I think the red pill can't be reconciled with society, it is a genuinely anti-social belief system. The smoking gun there is the fate of the pickup community: there used to be one, where guys supported each other in their quest to master seduction, but it all fell apart and left no legacy. This does not happen to pro-social projects.
As for guys that get drawn to rp, the counter is that they need to find what they value in life that is above the approval of women. Really the gist of Mark Manson's Models, that's a guy who got fed up with pick-up.
i think the rp value system is antisocial but the beliefs aren’t necessarily. agreed that most who get into pickup find some greater calling; this is inevitable.
I would argue setting out to produce "value" (who defines what is value?) is a needy mindset.
Consider Alexander Grothendieck. Did he produce value? From my perspective it's more like he got fascinated with something and pursued it his whole life. I don't think he was thinking about producing value.
had to look him up, was unfamiliar w his game. i’d argue that producing value and social worth are almost synonymous, and that masculine instincts tend towards value creation, conscious or not. how that exactly relates to self worth i’m not sure but i agree that centering others’ needs in order to feel complete is a needy mindset
It feels like your entire objection to the manosphere is, "Yeah, you're right, but you should like women and probably shouldn't complain." I think I need to hear your vision. Because this sounds like trying to adopt the aesthetic of transcending an idea without doing any of the ideation to actually accomplish that.
fair point. maybe i'm more so expressing a desire to escape the negative aspects of the manosphere while conceding its truth. i can't say my vision is fleshed out but it probably involves society in general accepting red pill truths like sexual asymmetry as the norm, recognizing men and women tend to have different values and respond to different incentives. i feel like much of the conflict stems from denial of masculine nature. then the question is, how do we make it so mens' will to power is channeled towards pro social goals? unsure.
Men aren't masculine without status/decisionism. If we can't give them either of those, then they can be slaves or recluses. With either of those options, you can't expect them to be especially prosocial.
Masculinity comes from ownership and thus responsibility and decisionism, and the coordination of domains within a hierarchy. Men's love for women comes from a protective instinct, which leads to some strange feelings if women have more power than them within male domains.
I'm just trying to clarify the problem. However we come out of this, it doesn't happen with mass acceptance of some precipitously balanced idea. Base and superstructure.
It sounds like you looked for an ideology or identity to save you and then when it didn't (because that's not how it works) you've demonised it and are rejecting it, when the reality is you were using it to create an identity rather than actually doing the work. The problems we want to solve are actually solved through utter ego obliteration and we are the only ones responsible for that, not a framework or set of information. This happens all the time. I've seen countless "Why I'm leaving spirituality" or "why I'm leaving the Feminine embodiment space" and all that tells me is those people were hoping to be saved by something that simply cannot save them. We've all been there. The thing to realize is this isn't about Red Pill at all, it's actually about your personal journey of becoming a man. Which is beautiful.
While I will agree with the rest of this (the redpill is information, devoting yourself to ideologies usually ends badly), I never saw the point of ego obliteration. Seriously, I don't get it. Why would you want to become nothing? Can you explain it to me?
obliteration might have been a strong word and I dont use it to mean no more ego ever but rather, any form of transformation requires an ego death. you could also see this as an identity death. if you want different results to happen in your life, you are the thing that needs to transform. does this make sense?
Sure, that makes sense. I've mostly heard 'ego death' as a spiritual state people go after where they're one with the universe. (I am probably not getting it right.)
I think part of what makes the Red Pill thing such a persistent social issue is that nobody can really agree how we're supposed to snap these guys out of it and back into some less antisocial frame of mind. A lot of people seem to think that simply scolding guys that have fallen into this sort of self-pitying misanthropy will somehow bounce them back out of it, but that strikes me as a pretty unexamined perspective. "Just get laid, idiot, lol" is equally unhelpful. Real heads will remember the time it was suggested that people should go fuck incels pro bono as a form of mutual aid (peak Twitter discourse, that).
