The Barstool Right
The Barstool Right
Toward a principled laddishness
This essay is an attempt to define a more principled version of Barstool Conservatism, which has hitherto lacked any clear formulation or inspirational mythic vision for the world. It tends to evoke very normie “grillpill” vibes, and is too often used as a synonym for libertarian or South Park Republican.
I aim to distance the term from these connotations, from Dave Portnoy, and from sportsball more generally, and articulate a comprehensive and consistent worldview that appeals to successful and civicminded secular straight men in the prime years of life.
To that end I have three primary goals for this piece:
Formalize the basic assumptions, heuristics, and ethical principles undergirding the Barstool Right ideology
Detail some specific changes that Barstoolers would like to see in public policy, discourse norms, and cultural sensibilities
Create a framework for building a good faith coalition with adjacent interest groups, including religious conservatives like Dave Greene and
, anti-woke gays like and , and reactionary feminists like and .
The Fourteen Principles
(P1) Sexual Essentialism - Men and women have different capabilities on average, as well as vastly different experiences that make us look at the world in completely different ways. Downstream of this are lower-order differences in values, priorities, hopes and dreams, and fears and anxieties. Society would be better off if we became a lot less androgynous and stopped pretending men and women are the same. We should talk openly about sex differences and accept them as a fact of life.
(P2) Inevitability of Patriarchy - Men display considerably more variance than women in most personality traits, which means the most intelligent and agentic people are usually men. Combined with the greater male propensity for aggression and risk-taking (not to mention obvious differences in physical strength and size), this ensures society will always be ruled a cadre of elite men. Even the most capable women like Hilldawg and Cleopatra tend to crumple like a tissue when squaring off in direct conflict with the likes of Donald Trump or Caesar Augustus. Distributionally speaking, women as a class just don’t have what it takes to rule. We must therefore talk about society with the assumption that elite men will always be in the driver’s seat and that their interests will always be privileged in some sense.
(P3) Demands of Chivalry - As a high status man, you have a basic moral obligation to protect both the women in your life and any lower status man who formally affiliates with you. You also have an obligation to represent their interests alongside your own when operating in public life. When you meet this obligation women and subordinate men will usually be very happy to submit to your judgment, but when you fail to do so they will feel betrayed and unprotected, and this inevitably causes a devasting breakdown in social order. Per P2, elite men must accept (and in practice all of them do) that they’ll always be in charge, and must game out the right concessions to extend other groups to best cultivate a productive and harmonious society.
(P4) Behavioral Elasticity of Men - Women are very agreeable to social convention and usually do as they’re told by society. Even the laziest and least conscientious girls are more likely to do their homework and follow the rules than similarly indolent boys, which is why modern dopamine traps have had a less pronounced impact on female educational attainment and professional success. Men respond more strongly to the brute material incentive structure, and are much less likely to work hard if they don’t feel like something’s in it for them. This means—very crucially—that our social policy and cultural mores should be calibrated with a focus on male behavior.
(P5) Longhouse Bad - We need a material and cultural incentive structure optimized for increasing the agency, energy, and grit of men in the “malleable middle”—think roughly the fortieth to ninetieth percentiles of ability. This requires investing in a more competitive, uncomfortable, and dare I say vital civilization. We must go to war with the stultifying Willendorfian impulse for a gentler and cozier society. We can and should give that sort of life to our women and old people, but men in the prime of life should never be allowed to be comfortable. It makes them miserable and worthless and at scale gives us a Wall-E society. Young men should be encouraged to constantly take risks—not by coddling them when they fail, but by venerating them when they succeed, while drastically raising the ceiling on individual success.
(P6) Sex Roles Good - Due to evopsych factors we’re all painfully familiar with, men and women desire fundamentally different things in a relationship. Women want to feel protected / cherished, men want to feel respected / needed; men are afraid of being betrayed, women of being abandoned; the masculine tragedy is disposability, the feminine tragedy replaceability. Obviously exceptions exist, and some outliers will always feel pressured into sex roles that don’t jive with their natural preferences. But all cultural norms are reinforced in a feedback loop, and we must reject all advocacy for outliers that practically immiserates the heteronormie majority.
