When I was a child, my father lent me a book of his that he told me would give me a good cognitive workout. This book was called “The Lady or the Nexu”, and it was by a mathematician named Raymond Smullyan. It contained a series of logical puzzles based around different premises. The first set of puzzles, as the title suggests, was called “The Lady or the Nexu”. It takes place in a kingdom where the king has come up with a rather novel form of punishment: Convicted criminals must choose from one of a set of doors based on clues written on the doors themselves. There were three possibilities: First, behind the door was a lady, and if the prisoner chose her door, he would be free and could marry her. Second, behind the door was a nexu, who would maul the prisoner to death. Third, the room behind the door was empty, and the prisoner would be sent back to his cell. It is up to the readers to figure out which door the lady is behind, by deducing not only what the clues mean, but which ones are true or lies.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt seen a similar hypothetical re-emerging of late, spawned from a TikTok video (please don’t click that link on mobile, TikTok is Hutt Cartel spyware!) of all places in which a bunch of women were asked “If you were alone in the woods, would you rather run into a man or a bear?” All the replies we saw were from women saying they would choose the bear. This video, as TikTok videos are typically algorithm-boosted to do, set off a series of heated debates. Or so we're meant to think.
Maybe I missed most of them, but I saw very few men losing their minds over this. Most of them just rolled their eyes, while feminists of both sexes grabbed bullhorns, got in the faces of normal men, and screamed at us about how our having a problem with women going out of their way to tell us that they would rather run into a dangerous predator than us was exactly why they chose the bear. Or that our telling them about the very real dangers posed by animals capable of literally biting their heads off made them feel unsafe around us.
In other words, it’s just an excuse to engage in petty misandry. Nothing really new here. Still, the fact that it’s such a specific phenomenon affords me an opportunity to touch on the bigger issue, one that’s plagued the Republic for decades now. It’s even bigger than the sort of juvenile man-bashing that’s been in vogue since before I was born. I’m talking about the war between the sexes. This is a topic that I’m personally quite passionate about, since it was how I got my start in political awareness, and I dipped my entire lower half into the debates on twitter. I normally try to avoid getting bogged down in the dregs of the holonet, but pulling me out of there is like trying to persuade Darth Dave not to have a streaming debate with yet another BreadTuber.
After I went through my delousing and Darth Vivalous’s cutting but incredibly constructive criticism, I decided to take a different approach than I typically have on this issue. Namely, I want to look at what got us here and see how we can get out. Sure, some playful bickering within a marriage is fine, and is even beneficial in some instances, but outright war and vitriol between the sexes will destroy us.
Up-and-coming science fiction author Devon Eriksen–whose book, Theft of Fire, you should absolutely buy—gave what seems to be a decent summary of the psychology that got us here. The long-form tweet he wrote about it is worth reading in full:
No aspect of women's behavior on social media is going to make sense to you until you realize two things:
1. For women, the appearance of vulnerability is status-enhancing.
2. For women, the appearance of compassion is status-enhancing.
Thus, women who play status games online will simultaneously insist that they are under constant threat of rape by purely theoretical criminals every time they step out the door, and that actual criminals must on no account be punished because they were underprivileged and couldn't help themselves, the poor dears.
The meaning of both these ideas is really just "I am very feminine and therefore precious, and you should all pay attention to me."
The first one, "I am under constant threat of rape" means this in two ways.
First, it means "I am highly desirable, and therefore all sorts of brutish men are scheming to have their way with me by force".
Second, it means "I am so very precious a thing that I must be defended at all times by others, because only a low-class peasant of no great importance must take responsibility for her own safety by carrying a gun or something."
It is in the second idea that things get really interesting, however.
Because compassion is a feminine virtue, female status-signalers labor to performatively display a maximum amount of it, the operative term being "display", as it is not really important to actually possess any.
This need to display performative compassion while displaying performative vulnerability forces a very interesting sort of mental gymnastics among women who play this game.
They must tell us constantly that rapists are everywhere, and they are in constant danger. But the actual men who rape almost universally have one thing in common: they are society's least preferred.
They are bums and hobos. They are junkies. They are poor. They are black and brown. They are in this country illegally. They are uneducated. They have rap sheets. They might not speak English. They come from the undesirable zip codes. They are the unemployed and the unemployable. They are mentally ill and emotionally unstable.
Usually they are more than one of these things.