The difficult thing is that these guys are ultimately individuals. They don't all have the same reasons for behaving this way. It stands to reason that there is no one size fits all way of pivoting them to a healthier perspective.
agreed that scolding and shallow ‘advice’ are both useless, is it naive to think that if broader society accepted certain rp truths i.e. feminism unfairly disadvantaged men in the pursuit of equality, men and women should be granted equal opportunity but not necessarily equal outcomes, that men who value truth would recognize that and become more pro-social?
i don’t think the appeal to individualism makes much sense; sure, each guy has his own reasons but they still fall under general patterns/trends. one solution might not fix all, but could fix a significant portion.
We have seen how they react when women outperform them even without equal opportunity - they declare an emergency of "men falling behind", and immediately advocate for stripping women's right to compete at all.
Yet that’s exactly what you feminists always react like when men do better than women. You demand it be changed for no other reason because you simply don’t like that men are doing better or outnumber women in that particular field.
No, just pointing out the accusation you made is exactly what feminists do! Any area where men do outnumber women like STEM or more business owners being men or more CEOs being men they demand it change. They act like the sky is going to down if it doesn’t. The emergency you claim that people make if women do better or outnumber is way more of a feminist behaviour. Then if people point out areas where women do better or outnumber men like college, or graduate school or law school or medical school feminists are quick to try and claim that person is attacking female dominated industries or occupations. You demand gender diversity except when it’s women who are the majority in a field. It’s very ironic!
takes a real man to admit he can review his beliefs. I salute you, Danny. May many more men come to the same conclusion, that no pill will easily solve their grievances.
This is the worst, most navel gazing, saddest attempt at jumping between the latest 'new trends' I've read in a while. It's like reading a Reddit thread where an Alien describes humans growing up.
1. No, there is no part of the manosphere that is not misogynistic.
2. As long as men keep behaving as villains (95.1% of men have committed an act that violated sexual consent), they will be viewed as villains - and their complaints that they don't have access to women's bodies will never be "legitimate grievances".
The battle of the sexes is a permanent feature of human development. Every decade, a new version of the same “concerning” movement surfaces and media performs a ritual alarm.
Young people need something to stand for, and extremism is always the easiest first move. Remove red pill and something else will take the slot. This impulse is structural, developmental, not ideological. It doesn’t go away, it just gets refined into newer language, point at it early, keep it from going feral. Repeat every generation.
'The fact that a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every 10 minutes is just human nature, sure it's annoying that as women we can't even trust our own husbands - the men who stood up and declared to love us for the rest of our lives, signed a legal contract to the fact - not to drug us, film themselves raping us, and post the footage online for thousands of other men to enjoy and take inspiration from to do the same to the women in their lives, but this is just a necessary and permanent feature of human development.'
I think it just kinda ends up doing that. For a lot of men, instead of teaching them to blame women for the differences, it just teaches them to accept them for what they are. Most of us (I'm a 43 year old man, a millenial) were taught that men and women were the same. Simply unlearning that can be both painful and isolating. You have to cultivate a level of disagreeableness that is hard for many guys to do without falling into a pit of greivance.
I think most of the sociosexual evo psych stuff is actually true (men and women do differ psychologically on average, women do like being sexualized by men they're attracted to, and you can improve your attractiveness) and addresses a couple of lies men were fed by left-wing environments.
Doesn't mean you can't chase after relatively masculine women if that's your preference, you can't choose not to sexualize them if you don't want to for some reason, or that women shouldn't be able to vote or whatever (after all men are notorious for getting trapped into doing stupid things by attractive women). I think this stuff is true but I don't think the whole ideology necessarily follows.
Thank you for writing this and I really appreciated the nuance you covered. Sending it to a few friends. I listened to it and really liked your read-through!
I think the red pill can't be reconciled with society, it is a genuinely anti-social belief system. The smoking gun there is the fate of the pickup community: there used to be one, where guys supported each other in their quest to master seduction, but it all fell apart and left no legacy. This does not happen to pro-social projects.
As for guys that get drawn to rp, the counter is that they need to find what they value in life that is above the approval of women. Really the gist of Mark Manson's Models, that's a guy who got fed up with pick-up.
i think the rp value system is antisocial but the beliefs aren’t necessarily. agreed that most who get into pickup find some greater calling; this is inevitable.
