Articles from November 2011

Intergender Friendship

Women have boyfriends and girlfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her girlfriend.

Ever since “When Harry Met Sally” was released there’s been a constant droning about the validity of intergender friendships. To even suggest that men and women couldn’t be strictly platonic, mature friends is to invite reproach from a society that’s been steeped in notions of egalitarian equalism. If men and women are fundamentally “the same” there should be no impediment to developing and maintaining a friendship in like terms to a same sex friendship.

First off, men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural resoponse to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 15 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I understand how stupidly obvious this seems, but remember we’re qualifying the characteristics of intergender friendships in the face of a social undercurrent that wants to convince us that men and women are fundamentally equal. According to this precept, men should essentially possess the capacity to repress their sexual impulse to the point that it should have no bearing on his rational decision to engage in a platonic friendship. Likewise, a woman should be able to dissociate herself from her hypergamous nature to pursue a completely asexual friendship. And both genders should maturely pursue the friendship for their mutual enrichment, however, reality tells a different story.

Girl-Friends

All of this isn’t to say that you cannot have female acquaintances, or that you must necessarily be rude or ignore all women with contempt (that is binary thinking once again), but it is to say that the degree of friendship that you can experience with women (as a man) in comparison to same sex friendships will always be limited due to sexual differences. Most men will only ever engage in friendships with women that they initially find attractive which then, of course, is colored by their attraction to that woman. Now I’m sure the “not in my case” card will get played and attempt to make the anecdotal case for how much an exception to the rule you are, to which I’ll say, even if you legitimately are, it makes no difference. Because the very nature of an intergender friendship is ALWAYS going to be limited by sexual differences. Even if you can legitimately make the case that you aren’t now, or weren’t in the past, attracted to your opposite sex friend, your other intimate relationships will still modify and/or limit the depth of that friendship.

Even the best, most asexual, platonic, male-female friendships will be subject to mitigation based on sex. The easy example is; I’m sure you’d be jealous and suspect of your girlfriend were she to be spending any “quality time” with another ‘male-friend’. It’s simply time spent with another male who isn’t you and you’ll always question her desire to do so in favor of spending time with you.

Bear in mind that it’s also important to consider how women relate with their same-sex friends as a template for their intergender friendships. Remember each sex uses its same-sex model of friendship on which to base their understandings and expectations for an opposite sex friendship. Very few men have the patience to sort out how women interact with their women friends, so they opt for the easy answer that equalism gives them – we’re all the same, so your buddies are the same as women. Any guy that’s been in the circular hell of being a woman’s “phone-friend” knows this isn’t true. Girl-friends have a much different dynamic for friendship than do men, but likewise, and by way of her innate solipsism, she’s presuming her intersexual friendships will follow along a similar template to that of her girl-friends.

And why wouldn’t women expect their male friends to conform to their template for friendship? In a feminine-centric world it makes practical sense for men to realign themselves to women’s friendship frame. Men will all too readily tolerate behavior and attitudes from girl-friends that they’d come to physical blows were their male friends to do the same. Since the prerogative of maintaining that friendship is, by default, cast in a feminine-centric frame, women (generally) wouldn’t even think of altering their own interpretations of friendship to accommodate a male perspective.

Get it out of your head now that you’re even in a so called “friend zone” with any woman. There is no friend zone – there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends, and you understanding that as soon as she becomes intimate with another guy your attentions will become a liability to any relationship she might want to have with the new sexual interest and she puts you off, or you do the same when you become so involved with another girl.

The Female Wingman

A lot of guys cling to this mistaken notion that they can parlay a female friendship into action with one of her hot friends. You may even have legitimate examples where that might’ve happened, but for each one, I’ll show you a girl who would’ve fucked you irrespective of whether or not you had a mutual female friend to vouch for you. That friendship may have been a convenient pivot into another hot girl, but it wasn’t the prior intergender – friendship that got you laid; it was that the girl who banged you found you attractive enough to fuck.

I’m not denying the utility of  ‘Social Circle Game’, nor am I ignoring that the conspicuous attention of hot women is good social proof – that’s not what the friend pivot is about. It’s about assuming a girl-friend will endorse you as a preselected, potential sexual partner.

