dagny-hashtaggart:

Got sucked down the Red Pill rabbit hole because of that post Rob and Esther were hatereading. It’s crystallized an idea that I hadn’t quite been able to articulate until now:

PUA culture cares more about embodying a certain ideal of masculinity than it does about winning. Even if we accept their idea that social relations are fundamentally adversarial, their recommendations for getting ahead in an adversarial system are pretty dubious. I can’t help but notice that “weak and effeminate men,” a category this Illimitable Men article mocks relentlessly, includes the majority of the most powerful people in the world. If your model for acquiring power places the last half dozen US presidents among those who are too emotive, concerned with being liked, and willing to engage in vapid pleasantries to get anywhere in life, maybe devote some time to thinking on the phrase “Procrustean Bed.”

The point that really made it click was this one: “Psychologically and symbolically, folding means you have ‘lost control and given up’ in the way that a player folds when they surrender in a game of poker.”

Okay, I get it, poker is the metaphor of choice for people who want to signal a certain sort of hard-nosed, pragmatic intelligence. But to do that, it helps to have a basic understanding of poker. You know what the best poker players do all the time? If you guessed “fold,” then congratulations, you know more about poker than Illimitable Men does. Stone-cold bluffs aren’t actually all that common outside of the movies. They’re often good drama, rarely good poker: your opponents are not idiots, and while it may make you feel very manly to raise big on every shit hand you draw, it will also make you predictable, not to mention committing you to throwing away substantial amounts when your opponent clearly has a hand that will trounce yours.

It’s not hard to see how this applies to the life philosophy of this crowd. Not only is cutting your losses clearly the right choice in many situations, surrendering can have strategic value even in cases where one isn’t clearly going to lose. Unpredictability is an asset. Commitment of resources to the areas in which they’ll provide the most benefit is important. The Red Pill philosophy is fixated on winning every battle, and that leads to a lot of lost wars.

Oh my god, that poker analogy is an exquisite self-own

(Good post in general too)

(via ursaeinsilviscacant-blog)

psybersecurity replied to your post “Hatereading Jim of neoreactionary fame/infamy is one of Esther and…”

i’m not picking up on what made this so particularly funny. i’m guessing you think that jim’s “shit test” explanation for the other dude being freaked out isn’t accurate and there’s some other obvious hilarious explanation but i’m not sure what it is?

A lot of what I was laughing at was in incidental details of the phrasing, etc., but yeah his description of that situation struck me as funny – it just seemed so under-determined by the observed facts.

What we know is that (1) she was attracted to the guy, (2) the guy was disturbed by something she said and didn’t want to interact with her after that.  Parsing this as “beta” behavior strikes me as especially strange because if anything it looks to me like the guy wasn’t desperate enough to persist with a woman who gave him bad vibes – if anything, it looks like he was aware he had options and didn’t “have to” keep flirting with a woman who freaked him out in that way.  But even that is just my own immediate intuitive response, and really neither Jim nor I can know with any certainty what was going on there, IMO

Meanwhile Jim’s outlook weirdly leaves men unable to have “nope, I’m outta here” criteria without relinquishing their “Alpha” status, which doesn’t seem like a recipe for anyone’s happiness (or even sexual satisfaction, like dude, you realize that if you’re flirting with a woman and it’s not going well, you could always stop and flirt with some other woman, right?)

The main other thing that struck me as funny was how he admits that “failing a shit test” and “the woman just rejecting you for being a dick” are hard to distinguish after the fact, which makes the whole thing look like a closed system – “women want you to be a dick” can be maintained in spite of all conceivable contrary evidence because what looks like a woman expressing the opposite preference could always be some especially intense “shit test”

Hatereading Jim of neoreactionary fame/infamy is one of Esther and my’s shared joys, and this recent post caused both of us to nearly collapse with laughter when I read it out loud today, so I feel I should broadcast its existence more widely

(CW for PUA stuff, and for very explicit racism out of the blue at the end, the “women really want [stuff] even if they say they don’t” attitude in full disturbing form, and for what I can only unhelpfully describe as “Jim being Jim”)

Contains a anecdote about Jim taking his girlfriend and her good friend to a resort in the hope of having a threesome, which goes about as well as you’d expect – but is only brought up to set the scene for, well, I’d better not spoil it

If you aren’t familiar with Jim of neoreactionary fame/infamy, he’s very … uh, distinctive, and that blog post is, yes, what he sounds like all the time

snarpreplies:

nostalgebraist:

I wonder if somewhere on the internet there’s a right-wing equivalent of Your Fave Is Problematic that calls out “beta males” and encourages people to shun them

I don’t think there’s the same need for a specific format/structure. Like, it happens here because we feel the need to rationalize aggression/mockery to make it acceptable. There’s got to be an ostensible ethics/politics/whatever-related reason to talk shit about someone, even though a lot of the time that’s obviously not really what’s behind a call-out. We dress our aggression up and take it out to dinner.