Which are the rp beliefs you feel aren't anti-social?
rp adjacent self improvement stuff, men need to produce value to have worth, instinct towards competition/status can be expressed in pro social ways
I would argue setting out to produce "value" (who defines what is value?) is a needy mindset.
Consider Alexander Grothendieck. Did he produce value? From my perspective it's more like he got fascinated with something and pursued it his whole life. I don't think he was thinking about producing value.
had to look him up, was unfamiliar w his game. i’d argue that producing value and social worth are almost synonymous, and that masculine instincts tend towards value creation, conscious or not. how that exactly relates to self worth i’m not sure but i agree that centering others’ needs in order to feel complete is a needy mindset
I think ur flexibility to change your mind will take u to reached safety, god bless you
It feels like your entire objection to the manosphere is, "Yeah, you're right, but you should like women and probably shouldn't complain." I think I need to hear your vision. Because this sounds like trying to adopt the aesthetic of transcending an idea without doing any of the ideation to actually accomplish that.
fair point. maybe i'm more so expressing a desire to escape the negative aspects of the manosphere while conceding its truth. i can't say my vision is fleshed out but it probably involves society in general accepting red pill truths like sexual asymmetry as the norm, recognizing men and women tend to have different values and respond to different incentives. i feel like much of the conflict stems from denial of masculine nature. then the question is, how do we make it so mens' will to power is channeled towards pro social goals? unsure.
Men aren't masculine without status/decisionism. If we can't give them either of those, then they can be slaves or recluses. With either of those options, you can't expect them to be especially prosocial.
Masculinity comes from ownership and thus responsibility and decisionism, and the coordination of domains within a hierarchy. Men's love for women comes from a protective instinct, which leads to some strange feelings if women have more power than them within male domains.
I'm just trying to clarify the problem. However we come out of this, it doesn't happen with mass acceptance of some precipitously balanced idea. Base and superstructure.
It sounds like you looked for an ideology or identity to save you and then when it didn't (because that's not how it works) you've demonised it and are rejecting it, when the reality is you were using it to create an identity rather than actually doing the work. The problems we want to solve are actually solved through utter ego obliteration and we are the only ones responsible for that, not a framework or set of information. This happens all the time. I've seen countless "Why I'm leaving spirituality" or "why I'm leaving the Feminine embodiment space" and all that tells me is those people were hoping to be saved by something that simply cannot save them. We've all been there. The thing to realize is this isn't about Red Pill at all, it's actually about your personal journey of becoming a man. Which is beautiful.
While I will agree with the rest of this (the redpill is information, devoting yourself to ideologies usually ends badly), I never saw the point of ego obliteration. Seriously, I don't get it. Why would you want to become nothing? Can you explain it to me?
obliteration might have been a strong word and I dont use it to mean no more ego ever but rather, any form of transformation requires an ego death. you could also see this as an identity death. if you want different results to happen in your life, you are the thing that needs to transform. does this make sense?
Sure, that makes sense. I've mostly heard 'ego death' as a spiritual state people go after where they're one with the universe. (I am probably not getting it right.)
Well that is one way to experience it lol. The connection with “all that is” totally shifts the identity most have of themselves.
I think part of what makes the Red Pill thing such a persistent social issue is that nobody can really agree how we're supposed to snap these guys out of it and back into some less antisocial frame of mind. A lot of people seem to think that simply scolding guys that have fallen into this sort of self-pitying misanthropy will somehow bounce them back out of it, but that strikes me as a pretty unexamined perspective. "Just get laid, idiot, lol" is equally unhelpful. Real heads will remember the time it was suggested that people should go fuck incels pro bono as a form of mutual aid (peak Twitter discourse, that).