(P7) Sex Roles are Flexible - The precise nature of sex roles varies across societies due to “cultural” elements downstream of genetics, technology, climate, and other material conditions. In any society you’ll also see lots of variance in sex roles across different ethnic groups and social classes. Something that codes as masculine to one group might code as faggy or barbaric to another, and these things can change very quickly. It is therefore silly to think sex roles can ever exist in stasis, and efforts to culturally retvrn to the precise sex roles of the 1950s etc. are wrongheaded. But it’s equally dumb to think sex roles are “socially constructed,” because such construction is always downstream of biology / hard material factors. We must instead think proactively about how to control these factors as best we can to create a beautiful and functional system of sex roles suited for the twenty-first century.
(P8) Heterosexuality Good - On a very basic level, men and women need each other to self actualize as adult humans. Without men in their life, women live like children, and without women in their life men live like animals. A crucial part of animus / anima integration is learning how to maintain a productive and harmonious relationship with people of the opposite sex. Meanwhile, society obviously needs a stable TFR to persist into successive generations. It is therefore vital that society invest in a healthy and stable culture of heterosexuality where boy-girl romance and sexuality is venerated as a sacred ideal.
(P9) Sexual Enmity Bad - There is almost nothing more dysfunctional and socially maladaptive than ginning up resentment and hatred between the sexes. It makes everyone miserable and leads to hugely negative outcomes on both an individual and societal level. Anyone who traffics in this kind of language, whether they’re an incel or sex negative feminist, deserves to be ostracized from respectable society. Naked contempt for the opposite sex should be outside the Overton Window.
(P10) Encourage Marriage - Most people are happiest in a stable monogamous relationship, hence the development of marriage as a persistent social technology across many diverse societies. The overall social incentive structure should therefore be calibrated to encourage marriage for most people, and we need to make it easier for the average heterosexual to find a suitable partner for a monogamous union. The modern rate of inceldom is much too high, and measures should be taken to make things easier for middle SMV guys (who are the ones actually suffering under the Tinder paradigm; low SMV guys wouldn’t be successful in any ecology). The average low-mid status woman should likewise be gently pushed into more chaste behavior (though this is already happening, so I don’t think we really need to do anything—if anything it behooves us to somewhat restrain the recent overcorrection).
(P11) Traditional Degeneracy - Due to the Coolidge Effect you can’t expect most elite men to remain perfectly monogamous, and you need some cohort of highly promiscuous women to absorb their libidinal energy so as to keep normie women sexually reserved for normie men and discourage maladaptive trends like harem-keeping. That can look like hookup culture among elites, prostitution, or mistress-keeping / sugaring / goomahs, but some such accommodation is always necessary to maintain a stable and enjoyable sexual ecology for the average person. Women who choose this lifestyle therefore need to be respected as an essential component of a well-ordered sexual ecology. But it must also be acknowledged this life isn’t remotely scalable to the average woman, and especially in online spaces we need to embrace an esoteric tolerance of promiscuity among elites while exoterically preaching a slower life strategy to the masses. A lot of this will involve simply being a lot more private about these discussions (hence me publishing this on Substack and not on Twitter).
(P12) Fringe Nonconformity - Promiscuous women, homosexuals, and gender benders shouldn’t be bullied or shoved back in the closet, but their behavior also shouldn’t be “mainstreamed.” Context is key here—nonconformists and degenerates should have spaces for themselves in the urban core of cities where they set the tone (and children aren’t permitted), but outside these spaces they need to be more circumspect and abide by flyover chud sensibilities. They must tone down their behavior in any space dominated by low openness suburbanites, and should mask almost all of it around old / religious people and especially children.
(P13) Curb Rakishness - Certain women are off limits for rakish behavior. High status promiscuous men must never sexually pursue a woman who is married with children or belongs to a close-knit religious community. You must restrain your advances to unmarried women who have consciously chosen a more free-wheeling lifestyle. When you go after the trad’s women you just make him hate you, destabilize society, and undermine the coalition we’re trying to build. It should likewise be incredibly stigmatized to go after the women of your subordinates, clients, or personal network. That said, it’s entirely kosher to steal the girlfriend / childless wife of a fellow elite degenerate.
