Real-Life Context (from a reader):

Hi Jordan,

As a man navigating today’s dating world, I’ve noticed how easy it is to develop a skewed view of the feminine due to bad past experiences. With the fast-paced nature of modern dating, we as men often encounter a variety of women, and sometimes things get messy. We’ve all had those moments where we feel burned by a femme fatale or find ourselves in situations where it’s tempting to blame women for the hurt we experience.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that women never take accountability or they always choose the wrong type of guy. I understand why blame movements like the ‘red pill’ resonate with some men. But I also know that this mindset can lead to resentment and a distorted view of women in general, sabotaging any healthy and good start with the next woman before we have even met her.

That’s why I was wondering how can we, as men, cultivate a healthy and balanced relationship with the feminine, especially when bad experiences, past or current, cloud our judgment? How can we keep a good and honouring image of women, and the gifts and qualities they bring to us men, so we don’t lose faith in her?

A personal example: experiencing the fast-paced dating life in Brazil did leave a certain impression on me towards women. Short sexual encounters with women are so available here that it almost loses its meaning and specialty for everybody. I also experience very flaky behavior on dates, and how women say they want the ‘good’ guy and complain about the Brazilian playboys but at the end of the night they go home with the playboy after all and reject me for example, etc.

And of course, it’s the ‘hurt parts’ within me that create those negative images and blame stories about women. Resentment starts building up to where I can already feel this does not serve anybody – neither me, nor future women I will meet. That’s why I want to learn how to keep honoring women and the feminine even if my current dating experience might feel negative and messy.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you already for your support.

~ F.

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Disorder and Regression

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If you look at the Brazilian flag, what do you see? Like the Amazon jungle you have a vast expanse of green and, within it, a diamond of gold, and, in the centre of that, a blue sphere, an earth, wrapped in a white sash and a slogan: ordem e progresso. I remember one carnival drinking and ambling behind a crowd of people—marching sloppily, on cobbled streets, to the salivating carnage of desire. And we were led by a girl, tanned and tall and clad in silver, who carried the same green-and-yellow flag but adorned with a truer description of the experience: disordem e regresso. Below the leather belt of the equator, F., all bets are off. If you can open your heart to the personal disorder and regression that will befall you in this wild land, you will stomach many awkward facts about the feminine.

Brazil is a mind-twister. It is because of that whole humid carousel that I’m here, still, writing to you. There’s nothing worse than struggling with women in a land of supposed abundance. Standing amidst all the flora and fauna, it is an attack on your very right to exist when everything, everywhere, is fornicating but you.

Speaking to your points and to your questions:

Our perception of the present is always clouded by the past. Healing whatever has happened to you is essential. But what is healing? In a sentence, humbly feeling the full and daunting consequences of what has befallen you without your mind’s interference or justification. You host the raw, composite feelings of whatever the pain was—the scolding mother, the older girls heckling, the succession of brusque rejections, that time the whole class laughed at your wet-patch or your hard-on—until you find care and acceptance of the very boy you were when these slashes and wounds dug in. Healing is one thing, a vital thing—and our culture is filled with the call to heal—but one can get stuck in the endless navel. Harder is finding men who, whatever the gravity of their scars, look out into the future; men who live with a positive, conducive view of women.

I may be asking the impossible, but if you can find any out there on this desolate planet, get to know proper adult men who don’t live in an internet vacuum, who don’t even know of the redpill, nor of the existence of these populists and demagogues. Yes, I’m asking you to put down your phone, to roll up your trousers and hunt down the dodo in the dead of night, but try and find men who are integrated into a normal sense of life. Men living outside the periphery of this blame culture. Listen to their perspectives. Scour society—rip through the cupboards and floorboards if you have to—for normal, integrated, human, men, and hear what they have to say. Then: find normal women; women who are accountable, at least to a large degree, for their lives. I mean, you likely grew up in a land of practical women before you went to fuck your way around Brazil. Finally, step three: throw your phone off the side of Corcovado.

There’s an idea in relationship therapy that, when you listen to a couple in pain, only ten percent of the hurt they’re living has to do with each other—the other ninety is fuelled from traumas past. What a metric to wrap your head around! And I sense it’s the same in a politicised environment: where men espouse hateful things about women, we’re talking 10% direct experience and 90% internet distortion; ten percent related to the present and ninety from some archaic past. Turn off the propaganda, listen to moderates, and things lighten up.

But we have to admit it: misogyny is as old as time. Where did misogyny start? Did the cavemen badmouth their mothers and wives in the primordial sauna or gin bar? Or does it stem from some trauma of rejection that almost every man has suffered—that outreach to mama for nourishing love, and that first day one is denied? I think we all must root around our darker recesses to find that hurt or hatred—even the banner-waving Amorati must search for and uncover the calluses of his heart, the once-soft vales and contours that became cynical about women. To butcher Solzhenitsyn: the line dividing love and entitlement runs through every Amorati’s heart. Perhaps, on every rejection, we all replay that primordial shock of our mother’s boundary—the initial ‘no’. When Fabiana won’t kiss you on the lips even after you paid for those caipirinhas, the child within rediscovers that he can’t have everything he wants. With girls, with sex, ‘no’ feels such a personal assault. I’ll come back to male resentment.

