People who love to wax dramatic about tribalism seem to forget that the strongest tribal hatreds are between peoples in geographic proximity – meaning that different tribes of whites, blacks, browns and yellows hate each other FAR more than they hate the “others.”

This one remark by Ferdinand seems to be responsible for almost half of the comment thread in the original post. It surprised me much more than it should have how completely ignorant many of the commenters are about history, especially our own “white” history. So here’s a quick primer on the history of tribalism. It is by no means exhaustive or complete – that would require many volumes. It is also, in many cases, simplified and abbreviated. I’m aware that there’s significantly more historical nuance than I’m providing. But it is basically accurate.

Civilization as we know it essentially began in the region known as Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers.” In this case the rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which flow through modern day Iraq. Babylon, one of the premier cities of Mesopotamian civilization, was situated very close to modern day Baghdad. But Mesopotamia was not one gigantic kumbaya, shiny happy people utopia. It was a collection of more or less independent city states – autonomously cities, generally ruled by a “king.” Today we would view these men more as a warlord or chieftain because although they had near absolute power over their “kingdom,” the kingdom itself wasn’t very big.

It’s hard to be sure exactly what ethnicity these people were because the concept didn’t really exist at the time. Most likely they were something similar to modern day Arabs or Persians. But we can be pretty sure that from a modern perspective they’d look more or less ethnically uniform. Despite a great degree of ethnic homogeneity, these city states were nearly always at war – with each other. Slavery was a huge part of life, although it was very different from what many Americans think of when they hear the word. A full discussion of the topic is a task for another day but the short version is that it wasn’t based on ethnicity, it was based on the time honored principle of “We kicked your ass in the last war so you’re our slaves now.”

The “tribe” in this case wasn’t another ethnicity. It was the next city over. It would be the equivalent of Washington, DC going to war with Baltimore. Two large (for the time) cities very nearby that just decided they wanted each others’ shit.

Fast forward just a little bit and two new civilizations pop up: ancient Egypt and ancient India. Unlike the Mesopotamians, these civilizations could actually qualify for the title of “empire.” But by modern standards these empires were pretty puny both in area and population. They, too, were nearly constantly at war. They’d fight all the neighboring city states. Egypt still had nearby Mesopotamians to fight and India had nearby Indian city states to fight. And every now and then they’d have a civil war, which usually broke down along geographic lines. Oh, and the nearby city states were still pretty much constantly fighting each other.

Still we see tribalism at work: our empire against the puny city states. Or still our city state against yours. Occasionally, though less common, our city state against your empire.

Fast forward a little bit more and we’ve got some more civilization popping up. We’ve got city-states in China and the beginnings of a Chinese empire. The Persian empire comes into being. And the Greeks are on the rise, as all of us “white people” love to harp about. The Persians pretty much swallowed up the Mesopotamian city states. Egypt is still around, and India’s absorbing nearby city states.

What most people don’t realize, however, is that Greek civilization wasn’t monolithic at all. These were definitely an ethnically homogeneous group. They all more or less resembled modern Greeks. Yet they, too, were a city state civilization. They fought each other more than they ever fought anybody else. The Spartans fought the Thebians the Thespians and the Athenians. The Athenians fought the Spartans and the Thespians. The Thebians… well, you get the idea. Occasionally they’d band together to fight off invaders (like the Persians). And sure, they banded together briefly under were conquered by Alexander the Great. Alexander built a huge empire, even conquering much of the Persian and Egyptian empires. But it totally fell apart after he died because of, you guessed it, tribalism.

Tribalism of this age was of the “our empire hates your empire” variety, the “our empire hates your city state” variety and quite a bit of the “our city state hates your empire” variety. But there was still plenty of “our city state hates your city state” tribalism going around. Or, to start getting to the point here, plenty of white people killing white people.

Fast forward a little bit more. The Persian Empire has declined a little bit. India and China are going strong by kicking the shit out of neighboring Indian and Chinese people (or at least people we would call Indian and Chinese today). And the big daddy of western civilization has come on the scene: Rome. Rome didn’t get to be the greatest empire of the western world by conquering yellow, brown, black or red people. It got that way by conquering other “white” people. Lots of them. Sure, they turned Egypt into a vassal state and beat down the Carthaginians (North Africans) until they left them alone. They conquered Palestine (modern day Israel) but always had trouble holding it. But they also conquered the Greeks. They conquered the Gauls (French). They conquered the Goths, Visigoths, Lombards and Vandals (Germans). They fought some of the Picts, the Celts and the Saxons (Irish, Scottish and English) with moderate but limited success.

