By David Futrelle
My new favorite Red Piller is Red Pill Duke, the not-so-humble proprietor of a blog called “Fight Club Theory” that purports to educate the masses on how to live one’s best bachelor life.
Most of his posts cover regular Red Pill stuff, ranging from lists of the “20 Rules of the Bachelor Life” (rule one: “No marriage!” seems a tad obvious) to the alleged disposability of the human male.
But sometimes he takes his little literary wings and just flies. Consider one recent post with the unprepossessing title “Coffee Shops and Bars.” In it, Red Pill Duke reports the result of a pre-quarantine experiment of sorts in which he spent a day tapping out his thoughts on a laptop while hanging out first in a coffee shop and then in a favorite bar.
It becomes quickly evident that he didn’t much like the cafe or its inhabitants.
The coffee shop is well lit, but full of society’s hipsters and posers. People plugging away at computers diligently working very hard to produce fuckall. Despite the crutch of stimulants and a perfect workspace, little seems to get done. Nearby a fat cow of a woman with a “speak to the manager haircut” walks in. She asks for a pen. She will likely crucify me if I give her my pen that says “www.redpillduke.com” on it. I say nothing while stacking up words in my mind to type later.
He never specifies which words he stacked up. I’d like to imagine they were cromulent, badger, metempsychosis, and shard. Those are pretty good words.
As a mysterious writer tucked away in the corner, I continue to mind my own business. I’m observing. A preserver of these evanescent moments of daily mundane activities. I am fitting in with my beanie and cozy sweater. My bulging muscles betray me and I fear their gluten intolerant noses pick up the scent of my toxic masculinity.
They probably did, if you spent your whole morning sitting nursing a single cup of coffee, scowling disdainfully at everyone around you. People can pick up on that.
Later, in the bar, RP Duke feels much more at home.
The bar is the yang to the ying of the coffee shop. It is dark and quiet.
Uh, the yang to the yin. No g. The Ying-Yang Twins are a rap group; the yin and the yang are the philosophical concepts.
A few of society’s more decadent and thus interesting, wander in and out of its cozy atmosphere. They talk of the truths of the town in quiet but more honest discourse. …
I belong here more than the coffee shop, not because of my demeanor or clothing choices. No, I belong here because everyone knows my name.
Huh. So you feel more at home at a place you go to all the time than at a place you’ve been to once. What an amazing revelation.
Also titties.
I once brought a woman I was seeing to this bar. I shit you not, I walked in and three fucking women gleefully shouted “Hey Duke” at me as I walked her in. The ultimate pickup artist couldn’t have planned a better dread game. … As we leave the bartender hugs me. This is the first time she’s done this. Her giant breasts press against my bulging chest muscles as my girl glares at her.
And then everyone in the bar stood up and applauded. That bartender’s name? Albert Einstein.
Amazingly, while RP Duke can use words like “evanescent” correctly, he sometimes struggles a bit with simpler ones. And he has a devil of a time sorting out some rather basic grammar. At one point he has this to say about the inhabitants of the bar:
They also know me cause I’m hear every week and my tongue loosen with each sinful sip from my steel member’s cup which dons my name.
There are a lot of sentences like that.
Yet the mothers against decadent delights decide that this drugs is bad while others are good.
In walks a man with a distinguished mustaches…. belay that. He shaved it off for the current flavor of the week.
The world may run on caffeine, but it is alcohol that stimulate true action and that is what makes change possible.
Here’s a thought, dude: try not to write when you’re drunk. Or maybe try not to write at all.
Oh, who am I kidding? Keep writing, dude. I always need material for my blog.
H/T — Big thanks to TakedownMRAs on Twitter, who introduced me and the rest of his followers to this delightful fellow.
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I wear my hair down most of the time. I’ve occasionally braided it, but tend not to do it often because it takes time and makes my hair frizz up a lot (I have curly hair so this is a concern). If I need to keep it out of my way for a bit, I put it in a ponytail. I haven’t done many other hair styles.
@Threp
Of course I loved doing anything I could to make our clients feel good about themselves and feel beautiful. And I hope I did. I did try to make my art part of their positive experience and loved it when I knew I was. I just meant that the beauty industry overall sells an idea that a woman’s value depends only on how close she comes to a very specific standard and as a feminist I know that’s wrong. But yeah I did still day to day try to help women feel good about how they looked and feel beautiful. My boss had always donated some services for free to low income women for special events and that inspired me. I appreciate what you are saying though and thanks for helping me remember that.
