I, Sambo

First my story (sorry to bore you)

The solitary reader supplies his own assessment of his relationship to those he meets in print. This can result in some unpleasant reckonings with reality, yet by the same token, the lover of literature may become confident enough about everything he has worked out in his mind as to embark on some great social adventure, like Don Quixote, emboldened by his romantic naivete. He resolves to put it all to the test. Some of which is guaranteed to turn out horribly. Which is likely to turn out just as it should. It’s really hard to go wrong with adventure so long as you are willing to risk it all.

OK, so here’s my story.

I went off to college and suddenly became a science geek (I did not go to college to study physics, simply stumbled on a passion), and this set me on a path of some success. By my 40th birthday I had earned a PhD in physics, worked for five years as a risk management consultant at Arthur Andersen, and then for two years as a quantitative analyst at Merrill Lynch Commodities in Texas. Between those two jobs I had circled the world alone in my 31-foot sailboat Ruth Avery, the boat I still own and sail to this day.

It was around this time, now entering my forties, that I had become obsessively vexed by the fact that I could never find a girlfriend. I began learning to play guitar and then going to open mic nights. It seemed to me like a good strategy, since it would give me a plausible excuse to be at social places like bars (yikes!), and an occasion to show off. But this did not go as planned.

Certainly I had set myself up for some rough sledding. But I had to somehow elevate and distinguish myself, stand above the masses. Not an uncommon motive for a man looking to attract a women, and not ignoble by any stretch. Such is the fuel of ambition. Only that the percent of ambition spent on trying to distort reality is wasted energy. Women are naturally very keen at piercing a man’s subterfuges, especially if you are a potential romantic interest. I stubbornly insisted on my version of things, and so the women stayed away.

To return to my formal education for a moment, I had graduated from Connecticut College in 1991 Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with major in physics and a triple minor in math, music, and philosophy. I thought I was good enough for Caltech, but the best graduate school I could gain acceptance to was the University of Chicago. And even that may have been a bit of a fluke, as I was in somewhat over my head there, although I did write a successful dissertation, earning my doctorate in physics in 1996. After which I got lured away by money into the financial world, first at Arthur Andersen and then at Merrill Lynch Commodities. My credentials happened to align with what was in demand at the time. There I actually received more respect (and money) than I thought I deserved.

I thought that living as a part-time musician should be easier, not to mention more satisfying, than all of the high-powered corporate stuff. I would be disabused of this. The world of professional music, even at the lowest level of bar gigs, is just as competitive and nasty as the corporate office, only it pays less. My first public performances at the open mic nights were unmitigated disasters. Initially I was so nervous that I forgot almost everything I had learned and, as what generally happens in those situations, the crowd just turns away and starts conversing amongst themselves, often noisily, as a way of distancing themselves from the dying elephant in the room. My response was to go home and practice harder. I was never lazy.

I also had more time to practice because I had lost my job with Merrill, now in the spring of 2008. I had a good deal of money saved up–one clear advantage of bachelorhood, that must be acknowledged–so the idea was that I would sail to the islands and get music gigs to earn spending money. This was precisely the kind of insane romantic plan that appealed to me back then.

I actually did manage to get some music gigs in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, over the course of the next seven years. I also recall getting fired from every one of them. But I practiced like crazy, went out and hustled for gigs, so I’m giving myself an ‘A’ for effort.

Now recall that I had begun this madcap venture as part of a two step growth plan: first to develop social skills, then, with said skills, land an attractive girlfriend. Both of these skill sets came very slowly to me, and only with herculean effort at that. Moreover, my quest to find a girlfriend had all but stalled. I did find some helpful books on the subject, in particular From Shy to Social by Christopher Gray and Without Embarrassment by Michael Pilinski. Yet it was clear that I was running out of time. I needed to go for broke. So I signed up for a bootcamp with Julien Blanc, the pick-up artist, who was working for Real Social Dynamics at the time.

I had my friend Rob boat-sit Ruth Avery for me, as I left her at anchor in Charlotte Amalie for the three days I would be gone, gone to Las Vegas. Naturally I came down with a cold the day of my flight, and I did my best to stay hydrated while traveling. Bootcamps consisted of an instructor and three students. We were supposed to meet at one of the hotel bars (can’t remember which) at 9 pm if I recall. My stomach was in knots, and just before I left the hotel I felt I needed to empty my bladder one last time and out came urine the color of red wine. The first and only time I had ever seen blood in my urine.

I find my way to the dimly lit, cavernous lounge area near the bar. I look about and see two men seated. One of them looks at me a bit searchingly. Holding eye contact I take a few steps closer and he leans in and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “are you here for the bootcamp?”. “Yes!” I reply, echoing the conspiratorial tone. We begin with brief summaries of our bios, how we found out about the pick-up community, etc.. So we talked, waiting for the arrival of Julien.

A little more of my backstory.

I wrote a manuscript to a book about my world voyage which I had hoped to publish. Thankfully it never was. I had grown up the son of a schoolteacher at a New England prep school, and I certainly had the professorial attitude down. Here’s a quote from the manuscript:

“The manifold moods of open sea and sky, sometimes serenely divided, sometimes rising up in frothing peaks till the sea is carried away in snowy streaks of vapor by a storming sky, are protean but constant taken as a whole, the timeless natural medium from which the art of building ships and sailing them arose. That the most ignorant and profane would boast that some clipper in which he served was the finest sight ever beheld says something. They instill the artistic sense, the sense for the beautiful and sublime, which in my estimate is far more genuine than anything I have known coming from the big-city art crowd.”

Actually that’s not too bad in my present estimate, but it gets worse. Here we go:

“I eagerly joined in with fellow cruisers whenever the opportunity arose. I recall a “sundowners” cocktail party while I was anchored behind the Saints, part of Guadaloupe. They were all pleasant peoples, all Americans if I recall and all typical cruisers. Being a solo-sailor always evokes curiosity, and being queried about why I sail the way I do, I would instinctively draw from writers like Joseph Conrad for eloquence and seriousness. I wanted to make it clear that I was more than a mere vacationer. Moreover, I used to think well of myself for interjecting quotes and ideas of great writers and thinkers, not as a vulgar showing off of ivy-league learnedness, but a certain conceit that I should carry on the Socratic mission.”

Calling out my own conceit here was just false modesty. I really did consider myself a philosopher of note, only not yet noted. At this point I had made it from the US East Coast to the Caribbean, which is no mean feat, but still only about ten percent of a world voyage. It was certainly not my place to speak as if I were Sinbad. Reading this passage, which I had happily forgotten about, had my face turning scarlet.