But, like, some guy on Reddit mentions spending less time playing Dwarf Fortress to spend time with his GF? It’s just expected that there are going to be responses suggesting DF-compliant ways of murdering her (magma, etc) and joking about the gelding mechanic. No structure, no explanation, it’s just there.

I feel like the thing that makes toxic masculinity actually toxic is the requirement that guys accept and participate in all these spontaneous pile-ons over failure-to-conform-to-the-impossible-standard. It’s built into that standard that you’ve got to be ready to attack and be attacked at any time.

This is all true, but I have this sense that if you delve into PUA / red pill / alt-right / 8chan / etc. etc. circles, there are a lot of fault lines that are relatively stable and recognized, where one subset of that big tent thinks another subset really consists of beta males (or w/e), even though everyone in the tent fancies himself an alpha.  And there’s an ethical imperative associated with this – we can’t let these betas corrupt our movement!

Although I haven’t really done the “research” necessary to actually know about these spheres (I am obsessed with a number of bad things, but not this one, yet), so I could just be mistaken.

The thread I had been reading involved someone from one of these spheres saying that the sphere should dissociate from a blogger, who some people in the sphere liked, because (?) he was a “gamma male.”  That definitely gives me a YFIP vibe.

(via snarpreplies)

jollityfarm:

@nostalgebraist, it seems to me that the ‘alpha males’ these guys always talk about could not, almost by definition, write on/lurk on ‘redpill’ or neo-reactionary sites.  using their own definition of ‘masculinity,’ they themselves will never ever be ‘masculine.’  the outsider perspective necessary to cultivate viewpoints beyond plain description ensures our boys won’t be supreme masculine overlords any time soon.

if anything, these are the guys who ‘masculinity’ failed.

something something nietzsche’s übermensch can’t be self-aware something something pretentious

Yes, and something like this is a broader problem with various sorts of “traditionalists” – the self-conscious version of a tradition often differs in important ways from the original version.

But with PUAs in particular there’s the twist that the entire apparatus only appeals to people who start out needing help.  There are plenty of masculine men out there who would have no interest in “game” because they’re already attractive enough for their satisfaction, just by acting in whatever ways come naturally.  PUA concepts are, exclusively, for guys who can’t do that, and need a structure to follow.

A lot of other types of traditions are set up to work for an entire community, and so there’s more leeway for people to join the traditions just by following their rules.  But “masculinity” has never been defined in this equal-opportunity way; the tradition ruthlessly judges some men to be more masculine than others and doesn’t have an extra footnote saying “but any guy can become an alpha male if he tries hard and believes in himself!”  So the PUA culture selects a bunch of guys who feel they’re insufficiently masculine and tries to make them more masculine … but they may still never reach the heights of, like, some random dude in the gym/bar who just is masculine.  Masculinity is harsh that way!

(And “every guy can be hyper-masculine if they try” is such an oddly liberal idea when you think about it?  You mean you can just change your gender presentation like that, because you decided to?  Get that SJW garbage outta here!)

brazenautomaton:

psshaw:

nostalgebraist:

Thanks to one of those tumblr posts about his meetups, I have been hatereading Roosh V, and mostly just noticing the same old thing that always stands out to me when I read PUA types

… which is that their attitudes don’t even strike me as masculine according to the indices of masculinity I have in my head?  They’re close to a certain “sleeps around successfully and doesn’t care about women’s feelings” masculine archetype – which ofc would not be good even if they perfectly embodied it – but their version of it just seems off.  It’s like they’re boiling that lifestyle down to a small set of theoretical criteria, then optimizing hard for only those criteria, tossing out a lot of not-actually-incidental stuff in the process.

For instance Roosh seems obsessed with having orgasms – which he refers to as “getting his nut.”  He’s pretty explicit about the fact that for him women are simply vehicles for getting more pleasurable, err, nuts than he’d be able to through masturbation alone.  This leads to some strange choices of focus:

A man’s nut is sacred, and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious. One time a girl postponed my nut and then I lost it completely. I couldn’t get it back and I was left with minor groin pain. I never contacted her again.

Not only is this hyperbolically whiny (minor groin pain, horror of horrors), it’s also just a really weird view of sex.  Sex has many facets and can be pleasurable in many ways; it’s not just thankless labor in the Orgasm Mines, all for naught if one’s “nut” is “lost completely.”  It comes off as the attitude of a horny teenager who still doesn’t have a perfectly accurate picture of how sex works.  (And thus precisely not like a worldly womanizer.  Just try to envision, say, James Bond talking this way.)

