“He is exactly the kind of partner a liberated woman is supposed to want, and yet she despises him for it”

I’ve been saying that women are the truest red pillers… now we see an article by a chick, about books written by chicks, that are as red pill as anything comes… it’s about whether a novel can “capture the contradictions of female desire,” but it’s not hard to understand… one just has to remember that chicks are random and also that many chicks don’t want to be accountable for their decisions. Seriously, the chicks writing the novels and the chick writing the article agree with me, just not in the exact framing I use…

Their behavior mystifies them, and they discover that the selective work of authorship can relieve their confusion: if they choose some moments from their past and discard others, if they arrange these moments in just the right way, they might be able to understand themselves as logical and consistent, free of the messy task of figuring out what they want, and the even messier one of fully accepting these wants.

When guys ask women logical questions about the woman’s behavior and don’t get logical answers, that’s often because the woman herself doesn’t know. “Their behavior mystifies them.” One thing most chicks hate, however, is boredom, as we see here.

Of the intervening years, we have learned that she married and abruptly divorced a kale-loving man, a classmate in her grad-school cohort, whom she describes as “nice” and “ever so understanding.” She is mocking him. He is exactly the kind of partner a liberated woman is supposed to want, and yet she despises him for it.

Nice guys are boring. “Liberated” women want what other women want.

Years after her ur-erotic hotel-room encounter, the narrator finds herself in another hotel room, this time with a man she has picked up in the bar downstairs. Her husband is at home and thinks she is away at a job interview or visiting friends; she can’t remember. Alone with the stranger, the narrator tells him that she wants to be dominated. This time she’s articulating her desire, rather than discovering it through someone else’s, and in the act of articulation she can’t help but come face to face with her own agency. But the fantasy itself is for the opposite: “I hate making choices,” she says.

If she wants it, the husband doesn’t matter, the previous agreements don’t matter… all that matters is the moment. The impressive thing is that she says she wants to be dominated. Most women want guys to intuit that, to just know it. But “I hate making choices…” that’s why smart guys minimize the choices chicks need to make. In the old world, the anthropological hunter-gatherer world and then the agricultural world, chicks didn’t have many choices to make. They married who their families, mostly their fathers and brothers, told them to marry. Now we are surprised that a lot of chicks are unhappy to be introduced into the world of intense mating competition and that many chicks are ambivalent about the choices in front of them. Chicks live in the land of maybe, but most guys are never taught this.

Most guys don’t understand what women want during sex, or how to give it to them…

This contrast—of women raring to assert their agency in one context, then willing, even eager, to relinquish it another—captured my interest in part because of its familiarity. I’d seen it crop up recently in widely praised works both written by and featuring brazen, outspoken, and almost always middle-class white women. It’s in Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” when Frances tries unsuccessfully to get Nick—older, married, kind—to choke and hit her during sex. And in Rooney’s “Normal People,” when Marianne discloses to gentle, sensitive Connell, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, that another man has hit her with a belt, choked her—that she asked for it, enjoyed it.

Read from the right perspective, this “feminist” article in a feminist magazine about feminist novels tells us more about real chicks than most of the man-hating feminist writing. There are some dysfunctional women who hate men and some dysfunctional men who hate women, but most of all guys need to learn to understand chicks, and then their behavior becomes clearer. Chicks are often like random-number generators, a fact that explains my interactions with many chicks the interactions so many men have with chicks.

This article is great reading for confused guys.

Women are the truest red pillers.