Our Masculine Power Part Four: The Power To Love And Appreciate

I've taken a long time to complete this post, not because it's boring, but because the subject is just so darn complex compared to the other masculine powers.  The power to Love and Appreciate is often counted against our masculinity, not for it, and as a result there is a tendency to shy away from exploring and embracing this most-essential part of the masculine soul.

The power to Love and Appreciate is the most misunderstood of all of our masculine powers.  Indeed, popular opinion is against lumping this in with masculinity at all, for the sake of political convenience.  I suppose it would be nice for the feminists of the world if all men were thuggish brutes without a speck of aesthetic sense, to help their generalizations about men and masculine culture, but the plain fact of the matter is that the power to Love and Appreciate is just as masculine and manly as the power to crush a skull with the butt of a rifle in defense of your country.  Or the power to order such skulls to be crushed.  Or the power to know the most efficient way to crush a skull.  The power to Love and Appreciate a slippery one to get a handle on for some men, and for very good reasons.

Let's begin by acknowledging that of all the powers at your disposal, this one is the most "feminine".  I say that not to try to detract from its masculinity (bear with me, here), but to acknowledge that this particular power is the primary means by which we interface with womankind.  This aspect of our masculinity is our most social aspect: the life of the party, the guy you want to be friends with, the dude a chick wants to hook up with because he's just so darn charming.  As such, it's vital that this power be informed and educated enough about femininity to bridge the gaping divide of gender and manage a meaningful communication.  The power to Love and Appreciate has implicit within it the desire to understand women . . . at least enough to mate with them and live in a cooperative arrangement with them for the purposes of childrearing.  Therefore it is every bit as vitally masculine as the others.

But it's not just misunderstood from the masculine side: for women, this power presents a golden opportunity for projection.  In this sense, projection is a positive thing most of the time.  When a woman sees a man actively love and appreciate the world around him, she assumes that he has a caring and compassionate nature, empathy with other people, and will be understanding of her emotional needs and even be willing to fulfill them.  Many a romance has been sparked by a woman jumping to these projection-based conclusions. The assumption that a man has a dog he's affectionate with, for example, translates into a whole host of supposed character qualities that a particular woman may interpret as good genes, giving her the green light to initiate Chemistry (often in conjunction with a low neckline) and entangle them both with sex and emotional baggage.

I'm not slamming that -- don't get me wrong.  Using the power to Love and Appreciate is a time-honored classic of masculine mating behavior, from the earliest caveman bringing his mate flowers to the penning of sophisticated love poetry.  While Power, Strength, and Intelligence all have a visceral appeal to women in aggregate, signifying as they do a combination of provider, security and healthy genes, the ability to feel, sympathize, and appreciate the "finer" (and often more expensive) things in life has been a deal-maker more often than not.

The best personification of this power in our modern Western culture has to be James Bond.  Often tauted as the classic example of Dark Triad traits, let's ignore the nastier bits of his personality (licensed to kill people) and focus on the real reason James Bond is such a popular figure.  He's not unique -- after all there have been plenty of action heroes throughout history.  Upon close scrutiny, Bond's appeal isn't the fact that he's a cold-blooded killer in the service of King and Country . . . it's his ability to appreciate the best elements of our culture.  Oh, and his ability to have sex with just about any woman he wants to.  We'll get back to that in a moment.

Bond's appeal can be summed up with the instantly-identifiable popular phrases and brands associated with him: "Shaken, not stirred", "Jamaican Blue Mountain, black", Austin Martin, Walther PPK, Saville Row . . . Bond represents not just an adept assassin and general badass, but a badass who oozes culture, refinement, and (importantly) appreciation from every pore.

That sense of appreciation is important.  When a man appreciates something for it's quality, he's not just making a value judgement about the experience in question, he's also saying a lot about who he is and what he personally values.  Appreciation of something's high quality -- whether it's an automobile, a precision-crafted firearm, or a particular adult beverage -- is a sign a man has invested his attention and passion into becoming informed enough and skilled enough to determine the difference between "coffee, black" and "Jamaican Blue Mountain, French Press, black".  The former implies that you are sleepy and somewhat rugged.  The latter implies that you have studied the matter enough to request one of the better single-origin, estate-grown Caribbean varietals on the market.

