Rock Climbing, Fear and Game

“Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the mastery of fear.” – Mark Twain

“…and the absence of fear is stupidity.” – Badger’s high school track coach

A few months ago, I went rockclimbing with a few friends. It was an indoor facility, and I was the only rookie in the bunch.

I had to suppress a chuckle once or twice overhearing the climbers ask each other to “belay me,” which brought to mind the old Ross Jeffries NLP line “below me.” (Belaying is the act of counterbalancing a climber’s weight to arrest a fall in the event the climber loses contact with the rock face.)

I had a decent enough time, I met some of the challenges and got a good workout, but I am going to lie to my readership – the overwhelming memory of the afternoon is one of repeated waves of fear, a dizzying, nauseating fear that rippled from my chest to the rest of my body and combined with the acute soreness to make all my limbs shake. I’m not particularly comfortable with heights, and when you put that together with a new athletic challenge, the pressure to impress these people that I really respected, and a body harness just inches from squeezing my balls, I felt my head and heart start to pound…and I started to worry to myself “what happens if I fail?” How I would look in front of these veterans?

I had honestly not felt that kind of fear, with its blinding intensity, in many many years. Interestingly, it took that shock of fear to make me realize that I am relatively fearless. I’ve rarely had trouble going against the grain of what was expected by others when I thought they were were wrong, taking extra steps to get involved in things I am interested in – or to tell a pal, “you go out if you want – I’m going to stay in tonight.” My steadfast stubbornness was a calling card of sorts when I was younger, and it never really dawned on me that I lacked much of the social fear instinct that inappropriately motivates so many people (oftentimes with permanently disastrous results). Whether it was the pressure to drink heavily or take drugs, to spend my working or free time a certain way, or get married or behave in certain ways around women because it was “what a man should do” at whatever age.

Even with the dedication to the game, the scores of approaches I had done that I’d had no business going into, my nervousness was never much more than getting a shot at the doctor – a brief prick of discomfort, and after a few seconds I’m either in the set talking to the girl, or we’ve separated and I’ve gone on with my day. Even in my many heartbreaks over the past several years, I was always left with a sense of sour disappointment and a desire to do better, but never fear, never a sense that I failing with no recompense, that my psyche thought I was really in trouble.

APPROACH ANXIETY FLASHBACKS

As I was digesting the experience later that day, it dawned on me that I had experienced what a lot of guys go through with intense, even crippling approach anxiety. I have had a lot of success minimizing AA, but I understand that many men are not there, and that the simplest step in the game – opening – is one they have a lot of trouble getting through. The rock climbing experience gave me an anchor of empathy I had not had in a while. It has already helped me better connect with and teach guys who need help with their game, as I can better express a sense of understanding for what they are going through.

I recall when I was a freshman in high school, and a senior varsity football captain came to talk to us before our first game. He told us, “you guys are going to be extremely nervous. I still get extremely nervous before games.” That resonated very deeply with me – this was the guy whose teammates had selected him to lead them into battle, and he’s admitting that HE has to keep the butterflies at bay. That was the first seed of me learning to master my fears, of which I had many when I was starting out in athletics.

Arianna Huffington wrote a book about becoming fearless- a typical modern tome of teaching our young girls to become anything they want, etc etc. I thought the premise was incredibly stupid, because fear is going to be there. Selling young people on the idea that they can banish their fear in a sort of modernist baptism is leading them down the wrong road. The right strategy is teaching people how to push through their fear in the pursuit of things that are worthwhile or that they really believe in.

I hope female readers here can understand what I’m getting at…some of the guys who approach you DO lack fear entirely. MOST other men, including many attractive sociable guys in the sweet-spot greater-beta category, are trying to master their fear in one way or another. I dislike hearing “I don’t want a guy who is nervous to talk to me.” If that is a woman’s belief, then she will only be satisfied by approaches from sociopaths.

Even guys that you think have it totally together on the outside are struggling with this on the inside. We do a lot to quell it in the game teachings, but at the end of the night it’s just something a guy has to fight through. The good news for guys, though, is that there are a lot of girls out there for whom you don’t have to put on a Clintonesque bravado – swallowing your fear for a moment and making a sound approach, and then carrying on a reasonably confident, measured conversation, is enough to get you in the door.

TEAMWORK

A footnote on the climbing afternoon: one of the girls in the group took the time to belay me on my first couple of climbs, and I was amazed at her ability to keep me from panicking by encouraging me from the ground. She shouted things like “keep going, Badger, I got you – you’re doing great!” in the most positive, confident tone. It really felt good to have someone rooting for me, which took a lot of the edge off of the unnerving first climb. The feeling reminded me of my high school football team, a very tight-knit crew, and the sort of selfless concern we had for each other, the pride we took in each other’s successes.

Even though this woman was obviously female, I believe that kind of collective spirit is what activates groups men and romantic relationships to really push the envelope. The most amazing things can happen when you have a group of guys believing in each other – or a couple believing in each other. You don’t have to wonder “what would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” or “what happens if I fail?” The idea of retreating or giving up never enters your mind. You don’t know how, but you know the team is going to press on.

My God, that’s a great feeling. One of the sad things about the prescribed pathway for the “standard American male lifestyle” is that it takes men away from the opportunities to experience that kind of teamwork again. Watching the game with the guys until your wife won’t let you put off your Honey Do list any longer, until you have to go to work and drone yourself out for a Lumbergh manager who doesn’t give two rips about your performance except to the degree it won’t get his ass chewed by his own boss, does not engender the sort of psychological rush I am talking about.

 

“You Can’t Judge Her For Her Dream”

Went to a movie last week. Buying my Reese’s Pieces, I noticed the clerk had a piece-of-flair name tag that read “Name: Mary. Favorite movie: the Little Mermaid.”

