On the This is Trouble blog, the Red Pill Lothario and former Return of Kings contributor known only as Kyle has issued a dire warning to contemporary men: women will “drag you towards mediocrity” if you let them.
The worst offenders? Pancake-eating women.
I mean, let’s just say you’re a super cool dude who’s maybe three months into a relationship with some hot pre-wall broad. Obviously, Kyle notes, she’s totally into you due to “various measures: your health, your wealth, and your overall drive motivation, etc.”
That’s cool. But then she starts doing crap that interferes with your ability to have, like, the best health, wealth and drive motivation. Like, the stuff that made her into you in the first place!
Instead of “encourag[ing] you to wake up at 6am on a Saturday to hit the gym” and work your side-hustle selling juice or writing ebooks on how to get hot babes, or whatever, she JUST WANTS TO SLEEP IN.
[G]irls flat-out self sabotage the very thing they’re attracted to by trying to keep you in bed with them all day, sleeping in and just being a lazy slob in general.
Come back to bed, honey, these torpid Sirens cry.
They will literally hold you back in moving forward because women have no sense of needing to move forward, EVER.
And that’s where the pancakes come in.
Even the ones that are in shitty positions in life (no career, no skills, no goals) have this self entitlement complex that a man is going to save them – SOMEDAY. It’s why they sit around in the mornings and eat pancakes rather than get up and be productive.
The pancakes! The horror!
Now, if this thing about pancakes seems like a weirdly specific complaint about contemporary women, well, that’s because it’s really a complaint about one particular woman, that woman being Kyle’s current girlfriend, an admitted pancake eater who, on one recent occasion actually delayed his Saturday morning trip to the gym by an hour.
You see, Kyle has got important shit to do. Not like you women.
Most girls simply go home from their 9-5 hellhole and turn on the TV, killing their brain cells and souls by watching shit involving the Kardashians. The smart girls go to the gym, and spend time preparing their own meals to better themselves in that sense. However, I’ve yet to meet a girl who does the gym, meal prep, and everything else I do on a day-to-day basis to keep moving forward on the self improvement and freedom path.
Preach it, brother!
That usually involves the 9-5 gig, a minimum of 2-3 hours a work on side work (10+ a day on weekends), an hour workout, and I still make time for friends, dates, etc. The trick is that I know how to get by on little sleep, I minimize my commute and I don’t waste any time.
Most women just cannot handle what I do on a day-to-day basis.
Hell, just hearing about all this makes me tired. No, not tired. What’s that other word that’s sort of like tired? Bored.
So anyway, Kyle was just going along living his impeccable life. And then came The Morning of the Pancakes.
Kyle recounts this terrible ordeal in graphic detail.
He and his girlfriend of one month are lying in bed on a Saturday afternoon.
I had wanted to go the gym at roughly 8am, and she said she wanted to join me. So of course we didn’t get there until about 9am.
I believe this is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. It should be, anyway.
At the gym, as I worked through a brutal superset workout…what did she do?
Walked on the treadmill.
Damn treadmill-walking lazy-ass woman!
Oh, and she did two whole sets of planks with me at the end.
Correction: Damn treadmill-walking, two-plank-set-doing lazy-ass woman!
Brace yourself, dear reader, because it gets worse.
After we got back from the gym, she really wanted to go and get pancakes.
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!1!!
And steak and eggs sounded like a good post-workout meal to me. I relented and went, and in Los Angeles, $30 is about the minimum you can spend on any meal for two.
Somehow I’m guessing that Kyle here is not much of a tipper.
Finally, another hour and a half and $32.67 later, we were full and headed home.
Yeah, he’s definitely not a good tipper. I mean, given that he’s holding onto his resentment that the meal for two cost $2.67 more than the arbitrary amount he expected the meal to cost.
But she didn’t have work until 2pm – so of course she dicked around my apartment (of course, didn’t make herself useful and clean up my apartment or anything) until 1:15pm…and ended up being late to work anyway.
By the time she was gone and I settled into a working groove, it was 2pm and half the day was gone.
A moment of silence, please, for the half of Kyle’s Saturday so cruelly murdered by his girlfriend.
Rest in Peace, Half of Kyle’s Saturday. Rest in Peace.
You know women wanting to spend time with him is not a problem this guy really has. This is such a sad attempt at a humble brag.
I learned early on in my dating life that encouraging a man to do anything he doesn’t want to do spontaneously is the surest way to being resented as an overbearing nag. I figured that it’s better to leave than do that before I was 20. Of course, in a long-term relationship, such interactions are unavoidable sometimes, but I have to say, by far the most unpleasant part of marriage is encouraging one’s husband to do something he is reluctant to do, with encouragement to get up early being one of the worst things. I don’t wake him up at 6 am unless absolutely necessary, because seriously, MY health is important too, and I don’t need the aggravation.