None of those people were all that happy about the Romans conquering them. And when Roman power finally started to wane, it was all these other “white people” who did the empire in for good. They were plenty happy to kill the Romans.

Tribalism of this period basically boiled down to, “We all hate each other, but we hate the Romans more.”

After Rome finally fell apart came the Middle Ages. During this time, all the tribes that had been resisting and fighting the Romans got back to their true favorite past time: killing each other. The Gauls fought the Franks. The Angles fought the Saxons, Celts and Picts. The Visigoths fought the Goths and the Vandals.

This period is particularly relevant because we find that contrary to the American perception of history as a continual improvement of the human race we instead find that the human race devolved quite a bit. And one of the biggest devolutions is that the ideas of tribalism that had advanced to more abstract concepts such as “Roman” devolved back into true tribes.

A few hundred years later, some of these tribes had gotten a good bit better at the killing than their neighbors were. The Angles and the Saxons interbred to the point where you couldn’t tell them apart and set about the task of conquering the Celts and the Picts, eventually forming the British Empire. The Gauls conquered enough of their neighbors that they started to be known as “France.” Eventually the Germanic tribes realized that it wasn’t worth it to keep fighting each other and they banded together first as Prussia and then as Germany – a nation that wasn’t unified until 1806.

During this time, the British were very happy to kill the French. The French loved to kill the Germans. The Germans liked killing French and Russians. They all kind of laughed at the Italians and the Dutch, who were too busy making a killing from trade to care much about actually fighting the idiots who were paying them so much. The Italians and the Dutch cried all the way to the bank.

But in between it all they had their share of “civil wars” which mostly fell along the old tribal lines. The Irish and the Scottish kept fighting the English. The Germanic tribes fought each other, as did the Italians (note: modern Italy unified in 1861, even later than Germany).

An old coworker of mine once phrased it this way: the Irish and the Scottish always got along well with the French because they shared the same favorite past time – killing the English. Although on the surface it seems like the notion of a “tribe” has grown more abstract, we see that in reality there’s still quite a bit of the small time tribe hating other small time tribes. And all of it is white people killing white people.

This period eventually gave rise to what we know in the modern world as the “nation state.” By the 1800s the world had “advanced” away from small tribes and city states into larger nations. This was largely a European concept, and the nation state worked well there. The nations of Europe were mostly ethnically homogeneous by modern standards. What this really meant is that these tribes had an extra long history of killing each other and they’d grown a little bored of it, so it was time to band together and kill somebody else.

At about the same time you had this weird little upstart of a place on the other side of the world, the United States, growing. But even here there’s intra-national tribalism growing. The damn Yankees don’t get along at all with the southern rednecks. Later on none of them quite no what to make of the cowboy Westerners. They all hate the American Indians and the Blacks. None of them really like the immigrant Chinese who built the railroads for them. Even the European immigrants have tribal issues. The Irish, Italian, German and Polish immigrants all face serious assimilation problems. They deal with them in different ways, eventually assimilating into the broader American culture – but it’s not an easy assimilation.

But it’s the north/south split that eventually sparks a civil war. Again we have white people killing white people. And that’s after the American Revolution (white people killing white people), the French revolution (white people killing white people) and the Napoleanic Wars (white people killing white people).

For a while, at least, white people elevated their tribalism to something more abstract. Tribes banded together to hate other bands of tribes rather than hating individual tribes. We call this “progress.”

Then the 20th century hits us with the real doozies: World War I and World War II. Guess what? More white people killing white people. The French, British and Russians twice duked it out with the Italians and Germans. The second time around the Italians and Germans tried to hook up with some brown people (the Japanese) for extra firepower, but the French, British and Russians hooked up with even more brown people (the Chinese). Whoops. And then they held their noses and begged those mangy mutts in the US to come save their asses from those pesky Italians and Germans.

