If you are new to these hallowed halls it may be perplexing to you to observe that feminism is an ideology that spread like fire through a stretch of parched Australian brush, while forcing momentum in the men’s movement has been more like trying to ignite a clump of soggy swamp grass by rubbing two sticks together.
The reasons for this are simple enough. Men are hard-wired to cooperate with women, and women are hard-wired to cooperate with each other. At the same time, women are hard-wired to utilize power generated by men, and men are hard-wired to compete with each other, often savagely, to provide that power to women in exchange for sexual access. These realities are as deeply ingrained in our sociobiological programming as the drive for survival, which of course is what much of this boils down to, historically speaking.
Enter the red pill, though, which a limited number of men and women are able to ingest without intellectually imploding. The effect is to strip away a few million years of evolutionary impulses and see past what we were stamped out to be. Feminists imagine they have taken the red pill; that they have moved past biology and social coercion and found a path to freedom from history and the oppression of gender roles. In reality all they have done is step up to the smorgasbord of life and demanded to fill their plates with the most delectable items available, skimming over any unpalatable burdens.
And of course they have been enabled to do this only with the support of some men by the exploitation of other men.
Red pill? My ass. It’s the blue pill at maximum strength; chivalrists and fair damsels in distress; social parasitism suckling from the tit of sexual competition, and we see it play out as it always has, from the Africa Savanna, c. 3,000,000 B.C., to the modern camps of the politically left and right, in the church and among seculars, and alas, between some MRA’s and their fellows.
Thing is, red pills are like antibiotics. You have to take all of them or you are just asking for more problems. At the right dosage, and given enough time, the results can be spectacular. But if your pills are half ingested or if you are taking a placebo, then not only do you stay sick, but you have the possibility of re-infecting others who are trying their best to get better.
The whole point of the red pill, in my opinion, is that we get to move past bio-programming entirely and into an existence that does not mandate our disposability or tolerate abuse, by anyone, even the state. Even from each other.
So far, most in the MRM have done pretty well with seeing and addressing the knee-jerk response in men to support women, no matter the cost or lack of legitimacy (white knighting). We have also done pretty well with taking a look at how women tend to circle the wagons and defend each other, no matter the cost or lack of legitimacy (feminism). And we have begun to sharpen our focus on the notion that both of these factors, though we call them out with modern terminology like feminism and white knighting, are actually just manifestations of what has always been present in men and women. We are learning that the new boss is just the old boss in a different costume.
This is progress for sure, but hardly a stopping point. And unless we are going to stagnate where we are (and ultimately perish because of it) then we need to complete the red pill prescription. We need to keep chugging those little red bastards down till we are able to see that the part of the programming that leads us to compete with each other for alpha-primacy also forms a mentality with the same biological roots that make men disposable and enables feminism.
I am going to use a recent article on this site, and some of the comments that followed, to point to what I am talking about. In this I am going to directly use the words of other MRA’s. I don’t really like doing it, but it is important to show examples, and we were provided them in a quite classical way in the past few days.
A new writer to the MRM penned a piece in which he described his path to becoming an activist. A new writer doing this kind of work is precisely why AVfM is here; to give a forum to a growing chorus of men and women who are manifesting the effects of the red pill and taking a stand.
Within that piece there were a couple of areas that I thought revealed a man who is a work in progress. The first is clear cut:
I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.
I admit I flinched a little when I read this. Clearly these are words rooted in old world sexist notions about violence; that somehow men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men. It is old programming that tends to swim around in the unconscious even after the first few rounds of red pills.
In addition to that, and a perhaps more subtle revelation about the authors mentality, he describes physically defending oneself from an attack as “reciprocal violence.”
I don’t personally agree with either one of these statements. Indeed, I think they reflect a collective problem in societal consciousness; one that gets corrected with sufficiently therapeutic levels of red pill Realitol™ in the system over a long enough period of time.
It will not, I respectfully submit, be rectified with standardized doses of blue pill shame. But that is what happened.