With a few seconds to kill, I instinctively went into some game-agnostic banter.

“Is the Little Mermaid really your favorite movie?”

“What? Oh! Yeah, I guess so.”

I personalized it.

“Is there anything you want bad enough to give up your voice?”

“Hmmm, to give up my voice? Yeah, probably not.”

Then busted her chops.

“Well then how can it be your favorite movie if you can’t identify with the character?”

“She wanted to walk on land! You can’t judge her for her dream!”

“She certainly paid the price for it. Thanks for the candy.”

The conversation was fun, and structurally non-threatening (there was no vibe of “this customer is hitting on me”), the kind of skill that comes in very handy when you’re running indirect game or daygame, and comes in handy anyway as a form of entertaining conversation for its own sake, the benefits of which extend far beyond the romantic sphere.

What stuck with me, however, was the young woman’s knee-jerk turn to defend a fictional animated girl – to stand up against the perceived judgment of an itinerant customer, a single-serving friend who dared question whether it was a wise idea to self-mutilate. She obviously was putting herself in Ariel’s position (or vice versa), and thinking, “what if some guy was trying to tell ME that I couldn’t go after MY dream no matter how ridiculous? If ours is a society where fairy tales might be viewed as the cautionary tales they were intended to be rather than over-romanticized fantasies pumped into our girls’ brains at all ages, then the terrorists have already won.”

The sudden shift in tone of the discussion towards projected defensiveness recalled a long series of posts on the topic by Vox Day, and also a piece of my own experience with a previous partner. I had no skin in the game so I didn’t worry about it, but men seeking quality in a mate would be well-advised to carefully observe these behaviors of defensive reframings in a potential paramour (with the requisite sequela of throwing the judgment back on you to explain how you dare say such an offensive thing to a lady).

Reprise: Don’t Believe Lies About Super Bowl Battery

I posted this two years ago on Super Bowl Sunday, just a month into my blogging career. It of course remains salient today. I really have to hand it to the femin-activist community, as they are truly adept at inserting canards into our thinking in all sectors of society. (A “canard” is a widely-held legend/belief that is actually false. If you ever hear someone warm up their rhetoric with “everybody knows…,” you’re probably about to hear a canard. Or as Mark Twain put it, “things you know that just ain’t so.”)

Once again, I draw attention to the way the lie is not just an overstatement – it’s an overstatement that directly indicts American masculinity, by falsely linking woman-beating with the mother of all sporting events. This is of course by design, furthering the feminist contention that men are intrinsically malevolent and violent creatures.

I never understood why the anti-DV movement would want to flood society with false messages about assault, as it’s likely to produce a callous backlash when people discover they’ve been lied to. The truth should be enough for most people to sign on to – people are being hurt, and the perpetrators should be discouraged and prosecuted. But with Vox Day’s recent focus on logical versus rhetorical argument, things makes more sense to me. These sorts of activists aren’t interested in presenting rational arguments in favor of their efforts and earning supporters piecemeal; they want to whip people into a frenzy, a mass emotional machine unto which the movement can be carried forward. With any crusaders, untruth is just collateral damage.

If you’re like me, more than once in your life you’ve been told that women are at their highest risk of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday.

It’s total bunk.

Put exactly, there is no statistically significant change in domestic violence incidence during the Super Bowl. There is less truth to this rumor than there is sex in the champagne room.

I was all ready to do some heady research on this repeatedly-disproven canard, but it turns out that our friendly rumor-demongering website Snopes.com has succinctly summarized the case.

Claim: More women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.

Status: False.

Origins: The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” demonstrates how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as “fact” even when it has been fabricated out of whole cloth.

A more accurate description of the issue is difficult to fashion. This story was probably an example of what journalists call “too good to check” – a lead that so resonates with the reporter’s sensibilities, or will provide so much publicity, that standard journalistic procedure is short-circuited in a vortex of zeal and confirmation bias. What better ammunition could domestic violence activists have for their cause than a study proving that the biggest game in the most archetypically masculine sport in America was inspiring enthused or crestfallen men to smack their wives from coast to coast? What better indictment of modern masculinity itself could they have asked for to justify social reprogramming like the Duluth model?

The facts of the case are well-covered in the Snopes link but I will repeat the skeleton for good measure.

• In late January of 1993, three days before Super Bowl XXVII between the Cowboys and the Bills, a Pasadena press conference put on by women’s groups declared Super Bowl Sunday “the biggest day of the year for violence against women” and cited an Old Dominion University study claiming that northern Virginia domestic violence statistics rose 40% in the wake of Washington Redskins victories.
• Television and print media exploded with the story; NBC, who was broadcasting the game, ran a guilt-presuming pregame public service announcement telling men to keep their hands to themselves.
• Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle contacted three principal sources, two of whom had been key to the original story. The first, a coauthor of the ODU study, said the study’s actual data flat-out contradicted the story sold to the media. The second source told him that quotes attributed to him were fabricated and that systematic data examining the hypothesis did not exist. The third source also said he had never seen substantive data on the issue.
• Predictably, the fact-based backpedaling retraction stories received far less attention than the original falsehoods, allowing the myth to burrow itself into the public’s mind.

No one should be surprised that it is male-friendly feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers whom Snopes quotes as the chief tracker of the mendacity. Sommers doesn’t seem to have much tolerance for academic mythmaking; as such, she has been all but ejected from “mainstream” feminist scholarship. (To call it a pity is tepid, but to call it an outrage gives the mythmakers too much credit.)

