I recently wrote an article calling RedHawk’s proposals for reordering society birdbrained. Aiming at restoring male authority, he wants men to be promiscuous before getting married, have multiple wives or perhaps avoid marriage totally.
Now he’s in a flap and has written two articles in response.
I’ve been engaging in Twitter back-and-forths with people in our circles who come from a more traditional perspective on marriage and dating. It’s no secret that many are not fond of my lifestyle choices and how I address the hellscape that is the modern dating marketplace. “RedHawk, you need to repent and find Jesus.” “RedHawk, you are leading women astray and contributing to the problem.” “RedHawk, pickup is gay, and without marriage you are treating sex just like a homosexual does.”
As my article explained, a vision of sex as mere friction for fun is essentially gay. According to RedHawk, however,
These critiques and others miss the mark, in my opinion. They come from another time, an outdated 20th century way of thinking.
Since our bodies and brains are essentially unchanged from those of our Stone Age ancestors, this is odd. Sex can’t become ‘outdated’. It still makes babies.
And the vague appeal to a new ‘way of thinking’ — sexual progressivism, the worst kind of wishful thinking — recalls Chesterton’s quip, “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
Despite claiming he’s not ‘black-pilled’, RedHawk concludes this article by saying, ‘Do not trust to hope — it has forsaken these lands.’ Not to hope is to despair. And Aquinas’s remarks here are illuminating:
hope withdraws us from evils and induces us to seek for good things, so that when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin, and are drawn away from good works. Wherefore a gloss on Proverbs 24:10, "If thou lose hope being weary in the day of distress, thy strength shall be diminished," says: "Nothing is more hateful than despair, for the man that has it loses his constancy both in the every day toils of this life, and, what is worse, in the battle of faith." And Isidore says (De Sum. Bono ii, 14): "To commit a crime is to kill the soul, but to despair is to fall into hell."
Ultimately, RedHawk’s response to the ‘hellscape’ of modern dating is to fall into it as a demon of lust.
Marriage, he believes,
'has become too risky in the West. Men can’t risk our livelihoods because we are horny or “need to do the right thing”…People in our circles can talk all they want about traditional marriage while claiming that “real men marry” and “pickup is gay,” but the reality doesn’t change.
Yet it’s actually his fantasy that’s fixed. The U.S. Divorce rate, for example, is at a 50-year-low. For every 1,000 marriages, only 14.9 ended in divorce.
His confusion continues:
A common issue that I see the among the Christian types is that to be a man means “to sacrifice, suffer, and put other’s needs before one’s own.” Indeed, there are some parts of that with which I agree, but more often than not, I see this used as a club and cope targeted against other men by those who have needlessly complicated their own lives.
There is nothing specifically Christian about this, although Christ is its culmination. (And when did ‘cope’ become an argument?) The masculine imperatives — procreate, protect and provide — are universal. The idea that a man with the responsibilities of a family has ‘needlessly complicated’ his own life is comical by the standards of all known societies.
But it’s not as comical as this:
Men need sex — it is a biological necessity — and if they can’t get it, they become despondent and develop very itchy trigger fingers.
A biological necessity? Really? So men die without sex? Imagine going into the emergency room saying you’re about to die because you haven’t had sex. Sex is necessary for the survival of the species, not the individual.
But it is true that men get ‘despondent and develop very itchy trigger fingers’ if they lack the strength for chastity. That’s why there are no non-monogamous large, stable societies. As Christakis showed in Blueprint, the earliest hunter-gatherer humans were monogamous. Subsequent experiments in polygamy were abandoned for good reasons.
Yet RedHawk thinks it’s coming back:
Whether people like it or not, our society is heading for polygamy…a post-marriage world.
Polygamy, however is not ‘post-marriage’. It is simply a different form a marriage — one that, as J. D. Unwin showed, produces inferior cultures but a form of marriage nevertheless. Polygamy is not promiscuity. Promiscuity was never a social stage in the history of humanity. Intense pair bonds drove human evolution, as Henrich shows in The Secret of Our Success.
Promiscuity occurs only in the Brave New World of sordid socialist fantasises: as J. A. Ryan explains, ‘the vogue which the theory of promiscuity for a time enjoyed seems to have been due far more to a priori considerations…and to the wish to believe in it, than to positive evidence.’
But Red Hawk’s despair-driven delusions are similar:
The days of going to the local diner or church to find an attractive, kind, loving, feminine virgin are over, and they aren’t coming back anytime soon.
Many men — and most Amish men — still do meet their wives like this. But RedHawk wants men to be ‘Red Pill-aware’:
It is up to you to use that information in service of whatever vision for your life you may have. If that means spinning plates indefinitely, or going MGTOW, or blindly getting married, or my approach — continuing to spin plates until I find a worthy woman to settle down with — the choice is yours as a man, and nobody else is going to make it for you.
If ‘whatever vision for your life you may have’ sounds like liberalism to you, you’re right. It is. And note the use of the euphemism ‘spinning plates’ for fornication.
There’s an attempt at rationalisation (there always is):
In this day and age, using old order ways of thinking to navigate the dating marketplace is the same argument as “muh principles” when fighting the Left.
But sex never goes out of date. And ‘those principles of being the chivalric man’ that RedHawk says ‘will ruin your life’ were always there not for the benefit of women but for men to stop lust ruining their lives.
For RedHawk, however, chivalry is ‘right-wing feminism’:
Beginning with a victim narrative is never a good sign:
Everyone can see that men are failing in 2022… They have been failed by their society and by their fathers, to the point where more and more young men than ever are checking out altogether.
