Aunt Giggles Doesn't Get It: The Red Pill Is The Toolbox

Susan Walsh, over at Hooking Up Smart, shot a nasty broadside against the Manosphere today with her post Elliot Rodger and the Red Pill.  Her growing anti-male/anti-Red Pill bias has come into full bloom, now, but more importantly she reveals her (perhaps intentional) ignorance of the Red Pill and what it means.

The Red Pill, as I've stated frequently in the past, isn't an ideology, as she claims.  Ideology is a set of beliefs. The Red Pill isn't.  Its a praxeology, or method of doing things to achieve a particular goal.  That's an important distinction.

The Red Pill is a collection of skills and methods - call it a tool box, to stay in masculine parlance - designed to help men (and some brave women) live happier, more fulfilling lives.  It isn't dependent upon an ideology.  It's dependent upon observable truths and reality-based results.

The goals shift from man to man, depending upon just what a particular man decides he wants out of life, but the central focus is to make men better men . . . for themselves.  Not to fit in better with society or make women happy.  Forty years of feminism has advocated for the things that allegedly make women happy (and largely failed).  That's what happens when you depend upon an ideology to live your life by: the real world comes along and challenges your ideology with, y'know, reality, and when it doesn't work out most often you find the world at fault, not the belief.

The Red Pill toolbox is replete with resources, but she focuses narrowly on the PUA side of the equation.  In doing so she blatantly ignores the larger picture and issues involved.  Sure, many men come to the Red Pill searching for a way to get laid - because that's a seriously important male issue.  But the focus of the Red Pill has always been masculine self improvement.  Problem is, Aunt Giggles wants to dictate to men just how they should improve themselves.  Not so that they will be happier in their lives . . . but so they can become more useful to women.

Giggles focuses on the idea that Red Pill men are frustrated by the tendency of women to focus on the top 10-20% of "quality men" (who have suspiciously Alpha-like qualities).   She sees the Red Pill as a failed ideology of trickery and disappointment.

The Red Pill lets guys off the hook. If they can’t get a woman, it’s due to the defects innate to the female sex. For many, the strategy of passing blame is more psychically rewarding than the strategy of taking responsibility.

This is where she's wrong.   The Red Pill does not let guys "off the hook", in part because yes, Virginia, there are a lot of batshitcrazy/attention-whoring/frivorce-happy/hypergamous/outrageously-entitled females out there (count the number of "selfies" on any given young woman's FB page for details), but also in part because the Red Pill does not "blame" women for anything.  While it may blame feminism (itself a disturbing and increasingly misandrous ideology), in its purest form it accepts women for what they are and what they have become . . . and arms a Red Pill man with the tools to deal with them.  

The true Red Pill man does not blame women for what they have become.  He merely recognizes the paucity of quality women in our society, and if he is inclined toward developing a long-term relationship, he becomes knowledgeable about how to recognize and pursue them.  Or, conversely, if he has decided that a LTR is not in his best personal interest, he uses those tools to pursue women for short term sexual liaisons.  There are even Red Pill men who decide that any interpersonal relationship with a woman is not in their interest.  They do not measure their masculinity in belt notches.  Neither do I.

But that last line is where she really screws up.  Because at the top of the Red Pill toolbox, the very first thing you take out, is personal responsibility.  And one of the first things you discard from your own scarred heart is the idea of blaming someone else - man or woman, men or women - for your troubles.  If you aren't willing to take responsibility for your actions, you aren't taking the Red Pill.  Pure and simple.  

The Red Pill doesn't blame women for the "defects innate to the female sex", it accepts them and teaches strategies of how to counter them.  If those strategies are ineffective, then either you're using the wrong strategy and you change it, or you're courting the wrong woman and you change her.  Not "change her" in the sense of making her who you want her to be . . . but "change her" in the sense of dumping her ass and moving on.  

Thanks to the destructive nature of feminism on femininity in the West, there are actually huge numbers of women who are miserable and unhappy with their lives and eager for any chance at a stable relationship. They write to me constantly, wondering where they can find a Red Pill man. Pursuing an unfulfilling relationship is not part of the Red Pill.  Pursuing quality women is.  The Red Pill teaches men that women are fungible, and if one doesn't work out, well, there are a hundred others out there waiting in the wings.  You just have to have the fortitude, skills and sense of personal responsibility to pursue them.  Or, at highest form, you become the type of man who becomes pursued by them.

The secret of the relationship side of the Red Pill, see, is not to wait around for "Ms. Right" to stick to the windshield of your BMW, it's to make yourself into the right man to attract the right woman for you.  

