Jack’s reflections on hosting Σ Frame.

Readership: Men
Theme: Special Post
Length: 1,600 words
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of when I kick-started the Σ Frame blog on WordPress.  This post offers some thoughts and reflections on this journey of faith.

Sourcing Content

One thing that is unique about Σ Frame that sets it apart from the other Manosphere blogs (those that have survived) is that the topics covered here come out of three main sources which are rare to find elsewhere.

1. The Bible + The Red Pill

The juxtaposition of these two sources provides a fuller analysis of both the nature and character of God (The Bible), and the nature and character of humanity (The Red Pill).

2. Experience

Σ Frame reports the life experiences of myself and other contributing authors and corresponding readers, including the more abstract conceptions we’ve learned that only began to “click” later in life.  The other Manosphere blogs that speak from the voice of experience mostly focus on PUA experiences, and even those are getting rare now.  My point is that although this voice of experience lends credibility and specific transferrable knowledge to the purpose of the blog, the Christian experience of Masculinity that we’ve all had has not been very much Christian nor Masculine, or at least not identified as such according to what typically passes for masculinity.  It’s been a long hard journey for us to rediscover Godly Masculinity within the modern context.  It’s embarrassing for us to admit this, but it is what it is.

3. Mystical Metaphysics

By mystical metaphysics, I mean the things I’ve learned through my prayers and in my personal walk with God.  It comes from a position of wonder about the nature of creation, and of not having already attained nor of being already perfected, but of being in a continual search for applied truth and maintaining a state of learning and growth (Philippians 3:12-14).

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Beginnings

I first started blogging in 2009, when blogging was relatively new and hot.  The reason I started blogging is because of the demand for my writings.

I guess it all started when my circle of friends at church was impressed by some insights I shared with them during group discussions.  People realized that what I was talking about was very important to their lives, even life changing, but they found it hard to catch on.  Several people asked me to explain some things to them in more detail.  They recognized that the nature of what I was talking about was rather complex and profound, and that they needed to learn more about it and immerse themselves in it for a while to catch on.

Within a few weeks, the number of people who were participating in the discussion went from 5 to more than 25.  They organized a weekend retreat and asked me to speak there.  Soon afterward, this turned into a small group that met every Sunday afternoon at church.  A lot of new people started coming to church just to take my class.

The pastors were uncomfortable with how popular the group became in such a short amount of time.  They couldn’t understand what I was teaching, and they thought it wasn’t primarily Christian, so they closed down the group.  Later on, after I started reading Dalrock, Donal Graeme, and Zippy Catholic, I realized that it was Christian, it just wasn’t churchian enough for their tastes.

Since we were unable to meet in a formal group at church any more, and it was inconvenient for everyone to meet somewhere outside of church, people in the group asked me to write down my ideas so that they could continue to digest the wisdom therein.  I found that blogging was a good way to share these essays with them and anyone else who might be interested.  So that was how I got started in blogging.

If readers are curious about what I was teaching, then go to the “Posts by Month” on the sidebar.  I have preserved 42 posts from the original blog; 29 posts in 2009, and 13 posts in 2010.  Most of these posts are rather long.  They’re not particularly Red Pill either.  I didn’t discover the Manosphere and take the Red Pill until 2017.  There are also two posts dated 2007.  I added these later on and listed the date on the post as the day I wrote those essays, not the day they were posted.

Within a year after these events, my first wife left me, and I lost my inspirational mojo for a while.  I didn’t post much for a long while after this time.

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Early Days on WordPress

About a year into my second marriage, I stumbled across the Manosphere.  After that, lot of things fell into place in my understanding of things.  I found a renewed hope and a sense of efficacy founded on self-regulation and life-regulation that I never had before.  Soon afterwards, I felt inspired to start blogging again.

When I first started writing about Red Pill topics on WordPress (in late September 2017), I had no idea that this blog would ever become as popular as it has, or that it would ever become one of the more prominent Christian Red Pill outlets.  All I knew is that I had some things to say, what I considered common sense, IMHO, but I just wasn’t seeing anyone else write about such things.  Also, I had a lot of questions in my mind which no one was addressing.  I decided that if I studied and explored those questions in blog essays, then others interested in the same questions might stumble across my writings and leave a note about their own insights and/or discoveries in the comments.  Then I might find some answers.  I kinda expected someone to shoot me down with a “Look doofus… It’s like this…” sort of response.  This has happened a few times,* but for the most part, I found that others knew even less than I did about the topics I cover here.

* Those men who took me to task the most often were Ed Hurst, Thedeti, and NovaSeeker, and they were good enough to guide me towards a better understanding of things.

Content Transformation

My blog posts from 4-6 years ago were rife with sexualized content, which probably helped kick start the popularity of this blog.  But after writing on this subject for a while, I realized that this was a catharsis for the malingering angst from my divorce which was finalized just a couple years prior.

The next phase was to use the Red Pill to identify my blind spots, where I went wrong, and how to adjust my life strategy.  Posts written during 2018-2019 came from this angle.

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A Renewed Focus on the Eternal

In 2020, the Christian Manosphere made a break from its secular compatriots.  Since that time, there has been an ever increasing focus on topics related to God, Headship, humility, mysticism, redemption, sanctification, and various other spiritual metaphysics.

Here, I’ll cite a passage from a landmark post by Adam Piggott that observed this transformation.

“The online discussions gradually morphed into a focus on how to get the girls.  This had various guises which I will not go into here.  Suffice to say that this was a stepping stone.  The various stepping stones became known as the red pill journey, of which getting the girls was the introductory stone.  But in the last couple of years the online masculinity communities have embraced Christianity to a very large extent.  Not completely, but definitely in big numbers.  The ultimate red pill as it were.

If the previous introductory step was how to get the girls, the introductory step today is totally different.  The introductory step now is Christianity because how to get the girls takes you away from Christ and towards mortal sin.  In other words, for young guys today the introductory step is different from what young guys only 10 years ago were doing.  Not completely of course, but in numbers high enough to be influential.

These days, you’ll see a lot more talk about God, Gnon, Metaphysics, and Mysticism in the Manosphere than you would ever have seen only 5 years ago.  And more importantly, it is celebrated whereas before it would often have been ridiculed.  This is a comprehensive and profound change to an online community that is large enough and influential enough that it has been the target of documentaries and studies by our cultural and spiritual enemies.”

Adam Piggott: “I will draw all men to myself.” – Jn. 12:32 (2021-12-12)  Last paragraph amplified by Jack.
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Current Status

During that time (in early 2020), I took the topics in a new direction by expanding my understanding of religious-sounding words and concepts that fly right over our heads, and how these concepts are to be applied to daily living — words like covenant, defilement, glorification, humility, and most recently, redemption.

Another one of these words was sanctification, and this led into a study of how sex is related to sanctification, an association I had never heard anywhere else in my life but was impressed upon me through reading 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8.

Since then, I’ve found that there are deeper purposes for sex and marriage which are never discussed in the one place it should be stressed – the church.

To wit:

  • That sex and marriage under a structure of Headship is the primary vehicle of sanctification for a large number of individuals.
  • Headship is what brings God’s blessings, joy, peace, and presence into the home.
  • Headship is what allows children to know God while they’re growing up.

As this blog has matured, and judging by what I’ve read from other bloggers around the sphere, it looks like this blog is and will be best known, not for RP Christian marriage as I had imagined earlier, but for developing a fuller understanding of Biblical Headship and various other nuances and expressions of masculine authority.

…and this includes single / unmarried men!

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