Blaming other people is OK, you see, but telling men to fix themselves is ‘participating in the man hatred going on in our society’. People doing this, he says,
encourage men to fall into their traditional roles and to take up their positions as leaders, without giving them any of the incentives that once existed as a reward for them taking on such burdens.
The irony here is that the ultimate male incentive is sex, and that’s exactly what RedHawk wants without burdens: friction for fun, no different from gay cruising.
But he claims that,
in order for Christian sexual morality to work, it must be enforced from the top down by those in positions of power and influence.
Note the confused idea that there’s something specifically Christian about being opposed to promiscuity. There isn’t. And history shows that Christian sexual morality works without being ‘enforced from the top down by those in positions of power and influence’: Christians emerged victorious from fallen Rome because they were the only fertile community (along with Jews).
RedHawk wants men to have ‘an abundance mindset with women and…a lot of experience with them’ — again, note the euphemisms and the fact that this isn’t merely about being ‘aware’ but advocacy — yet not even the pagans did this:
As for woman, the promiscuity which is the surest sign of her degradation never existed as a general or stable characteristic of primitive folk. In China and Japan, Buddhism and Confucianism depressed, not succoured her; in ancient Egypt, her position was far higher than in late; it was high too among the Teutons. Even in historic Greece as in Rome, divorce was difficult and disgraceful, and marriage was hedged about with an elaborate legislation and the sanctions of religion.
As Christopher Dawson explains in his essay ‘The Patriarchal Family in History’, ‘the whole tendency of modern anthropology has been to discredit the old views regarding primitive promiscuity and sexual communism, and to emphasize the importance and universality of marriage.’
So why is RedHawk flying blind? In the past, he says,
women needed men for security and provisioning, and thus would swoon over men in numbers. The woman qualified to the man, while in gynocentrism the man qualifies to the woman.
This is not just wrong but the opposite of the truth. Universally, men have to qualify to women. Think about the basic biology of reproduction. Women are more limited by physiology than men are. About 20 pregnancies is the lifetime limit for a woman; the Sharifian emperor of Morocco, Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, had 888 children. Since the female’s greater parental investment is a scare resource, males compete for it, fighting and dying for the chance to inseminate females.
Female prostitution is ubiquitous; its converse is extremely rare. Women’s magazines are generally about how to enjoy sex; men’s magazines are about how to get more of it. According to Symons in The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ‘everywhere sex is something that females have that males want’ (OUP, 1979), p.253. This is why nuptial gifts from males to females are so prevalent in nature. The male, as Darwin explained, is competitive; the female, ‘choosy’.
RedHawk complains that ‘what men have today is 100% responsibility and 0% authority’ yet doesn’t understand that his approach of pursuing autonomy — irresponsible sex — necessarily abdicates authority. Male authority over women is exercised in the context of the family, as the encyclical "Arcanum", 10 February, 1880, declares: "The husband is ruler of the family and the head of the wife”.
In contrast to this, RedHawk offers emasculated despair:
Encouraging men to participate in the current rigged game is only setting them up for failure.
The men winning the supposedly ‘rigged game’ can only read this with pity. And pity, too, his desire to dismiss the standards he finds too high:
They appeal to some vague notion of masculinity — pulled straight from a Miller Lite commercial — and make promises of rewards in the afterlife, and even that they can’t guarantee!
The ideal of masculinity as procreating, protecting and providing is not vague. No culture ever has valued men for being childless, promiscuous and playing video games. Nor is it specifically Christian. And the rewards are right here in this life: married men are happier, live longer, enjoy better health and earn more.
RedHawk’s superficiality is most clearly evinced by his lack of emphasis on children:
‘Young men — the ones who haven’t checked out at least — are looking for power, for young women, and for money.’
Power and money are proxies for indicating resources for the provider role, and youth is a proxy for fertility. As I explained in my initial response, however, it seems these young men are not only having sex outside marriage (they’re afraid of marriage) but also using contraception (they’re also afraid of children).
These are supposed to be the ‘strong men to take back the highest positions of power in our society’? By indulging in the same vices — abandoning pre-nuptial chastity, spurning monogamy, using contraception — that, historically, have always weakened societies?
We must encourage a return to masculinity and the warrior spirit, if we want things to change.
Promiscuity is not masculinity and never has been. Nor is it ‘the warrior spirit’. Absolutely monogamous Teutons overran marriage-spurning sexually decadent Rome. Monogamous communities also outbreed polygamous ones. And knights took a vow of chastity.
As Aquinas said, however, ‘when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin.’ And the problem with lust is that it disorders the mind. Terence, speaking of lecherous love (Eunuch., act 1, sc. 1), says that ‘this thing admits of neither counsel nor moderation, thou canst not control it by counseling.’ Similarly, of the lustful old men it is written (Daniel 13:9) that ‘they perverted their own mind…that they might not…remember just judgments.’
Choose ‘whatever vision for your life you may have,’ RedHawk tells men:
I will continue to give men the tools that they need to succeed in their own best interests, and I will not shame them for that.
Shame can save the lustful man. But this is essentially the attitude of a “Gay Pride” parade, and pride is even more dangerous than lust.
How is a successful male promiscuity not the sign of masculinity? Aren't women attracted to men who are masculine and of high value? They certainly are. Which implies that many women being attracted to a man is the ultimate validation of his position as an alpha on top of the hierarchy, of his masculinity and high value.
How is a successful male promiscuity not the sign of masculinity? Aren't women attracted to men who are masculine and of high value? They certainly are. Which implies that many women being attracted to a man is the ultimate validation of his position as an alpha on top of the hierarchy, of his masculinity and high value.