It’s easy to sympathize with reporters downstream from the study itself – they got leads from people they trusted and work under deadlines that don’t leave room for secondhand fact-checking. That doesn’t change the fact that somewhere, somebody took the unabashed liberty of lying about the study results to fit an agenda. The first question a reporter needs to ask with blockbuster stories like this is “does this story sound too good to be true?” Do you think you are that lucky of a reporter that a perfect story that exactly lines up with activist ideology (of any stripe) will simply fall into your lap? The better a story looks, the fewer loose ends, the more you have to drill down and make sure somebody hasn’t cut the loose ends off themselves.

Interestingly and pleasantly, the second link that came up when I Googled “super bowl domestic violence” (the first was the Snopes post) was a PsychCentral story citing the falsity of the myth, and digging up some other interesting health data as well:

On Super Bowl Sundays, compared to non-Super Bowl Sundays, Redelmeier & Stewart (2003) found a 41% relative increase in the average number of [driving] fatalities after the telecast on Super Bowl Sunday. So if there’s one piece of actionable advice you can take from the research, it’s to be very careful driving home after a Super Bowl Sunday get-together or party.

…

The researchers found a tiny positive effect for a rise in domestic violence dispatches on or after Super Bowl Sunday. By comparison, they found a much bigger effect for a rise in domestic violence calls around major holidays like Christmas though — nearly fives times as many. So while they did find a small but significant relationship there, it must be tempered by the fact that this was never peer-reviewed research and that most major holidays throughout the year have a much bigger domestic violence impact.

…

[A study of World Cup games] found that men’s risk of having a heart attack was 3x higher while watching their team play, while women’s risk was 2x higher. Something to keep in mind while watching the game this year — be aware of heart attack symptoms and take them seriously if your heart suddenly doesn’t feel right.

So if anyone at your Super Bowl party tries to pull this crap out of their tail, just tell them they’re wrong, and maybe let them know that wearing a holiday sweater might be more risky than putting on that Packer gear.

Snopes gives Sommers the last word and she delivers:

“How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained.”

Does Game Entail Promiscuity?

Some more discussion coming off the Dalrock post I referenced in my last post about Basic Skills for Game. As usually happens, the “what is game” discussion turned towards moralism, which itself brought out a series of arguments from people who either appreciate game in an intellectual sense while eschewing it for themselves, or insisted they wanted to separate game writ large from “ethical applications” of the Venusian Arts.

Many in the religiously-oriented communities that overlap with Dalrock’s readership (and also overlap with the conservative alternative lifestyle blogs that deal with “traditional” family relationships, paleo eating, or homeschooling) have a strong aversion to premarital sex. Therefore, the potential of game to empower a man to lead a sexually active lifestyle makes game itself morally suspect. It’s also worth noting that some non-religious critics of game are decidedly critical of sexual promiscuity as a life goal or as a point of lifestyle which normally manifests as a blustering superiority in the vein of “I don’t have to bang a bunch of sluts to feel like a man.”

As this came up in the comments, I provided some thoughts on the matter I expand upon here.

1. Game is not necessarily about promiscuity, but I am glib in saying that; most young guys get into game because they want to have sex. Let’s not beat around the bush here. Sex drive is a base, and at times all-consuming, motivation for young testosterized men. It’s really something that is difficult for women to understand, as they normally don’t have the ever-present and undifferentiated desire men do. To a young virile man, the desire to have sex, more sex and more sex with more partners is on the order of eating or breathing.

It’s easy for women, who have sex basically available when they want it, or men who have a lot of sexual options, to say in a vaguely shaming manner “there’s more to life than sex,” as it’s easy to tell a hungry man there’s more to life than food when you are well-fed.

Now, that sexual desire is a base drive, one often moderated by other life pursuits or by a moral or constitutional sense of order. In essence, many men sublimate and override this impulse due to a personal self-concept of a guy who isn’t ruled by his libido. The important thing to understand is that the drive is there.

Another group of men getting into the game is married/LTR people who get into game to improve their relationships with their wives, usually for more sex but often for the collateral benefits of a less quarrelsome home. They aren’t seeking extra sexual partners, but as per Athol Kay’s Male Action Plan, sometimes the end game is to find another partner who’s more in sync with your sexual desires you thought were going to be satisfied in marriage.

I don’t see any point is positing game as some kind of abstract male self-improvement operation whose benefits happened to include sex. Game was developed by men who wanted to get better at having sex.

So, game is about having sex in some form, and is often about getting sex from new partners. The next point builds on this.

2. In the West, only an extreme minority of people have 0 or 1 sexual partners throughout their lives. Western society is already promiscuous, in all of its subcultures and classes; poor, rich, white, black, educated, uneducated, every group has a sexual marketplace where active trading is happening.

IOW we’ve established what society is, game is just haggling over the price. Game is a way to get a better deal for yourself for the promiscuity society already sanctions. To add to this, you may not feel your manhood increase because you are bagging new quarries, but preselection means that women sure do. Part of the game is flexing preselection, or at least faking it well enough, and much field work has found that even among those professing chastity, declaring your own can be a ladyboner killer.

To say game is bad because it involves promiscuity is looking at the finger instead of the moon.

3. Now let’s explore how promiscuity itself fits into the quest for game. I have made this point many times on my blog and other places: most guys who get into game are not trying to get the highest notch count possible – most guys are jealous of their player friends’ abilities with girls, but don’t necessarily want to be them. They want to be able to get a girlfriend, keep her, get a new one if she doesn’t work out, and keep their future wife sexually interested in them. Most guys do not want to be tomcats all their lives and desire a partner and family. This has been surveyed and researched fairly conclusively. As I said in the previous post, it’s not the abundance as much as the abundance mentality these guys are seeking – it’s a real bummer to have the rest of your life together (good health, good career, respect of your peers) but feel unable to attract women and out of control of the love and family aspect of things.

