I’ve been watching this TRP/TBP thing from a nice distance for quite a while. I comment a lot in /r/askmen and /r/oney, and I’ve been active in the reddit gendersphere for a long time, so the (relatively sudden) rise of a… I guess you could call it “conservative” relationship/dating/sex philosophy is really interesting to me.

I disagree with TRP’s ideas for the most part, I should put that out there. I think, taken broadly, they reinforce some of the more negative, unpleasant aspects of traditionalism in dating. But I also believe that, having said that, we need to be more sympathetic to these guys. I think the pathology that led them to TRP is pretty common, and I empathize with them. If you recontextualize their complaints, it’s unsurprising.

I think a lot of these guys never got to live the life they think they wanted to lead when they were young-ish men. I’m guessing not many of them fit the cultural ideal of “how a man should look,” and when you read their posts on TRP, that kinda bleeds through. They weren’t “chosen” by the pretty girls when they were 16, 20, 24 to be the lucky few to have casual sex with attractive women.

So they did what society told them to do – keep their noses clean, work hard in school, and try to make something out of themselves, all while the pretty girls they wanted to be with were riding that cock carousel, full of tattooed DJs and baseball players and [insert “alpha” caricature here]. The bitterness grew and grew for them because they were and are attracted to the ideal that society passed to them – that young, virginal-ish, traditionally attractive women are the peak of femininity.

Now here’s the part that I think gets ignored too often: they feel like society pushed them into the Man Box, where you sit down and you do your work and you’re judged by your success. And indeed, they ARE being judged by their success by the women who they meet. They Did It Right. They are now approaching society’s traditionally masculine ideal: self-sufficient, confident, with maybe the possibility of being upper-middle-class through hard work.

And now they’re pissed. Because they Did It Right. Just as they sat in the Man Box and shut up and worked hard to be society’s masculine ideal, they want the feminine ideal. They want a young, attractive woman.

Just as society still (wrongly) overvalues men for their success in life, so too does society (wrongly) overvalue women for their youth and beauty, and because they are Doing It Right in terms of success, they feel entitled to a woman who’s Doing It Right in terms of youth and beauty. And all these women who rode the Cock Carousel™ and are now hitting The Wall™ are no longer the feminine ideal, yet are still trying to uphold that ideal in them, the TRP guys. They want their men to be successful (uphold the Man Box part of the bargain) but can no longer be young and beautiful (the Woman Box part of the bargain).

Anyway, like I said, I obviously don’t subscribe to the ideology, and I think all the stuff I just wrote there upholds the kind of traditional gender dichotomy that we’re trying to chuck right now. I just have some empathy for the guys, for how they seem to feel trapped and lonely and angry with the hand dealt them, and I can see the path they could take to TRP. Hell, that’s why I comment a lot in OneY and AskMen – I think early intervention with these guys when they’re 16, 20, 24 years old can keep them off the TRP road.

Sorry for the rant. Thoughts?