High Couch is a classic. It is also, so far as I know, sui generis. In a long life of writing and editing in which I have written nine books, edited more than two hundred and read thousands I do not know of another book like it, not even remotely. On one level it is an exciting sci-fi adventure. On another it is a sword and sorcery epic, and on yet a third it answers Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?”
A brilliant woman has decided to give the game away, and guess what? Feminists have attacked her for it.
The writing style is heroic, but readable and fun. The characters are recognizable, the plot is satisfying, and the world it creates is like nothing you have seen before, but is still believable. It also contains what I consider the most erotic single sentence in all the thousands of books I have read:
“Flesh toy, come here!”
If that doesn’t set up a scene in your mind then you have no business reading fiction.
I’m not going to give the plot away. I’m just going to recommend it. Highly.
Janet Morris began writing in 1976 and has since published more than 30 novels, many co-authored with her husband Chris or others. She has contributed short fiction to the shared universe fantasy series Thieves World, in which she created the Sacred Band of Stepsons, a mythical unit of ancient fighters modeled on the Sacred Band of Thebes. She created, orchestrated, and edited the fantasy series Heroes in Hell, writing stories for the series as well as co-writing the related novel, The Little Helliad, with Chris Morris. She wrote the bestselling Silistra Quartet in the 1970s, including High Couch of Silistra, The Golden Sword, Wind from the Abyss, and The Carnelian Throne.
This quartet had more than four million copies in Bantam print alone, and was translated into German, French, Italian, Russian and other languages.
In the 1980s, Baen Books released a second edition. The third edition is the Author’s Cut edition, newly revised by the author for Perseid Press.
Don’t get me wrong; some of my best friends are betas and white knights, but…
…In the socio-sexual spectrum, betas and white knights are the useful idiot minions for the perverse cultural Marxist social engineers.
A telling anecdote about the state of America’s girls and women:
In 15 years as a BSA leader I never heard dads speak so proudly as when saying that their daughters were tomboys.
(BSA=Boy Scouts of America?)
Truth be told, I’ve even heard ostensible alpha males bragging about their macho daughters. (No, I am not referring to John Scalzi admitting his daughter can beat him arm-wrestling, just in case I confused you.)
…Another reason for this glorification of grrlpower and imputation of male sex roles onto daughters by beta dads is, it must be said, a subconscious kowtowing to the reigning feminist shrikegeist. The culture is so steeped in feminist idiocy and the attendant ugly woman project of training girls to grow up into ballbusting men (and of shaming men to become supplicating nancyboys) that it seems perfectly reasonable and normal for the regular dad on the suburban street to crow about reshaping his daughter into an androgynous weirdo with a penchant for throwing balls…
Well, yeah. But I’ve noticed this attitude in white knights even when the female in question is no relation to them. They take some kind of pride in it–most of them even have the same facial expression when they sing the praises of some butch broad who comes to their attention. Maybe part of this is the American worship of underdogs; or the equally pathological hatred of favorites. Maybe this speaks to a subconscious obsession with gender-bending that has spread from the elites into the commoners.
I am frequently annoyed at how superficial the manosphere and “Alt Right” work so hard to be. But on the other hand, I must admit that we aren’t just being threatened politically, economically and militarily–we are under attack on even more basic levels:
Genetically–we are being herded toward a race war.
Anatomically–we are seeing the tip of the iceberg in regards to self-mutilation. The more “transgenderism” is normalized, the more psychologically damaged people will volunteer for it. And it won’t stop with mere gender-bending.
Pharmacutically–As if we need more psychologically damaged people, more of the population is being medicated with powerful, mind-altering drugs for excuses that are suspect. And children are getting hooked young–usually with the consent of parents.
Even for biologically sound individuals who don’t want a sex change, the male population is increasingly effeminate while women become more and more butch–all encouraged by pop culture and the Public Education Cartel. This engineered gender confusion is destroying what is left of the family–the fundamental underpinning of humanity.
Our enemies won’t stop at destroying the USA. You can see they’re already positioning themselves to fundamentally transform humanity itself.