Later in the century we watched the Soviet Union collapse and with it we saw again what happens when an ethnically diverse group suddenly witnesses a power vacuum. Once the threat of the Soviet Union was gone, Yugoslavia devolved into chaos. The Bosnians fought the Serbs. The Serbs fought the Muslims. Tribalism once more reigned supreme until somebody else came in with a big stick (the UN) and made them behave – with mixed results.

As the 21st century dawned we witnessed even more devolution from nation-state “homogeneity” into tribalism as the US destroyed the “strong men” that held Afghanistan and Iraq together. In both cases we witnessed tribalism returning to life with a vengeance.

White people have killed far more white people than they have of any other ethnicity. More than they’ve killed red people, brown people, black people or yellow people. And those tribal tensions haven’t gone away. Why do you think the Europeans riot at soccer games? Because those teams are built along tribal lines. In the US, our sports teams have rivalries that go back a hundred or two years, back to the days when we were economically competing neighbors. In Europe, those sports teams have rivalries that go back a thousand or two years to the days when they were killing each other. Real, armed conflicts, some of which only ended within living memory.

Those conflicts have ended largely because of three phenomena. The Cold War imposed a new “strong man” stability on the world. Nobody could afford to fight each other because they then risked being gobbled up by one or the other superpowers.

The Europeans had witnessed first hand just how destructive the modern age could be, as their homes were left in utter ruin by two world wars. They decided to try “conquering” their neighbors by other means, such as trade.

And the European centered world entered the most prosperous time it had ever known. What’s the point in going to war if everybody’s fat and rich anyway? Hey, let’s keep living the good life.

The Cold War is over and with it the international order is destabilized. Those who lived through the destruction of the world wars are dying off. There are few left to remind us of how horrible war can be. And the post-war era of prosperity is coming to a close in much of the world.

Even the modern idea that tribalism has gone on to the next abstraction with the invention of political parties is bogus. Tribes are about ideas now, not ethnicity, some people would say. But it’s BS. Look at any political map of the US and you’ll see it clearly. Our modern “tribes” of Democrat and Republican are merely geographical. They break down as North vs South, Coasts vs Inland and Urban vs Rural. Throw in a mixture of race and gender breakdown for good measure and you’ve pretty much accounted for the entire split. Europe isn’t more liberal than the US because it’s more advanced; it’s more liberal because it’s more urban, plain and simple.

When “white people” start realizing that their prosperity is going away they’re not going to start taking it out on brown, black, yellow or red people. Why would they? Those people have little wealth to take (except for a handful of the yellow nations). They’re going to go back to what’s “worked” for them for two thousand years: taking shit by force from other white people.

The idea of an overarching “white nation” that has decayed and has to be preserved shows a profound ignorance of history. The last time there was any kind of white unity was 1500 years ago before the Roman Empire split into two, and even that was exaggerated. It wasn’t “white unity”. It was white tribes conquered by the Romans.

Likewise the idea of a “white nation” fighting off the forces of other cultures is a pipe dream. The white race is as united as it’s ever going to be.

The US has a gender imbalance problem that just might be as bad as those of China and India. Its effects are already being felt. In the medium to long term it presents a serious threat to the American culture, society and economy. The root cause of the problem is a handful of specific policies brought on by specific interest groups over the last three generations in American politics. If we don’t do anything the problem is going to continue to get worse, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The Data

The gender imbalance problem in the United States is not apparent at first glance. According to Wikipedia, “There were 155.6 million females in the United States in 2009. The number of males was 151.4 million.” Consider further that over the age of 85 there are nearly three million more women than men due to the longer life span, on average, of women and it’s looking pretty darn close to parity. Yet despite what this cursory view tells us, we do have a gender imbalance problem. And it will become very clear as we delve deeper into the Census data.

Thankfully we have some help. Soma has put together this very handy interactive graphic of the male to female ratios in major US cities that we’re going to rely on very heavily. When presented in this format the data are very revealing. The graphic shows the ratio of single men to single women in different cities. The data is straight from a 2006 US Census Bureau report. The Census Bureau defines single as never married, divorced, or widowed – or essentially anybody who isn’t currently in a legal marriage.

