Beta or Codependent?

During the early days of the Manosphere our objectives were simple and straightforward: figuring out what sort of behaviour attracts women, and what sort of behaviour repulses them.  This was the cauldron which gave rise to the terms Alpha and Beta, a simplistic (but useful) metric where young Lotharios would ask themselves if they were behaving like A) a simpering dweebo, or B) Like a Boss.

We’ve grown quite a bit since then, and so has the terminology.  Our scope has expanded beyond the mating dance, to politics and sociology, and we’ve developed a more nuanced understanding of masculinity.  Vox Day’s Sociosexual Hierarchy is the current gold standard in these circles, and I’d like to focus on his definition of the Beta Male in particular:

Beta: Betas are the good-looking guys who aren’t as uniformly attractive or socially dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy’s friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier one women and cheerfully pairing up with the tier two women. Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don’t have a lot of illusions about them either. Betas tend to be happy, secure in themselves, and are up for anything their alpha wants to do. When they marry, it is not infrequently to a woman who was one of the alpha’s former girlfriends.

With this in mind, consider the following exchange between the Reddit user ToastedCookieOats and the woman who rejected him after their date, only to have a meltdown when he rejected her in return.  Ask yourself: is he being Beta?  Or is there something more to all of this?

It’s an amusing exchange; her meltdown is perfect example of Millennial entitlement and narcissism.  Paracelsus at the Roosh V Forum sums it up thusly:

…a narcissist sees themselves as the protagonist of their own film. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they didn’t therefore assign lesser roles or extras parts to everyone else in their lives. It’s not that they aren’t people, it’s just they’re … less important. Not fully real.

This is the reason the ending of The Sopranos was both accurate and set off so many rages in its viewers: because it’s Tony, a lethal narcissist, dying, but with no end credits, no final swell of the main theme. That’s not how it’s meant to happen, even if it actually does reflect well the onset of death: cue curtain, no encore, cut to black.

It’s fairly clear that something sets off the woman’s rage. All rage comes from a narcissistic injury. It comes from a strike to the rager’s identity. Therefore: what about this guy constituted a threat to her identity?

The reply he made that triggered her off was this: “No, not at all. I felt the same way, so I’m really glad you said that.” That is: I don’t see you as a romantic partner.

In this context, the words are the threat to the woman. She cannot fear being raped or beaten up by the dude, he’s at the other end of a phone line, so it’s those words which cause the rage.

And why? Because — the narcissist being the protagonist — she’s pissed he’s flubbing his lines. He isn’t playing the part of the loser that she had cast him in, said casting session being the date and her reasons for casting him in that role being his income ($55K), his career (carer), and his physicality (balding and limping). He doesn’t get to think she’s not desirable, that’s meant to be for guys that turn her on. Extras aren’t meant to have independent judgement.

She desperately tries to get him back on script: “I know rejection stings but you don’t have to get salty…” — here, idiot, here’s what you need to be saying, stop doing that whole fully-formed person thing, it’s scaring the fuck out of me that you might see through the identity I’ve constructed for myself.

And to top it off: “If you didn’t think there was anything there why the fuck did you text me today?” I have cast you in the role of the loser and/or disinterested guy who doesn’t call back, why didn’t you follow your fucking script, don’t you know you’re supporting role?

That question is genuine, by the way, guys. She genuinely cannot conceive why a guy would call back if he wasn’t interested in her. Just take a moment and think through the implications of that statement and what it says about a woman, shit, a human being who thinks that. That is a measure of how deeply the idea that he might have ideas or judgments of his own impacts on her.

Let’s leave aside that necessarily she has been told, or has convinced herself, that she is desirable and special and all that. You are looking at the condition afflicting much if not most of the female population in the West right now.

No more needs to be said about her.  The life she lives every day is punishment enough for her transgressions.

Instead, let us focus on ToastedCookieOats, and consider what’s going on with him.  Is he Beta?  Blue Pill?  Without a doubt – the fact that he has an account on Reddit is proof of that.  But there’s more going on here than merely acting like a simp – he’s a perfect example of a narcissistic codependent.

Even within this short exchange, several red flags pop up:

• She lied about her weight with old photos, and he said nothing,
• She badgered him about his income, and he allowed it,
• She ignored him all night, texting on her phone instead,

…and he still sent her a text the next day saying “It was great to meet you!”

Codependence is a topic which The Rawness has covered at some length.  They are the inverse companion to the narcissist, giving the latter the attention they crave, while secretly considering themselves to be the superior one.  They seek out abusers to prove their sainthood through tolerance, and and are ultimately narcissistic in their own, covert way.

For example, although narcissists act like they think they’re better than everyone and have superior, arrogant attitudes, the fact remains that they crave admiration the way a heroin addict craves heroin. So even though the narcissist acts superior to everyone around them, they secretly crave and need the attention and approval of these so-called inferiors, and if deprived of it will begin to act pathetic and even plead and subjugate themselves if desperate enough.

Also, codependents may be considered to be self-effacing person with self-subjugating tendencies. However, there is definitely a quiet grandiosity among codependents, and subtle ways in which they think they’re superior to others. For example, when the narcissist tells the codependent a sob story about how everyone else has mistreated her before she met the codependent, the codependent believes he will be the one who will finally treat the narcissist right and “save” her. He has no trouble believing that he will prove himself to be the best partner the narcissist ever had, no matter what the background or attributes of her ex-es.

This is precisely how ToastedCookieOats is behaving.  He not only tolerated her bad behaviour (plenty of men might have put up with it to avoid making a scene), he actively encouraged it by praising her the next day.  She correctly interpreted his second message as a passive-aggressive attempt to flip the script: instead of conforming to her narrative (popular girl with endless options), he’s the long-suffering Nice Guy Male Feminist™ who’s using her as a prop to prove his virtue.  Then – as if this whole situation weren’t embarrassing enough – he went onto Reddit/Cringe (a subreddit named after its users, rather than the links they post) and openly displayed this dysfunctional situation for all and sundry to see, as if he didn’t come off looking just as terrible as her!

The question as to whether or not he’s Beta can’t be answered until his codependence is addressed.  Were he to achieve mental health he could wind up anywhere on the hierarchy.  At present, he’s actively seeking out women who exhibit bad behaviour; he craves their abuse, because that makes him the good guy – the superior.  And by showing off this great ‘virtue’ after weeks of their selfishness, he can drive them into a spiral of rage – and that’s where he gets his identity.

When feminists complain about men, they’re complaining about the sort of men who surround them: nasty pieces of work like ToastedCookieOats, “nice guys” whom they’re battling them in a zero-sum game of ego dominance.  So when you hear feminists complain about men who give women orgasms – there is a certain demented logic to it all.  It’s nothing but narcissists crashing into narcissists in our narcissistic age.  Better not to engage with any of them.

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