“A Normal Guy”

My post about a dinner-party proposition drew some discussion from the commentariat regarding the woman in question’s desire for a so-called “normal guy.”

Georgia Boy hit the nail on the head:

Normal is an interesting choice of words. I wonder about it because it’s something I was called by a then-recently-ex girlfriend back in my pre-red pill days. She told me it was an ego boost to her because “it was the first time a relatively normal guy wanted to date me.” What would the Womanese-English translator spit out if you typed in “normal guy?” “Suitable relationship beta who’s not too dweeby,” maybe?

As did ASF:

Normal guy just means guy I like/am attracted to and who others in my social circle will approve of. As deti points out, there is no specific set of traits that will make you “normal” aside from all of the standard things Game teaches.

Georgia Boy’s mention of the Woman-English translator is germane, as the critical distinction here is that the connotation of “normal” is very different between men and women.

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

If you ask a man in my social circle to describe a “normal guy,” you are probably going to get something like these traits:

• A few pounds overweight
• Basically genial and seeks to be nice to everyone
• Takes his turn when picking up the tab or giving people rides
• Not a ladder-climber but a good enough worker to be a team contributor and not make any office enemies
• Decent but unremarkable fashion sense
• Unceasingly well-intentioned but predictably ham-fisted in his efforts with women; gets lucky on occasion in the true sense of the word
• You’d have him over to drink a few beers and watch the game

In other words, a “normal guy” is just that – an average, or median, specimen. There’s some adjustment for subculture, as “normal” in say a college-educated urban community is different than a middle-aged suburban family neighborhood; likewise hipsters and young black professionals have different norms as well, as do religious and non-religious (and much of the criticism of organized-religion communities is actually a criticism of their social norms, not of their faith per se).

This is exactly the kind of dude most guys want to have as “part of the gang” – a reliable teammate who isn’t going to be too much of a bother or a challenge.

The problem is that this type of back-seater is almost invisible to women who have not yet hit the “I’m getting older and had better lock down a husband” kind of panic.

SIMPLE TASTES

Remember that while the male hindbrain’s thought pattern is to find a woman attractive absent a disqualifying criterion, a woman’s pattern is the opposite: to seek a series of qualifiers before approving her attraction to a man. In fact, the general tendency is for women to judge the majority of men as defective. When you combine a woman’s own natural sex rank (below which men are not considered at all), the particular attraction markers she’s looking for in a man (be they height, fitness, status, or socially dominant personality), and the need to have her choice culturally blessed by her social circle, there’s just not a lot of guys who are going to make it through all the filters.

So when you hear a woman talk about “normal,” what she really means is “normative” – a guy who fits her mental “standard” of how a “man” she would date must be. He’s a high-value man with a well-developed beta sidecar:

• Is working hard at advancement (“ambition”) in a job that is either high-status (law, management, banking) or “interesting” (musician, media, non-profts, politics)
• Can show group dominance, i.e. “work a room” and do a bunch of glad-handing but not a compulsively dominant guy who will pick fights or make trouble
• Can flash dominance to her (e.g. pass fitness tests, avoid fitting into her frame)
• Tidy and fashionable, but not so much that he’s gay or OCD
• Aesthetically pleasing: shows strong physique, fitness and/or fashion sense
• Fits into feminine imperatives: holds relationship/marriage/kids as long-term life goals, but doesn’t seek to serve a woman
• Has good timing of beta traits so the other girls will say “awwww, I wish MY boyfriend would do that for ME!”

(This list is skewed towards the college-educated young adult frame because that’s the world I live in, but you could tweak it for any subculture without much trouble.)Long story short, a “normal” guy is “an alpha who will play the beta game when I want him to.” A dude who is not deficient in some category she deems essential to her life path – she’s never going to write to Dear Abby about him and say “I really love my boyfriend, buuuuuut…” and spit out what she sees as some kind of red-flag dealbreaker and waxes about the cute guy who gave her his phone number at the bookstore.

My tone sounds cynical, but there’s no point making ethical assertions about this; it’s the culture they live in, you aren’t going to change their preferences by argument or shame, and you’re going to find most of these items, in some combination, in almost all women you find even remotely attractive.

As you can imagine, finding the balance point of ALL these items, and calibrating it to the woman in question, is extremely difficult, and those kind of guys are pretty rare in quantity. Thus we guys think it ludicrous when we hear “I can’t find a normal guy!” when by the male definition they are all over the place.

One other important aspect of normative “normal” is social approval, which goes to ASF’s point “who others in my social circle will approve of.” The normative man is a socially-reinforced concept, a group is going to exercise its collective power by encouraging conformity and cross-accountability – they can’t keep up their image of a bunch of Strong, Independent, Empowered Awesome Women, the Blonde Mafia or whatever image they hold dear, if they allow each other to date geeks, bums and guys who are Reeeeally Niiiiiice. A guy who threatens to alienate a girl from the group is a threat to the group, and deciding between the guy and the group is something I’ve noticed young women don’t really have an appetite to do. This in turn plays into a conclusion I’ve come to that today’s young educated women don’t really want a “committed partner” – they want a lifestyle accessory, a guy who enables a new class of “fun” and comfort with minimal friction to her current life.

Remember that despite being the ostensible “choosers” of the sexual marketplace, women view the men who pursue them as a mirror to their own value – it’s a compliment when a high-value man makes moves on you (even though he may be only angling for sex), it’s a scary proposition when a wimpy beta guy thinks you’re a good match for him because he may be right. Thus GB’s experience of “it was an ego boost to her because “it was the first time a relatively normal guy wanted to date me.””

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE NORMAL PLACES

This is not the first time the “normal guy” conundrum has come up for me. I used to share an office with an attractive young woman straight out of college, who played host to a series of older young women who would gossip with her on the regular. I found out by accident that if I put on my headphones, they would assume I was occupied by music and unable to hear them; thus I was able to regularly eavesdrop on invaluable sessions inside the (virtual) girls’ locker room.

One particular Monday, one of matrons came in to debrief the young gal on their Friday evening, which began as an after-work happy hour and stretched into a singles night at the local watering hole, which happens to be known as one of the biggest douchey-frat-guy bars in town. (Being attractive educated women, they had spent most of their time since age 16 socializing with the jocks and frat guys who were their SMV peers anyway and so felt right at home.)

“So, what happened with that guy you were talking to?” (I could tell by her tone of voice she wasn’t approving of the man in question.)

“Welllll, he asked for my number, then the next day he texted me that some people were going out and I could meet him there, but I already kinda had plans so I didn’t meet him.” (HER tone of voice expressed a distinct lack of enthusiasm. This sounded more like a wannabe-player than the real deal, trying to pull off a botched least-interest game without having built sufficient value and allure in the initial meeting.)

At this point the group-protection instinct kicked in and the matron made clear that this guy didn’t fit the bill. She shook her head, intoned “we’ll go out again this weekend, we need to find you a NORMAL GUY,” and then proceeded to discuss other fratty bars they could peruse in search of the perfect man.

It didn’t seem to strike them as odd that they were looking for said “normal guy” at the douchiest bars in town, home of guys who are well-known for the pump-and-dump game. I took this as a sign of their normative judgments – “normal” entailed a guy with very high confidence, social skill and sexual social proof. I didn’t have the heart to blow my cover and tell them they were setting her up as player-bait, so I just filed it away in my growing red-pill datastore.

Understanding What You’re Communicating

In my last post I discussed a woman who asked me to introduce her friend to some “normal men” on account of the fact she had (by her friend’s own admission) strip-mined conventional dating sources of available men.

(It was floated in the comments that the woman may have been attempting to hit on me directly by flattering me as a source of dating advice; while that’s certainly a possibility, I am skeptical, because she was sitting next to her boyfriend and the hostess of the party was a woman I was dating.)

It’s not that I fault her for it, it seems to be a normal part of the young female mind-script to expect a “she had so much trouble dating the wronggggg men and then she just magically met this GREAT guy who made it allllll better!”kind of story to emerge in her social circle. What she and other women are going to be waking up to is that today’s (beta) men are growing less tolerant of cleaning up after a girl’s youthful indiscretions.

YOU’RE NOT SAYING WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE SAYING

One point I drew attention to was that while she thought she was expressing “I have a single woman your friends might want a crack at,” what she was actually communicating was “my friend is a hot mess and I’m useless as a yenta, will you please help me save her bacon?” She’d effectively disqualified herself and her friend.

In my first job, my boss taught me a ridiculously useful way of evaluating my and others’ workplace actions: “you always need to look at what you’re communicating.” In truth, he was teaching me the concept of frame management, filtered through the corporate survival game. Frame is a critical social dynamics concept, the art of managing how you are presenting yourself and a situation when interacting with others, with a particular bent towards social positioning.

At the time I was boning up on game for the first time, and the relationship between the two was lock and key.

Humans, men especially, tend to overrate the importance of logical integrity and congruence when arguing and persuading others. The truth is that winning friends and influencing people requires so often that we induce or negotiate feelings within people, ahead of presenting them with logically sound arguments. Vox Day has termed this dichotomy “rhetoric” (the former) and “logic” (the latter). (It’s a bit like the Oprah-esque aphorism “people won’t remember what you do, they’ll remember how you make them feel – an important game lesson, incidentally.)

