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May 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:10
243 Reclaiming Masculinity Part 2: Ethical Partnerships
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Good afternoon. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's time for part two of Reclaiming Your Masculinity.
Now, in this version, we get a nice set of fur gloves and reach under the table slowly.
One moment. I'll be right back.
Alrighty. Where was I? Oh, something to do with grabbing yourself.
Well, now that you're done with that, it's good that you had a boss while I was working on that phone call, so...
This is part two of offending everyone.
I mean, sorry, of getting in touch with your masculinity.
And what we're going to chat about today is beauty.
The lure and the lie of beauty.
Now, all power that is not based on morality corrupts.
That is a basic, I think, axiom of what we're working with as a conversation about ethics here on freedomainradio.com.
All power that is not based on virtue, right?
I mean, I would say that I have some small amount of power here based on the fact that what I say, I try to vet fairly rigorously or logically, or at least based on my own personal experiences, so to a small degree empirically.
But do I have any power or influence?
Yeah, I have a little bit of power and influence based on the virtue of what it is that I'm trying to talk about.
The rigor and virtue and the ethics and the epistemology, the metaphysics and so on, all that kind of stuff.
So yeah, I have a little bit of power.
People say, do you have a little bit of influence?
Yeah, I get a little bit of influence, but it's based on virtue.
But influence which is a power which is not based on virtue always corrupts.
Now, question for you, my fine feathered friends.
Is female beauty, physical beauty, we're only talking, when I just use the term beauty here, I'm not talking lofty spiritual essence, I'm talking TNA. Physical beauty, is it moral or is it not moral?
Well, clearly there's no ethical basis to physical beauty.
Physical beauty is not a reward that you get for being a good person.
But it is just an accident which is often cultivated by, you know, assiduous dieting and going to the gym and sometimes reconstructive surgery and makeup and clothing and so on.
But it's, by and large, accidental.
You can't take an ugly person and turn them into a model, but you can take a good-looking person and make them look great.
So, that's the sort of pretty basic thing to understand, that physical beauty is nothing to do with virtue.
Now, because Physical beauty has power, right?
Physical beauty has the power, and it is one of the greatest powers in the world.
Plato said, you want wealth, you want beauty, and you want health.
That's sort of the basics, and wisdom, I guess, he sort of put in as an afterthought.
And beauty is a very powerful thing in the world.
Of course, you just look at TV, you look at movies, you look at...
Magazines in particular, and the whole thing is sort of cheek-to-cheek, stuffed to the jowls with beauty.
It's the basic currency, you know, like that old song from the musical Summertime, your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking.
That's the two basic coinages that occur in the world.
Male wealth and female beauty.
You always, when you see a rich, successful man and you see his wife, you never see a plain or homely woman.
With the possible exception of Terry Quinn from Lost, where if you see a picture of his wife, she looks about like two and a half miles of bad road.
But I'm sure she's a wonderful person, so that's what really counts.
So, female beauty has a great deal of power in the world, but female beauty's power is not based on morality.
Therefore, the power of female beauty and female beauty itself corrupts.
Now, I know a tad whereof I speak, and I'll preface this just by saying that I find Christina gorgeous, but as I've mentioned before, she was not my type when I first met her, and neither was I her type.
She likes the strong, silent type, not the weak, chatty type.
That's just for you, baby.
But before I went out with Christina, I went out with a strikingly my type kind of good-looking woman who was a purser, sort of head stewardess and so on.
And before that, I went out with a bunch of women, but basically I was very shallow around looks.
And I've talked about this in the podcast about my yoga class.
I can't believe a libertarian podcast is about a yoga class.
But I think if you've heard it, you'll know where I'm coming from.
But beauty has been something that is a great draw to me, as it is for most men, female beauty.
And it's something that is a great coinage.
A woman didn't have to be that special a human being for me to want to go out with her if she was pretty in the way that I liked.
And so my first criteria for finding a woman attractive and wanting to talk to her was physical beauty.
And this, of course, caused great corruption and degradation within my relationships because I was not requiring that the woman be virtuous.
I was not requiring that the woman be kind or rational or good.