Speaking as one of those guys, the problem from our side is that women seem to be specifically attracted to men who don’t want to commit, and so the commitment-minded men find they have to put on a show of non-commitment to attain a woman’s interest. Now women complain about screening “fake assholes” in additional to real ones; the market has given them what they demanded, so that’s their own problem as far as I’m concerned.

A good dose of game gives these men that sense of control over their own sexual fate, that they don’t have to be at the mercy of their woman’s choices and out if the cold if she loses interest. In fact, many men who DO get into game specifically to bang a lot of women find they get bored with that, and look instead for one high-quality woman they can depend on instead of a series of floozies. There was a commenter in the Dalrock thread named Anthony who stated he has no intrinsic interest in being a dominator or a player, and he finds running game exhausting and outside of his own personality – but he tolerates it enough to keep his relationships going.

3b. To back away from the specifics a bit, I agree with commenter J R: “I think the Roissysphere debate has become sterile and needlessly polemical.” Roissy is an affected intellectual (clearly a sharp thinker but also putting on an intentionally puffed-up academic persona), and his geosexualpolitics are interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, but most guys don’t give a crap beyond the game basics he is continually pointing out. I don’t at all mean to pick on Roissy himself; Roissy’s vision and sheer volume of output helped make him the number one most cited figure in the Manosphere (and the namesake of the pre-Manosphere game-writers’ collective dubbed the Roissysphere); however the powerful appeal of his candlelight-revolutionary frame and style, which was duplicated or aped by dozens of game writers and cultural analysts, has passed.  It is one reason that Ferdinand Bardamu, followed by a bevy of Manosphere heavyweights, quite resolutely gave up the ghost. There is also something to the idea that Roissy had the master’s touch as the initiator of a format that his admirers could not successfully emulate, but Roissy himself stopped being that long ago anyway.

Not to mention that the nature of the ideas we are discussing means that an aggressive, combative posture alienates potential allies and induces the keepers of the status quo to marginalize and crush our members. We can be resolute and committed without being abrasive and disagreeable.

This is one place where, to take a notable example, Athol Kay’s work stands out by contrast: he’s a practical realist, focused strongly on action, and doesn’t spend a lot of time waxing philosophic without moving towards an explanation, motivation or action path forward. Even by Manosphere standards, his is a very active-masculine approach that aims to produce results and disarms critics in the process.

ENNUI

This last item was inspired by the general snipey, “you show me yours” attitude on the Dalrock thread. There is a certain point beyond which arguing all this stuff on the Internet is beta – you gotta get out and live your real life. If you think game is a big fraud and whatever mating strategy you have is yielding you optimal results, knock yourself out; I’ve lost the will to try to convince you otherwise. If you’re down with an alternate way of thinking about dating and society, maybe some stuff on my blog will help you move forward and I hope you enjoy it. So many posts and words have been written on this stuff, and almost every point or quibble raised by critics, haters, trolls, bots and even genuinely curious fellow travelers and skeptics has been hashed out and answered somewhere already. As I mentioned, you’ve seen a lot of good Manosphere writers fold up in the last few months, and this is another big reason it’s happened – most people don’t have the patience to discuss the same thing more than a few times before they decide they’re done arguing.

 

“‘The Bachelor’ Is Sexist”

A few years back I was LTR’d with a particularly stimulation-seeking, short-term-oriented woman. This plus her relatively socon upbringing meant that she had a straightline blue-pill perspective of female pedestalization and lack of coherent logic in her thinking. She lived in a rapidly-swirling, “how can I make myself feel good right now” emotional swamp. I used to tease her by reading aloud Roissy’s more incendiary invectives.

One day I made a crack about the girls on The Bachelor*, how pathetically desperate they were to earn the attentions of the show’s synthetically-famous protagonist. I can’t say I was prepared for her reply.

“That show is sexist.”

“What?” I could think of a lot of negative adjectives to describe the program, but sexist wasn’t one of them.

“It’s wrong to force girls to chase a guy around on TV. Women shouldn’t compete for a man.”

I hadn’t seen any evidence anybody was being “forced” to participate in the show. Even knowing her troubles with agency for over a year, the victimhood mentality surprised me. Sure the show is contrived, but the basic outline of women chasing and competing for a very attractive and high-status man plays out everywhere without lights, cameras or professional makeup. But to her, merely the sight of a guy entertaining offers from multiple girls was evidence of social violence and wrong, apparently under the idea that it’s unfair to cause a woman negative feelings by suggesting she can’t have the man she wants – or the old primary-school rule, “if you bring a snack you have to bring one for everybody.”

I then made a grave, yet revelatory, error in trying to appeal to logic and fairness.

“What about “The Bachelorette”? Isn’t that the same thing but sexist against guys?”

Her reply was quick and resolute.

“No – men are supposed to compete for a woman, so that’s OK.”

This one-minute conversation was a verbal lithograph of a Rollo Tomassi-esque plugged-in worldview – a female-presumptive narrative where woman is always higher value, no ifs, ands or butts about it, and man by virtue of his being is called upon to continuously re-prove his worth.

What’s sad (and dangerous for their own well-being) is that men believe this stuff too.

*(It’s interesting to note that trash TV was part of our undoing. I would usually sit on the couch with her and steadfastly read a book or blog while she watched whatever chick-porn struck her fancy. In an argument once, she revealed that she found it profoundly insulting that I wasn’t focused on whatever brain-killing junk culture she was focused on. I guess she felt judged…guilty as charged.)

