The Philosopher's Stone: The Secret of Esther Vilar

Once one has read Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man, it’s hard to forget.

The book depicts women as stupid--unwilling and unworthy of participating in a man's world. She says that men have become these worthless creatures' slaves.

Yet she herself is a woman. Her tone is, "All Women Are Like That," but doesn't the fact that she says so many ugly things indicate that she is A Woman Who Isn't Like That?

Why is a woman attacking other women so viciously?

Here is her claim from a later edition of the book:

Over thirty-five years have passed since the first publication of my book The Manipulated Man - a pamphlet written in great anger against the women's movement's worldwide monopoly of opinion. The determination with which those women portrayed us as victims of men not only seemed humiliating but also unrealistic. If someone should want to change the destiny of our sex - a wish I had then as I have today - then that someone should attempt to do so with more honesty. 

She says she aims for honesty. This statement is dishonest.

TMM has a second mystery. Why isn’t it more significant? It’s nearly forty-five years old. It’s written with no ambiguity. It hits both red pill points and men’s rights points. Yet it is referenced less often than, say, The Book of Pook.

Vilar’s second book of her series, The Polygamous Sex, provides a clue. While TMM describes the fixed game men are playing, TPS is her attempt to explain why this situation has arisen. It reveals her thinking as unreasonably flawed.

It also tells us why Vilar turns her bile toward the entirety of her sex.

TPS comes to us via Eric Crowley at runsonmagic. He calls it, “The Best Book the Manosphere Has Never Heard Of:”

The Polygamous Sex could be the most important book the manosphere has never read. It begins from one simple premise about human drives and works its way forward with clear reason.

She uses “clear reason,” yes--but it’s the reason of Chesterton’s lunatic in Orthodoxy. A reason so unburdened by reality that it approaches madness. It is the madness of the Philosopher's Stone.

The “simple premise” is that humanity is driven by three biological imperatives. The first, that we must protect our own lives, is immaterial to her arguments.

The next two are the basis for the rest of the book. We have a drive to reproduce--to have sex. The last is the mentoring drive--the urge to rear offspring until they are able to care for themselves.

Vilar’s logic is obsessively focused on definitions. The reproductive urge is sexual love. It is completely separate from the second drive.

Vilar goes further. Sexual love properly requires partners to be completely equal. Equal, that is, except in their sexual characteristics. These are optimally as opposite as possible. This point of her definition is vital for what comes later.

She defines a protege as one who is inferior both mentally and physically but shares some kind of likeness with their mentor. Children often look like their parents and echo their personalities--this is the source of the affection parents have for them.

After establishing that these urges can be manipulated into almost unrecognizable forms, Vilar show a streak of Marxism. The relationships between a man and wife, and a man and child, are essentially those of power.

Vilar describes the difference between power and force. Force is obvious:  the strength to compel others to fulfill one’s wishes. Power is more subtle:  the condition in which others want to fulfill one’s wishes. In other words, the powerless compel themselves.

The most one-sided power relationship in this light is the mentor-protege relationship. Though the protege is weaker, it holds the power because the mentor is driven, through its biological imperatives, to serve the protege. The protege has no reciprocal desire.

Sexual love is more flexible because each partner has desire for the other. When the power dynamic favors one partner over the other, it’s because one partner has less desire than the other. When one partner is pursued and the other is not, the former has the power.

Vilar accepts as axiomatic that humans--and particularly women--plot to increase their power.

This is the fundamental idea behind the first book. First, in order to increase their power, women restrain their sexual drive, making themselves the least desirous partner in the sexual relationship. A man desires sex; the woman does not. The man is in the weaker position.

Second, women transition their sexual relationship to that of the mentor and protege. Women position themselves as physically and mentally inferior; this inspires men to serve them just as they would serve their children. By altering their sexual relationship in this way, women have the more powerful position in both the sexual and the protege dynamics.

TMM describes the situation that arises from these manipulations in the bluntest way. But if her description seemed world-shaking there, it's because the analysis it stems from is built on something less firm than solid ground.

The conclusion Vilar draws from her examination of the male-female power dynamic is this:  The sexual relationship between a man and a woman--manipulated into a mentor-protege relationship--is pseudo-incest. The woman has turned herself into a pseudo-child. The sexual relationship has been contaminated.

The sexual drive and the mentoring drive are so dissimilar that the pseudo-incestual relationship causes cognitive dissonance. The man must resolve the two drives. Vilar tells us that he may submit and eventually commit real incest. Those with more common sense, she says, react by becoming either polygamous or prudish.

