The Illusion of Dominance: Why The Redpill Is Wrong

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The “redpill” is a loose body of seduction instructions for men and supporting analyses of female sexual psychology. It contains some truths and some falsehoods, and this brief essay won't go over each of these point by point. Instead I'll explain something very fundamental it gets wrong. So fundamental, in fact, that you'll discover the redpill is supporting the very system young men believe it overturns. It promises to empower men to get what they want; instead it makes them into the submissive slaves of women. In explaining why this is the case, I'll provide an analysis of male sexual psychology and the process of courtship that will be useful to men and women alike even after the redpill fad is forgotten.

I've never had any interest in writing seduction advice for men, and yet my starting point here is indeed seduction advice—for women. In the process of producing an explicit account of how women can better seduce men, I realized what was missing from the redpill. Namely, an accurate analysis of male sexual psychology. In their narrow focus on manipulating women, the pick-up artists behind the redpill looked too little in the mirror. They glossed over male sexuality and courtship behavior with simplistic explanations that don't stand up to scrutiny. They failed to understand what men's true goals were and why they held them, and accepted a caricature as if it were living flesh. This made it impossible for them to see the bigger picture.

Their error hinges on the problem of dominance. It will take a while to both explain what I mean by “the problem of dominance” and provide enough context for you to make sense of this problem, so please be patient.

Perhaps it's best to start on a topic that's familiar ground for redpill devotees. Women find violent domination arousing. Today it's no longer even shocking to say so. I should probably write “many” women or “most” women, but when we're about to tread so deep into the muck of human psychology these weasel words seem inappropriate. The truth is indeed that a large majority of women find violent domination arousing, though what differs to a very important extent is the degree. For some an aura of strength and an intimidating gesture are enough, and the right tail of female taste seems outright repulsive, and scarcely believable. Yet one doesn't have to go very far along that right tail to find women who are aroused by extremes of violence no sensible person would speak of in public. The bulk of women fall between these two groups, and the exact degree of violent domination they enjoy is hard to discern. Not only hard to discern because they conceal their preferences for the sake of social respectability, but also because, as I'll explain later, the preferences themselves appear to be flexible.

Submission to male dominance is an ego boost coated in the fluffy frosting of freedom from responsibility. It's gift-wrapped for someone else, but you get to eat it yourself and still take credit for giving it to him. If worst comes to worst, you also score points for being a victim, because he brutally stole it from you right before he forced you to savor it. And he has nothing to complain about. After all, the whole thing was about what he wanted. (Or was it?)

When I analyzed a random selection of bestselling vintage and modern romance novels written for women, scenes that glorified forceful male domination and even outright rape were ubiquitous. This does not, however, imply that the women who read and enjoy these novels all want to be raped. Rather, they like the idea of being desired and dominated by someone stronger—and “forced seduction,” as the euphemism calls it, is the most vivid representation of this. A key word here that many overlook is desire. As I explain in Dispelling Beauty Lies,

“Men's erotic sensibility focuses on the female form. Women's erotic sensibility, however, does not focus on the male form. Rather, it focuses on the pleasured female form as an object of desire. That's why the erotica commonly preferred by women includes 'forced seduction' (an enactment of desire), lesbian pornography (a spectacle of the pleasured female form), and even solo girls (female form as object of the desiring male gaze), but not male centerfolds. Male beauty is relevant because it affects the value of the desiring subject. Only to a lesser degree is it the object of erotic contemplation.”

The rape fantasy is the most striking example of this sexual psychology. It mixes together a heady cocktail of male power and dominance in a scenario that centers around the heroine, and specifically the heroine's desirability. The hero's desire for her is so strong that he becomes caught up in emotion and physically overcomes her resistance to his advances to give her, against her will—well, exactly what she actually wanted anyway. As an extra bonus, the fantasy completely frees the heroine from any guilt for seeking out the jouissance she herself desired, because she bears no responsibility for what happens.

If we view the rape fantasy purely as a psycho-literary figment, we're forced (against our will!) to recognize it as ingenious and perfect. And yet it's a fantasy, not reality. It's a fantasy that the common run of men are better off not knowing about, because its real meaning is so counterintuitive to them that it's almost impossible to grasp. “All women want to be violated so get to work,” is not only not the message, it completely misses the psychology at play. Women are looking for signals of strength and power here, yes; but also for desire, and specifically desire that comes from a worthy subject whom they secretly desire in return. Were the rapist-hero's skill at mind-reading any less precise, were his attractiveness any less magnificent, he'd be little more than a villain.

So to repeat, women are looking, among other things, for signals of desire. This isn't only because high desire indicates a healthy libido. It's because a man whose desires are fixated on you to such a degree makes a better mate than one who doesn't. He will be less likely to stray, less likely to set you aside, and more likely to treat you well. Here some will object and say that a weak man with low libido will treat a woman better than a lustful, violent romance-novel hero. But that's a meaningless kind of “better,” because it comes at the cost of masculinity and health. It's painless, but flaccid—need I say that this isn't what a woman wants? For men who have both masculinity and health, he whose sexual desires are stronger and more fixated on you will make a better mate when all else is equal. Naturally it's not that women are thinking this through with logic, but that the logic—which is accurate, by and large—has shaped their instincts.