(Interesting side note: Don't think Bond is the best bellwether for the Appreciation and Love power?  Consider his influence:  thanks to Mr. Bond's predilection for JBM, mentioned (I believe) in Live and Let Die, among others, when the Japanese economy began to be dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, the  Japanese collectively bought up the entire world's supply of JBM for a couple of years . . . because that's what the ultra-cool Westerner, James Bond, drank.  Ian Fleming, the author of the 007 novels (and, interestingly enough, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang), wrote them all at his Jamaican Goldeneye estate and since he preferred the local JBM varietal, that's what Bond drank.  It was a tiny, minor detail, the sort we fiction authors love to throw in to add depth to the character without a lot of boring exposition.  But it made it into the movies, and Bond's character is so culturally powerful that suddenly everyone wanted JBM.

The resulting surge in popularity created an artificial bubble in the coffee market, which led to the poorly-administered Jamaican coffee industry to capitalize on it wildly.  They limited the number of estates that can be attributed as "Jamaican Blue Mountain" to five.  Together, they produce 20,000 bags of JBM a year, more or less. But over 50,000 bags of "JBM" are sold on the international market every year.  Why does it continue to be so popular, even when there are varietals and origins just as good all over the Caribbean and Latin America?  Because every time some third-world dictator, Russian oligarch, East Asian tychoon makes a fortune, they naturally opt for the "very best" stuff in the world.  And when it comes to coffee, it doesn't matter what is actually best (Personally, I'd take pure Kona over JBM any day, and in good years Kenya and St. Helena both deliver some of the best coffee on the planet).  What matters is the fact that James Bond drinks JBM, and he is the most sophisticated cultural icon in the Western world.  But I digress.)

You can find the same deep interest and sophistication about Bond's martinis.  The famous "shaken, not stirred" line has become iconic.  Most of you wouldn't be able to tell a shaken martini from a stirred martini if your life depended on it, but the fact that Bond makes the designation to his bartender indicates to those who observe him that that sort of detail matters to this guy.  He can appreciate the difference.

In fact, a more complete recounting of his discriminating taste in fine adult beverages is in the books.  If you want to know Bond's authentic drink of choice, and get a little more insight into his character, then this passage from Casino Royale is helpful:

'A dry martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.'
'Oui, monsieur.'
'Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?'
'Certainly monsieur.' The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
'Gosh, that's certainly a drink,' said Leiter.
Bond laughed. 'When I'm...er...concentrating,' he explained, 'I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink's my own invention. I'm going to patent it when I think of a good name.' 

                                        — Casino Royale, Chapter 7

The description is illuminating: Bond has very, very definite tastes, and he has them not because it's fashionable to show discriminating tastes -- he has them because every day might be his last, he works really hard at his job, and he fucking knows what he likes and doesn't see any reason not to cater to that if possible.  His tastes aren't affectation -- they're his on the force of his own masculinity.  His drink has a particular taste, a particular feel in a particular glass, and a particular temperature and preparation method.  The dude knows his poison so utterly that any deviation from his desires is suspect.  He has manifested his appreciation of the taste, feel, and even the vessel he likes to be served in, because he's all Alpha and that's just the way he wants it.

Bond is, as the newer movies never hesitate to point out, an atavism, an anachronism, a dinosaur in the world of mammals.  And while that's a fair assessment, it doesn't just refer to his ability to dish out lethal violence with dashing abandon.  It also refers to Bond's historical background as a character.

Bond is British (and half the world speaks English now), a scion of a a Scottish father and a Swiss mother, giving him an international, Continental feel while maintaining his essential Britishness.  Bond's name was picked by Fleming because it was short, British, and undeniably masculine.  His character is presumed to have attended all the best schools, been raised with the kind of education only a British gentleman would complete, and with that inclusion into the cultural aristocracy of the British Empire it is assumed that he has encountered and developed an appreciation for things to be just as he likes them.

The power to appreciate such things is sometimes looked upon as effete by those who don't understand it as masculine; call out what kind of single-origin coffee you like in a group of guys, and you had better be able to defend the answer passionately.  Because that's what the power of Appreciation is: the expression of personal passion.  We are, by definition, encouraged to develop specific tastes within our passions, tastes that reflect on our deeper inner personal life and our broader world view.  A professional fisherman is going to have a very definite set of personal idiosyncrasies when it comes to his gear, his approach to fishing, and his fishing routine, all based upon his accumulated experience, knowledge, and appreciation.  When a man is called upon to exercise this power of appreciation in public, it is a de facto Fitness Test from the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, most Blue Pill men have been artificially divorced from most of their natural passions, thanks to post-industrial life and feminism.  When they look back on their pre-marriage lives, they see them in terms of what they had to give up in order to be married.  In other words, most Blue Pill men have defined their contemporary lives in terms of the compromises they have made -- the passions that they gave up in exchange for "wedded bliss".  Which is why most Blue Pill men are leading undersexed lives of quiet, passionless desperation.

