Ego-inflating rhetoric is everywhere. At work, at school, and at the mall, Americans expect everyone to tell 'em how special, talented and important they are. In our inverted world, the weak are somehow strong, everyone who survives a hangnail is "brave," and every bean-counter who works for the Department of Defense is a goddamn hero.
At GloboCorp, the human resources department tries to convince every John and Juanita that they are absolutely essential to the success of the organization. Everyone's creative talents are valued, and everyone from the janitor to the CEO is capable of making tremendous positive contributions. In his recent book about the value of work, Matthew B. Crawford argued that modern corporations devalue meaningful achievement when they pander to us and speak as though everyone were some sort of Einstein.
Americans like to be told that they are brilliant and brave, but as a people these aren't our highest values anymore. Who can name five legitimate, recent war heroes? The hoi polloi don't care too much about who is smart, either. They only care about science when they want to lose weight, win an argument on the Internet, or find out how the world is going to end. If you can name ten guys doing hard science right now, you're probably a scientist.
Most people know they aren't Einsteins, and they really don't care. They have a more pressing concern.
What they're really asking themselves is, "Am I hot, or not?"
Beautiful people are the brightest beacons in our floating world. Attractive models and actors get far more praise and attention than Medal of Honor recipients. People love technology, but they use it to keep up with the Kardasians. They pack into gyms, but strength and fitness are by-products of their desire to be desired. A six-pack has a higher value than a powerful bench press or a heavy squat. No one cares how much Tatum Channing or Brad Pitt lifts, or how fast they can run, or what they can build, or how many men they could defeat in combat. They're admired for being desirable.
It used to be that only young women worried excessively about being desired. In traditional patriarchal societies, a woman who no one wants as a wife becomes a burden on her parents. An unwanted woman could never become a mother or run a household. She remained forever a dependent daughter or an independent, lonely spinster. For women of marriageable age, attractiveness had a very high value, and while the importance of attractiveness decreases with age, most men would still rather have a pretty wife than an ugly one. Whether by habit or by nature, many women tend to enjoy painting and adorning themselves to appear youthful, fertile, feminine and appealing.
However, the woman who cares the most about being desired is the harlot, because her survival depends on her ability to lure men into her loins.
Some will point to male ornamentation as a counter-example, but the motivation behind male embellishment has traditionally been different. When men decorated themselves, they did it to appear more fearsome or to communicate status. Samurai wore rouge, and like many finer points of samurai grooming, they did it so that their enemies would respect them as virile opponents even after they were dead. They didn't tart themselves up to get laid. They did it to gain the respect of men.
Last weekend, a movie about male strippers made $39.2 million dollars at the box office. America's come a long way since Flashdance.
In The Way of Men, I used Bonobos and Chimpanzees to compare the female-oriented society to the male-oriented society. People aren't exactly the same as apes, but I think Chimps and Bonobos make revealing metaphors for where we've been, and where we seem to be headed.
Bonobos live luxuriously, with access to as much food as they need. Female coalitions check male aggression, and males rarely form tight-knit groups. Males don't know who their fathers are, only their mothers. Sex is, as a bar whore once said to a pal of mine, "like shaking hands." Homosexuality is commonplace because sex is a social activity, and everyone has sex with everyone. It's not about reproduction; sex is about mutual masturbation and having a good time. Sex is a major part of bonobo life. Bonobos are said to be peaceful, and while that may not be completely true, they're definitely matrilineal and exceptionally horny.
Chimpanzees form patriarchal hunting groups. The males stick together, and the females end up moving from group to group. Sex is a reproductive activity. Homosexuality is rare. Males dominate females and the males at the top of the male hierarchy control the group.
America is fast becoming a "Bonobo Masturbation Society," devoted to pleasure and organized primarily to serve the interests of females. More and more men are raised by single mothers, and males are discouraged from organizing without female supervision. Sex is social, and the majority of the hard, dangerous work that men used to do is either done by machines, idiot-proofed, or outsourced to countries where life is cheap. Women and dishonorable men micromanage male aggression with endless laws and lawsuits, and bad boys who can't pay big lawyers are drop-kicked into a multi-billion dollar prison industry that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.