While watching the Cup races this season, it occurs to me that NASCAR is, in some ways, a perfect microcosm of American culture. In particular right now, I’m thinking of Danica Patrick.
Saturday’s All-Star race was wild and wacky from start to finish. The drivers, crew chiefs…even the announcers were confused by the complex format and rules. Tony Stewart, with his usual diplomatic finesse (ahem!) said something to the effect of: “This is the worst job of officiating I’ve ever seen. I’m glad this is my last one.”
But the Danica Patrick Factor is easy to understand, because it is symbolic of the Womyn Factor in our feminized society as a whole. She remained the backmarker consistently all through the race, only moving up from the back of the field when another driver was penalized, wrecked, etc., and sent behind her.
This was the All-Star race. In an “all-star” anything, you’d expect only the cream of the crop to participate, and at one point in history that was the case.
Danica is not one of the elite drivers. She did not belong in the All-Star race. Why was she even there?
Because she’s a fan favorite. Fans voted her in.
Much like real life, the best women can’t compete with the best men in most physical contests, despite what the pop culture svengalis would have you believe. And average women can’t compete with average men. But there are more than enough white knights out there to give them opportunities they didn’t earn and don’t deserve, all while regurgitating The Narrative (which says that celebrity womyn like Danica are oppressed victims who rise to prominence DESPITE discrimination AGAINST them; which means they had to be even better than the men, blah blah blah.)
One easy example to point out from the culture is our social-engineered military. The latest fiasco is putting females in the Rangers. They can’t meet the standards men have to meet, so standards were changed to let them in anyway.
Because vagina.
Even in normal cup races, Danica always shakes out around the middle of the field–behind all the drivers who have support and resources commensurate with hers, but ahead of most of the independent, low-budget one-driver teams without the support and resources.
Organizations like the NFL are already fully SJW-converged. They’re not yet stupid enough to start forcing teams to add female players to their rosters, but the league is a zealous enforcer of the LGBT agenda. They already coerced the governor of Georgia to overturn the will of the people–it’s frightening to imagine what kind of muscle they must use to crush dissent within their own organization on behalf of the advancement of sexual deviancy.
This madness won’t stop until the cancer spreads to every once-great institution and destroys it. Keep in mind that even NASCAR is pushing for more “diversity” now. It’s only going to get worse.
America has spent the past forty years shaming and denigrating that ethic by systematically removing masculine virtue from the public sphere.
Unfortunately, he only answers half of the question.
An observant, intelligent, and honest person won’t deny that true masculinity is villified at every turn in our increasingly toxic culture. This is pretty well documented in the manosphere. The post handles that aspect well. But what about the patriotic aspect?
Whether inside or outside warrior circles, American patriots today comprise a marginalized counterculture. Only in America are people who love their country demonized by the establishment, mainstream media, the education cartel, pop culture, and the average Joe.
We’ve learned contempt for the American republic from all the above, beating The Narrative into our heads everywhere we go, all our lives. Finding the information to overturn all this conditioning is still possible, and not yet even all that difficult…but few citizens of this country, including “conservatives” (whatever that means) ever do discover the antidote to the anti-American worldview.
The elites have not only poisoned and confused the warrior-patriot ethic, they’ve fundamentally transformed our armed forces into a hostile environment for warrior-patriots. And their social engineering plus ubiquitous propaganda has just about driven the American warrior-patriot to extinction.
Partially on-topic is this new clip from InfoWars. Alex Jones touches on how feminization is being used to destroy the effectiveness of the Armed Forces. He also touches on drones–to include replacing human ground troops with robots.
There are several different ideas about what film noir is and isn’t, and you can hear a lot of them on youtube.
The best interpretation of the French term would probably be phrased “dark cinema” in English. Here are some of the requirements as I learned them:
Shot in black & white.
Dark, moody lighting.
Made in the postwar years.
Featuring a femme fatale.
A very cynical outlook.
(Wow–sounds like a genre custom made for the red pill manosphere.)