I just required, basically, that she be pretty in vain.
Now, speaking from my own experience, that didn't work out so well for me.
Choosing a woman based on looks didn't really work out so well for me.
What would happen is that I'd go into a restaurant with a good-looking woman on my arm, and everybody would turn and go, ooh, or as my boss put it, you her bodyguard?
I don't think he thought I was the best-looking guy in the world.
That's neither here nor there.
But, of course, they'd go...
And maybe they'd say, wow, that guy's with a pretty girl.
And then they would just go back to their regular lives and not really give me a second thought.
So maybe I'd get that sort of flash of, I don't know, like alpha male with the pretty girl feeling, and then they'd sort of go back to their lives.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so that was a bad idea.
And there's a whole chunk of the God of Atheists, which maybe I'll post on the boards, where Rudy, who is the babble fish in the God of Atheists, has this problem.
He calls himself a blut, which is a beauty slut.
Somebody who will do just about anything to be with a pretty girl.
And so I wrote an entire section, but it was just too long a book.
I had to cut it out. But I turned it into a short story, so I'll post that on the boards, and you can get a bit more of an idea of what it is that I'm talking about when I talk about wrestling with attraction to stereotypical kinds of beauty.
Now, that having been said, there are certain types of physical imperfections, you could say, which...
are suspicious in terms of what it might mean about the woman's psychological makeup, or the man's, of course.
So if the woman's 300 pounds, there might be something wherein she's using food to cover psychological problems or ailments, just some sort of problem somewhere, somehow, probably to do with sexual abuse, because a lot of women who are sexually abused end up putting on a lot of weight so that they don't have to worry about being approached from a sexual standpoint, which brings within them great horror, of course.
And this is true of men as well.
But the idea that there's a kind of pretty face, pretty hair, a woman who doesn't have to be shaped like an hourglass, but is healthy and so on.
Well, the idea that we as men should be basically slaves to female beauty and should make our decisions about who to date and have our primary attractions based on stereotypical or culturally normalized ideas of Female beauty is a very, very, very bad idea and something which is frankly completely emasculating.
Completely and totally emasculating for a wide variety of reasons.
First of all, it's emasculating because we are holding up a standard that we as men always fear to be judged by.
As I talked about in the podcast about my yoga class, I wanted to go out with a couple of women in the yoga class because they were beautiful.
And so I would approach them and I would chat with them.
And the two most beautiful women in the class basically would chat with me for a few minutes but wouldn't give me the time of day.
And of course I resented that because I thought it meant, I'm sure it is true, that they felt I was not attractive enough.
And of course that's just a pathetic paradox as I sort of figured out towards the end of this time at this class that...
I mean, how ridiculous is it to say, I want to go out with this woman because she's beautiful, but I don't want her to not go out with me because I'm not beautiful.
If you're judging her by that standard, how on earth am I to blame this woman for judging me by exactly the same standard?
I want to go out with you because you're beautiful, but I don't want you to apply any standards of physical beauty to me because I am not in the top tier of physical beauty and you are and so on.
So I was able to go out with other women from the yoga class, but never quite at that top tier of beauty.
The sort of really head-turning, jaw-dropping kinds of beauty.
And that's because I wasn't as bald or I wasn't good-looking enough.
And that's fine.
I mean, that's something that you learn to deal with as a mature man, that this is not your primary mechanism or key for being attractive and forming stable relationships.
So if you judge a woman by her looks, then it's certainly possible that there's going to be some great personality inside a very pretty shell.
So there's nothing wrong with chatting with a pretty girl.
Don't get me wrong about that.
But the odds are very small.
Simply because power corrupts.
It's like expecting there to be somebody who has inherited a lot of money and beauty having a very strong and productive work ethic and understanding the poor.
It's just not that likely.
It could happen, but it's just not that likely based on circumstances.
A power corrupts, and this is a power that we as men absolutely grant to women.
And we as men, I know that there are biological imperatives and this and that, but so what?
The fact is that we grant this power to women based on the fact that we judge them by their looks.
Now the second power that we grant to women is the power of providing sex.
So the woman provides sex and suddenly she has value because she has an orifice and is willing to open her legs.