Problem is, that right there is a laundry list of people who are socially unsafe for women to criticize, because the narrative is that they are failing to thrive because of "oppression" by those who are thriving, rather than because they lack the IQ score, the sanity, or the life skills to get their shit together.
So the compassion-signaling would get in the way of the vulnerability-signalling, and the vulnerability-signaling would get in the way of the compassion-signaling.
Unless...
Unless a shell game can be performed where the blame for male-on-female rape is shifted to those least likely to commit it.... high-status, well-socialized men. Typically white or east asian.
And so the notion is spread that rape is committed by high-status, well-socialized men, out of an attitude of entitlement, rather than by society's antisocial outsiders.
But high-status men don't have to rape... women desire them. Well-socialized men don't want to rape... they want to be desired. Rape is the province of men too socially awkward to secure female consent, or, even more frequently, too feral or socially maladjusted to care.
But if successful men can be abstractly, as a group, in absentia, be blamed for rape, then women who so desire can simultaneously vulnerability-signal, and compassion-signal.
So the next time a woman says she'd rather be alone in the woods with a bear than a man, just take it for what it is... woofing. Just the female equivalent of Andrew Tate talking about being an "alpha male" who is "built for conquest".
It doesn't signal any actual belief of fact. It's not supposed to convince you of anything. It's just there to attract the desired attention.
You don't have to talk her out of the belief, because there is no belief. It's just a social ritual, like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. You can ignore it.
Or, if you want to have some fun, ask her if she would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or a black man.
Have some popcorn handy.
Devon’s advice for men on how to handle this situation is solid, and if I were more sensible, I’d have followed it better. He does, however, touch on another psychological fact that explains quite a lot about where feminism came from, what it has come to be, and how it has shaped our society. Specifically, the fact that women are largely compassion-driven. This fact is what has made feminism what it is, and why feminism has sought out the causes it has.
Thanks to the bait-and-switch Barbie holovid and its message being subverted by the very people it attacked, nearly everyone who hasn’t forced themselves into a Darth Lorax-type lifestyle knows what the term “Longhouse” means.
But, in case you’re part of some demographic I couldn’t think of, here’s a basic definition, distilled from those who have written extensively on the subject, such as Darth Pervert and Lom3z: The Longhouse was the basic social structure of the Iroquois Nation and other nomadic societies in which the center of social life was, well, a long house. Since the men of the tribe were out busy hunting or defending the tribe from its enemies, raising young boys was left up to the women of the tribe. Within a longhouse, there was little privacy, and the authority was concentrated in the hands of one of the senior most women, who was known as the Den Mother. The Den Mother, spending much of her time primarily around women and girls, was inclined to think that boys should be raised the same way as girls, and boys acting in a way that was not normal for girls were behaving poorly. In other words, the longhouse treats boys like defective girls instead of like boys.
Feminism dreamed of the longhouse life and turned it into a political institution. Though many feminists would insist until they’re blue in the face that she was an extremist who didn’t represent their views, Valerie Solanas–who was described by NOW President Ti-grace Atkinson as “the first outstanding champion of women’s rights”–outlined the promise feminism made in her only widely known piece of writing, the SCUM Manifesto.
Most feminists find the SCUM Manifesto off-putting both because Solanas uses profanities in it like she’s worried she’ll run out of them, and she outright calls for the destruction of all men. Putting aside Solanas’s completely baseless assertion that “it is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females)”, she cites the male tendency toward violence and roughness as the cause of women’s oppression, and calls men “emotional cripples”. She also claims that there is no good reason anyone should have to work more than two hours a week, and that the elimination of men will result in a world that is more empathetic, loving, affectionate, and tender. Such a desire is not out of place in any contemporary feminist think piece denouncing the “patriarchy”. Some feminists really do love the men in their lives, and others know the importance of not saying the quiet part out loud as Solanas did, so calls to cull men aren’t so popular unless you’re a delusional Australian blonde edgelady, and instead, feminists merely insist on raising boys to be more girl-like, as if this is the answer to all our woes.
Lom3z’s article on longhouses in First Things magazine explains the problem with this way of thinking: Jonathan Haidt explains that privileging female strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In not so many words, Haidt is saying that the Longhouse is what gave us cancel culture. The Longhouse is what has caused the focus of criminal justice to be on rehabilitation rather than punishing the offender, based on the notion that a criminal commits crimes because society has put him into the position where he sees no other way to live, rather than that he has decided to put his needs ahead of the rights of others and the stability of society.