With the details out of the way, let’s start looking at some data. By default, the map shows us an age range from 18 to 64. Yes, in some parts of the south people still get married at 16 and younger and occasionally you hear of the octogenarian wedding in a retirement home. But for practical purposes I think we can agree that this age range fairly accurately represents the marriagable age range. A cursory glance at the map shows us what we learned from Wikipedia. It may not be perfect, but the gender balance is roughly equal. There are about the same number of red circles as blue circles, and they’re roughly the same size. If we counted them all up we might find a slight imbalance, but it probably wouldn’t be huge.

But when we start to look at specific age ranges we’re going to see some drastically different numbers. Let’s start with the 18-29 year old age group. When we adjust the sliders at the top to show this cohort we can immediately start to see the problem. Our map now looks completely different. All but two of the dots are blue (representing more men than women). There are some pretty big blue dots in there. In contrast, our two lonely red dots are rather small. Fayetteville, North Carolina for example has 1,129 single men for every 1,000  single women in this age bracket, or 12.9% more single men. That’s pretty substantial. New Orleans, by contrast, has 1,014 women for every 1,000 men a difference of merely 1.4%. Not only do we have only the two female skewed cities, but they’re only barely skewed female. They’re simply dwarfed by all the cities that skew male. The problem is even worse for those on the younger end of the scale. If we adjust our graphic once more to show the younger 18-24 age group, we find that Fayetteville now reaches a difference of 1,179 men for every 1,000 women – pushing close to a 20% difference.

This is bad news for young single men. Kay Hymowitz asks where all the good men have gone, but for these age groups the question is where have all the women gone?

Explaining the Numbers

Before we start drawing conclusions, let’s keep looking at the data and see what else they can tell us. If we look at the next group up, the 30-39 demographic, we see that the gap is starting to narrow. At a glance it still seems to skew male, but only by a small amount. But it’s when we move to the 40-49 cohort that things start to get really interesting and we can start to get a glimpse of what’s actually going on. Our gender ratios have now flip flopped. It’s not quite as extreme as the twenty-something group, but this group is now clearly and definitively skewing female. And if we jump to the 50-59 age group, it looks about as bad for women as it did for men in their twenties.

On its own this is merely puzzling. But if we add some other information we start to get a picture of why this is happening. First, let’s look at remarriage statistics. The statistics we need are actually kind of hard to find, but what I’ve found is enough to make the point. First, some information from remarriage.com. According to their statistics, 54% of divorce women remarry within 5 years, 75% within 10 years. Seems pretty good at a glance. However… Women under 25 have an 81% chance of getting remarried, while women over 25 have only a 68% chance of getting remarried. This is starting to get interesting, and hints at the answer to our demographics. But really we’re interested in women aged 40 and up, because that’s when our gender gap reverses. We’ll have to look elsewhere for that.

Healthymarriage.com has some information that helps us a bit more:

The remarriage rate for women ages 45 to 64 is half the rate for similarly aged men.

OK, that tells us something useful. We can infer from the remarriage.com statistics that the likelihood of remarriage for women declines with age, although we don’t know by exactly how much. By using such a young age (25) for their cutoff we really don’t get a sense of how the decline happens as women age. But the healthymarriage.com data tells us something else interesting. Men aren’t experiencing the same effect. Or if they are, it’s at least not to anywhere near the same degree. Think of it this way. We have a couple in which both partners are 50 years old. They get divorced. The man is twice as likely to get remarried as the woman. But if women that age aren’t remarrying, then who is this 50 year old man marrying? That’s right, he’s marrying a younger woman, somebody at least below the 45 year cutoff for this statistic.

This comes as no surprise whatsoever to anybody who has spent time studying Game. We know that women prefer relationships with men of higher relative status. All else being equal, an older man has more status by default. But even more than that, older men tend to be wealthier, more established, and higher status in society than younger men. At the same time, men prefer prettier women, all else being equal. And prettier women tend to be younger. So what we have is these older divorced men getting remarried to younger women. But in the 45-64 age bracket, there just aren’t that many single older men left for the divorced women to marry. So we see a much larger number of single women.