I GET THIS SAME VIBE.

MRAS are very anti-Toxic Masculinity, when you think about it.

I hope you’re not saying that Roosh is an MRA, because he specifically hates MRAs and we hate him. 

And how have you not used the “cargo cult” analogy yet? That’s pretty much what this is. Our culture is lacking in positive views of masculinity, so shitheels like Roosh build up whole worldviews around “men get mocked for not doing this, therefore, doing this is all that matters as a man” with a heaping helping of the ever-present “since saying true things that are inconvenient is decried as rude and hateful, the more rude and hateful I am the more truth I am telling!”

Roosh isn’t precisely a redpiller, but he’s certainly closer to it than anything else, and is another great time to point out how radical feminists and redpillers believe the same things. Roosh sees radical feminists talking about how men are depraved animals who only care about sex and says “Yup, sounds good!”, and hears them say how incredibly weak and fragile and incapable women are and says “Yup, sounds like you don’t deserve any respect at all!” 

So not only is RoK a cargo cult, its empty meaningless rituals are based on attacks against it. It’s like, it’s one thing to build a reed airstrip and a bamboo ATC tower where a guy with coconut headphones signals the planes to land with cargo – it’s another to try and get the planes to come by building your village to look like a Japanese outpost so they will come and bomb it.

The cargo cult terminology had occurred to me when writing the post, but I decided not to use it, because I thought it didn’t quite fit.

The central thing about cargo cults is that they reproduce superficial features but lack the functionality of the original – they don’t work.  Whereas Roosh’s version of masculinity, whether or not it’s “really” masculinity, seems to “work” well enough, in the sense that he seems happy with himself* and has a lot of promiscuous sex (by his own account, but I’m provisionally taking him at his word).

That is, it’d hard for me to say that the things I see separating Roosh from “actual masculinity” are “the functional parts” of masculinity.  They’re functional insofar as Roosh’s lack of them makes him look silly to me, but then I’m just one guy and he appears to impress a whole lot of people.  (I would have predicted that without these features would prevent someone from becoming a a (even subculturally) renowned avatar of masculinity, but Roosh has, so that’s a count against my own model of the world, not against him.)

One could conceivably propose that what Roosh and similar guys are doing lack the “functional parts” of masculinity in that they miss what made traditional masculine roles function within society.  But I’m not sure specific masculine archetypes they are going for were ever a very “functional” part of society to begin with; the classic Lothario doesn’t really serve a social purpose as far as I can see.

There are of course more pro-social masculine archetypes out there, but I don’t think Roosh et. al. are even trying to approximate these, so I can’t fault them for failing to hit that target.  (For instance, PUAs sometimes talk about marriage, but IME they almost never talk about fatherhood.  If they had bad ideas about how to be a father, that might be cargo cultish, but instead they’re trying to be the kind of guy who wouldn’t want to be “tied down” by fatherhood at all.)

(via brazenautomaton)

Of course given the topics of my last few posts, my brain has now started conceiving of Roosh as a machine learning algorithm trained on “masculinity,” with not entirely satisfactory results.

Thanks to one of those tumblr posts about his meetups, I have been hatereading Roosh V, and mostly just noticing the same old thing that always stands out to me when I read PUA types

… which is that their attitudes don’t even strike me as masculine according to the indices of masculinity I have in my head?  They’re close to a certain “sleeps around successfully and doesn’t care about women’s feelings” masculine archetype – which ofc would not be good even if they perfectly embodied it – but their version of it just seems off.  It’s like they’re boiling that lifestyle down to a small set of theoretical criteria, then optimizing hard for only those criteria, tossing out a lot of not-actually-incidental stuff in the process.

For instance Roosh seems obsessed with having orgasms – which he refers to as “getting his nut.”  He’s pretty explicit about the fact that for him women are simply vehicles for getting more pleasurable, err, nuts than he’d be able to through masturbation alone.  This leads to some strange choices of focus:

A man’s nut is sacred, and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious. One time a girl postponed my nut and then I lost it completely. I couldn’t get it back and I was left with minor groin pain. I never contacted her again.

Not only is this hyperbolically whiny (minor groin pain, horror of horrors), it’s also just a really weird view of sex.  Sex has many facets and can be pleasurable in many ways; it’s not just thankless labor in the Orgasm Mines, all for naught if one’s “nut” is “lost completely.”  It comes off as the attitude of a horny teenager who still doesn’t have a perfectly accurate picture of how sex works.  (And thus precisely not like a worldly womanizer.  Just try to envision, say, James Bond talking this way.)