Now, that is really a very, very poor way to judge the quality of a woman, to judge the value of a woman.
That is a power that corrupts.
Is the fact that she has an orifice based on any particular virtue?
Do good women get orifices and bad women don't?
Of course not. In fact, often women who are corrupt and have severe personal problems tend to have accessibility slightly on the higher end of the scale than women who have self-respect and self-esteem.
And so it could be said that the accessibility of this orifice is actually inversely proportional to the woman's virtue.
Possibly. I'm not saying completely, but it's certainly possible.
And in my experience, the easier that the orifice is to get at at the beginning of the relationship, the less you get at it later in the relationship.
But we don't really have to go into a huge amount of detail about that, I'm sure.
And quite the obverse is true with women of virtue.
So the fact that a woman is willing to have sex provides absolutely, creates absolutely no value.
In fact, I would put it as a danger sign, unless it's, you know, like your 10th or 15th or 20th date, and you've got real compatibility, and you're really going somewhere based on virtue.
And so the physical beauty of a woman is not something that she earns, and it is not something that is based on any virtue.
The sexual availability of a woman is not something that she earns.
She earns neither her orifice nor the male sex drive, and don't get me wrong, I know that women have a very strong sex drive as well.
But, typically, it is the man who proposes and the woman who disposes in this area.
Despite all of the progress of feminism, women seem very keen to aim at the boardroom, but they still don't ask men out.
That's sort of been my experience and the experience of most of the men that I've talked to.
So, these two aspects of femininity, beauty and orifice accessibility, OA, perhaps we shall call it for short, It's something that twists a lot of men in the wind, and I speak from great experience here, twists a lot of men in the wind and lets us imbue or makes us imbue value into that which has no value.
I mean, yeah, it's pleasant to have sex, it's great to have sex, and yes, it's nice to have a pretty girl on your arm, but I think that we're supposed to be a little bit deeper than that, especially we philosophers, especially we thinkers, especially we libertarians, especially we anarcho-capitalists, especially we moralists.
So, if you're some...
Calvin Klein model out there listening to this while you're on your way to the gym, this may not include you, but we are in fact moralists and philosophers and supposed to be just a little bit deeper than wanting to basically have sex with well-shaped mannequins.
I think that we're supposed to aim at something a little bit deeper and more virtuous than orifices and even features.
That is an incredibly shallow way to approach the question of love.
You can't love physical beauty.
This is a great paradox.
We are attracted to physical beauty as men, and just as women are attracted to physical beauty in guys.
What is it that women say they want these days?
It's cute and funny. And with a great car.
No, actually, just the cute and funny thing seems to be the common refrain of what women want.
And so... We are attracted to physical beauty, but we cannot love physical beauty.
It's a dangerous drug.
It is an addiction. And we are attracted to sexual availability, but we cannot love sexual availability.
In fact, it's very hard to respect a woman who is sexually available in a way that is not sort of monogamistic and exclusive to men who've earned it based on virtue and mutual attraction and so on.
We have this power, this sexual and romantic power that we give to women, irrespective of their virtue.
And of course this corrupts women.
And of course it corrupts relationships between the genders.
And of course it causes women to focus more on appearance than on virtue.
We train women as men by what it is that we will be attracted to, and what it is we will put up with, and what it is we will reject, and what it is we will pursue.
We train women on how to be as a gender because women generally respond to what men find attractive.
Now, of course, men do respond. Just talking about it from the male perspective.
You can reverse it if you want.
Just talking about the male perspective.
Women will adapt their virtues and what it is they spend time on to further to appeal to what it is that men find attractive.
So, if all we're interested in is pursuing wasp-waist, tight-bund, Christy Turlington look-alikes, then, by golly, all of the women will be attempting to fit through that mold.
All of the women will, I mean, most of the women will try to become that person.
And if you doubt me at all, pick up any women's magazine.
Absolutely stunning. There are no pictures of men in there.
I mean, it's all women.
And it's all about fitting into a particular hourglass figure, a particular kind of hair.
All women want to do is try to be as attractive as humanly possible to men, in the majority, in general.