(P14) Center Intergenerational Amity - One of the most poisonous social ills of the modern world is the breakdown in intergenerational friendship. Young people need to interact with older people to gain wisdom and benefit from their experience and accumulated knowledge, while older people need to interact with young people to regularly update their priors and adequately understand how life on the ground is changing outside their self-selected bubble. This usually needs to occur in a sex-segregated environment where people can speak candidly about the opposite sex without the risk of crossed wires or hurt feelings.
What do we want?
Below are a few policy and socio-cultural initiatives for the Barstool Right that follow from the above principles, and which I believe are achievable in the medium term.
Moderation on Abortion Policy - Barstoolers don’t want abortion illegal should we ever knock someone up in a night of Dionysian excess, but we’d also feel really shitty if this was ever necessary. This is because we do extend the fetus some moral dignity, and are repulsed by the Left’s increasing comfort with flagrant infanticide. And for a long time (before the GOP’s recent overreach) this was also the sensibility of the median American. I think Louis CK sums this attitude up best:
We simply need to depolarize the issue of abortion, and shouldn’t tolerate this simplistic Manichean discourse between infanticidal prochoice extremists on one hand and prolife maximalists who push for politically unsustainable six week bans on the other.
My personal stance is that abortion should be legal in the first trimester and banned thereafter with exceptions for rape and incest, but I am entirely willing to form a coalition with people to the right of me here. I only demand that they take things one step at a time and work on changing hearts and minds on the ground instead of provoking a thermostatic backlash from women and normalizing infanticide by adopting rabidly intransigent views on the matter.
Burn Down the Longhouse - We need to stop emasculating young men in primary and secondary education. It is deeply unfair to shame boys for fidgeting around or not doing their fake and gay homework when the surrounding incentive structure is so horribly maladaptive and the culture so disengaging. The education of boys needs to involve regular physical excursions to burn off energy and harden them up, as well as high stakes competition with other young men to adequately prepare them for the reality of masculine conflict. Around puberty we also need to sex segregate education for most classes to take the edge off stressful intersexual status hierarchies.
The most immediate obstacle to this initiative is that teachers primarily come out of the cohort of young women most heavily indoctrinated by libtarded social constructivist ideology. But these women are also very agreeable by nature, so I don’t see this as an issue. You simply need to hammer sex realism into the educational infrastructure by legislative and executive fiat, and can facilitate this by i.e. offering teachers a $5k annual raise if they attend a comprehensive training session on sexual differences in cognition / behavior. DeSantis already did something similar with training for civics education, so we already have a workable model for this.
Privatize Marriage - Marriage is broken these days and many men have tragically little faith in it as an institution. If you are a financially and sexually successful man then a legally recognized marriage doesn’t offer you much. The tax benefits are outsized by the legal exposure, especially because most women see getting an ironclad prenup as a hostile act. This creates an asymmetry where marriage is usually much more attractive to women than men, with the exception of low status men in more traditional communities wanting to “lock her down” etc.
My suggestion is that we scrap the whole thing as a public institution and instead let people define their marriage contracts on a case-by-case basis. Before being recognized for tax / inheritance purposes, every marriage contract should be signed off on by a judge who’ll require both parties to confirm they’ve reviewed all conditions with counsel and assent to the terms of the marriage agreement. The private marital contract should then be held as a sacred and inviolable institution in our society.
Trads and reactionary feminists should support this because in practice it will allow for much more robust and meaningful marital contracts than can otherwise exist in the modern world. You can police things like adultery, financial profligacy, and addiction with a lot more rigor. Each religious community can also have its own “standard marital contract,” and this will enable a pluralist traditionalism that makes everyone much happier in practice.
You can also have parallel contracts for mistresses etc. that ensure women on the side receive adequate protection and make the culture around this practice less seedy.
Embrace The Chase - We need to make it significantly easier for men to pursue women romantically, and this means taking a chainsaw to sex negative feminism and ankle biting cock blocking incel culture. You can’t have a functional heterosexuality if asking a woman out in public is seen as “creepy” or inappropriate, and we need to do whatever it takes to move things in a better direction.
