Hey Doc, I’ll get right to the heart of the matter.
Growing up, I’ve had a leftward political migration. Where as I was a run of the mill, centre-right type with a very poor grasp of politics and the history that goes into it, I’ve migrated more and more towards what might be called the left, as broad and useless as that term is. This is something which is quite rare in guy with my background which is a middle class, upper caste hetero guy who grew up in India during the early 2000s. I went from thinking Nazis were these cool looking villians and having Nazi propaganda poster as my Facebook picture to actually understanding the depth of their barbarity and desperately trying to scrub that from my page. I went from thinking that while feminism was necessary in the past but is now out to destroy video games to realizing that I mostly agree with feminists. I went from being uber-religious to being an atheist. From thinking that free markets solve everything to realizing that the genuine pitfalls of capitalism and a need for social democracy. This will all get important in a bit.
Part of that was the fact that when I was younger ( 18ish ) I was drawn into PUA stuff, which I admittedly just skimmed through instead of reading it thoroughly. But the fact is if you’re repeatedly exposed to something and you don’t make an effort to pushback against that from a skeptical viewpoint, it seeps into your worldview. This all kept building up and as I was conditioned by various experience, I was turning into this “Nice Guy” stereotype, something I was driven away from by reading things like Heartless Bitches International (Which I think should be required reading for anybody complaining about being Friend-Zoned) and books like No More Mr. Nice Guy (which, admittedly, I still haven’t completed, in that I’ve read the book but not followed along with the exercises in it).
But somehow I still was being sucked deeper and deeper into the orbit around The Red Pill, and while I never visited those subreddits I still, on an honest reflection, found that my views and theirs kinda overlap. I’m nowhere near as misogynistic as them, mind you. It’s that I find myself reading some blogpost from people like Rollo Tomassi and thinking with something quite resembling a deep conviction that women can never love men, not really. That they are all really hypergamous, and any pleasantness on their side is just a facade, a way to get stuff done. This put me in a really dark place in 2017 and was exacerbating the anxiety and depression I already deal with. I thought, when the world’s so bad for those with girlfriends, what’s the chances of a 21 year old fat virgin who does not match the ideals of hegemonic masculinity that are prevalent in my culture.
Thankfully, I found many resources to get through that helped me through that time, I was talked down from that by an uncle who was a player in his 20s, but is single now (in his 30s). I found the ExRedPill subreddit that was massive help, and through them I found things like the works of bell hooks, Mark Manson and you.
And even though I have largely overcome the bad part, I think, I still have this bubbling feelings of anxiety from the residual attitude I have. I still feel hopeless and despondent when I read so many studies about things like “Bad Boy” allure or ones how females are more likely to rate High-T indicators showing males as more attractive while they are ovulating and Lower-T indicators showing males while they are not. I admit, I’m not that well-versed on how to distinguish between a good and a bad study. However, from one statistic class I took I know that bigger the sample size the more confidence one can have on extrapolating it on the general populace. I am also skeptical of studies that seems completely trusting of assumptions baked into their methodologies and aren’t cross cultural.
I’m sure that there is a lot of confirmation bias involved in this. But I don’t know how to get out of this rut in my brain. For all that I have read on gender and socialization, I can’t get behind the outright denial of evo-psych I see so prevalent on the left, even while granting that 90-95% of “research” that comes under the banner of evo-psych are fucking bullshit. I can’t agree with the assertion that all the differences we see are socially constructed given that there is a ton of research showing how sex differences emerge by a very early age when not a lot of socialization has taken place, but at the same time when someone says something like “It’s all biology” and “There are only two genders”, I can only think of how unbelievably naive they are on this topic. But all of this is besides the point.
The thing is I have better things to focus on than this. In 2017, I put no effort into campus placements because I was struggling with this, and the anxiety it built up. Similarly now, from time to time, I become embroiled in this, fall down the rabbit hole and don’t focus on things that are more urgent, more important, like that fact that I don’t have a job still and am dependent on my parents. The fact that I’m not working hard enough towards my portfolio. The fact that all the friends I had in college are in different cities, the nearest one being a 2 hr metro ride away, and most of which were toxic and performance-based anyway, where only 2-3 of them I can say had any mutual ‘philia’ and I’m not doing anything that would change that.
How can I get past these attitudes so that they no longer cripple me on my path towards self improvement?
Choking on The Red Pill