And that's biologically perfectly understandable.
So what is it that we as men say is attractive for us?
What is it that we say women should be in order to get us as mates?
Well, we say that they should be pretty and they should be available.
I mean, really? Fundamentally?
That's about it. And what does that do?
Well, it focuses women on being pretty, and then it focuses them on all the stress of wanting to be available to men.
And this is a great problem for people who are particularly, those who are younger than I am, even, oh, even younger than I am.
That women have this constant problem of knowing that if they don't have sex with the guy by the third date, he's not going to be interested.
But if they do have sex with the guy by the third date, then he's probably not going to be interested further after that.
So there's this great problem that women face.
And basically, it's should I put out or should I not put out?
If I really look like this guy and I put out, then I'm...
Giving a particular kind of signal and showing myself to be a particular kind of girl.
And he may lose interest.
He may lose respect. But if I don't put out, then the guy may think I'm a prude.
He may think I'm this.
He may get bored.
There's other women always out there who are throwing stuff at him day and night.
I mean, from the woman's perspective.
And so there's this constant struggle within women.
And we've trained them into this kind of mess.
Only in virtuous women, right?
And non-virtuous women either...
Reject you in a harsh way or sort of it's like open fields on the orifice time.
But virtuous women, women who are concerned or care about having a longer term relationship or getting married or having kids, they have this struggle and it's a significant struggle.
And we as men train women, right?
This is a great secret of masculinity.
We train women.
We train women on how to be by what we're attracted to.
Women need men in a way that men don't need women.
A woman really wants to have kids, and I know men do want to have kids as well, but it's a special thing for a woman because she's pregnant and breastfeeding and all that.
She's sort of more designed for the nurturing than men, just at a basic biochemical level, a basic sort of brain pattern level.
And so women want the kids, want the family, and this is traditionally known throughout societies that it's a little harder to get men to commit than to get women.
Women are always thinking about the future.
Men are just going day by day.
There's a little bit of that. I think that's true.
And so women need men in order to have children because they can't survive alone.
This is in the biological sense, not in the welfare state sense.
And men, you know, we can kind of get by without women, as long as we can sort of have access to dates and so on.
But Women really need men more than men need women from a family standpoint, and so women are the ones who focus on being more attractive and wooing and being seductive and not wooing like going out and bringing flowers to the guy, but inviting, right? Being attractive and being inviting.
And women also become men wranglers of the first order, right?
You know, you want the guy to come to you, but of course, when you put out being attractive, you get lots of other guys coming at you, and so you've got to fight them back and get the guy to come to you who you do want to get.
You know, it's complicated. And I sort of used to do, when I was younger, this sort of bit about a woman at a bar, just tossing her hair and sipping her drink delectably and just trying to get the guy to come over who she wants to come over.
But he's scared. It's like trying to feed a squirrel.
You don't want to move too quickly.
You want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to get the guy to come to you.
And it's kind of stressful for women, I think.
Just come on over. Don't be frightened.
Don't be shy. You can do it.
But... What we do by focusing on looks and sexual availability is we train women to focus on their own looks to the expense of their own personalities.
And this is pretty important, I think, to understand.
Men have an enormous amount of power in gender relationships.
I know that we're not trained to that, right?
There's a lot of propaganda about how we're kind of useless.
We're like tits on a bull.
We're kind of useless and we're kind of put up with because of X, Y, and Z.
You know, it's nice to have somebody in the bed who's warm.
We're basically a rather large and flatulent hot water bottle.
But we have an enormous amount of power.
Now, this is more true before the welfare state.
The welfare state comes in, men become much more expendable, and this is sort of what you're seeing in society.
But we're talking about virtuous women who want a good relationship.
We're not talking about women who just sort of bang around and end up pumping out kids and just sort of live on that.
We're talking about virtuous women who want a decent relationship.
Men have an enormous amount of power.
But what we need to do as men, if we want to regain some sense of our own power and efficacy as men, what we need to do is to start demanding that women are virtuous and forget about and fight the looks thing.
Fight, fight, fight the looks thing.
And this is something that's so fundamental that I'm not trying to put you in this position of like original sin where you have to fight every impulse you have.