But a good Red Pill man has discovered this very important aspect of his masculinity -- one way you know the Red Pill is working is when you look at your life and see the positive expressions of your personal passions not as remnants of better times, but as indicators of future directions.  When you feel comfortable standing up for and pursuing a passion that your wife or girlfriend may not share, then you're being Alpha even if she can't stand the passion in question.  Consider most professional sports -- many wives can't stand baseball, but do get aroused (or at least intrigued) by their husband's devotion to it.  Or the stereotypical "golf widow" or "video game widow" may hate the game of golf or every new first-person shooter that hits the market . . . but she continues to find her mate's passionate interest in the subject intriguing.  She doesn't have to share his passion to appreciate it and react positively toward its display.

The other side of this power is the power to Love.  And that's where things start to get interesting.

This sphere of masculinity is where Game resides, after all.  Our desires for sex and companionship may spring from "baser" urges, but this is where they get expressed.  For most men, who have let this power atrophy from underuse or go crazy through misuse, their expression of their personal passions may fall flat -- "I love football!" is hardly a sophisticated commentary on a dedication to the sport.  And while it denotes passion, it doesn't elaborate on exactly why this particular dude likes football.   Consider: if you can't enunciate why you like football, if it's a personal passion, what makes you think that you have the chops to declare your love for your woman convincingly?

Just like Command, Conflict, and Contemplation, the power to Appreciate and Love is a learnable, practicable skill.  If you can't articulate how you love the stuff you merely like, how are you going to be able to communicate how much you love and appreciate something such as your wife and kids?  As our interface with femininity, and the rest of the social world, this power has to be developed.  That's why we study Game, after all: to be able to express our desires and communicate our wishes in a way that is attractive, compelling, and admirable.  Or at least fake it convincingly.

This power demonstrates our discriminating nature.  Our ability to recognize quality in other people, in women in particular.  No woman wants to be with a man who doesn't value her -- but in order to do that, he has to demonstrate that he knows HOW to value something else, first.  Further, he can't just say he "likes pretty women" and therefore she should be flattered . . . she wants to hear in gross and gory detail just how much he likes her in particular, and why, in the context of being an appreciator of pretty women.

Now, it's tempting to decide that your woman should be the object of your passion -- I mean, read one romance novel and you'll see how much utter devotion the heroine loves hearing from her man how much he can't live without her.  But you try that shit in real life, and you invoke Roissy's 3rd Commandment:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority 

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

I can't put it any more clearly than that.  If the Power to Appreciate and Love is the natural locale for your Game development, then an essential element of that Game is to understand that professions of love and devotion are one of the surest ways to kill her interest and excitement for you.  Oh, she might feel valued at first . . . but if she is the center of your existence, then you aren't displaying the discriminating passions that are the DHV for this sphere.

But you can't just ignore her, either.  You do, in fact, love her (or at least want to get in her pants and feel pretty passionate about it).  How do you express that?  Get beyond "nice shoes" and start delving deeply into her psyche for the really good stuff she'll react to, for one thing.  This is axiomatic of Roissy's classic 16 Commandments of Poon Number 9:

IX. Connect with her emotions 

Set yourself apart from other men and connect with a woman’s emotional landscape. Her mind is an alien world that requires deft navigation to reach your rendevous. Frolic in the surf of emotions rather than the arid desert of logic. Be playful. Employ all your senses. Describe in lush detail scenarios to set her heart afire. Give your feelings freedom to roam. ROAM. Yes, that is a good word. You’re not on a linear path with her. You are ROAMING all over, taking her on an adventure. In this world, there is no need to finish thoughts or draw conclusions. There is only need to EXPERIENCE. You’re grabbing her hand and running with her down an infinite, labyrinthine alleyway with no end, laughing and letting your fingers glide on the cobblestone walls along the way.

This might seem in conflict, or even contradictory, with Rule III, above.  After all, how can you connect with her emotions and demonstrate your non-woman-oriented passions to her at the same time?  Especially within the confines of a long term relationship this is going to be a challenge.  But not impossible, or even that difficult, once you understand it.

On the one hand you want to "connect with her emotions", that is, establish a bond of empathy and sympathy at an emotional level that shows that you are both of like mind and moving emotionally in the same direction -- musicians and statisticians call this "entrainment".  This is a particularly important (and often overlooked or misunderstood) aspect of female desire: women, in general, like to feel like they are part of a team who shares common direction, common background, and common experiences.  It's the Swingset idea that if everyone is swinging along at exactly the same speed, then you all line up for a moment -- entrained -- and the exhilaration you feel from the act will be fulfilling.  So her desire to be "on the same page", "plotting the same course", or otherwise be entrained with you is strong.  Mrs.Ironwood expressed this desire as wanting "to share one brain".  As uncomfortable a mental image as that was, I took the expression in stride.