The impetus for my boss’ communication discussion was one coworker or another who had pissed off a client – not by delivering a bad product, but by constructing her response to a client request in a frame that said “I know what you need better than you do.” The client was a high-expectation yet easygoing character, who had plenty of patience for an honest mistake or an earnest counterarugment – but who was deeply put off by a brusque, arrogant response that said in so many words “I know better so why don’t you just shut up and listen to me.”

My boss’ point was that there’s much more to serving a client, customer, friend or partner than what you say and do – there’s a whole subtext of how you’ve framed the discussion, how you present the power balance and how you balance persuasion versus demand in the exchange.

Imagine a hypothetical example where you ask a pal for ten bucks to buy lunch. If you say “dude, I was hoping you could spot me a few bones? It’d be a big help, I’d really appreciate it,” you’re communicating a pre-emptive gratitude and deference to his voluntary charity. But if you say “hey man, how about ten bucks? I know you won’t even feel it,” you’re communicating a sense of entitlement, and an attitude that he’s got so much goddamn money you don’t even care if he sheds a few dollars and he shouldn’t either.

In both cases, you’re asking for exactly the same thing, but you’re creating a very different image of yourself in your friend’s mind.

Another example my boss liked to cite was conspicuous largesse or luxury in tough economic times – executive bonuses and resort conferences were brought up repeatedly. Regardless of the dollar amounts involved, any kind of “perking” when others are asked to go without communicates an air of elitism that is corrosive to a work team’s unity. Shrewd managers know how to put on an air of modesty that keeps the troops believing in cross-team empathy.

FRAME IN THE GAME

Some of the classic tactics of PUA game are based around communcation consciousness:

• Don’t answer text messages quickly – communicates that you have other higher priorities than chasing girls
• Don’t call on the phone often – communicates that your schedule is busy and your time well-spent
• Avoid dinner dates – communicates that you aren’t a bank provider and bankroller of her social life
• Be cool in the face of sexual rejection – communicates that sex is common for you and not a big deal

THE MIRROR STARES BACK HARD

When it comes to understanding what you’re communicating, a number of cognitive biases conspire to obscure the truth.

Solipsism (a self-referential perspective that paradoxically crowds out self-awareness) often blinds women to this process. There’s been a lot said about solipsism lately so I won’t rehash it, but it does tend to produce an acute lack of understanding about how your actions and words are being interpreted by others.

Conversely, men are often blind to what they are communicating due to male-typical tactic of not mincing words or dressing up talk with flowering indirect statement. What seems like a straightforward logical declaration can come across as a abrasive, disempathic personal attack. It’s not so much that men are unaware as they’ve decided (or been told) that the logical correctness of their words is all that should matter.

“Should” ain’t got nothing to do with it – we need to account for what  we’re communicating, in all interactions, if we want to be persuasive and seductive.

The Benefits of Lifting Are Not Just Aesthetic

There’s been some discussion in the Manosphere about muscular power as it relates to female attraction. Lifting weights has been a longtime tenet of the game lifestyle from many sources. Athol Kay has weightlifting as the first item in his book’s Ten Steps To The MAP appendix. The more youthful gamers push it hard as the key to maintaining a body that will provide value in the SMP for decades to come. Lifting is critical to maximizing your sex rank, and as you get older and your status and income become more difficult to change, physical fitness can become the most mutable attraction trigger you possess.

My aim in this post is to emphasize a key point about weights: lifting is not just about improving how you look, it’s about improving your fitness and the social and hormonal signals you send to the opposite sex. Thus, lifting is about more than getting ripped muscles that look good in the mirror – even if you’re not getting giant biceps and a six-pack, weights are improving your body.

There certainly is an aspect of being fit that is just aesthetically pleasing to eye – the ripple of muscles, the taper, the lack of a gut. But there’s a reason I put looks and physical fitness in two different categories of my list of attraction triggers. A fit man also indicates good mating potential in more practical ways: he signals good genes to give to the woman’s future child, and portends the ability to provide for, construct for and protect the child (and its mother). In addition, a guy who is in shape and in good athletic control of his body is going to have a better social profile, because people subconsciously respect his improved physical stature and he’s probably giving off direct hormonal messages that he’s virile and ready to get the mating job done. Frost of Freedom Twenty Five put it simply: “you smell like testosterone.” There’s a phenomenon among women called “sexy ugly,” a guy who doesn’t have an alluring physical look but is attractive to women. Social behavior – i.e. game – explains a lot of it, but it’s not all: even an aesthetically unremarkable man can earn points with the hindbrain with his fitness.

The reason I emphasize this difference is that whenever this topic comes up around women, the discussion usually trends toward ”how does your body look in a photograph.” Much attention is paid to celebrity photos as examples of what they like (which are prone to mis-attributing personality or status traits to physical ones). A great cacophony ensues as a subset of women insist they don’t like “muscles” and go for “skinny guys.” Part of the debate is just plurality – there is indeed a spread of what women find attractive. But there’s also a bit of wordplay going on. I find when I dig into these discussions, by asking for examples of who they find attractive, that the “skinnylovers” almost always prefer slim-built guys, yes, but slim guys who are strong and hard. Pasty men are not on anybody’s hitlist. What I don’t think women realize is that when meeting men, in the flesh, they are responding not just to his aesthetic look but to his signals of fitness. Thus an “uglier” guy can be more of a turn-on if he’s more fit.

MAY PRETTY LIES PERISH

I am concerned that men will hear this discussion and internalize one or both of these two false messages:

• Women don’t like muscle-bound men, so you should run or bike instead of lift and try to be as lean as possible
• You’ll never get to Mr Universe levels of muscle mass, so don’t bother lifting at all

We see both of these messages in game, as well: “game doesn’t work, women would never fall for that crap,” OR “even with game you won’t bang supermodels so why try to improve at all.” The former is simply mendacity; the latter is a defeatist straw man.

This confusion is an occupational hazard of interviewing women about their attraction triggers; not only do you have to deal with rationalization hamsters, you have to deal with vocabulary that doesn’t compute and also with false dichotomies. Lots of women (and some men) regard any discussion of weightlifting to mean bodybuilding and powerlifting, of meatheads throwing fifty-pound dumbbells around a stinky ass gym that doubles as a frat house where pussies who can’t bench their own body weight aren’t welcome. (GLPiggy wrote of Planet Fitness’ strategy to market directly against that stereotype, and how it partially reflects a feminine tactic to run away from and shame uncomfortable social friction. On the other hand, there are some really annoying gym guys.)

Over on the Alpha Game thread, one self-righteous commenter/blogger under the nom de guerre Bob Wallace bleated the following:

Almost all body builders are homosexual, and they do it because they are narcissistic and they do it for each other. Then you have the short guys with the Little Man Complex. Lots of women don’t like muscles and I’ve met many who prefer tall slender guys.

Classic example of the false dichotomy, this was in a discussion about fitness, not about “bodybuilding.” It’s akin to interrupting a discussion about which passenger car has the best gas mileage by saying “those big semi-trucks are major gas guzzlers, you should bike around town instead.”

By the way, the stereotypes of “weights culture” are a important issue in fitness, because the lunkhead stereotypes drive women away from weights, and weights are critically important to both genders’ fitness plans, not to mention much more effective than those stupid elliptical machines. Women need to know that plenty of men lift weights without a grunting hypertrophic approach, and that women can lift weights without engaging in any of that either. Women say “I don’t lift because I don’t want to get big.” It’s just not a real risk for regular women in regular workouts.

Back on the topic, a photograph of Orlando Bloom was floated as an example of a “skinny” guy:

No man versed in athletics would describe him as skinny. I would say he has a slim build and is in good shape. Extremely good shape. Look at the way his deltoid folds into his torso and the complete lack of a gut. He looks like he could play safety.

I think it’s as universal a rule as we can come up with that whatever body type they prefer, women like fitness and tone on a man.

FIT OR FAT, FOR YOUR TYPE

To cut through the vocabulary, I view the issue like this: there are a certain number of basic male bodytypes (the ecto/endo/mesomorph types are one way of indexing them). each woman is programmed to dig certain body types, among the other traits she’s interested in. Within those types, a woman will almost always prefer the fitter example of the type.

If you’re a big guy who puts on weight easily (big bone structures tend to do that), being “not fit” is probably going to mean being chubby. When he eats right and gets in the weight room, he can put some real definition on his very large muscles and look classically “ripped.” Conversely, a slim-build guy may not get a bulging muscular look when  he’s working out, but he will be toned and fit, which can certainly be felt if not seen. However, when he’s out of shape, he won’t look any bigger, but he’ll have a pasty “skinny fat” look and feel that will disgust most women on contact.

GIVE THE BODY AGENDA A HAND UP

Finally, you never really know until you try which of these levels is going to operate on a particular girl (or guy), whether you’ll be judged “sexy ugly” or a “pretty beta.”