Have the impulses. Of course, you can't fight being drawn to an attractive woman.
But when it comes to somebody you want to date and spend time with, you just have to demand a little more.
And if you don't demand more, that's fine, but all you're doing is training women to be shallow and to be corrupt, right?
Because if they can use beauty and they can use sexual availability as their value, then there's absolutely no chance that they're going to be motivated to work on virtue at the expense of those things.
Now, it's not exactly the easiest thing to turn this supertanker of gender degradation or the degradation in gender relations around, but I think it's essential.
And it starts pretty early on.
And it's exactly the same thing as I have been talking about with everything else in the podcast series.
It's exactly the same basic principle.
Your parents do not have value because they fill the category called parents.
Your parents do not have value, do not have virtue, because they had sex and gave birth to you.
That is not something which creates virtue.
Having sex, having a child is not a virtuous activity, and so your parents must be judged as human beings, irrespective of the category called parents, which is simply a long-ago biological categorization.
And so what am I saying?
I'm saying you don't judge people by categories which are not innately bound up to or are inconsequential to virtue.
You judge people by virtue.
Because we can only love virtue.
We can only respect virtue.
We can only get along with virtue.
We can only have win-win negotiations with virtuous people.
We can only have happy lives if we're with virtuous people.
Virtue is the methodology for joy.
You can't get around it and get by it and have some other methodology that can work for you.
So, you can't love your parents because they're your parents.
You can only love them if they're virtuous.
Can't love your siblings. The state doesn't exist.
A politician calls himself the state.
You do not judge virtue by something called the state.
You do not judge value by something called physical attractiveness.
It is a physical characteristic that has nothing to do with virtue whatsoever.
And if you try to love physical beauty...
You will end up corrupted and degraded and in a lose-lose situation, or actually win-lose for the woman and lose-lose for you.
And you will end up with a great deal of insecurity because if you're there just because she's pretty, then some other guy who's going to come along and who can give her something else, who's prettier than you are or richer than you are, since you're basically exchanging things based on inconsequential physical characteristics.
And I include wealth in this as well.
It's an inconsequential physical characteristic if it's inherited.
If you've earned it, it may have some virtue if you've done it honestly.
But you will not ever be happy if you attempt to love based on physical beauty.
It is, in fact, inverse, in my experience.
It's been inverse to happiness.
Because what actually happens in life, and this is based on my experience with Christina, is that, yeah, the woman might not be your type when you first start going out with her, but now I think she's the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world.
Our perceptions will alter.
Our type will alter to fit the virtue of the woman we love.
I mean, that's something you just have to trust me on, if you haven't experienced it already.
And if you have, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.
And so, that's something that we really need to focus on as men.
Stop rewarding women for being pretty, for being pretty, for being cute.
Stop rewarding women.
for sexual availability.
Stop rewarding women with our time and our focus and our attention based on anything other than their virtue.
And the virtue, it's a complicated thing for women.
Virtue is not exactly the same for women as it is for men.
It is in sort of the basics.
But in some of the aesthetic forms of virtue, it's a little bit different.
Women need to be a little bit more nurturing.
But of course, nobody gets to kill, steal, and rape.
But there are certain aesthetics that are different.
Otherwise, we'd just be photocopies of the genders and there'd be no such thing as heterosexuality other than as a statistical average.
But we have to quit approaching women as objects of physical beauty.
And we have to quit approaching women as objects of sexual availability.
If we want to start to begin to gain control of our own masculinity and the value that we have, everything that we approach in life, which we do not approach from a state of virtue or a state of curiosity about virtue, which is sort of deep and meaningful, not sort of whether you should eat a candy bar, if we don't do it on the basis of virtue, then we end up corrupting and destroying the relationship and corrupting and destroying ourselves over the long run.
So, I think that is something that as men we need to pay an enormous amount of attention to.
If there's one thing that I could get men to do, it would be to quit rewarding women for shallow and inconsequential characteristics that they have.
And to only start dealing with women from a romantic standpoint, from the standpoint of desire for virtue, respect for virtue, goodness, intelligence, integrity, honesty, Courage. Honor.