This classic masterpiece written by Daniel Mainwaring and directed by Jacques Tourneur fits the criteria pretty well. Whatever someone’s chosen definition of film noir, Out of the Past is universally accepted.
This movie has much in common with The Maltese Falcon–another classic masterpiece I highly recommend (and the most I’ve liked Humphry Bogart in any flick).
Jeff Marcum (Robert Mitchum) is a tough private detective who comes off smart, is never at a loss for words and seems to have rock solid frame control. You would assume him to be an alpha…until he meets Kathie (Jane Greer).
Historical day game–he thinks he’s acing it; but really he’s entangling himself in the web of a black widow.
He completely lets his frame crumble; places Kathie on a pedestal; falls for her lies and reverse game (I’ve never seen a reference in the manosphere to women using game…but they do, and here’s an example); double-crosses his client; flushes his career down the toilet; and ultimately has to go into hiding, assuming a new identity, after realizing he’s been used to help Kathie avoid the consequences of her thieving, murdering, deceptive behavior.
At the beginning of the film his name has already been changed to “Jeff Bailey” and he runs a gas station in a small town. He’s found another girl, too–a good one: honest, feminine, submissive…a keeper back then; a unicorn today.
Behind every frustrated chump is a conniving woman.
Kirk Douglas plays Whit, who is ostensibly the villain of the story–but is he, really? He’s the one Kathie played for a chump before Jeff came along. He’s also the client that Jeff double-crossed because of her. One of his henchmen (for lack of a better term) just happened to drive through the small town one day and saw Jeff pumping gas.
Just like that, all Jeff’s sins and foolishness come out of the past to bite him hard, in the present.
The acting is solid all around, and the production values are just plain classy. Though it takes place in a bygone era (when you really could change identities and start a new life), I consider the story timeless. However, the plot skeleton was transposed into the 1980s for the movie Against All Odds, which is also a good watch.
A reasonably intelligent man will learn these maxims eventually. Unfortunately, most will learn by experience via the Hard Knock Academy.
IM MAXIM #108 – Give a woman less attention than she wants, and she will desire it. Give her as much of it as she wants, and she will not. Women quickly devalue the attention of a man who would attend to her every whim, so be frugal; it is easy for a man to be too generous, but near impossible for him to be too frugal.
IM MAXIM #109 – In matters of women, entitlement and worthiness is a matter of false equivalence; her level of entitlement almost always exceeds what she is worth.
IM MAXIM #110 – If she can find a way to blame a man for her decisions, she will. If she can find a way to avoid guilt, she will. Oft these two intertwine, for women are allergic to responsibility and loathe to be held accountable.
Maxim #110 helps explain, for instance, the firestorm of criticism aimed at Donald Trump because of his careless remark about women and abortions. Yes, he was ambushed by the press (probably mild compared to what lies ahead for him), but that’s not my point here. His cardinal sin was to suggest that a woman who asks for an abortion be held just as accountable as the doctor who performs it (assuming the doctor is a man–in the case of a female doctor, well, obviously it’s a victimless event).
Even anti-abortion females are shocked by this outrageous suggestion that the women who choose to have unprotected sex, then choose to have the baby killed, should share in the blame for what results from their choice.
“But…but…but…those women are victims! Because rape.”
We all know that very few abortions are requested because of rape.
“But…but…but…those women are victims! Because the patriarchy! Some man manipulated her into sex. She had no choice but to abort because of how she’ll be treated if she doesn’t because of the unwritten rules that men dreamed up and men enforce.”
IM MAXIM #111 – Women have a propensity to distract you from your mission, do not permit this.
Ouch, ouch, and triple-ouch.
I once had a lot of goals in life, most of which were within my grasp to achieve. In most cases, I ruined my own chances by allowing myself to be distracted by some woman or another.