Connecting with her emotions means not just agreeing with how she feels or her opinions.  It means offering your own personal insights which may -- and probably do -- conflict with hers.  Believe it or not, Blue Pill guys, your woman doesn't want you to either agree with her all the time or to have no opinion.  On the contrary, as much as she desires entraining with you, emotionally, being indecisive or being too agreeable are both positive traits she seeks . . . in other women.  Not in the dude who is slipping her the sausage.

Most dudes screw this up by clamming up -- and while strong and silent are generally attractive qualities in a man, a stoic and laconic manner will eventually lead her to conclude that you are either too deep for her or too shallow, based on a lack of evidence in either direction.  If she's begging you for emotional connection and you're giving her nothing, you're a wash in her mind.  On the flip side, over-sharing your feelings is more suitable to, say, her BFF or best gay friend, not the Cockzilla in her life.

In order to find the happy medium that will satisfy both her desire for emotional connection AND keep her intrigued by your non-sexual passions, I use the model of the Zookeeper.

Consider your emotional landscape in the form of a Zoo, which you, the Zookeeper, are in charge of.  When you connect with your woman emotionally, you are essentially taking her on a guided, personal tour of the Zoo.  When you've established a friendly rapport, you can show her the monkey cage (your innate curiosity), the aviary (your sense of spirituality), the gorilla cage (your physical and emotional strength) the tiger cage (your willingness to go after what you want) -- but you don't show her more than she can handle at one time.

Imply that there are plenty of other cages she hasn't seen (the sloth cage or the hyena cage, for instance), and some you don't want her to see yet (the Lion cage, for instance, where you keep your righteous anger and appreciation of violence, or the bear cage where you keep your determination).  But by showing her a few of the cages in carefully controlled circumstances, you are introducing her to your emotional life and allowing her the opportunity to follow you on the tour and observe for herself.  

Not to conduct it: she only gets to see what you show her.  And don't think she'll get resentful because you aren't being emotionally forthcoming enough -- on the contrary, she'll ultimately be far more impressed with your control of your own emotions than the breadth of emotional life you may have.  After all, there are few things less masculine than a man in an emotional panic.

It's also important to emphasize in subtle ways that while you are, indeed, in control of your emotions -- you're a good Zookeeper -- you are also completely willing to drop the bars of the cage when you need to.  That is, if she ignores your warnings about how to deal with your emotions, then you are completely allowed to expose her to your raw emotions without the filter of the Zookeeper around.

If she tries a Shit Test involving getting rid of something you value "for your own good", for example, then it is a perfectly reasonable response to let her see the Lion, sans protective bars.  You are a Zookeeper -- you aren't a prison guard.  Your control exists for the benefit of your mental health, not for her benefit.  You are there to see that the animals stay on one side, the spectators on the other, but when a spectator wanders into the lion's cage . . . well, they should have read the sign.

Among the cages in the Zoo of course is the Lovebirds: your sense of romantic, sexual love.  This is at the heart of this sphere, and unfortunately all too many men have grown up ashamed of this cage, for whatever reason.  Either they were talked out of it by an over-alpha male at an impressionable age ("real men don't go in for that mushy romantic stuff") or they refused to embrace the erotic nature of that kind of love out of a feminist-inspired Blue Pill guilt about "taking advantage" of women sexually.  Either way, they hide away their Lovebirds from their woman except on very special and rare occasions.

Of course, that's why the woman came to the Zoo in the first place.

First, you can't be ashamed about being a man who likes women, wants to get them naked and fuck them.  That's your masculine birthright, and all the "rape culture" bullshit designed to make you feel guilty about having a penis needs to be seen for the culture-wide shit test it is.  Wanting to have sex with women is not the same as wanting to rape them, despite what the radfems insist and the rest of feminism supports.  Your Lovebirds want you to go out and get laid -- accept that, and don't be afraid of showing that part of the cage to your woman.

Just be sure she understands where the bars are, and why you're not going to open them except for very special circumstances.  And believe it or not, that's a good thing.  Just as you don't want to think that she's let half the world tour her vagina, she doesn't want to think that you've let half the world tour your deepest, most intense emotional landscape.  She wants to be your special little snowflake who you are so enthralled with that she, alone, is worthy of a cage-less tour.  That's part of the allure of Christian Grey and other one-dimensional romantic heroes: they guard their Lovebirds so carefully that the heroines get obsessed with being allowed in the cage because they alone are worthy.

