On Hard Power and Soft Power.

64 points8 commentssubmitted by AldabruzzoMod to r/WhereAllTheGoodMenAre

I've on occasion written about hard power and soft power. This post on masculine women by u/Deeplydisturbed1 reminded me of this.

Hard power: Brute strength. Using and deploying force, or at least the willingness to deploy force. Generating and marshaling resources. The use, distribution, and allocation of resources. Determining and deciding what needs done, when it needs done, who will do it, and how it will get done. Setting up, operating within, and enforcing, hierarchical power structures.

Soft power: Gossip. Manipulation. Deceit. Subversion. Subterfuge. Behind the scenes discussions and machinations. Wit and wiles, especially when deployed upon men.

Men are more suited to hard power. Women are more suited to soft power.

Hard power reaches unequal and unfair results. Hard power is concerned with getting things done. Hard power identifies winners and losers. Winners get the spoils. Losers get the scraps. Or if they're lucky, they work for winners and get some of the winners' spoils.

Hard power demands that you work, live, and operate in a merit-based hierarchy. Some men are worse than you are, but some are better. It will always be this way. If you prove yourself, you move up. If you can't prove yourself or you fuck up, you move down.

To get what they want, men are prone to deploy hard power. Giving orders. Organizing ideas and tasks, and delegating responsibility for those tasks to others. Granting and withholding resources. Granting and withholding respect. Promoting those who carry out their tasks well and get results; demoting or removing those who do not. Granting rewards for good compliant behavior; and imposing consequences for bad, rebellious behavior. Threats of physical force. Deploying physical force.

The 3 R's of hard power are responsibility, results, and respect. Hard power demands that you take responsibility and you get shit done. It demands honesty and loyalty. It demands your accountability to those above you, and that you hold those below you accountable. It rewards hard work and merit; it punishes laziness and error. Or, at least, it trusts those who get it done and does not trust those who don't. Those at the top are respected; those at the bottom can get respect if they work hard and merit that respect. If you fuck up enough times, you can get kicked out of the tribe. Or you can leave the tribe if you want.


Soft power depends on consensus, keeping everyone in the fold, and courses of action that everyone feels good about. Soft power is concerned about fairness and equality, and seeing to it that everyone gets something. Everyone gets a participation trophy. Equality of result - everyone gets something, everyone gets more or less the same things. Or, at least, the appearance of getting the same things.

Soft power is based on who is in the "in" group, and who is in the "out" group. The soft power hierarchy, and where each individual woman resides within that hierarchy, depends on each individual woman's marital status, maternal status, and race. In general:

--married women and widows> divorced women> never married women> never married mothers.

("Married" = legal marriage such that if the relationship ends the woman has legal rights and protections that will kick in to fuck over the man who married her. Permagirlfriend status, baby mama status, cohabitation, or financial support? Not enough. Women demand LEGAL marriage because then she's got him. She's got his nuts in a vise and bent over a barrel. They want legal marriage so that they can continue the same standard of living as a married woman with the resources of a married woman, even if she decides to end the marriage.)

--Women with more than one kid> women with one kid> childless women.

(Caveat: If you have a child, you must be married to or divorced from the child's father. If not, you're a never-married mother, and you go directly to the bottom.)

--White/European/Ashkenazi Jewish women> East Asian women> Middle Eastern/Sephardic Jewish/Mediterranean/North African women> Indian subcontinent women> subSaharan African/black women.

This is all self evident. It's based on women's physical appearances, which women can assess as well as men can. In general, women of Caucasian extraction, originating in Europe west of the Caucasus mountains, are considered worldwide the most attractive. This includes women of the Jewish diaspora which had migrated from the Middle East into Europe and which had resulted from Sephardic Jews intermarrying with white Europeans. This is followed by women in the Far East, what used to be called "the Orient". Women from China, Japan, the Koreas, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, etc. After that are women from Arab countries and on the east shore of the Mediterranean Sea, including native born Israeli women (Sephardic Jewish). Indian Subcontinent women and women from subSaharan Africa are worldwide considered the least sexually attractive women.