Ladies, Don’t Ask Us To Clean Up After Your Girlfriends’ Dating Mistakes

At a dinner party recently, I was seated next to a vaguely abrasive young woman who leaned over to me and breathlessly queried,

“Do you have any normal friends for my friend to date?”

Vaguely confused by the hasty presumption that I was a dating sourcer, but detecting an opportunity for a silent manosphere laugh, I replied “you’d have to tell me more.”

“Well, she’s been dating guys from OKCupid and says she just can’t find any normal guys there.”

Now I was irked. It would have been one thing if she said her friend worked long hours with all women and just wasn’t meeting men, or had had trouble getting back on the carouselhorse after a breakup. But she’s swimming in men and is striking out wildly. And I happen to know that a significant portion of the young men in my city are on OKCupid, so I know there’s a few good fish in that pond. The more I thought about the more I saw she was trying to outsource this woman’s man-choosing algorithm before she came up 00 again.

But that wasn’t even the interesting part of it. It was the fact that she came to me, a guy she had just met, and proceeded to recruit me into the problems of a woman I’d NEVER met, that fascinated me. It felt invasive and uncomfortable, as if she had turned to me and said “I’m getting divorced, and let me tell you, it’s nothing like those chick flicks would have you believe!”

And then it felt opportunistic. Let me explain that further.

The fact that she saw me as a possible conduit for her issue of the day smacked of a combination of megalomania and an appeal to the male instinct for problem-solving – “maybe you can help me fix this!” Expecting me to leap into the coat closet and re-emerge in my Captain Save-A-Ho suit, ready to line up cannon fodder for her chica amiga who couldn’t generate her own romantic sales leads. I also bet there’s some female-on-male projection in there, thinking that I get such a kick out of setting up my male friends that I’m going to facilitate a third-hand setup involving a woman I’ve never so much as set eyes on. There’s an element of matchmaking/relationship drama that women crave that is just not really a guy thing. Truth be told, I’ve already set up two marriages*, so she had come to the right guy; unfortunately for her, Yenta Badger knew enough to turn down the case.

The failed communication frame she put across was another interesting part of the exchange. What she THOUGHT she was communicating was:

• I have a friend who is eager to date, so it shouldn’t be hard for the guy to close the deal
• Her standards aren’t unrealistic, my friend just wants a “normal guy,” so he has to be single but not spectacular
• This is an opportunity for you to feel good about yourself playing matchmaker

What she was really communicating to me, through the prism of my male mind, was:

• It IS going to be hard for the guy, because she can’t find satisfaction with the large pool of eager men available online
• I’m trying to find someone who will clean up the drama-mess she’s made of her life
• I need you to screen for “normal” men since neither of us gals know the right guys (the “right guy” probably doesn’t exist)
• She’s desperate (or I’m desperate to stop her incessant complaining)

Another thing she didn’t consider is that generally speaking men are not very good at evaluating other men’s sexual market value (guys tend to evaluate male SMV post-facto, by inferring it from the quality of women he’s pulling).

I’m unusually game-aware, so I have a pretty good sense of when a setup is going to bomb, but the typical guy’s recommendation of a man to a single woman is usually worthless. That again goes back to the differences in how men and women evaluate their own sex versus the opposite sex – a guy we like and admire for being an honest, dependable, low-maintenance and mutually supportive is sadly a good bet to go straight into a woman’s “boring, no-spark” bucket.

One final factor is that she didn’t even try to sell the woman in question as a good partner with a bunch of boilerplate like “she’s a great girl, really cute/smart/etc, she just hasn’t found the right guy.” It was simply, “my friend needs a man. Can you give me one?”

THE HARSH TRUTH

Since picking up my game and finding that good women, while few, are found everywhere, and that good men truly ARE everywhere you choose to look, I have come even more to the conclusion that a woman who “can’t find a man” is more often than not:

• Suffering considerable personality flaws that drive men away (abrasive), or drive men away from committing (slutty), or blow her dating logistics (the Rules/sucky girl game)
• Stuck to a counterproductive comfort zone, refusing to mine new places or give audience to new types of men (he’s “not her type” or she’s “not going to settle!”)
• Unserious about commitment herself (possibly subconsciously) and thus positively smashing good opportunities

Or some combination thereof. This doesn’t apply to all women everywhere, particularly introverted women who have a much lower tolerance for the pageantry of social preening, but a large enough chunk to be a valid concern about an unhaaaappily perpetually-single woman you might hear about at a party.

*One where I introduced a girl I was pursuing to her future husband.

Comfort Game By Stocking Your Fridge

Hat tip to Danger and Play. A great video about having the right food and drink to grease a seduction through its final stages:

It’s really worth watching for the commentary, which includes female drink choice broken down by age, using Otter Pops to disarm the children of single mothers, snacks for zaftig women and an assertion that “black people don’t eat bleu cheese.”

This is brilliant stuff. With even a portion of his inventory, you have automatic variety available when a gal comes over which makes you look cosmopolitan, and when you bring a group back for an impromptu after-party (a key trick in the club-game arsenal) you have a ready-made party spread to keep things going.

Plus, there is an aesthetic appeal to having an orderly, well-stocked fridge and pantry with lots of choice.

COMFORT IS A STEP IN THE GAME

Mystery’s flowchart for closing the deal is attraction->comfort->seduction, in that order, in some number of meetings (he posited seven hours as a reasonable amount of buildup to the final seduction move; results from the field vary wildly, but once attraction is triggered sex is not long in coming).