Women want goal-oriented men who have worked hard and achieved great things. But if they latch onto a man before he has achieved his goals…sin loi, dude. She will not tolerate the focus and sacrifices needed to pursue those goals, and manufacture all kinds of drama which MUST TAKE PRECEDENCE over any- and everything that’s important to you to accomplish. And if you succumb to her demands, later she will of course blame you for having accomplished nothing.
And she’s right to blame you. She can’t help it. Like the Geico (or whatever) commercial says, it’s what you do if you’re a woman. If the man doesn’t maintain frame under the barrage of the woman’s shit tests, it is his fault. Frogs and scorpions, young man. Frogs and scorpions.
The following maxims lead me to believe they were written in no particular order:
IM MAXIM #115 – Whenever there is a problem between a man and woman, the fault is always assumed to lie with the man and never the woman. And so because of this, the onus to fix the problem lies on the man, not the woman. Even when it is obvious that all if not most the blame lies with a woman, polite society will reject all good sense and insist that liability is man’s to bear. Would it then be a stretch to presuppose that even on the most subconscious of levels, people believe it easier to coerce a man than reason with a woman?
IM MAXIM #116 – Women define themselves by their relationships, men by their achievements. Refer to Maxim #104
IM MAXIM #117 – Female helplessness is an asset prompting charity and sympathy, male helplessness is a liability prompting disgust and aversion. Women are independent by choice, men have no choice.
IM MAXIM #118 – Any man who needs a woman is not a man she’d want. Women want to feel wanted, not needed, they can’t handle being needed. Needing a woman is tantamount to forfeiting her, women are repelled by desire that has transformed into need.
IM MAXIM #119 – Women are the needier sex and hence the deadlier sex; great need necessitates great duplicity.
You have been taught to believe something totally different, I know. In fact most women actually convince themselves that a weak, vulnerable man who pedestalizes her and lets her wear the pants is attractive (as long as he maintains a six-pack and earns a six-figure income like in the movies). But she herself feels no attraction to helpless, needy males. She just embraces it as an ideal that other women should strive for.
IM MAXIM #123 – Snagging a high value man is women’s entire purpose for being, although she’s never quite sure she got the best deal possible.
This is one reason there is no such thing as “happily ever after” in the real world–even if you were her Prince Charming at one point.
IM MAXIM #126 – If a woman accuses you of cheating when you haven’t done anything, there’s a high chance she’s projecting her infidelity onto you – abandon her.
Sounds ridiculously simplistic, but it is absolutely accurate. The most intelligent woman, regardless of how high her IQ, is just not very complex. They seem unpredictable and mysterious to the miseducated male mind, but that’s a myth, reinforced by the culture. The red pill demolishes myths like these, but few even find it–much less swallow it. You can grow to hate women–simply imagining that it is purely malevolent sadism behind their actions–if you don’t accept the scorpion/frog paradigm for what it is.
I strongly suggest that younger men read the more exhastive list of these maxims and take them to heart. Readjust your thinking before it’s too late for you. I have learned by experience that these are true, whether they sound harsh or not.
On the one hand I wish this information had been available for me back in the day. Oh, how badly I wish. But on the other hand I have to be honest.
The fact is, I probably would have rejected this wisdom. I was too hard-headed. Not only did I swallow the blue pill, but I wanted to believe the myth. I thought my one-itus was a virtue, and wanted there to be a special snowflake I could place on my pedestal.
Ignorance may feel like bliss at the time, but it leads to misery in the long run.
IM MAXIM #128 – Women need their ex’s to be losers to feel like they made the right choice. If even one is a winner, her hypergamy will realise a glitch in its optimisation and thus the afflicted woman becomes awash with regret.
IM MAXIM #129 – If you place your trust on a woman’s conscience to compel her to do the right thing, then you are a fool by definition.
IM MAXIM #130 – The smarter the woman, the more nimble the rationalisation of her emotion.
IM MAXIM #132 – As a man, win or lose, you have to take risks; being complacent and passive is a female privilege – men have the burden of performance. Taking risks is core to the personality of masculinity, when nature gave you XY chromosomes, this was ordained. Meek and lazy men get nothing.
