Thursday, January 12, 2012

Game As A Tool Towards Recovering A Lost Masculinity



Over at Alpha Game yesterday morning I caught a great quote byVox, as he was advising someone on whether or not to return to a woman he’d lost pre-Game for a second chance post-Game.  While that conversation was fascinating enough, the quote is what got me:

I appreciate the positivity from the non-predatory crowd. I would simply say that what I am attempting to do with Alpha Game is to apply the basic principles of Game more broadly to socio-sexuality rather than focusing solely on a particular subset of sexual relations as other Game bloggers do. My interest also tends to be more theoretical, whereas Roissy and Athol, just to give two of the more substantive examples, are both relentlessly practical in their applications of Game to pick-up and marital relations, respectively. This is not a criticism of either of them in any way, as I both appreciate and respect what both men are doing in their tangential areas of interest.

His point is well-taken, and vitally important to the evolution of the Manosphere.  Pay attention:

Right now, Men in our culture are divided into three groups.  One is the group bravely trying to build a family in hostile conditions, against all odds, in the fulfillment of the traditional quest to be a Family Man.  Call them the Old Married Guys.  We’re the ones at the far end of the spectrum, hacking our way through our individual relationships, counting our blessings, and despairing of what’s happening to other men around us and to masculinity in general.  Some of us have been divorced, some are bitter, some are hopeful.  All of us have some unique and valuable insights to share with younger dudes.  Some of us even are younger dudes, men who against all reason got married young and tried to start a family, and who have the wisdom to look to other men for advice and answers. 

I would try to call this group the “Patriarchy”, but that term has been maligned by feminists so long as to be tainted, on the one hand, and the fact is “patriarchy” means “ruled by the fathers”, and let’s face it: fathers haven’t “ruled” in this country since 1970.  So instead call them the Patriologists, “those who study fatherhood (and, by extension, masculinity)”.  While fatherhood isn’t the end-all, be-all of masculinity, it’s a pretty potent defining characteristic. 

But then again so are our dicks.  The single dudes, whether single by choice, circumstance, or by divorce decree, are the second group.  They’re the ones taking advantage of the culture of promiscuity and running Game like it’s a lotto system.  The “PUA” and the “MGTOW”, racking up notches and enjoying the tight, moist fruits of the land while spending their off-hours watching sports, playing fantasy football, and killing at HALO.  These are the “peter pans” that the feminists created but can’t stop bitching about.  The “boys” who wouldn’t grow up. 

And obviously it’s their inherently evil nature that makes them want to indiscriminatingly tap anything in a skirt, according to feminism, and not the fact that most of these dudes had absent or distant Beta fathers who were actively prevented from passing on the mature paternal wisdom that usually allows a young man to “grow up”.  Testosterone is a powerful force, after all, and left unchecked and untempered you get . . . well, you get what we got.  We lost control of masculinity, and let it be defined and regulated by feminism.  The result is not a Patriarchy – they successfully crushed that – but a “Puerarchy”, or “rule by boys”.

That’s not to say these “boys” (some in their 40s) actually “rule”.  In fact, thanks to the wholesale diminution of masculinity in the last forty years, their chances of actually getting to the “halls of power” are slight.  Despite the myth of male privilege they have largely eschewed the “successful self-made man” model – they don’t want power any more.  Money is better..  And who can blame them?  The “rewards” for most of the dudes who make that run are usually divorce court, custody hearings, and a loss of faith in all of womanhood, so why take the risk?  Internet porn, Game-driven hook-ups, and videogames make contemporary life for a single dude in the Puerarchy a kind of techno-Valhalla, if he can keep from damaging romantic entanglements. 