To understand why this point about desire is so crucial we need to turn the mirror back on men. Men are little inclined to self-reflection, and women too understand male sexual psychology much less than they believe, because the temptation to project their fantasies of men onto real ones thoroughly tramples their intuition for character. Women become so enamored with erotic dreams of dominant heroes that they fail to notice actual men don't want to dominate them. My assertion that men don't want to dominate them even seems unbelievable to women on first blush, and offensive on second. Bizarrely, a lack of introspection leads men to accept women's fantasy projection of male psychology as if it were, or should be, reality, when it's very far from it. The result is that everyone thinks they understand male sexual psychology, but they don't. They are badly wrong.

To explain I'll cite a few relevant passages from the section on seduction in Dispelling Beauty Lies. You can find further evidence for my claims there if you are in doubt.

“It may be tempting to project a lust for domination onto men, but this gives you the wrong idea of what actually turns them on. Women are far more aroused by male violence and dominance than men are. BDSM is sexual entertainment for women, not men. And not only is violent pornography not reality, it's a false representation of male desire. Men who engage in consensual violence beyond mild rough behavior usually do so to fulfill female sexual fantasies, not for their own pleasure. This means consensual violent male 'domination' is in truth male submission to female wishes, and quite the reverse of genuine domination. When a man ties you up, gags you, or chokes you, he's submitting to you, not the other way around.”

Men's indifference to or rather distaste for the dominance/submission dynamic isn't an accident. It's part of their broader mate-selection strategy. And that strategy isn't complicated. As soon as you notice men don't want to dominate and ask why (few people have done one of these things, let alone both), the correct answer presents itself: men want to be desired, and for exactly the same reason women do.

“Much like women, men do want to be wanted. And for good reason. A partner who wants you is always more reliable, and therefore more valuable, than a partner who doesn't. That remains true no matter how strong and powerful you are. This is an important point you should read twice. There are no exceptions.”

So both sexes like to see signs their lover desires them. The signs they look for have the same meaning, but they're superficially opposite. Women want men to demonstrate desire by overcoming their resistance to its fulfillment. This manifests as a constraint (for example, “he desires me so much he'll force me to submit”). Men, on the other hand, want women to demonstrate desire by expressing it spontaneously and voluntarily in both words and actions. Women can only do this when they're free from constraint.

Obviously freedom and constraint are contradictory. And that's the crux of what I call the problem of dominance.

The fact that there's a gap between women's desire for dominance and men's inclination to provide it is hardly news to redpill proponents even if they've never phrased the issue in this particular way. That gap is indeed the main reason for the redpill's existence. But they've overlooked its source and significance in the rush for a band-aid that can promise men an easy shortcut to getting laid. Their proposed shortcut is, in brief: fake dominance, provide women whatever violence they desire, and wrap the whole thing up in a bow of feigned indifference that serves as a display of status. Too easy. (Or is it?)

When we reevaluate the redpill band-aid in light of our analysis so far, we come upon a series of troubling contradictions. Both courtship and sex are made into chores where men do things they don't like to appeal to female fantasies that are disconnected from reality. Redpill men are effectively barefoot in the kitchen doing the dishes for women—but while posing in a very dominant way and “maintaining a dominant frame.” If you're not laughing, maybe you should be. This is male submission packaged as dominance for women's entertainment. The dominance isn't just an illusion, it's a fraud, because what it's covering up is precisely its opposite. It's a fraud when men make a show of violence during sex, and it's a fraud when men play dominance games during courtship.

If you want a memorably catchy phrase for this form of male submission, “black knighting” will do nicely. The submissive nature of black knighting is made clear by the fact that it undermines men's natural mate-selection strategy. Why so? Because men's natural mate-selection strategy doesn't emphasize dominance. To the contrary. If it did, you wouldn't have to advise them to “act more dominant.” They would do it without trying.

Here you might object that men's natural mate selection strategy doesn't work very well. There is some truth to this I'll address further in a moment, but for now I'll point out that it depends entirely on what you mean by “work well.” If “work well” means maximizing bodycount, men's natural inclinations lead them astray. But as much as some want to claim that maximizing bodycount is men's evolutionarily enforced goal, that's just not the case.

There are very few Genghis Khans, but many farmers with farmer's wives. “Who would make a good farmer's wife” was therefore a much more important question than “how big a harem can I build.” So we should expect men's strategy to be geared not just toward maximizing the number of mates, but toward the more common and realistic goal of determining who would make a good farmer's (or hunter's or herder's) wife. The Genghis Khans loom large in our minds, but their net evolutionary effect is overridden by the mass of normal people living normal lives and raising normal children in normal households.

I don't like to get too far into the weeds on evolutionary psychology. It's an unreliable field I normally avoid scrupulously, because it's easy to invent just-so stories that prove whatever you want. I've completely omitted any reference to it from Dispelling Beauty Lies, and that wasn't an accident. So I'd prefer to stop at the very simple point that men's instinctive strategies are not what they “should” be if maximizing bodycount were the main goal—and, therefore, it cannot have been the main goal.

