For the past 12 years I’ve been asked some variation of this question:
“Rollo, why should a man bother with women at all today? All women today, yes all women, are vain, self-important, narcissistic, hubristic and entitled. What average man would ever want to have anything to do with the average woman? By the time a girl reaches her late teens she’s already conditioned to expect a High-Value Man is what she’s due in life. By the time she’s in her early 30s she still hasn’t had the delusions of her entitlements dispelled for her – no matter what the realities of her situation might hold up in her face. What’s the average guy supposed to do about the average woman?”
Although I’ve been writing about intersexual dynamics for 20 years now, there’s definitely been a sea change in those dynamics since the rise of social media. While the last two generations of women have been the test experiments, it’s not just a case of “Bro, women’s egos and assessments of their own SMV are blown out of all proportion because of Instagram.” Men’s expectations (really anticipation) of average women’s overblown egos is also part of the experiment. We’ve come to a point where men don’t expect anything else from women than an aggrandized sense of female self. The average guy has little recourse but to accept this ego-appeasement and adapt to a sexual marketplace defined by women’s hubris; or by choice, or necessity, (usually necessity) they simply opt out of that marketplace – or they convince themselves they do. In fact, much of what passes for dating now is really a form of personal brand management that has to contend with the rigors of a global sexual marketplace. No one really “dates” in this market. Without realizing it they simply look for strategic co-branding opportunities that align with the changing perception of sociosexual value in global society.
- How will the images of me dating this guy increase my brand engagement?
- How will the pics and video of him appearing in my feed impact my future opportunities to get with a hotter guy?
- How many Simps (commodified Beta orbiters) funding my lifestyle will abandon my brand as a result?
While these (and more) may not be conscious concerns for women “dating” today, the sociosexual context of this brand management is pervasive. It is the acknowledged environment in which men and women have play the game.
In a Gynocentric global social order the sexual marketplace is by women, for women’s short term and long term mating strategies. Men are simply the replaceable accessories needed to optimize those strategies,…or to be used as convenient foils when the consequences of those strategies become unignorable. So, it’s hardly surprising then that we’re moving into the second generation of Lost Boys. Young men with no real purposeful direction in life, less creative drive and a generation-defining sense of existential ennui.
And what would be their incentive to prompt them to creativity or purpose? Certainly not the long-term reward of an adoring woman or of sexual satisfaction born of her genuine desire. Those rewards are reserved for the High Value Men all women (young and old) believe are their due. Anything less is just brand management now. In an age when girls are raised on the ideal that no woman ought ever to do anything for the express pleasure of a man, doing something pleasurable for one becomes an act of rebellion against the Strong Independent Woman character they’re raised to emulate. Thus, any guy she’s motivated to go against her Fempowerment programming for had better be extraordinarily, confirmedly, high value. To paraphrase Patrice ‘O Neil, women want a man who’s better looking, smarter, stronger, more dominant, educated, taller and richer than they are, yet still wants him to think of her as his equal – or his Queen. He’s the ideal Superman who still defers to her socially-mandated authority (because he respects women) despite being her superior in every way she measures high-value. Oh, and he still has to continually qualify for her intimate approval even if he initially passes the average woman’s filters. Otherwise she might begin to feel as if she settled on him.
One thing that our new order communication society has made unignorable is that the truths we used to build the previous social orders on aren’t exactly what we believed them to be. In some cases those presumptions were useful faiths in truths we expected others to mutually accept; others were pretty-but-useful lies. Regardless, we still cling to romantic ideals that were tenable in previous eras despite the growing (easily accessible) research, data and empirical evidence that puts the lie to that romanticism. What we’re left with is a conflict of old order hope, faith, romance, emotionalism and the lives shaped by these influences versus the often harsh, empirical, objective truths about human nature that are unignorable in this age. Reason itself doesn’t destroy comforting faith, but it does take the magic out of faith by explaining it. Faith confirmed by reason only reinforces faith, but it can never go back to being a faith again once it’s explained. This is a hard pill to swallow for generations that have made a faith in emotionalism the guiding principle that defines their personalities, entitlements and expectations of the opposite sex. And this is to say nothing about the current global social order founded on emotionalism (Feels Before Reals).
Long ago I wrote an essay titled The True Romantics where I asserted that it was men, not women, who are the true romantics – of this age and those past. Men are innate idealists. This idealism prompts us to the performance we use to establish dominance and competence hierarchies amongst ourselves, but it also incentivizes us to the romanticism we hope will solve our reproductive problem. I’ve said in the past that this idealism is both our greatest strength and our most exploitable weakness. For the past two generations this idealism has been a liability for most men. When you make a man necessitous it’s his idealism that makes him hopeful in hopelessness. It’s idealism that makes him a suicidal nihilist or a pollyanna optimist. It’s idealism that keeps him going to work each day in the hopes that his dedication to a proscribed rule-set he believes everyone else is (or should) be playing by will earn him respectability. It’s idealism that makes him a Black Pill Doomer when he can’t reconcile his old Blue Pill conditioned hopes and goals with the Red Pill aware, new order data confirmed for him every day on social media or is just a Google search away. And it’s idealism that makes him hate the women who will never make those pleasant Blue Pill fictions a reality, while he hates the men who brought him to that despondency even more.
Both sexes are gravely, irreversibly, disillusioned today. Both would like to return to some idyllic time where women could swoon for a dashing high-value man who would become a husband they could admire (and be hot for) – and men could find a suitable mate via an understandable and realizable performance, acceptable responsibility, and actionable authority. But an underlying blind faith in the Blank Slate, Social Constructionism, Emotionalism and Subjectivism have made all this impossible. Progressivism, feminism, gynocentrism, (Wokeism) and all of the fallacies that built them, are really old order faiths founded on previously accepted presumptions – presumptions that are destroyed by new, easily accessed, empirical data every day. The more empirical truth (or even the questions that come from it) the more desperate the old social order becomes in maintaining the frameworks its power relies on to sustain it. Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics is one such catalyst that is disrupting those old order, Blue Pill, false ideals. It exposes a game we all enjoyed playing up until technology made public what the winners and losers had to do to be so. Women want to play the game, they don’t want to be told they’re playing it is an old maxim I’ve used for over a decade. Now we can apply this to the entirety of our globalized social order; except being told we’re all playing an old game is unavoidable. It makes playing it seem contrived, but it also calls into question why we’d ever build our lives around the contrivance.
Women and men are being dragged from this comfortable game based on emotionalism, false potentials of a Blank Slate and social constructivism. They are being forced to take the Red Pill and cross an abyss very few will have any idea how to deal with. We need new paradigms of thinking, and new ways of inter-relating with each other that align with an empirical understanding of our natures. This will require an acceptance of Red Pill awareness, and innovation and creativity that is sorely lacking in these generations.