You may think it’s great social proof to have some hot friend endorse you as a good lay for her other friends, but women talk. In fact it’s all they do most of the time. Your status as a friend gets transferred to her girlfriends. Why? First, if she was a prior target for you who turned into a LJBF, you already have that as an association of your friendship. Any of her girlfriends that would subsequently date you will know that she was your primary interest initially – not them. Secondly, assuming you even could have a completely innocuous, asexual, platonic beginning to your inter-gender friendship, there will be competition anxiety with the other girlfriends. This will result in a tendency for the original friend to filter your exposure to which of her girlfriends she finds the least threatening. You have to consider the balance between your value to her as another friend / orbiter against her endorsing you as a potential intimate for one of her girlfriends. Just because you have a girl-friend with a social circle of attractive female friends doesn’t mean you’ll get her endorsement for the one you’d prefer to get with.

To complete the circle here, all of this leads up to understanding that your female friend will NEVER be one of your guy friends. This silly notion is founded on the expectation that your female friend will hold the same interests and have the same reactions that your male friends will. Women are never going to be your wingman. One of the great downfalls of men today is too much female influence in their lives, to the point that it’s become stigma. Beware the guy with too many or exclusively female friends. This might make for the plot of stupid movies, but most women are wary of guys with so many female friends that they question their being able to relate with and be Men.


The Paradox of Commitment

Courtesy of Post Secret this week.

The concept of commitment is a fantastic utility for women. Men can be simultaneously shamed for not sticking to a commitment that benefits them and still be shamed for steadfastly adhering to a commitment that doesn’t. The social convention is so developed there’s even a cute term for it – “commitment-phobic” or “commit-o-phobe”.

There’s an interesting control of the message here; the principle of commitment is cast in feminine-centric perfection. The idea is that commitment should only have meaning in a feminine defined reality. Ironically, it’s Men who commit far more readily to ideals, family, military, business ventures or partnerships, and servitude than women have the capacity to appreciate, because recognizing this doesn’t serve their imperative. In other words, a commitment to anything that doesn’t directly benefit the feminine isn’t commitment; answer? Redefine commitment to reflect feminine interests.

Whenever I  get into these debates about infidelity (albeit usually from the male perspective), and it becomes an immoral / amoral / moralist ménage à trois, I wonder, what is the greater “moral” imperative; to remain faithful to your morally obligated commitment with your spouse in spite of a loveless, passionless, sexless partner, or to break that commitment in order to pursue the obligation and commitment you owe yourself as a “superior” Man deserving of a better “quality” partner?

What has moral priority, a commitment to yourself or a commitment to marriage? You see it’s easy to wave the flag of self-righteousness when the issue is a right vs. wrong issue. It’s much more difficult when the question is right vs. right. I have no doubt that all the answers to this will be entirely circumstantial, rationalized twisting in the wind, and maybe that’s what decides for you, but think about it for a moment in the terms of what one must sacrifice for the other.

Whatever you cannot say No to is your master and makes you its slave.

This is a favorite go-to trope for moral arguments where there’s a clearly defined right and wrong, however, by this definition then, does not commitment make you a ‘slave’ by default? If by the circumstances of a commitment you cannot, figuratively, say “no” to the that (or due to that) commitment, are you not then a slave?

You can even take marriage out of the equation; if I’m in a committed LTR with a GF and over the course of that relationship I realize that she’s not what I’m looking for (for any number of reasons, not just sex), even though she’s 100% faithfully committed to me and the LTR, should I then break that commitment? If I do, am I then being unethical for having broken that commitment irrespective of how I break it? Should the commitment to my own personal well being and future happiness be compromised by another commitment?

What’s my obligation; neglect myself in favor of a bad commitment or to the principle of commitment itself?

It’s my take that commitment ‘should’ be a function of genuine desire. Ideally, commitment should be to something one is so passionate about that the limiting of one’s own future opportunities that come from that commitment is an equitable, and mutually appreciated trade. This is unfortunately rarely the case for most people in any form of commitment because people, circumstance, opportunity and conditions are always in flux. A commitment that had been seen as equitable sacrifice at one time can become debilitating 5 years after depending upon circumstance.