The Red Pill is not science, though it is informed by science.  The Red Pill is craft, like that of a carpenter.  Extending that analogy, an apprentice carpenter's work is usually crappy, due to lack of experience.  A master carpenter is a master because he not only has the experience to pound a nail perfectly, but he has it to discard poor quality materials in the first place.  While an apprentice may not realize that a perfectly reasonable-looking plank will warp or twist over time, a master does, and avoids it.  He doesn't blame the plank.  He merely discards it and moves on.

That's part of what sticks in Giggles' craw about the Red Pill: it empowers men to recognize poor quality women and avoid committing to them in the first place, or discarding them after they've been tried and tested in the social and erotic arena.  The female imperative of hypergamy instructs a woman to do whatever she has to to land a "high quality" man for a LTR, including misrepresent herself and her character, in order to convince a man to offer a commitment.  The Red Pill teaches men to resist the allure of that offer by giving them the tools to recognize a knotty, poorly-planed and possibly twisted plank, and make use of it for what it is.  Use it to build a house?  No.  Use it to prop up a wall while you're looking for the right plank?  Why not?

Of course some will counter that women aren't piece of wood, or meat, or . . . whatever, that they have feelings too, etc. etc.  But the fact of the matter is that the Red Pill isn't there for women to soothe women's hurt feelings, it's there to help teach a man build the metaphorical house.  Whatever kind of house he wants to build.  He's the one in control of commitment.  She's not.  If she's sub-standard quality, then trying to wish her into better is avoiding the personal responsibility implicit in being a more quality man.  

For the young Red Pill man, that means being able to avoid the temptation of seriously pursuing a serious relationship until he's old enough and established enough in his masculinity to sustain one.  Chasing hot women, as Elliot Rodger did in his mind, is like searching for pretty boards and not worrying if they can carry a load.  More often than not they're rotten and unstable under the pretty grain.  Woe to the man who makes this mistake.  

Other young men, desperate to build, grab the first board that comes along and tries to make it fit, perceiving it as sound because it looks OK . . . but the first time it comes under pressure, it bends, twists and snaps, usually with a lot of groaning he tries to ignore.  Woe to the man who makes this mistake.  Only when a man is old enough and experienced enough in his masculine craft to recognize quality is he ready to start building . . . and he may have to go through a lot of lumber before he gets there.  As a champion of sub-quality lumber, Aunt Giggles' job is to help young women disguise their inherent flaws under veneer and skip around the yard until they find an untrained carpenter dumb enough to include her.

To the older Red Pill man, who has decided to join the Patriarchy and settle down, the choice becomes critical - this is the house he's going to raise a family in.  Choosing poorly will have consequences not just for his own head, but for that of his children.  For this the Red Pill toolbox offers essential skills, but the responsibility for the craft still comes from the man.  He can't blame the tools if he doesn't use them right.  He can't blame the wood if it was warped and he didn't bother to see it.  

To the older Red Pill man who has elected to remain with the Puerarchy, knowing the tools and using them properly means he gets to use the planks he likes as long as he likes, then tear them off and keep searching . . . as long as he likes.  That's what's scary about the Red Pill for Giggles and her gigglettes: because it encourages a man to decline offering a commitment after trying it out.  It's not the poor carpenters arguing over the prettier veneer and bitching about the lack of good wood, as she implies, it's the really good carpenters who are going to pass over 90% of the lumber because he's been properly trained in how to spot their defects, and he's often eager to pass along that wisdom.  

For this the Red Pill toolbox has many tools.

Firstly, the recognition that YOU ARE THE DAMN CARPENTER, and that the power to build is yours - and your responsibility - alone.  Your dad may have taught you how to hammer a nail, but if you ain't nailing stuff regularly yourself, your experience in the matter is going to be telling in the final construction.  Consider this the Tool Belt, the parts of the Red Pill toolbox you carry with you everywhere.

The Yardstick: the ability to objectively look at a relationship and measure it properly for soundness and suitability.  A hot blonde may be appealing to your aesthetics, but compared for quality to others (which women hate) they often fail miserably at the stress test.  Women don't like the Yardstick, which is why they frequently object to "objectification".  You can't measure a plank without another stick to compare it with, however, and if you put it against a wall with all the other planks, the differences will tell.

The Chalk Line: the ability to declare and enforce proper boundaries and hold to them, no matter what the plank in question might suggest.  Poor quality women will rebel against your attempts to "limit them" - so the craft mandates you throw them back in the pile, whether you've nailed them yet or not.  The Chalk Line is your willingness to establish your personal and interpersonal limits and hold yourself - and the plank - accountable to them.

The Level: the ability to determine the soundness and straightness of a given plank.  Many women will attempt to obfuscate their pasts, particularly their sexual pasts, and this often presages other issues that make a them untrustworthy.  Being able to stay balanced enough yourself to know when a plank is off-center and out of balance is a key skill.  That makes the Level a key tool.