All of the great things that women can have as powerfully as men.
We have got to stop rewarding shallow inconsequential women with our lust, our desire, our time, our money, our resources, our wedding rings, any of that sort of stuff.
And we have got to start focusing our attentions on women of virtue, of power, courage, honesty, integrity, honor.
All of the great virtues that make a human soul beautiful.
Because it's got to be really frustrating for women out there.
I know it was for me when I was a single guy.
It's got to be really frustrating for virtuous women out there.
I mean, imagine, picture this.
Just picture this. So you're a virtuous woman, and you're not fat or anything, but maybe you're not the prettiest by sort of standard definitions.
You're not the prettiest thing on the planet.
But you're really intelligent.
You have a great deal of courage and humor and integrity and honesty.
And you're really virtuous.
And you really care about right and wrong.
And you really want to raise your kids right and do right by the world.
And you've got all of the virtues that we would admire.
And there are all these guys around spouting off.
We're just talking about the libertarian guys.
All these guys spouting off about how, oh, we're so into virtue.
We're so into rationality.
We're so into goodness. We're so into ethics.
Oh, all we care about is this, that, and the other to do with goodness.
And then some tee-hee-hee kind of idiot blonde or brunette or empty-headed chick comes along with T&A, shakes it around a little bit, and all the libertarians are swarming all over her.
I mean, how frustrating would that be?
How maddening would that be?
And how much respect would you, as an intelligent, virtuous, and courageous woman, Have for men who talk all this talk about virtue and honor and integrity, and then some ditzy chick wanders by in a tight skirt, and you all swarm after her.
I mean, wouldn't you just look at guys like that and say, oh, what a bunch of retards.
What a bunch of hypocritical retards.
If you all are so into the beauty of the soul and the virtue of the individual, why don't you come and talk to me?
Why are you chasing after Miss Peroxide Buffon Boob Job Liposuction Chickorama when you could actually have a woman of substance, intelligence, integrity, honor, and virtue, and humor by your side, or at least talking to you?
Oh, you sad, sad, sad little boys, she would think.
How am I supposed to get up in the morning filled with such hypocritical weenie men?
Such hypocritical, lust-driven, stereotypical, non-integrated, two-faced, talking about virtue chasing after the T&A, men.
Well, these aren't men.
These are boys. These are boys who do not understand the cost of attraction at a base physical level to that which is shallow and inconsequential.
And this is why women of virtue treat men with such contempt.
And I can't really blame them.
Because if we really are serious about virtue, about virtue as a value, about morality as a value, about honor and integrity as a value, then that's who we need to love.
That's who we need to be with.
That's who we need to embrace.
That's who we need to pursue.
And if we do that as men, if we begin to value and pursue women of honor and integrity without getting lost in just the physical looks, if we really start to pursue women of honor and integrity, what happens is, slowly and surely, women will begin to focus on their own honor and integrity.
And through that, through that, they will begin to raise children better.
I know it's not a three-minute plan, but it's absolutely essential.
There's so much that we can do as men to make the world more virtuous.
And the very first thing that we do outside of getting rid of our family and friends who are corrupt is to stop Chasing women for tits and ass.
And start chasing women for virtue and integrity.
That will cause women to realign themselves along those particular goals and desires.
And that will then, in the long run, make sure that the most virtuous women are raising the children.
I know. It's a long-term plan.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and we have infinitely more capacity to date virtuous women than we do to overthrow the state.
I mean, please, people, let's get serious about what's possible for us as individuals within our own lives.
If we want women to be virtuous, if we want the world to be virtuous, then we as men need to start exercising our power of choice when it comes to the women that we go out with.
And to begin to choose women who are aligned with the values that we claim oh so loudly to possess.
And if we don't possess them, that's fine.
Then stop listening to this podcast, and stop coming to the boards, and stop dealing with any kind of ethics at all.
And just be honest. Be honest.
That's all we're really asking for.
Just say, yeah, okay, I talk a lot and loudly about virtue and integrity, but I am in fact an empty-headed man slut, only interested in chasing after whatever piece of meat passes by that fits a certain shape, and all I care about is tumbling locks and pretty blue china eyes, and I could care absolutely less.
