To the guy who always comments…
I write this post with one particular person in mind, though it is actually for any man who – for whatever reason – has come to the Red Pill / manosphere type conclusion that all women are essentially the same. (This means you believe that all women are attracted to the same traits, react to things in the same way, and generally think, believe and feel the same things. In other words, they are the same psychologically.)
The man I’m writing this post for comments on nearly all of my youtube videos – particularly those about relationships and boundaries. And these comments nearly always disagree with what I’ve said (or what he’s assumed I meant). At the heart of his disagreement appears to be a core claim: that all women are the same, and therefore anything I say about women that does not match his own experience must be false or delusional.
The wife from Hell
This man appears to have a wife who makes his life a living hell. It seems she is impossible to set boundaries with, and uses emotional outburts to manipulate him. It’s hard for me to tell if this wife exists in real life, or is more of a hypothetical example he created to demonstrate the points he’s making. Either way, it’s clear that he thinks that coaches like me are misinformed or untruthful, and that we’re potentially harming men by encouraging them to set boundaries etc., because those men will only end up getting abused.
It seems that he believes this wife is a representative for all women. How she behaves and reacts to him is apparently congruent with his past experiences with other women, to the point where he’s concluded that all women are basically the same. I often challenge him, saying that staying with an abusive partner is a choice. My guess is that his main justification for staying with such a supposedly abusive wife is that any other woman would treat him the same, so he may as well stick with the one he’s got.
The Red Pill
The all women are the same belief is a core principle in the Red Pill ideology, and indeed in any ideology that categorises male and female psychology as fundamentally different. Even classic books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus reflect a commonly held belief that men and women have different psychological functioning, consistent amongst their gender and separate from the other.
Common sub-beliefs include: women are more emotional while men are more stoic; women are hypergamous (will leave a man for a better deal) while men are more loyal; women are vindictive and nasty – “Hell has no wrath like woman scorned” – while men are more reasonable. Women and children are loved unconditionally, while a man must prove his worth. And so on. The theme being, of course, that women are worse than men.
After coaching and supporting so many ex-manosphere devotees regarding this belief system, one astonishing insight I’ve had is that for these men all of this is actually true. They are not lying or deceiving themselves about their personal experience. They have indeed been consistently mistreated by nasty women on multiple occasions.
It’s so hard for a man with repeated abusive experiences with women to NOT come to the conclusion that they’re all the same. In his eyes, he’s experience a range of different women and yet found them to all behave basically the same (i.e. negatively). His online algorithms have picked up on this belief, and so his feed is packed full of manosphere-type content confirming his suspicions.
The clear fact that thousands of other men agree with him is the final nail in the coffin: to him, the only logical answer for his experience with women is that they’re all the same.
To all men who feel this way, I want to ask a simple yet important question:
Do you HOPE you’re wrong?
By this I mean, if there was a chance that SOME women are NOT like this, would you be interested in knowing more? Even if you are currently 100% certain that all women are the same (i.e. bad), just hypothetically speaking, if I were to discover a small group of women who weren’t like this, would you be keen to find out more about them?
Would you be open to believing in exceptions?
I ask because there’s a difference between someone who resents all women but wishes he didn’t have to (i.e. he feels like he has no choice because of the evidence he’s seen), vs someone who is so attached to the belief that women are all the same (and worse than men) that he actually wants it to be true and has no interest in being proven wrong.
Which are you?
This man who comments on my videos seems resistant to the possibility that some women might not behave like those he’s personally experienced. It’s hard for me to tell if he simply can’t believe it because in his mind it’s already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, or if he’s enraged that his belief is being challenged and wants to keep believing it no matter what.
But why would someone not want to know about positive exceptions?
In a word:
Responsibility
If there are good women out there but all you’ve had is terrible experiences, that means you either have bad luck or you somehow repulse good women, or both.
This is something very few men have the courage to accept. It’s much easier to believe that no matter who you are, women are awful. The idea that you might be sabotaging yourself is too much responsibility for some men to bear.