For a few years there’s been some acrimony between the first two camps over the definition of masculinity and the role of Game in it.  Their goals are slightly different.  The Patriologists want to see family life made less challenging for men, and re-claim some of the respect and legitimate prerogatives of mature masculinity and fatherhood, as well as improve their marital lives so that they get laid more.  The Puerarchy wants to get laid more, too, but it doesn’t see the advantage of being an OMG and often treats such men as either sell-outs or willing dupes.  Both have very definite ideas about what Masculinity is.  Unsurprisingly, both have an especial emphasis on Getting Laid, whether it’s by their wives or a succession of hot young gullible girls.  But don’t discount the bonding possibilities of sexuality – we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Then there’s the third group: the Blue Pill dudes who don’t have a clue.  There the ones who bought into the idea that Marriage is an equal partnership between you and your soon-to-be ex-wife.  They “respect” women, that is, they defer to them at every turn regardless of their own interests.  They’re the Chumps.  The vast, vast sea of Betas who are the grist for the divorce mill.  They have unrealistic expectations of marriage, not just because they’ve bought into the “Twu Wuv” one-itis meme to the point where they get blinded by pussy, but because they really believe in all of that “union of equals” crap without understanding that “equal” in that context means that their wives are always more equal than they are.  Without good fathering, they don't know any better.  There's no one left in their lives who feels comfortable passing along that kind of valuable information.  Until the Manosphere.

And for that sacrifice, for which they believe they will receive the divine feminine favors (i.e., getting laid more), they instead find that their wives don’t respect them, resent them, and eventually actively despise them for doing exactly what they’ve been told by women is what women really want.  They put their own interests and issues at the lowest priority for fear of being accused of being a chauvinist or something.  They’re far more concerned with being liked and not respected by their women.  Keeping the woman happy is their primary focus, whether it’s her request for more security, more affluence, or more “emotional support” (that is, agreeing unconditionally to every thing she says).

They are, in other words, completely divorced already . . . from their own masculinity.

Between the Puerarcy and the Patriologists lie these true Beta Lost Boys.  Despite their age and apparent maturity they will, indeed, remain “lost” to manhood in their hearts and their lives.  They might become Adults, but they won’t ever be real Men.  That’s because their self-loathing ideas about manhood and masculinity have been tainted by feminine and feminist critique for so long that they’ve abandoned all hope of controlling their lives, and have descended to merely managing their lives . . . and usually doing a piss-poor job of it.  And an almost universal element of masculinity, across culture, is the idea that a fully-formed Man is in control of his life.

Those poor Blue Pill Betas are the ones who need the Manosphere the most.  They need to be taught that it’s not just okay to be male, it can be fucking fantastic if you quit worrying about what women think and approach it from a masculine perspective -- 'cause that Blue Pill perspective just leads to misery and depression.  That’s the Red Pill message.  The Red Pill is nothing less than the attempt of Men in our culture to consciously revalorize masculinity.

“Revalorize” is an obscure word, I admit.  It was coined by Mircea Eliade, one of the great Religious Studies scholars of the 20th century, based out of the University of Chicago.  He used it to mean taking a term, idea, or meme from the past and reconstituting the traditional with new and more useful meaning.  In this context, the Red Pill revalorization of masculinity is vital and necessary if we don’t want to see the mistakes of the past four decades promulgate into our sons’ futures.  Or our daughters: things are looking just as grim for our girls as our boys.

The current popular ideal of masculinity, ala the Blue Pill, is essentially “a person who just so happens to posses an XY chromosome and lives to serve women”.  Bereft of all the “bad” masculine qualities (which also happen to be all the Alpha qualities women get their panties wet over) – honor, bravery, aggression, anger, stubborn determination, leadership, and yes, violence – Blue Pill masculinity leaves “good provider” and “has a functioning penis” intact at the expense of all the rest, and the latter isn't even really required. 

Now there are plenty of feminists who have no problem with this definition, and don't think that seeing two generations of miserable men is too high a price for their trouble.  They don’t want a new masculinity to include, well, masculine traits.  If aggression and achievement are considered “masculine”, then they don’t feel like they can play with the boys properly.  If they re-define masculinity to include a bunch of Beta skills and get rid of all of the Alpha skills, then they have an opportunity to control the balance of gender-based power in our society.  Which is essentially what they’ve done for two generations.

The problem is, it doesn’t work.  Not for men, at least, and not for our kids.  When you allow women to define masculinity for men, you get what we have now: a generation of men largely bereft of maturity and wisdom, growing up without dads, with overbearing mothers who encouraged them to hate their own gender, and feeling shame and guilt about those natural inclinations towards traditional masculinity that inevitably arise.  Particularly around sex and violence. 