To that end, we should cultivate female / gay allies and demand they tone police Lisa Simpson HR types who shame straight men for displays of sexual exuberance in “inappropriate” situations. The poisonous concept of “appropriate” must be set on fire when it comes to sex and love. It’s not creepy to ask out your waitress, and if you think it is then you are responsible for social decay and ought to be bullied.
A big part of this impulse will be destigmatizing relationships in the workplace. These days white collar office workers are repulsively effeminate nebbishes who almost never ask out their female coworkers for fear of being #MeToo’d. We need to obliterate this horrible culture by abolishing all provisions surrounding sexual harassment in the workplace. As I have argued to longtime foil
, this will actually benefit the average woman, and I suspect if you put me in charge of propaganda I could get most women supporting this initiative.We likewise need to destigmatize age gaps in hetero relationships. These days it raises eyebrows in many circles for a 30 year old man to date a 23 year-old girl, and this is incredibly toxic and retarded. It also doesn’t make sense in a world where young women are starting to significantly outperform their male peers but still desire higher status male partners. We need to push opposition to age gaps firmly outside the Overton Window and make it laughable to shame heterosexual couples in these relationships.
Stigmatize Swipe Apps- This goes hand in hand with the above proposition. Swiping apps like Tinder and Hinge are based on the Grindr model and are generally not suitable for heterosexuals. They don’t give women sufficient information to make a good decision, so gals end up applying simple heuristics like excluding all guys under 6’0, and this obviously skyrockets the incel rate (particularly because straight men are horrible at taking selfies and are always worse looking in their profile pics than IRL).
But the incels err in thinking this is some conspiracy of women and chads against them. Most girls obviously don’t want to be pumped and dumped by West Elm Caleb. They don’t want to assess men based purely on looks. They don’t like the swiping apps any more than we do. They’d much prefer to be asked out in person by guys they actually like, but this is just not happening, especially as Zoomers increasingly eschew alcohol consumption. When you say it’s creepy to ask girls out IRL, only creepy guys will do so. And so as it stands the majority of young people date through the apps, which has really terrible social consequences.
In an ideal world we’d obviously just ban Tinder and Hinge (also gayer apps like Bumble), but this is never going to happen. So I suggest we lean into the resentment that already exists towards the apps from both sexes and mobilize that into a stigma against them to accompany the renewed impulse to destigmatize asking girls out IRL. This will require effective propaganda and lots of grassroots argumentation, but I believe it is nothing short of essential if we’re going to solve The Incel Question.
Curb Porn Addiction - I sincerely believe the overwhelming majority of guys these days are at least moderately addicted to internet porn, and a lot of them are severely addicted. This has created an epidemic of erectile dysfunction and paraphilias in the youth while draining young guys of vitality and agency. It’s become a crisis comparable to opium use in China or alcoholism in 19th century America, and we desperately need something like the Temperance Movement to adequately contain it.
But unlike Temperance, this effort can’t become coded as longhoused/schoolmarmish; it must remain masculine and vitalist. Thankfully, the NoFap movement has already developed such a culture, and can easily be co-opted by the Barstool Right. We must embrace and scale up the institutions NoFap has already built and start treating porn addiction as a serious public health issue that ought to command the same level of compassion and civicminded problem-solving energy as drug addiction.
It’s going to be a long time before we muster the political capital and grassroots support to actually ban porn, but in the interim I suggest we allow men to voluntarily submit to an onerous IP block on all porn websites and major VPNs, and if any website / VPN doesn’t comply we’ll send in the FBI to shut them down or have the FTC drown them in fines. We should also invest resources in creating zero cost rehabilitation centers for porn addicts where one can work remotely and use the internet for other activities but there’s absolutely no opportunity to access porn. This can be funded with a “sin tax” on porn studios and streaming websites.