IM MAXIM #133 – Masculine women are a poor simulacrum of man, for they capture a man’s fierceness absent his reason or accountability.
Or, as it was so aptly expressed on film:
IM MAXIM #134 – A woman hates a man who won’t give her what she wants, but she absolutely detests a man who does, and without a fight.
IM MAXIM #138 – If you’re winning, women care about your tiniest grievances, when you’re losing, you’re dead to them.
IM MAXIM #139 – When you’re winning you can be rude and unruly and she will apologise for your mistakes. When you’re losing, she will blame you for her mistakes.
The more the list goes on, the more it hits an experienced man right between the eyes. Life will be so much better for you if you learn from the mistakes of others.
Character reboots are commonplace these days. In a pop culture spectrum so bankrupt of creativity that the only movies produced anymore are remakes, sequels, adaptations (often of old TV shows that weren’t so good to begin with), thinly-disguised ripoffs of other movies (the Fast & Furious franchise started with a Point Break knockoff set in a fantasy streetracing scene; Avatar was Dances With Wolves in outer space, etc.) or an attempted fusion of previous successful movies; and the bulk of TV programming is some sort of lame “reality show” because the industry lacks the imagination to conceive anything more interesting, re-forming an established character in one’s own image is lauded as some sort of seminal breakthrough. Seems like comic book characters (one of the ores constantly mined by Hollywood) are revamped, and their histories revised, every 3-5 years.
The Social Justice League of America celebrates diversity. The blond-haired Aquaman just wasn’t inclusive enough.
Wonder Woman is a character whose essence needs no revamping to fit the current Narrative being rammed down our throats incessantly. She fit that Narrative from her very debut in the 1940s. She was probably the very first Amazon Superninja to appear in American pop culture, and from the very beginning was intended to be a social conditioning propaganda tool. But despite all this, her inclusion in Dawn of Justice doesn’t bother me much.
Wonder Woman has been a member of DC’s superteam the Justice League going way back; and was a founding member of the “Justice Society of America” before that. She was good-to-go for the leftist pop-culture svengalis already, so they didn’t have to feminize an established male character or otherwise ruin the work of earlier creators.
Perhaps it is fitting that an exotic beauty was cast to play the Amazon. After all, she comes from “Paradise Island,” an all-female society closed off from the rest of the world since ancient times. So it’s appropriate that her accent sounds different from ours, and that she doesn’t look like a WASP. (However, it appears that DC/Hollywood also intends to ethnicize the Flash and Aquaman, which is getting annoying.)
Do you imagine it’s an accident that the female is shown on point when physical combat is imminent; or that the males are merely guarding her flanks?
At some point after I quit reading comics, I guess Wonder Woman took to carrying a Bronze Age sword and shield, in addition to her golden lasso. This only makes sense, if she’s going to be fighting gargantuan baddies like Doomsday. What doesn’t make sense is that her ancient bronze shield can withstand a Kryptonian’s heat vision without a scratch, when heat vision slices through every other form of matter except other Kryptonians. Because vagina, I guess.
Another development is that her red, white and blue colors have been replaced by some muddy red-brown metal flake scheme. This also makes sense. First of all, those colors represent oppression (college girls being forced to pay for their own birth control, for instance). Remember: WW was never an American in the first place. And all the big screen superheroes wear costumes with drab color schemes. Even Superman, who has never needed camouflage or to avoid attracting attention, wears a costume that looks like it’s gone a few months without being washed.
Might be hard to see here, but the dude just to the right of her looks a lot like a Native American. Explain THAT one.
I don’t know if this ties in with comic book revisionism, or is original to this screenplay, but Wonder Woman is apparently a WWI veteran now. Bruce Wayne/Batman finds an old photograph from 1918 that shows her with an odd assortment of guerillas (in Belgium, if memory serves).
Diana Prince looks even better in the red dress when Bruce Wayne first meets her…but I couldn’t find an image of that.