So what I’m getting at is where do you draw the line? People go all kinds of crazy when I suggest a guy NEXT some girl that’s obviously showing all of the indications that she’s using him (or has proven so) and then two comments down suggest that it’s Men’s obligation to vet women by “walking away.” If I have one life to live and one precious lifetime to do it in, what is more important; a commitment to oneself in learning and securing the best options for a lifetime or being committed to the principle of self-sacrificing commitment?

In the community we brazenly tell freshmen chumps to dedicate themselves to self-improvement; to seek out and accomplish what’s best for them – in other words, to uncompromisingly commit themselves to their own cause in as positive a manner as possible. I’d argue that genuine desire is a necessary precursor to this, but in advocating this self-concerned improvement, are we not then doing them a disservice if their duty ought to be focused on the principle of commitment, even when that commitment is (or becomes) deleterious to their commitment to a positive self? What holds more water, being a martyr to chivalrous commitment, or a steadfast dedication to ourselves?  Should we not then hold AFCs in the highest respect when they selflessly sacrifice their futures due to their devoted commitment to a ONEitis girl who’ll never reciprocate on, much less appreciate, that commitment? We’d call them chumps, but in contrast to their devotion to the principle of commitment, maybe they’ve got it right? You can’t doubt their (albeit misguided) dedication to their convictions.

Humanism, Behaviorism and the Amorality of Game

Our great risk in life is not that we aim too high and fail, but we aim too low and succeed.

I think one of the major hurdles guys new to Game encounter is an inherent discomfort with experiencing just how raw and uncaring the motivators are behind intergender dynamics. I can’t entirely blame this on a naive, White Knight dependency on wanting to have things fit into their perspective, it’s something more than that. For men with some sense of honor or duty there also comes with it a need to enforce a perception of morality. Understanding the evo-psych roots that drive what would be considered ‘immoral’ behavior by their mental frame is often enough to have men reject Game and the red pill altogether. They believe that even attempting to understand the roots of that immoral behavior is tantamount to rationalizing a way to excuse it.

For all the accusations of being a moral relativist, it’s still very hard not to see the latent purposes behind the behavior itself – this is cause for a lot of internal conflict for a morally predisposed man newly discovering the foundations of Game. In War Brides I made a case for women’s propensity to establish new emotional bonds after a breakup or a widowing with far greater ease than men due to a hard-wired psycho-evolutionary sort of Stockholm Syndrome. You can read the details in that post, but the implications of that is one of rationalizing a cruel, heartless bitch’s actions that could very well be considered amoral, if not immoral. There are plenty of other illustrations that to a newly Game-aware Man seem deplorable and duplicitous behaviors. Why can’t women just say what they mean and mean what they say, right? It seems like a horrible inefficiency to have to rely on women’s behaviors in order to really see their true motivators. What’s ironic is that much of what men have invented as moral considerations were designed to keep these behaviors and their functions in check.

All that said I can’t help but see a want for a higher order of self-image in understanding Game and how the visceral world of sexual dynamics operates. It’s raw behaviorism clashing with a desire to find a humanistic meaning in the cosmos, all set in the theater of intergender relations. I could simply take the easy way out and advise men to drop the pretense of morality altogether since it’s always subjective to whomever’s benefit the moralizing is done for. But that doesn’t remove the desire to see what we think is justice; the key being the desire for it, not necessarily the application of it. While I can certainly respect the aspirations of the nobler prospects of this approach, overall it’s a bit Pollyanna to nuts & bolts behaviorists. That’s not intended as a statement of fact, it’s just an observation.

From the humanist perspective you have to follow a linear, chronological advance in human understanding in many different realms – math, art, cultural ritual, science, societal conditions and any number of other ‘advances’ we’ve made from our hunter gatherer, tribalistic beginnings to our globally connected present. And while it is very ennobling and self-satisfying to see such achievements as evidence of our high-minded progress, it’s far too easy to overlook the root motivations for these advances that are anchored in the very evolution that the humanist perspective would like to claim triumph over.