Polygamy is the man’s effort to separate the paternal feelings he has for his wife with the sexual urge. Vilar has a hierarchy of what she finds the least negative among the polygamous reactions. The least unhealthy situation is that of a man with a wife and a mistress, which she calls “simultaneous polygamy.” The wife is the recipient of his mentoring drive; the mistress, his sexual drive.

Other men pursue “successive polygamy,” which we may better know as “serial monogamy.” The man leaves behind one woman for another. The paternal successive polygamist searches for a new mentor, while the sexual successive polygamist searches for a new equal.

Neither ultimately finds what they are looking for, because woman insist upon play-acting the role of the child. The paternal are disillusioned because the act is false. The sexually-driven bachelors are disillusioned because the woman refuses not to perform the act.

Vilar points out that the above two reactions to pseudo-incest are available only to men of means. It costs money to support two women, or to divorce one and marry another, or to court one after another.

The poor, then, are reduced to sporadic or symbolic polygamy. Sporadic polygamy entails the use of prostitutes or seizing upon the occasional one-night-stand with a promiscuous woman. Symbolic is the use of pornography.

It’s important to note that Vilar is framing the sex within polygamy as a substitute for the sexual relationship she established earlier. The sex acts in most polygamous relationships are just that--mere sex acts.

The ideal sexual relationship--the sexual union of two partners equal in all respects but sex-specific characteristics--is only present when a man takes on a single mistress while continuing to act as a husband to a pseudo-child.

Polygamists are attempting to express their sexual imperative without commingling it with their paternal imperative. Prudes attempt to deny their sex drive entirely.

Vilar tells us that all of human society is built upon the power of women. Thus, in order to succeed, a man has to publicly acquiesce to female demands. This results in a false prudery. A politician, for example, must appear to have a monogamous marriage and disdain polygamous expressions. This may not be his personal preference, but he sacrifices his sexual imperative in order to succeed.

Genuine prudery is that of the father. Finding his sexual imperative mixed with his paternal imperative and finding the dissonance intolerable, he rejects the sexual drive. When he does have sex with his wife, he feels guilty--he is having sex with his protege.

So far, Vilar has offered a small number of assumptions and derived their combinations. These are reasonable and some may even find them enlightening. As we go forward, however, we will find her inserting more simple assertions, assertions that are increasingly unreasonable. Through these statements, we discover why she turns her wrath towards her own sex.

Vilar “proves” that faithful family men are prudes by asserting that such men express their guilt through dirty jokes and talking about sex with other men:

But why should a grown man, unless he is a homosexual, discuss sex with another man? Normally, the sex act is a fit subject for conversation only between two sex partners. That men nevertheless preferably and persistently talk with other men about their sexual experiences can be explained only by damned-up guilt feelings, the bad conscience they have about their sexual intercourse with women.

As contemptuous as Vilar is about male conversations about sex, she heaps scorn on the desire for a virgin bride:

Genuine prudery is also expressed by the male preference for a virgin bride. The man who wants to marry a virgin is clearly expressing a low opinion of sexuality. He subjects women to a simple test: if they go to bed with him they are no good; they are only good women if they refuse to go to bed with him. Only a good woman, i.e., one who has proved that she does not desire him sexually, is eligible to win him as a provider for the rest of her life.

Having analyzed all of the male reactions to pseudo-incest, Vilar next attempts to define the ideal sexual relationship.

If there are any doubts where her preferences lie, remember that fulfillment of the sexual imperative is “love,” while the paternal/mentor relationship is something else entirely.

Vilar’s ultimate conclusion is that love is monogamous, jealous and faithful. She asserts this through the ontological arguments of Klaus Wagn.

Wagn, she neglects to mention, is her ex-husband. She had a child with him and remained “allied” to him after their divorce. TMM was written around seven years after the split, TPS a dozen years.

To be brief, Wagn’s argument centers around the idea that objects are defined only by comparison with what they are not. These not-objects define the object.

Vilar says that the individual is no different than the object. She knows who she is by the definition of others.

The optimal definition comes from a single other. More than one definition results in contradiction. Thus, the optimal definition for an individual comes from a lover, who gives her "the total definition of my person, my body and my mind, by means of one other person."

She delves further into the murk as she explains love’s qualities, but it should suffice to say that any condition that isn’t monogamous, jealous or faithful creates a non-optimal definition. If love is the optimal definition of the self, then a non-optimal definition is not love.