A softness on crime of the sort that has allowed crime to flourish lately in the Republic is just one of the many ways the Longhouse undermines the Republic. In and of itself, a spike in crime wouldn’t be a terribly big problem, but the Longhouse is ensuring that this spike will last a long, long time. The Longhouse is extending its ridiculous mode of thought to every aspect of society, via the government school system. Novelist Doris Lessing put it best:
I was in a class of nine- and ten-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives. The teacher tried to catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish. This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.
Lessing’s focus was on the hurt that was being caused to boys, in that moment and at that place. What’s not mentioned there is how boys brought up in such an environment will turn out. At one end of the spectrum, you will have boys who live in constant paranoia. Boys who spend their entire lives walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting any and all women around them. Boys who are too scared to talk to girls because they’ll get their lives ruined. Men who think the Boomer creed of “Happy wife, happy life” is sensible marital advice. Men who quietly resent their girlboss wives for walking all over them, then one day reach their snapping point and…well, you get the picture. At the other end of the spectrum, you will have the boys who don’t go along with the program and are lucky enough to have fathers who resisted the brainwashing.
Then you’d have the ones in the middle. The ones whose fathers are weaklings that either don’t know how to stand up to this sort of institutional bullying or think it’s a good thing. The ones who, thanks to watching too many holovids written by screenwriters with the emotional intelligence of a teenager, think that mere “niceness” is how you get love, and end up becoming bitter and hateful because of it. You know the type. They’re almost ubiquitous these days.
Only one of those three types of men are the sort who can make any meaningful positive change in our society. They will find their efforts continually thwarted by the other two types, either through passivity or resentment. Better to minimize their numbers, wouldn’t you say? But the nature of men isn’t the only thing that the Longhouse changes much for the worse. While I can’t speak for any man but myself, I can say that what I find so upsetting about the “I choose the bear” phenomenon is that I know women in general can do better.
Darth Dave wrote a very long, and very good explanation on what feminism has robbed us of by cultivating the ideal of the girlboss, and his article is worth reading all on its own. So, allow me to summarize here for the sake of simplicity: Women can be admired in leadership-type roles, provided they enact those roles in a way that befits women’s unique qualities. As his example, he uses the recently-deceased British monarch, Elizabeth II, as his guiding example. When she died, Elizabeth was mourned by countless British subjects, even those on the left. It’s hard for those of us who have not grown up under even figurehead monarchs to understand just what she meant to her people. She was a mother figure to her entire nation, and for all her faults, she played the role well.
Elizabeth did not make a show out of publicly denigrating the men of her nation. Whether this was out of political posturing or simply because she was a product of her time, it doesn’t matter. She treated the men in her life with the dignity they deserved (well, a lot more dignity than Andrew certainly deserved), and served as a role model to her female subjects. And she did all this without directly wielding any sort of political power. I think that says something about the sort of power that women hold.
It is women who give birth, who hold the greatest sway over babies and younger children. If a mother can keep her cool in a tough situation, her children find it that much easier to stay calm. On a national level, this can mean the difference between order and chaos. In older age, this mother’s children will remember what a rock she was for them, and will become instinctively defensive of her. “For Queen and Country” was a rallying cry for British men for decades.
We’ve all heard the stereotype before of children raised by single mothers being violent, unruly, and misguided. While it’s not a universal, there is a lot of truth to it.
Children do, in fact, become far more reliable members of society when they have a father figure of some sort involved in their lives. Men and women have different styles of parenting that are complementary. Women look after a child’s material needs, while men look after a child’s social needs. Take, for example, this clip from a TEDx talk by a woman who works as a divorce lawyer primarily representing fathers, in which she explains which questions about one’s children, mothers or fathers are likely to get right.
Stereotypes notwithstanding, in every human society that’s ever existed, if you go far back enough, men and women have their own spheres of influence. Men dominated the realms of politics and production, while women dominated the domestic realm. A lot of red-pillers will likely hate me for saying this, but nearly every complaint feminists made had some validity to it. However, they nearly always exaggerated the scope of the problem by orders of magnitude, and their solutions have seldom done little besides make the problems worse.