For example lets consider Pablo Picasso. Not my favorite artist, but one of them and one most people recognize as a considerable personality in art. The humanist would hold Pablo up as the banner of human achievement – a fantastic artist as the result of our progress as a race and a tribute to our overcoming our brutish past. To which the behaviorist would ask, “why should it be that art is so highly valued among human beings?” For that answer we have to go back to the root causes for creative expression. Cavemen painted pictures of animals they’d killed on cave walls for millennia before Pablo arrived on the scene. Now you can argue that these drawings were communicative in nature, but the function of them was to convey a message – “Here is how we killed an antelope and you can too thusly.” Language then springs from this methodology and we progress, but the base function is communication that benefited the survival of the species.

Then you may ask why would Pablo personally want to be an artist? The humanist replies, “to fulfill his personal need for expression to become a self-actualized being” and the behaviorist answers “to make his life’s function easier.” I sincerely doubt that if any manifestation of creative intelligence wasn’t a precursor for sexual selection there would be so many “artists” throughout history. I could easily make similar arguments for famous inventors, scientists or even Benjamin Franklin. It all returns to root motivations.

The self-actualized man still finds himself aroused by the Playboy Playmate irrespective of how much he convinces himself he should reserve his ‘feelings’ for his wife or girlfriend to “morally” conform to his higher-order of self-expectations. Powerful establishing operations such as deprivation virtually ensure that he will have an ‘inner conflict’ and to remedy this he will behaviorally condition himself to act accordingly. Regardless of the method, it’s still the biological root that has been hardwired into his head millennia ago by his hunting ancestors. Whether or not he acts on an opportunity to cheat on his wife, the base desire is still present and an undeniable motivation. A wife can close her eyes and imagine she’s fucking Brad Pitt when she’s with her husband – the motivation is still the same.

2/3rds of the American population is overweight, why do you suppose this is? According to the cognitive-humanist we’ve solved our hunting/gathering needs and can devote ourselves to ‘higher pursuits’, but yet statistics confound us here. The behaviorist sees this and notices that our own evolutionary psychology predisposes us to over-eat since in our evolutionary past we didn’t know whether or not we’d eat at all tomorrow or the next day (thus the ‘gathering’ was invented I suppose). Our bodies process this food in such a way that we burn fat far slower than carbohydrates and protein is reserved for muscle building. All of this in an evolutionarily efficient manner to preserve us, but now once we’ve (more or less) mastered our environment and food is convenient and plentiful it becomes a disadvantage. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just our innate biological mechanisms motivating us to behave in a manner that will benefit us best.

Every vice you can point a negative finger at operates in precisely in this dynamic. Our morality, our intelligence, our sexuality and the behaviors that are manifested by them are all motivated by this base. It would be a pleasant fiction if we could all remove our consciousness from this and be these enlightened, self-actualized beings, constantly operating in a state of peak experience, but this damn testosterone in my body keeps pulling me back down to earth. It may be morally reprehensible for a woman to break her marriage commitment, divorce her husband and remarry a rich entrepreneur, but from a behavioral perspective it makes long term pragmatic sense.

The problem that moral relativism poses to the humanist approach isn’t so much in recognizing this primitive base motivation, but an unwillingness to embrace it and live with it and use it.

I want to run, I want to fuck and I want to fight – I want to feel the blood, testosterone and adrenaline pumping in my arteries. I also want to write a sonata, paint a masterpiece and be a loving father to my daughter.

Behaviorism is the antithesis of putting angels wings on our backs and claiming we’ve evolved ‘above all of that.’ I haven’t, you haven’t and no one has, and our behaviors will make hypocrites of us whenever condition and opportunity facilitate it for us. It’s not that behaviorism would have us all living like animals in the bush as an ideal state, nor does it deny that people have very ennobling qualities; it simply accepts the whole of what prompts us to do what, why & how we do things and explores the reasons why in a far more fundamental way than a romanticized humanism. I’m sure this is akin to atheism for people invested into humanism, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s simply a more pragmatic, efficient and realistic approach for explaining behavior.