Now, the redpill has an explanation for this that's persuaded people for a long time, but is wrong. Their story goes that there are “alphas” who try to maximize bodycount and “betas” who instead offer resources in exchange for wives because women don't really like them. While not completely false, there's a deep flaw in this argument. When you look closer at how betas are thinking and what they're looking for, you see that it doesn't resemble prostitution at all. Yet the redpill explanation of betas' behavior treats marriage as an extended form of prostitution enforced by society. In reality, even men who do hire prostitutes often want “the girlfriend experience.” But why?

If strict social enforcement of marriage were the end-all-be-all that made “betas” competitive in the past but not now, then we should expect “betas” to be indifferent to their wives' affections. Once you've bought the cow, you can do whatever you want with it. You don't need the cow to like you. Once you've paid for the prostitute you don't need to curry her favor. So according to the redpill story we should expect “betas” to treat their wives like chattel, careless of their desires. Yet instead they're said to be characterized by the opposite attitude. They're said to care too deeply about their wives' affections and treat them too well. So the explanation for “betas'” behavior and attitudes is in direct contradiction with their actual behavior and attitudes. It's an explanation, dear readers, that just doesn't work.

What explanation does work? I've already given it. A mate who desires you is more valuable than a mate who doesn't. She is less likely to betray you. She is less likely to run off. She is more likely to treat you well. She is more likely to stay with you when times get bad. She makes, in short, a better wife than a woman who's merely been bought. And men are looking for the best wives, not simply the highest bodycount. They will try to fluff up their bodycount with hanky-panky on the side, but in the end their legacy is secured by the success of their family, which requires a quality wife, and a quality wife is one who desires her husband. And to repeat, a man who wants to identify a quality wife must not dominate her, because only freedom gives her an opportunity to demonstrate her desire.

These so-called “betas'” attitudes are therefore not those of men who are simply trading resources for wives (a description that better characterizes a sultan or a slaver, neither of which fit into the proposed “beta” mold), but rather those of men who are looking for the best quality mates within a largely monogamous framework. Men who are indifferent to whether women desire them in return are either not looking for a quality mate in a monogamous framework the first place, or they've given up all hope of being able to secure such a woman. Such truly indifferent men exist, but constitute a small minority of the total, and an even smaller minority of the highest-quality men.

Now we can return to the issue that brought the redpill to public attention in the first place. Nice guys don't win. “Beta” strategies seem particularly ineffective in the modern age. Well, perhaps there is a better answer to this than submitting to women while posing dominantly. Perhaps becoming a sexual house-slave in shining armor is not the solution.

So, the dominance-submission binary is inherently foreign to men's mate-selection strategy. The redpill band-aid is for men to embrace this binary anyway because it impresses women. And yet—do we really need to think within this dominance-submission binary? What if trying to solve the problem within that binary is a mistake from the get-go? I believe this is the case. In what follows, I'll explain why.

When I hear about men acting wimpy in relationships or simping for egirls, my first reaction is, “Did their fathers really teach them nothing about how a man should behave?” Simping is transparently disgusting and unmanly behavior. It's mystifying that anyone at all has so little shame that they would take more than one step down that path without immediately turning back after being alerted by friends or fathers to their misstep; and yet here we have millions of men throwing money at egirls for mere winks of faux affection in return. The problem with this sort of behavior goes beyond just being submissive or dominant, and isn't well characterized by either of those words. It's a broader failure of masculine virtues. These masculine virtues should be inculcated early on from father to son, and by society as well. But instead the reverse has been happening.

Parallel with the rise of feminism, there has been a Great Wimpification. Whether this is a consequence or an accident I don't know, but my feeling is that the breakdown of traditional gender roles that was supposed to “free” women also caused a loosening of expectations for men to behave in a masculine way and exhibit masculine virtue. Not that they ever did so perfectly; but a slackening of such virtues is undeniable, and especially salient in the wimpy “average Japanese high-school student” who typically serves as the protagonist of animes written for the descendants of samurais. Perhaps fathers heeding feminist announcements of a new era even thought it morally right to shirk their responsibilities in this regard. The result, as we can see all too clearly in retrospect, has been generations of increasingly wimpy young men. I don't believe these wimpy young men deserve all the blame, because society as a whole has let them down. There is a failure of education, upbringing, culture, and basic physical health as well (contaminants in food and water may play a role in the dysfunction). Not least of all, our wicked “elites” prefer that they stay wimpy, for reasons that need hardly be spelled out.

Now, as soon as you bring up the topic of masculine virtues, redpill proponents will accuse you of white knighting. That is, telling men they need to behave in a chivalrous way that actually subordinates them to women, who therefore lose respect for them and take advantage of them. Or telling men to “man up” and work hard to just give women everything they want. Well, this is certainly not the kind of masculine virtue I'm talking about.

Properly masculine men need to stand independent of their women and not dependent on them. The ideal man “needs” you but doesn't need you. This is about mindset (almost always a useless concept but actually appropriate here) not necessarily about material reality. A man who's stood strong and independent of his woman will be nursed by that same woman if he becomes too ill to care for himself. The relevant strength and independence pertain to attitude, outlook, and choice of behavior.