So, you ask, how can we cultivate a healthy and balanced relationship with the feminine?

A former client of mine moved to Bali, and like many men who redefine the values by which he lives, he took to the morning surf. The thing with Bali is that the best waves—those luscious, generous, beginner waves; those waves that make even the inept feel great—are utterly crowded with men. One morning my friend took a good wave, fell, and before he could look up he was smashed in the skull by the rudder of the next man’s board. It cut a hole in his head at least an inch deep, required a number of stitches, and left the sea red with the contents of his mind. Good job there were no sharks around. We had a good laugh about that. ‘It’s a bit like dating women,’ I said. ‘Yup’, said my client. We smiled in a toast to the sky.

When I was six we rode bikes as fast as we could, we pulled wheelies, jumped off ramps, and laughed at each other as we fell. The real danger is that kids don’t do this anymore. I remember, around six or seven, pulling a category-defining wheelie some ten or twenty yards up the concrete driveway, losing control, then smashing over the handlebars and landing on my chin. My family took me to the hospital and the doctors gave me five stitches. The scar’s still there. I once dated a girl with the same scar—always a good start for a game of show and tell. Anyway, whenever my Mum tells this story, I’m always coming out of the hospital laughing. I don’t know whether it was true humour or a reaction of shock—kids before the status thing are amazing. Some guys are like this with women: they never bemoan an accident. If the feminine is an ocean, we have surfer’s lore. We all long, at least once in our lives, to ride the big wave. We travel to Hawai’i—want to lose ourselves entirely. Women are designed to smash up our egos—it’s wonderful how some of us have a good time. But other men? I’m not quite sure what they expect. One needs to accept the waters he wades into. Before approaching enlightenment, the Buddhists say we need a view—a profitable understanding of what a spiritual path is, and how we should walk it before wasting time in misaligned action. I think the same should be so in dating and relationships: before approaching women, do you have a decent, realistic view of what is possible, what a woman is, what the feminine experience is—in all its heaven and hell? Or are you still driven blind by that primordial shock of first ‘no’?

We’re conditioned, of course. In our jobs, in how we’re attuned to the world. Men are trained by day to find faults in machinery or code, and spend all night seeking faults in women. But how is your scoreboard at counting her generosity, her grace—that about her which is poetic, a give? Do you see her, even in her quietest expressions of love? This is the dimension virtually all of us men miss: we see errors in her function, but not her animation between the lines. Want to get practical? Think of the five or ten women closest to you. How is the love of their hearts made manifest, have you seen it, do you notice? Keep a journal.

So, the women that complain of the players and then sleep with them, while the good guy who listens to her agony gets left behind. Bwahahahahahahahahah! This is low-level female hypocrisy, classic entry-level nonsense. If you can’t laugh this one off you’re screwed! Fail to find this old cliché somewhat amusing (even tiring) and your issue is quite clear. To be blunt, the women who play this tired tune are either not grown up, or they know the whole racket they’re playing. It’s the same as men that curse the limitations their work puts on them and not quitting. Men are afraid of the responsibility that claiming their freedom would put on them—far easier to bleat and blame the boss. Such women are still addicted to the drug-high produced by men they can’t influence or control. It’s a second-and-third-order drama, only ended when she has the self-awareness to draw a definitive line in the sand. I would sleep with a hot girl when the energy is there, sure—but I’d make no emotional investment in a woman who hasn’t seen or laughed past this proclivity of youth.

Reading you, F., I might suggest you discern real women from ‘girls’ and raise your standards. But that’s basic advice. If you were truly tired of the bodycount game you’d be having a different conversation with women already. It sounds to me that you’re still playing the nice guy. You’re colluding with this whole drama. Are you embodying the jerk as much as you really would, if you were free? Are you still molded by your mother’s over-respectful shaping; fenced in because father never set you free?

Here’s the role of resentment: resentment means you’re not getting what you feel you deserve from your efforts. You are secretly entitled, but you are not sharing your entitlement. Are you showing up appropriately, and really expressing what you want—in a way that’s compelling to the girls of Brazil? Or are you burying the light of your desire under a bushel of round-about effort? Here are the roots of the nice guy’s resentment: every time your will was ever suffused by a woman; every time your desire was judged or flattened or ran out of steam. All those nasty girls at playtime that told you no, even when you came from goodness. Every time you heard Mum speak with bitter and contemptuous breath towards Dad.

