I moved back to my hometown almost five years ago after living in a city for more than a decade. I’ve settled down, starting a family in a town with just over 10,000 residents. I’m no longer mixing with the libertines and social strivers. The red pill movement has been more an object of study than a new gospel for me.
I found it exciting. Finally, everyday men were discussing truths the previous generation had to find out for themselves. Some never have.
I’m of the previous generation. The sexual revolution was finally the new paradigm. The Moral Majority had been the last populist pushback against the new sexual morality, with a weak echo in the GOP’s “family values” platform in the early 90s. License had triumphed.
For the sake of argument, let’s agree that traditional morality at least restrained the most damaging aspects of unrestricted sexuality. I’m not here to parade the classic arguments of teen pregnancies and STDs. What I’m most interested in are the personal interaction aspects.
What traditional morality restrained was the male’s roving eye and the female’s fickle heart. All romantic roads were to lead to monogamous marriage. If an individual didn’t wish to face legal, social and familial disapproval, he or she would have to learn to manage their extra-marital desires. In the best scenario, they would learn to love one another more deeply and maturely.
The sexual revolution legitimized--but did not create, libertines will remind us--romantic relationships other than the marriage path. One-night stands, serial monogamy, short-term polygamy, casual hook-ups, friends-with-benefits are all available and applauded.
As proud as we all are about our sophisticated expressions of lust, some problems arose. For one, no one ever seems to know exactly what kind of relationship into which they’ve entered. Worse, if one party pushes for clarification, the magic disappears. “What are we doing here?,” is such a fun-killing question that it’s become a cliche. Worst is the unspoken suspicion that one’s partner has a different idea of the relationship than you do.
The red pill deals specifically with another problem: that the nature of women, once traditionally concealed under flattering constraints, has been more recently rationalized as a natural good in and of itself. The old pedestal of innate female nobility is still there, only women now believe that wherever they step, the pedestal is beneath them. They are told that whatever feelings they have are correct, without need for adjustment. We forget that the pedestal was also a boundary of what was acceptable.
Red pill theory tells us that what we’ve been told about women's natural goodness is untrue, that we’ve been believing the lies women tell themselves.
My opinion is that the most important truth of the red pill is in that neologism, hypergamy. Women want the best possible man they can get.
One aspect of this I haven’t seen discussed--and what I think is behind the techniques red pillers advocate--is how this plays out internally. How does a woman know that she has found her best possible mate?
When she feels like she just barely qualifies.
When a man engages in what’s called “beta” behavior, he is communicating that she qualifies for his affection and does so without any effort. When one practices “bad boy” behavior, he is telling her that her hold on his attention is tenuous; she’s just barely good enough for him. If she’s just barely good enough for him, he must be pretty special. Her emotions are parallel to that of a student struggling to keep up in a prestigious school or a neophyte among a team of high-powered salesmen. The slightest bit of approval produces a glow that no number of “You’re beautiful to me,” comments could.
It goes without saying that this is simply a trick and the source of the “Chicks only dig assholes,” lament. The shiftless but handsome man is triggering the cues that tell women, “This is a good one,” without actually being a good one. But women view the world through their feelings first and their reason second. When their heart is telling them one thing and their mind another, they naturally follow the former.
I’m starting to believe that the red pill community, for all the condensed wisdom it has assembled, is ultimately worse than the even more autistic PUA community. While the PUA discussions looked like the manual for a space shuttle, their compendium of techniques, plays and other discrete abstractions were separate from their personas. That is to say, the red pill aims its acolytes at personal transformation, to attain the internal state of the “alpha male.”
No one has done a better job of outlining the problems with red pill theory than The Rawness in his Reader Mail series. His argument is that re-forming oneself to red pill standards is to become a compensatory narcissist.
To paraphrase it with my own commentary, the female half of the sexual market is now populated with women whose tendencies toward solipsism and hypergamy have been unshackled. In order to compete with other men and present themselves as the best of the options, recovering betas (Rawness points out that “beta” behavior is actually co-dependent behavior) assume the impervious facade of the bad boy.
The Rawness doesn’t consider this a healthy reaction. The switch from being co-dependent (“You are more important than me”) to being faux-narcissist (“I am more important than you.”) is just the other side of the same coin. I consider it being an expert on the rules of a children’s playground.
This weekend, I had the opportunity to visit a nearby city with an energetic nightlife. Hundreds of people were out on the streets walking from bar to bar. I got the chance to see the living results of red pill thinking.
I was with my girlfriend with whom we have an infant (I am aware that I am in violation of my faith, so no need to point it out) and her sister. We had just come from a family get-together celebrating her engagement to her long-time boyfriend.
My first experience came when we left the quiet jazz bar filled with adults and entered a multi-story nightclub. I left the women to visit the bathroom. I came back to find two separate gentlemen triangulated around them. They didn’t face the dancefloor and the DJ like everyone else. They were at the accepted forty-five degree angle and looking at the ladies alternately directly and from the corner of their eyes.