OT:
David, do you use a word-of-the-day calendar? That was the OED one yesterday.
Wouldn’t it be funny if one of the other people there was writing a bestseller? It would be even better if they included this guy as a minor character, writing away in a coffee shop and diligently working very hard to produce fuck all.
OT: I think I’m going to give up dying my hair and just go white. Maybe with purple and green streaks. You know the meme about not wanting to be a sweet old lady, more a “Crap! What’s she up to now” old lady? That’s the vibe I fancy.
Love, love, love that vibe! Go for it!
We can recognize the beauty industry is pretty shit overall without vilifying the (mostly) women who make a living within it. All of us live in a racist, patriarchal, capitalist society, and we hustle as necessary to survive in a world that requires us to twist ourselves into pretzel shapes around the restrictions in it. Refusing to support a misogynist industry is a fantastic position, but it’s not one that every woman is privileged to take.
In other words, be gentle with yourself when your situation doesn’t line up perfectly with your feminism, even if you had “choices” otherwise. Capitalism and patriarchy work together to restrict choices, so that you make a “free” choice from a highly curated menu of options, rather than from the full set. Can that choice really be considered free?
I’ve been doing a ballet bun with gel a lot lately because I like how severe it makes me look. Some new long and dangly silver intricate lacey wire look earrings give enough of a feminine accent that I like to combine with the severe look.
I LOVE playing with those combined contrasts. I guess that’s what they are but who’s to say. Just feels good to me.
It’ll fuel some asshole NiceGuy(TM)’s indignation but I’m well practiced on dealing with them now.
@PoM
Those are good points and after reading what you wrote (brilliantly expressed) it does remind me what I remember learning in college about structural inequality and lack of freedom. And I did and do still see first how I dress and now my newer life as a form of living resistance of patriarchy through creativity and assertion about getting my desires fulfilled in terms of intimacy.
So, yeah, and thank you too.
@Sheila Crosby
Going to second Stacey here and say to go for it. Especially if you have matching earrings or other accessories that could match or compliment those colors.
@Stacey
As a musician, I find that contrasts are great for expression. For instance, one song I recorded the other day and am mixing has a slower clean guitar part that repeats between the heavier distorted sections and the contrast between them creates special tension in the song.
The beauty industry has a vested interest in making women feel insecure about themselves so that women will buy the products they claim will fix the flaws that the beauty industry manufactures for people to feel insecure about. And the beauty industry pours millions of dollars into advertisements and things to make women more insecure.
That said, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and not often ethical working conditions either. For example, I work for an engineering consulting company and there’s a huge amount of harm that people within my industry do to the environment and indigenous land. I try to operate ethically as best I can, but there’s only so much I can do to mitigate harm.
Unfortunately, we need to work in order to survive, and often even when we want to use our skills to help others, we’re still complicit in a system that is exploitative and harmful. I don’t know what the solution is to this. It’s not something that we can take the full responsibility for onto ourselves, though.
I’ve tried the longish layered bob a few times, but each time I conclude that it’s long enough to keep getting in my eyes, not quite long enough to tie back, and still needs almost as many visits to the hairdresser as a Louise Brooks bob which looks better on me.
@Sheila Crosby:
I decided in my thirties to try and get a jump on the “crazy old lady who’s led an extremely interesting and glamourous life that you won’t know about till you read it in her obit” look.
@Naglfar
Contrasts and experiencing them and seeing how they make you feel can be important in any creative act.
Tension in music can be beautiful.
I guess there is some tension on my look because my hair up this way makes me look severe but it’s still really a very womanly severe because you can see my jawline (I have delicate facial features).
The tension is fun for my guys.
It’s frustrating for NiceGuy(TM) “suitors” (creeps) but I don’t care and laugh at them to their face and behind their backs. I’m finally in a daily life situation where my physical safety is pretty much secure so now that a NiceGuy(TM) isn’t a threat I actually enjoy putting them in their place. I don’t think of myself as a mean person but they deserve the sharpness, humiliation and social exposure of their disgrace because of their misogyny, I think.
Thanks for the encouragement. The hitch is finding a hairdresser to strip the current dye. Small island!
I could just wait for it to grow out, I suppose.
TIL that toxic masculinity smells like gluten apparently?
That sentence, tho. It makes me think that his correct use of “evanescent” was entirely accidental.