In our Bonobo Masturbation Society, fucking is one of the only things men are encouraged to do that actually makes them feel like men.
Throughout the Alt-Right, several writers have criticized "pick-up artist" culture and "game." Because just about the only manly thing that most men are allowed to do is bang, I am more sympathetic. I see what many call game as a kind of gateway masculinity. Game is essentially assertiveness training for a generation of young men who spent most of their lives playing "mother may I?"
Manliness is like a talent. Some males are more gifted than others, but like any talent, masculinity has to be pushed and developed to amount to anything impressive. Boys who were raised by single moms or overprotective parents and put through the public school feminist brain-washing system were never tried or trained by groups of hard men. You can't hand a hen-pecked boy a high school diploma and expect him to spit like Clint Eastwood.
When they talk about game, men in the Manosphere are shoveling through the bullshit that the system tells boys about girls. This is work that needs to be done. If average young guys believe the official malarkey they are told about sex and relationships, they'll be used and abused by entitled American girls for the rest of their lives. And, as they unpack feminist myths about the sexes, I've seen a lot of those guys start to wonder what it really means to be men. This is an important conversation. However, it almost seems like a safer route in today's cultural climate to make chasing poon a long-term lifestyle choice. That's where the positive mean slides toward a negative extreme. Andy Nowicki wrote that if men really wanted to undermine the matriarchy, they would stop fucking. He may have his own (possibly religious) reasons for saying so, but I think he has a point.
Our feminist, globalist handlers would love nothing more than to keep young men -- the most dangerous and potentially revolutionary group in any civilization – completely distracted by tang. And while it may feel like asserting dominance (in conveniently the most harmless way possible), if everything you do is designed to make you more appealing to women, you're an eager vibrator. When your muscle is just for show, when everything you do is to make yourself more desirable, you're playing the female role. When your worth as a man depends on how many women you can lure to your loins, you're just a gigolo.
As Hunter S. Thompson noted, sex is the most fun for amateurs. It's great when you're young, pretty, naïve and carefree – but "old whores don't do much giggling."
Mark Simpson had a lot of this figured out when he coined the word "metrosexual" way back in 1994. The metrosexual is not necessarily gay or effeminate in the flamboyant sense of the word – that's just the way people picked up the word. Simpson's idea of the metrosexual is a "mirror man" whose highest narcissistic concerns are pleasure-seeking and being regarded as "desirable." He may be in love with himself, but that, too, is a shallow kind of love. He cares more about how he looks and how well he fucks than what he has achieved or how well he is respected. It's a harlot's vanity.
Hugh Hefner was far ahead of his time. It was homosexual men who pioneered the bonobo lifestyle en masse. Before today's PUAs were in pre-school, homos were doing it for the numbers, looking for validation, basing their self-worth on how many and how hot. Homosexual men rejected traditional male roles and expectations, and channeled all of their masculine aggression into sex for the sake of sex. Their idea of masculinity became masturbatory – a pumped up Tom of Finland caricature of masculine form without function or honor or virtue. Homosexual men, because they were men, set the cultural stage for objectifying men the way that men have always objectified women.
As pilot bonobos, the homos discovered the downsides of harlotry. An experienced player was bound to acquire a handful of STDs, and AIDS practically wiped out an entire generation of "sexually liberated" men. For many, there are also psychological costs. Being desired is a drug, and it's addictive. When it's your highest value, it becomes your identity. One of the problems – and this has always been a curse to women – is that sexual attractiveness is linked to the mating instinct, and it peaks in the young. Men mature more flatteringly than women, but most men who trade on their sex appeal won't relax into the confident, secure, middle-aged manhood of their forefathers. Like homos and movie stars, I wonder how many of today's players will chase steroids and sex drugs and eventually convince themselves that maybe that Kenny Rogers face lift will look better on them than it does on him. (It won't, fellas. You'll still look like an old lesbian who can't blink.) There's something particularly desperate, sad and undignified about a man of a certain age who spends too much time looking for sexual validation.