So we circle back to the healing: it’s time to get real friendly with the parts of you that resent, that have resented, that resented as a little boy. Get to know them, find a way to understand your lifetime story with this pattern, to the point where you can find, inside it, great energy and humour. Resentment isn’t bad, it’s just frozen and festering. We just need to turn the heating up. Indignation is a great quality, a sort of angry entitled desire for your needs being heard and met. Stop fucking around with those playboys and come home with me—how much longer are you going to keep wasting your time! I’m fucking here, this is deep, and the sex will be better than church. Let’s worship these young glistening bodies while we’ve got them, caralho! Get that fine ass in the Uber, I’m settling the bill! Something in the attitude of claiming his needs is exactly what the playboy—despite what might be smarmy or sickening about his method—does right.

We have to be honest with ourselves, F. We want to poke the barbie. We wanted to poke the barbie and the girls told us ‘no’. Because we were smelly boys. And we told them a lie, F., we told them ‘no’, that we’re not smelly. That we’re not smelly like all the other boys. And it worked—they let us play a little dress-up with Barbie. They watched as they let us play by their rules. And the price for this play? It never lasted very long, but it cost us our balls and our dick. And later, you look on in horror. One of the smelly boys has got that Barbie—he’s got her naked and broken and covered in mud.

All resentment comes from not showing up and declaring what you want and what you need. To the extent that your declarations feel invitational—and not coercive, impositional—you’ll command the world to accompany your will.

On my first trip to Brazil I found myself upset by the tale of Barba-Roxa—upset that, in a land of mostly dark-haired people, I was always the only redbeard around, and if the girls really watched what I was doing (they always watched what I was doing), I knew that’d see. In the aftermath of my first carnaval, the survivors took for a waterfall deep in Minas Gerais. We were friends, but I was alone: I’d had a girl during carnaval but I’d dropped her halfway through (amazing how, after getting the teet or the cookie, we’re so quick to drop it) and I reached for the Sāo Paulo butterfly who, coming so close and so effortlessly, would always flutter from my grasp. Now Barba-Roxa was left at birth in a basket by his mother—I guess he was illegitimate, she couldn’t afford him—and she left him beside a waterfall and he was raised by a witch, or the deer, or the monkeys, depending on who you ask. But he must have known his human form, his human fate, and Barba-Roxa would wait by the waterfall, peering out through the leaves and the undergrowth, for women to bathe alone in the pools, at which point he would seize his chance with force and abandon, and dive in for his need-drenched kiss. Oh, the childhood grief of primordial separation! Oh, this lower-body adult irritation—this sexual power that can assault and attack! The girls of the country were all warned of Barba-Roxa—warned never to bathe alone else they might not ever come back. What a strange and painful cocktail of feelings we have to hold and not project all over women—women who have nothing to do with our psychodrama. It took me a while to make peace with this. A long while. It took more than careful shaving those following weeks. If only more of us could grow out of this.

Now, F., are you really looking for women deeper than the one-night stand? If that is so, you sound undecided in both your behaviour and in your feelings and judgments. Adult women are not hard to come by when you’ve made peace and made laughter with the child. I’m not surprised tricky results come back at you. Though to the extent that old entitlement drives our dating, we never really know where we are.

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Loving the Wave, in a Nutshell

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If you want to let go of your skewed view and appropriately love the feminine, here’s the big picture:

1: Death. One day, all this will have gone. All these painful lows, but all the exhilarating highs. Are you ready, right now, to die? If the answer is no, you must in some way still love the feminine. Write a list of all the ways you still want to live, and look at that list each day.

2: Non-Surfers. Speak to guys who have no women in their lives. Get up-close, empathic, personal; feel the energy of these men. A man that hates women, or who has no women in his life, has mostly a nihilistic energy that is very close to death. Let the living dead polarise you in the opposite direction.

3: Feelings. At the end of the day, none of your questions have anything to do with women, but with what you accept or reject emotionally within yourself. Not liking how a woman shows up is simply you having difficulty with the feeling that provokes within you. What if you could learn to enjoy even the flakes and the bad accountability, the irritation? That’s what would make you resilient, life-affirming—and attractive to the next!

When a man finds the space within himself to enjoy all the things he finds annoying about women, when you learn to see overwhelming emotions as pure life-force showing you’re alive, then you’re unreactive towards all the bad stuff. The good then shines all the more.

I would be lying if I said I was a perfect surfer, or that I never felt exasperated in Brazil. The dance forever intensifies; the waves crash louder and stronger. The easier and more delightful I get, the thinner her fingers: the more challenging the buttons she finds in me to press.

Anyway, I’m not ready to die. I love this whole land of women.

This doesn’t mean I lack standards or boundaries. Or that I’m willing to rewatch telenovela drama that’s as stale as old carnival beer. And let’s face it: none of us were abandoned in a basket.

May we all get a little indignant and raise our voices—let us shake off that matriarchal scorn. I want to poke around with the barbie! Me!

May your last sunsets be filled with fire, F.

~ Jordan

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