But to those of you brave enough to open your mind, however slightly, to the possibility that there are good women out there but YOU would need to change YOURSELF to meet them, then there is hope for you.
I understand you might feel hopeless. It’s hard for the average human brain to accept being wrong in any circumstance, and it’s nearly impossible to believe you might be wrong after repeated bad experiences without exception AND seeing social proof from many other men online.
But Red Pill type guys often pride themselves on their rationality and logic… so let me appeal to those traits now.
Confirmation Bias
Let’s start with the most obvious problem that affects us all: we’re biased to reinforce beliefs rather than challenge them. Our brain actively cherry-picks information that suits our beliefs, and dismisses counter-evidence. All of us do this, there’s no shame in it.
So you notice stats about how women are more likely to initiate divorce (giving you the impression that they’re fickle and disloyal), while dismissing stats that show women average 8 years in a marriage prior to getting a divorce (indicating that they try to hold it together for a long time before giving up).
You notice videos online of tall, powerful and famous men getting “all” the women, and ignore all the hundreds of happy couples at the mall that prove any type of guy can get a partner. You pay attention to stats that say “the top 20% of men attract 80% of the women,” while ignoring that these stats only relate to how people swipe on dating apps and don’t reflect real life relationship choices.
You are constantly reinforcing the all women are the same (and bad) belief, while subconsciously weeding out the counter-evidence. You simply don’t notice all the loyal, kind, reasonable and nurturing women, because you’re too busy paying close attention to the narcissistic, shallow and abusive ones (especially because these are the ones you tend to attract).
Anecdotal bias
Our mind has a heuristic which gives far more weight to our personal experiences, especially the emotional ones, than cold hard facts. And we also give a lot more weight to stories we hear – again, especially emotional stories – than to general statistics.
So when you and all the guys you know seem to have the same personal experiences, you will feel like this is undeniable evidence. When you hear counter-claims based on statistics that mean nothing to you, or experiences of people you don’t know or trust, it just sounds like bullshit.
Red Pill guys tend to congregate together and share their woes. They reinforce their own beliefs by confirming they’ve all had similar experiences. Unfortunately, the kind of men who have regularly had positive experiences with women will NEVER join in these discussions, in the same way a sober person never goes to an AA meeting.
And, in my experience, if a guy like me does try to join the discussion, the group leaders quickly block him out to ensure the harmony of the group’s ideology. Red Pill online forums, for example, are notorious for attacking and bullying anyone who challenges the status quo.
You end up in a closed silo of information – just your experiences combined with similar stories from other guys like you. Nothing ever contradicts you, so it seems like solid proof of your beliefs. Even though you’d mock feminists for doing the same thing, you get no sense of hypocrisy. There’s no awareness that the sample size is small and skewed and non-representative.
Which brings us to…
Cluster Effect Bias
This is a term I coined myself. I’ve noticed a belief that rules peoples’ lives socially: the idea that you’ve met a representative range of humans, and therefore your conclusions apply to everyone.
Because we’ve all interacted with a large number of people, we come to the conclusion that we must have seen a broad range of all different types. We also believe that luck is the main factor that decides who comes into our lives, and therefore we must have experienced a random sample – and can therefore draw solid conclusions about ALL people.
But what if we don’t get a range? What if we’re doomed to repeat ourselves?
This is the point I most want to get across.
When I was working in the Department of Corrections, I felt like nearly everyone was a criminal. It’s obvious why: 80% of the people I interacted with personally were criminals. This was not random bad luck – I had chosen a job that skewed who I met. Criminals only make up less than 5% of the population, but I was experiencing an overrepresentation of them.
When I was living in West Auckland, I felt certain that everyone needed alcohol to socialize. And yet there are plenty of people who don’t need to drink to socialize – indeed, there are entire countries that don’t drink anything at all. I wasn’t meeting those people, because without realizing it I had somehow only selected friends who drink.