Legalize Mutual Combat - This is more of a frivolous / fun one, but I think it would have enormously positive downstream effects on culture. We all agree men are too soft and bitchy these days, and that this stems from never being hit / being too reluctant to engage each other in physical combat, but it’s hard to change this on a cultural level given the existing legal structure in which participants in streetfights can get charged with serious crimes like assault. We should pass federal legislation decriminalizing mutual combat so it becomes legally and culturally acceptable for guys to take it outside. This will result in a few injuries here and there, but in most cases two untrained skinnyfat guys aren’t going to seriously hurt each other, and in situations where someone *might* get hurt the guys will be more cautious.
What will we give?
As I frequently say, politics is transactional and coalitional, and achieving any of the initiatives listed above will require strategic flexibility and compromise with other groups in a way that doesn’t contradict our fundamental vision for the world.
To that end, successful Barstoolers in their thirties and forties first need to bring young men on board by committing to practical mentorship. We need to teach these guys how to get laid and make money so they start to think of themselves as winners. This will instantly make them side with us, because Barstoolism is the natural and obvious sexual ideology of the secular and upwardly mobile young man.
We can then make specific and targeted appeals to adjacent interest groups to create a pluralistic right wing coalition capable of effective action on shared issues.
To the trads…
CC:
,My good sirs,
Obviously we have lots of substantive disagreements on things like abortion and surrogacy. I’m not asking for you to cuck on those issues, because I know you won’t.
I *am* asking for you to pursue your objectives in a strategically sound manner by not wasting political capital on unsustainable bans that only mobilize ferocious backlash from the Pantsuit Brigade. I myself would much prefer a shorter window of legal abortion, but you can’t just impose a six week ban out of the blue when there isn’t an appetite for it, or you will just get thousands of babies butchered in the third trimester.
So please let’s work together to move in a more productive direction on this issue and others. When it comes to things like dopamine traps and porn addiction in particular I am certain we have a lot of common ground.
On a personal level, I recognize that you disagree with certain aspects of my lifestyle. To that I’ll just say I won’t talk about those things around you, and will make sure our coalition partners follow suit. I will also do my best to ensure that your women and children are never forced to confront the ugliest facets of modernity.
In return I ask that you reproach other tradcons whenever they shame right wing urbanites for not being married with children. This is maladaptive and only frays the coalition for no good reason. Please understand that the vast majority of us *plan* to take a wife one day, but everyone is ultimately on his own path, and finding a marriageable girl is significantly harder when you aren’t a believer and can’t organically affiliate with a religious community.
At any rate, I hope my earnest commitment to civility, alongside a basic respect for temperamental pluralism, can facilitate productive collaboration between us.
Your obedient servant,
Walter Bismarck
To the reactionary feminists…
CC:
,My dear ladies,
I understand your issues better than most, which is why I famously annoyed most of Hanania-adjacent Substack by siding with you on agreeableness and consent against
’s more individualist sex positive position.Regretfully, I was kind of mean to her about this, because I’ve had a lot of personal experiences that have convinced me Zoomer women are experiencing a genuine crisis in their ability to demonstrate meaningful agency in their sexual choices, and I am quite frustrated by how older generations seem to lack any understanding of this. That is why in my recent manifesto I advocated for the return of Breach of Promise laws and even floated a “rakishness” civil charge for coerced consent situations.
To put it bluntly, I want to be an “Uncle Tom” for your position against rakish guys who take an individualist stance on consent norms in bad faith because they personally want to continue taking advantage of this dynamic.
Some people will object that this contravenes the whole point of Barstoolism, but this is an incredibly smooth-brained take. There is nothing anti-Barstool about having a chivalrous impulse towards women, so long as this impulse isn’t longhoused or anti-vitalist. Per my formulation above, a lot of RxFem ideas actually follow quite organically as corollaries to Barstool ideology. Barstoolers don’t want to destigmatize pressuring girls into sex or make excuses for rapacious pornographers. We just don’t want to be shamed for dating a grad student or talking about tiddies with the boys.
Barstoolers are superbly positioned to support RxFem positions re: how female agreeableness undermines life outcomes in situations involving casual sex and pornography, and will have lots of credibility with the guys who would ordinarily call your rhetoric longhoused. We can get 4chan/reddit type guys on board with your program and push them away from their individualist and libertarian sensibilities.