Sometimes the body agenda doesn’t kick in until close contact. As I wrote here, I recently dated an attractive, very intelligent, very interesting woman who had one fatal flaw – every time I touched her, my body agenda induced a sense of cum-curdling disgust. It was completely unexpected; I could fantasize about her in my own mind, but when I went to I felt an unshakeable sense of disgust. It felt bad to tell her we should stop dating; it must be what women feel when they have to dump their smart, hardworking, nice, but ultimately non-dominant and unattractive beta male.

Then on the other hand, often I’m drinking casually at a bar or pub, and a girl who was otherwise unremarkable to me will walk past and accidentally bump me, and this tingly shiver will run up my body from my junk to the top of my head. Putting aside the portion of bumps that are not accidental (it’s a key insight of game to realize that so much of the thigh-bumps, boob-rubs, and casual eye contact of women are not accidental at all), it’s a great anecdotal example of the localized nature of attraction – it can get triggered at any point in the entire process.

I find the same thing when women touch me when I am toned and in shape – once they cop a feel of the muscles, their eyes pop out of their head and they’re hooked.

As does another commenter at the Alpha Game thread:

From my experience, women say negative things about muscles until they are able to touch them and feel them from men.

Much more if they experience sex with a muscular guy.

When it’s you who is hoping for that positive reaction up-close, you want to give her body agenda a hand up by being a body her body would want.

Measuring Your Game Outcomes

With the recent posts on what game is, it’s prudent to explore the issue further and discuss how to measure game’s impact on a man’s personal life. Any improvement plan – personal, athletic, financial, corporate – had better be bookened by before-and-after evaluation. If you’re a consultant, you’ll get laughed out of the room if you can’t point to some measures of performance and say “these numbers are going to go up/down if we execute my plan.” Powerpointers speak of arranging statistical plots to go “up and to the right,” showing a trend of improvement over time.

As the readership’s game consultant, it behooves me to posit some metrics you can use to tweak and target your game strategy. Here are some goals you might have that motivate your pursuit of tighter game:

I. Attract more women

II. Get further sexually and personally with women who are attracted to you

III. Attract women who are more attractive

In rough order of difficulty.

These are all realistic goals for a man working on his game, but you may notice that they can be contradictory. If you’re working on closing the deal with a woman, you take away time to spend on attracting other women, and if you try to up the caliber of woman you are attracting, the number of women you are attracting is liable to go down. It’s a bit like, say, the national health care debate – should society seek to lower the price of healthcare for those who already have access to it, or to provide access to people who don’t have it now, or to increase access to specialty care for everybody? It’s all about tradeoffs, which is why it’s good practice to pick one of these metrics to work on every time you embark on a game-oriented project.

Attracting more women is largely about putting more time and emphasis on the game itself. Once you’ve identified the level and style of girls who tend to be into you, you go whole-hog into approaching and opening them and at least some of them are going to be attracted to you. To do this, you have to go where girls are – bars, clubs and concerts at night, coffee shops, bookstores, farmer’s markets and yoga studios in the daytime. There’s a lifestyle change, but only to the degree of getting out more and striking up more conversations. A good place to start is to examine how many women you meet in a week.

Secondary skills here are reducing approach anxiety and building your casual conversational skills. The key factor here is to “be cool” (hat tip to Roosh) – if you are OK with the women you can get now, you don’t need any extra game except to do more of it and let whatever natural attraction you have do its work.

An aside: it’s a good practice to not positively reject a lot of women or to get butthurt about their rejection, because even if she’s not into you, her friend might be, and a good word amongst them (“he doesn’t really do it for me but he’s a good guy”) might be enough to get you approved by a girl who’s on the fence about you. Don’t be a beta orbiter, but always recognize the benefits of a magnanimous, genial attitude in social-circle game.

Closing the deal more effectively requires a combination of logistics (arrangements of time and space that are conducive to sex and personal bonding) and seduction (the act of drawing someone into an emotional space where their desires are validated and allowed to blossom). I’ve written about both of these here. Logistics have been covered voluminously in other literature, the basic idea being that you need to actively escalate the privacy and intimacy of the encounter, by isolating, location bouncing/venue changing, and finally getting the both of you to your place or her place, a comfortable, safe environment for sex.

Seduction is the emotive counterpart to escalation, and much game writing focuses on building the personal connection and comfort that sets up a successful seduction without inducing a buyer’s remorse, “OMG what am I doing?” reaction. Contrary to the plaintive didactions of female advice-givers who say “a woman really needs to get to know a man before she’ll be ready to have sex with him,” this comfort can be built up in a matter of hours. It’s really not difficult, do a couple of cold reads or ask some deep rapport questions and segue into an honest discussion about each other (avoid spoiling your mystery by continually turning the conversation back to her).

Along with these, there’s an element of removing anti-game behaviors (like supplication and hesitation, or fidgety body language) to help you escalate and close more reliably.

A sidebar discussion is necessary at this point. It’s important to understand that failure in seduction makes the rest of your game superfluous. Below a certain level of seductive skill, a man’s SMV is effectively 0. It doesn’t matter how many women are attracted to you or how hot they are, if you can’t guide them all the way home then the attraction is for naught. This is the position of a really shitty salesman, who fails to get the sale even when he has customers who want to buy his product for a price he would accept. It recalls Mystery’s quote – “if you cannot attract a woman, you are by definition sterile,” except your problem is not attraction, it’s literally getting the bang.

This is, sadly, the lot of today’s nice-guy beta. He may – and probably does, owing to his educated and genteel upbringing – possess the discipline, intelligence and athletic fitness to be a formidable actor in his cohort’s sexual pool. However, he’s plagued by entrenched anti-game, by insufferable traits like false modesty, aseptic serenity, sexual anxiety and deference to female emotional ejaculation, and a silly sense of ersatz romance that tells him fatalistic coincidence will bring him the love of his life (obviously he’s not listening to Axiom #1). Thus, even when a pretty girl thinks “this guy is interesting and kind of cute, I think I like this guy,” by the time he tries to get her into his bedroom, she’s so frazzled and put off by his incongruent stuttery behavior that her tingle is all gone.

Even more sadly, oftentimes this Poindexter is guilty of only one or two seemingly-minor behavioral faults. A lot of otherwise-adequate guys are sucking in seduction and don’t even know it, disappointing both themselves and the girls – all for a couple of quirks that can be easily fixed.

So don’t let anyone tell you that learning and practicing seductive skills is stupid or “beta” or whatever. This is an area where the anti-gamers and the “inner game” folks are just out to lunch. They tell guys who can’t close the deal to just “be confident” or some other useless aphorism, ignoring the fact that there is a reliable order of operations for taking an attracted woman to bed. If you mess up the order, or leave out certain steps, you will fail almost every time, unless you are with an atypically forgiving, forward or sex-positive woman who is willing to push things along herself.

To make an analogy, imagine firing your gun before you load it. You will never once hit a target if there’s not a bullet in the chamber. Or putting your shoes on before your socks. You’d never advise a young athlete to “just park the car” without training him in parallel parking, or a cook to just throw the ingredients together. It’s ludicrous, in fact. Yet we send men out into the world in pursuit of one of life’s great pleasures for both genders with little more than a platitudinal ”well it’ll just happen, one thing leads to another.”

The haters tend to view seduction as a predatory activity, as “fast-talking” a woman into the sack. I find this concept to be close to ridiculous, not to mention patronizing to female sexuality and agency. A girl who’s interested in you, who is spending time with you and responding to your personality, wants to have sex with you – and wants YOU to take the lead and make it happen. They want it as bad as you do, and will judge you harshly if you can’t take them there. (Don’t believe me? Go to a message board where frustrated women talk about guys they dated who couldn’t get the signal and proceed to sexual ravishment. Or just read this post and this one. Women see a lack of seductive success to be a rejection of them, or a failure of the man’s virility or both.)

OK, sidebar over.

Another side note: I can say from personal experience and friends’ testimony that when you jump into the game like this, it’s easy to get impatient and frustrated when your seductive efforts fail. Just as with overcoming field rejection, you can really hamstring yourself if you allow your emotions to get the better of you, and you kick the girl out, or delete her from your phone, or stop responding to her texts or whatever. Plenty of guys getting into the game don’t want to feel like beta orbiters or chumps, and want to dictate the terms of the encounter after being dictated to for so long, and so they are tempted to harshly reject a girl and cut her out of his life when they can tell they’re not going to get what they want.

But you aren’t always getting strung along, sometimes the girl is attracted but has some kind of hangup or another guy she’s consumed with or something else bugging her that has nothing to do with you. Sometimes the move is to just stop any initiating efforts, and see if she comes back to you. You need to accept you’ll have some failures, but you also need to consider that some of your leads who won’t sleep with you now will get the itch later, and you leave that door open when you don’t express an overt, angry rejection.

You really never know when you’re going to get that phone call or text message saying “what are you up to tonight?” or “hey I’m in your neighborhood, let’s meet up” or more simply “want to come over?” Don’t plan on it, but don’t plan against it – it costs you nothing to let go gently and leave her that option.

Attracting more attractive women is somewhat about tightening your game, but ultimately centers around building real value. Making more money, gaining power and influence (or fame), brandishing prestige and dominance, moving in more prominent social circles, and living a lifestyle that is genuinely interesting and alluring.