I already have my own counter-technique in place. I motioned over my girlfriend and directed her to kiss me on the cheek. I counted to myself, “Five...Four...Three…,”and both gentlemen broke their stances. To my surprise, one walked over to the other and began talking into his ear; they were a twosome.
The second instance was at another bar. It was mostly empty--our end of the night spot. There were no women around the bar, though I assumed that there were a few in the booths farther in the back of the restaurant. We took a bar-side table.
Once again, I stepped away. When I returned, some dude was talking up my girlfriend and two more were approaching her sister. I put myself into the conversation with my girlfriend. She was being coldly resistant, which did not slow him down, but, seeing how I was being friendly (pretending he wasn’t doing what he was), he moved over to talk to me.
My goal was to get him to move on, so I told him who he was talking to. “That’s my girlfriend and that’s her sister, who is engaged.” “So you’re saying you have a claim here?,” he responded.
“You’re in the wrong place,” I told him. “Look around. There’s no women here. If you’re looking for action, go across the street.” I pointed to the club and the crowd of people in front of it.
I wish I had asked him, “Did you take the red pill or something?,” but my attention focused to the sister. The two guys weren’t taking her hints and she had to be pointedly rude, three or four times, to get them to leave.
(I haven’t even mentioned the peacocking guy with the rose-print wife beater, six-inch beard and perfectly-coiffed hair. Or the dozens of men who entered the various places alone and maneuvered for position. Or the scores who scanned the rooms with a look of desperation masked as aloofness.)
What’s wrong with you guys?
Being an impervious egomaniac is not the key to happiness. Making cold-calls to get booty-calls has zero dignity.
One of the supposed crimes of the Catholic Church is that it prevented the common man from reading the Bible for himself. It was kept in Latin, read aloud in service without the people understanding the words, and then interpreted for them.
But look what happened when it was translated into the vulgate. One person after another decided that they alone understood the meaning of the text and Christianity split into a thousand different sects. Some have been more valuable to the Faith than others; some have ended like the Branch Davidians in Waco.
Likewise, the red pill has been the distillation of principles from the PUA/Seduction community. Perhaps things were better before because the average red-piller can’t seem to handle the truths behind effective techniques.
For example, here’s something that’s been lost from that acronym-heavy bygone era: IOI--indicators of interest.
The men that vultured my companions hadn’t received any IOIs. Yet, they approached, confident that their “alpha game” was tight enough to bend the will of their prey. Once they were rejected, they soldiered on until they were insulted, clinging to their vision of an unperturbed bad boy.
Red pill men, do you realize that you are creating a romantic arms race? Please realize that women are not always out in public to get it on. In fact, I’d say that the majority of them aren’t. Your unwelcome approaches and your inability to hear the word “No,” can only result in stronger defenses. It’s only a matter of time before women respond with a punch in the face--you are exhausting the effectiveness of rudeness.
Why aren’t you able to spot the ones who are looking for action? First of all, they are not sitting in a quiet bar talking to their friends. They will be looking around all the time. They will be dressed provocatively, in one way or another. They will be out on the dancefloor. They’ll be squeezing themselves between men at the bar.
How many fractures and exposed frauds have populated the manosphere? How many pixelated alphas found in the comments and forums are actually alpha in real life? Why hasn’t the oft-discussed formation of red pill rules for long-term relationships ever come together?
Because, at the ground level, the manosphere is full of children who grab a piece of wisdom that appeals to them and miss everything else.
The saddest part is that the biggest bloggers associated with the red pill aren’t even telling you to behave this way. What they do best is explain how to avoid blowing the whole interaction because you can’t keep your feelings in check. They talk about abundance mentality and being secure enough that the shit-tests don’t cause you to melt into a puddle of emotions. They don’t talk about being a robot with an erection whose only mission is to spit game and ignore all other input.
Maybe even a year ago, one could make the claim that the red pill was about rediscovering masculinity in an age that denied its unalterable existence. Now it’s reduced to hollow braggadocio and arguments whether it’s about self-improvement or getting ass. Have you ever seen anyone ask, “I’d like to know how to work on my own car. Where do I start?” Why would you ask these morons?
They don’t discuss much that’s typically male. Where they once could have been men exchanging advice about how to be a man--an ancient practice abandoned by most of our Baby Boomer fathers--they instead shame one another for not going to the gym enough and not getting a STEM degree.
Men and women are fundamentally different. The message of our time is that they are not, but the information-elite won’t let us take women down from the pedestal. And, when you are trying to transform yourself into a cocky, unruffled player, you are putting them on a pedestal.
My generation was told that women wanted, to paraphrase, beta behavior. All the romantic comedy stuff that would get the average guy arrested as a stalker. The resultant man was whiny and needy but at least he was himself (the most unimproved version of himself). Today’s post-red-pill man lives only inside his own mind, creating a world of supreme ego and measuring it with his dick. It’s as pathetic as what came before.
If only Roosh, Heartiste and the rest had written in Latin.
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