In exchange I’d like for you to use your own credibility with more normie women to push back aggressively on the worst excesses of sex negative feminism and help Barstoolers destigmatize the kind of exuberant and assertive male heterosexuality that will help create better life outcomes for both sexes.
So when you hear a woman calling a guy a pedophile for dating a 24 year-old, or saying a dude is creepy for asking out a waitress / talking about Sydney Sweeney’s boobs, can you please call that woman retarded?
Also will one of you please write about the early puberty thing? We need to get people aware of this and mobilize normie women against endocrine disruptors.
Thank you kindly for your consideration,
Wally B.
To the anti-woke gay dudes…
CC:
,Hey fellers,
I recognize and empathize with the complexity of your position.
On one hand you want to live in an energetic and vital society that rewards excellence and is honest about the nature of reality, and progressivism is actively hostile to all of those impulses. But you likewise find it difficult to build a coalition with social conservatives, many of whom are still very hostile to gays and will always be suspicious of you no matter how many boxes you check. I’m sure it’s maddening.
But I think Barstoolers are superbly positioned to serve as an honest broker between guys like you and social conservatives. Gays and tradcons probably can’t ever trust each other 100%, but I think both of you can trust Barstoolers to collaborate with you in good faith and ensure that promises are kept.
Ultimately if we’re gonna defeat the Woke Left we desperately need the numbers tradcons bring, but our side can also benefit tremendously from your disproportionate wealth, influence, and cultural clout with Lisa Simpson type straight women. We can also use you to go after Corporate Memphis Buttigays in situations where such women would perceive it as bullying / bad faith coming from a straight dude.
But to do this effectively our prospective coalition needs to figure out ways of moving past intractable conflicts on very spicy topics like gay adoption and surrogacy. And I won’t pretend to have a good answer here.
As I expressed to
in my recent discussion with her, I will always stand by the right of exceptional people like Jeff and Trace or my BFF to do this, but given the worrying statistics we’ve all seen, I also feel like there should be a higher bar for gay people when it comes to becoming a parent. We can’t pretend that homosexuality and heterosexuality are interchangeable, and exceptions need to be exceptional… but exceptional exceptions are also worth taking a stand for.This position obviously risks alienating both sides and destroying any such coalition in its infancy, but it’s how I honestly feel. Ultimately I think it’s the only sensible point of equilibrium on something like this.
But perhaps we can’t reach an agreement on this topic because the stakes are simply too high. In that case I suggest we do our best to simply ignore the issue until it becomes salient, and continue to collaborate directionally where our issues do overlap.
I’m quite optimistic about the prospects of this, as I suspect that anti-woke gay dudes are already quite used to the idea that the world is a contradictory and messy place, and will find it relatively easy to get on board with a Barstool alliance.
Love you guys (no homo),
Walt
This is the first time I’ve attempted to articulate this vision in any systematic way.
As such, I reserve the right to refine certain elements of this manifesto over time as my thinking develops and coalitional prospects change.
But for now I look forward to hearing your feedback on my ideas.
*ahem, ahem* [gets ready to speak in MLK voice]: "I have a dream that, one day, the world will accept that an autistic, semi-polygamous Alt-Righter who makes genius music videos; and a well-bred 2nd generation Tamilian faggot-chad who nerds out about esoteric algebraic theorems; can, indeed, be BFFs. I have a dream that their commonalities – being frustrated late-Millennials, born and raised in the American Southwest, with 95%ile openness, and hatred of longhouse morality – should be exalted and that their brotherhood shall be publicly celebrated without ostracism or sanction. I have a dream that they would find a common cause in mercilessly tearing apart the Civil Rights regime, and in bringing a liberating breath once again the to BarstoolBro forces of this beautiful country we call America..."
I have also considered privatized marriage contracts but this will quickly erode due to hardwired sympathy for women. They prefer to work outside of formal authority which is why rape has been replaced by more nebulous sexual assault, why women often take to social media or whisper rather than using the legal system to adjudicate justice. The legal system will cave to their pressure. Wherever there is formal power, women will find a way through the informal. This is not a criticism. It’s a compliment. I respect the ability.