I really need to thank Longtime Reader, friend, and most excellent Great Mondaydact Browser Buster contributor (practically co-author, at this point, honestly) Dawn Pine for pointing me to a few very interesting YouTube channels. Now, I’m not big on watching videos, I listen to them while they’re playing in the background while I’m cooking or writing or reading the news. And some of the longer-form broadcast videos from channels like Think Before You Sleep and Better Bachelor are well worth watching (or listening to) when you’re busy with other things.

Joker from Better Bachelor, in particular, has been on a real tear of late. He recently uploaded an excellent video dissecting a refreshingly honest article written by a woman about the kind of psychological abuse that she regularly unloads upon her own husband:

This reminds me of a superb article from our friends over at Men of the West, dating back to the very beginnings of the site, called “Taming the She-Beast“. This is the important bit from the article:

The more unhappy and unpleasant I got, the more distant Karl became. It was as though he’d gone back to being a single man, and was living his life without me. I wanted him back. Out of desperation, I mumbled something about divorce, thinking that might snap him into line. Instead, he gave me a cold look, and said he’d call a lawyer in the morning. I was devastated. I didn’t want a divorce, but I didn’t want to go on like this either.

It took some intervention by my sister-in-law to help me realize that it was my own bad behavior that was destroying my marriage. Needing some time to think, I’d gone up north to visit her and my brother, and had the opportunity to observe their daily life together. What I saw was a solid, Christian marriage between two calm and happy people. I wanted to know their secret. She sat me down, prayed with me, and then gave me two books. One was The Power of a Praying Wife, by Stormie Omartian. [Omartian?!?! That’s got to take the cake for coolest name that I’ve heard in a long time.] The other was a manual instructing wives on how to surrender control to their husbands. She told me to read these if I wanted to save my marriage.

The provocative copy on the surrender book was intriguing. Surrender. There was something about the word that was exciting, almost titillating. I read the book in two days. It made me realize that what my husband needed was for me to place my full trust in him, to surrender control. The book promised marital peace if I would just let go. So that’s what I did.

When I let go of trying to have control over my husband, a miracle happened. I got the loving, attentive man I wanted. And we both got the sense of peace we needed, because we were both finally carrying out our God-given roles—the husband as the leader and the wife as the helper. It was difficult to accept, but I was the one who had been failing. My husband had been carrying out his duties as a leader all along. I thank God for Karl’s strength and resilience, because they forced me to confront how immature and out of control I was. His strength allowed me to grow in my capacity as a wife, and I am much happier because of it.

Ms Erika Andersen, the author of that piece, goes on to point out that the dynamic between a stroppy woman and her man is similar to the relationship between a parent and an upset child. It is tempting – VERY tempting – to simply give in to the demands of the angry child every time, just to make the temper tantrum stop.

But this is a mistake, a huge one.

The parent that makes this mistake betrays weakness, just as the man who consistently gives in to the temper tantrums of his woman betrays the same thing. This repulses and terrifies women, because women need a strong man to keep them in line and are instinctively attracted to strength, resilience, purpose, and drive.

That does not mean that they will always respect these qualities, however.

It is often said by red-pilled men that women are basically just overgrown children. Women, of course, say exactly the same thing about men. Both are right to a greater or lesser degree. What is indisputably true is that women are ruled by their emotions far more than men are, and that by definition renders them more childlike.

To understand why, you have to go back to a psychological model called “transactional analysis”, popularised by Dr. Eric Berne:

Steady, now, boys, as most of you know, I don’t have any particularly great respect for psychology as a science. But this model does have a lot of research backing it up, and it does appear to be tested and durable in the face of observable reality. I talked about this model in a previous post of mine about being an adult and growing up, which my friend and fellow shitlord Last Redoubt very kindly referenced some time back.

Women tend to take on one of two states – parent and child. Very few women ever grow up to the point where they can consciously choose to control themselves and adopt an adult state. When they do this, they are fully conscious of their choices and the consequences of those choices. They are able to move into a parent or child state as the situation dictates. They are able to suppress their own desires and wishes and promote the happiness of people around them, because they live in the now and are capable of rationally and logically selecting a course of action that will address more than their own selfish needs.

If this sounds nothing like most women to you, that’s because most women ARE NOT like that, as I pointed out above.

Again, almost no woman you will ever meet will be able to adopt this adult situation. They are constantly testing men for any sign of weakness. And every single one of us is guilty of making a mistake and giving in to a woman in the midst of a raging hysterical fit simply to make the pain stop.

They can’t help it. That’s their nature. Recall that passage from Genesis 3:16 that I quoted in yesterday’s post about game – that is what women do, and there is not the least bit of use in blaming them for it. That would be like blaming a tiger for its stripes.

That does not mean that a man is responsible for a woman’s happiness.

Our friend Adam Piggott wrote about this too, a while back, in which he pointed out that you cannot be held responsible for someone else’s happiness. If you were, then the very concept of marriage would be foolish beyond belief. No man in his right mind would ever enter into that contract. In fact, no man in his right mind would ever even so much as look at a woman again, because he would be held responsible for her happiness.

Women must be held responsible for their own unhappiness. If they are constantly nagging men who are good men and fathers and husbands for their perceived inadequacies and failures, no matter how small, then they absolutely have to be set straight.

The problem is that far too few men actually do anything about setting their women straight.

For, while men cannot be held responsible for the happiness of their wives and partners, we can and should create the conditions in which they can be happy.

And wives, mothers, and girlfriends are happiest when their men take charge and establish boundaries.

If men do not take the time and trouble to establish their own clear boundaries and make their preferences known, and tell their wives off for being too demanding, bitchy, and persnickety about very minor quibbles, then they have no backbone and no balls.

And that is when the trouble really starts – because, if women mostly act like children, and it’s been pretty well established that they generally do, then they need boundaries and rules.

The man who refuses to set boundaries and who does not bother to stand up for his own rights, is basically walking into the middle of a pride of lionesses wearing a suit made entirely out of raw meat.That is an apt analogy, in fact, because in lion prides, the females do the hunting and absolutely will not hesitate to attack a weak or insufficiently dominant male if he falls short of their expected standards.

Speaking of analogies involving lions:

It doesn’t have to be that way. But getting a relationship to not be that way requires two adults in the relationship.

And this is very, very hard to achieve. Most relationships come down one of the following situations:

• Parent and child – basically one partner raising the other, often not very happily, and God help you if the woman finds herself in the parent role;
• Child and child – basically two equally temperamental and unsuited idiots who ONLY think in the short-term and can’t figure out long-term strategy worth a hill of beans;
• Adult and adult – extremely unusual and quite happy;

That last one is what most people aim for but never reach. To get there requires that a man be an adult in his own right, which most men spend their entire lives trying to become.

But it ALSO demands and requires that a woman be an adult, and take responsibility for herself and her emotions, and learn how to give up from time to time so that her man can take charge, make decisions, and get on with leading.

If that does not happen, extreme unhappiness and frustration is the inevitable result. And that usually ends with the she-beast alone in the house that her ex-husband bought for her, with most of his stuff, his kids, and his balls – and feeling extremely unsatisfied and unhappy despite her material comforts.