistic Patriarchy that still clings to a social contract that hasn’t existed since the time of the Sexual Revolution.

Our feminine-primary social order is a reflection of how intersexual dynamics have shifted to favor the female and the female sexual strategy. The male dominance hierarchy and the qualifications of it are still dependent upon women’s evolved Hypergamy, only now, in light of how women have been insured against any real liability for their sexual selection choices, the prioritization of those hierarchal qualifications have shifted. There is still a “patriarchy” created by women’s sexual strategy, but now this male dominance hierarchy is primarily founded on the Alpha Fucks side of the Hypergamous equation.

Evolution of Complaining

The fact that complaining seems to come so natural to women is something we kind of take for granted, in fact so much so that we will make jokes about it and think nothing of it. We can interpret this also from the ‘men display, women choose’ principle. There is an expectation that men will qualify themselves for a woman’s intimate approval – whether or not they do so is irrelevant, it is women’s expectation of performance from men. Men being innate idealists, as well as deductive problem solvers, it only follows that men (majority being Beta) would make their best efforts to solve women’s problems as a primary element of their sexual strategy. The deductive logic is: Solve a woman’s problems and in exchange she will reciprocate with her intimacy.

This, in a nutshell, is what constitutes most men’s Game in their earliest attempts to get with a woman, and really why wouldn’t it? Boys are taught a default deference to “respect” the female sex from an early age. This deference is where the expectation of performance begins, and taken to the extreme it can end up as the Savior Schema and expectations of women reciprocating in Relational Equity. This is where many Betas have their ‘game’ disillusioned for them. They see the guys who do not perform for women in a direct manner being rewarded with intimacy while they are shamed for their ‘Niceties’ – the behaviors they’ve always been taught will endear women to them – and shamed for expecting intimacy in exchange for solving women’s problems.

But really, what is women’s complaining about? The facility with which women will complain to men makes evident their need for security and this security need flows from the provisioning side of Hypergamy. As I’ve said many times before, Hypergamy is rooted in an existential doubt – is this guy the best she can do? It’s important to put this doubt into context though; bear in mind that there are two sides to Hypergamy – short term sexual, genetic optimization (Alpha Fucks) and long term security, safety and parental investment optimization (Beta Bucks). Both sides of women’s pluralistic sexual strategy always have doubt attached to them. And as Zion implied, even when women are assured of security that doubt still persists.

When we consider women’s subconscious need to shit test men we also need to see that women’s complaining is part of her subconscious attempting to reconcile this doubt with a man she’s invested herself in. It is indeed written into women’s mental firmware that men are to be looked to as the problem solvers.

A while ago Deti had a great comment on one of Dalrock’s posts:

Some of the best depictions of shit testing and comfort testing in media are in Mad Men, where Betty brings some concern to Don. Some concerns are serious; some are frivolous and trivial. Almost all the time, Don faces her and says something like “Bets, you’re tired. You’re upset. And it’s all understandable. It’ll be OK. Just go get some sleep, and we’ll figure it out in the morning.” And that’s all Betty needed to hear. Don has it under control. He explains to her what’s going on, and says he (or they) will get it taken care of.

That’s passing comfort tests with flying colors.

A shit test is depicted where Megan (his second wife) is cleaning their apartment in her bra and panties. She taunts him, saying “you can’t have any of this”, while on hands and knees in a clearly sexually provocative position, all the while looking back at him to gauge his response. He then proceeds to pull her to her feet, kisses her, and has sex with her on the living room floor. She willingly submits to him.

That’s passing a shit test with flying colors. And that really is a shit test – she’s being a total bitch to Don and stating a literal challenge to his masculinity. It’s “I’m here, calling you less than a man and depriving you of something we both know you want. You don’t have what it takes to stand up to me. What are you gonna do about it?”

You cannot make a woman “Happy”, however, this does not preclude a woman’s innate need to see you as either a confident problem solver (as in Draper’s exchange with Betty) or a guy who “Just Gets It” (as in the shit test example with Megan). I believe Deti is correct here, but I think we can make a distinction between a woman’s need to test for a comfort versus a shit test of sexual selection.

I would argue that a comfort test comes from women’s deep need for security in a chaotic world. A comfort test, and I would include complaining and nagging in this, is rooted in a woman’s Hypergamous need of certainty and consistency in provisioning. A persistent complaint is really a cry for security and confirmation of a man’s competency. Male dominance will always require a superior competency in virtually all matters. That may not be realistic or pragmatic, but it is the expectation, and this need for competency finds its roots in men understanding and accepting their Burden of Performance.

A shit test, on the other hand, is a challenge of a man’s savvy with regard to reading, interpreting and acting upon a woman’s covert communications of sexual competency. Shit tests, even subconscious or unintentional ones, are initiated to gauge whether a man Just Gets It with regard to a woman’s sexual subcommunications. It is a test designed to determine a man’s Alpha potential and his capacity to push past his social programming and go after (even physically) what he wants sexually – hopefully that’s the woman giving him the indicators. It is a test of a man’s capacity to understand that the Medium is the Message.

One reason that Amused Mastery is such an effective PUA technique is because – when understood and applied well – it serves to satisfy both sides of these tests. It implies competency in both problem solving and sexual viability.

Lastly, I should also point out that both of these tests of competency are part of women’s evolved, psychological firmware. Women can certainly deliver these tests with malice, intent and forethought, but as to why these tests would be significant from an evolutionary perspective, only her subconscious is aware of it. Both tests have the latent purpose to establish a man’s competency in either the Alpha Fucks or Beta Bucks aspect of a woman’s Hypergamy.

Filed under: Alpha, Biomechanics, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, The Feminine Imperative