Here’s one last passage which I think important for what follows:

“The weather forecast called for strong Trades in two days time, but I had decided to leave; I had to get going lest I lose my courage, I thought. I expressed some anxiety, searching as a man always does, I think, for the tender sympathy of a woman. But Karen let drop a giggle, and I was struck to the marrow. In a moment I regained my composure, the mask of unconcerned heroism. We talked of other things.”

Such was my understanding of women then. I wanted sympathy from them, as a child wants from his mother when things get tough.

Which I think explains a good deal as to how I ended up hiring a pick-up artist to teach me about women, things I should have learned twenty years ago.

Julien shows up and, following introductions, has us take a pledge to do whatever the instructor says. Well none of us are about to back out, not after having traveled thousands of miles to get here, not after having paid the two-thousand dollar tuition fee. After the pledge Julien looks at me: “OK, you are going to go up to the bar and ask for a knife. Then you will cut your hand with it, just enough to draw blood”. I stare back for a minute. “Well?”. So I get to my feet, but before I take a forward step he pulls me back down with his hand on my shoulder. “Sit down, I’m just messing with you.”

We always had our meetings in noisy places, places where we all had to shout to be heard. This was to help with projecting our voices, as bars and clubs are always noisy. None of us had strong voices and we were all struggling, already. Julien then reviews the hand signals to signal which girl to approach. Approaching girls and striking up conversation is the PUA’s great claim to fame, and at least some of them are effective teachers in this area. Julien, I can say, is an attractive man who projects the confidence that women find attractive. I saw that much with my own eyes. I only mention this because PUA’s are frequently dismissed as charlatans, and while many (read: the majority) of them are, some of them do have actual skills to teach.

I remember my first approach had Julien, his assistant, and my two classmates roaring with laughter. Well I guess it was kind of funny, in retrospect. I was making rookie mistakes, such as approaching a woman from behind, or touching first to get her attention. The bootcamp would go on until around 0200, when Julien and his assistant would disappear and we were left to our own devices. I was always exhausted at this point and very much looked forward to getting back to my hotel room, much too tired to care about my girlfriend situation anymore.

Julien had a three day lesson plan for us, the notes from which I managed to recover. On the first night the plan was to simply stay active in the intense club atmosphere. One major reason a man will fail at seduction is that he is too socially timid. This is the sort of man who will freeze up in the night club jungle, stand with his back to wall, drink in hand, staring at all the glammed up women covorting about. Stay stationary for too long and you become jungle vegetation.

Over the next two days Julien taught us how to “set up the pull”, where “pull” is PUA-speak for removing the woman from her social milleiu to a place private enough for sex. I think the youngest student may have pulled on the third night, but I don’t know. We parted ways then and I never followed up. For the other student and myself, who were evidently going to remain bachelors for the foreseeable future, Julien told us that our journey had only begun. Now it was up to us to continue going out and approaching girls, applying what we had learned. He told us to keep a journal and report to him on our progress. Which I did. He never wrote back.

Over the next two years I settled into a regimen of going out at least three nights a week and making at least three approaches each night, if at all possible. Of course I was frequently rebuffed, had other men threaten me, was eighty-sixed several times, on two occasions told I was not allowed on the property again, and so on. In the bigger towns like Miami I sought out other men in the “community” as wing men. Most of them were useless. A few were OK.

As far as lessons learned, I was certainly playing out of my league with the women I was going for. This is one of the false promises of PUA technique. Recall the subtitle of Mystery’s famous book on his method: “How to get beautiful women into bed”. Naturally as one begins to re-train one’s sights toward more attainable mates, success should increase, but that wasn’t happening for me. Also I was getting tired of it all. In fact I was getting to hate it. Intensely. So I quit.

So all for nothing? Hardly. My PUA experience did not follow the cliched script foist upon it largely by its critics, the swingin’ bachelor who hops from woman to woman while degenerating into sloth, substance abuse, and venereal disease. On the contrary, my experience more closely approximated the storied hero’s journey. Though I had certainly harbored some bitterness toward women and the world in general for the battering I received, it was tempered by a pride of maturation, of having made it through basic training.

I never found a girlfriend, so, yes, I have failed in this area. I have here detailed to the best of my knowledge my own foibles and misconceptions with regards to this problem. I have made an honest attempt to take all due ownership of my failure. However, I don’t think that all of it was my fault.

Here’s one observation I’ve made. Many nights I went out not because I had any desire to, but simply as practice for developing a skill. Yet none of the women I approached ever seemed to catch on to this. Most women are extremely keen on ferreting out men’s hidden motives, yet they never seemed to discover this one in me, of if they did, they never let it on. Another observation, and I know I’m not the only one on this one, is that women have a near sociopathic lack of empathy toward men, especially when men show them romantic interest. There seems to be a reflexive interpretive bias in women which causes them to interpret almost any advance made by a man as an affirmation that she’s simply irresistible, and that it is also her prerogative to reject his advances by any means necessary, or more commonly, unnecessary. With many of the women I’d approached, I would say that this affirmation was all that they ever needed or wanted. They had no compunctions about playing along just to get their attention hit and then moving on without a second thought. In other words, they were narcissists.

I’ve wondered whether this is hardwired or cultural. The answer is obviously both. I think we can in fact identity some culture currents which are turning modern females into narcissists and making them unappealing to men for any other purpose than sex. This is subject to which I now turn.

Modern Woman

American women today suffer from a combination of emotional and characterologic pathology that renders them unfit to be romantic partners to men. On the emotional side, they are angry, anxious, and dysregulated. Men find them exhausting and not at all fun to be around. In addition to their unpleasant emotions, men must also contend with their toxic personality traits: narcissism, ingratitude, and an overbearing and judgmental attitude that appears to be constant. American women approach dating as a fact and fault-finding mission, with a degree of arrogance that can only come from a profound absence of self-awareness. They have no idea what their role is in the encounter or how to properly support the man who is leading the date. They act as saboteurs rather than facilitators. Most men have tired of this

–Mark McDonald MD [1]

The entire reason women have been such a privileged class throughout history is because only the good parts of her nature were displayed openly for the rest of society to see. Feminism, for possibly the first time in recorded history, has allowed Western women to show their true nature and it is possibly the worst thing they could have done for themselves because now the physical beauty of women comes as a double-edged sword of documented and well known unbridled greed, manipulation, and toxicity. Not since the days of Samson and Delilah have men been so keenly aware of the destruction and havoc women can visit upon them.