This mental strength is not a frame you need to maintain perpetually without interruption. Nor is it a game you need to play with your lover; nor do you need to take her down a peg so that your own perch seems that much higher. An occasional sign of weakness will drive a bad woman off, but it will tell a good woman there's room for her to contribute something to your life. That's reason enough not to wear a mask of perfect control at every moment.

Even so, the line between insatiable desire for a woman and emotional dependence on her affections is one which, while fine, must never be crossed. Today wimps and simps start on the wrong side of that line, and even superior men, who have, as we've analyzed, very good reasons to want their lovers to want them in return, are tempted to cross it at one point or another in their lives—and sadly most tempted at the precise moment they encounter the woman they most desire.

Where masculine virtues hold firm, the woman will play a supportive or supplementary role in a man's life, but not a “submissive” one in the sense implied by the dominance-submission binary. Hers is a supportive role undertaken willingly, to a man whose strength does not manifest in the form of posturing or dominance games. The man leads but does not need to compel nor demean. Rather, he takes on the male part we see acted out in traditional dances of all sorts. A tango where the male had to compel the female to carry out her steps would be even worse than one where the female leads, and this is hardly an accident. We can already sense on an aesthetic level what the relationship between the sexes is supposed to look like.

I don't have time to write a complete analysis of masculine virtue. That would be a book in itself, and not one I'd nominate myself to write. Others can flesh it out both more accurately and in greater detail. My only concern here is to sketch out a basic outline of how these masculine virtues differ from and are superior to the “dominant” role in the dominance-submission binary, and to open your eyes to the possibility that black knighting is dispensable.

But—is it really? To answer this question persuasively we need to turn back to women and paw again through the dirty underbelly of the modern libido.

In recent years there's been a growing movement to highlight the negative effects pornography use is having on men. Yet at the time of writing few (if any) seem to be aware that it's having much greater negative effects on women. Indeed, few are even aware of the basic facts in that regard. Ever since smartphones were first put into the hands of children there's been a substantial increase in female use of video pornography, often starting in the preteen years.

In some countries women are now an absolute majority of video-pornography users, to say nothing of what would happen if we included written erotica as well (very popular, and far more so among women than men). And while the chart above is already compelling, it still doesn't do this secular shift justice. That's because the numbers are skewed downward, not only by a concomitant increase in male pornography use, but by the demographic pyramids of the listed countries. For instance, Germany is an old society, so the near doubling in female pornography use in just ten years is concealing a much greater increase focused in the youngest generation (old women are not the ones changing their habits). Young countries like the Philippines show the greatest rise, and there women now dominate video pornography use not just outright, but by a large and growing margin.

This increase in women's video-pornography use has been accompanied by an increased preference for violent sex, shown quite clearly in the next set of charts. I find any attempt to excuse this as mere correlation and not causation implausible, and I'm certain you will too. When I've casually asked young men about the tastes of their lovers, there's been broad agreement that they do indeed frequently ask or expect to be choked. This comes as a shock to older generations, for whom such a taste and such a request were very rare indeed.

Fantasies of violence were already the norm in vintage historical romance novels. However, these novels had an imaginative character, and my feeling is that women registered them metaphorically, and this muted their impact. The concreteness of visual pornography seems to have a stronger effect on real-life behaviors and expectations. Where modern romance novels and erotica fall on this scale is hard to say, but it's safe to bet that today's bestselling BDSM erotica has done considerable net harm.

To understand the magnitude of this impact we need to consider the escalation of desires. Women seem to be subject to an escalation effect similar to the one whose results can be seen here (NSFW), but applying to the taste for violent domination rather than physical proportions. While the link shows that only around ten percent of men are subject to this degree of pornographically induced escalation (some examples of feminine beauty dating back millennia still match the median male tastes today), it appears to affect women more broadly. Women who begin consuming mildly violent pornography escalate to more and more violent pornography, until they reach an extreme scarcely comprehensible to those who've never stepped on the ladder. And sooner or later, they try to chase after this extreme in reality.

What matters here isn't whether women are using more video pornography than men or vice versa. The evidence available does not, at any rate, constitute definitive proof in either direction, because it comes from a single site. I've highlighted these comparative statistics to jar men out of a dogmatic slumber that assumes the innocence of young women, so they take the issue seriously; and also so the women reading this who've struggled with pornography addiction don't feel alone in their plight. What does matter for our project here is that women are using pornography enough and early enough to bring about a broad shift in their tastes, and this shift creates an additional obstacle for us to overcome if we truly wish to dispense with the absurdity of black knighting.

So even as men are succumbing to the Great Wimpification, women are becoming addicted to more and more violence. Often addicted to degrees of violence that only the worst psychopaths would impose on them happily. One can hardly blame the younger generations for this when their parents handed them, at age twelve or earlier, a battery-powered pornographic escalation machine. Nobody can expect children to exert a level of self-control that takes effort even for adults. It was the responsibility of those adults, and society in general, to protect them from the trouble they could get themselves into, but instead they were left to their own devices—if you'll excuse the pun. And here we are.

