Dean Abbott is a chaplain and author of two books as well as the Substack blog The Anchor & the Waves. He is also an ass.

To be fair, that title is a bit click-baity, and I don’t really know for a fact that Dean Abbott is an ass. I’ve only recently become aware of his existence, but ever since, I have noticed an unfortunately high density of inane takes coming from his account. So if that is not indicative of the type of man he is, well then…my bad, I suppose.

But I don’t think that I would have taken much interest in Abbott if he hadn’t been so reminiscent of so many other men I’ve encountered over the years, men for whom I have developed a profound distaste. And I think now is as appropriate a moment as I’m likely to find to explain why. Let’s begin with a recent tweet.

The Red Pill has become a guiding mythology for broken insecure men who think the aim of life is never to be duped or fooled.

They imagine the world is full of vicious women, and they think if they can make it to old age without ever being victimized by one, they'll be able to… https://t.co/JGyHxyDd9k

— Dean Abbott (@DeanAbbott) March 10, 2024

In case you don’t feel like checking it out on Twitter, the full text reads:

The Red Pill has become a guiding mythology for broken insecure men who think the aim of life is never to be duped or fooled. They imagine the world is full of vicious women, and they think if they can make it to old age without ever being victimized by one, they’ll be able to pat themselves on the back and console themselves with the knowledge that never, not once were they a simp or a beta. They can’t see that their paranoia and cynicism costs them their souls and that the weakness and fear they telegraph ruin their relationships.

There are two kinds of Christians that I really don’t care for very much. The first is the John Pavlovitz type who really probably doesn’t deserve the name “Christian” because I’m fairly certain the only thing he worships is his own ego. I’d put Ben Cremer in this category as well as any number of even lesser-known and like-minded personalities. These are the Steven Pinkerite types, the “progressive” Christians. They’re “progressive” in the sense that they have subordinated Christianity to liberalism (or occasionally socialism or communism) and called it progress because when you’ve arbitrarily decided on the outcome of history, well then you get to always claim that you’re on the right side of it. Huzzah!

But there is a second type that I detest even more: the boomerite (though necessarily proper boomer) wannabe leader-of-men. They are middle-aged or elderly (as suggested by the name), almost always fat. They have effete, high-pitched voices and a general flair for the dramatic. In fact, I have often come away with the impression that more than anything, they are thwarted thespians. And the subject that these thwarted thespians most often wish to opine on is the state of men, particularly young men. And I would certainly not have any objection to that in principle; the state of young men today deserves more than a little bit of opining. But what makes every dripping word out of these fake guru’s mouths utterly insufferable is that it is all the smuggest fart-huffing bullshit imaginable.

Dean’s tweet is an illustrative potpourri of boomer cluelessness and effete linguistic histrionics. The Red Pill is a “mythology” for “broken insecure men”? This type of front-loading is typical of those who have no desire to understand what they are talking about. Make no mistake, Dean has no interest in reaching these men. He doesn’t care about them and they are not the audience for these tweets. This is nowhere more clearly visible than in his interactions with anyone bothering to give him even the mildest pushback.

No, this is meant purely for Dean to assert his own righteousness and attempt to shame men into thinking that if they entertain certain doubts about the dating market and the wisdom of even trying to get married, they are losers. Is it a bit uncharitable for me to assign these motivations to Dean without knowing his inner character? Obviously, but if it’s good enough for Dean…

And I’m not overly fond of the Red Pill crowd myself, not withstanding some of their obviously correct diagnoses of the problems with the modern dating and marriage market. In no way is the RP a “mythology.” They are simply the long overdue reaction to analysis of the trends in the changing material circumstances between the sexes. Does this analysis often become excessive and sometimes hysterical? Yes. But Red Pillers should not even wield the kind of cultural significance that they do. The reason that they do is because of the unqualified failure of those like Dean to answer one very simple question: why should men bother?

Why should men bother getting married to women who will appreciate them less and expect more from them? Why should men bother ‘growing up’ and putting themselves forward in a culture that increasingly treats them as dupes for making the attempt. Most fundamentally, why should men be selfless in a selfish world?

Those like Dean invariably answer with something about men’s sacred duty:

“The universal structure of masculine and feminine forces, while obscured, stands unshaken. Part of that obscuring means men themselves have forgotten their unique power: the power to enter in a situation, to rescue those who are trapped and to lead them to something better.”

