The Atlantic Report: Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante

Much of the reason that mainstream media reports are so infuriating is not because they are biased--that's obvious--but the condescending journo-speak that writers believe masks their bias.

Case in point, Olga Khazan's "Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante." The title is representative of another online trend:  the article is about 5% creep-busting vigilantes and 95% examples of boorish behavior.

“We can't win,” [Alexandra] Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

It's time to be honest. The proliferation of online dating is about expanding one's potential dating pool with minimal costs. One of those reduced costs is danger; it's much safer to hang one's shingle on the net and entertain offers than it is to, say, wander streets with a sign around one's neck reading, "Looking for Love."

Because that's what an online dating profile is about, isn't it? It's flipping a pink light above one's front door announcing one's willingness to engage in a romantic relationship. One can even specifically describe the type of relationship one is looking for, from sexual preferences to intensity of feeling.

I don't know what's going to be the watershed, but there's no doubt that flogging the "online harassment" horse is going to end. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there's no "there" there. We hear quite a bit (unconfirmed) that the "FBI is investigating" but we never hear any results.

It's typical semantic trickery, just like the nudging of "rape" over to vagaries of "consent." Any random woman online can claim "death threats" and, at the phrase, we are to respond as if a man in a trenchcoat is standing outside her door with a survival knife. What this article is really talking about is men being rude and angry in a medium that not only allows blocking but can be turned off entirely.

The Internet may not be a "civil" place but it's really not a "dangerous" place unless one is sensitive beyond all proportion. As Seanbaby said many years ago, being offended on the Internet is like seeing "Fuck you" written on a bathroom wall and thinking, "Fuck me? How dare they!"

But even that overblown phenomenon is not what is at issue here. Instead, it's the near-criminalization of being a jackass of the male variety.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters. 

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’” 

The shift from a "marriage market" to a "sexual marketplace" has altered standards for men a great deal and the new standards are much more stringent. Attractiveness, cockiness and suavity are less achievable than loyalty, reliability and virtuousness. It's no wonder that men online would rather play the numbers game with an overt sexual goal--it's easier to be diligent than artful.

The boorishness is also a result of the phenomenon I discussed here:  Red Pill attitudes--being the leading set of rules that "work" in the sexual marketplace--are creating an arms race between the sexes. Men affect that they are not impressed with women. Because the average man is, well, average, he is clumsy at feigning the mystique the Red Pill promotes. The blase, take-no-crap attitude is supposed to be challenging, but that's very near hostility, and hostility is pretty easy to achieve after sending message after message with no response.

The article represents another cycle in the environment that produced the Red Pill. Men are lectured to be "respectful" but being respectful doesn't get the results they want--it only filters out the "nice guys," who, it should be said, are simply listening to what they've been told. One can make an argument that saying one thing but wanting another is feminine coyness but logical males don't see the difference between this and lying. Being lied to makes most people angry.

Let's be honest:  women want the men to whom they are not attracted to disappear. For every man who is shamed on one of the sites the article discusses, there are probably about twenty who sent a simple, "Hi," and were ignored as if they never existed. A man singled out for being especially crude is at least acknowledged.

Meeting Buddha on the Road: The Red Pill Shades Purple

The saddest element of our information age is how quickly coalitions can form only to crash and burn immediately. Take the Red Pill.

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.

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.]