In every woman-led social coup d’etat I’ve seen— and you’ll see many if you stick around on this Earth for long— the most glaring but overlooked characteristic is the same one that drives all of women’s philosophical endeavors: externalization of responsibility.
That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Women are looking for a leader. As Patrice said, they don’t want to win, they want a winner. That’s a shocking statement to the average listener, who has been force-fed pipedreams of equality and just-talking-things-out their whole life by nebulous forces that expect to be trusted without looking at the facts— or the consequences.
But we’re here to get down and dirty and dig up the bare, elemental truth. As Patrice also noted, a queen is the highest position a woman can attain (metaphorically— he may not have heard of empresses or secretaries of state,) which comes from marrying the king. And happiness and all good things trickle down from the king.
A lot of women are struggling to achieve the unattainable—kingship— by blatantly emulating man-ness. It’s a tragic thing, as no little girl ever grew up dreaming of working the oil rig, or being the dominant personality in her household, at least not without some kind of tremendous pressure that warped their natural disposition.
The cold ruthless CEO, the overbearing wife who feels compelled to manage and control everything. Even today’s female comedians, who can’t get through a show without talking about their pussies.
That’s not their invention, that’s what they think men want to hear. The lukewarm IQ male watching sips boredly on the lukewarm Natural Ice they’ve switched to to try and honor their Facebook promise to boycott Bud: “I guess this is better than whatever boring story they were going to try to make funny.” Nevermind that both brands are owned by Anheuser-Busch, or that he created the show by being the audience.
I’m not blaming women here. As always, I’m blaming you, the man. Women are the very real victims of a diabolical one-two punch: a media (sorry, I mean culture) constantly telling them that men are too stupid, weak, and impotent to take charge, and a sea of men that happily confirm it. Step up and prove her wrong? Eh, too much work. She’ll just yell at me.
When I parrot Patrice in saying it’s your fault, (the men’s,) that is not just a philosophical stance, that is a very real and demonstratible material reality. Despite the infiltration of women into every male space that exists (we’ll talk more about that later) this is a man’s world still, and when women are acting out, that’s because they’re not getting the resources and guidance from the man in her life, whether that’s husband, boyfriend, date, father, brother, doesn’t matter. Which means they’re getting it somewhere else, even if it’s something as seemingly innocuous as television and a part-time job.
Men have vacated their God-given responsibility to exert pressure on and promote virtue in their women. Why? Again, what Patrice already said:
“Women’s power is in your fear of… whatever it is they’re gonna do.”
Small concessions led here. You didn’t want an argument, didn’t want to deal with a bad mood for the rest of the day (or month), didn’t want to lose some sex tonight. A hundred thousand little concessions later and now you don’t want to cause conflict because she might throw your computer, herself, and you too out of the window, blame you for it, then divorce you and take the house, dog, and the kids.
Changing the direction of the ship now would be hard and dangerous. Too hard and dangerous? Maybe, but if you’re not at the helm, who is? And where is the ship headed if you choose to just maintain? Keep the peace? What’s the saying, if you’re not growing, you’re…
And you’re not going to change it overnight, buddy. It didn’t happen overnight. Every guy who’s gotten online and read a few articles from trp or relationship advice or whatever affeminate wrongheaded “life coach” or pickup artist they subscribe to has gotten the urge to take things from zero to sixty a.s.a.p, and many have, usually with disasterous results. You can’t change the relationship overnight because the happinesss and the state of affairs trickle down from you, and you haven’t changed yourself.
Are you going to? Really? How?
We’ve heard a million reasons how men aren’t doing right: conflict avoidance; past mistakes haunting and present flaws glaring; not leading by example; bad precedents that seem set in stone. But we don’t really talk about why men are fucking up:
Because we don’t have a philosophy.
We don’t know what we’re doing or why we do it. Not just in the big picture, sure, you must set your missions and goals, but here we’re digging into the nittiest of gritties: every interaction you have with your woman. It all has meaning that defines your relationship, even when it doesn’t. It must for you.
What else matters if not those little interactions? The wedding ring, the mortage payment, the promises made, promises broken? Even those are just the material and spiritual sum of the little choices you made— and didn’t make.
Ask yourself why you didn’t check her on that bullshit thing she did that made your gut sour. Once you can answer that, you can decide whether that’s a good reason, or whether you should have checked her. And let’s be clear, you almost always should.
Why? Jordan Peterson’s 5th principle in 12 Rules for Life, “Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” — Why should it be any different with the woman who miraculously bumbled into your uncareful stewardship, yearning with her heart of hearts for a man to guide her and protect her, only for you to tell her, “You’re on your own, kid”?
Let ‘em skate, don’t let ‘em make you hate
Giving her what she needs is the key, and if you don’t know what she wants, how can you be expected to give it to her? Medicine is bitter, but better than festering. Candy doesn’t cure infections, and your relationship has the gangrene.
