Manosphere Rhetoric is Broken

Some "Redpilled" Guys are Surprisingly Naive

The meteoric rise of the manosphere is one of the biggest unacknowledged revolutions of the internet age. Within a decade, the sphere has catapulted from a small and hated fringe to its core concepts being accepted by mainstream figures, even if not acknowledging their source. It has also birthed countless offshoots and sub-cliques with their own flavor. You have the sex-maximizing guys telling men to never marry and, if married, to have an affair. Others with a Christian world model endorse marriage and fidelity while still demanding excellence from men. They are to lead the family and maintain a sense of purpose, even if it causes conflicts with the wife. As with every internet culture that has evolved, it has a plethora of phrases and concepts such as frame, shit test, covert contract, etc. that have been examined and expanded upon along with a canon of foundational works to absorb.

It started out with a small cohort of men who learned the lessons their elders taught was worse than useless. It was literal anti-knowledge. Whether because culture changed or the “lessons” never worked in any time is immaterial. Men playing by the rules weren’t getting what they wanted. The pick-up artists of the 2000’s were born out of this, taking notes and figuring out what worked in getting a woman in bed. These guys weren’t the most attractive and had little money, but honed techniques that ran circles around more attractive men in getting women’s attention.

This evolved into the RedPill, a movement less interested in specific pick-up techniques and more in general rules of behavior to follow for success. Its praxeology expanded from one-night stands to success in long-term relationships and marriage. Frustrated men in every stage of life started sharing notes on what actually created success with women. Some saved their sex-lives and marriage, some blew everything up. These were all data-points, documented in deep detail, that added to their vault of knowledge. Rather than data sets from a survey, the ideas stemmed from extensive “field reports” going into meticulous detail what was done and what happened.

It’s mildly amusing that the principles they finally figured out coincided with the classic male archetypes well-known to the silent generation and earlier. Everyone has read the stalwart family man who does what needs to be done, going against his wife’s pleas. They’ve also read of the Casanovas and their debauched flings. Both understood the world in largely the same way, the only core difference between the men being their sense of morality and personal duty.

The self-denigration of such phrases as “happy wife, happy life”, “she’s the boss”, choreplay, and countless others was an anomaly largely pushed by the boomer generation that left both sexes miserable. If you talked to a man in the 1800’s on RedPill concepts, he would look at you with confusion, arguing you’re making common sense too damn complicated. For young men who are never taught these things though, it’s like discovering plutonium.

A core principle of the RedPill has always been you can’t force anyone to do anything and can only incentivize good behavior. You can only control your own behavior and your own mindset. You need to Own Your Shit and refuse to live in another person’s mental framework. The focus was always on actionable information but, like anything, it started to attract those who had little interest in improving their plight, but to feel superior because they understood the world. They wanted a hug box assuring them that all women are bitches who will get what is coming to them for being nagging whores. The Men Go Their Own Way movement is the most obvious example of this, along with the irony that they seem to talk a lot about people they claim don’t matter.

As manosphere influence has grown, an entire industry has developed looking at macro-trends regarding sexual relations. Two types of people tend to occupy this space, the data spergs who have a genuine interest at how gender relations have collapsed, and let’s be clear, they have collapsed. The much larger cohort finds macro-analysis another good avenue to bash women. This has created a plethora of narratives that are often either wrong or technically true but useless. While many men want certain things to be reality based on their sense of justice, everyone has to engage the world as it is. Depending on fantasy only decreases your ability to adapt. The following are a few common misleading arguments, but by no means comprehensive of the space.

Women with a high number of partners are more likely to divorce you.

This is largely based on the following graph.

On first glance, this looks pretty bulletproof. You see a clear line of divorces as the number of sexual partners increase and, while this is not causation, it looks like pretty good evidence. However, you need to look at the data set, in this case women who are in “stable” marriages to their current partner for more than five years. Note also that this is all marriages, not first marriages. If we use different criteria we get very different results.

For this study it delineates first time marriages and is for women ages 15-45 who have been a married at least once. As you can see, the virgins are still far less likely, largely due to strong religious ties, but things get murkier after that. Afterwards the information is muddled and worthless to reach any conclusion. This Reddit post goes into excellent detail as to the nuances of this.

Also, body count doesn’t seem to really effect their marital happiness.

Sorry guys, that girl whoring it up in college is just as likely as the “nice girl” to have a happy marriage. Your revenge fantasy is based on nothing.

Women with College Degrees are More Likely to Divorce You

This trope is one of the easiest to refute. While it is true that college educated women are far more liberal in terms of voting patterns, they are paradoxically far more conservative when it comes to home life. If you look that the stats, college educated women with a bachelors are actually more likely to both marry and stay married than those with only a high-school education.

Really, this is so easily disproven it’s hard to fathom why this is a talking point except a strange nostalgia for a country that hasn’t existed for at least fifty years. The talk of finding a nice girl in the country who never went to college is idiotic to anyone who has lived in the country. The good girls who don’t go to college marry their sweetheart in town quite young. The singles that are left aren’t exactly a catch.