Old Flame, New Game

An interesting scenario for Game-aware Men has developed in the last 12 years in that, with our new level of connectivity and virtual social communication, now more than ever before it’s not only convenient to reestablish a connection with a previous lover, it’s far more likely. Even if you’ve moved on from a lover more than a decade ago and live thousands of miles away, they’re still as close as a google search or facebook friending away from you now. This presents an interesting situation for Men who’d previously been left by a woman in their ‘beta’ mode of thinking, only to reestablish (or have the old lover reestablish) a connection with the potential for a fresh intimate affair.

The temptation to prove something to an old lover is a very strong impulse in Men, and particularly if the former relationship resulted in his being dumped for a mindset in himself that he now realizes was the cause. Pair this need for vindication with a woman who’s initiated the contact after her last LTR failed, and you can see how consuming this opportunism might be for a guy. Considering all this, it’s very difficult to assess the real situation and the motivations for such a reconnection.

Rebound Guy vs. Sure Thing Guy

Rebound guy is defined by being a fresh prospect, coming around conveniently at the end of an LTR. The rebounder is also generally an emotional tampon rather than (but not limited to) a sexual release for a girl. Status as a rebound guy is usually based on how involved her LTR was prior, and the terms and circumstances of the break up. For instance, if the old boyfriend / husband cheating on her was the catalyst for the break up, then there’s a good chance you’ll be rebound fucking her as both retribution and an ego-preservation function for her. If she split with the guy due to her own indiscretions, or the guy was simply too beta for her to endure any longer, depending on your Game and Alphatude in comparison, you’re probably rebound fucking her. If the former lover was himself an Alpha (based on her perception) and she’s become his leftovers, then you’re probably in for a long haul down the emotional tampon highway – or at least if you permit it – and the end result will be frustrating.

However, the far more entrapping situation is being the ‘sure thing’ in this episode. AFC guys resort to ‘sure thing’ thinking constantly, but it’s not uncommon for women too. What tends to happen when we find ourselves at the end of an immersing LTR is that we look for what rewarded us prior to our involvement with the monogamous relationship. Naturally, monogamy requires the lion’s share of our attentions, so when that attention is freed as the result of a break up, the automatic response is to seek out what had previously rewarded us with good feelings (sex). So we return to the ‘sure thing’; the person, habit, behavior, that rewarded us before. It’s really just subconscious deductive reasoning. When you lack options, the tendency is to go back to what worked before. It’s the path of least resistance, because the perception is that it will be easier to return to that sure reward than to generate new rewarding situations (i.e. fear of rejection). The inherent problem with this is that, although this might work in the short term, what had been rewarding before  has fundamentally changed.

All of this now has been compromised by the ease with which we can now reconnect with our past intimacies. We still consider the person using the same metrics we had when we knew them 5-10, maybe 20 years ago. Our rational minds might, logistically, take into account the time and life changes that have occurred in that span, but our emotional perception is still one of the idealization we held for her. Maybe it was regret for having not invested more, or self-resentment for lacking the understanding of  how the Game fundamentally works at that time, but the emotional reaction competes with the rational observations.

Your rational side will see the physical ravages of time and the post-Wall desperation for provisioning a woman endures, but your emotional fights this with the decades old perception of the girl you knew and loved and wants for that to be reestablished, and particularly under the auspices of your now enlightened view of how women’s game really works. You know you could make it work now because your eyes are opened! Who wouldn’t want to go back in time to run Game on the girl who crushed his soul, or get back the girl he knew he was too beta to keep around?

As seductive as all that sounds, it’s very important to keep this dynamic in perspective. There’s not a lot of profit in revenge, nor is there any realistic way to right the past wrongs. You should always move forward. It’s hard not to take a little personal pleasure in having an old flame seek you out while your SMV is ‘out of her league’ – the reverse of how it was in the past – and you may think it some kind of karmic justice in just entertaining her, but in reality you’re just grabbing at shadows and wasting time.

“You’ve been with how many girls?!”