For example, let’s take the issue of domestic abuse. Under old systems, a woman who was being brutalized by her husband had little recourse. She couldn’t fight back against her husband, who was far stronger. She couldn’t leave him because she didn’t make money outside the home for herself, and she couldn’t seek legal recourse because getting a divorce required proof of abuse, which is often difficult to provide. Instead of creating a social safety net for women in these situations, or enacting moderate reforms to make it easier for women to leave their abusive husbands, feminists decided to make it possible for women to unilaterally end their marriages for whatever reason they wanted. Whether intentionally or not, this was a disaster for the family structure as it became more and more a part of the cultural zeitgeist, and as feminists continued to widen the definition of “abuse”, the prevailing view on marriage was that it was something to be treated like a set of clothes that a woman could step into or out of as she pleased.
At the same time that they were making it easier to end marriages, feminists were also demanding that women be allowed access to male-dominated workplaces, the reasoning being that women needed to be able to support themselves if their husbands turned out to be abusive. Putting aside that the vast majority of marriages are not abusive, this is not the sort of mindset that you’d want to cultivate if your aim were to build a healthy society. What’s there to be gained by teaching women that they should constantly approach marriage with one foot out the door, ready to castigate their husbands as violent abusers, whether it’s true or not? And what effect does talking like this have on men who can hear it?
Not too long before the asinine man vs. bear video came out, a firestorm of controversy rose in the right when conservative commentator Lauren Southern, citing her own bad experiences with marriage, claimed that the women she knew were moving to the left because of sexism leveled at them. While I’m not aware of any sort of formal survey being done on right-wing women, and while the case could certainly be made that nearly all of Southern’s difficulties were due not to conservative men hating her, but to her being such a consistently poor judge of character, it’s asinine to pretend that this tension isn’t real. Nor is it new, exemplified by Darth Mustache in his famous saying: “Thou goest to talk to woman? Do not forget thy whip!”
Southern’s whiplash is somewhat understandable. She was raised by loving Christian conservative parents in a modest but comfortable Canadian household, is quite physically attractive, and while certainly bolstered in popularity by her good looks, proved her mettle with a documentary drawing attention to an actual genocide going on at a time that so much as calling it a “genocide” was wildly politically incorrect. She’s not on the autism spectrum, and as such is less inclined to rationality than the more esoteric political thinkers, so it’s to be expected that she’d want to rebel against her upbringing. Still, what she’s doing isn’t helping advance the discussion. It’s never occurred to her to ask why so-called “red pill” rhetoric, whether from the soft-spoken statistical analysis given by Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power, the more aggressive, but still not vitriolic, agitations of Paul Elam of “A Voice for Men”, or even the nihilistic, aggressively misogynistic materialism of short-thinking idiots like Andrew Tate, has resonated with so many of today’s young men.
These young men have never had an opportunity to see women at their best. They’ve only seen the sort of women that were created by the consequences of the Industrial Revolution: Women who’ve been told that their highest ambition in life should be to imitate men as well as they possibly can. Not the actual men in their lives, but rather feminist caricatures of men. These women are the very sort who embody the ideal of “girlboss” that has since, for good reason, become a pejorative: A domineering, petty, promiscuous, overbearing shrew who was only put in charge because she checked the right diversity boxes. When they’re being told by pop culture that these are the sort of women they should learn from, be managed by, and even marry, is it really such a surprise that they’d rather have sex with a beehive?
I’ve met more than my share of women who fit the “girlboss” archetype. They’re not pleasant to be around, they’re constantly angry at everything and nothing in particular, and they rarely know what they’re doing.
I’ve also met plenty of women that would fit the role that Elizabeth assumed in ruling her nation. The vast majority of women I’ve met fall somewhere in between. Not every woman is a tender-hearted matriarch-in-waiting with steely, motherly resolve, but I think many of them have untapped potential to be.
Feminism is the con that got us into this mess, and we will only get out by rejecting not only feminism, but its flawed underlying premise that men and women are effectively interchangeable widgets. When women try to imitate men, they shed those very qualities that give them their unique feminine power. The same is true of men who try to imitate women, though the results there are far more apparently grotesque. For all the cries about how unfair it is that mediocre biological men are beating female athletes by such large margins, it speaks to a much larger truth that has been cast aside in the name of pithy ideals: Women cannot compete with men. But this isn’t a bad thing. Men don’t, as a rule, enjoy competing with women. Men thrive on competition, and prefer competing with other men. The way forward for us is to remember that we are complementary with one another.
As Dave laid it out in his video, the formula is deceptively simple: The King rules the realm, and the Queen rules the King’s heart.