the invisible labor / gender abolition piece is really interesting to me - the project of getting men to find a way to contribute to domestic/relationship labor does seem like it could benefit from engaging with how men see themselves, rather than trying to get them to identify as men less.
"show that youre a business-savy sigma male by negotiating a mutually agreeable chore responsibility matrix with your partner"
i can say def in my case (as a man) that i avoided cleaning up partially because the ambiguous situation about who is in charge of the house was too much for my male brain to comprehend. i like clean lines of responsibility. me being told that i was supposed to take initiative to clean was very confusing. to me it was an obvious game being played by my wife who wanted me to clean and be in charge but who didn't want to give up the authority to hold her standards above mine. i felt like it was a trick. it took me a long time to figure out how to be better at cleaning up without triggering this. the trick of "do it like i am single" is a good way around all this mess i think.
im right there w u about wanting clear lines of responsibility! gender isnt really up to the task of providing that when the roles arent really strict. like if cleaning isnt 100% on women, then who does the cleaning is downstream of lots of other labor that needs to be assigned - like who notices when cleaning needs to happen, who decides the standard of cleanliness, who gets to approve or object to the results.
maybe what straight women want is for men be able to do some collaborative project management - or to act like a subordinate whose boss is too busy to communicate project specs but still has the final say on whether it's good enough.
"Collaborative project management" sounds closest, I think.
A spouse who's subordinate is okay. I expect most women married to men would settle for that. Especially if they're happy in the subordinate role and cheerfully accept a long list of honey-dos, and especially if they can take some initiative and don't require micromanagement.
But it's much better to have a spouse who actually sees themselves as responsible for Project: Household, who notices what needs to be done and does it, who participates in setting the standards for cleanliness rather than passive-aggressively neglecting chores they've decided don't matter.
>to me it was an obvious game being played by my wife who wanted me to clean and be in charge but who didn't want to give up the authority to hold her standards above mine.
i feel like this is the crux of the issue
what was the actual difference in the standards just out of curiosity
actual difference in standards is very typical - that i am untidy (adhd style man) and do not see it, and she wants it cleaner.
when i started working toward what she wanted i found a lot of contradictions (what she said she wanted and what she actually wanted) which i interpreted as she actually just wants her own territory and control. which is fine and makes more sense to my brain. i want that too, i get it, we live in an apartment with a kid and there's not enough space so there is conflict.
i think trying to superimpose "fairness" over this issue didn't help me at all. she went into fairness mode, which means that resentment over it became a kind of fungible currency. i really disliked that.
I poked around on the site a bit - illuminating. One commenter claimed that there had been a shift ~5 years ago away from reinvigorating stale marriages towards what you call "saving the man, not the marriage". Were you witness to such a change? Interested in other cultural shifts you might have observed over time
Question about the third footnote: could you elaborate on how/why that paragraph is worse/scarier than general redpill misogyny? I'm clueless about relationships in general, so applogies if i'm missing something very obvious here. but afaik the point about being able to be happy without your partner is a basic cliche for dating advice in general.
not the "being able to be happy without your partner" which is fine by me, but the "prove to yourself htat you'll be able to be happy without your partner specifically by flirting with other women"
I see how it's scary and unpleasant - I think the boring moral answer is the obviously correct one here: Stand up for yourself, set clear boundaries, reach out to your love and hope what comes back isn't more of the same old. When that doesn't work out, leaving is the only option.
Thoughever, here's my understanding of where this mentality comes from: Say you're a pussy-whipped 'yes, honey…' type husband. Despite trying to change your relationship dynamic your wife is too self-serving to reciprocate properly while you are in a position of weakness. She knows she 'has you in the bag', so she doesn't have to try very much, does she?
I think this is the pathology in a lot of those types of marriages. The men could without exaggeration be characterized as emotional abuse victims. They have no bargaining chips in their marriage because they are too invested in their partner - I wouldn't necessarily call that 'love', at the very least it's tainted by a childish kind of attachment, but still - I'm sympathetic toward that. I get it. And more so when they *do* try to change the dynamic but are stonewalled. They should just leave at that point, but I get why they don't.
The older generation in particular wasn't as self-aware as we are today about how toxic the relationship dynamics portrayed in popular media of their time were. They just seemed to accept the slop they were served up in sitcoms as empowerment, progress, women challenging outdated chauvinist models of marriage and family dynamics.