You can dislike this all you want. But everyone understands this is true, instinctively, and women put each other in their feminine social matrix/status hierarchy in part based on race.

The way a woman gets "promoted" in the hierarchy is to get married, and have at least one child. Lots of bonus points if she is white or East Asian. At the very top of the hierarchy are married white mothers. At the very bottom are never married black mothers of bastard children. This is social status only. The women confer status and position on one another, based on the above three factors. All of it is unstated and implicit. Women at the bottom get resources because ALL women pressure men to give it to them, because that's "fair". Women in the middle and at the top work hard to enforce social position on each other.

But, importantly, even the lowliest woman has a place in the hierarchy, because she's a woman. Women NEVER get kicked out of the herd. When even the lowliest woman is down or in peril, all women circle around her for shelter and protection, and yelp constantly for the men to do something to help/protect her. Every woman, regardless of age or station or place in the hierarchy, will get what she needs. Maybe not what she wants... but she will always get her needs met.

To get what they want, women deploy soft power. They manipulate, deceive, and scheme. They tell one person one thing, and another person the exact opposite. To get what they want from other women, women will use deceit, duplicity, shame, and verbal/emotional bullying and abuse. To get what they want from men, women use sex appeal and sometimes shaming (especially "incel" and "manlet" and "you need to man up and step up" and "you're not a real man" and "you're so bitter and angry").


Women got dissatisfied with using soft power and demanded more hard power. The problem happened when women demanded, and then were given, more and more hard power. That resulted in several problems:

--forcing hard power to be used and deployed "fairly". That meant restraining hard power and deploying it in unpredictable, inconsistent ways, which lessens its effectiveness.

--eliminating brute strength, physical force, and threats of force, except when used in the service of women.

--lack of responsibility and accountability. Buck-passing, corruption, dishonesty, disloyalty, untrustworthiness.

--lack of results, poor results. Incompetence, unpreparedness, work that needs done left undone.

--effeminate, indecisive, ineffectual men. Hard, masculine, bitchy women.

--Men were forced to use soft power. Men aren't suited to it, so it made them more like women: soft, indecisive, overly concerned with what others think and want, emphasizing how they feel over what they think. Since men aren't suited to soft power, they misused it often, and that lessened soft power's effectiveness too.

--women aren't suited to hard power. Their using it masculinizes them and causes them to imitate men at the top of the hierarchy. Those men tend to be the most masculine and "toughest": Competitive. Unyielding. Uncompromising. Accustomed to getting their own way. Giving orders. Confident to the point of arrogance; inconsiderate to the point of rudeness. Sexually promiscuous. Prone to violence, willing to use physical force or at least threaten the use of force.

Now, imagine what you get when you have women emulating men at the top of the male hierarchy. You get today's western woman: Rude, mouthy, entitled, bitchy, pushy, dishonest, disloyal, sexually promiscuous, overconfident, and overestimates her own capabilities. She even hits, pushes, strikes and punches men. But it's all overlaid on top of what a woman is at her core: emotional, hypergamous, prone to complaining, and at the end of the day, uses feminine charm and access to her body to get men to do the dirty work. Because in the final analysis, women kept all the benefits of being women, so they can't be penalized or punished as men can be.

And she's willing to do all the shit that powerful men do; but GOD FORBID anyone actually treat her like a man. Any man who acted like a masculinized woman does would very quickly be knocked on his ass, figuratively or literally, and all status and respect would be GONE by the end of the day. But with women, it's "you can't hit me! I'm a girl!"

And we have a very few alpha attractive men who know how to handle these women. The vast majority of men have been emasculated, beaten down, injured, defeated, stripped of their resources, forced to "talk about their feelings", and otherwise forced to become women with penises.

That's what giving women hard power has done.