A romantic partner isn’t one’s mother, a gendarme or an administrative assistant. You are a grownup. If you need to go to the gym at 6 am on a Saturday, set the goddamned alarm clock and haul your own ass out of bed like a big boy. Don’t talk to me about your manly “drive”, if you need your girlfriend to stand over you and crack to whip to get you to maintain your routine.
I know a woman who runs a page that helps abused people. She spends part of her weekends reading messages from people in need and helping them. I wish she’ll never date that kind of guy.
Misandrycakes, misandrycakes, beta man,
Griddle my cakes as slow as you can!
Whine because the food’s not free.
Get more sleep than an hour or three.
That’s it! I’m definitely getting waffles this weekend for brunch.
Man, this line of thinking is as old as the hills. In 1615, fencing master and all-around misogynist Joseph Swetnam wrote The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, and the very first chapter is titled, “This first Chapter sheweth to what use Women were made, it also sheweth that most of them degenerate from the use they were framed unto, by leading a proud lasie and idle life, to the great hinderance of their poor Husbands.”
There should really be a We Hunted The Mammoth article about Swetnam. I’d read it.
Another jewel from Swetnam, showing that MGTOW would feel right at home in the 17th century:
“…there are many which thinke when they are married that they may live by love, but if wealth be wanting hot love will soon be colde, and your hot desires will be soon quenched with the smoke of poverty. To what end then should we live in love, seeing it is a life more to be feared than death, for all thy monie wastes in toyes and is spent in banquetting [N.B.: on pancakes, perhaps?], and all thy time in sighes and sobbs to thinke upon thy trouble and charge which commonly commeth with a wife, for commonly women are proude without profit, and that is a good purgation for thy purse, & when thy purse is light then will thy heart be heavy.”
@Bina
Oh, BURN! *snaps fingers in a Z shape*
So, I took a look at this guy’s blog. His “side gig” appears to be self-improvement. Namely, blogging and writing books about self-improvement and how to self-improve the same way he self-improved, by telling other people to self-improve. Nothing special. It’s the same hustle hundreds of other RedPillers are attempting, all trying to make money off each other.
On the about page, he says that his current day job (networking and data storage engineer) doesn’t excite him because in ten years he’ll “only” be earning $130,000 as a manager and having to deal with a bunch of “lazy workers” underneath him. This rubbed me the wrong way for a couple of reasons:
1) Granted, those are southern CA $, but still…damn, that’s a pretty comfortable income. But no, $130k won’t cut it, he needs “a Ferrari and a place in Monaco.” Massive entitlement here. I hate to break it to him, but chances are pretty high he’s not going to be able to finance a lavish multi-million dollar lifestyle through blogging. Blogging is pretty tapped out as a passive income stream. The self-improvement marketplace is bloated with thousands of bright-eyed, eager hustlers just like him. He’s not bringing anything special to the table. It’s not like he’s a florid (entertainingly bad) writer like Heartiste, or a world traveler/sex tourist like Roosh. All he has is the conviction that he’s a special snowflake who deserves more.
2) In no way, shape, or form should Kyle ever be put in charge of managing other people, with that condescending attitude. I can just see him constantly pressuring his team to put in 100 hours a week and telling them they’re all useless, lazy losers. His co-workers will resent the hell out of him. They’ll either leave the company or do everything they can to undermine him, and he’ll eventually be given the boot. I’ve been in the business a long time and I’ve seen many people like him come and go. The managers who last respect their team and treat them like adults.
It’s astounding to me how many of these RedPill/RoK dudes think they should be captain of everything, and yet they’re so contemptuous of the people they’d be in charge of (their wives, their subordinates). If your “subjects” are truly that worthless, then you’re not much of a king.
It’s fine to have a go-go-go personality and the desire to channel energy into something productive, but the type of “self-improvement” regime Kyle is on just seems so airless and dysfunctional and shallow. Muscles and money. So what? How does that make the world a better place, or make him more interesting to be around?
It’s all about Kyle, all the time. Any woman who gets involved with him will always play a distant second fiddle to his hustle. I mean, just look how deeply it pains him to have to leave his computer, spend time with a woman he’s not interested in as a person, and part with the price of a pancake breakfast. Seems like most of these manosphere types want wives and girlfriends in the abstract, but once they actually get one, they don’t know what to do with her. They find flesh-and-blood women vaguely irritating because they don’t have an off switch, a manual, and a set of predefined functions.
I had a huge hankering for pancakes this morning, so I made pancakes for us (very beta thing to do, I know). On a work day, which normally we don’t have time for.