Unfortunately it’s also the area that’s hardest to improve. Not for no reason does Danger & Play advise dedicating your 20′s to maximizing your cognitive ability and doing the core work for your career and lifestyle, so you can use some game to skim your sexual successes off the top of your lifestyle, instead of trying to use game (social behavior) to paper over the holes in the rest of your attraction palette.

Myself and a few other readers have made the independent realization that to consistently get really high-value women (8/9/10′s), you need to have some real value. Real value means money, power, fame or exceptional good looks. A successful middle-class guy with tight game is not going to be bagging women who have access to music moguls or high-level politicians. Take a look next time you’re out on the town; are desk jockeys who clean up well going home with the hottest girls in the place? Sure, Mystery parlayed a magician act into top-flight nightclub PUA. But he’s an exceptional pickup artist. Neil Strauss followed in his successful footsteps, but was a Rolling Stone reporter who had interviewed rock and roll stars.

A guy who is basically above average but lacks those exceptional traits needs to decide how much he really wants to break through that ceiling and go for elite status in something. And if you’re doing it for the chicks, you probably won’t get there. People who become rich and powerful are usually motivated by internal drives that go way beyond getting laid. Getting women is a side dish of their success.

RECAP

To conclude this discursive discussion, there are three different goals you can shoot for when you set out to improve your game. Which goal you choose will influence where you put your efforts (including efforts in fields other than your game itself). Always have the goal in mind when you are planning your next self-improvement project.

Game As Part Of Your Attraction Palette

Yesterday’s post on the axioms of game-oriented thinking brought out some good discussion, and while I don’t want to start a debate that’s destined to fail, I think it’s prudent to discuss what game is and isn’t so that readers know what I’m getting at when I talk about the assumptions that underlie any game-based strategy.

As a shorthand, talking about a guy’s “game” can refer to his overall success with women – the quality of woman he’s attracting and how frequently he has women in his life. But for the most part, when we talk about “game” we’re talking about social behavior: how you interact with people (especially women), what that communicates about you, how it influences others’ mental states, and how it moves your goals forward (or doesn’t). In short, it’s your personality + action patterns in the social sphere.

To recap from yesterday’s post:

Axiom #1 says that a man can change his sexual market value.

Axiom #3 says that changing behavior can change a man’s sexual market value.

#1 is about agency. #3 is about game.

Game isn’t the only lever of attraction you can pull. You can trigger or modulate attraction based on a bunch of factors, including:

• Physical constitution (height, build, facial structure, symmetry)
• Fitness (however it’s built, a body in shape looks better and gives off better hormonal signals)
• Earning power and access to resources
• Social status (influence and power, plus how cool your job is)
• Displayed ability to dominate other men (fitness) or to attract women (preselection)
• Social ability with women, i.e. game (opening, generating interest, avoiding fitness tests, building personal connection, creating intrigue and plausible deniability, escalating effectively)

How do these things add up? It’s situational and hard to say. But boosting any of these will boost your attraction among most women.

Roissy posited a good rule of thumb that game is worth 2 points on the 10-point scale (that I don’t use, but who am I to disagree with the best). Roissy also dubbed a man who has all the other things but whose behaviors with women really suck a “paper alpha,” a guy whose status earns him an interview with top-quality girls but who lacks the social ability to do it live.

IT ALL FITS TOGETHER

Plans to up a man’s game almost always involve addressing other areas at the same time. As an example, when Neil Strauss was training as Mystery’s protege, he also took up surfing, got Lasik eye surgery and shaved his head. Roosh’s blog and his book “Bang” advocate that men should read a lot of books and become intellectual versatile so as to have interesting things to talk about to fascinate women. (It works, btw.)

Just as an individual painting gravitates towards pastels or primary colors or whatnot, eventually all of your attraction threads start to run together thematically, because of congruence – your dress code and your social behavior and your occupational status will all have to roughly match each other or you will confuse the people you are with. You can exploit some discrepancies with contrast game, but rolling up in an American Eagle tshirt and rack jeans claiming you’re a rising executive won’t make people think you’re so alpha you don’t have to care about appearances – it will just make people think you’re a poser or the COO of your friend’s trucking business.

OTHER NOTES

It’s interesting to note that a lot of the LTR/married game promulgated by Athol Kay and others is not really about game as much as it’s about creating an environment conducive to the orderly household and regular sex life that should be the standards by which any marriage is judged. That means articulating boundaries and roles, staying fit, holding a job and advancing in it, keeping the house maintained, and parenting adequately. Athol himself refocused his blog recently on “structural factors” instead of sexy move advice, saying that in a married context, most attraction will be structural in origin (once you’ve eliminated low-status behavior like failing fitness tests).

Generally speaking, you’ll be limited by your weakest element. As women scan for reasons to eliminate you, the quality of woman you can get will hinge on getting her to look past your lowest-value dimension, and you can only compensate for a weak link so much. If you’re out of shape or your game sucks, that’s not hard to fix, but if you want to double your income, you have a much tougher task ahead of you. The good news is that middle-class employment+fitness+game can get you regular access to the “7″ category and that meets a lot of guys’ needs.

If you are constrained by your weakest link, what about those people you know who have shitty game but get quality girls because they are really good-looking, or super tall (height works for sure), or have big money? Well, the generalization has limits – you can be so superlative in one area that some of the other stuff really doesn’t matter.

And don’t forget that lots of women find some particular thing about guys irresistible. Like she’s just really got it bad for tall guys, or guys with stubble, or she’s always wanted to date a firefigher, or her dad was a cop, etc. Sometimes one trait hits a hindbrain nerve that won’t be reasoned with. Men have exactly this too – with some women, a man can find himself irrevocably captivated by her boobs or her hair or the tone of her voice. I wouldn’t use that as a strategy though. Emphasize your top strengths, cover all your bases as best you can and don’t neglect your game, and you can be confident you’re pulling what you “should” get in the marketplace.

The Underlying Axioms Of Game

A few weeks back Professor Ashur was nice enough to link to my post about stone soup as a metaphor for game or any other behavior modification exercise.

Societies change, and therefore Game must change. This leads to an interesting return to our Stone Soup storyline. Is it necessary to have a stone to use the Stone Soup method? Or is the stone a mere prop for a person who is a master at motivating others. Consider that the stone worked because it was a new tactic. If half a dozen SSAs (Stone Soup Artists) in the same village started using that process to get a free meal from time to time, the efficacy of the method will diminish. Eventually, a Neil Strauss equivalent will write a book called The Soup, chronicling his road from hunger to satiation. Meanwhile, a diligent curator of human behavior from the capitol will write STONE, and then eventually DAY STONE, along with additional literature on making stone soup in Columbia or Poland. Many will hate him for his success, even as they fail to understand that his partners in soup-making do so willingly, even happily.

The excellent discussion got me thinking about the mental framework in which game operates. Much discussed has been rules of game, such as heed women’s actions and not their words; don’t take dating advice from women; don’t buy women drinks, and no dinner dates early on; approach quickly and often; always be escalating; withhold commitment except for very deserving women; and so on. There are explanations and justifications for the rules, which range from pure empiricism (what works and what doesn’t) to biblical and biological explications.

But the rules aren’t the core level of structure to game. When you talk about any system of knowledge or a strategy or process for accomplishing something, there are subtextual assumptions in the framework that can get lost in the discussion but are important to recognize as the movement progresses. Think about, say, geometry or ontological mathematics, which has postulates and axioms that are taken for granted in general use. While those same postulates are the subject of endless and intense debate among philosophical mathematicians, your basic contractor or surveyor or football coach just needs to be able to apply the basic rules to his field. Likewise, a good number of guys who want to improve their lot with women are not going to get into the deeply-fleshed discussions we have in the Manosphere. They want practical discourse that will benefit them in the field. But let’s not lose sight of what drives the discourse in the first place.

CHANGE IS POSSIBLE

The – THE - key subtextual assumption of game is that a man can take action to change his results in the sexual arena. It doesn’t have to be romantic Roulette. You don’t have to pray for a soulmate. YOU can affect WHOM you attract, WHOM you engage with romantically, WHAT sort of relationships you enter into and HOW your partners treat you. In other words, by acting differently we will get different results.

We get into so much debate about HOW we change our results that we lose sight of the fact that compared to society at large, positing that we CAN change our outcomes is a radical proposition. It becomes clear how radical it is when we try to expose a new, plugged-in guy to the world of game: “no way, that totally doesn’t work on women.” “A girl either likes you or she doesn’t.” Challenging his delusion only makes it stronger.

This sort of learned helplessness is so anathema to the self-reliant gumption that men are supposed to be exhibiting. To judge from reading single-girl blogs and women’s magazines (not to mention surveying our own dating lives), women have made a first-class art form out of constructing victim narratives casting themselves as flat actors without agency, buffeted by the people and events around them.

Meanwhile, men seem to just throw up their hands, and sigh “I don’t know man, women are fickle and capricious. You just gotta deal with it.”