The difficult thing is that these guys are ultimately individuals. They don't all have the same reasons for behaving this way. It stands to reason that there is no one size fits all way of pivoting them to a healthier perspective.
agreed that scolding and shallow ‘advice’ are both useless, is it naive to think that if broader society accepted certain rp truths i.e. feminism unfairly disadvantaged men in the pursuit of equality, men and women should be granted equal opportunity but not necessarily equal outcomes, that men who value truth would recognize that and become more pro-social?
i don’t think the appeal to individualism makes much sense; sure, each guy has his own reasons but they still fall under general patterns/trends. one solution might not fix all, but could fix a significant portion.
We have seen how they react when women outperform them even without equal opportunity - they declare an emergency of "men falling behind", and immediately advocate for stripping women's right to compete at all.
Yet that’s exactly what you feminists always react like when men do better than women. You demand it be changed for no other reason because you simply don’t like that men are doing better or outnumber women in that particular field.
Are you lost?
He’s Projecting.
No, just pointing out the accusation you made is exactly what feminists do! Any area where men do outnumber women like STEM or more business owners being men or more CEOs being men they demand it change. They act like the sky is going to down if it doesn’t. The emergency you claim that people make if women do better or outnumber is way more of a feminist behaviour. Then if people point out areas where women do better or outnumber men like college, or graduate school or law school or medical school feminists are quick to try and claim that person is attacking female dominated industries or occupations. You demand gender diversity except when it’s women who are the majority in a field. It’s very ironic!
What changes do feminists demand?
takes a real man to admit he can review his beliefs. I salute you, Danny. May many more men come to the same conclusion, that no pill will easily solve their grievances.
Great shit man
🙏bless
I don’t think you were ever red pill, more like red pill adjacent.
perhaps
This is the worst, most navel gazing, saddest attempt at jumping between the latest 'new trends' I've read in a while. It's like reading a Reddit thread where an Alien describes humans growing up.
Two things:
1. No, there is no part of the manosphere that is not misogynistic.
2. As long as men keep behaving as villains (95.1% of men have committed an act that violated sexual consent), they will be viewed as villains - and their complaints that they don't have access to women's bodies will never be "legitimate grievances".
The battle of the sexes is a permanent feature of human development. Every decade, a new version of the same “concerning” movement surfaces and media performs a ritual alarm.
Young people need something to stand for, and extremism is always the easiest first move. Remove red pill and something else will take the slot. This impulse is structural, developmental, not ideological. It doesn’t go away, it just gets refined into newer language, point at it early, keep it from going feral. Repeat every generation.
I find all of it truly annoying but necessary. 😩
'The fact that a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every 10 minutes is just human nature, sure it's annoying that as women we can't even trust our own husbands - the men who stood up and declared to love us for the rest of our lives, signed a legal contract to the fact - not to drug us, film themselves raping us, and post the footage online for thousands of other men to enjoy and take inspiration from to do the same to the women in their lives, but this is just a necessary and permanent feature of human development.'
Ew
Sexual validation as a mean to build confidence in men is under discussed.
Red pill unfortunately takes all that is true about real differences between sexes and for some reason decides to just blame women for it.
I think it just kinda ends up doing that. For a lot of men, instead of teaching them to blame women for the differences, it just teaches them to accept them for what they are. Most of us (I'm a 43 year old man, a millenial) were taught that men and women were the same. Simply unlearning that can be both painful and isolating. You have to cultivate a level of disagreeableness that is hard for many guys to do without falling into a pit of greivance.
It doesn’t go away, it’s a skill. You need to be toxic sometimes, if not often. It’s threading a needle.
I think most of the sociosexual evo psych stuff is actually true (men and women do differ psychologically on average, women do like being sexualized by men they're attracted to, and you can improve your attractiveness) and addresses a couple of lies men were fed by left-wing environments.
Doesn't mean you can't chase after relatively masculine women if that's your preference, you can't choose not to sexualize them if you don't want to for some reason, or that women shouldn't be able to vote or whatever (after all men are notorious for getting trapped into doing stupid things by attractive women). I think this stuff is true but I don't think the whole ideology necessarily follows.
https://lizzieexplainsitall.substack.com/p/lets-talk-aboutbeing-chased-by-an?r=7678ly&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Thank you for writing this and I really appreciated the nuance you covered. Sending it to a few friends. I listened to it and really liked your read-through!