From that background, it makes sense to me how those kinds of men, when they get tired of compensating in an unhealthy way, might get it into their heads to 'flirt with other women to prove to yourself you have options'. You see what I mean?
I see what you find frightening about it. I don't like it either. But it checks out.
i appreciate the explanation, i def get it, its just so so scary i would really labor to avoid getting a relationship into a pass where an unhappy partner's only option was so threatening
Like I said, they have options, some guys are just too weak to walk away. Anyway, you're probably worrying about the wrong thing - you come off as very agreeable to me.
I came to a similar conclusion, writing about incel/ladder theory/friend zone stuff, that systematized misogyny seems to be a basic failure of modeling (charitably, else clearly a more severe/sinister failure of theory of mind). Definitely an interesting contrast that here, as you say, the model seems to have been just right enough (or has only been corrupted later) to get them that first partner. You're definitely getting to see the trainwreck happen closer to real-time like this.
I wonder what the inverse looks like, is there a married femcel subreddit or would women conspiring to get a side piece be too severe of a social defection to doable in public?
I think the most discombobulating thing about this is reading the posts in the weekly thread where people invariably post their lifts (i.e., how much they can bench/deadlift/squat) in an overall context of trying to improve their lives. Which is crazy by itself, that anyone would imagine these specific numbers to be any more relevant to their overall life than the level of their world of warcraft character.
But what makes it especially crazy is that they don't put down their income. Now if I were giving someone life advice my advice might change dramatically depending on their income. It wouldn't change at all based on how much they can lift.
I can imagine many possible explanations, few of them charitable.
"but a given individual’s desire to embody a specific gender role is inflexible and unlikely to change. Responding to the changing economic and social environment with new gender roles and stereotypes that are both genuinely fair and still feel gendered, is probably always going to work better than gender abolition."
Does anyone here have advice for someone who has no wish to embody a specific gender role?
honestly this is probably not great advice but ive found that all else being equal when you're fairly neutral about a gender loaded choice, people will like if better if you do the high status thing for your gender
It makes sense that people would like that better (maybe this is related to conforming to expectations -> being easier to predict -> being easier to interact with?)
thanks for pointing that out, and for pointing out the status thing. I'm not super good at reading status, and I have a bit of an impression that for women the feminine choice isn't always the high status choice but I'm not well calibrated about that.
Thanks for getting me to think about that.
Part of my problem is probably that I'm actively averse to some feminine stuff, and I'm not sure if I want to do what would be required to dissolve the adversity.
I’ve definitely noticed that the red pill perspective on women doesn’t apply as universally as it seems at first. It helped me get a woman in the first place but the first most obvious falsehood is the red pill claim that women can’t really love men. That became obvious with my first girlfriend.
What’s true is that narcissistic women can’t love men. And the sort of man you become when you optimize for getting laid cause you to mostly get romantically involved with those sorts of women.
There are lots of smaller ways the red pill falls short but feminist advice is usually precisely the worst advice and the general culture is roughly useless, so the red pill is where to start.
>the first most obvious falsehood is the red pill claim that women can’t really love men
whitepill 🥺
>What’s true is that narcissistic women can’t love men. And the sort of man you become when you optimize for getting laid cause you to mostly get romantically involved with those sorts of women.
these men don't think of their wives that way. i mean some of these women do suck, but many of the men come to the conclusion that their wives withdrew due to a failure on their own (ie the husband's) part, and in these cases i don't tend to see the women being described as partying a lit, just as being shrewish. the husbands tend to frame it as a failure of leadership, i'm sure their wives would frame it as a failure of emotional labor, to me whichever way of thinking about it allows for an actual change to happen is the right way to think about it
well the men i know are worse than the women i know, prolly for the same reason that the women you know are worse than the men you know. i am around women solely based on whether i like & trust them, but a lot of the men i'm around, i'm around bc a woman i know is infatuated w them, & love makes you dumb
I hope this is just part 1. I’m gripped.
omg too kind
Fr it feels like it ended on a cliffhanger
seconded!!!
thirded, i was reading this and was like wait, where is the rest? is there more?? i hope there will be more!!!
me too! I'd love to learn more.
same!!
omg i know yall are being nice & encouraging but im getting performance anxiety now...will you people ever be satisfied...
I familiar with a coping strategy for this problem which is, if nothing else, entertaining to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA
can you read my substack, i think you may find it interesting based on this post...
the invisible labor / gender abolition piece is really interesting to me - the project of getting men to find a way to contribute to domestic/relationship labor does seem like it could benefit from engaging with how men see themselves, rather than trying to get them to identify as men less.