Maybe the most interesting thing about Wonder Woman in this movie is how Gal Gadot’s performance fits into a red pill socio-sexual understanding. Gadot is far more attractive as Diana Prince than as the Amazon heroine. Upon reflection, it’s obvious why: she is very feminine when incognito in the secret identity, as opposed to her super-identity as an extremely masculine brawler with tits.
“I just don’t understand why I can’t get dates!”
Only fetishists, white knights and sexual deviants find such a gender-bent individual even remotely attractive; no matter how much skin she shows or how well she fills out a skimpy costume.
Captain Capitalism is confident the latest gyno-reboot (titled Ghostbusters) will flop:
For those of us who aren’t in the echo chamber of Hollywood and the media, we see this movie for what it is – a truly inferior, slipshod affirmative action piece that is so blatant in its pandering towards “team woman” it’s pretty much insulting everybody. It’s so bad even avid consumers of “Round House Kicking Chick Cop Shows” aren’t swallowing it, as evidenced by its trailer receiving more downvotes than a Hitler speech in a synagogue.
Not only does Hollywood lack the imagination to produce anything that hasn’t already been done, but they are compelled to feminize or sodomize it in the process. I wonder if Cappy’s right about its rightful failure, though. The Force Awakens is nothing but a remake of A New Hope, feminized and with updated special effects; yet sheeple poured into theaters by the millions to further their feminist indoctrination. Same with the so-called Mad Max movie, wasn’t it?
Yes, your average American is an idiot. And yes, your average American woman can be sold a bill of goods if you merely slap the label of “rah rah female” on it. But what Sony did was take a hallmark of American culture, a genuine apolitical cinematic classic that young and old hold dear to their hearts, and shit all over it with politics.
Here I slightly disagree: the original Ghostbusters movie, if you analyze it carefully, celebrates the free market with a strong capitalist message: A team of hardworking entrepreneurs recognize an unmet need in the market; launch a business tailored to meet that need; perservere through a dry period, at first, getting the business off the ground; find their big break via a client desperate enough to try something new and radical to solve his problem; their business explodes into insane profits…then some self-important government bureacrat strangles the industry with regulation and the entire city is plunged into violent chaos as a result.
There is no way Hollywood could leave a message like that intact, even when most people fail to recognize it.
For all you manosphere bloggers out there who prefer the stick figure silicone Barbie Dolls, you might get a chuckle out of this.
For the red pill aspiring alpha who believes that for a chick to have a “feminine” figure she must resemble a transgender poster child…this video is for you!
While my footprint shrinks I’m making a point to spend more quality time with family. I left the selection up to them for movie night last weekend and they chose this old Jim Carey vehicle.
I laughed a lot despite myself, and also couldn’t help noticing how it nailed a boatload of major manosphere themes. The only thing missing is a false rape accusation, to make it the ultimate neomasculist flick with every box checked.
For the duration of the film, the title character (a lawyer) is involved in a court case. It is a divorce-rape of the highest magnitude, depriving a good father of his children and awarding half of all he has worked for to a gold-digging slut who has been habitually unfaithful.
Meanwhile, the lawyer’s own life is a perfect demonstration of game, and the female rationalization hamster at work.
He is a remorseless BS artist who thinks nothing of manipulating and using people to get what he wants. And this attracts people all the more.
Just during the length of the movie you lose track of how many times he flakes out or blows off his ex-wife and their son. But no matter how many times he does it, she’s always ready to give him another chance. Meanwhile, her supplicating beta boyfriend orbits (even proposing marriage), doing everything “right,” but just can’t generate the tingles in her like the reprobate main character does.
At one point, when under a spell forcing him to tell the truth, the liar admits to his ex that he blew off their son’s birthday to have sex with his cougar boss in order to make partner in his firm. She is angry, initially, but goes right back to her old ways of giving him undeserved chance after chance.
By the end, the beta chump is dumped (despite being and doing everything women say makes the “perfect” man) and it’s obvious that, when the sun goes down after the last scene we are shown, the ex is going to invite the liar back into her bed.
A sad commentary, of course, but no less true because of it.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