Which brings us back to the 16 Commandments and Game in general again:

VI. Keep her guessing 

True to their inscrutable natures, women ask questions they don’t really want direct answers to. Woe be the man who plays it straight — his fate is the suffering of the beta. Evade, tease, obfuscate. She thrives when she has to imagine what you’re thinking about her, and withers when she knows exactly how you feel. A woman may want financial and family security, but she does not want passion security. In the same manner, when she has displeased you, punish swiftly, but when she has done you right, reward slowly. Reward her good behavior intermittently and unpredictably and she will never tire of working hard to please you.

"Keep her guessing" about your Lovebirds, and it will intrigue her for years.  Let her walk into the cage like she owns the joint, and you're doomed to Betadom.  

That doesn't mean you can't maintain your careful control over your emotions and still express your enthusiasm for her -- it just means that mixed in with precious glimpses of the Lovebirds she has to get past the hyenas and perhaps a random troop of baboons loose in the Zoo.  She has to exert some effort to see the Lovebirds cage, and her satisfaction with it will often be tempered by how hard she had to work to get there.  If she can just walk in, walk up to it, and walk right in . . . well, she can be done by 10:30 and still have time to catch a movie with her girlfriends.  

So do your best to make your Lovebirds worth the effort . . . and worthwhile to see again.  Keep her guessing about how to get in, keep things stable but unpredictable, keep her trying to figure out how to maneuver through the Zoo to get there, and you will keep her intrigued and interested enough to make the trip religiously.  The key is to change things up often enough so that she always discovers something new when you finally do "let her in" to your Lovebird cage.  Perhaps how you love a particular little thing she does that she doesn't even realize, for instance, or how the poetry of Keats always gets to you because of your ninth-grade English crush.  Sharing tidbits and breadcrumbs that suggest -- but do not scream -- that you have a complex emotional life gives her a puzzle to solve, and one she'll be happy to solve over and over again.

The power to Love and Appreciate comes naturally to most men; some of us just un-learn it if we're placed in extreme situations where it becomes a punishable offense.  But women are attracted to this very-masculine archetype as much or more than the others.  It's the one that talks to them, not at them, the one who really cares what kind of day they had, and the one who would rather go to the game than go shopping . . . and doesn't mind saying so.  This is the seat of your aesthetic sense, your appreciation for color, texture, taste and sound.  When you spend an extra $50 on car speakers because you love the way Led Zeppelin sounds that much, your Lover is showing.  When you call in sick to work -- for both you and your wife -- and then spend the rest of the day being intimate (i.e., plowing her like it's Springtime in Kansas) without regret, your Lover is in charge.  

I said that this is the sphere wherein Game lies, and I stand by that.  While every part of you can appreciate the sublime act of getting laid, the one who actually does the leg work is this one.  The intellect may be figuring Game out, the Captain may be using it as a valuable tool of structure and order, the Warrior may see it as an intriguing pass-time between battles . . . but this is what the Lover lives for.  James Bond with a license to fuck.  Sophisticated tastes and larger-than-life appetites.  Experience and wisdom tempered by enthusiasm and delight.  An appreciation for his emotions to inform his larger life, but the control to keep them useful experiences instead of excuses for failure. 

By seeking out the complementary companionship of a quality woman and appealing to her sense of emotional intrigue, you are exercising a profoundly masculine power.  By yoking the intellect to the matter, you get Game in its modern context.  By producing high-quality kids with her and raising them to maturity, you get a sense of satisfaction the Captain, Nerd, and Warrior can only imagine.   And by indulging in your personal passions, you not only fulfill your own desires, you demonstrate your worthiness to a woman by showing your ability to have a commitment to something outside of yourself.  

For all the Dark Triad shit that gets saddled on Jame Bond, remember that his emotions -- patriotism, noblesse oblige, sense of higher purpose -- are actually subordinate to his classic narcissism, or he wouldn't have a license to kill -- he'd just be a killer.  Understanding the importance of the work he does, James Bond doesn't flee from or deny his emotions, he embraces them, controls them, cages them until he can call them forth at will and make them do his bidding.  He may love himself . . . but only in the context of a higher calling.  The important thing is that he can love, and more, that he can appreciate those things worth fighting and dying for (or at least sleeping every night with a pistol in your hand and three fingers of Scotch at your elbow) more than he values his own survival.  

While this concludes the series on the Masculine powers, that doesn't preclude revisiting them in the future.  If you have questions, I'm more than happy to back over any of these posts and explain in better detail.

If you don't have questions . . . then what are you waiting for?  Go out and be manly and fuck something sweet and tasty.  You'll thank me later.