When I was struggling with dating in my early 20s, I was convinced that women were not attracted to me. But yet again, I was unaware that not only was I blind to signals of attraction, I behaved in a Nice Guy way that prevented romance from escalating. I kept getting into the “friendzone” situation due to my behaviour, not because of female psychology.
Without being consciously aware of it, I was significantly limiting the range of people in all areas of my life.
Manosphere-minded men don’t seem to realise that they’ve been unconsciously curating their experience with women, interacting with only a very limited niche their entire lives due to behaving in ways that selectively excluded other women.
From their mother and sisters, through to the girls at school, and onwards into adult dating, they have repeatedly experienced nearly identical women over and over again.
And this isn’t bad luck.
Why the women in YOUR life are terrible
Use that logic of yours. Think it through.
If the same thing keeps happening to a man despite changing the external factors, is it more likely that the repetition because of those external factors or because of the man?
Think of the kind of women you’re attracted to. Do you notice that it’s not a wide range? From physical attributes to personality traits, ntice the consistency. This means you’re screening for a narrow type of woman. You might think your preferences are “normal” for all men, but why are other men getting into relationships with different women?
What if your attraction is wired towards unhealthy women without you realising?
And think about your own attributes, behaviours and traits. Do you think all women will be equally attracted to you? Obviously, some will prefer you while others won’t, right? What if you’re presenting in such a way as to only attract the more abusive types of women while you REPULSE healthy and confident women who treat people well?
If I’m focused on materialistic things, do you think I’ll attract deep women? If I only socialize while drunk, do you think I’ll attract sober women? If I try to impress women and seduce them, do you think I’ll attract women who like men to be authentic? If I’m desperate for sex and will take any woman who is interested in me, do you think confident women will find me attractive?
If you doubt this logic, try reversing it.
Do you think a woman who is only attracted to arrogant, dominant and sexually-obsessed men is more or less likely to be cheated on, compared with a woman who is only attracted to kind, thoughtful and calmly confident men? Do you really think both women will experience a random range of men over time, or will they repeatedly have similar relationship experiences over and over again?
I’m lucky
My mother is a kind and thoughtful woman. Throughout my school years, I often had female friends – many of whom I would consider to be “best” friends – and they were always loving and supportive. Even when I was struggling with dating and was attracted to quite damaged women (because I subconsciously wanted to fix them), still I was never yelled at or insulted, and I only got cheated on once that I know of.
For some reason, I had a different experience of women than the Red Pill type guys I’ve coached and helped over the years. I consider this to be all about luck – it’s not something I can take pride in. The person I am somehow attracted decent women and screened out the nasties 95% of the time (there were exceptions but they were so rare that I didn’t hold it against all other women).
So I learned to love women, and even to this day consider them to be better than men in many ways, especially when it comes to relationships. My experiences have forced me to have arrive at different conclusions than the Red Pill guys.
For example…
I believe men are more emotionally unstable than women (as evidenced by rates of suicide and violent crime), because women are better at honestly expressing their feelings without shame. I believe women are more loyal than men, because of my friends the men were far more likely to cheat than the women. And I trust that my wife loves and respects me without conditions, because her behaviour demonstrates this on a daily basis – even when I’m depressed, broke or overweight, she sticks by my side. I can safely be weak with her.
This isn’t to say that I’m more “right” than someone else, only that I’ve been lucky enough to experience a different niche of women than some other men. There’s a reason guys like me aren’t on the Red Pill forums or watching Andrew Tate videos – it’s because we’ve had wonderful experiences with women, and hearing derogatory things said about women just sounds inaccurate and alien to us.
And I have to confess…
Guys like me immediately judge the men who believe this Red Pill stuff, with an assumption: they must suck with women.
I remember seeing a clip where that looksmaxxing guy Clavicular said he can’t be bothered giving a girl an orgasm when he has sex. I remember thinking, “C’mon mate, just admit you don’t know how.”
Whenever I see some manosphere influencer claiming that women just want men for their money etc., I always just think, “Yeah, maybe the women in YOUR life because your personality repulses decent women. Maybe if you hung out with women other than club sluts and Only Fans prostitutes you might have a different experience.”