–Barbarossa[2]

There’s a popular saying in the so-called “manosphere” (which largely exists online): you can love women, or you can understand them. Female nature has heretofore been cleverly hidden from most men, so the theory goes, and that men have been fed a lot of bogus ideas about romantic love and the goodness of women. Taking the “red pill” is coming to understand that Ms. Sugar & Spice is driven by a ruthless mating strategy, by hypergamy, where she will try to maximize the genetic health of her mate along with his ability to garner resources and his willingness to share them with her. This is why she prefers tall, athletic men who gladly pay for expensive dates. It should be noted that the female mating strategy, according to the manosphere, is backed up by science. For those who are interested, David Buss’ The Evolution of Desire is a good place to start.

I dispute the overall claim. I doubt that the women of the artists and romantic poets (“She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies/And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes”[Byron]) were but mere fantasies, though they certainly were idealizations. All humans can be cultivated to some extent, their nature is malleable to a degree. There’s an entire body of scientific literature on an effect known as behavioral epigenetics, which measures the extent to which our genes respond to our environment. The fact that so many women today are closer to what Mark McDonald observes as a psychologist as opposed to the poet Lord Byron does not prove that we have discovered true female nature. Rather, I contend, we are observing the results of a social engineering project which has mangled and exploited female nature.

This bad bit of social engineering to which I refer is of course feminism. Hanna Rosin, one its more obnoxious proponents (the competition here is fierce), ironically argues essentially the same point as the high priests of the manosphere. Female nature is now free to flourish, to show itself unfettered by the oppressive patriarchy, thanks of course to all of her brave feminist fore-mothers. The natural result of which is the end of men–the end of a male dominated society. This is because the new industrial and information age (although almost exclusively invented, built, and maintained by men, a fact which Rosin glosses over) is far better suited to women than men, and so women will soon be the dominant gender. There is evidence for this. Boys are failing in school, dropping out of the workforce, living at home with mom, losing themselves in the world of porn and video games, and remaining single and undesirable to women. [3][4][5]

Yet are women winning because they are the “superior” gender? Are the great masses of women finally rising up and sticking it to men? Let’s go back in history some and have a look at the celebrated Women’s Movement.

In 1895, the state of Massachusetts polled voting aged women as to whether they wanted suffrage. Of the 575,000 eligible women voters, only 22,204 voted yes.[6] So the vast majority of women did not want suffrage, which naturally begs the question as to how it came about. The answer appears to be: from the top down. Author Rachel Wilson cites the case of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. Alva was twice married to very wealthy and influential men (William Kissan Vanderbilt and then Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont). Through her access to vast wealth and influence, Alva “dedicated her life to feminist causes, including suffrage. She donated vast sums of money to women’s suffrage organizations in both the UK and the US. She frequently paid the bail of picketers and demonstrators in the suffrage movement, and she funded and organized large rallies and marches. She founded the Political Equality League in 1909 to help gain votes for suffrage-supporting candidates in New York. She purchased office space for the National American of Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and funded its national press bureau. She convened a ‘Conference of Great Women’ in 1914 at Marble House, one of her sprawling estates. She organized huge fund raisers attended by her wealthy elite New York friends and is regarded by historians to be likely the largest single contributor to the financial success of the suffrage movement.” [6](p. 85)

In more recent history, consider the case of Meghan Markle, Dutchess of Sussex. Born in Los Angeles in 1981, she was the daughter of Thomas Markle Sr., an award winning lighting and photography director for many television shows, including General Hospital. She was an attractive girl with connections to the entertainment business and she managed to land some minor acting gigs. Though she graduated from Northwestern University, she does not appear to have had any significant academic abilities. So more or less a nobody until she landed an absolute plumb of a husband with Prince Harry. With marriage came a significant place in the twelve-hundred-year-old British monarchy, immediate socio-political power, media attention, and great wealth.

Markle may have become a real life Disney princess, but she is also a feminist, so no, that wasn’t going to happen. Soon she found the customs of the ancient family burdensome. She felt she needed to carve out her own path in life as a strong and independent woman … “it is precisely through her connection to the monarchy, one of the oldest hierarchies known to man, that she has the capacity to tear down the hierarchy she married into. She married into power and privilege only to undermine power and privilege.”[7] As a feminist she exhorted other women to do the same, to sabotage the very institutions which have allowed them thrive and succeed as never before. “Markle, perhaps one of the most privileged and entitled women in all of history, is now producing a podcast, Archetypes, that features her and her friends talking about women’s oppression.”[7] Talk about chutzpah.

There are many other examples which Rachel Wilson cites to illustrate the point that feminists largely worked from the top down through wealthy and influential men–through The Patriarchy–rather than up from the grass roots, as feminists would have you believe. Similarly, feminists have been very effective in infiltrating many critical, literally man-made institutions, frequently finding the patriarchs guarding the doors all too happy to step aside and usher them in. Several authors (e.g. Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys, Warren Farrell The Boy Crisis, William Collins The Empathy Gap) have documented the feminist infiltration of the education system. Feminists have skillfully worked to disadvantage boys and men all the while claiming that girls and women are the real victims of institutional discrimination.

Feminists have also burrowed their way into the courts, law enforcement, and above all, social services. Professor Stephen Baskerville writes: “These feminists created and control the vast and impenetrable social services industries that most journalists and scholars find too dreary to scrutinize. In the US they dominate the $53 billion federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the gargantuan trillion dollar Department of Health and Human Services. They are both dispensers and recipients of its $350 billion grant program (“larger than all other federal agencies combined,” according to HHS) funding local “human services” or “social services” bureaucracies—by far the largest patronage machine ever created, reaching into almost every household in the land and making the Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle.”[8]

So the prevailing narrative of the Women’s Movement, of the brave suffragettes, of the iconic marches of the 1960’s, of ordinary women taking to the streets just to have their voices heard, is more feminist folklore than fact. Not that it didn’t happen, only it was a sideshow which conveniently confers the appearance of a grassroots movement. As usual, the women didn’t overpower the men through direct force, but through manipulation. They cleverly and effectively lobbied powerful men–the patriarchs– to hamstring their fellow men so that the women could elbow their way past.

But why, you might ask, did all of these powerful men just hand over their power to feminist women? How have feminists invaded so many Western institutions with such little resistance? Answer: by appealing to men’s innate sense of chivalry, his desire to please and protect women. As men’s rights advocate Paul Elam explains, men will never object to any measure purportedly done to benefit women, will attack any man who does, and will never complain if said measure hurts men as a group. Think of the men who stood by on the decks of the sinking Titanic ready to shoot any man who refused to yield his lifeboat seat to a woman. Conversely, women will never oppose any measure which purports to help women, will attack any woman who does, and will always complain of anything that hurts women as a group.[9] Let that sink in. With these natural, gender specific proclivities at work, the disenfranchising of most men (but not the powerful ones at the top, feminists still need them for their continuing march toward an absolute matriarchy) virtually falls out as a matter of course.