What's worse is that straight men aren't in the market for men, they're in the market for women, so biology puts them at a major disadvantage. Game strategist Heartiste recently posted about an online dating experience where together, the two best looking guys managed to get a total of 50 messages from women, while the most attractive woman got over 536 messages from men in the same time period. That playing field will never be close to equal, but game is gaining popularity because men see that disparity and want to increase their odds.
Good-looking men with some game may be able to keep at it for most of their lives, and they'll end up with some good stories. A small minority of men have always been libertines, and some men are probably particularly well suited to it. Some will have regrets, and some won't.
The problem isn't what happens to a few players, but what we become as a society when everyone wants to be a player. Libertinism used to be a form of rebellion, but increasingly, it's part of the program. In a society where sex and attractiveness are the highest values, what happens to the other two-thirds of the curve?
The flesh won't be democratized. Attractiveness isn't any more evenly distributed than strength, size, or IQ. The world is full of fat, ugly people. People can improve their lot with diet and exercise and grooming – and they should – but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Some men and women just aren't that great looking. A lot of people are actually pretty repulsive. A few should probably avoid daylight altogether, because they frighten small children.
Women have always been aware of the cruel elitism of beauty's natural hierarchy. In societies where other virtues had higher value, they could focus on piety or simply being good mothers. When women were "sexually liberated," some feminists (usually the fat, ugly ones) thought they could rely on social conditioning to give us all permanent beer goggles and make every bloated hag as desirable as Heather Locklear. If only Barbie had realistic proportions, or we were forced to watch more morbidly obese people on television, then fewer tears would tumble into buckets of ice cream. They keep pushing for "fat acceptance" and keep telling us that "big is beautiful." When that doesn't work, they barrage us with bad clichés and try to convince us that beauty is either in the eye of the beholder, or "on the inside." We might patronize them, or try to be more sensitive, but pretending everyone is equally beautiful is just as absurd and untrue as pretending everyone is an Einstein.
No one wants a Barbie doll with cankles, and the de-objectification of women is at odds with the Zeitgeist of our oversexed Bonobo Masturbation Society. Andrea Dworkin lost, and more teenage girls than ever are watching hardcore porn to learn how to twist, stroke and swallow like the pros. I go to the gym and I see young guys who aren't there to lift or get big. They're following routines to "cut up" and build a body "for the ladies." Those ladies are tanning, getting boob jobs, and trying to look like strippers. A friend who teaches at a high school in California said they had to cancel Halloween dress-up days because the kids didn't want to be scary or cute anymore. Boys and girls alike used the holiday as an excuse to come to school as close to naked as possible.
People used to have decent aspirations. They wanted to have families. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to be good citizens, good Christians, good people. Now everyone wants to be a player and a porn star. Everyone wants to be the kind of monkey that all of the other monkeys wants to rub up against.
We call this matrilineal hump-fest "progress," and seek our moral redemption in recycling.
Sex may be natural, and it sure is fun, but it's just a part of life. A society that over-emphasizes sex to the point where it seems like the only thing in life that means anything is grotesque and degraded, and for most people it delivers more emptiness than ecstasy.
In healthy patriarchies, men push themselves to earn the respect and admiration of other men. They work to prove their strength, courage and competence to each other. Men pride themselves on their reputation for mastery of their bodies, their actions, and their environment. They want to be known for what they can do, not just how well or who they can screw. And they sure as hell don't waste their time trying to figure out what they can do to bedazzle bimbos.
Hell, in some places, when a man is ready to take a wife, he just picks one and kidnaps her. Men used to get married and get on with their lives. It seems like a healthier life path to me, and I've previewed what the other side has to offer.
Recently, I watched Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. There was this scene in it where the Americans had to negotiate with local tribal elders. The elders were a bunch of dead serious-looking old dudes and their long beards were dyed bright red with henna.
Our tribal "allies" in the graveyard of empires have their problems. They shit in their hands and rape little boys. Their customs leave room for improvement.