Unless you’re catching a woman on Spring Break, on a foreign vacation or some other environment where the accountability is low and the windows of opportunity are short, generating attraction is not enough. You have to provide some comfort factors to your nascent romance to create a sense of nonsexual bonding and to allow her mind some time to anneal the concept of being with you. Thus the heavy PUA emphasis on building rapport, on cold reading to imbue a sense of familiarity, on bouncing locations to create the illusion of extended contact, on setting off the emotional adventure in her head, on throwing out some bones of vulnerability. Most guys do not have enough attraction power to totally dictate the terms of the exchange, and need some beta traits to smooth things along. What you’re doing is setting her up with the idea that this is a normal thing that’s happening and that you’re a normal, regular guy (even as your attraction/alpha game is trying to set you apart from all the other herbs that want to get into her pants.)

NESTING AS COMFORT GAME, NOT AS DISPLAY OF HIGH VALUE

When it comes to comfort factors, a little nesting goes a long way. Having your place be comfy and inviting, with some tasty foodstuffs and interesting reading material on the table, is not going to turn on your typical American woman with burning desire. It is, however, going to prevent her from thinking “eww, what kind of place does he live in?” or “hmm, this whole thing is actually kinda trashy” which will happen if your home life is a spartan mess.

If the woman is at your home alone with you, odds are she’s pretty attracted to you and her body agenda is at least willing to hear your body agenda’s seductive offer. She doesn’t need a lifeline, she’ll know her final answer soon enough; that’s why she came alone. Your job is to not screw it up and escalate on opportunity.

It’s all about eliminating worrysome distractions. If she has to consider, even for an instant, whether a roach will scurry under the counter when the lights are switched on, the seduction is at Defcon II.

(I once successfully negotiated past a disaster-area mess in my living room by stating plainly that I was about to move and so all my stuff was laid out for packing. That fact happened to be true, but the important thing was she discounted the negative beta points and we went on with the plan.)

BETA TRAITS KEEP THE GAME GOING

If you had a motto for flexing beta traits in your game, it should be ”don’t try to win it, just keep us in it.” Don’t think that you are making her hotter for you; what you’re doing is eliminating reasons for her to say no. Athol Kay had a great riff on this with the L-Spot; he argued that by taking the initiative to do the laundry, you take a big physical and logistical complication off of her to-do list AND you have fresh sheets on the bed. (Obviously there’s a balance point here, if you’re already too beta or failing fitness tests, doubling down is not going to help.)

Mothers have been indoctrinating their sons into comfort game for generations; the mistake they have made is to let their sons think that being clean-cut and well-made at home is going to get girls chasing them. It’s valuable for seduction, but in a certain way at a certain time; the way is not making her want you sexually, and the time is not at the front end of the encounter.

I know there’s going to be at least one person in the comments who is like, “this is bunk, I haven’t cleaned my place since the Bush administration and I still get plenty of tail.” Putting aside the Internet-tough-guy pose, the question for the readers is, is that YOU? Are YOU getting a ton of tail while neglecting key parts of the game equation? If you’re not, you don’t have any margin of error to play with – load the dishwasher and get a broom. Don’t engage in game feats of strength where you try to get laid with intentionally-imposed handicaps. Some guys think they can get away with the slovenly, unkempt frat-guy game that worked in college (which worked because nobody had any money or long-term dwellings). As you age, that style of game yields trashier and trashier women, because beautiful women shift away from pure social dominance and free beer and towards the elevated income and status they can command in men as they move into adult society.

A sidebar: In America today, we are regrettably at a point where the presence of comfort is itself an anti-attraction trait, a Display of Low Value (DLV) to a significant pocket of women. Unless he’s blessed with preeminent good looks or status, a guy who has the time and wherewithall to tidy his dwelling and practice some basic courtesy is presumed not edgy or exciting enough for attraction to today’s spoiled Millenials. (And then after the women go through a few years of rewarding the overconfident slobs and leaving Billy Beta alone with his hand, they are shocked to find that the men they spent their best years on are still drinking cheap beer and playing video games, just like they did in college whatwith no incentive to change. Meanwhile the not-so-hot guys with the comfy beta traits have opted out entirely and won’t sign up to be the “I’ve had my fun and now I want to settle down with YOU” targets.)

Check Out Roosh’s Interview With Virgle Kent

Manosphere blogger Virgle Kent has been writing about game for a long time – his first posts are from 2007, which makes his online persona as old as Roissy himself. VK’s focus has normally been brilliant exposition on his own game experiences (including a hilarious and intense two-part series about a fling that went bad) and attendant factors like personal style, along with a healthy dose of  bold inner game in a “me against the world” kind of way (plus hip-hop soundtracks to his posts).

RooshV just published an interview with VK in which he riffs on shifts in the mainstream praxis of game, foreign girls and his new male lifestyle website nexxtlevelup.com.

Here’s a sample:

I disagree with the thought that game is the response to modern feminism. Feminism has been around far longer than game. I’ll tell you what, game works best on feminists, girls so assured of themselves and filled with fake confidence based on their education and careers that they never see it coming. Most feminists honestly believe that game doesn’t exist or would never work on someone like them. But in the grand scheme of things most young women are feminist in name only, because they’re alone and have nothing else to hold on to or call themselves so they use feminism to feel a part of something. So if they meet a real alpha or guy with game and it’s between him or dying alone with one cat and two eggs holding on to each other for dear life, what do you think they’ll choose? For most women, feminism is an act of convenience more than a lifestyle of faith.

One part I really liked was this:

Game has evolved into a whole theology on what it means to be a man and feel like one in today’s society. It’s about being a man during the first approach, during a relationship, and even during a marriage. The secret being it’s not really what you say but how you say it. In the future men will have to work on setting themselves apart from other men with individual aspects of their lives that will make them naturally more interesting than most guys in the bar, lounge, party, or any environment they’re trying to pick up. Self improvement will be key.