But the effect works the other way as well. These older men have remarried the younger women, taking them off the market for the younger men. Worse, there’s a ripple effect. The slightly younger men are now forced to look more toward even younger women – more even than they might be doing anyway just from preference effects. As the most eligible women of each age group are claimed by older men, the men of the same age group are forced to look at younger and younger women to find a partner equivalent to what they can bring to the table.

The effect is also compounded by the difference in multiple marriage rates between men and women. Again we’ll turn to some remarriage.com statistics. It seems that the percentage of men who have been married three or more times is 4.2% while it is 3.7% for women. These seem like small numbers and small differences. But note that men are 14% more likely than women to be married three or more times. What we have going on here is essentially the alpha male effect. These high status men are able to remarry repeatedly because even after multiple divorces they’re able to continue attracting women. Indeed, thanks to the preselection effect their perceived value in the marriage marketplace might even increase. For women, on the other hand, each divorce leaves her older and “more used” and hence less valuable to men who are looking. More importantly than the why, however, is the effect. If men are 14% more likely to marry three or more times than women, who are they marrying? They’re marrying more “never married” women. That’s the only place left to draw from. Again, this leaves fewer women available for other men to marry.

The effect is very much the same effect you get in societies that allow polygamy. A small number of men are matching up with substantially more than their share of the available women, thus leaving some number of men out in the cold, barred from the institution of marriage (and the stability, reproduction, and social respectability that come with it) by the harsh, unfeeling realities of simple mathematics.

What’s Causing All of This?

There are several contributing causes. The biggest contributor, hands down, is the current state of US divorce law. Divorce is easy in the United States. New York, of all places, was the last holdout, but as of 2010 no fault divorce is legal in all 50 states. Gender imbalances in divorce law are also a major contributor. Compared to times past when the low-earning spouse could potentially be thrown to the wolves in an at-fault divorce, modern no fault divorce tends to award quite a bit of the marriage’s assets to the low earning spouse (most commonly the woman), thus increasing her incentives for the divorce.

Economic and social trends also contribute. The modern invention of adolescence and its continued extension makes it harder and harder for young men to accumulate enough status to successfully woo a wife. Perversely, this only increases the demographic shift as the young women look even more to older, established men. This is most evident in the amount of schooling now required for a young worker to even have a hope of a middle class life. The fact that most US households now require dual income to meet the middle class standards further hurts these young men, as women their age (given the chance) will find it beneficial to instead pair with an older man who can provide more, meaning that she has to work less or provide less.

Lack of community involvement in new marriages also contributes. Sure, we still have the tradition of plenty of wedding gifts for the new couple (my wife and I certainly got our share). But there is no longer the huge commitment from families and communities toward helping the new couple get established and on their feet. The decline of both family and community in modern America has left a gaping void in this regard, and it’s just one more factor that makes it more sensible for a woman to look toward an older, more established partner.

The problem is likely to be even worse than it appears in the demographic data, however, because a similar phenomenon happens among people who don’t marry. Older, higher status, wealthier men enter into long term relationships with younger, prettier women. Even though no marriage occurs, these women are still taken off the dating market, leaving their age contemporaries with even fewer choices.

Who Wins and Who Loses?

In a true no fault divorce scenario what we see are two major stereotypes of how the story plays out, both stereotypes earned and deserved by the many men and women who fit them. First we find the case of women who feel, for whatever reason, that they can land a higher status man than the one they’re currently “stuck with.” She has either already met such a man and has her eye on him or she has merely become dissatisfied with her current husband. She files for divorce, the gender imbalance of divorce laws award her full custody of any children, half of any assets, and very likely a decent amount of alimony and child support. She finds her higher status man (if she can) and remarries. By remarrying, she loses the alimony – but keeps the child support, assets, and children, and also gains a solid portion of the new husband’s wealth. For women who can successfully trade up, there is quite a bit of material gain to be had.

Second we have the case of men who feel that they can attract younger, prettier wives than the one they’re “stuck with.” Due to the gender imbalance in our courts, these men need to be fairly wealthy in order to survive the system. But such men probably can attract younger, prettier women. They file for divorce, drop their wives, stick her with the kids (all the while claiming that the biased courts didn’t give him a choice anyway), pay her off with alimony and child support, and then proceed to find some pretty young thing to hang over their arms.