Rational reader Poker ran this one by me recently:

I’ve been seeing this girl and we’ve slept together a few times… Today, in bed, I got asked, “How may girls have I been with?” and “Why won’t I be her friend on Facebook?”

How many girls question…

Here’s how I handled it – would love to know if you think this was handled properly… (using cocky-funny attitude)

Me: “I don’t tell that.”
Her: “More or less than 20?”
Me: “I have some freedom of information forms in the car – you could fill one out and get your answer in 20 years.”
Her: “Don’t you want to know how many guys I’ve been with?”
Me: “No.”

Iron Rule of Tomassi # 2

NEVER, under pain of death, honestly or dishonestly reveal the number of women you’ve slept with or explain any detail of your sexual experiences with them to a current lover.

The single most disastrous AFC move a man can make is to OVERTLY describe past sexual experiences and/or give a number (accurate or not) to how many women he’s been with prior to the one he’s with. This simple act, whether you offered the information or she dragged it out of you, ALWAYS comes off as pretentiousness and is often the catalyst for an avalanche of emotional resentment, if not outright emotional blackmail from an insecure woman. This is a rookie mistake that will only take you once to learn.

If a woman puts you on the spot by directly asking you for this information always sidestep this COVERTLY. C&F works wonders in this situation and still keeps the air of mystery and challenge about you.

Her: “So how many girls have you been with?”
You: “You’re my first actually”
Her: “Really, how many girls have you been with?”
You:” You mean tonight?”
Her: “C’mon, how many girls have you been with?”
You: “You know, I really lost count after 50” (or something outrageous).

When a woman asks you this question she is seeking confirmation of what she already suspects – NEVER give her this satisfaction. When a woman resorts to OVERT communication (COVERT being her native language) she’s generally exhausted her patience to be COVERT and this is a desperation tactic for an insecure woman.

While this scenario may be fraught with potential disaster, it is also an opportunity to encourage her imagination and prompt some competition anxiety.

Her: “How many girls have you been with?”
You: “I have an idea, lets fuck and then you can tell me how many girls you think I’ve been with, OK?”

A lot of Game rookies think that since they’ve only been with 1 or 2 women in their lives what’s the harm in open, honest, full disclosure? Like most Betas they bought the “open communication is the secret to a good relationship” meme long ago, so the impulse to be upfront is their default response. They tend not to see the utility in  keeping that information, or being ambiguous about it, plants a seed of competition anxiety. When she KNOWS she’s your first, you’ve just abdicated the frame to her in any kind of relationship. Second, if she’s your 9th then every girl up to 8 becomes a stamp in her collection to use against you in the first fight you have. Every date you take her on she wonders “Did he take #6 here too?” It’s as if you cheated on her with every previous girl up to her. I should also add that this is the first question a BPD (borderline personality disorder) woman will ask you so she can feel horrible about herself for not measuring up to “your standards” and drag you into the emotional hell-pit with her.

Kill the Beta

Rational reader Paul recently sought out my guidance for probably the single most asked for advice I receive.

I’ve read through your blog entirely, and my biggest issue is, how do I kill the beta? Every girl I sleep with, or even fool around with, I end up developing feelings for. Even if it was a one night stand or the girl is cheating on a bf with me. It’s like I have no self control; like I’m a girl that agonizes over every guy she sleeps with.

I wish I honestly had a definitive answer for Paul. If I could construct some step-by-step program, a universal template that men could all follow in order to kill their inner Beta, I’d be rich beyond my wildest dreams. Just as I said with about the Alpha Buddha, if I could find a way to bottle the essence of Alpha I’d be set for life. The real truth is that there is no simple answer to this, because each man’s conditions are unique to him. To be sure there are common roots to their problems, and common mindsets that form as results of attempting to formulate working sexual strategies (Beta Game) within the feminine Matrix, but undoing these mental schemas and reforming a better functional sexual strategy is unique to the individual.