"show that youre a business-savy sigma male by negotiating a mutually agreeable chore responsibility matrix with your partner"
i started feeling like cooking was genuinely reaching "shared task" status when i started hearing stereotypes about how men cook
i can say def in my case (as a man) that i avoided cleaning up partially because the ambiguous situation about who is in charge of the house was too much for my male brain to comprehend. i like clean lines of responsibility. me being told that i was supposed to take initiative to clean was very confusing. to me it was an obvious game being played by my wife who wanted me to clean and be in charge but who didn't want to give up the authority to hold her standards above mine. i felt like it was a trick. it took me a long time to figure out how to be better at cleaning up without triggering this. the trick of "do it like i am single" is a good way around all this mess i think.
im right there w u about wanting clear lines of responsibility! gender isnt really up to the task of providing that when the roles arent really strict. like if cleaning isnt 100% on women, then who does the cleaning is downstream of lots of other labor that needs to be assigned - like who notices when cleaning needs to happen, who decides the standard of cleanliness, who gets to approve or object to the results.
maybe what straight women want is for men be able to do some collaborative project management - or to act like a subordinate whose boss is too busy to communicate project specs but still has the final say on whether it's good enough.
"Collaborative project management" sounds closest, I think.
A spouse who's subordinate is okay. I expect most women married to men would settle for that. Especially if they're happy in the subordinate role and cheerfully accept a long list of honey-dos, and especially if they can take some initiative and don't require micromanagement.
But it's much better to have a spouse who actually sees themselves as responsible for Project: Household, who notices what needs to be done and does it, who participates in setting the standards for cleanliness rather than passive-aggressively neglecting chores they've decided don't matter.
>to me it was an obvious game being played by my wife who wanted me to clean and be in charge but who didn't want to give up the authority to hold her standards above mine.
i feel like this is the crux of the issue
what was the actual difference in the standards just out of curiosity
actual difference in standards is very typical - that i am untidy (adhd style man) and do not see it, and she wants it cleaner.
when i started working toward what she wanted i found a lot of contradictions (what she said she wanted and what she actually wanted) which i interpreted as she actually just wants her own territory and control. which is fine and makes more sense to my brain. i want that too, i get it, we live in an apartment with a kid and there's not enough space so there is conflict.
i think trying to superimpose "fairness" over this issue didn't help me at all. she went into fairness mode, which means that resentment over it became a kind of fungible currency. i really disliked that.
I poked around on the site a bit - illuminating. One commenter claimed that there had been a shift ~5 years ago away from reinvigorating stale marriages towards what you call "saving the man, not the marriage". Were you witness to such a change? Interested in other cultural shifts you might have observed over time
goodness to me it feels like that's been the vibe forever!
Everything in life is about taking ownership, except taking ownership. Taking ownership is about sex.
Question about the third footnote: could you elaborate on how/why that paragraph is worse/scarier than general redpill misogyny? I'm clueless about relationships in general, so applogies if i'm missing something very obvious here. but afaik the point about being able to be happy without your partner is a basic cliche for dating advice in general.
not the "being able to be happy without your partner" which is fine by me, but the "prove to yourself htat you'll be able to be happy without your partner specifically by flirting with other women"
I see how it's scary and unpleasant - I think the boring moral answer is the obviously correct one here: Stand up for yourself, set clear boundaries, reach out to your love and hope what comes back isn't more of the same old. When that doesn't work out, leaving is the only option.
Thoughever, here's my understanding of where this mentality comes from: Say you're a pussy-whipped 'yes, honey…' type husband. Despite trying to change your relationship dynamic your wife is too self-serving to reciprocate properly while you are in a position of weakness. She knows she 'has you in the bag', so she doesn't have to try very much, does she?
I think this is the pathology in a lot of those types of marriages. The men could without exaggeration be characterized as emotional abuse victims. They have no bargaining chips in their marriage because they are too invested in their partner - I wouldn't necessarily call that 'love', at the very least it's tainted by a childish kind of attachment, but still - I'm sympathetic toward that. I get it. And more so when they *do* try to change the dynamic but are stonewalled. They should just leave at that point, but I get why they don't.
The older generation in particular wasn't as self-aware as we are today about how toxic the relationship dynamics portrayed in popular media of their time were. They just seemed to accept the slop they were served up in sitcoms as empowerment, progress, women challenging outdated chauvinist models of marriage and family dynamics.