Yet how has it been that this dynamic never played out to any significant degree in the past? Answer: because of the unprecedented technologies and wealth resulting from political liberalism, from a meritocratic free enterprise system which has unshackled us in countless ways from our mutual oppressor: mother nature. Most early societies struggled to even maintain their populations against war, starvation, and disease. Industrialization has vastly reduced the latter two, freeing women from the undeniable duty of baby production. Then another invention, birth control, freed them from unwanted pregnancy. The patriarchy, or the male dominated public sphere of politics, industry, science and technology, which feminists tirelessly revile as the great oppressor (yet want all for themselves …) is in fact the great liberator of women.

By the 1960’s feminism had firmly aligned itself with communism, partly to adopt its social pressure tactics to get women out of the home. Betty Freidan made this her mission in life, and she was a brilliant propagandist, famously comparing traditional home life to a “comfortable concentration camp”. Absurd, but it worked on women. In 1975 Simone de Beauvoir, in an interview with Betty Friedan, famously said: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”[7](p. 75) Where persuasion fails, the state needs to step in.

Feminists believe that, nonetheless, given a state sponsored push in the right direction, women will naturally prove themselves better than men at being men. This does not appear to be the case. In her recent book The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, Carrie Gress writes: “Feminism offered us women’s studies and women’s health and women’s rights, but they didn’t tell anyone, even once solid data was in, that their goals leave women miserable, unhealthy, and wondering what we did wrong. They didn’t tell us that the life they want us to live serves those in power, not us. Their goal via the sexual revolution was to reject motherhood, monogamy, and marriage in favor of hookups, money, glamour, and it has left so many unfulfilled, and deeply unhappy.” [7] (p. 94) Or as Paul Elam puts it: ” Feminism took women out of secure, supportive homes, where they generally tended to be happy and put them on the fast track to the professional middle. It has created a wide gulf between men and women which has ironically also gutted a lot of men’s chivalrous tendencies … women went from being mothers to just another customer at the day care center, they went from cherished wives to untrusted potential threats in the lives of men. The promised rewards for all of these unintended consequences utterly failed to materialize.” [10]

One final point. Nearly all of the most celebrated feminist leaders were character disordered women. Valerie Solonas, for example, was physically abused as a child, an incest victim, who was homeless by the age of fifteen, when she lived on the streets as a panhandler and prostitute. Andy Warhol once declined to produce a play she had written and she attempted to kill him with a pistol. Kate Millet, another feminist icon of the latter 20th century, was in and out of mental institutions her entire life. Shulamith Firestone also struggled with mental illness. She died alone in her apartment. It is believed that she died of starvation. And the list goes on. “Nearly every one of these women was affected by one or several major struggles in her life, including mental health issues, mother wounds, father wounds, sexual abuse, abortions, suicides, drug overdoses, bipolar disorders, depression, and run-ins with the law.” [7] (p. 88) From such a poisoned spring it is hard to fathom how anything salutary can flow. Yet to this day these feminists are celebrated as heroines, their writings are taught in universities, and they are hailed as important thought leaders.

So to conclude this section, I do not contradict what the manosphere nor Mark McDonald say about modern women. Indeed my own experiences with women align with much of what they say. While nature and genetics certainly determine to a significant degree who we are, how we behave, it is also true that environment and culture play a role as well, even to the point of modifying how our genes are expressed. I reject the “red pill” premise that women are naturally and simply Machiavellian maters. Rather, modern woman is the peculiar result of a social engineering project which did not grow up organically from the grass roots, which is to say, did not issue naturally from female nature (or from natural female superiority, as the supremacists would have it), but rather came down from on high by disgruntled elites. It turns out that these elites, most of them women, hate femininity, as femininity makes women better suited as helpers and followers than leaders and adventurers. Above all they hate the most uniquely important female role, which is producing the next generation of humans. This takes too much time away from the front where they should be battling men for supremacy. The feminist program requires the constant application of social pressure for it goes against nature, and it is uncertain as to whether they will achieve anything beyond making us all miserable.

The Child-Man

“Sambo” refers to a psychological type who emerged among the black slaves of the antebellum American South. That’s according to historian Stanley M. Elkins, who writes: “Sambo, the typical plantation slave, was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior was full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment: it was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being. Although the merest hint of Sambo’s ‘manhood’ might fill the Southern breast with scorn, the child, ‘in his place,’ could be both exasperating and lovable.” [11]

Elkins argues that a Sambo type results from a “closed system”, meaning a life situation which offers no reasonable hope for future freedom or self-agency. He notes that such a type emerged not only on the plantations of the antebellum South, but also in Nazi concentration camps. Many prisoners, convinced of the utter hopelessness of their situations, reverted to a child-like state, playing at pranks, giggling at bodily functions like farting. He also notes that their mature sexuality had all but disappeared; they were effectively prepubescent again. Conversely, Elkins notes that the slaves in South America, where it was possible for a slave to earn money from his own labor and therewith purchase his freedom, rarely displayed the Sambo type.

I stole half of the title for this section from a chapter in Kay Hymowitz’s book Manning Up, a chapter she titled “Child-Man in the Promised Land”. Hymowitz observes that with the rise of girl-boss feminism in the 1990’s, in what many thought would be the final battle for gender equality, the men, curiously, turned into Child-Men. “The child-man is the fun house mirror image of the alpha girl. If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organized and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily not. Their opposition is stylistic as well: she drinks sophisticated cocktails in mirrored bars, he burps up beer on ratty sofas. She spends her hard-earned money on mani-pedi outings, his goes toward World of Warcraft and gadgets … The child-man prides himself on his lack of pretense, his slovenly guyness, not to mention his fascination with bodily fluids and noises. The child-man is the reason, for instance, for the success of iFart, an iPhone app—in fact, ‘The Premier iPhone Fart Application’—that imitates the noise suggested by its name.” [12]

In other words, he’s a Sambo. Naturally feminist authors and academics are all too happy to explain the child-man. He’s the entitled brat who suddenly had his privileges revoked and now he’s throwing a tantrum. This is the view of well known gender-studies sociologist Michael Kimmel, who speaks of the masculinity crisis as “aggrieved entitlement”, that men always thought their historical winning streak would continue, that the world was theirs for the taking, and they are now going through the grieving process of finding out that this is no longer the case, that it’s now the girls’ turn.