Let us now turn the mirror back to men again. Egirls—though they will surely have a new name within a few years if they haven't yet been consigned to the dustbin of history by AI girlfriends—are paid absurd amounts of money for offering men online erotic entertainment. They've turned seduction into a form of mass media beamed into every young man's phone, not sparing young boys who first come online to play games with their friends. Before they've ever said so much as “hello” to a real woman, an expert seductress is flaunting her body and sighing affectionately in their phone speaker. Is she asking to be dominated? Hardly. Men, after all, don't want to dominate women, and boys don't either. Instead she oozes a blend of lustfulness and coyness, beckoning men toward her but then drawing back until a flood of cash inspires her to reward them with a well-feigned smile, and much more vulgar displays besides.

Thus the commodification of sex is shoving men and women alike off into opposite corners that take advantage of their need to be desired in different ways. And in the end, they're each alone in those opposite corners—alone with their phones. Men have become wimpy and simpy by consequence; women addicted to extremes of violent domination even the worst man they know would think twice about meting out.

Here we arrive at a fork in the road. There are two paths forward. One is to double down and turn everything into a roleplay of dominance that can still reach women at the top of the escalator. This is on the verge of becoming the mainstream attitude, if it hasn't already. Our submissive black knights' reward for servicing these women in the least enjoyable ways is another notch on their belts, and certainly for some that will be reward enough (or so they will tell themselves). At best men can develop an even more bizarre kink and force women too to grit their teeth through satisfying it in order to make everything come out “equal.” Equality—not very inspiring after all, eh?

But there is, dear readers, an alternative.

As I noted at the beginning, this alternative came to me in the process of advising women how to seduce. Women's increasing embrace of violent imagery has left them more and more clueless about the nature of seduction, a topic they never understood well to begin with, because their erotic focus on being desired blinds them to the power of expressing desire. Only those who are paid to understand what men want have taken the trouble of learning to understand what men want, which is a sad thing indeed.

And it's not only sad from men's perspective. That's because there's an important difference between the seduction techniques the redpill suggests to men and the seduction techniques I've suggested to women. As I've already explained, when men insist on feigning dominance to seduce and using violent compulsion to entertain in the bedroom, they're undermining their natural strategy to leave women the freedom to express unforced desire. This is a freedom that will sometimes result in rejection—but allowing rejection is precisely a form of selection. (In other words, by giving a woman the opportunity to reveal her indifference to you or even reject you now, you spare yourself the problems that would come about if she proved unreliable at some critical moment in the future, e.g. by cuckolding you. In such cases it might appear as if she's rejecting you, but in a very important sense you're rejecting her. This is a method of selection which, while momentarily demoralizing, privileges the long term and helps you identify the best mate for the course of life.)

However, the seduction techniques I suggest to women create no fundamental conflict. Women like the idea of being seductive because it promises them the power to elicit desire, and this is a power they particularly cherish due to their reflexive erotic focus. For women effective seductiveness almost verges on auto-eroticism—a self-induced high that seems at first too good to be true. Because men have an external focus, their desire to be desired is not rewarded in the same way, and moreover the seduction techniques they've been advised to use to elicit that desire undermine, as I've just pointed out, their need for that desire to be freely given. What's prevented women from tapping their power for seduction isn't a fundamental conflict, but a misunderstanding about what seductive behavior actually looks like.

The critical proviso that makes seduction not only palatable for women but rewarding as well is one of timing and order.

We can characterize the proper unfolding of the courtship and mating dance as follows. In the prelude, a woman tempts a man with her beauty and charm. He approaches and she expresses ambiguous and inconsistent interest that encourages him to continue without promising success. He courts her more aggressively, and eventually she permits his advances, now signaling hesitant desire. Whether he or she makes "the first move" to capture the other's attention is not critically important here; what is important is that at some stage of the prelude she holds back or retreats and he gives chase. To men this may seem a superfluous annoyance, but it provides her with a psychologically valuable confirmation of his desire that will resonate in their future together. It's not an accident that resistance-chase is the fundamental plot of nearly every romance novel written for women.

After this prelude, when the relationship proper begins to blossom, he takes the lead and she follows happily. This is the period of easy bliss about which little need be said. It is the next act where women go most wrong. After a woman has been won over, and after the durability of a relationship has been confirmed, then she should express desire to satisfy men's desire to be desired. And this is the most seductive behavior of all, overlooked by women because it begins precisely where romance novels end, and because it's deeply counterintuitive to those raised on videos of bondage and abuse.

So after the male has expressed his desire by overcoming her initial resistance, the female can further amplify his desire by expressing her own in return at the right time. I've been explicit about the precise means to do this elsewhere, so I'll spare you those details here. Because their erotic visions of dominant men, which some reinforce ad infinitum with pornography, have obscured their understanding of what best elicits male desire, women almost uniformly fail to make this important seductive turn, and by consequence the flames of desire dwindle in the second act, and thicker chains trotted out to bring them back only cause them to gutter more.