I feel that this is the major reason Game is not taken as seriously as it should be – it’s a lot of work doing your own self-analysis and then creating a strategy to remake yourself. One of the reasons PUA gurus and the Game demigods of the last decade seem so cheap, like snake oil salesmen, is because they fail to take into account the degree of personalization necessary to truly kill the inner Beta that guys eventually have to confront. That’s an element of internalized Game that the guys doing seminars would rather not address because your degree of success, in truth how you even measure success, is entirely dependent upon you. Hooking up with girls you’d never had access to before may sell pick up DVDs; changing the inner workings of your personality is a much tougher order. If you ever look through the ‘self-help’ psychology section of a book store and wonder why there are so many books published in the topic, it’s exactly due to this dynamic – effecting a fundamental change in one’s life requires an effort that few people have the patience and perseverance for.

So with all of this in mind, let me say right now, I don’t have a map for you – anyone telling you they do is selling you something – however, I will attempt to point you in the right direction. I can’t say what will work, only you can find that out on your own, but try to bear in mind that changing yourself is a process that takes time. Even for the guy’s who have an easier go of transitioning to an internal Game-state personality, it’s still an ongoing process. I’d like to think of myself as at least a lesser Alpha (by Roissy’s measure), but that doesn’t mean I don’t trip up at times. This is what I mean by the process; you’re not going to be bulletproof and pass every shit test ever thrown at you, but be encouraged in knowing you learn from what you do wrong and adjust for the next time. There is no grand arrival moment when you know you’re an Alpha, or if you don’t like that term, there is no definitive point at which you’ve internalized Game. You don’t get some certificate of Game completion. You can, however, definitively change your thinking, it’s always on-going.

Knowing is half the battle

If there truly is a first step in internalization then it has to come from educating yourself. This is actually one of the most difficult tasks. If you’re a reader of my blog, or are at least peripherally aware of Game as a concept, this is going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that there’s an entire world of men who are still plugged in. Only a fraction of them will even be amenable to considering Game and positive masculinity, and fewer still will see its value. From our perspective it seems like a matter of course; we read the books/blogs, familiarize ourselves with the concepts, we pick what might work, experiment with ideas, evaluate the validity of them and adopt them or toss them. However what’s apparent to the unplugged seems like blaspheme to the plugged in.

Your “education” doesn’t stop once you’ve unplugged. In fact I’d argue that it’s even more vital in internalizing a new mindset since you’re now putting things into practice. One thing I remind guys who spit the red pill back up is that there is no going back. A lot of frustrated guys who discover Game and fail to apply it because they lack the social skills or they convinced themselves that PUArtistry was their easy magic formula to fuck the girl of their dreams, they tend to want to regress back into the comfortable shell of their former ignorance of intergender social dynamics. Only they find that there is no return. They see the truth in the what they’d been blind to no matter where they turn. The social interactions, the feminization, the raw deal they’ve been conditioned to accept as normal – all of that subtly reminds them of the truth they’re avoiding and they hate it. They become hostile to it.

I add this because it’s a very real danger for guys transitioning into internalizing positive masculinity. In the same respect you now have become (or should become) more sensitive to Game truths and the unplugged reality you now find yourself in. There’s a point of departure from what you thought was normal to seeing the signs around you. An easy illustration is really contemplating any gender related issue in popular media. You’ll hear a song, watch a sit-com, overhear a conversation in the lunch room, and begin to realize how surrounded you are by basic presumptions of a culture remade by feminine primacy. Understanding what your position in all of this is is crucial to internalizing a new mindset or backsliding into your old frame of thinking.

Practicing the change

It should be self-evident that applying what you’ve come to see as a new truth for yourself is vital. You need to get off the internet and field test the theories you learn here and elsewhere. Whether that means going to sarge at the clubs, or adopting a new attitude with your wife, or even the women you deal with at work, it’s really up to you. The hardest part of practicing change is the initial shock of having the people who know you question the validity of the new you. If you were to move to a new city, completely change your social circle and play the role of an asshole Alpha, no one is the wiser. However, make a radical shift in your personality with those who’ve known you for years and you’ll be a poser who’s “trying to be something he’s not”.