In my estimation, Kimmel and the feminists are more interested in promoting–and funding–their activism than understanding problems, especially those of men. These Sambo’s are not grieving, they are fighting. Men know well that direct confrontations with women, which they are loathe to do in the first place, are likely to get them shouted down as misogynists or chauvinists. So they foil them instead. Hymowitz notes that “it’s important to recognize that the child-man knows very well he is playing to a clownish sociological type. In Maxim and other child-man outlets, sentences seem crowded with ironic quotation marks as if to announce, ‘We seem like just a bunch of horny, stupid, insensitive guys, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. You shouldn’t either.’ ” [12] (Kindle Location 1714) The more the new generation of boss girls demand that men level up, man up, grow up into suitable partners, the more men gleefully frustrate them with puerile antics. Victory for the Sambo’s in this ascendant feminist matriarchy is the utter exasperation of the boss girls.

I anticipate that some will object to comparing present day Western men to concentration camp inmates or plantation slaves, but nonetheless I think all of the above find themselves in a closed system, and thus, following Elkin’s analysis, we see the emergence of the Sambo in each of these social systems. As Dr. Helen Smith once put it: “… this new world order is a place where men are discriminated against, forced into a hostile environment in school and later in college, and held in contempt by society—and for the honor, are expected to conform to a society for women only.” [13] I think many men have come to realize that the society for women only is the only society they know and are ever likely to know.

Though I was never anything like the Child-Man which Hymowitz describes, as I was much too self-conscious and sexually inhibited for any of that, I would say that I was a kind of Sambo as well. Some people said that I was a Peter Pan type, which I resented because I thought that they were wrong, but in retrospect I see their point. Growing up on a prep school campus in New England I got pretty heavily marinated in feminism, and naturally wanted to behave as the sort of man the feminists deemed a “good man”. I joined in the chorus when it came to ridiculing men, especially macho men. When I went to college I found similarly minded classmates who hated the frat types, the jocks. “Keg Warriors” we called them. In graduate school the Simpsons was a favorite. The idiot dad seemed all good fun back then.

Yet I also had a sense of incongruence. I was fighting with something basic to my own nature, that I could sense. In graduate school, as a break from my studies, I read literature, especially of seafaring adventures. I found the books of Alan Villiers nestled deep in the recesses of Crerar Library, and I devoured them. Falmouth for Orders, By Way of Cape Horn, Sons of Sinbad, Cruise of the Conrad–I could feel the mighty ocean winds on my cheek, smell the sea salt just from titles. The Great Age of Sail, the windjammers with towers of square sails, the rugged men–yes men! No women except the occasional captain’s wife who went as a passenger– who were muscular, tanned, and tough. My soul lifted with the sails of those old ships. My life was there, or at least part of it was.

Problem is that the sailing ships are long gone. The merchant marine is all powered vessels now, and of those I have no interest. As far as social respectability, having a PhD in physics and now working at Arthur Andersen in Chicago certainly had me on a track to considerable wealth and respect. All those years of trying to be a feminist-approved man was paying off and certainly would pay even more in the future. But the plain truth is that it had also injured my masculine identity to the point where I developed a neurotic fixation on escape.

Before the world voyage in my own boat, I had applied for a crew/trainee position on barque Picton Castle, as she was about to set off on her second world voyage. If I recall the tuition for the voyage was $36K, and I had some money now, now having worked for four years at Arthur Andersen. I plunked down my deposit and scheduled a visit, to where the ship lay in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.

They wanted me to stay several nights, but I could only stay for one as I had to return to work. My reception was decidedly chilly. At first it was hard to get anyone to talk to me. I was under the impression that I was to interview with Captain Daniel Moreland, and I was informed that he was not there. Nonetheless, they let me spend the night on the ship, and a few of the crew and one of the mates started to warm up to me a little. Anyway, I was then informed that the captain would interview me by phone at some such time. He never called. Finally I called the booking agent for the Picton Castle and complained. Finally the captain called me. It did not go well. Afterwards the agent returned my deposit.

Earlier I shared some of my writing and my attitudes. I do not deny that I had a lot of growing up to do. So I am not going to blame Captain Daniel Moreland and his organization for what happened, at least not entirely.

Later I found a rather lengthy article on the Picton Castle and her captain. Of interest I found the following passages: ” … when at last there came the opportunity to get to know the Picton Castle‘s master socially, the interview questions were postponed in favor of topics of equal interest to him, including the literary merit of Melville, the philosophy of Lao-Tzu, the comparative qualities of various marine painters, local and world politics, global environmental problems, the nature of enlightenment, and the advantages with sailing with a predominantly female crew. ‘That’s according to my theory of the natural ascendancy of women aboard ship’, he observed … ‘it’s different when they get aboard ship. They get to explore in a way they can’t at home, and they’re more compliant. Especially the girls … Guys are OK for about a week, then they’re all experts. Girls keep right on learning without that hang up”. [14]

So the captain is a male feminist. I have no way of knowing whether his apparent feminism was the reason for my rejection, only that it certainly fits into the anti-male trends in education we see almost everywhere nowadays. I also cite this episode from my own experience as evidence for the aforementioned “closed system”. While the romance and beauty of great sailing ships certainly fired my imagination and was a motivation in and of itself, looking back I also see how desperate I was for a traditionally male vocation where men not only developed skills but a foundational identity, an identity which could stand independently of whatever the women might think. Unfortunately, like so many of such spaces, they’ve since been invaded by feminists and their devotees. As Janice Fiamengo, a former feminist, succinctly describes it: “Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to.”[15] While there still are powerful men at the top, many of them are but marshals of the feminist matriarchy.

Hence there appears to be just two viable routes for men of the 21st century West. One, which I followed for some time, is to become the compliant, docile, feminized worker male who serves the matriarchy and stays out of trouble. And work you will, as feminists will never stop moving the yardsticks, updating their demands as to what you have to do to stay in their good graces. The few alpha men who refuse to play ball, like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, or Laurence Fox, can expect endless, expensive lawsuits and arrests. As most men could never endure nor afford this, there’s the second option, which is the Sambo, the man not at work, the man playing video games all day, the buffoon. While it condemns him to a lowly life, it also affords him a way to stay out of the crosshairs of the matriarchs while slyly giving them the finger at the same time.

More recently, however, men seem to be adopting a third way, a path which I now find myself on as well.

From Sambo to Separatist

Along comes the internet. Suddenly a new Wild West opens up in cyberspace, and naturally the men became pioneers, prospectors, rogues and sheriffs again. While feminists could threaten to withhold federal funds from organizations like the Boy Scouts of America unless they complied with their demands, any man with enough money to buy a computer and an internet service plan could enter an online men’s club. Many men disguised their identities behind a cryptic user names. As one of the early “manosphere” content creators Sandman points out, one of the reasons that feminists were so keen to get women into traditional male spaces like the Boy Scouts was monitor them, to police their speech and behaviors. [16] But the online world is protean and a massive jumble, making it hard to even comprehend much less control.