SKILL IN THE VENUSIAN ARTS IS WORTH IT

A secondary assumption, one that is as much if not more often opposed by critics, is that game is worthwhile and adds value to a man’s life. Raise your hand if you’ve ever read something like this on a game forum or blog comment section: “I can’t believe what a bunch of losers you guys are, don’t you know there’s more to life than getting chicks?” It’s easy for a woman (who never has to wonder how she’s going to get her next spurt of attention from the opposite sex) or male naturals (who have never been thirsty in the desert) tell guys trying to get better with women that what they don’t have isn’t really important.

But we who have been on both sides know that the journey and the destination are worth it – for the adventure, for the increased fitness and self-confidence, for the feeling of power and influence, for the sexual satisfaction, for the formation of relationships on our terms, meeting our emotional needs instead of as scaffolds of sexual blackmail.

A variant of the “game isn’t worth it” chorus is the finger-wagging warning from busybodies that game makes you miserable, directed at men who have through their expanded experiences grown cynical and disappointed with the large swaths of low-quality offerings in the sexual marketplace. Let’s put aside the fact that a lot of this criticism is projection from women whose own casual-sex experiences were disastrous (and also put aside that game can be productively practiced without entailing a casual-sex lifestyle). The truth is that game didn’t make these guys cynical, in fact it’s just the opposite; realizing that women respond to game (polished and practiced) ahead of responding to real value in a man, seeing the craven social tricks you can pull to make people like you and trust you that have nothing to do with your actual personality or character, is what induces the nihilistic ennui. Game only gave them the tools to discover the emptiness of the mine. Of course, game can also be the tool that gives you a way out without becoming an ascetic. Because going back to sexual irrelevancy is hardly a solution.

STUDY UP

A third assumption is that the changes in behavior that change the results we get in the SMP can be practiced and learned. One doesn’t have to rely on a spiritual change, or a shift in monetary or power value, to effect change in his luck with women. Thousands of men have honed the learning and practice process before him, and a handful have  inscribed their methods in print. They know how to teach and coach the game. Trust them. Danger & Play has a great post on jumping in. Trust him.

REDUCTIONISM AND SKEPTICISM

Commentators who lose sight (or never knew) the axioms can criticize game as a sort of shapeshifting concept, since rote definitions of game change depending on who you’re talking to and the explanations for social data (i.e. who’s attracted to whom) changes with environment and the people involved.  They seem to be desperate to get a hard and fast definition so they can immediately begin “debunking” it, or to discredit it as a field of empirical study and claim they are just repackaging someone else’s self-help material.

A chunk of commenters, writers and critics say that game is simply rediscovering “traditional masculinity.” This is especially common among those who have an irrationally optimistic view of humans and try to deny what we see in the field with our own eyes, for example denying that girls dig jerks, or saying that you don’t need game, you just have to be confident. It’s also popular among those who don’t want to really grok that there is a large casual-sex environment out there. Confusingly, I see a lot of this from Christian writers, whose faith explicitly and intrinsically acknowledges mankind’s proclivity for wickedness.

But game is different than a paeon to masculinity. To start with, ”traditional masculinity” is an archetype, a big-picture concept, and a cartoonish one at that – not a code or manual of male behavior (except in the self-parody “man law/bro code” meme), and certainly not synonymous with a set of behaviors that are effective in attracting women.

Secondly, the normal connotations of “masculinity” are simply outside the realm of dealing with women. Your traditionally-masculine father or grandfather might very well have little constructive advice for you when it comes to women –  he came of age in an era of different roles and expectations, his constitutional commitment to said tradition itself being a barrier to his understanding the brave new sexual world we have wrought. The structures of his day, in which he was expected to pursue women in his “league,” and they were expected to say yes lest they fade into spinsterhood, doesn’t exist today, which requires a order of magnitude more male effort to actualize his romantic desires. Teaching you to fish and hunt and go to work on time is different than teaching you to approach, converse with, attract and date women. Imitating the man’s behavior thinking the interested women will just appear may do little more than get you a reputation as an obtuse relic.

Conversely, no one would ever call the dandy (emo) a masculine frame, but the dandy act has been effective with women for centuries.

I suppose to the degree that “traditional masculinity” contained an element of presumptive chauvinism, it could be likened to modern game which seeks to back off on female pedestalization. But the fact we’re splitting these hairs shows the weakness of the reasoning.

You might also say that “game empowers males.” But that’s too shallow an analysis. Game IS male empowerment, integrally. Ipso facto, game has as a core principle of itself that men can and should become empowered – see axioms #1 and #2. That men DO become empowered is a not a cause-and-effect outcome of practicing game, it’s simply the seed of of game’s axioms.

THE AXIOMS AS META-GAME

These axioms provide an existential value to the concept and practice of game, without which the concept and practice would be a dinner-party discussion between the dessert and the cheese plate (and in fact would be a uniquely non-threatening discourse).

Going back to Ashur’s post, my point here is that while the outer shell, the tactics and schemae, of game will change (just as girls get wise to certain overdone shticks as they got wise to what’s your sign and can I buy you a drink, and other routines and personas just fade into cultural irrelevance and anachronism), the basic postulates will always be there and need to be re-emphasized with every tactical refresh. And internalizing those postulates is what makes a man able to “roll his own game” – he has the raw materials to construct new skills as his environment and the social landscape change.

Descartes wondered if he actually existed, and eventually developed a heuristic that defined existence as a lucid dream – the fact that he could think proved his existence, “cogito ergo sum.”

We men who are thinking about game go a step further and wonder if we can actually affect the micro-world we’re living in. The answer is yes. We’re already doing it. Never lose sight of the core axioms; you can always go back to the basics.

Decoupling Intimacy and Commitment

Infantry, the star of my last post for his comments on “beta hate,” left a comment there about the risk of habituating into an intimacy-averse mindset:

Something I’d like to see you talk about it is the way that a long term dedication to game, abundance mentality and ‘not chasing’ can lead to intimacy avoidance. Back in my blue pill days I always used to wonder about guys with ‘commitment issues’ and why they would ever want to cut away from getting close to a girl. Now I know why.

If you get close to a girl and feel that you don’t have the ‘upper hand’ in your relationship, you reflexively pull back and try to cut ties to avoid oneitis. The girl must think ‘he really likes me, so why did he disappear?’.

It’s one of those long term issues that I’ve become aware of recently and its only really a problem if you got into game to eventually attract a woman for a long term partnership (like me). When you’ve spent so long training yourself to cut away, how can you really get close to someone?

I’m not here to blow smoke up anybody’s ass, so I’ll be honest – this is an occupational hazard of getting into the game.

You do need to look at this as a complete tradeoff – in betaland, you have a desire for emotional comfort and intimacy and an almost uncontrollable urge to seek it out, yet exactly because of those factors you cannot get it and you go uncomforted by the woman’s touch. In alphaland, you’ve conditioned yourself to suppress those desires and urges, but you are in a position to attract women to meet your needs.

This is not a doomsday scenario, as plenty of guys get on the game train and hop back off when they’ve attracted a woman worth keeping and built enough skill to be confident they can keep her. (Regular commenter Mike C is one of them, who left the operational scene very quickly when he decided the woman he was with was of high quality and worth his investment.)

If you’re paying attention, your next question is likely to be, but why? Why is their a dichotomous split between no emotion (or faking emotion) and going overboard and scaring the gals away?

The thoughts here give prose to a number of concepts I’ve been formulating as I’ve taken a deep analytical look at today’s sexual marketplace and in particular its sexually detached hookup subculture. I have detailed thoughts on the female side of the predicament, but in keeping with Infantry’s concern I’m going to stick to the guys for the moment.

Commented Wudang got my neurons going with his comment to Infantry:

“this post by Xsplat for good thinking on intimacy and closeness. Men need to learn to feel strongly without crumbling.”

Xsplat’s post is a fantastic riff on exactly what it says it is – that you don’t have to deny your intimate side and be Mr. Robot to be an effective, sexual man.

A huge part of seduction is about intimacy. All of us crave it. For most people it is a peak experience. But for you it doesn’t have to be. It can be your modus operandi.

Forget about being aloof. Intimacy is women’s kryptonite. You can make them weak in the knees with a look.

I’d have to work to remember how many girls I’ve moved in on the first date. How many I connected with from the get go as if we’d been long time lovers. How easy it’s been to just connect. I’ve never tried to be aloof. I’m a passionate man. This personal style has never been a hindrance – it has been my greatest strength.

DON’T COUNT ON INTIMACY AS A HARBINGER OF COMMITMENT, BUT RATHER AS A NORMAL MALE NEED

Xsplat’s post title – “intimacy without commitment” – brings up an interesting point. For the last generation, women have counseled one another as to how to distinguish guys who want sex vs guys who want sex and other things. They’ve always broken this down on the basis of intimacy – does he stick around after sex, eats meals, do you meet his parents, does he talk about his feelings, etc.

But lately, women have been flummoxed as these rules seem to be breaking down. “I don’t get it, we sleep together, eat together, we hang out with his friends, but he says I’m not his girlfriend. He doesn’t talk about planning the future. But he does everything I’d expect a boyfriend to do. Is he just in it for the sex? Is this a ruse? WTF?”

What’s really going on, laid bare, is that the man enjoys intimacy, and – in what is the really distinctive characteristic of today’s sexual marketplace – he doesn’t feel the need to put some amorphous concept of “commitment” underneath it.