Her next step is to examine different sorts of love affairs using this definition of the ideal and that sexual love is the union of two equals who are opposite in their sexual characteristics.

Brief love affairs are the result of one or both partners idealizing either themselves or the other. They imagine that the other is their equal or that they are equal to the other. When the illusion disappears, so does the love.

It is in her discussion of mid-length love affairs that she begins to reveal herself. Her argument is that extended affairs begin as the ideal. After time, the balance shifts. One partner may grow while the other doesn’t so that they are no longer equal. In another case, one partner loses the opposite sexual qualities, as in a woman who begins to take on masculine attitudes and appearance.

Placed right in the center of the examples is another cause for the end of an affair, instability:

Instability often goes hand in hand with above-average intelligence. All things can be seen from more than one aspect; it is possible to have at least two different views of anything, and each view is somehow right, somehow wrong. The person of average intelligence is not aware of these complexities and sees only one aspect at a time. The one of above-average intelligence is aware of them, and tends to fall from one extreme into the other. Naturally the partner of an unstable person is not safe from these constant shifts in mood or perspective, being in fact more immediately exposed to them than any other part of that person's environment. The love partner of the unstable person is constantly faced with contradictory definitions of himself: he is good one day, bad the next, praised or damned, never sure what to expect. He finds himself always exactly defined, but the quality of the definition can never be depended on to last. In time he ceases to believe what his partner tells him — he will withdraw his confidence from his partner and try to find a more dependable definer of himself.

If one is intelligent, one is unable to choose among multiple valid perspectives. Having multiple perspectives means that the definition of the love partner changes often. The definition is inconsistent, so the love affair eventually falls apart.

Vilar gives us a very specific and very detailed explanation. Is there a reason to assume that it is not autobiographical?

But I'm giving away Vilar's secret too soon.

Skipping over her description of "Great Love," she takes a detour to discuss journalists as public fathers. There is some interest here to advocates of Cathedral theory, as she discusses the motivations journalists have for spreading the lies of  a covert matriarchy. However, it is tangential to the rest of the book.

Her conclusion is that polygamy is making the best of a bad situation. The best play out of a bad hand is the arrangement in which a man has a wife and a mistress. This situation, though, is far from ideal.

The man who takes a wife and a mistress takes two women. This leaves another man--a poor man, probably--with no women. Polygamy does not hurt wives--it hurts other men.

For a man to allow this to continue is to be a traitor to one’s own sex. She lays it out thus:

Women are free to choose: they can take a man as a father or as a lover; they can arouse his compassion or his desire. As long as women play the role of children, they clearly prefer sympathy. As long as they choose to be the weaker, younger, less intelligent partner in every relationship, i.e., as long as they insist on choosing male superiors they are opting openly for altruistic love.
...
Women are to blame when both sexes have to go without adult egalitarian love — they renounce it voluntarily, and the man has to make do with what they call love. 'True love puts the partner's happiness first," is the female definition of love. The man tries to adhere to it. But every time he feels for a woman what she expects of him — putting her happiness first — he is not happy with her; every time he is happy with a woman, he has [put] himself first.

Then, for all the aggressive condemnation of women in this book and the previous, Vilar concludes strangely--and revealingly:

As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy. They need not torment themselves with guilt because of it. As long as women insist on simulating children, as long as they want protection whether they need it or not, men have a right to more than one woman at a time. They have a right to keep looking for a real woman, among all the little girls they encounter in the course of their lives, until they actually find one. In any case, they alone are the real victims of polygamy. Whether or not they want to victimize themselves thus, is ultimately for them to decide. 

Can you hear what she’s saying? Women are villains, but men are victimized because they allow it to happen. It’s their own fault. It’s up to them to change.

Doesn’t that sound like something a feminist would say?

That’s because Esther Vilar’s secret is that she is a feminist.

It’s a mutant form of feminism, to be sure--it looks a great deal like misogyny. One might be more comfortable viewing it as a rogue form of progressivism, but that would mean ignoring the one quality that defines feminism.

Vilar relies heavily on definitions--she sees the world through them. Most of the definitions are reasonable enough that one can agree for the sake of argument, but then she throws in bizarre assertions, like her definition of love.

Armed with these definitions, her descriptions get further and further from reality. Her definitions are true, thus any logical derivation is equally true. Progressives usually live within a world of abstraction so that even the smallest of phenomena are products of oppressive forces.