So the feminists used the megaphones that they already had, legacy media outlets like television news and print media, to maintain their heretofore firm grip on culture and gender politics. When Cassie Jaye began her documentary The Red Pill Movie her initial topic was rape culture, particularly how the online sub-culture of women haters–who call themselves Men’s Rights Activists (MRA’s)–were contributing to the problem. She believed this to be the case because she had never heard otherwise. Such was the extent of media saturation which the feminists enjoyed. In the course of the documentary she discovers, much to her own consternation and bewilderment, that the men’s rights advocates had well reasoned arguments and facts to back them up. Though she would never become an MRA, in the course of the film Cassie Jaye comes to realize that the feminists had put blinders on her, that she had based her opinions on incomplete information.

One central figure in The Red Pill Movie is Paul Elam, founder of A Voice for Men, and is one of the worst men on earth if you listen to feminists, as he and his website posed a very real public threat to the feminists’ carefully curated narratives.

Now long before the online men’s movement, a former male feminist and soft-spoken academic, Dr. Warren Farrell, published a book called The Myth of Male Power. The modest and unassuming tone of the book only amplifies its impact. Anyone raised in the feminized West likely regards male power and privilege over females as axiomatic. Farrell argues that women are in fact the privileged sex while men, he famously points out, are the disposable sex. Though certainly women have to look after themselves, and they have to bear children, still they can more or less just be who they are and society will love and support them. Men, on the other hand, have to earn a place in society through hard work, talent, and sacrifice. Moreover, the value of men’s productivity is typically valued in so far as it benefits women, particularly so far as it benefits mothers. Again think of the sinking Titanic. Men would be forever shamed–or shot–should they fail to yield their seat on a lifeboat to the women and children.

Paul Elam describes his reaction to Farrell’s book as follows: “After binge reading the whole book, everything in my life changed … [it] gave me the satisfying realization that I had been right all along, that I wasn’t crazy, that there was in fact something wrong in the world … men are raised with a slew of coercive messages. Do this, don’t do that, get your do’s and don’t’s down to a fine compliant art form or face the shaming consequences. Don’t think of yourself. Ever. Ignore your pain, produce like a fucking machine, and lay it at the feet of women. Man up and take that shit. Deal with whatever comes in silence or be relegated to society’s reserved, default trash heap for non-men … throughout history shame has been used to silence men with the malfunction of thinking they are as important as the causes and people they serve. In a world that operates like this, anger is unavoidable.” [17]

I believe, contrary to Elam, that men do have to man up and take that shit. It’s what they are programmed to do, and it is what brings them a sense of purpose and meaning. Paul Elam even admits that it was traditionally masculine men–the fearless warriors, the tireless workers, the lonely but brilliant iconoclasts–who built civilizations like our own.

In my estimation the real problem today is not the life of hardship and sacrifice men are expected to lead, but the pernicious lie told by feminists that the civilized world and all of its institutions are merely instruments of power and domination intended to serve supremacist males–the so-called Patriarchy. Believing this, feminists demand that men be put on probation. Male sacrifice will still be required, of course, only no longer honored. Why would anyone honor oppressors? Feminists see it as their mission and prerogative to take control of the governing institutions which have guided the West in order to use them to finally institute “equality”, which means turning them into institutions of power and domination for supremacist females. Even if they were to acknowledge this fact, feminists don’t care. Men need to be controlled and routinely punished. It’s the only way to turn them into “good men”.

It must be said that feminists are correct in pointing out that most human societies looked to older men as advisors and leaders. In this respect they were patriarchal. In Ancient Rome, for example, there was the senate, a word which derives from the Latin senex, which means old man. The senate was thus an assembly of elders. Prior to that, like so many primitive societies, the ancestors to the Romans were structured in clans, or a group of families led by a tribal chief, or a pater, a father. So as Rome grew up, the senate thus became the meeting place of fathers representing the clans.[18] This was indeed a patriarchy.

Why were so many societies organized this way? Because, as Farrell points out, men had to earn their way by serving the rest of society, the women, the children, the sick and the elderly. They had to go to war and they had to hunt for food. Those who survived the ordeal, who endured years of hardship and privation, who dealt with savage enemies, who faced evil and their own immanent deaths, were the most likely to become wise individuals late in life. They’d seen it all. They are not easily swayed by the latest fads. They don’t listen to fools as they’ve nearly gotten themselves killed doing just that too many times already. They are stern, judgemental, but respected men.

While the ruling pater‘s are only a select few in society, all men who are fathers nonetheless rule their own family in a similar way. Hence by the lights of the feminists, not only the ruling pater‘s, but all fathers are participants in an oppressive patriarchy. Hence the feminist crusade to disable fathers in America and throughout the West. Says Stephen Baskerville, feminists implemented policies “the express purpose of which is nothing less than to enfeeble and degrade America’s men on an enormous scale. This is done especially by destroying men’s home life and authority over their children, but elsewhere too: by patently false accusations of domestic violence and rape; by family courts that confiscate children from legally innocent fathers, whose authority has been undermined and terminated before their property is plundered and their persons incarcerated without trial … ” [19] Ultimately nearly every feminist campaign in some way or another aims at destroying fathers and fatherhood, destroying male authority and the culture-wide respect for that authority.

All of which leaves young men of today will little to aspire to. The “good man” of the now feminized West is a servant, a slave to his female superiors. The proliferation of man-children, of Sambo’s, should not come as any big surprise given these cultural forces and what we’ve already discussed. The natural apogee of masculine maturity is a pater, but this is longer allowed in the feminized West, hence men who wish to become men are left with really only one option: to leave.

“Leave” needs to be placed in scare quotes. Very few men, or anyone for that matter, wishes to leave the modern world entirely and go live in the wilderness. Anyone who has any experience with such an existence–or anything even approximating it–has probably learned that it is rarely any fun. No, most men intend to utilize global supply chains and modern conveniences, which of course means that they will need some way of earning money, which in turn means that they must live in polite society at least in so far as it is a requirement for gainful employment.

So we are not talking about separating from society completely. Perhaps the most radical male separatist movement is MGTOW, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The movement exists mostly online, with dozens of content creators, thousands of videos and millions of views. For the MGTOW’s, separation primarily means refusing to participate in the dating and marriage markets, as that is where the modern matriarchy exerts most of its control, with sexual harassment policies, divorce and family courts, and women’s monopoly on reproductive rights.

The fact that sexual separation produces no children to transmit one’s teachings means that MGTOW can only be a temporary, stop-gap solution. As we’ve said, a pater is nearly universally esteemed in all human cultures because he is a human male who has come to complete fruition, and no man can become a father without knowing a woman. “Women are the foil against which a gentleman defines himself … It is no accident that all the classical advice books emphasize the central importance of how a man should relate to women.” [20] Going all the way back to Genesis, Adam only becomes a mortal man because of Eve, who is his curious, devious, and beautiful helpmate. Men and women are neither without each other.