(Another factor here is that women have raised the costs and expectations of a “relationship” to very high levels, such that men are wary of putting the “relationship” label on things so as to avoid the subtextual obligations. Thus men may steer towards “friends with benefits” arrangements that, far from being booty calls, are relationships in everything but name. A tertiary factor is that men have noticed women’s ability to get out of relationships with almost zero cost to themselves, and are not eager to sign up for an ontological designation that introduces such an asymmetry.)

Underlying this confusion on the part of women is that women have been taught that men DON’T have active emotional centers and DON’T desire intimacy and possibly that emotional investment is just a con that men pull to secure sexual access. So this male behavior makes no sense, because they have a bogus model.

I see this “indefinite term relationship” as an outcome of a few combined factors, the most prominent being Boomerism and the accelerating sequelae of the sexual revolution.

In short, first we decoupled sex from commitment, which resulted in mainstream effects like one-night stands and booty calls and excesses like “free love” communities. Now we’re decoupling intimacy from “commitment,” reflected in endless engagements and fully-ornamented no-term relationships. And a lot of men are finding that’s a pretty good deal.

Now to the core of the discussion.

GEN Y WAS DEPRIVED OF THE TOOLS FOR SOUND EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION

Part of the reason for this decoupling is that Millenial men were raised by Boomer parents who sought to act more as friends than as parental figures, so Millenials could never emotionally mature and become masters of a healthy emotional system, because they were carrying the emotional immaturity of their parents. Combine that with the beta-ization of Gen Y boys (partially attributable to aggressive feminism, but also to a general trend of a “kinder and gentler” society) and you find a generation of young men who have been denied the means to meet their basic emotional and bonding needs.

This is one large reason we see so much needy behavior*. Parents probably thought they were teaching their kids to be emotionally open, but they really just washed them in an orgasm of affect of which they couldn’t make any sense. Boys and men were isolated from the male authority ladder they require to develop from boys to teens to men, and denied the dignity of their own masculinity, inducing further shame and self-doubt. So they seek emotional context and comfort where it appears to present itself, which to them is women, who are presented in popular culture as the font of goodness and acceptance. But they’re like a hungry man exposed to a storehouse of food, unable to eat in any fashion other than gorging.

(*By the same token, I find today’s young women unable to relate to men of normal emotional range, which they interpret as insecurity and impending neediness – an emotional trap for their own immature affective systems that they are desperate to avoid. This explains their preferential and often exclusive attraction to men who overtly display a lack of the emotional vocabulary that is the mark of the unforigveable beta – in other words, the guys act like jerks, and the women take it as a signal of emotional security, while the rest of the guys are pre-emptively rejected or go completely unnoticed under the assumption they are incipient emotional vampires. This will be discussed at length in a future post.)

IF YOU’RE SEXY YOU’RE ALLOWED TO BE EMOTIONAL

And of course, because we live in a tingle-first society, the only way for a man to get this intimacy that is his fundamental need is to be sexually attractive and to be under emotional control. There IS no emotional intimacy available to a man today unless he is able to sexually attract a woman. He can’t hope to parlay paper-alpha status and beta traits into an audition period in which her respect and attraction can grow. He’s gotta have it up front, or he’ll get the “well it was nice meeting you” and the posthumous “there just wasn’t any spark” speech she gives to her friends. As Athol Kay put it:

There’s probably not a single man reading this blog who hasn’t had his heart ripped out by a woman rejecting him for his lack of Game at some point in his life. Many of the male readers of this blog are in sexless marriages too. So learning Game is pure and simple a requirement for the average guy dealing with women. We’re learning it to simply be able to have a relationship with women.

Despite women’s plaintive cries for men who will resonate emotionally with them, men have been consistently punished for seeking to meet their emotional needs as a primary mechanism of relating to women. I’m not going to get into a moral judgment, both sides are understandable. But clever men notice the negative outcomes and veer in the emotionally stunted direction intentionally, which crystallizes into a paradox where they can acquire the furiously sought emotional contact they are no longer in a condition to receive. Which loops us back to the problem that Infantry and Wudang speak of at the top of this post.

In conclusion: long-term commitment and its obligations are decoupling from sex, intimacy and the other benefits of relationships, due to a host of reasons relating to poor emotional rearing, a broken and disrespected “commitment” system, and a sexually atomized society. Game is a partial solution to the male problem of getting sexual attention which is a prerequisite for acquiring emotional comfort and relationship benefits, but is not a solution IF one becomes emotionally repressed and confined in the process. For some men that’s not a big deal; for most men I wager it is, because for them it’s about a lot more than rubbing until you get off – it’s about contact and closeness, and being desired and respected and allowed to be vulnerable.

Stone Soup

When I was a kid, I read/heard several variations of the folk tale “Stone Soup.” The plot is that of a hungry vagrant who convinces a resident to furnish him a pot and water so he can make “stone soup” (he has provided the stone). As the water boils, he remarks that the soup could use a dash of something. A carrot or celery or a potato is procured and donated to the stock, then another item, and eventually the pot is filled with furnishings (from either his host alone or various townspeople) alongside the stone. Everyone was excitedly awaiting the “stone soup” and so were happy to give their own modest parts to it.

All those involved enjoy the soup, then the vagrant takes his stone out of the pot, puts it in his bag and departs. The whole point of the story is that there was no “stone soup” – they just made a soup with the vagrant exploiting the stone as a catalyst to get things moving.

For most of my life I have regarded this tale with a glint of cynicism, as a warning against a ripoff by a person who feigns to have something to offer but is really just setting you up to do all the giving.

I’m told, however, that it’s generally regarded as a fable of sharing and cooperation. In an optimistic light, the story provides a great example of getting resources in a state of great need by not begging for the charity of others but by putting your ante in first. The guy didn’t really have anything to offer, but he did a lot with what he could – not just providing the stone to seed the soup-brewing operation, but providing the environs, the mood, the enthusiasm around the event, the chance to be part of something. Most of his contribution was non-material, yet he ate well that day.

It recalls the Gospel story of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, where the good Lord and his crew sought to feed a large crowd with only a handful of things to eat, yet wound up collecting basketfuls of scrap food after all had eaten their fill.

When I was growing up this had always been very sketchily proffered as a conventional miracle of provision, that God could provide against material want as a sort of cosmic vending machine (which, if you haven’t been reading the papers, we don’t really see Him doing on a daily basis).

But one piece of theology I read had a much more practical interpretation: faced with the task of throngs of hungry people gathered to hear the sermon, those in the crowd who could procured their own foodstuffs and donated them to the crowd at large.

THE STONE-SOUP PROCESS

Another interpretation of the story is the allegory of building something – beginning with a pretext, which superficially motivates everybody to contribute, and coalescing into something where the original pretext isn’t important at all.

Allow me to coin the idea of the stone-soup process: to begin a task with a kernel that is wholly critical, where at the end of the task, the kernel will be wholly irrelevant.

Game, in most of the forms we understand it today, is a stone-soup process. That means both the process of learning game, and the process of building a sexual and romantic connection with a woman.

THE HOOKS REQUIRED TO START BUILDING GAME EVENTUALLY SUBSUME INTO IRRELEVANCE

Game is incessantly criticized for its teaching of small, digestible tasks men can use to improve their social-sexual ability – openers, funny or confident routines, responses to fitness tests, body language tips, dress tips, tactics to touch women effectively, even the appropriate order in which to stroke a woman’s erogenous zones. The critics will tell you that all that stuff is crap that “doesn’t work,” that you should just “be confident and don’t be a pushover,” or that if you try to employ tactical tips you’re already a loser that women will see through.

It’s a bit like Yogurt from Spaceballs, telling Lonestar that he found the Schwarz ring in a Cracker Jack box. (There’s usually also a good helping of “that nonsense would never work on me.”)

I played sports for a long time in my youth, and when I reached adulthood I began coaching sports. One of the key tenets of coaching athletes is that for all practical purposes, new muscle movements cannot be learned at full speed. A large part of coaching is the process of teaching new skills, then repping them (correctly) at progressively advanced speed and increased complexity until they can be executed autonomously in he heat of competition. At that point, the skill is internalized and automatic, and the athletes can concern themselves with the dynamics of the game instead of which foot to put in front of the other.

Those who can be told “go catch this pass I’m going to throw to you” and do it on the first try are natural athletes – their bodies came programmed to accommodate physical tasks demanding in time and space. Another challenge of coaching is teaching athletes who are naturals, or who think they are naturals, that it’s important they learn to do skills the right way and not rely entirely on their natural ability, which is prone to change or might not be useful if the required skills change a bit. (One interesting outcome of this fact is that many natural athletes hit a wall of development – some of them in early high school - and get passed by other athletes precisely because they can’t get out of the “naturals’ mindset.”)

Back to game: the fact is that new mental-muscle movements can’t be learned at full speed either.

