Men should learn to free themselves ...
Novaseeker posts
on
Spearhead
I very much agree with the idea that Obsidian has
about self-improvement. It’s always a good thing for men. I don’t,
however, agree that getting women is the key to male happiness or an
indicator that a man is “doing well” with his life. A good number of guys
who are very good at getting women are *not* doing well with their lives,
but are low-lifes, jerks, incarcerated, abusive addicts and so on. Many of
these guys are not lacking women at all, yet their lives are a disaster
and in *no* way indicative of how men should be.
This is where my support of Game begins and ends. It’s fine as
a self-improvement technique, and for people to use it as they wish. When
it morphs into a worldview, such that judgments are made about whether men
are quality or not depending on their success with women, it crosses a
pathological line and begins to collaborate with the system it was
established to navigate. In other words, the shortcomings of allowing Game
to become a worldview, or even a lens through which the quality of the man
is evaluated by other men are:
(1) it
is way too narrow a perspective on what is important about being a man,
and the various qualities that men bring to the table, most of which have
zilch to do with success with women
and
(2) it surrenders the criteria for
defining manhood to women, because ultimately what Gamers are doing is
figuring out how to do what women today want — sure, I get that they are
doing it from a perspective of being in control of the situation, but at
the end of the day they are in control of altering their behavior to meet
the expectations of women.
Using this
criterion and then criticizing other men on the basis of how women
evaluate them is simply pathological for men. It takes us away from the
kind of freedom we have today and instead puts men back into a box — a box
designed to cater to women, their desires, their wants, their passions and
so on. Again, my criticism is certainly not of guys who learn and use Game
— that’s not an issue. What *is* an issue, however, is men picking this up
to use as another knightstick to yet again beat on other men, at a time
when we should all be endorsing more freedom for men to do what they want
with their lives, rather than tying them to women and their expectations
if they do not wish to be so tied.
Another way of saying this is that Gamers are certainly one way to lead
the life of men today. And that is fine with me. What I take issue with,
however, is when Game becomes a kind of fundamentalist worldview — one
which places success with women at the center of manhood and even
credibility as a male. This is going in completely the wrong direction for
men, in my opinion. The freedom we have today as men is broad — our canvas
is vast. If some guys want to learn Game and get very successful with
women, that’s fine. But arguing that guys who want to focus on other
things in life, taking advantage of the freedom that the breakdown in
gender roles now permits us as men, are somehow less manly, less
legitimate as men, less successful as men and so on is just fundamentally
counterproductive to what men should be doing for each other — namely,
supporting each other’s choices, rather than denigrating those men who
make different choices than we might.
This has been the chronic issue of the men’s movement in the past. Men are
“systemizers”, typically. We work hard to find a system that makes sense
to us and then we adopt that system. Often, however, men get
fundamentalist about their own system. When this happens, men grow into
conflict with each other, because they begin to criticize each other for
being on the wrong “system”. This kind of thinking and behavior has been
sinking the men’s movement since forever, and it needs to end.
The way to end it is for men to embrace … freedom. It really is
that simple. Support for the choices other men make, according to their
own worked-out “systems”, rather than denigrating men for belonging to the
“wrong” system. Our movement should be about male freedom — freedom from
old roles and their burdens, freedom from new burdensome laws, and more
fundamentally the freedom to choose our own path. Not a one-size-fits-all
approach which says “be successful with women or I’m not interested in
what you have to say, buddy”. |
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