When I started the Masculinist, the church was a barren wasteland for advice on sexuality. I barely saw anyone else writing constructively about even the most basic issues—things like attraction, the differences between men and women, marriage, divorce.
This Thursday, July 29 at 2pm ET I’ll be hosting a special live interview with Mike Yarbrough. Mike runs a couple of businesses for men, including a cool custom ring company Rustic and Main, as well as Wolf and Iron.
We’re going to be discussing his new book about manhood called Tending the Fire. We will chat about the five key principles of manhood he covers in the book: living deliberately, living courageously, living virtuously, living truthfully, and living spiritually.
Watch live or on replay below.
Hyperinsulinemia is sufficient but not necessary for weight gain.
Since keto kept coming up equivocal or inferior to ultra-processed food (UPF)-free diets, some proponents kept trying to invent mechanisms as to why keto ackshually was superior O_o
Let’s call this Keto Pseudo-Dominance.
-The best evidence was a spontaneous reduction in appetite. Unfortunately, it turned out that this was due to cutting UPF, not carbs per se, so it worked equally well on higher carb and even WFPB *gasp*
Here’s where it went from there…
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I expected that my reference to the Practical Conservative’s post arguing that homeschooling undermined conservative political advocacy would generate quite a bit of discussion. And it did. There are a lot of substantive comments on the thread that are well worth reading.
I think one point of confusing is that while I used the term “activism” in the title, she refers to “organizing,” with a broader implication. She refers to things like the founding of La Leche League in addition to just pure politics like opposing the ERA.
To shed more light on the social organizing function women played in communities prior to the mass entry of married women into the workforce and the homeschooling movement, I’ll share an excerpt from Brian Alexander’s book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town.
Glass House is about the destructive role of private equity in undermining communities. It will tell you more about how the economy really works today than any conservative writings will. It’s very much on my recommended reading list.
Alexander is definitely a liberal, but his keen journalistic observations make any number of perhaps unintended conservative points.
Here’s what he wrote about the role women used to play in his subject community of Lancaster, Ohio:
Through it all, Nancy threw herself into civic life. She was invited to join Twig 1 (of several Twigs), a women’s group with a mission to raise funds for the hospital. She volunteered as a “gray lady” in the hospital, working in a gray uniform at the reception desk, distributing newspapers to rooms, selling snacks.
She campaigned for school levies. When Nancy came to town, there were four main elementary schools, dating from the 1920s and 1930s and prosaically named West, North, East, and South. They were the result of a series…
The media glamorizes people making the choice to defer marriage and children in order to focus on other priorities like career. While this is a free country and people absolutely have the right to live their lives how they want, the longer term consequences of this for many is not as well advertised. The proliferation of older singles in the pews is in part a downstream consequence of these decisions.
The church should not simply become an underwriter of other people’s choices to live life on their own terms. While the church absolutely be adjusting to the new realities of more singles in congregations, it should also make sure the role of individual choice in how people ended up where they are is fully acknowledged. And people should be challenged to make different choices going forward.
Black Rifle Coffee recently got into trouble with conservatives for some of the stances they’ve taken lately. You can read more about it in the Revolver News article here. The point of this post isn’t to discuss their controversy. The politics and debate are somewhat predictable. The more fascinating thing about Black Rifle Coffee and the Revolver News article is this line that stuck out to me:
“In many ways, the imagery that Black Rifle indulges is actively harmful. Male-to-female transsexuals famously have a cartoonish, porn-influenced, stereotypical idea of what being a woman is like. That’s why drag queens have such a garish, over-the-top look. BRCC ads evoke the same idea, but for men. Their target demographic is, in a sense, male-to-male transsexuals.”
The phrase “male-to-male transsexuals” is apt. I’ve written in the past how there is a phenomenon I call the Manliness LARP. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing game where men grow beards, learn about whiskey, and pretend to be men. At the end of the day, it’s a consumerist ploy to convince men that they’ll be manly if they purchase these razor blades/booze/coffee/whatever. It’s a similar marketing tactic to what cosmetic companies use on women. Purchase this thing, and then you’ll be fulfilled/attractive. It’s not manliness or manhood. It’s a fad used to separate insecure men from their money.
We live in a world where Christianity is considered a negative. But we also live in a world where authentic manhood is negative. That’s part of the reason why Black Rifle Coffee was able to be so successful. They appealed to the manhood crisis.
However, it should have been evident from the beginning that Black Rifle Coffee was inauthentic. Their definition of manliness was always safe and immature. It was frat boy manliness. It was…
Jason Meyer, the successor of evangelical superstar John Piper as senior pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, resigned last week.
In 2015, Meyer preached a sermon on domestic abuse that lots of Evangelicals shared and promoted. Even today, people on twitter are referring back to that sermon in their comments on his resignation.
The sermon was “Fooled by False Leadership.” Both a video and the text are available online. Please note that the posted text is not a literal word for word transcript, so please refer to the video for the actual specifics of what was preached.
With Meyer stepping down, this is a good time to look back at perhaps his most famous sermon. It contains some good points but was also deeply troubling in many ways. A thorough analysis would take many thousands of words to detail, but I will share some highlights that will hopefully make you question what you are hearing.
Meyer defines abuse as: “A godless pattern of abusive behavior among spouses involving physical, psychological, and/or emotional means to exert and obtain power and control over a spouse for the achievement of selfish ends.”
Where did he get this definition of abuse from? He is giving a sermon, with 2 Corinthians 11:16-21 as the sermon text. He spends about 20 minutes discussing the passage prior to beginning his discussion of domestic abuse. The abuse section of the sermon is even labeled “Application” in the online text.
Does his definition of abuse come from this passage (or anyplace else in the Bible)?
Compare Meyer’s definition with the United Nations definition of abuse: “A pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner….
When I started the Masculinist, the church was a barren wasteland for advice on sexuality. I barely saw anyone else writing constructively about even the most basic issues—things like attraction, the differences between men and women, marriage, divorce.
Are the top people in the evangelical world really elite? Are they elite evangelicals or evangelical elites? In reality, they are a sort of sub-elite, more adjacent to than part of the genuine American elite. This episode looks at how to think about and talk about the top people within evangelicalism. It also examines the roots of progressive energy in red states in the “progressive yokel.”
You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and elsewhere. Check out the other podcasts here.
The correct red pill response to these tests is often highly counter-intuitive. The most famous response technique in the Game arsenal is “Agree and Amplify.” So if a woman says something like, “You just want to have sex with me,” the red pilled man would say something like, “Babe, I don’t just want you for sex. I want your money too.” Or if a woman asks the infamous, “Do I look fat in this dress?” question, the right answer is not something like, “Of course not, honey. You’re so beautiful!” Rather, it would be to grin, spread your arms as wide as possible, and say, “Huuuuuge, baby!” This assumes she is not actually overweight, of course. And the key in all these interactions is to “hold frame” if she seems to initially be offended by the man’s answer.
For a guy interested in having sex with women, Game would teach that it’s actually better to come across as something of a scumbag than as potential boyfriend or husband material. If you seem like a potential boyfriend, this will only cause her to delay getting sexual in order to make sure she doesn’t come across as a slut. In other words, the pickup artist wants to trigger her alpha seed desires vs. her beta need ones. So in their view it’s actually important to avoid being seen as a “good man!”
Another important concept is to maintain an abundance mentality and not a scarcity one. This is a staple of mainstream self-improvement teachings of course. In the red pill context, it means seeking to become “outcome indifferent.” That is, if a woman you walk up to in a club rejects you, it’s no big deal. There are plenty more out there. In fact, it’s probably her loss. Above all, a man should avoid…