I’m here to tell you that for most guys, starting with the small stuff is the way to go. It’s way too daunting a task to begin with “you need to really envision yourself as the prize that women are lucky to chase after” or “you gotta let go of the idea that the outcome matters to you” and try to get results with it. It’s not actionable and is nothing more than a hollow affirmation. Only a guy with the psychological plasticity of a woman is going to be able to turn “be more confident” into a product without going through a behavioral-adjustment nexus. (An aside for another post: I’m working on a theory that one reason women are so dismissive of the idea of game as an acquired skill is that women tend to be susceptible rapid changes in psychological state in response to cultural stimuli, whereas men have a long-term, durable psychological arc based on a rational assessment of their own core value. So to women, it sounds perfectly normal to just wake up tomorrow and “be more confident.”)

There are some guys who are messing up in one particular tactical area, and once that is addressed, they hit their stride. Other guys have most of the outer game covered, but just need to believe they can win and develop some “killer instinct” for getting after it in the field. But the bulk of guys who are drawn to game need a lot of work in a lot of areas.

The thing is – and this is where the stone-soup idea comes in – once a guy is on his way to mastering a number of these tactical points, it becomes internalized, and the rest of his issues can rapidly dissipate because the overall mental frame, the feeling of power and confidence, takes over and drives out the rest of the negative traits.

There are limits to this, but it’s an effective strategy to fix some of your glaring problems for their own sake, get a bit of success from it, then once you “get the hang of things,” to move forward in a more holistic manner.

I went through this as did many guys. I never did a lot of highly structured PUA-style game to begin with, but I dabbled in some of its constructs. But today I could barely tell you what I’m doing in a set or where I got it from. The idea of opening, teasing, connecting with, and escalating with girls is something I can feel out – I don’t formulate a mental strategy, I just play out the behaviors and the mindset I subsumed under practice.

The “game” as the stone in my soup is back in my bag, while me and the girls are enjoying the soup.

“FAKING IT” WILL HELP YOU MAKE IT

The joke is really on the haters, because psychology is on our side. Not only does body language reflect our mentality, it goes the other direction too – it’s been demonstrated that changing the way we sit or stand affects how we perceive our own attitude and sense of power, and I can tell personally that changing my workwear changes my approach to my craft (I take my work more seriously in a suit than in grad-student shorts and tshirt).

Our minds have evolved elaborate shortcut mechanisms to infer one’s mental state and psychological fitness from body language, and it seems our minds are impressionable even when it’s ourselves doing the impressing. Thus it’s important for a guy whose game sucks to literally start going through the motions to adopt physical and verbal mechanisms that will imprint the winning attitude onto his mind.

GAMING A WOMAN REQUIRES EXPEDIENT HOOKS

Another way the stone-soup principle works is in the process of attraction and seduction itself. You’ll use spontaneous coincidences, short-term opportunities, deja-vu moments and other things as logistical props to move the process forward, completely for that purpose and with no persistent meaning.

One classic, archetypal example is that almost no woman will ever remember your opener. I’ve asked women if they remember the first thing a guy said to them; crickets. It’s critical to have an opener to get the conversation started, but it almost immediately becomes irrelevant and is more often than not forgotten.

Another is the oft-cited principle of using discretion and plausible deniability to advance the seduction temperature. If your plan is to go to your place, you can drop bait about seeing your vacation photos or shaking her up your custom Martini recipe. If it’s her place, you can always ask to use the bathroom and see how that goes, or suggest watching a movie.

(An aside that’s worth talking about: hard-edged critics paint this soft-sell approach as “coercive.” This line of thinking is frankly silly and tries to paint women as infantile victims of male agency with no accountability for their own decisionmaking.  I don’t view it that way, first of all because she can say no if she’s not interested (and in my experience, they do, because you’re creating an environment where it’s OK to say no) and in fact I’ve found that girls who are interested like the roundabout process of seduction that gives them the feeling of discretion and “it just happened” that they like. There’s nothing romantic or seductive about “why don’t we go upstairs and bone?”

You’re doing your job as a man when you take that kind of pressure off of her so she doesn’t have to go through some mental gyrations about “should I invite him up? Is it too early? Would that be kind of slutty? Do I really want to do this with him? I wonder if he’s as good as Mike was…he smells good enough…we can always watch TV if it’s not hot, then I can kick him out. Is he not asking because he doesn’t like me? Maybe I should have worn another top…shit, I was supposed to wear this one to the work social tomorrow. I better just end it here, I have laundry to do. Oh, why won’t he just kiss me?”)

ROOSH SOUP

The first-class game blogger Roosh had a post with a stone-soup ethos. A young man in a coffee shop asked Roosh to teach him everything he knows about women. Roosh tasks him with progressively more involved personal projects, including approaching 100 girls, reading books, getting fit, and learning a new language. At each juncture Roosh promises to teach him about women after he completes the next task.

Of course, Roosh is teaching him to be a higher-value man, a complete package that is attractive to a wide spread of women. Eventually the hook of teaching what he knows about women becomes superfluous.

Three months later he came back to the coffee shop. Behind him was a pretty girl.

“Hey Roosh this is Rebecca. I met her in the grocery store and we’ve been going out for two months.” When she stepped out to make a phone call, he said, “Roosh you’ve been very helpful to me. I’ve grown a lot in the past couple years and can barely recognize myself in the mirror, but I’m finally ready for you to teach me everything you know about…”

Suddenly he stopped and stared at me. A smile formed on his face. He gave me a strong handshake and then left with his girl. I never saw him again.

With Regard To A Woman’s “B*tch Shield” And Why Nurturing Is A Commitment-Boner Trigger

The “bitch shield” (or “protection shield” in disarmed parlance) is a celebrated PUA concept that women will deploy “false” distasteful personalities in public to deflect male attention. The basic idea was that certain women get hit on so much that they couldn’t be expected to be pleasant in public. In a roundabout kind of way, the idea seeks to rationalize poor female behavior as the result of bad game – as a sort of motivation for men to up their game, essentially promising that a suitably-attractive and well-gamed man will be able to get the icy queen to smile and supplicate to him.

The critics of game have long argued “why would you want to be with a woman who was susceptible to game anyway?” It’s generally a silly concern and a fallacy because most women want and respond well to some combination of confident frame, emotional connection and sound sexual escalation. However, in this case the critics have a point – what do you want with a woman who didn’t just reject you when you weren’t good enough for her, she blew you out with no remorse? We’ll discuss the long-term implications of this phenomenon in a bit.

The “bitch shield” idea recognizes a real phenomenon, that of women treating men “below them” like crap and treating men “above them” like princes. This is not a universal feature of womanhood, but it’s a common enough experience for men that anticipating and fearing it becomes a regular part of male life. When you add the distasteful behavior to the fact that a lot of women are prone to over-value themselves in the sexual marketplace, you’ve got a two-dimensional problem.

The now-defunct blogger Cless Alvein had an excellent post on this issue, making his point by analogizing a hot girl to a rich man:

Let’s go further and assume that you’re of average means, and that this guy has just treated you like dirt. Understandably, you dislike him. One of his friends excuses his behavior. “He’s not really such a bad guy. The obnoxiousness is just an act. That’s just his rich shield. If you can prove your status to him, he’s actually a decent guy.” How would you respond?

If you’re like me, your response would be something like the following: “What? I have to prove my status to this prick? No thanks. ‘Rich shield’ or none, he’s shown himself to be an unlikeable asshole.”

In other words, if she thinks she can treat men like crap if they don’t meet her standards of attractiveness, she isn’t putting on a false front – she’s just a distasteful person, full stop.

Whatever we can say about the morality of the bitch shield, the reality is that it exists in many of today’s women. Women who argue against men using some form of game often threaten men directly with the spectre of bitchy treatment, as in: “If a guy used those creepy pickup techniques on me, I’d slap him/throw my drink at him/insult him/etc.” But the reality is that a gameless man is at much higher risk of being on the receiving end of bitchy behavior, as he offends the female sensibilities in his earnest but highly misguided quest to “just be himself.” And women, running their rationalization hamsters hard to convince everyone they would never fall for game, vastly overestimate the degree to which women can recognize and confront game-aware men in the field.

Women say they have to deploy a surly personality because they get hit on too much, or hit on “by the wrong guys” (which is itself synonymous with a girl’s concept of “getting hit on.”) Girls: if you have to utilize a regular “bitch shield,” one of two things is going on.

• You’re spending more time than the patience of your personality allows in places where people are expected to socialize more than you want to (solution: stop going places where you’re going to get hit on at all)
• You’re spending too much time in environments with people who are sexually incompatible with you (whether above, below or outside your target zone)

The shield winds up being self-defeating. If you are distasteful in public and issue pyrotechnic rejections, only the most confident and ballsy men will dare approach you, and those guys have probably noticed your attitude anyway and slotted you squarely onto the casual-only Ladder 2. Let’s talk about this in more detail.

THE SHIELD OVER THE LONG TERM

A woman who feels justified in deploying the bitch shield poses a serious structural problem for a long-term relationship. No matter how much game a guy employs, he can’t be the alpha-make BMOC all the time. That means there will be some point where he falls below her attraction line of demarcation.

If the woman has shown a willingness to dismiss and belittle inferior suitors, that means there’s a real danger I’LL wind up dismissed and belittled if I break out of whatever expectations she has – if I suddenly become not successful enough, put on a few pounds, don’t read the right books, watch the wrong movies, or God forbid don’t feel like going to Sunday brunch.