The Plumb Bob: There are constants in this world, like gravity, that can be useful in constructing your masculinity.  Having the ability to determine the truth of a relationship by measuring it against constant real world factors helps ensure you stay straight and true.  Gravity doesn't vary appreciably, it's a universal.  So are things like hypergamy and shit testing.  Being persuaded to lean in a given direction to appease a plank is a betrayal of your personal responsibility to build the house properly.  Knowing your center is vital.

The Square: Right angles are another constant, and knowing the difference between 89 degrees and 91 degrees can be the difference between a house standing or falling.  The fraternity of masculine society helps a man establish just where 90 degrees is by providing context and experience of other men to guide you.  Relying on women for this is like using a pair of chopsticks as a T-square.  If your dad and your brothers and your friends are all suspect of the plank in your hand, then odds are it's not at a 90 degree angle.

The Plane: While no plank is perfect right out of the pile, sometimes it just takes a little effort and work to refine it to usability.  The ability to recognize and remove rough spots and uneven patches through the application of your masculine decisiveness is the height of craft.  Seeing a good woman "in the rough", that is, one who can prosper brilliantly with the right incentives and treatment, is implicit in the Red Pill toolbox.  For example, sometimes just removing a woman from the vicinity of her mother can work wonders for crafting that particular plank.  And with exposure to your steady, secure guidance, a given plank can often be persuaded to come into near-perfect shape.

The Hammer: The ability to commit - to a task, a course of action, a vocation or a woman - is implicit in this tool.  A hammer is a tool of action: it binds two boards together with a measured application of force.  The Red Pill not only demands responsibility from a man, it demands his personal action.  It might take years before you find the right plank, but once you do you take action to secure it soundly and completely.  This may require repeated nailings.

The Crowbar: The ability to use leverage to move a plank in a constructive way.  This is the metaphor of such Red Pill techniques as Dread and ultimatums.  Rarely do you get results from merely banging on the plank with the crowbar - and it mars the wood.  But place it just so, apply just the right amount of leverage and strength, and you can often move it into the right position.  Having the emotional control to fix a situation instead of mindlessly wailing away at it is masculine craftsmanship of the highest order.  And an understanding of female psychology is essential before you decide where to stick your crowbar and how much leverage to apply.

The Sledgehammer: Sometimes it becomes necessary to use naked force to knock a situation back into shape.  When a wall starts leaning badly, a tepid response isn't going to fix the problem - but sometimes a well-controlled display of raw power can.  It's not the first tool in the box, but it is a vital one for any man to master.  And it requires a lot of strength (emotional, mental, or physical) to do so - strength you can't suddenly invent.  It must be cultivated from the first.

The Sawhorse: Every man needs points of stability upon which to work his craft, and that means a stable and supportive environment.  Having a solid foundation makes using the other tools far easier and more efficient - whereas an uneven sawhorse can throw your work off from the beginning.  The Red Pill instructs that proceeding to construction before your personal foundation is settled is folly.  The first thing a carpenter builds are his sawhorses.

Sandpaper: The ability for a man to polish his social presentation - and that of the plank in question - until it's as smooth as glass.  Like sanding, it takes a lot of work and often a lot of time, but the result is a gleaming, smooth presentation that enhances the quality of the project.  And such sanding often reveals hidden flaws in his materials.

The Saw: The most feared element in the Red Pill toolbox: the ability and willingness to cut off a plank that isn't working out and discard it in favor of another.  A final option in most cases, the Saw gives a man the ability to cut his losses and start over anew, wiser, smarter, and better prepared for the project.  While real commitment is to be valued and cherished, the ability to walk away from things that are clearly not going to work out is essential.  No one likes the Saw, but you can't build a house without one.

The Blueprint: the ability to craft a vision of the final project in completion, and the understanding of how to get there from here.  This is implicit in the Red Pill, from Roissy's "Make the Mission, Not The Woman, Your Focus" to Athol Kay's emphasis on male self-improvement in the MAP.  You must have an idea of what you want.  It doesn't matter if that's a happy, successful marriage or a string of fulfilling love affairs, or a life of quiet reflection and solitude, the Red Pill mandates every man create his Blueprint and follow it.  Sure, you might have to issue a change order from time to time, as experience and circumstance dictate, but the Blueprint is there to provide the vision you need to get the house you want.

While I might be torturing a metaphor at this point, the fact is that the PUA side of the Red Pill is just a small, small portion of the praxeology - a kind of beginning carpentry class.  Aunt Giggles wants to point to that and insist that we're all essentially blaming our materials, when in fact we are working on our craft.  Using the tragic episode of Elliot Rodger as some sort of "test case" of Red Pill praxeology is a hamster run amok: he never took the class, he just went mad because he couldn't have a pretty house and couldn't be bothered to do what needed to be done to learn how to build one.  