This is said after having just explained that (among other depressing facts) women make up the majority of college students, while men make up the majority of suicides, and it serves to illustrate the permanent bug in the boomerite brain–they have absolutely no solution that is not some version of “everything would be ok if men today would just MAN harder.” Be more selfless! Who cares if you get taken for all you’re worth in divorce court? Who cares if you find yourself on the wrong end of a cancel mob? Certainly you shouldn’t care about what happens to you. After all, no one else does.

“The masculine call is clear. Rather than nursing our wounds, we must offer ourselves. Rather than retreat, we must enter in to the world, especially into the lives of women and children, full of love and the willingness to suffer to make them what they might be…”

I don’t know if anyone has coined the idea of a “masculine mystique” in the way of Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” but if not, then it is past time to formulate the concept. The masculine mystique presented by Dean Abbott and all those like him is one in which men’s sacred duty involves being a kind of perpetual motion machine, a limitless battery of altruism.

Selflessness makes sense under certain conditions, like it makes sense for an infantryman to charge his enemy under certain conditions:

And if a man will not charge under those circumstances when other men will, then he can justly be called a coward. But under other conditions–

–then charging can be an extremely stupid thing to do, and the man who refuses is less of a coward than the man who commands him to is an idiot. Certainly, diving into the dating world isn’t charging a machine gun, but the point remains: why should men bother?

In his predictably-purple prose, Dean insists that the only alternative to men’s turning themselves into an eternal, infinitely flexile bandaid on all the problems of the world is “shame and dishonor,” but Dean is not a man capable of shaming other men. There’s nothing admirable about the man who sits back and tells you that he hasn’t contended with your reality but is sure that if he had, he’d have done it better. In fact, there’s very little that I can find to be admirable about Dean to begin with. If telling men to just try harder was the answer, it would have worked by now. But God knows that won’t ever stop these fatuous bloviators from giving themselves endless pats on the back for breathlessly expounding on the “masculine role.”

Dean and the Red Pill

What makes Abbott’s relationship with the RP so interesting is how inept he is at even articulating his problems with it.

“He must understand that her asking him to ‘share his feelings more’ is her coded way of asking him to stop losing emotional control. If she believed that his talking about his feelings less would lead to fewer emotinal outbursts, she would be asking him to talk about his feelings less…[She] sees his talking about his feelings as a means to an end, and for her, any means will do so long as it gets her to the desired end which is peace and safety.”

And so the solution for men is that they need to develop the “emotional strength and fortitude” to talk about their feelings with their wives rather than having a meltdown. Except not so fast.

In the very next paragraph, after reiterating that all of this goes back to women being more cowardly–oh, I’m sorry– “experiencing greater baseline fear than men,” Dean explains that this means that women are also more affected by their partners’ anxieties. And so, if you share them with her, she will eventually lose respect and interest in you.

“A man who piles his worries on his wife will first find her distant, then indifferent, and finally cold. His use of her as a dumping ground for every fleeting concern will kill her desire to be near him as she begins to view him as someone more concerned with being comforted than comforting, more concerned with being protected than protecting. She will feel a need to be the strongest one in the relationship, and she will armor up.”

Uh…pardon? Did Andrew Tate just bully Dean off of his own keyboard? Minus the aforementioned flowery writing style, this is indistinguishable from anything one would find in the “manosphere.” But also, how does this square with his previous statements? Well, Dean has an answer for that; it’s just a bad one. Of course Dean can hide behind some of the language here by saying that it’s fine to share some feelings and concerns, just not “every fleeting” feeling/concern; but this is just a rhetorical trapdoor to get out of the obvious implication that this is essentially a prescription for men to hide their feelings from their spouses.

“Things are different for the man who has learned to process his feelings in a way that does not allow them to control him. The man not mastered by his feelings can talk about them, because he knows they are just feelings. His wife knows it too. Of the mature man, the wife will say ‘Sure, he has moods and sometimes he gets down, but those moods never last. He snaps out of them quickly.’”

The way to solve your emotional problems isn’t to talk to your wife and find solace and comfort with her. Lol, get fucked, you beta! The way to solve your emotional problems is to [drum roll please] have already solved them! And if you’re such a loser that you can’t do that, well then Dean can help. Oh, did I forget to mention that he’s a therapist–ahem– “counselor,” and that he hocks his wares on his blog?

It’s all so sleazy. Whether it’s Tate (I’m sorry, he’s the only significant Red Pill guy that I’m really familiar with so I’m going to be referring to him a lot) or Dean, the goal is still to find a way to monetize the suffering of young men by pretending to have the answers.

But at the same time, I feel the need to back up and ask, “Do you get it, yet?”