The widespread belief that the right man should forever “Rape you just the way you are,” figuratively speaking of course, is preventing women from opening the full flower of their femininity. It implies there's no reason for a woman to pursue beauty, behave seductively, or even learn basic sexual technique, as her lover's affection will be proven all the more if he takes total control while she lies there like a dead fish in beige lingerie. In reality when she just visibly tries to do these things it already improves her relationship, because it demonstrates to him that she cares enough to do so. And when she thereby causes him to desire her more, her own satisfaction will increase by consequence, so in the long run both lovers will find more happiness than the quick thrill of dominance games could have brought her.

My alternative to the redpill band-aid thus consists of several components. It is a project that neither men nor women can carry out alone. If the absurdity of black knighting is to be dispensed with—and it can be—they must undertake it together.

I acknowledge that the list above sounds too simple, and yet too hard at the same time. It is an approach that lacks shock value, and worse still, can promise little efficacy at scraping the drunken dregs off the barroom floor in the small hours. Why, then, do I deride the redpill so much when it has a fast-food convenience my own recommendations can't match, and when some of its observations are both wise and true? No, not only because it comes easiest to the worst of men and works best on the worst of women.

What I find especially ironic is that the redpill approach, which paints itself as so politically incorrect, nevertheless fits entirely within the framework that induced the Great Wimpification in the first place. It not only accepts a simplistic feminist caricature of masculine sexuality as bestial, undirected dominance, but embraces that caricature in a way detrimental to men's real inclinations and innate mate-selection strategy. If you want me to put it succinctly, the redpill is crypto-feminism. And no amount of macho posturing can change that. This irony is even clearer in the case of BDSM, the advanced bedroom version of courtship dominance displays. BDSM fully accepts the erasure of traditional gender roles on a social level, but then reinstates them in an exaggerated and twisted form, within a tightly bounded realm that reduces them to safe play. It's an exhaust valve for human sexuality in an environment that's hostile to it. But by deflating resistance, this exhaust valve allows that hostile environment to persist.

The “historical reenactment” of normal gender roles within the carefully circumscribed boundary of four bedposts goes hand in hand with tacit acceptance of the Great Wimpification. It neuters the energy that ought to bring about a corrective renewal, capturing it instead within an isolation chamber until it dissipates harmlessly in the morning, when the “slave” returns to her dayjob as bossgirl and her “master” returns to pushing paper. Romance suffocates under an artificiality contradicted every day by the clear light of dawn, and physical desire soon suffocates too. That's because the dominance, compulsion, violence, and even the feigned indifference aren't real, and cannot be real in the modern world; whereas strength, leadership, and freedom can be and are.

What I'm saying, dear readers, is that the redpill and BDSM are just the final face of the system you thought you'd broken out of. They are still in the matrix. The real way out involves a return to genuine masculine (and feminine) virtues. An end to the Great Wimpification—not a hollow caricature of sexual relations.

The replacement of romance with a slapstick sex comedy of incompatible fetishes is not a social shift without political repercussions. Only solidarity allows us to resist oppression under the boot of the wicked and powerful; so the logical first goal of the wicked and powerful is to undermine that solidarity. Making relationships dysfunctional, and better yet, mediated by mutually offensive psychological games, is a very effective step in this direction, because of all the methods for splitting a population against itself, the most perfect is to instigate a battle of the sexes. This neat fifty-fifty division sets the public to endlessly bickering over he-said-she-said issues of no relevance to evil elites, leaving those evil elites free to manipulate the system and rob all of us blind in perpetuity. Which they're doing. The divisive redpill gurus who've shot to fame with suspicious speed facilitate this scheme by encouraging the polarization of the sexes. They impress inexperienced boys with their crass thuggery while driving girls away and into the arms of their equally wrongheaded misandrist counterparts on the opposite side. The only difficult question is whether they're assets or just useful idiots.

In a world where men and women are bound to each other by the magnetism of mutual affection put in place by nature, a battle of the sexes can hardly get off the ground. But when you distort and interrupt that affection in all the ways we've listed above, and more besides, then battle there can be. It's a divide-and-conquer scheme, a game we all lose just by playing—and the only right answer is to call a truce and make love rather than war. In the most literal sense, naturally.

Enough said on that topic for now. To learn more about how bad actors manipulate public opinion to create destructive divisions, read my essay Trust Networks.

I realize the argument I've made here doesn't stand on the solid rock of irrefutable fact. I always prefer to stick with certain facts when I can, and in my other writing I've maintained that orientation to the extent possible. Yet human sexuality is a fuzzy realm rife with bad data, and surveys that claim significance to the third decimal point are often undermined in their first two digits by instinctive, intentional, or accidental preference falsification. Very often people don't even know what they want. The behaviors they seek out in pornography are not necessarily those they emulate in reality. There are many other sources of error as well. So one tries to look at the question from many angles, but one can never obtain certainty. The best one can do is to develop a rough map, and then test that map by using it, with more or less success, to navigate reality.

Since all of us are faced with the same problem of fuzzy and even outright wrong data about human sexuality—a problem that decimal points, error bars, and ANOVAs distract from but do nothing at all to correct—remaining silent due to irresoluble uncertainties would only give the field over to those who are happy to speak with the least circumspection, or to professors who follow the formulas of science where unsupported leaps of insight are precisely what's required to approach the truth; and due to the importance of this topic in the course of every human life, these careless shouters will find an attentive audience regardless. In such an environment I believe it best that I speak up and offer an alternative map, whether or not I can prove that map is correct in every feature, and whether or not I can meet the higher standards of evidence to which I aspire elsewhere. Indeed, this map doesn't need to be correct in every feature; it simply needs to be more useful to you than the available alternatives. Accept it in that spirit, and do what you will with it.