The “Wife is happy, everyone’s happy” crowd is just a porcelain mask over the Screwtape-tier devilish lie that giving her what she wants is key. It’s one of many suspicious dictates that are taken for granted, yet no one can really explain why. It’s an oppressive falsehood that was passed down to you from the mind of another weak (or evil) man. That’s not your real thought, that’s your cope for the shame of being beat down by someone who sits down to pee.
But we don’t negotiate with terrorists. We cultivate good relations and set expectations.
Speak firmly and carry a big stick.
Let me repeat, we don’t know what we’re doing or what’s going on because we haven’t figured it out ourselves. And unlike what many limpwristed feminized hippies will tell you, that’s less a process of self-discovery and more accurately a process of self-direction.
Women are reactive. They tend to fit the environment they’re in, and they’re usually happy to if the environment is good or at least sufficiently entertaining. Men, however, have the power to create, to transcend the pressures of the world around them, and give new shape to the environment that their loved ones will exist in. In other words, men have the power to craft a better world.
Is there a greater sin than not to do it?
“But I just am how I am.”
Yes, there are parts of us that for most purposes are set in stone, but even deciding which those are is a decision itself. And if that decision is a sniveling passive yesman who has tried to internalize the delusion that conflict between himself and his— yes, I’ll use the phrase— his spiritual and mental subordinates… then I feel sorry for you, and that you choose to be that, and are right now still choosing to be that. And I feel even worse for those in your care who have to suffer for it.
You don’t know who you are because you haven’t decided to become it, to live it, to breath it, to exude it and make the world around you bask in it.
“I can’t control everything!”
No kidding, you haven’t even decided to control yourself. But the prudent man’s task is to know when he needs to step in and when he needs to let things be. That’s not an envitable task, and that’s why your woman is frustrated as you bumble around confused on it, trying to fill in for you while you’re in la-la land.
And buddy, you’ve been letting too many things just be.
It’s not fate. You’re just retarded.
Wake up, grow up, and figure out why you’re going to tell her to stop annoying you and getting in the way of what you’re trying to do for yourself, for her, and for your family.
…What are you trying to do again?
What future are you painting?
Explore the irony of this article, ladies, that despite the title, the bulk of this content so far is a message directly to men, with only a very simple and easily enacted message for you.
This blog isn’t to help you. It’s to help men.
You have all the support in the world from your yea-sayers, a whole sea of other confused girls that are elementally disabled from telling you you’re wrong, because then they would be wrong, and because misery loves company.
They don’t even understand what you or they are doing wrong, and if they did they wouldn’t tell you anyway, either out of conscious or unconscious sabotage, or avoidance of conflict (since you wouldn’t take her advice anyway, unless it was already what you wanted to do.)
Nevermind social systems and the political system and the court system and the once-male workplace, where you get the sweetheart jobs a teenager or old guy would usually get, since you can’t lift a heavy box and you call out once a week due to hormone-induced insanity.
If you’re still reading, you’re either good and angry, or you’re a real trooper— a soldier— or at least you want to be one, or become one again, like the hot little happy thing you used to be, before he became… how he is. I was just testing you, private. Let’s hop to it.
This blog is to help you, by helping your man, and the men around you. By helping your man, I’m giving you exactly what your darling little heart truly yearns for, a strong man you can lean on so you don’t have to feel unsafe and alone in a world that, if you step outside your cellphone screen or the roof over your head, is really quite scary and dangerous. I’m shocked you don’t sit around with a gun in your hand. It’d make you feel safer, and your husband will definitely be more apt to listen to you.
Helping you directly though, that’s your man’s job, so the only advice we can give you is simple but beautifully straightforward. It requires no hard thinking, no reading two dozen self-help books, no counseling, no therapy, no degree, not even experience, just a little faith and only the simplest (if the most daunting) of emotional effort:
Respect him.
You don’t understand a man’s real need, (notice I use the singular. One need. Respect.) let alone his wants. That’s why you choose to do what you think is sexy or loving or memorable when it comes time to do something special “for him.”
“Oh, candles and an outfit you feel sexy in, after an expensive dinner I paid for? I ordered the sloppy blowjob, but I guess I’ll muscle through this, yet another chore. So she doesn’t yell at me.”
Yes, if he doesn’t show appreciation for whatever you decided to so selflessly serve him—as ample repayment for him providing for every material, mental, emotional, and spiritual resource in your life that you take for granted— then goodness knows you’ll hold him fully accountable for “ruining it. Again!”
“He should appreciate any gift he’s given, even if it’s not the gift he wanted. It’s childish and unattractive to spurn someone’s expense or effort on your behalf.”
You’re missing the point. The point is that you didn’t care about what he actually wanted, you did what you wanted. That’s childish and unattractive. But as always, who cares what he needs? He should make what he wants happen if he’s a real man, and if he doesn’t, I’ll hate him for that too.
Talk about having your cake and shitting on it too.
You only want to talk about what one person is doing wrong, as long as it’s anyone but you. Best of all if it’s him.
You want to make your man’s heart flutter? Stop saying you love him. He knows that, and he knows how little it means, because two weeks ago in that big fight, you said you hated him. Sixteen times.