I’m judgmental, I know. But am I actually wrong?
I have never once in my life witnessed a man who understands women and does well in relationships complain about “female psychology.” The only guys I’ve witnessed complain about women are those who lack the skills to attract the good ones and maintain healthy relationships.
That doesn’t mean I see myself as better than anyone else. I’m just lucky enough to have had the experiences needed to be better educated… and I believe any man can enjoy the same education if they’re willing to be humble. I had to humble myself to improve my experiences with women, and it was worth sacrificing my ego and limiting beliefs.
This is why I don’t accept any victim-story from a man – I know that he could change his situation if he really wanted to.
I was basically an “incel” before the term became popular. I couldn’t even get a date during my early 20s. Then, after dealing with my bullshit, I started dating abundantly for a few years, and I’m now married to the love of my life and have become a father. That once seemed impossible. But all I had to change was the way I saw the world, and how I interacted with women.
I’m under 6 foot tall. I’m not rich or powerful. With my pale skin, dad bod, and male-pattern baldness, I’m at best a 6 looks-wise. I’m not especially skilled or interesting. I just learned how to find and attract good women.
Anyone can learn this.
The choice
You have a choice in front of you: keep believing all women are the same, or take responsibility for your experiences.
I don’t mean blame yourself.
I mean accept that your experiences with women – as true and horrible as they may have been – were not because all women are the same in general, but because you behaved in a way that ensured all the women in your life were the same as each other. And accept that if you were to change the way you think and behave, you’d attract better women into your life.
Yes, there are “bitches” out there. Just like there are men who beat their wives. But there are also guys like me who would never even raise their voice against a woman. And there are women like my wife who will respect you for free, love you without conditions, and treat you well and be loyal to you even when you’re struggling.
But for you to meet such women, YOU need to change.
If you don’t want to change, that’s fine. But you must then admit you haven’t tried ALL possible solutions to your problems with women, so you can’t blame them for your reluctance to try something new.
Guys who struggle with women tend to repeat the same mistakes.
Using dating apps instead of meeting women in real life. Or meeting women in bars and clubs instead of healthy hobbies.
Trying to “mogg” and demonstrate Dark Triad Traits instead of being genuinely honest. Or behaving like Nice Guys instead of asserting your boundaries and holding high standards for how you are treated.
Prioritising looks over personality. Fixating on sex instead of creating a connection. Spending your time blaming others instead of working on yourself.
The list goes on and on. But the point is you have NOT tried everything, you have NOT met all types of women, and you will NOT be able to improve your romantic experiences by staying the same.
Keep the belief, or take responsibility. Stick with your biases, or accept the logic that you might be wrong. Keep hating women, or learn how to attract the ones who are easy to love.
The choice is yours.
And of course, if you do want to take responsibility and have different results with women, and you want my help to accelerate that change, check this out:
One Response
I’m guessing I’m the guy you’re referring to. Please understand I’m not singling you out and if we sat down for coffee, you’d see I’m very calm and not ranting, I’m just trying to make points of my own experience and how for the past decade, it just seems like I can read or hear something from a coach, look at the women I’ve known and think “yeah, that doesn’t apply here”. For the longest time I just dismissed things I saw that weren’t going to work until I read something from Deida that was so contrary to every woman I’ve ever known that I couldn’t even finish the book. That’s when I started leaving comments on videos and podcasts just to try to question or get clarification.
There’s a lot here. A big one is that I don’t believe all women are the same, but I can see three categories of women I’ve known. First are women that aren’t interested in me at all. That’s fine. The second are women I’ve been friends with but they weren’t attracted to me romantically. Most of my friends and usually my closest friends were always women, so I know I’m not some sort of creep. Yeah, women in the first category would call me creepy, I’ve heard that many times in my life. But I’ve known enough who enjoyed being around me as a friend that I know I’m not seen as a creep or scary to all women. Between my first and second wives I was friends with one woman for so long and we did so much together that people thought we were a couple. There’s a chance we could have even moved in together and we probably should have. No intimacy, just roommates. In the past 20 years I realize that would have been better.