Plenty of guys (and girls) have weighed in with this “game for self-improvement” meme, and most of them are just trying to avoid looking like they are trying too hard to get laid. VK recognizes that you can build your lifestyle, take the romantic benefits that come along  with it, and not feel like a sellout or a pussy for it. (I had a similar insight in my game journey where I visualized being the kind of guy the girls I wanted would have an affair with, which kept me focused on the still-waters-run-deep kind of understated personality that works best for me - hat tip to Athol Kay for the wordsmithing there.)

He also shows a magnanimity about the typical game-running guy and the manosphere material he reads, at a time when some bloggers are quick to dismiss guys who aren’t getting results as loser herbs.

I think young guys are just being young by their nature. What comes with that is anger, and more commonly, impatience. They’re in denial because game didn’t work fast enough for them. They read the books, followed the blogs, did everything “word for word” and in 6 months, 10′s weren’t falling from the sky…Part of it is our fault. Game bloggers that show the end results. We don’t talk much about our mistakes or times we failed at a pick up, or even the many years trying to crack a certain type of situation, which is where the true lessons are learned.

Go over to rooshv.com and check it out, and read VK’s work here.

The Mainstream Trains Men In Compatibility, Not In Attraction Where Most Men Need Work

In the peanut gallery at Alpha Game, van Rooinek riffs on the female attraction algorithm and social training therein.

I think Cail summarized it best: the point which the article clearly makes is not that being Godly makes you unattractive to women. It’s that being Godly just isn’t relevant to the process of attracting women

To put it another way:
(a) Attraction is not compatibility. (Surely you know this, you must have at least once in your life been strongly attracted to someone that you knew was a poor match).
(b) Almost all romantic advice given to men, by parents, pastors, and female friends, involves improving your compatibility – eg, spiritual growth, communication skills, dealing with emotional damage, cultivating outside interests, etc.
(c) But, all the compatibility in the world, will not get you a relationship without attraction.

Even when the issue of attraction IS dealt with,
(d) Attraction is one-dimensional for men: Looks (which are a good proxy for health and fertility). This is universally known.
(e) Attraction is TWO dimensional for women: Looks AND Status. (The desire for a higher status mate has a technical name, hypergamy).
(f) Hypergamy is NOT widely known – women themselves, despite the strong effects it exerts on them, appear to be unaware of it, and simply cannot explain why they like one man over another, especially when the one they rejected is clearly of higher quality in every compatibility dimension and may even be taller and better looking!
(g) Most romantic advice given to men, ignores hypergamy and is therefore at best worthless.

A few reactions:

1. We can quibble with tiny pieces, but he’s boiled the whole thing down pretty well: when it comes to mating and dating, there is attraction and there is relationship fitness/compatibility; social factors weigh much more heavily in the female attraction system than in the male; society lacks good advice to give men especially wrt maintaining attraction; and most men who want to be boyfriends and husbands and fathers lack attractive value far more than they lack relationship skills. (This last part is especially true in the educated class, where men have been domesticated wholesale but at the price of neutering their leadership and dominance attraction traits.)

1b. Churchian culture exhibits a strong streak of denialism on this topic, refusing to acknowledge the need for attraction in the open and instead replacing attraction psychology with fairy tales about “the Holy Spirit told me to marry this person” and churning out self-flagellating men whose debasing exercises in boisterous humility are spiritually masturbatory. This is on top of society-wide acculturated misandry that shames and excoriates men for the things that attract them, while defending and encouraging women to chase their own preferences.

2. Much male failure in mating and dating results from trying to build attraction with traits that are just plain not relevant.

3. van Rooinek’s comment dovetails perfectly with the universal Manosphere advice to never take dating advice from women. When a man asks a woman “how do I attract a woman [or this particular woman I am attracted to],” she usually answers a different question, instead listing behaviors she wants to see out of a man to whom she is already attracted. In short, men ask for attraction advice, but receive compatibility advice that presumes attraction – not attraction to him, but to a idealized and usually fictional male. He will have no idea she’s answering a different question, and she most likely will not understand her own mechanisms of attraction to begin with and won’t comprehend that she is answering a different question at all.

In reality, men are giving women too much credit for knowing their own secrets and giving them away – no one asks the prey for advice on hunting itself. Just follow the rule, it will not lead you astray. Besides, those nuggets of good advice you might occasionally get are ones you can get from your male game advisor too, so you lose nothing by following the rule.

Dominance and Femininity

In my last post I discussed dominance and its expression during sex. (It was quite a week, with myself, Roissy, Rollo Tomassi and the Private Man all posting on some factor of the dominance issue).

The earnest and lively discussion got me thinking about Athol Kay’s observation that when he gets down with the dominance, when he really rag-dolls his wife, she spends the next day or two being incredibly nuzzly and cuddly towards him (couldn’t find the exact post but he’s said it more than once). Like a lot of guys in the process of unplugging from the beta matrix, this was quizzical to me. I’m not one to have the good-feeling vibe of great sex carry over past the next morning’s breakfast. Wouldn’t the woman be sore and disinclined towards physical activity? Wouldn’t it be like post-coital lobsters, where after molting and fertilizing with the female of his choice, the male retreats to his in a posture of repose and the female retreats in a fecund humiliation?

Ah, but I had forgotten the key insight of analyzing male-female relationship – you can’t expect both sides to react the same way to the same stimulus; you have to account for complementarity.

To square this up, I had to go to Private Man’s principle that “the masculine attracts the feminine; the feminine attracts the masculine.” Mrs. Kay, and thousands of women like her, are responding to a man’s most primal expression of core masculinity with a primal expression of femininity.