About any kind of virtue, so I'm all talk, no action when it comes to ethics, so any empty-headed chick who comes along who happens to crank my hormonal levers is the person that I will spend resources and time and money on and pump up and imagine it's the best thing ever because I'm a shallow, vain, kind of idiotic guy, and all I do is talk about virtue and never intend to live by it.
That's fine. At least I can respect that from a standpoint of honesty.
But if you are absolutely, or even remotely, even a tiny little bit, interested in virtue, interested in living a life of integrity, then the first thing that you need to do is deal with your personal relationships, right?
Deal with your romantic relationships, family relationships, friend relationships.
And if you are involved with a woman who you're involved with just because she's either available or pretty or both, Then don't.
Do it. Stop it.
And for God's sake, don't try and reform her.
I mean, that's just cruel. That's just plain cruel.
For God's sake, don't take some woman that you're going out with who's not virtuous, who you're just going out with because she gets your dick going.
Don't sit there and say, oh, okay, well, what I need to do, you see, is I need to try and turn her into a libertarian virtuous woman so I can continue to bang her like a tribe of Vikings.
Well, no, that's absolutely unfair.
It's completely wrong.
It's completely wrong.
If you chose her for her looks and she doesn't have virtue, attempting to turn her into somebody who does have virtue is just cruel, right?
Because that wasn't what she was selling, right?
That's not what she's selling.
When you went out with her...
It's not about virtue.
You didn't choose her because she was virtuous.
You chose her because she was pretty or available.
And so trying to turn her into somebody who you'd choose if she were virtuous is just plain cruel.
Absolutely cruel. You choose someone for who they are.
You don't choose someone, change your characteristics, and then try and make them into someone.
That's just completely wrong and cruel and will be very destructive to even the shred of self that she might have.
So that's... I'm sorry.
I hate to say it. You can try.
And if you're successful, let me know.
But I guarantee you up front that you won't be.
You have to get rid of these women.
You have to get rid of these women if they're in your life.
And if you're pursuing a woman like this, just stop, will you?
Just stop. I'm telling you.
I don't mean to sound mean because I've wasted a lot of years in this pursuit.
But I'm just telling you from somebody who's been to war for many years, don't do it.
Because, of course, there's an enormous risk.
I'm not just talking about you'll waste some time and you'll blow a bunch of money on women who aren't worth it, as I've done, but I'm talking about some things much more fundamental and much more serious than that.
And there are two major areas that men need to just understand that the only shield against the risk in these areas is virtue.
The only shield against the risk that is available to us in these two areas that I'll talk about is virtue.
Now the first area that I will talk about is the one that men all know and fear, which is divorce.
So if you end up getting together with a woman and it doesn't work out and you get divorced, even if you don't have kids, you're hosed.
You are hosed.
And this is going to be much woe, many tears, much helplessness.
It's going to completely emasculate you and you're just going to be a complete wretch.
And it will have been your own damn fault and you'll certainly get no sympathy from me.
Assuming that you're not already in this and you haven't heard this podcast.
Now that you've heard this podcast, no, there's no sympathy for me.
Not that I'm sure you care hugely about sympathy for me, but it is something that if you know the risks and you've been warned of the risks and you continue to accept the risks, it's a little hard for people to find sympathy for you.
And it should also be, I think, a little hard for you to find sympathy for yourself, but that's not something we have to talk about right now.
But... The great risk, of course, is divorce.
That's the minor risk.
The major risk is children, right?
The major risk is children. I will tell you the surest route to an absolute living hell, and I have seen this in more people than I would ever care to count.
The absolute and most sure way to a complete living hell is the following.
Harm children.
It's really all there is to it. If you want to live in Dante's nine millionth layer of flaming hell, all you need to do is harm children.
This is something that the soul cannot survive.
And I don't mean like, you know, you raised your voice once when they were eight.
I'm not talking about that.
What I'm talking about is exposing them to people who are corrupt for any significant period of time.
You know, one babysitter they can survive once.
But what I'm talking about is something more fundamental than that.