But I was really, really confused where this hankering came from… and then I find this open tab on my computer.
It helps that my comfybi cats decided for some strange reason to go sleep in another room last night. They *always* sleep with us, so we were actually worried in the morning when we didn’t see them. But they didn’t “hold me back” by being cute and cuddly like they usually are.
In general, I love the irony of this whole rant. Women are distracting Kyle and dragging him away from his self-improvement regime designed to attract women. If only women would quit being attracted to him and let him get on with the hard work of attracting women, then he could finally get somewhere in life.
Not content with only one mic drop, Buttercup Q. Skullpants delivers two within the space of 20 minutes. I’m not certain that enough “oh snap” gifs exist to give her the praise she deserves.
Have an internet, Buttercup Q. Skullpants. You deserve it.
She os the one who works on weekends. Yet she’s supposed to be lazy? riiiiight…
I spent my last relationship encouraging my boyfriend to get a job or start college (note that I live in a country with free state college)…
Never again. Seriously. I also tried to get my best friend to finish high school. And I learned a valuable lesson. I will never again attempt to be anyone else’s cheerleader but my own. They hate it. I hate it. Everyone has a miserable time.
I’d rather eat pancakes.
You shouldn’t mock him; his exercise routine just might cure cancer!
Thanks, EJ! I will love it and hug it and name it George.
I really enjoyed your takedown of Heartiste the other day, but didn’t get a chance to say so. It was absolutely masterful.
This whole thread is making me want pancakes so badly. For Christmas, my brother gave me a jar of what appears to be homemade maple syrup, but is actually a fiendish plot to drag our whole family down into decadence and mediocrity. Still, it’s worth it for gingerbread pancakes with lemon sauce and maple syrup. Yum!
If they both got waffles instead of his oh so manly meal of steak & eggs. Me thinks the bill would have been under $30.
Lol what am I saying? MEN eat MEAT, it’s only those silly womenfolk who eat pancakes (pancakes being the breakfast food most similar to to bonbons)
Yeah this whole ‘rant’ is one hyperbole away from being an actual parody of a ‘red piller’, especially with the hilarious irony Buttercup Q. Skullpants pointed out!
@Lea
It’s hilariously thinly-veiled humble bragging. Which really makes me question the validity.
He’s in Southern California and he’s complaining there aren’t enough women obsessed with money and working out? Damn, man.
I’m in Northern California, and oh my lord am I over low-level tech guys whining that they only make six figures.
And, Cory Sampson, there were also responses to Swetnam at the time: notably the play Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women (1620).
For every Early Modern self-improving gym-going woman-hating red-piller, there’s a quasi-feminist defense of women. Seems like the controversy sold just as well in the 17th century as it does today — and the fuel (cuckoldry anxiety, terror of women, resentment of uppity underlings and a generalized sense of entitlement) — is just about the same.
Alan Robertshaw
Sorry, no. She supported that peice of shit with every iota of political pull she could muster. I don’t give a half dram of stale rat urine if she didn’t personally give gay people she knew shit about the fact.
‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.
All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life—yes cheated.’ -Margaret Thatcher, 1987
@Cory Sampson, @jrochest
Hey, these plays are new to me. Thanks for calling them to my attention.
Not new to me: the fact that woman haters have a long, wretched history.
For me, this whole article — and the photos of yummy, yummy pancakes! — ought to have a trigger warning.
My authoritarian, rageaholic father was usually in a bad, blaming mood.
But when my mother made pancakes, he would beam. He associated pancakes with power — his power to command good things to come to him. Finally, his wife was pleasing him.
Even as a child I could see the invisible crown on his head on pancake mornings. And I knew that his own mother — who died before I was born — must have made him pancakes.
Not that I blame pancakes for anything. It’s people who don’t know what to do with delicious food that I have a problem with. ‘Cause this guy interfered with my enjoyment of pancakes.
@ dalillama
True, but that was back in the days of ‘collective responsibility’ when everyone in cabinet had to spout the party line, no matter what they themselves believed. Obviously that doesn’t help the people affected.
Interestingly there’s talk about abandoning collective responsibility in relation to the EU referendum. Labour are also considering it in relation to Trident.
It would be more honest than the current thing of saying one thing publicly then briefing against the party line privately to journalists.
I watch the Kardashians WHILE I clean my apartment so what now, “Kyle”?
Alan Robertshaw
Correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that as PM and head of the party, she was largely responsible for defining the party line that everyone had to follow. Even if that’s not the case, ‘needed to follow the party line’ still cuts no ice with me as an excuse, because she’s the one who chose to run on the Conservative ticket to start with.