ANXIOUS WOMEN ESCHEW FEMININITY

Much complaint in the Manosphere has centered on lowbrow, boorish and unfeminine behavior among American women. One of the lessons of game is, quite frankly, that a lot of these women haven’t had a real assertive man put his foot down and tell her to knock that shit off, and for a portion of same, a good dose of masculinity from a halfway-attractive guy brings them right into line as cooperative, sweet girls.*

(This is excepting the pocket of women who respond to male assertiveness with a combative, competitive pose of their own.)

It’s like their cop-an-attitude shtick is just a big macro-scale shit test, pre-weeding out guys who aren’t crafty or unmoved enough to see through it. There’s an anxiety element to the evolutionary foundations of the fitness test concept – the man must be tested if and when she detects a possible crack in the foundation, when she’s viscerally nervous that he may not have what it takes to protect her female imperatives. When she is confident and secure in his masculine capabilities, the testing abates (even then, sometimes she’ll throw some tests out just to feel him express it, to “rub up against his manhood”).

The same lesson is visible in the home life of married and long-term couples – as the complexities of domestic life grow with co-ownership of property and the rearing of children, the opportunities for existential anxiety grow, and along with them the urge for control and the the risk of mate rejection.

*A Public Service Notice:

I generally recommend that you don’t plan on gaming or asserting your way around a woman’s unpleasantness in the aim of sexual or romantic reward. Sure it’s great if you can tame a shrew with your Venusian Arts powers, but you’ve set a trap for yourself – the moment you slip back below whatever her bitch-shield attraction theshold is, she feels justified in being distasteful again.

You want to do your best to screen for a woman whose behavior is measured, nurturing and positive before you run any serious game. Such a woman already has her female beta traits deployed naturally without stimulus, which greatly simplifies your task at hand. You can use your game to get her alpha (attraction/attracted) side aligned with yours, instead of trying to trade your sex rank for her good behavior. You can’t expect to not have to pass any fitness tests at all, but any worthwhile Ladder 1 woman is not going to make you pay continuous tribute to her in the form of acting like a child and expecting you to act as her surrogate daddy. If she does she’s just voted herself off the ladder.

We now return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

This idea of putting out your masculine to bring on the feminine rings irksome to many; putting the onus on us dudes makes it sound like it’s our fault if women are acting up. (Fellow blogger Dalrock has made a killing exposing this inversion of accountability in Churchian marriage philosophy, so much so I can’t target just one post as an example.) As I just noted above, women who make a habit of acting out of line don’t deserve the calming, mediating power of a man who is in control of things.

In addition to documenting his dominance files, Athol Kay has also made the assertion that female sexuality is more or less reactive to male sexuality (in terms of seduction, sex rank changes, boundaries and other factors). You can view that as a burden or as an opportunity. We men have to take the first step in cooperating our way out of the SMP standoff. We have to work at-risk, as the business term goes; putting effort forth without any definite promise of reciprocation.

(I’ve found, by the way, that the less invested I become in reaping any kind of “reciprocation,” and the better I am at telegraphing that disinvestment, the better the reciprocation winds up being. It’s as if not feeling accountable for any under-the-table expectations makes the women feel more free to invest themselves. There’s some kind of comforting and empowering effect for women when they perceive a man is not angling for a proximal reward, even though it’s patently obvious he’s talking to her because he’s attracted to her – hamsters, start your engines.)

Now don’t get me wrong. Guys have to put the first step forward for our own self-interest, one woman at a time. As long as the risk of leading has the potential for reward attached, it’s a worthwhile trade to take some of that risk (I’ve noticed some women’s heads explode when I assert that it’s not my job to give free stuff to women simply because my genitals point outward).

By the same token, we can’t be white-knighting our way through a society-wide game of Captain Save-A-Ho. A man only needs one wife; it’s not our job to make them all give up their fem-dom act, and if women can’t provide enough seed material to draw out the masculinity of a man whom they can respond to, then that’s their problem.

That all being said…in today’s equalist world where women have hair triggers for male “neediness” and “creep factor,” it doesn’t behoove men to take all that much risk (e.g. expensive dates, lots of time investment and opportunity cost) before expecting some cooperation. That’s not a statement of entitlement, just one of appropriate boundaries and the expectation of mutual value in a romantic exchange. In this way, you avoid chumpitude and filter out time-wasters who are never going to yield value.

ACCEPT YOU’LL TAKE THOSE FIRST STEPS ALONE

One of the things you have to accept in your quest to become a virile and desired man is that you’ll be doing a lot of work on yourself without marginal recognition at each step. Honing your game from an amorphous block of beta to a chiseled cockboxer is the 21st-century American vision quest, a trial of unbearable solitude punctuated by all the human comforts you could ever want.

I’m not going to lie: the road can get lonely. Even your friends will out themselves as haters and plugged-in manginas unwilling to make the mental leaps you are making. Women will mock you and spit in your face for daring to invite them into your life. Like a long-tenured quarterback throwing lots of interceptions, you’ll experience mounds of failure and rejection that will stick in your mind more than your growing successes. You’ll wonder if it’s all worth it. Even if you get to the point where women are hitting on you, you’re not going to get there without doing a lot of the gruntwork yourself.

Bringing it back to the top, you need to polish your own bona fides if you expect any woman of worth to follow you. It’s all about you being in control of your life, mastering its direction and ruling your world instead of letting your world rule you. That is, after all, what dominance entails; you’re in charge, and you’re inviting her along for the ride.

When you’ve mastered all that, THEN you can ragdoll your lady and then get a backrub from her while eating the eggs she scrambled the morning after you scrambled hers.