Manipulative Women: A Warning for Romantic Men
Image credit: A trompe-l’oeil vanitas still life, Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts (Flemish, c. 1630 – c. 1675). Public domain.
Herein lies a particularly insidious and necessary warning for romantic men because they are so drawn to the beauty and vulnerabilities of feminine creatures. We underestimate a woman’s ability to destroy us with the power we give her. We trust that she will naturally only do beautiful things with it because we perceive her as a purely beautiful creature. It is imperative that we retain the ability to spot toxicity brewing within her and the perversion of her beautiful feminine nature.
Women, feeling weak and vulnerable, might learn to exercise power through social manipulation. This makes up for the overt physical power and leadership authority that men naturally harness. Women most often accomplish this feat with their looks and sexual appeal, the natural attraction they wield for ugly men inhabiting a grey, dull internal world who are drawn to color when they sense it. The manipulative woman plants beautiful dreams in men’s heads about a future they desire, a future where all that color and beauty will permanently be theirs and they will never have to return to the natural state of ugliness that is theirs to occupy by default. The successful ones master the art of telling men exactly what they want to hear, showing them obvious physical signs of interest, and leading them on with little glimmers of hope and progress toward the goal of masculine Shangri-la.
The most trusting and idealistic men make for the best targets for manipulative women. Romantics, in particular, need to be wary of the threat they pose and not fall for their tricks, no matter how beautiful the lie may seem.
Already, many women will rise to arms defending the behaviors I have described here as essential parts of their femininity, of “just being a woman.” It’s indicative of the systemic problem we are facing: that women see the worst aspects of their undeveloped nature as goals to strive for, characteristics that define them and should be cherished and compensated for because of how much worth they bring to the world. Men do the same, of course, regarding their own toxic, immature behaviors. Being a crass and horny brute is not what makes you a man, but you will continue to be that way so long as you have been conditioned to take the easy path of your masculine development.
How Women Get This Way
It begins with the innocent expectation of special treatment for being a woman, particularly an attractive young woman. Taken as a lifelong absolute, it breeds an abominable self of entitlement in a woman. She comes to accept that men, and even the world itself, are resources to serve her. She is a trophy to be won. Man is a machine built to win her if he is up to it.
You’ll see hints of this in her everyday behavior if you know what to look for. But you might never dream of how far she can take it under the most desperate internal circumstances. In the beginning, you see them only as unfortunate aberrations upon a deep and beautiful soul. She has managed to keep it under control around you, to show you enough of what you want to see in her, what she needs you to see in her, to get what she needs from you. You suspend your disbelief about the story because it is so goddamn attractive to you compared to the alternative, the world you knew without her beautiful feminine influence.
Eventually, there will come a switch: a dramatic change in personality, priorities, or working terms of your relationship, and you will wonder if you even know this person at all because how they behave now is so incompatible with the person they were (apparently) being before. One version of the person you love must be a lie, as they cannot coexist in the same human vessel. So, which one is the story? And which the reality?
Perhaps you are not dealing with a person at all anymore. Maybe you never were but a machine all along, a psychological program that bends people and circumstances around it to support the story it tells about itself. It’s a survival mechanism in a pretty package. So long as it fears its own destruction, it will suppress any emotions or information contradicting its comfort.
You can never have an equal and fair relationship on these terms. You cannot fix such a person. You cannot save them (but they will string you along for as long as possible with the hope that you can). They will use your greatest strengths, such as your empathy and desire to do good under all circumstances, against you.
You must work against your humanitarian instincts toward someone you love in these moments. Avoid the temptation that she will get better, that she will somehow learn how to love and treat you. That’s how they keep you entangled in the story. It’s how they string you along for the ride far longer than would be reasonable despite all the warnings. You cannot negotiate reality with someone who has embraced fantasy about who they are and the world they live in. Their only imperative is to perpetuate the narrative that serves their ego, social identity, and material comfort. It’s their survival mechanism hopped up on psychedelics and steroids.
There must be dealbreakers in place. There must be reliable tests of character and action that, if failed, undoubtedly reveal the truth about the woman you are intimately connected to. If you ever realize that you would never treat the woman you love the way she is treating you, you will have also realized that you are occupying fundamentally different roles in each other’s lives, telling different stories and playing different games. That’s why your disappointment was inevitable from the start. She could never actually be the girl you thought she was, the girl she pretended to be.
“You may be smart,
But you don't have a heart,
Like the girl you pretended to be.”
Fastball, The Girl You Pretended to Be
However, before you judge a woman too quickly or harshly, remember that we are all on a developmental journey. Just because she currently displays some facets of immaturity (indeed, it’s inevitable that she does) does not mean they are fundamental to who she is and that she can’t grow out of them. And even if these aberrations always stick around in some form, they don’t have to define who she is and how she interacts with you—just as yours don’t have to define you.
I imagine that even the wisest and most developed men on Earth still have some lingering desire to sleep with bikini models, for instance. It’s still a visceral appeal to them, no matter how juvenile it seems in the light of everything else they have experienced and that now defines them. There’s no inherent harm in appreciating a nice pair of tits for what it is. But that’s all it is: a momentary stimulus only briefly worth indulging if it provides some cathartic benefit. The difference with the undeveloped man is that he prioritizes such sophomoric impulses over meaning and development. He is their slave, pulled around in chaos by their distraction instead of consciously setting his own destination.
The Toxic Feminine Defense Mechanism
The default recurring justification for toxic feminine behavior is personal empowerment and self-expression. You’ll hear it in a thousand different forms. A woman who cheats on her loving partner because it is “just what she needs to do to feel beautiful or like a sexually fulfilled woman.” Blowing off explicit plans and agreements, often without notice of any kind, because they don’t “serve” how she feels anymore. These girlboss moments of ditching responsibility are reinforced by a woman’s community of other women who seek personal empowerment through similar disastrous means.
The undeveloped feminine mind is a hopelessly flighty thing, barely able to retain long-term memories and associations, instead subject to whatever it happens to be feeling, even without understanding why it feels that way. It rejects introspection and conscious rationalization. This is one primary reason why men can find women’s behavior so incomprehensible at times. The masculine relies on a memory of the history of things, patterns of action, and agreements held between parties. And then there is the universe of randomness and chaos that lies beyond that mold and cannot be predicted or understood. Woman more readily casts herself beyond those ordered confines without requiring a reason to.
Undeveloped women can change their minds on a dime about something important, something long-planned and prepared for, disregarding how it affects others. They can forget years of personal history and the buildup of expectations when the responsibility of keeping them becomes too much to bear. The masculine mind has difficulty grasping this because it is never random. Even in its destructive moments, it is never without some semblance of reason, however weak the justification. It can never amount to “That’s just how I feel right now, and that’s enough for me.”
An actual justification will only be invented later, in retrospect. Memories will morph to align with a narrative that makes her chaotic behavior seem perfectly natural and reasonable. It’s shocking how quickly one’s personal history can be forgotten and replaced by something that might be the opposite of what actually occurred. This, again, contributes to the sense that men and women are sometimes inhabiting totally different realities and are forever doomed to misunderstanding and division.