College Educated Women Pursue a Career Instead of Having Kids

This is one of the tropes that is technically true, but not nearly as profound as one would think. While there is a fertility penalty regarding educational attainment, it’s quite small.

Source

The difference in fertility between a high-school grad and a bachelor’s is 0.3, and both are below the necessary 2.2 total fertility rate to sustain a population. Unless you want to marry a girl who dropped out of high-school to ensure you have lots of kids (good luck with that), the reality is the plummeting fertility is somewhat because of education, but a drop in the bucket compared to other factors. Frankly, it’s collapsing among every cohort, and removing a large portion of women from college education would likely only minimally increase fertility. The argument that more women would marry if they didn’t attend college is shaky too, given college age women are more likely to marry. As a man, you’re better off finding a girl on campus looking for her MRS degree than trying to find the high-school dropout diamond-in-the-rough for your big family.

Most Women are Riding the “Cock-Carousel”

While promiscuity has increased dramatically since the sexual revolution, the average woman’s number of partners has been rather tame. She still prefers mating with someone in a long-term relationship as opposed to random swings, and most are not whoring it up every weekend like many manosphere pundits like to think. Half of women have 4 or less partners in their lifetime, and only 13 percent have fifteen partners or above. Given sex is largely available for women anywhere and anytime with little social stigma, these are modest figures.

Source

As you can see though, one part the manosphere gets right is a certain percentage of men are getting A LOT of action, with 28 percent having 15 or more sexual partners.

Wives Cucking Their Husbands is Common

Infidelity among females is uncommon in marriage. Males, as would be expected, have more affairs, even in modern times.

Men cheating, while bad, doesn’t make the woman raise a child that she doesn’t know is another woman’s, for obvious reasons. So, what percentage of women have a secret affair that involves bearing a child that isn’t her husband’s?

There are some harrowing statistics out there, like one that states 30 percent of men who get a paternity test find out the child is not his. Of course, this is a ludicrously biased sample, as men who get such a test have deep suspicion of infidelity. If we have a more objective analysis, what would they find? With good studies, the rate of false paternity is only 1-3 percent. Luckily the fear is overblown, but if you want to get that paternity test, more power to you.

Some Rhetoric is True.

This doesn’t mean all the talking points are wrong. Many are indisputably true. Some examples are:

• Divorce-rape is absolutely a thing, and a man can see a massive chunk of his income being spent on child-support

  

• Parental custody in divorce strongly favors women.

  

  Source

• Women are, by far, the biggest domestic spenders in a marriage.

• Single women are far more left-wing than men, and getting worse.

• Marriage rates are plummeting.

This is not to discount valid issues, but to acknowledge a lot of “hard truths” people have taken for granted aren’t actual truths, but a comforting fiction.

Facts and Logic, Arguing with Women, and other Nonsense

Complaining is cathartic. Everyone needs a good rant once in a while, and I’m no stranger to doing so myself. It is also a time sink and should be treated as such. When a whole industry is formed around directing your attention and anger at an outgroup, it should give you pause. Sure, dunking on some dumb broad with a picture of an empty egg carton is funny, but it’s not moving the ball forward. While modern culture is pathetically naive in thinking sex relations can be completely cooperative, like there are no conflicting needs between the sexes, it’s also wrong to say a relationship is adversarial and zero-sum. A woman’s gain isn’t necessarily a man’s loss. As cliche as it sounds, we need to get along.

Two core concepts are emphasized ad nauseum in The Red Pill: 1. that no woman is going to be convinced by facts and logic, and 2. arguing with women is pointless. You can disagree, but most people in the space believe it. Billions of bytes are sent lampooning guys trying to negotiate sex, sometimes going to the length of making a spreadsheet documenting her countless refusals. They will lambast men who act like totally unattractive wimps while arguing with their wife or girlfriend for acknowledgment, then watch podcasts of guys arguing with women or rage-post on social media.

What’s the endgame here? Even if all their stats and arguments were true, what then? Do they think that a cabal of women, after being hit with FACTS AND LOGIC, will all come together and say “hey, those online anons are correct. Let’s work to uproot the entire social structure to make things fairer.” Is all this talk of body count and fertility going to make a woman with a dead bedroom want to sleep with her husband again? Are a crowd of women going to throw themselves on you when you post your twentieth “All Women Are Like That” rant?

Women generally don’t care what you think unless you’re her dad or husband, and even then, it’s iffy. Why would they? You think you, as a man, can shame a woman? They’ve navigated women’s circles their entire lives, seamlessly living through passive-aggressive power plays, social landmines, and subtle jabs that would make your head spin. You’ll always be in the bush-league. Men have many strengths, but that’s not one of them.

Originally, the purpose of The Red Pill was simple. How can I, as a Man, get my relationship needs met? It had no interest in saving the world, understanding most men were unwilling to do the work necessary to get more out of life. Over time, it morphed into a vast empire of collective misery and finger-pointing. Stats were never the point. Grand theories were once frowned upon. It used to be a movement that demanded accountability and rejected impotent yelling into the void. Maybe it’s time to return to those roots. Maybe it’s time to sit down and compare notes again.

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