So if you are dating a woman or, sorry, if you are married to a woman or having children, considering having children with a woman, And the woman is not virtuous.
You chose her for her looks or her availability or some of the criteria that is not based on her virtue and her courage and her ethics and so on.
Then don't do it.
Absolutely do not do it.
Because what you will do in that situation is you will end up having children with somebody.
You will probably get divorced or if you're not divorced you'll be completely emasculated.
I mean she'll be carrying your pair in her purse.
Because she's always going to be over the threat of divorce or the implicit threat of your life being ruined.
But whether you get divorced or whether you don't get divorced, you will be exposing your children to a corrupt human being who has enormous power over them.
So, let's say you do get divorced, and then your children end up, even let's say you get joint custody, well, you know, during the weeks and every other weekend you get them, or every other week, or however it works out, your children are still exposed to a corrupt and probably vicious human being, certainly a non-virtuous human being.
Which is going to make all of your attempts to teach them any kind of philosophy completely meaningless.
I mean, can you imagine if you married some woman, she turns out to be the wrong woman because of a lack of virtue, and it is always the wrong woman because of a lack of virtue, and then you try and teach your kids right and wrong and all about your noble libertarian ideals and how you're so much against virtue and integrity and honor and honesty and Well, you know, the very product of a union that defied all of those values is staring you at the face while you teach them about how important those values are.
How do you think that's going to come across?
I mean, it's going to be terrible.
So they're going to be enormously harmed.
You're going to look enormously hypocritical.
You're going to feel enormously hypocritical.
And you will be helpless to save them from the harm that they're going under because the state is on the woman's side when it comes to this kind of stuff.
And even if the state is on both of your sides, they still are going to give her half custody rights.
And so you are going to be in a complete mess.
When it comes to this situation, your children are going to be repeatedly exposed to harm.
You will have no integrity with them, or you'll be able to really express no integrity with them.
And so you're going to be in this constant spiraling shame nightmare of allowing harm to come to your children and being helpless to stop it.
And this really, my friends, is what we're talking about when we're talking about the dangers of dating women who are not virtuous.
I'm not saying don't go out with a hot chick because I want you to not get a hot chick.
If you can find a hot virtuous chick like I did, fantastic.
Go for it. I would absolutely encourage that as best as I knew how.
But the risk that you're taking is to your own soul, to your own joy, and fundamentally, of course, to your own children, which is your area of greatest vulnerability, as any parent knows, the area of greatest vulnerability that you have in the world is the welfare of your children.
And you will know exactly how they're being corrupted by their mother, and you will be helpless to stop it, I guess, unless you want to take them off to Mexico or something and live in the mountains.
So, I'm telling you all of this because you don't have all the time in the world.
You know, you don't have all the time in the world.
Don't waste your 20s dating all of these idiots.
Find the right woman and settle down when you can, as young as you can, so that you have as long a time to be married to the woman of your dreams as you can have.
And, of course, it gives you more time with your children and so on.
And I'm telling you this because if you waste time pursuing women who are either available or pretty or both, then...
You are, A, doing serious harm to your own values and hypocritical harm to your own values, but you are fundamentally not pointing yourself in the right direction about how to live your life and what to do with it.
And every day that you spend pursuing these idiot women is a day that is spent training women to become more corrupt and more shallow.
It's a day that is spent training everybody in your life To treat you badly.
It's just a day that you don't really want to spend, I think, in that kind of pursuit.
And it fundamentally is a day that makes the world a lot worse than it could be or should be, because the moment that we start demanding of women virtue in exchange for semen, to put it crudely, but it's true.
The moment that we start demanding of women virtue in exchange for our time, attention, money, resources, and energy, then women will slowly, inevitably, start to become better, which will make them better parents, which will make the children better.
And this is how the world becomes more moral.
It doesn't necessarily happen with flaming revolutions.
It happens with little individual choices that we make within our own lives, where we have some power over.
So I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much to the kind gentleman who donated $220 today.
I hugely appreciate it.
Thank you also for the two smaller donations that I got today.
I also appreciate those too.
Don't feel that if you can't donate as much that I don't respect it.
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