Revisiting the basics endlessly isn't entertaining to me. I prefer to write what I'm currently interested in, and let others endlessly recycle old material for their Patreon pittance. But sometimes, misinformation gets out there loudly enough to drown out the real story.

• "From what I gather through my years of experience is that frame, when ignoring external action, is the maintenance and regulation of appropriate, or more specifically, your true emotional states."
• "Maintaining frame has two parts first is keeping your cool... The second part of keeping frame is being the one chased, not chasing."
• "So a man with a strong frame is well aware of his surroundings and is moving the direction towards a path he wants."
• "Frame is the entire foundation of a man."
• "It’s just keeping your cool in situations where you, if you had weak frame, would either explode on someone or even worse cry."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Think about a "frame". Not metaphorically. Literally.

The frame of a house. The frame of a door. The frame of a picture. What is it? What does it do? Well, it provides structure, and it defines the boundaries.

The "Frame" we speak of when we say "frame control" is not the frame of you, it's the frame of the interaction.

The frame of an interaction is its structure and boundaries. What is being talked about. Who is talking. What the goal of the interaction is. What the context is. All of the aspects of the interaction that determine what is and isn't appropriate to do and say.

When you control the frame of an interaction, it means that you are interacting in such a way that you are able to steer it and decide what is "in bounds" and what is "out of bounds".

For example, if I say "All women are inherently submissive. They don't know what to do with freedom. If you liberate a woman, she just looks around for someone to imitate."

And some clam says "you're a misogynist"...

... Then she is trying to seize control of the frame, to change the conversation from being about "whether women are capable of being free" to "whether Whisper is a misogynist, and by implication, a bad person, and by further implication, wrong".

So, if I say "no, I am not", I have lost control of the frame. Because now we are arguing about whether or not I am a misogynist, which is not what I typically want.

So there are things I can say instead to maintain control of the frame, and these will vary depending on what I want to the frame to be.

I can say "no, I am THE misogynist" if I wish the frame to be "conversation that demonstrates that Whisper is unflappable, while upset chick is prone to losing her shit". We are now still talking about whether I am a misogynist, but without the implication that I am bad, or wrong.

I can say "That IS the standard response, which you have now just imitated." if I wish the frame to be "conversation where a woman shows that I am right while saying that I am wrong". We are now not talking about whether I am a misogynist at all, but about whether she is a non-player character.

I can say "That's not relevant. We are talking about whether women make their own choices, or whether they tend to imitate each other, not about how I personally feel about women." if I wish to frame the conversation as a formal debate. I can now derail every single personal accusation she makes about me simply by calling it out as a personal accusation, and dismiss any assertion she makes without producing evidence. This isn't sexy, of course, but I might want to humiliate her rather than appeal to her.

When I control the frame, the interaction is about what I wish it to be about, it has the tone I wish it to have, and it starts from the assumptions I wish it to start from. When it has all those things built into it from the very beginning, it is almost inevitable that it will go the way I wish it to go, to the outcome I wish it to have.

Tip Whisper for their post.