Case in point, the very first comment to this article contained the following:
When a woman hits a man and he hits her back, this is not a male-on-female crime; this is reciprocal violence.
Really? Is it not self-defense against a woman’s violence? or justified payback against a female aggressor?
I am always shocked that even fervent men’s rights proponents still are too pussy-footed.
“Pussy-footed.” Really? It is as though the rest of the article, which was actually quite good, inspirational even, somehow didn’t exist. Suddenly, in the eyes of this MRA, he was not a fellow man stepping out of the shadows for the first time to raise his voice against a corrupt, feminist dominated domestic violence industry. He was just “pussy-footed.” Need I fill in the blanks for all that implies? At the time I am writing this, that comment was up voted 27-2, and one of the two down votes was mine.
Yet another person who commented took it even a step further by name calling.
You’re still a mangina/white knighter.
Fortunately that one was the recipient of more down votes than up, but voting is not really the issue here. Culture is. And so is our shared understanding and values.
I posted a nudge for readers to consider that we need to measure our responses and reactions to each other; that we need “constructive dialogue that strengthens our ties and encourages the refinement of our ideas.”
The reaction from the one calling names was, “Isn’t that what we are doing?”
Uh, no. MRA’s name calling and shaming other MRA’s is not constructive. It is petty alpha-gaming, but I will get to that in a moment.
The options here are pretty straight forward, as far as I can tell. How do we choose to react to new MRA’s who are “getting it” but have not had the time or opportunity to fully refine their understanding of the modern zeitgeist? Do we support their work and encourage them to perhaps re-evaluate some of their less thoughtful ideas? Or do we call them names and publicly humiliate them?
Well?
It isn’t just common manners that make prefer the former. I think I have long demonstrated the belief that good manners with the wrong people are a waste of time. No, my aversion here is to blue pill thinking.
As I noted at the start of this article, a significant part of the dynamics that hinder progress in the MRM is the innate friction between men which is driven by an undercurrent of sexual competition. Our unfortunate programming is to apply downward pressure on each other in order to vie for sexual selection. In the last 50 years, we have seen much of that downward pressure manifest in the legal system, in politics and in the PC mandates that dictate social conduct. It is without a doubt a core reason that the MRM even exists in the first place.
And it will serve no better purpose here than it does in society at large.
Part of AVfM’s mission is to create an alternative environment to that. That mission is made all the more difficult by latent misandry. And so it must be addressed from time to time.
My perspective on this is in keeping with my perspective on sociobiology. Feminism is an outgrowth of chivalry. It is dependent on male sexual competition to thrive. In short, misandry, feminism, the stinking lot of it, is a human problem rooted in men’s mindless competition for women. We don’t get out of that competition by simply rejecting women or Going Our Own Way. We get out of it by identifying and respectfully challenging the elements of that competition when they prove dysfunctional, as in going after MRA’s for blood any time we imagine they are not 100% on message. This conduct, when distilled down to its essence, is just a tell-tale artifact of pussy-centric masculinity.
Of course, I know there are many who feel that tearing down each other’s points is just a part of the vetting process, and I agree with that. But when it becomes attacking on a personal level, or an exercise in shame, it is immediately proven that it is not about the point but about the primacy. It is time for another red pill, and then another, till we wake up and realize that it is us, not the target, who is off message.
If you have ever looked around at the explosive numbers of blogs and other efforts to promote men’s rights and wondered “Why the fuck aren’t these guys pooling resources, organizing and flexing more collective muscle?” then in my opinion you have just been given the answer.
Men have never done well at working together in ways intended to benefit men, as a monolithic group. We have always been too busy cooperating for the sake of others, stabbing each other in the back for the sake of pussy, and helping women who work only for their own gain.
I doubt that we will ever see the end of that in the human race. However I also believe that with time and effort we can construct a sub-culture for men and women who want something better than that. From time to time we may have to gently turn to our brothers with a bottle of red pills and say, “Have another.”