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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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It's hard to summarize books with hundreds of pages, especially when those books are, themselves, the collected summaries of thousands of blog posts and comments. But if I had to give you the elevator pitch...

Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows. These lies are useful to women and society, but harmful to you. The Red Pill metaphor comes from the famous scene where Neo chooses to wake up from the Matrix.

Once you learn accurate truths about women, men, dating, and sex, you will almost certainly choose to change your behavior. Both your new beliefs and your new behaviors will be extremely at odds with feminist dogma, and most people, being in thrall to that ideology, will indeed boil it down to you viewing women as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of men. But that is obviously not how a practitioner of the Red Pill would frame it; unlike fictional villains, real people don't usually think of themselves as evil.

A quick sample of Red Pill beliefs:

  1. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Men are the expendable gender.

  2. As a consequence, men are attracted to the majority of fertile-age women. Women are only attracted to a small minority of men.

  3. Therefore, fertile-age women are able to easily have casual sex with men who are completely out of their league relationship-wise (rock stars, Olympic athletes, etc.) and often become deluded about their actual Sexual Market Value.

  4. Women and men are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, fertility, purity, and nurturing. Women are primarily attracted to height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits.

  5. This explains why men age like wine, while women age like milk. Youth, beauty, fertility and purity are things that can only ever go down with age, while status, power, money, and sexual experience tend to increase with age.

  6. Ipso facto, any dating advice which assumes men and women are the same is nonsense. Few do this explicitly, but many do it implicitly by failing to give out different dating advice to different demographics, e.g. "be yourself".

  7. A surprisingly common mistake is projecting the desires of your gender into the other gender. For example, a woman in her 30s complaining about the lack of attention from high-quality men despite the fact that she spent her youth getting a fancy degree, a good paying job, a nice house, an expensive car, cool hobbies, etc. Not understanding that men don't give a fuck about any of that and would rather date a broke but cute 18-year-old waitress.

  8. Women become infertile much faster than men. By 35, usually too late to have children. If plan to have 2-3 children, should be married by 30 at the absolute latest. In our culture, where you are expected to date and cohabit for a few years before marriage, means a surprisingly short window between the time a woman becomes legal at 18 and the time it is too late for her to find a husband. Goes double for middle-class and upper-class women, who are expected to finish a degree at 22 before even thinking about marriage.

  9. Women often follow a dual-mating strategy of sleeping with high-value men in their sexual prime, then settling down with a reliable provider in their later years. This is called Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks. You want to be the Alpha Fucks, or at least avoid being the Beta Bucks.

  10. Some implications of this information to your own life; self-improve, lift weights, never commit to a woman over 25, never commit to a woman with children, pretend you have more sexual experience than you do, project confidence, never appear needy or desperate, etc.

men are attracted to the majority of fertile-age women. Women are only attracted to a small minority of men.

Is there evidence for this? I read an article that says men and women face similar disparities in the top X% of your gender getting a disproportionate amount of attention: https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps . For instance the top 1% of men get 16.4% of the likes from women, while the top 1% of women get 11.2% of the likes from men. So it's worse for men, but not a huge difference really

Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, fertility, purity, and nurturing. Women are primarily attracted to height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits.

Is there evidence for this? Some sort of survey or something? (Also, how do we separate nature from nurture?)

Women often follow a dual-mating strategy of sleeping with high-value men in their sexual prime, then settling down with a reliable provider in their later years.

How is "high-value" measured in this case? You said earlier that women are primarily attracted to "height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits." Are you saying that women value these traits in their sexual prime, but cease valuing these traits when they get older?

This is called Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks. You want to be the Alpha Fucks, or at least avoid being the Beta Bucks.

What's wrong with settling down with a reliable partner?

never commit to a woman over 25, never commit to a woman with children

Why not? What would happen if I did that?

pretend you have more sexual experience than you do, project confidence, never appear needy or desperate, etc.

Has it occurred to you that lying might have negative consequences? If I'm actually feeling needy or desperate for whatever reason, isn't it better to seek out people (romantically or otherwise) who can deal with the emotions I actually have, instead of wearing a mask all my life?

Personally I have a long history of being smothered by masks.

For the first 2 questions regarding evidence: I am sure there is a lot of peer-reviewed evidence out of there of all sorts of quality. But the real proof lies in the fact that anyone (man or woman) in modern Western World can state these sentences in a small trusted friend group, in appropriate wording, and they will be taken as self-evident truths. Indeed, this is usually very good way of smoking out "hidden truths" of a society.

Are you saying that women value these traits in their sexual prime, but cease valuing these traits when they get older?

This is a correct understanding. Many women choose more reliable types of guys later in life if they are still on the dating market.

Why not? What would happen if I did that?

I am not totally sure but I believe the OP's thinking is that women will age and lose beauty/fertility very fast after this age. There might be some "purity" considerations at play here as well. Dating and hooking up with many people inevitably makes one much more cynical after a while and you have to stunt your powers of emotional connection a bit to deal with a series of breakups without going mad. The child thing sounds like an off-shoot of this.

Has it occurred to you that lying might have negative consequences? If I'm actually feeling needy or desperate for whatever reason, isn't it better to seek out people (romantically or otherwise) who can deal with the emotions I actually have, instead of wearing a mask all my life?

I believe the idea is that after a couple of times you won't be lying anymore! A lot of red pill stuff is best thought off as a for-dummies guide and not a life-long strategy. The target demographics is people who are absolutely clueless, and the ideal case is to change their perspective and give them some practical tips so they understand the rules of the "game", get a feel for it, and then do their own thing.

You may feel like she's better off alone than with you. You might be wrong about it (and hopefully you're in the process of becoming wrong on that count by improving yourself and becoming more self-sufficient+attractive).

If you act like she's better off alone, you'll likely convince her. Don't have to give women excuses to reject you, they manage fine by themselves.

Solid overview.

However, some of those points might be better characterised as black-pilled nowadays. Also—soft, euphemistic blue-pill language is somehow leaking through: e.g., “sleeping with”.

Taking the chatGPT "overfit on bland inoffensiveness" approach and overfitting on TRP guru books doesn't make a good style guide.

However, some of those points might be better characterised as black-pilled nowadays. Also—soft, euphemistic blue-pill language is somehow leaking through: e.g., “sleeping with”.

Are there pills of many different colors? Can someone give me a glossary?

Quick overview:

  • red pill: explained above

  • blue pill: the antithesis to the red pill, accepting social norms around sex

  • black pill: a grim and hopeless take on the red pill view

  • purple pill: the theoretic best of both words of red pill and blue pill

  • iron pill: disregard women, obtain lifts