Clarity need not be bitter

In one of his more important posts to date, Dalrock addresses some of the inevitable problems when truthful observation destroys male fantasies about women and produces what he describes as Red Pill Bitterness:

Understanding women left him with at worst an intense hatred for women, and at best a greatly reduced ability to feel love for women.  The first is an overreaction to starting from a position of overlooking all sins committed by women.  If you nurtured a fantasy that women are innately good then seeing their sins for the first time is bound to be jarring.  This is especially true given that the widespread pass given to women has encouraged an immense amount of bad behavior.  If you are struggling with this be careful not to paint all women with the same brush, and to understand the pass which modern men have offered women for what it really is, cruelty dressed as kindness.

This doesn’t mean there is no place for anger at injustice, but to keep the larger picture in perspective.  This means not seeing “woman” as a faceless collective, but making a serious effort to see individual women for who they are.  The “red pill” helps us understand their different temptations from ours, but understanding this should help us empathize and relate to our own imperfection.  Key to this process is keeping in mind the importance of repentance. 

From the logical perspective, the metaphorical cracking of the pedestal should be no more troubling than the realization that girls are not, in fact, literally made out of sugar, spice, and everything nice. The distinction between what we want and what happens to be is no more earth-shattering when it applies to women and their behavior than to any other application of the is/ought problem.

And yet, it is emotionally difficult, if not shattering, for many men to realize that their paragons of virtue are no more virtuous than they are, that said paragons may actually, in fact, be considerably less virtuous from the male perspective than the man himself is.  And how can a man rely upon a woman to inspire him to be a better man when he is already a more noble and virtuous individual than she has shown herself to be?

The answer is that if a man is relying upon a woman for inspiration, he is utilizing an unreliable crutch. A woman may be the prize, but she should not be the purpose. The runner does not run the race for the strip of colored silk that is his reward, it is the race and the victory that are the reward and the prize is only a reminder of it; the value of this sort of victory is not derived from the prize.

Honor, as was said in the movie Rob Roy, is a man's gift to himself. Virtue is his duty to God. Neither of these things are sexually appealing to women, they do not derive from women, and in their male form, they are not even necessarily relevant to them. Bitterness is not only not justified, it is the result of a philosophical category error.

It should always be kept in mind that the sabotaging that so many men suffer in their formative years at the hands of well-meaning women, clueless naturals, and deluded BETA males is not intentional. One must forgive them, even as one learns to completely ignore their advice, because they quite literally do not know what they are doing.  After all, if it is difficult for a man to accept the observable reality of female lack of virtue with equanimity, how much harder, how much more shattering must it be, for a woman to do the same?