Apologies to all my readers wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks. The truth is, I’m not totally sure where I stand in the Red Pill world lately.

The first thing that happened is I started exercising way too much. Like 4+ hours of High Intensity Interval Training a week, plus weight training and other stuff… my whole world pretty much clamped down around that and I found myself unable to write, think, read among other things for a few weeks.

I cut the HIIT to once or twice a week and my world started opening up again. But I still didn’t gain back the desire to write or revisit the Red Pill blogs I love, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is.

Okay, what I’m thinking right now is this – the Red Pill is like one of those 12 inch wooden rulers they give you in first grade. It’s true and it’s right and it’s good – but it’s not the only way of measuring something. If you try to measure the width of a ball with it, you won’t understand the ball very accurately. If you try to measure your bodyweight with it, you’ll be left in the dark. It’s good, but you need to be able to measure in other ways.

Let me explain this a little more.

I’ve mentioned before that relationships haven’t been my strong point for a few years, to put it mildly. That’s changing now.

Some of the friendships I’ve been cultivating with women over the last year are starting to take root and grow, and I’m going deeper with other women, getting a closer look at their lives and marriages – and I’m having this problem where what I’m seeing isn’t matching up in any way with popular Red Pill “truths”, laws or maxims.

I just feel like at this time that I can’t keep one foot in the world of real life and one foot in the Red Pill blogosphere without deliberating shutting my eyes and refusing to see in at least one of those places. 

I can’t refuse to see how many of the women around me actually are, how they in no way approximate the dire descriptions of female nature found on Red Pill twitter or the Manosphere. I can’t refuse to see how they sacrifice their bodies, dreams, ambitions for their families. I can’t not see how devoted so many of the women around me are to serving, loving and respecting their husbands, often at great personal cost.

At the same time, I have to admit that there those dire descriptions aren’t a misogynistic farce. There are women out there who really are utterly debased and morally corrupt, and they are often encouraged to be that way by our culture. It’s not that those descriptions of female nature aren’t descriptions of reality… it’s just that they’re like the 12 inch ruler — good for measuring certain things, not everything.

I went to a Christian mini-conference for stay at home moms this morning. How do I use the Red Pill to measure my experience sitting through workshop after workshop on putting yourself second, caring for your husband’s needs more, living life as a servant, being thankful and faithful… a group of women got together to put on this event, put the program together for no pay, just to encourage women to be better wives and mothers… tell me, how does that in any way match up with what you read about female nature on the manosphere?

It doesn’t.

At the same time, there are other things I can’t not see. My husband hosted a poker game last night and I “had to” get out of the house and go to the movies by myself for a few hours – one of the most delicious experiences for me. Anyways, I’m sitting there in this dark, almost empty movie theater and here comes a preview for ‘Bridget Jones’ Baby’ – a movie which basically seems to be promoting female-led open relationships… something I read about on a Red Pill blog months ago and is popping up left and right now in women’s magazines and apparently mainstream movies.

Okay, I can’t unsee that. And I’m so thankful that I can take my Red Pill ruler and hold it up to that and understand it a little better.

But… what do I do when the only polyamorous relationships I’m hearing about happening in real life are the traditional kind, with one man and several women? Because that’s the actual case for me. I’m going to need more than 12 wooden inches to figure this cultural development out.

There are other doubts. Like how much of the Red Pill is just a movement teaching men to maximize their selfishness and self-interest? I get why that’s a message in some ways needed, for many reasons, in our culture right now, but if that’s the case how much involvement do I really need to have with that? I don’t agree with the imbalance in our legal system or the morality of our culture, but I also don’t agree with living a totally self centered life.

I guess where I’m at right now is this – I want to love my husband well and raise my kids to lift burdens instead of creating them, and I want to create and offer up more than I consume and I want to do this in intimacy with the people around me.

I don’t want to be a part of something that’s about getting yours and screw the wreckage left in your wake. I get why that’s an attractive message, especially for hurt men who were persuaded to live the unhealthy opposite to that rule for a long time, but I don’t have a place in that, because that’s not what I believe is healthy or wise living.

So that’s where I’m at. I invite you to push back against this, against me. How do I keep one foot in each world? How can I see everything, how can I see clearly and not just one angle, just one measurement, but the whole?