Thus spake Giggles:

The very men who considered themselves beta losers were desperate not to improve their lives by degrees, but to become “magnificent gentlemen” in that top tier of alpha males. This is precisely what we heard from Eliot Rodger. 

For men who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the very hard work of real self-improvement, Pickup Artists offered a quick fix, which can pretty much be summed up as “Chicks dig jerks, so be an asshole.”

The Red Pill IS the route to masculine self-improvement, and anyone who thinks that "Chicks dig jerks" is at the core of it has failed to give the praxeology the time and effort necessary to understand its utility.  Which shouldn't be surprising.  Just as Elliot Rodger didn't put in the time to understand it, beyond the feminist-tinted jingoism of PUAHate, Susan Walsh has failed to put in that same time or effort, and her attempt to condemn what she doesn't understand has earned her post a MASSIVE FAIL.  PUAs aren't offering a quick fix.  They're offering access to tools a man can use toward the completion of his personal goal.  Using Elliot Rodger's psychotic breakdown as proof of anything is a level of cynicism I hadn't expected from Susan.

There are many tools in the Red Pill toolbox . . . but psychopathic rage is not one of them.  

She compounds the problem by mentioning The Art Of Manliness and pointing out that two of the "Three Pillars of Masculinity" are broken - protection and provision, which means that most modern men have to lean on that third pillar - procreation or sex.  But she doesn't go into why those first two pillars are broken, the advent of 3rd wave feminism that sought to marginalize and even criminalize masculinity.  Instead she blames the men who have been left with the feminist legacy thusly:

The problem is that this creates a wholly unproductive segment of male society, who have little to do but obsess about not getting laid. When these men fail to improve their results with women by adopting Red Pill tactics, they grow increasingly angry and resentful. This is revealed in the increasingly prevalent sexual entitlement we see today.

"Wholly unproductive" in this case means "Useless to Women" in Giggles' parlance.  It hasn't occurred to her that the men who seek sex are doing so not because they aren't in the army or working in a cube, but because they have made the decision that sex, for them, is important enough to study as a craft.  The men who seek out the Red Pill aren't the ones who feel entitled to sex - they're the ones who realize that sex is not an entitlement.  It's a set of skills that must be learned, practiced, and perfected.  And while that practice includes a fair amount of failure at first, with further practice and study they get better at it.

The Red Pill only fails for those men unwilling to stick to the Blueprint, use their tools wisely, and choose the right materials with which to work.  And especially for the men who give up in disgust because they didn't build a mansion their first few times on the job site.  Elliot Rodger never even made it to the gate.  With patience, study, and consistent and persistent practice, the Red Pill tool box does, indeed, produce results.  Not in "getting laid", necessarily, but in building stronger, better men.

Of course female attraction isn't guaranteed by the Red Pill - not of any particular female.  But the same willingness to objectify women Giggles snits about is also the one that opens a man up to the possibilities of all women, keeping him from betraying his own vision for the prospect of easy pussy.  If a man follows the Red Pill praxeology, he will become more attractive to ALL women, and the attraction of any particular woman becomes less meaningful as a result.  If the Red Pill gives you the knowledge toward becoming a master of the male-female dynamic and understand the peculiarities of modern female mating behaviors, then suddenly that cute girl you were interested in when you started fades into a sea of really cute girls who are all suddenly interested in you.  Pursuing them becomes unnecessary, because they will start competing for your attention and commitment, not the other way around.  And women hate that.

THAT'S what really frightens women like Giggles about it - not the possibility of misogyny, but the possibility that men will recognize their own worth enough to be highly selective about their mates, be even more stingy with their willingness to commit, and that the poorer quality women she's writing for will suffer accordingly.  It's far easier, then, for her to point the finger and blame the Red Pill for the shootings, when we weren't even in the room.  Hell, Elliot HATED us, he was depending on Twu Wuv and shallow women, not authentic Red Pill praxeology.  As she says in closing,

Instead of working to earn sex, men would do better do cultivate respect, affection and ultimately, intimacy. There are no shortcuts to quality relationships.

Her take on the subject suggests "cultivating respect" (kissing ass), "affection" (kissing ass) and "intimacy" (kissing ass), all of which are, indeed, "shortcuts" to a quality relationship.  Such relationships last only as long as the appeasement is preferable to the enticing prospect of hypergamy, and Giggles doesn't even address that.  In truth, Elliot Rodger and his PUAHate ilk, psychotic and non-psychotic alike, were sold on the "kissing ass/being a gentleman" approach to relationships, and they suffer accordingly.  Unfortunately, so did six other poor souls.

The only real way to build a quality relationship is with understanding how the pieces fit together, finding quality materials, and expert application of the toolbox with confident, manly hands - and the only place that's being taught anywhere is here in the Manosphere.