So the bulk of modern male separatists–at least the ones who are actually serious–are neither separating from modern economies nor from women. Rather they are searching for a path through modern society which leads to prosperity, personal freedom, and perhaps romantic relationships but without ever coming within shelling range of the feminist matriarchy. Several authors in the so-called “red pill” space have offered life plans for such a male separatist. One is Richard Cooper. His book The Unplugged Alpha is relationship advice for male separatists. Cooper spends a good deal of the book laying out his guiding principles for screening out women who will likely turn out to be apparatchiks of the matriarchy. In his chapter titled “Red Flags”, he reviews the most obvious signals emitted by women who pose the greatest risks to men. Not surprisingly, any woman who overtly identifies as a feminist is to be avoided. More indirect clues of the feminist character type is a general disdain for traditional femininity, body piercings, unnatural hair colors, and being overweight. Disregarding traditional femininity also includes excessive promiscuity. Good women aspire to be chaste.

Perhaps the most glaring red flag for Cooper is if she is a single mother (naturally the “not all” caveat applies here as everywhere). He devotes an entire chapter to these women. And on another point there is nearly unanimous agreement among male separatists: avoid marriage. Not because it isn’t a good thing for men, women, children, and all of society, but because in the West the institution of marriage has been utterly corrupted by feminists. Cooper himself went through what is now a familiar tale of divorce, when he discovered that contrary to being a privileged male in a patriarchy, he had few rights but a slew of responsibilities, especially when it came to writing checks.

Cooper also discusses men’s health, both physical and mental, on fitness and developing a Stoic mindset. Besides going to the gym, men should have a few masculine hobbies and interests. Cooper recommends owning a motorcycle.

For Stephen Baskerville, however, much of this, while all good, could still produce but a caddish player. A man needs to become a Gentleman. I have to agree. “Alpha” is crude. For all the talk about self-improvement you hear from the red pill crowd–“money, muscles, and game” is a constant refrain in these circles–their advice boils down to little more than developing lowest denominator mating signals in order to attract the kinds of females who respond to such things.

The making of a gentleman begins with a proper education. A gentlemen should have a working knowledge of classic literature. This would include Homer and the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. He should know at least the big four plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. He should also be familiar with the Bible. Throw in some of the great novels, such as Oliver Twist by Dickens and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, and he’s got enough to work with.

A gentleman should also have a knowledge of world history, beginning with Ancient Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages to Renaissance Europe, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War, and the two world wars of the 20th century. In addition he should have some familiarity with the great philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau, as well as great scientists like Newton and Einstein.

Finally there’s the arts. A gentleman knows some of the great classical composers, e.g. Mozart and Beethoven, as well as some of the great painters and the various genres of art, such as Baroque vs. Romantic (admittedly I am woefully ignorant on visual art and architecture, unless we’re talking yacht design …)

Are you beginning to sense how adolescent “money, muscles, and game” sounds by comparison?

When it comes to women, however, Baskerville agrees with much of what Cooper says, particularly that a man should start running at the first whiff of feminism. “In general, a good woman is one who accepts the virtues of modesty and chastity and who wants to be courted. A woman who expresses her determination to demand her ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ and who wants to take the initiative is trouble.”[p. 88] That is, a gentleman seeks a Lady. But where to find her? “To find good women, white men are looking to Eastern Europe, and black men to Brazil and Africa, and all men to the Far East.”[20](p.89) says Baskerville. Enough Western men are in fact doing this that they now have a group identifier: The Passport Bros. [21]

Good luck with that says Aaron Clarey. He opens his book The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex with the story of Fred, a man who seemingly had it all. He certainly had what women wanted, and there was no shortage of young attractive women in his life. Yet Fred was troubled and finally took his own life. Clarey’s analysis is that he was seeking a wife–a Lady–and after sifting through dozens of women none of them even came close to the mark. “But what [no one recognizes] is we are now entering a post-marriage, a post-partner world where the opposite sex is no longer the primary objective of the other.” [22] Men and women are still seeking traditional marriage and family, but most will end up heartbroken upon discovering that this is no longer a realistic possibility.

Clarey is not opposed to casual dating or hooking up or even hiring a professional, but no man should ever make love and marriage the focus of his life lest he end up like Fred. What should a man focus on? First off, no matter what his circumstances, a man must be leading an active life, must be doing and striving not sulking in mom’s basement. Naturally this should include daily exercise and a good diet. Most importantly, not only should a man earn enough to financially support himself, but he should seek a profession not merely a job. While you can get by as a low skilled laborer, generally it doesn’t pay well and you have no specific skill which the larger society values, as they are already capable of doing such things themselves. But if you are a plumber, computer programmer, a pilot, etc., nearly everyone at some time or another will find themselves in need of your services. Professional titles don’t just command higher wages, they indicate how you contribute to society. As feminists now have trained us all to eschew any sort of dependence of a women on a man, it is of vital importance that a man find some sort of work which not only earns him money but earns him a respected place in society as well.

As for myself, having learned to sail early in life, and having my imagination set ablaze by authors like Alan Villiers, Sterling Hayden, Bernard Moitessier, Joshua Slocum, and on a more literary level, Joseph Conrad, I knew that somehow I had to somehow forge a sailor’s life for myself. After my experience with the Picton Castle I was determined that I was going to do it my way, even if I was the only one doing it. That really left me with only one option, which was to save up enough money from working in order to buy my own boat and live for some time without needing to work again.

It was by only a few grainy photos posted on YachtWorld (a brokerage site) did I spot her in the vast jumble of “pre-loved” boats. A Gilmer 31, owner finished, gaff rigged, no engine nor electrical. She was named Ruth Avery after the owner’s mother. Ruth Avery is engraved on her ship’s bell, so that’s her name, I was never going to change that. When I first visited the boat in Rock Hall, Maryland, on a cold, raw February day, I knew she was to be my ship. So much the better that I could have her for a song, not being the sort of boat anyone else really wanted, especially without an inboard diesel engine. I gladly cut the check for $22K USD.