As a culture under the influence of feminism we have been taught since birth that men are all secret sexual predators one step away from brutal abduction-and-rape, and we should therefore despise all aggressive male sexuality or we’re essentially condoning rape.  We’ve also been taught that men are all power-hungry despoilers or ignorant idiots messing up the world – that is, the world women live in – by killing and exploiting everything in sight at every chance.  We’re the ones responsible for all of the wars (that we fight and die in).  The level of guilt about this has been raised to such a high degree in an attempt to remove the violent impulse from men that it has left us with a bunch of unassuming Betas who honestly feel, in the depths of their hearts, that they are bad people just because of their penis, and nothing they can do – however much they try – is ever going to make up for that.

The intriguing thing about the evolving Manosphere is that the Patriologists and the Puerarchy, while they’ve been learning various aspects of Game from each other (because our common goal, to have more sex, is truly universal) have also been revalorizing masculinity.  Most of the essential nuggets of Game theory are re-hashings of old masculine paradigms long discredited under feminist dogma, after all.  And while the two groups have been volleying Game back and forth, some of those poor Blue Pill Beta bastards have started to notice, hey, why are these guys having so much more sex than I am?  What is their secret?  Teach us, oh Wise Ones!

The desire and even yearning for the Red Pill is out there, but it isn’t just about Game.  Game is the vehicle, because Men are motivated by sex, and Game is about how to get laid.  But the things that Game teaches us go far beyond managing our sex lives.  Game informs our new definition of masculinity by returning to the essentials of our mating toolkit instead of talking about our feelings with our woman until she’s so bored she’s sleeping with the pool boy.  Beyond that, it gives us a medium through which to pay respect to each other for our masculine achievements. 

Hard-core Alphas in the Puerarchy can learn, for example, that getting married doesn’t have to mean the end of your sex life and the beginning of servitude, it can become an empowering and richly masculine experience.  Conversely, the Patriologists can learn from the Puerarchy that the apparent solid wall of feminist thought that seems to dominate the intellectual landscape is actually made up of a new generation of very, very fallible young women who are just as frustrated with the mess their mothers made of things as we are – and that in a relationship its more important that your woman be attracted to you than that she like you.

But between them both you have a sea of Betas who are staring at the single dudes getting laid with a single text message and the OMGs getting laid like tile by their wives like it’s a porn movie and running their stable households the way their grandfathers did, and they’re starting to wonder: what do those guys know that I don’t? 

And that’s the secret we need to tell them: the Manosphere means it’s not only Good To Be A Man, once you quit deferring to the women in your life, but that it doesn’t matter which end of the spectrum you prefer – both fatherhood and eternal hook-ups are two sides of the same masculine coin.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Nor is Game the end-all, be-all to masculinity, it’s just the beginning.  A man who learns Game (single or married varieties) and learns it effectively will soon find himself much-improved, spiritually, and that’s not just all the sex talking.  In a re-defined masculinity, Game is an essential tool, but it’s not your only one.  You need to talk to other men, have solid male friendships, enjoy a solid culture of masculinity by learning from the old dudes and teaching the young dudes, and accept in your mind that while men and women might be technically equal under the law, that doesn’t mean we are the same.  Our differences define us.  Men have their own interests and issues, and we have just the same rights as women to pursue them . . . just as aggressively.  We, not women, and certainly not feminists, are the ones responsible for defining what masculinity is in the 21st century.

And the most important thing the Betas need to discover?  They don’t need any damn woman’s permission to take the plunge, swallow the Red Pill, and rediscover their own masculinity.

And heck . . . we’re willing to help.

So if there is one thing I’d like to see the Manosphere accomplish, it’s to inspire a Revolt of the Betas.  Because if a significant portion of the men in the West were to learn Game on the way towards embracing our own masculinity, then collectively we might be able to improve things for all men.  Once they are convinced to stop working against their own masculine interests, realize their own value in society, and give them the tools to recognize that, then we’re going to see a lot more Red Pills going down the hatch.  And that’s a good thing for everyone.





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