You want to make your man’s heart soar and think you’ve been replaced with a version of yourself from another timeline where you’re not terrible?
Tell him you respect him.
Of course you probably won’t mean it the first few times, or the first hundred times. But eventually you will.
But that’s beside the point. Your job is to make him believe it.
And rest assured, it’s your single most important job. Even the Bible says so:
Ephesians 5:22-23 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
A general who’s soldiers have lost faith in him faces an uphill battle of the gravest kind, a truly life or death struggle. If his closest lieutenant who once loved and respected him now despises him, ridicules him, challenges him for control at every turn, speaks out against him in front of the younger soldiers, that general is lacking the support that the system has ordained for him, that his lieutenant pledged an oath to give to him through thick and thin.
And that lieutenant isn’t just screwing the ol’ general over, they’re screwing themselves over, and the entire army that they supposedly care about. Maybe the lieutenant is thinking a bit too much of herself— er, I mean, himself.
A general who’s soldiers look up to him and stick with him even through catastrophe will eventually snap out of his drunken gloom and emerge from his delapidated command tent, remember the young soldier he was that’s still living inside him, and call to assemble the troops. “We’re going to push the Enemy back. We’re going to whip these bastards. We’re going to win.”
The Enemy isn’t your general, it’s everything that threatens your army, everyone but your family, everyone that threatens the mission. But you forgot the mission and forgot who the Enemy was, and now you’re engaging in repeated and continued friendly fire.
And maybe that’s the general’s fault for being a bum. In fact, I’m with you, it is his fault. But as the going got tough and the tough got worse, did you build your general up or tear him down?
You want to hold it against him, make sure he knows how hard it was to face those battles without what you— a lieutenant, not a general— perceived as proper leadership, while you spurned every attempt he made to lead. Maybe you don’t want to win. Maybe you just want petty revenge. That’s not the stuff of a grown woman, that’s the stuff of an overgrown teenager disguised as a reasonable, loving woman.
Maybe it’s time to get a new general.
But you’ll be the same miserable lieutenant you have been. No, in fact, you’ll be knocked right back down to private, working your way up the ladder of trust and intimacy and hoping a new general (if you can land a general) treats you right because, what? “I ain’t taking no shit from no man ever again!”
Lovely, that’ll attract Prince Charming. Nevermind that you decided it was better to let your last army fall apart and let everyone die just because you couldn’t salute and say, “Yes sir!” I’m sure a much better general will be dying to recruit you.
What? It feels emotionally disingenuous to support the man you pledged to love forever, that you married, that you have or want to have kids with? It was easy to promise, but once the horrifying realization that you have to actually work even when it sucks sets in, well, I guess your feelings are more important than winning, and that’s been the whole problem. He let your feelings run the show. Now look where things are.
Don’t worry, if you want to hold onto your hate and disgust, so be it, sister. Girl power! But the general is still better than you and that’s why he’s the general. Don’t be surprised when, after he snaps out of it, he’s gotta verbally whip the attitude out of you and remind you who’s in charge.
Or you could snap out of it and take your place as second in command. Bring those beneath you in line and support the leader in making things right again. He has to do all the actual doing, the hard stuff, the man stuff that you know you don’t want to do. All you have to do is show respect.
“My girlfriend, my boyfriend, my bitch wife, my stupid husband, my kids, liberals, Republicans, the government, taxes, the economy, the customers, black people, white people, my bad back, my bloody hemorrhoids, that damn guy across the street that plays music too loud— they’re the problem!”
Everytime you hear this, be sure it’s a deflection from the brutal reality that we all fight tooth and nail to avoid: “I’m the problem.”
Those things well may very well be real sources of woes for you, but even in that you can only choose how you react to them. Only you can choose what to do, and what you do is who you are.
The good news is that this blog isn’t here to blame you, it’s to remind your guy in no unclear terms that he let things get here. (Due note: That’s not your job. It’s mine.)
He has to dig himself out of this mess, figure out how to make things right in the house again, how to establish new positive patterns, how to become attractive to you again.
It’s a hard road for him.
It requires a lot of thinking, a lot of trial and error, a 24/7 no-breaksies commitment to something that he has had to figure out entirely himself, (no one ever taught him how to be a man, because no one taught his dad how to be a man either, or his dad before him,) and now he’s trying to deliver his guidance he had to strive and struggle to figure out all for himself, to you freely and in love, and show exactly how to be loveable, so that you can have him and have happiness. Not a bad deal for you. See how it all trickles down?
But you have a role too, and you’ve forgotten it. Fortunately your mission is much simpler, and you can start today, right now, the next time you talk to him: Tell him you respect him, that you support him, and listen to him.
A greater Being than any of us said it better than me, and it worked for a lot of lovely ladies who were just as frustrated and hopeless and angry as you:
Ephesians 5:33 - Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
Psalm 33:18-19 - Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy; To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.
These are goldmines the way you use patrice philosophy to break things down is genius.