I ask you, male readers, to consider that you might be able to free yourself from the Great Wimpification without the new submission of black knighting; and I ask you, female readers, to consider that you might still tap seductive powers of which you've scarcely dreamed if you reset your erroneous assumptions about male desire. In so doing we can all retrieve, from the dirty underbelly between sweat glands and smartphones, a space for romance. Yours—if you want it.

Before I conclude I'll respond in advance to some of the many inevitable objections. Redpill gurus have established lucrative reputations by promising young men the keys to quick sex, and are faced with a choice between fighting tooth and nail to prove me wrong, or claiming fairly implausibly that they'd already put together every idea I've just presented even though this was, inexplicably, not apparent beforehand to a single one of their readers.

Thugs who are deeply invested in the redpill will claim that “real” men do want to dominate women, and if you don't want to dominate women you're a wimp, not a real man. But this is just another version of “man up,” which redpill advocates themselves have rightly criticized. As I've already explained many times, it's subservience to women, not genuine masculine virtue. These loudmouthed thugs are just low-class trash with a high follower count. They're not worth your time.

To be quite clear though, when I write that the redpill is wrong, I don't mean to say that every claim it makes wrong, but only that something very fundamental to the redpill way of looking at the world is wrong. I've identified this wrong component as “black-knighting” against the grain of natural inclinations that men have for good reason. This apparently small error is actually a big one that's encouraging cumulative dysfunction in relationships, sex, courtship, and society as a whole to persist and indeed worsen. Reformulating the redpill to take my criticism into account isn't going to work, because the error lies at its root.

Another criticism redpill advocates will make, quite fair in this case, is that I'm not promising young men easy sex, while they are. True enough. That's not my goal here. Yet I wonder how well they deliver on their promises, and whether the fast food really tastes as good as it looks in the advertising art.

Men mature slower than women, and come into their full powers later. Young men aren't properly informed of this because our society loves the lie that young women are in the weakest position and in the most need of help and sympathy. Young women today aren't just in a strong position, they're in the strongest position of any group, while the position of men in their late teens is particularly weak, and perhaps the weakest. Worse still, young men in their late teens and early twenties are subject to extremes of libido that inevitably create more clumsiness and distraction than satisfaction, and prone to continually embarrassing themselves. Given all these unspoken disadvantages, it's hardly surprising they latch on to any advice that promises a quick score. Well, I don't have that advice for you. All I can counsel you is patient persistence and development of proper masculine virtue, as I've defined it above. As much as you want to win today, you need to play the long game too. If you attend to your self development, your position will gradually strengthen over time. Now, I'm not telling you to intentionally wait to find love later and twiddle your thumbs in your basement until the right moment arrives. Don't delay—just persist, build strength, and learn to look at women with a discerning eye. Not all that glitters is gold.

Another likely objection is that I've ignored clear evidence men do willingly engage in rape, particularly in the fury of war. Does this not disprove my claim that they don't wish to dominate women? Well, humans are complex, capable of good and evil depending on their circumstances, and war is the most extreme of circumstances, where ordinary men kill with little compunction and die with little fanfare. Without diminishing in any degree the mass rapes carried out at the beginning and end of the last World War, it's unreasonable to pretend this is men's preferred mode of behavior in civilized circumstances. Outside of war, rape is the strategy of the lowest and least, of the wickedest and worse; in war it is an act of men driven to extremes of hatred and deprived of women for years on end. It is not a strategy the best of men nor even the bulk of men entertain, let alone act on, in the regular course of life. If you want evidence for this claim I'll refer again to the analysis of male fantasies in Dispelling Beauty Lies, from which “forced seduction” is distinctively absent.

Yet another predictable objection is that I've spoken in generalities and neglected, for instance, the tender sensitivities of yaoi girls and the less than tender inclinations of convicted criminals. If one refuses to write in generalities and continually cite exceptions everything becomes very clumsy, coherence decreases, and the message becomes unclear. For the sake of good communication I've spared readers needless weaseling with the understanding that none (not even one!) of the sweeping generalities above is intended to apply with universal absoluteness.

Some will object to the very fact that I mentioned romance as a desirable goal. Surely romance is dated? Well, I don't advocate for excessive devotion to romance. That leads to unreasonable expectations, dramas, and disappointment. Don't chase with all your heart after flights of emotion that are fickle and unpredictable or you will break it. Nevertheless, we should leave space for romance to bloom if it wants to. There are too few beautiful things in this life, and giving lilies an opportunity to grow in the grime, against all odds, is far better than paving over the ground twixt sidewalk and gutter to avoid disappointment if they don't.

Finally, someone—they always do—will claim this essay must be wrong because a female writer could never understand male sexuality. This is surely the most laughable objection, and for several reasons, not all of which merit listing. Do you not see how effortlessly egirls manipulate you? Do you think they make eight figures by accident? The problem afflicting our society isn't that no one understands male sexuality, but that the women who ought to understand it best understand it least, while profiteers wrap you around their smallest fingers.