Both of these groups benefit from the current situation. But note who they actually are. The wealthiest and highest status men benefit from the continued rotation of young, beautiful partners. And the women just below the top win, as they’re able to trade up one or more times to reach equivalent wealth and status as a very top tier woman might have reached in one round of play.

Note that the very top tier women lose out. These women manage to land a prime catch on their first round of play (just as they always would have). But when they age, they now find that their husbands can easily discard them for the next up and coming young filly. Due to their top tier status they might find that they’re able to remarry, but it’s unlikely to be to as high quality a mate as they picked the first time when they were at their peak.

Likewise, bottom tier women lose out. Even the lowest status men will typically find that their status and wealth increases with age, and many will find that they can trade up later in life. True, they might not be able to trade up very far. But the bottom tier women that they cut loose will find that they have no prospects at all, and are left to care for children with minimal income and wealth left, instead turning to social programs like welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps to cover the bill.

All men except for the very top tier are net losers in this system. The very top tier still attracts the best women, as they always have. Only now they’re able to take more than their share meaning that every tier below them has access to lesser quality mates than they otherwise might. The men at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are the biggest losers of all as there is simply no one left for them.

Why Is This a Problem For Society?

Because the success of western civilization is built on the backs of middle and lower status working men. The middle status men, the modern artisans and craftsmen, are the scientists, architects, engineers and computer scientists who bring the innovation and technological development that drives progress and wealth in our society. The lower status men are the laborers without whom that society couldn’t function: truck drivers, construction workers, factory workers, garbage men, mechanics, plumbers, etc. Without all of these men, society as we know it can’t function.

There is also the problem of testosterone driven male aggression. When women get angry and feel oppressed they form committees. They march, they protest, they burn their bras. They talk. If they’re especially upset and coordinated, they withhold sex. When men get angry and feel oppressed people die. This is a hard cold reality of human history. Large numbers of frustrated and cut off young men leads to increased violent crime, dysfunctional social institutions, riots, and general civic unrest. Witness the race riots in Paris or the recent riots in Greece.

Left to its own the problem is going to continue to get worse as more and more young women disappear from the dating market. Cultural and social norms are becoming ever more permissive, which only makes it easier for the alpha men and the women who trade up to continue. Unlike other major upcoming demographic problems (the retirement and slow dying off of the Baby Boomers that will collapse Social Security and Medicare), this is a problem that very few people are aware of. The effects, then, are likely to be amplified by the fact that nobody sees it coming.

What Can We Do About It?

The only thing that can correct the problem is to go after the source. Eliminate no-fault divorce. Restore the social stigmas against divorce and promiscuity (especially female promiscuity) in general. Reverse the modern trend of encouraging young people to marry late and delay childbearing. Remove the artificial credentialing constraints that our society has adopted that keep young people economically disadvantaged. Sadly, none of this is easy to achieve or likely to occur anytime soon.

We’re men. Unlike women, we (generally) like to find solutions to our problems, not sit around whining about them. One of the biggest things I see over and over in the comment sections at almost every manosphere blog is, “Right on! But what can we do about it?” The question is made even more difficult because there are a lot of factions involved, and we don’t all agree on everything.

Well, I have somewhere to start. It’s just a start, and we need other ideas and other things we can do. But I believe that most of us can get behind this, and we even stand a reasonable chance of getting others on board. It’s not a short term fix – it will take some time. But I believe we absolutely can achieve at least some of what I’m about to lay out.

We need to start a concerted effort to support and get behind, and maybe even start, attempts to make certain changes. I believe we should get behind politicians (local, state, or national), of whatever party, who support the following policies.