From that background, it makes sense to me how those kinds of men, when they get tired of compensating in an unhealthy way, might get it into their heads to 'flirt with other women to prove to yourself you have options'. You see what I mean?
I see what you find frightening about it. I don't like it either. But it checks out.
i appreciate the explanation, i def get it, its just so so scary i would really labor to avoid getting a relationship into a pass where an unhappy partner's only option was so threatening
Like I said, they have options, some guys are just too weak to walk away. Anyway, you're probably worrying about the wrong thing - you come off as very agreeable to me.
lmao nooooo dont say that in public i must maintain an air pf unfuckwithability
Lmao same
I came to a similar conclusion, writing about incel/ladder theory/friend zone stuff, that systematized misogyny seems to be a basic failure of modeling (charitably, else clearly a more severe/sinister failure of theory of mind). Definitely an interesting contrast that here, as you say, the model seems to have been just right enough (or has only been corrupted later) to get them that first partner. You're definitely getting to see the trainwreck happen closer to real-time like this.
I wonder what the inverse looks like, is there a married femcel subreddit or would women conspiring to get a side piece be too severe of a social defection to doable in public?
I think the most discombobulating thing about this is reading the posts in the weekly thread where people invariably post their lifts (i.e., how much they can bench/deadlift/squat) in an overall context of trying to improve their lives. Which is crazy by itself, that anyone would imagine these specific numbers to be any more relevant to their overall life than the level of their world of warcraft character.
But what makes it especially crazy is that they don't put down their income. Now if I were giving someone life advice my advice might change dramatically depending on their income. It wouldn't change at all based on how much they can lift.
I can imagine many possible explanations, few of them charitable.
"but a given individual’s desire to embody a specific gender role is inflexible and unlikely to change. Responding to the changing economic and social environment with new gender roles and stereotypes that are both genuinely fair and still feel gendered, is probably always going to work better than gender abolition."
Does anyone here have advice for someone who has no wish to embody a specific gender role?
honestly this is probably not great advice but ive found that all else being equal when you're fairly neutral about a gender loaded choice, people will like if better if you do the high status thing for your gender
It makes sense that people would like that better (maybe this is related to conforming to expectations -> being easier to predict -> being easier to interact with?)
thanks for pointing that out, and for pointing out the status thing. I'm not super good at reading status, and I have a bit of an impression that for women the feminine choice isn't always the high status choice but I'm not well calibrated about that.
Thanks for getting me to think about that.
Part of my problem is probably that I'm actively averse to some feminine stuff, and I'm not sure if I want to do what would be required to dissolve the adversity.
"also it’s just inherently weird and difficult to ask someone to be responsible for soething you’re responsible for."
Who is the "someone" here and who is the "you"
I’ve definitely noticed that the red pill perspective on women doesn’t apply as universally as it seems at first. It helped me get a woman in the first place but the first most obvious falsehood is the red pill claim that women can’t really love men. That became obvious with my first girlfriend.
What’s true is that narcissistic women can’t love men. And the sort of man you become when you optimize for getting laid cause you to mostly get romantically involved with those sorts of women.
There are lots of smaller ways the red pill falls short but feminist advice is usually precisely the worst advice and the general culture is roughly useless, so the red pill is where to start.
>the first most obvious falsehood is the red pill claim that women can’t really love men
whitepill 🥺
>What’s true is that narcissistic women can’t love men. And the sort of man you become when you optimize for getting laid cause you to mostly get romantically involved with those sorts of women.
im curious about exactly why this happens
Why the optimization you mean?
Interesting outsider perspective.
does that mean you're an insider? 👀 what am i missing would you say
Nah. Just had a problem once, searched, ended up there, solved it, moved on with my life.
healthy approach tbh. get in get the goods get out, like a bank heist. dont build your identity around it etc etc
these men don't think of their wives that way. i mean some of these women do suck, but many of the men come to the conclusion that their wives withdrew due to a failure on their own (ie the husband's) part, and in these cases i don't tend to see the women being described as partying a lit, just as being shrewish. the husbands tend to frame it as a failure of leadership, i'm sure their wives would frame it as a failure of emotional labor, to me whichever way of thinking about it allows for an actual change to happen is the right way to think about it
well the men i know are worse than the women i know, prolly for the same reason that the women you know are worse than the men you know. i am around women solely based on whether i like & trust them, but a lot of the men i'm around, i'm around bc a woman i know is infatuated w them, & love makes you dumb