However, as I watched their grave eyes, I wondered if any of these men had spent much time wondering, "Am I hot, or not?"
Jack blogs at jack-donovan.com
At GloboCorp, the human resources department tries to convince every John and Juanita that they are absolutely essential to the success of the organization. Everyone's creative talents are valued, and everyone from the janitor to the CEO is capable of making tremendous positive contributions. In his recent book about the value of work, Matthew B. Crawford argued that modern corporations devalue meaningful achievement when they pander to us and speak as though everyone were some sort of Einstein.
Americans like to be told that they are brilliant and brave, but as a people these aren't our highest values anymore. Who can name five legitimate, recent war heroes? The hoi polloi don't care too much about who is smart, either. They only care about science when they want to lose weight, win an argument on the Internet, or find out how the world is going to end. If you can name ten guys doing hard science right now, you're probably a scientist.
Most people know they aren't Einsteins, and they really don't care. They have a more pressing concern.
What they're really asking themselves is, "Am I hot, or not?"
Beautiful people are the brightest beacons in our floating world. Attractive models and actors get far more praise and attention than Medal of Honor recipients. People love technology, but they use it to keep up with the Kardasians. They pack into gyms, but strength and fitness are by-products of their desire to be desired. A six-pack has a higher value than a powerful bench press or a heavy squat. No one cares how much Tatum Channing or Brad Pitt lifts, or how fast they can run, or what they can build, or how many men they could defeat in combat. They're admired for being desirable.
It used to be that only young women worried excessively about being desired. In traditional patriarchal societies, a woman who no one wants as a wife becomes a burden on her parents. An unwanted woman could never become a mother or run a household. She remained forever a dependent daughter or an independent, lonely spinster. For women of marriageable age, attractiveness had a very high value, and while the importance of attractiveness decreases with age, most men would still rather have a pretty wife than an ugly one. Whether by habit or by nature, many women tend to enjoy painting and adorning themselves to appear youthful, fertile, feminine and appealing.
However, the woman who cares the most about being desired is the harlot, because her survival depends on her ability to lure men into her loins.
Some will point to male ornamentation as a counter-example, but the motivation behind male embellishment has traditionally been different. When men decorated themselves, they did it to appear more fearsome or to communicate status. Samurai wore rouge, and like many finer points of samurai grooming, they did it so that their enemies would respect them as virile opponents even after they were dead. They didn't tart themselves up to get laid. They did it to gain the respect of men.
Last weekend, a movie about male strippers made $39.2 million dollars at the box office. America's come a long way since Flashdance.
In The Way of Men, I used Bonobos and Chimpanzees to compare the female-oriented society to the male-oriented society. People aren't exactly the same as apes, but I think Chimps and Bonobos make revealing metaphors for where we've been, and where we seem to be headed.
Bonobos live luxuriously, with access to as much food as they need. Female coalitions check male aggression, and males rarely form tight-knit groups. Males don't know who their fathers are, only their mothers. Sex is, as a bar whore once said to a pal of mine, "like shaking hands." Homosexuality is commonplace because sex is a social activity, and everyone has sex with everyone. It's not about reproduction; sex is about mutual masturbation and having a good time. Sex is a major part of bonobo life. Bonobos are said to be peaceful, and while that may not be completely true, they're definitely matrilineal and exceptionally horny.
Chimpanzees form patriarchal hunting groups. The males stick together, and the females end up moving from group to group. Sex is a reproductive activity. Homosexuality is rare. Males dominate females and the males at the top of the male hierarchy control the group.
America is fast becoming a "Bonobo Masturbation Society," devoted to pleasure and organized primarily to serve the interests of females. More and more men are raised by single mothers, and males are discouraged from organizing without female supervision. Sex is social, and the majority of the hard, dangerous work that men used to do is either done by machines, idiot-proofed, or outsourced to countries where life is cheap. Women and dishonorable men micromanage male aggression with endless laws and lawsuits, and bad boys who can't pay big lawyers are drop-kicked into a multi-billion dollar prison industry that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.