Re: Karens – I spent ten years working at a US craft chain and my experience is that 98% of the time, it’s women who ask for the manager. A co-worker who came to us from a big-box home improvement chain agreed (still not a significant sample size, I know.) We got complaints from all ages and ethnic groups even though we were in what passes for “white” suburbia but maybe that’s just a California thing.
I think it may be different in restaurants, though, because several men I’ve gone out with seemed to think abusing waitstaff and/or complaining to the manager would impress me. Spoiler alert: It did, but not favorably.
In a craft chain, wouldn’t it normally be mostly women as your customers? It would make sense that mostly women would ask for the manager if they are the majority of your customers.
I dislike the “Karen” meme because it punishes women for being assertive in a way that men are not punished. If I encounter bad customer service, I will, in fact, ask for a supervisor and that doesn’t automatically make me “Karen” but you can’t tell some people that anymore. Any reference to the manager makes you “Karen” and that’s bullshit.
Yes!
Thank you for saying that.
And men get rewarded for being “assertive” when they are actually being assholes or rude.
Women do most of the household shopping, so it follows that they are the ones who ask for a manager in retail.
When I was in project management in design/construction, I got plenty of entitled men asking for my manager if they wanted a different answer than I could give them.
I work mostly with men, and sometimes I get this feeling that a guy is going to ask for my supervisor’s opinion cos he doesn’t like mine? I will sometimes pre-emptively go to my supervisor AND my manager for their opinions before I break the bad news because some guys just like to flex by going over my head and I don’t enjoy that. So I will get backup first. I sometimes worry that I’m undermining myself by not waiting for the guy to email my supervisor, but more or less doing it for him.
But “Karen” is supposed to not just be an assertive woman who takes no shit, but also a particular kind of racist, so the term has experienced definition creep such that it now applies to any woman who dares to speak up for herself. It’s toxic and I loathe it.
@PoM
There’s also a cultural appropriation issue, as the term originated with Black people using it, then white people took it over and made it into its current form. That’s my other issue with the meme.
I work in benefits administration and deal with both men and women roughly equal. I don’t find that women ask for the manager more. I think men do, at least. Men are more likely to not believe that I am giving the correct information. Also, I’m administering employee benefits, so the people I talk to are not customers. It’s the companies who hire us that set the policies, so the callers do not have the power to harangue us into giving them special treatment. For the most part, women get that. I’ve had a lot of men, particularly older, retired men who worked back when conditions for workers were better, just be outraged that they have to wait for an answer or a request form because “I worked for (company) for 40 years and this is how you treat me!?”
Women are just as prone as men, I think to treat people they consider inferiors poorly, but the women I deal with generally don’t see me as an inferior while men often do.
I’ve always assumed that the reason that it’s women have become the meme is because they’re more likely to be doing the shopping, and therefore more likely to be in a position to ask to see the manager. (Also possibly because men are more likely to just continue bullying the person in front of them; after all, bringing the problem to the manager suggests that they can’t fix it themselves, either by browbeating the underling or demonstrating their manly decisiveness by walking out of the store.)
I personally hate the meme mostly because most Karens I know are very nice people, and it’s become widespread enough that it seems gratuitously insulting in a way that, say, “Chad” and “Stacey” aren’t, because the majority of the population has no idea what those names refer to.
(Also possibly because I know someone who fits the meme perfectly, and her name’s not Karen, so my immediate thought is always that it’s misnamed.)
I wear my hair in a braid at work so my satchel doesn’t treat it out, but the rest of the time it swings freely to my hips. Sometimes I think a sorry cut would be cute, however long hair is part of my identity. More than gender is now that I think about it. I’m much more “a person with long hair” than anything else.
So your satchel doesn’t “treat it out”? What exactly does that mean? And what is a “sorry cut”?
Sorry, I’m not very familiar with beauty industry jargon. And this is likely equally true of a lot of the AMAB readership here.
@Cats in Shiny Hats
I feel this way too. As a kid I was forced to cut my hair short and I really didn’t like how I looked, it contributed to what I now realize was dysphoria. Then when I was a teenager I finally convinced my mother to let me grow it out and I’ve had long hair since. Even though I didn’t understand my gender at that time, having long hair felt like I finally owned my body and could be who I was.
To be clear, I don’t have anything against anyone else having short hair. I know lots of people of many genders who rock short hairdos. It’s just not the way I want to present myself.
@Surplus
I think that means get tangled up in it, but I’m not sure, I haven’t heard that phrase before.
It means short hair.