And oh has it been quite the ride! Beginning with a refit in Maryland, in the suffocating August heat and ferocious mosquitoes. Then freezing in Hampton, Virginia, early November, waiting for Herb (an SSB amatuer meterologist and passage router) to give the green light on weather for a run to Bermuda. That was my first major offshore passage with Ruth Avery, and she barely blinked. Then on to the Caribbean and dreaming of the South Pacific. Without an inboard engine the Panama Canal is out of the question, so I sailed to the rather depressing port of Galveston, Texas and put the boat on a truck. I ride in the cab with the trucker and his girlfriend all the way to Dana Point, California. After having my wallet considerably lightened by the boatyard there, I’m off on a nearly month long passage to Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas. Then comes the fabled South Pacific run, the Society Islands, the Tuamotos, and Tonga. October is the spring there and the beginning of the cyclone season, so it’s a long and rough ocean trip south to New Zealand.

The stay in New Zealand must be as long as the cyclone season, which is nearly five months. I remember watching the 2002-2003 America’s Cup series at the sailing club in Opua with a traveling tribe of other cruising sailors. Following the cyclone season it’s back to the tropics, to Fiji, to Savusavu. Then to the Torres Strait, Home Island, westward to Darwin, a modern city in the middle of Australian desert. Across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. I now count my lucky stars that I made it around southern Africa in an engineless boat without getting caught out by severe weather. It happens in those parts. Frequently. Could have easily lost the boat if not my life, but the sea gods, Moitessier insists, love fearless and determined souls. He may be right.

Up through both Atlantics and I finally end my odyssey in Maine, where I put the boat on the hard at Great Island and move in with my parents. I spend a year and a half attempting to become a great author. Oh well. It became clear that my only hope to return to life aboard was to get back into the financial world and earn more money. I was still relatively young–in my 30’s–but with such an unusual career thus far getting back into the ultra conformist corporate world was not going to be easy. Indeed it wasn’t.

What I did not count on was how hard it would be staying there. Though I had landed a great job with good pay at Merrill Lynch Commodites in Houston, Texas, this was one of the most painful episodes of my life. This is actually a recommendation for living a life of adventure. It brings problems, many of them dating back to your earliest years, up to the surface so that you can deal with them before it’s too late. Otherwise you may have become just another member of the anesthetized masses. OK, I’m sure some of them are genuinely happy. I sure was not. I was constantly tense. Driving to work in my little Corolla I sometimes found myself yelling until I was hoarse in uncontrollable fits of rage. This couldn’t last.

I recall the pressure interview with Human Resources when I was laid off from Merrill in early 2008. In the end I’m not sure which of us was more surprised. I did not anticipate actually getting fired nor escorted out by armed security. I doubt that they anticipated that I would so willingly, almost gleefully sign my severance, such as it was, and walk out. I remember looking at the window at the pale winter sky knowing that this was another turning point in my life. I was done with the corporate life. I would likely never again find employment that used my education or career skills. I would not have a stable income. I didn’t even have a coherent plan.

Except for fitting Ruth Avery out for more seagoing adventures, that was a given. I threw myself at the refit, which included significant modifications to both the interior cabin as well as the rig, building a new self-steering windvane, re-barrier coating the bottom, etc. I worked all spring and summer and fall of 2008, launching by chilly November. I set off for Bermuda in early December in what would be one of the coldest, most miserable passages of my life. But I made it.

Then on to the Caribbean. I would spend the next eight winters in the Caribbean, trying to become a professional musician, of which I’ve already spoken. I wanted to write, but saw no way of getting published nor earning any money at it. At least the stock market was recovering so my investments I had made from earned wages were accruing value. In fact they were doing well enough that in 2015 I attempted to seriously get into the dating market, with the RSD Bootcamp I have spoken of.

Still nothing was panning out, though. Always refusing to just wallow in despair, I clicked on yet another pick-up video on YouTube, looking for yet another angle, another way to attack not only my dating problem, but the larger life problem. And then it hit me. Why don’t I make YouTube videos on sailing? That’s something I know a thing or two about. I can write scripts, so that will scratch my writing itch some. Plus I can compose and record my own music for the videos. Thus How to Sail Oceans was born. And the rest is history …

Well no, not really. Although what followed was certainly a huge improvement.

A video on engineless sailing got me through the noise, after which I very quickly had enough subscribers to monetize my videos. That’s income, baby! After all those years of foolishly dreaming of becoming a professional sailing ship man it had now become a reality. All of those seemingly pointless dead ends, in which I had invested so much time, like music, was now part of a profitable venture. Most important of all I was building a base of followers who respected me.

Not that any of this is making me rich or world famous. I still have to rely on my investments I made back when I had a “real job” for the bigger purchases, like new sails or electronic equipment, or haulout fees. At present I make enough to pay for my day-to-day expenses. And I constantly feel the pressure to keep turning out content and to improve lest my channel recede into obscurity in a sea of other creators all elbowing their way toward the spotlight.

Then there’s the question of what I shall do when I’m too old to sail oceans. I don’t have that worked out yet. But I am certain that had I stayed in the corporate world, with health insurance, nice things, a fat retirement fund, and so on, it may have all been for naught. I may well have ended up like Fred. Instead I found a way forward that is not always pleasant but provides me with a sense of directed growth, directed not by fad or fallacy, but by the design specs coded into my DNA. Or by God’s Will. Still not sure which.

References

[1] https://markmcdonaldmd.substack.com/p/why-american-women-are-undatable

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyenSX4XSZA

[3] Farrell, Warren . The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. BenBella Books. Kindle Edition.

[4] Eberstadt, Nick . Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) (New Threats to Freedom Series) (pp. 102-103). Templeton Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/young-men-single-young-women/

[6] Wilson, Rachel. Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation (p. 82). Kindle Edition.

[7] Gress, Carrie. The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (p. 4). Regnery Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[8] Baskerville, Stephen. The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power (p. 47). Angelico Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Elam, Paul. Men. Women. Relationships: Surviving the Plague of Modern Masculinity (p. 105). LPS publishing. Kindle Edition

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQUJJ7bPAHg

[11] Elkins, Stanley M.. Slavery (p. 82). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

[12] Hymowitz, Kay S. Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys . Basic Books. Kindle Edition (Kindle Location 1710, 1770).

[13] Smith, Helen. Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters (p. 8). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.

[14] Gilkerson, William, “Captain Daniel Moreland and Picton Castle“, Maritime Life and Traditions, No. 11 (Brooklin, Maine, USA), p. 12

[15] https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not

[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOpZxLa_WcI, starting at 1:16:00

[17] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63BcP-ajdEg&t=91s

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate

[19] https://menaregood.com/4272-2/

[20] Baskerville, S. K.. A Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and Ruling the World: How to Survive as a Man in the Age of Misandry– and Do So with Grace (p. 83). Sophia Institue Press. Kindle Edition

[21] https://www.zerohedge.com/political/passport-bros-feminists-are-outraged-men-going-overseas-find-traditional-wives

[22] Clarey, Aaron. The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex (p. 6). Kindle Edition.