In our Bonobo Masturbation Society, fucking is one of the only things men are encouraged to do that actually makes them feel like men.
Throughout the Alt-Right, several writers have criticized "pick-up artist" culture and "game." Because just about the only manly thing that most men are allowed to do is bang, I am more sympathetic. I see what many call game as a kind of gateway masculinity. Game is essentially assertiveness training for a generation of young men who spent most of their lives playing "mother may I?"
Manliness is like a talent. Some males are more gifted than others, but like any talent, masculinity has to be pushed and developed to amount to anything impressive. Boys who were raised by single moms or overprotective parents and put through the public school feminist brain-washing system were never tried or trained by groups of hard men. You can't hand a hen-pecked boy a high school diploma and expect him to spit like Clint Eastwood.
When they talk about game, men in the Manosphere are shoveling through the bullshit that the system tells boys about girls. This is work that needs to be done. If average young guys believe the official malarkey they are told about sex and relationships, they'll be used and abused by entitled American girls for the rest of their lives. And, as they unpack feminist myths about the sexes, I've seen a lot of those guys start to wonder what it really means to be men. This is an important conversation. However, it almost seems like a safer route in today's cultural climate to make chasing poon a long-term lifestyle choice. That's where the positive mean slides toward a negative extreme. Andy Nowicki wrote that if men really wanted to undermine the matriarchy, they would stop fucking. He may have his own (possibly religious) reasons for saying so, but I think he has a point.
Our feminist, globalist handlers would love nothing more than to keep young men -- the most dangerous and potentially revolutionary group in any civilization – completely distracted by tang. And while it may feel like asserting dominance (in conveniently the most harmless way possible), if everything you do is designed to make you more appealing to women, you're an eager vibrator. When your muscle is just for show, when everything you do is to make yourself more desirable, you're playing the female role. When your worth as a man depends on how many women you can lure to your loins, you're just a gigolo.
As Hunter S. Thompson noted, sex is the most fun for amateurs. It's great when you're young, pretty, naïve and carefree – but "old whores don't do much giggling."
Mark Simpson had a lot of this figured out when he coined the word "metrosexual" way back in 1994. The metrosexual is not necessarily gay or effeminate in the flamboyant sense of the word – that's just the way people picked up the word. Simpson's idea of the metrosexual is a "mirror man" whose highest narcissistic concerns are pleasure-seeking and being regarded as "desirable." He may be in love with himself, but that, too, is a shallow kind of love. He cares more about how he looks and how well he fucks than what he has achieved or how well he is respected. It's a harlot's vanity.
Hugh Hefner was far ahead of his time. It was homosexual men who pioneered the bonobo lifestyle en masse. Before today's PUAs were in pre-school, homos were doing it for the numbers, looking for validation, basing their self-worth on how many and how hot. Homosexual men rejected traditional male roles and expectations, and channeled all of their masculine aggression into sex for the sake of sex. Their idea of masculinity became masturbatory – a pumped up Tom of Finland caricature of masculine form without function or honor or virtue. Homosexual men, because they were men, set the cultural stage for objectifying men the way that men have always objectified women.
As pilot bonobos, the homos discovered the downsides of harlotry. An experienced player was bound to acquire a handful of STDs, and AIDS practically wiped out an entire generation of "sexually liberated" men. For many, there are also psychological costs. Being desired is a drug, and it's addictive. When it's your highest value, it becomes your identity. One of the problems – and this has always been a curse to women – is that sexual attractiveness is linked to the mating instinct, and it peaks in the young. Men mature more flatteringly than women, but most men who trade on their sex appeal won't relax into the confident, secure, middle-aged manhood of their forefathers. Like homos and movie stars, I wonder how many of today's players will chase steroids and sex drugs and eventually convince themselves that maybe that Kenny Rogers face lift will look better on them than it does on him. (It won't, fellas. You'll still look like an old lesbian who can't blink.) There's something particularly desperate, sad and undignified about a man of a certain age who spends too much time looking for sexual validation.