This is the problem my writing on beauty and seduction is intended to correct. In a more innocent world one could make an argument that the secrets are best kept secret, so those women who embody them naturally can stand above the rest, and men's instinctive tests for genuine affection can be administered as intended, with no risk of cheating. The commodification of sex puts a definitive end to this argument. The most manipulative and Machiavellian women already know what men respond to, whereas all the other women have been taught to do all the wrong things, and become by consequence anti-seductive, and too often saboteurs of their own beauty. We can only right the balance by explaining the facts to everyone instead of letting them stay the trade secrets of exactly the wrong people. Well, I can only. At present I don't see another soul highlighting the problem, let alone offering a solution.

There will surely be more objections I haven't addressed here, but in the interest of brevity I have to stop somewhere. My hope is that this essay will spark a reevaluation and renewal. If you find it interesting, please share. And if you feel you've benefited, consider making a donation to my writing here. Naturally, I also encourage women to read the companion section on seduction in Dispelling Beauty Lies—already linked above, but you can also find it right here.

Best wishes,

J. Sanilac
December 28, 2024

Postscript: Oneitis

One sin leads to another, as the saying says; and so goes it here too. The redpill mistake of dismissing the value men instinctively place on emotional reciprocity also leads to an overbearing and erroneous critique of “oneitis.”

Oneitis is fixation on a particular romantic prospect in the belief that she's “the one:” in other words, that she's so uniquely special the suitor is justified in making sacrifices for her that she would never return in kind, and which eventually prove to be mere foolishness. The redpill advises young men that there are plenty of fish in the sea and no one fish is ever so special. There is, in short, no such thing as “the one,” and catching oneitis is an embarrassment that inevitably ends in rejection, abuse, and doormattery. Here the redpill does recognize a real disease, but proposes both a faulty etiology and a faulty remedy.

To avoid accusations of sentimentality, I'll offer a completely dispassionate and even mathematical analysis of what “the one” and “oneitis” really are. We can mathematically define “the one” as a positive outlier in match compatibility, such that the likelihood of meeting another mate with the same or greater level of match compatibility is exceedingly low. Thus, “the one” may not be unique in an absolute sense, but is nevertheless unique in practice.

There are two further points consequent on this definition. First, emotional reciprocity is a necessary characteristic of “the one,” because for all the reasons I've already explained earlier in this essay, a truly superlative match also sees you as a superlative match. Second, there is a fundamental difference between a mate of high quality and a uniquely compatible match. A mate of high quality might be interchangeable with another mate of high quality, just as one gold coin can be exchanged for another of equal weight, but a uniquely compatible match fits in the manner of lock and key, producing a relationship that's sticky for reasons independent of generic quality.

With the one thus defined, it's easy to correctly describe the pathology of “oneitis.” Oneitis occurs when you too hastily conclude that a romantic prospect is the one when they are in fact not the one at all. The most common cause of oneitis is overlooking or ignoring a lack of reciprocity due to excessive enthusiasm, though of course it's common to overlook other important flaws or incompatibilities as well. Oneitis is therefore the consequence of having an itchy emotional trigger finger and prematurely attaching yourself before making the necessary confirmations, particularly with respect to emotional reciprocity.

As we've already noted at length, men's romantic and sexual psychology are keyed to detect emotional reciprocity, so the correct medicine for the prevention of oneitis is to acknowledge the importance of being desired, slow down, and back off enough to suss out whether desire is really there and whether your romantic interest is really all that you've built her up to be, and refuse to attach yourself emotionally until you receive positive confirmation. Easier said than done perhaps, but not all medicine is smoothly swallowed.

The redpill bloodletting “cure”—acceptance that there's really no such thing as the one and that the whole idea is in fact quite silly—isn't much more effective than the sage advice I've just given; and as a side-effect, it dashes all hope of romance and encourages men to treat women as an interchangeable currency, which while sometimes appropriate, is perhaps less than the best of us should aspire to and hope for. Because if you do find the one—the real one—then embracing that unique relationship with a special level of devotion and attachment is in fact a good and sensible thing. Nevertheless, given our definition of the one, it is a rare thing as well—a stroke of luck we might dream of, but should not expect.

So you're free to dream again, dear readers. Please stop taking pills of any color. And may you all find the one you're looking for, in this life or the next.

More by J. Sanilac:

Memoirs of an Evil Vizier

Trust Networks – how we actually know things

Dispelling Beauty Lies – the truth about feminine beauty, including practical advice for women

Ultrahumanism – a middle path through the jungle of modern and future technology

A Pragmatical Analysis of Religious Beliefs – are pragmatism and belief opposites?

Against Good Taste – aesthetics and harmful social signaling

Critique of the Mind-Body Problem – it's not solvable

GIMBY – a movement for low-density housing

The Computer-Simulation Theory Is Silly – GPWoo

End Attached Garages Now – a manifesto

Milgram Questions – what they are and how to call them out

Amor Fatty – how an obesity cure will end the body positivity movement

An Introduction to My Music