Vilar sneers at the preference for virgin brides, practically writing SLUT across her bare chest in protest. She clearly has nothing for contempt for traditional families, as they are defined by slavery and deception.

Her position is based on cultural Marxism, seeing male-female relationships entirely as a result of power dynamics and exploitation. Her only distinction is that she says men are exploited and not women. She promotes a form of "equality" as the ideal.

Her description of the world takes place in an eternal post-war West. The role of historical stressors on male-female relationships doesn't enter the picture. It seems that, sometime at the dawn of civilization, women decided to start conning men and have been on the gravy train ever since.

Vilar’s third book in this series is The End of Manipulation and is untranslated. In it, she prescribes a solution to the problems outlined in the first two books. From what she’s already written, it appears that she believes in a sex-positive destruction of the traditional family. She divorced her husband because she no longer believed in the institution of marriage. She asserts that children don't love their parents. Her descriptions denigrate family life as being a grift against men while sexual union is "love." She wants nothing less than to destroy the foundation of civilization.

Yet all this would still make her only a mere progressive, looking at the world through a counter-intuitive lens and demanding an end to society as we know it.

What makes her a feminist is that she wants all this for her own personal benefit.

Only feminists want the world to change so that they personally get the validation they desire.

Steve Sailer's First Law of Female Journalism:

"The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking."

Now consider Vilar's discussion of Great Love, in which a man and a woman are equal in all respects except for their sex-related qualities, which are as opposite as possible.

There is a reason why it is so rare, as Vilar explains (emphasis mine):

Women who are outwardly not unmistakably different from men — women whose appearance is not especially feminine — are biologically less attractive than the others, and not likely to be pursued by men seeking to corrupt them. To survive, these women must plunge into the same hard struggle for existence as men do, and are equally compelled to develop their minds. These barely feminine women — in appearance and effect — accordingly also fulfill only one of the two necessary conditions for love: that of intellectual equality. The other condition, of outward polarity in appearance, they mostly tend not to fulfill.   

This leads to the following consequences:   

1. Whomever the man chooses as a partner, he is likely to find lacking in one of the required qualities for love (the woman is either too unfeminine or too stupid).
2. Whomever the woman chooses as a partner, she is likely to find lacking in one requirement for love (the man is either too unmanly for her, too stupid, or too intelligent).
3. Since the fulfillment of biological law has priority — since biological drive is more powerful than a psychological need — feminine-looking women, though stupid, are preferred to unfeminine-looking women, who are intelligent.   

This leads to the following misapprehension:   

1. Men believe intelligence makes women unfeminine. In reality it is the other way around: a lack of femininity makes women intelligent.
2. Women believe that intelligence puts men off. This is not so: men don't mind intelligence in a woman, but they are put off more by an unfeminine appearance more than by stupidity (it is a matter of priorities).    

It is a vicious circle: men cannot find women whom they can love, and those women who value a man's love more than his protection cannot be lovable. Since they believe that men will avoid intelligent women, they studiously avoid whatever will expand their mental horizons, and so move ever further away from fashioning themselves into true love objects. The few, rare great loves that do bloom into being and last a lifetime only prove that there are exceptions to every rule.

There is a victim in these misapprehensions:  the feminine woman of great intelligence.

Can you think of anyone who might believe herself to fit into this category?

Vilar tells us that unfeminine women do not easily gain the protection of men. As a result, they are forced to develop their intelligence. Feminine women gain the protection of men and have no need to develop their intelligence. Female stupidity is correlated to femininity, so the public thinks that stupidity is inherent to femininity.

But, Vilar cries, it just isn't so! Even though men "believe" that intelligence is unfeminine, and women "believe" that intelligence is unfeminine, that belief is only the result of the villainous plotting of women.

The plotting of stupid women, that is.

This is the most stereotypical feminist statement imaginable:  "They only like those dumb girls because society tells them to.”

“I deserve the best men because of my intelligence! Men should be attracted to women based on the qualities I value."

Vilar's trilogy is not a defense of men. It is a tool of female competition. She wants men to reject the unintelligent women they appear to prefer. She wants to convince men that the reason they don't prefer women like, say, Esther Vilar, is because the have been manipulated, deceived and enslaved.

Fat acceptance feminists tell you that "Real women have curves." Esther Vilar tells you--in one of the most brilliant misdirects in polemic history--that "Real women have brains."

[But Vilar's covert feminism isn't my primary issue with her work. In Part Two, I discuss the foolishness of pursuing the Philosopher's Stone.]