What Dean is saying without saying it is that women cannot possibly be asked to take responsibility for their own feelings. This man’s wife could not conceivably be asked to control or process her fear of her husband’s occasional outbursts. Neither can she actually give a damn about her husband. All of these things are, according to both Andrew Tate and Dean Abbott, completely beyond the scope of a woman. Don’t even bother asking. As Dean has made clear, the only reason that she wants to talk about his feelings is because she sees it as a means to an end. And that end is not the well-being of her husband but her own peace and security.

The RP assessment of “female nature” is that they are irredeemably self-interested and incapable of loving you for anything other than what you can provide for them in terms of material goods and safety. The whole “I am not a prize to be won” attitude of the 90s is dead and dusted. To the RP, women are precisely that: the prize that you get when you’ve made it financially and in terms of status. There is no idea of loyalty towards women because it is assumed that women have no loyalty towards their husbands or boyfriends. If they sense an opportunity to “trade up,” they will take it. This is what those in the RP mean when they talk about women’s “hypergamous nature.” The relationship between the sexes is envisioned as totally transactional.

And astonishingly, Dean, the anti-Red Pill chaplain has no serious disagreement to offer against this assessment. In Abbott World, women are equally incapable of being held to the same standards (moral or otherwise) as men. This, he will occasionally admit, is simply a matter of recognizing the “real differences between men and women,” which must be, both recognized AND appreciated.

Obviously, there are some differences that are worth appreciating. But Dean bends this fact until it is effectively relieving women of any moral accountability whatsoever. Any fault, provided that it can somehow be framed as an innate quality of being a woman, is justified with a shrug and a “Well, that’s just how they are and if you don’t like it then maybe you just don’t like women.” Concealed beneath this conjecture is the tacit admission that women don’t need to have any limits placed on their self-interest or their ability to demand that all spaces cater to them. But if being a “real man” means having a limitless willingness to sweep any and all moral failings of women under the rug, then Dean can keep it to himself.

Abbott will say exactly nothing about the ways in which women ought to change, because that’s actually risky. That can come with consequences. The moment you do so, you are pushing against some very twitchy nerve endings in our culture, and so Abbott stays far, far away from the subject of what women might do differently. Instead, he takes the safe path of haranguing men for not being more selfless. Every fault that a man can have is the result of their refusing to take responsibility for themselves. Every fault that a woman can have is the result of her nature.

Unworthy to Lead

But in outlining my own complaints with Abbott, I do have to admit that I do share more than a few of his ideas. I think that men should aspire to more than just a life of self-protection. I think that men (and women too) should aspire to be less selfish and more heroic. I think that the Red Pill and its more extreme offshoots like MGTOW (men swearing off women altogether and refusing to have significant relationships with them) are ultimately sterile ideologies. I think that life involves risk and that we should accept that and choose to play the odds anyway. Nevertheless, I also believe that Dean Abbott is a prick, and I think I’ve identified why.

It’s not just his bad argumentation or his boomerite arrogance. It’s that Dean’s vibe itself is all wrong. If he were sincere, if he were coming to the table saying something more like, “Hi men, I know everything is fucked and you are in rough shape, in large part because of my generation and things that we have done and our general carelessness in handling society, and I completely understand why you would want to check out completely because our culture is utterly bankrupt in nearly every sense other than literally…………….but is there any part of you that wants something more?”

Well, then I’d have a lot more patience with him. I might even be on his side. The problem is that Dean simply isn’t man enough to lead with his ego like this. I don’t a single impressive thing about him, and I see a great many things about him that I find distinctly unimpressive, such as his commitment for going after the safe targets and his sanctimonious posturing in lieu of any recognizable virtues.

And that is probably what it all comes down to. He’s not a leader of men; he’s just a bossy pretender. And though the things he stands for would appear to be good and true, something about the delivery is giving perfumed pig vibes. I do believe that men need to be able to devote themselves to something larger than their self-interest, something for which they are willing to suffer, but whatever vision it is that Dean is selling doesn’t pass the sniff test. In fact, it smells very much like a politically inert LARP, or a grift. Some grift for the money, and certainly Dean isn’t shy about pressing his platform to his financial advantage, but there are also those who grift for their own egos, and it seems to me that this is equally the case with Dean.

For all of recorded history, men’s special bargaining token has been their capacity to take on risk, to be willing to sacrifice themselves, and much of the world around us has been built of the backs of those who made great sacrifices. But that sacrifice should never be taken for granted, and those who attempt to retain it as an obligation after it has lost any hold on the hearts and minds of men deserve no consideration. In this time when men need to be seriously examining their world and the various visions of the future which compete for their loyalty, Dean is not a serious option. He has his head stuck in the sand (or perhaps in another place).