• Reform Divorce Laws. There’s no question that these are currently unfair toward men. There is a lot of potential for reform here. I’ve got several ideas of my own, and there are others I could get behind and even more I could tolerate as at least being better than what we’ve got. But what we’ve got is broken and it needs to change.
• Eliminate Title IX. I can be generous and admit that at one point this might’ve been necessary. But let’s be honest – we all know that in this day and age if there’s a women’s sports team that’s not getting enough funding, parents will show up at the next PTA meeting with torches and pitchforks. The only effect this legislation has today is to eliminateboys sports teams because not enough girls are interested to form an equivalent girls team and keep funding parity. Put control back in local hands.
• Eliminate Government Set Asides for Women Owned Business. This is a joke. It’s an insult to women and men both – implying on the one hand that women can’t cut it and on the other hand that men are somehow stopping women from starting their own businesses. But it doesn’t even work as designed. Here’s how it really works: a man decides to start a small business. Then he puts 51% of the company in his wife’s name so that it qualifies as “woman owned.” He now gets preferential treatment on government contracts. Then 10 years later she divorces him because he’s never around (thanks to working so much to make his business succeed) and takes controlling interest in his company with her. Everyone involved knows that this is a total scam. End it already.
• No More Jail for “Deadbeat Dads.” One of the best things about the United States in historical socio-economic terms was that it had no debtors prisons. Why have we brought these back? The fact that this is done in the modern age is true a human rights atrocity.
• Eliminate the Sex Offender Lists. Child molestation is a serious crime. But the vast majority of the people on these lists haven’t done anything of the sort. Why does a 19 year old boy have his life ruined because his 17 year old girlfriend gave him a blowjob? Or the people who are on it for streaking? Sex offender registries ruin lives – mostly the lives of men, and mostly far out of proportion to the severity of the actual offense.

Some might counter that these reforms will be difficult because they’re politically unpopular. I say that we need to make them popular by showing that we’re willing to vote based on these ideas. What’s more, we need to be advocates for them. Inform our friends and family just how destructive these policies are and why they need to change. In the last decade I’ve already witnessed a change in opinion on many of these topics. If people as conservative as my parents can be convinced that these aren’t good policies, the public at large can be won.

Why in the world have we allowed Kay Hymowitz and others like her to tell us what the words manning up mean? Why do we allow them to turn those simple words into shaming language? By accepting them as shaming, we’ve implicitly bought into the feminist frame of mind. We’ve accepted their frame that being manly is shameful.

I don’t accept this, nor do I accept these words as shameful. We’ve forgotten our basic Game techniques, and we’ve allowed Kay Hymowitz to set the mental frame. I say, “No.” I say that we set our own frame.

Maximus tells us that we should man up by taking charge, leading women and society where we want it to go. T.L tells us that we already are manning up by refusing to play by their rules. I say that they’re both right.

What does it mean to “man up?” What should it mean?

I say that it means being a man, and that there’s no shame in that. What does it mean to be a man? Yes, it has always differed from society to society and even from man to man. Yes, there are thousands upon thousands of volumes throughout history exploring the idea. But at heart, I believe there are a few principles that always hold true.

• A man is strong. Both physically and emotionally, we do the heavy lifting.
• A man is bold. We take risks – but only when the potential payoff is proportional to the risk we’re taking. We may be afraid, but we don’t let the fear stop us.
• A man is decisive. Let the women spend two hours deciding which brand of peanut butter to get. We’ve got better things to do.
• A man knows what he wants. You don’t need Maximus or TL to tell you whether to marry or not – you already know.
• A man goes after what he wants. Do you want to marry? Then go after it. If you don’t, then don’t let them shame you into it. That is “manning up.”
• A man wants to be good at what he does. Yes, we’re competitive. We’ve let the feminists frame this as a bad thing (unless women are doing it), but competitiveness brings greatness. I don’t care what you do, whether it’s building bridges, being a CEO, or playing video games. Be good at it.
• A man is strong in his convictions. We don’t change our minds because it’s popular or easy. We stay fixed on what we firmly believe to be true.
• A man is his own man. We form our own conclusions and use our own minds. While we let others convince us and sway us, we make them work for it with truth and reason, not pretty words and lies.

Those are just my ideas – and you might disagree with them. Good! Have your idea of what it means to man up. Why are we letting this woman dictate manliness to us? It seems to me that the problem for 50 years has been that we’re letting women dictate the terms of masculinity. We’re letting them own the words and their meanings.

I say No More. I say man up and be proud of it – but don’t let feminist hacks tell us what it means. Manning Up doesn’t mean that we bend over and take it up the ass from the other half of the population – if anything, quite the opposite.

They won’t like it when we man up. They’ve spent decades trying to keep us from manning up. Now they want to redefine the very words in their attempts to make us who we want them to be.

Don’t let them. Be a man, on your own terms.