Some might spin this as a good thing, in that the man is getting a clear signal that he’s not up to snuff and can correct on it quickly. But this is a hollow comfort – the point of a man’s existence is not to please a woman, and a woman who becomes exceedingly unpleasant at the first signs of dipping value in her man is not one who’s fit for investment in today’s relationship climate.

That’s not to say a normally-pleasant woman can’t get combative and bitchy in a long-term relationship, but a woman who does so in her youth is lining up a lifetime of expectations for the same behavior from the word go.

A NURTURING ATTITUDE MEANS I’LL GET A BREAK WHEN I NEED IT

Let’s look at the counterpart to “bitch shield” behavior. A nurturing woman is one who shows a generally friendly and compassionate demeanor, even (especially) to those of lower status and with less power.

I’ll say it right now: there is something about women being nice to old people, kids and guys they aren’t interested in that makes men feel reassured about their fitness as relationship partners and potential wives. Teachers and nurses have a strong reputation as wife material exactly because of this nurturing vibe that their job depends on.

For the Mad Men fans reading this, recall how quickly Don Draper was smitten with his secretary Megan when he saw her cheery and carefree attitude towards his children, the antithesis of his bitchy and paranoid ex-wife Betty. Megan became Mrs. Draper not long after.You can’t be a bleeding heart and give endlessly to bums and saps, but a sense of personal generosity to the world can really warm a man’s heart.

I believe part of the reason is that a halfway-aware man knows that the pressure is on for him to stay large and in charge in the world, and it’s a real anxiety-inducer for him to consider what might happen to his relationship if he hits some bumps in the road.

If he’s with a nurturing woman, he can trust that if and when he does slip, he’ll get compassionate encouragement instead of negative reinforcement.

By way of real-life example, I recently made the personal and romantic acquaintance of a woman with experience as a schoolteacher, who showed strong signs of a pleasant and easy-going nature. While engaged in some heavy kissing, I bumped my head against the wall. She shifted instantly into a compassionate mode, rubbing my wound and expressing sympathy. Once I assured her I was OK, we went back to the passions of the evening. Her flash of nurturing concern stayed with me and proved to be a real boost to her value in my eyes. It was nice to know that a brief moment of weakness by me actually allowed her to showcase her best side without cutting me down further.

 

The Subsidizer’s Dilemma, or Squeezing the Sexual Marketplace From Both Ends

One of the major hammering points of conservative/libertarian thought over the years has been the psychologically necrotizing effects of subsidization on human productivity and innovation. While the mass effects of these policies are most impactful with regard to tariffs, tax policy and politically-interested grants, the psychological consequences and risks of subsidy are most starkly visible with regard to aid at the personal level, known colloquially as welfare.

The informal ward of the state has no personal incentive to better their situation, driven as they are into the pernicious cycle of dependency, and has no political incentive to change the system, because the status quo directly benefits them.

I’m not saying anybody is living large on welfare – they’re not, didn’t anybody see “Precious?” – but income subsidization removes one major bother from one’s life: day-to-day accountability to a boss and an organization. Stability is a huge incentive, one that can easily override the drive to better one’s station. It’s an ironic paradox that people will put up with a lot to get something that’s free, and it’s not always a conscious process; like wax dripping onto a rock, the molding of our psyches by incentives in fact taps into our very deepest hindbrain quarters, shaped as they are into efficiency by millions of years of mammalian evolution.

If they have a strong ambition or a need for autonomy, they might be driven to move up from statist dependency, but that’s a large mental hurdle to clear, and it gets higher the longer one is dependent. There’s also the matter of learned helplessness – as time goes by they find it progressively more difficult to get out of their quandary even if they want to or it becomes possible to do so. For an example, consider people in mediocre relationships; even though their situation is unrewarding, many stick with it because the change itself is too much bother.

Now, with that knowledge in hand, consider another angle of poverty. The so-called “working poor” consists of people whose labor is so fungible (i.e. unskilled and rote) that they have almost no microeconomic leverage against their employers or industries. Thus not only are their wages low, their negotiation power is at a minimum. Unionization is essentially a way of binding together all the workers’ interests into one contiguous block against the management, to prevent laborers from competing against each other and instead threatening management with a wholesale loss of labor output (i.e. a strike).

Don’t get me wrong on romanticizing the blue-collar worker – some of the trades are making big bank (I’m told plumbing and garbage collection are six-figure occupations) and there’s growing awareness of a crop of “white-collar poor” young adults, buried under massive student loan debt for a degree that got them in on the basement floor of a faceless, capricious organization.

In any case, those at the bottom of the employed ladder don’t lack the incentive to change – they are already putting in the dirty work yet not being particularly rewarded for it. What they really lack is the ability to influence either their station in life or the system at large; they are so far down the list in terms of productivity and wasta no one wants to listen to them.

So we have two exactly opposite scenarios, both of which contribute to an imperfect setup.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma,” a term coined by business scholar Clayton Christensen, is the phenomenon that a market leader with the customer share and capitalization to introduce a disruptive technology to a market is fundamentally disincentivized from doing so, due to the fact that they are successful doing it the old way, until it’s too late – when they get scooped by an upstart who has made the leading-brand product obsolete. So the innovator is either trying to change the modus operandi of people who have no proximal incentive to change, or he stakes out on his own in a disadvantaged position where he lacks capital and credibility and thus his idea may never be realized.

Thus the Subsidizer’s Dilemma, if I may adapt a phrase, is how to empower people to change their situation without further disincentivizing an already-empowered cohort who has no motivation to contribute as is.

THE SUBSIDIZER’S DILEMMA APPLIED TO THE ALPHA-OMEGA SPECTRUM

I recently happened to reframe this issue onto the sexual marketplace from a comment at a Manosphere blog – I can’t hope to recall the blog or the comment, apologies to whoever it was.

The small crop of alpha males have no incentive to change the marketplace or turn away from the benefits they receive – they can acquire with ease the sexual comforts of women while paying relatively little cost in commitment or relationship investment, and if and when they want to have a relationship they have many prospects to choose from which in and of itself forces suitresses to consciously increase their relationship fitness. There’s no reason for them to work for or support a marketplace reform that cramps their options or requires further investment on their part – the haphazard and disordered sexual marketplace is fine by them.

Meanwhile, the lower-beta crowd and below live through their sexual primes wholly uncomforted by the female sex – at the time when their sexual and psychological needs are at their most intense. They have no personal power (because they can’t get women) and they certainly have no political power (any agitation would immediately be dismissed as the whinings of an unattractive man that society should find his qualities more attractive).

Much hand-wringing (by both men and women) has occurred of late based on fears that the alpha-omega divide is growing more stark, with men differentiating early into implacable raconteurs and sexual basket cases. The fact that adult male virginity is more common than that of adult females seems to disturbingly support this hypothesis, however it’s all a matter of opinion as to whether this is due to increasingly-dysfunctional female sexual selection or an increasingly emasculated crop of men.

Now the Subsidizer’s Dilemma comes into effect. One method of addressing the imbalance is a re-valorization of beta-oriented males. This has produced predictable muffled snickers from the alpha male cohort, who again have no incentive to cooperate with a reform that takes away their catbird-seat power.

Another method along these lines is a tightening of courtship and commitment practices to reduce partner-swapping – to soften the overall volatility in the market by attaching costs to promiscuity and by ensuring men get some dividend returns on their commitment investment. However, this has produced opposition from women, who can’t bear the idea of being “trapped” in a relationship – when pressed on the topic they don’t seem to be very enthusiastic about the idea of commitment after all. Recall the ubiquitous Notebook-esque plot of “woman/man engaged/committed to to the wrong person.“

On the other hand, one could give betas the ability to be more alpha and thus assume a position of market power. Theoretically, alphas also aren’t going to support this as it undercuts their market advantage, although in reality alphas probably don’t really care since part of being alpha is being irrationally confident that you can best other suitors, and another part of being alpha is understanding there are lots of prospects to mine – either way, extra competition is just a marginal bother.

This is the art of game, a key mission of this blog and many others, as attractive behaviors and lifestyles can be learned, practiced and improved. This has also produced gnashing of teeth from lots of women, threatened by the bogeyman of “fake” attraction and apoplectically anxious that a new class of alphas will rise who leave their comfort- and commitment-oriented traits behind in pursuit of sexual success. (This raises the question of why, if those traits are so desired by women, they are consistently punished in the sexual marketplace to the point those men seek semi-professional advice in the form of game.) In this instance, women are the management, uninterested in having their laborers unionize or raise their skill level to the point they can strengthen their negotiating position.

And many beta-type men will be unwilling to learn and implement decent game anyway, due to either lack of fundamental talent and efficacy or a hamster-driven rejection of the art as “fake” or “just for losers” (look in the mirror?)

CONCLUSION

Any talk of a macro response to the sexual imbalance (which itself might be a pipe dream anyway) needs to take the Subsidizer’s Dilemma into account. We can’t simply aim to take sexual power from one group and grant it to another without accounting for the non-cooperation of the former, and the inefficacy and learned helplessness of the latter.