What's worse is that straight men aren't in the market for men, they're in the market for women, so biology puts them at a major disadvantage. Game strategist Heartiste recently posted about an online dating experience where together, the two best looking guys managed to get a total of 50 messages from women, while the most attractive woman got over 536 messages from men in the same time period. That playing field will never be close to equal, but game is gaining popularity because men see that disparity and want to increase their odds.
Good-looking men with some game may be able to keep at it for most of their lives, and they'll end up with some good stories. A small minority of men have always been libertines, and some men are probably particularly well suited to it. Some will have regrets, and some won't.
The problem isn't what happens to a few players, but what we become as a society when everyone wants to be a player. Libertinism used to be a form of rebellion, but increasingly, it's part of the program. In a society where sex and attractiveness are the highest values, what happens to the other two-thirds of the curve?
The flesh won't be democratized. Attractiveness isn't any more evenly distributed than strength, size, or IQ. The world is full of fat, ugly people. People can improve their lot with diet and exercise and grooming – and they should – but you can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Some men and women just aren't that great looking. A lot of people are actually pretty repulsive. A few should probably avoid daylight altogether, because they frighten small children.
Women have always been aware of the cruel elitism of beauty's natural hierarchy. In societies where other virtues had higher value, they could focus on piety or simply being good mothers. When women were "sexually liberated," some feminists (usually the fat, ugly ones) thought they could rely on social conditioning to give us all permanent beer goggles and make every bloated hag as desirable as Heather Locklear. If only Barbie had realistic proportions, or we were forced to watch more morbidly obese people on television, then fewer tears would tumble into buckets of ice cream. They keep pushing for "fat acceptance" and keep telling us that "big is beautiful." When that doesn't work, they barrage us with bad clichés and try to convince us that beauty is either in the eye of the beholder, or "on the inside." We might patronize them, or try to be more sensitive, but pretending everyone is equally beautiful is just as absurd and untrue as pretending everyone is an Einstein.
No one wants a Barbie doll with cankles, and the de-objectification of women is at odds with the Zeitgeist of our oversexed Bonobo Masturbation Society. Andrea Dworkin lost, and more teenage girls than ever are watching hardcore porn to learn how to twist, stroke and swallow like the pros. I go to the gym and I see young guys who aren't there to lift or get big. They're following routines to "cut up" and build a body "for the ladies." Those ladies are tanning, getting boob jobs, and trying to look like strippers. A friend who teaches at a high school in California said they had to cancel Halloween dress-up days because the kids didn't want to be scary or cute anymore. Boys and girls alike used the holiday as an excuse to come to school as close to naked as possible.
People used to have decent aspirations. They wanted to have families. They wanted to do good work. They wanted to be good citizens, good Christians, good people. Now everyone wants to be a player and a porn star. Everyone wants to be the kind of monkey that all of the other monkeys wants to rub up against.
We call this matrilineal hump-fest "progress," and seek our moral redemption in recycling.
Sex may be natural, and it sure is fun, but it's just a part of life. A society that over-emphasizes sex to the point where it seems like the only thing in life that means anything is grotesque and degraded, and for most people it delivers more emptiness than ecstasy.
In healthy patriarchies, men push themselves to earn the respect and admiration of other men. They work to prove their strength, courage and competence to each other. Men pride themselves on their reputation for mastery of their bodies, their actions, and their environment. They want to be known for what they can do, not just how well or who they can screw. And they sure as hell don't waste their time trying to figure out what they can do to bedazzle bimbos.
Hell, in some places, when a man is ready to take a wife, he just picks one and kidnaps her. Men used to get married and get on with their lives. It seems like a healthier life path to me, and I've previewed what the other side has to offer.
Recently, I watched Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. There was this scene in it where the Americans had to negotiate with local tribal elders. The elders were a bunch of dead serious-looking old dudes and their long beards were dyed bright red with henna.
Our tribal "allies" in the graveyard of empires have their problems. They shit in their hands and rape little boys. Their customs leave room for improvement.
However, as I watched their grave eyes, I wondered if any of these men had spent much time wondering, "Am I hot, or not?"
Jack blogs at jack-donovan.com