The third group are the women who go out with me and will be in a relationship with me. When I’ve been single, I was able to meet and get a first date maybe three times a year. And I’ve spoken to a lot of guys who said that was a lot better than they did, maybe getting one date a year. Consider half of those don’t even lead to a second date, fewer lead beyond that, and guys like me, if we want a normal life where we’re married and start a family, over the course of 5 years we might have a pool of maybe 3 women to choose from. Coaches seem to make the choices seem limitless.
Does my wife exist? Yes. I’m actually on my third even though I’m not married to my current wife, I just call her that. We’ve been together since 2009. Not getting married was her idea. Two women before that, each marriage lasting about four years. And most of the stories I could tell you about any of the three, along with a lot of women I dated, completely contradict everything told by any coach including those considered the Godfathers of this genre such as Deida and Glover. That’s what made me start commenting on videos. Trust me, check with others in your field, like Scot McKay at Mountaintop podcast. He’s just as frustrated with me as you are. And I don’t mean to be frustrating. But when I hear a coach say something and then I look at all the women I’ve known, at least those I’ve been close enough to either be friends or in a relationship with and I realize it’s completely different, I just want to say something and be heard.
Are there areas where I think coaches are mistaken, such as the reasons so many of us are “nice guys”, yes, but I can be civilized in the discussion. But most coaches seem to just point out “here’s where you’re making a mistake and why” and they don’t seem to understand that they might be off in their reasoning. Look at the relationship made between the terms nice guy and people pleaser. Most coaches tell about how if a man doesn’t set boundaries or stand up to a woman, it’s because he’s hoping that by giving in to her, he’ll make her happy. I’ve seen videos from coaches, including female ones, who say women respect men who set boundaries and how the sexiest thing a man can say to a woman is the word “no”. Great, let me introduce you to the women who if you do that, all you’ve done is piss them off. And no, I don’t believe women are all the same. Thinking of my female friends I’ve had, I could easily say no to them and it was fine. I’ll say I never had to set boundaries with those women because they weren’t the kind who did things where I felt I needed to set boundaries. With women who I’ve been able to date, a boundary is simply something for them to break to show me that they won’t let someone tell them what to do.
So do I see all women as being the same? No. Have I had horrible experiences with the women I’ve been in relationships with? Yes. Do I see women as being “evil”? No. But do I see a lot of them as being led by their emotions even if it leads to bad choices? Most definitely. Bad choices to the point my first wife left me for an unemployed druggie who beat her? Yep. And I really don’t mean to rag on you coaches. The problem is that when someone like me is with a woman and we point out that the advice we’re being given doesn’t work, we’re told to just dump her and move on to someone else. As I pointed out, a lot of us are very limited when it comes to meeting women and we have to find a way to make it work with the woman we’re with. And times we get out of a relationship, we’re often just finding the same women.
To wrap this up, let me give you an example of something I’ve heard many coaches say about testing boundaries. Don’t know if you’ve heard this but there’s the idea that setting a boundary is like putting up a wall and she’s going to push on the wall to see if it’s strong enough to stand or if it just falls over. Great. A man is led to believe that if she pushes on that wall and it stands, he passed the test. But for a lot of us, the test isn’t whether or not the wall still stands but how far they go before they can make it fall. If a woman pushes on it and it stands, she then digs in, puts her shoulder to it and shoves with all her might. Still stands? She’s grabbing a sledgehammer, a jackhammer, whatever it takes. She’ll find a way of getting a bulldozer and wrecking ball. She’ll use explosives. She could set off a nuke and even if the man is strong enough that the wall is still standing, she’ll destroy everything else in her attempt. For a lot of us, there is no “stand up to her and she’ll respect you” like Glover says. And yeah, we can leave her, and then what? Six months to find another woman and there’s a very good chance it’s the same thing.
Long enough, sorry about the rant.