Human beings need predictability – it gives them a sense of control over others. When you alter yourself, or have your personality altered by an outside force, this is a threat to that predictability, so the logical counter is for others to attempt to put us back into our places. Shaming comes as a natural tactic for women, but the push is always to get you back into their frame. And that’s essentially the threat others interpret, the new you is a frame grab. Do it all at once and people will accuse your personality of being a disingenuous reaction to having been burned. Do it subtly and persistently over a time and people will be more willing to accept the change as genuine. Always insist on change, but never too quickly.

This is important to remember because your friends will be your biggest source of doubt in your transformation. They might mean well, but understand, that intent comes from a desire to see normalcy, not your best interest. The first time an old girl-friend you had a thing for calls the new you an “asshole”, it’s kind of a shock to the system. There’s always this stab at the old you who wants to set things rights, but you have to resist this impulse to take offense. It’s really hard to say “yeah, I am an asshole” as a point of pride when your whole prior life’s learning taught you not to offend others and particularly not girls you ever wanted to fuck. It’s counterintuitive to the beta in you. As sadistic as it sounds, you’ll be more consistently rewarded for your capacity to indirectly offend the women you want to get with, and the internal conflict this creates between the beta you and the burgeoning alpha you is the hardest part to reconcile. This is where most guys fail in transitioning, and this is primarily due to an unpracticed ability to keep their emotions in check.

Aesthetics vs. Social Robots

As I’ve stated before, men are the True Romantics, women are simply the vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. One of the biggest gripes the post-sexual revolution feminization had with men was some prepackaged notion that men weren’t in touch with their feminine sides. We were “out of touch with our feelings”. God curse Carl Jung’s rotten corpse to hell for ever convincing popular culture that each sex had equal, but unexpressed, measures of feminine and masculine energies. Western culture has been so saturated with Jungian theory that we don’t recognize it as such. It’s become normalized to believe an idealized goal-state is a genderless, androgynous society.

Rants aside, up until the last 50 years, it has in fact been men who’ve been the sex with the most self-control regarding emotion. It’s been just this reservation that’s made Men more endearing to women. Either as enigmatic poets and artists to figure out, or as natural stoics who’s every measured expression of emotion is an event unto it’s self,  it’s been Men’s classic reservation of emotional inaccessiblity  that’s made women more interested in Men. In contemporary society, men are encouraged to express themselves as a primary way to accessing a woman’s intimacy – essentially killing any sense of mystery to unravel with full disclosure. Brain function gender differences aside, It would be my guess that men socially evolved a more reserved expression of emotion, not due to some juvenile insecurity, but rather because it so consistently worked in generating interest in women.

Not so in this age. At every instance boys and men are conditioned to think that emotional expression is a means to solving problems. Boys don’t cry, was instituted with a purpose. Unguarded easily expressed emotion is a feminine trait. It’s not that men should become social robots, deadened to all but the most intense emotion; it’s just become normalized to cheapen that expression by overuse. Displays of a Man’s emotions should be rarely given devine gifts  for women who are generally lacking in true appreciation as it is.

Unlearn what you have learned

It’s very difficult for a beta man, conditioned for so long to be emotionally available, to turn these emotions off. The good news is I’m not suggesting you do, I am suggesting you unlearn your reasons for developing emotional sentiments so easily. It’s easy to go emotionally cold as a result of being burned, it’s a much taller order to tamp that emotionality back into check when you’re really feeling good about it. Our emotions make us human and humane. It’s important to embrace that, but equally important to see how easily it’s used against you. You need to unlearn the reasons why you’re so easily emotional. Maybe it’s abandonment issues, maybe it’s a more deliberate conditioning in your upbringing.

Remember in high school, in drivers ed class, when you were taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid? When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our natural impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Everything in our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is aggravate an already precarious situation. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, often enough we make this our default reaction and we find that the car rights itself, we avoid disaster and continue safely on down the road.

You have to unlearn the old behaviors and condition new ones in order to right your course. This takes practice and repetition – even in the face of conditions that you would impulsively think would need to be reacted to otherwise.There is no substitute for perseverance.

Changing your mind about yourself is the first step. This is actually the most difficult step for guys because most don’t want to believe they need to internalize a new way of thinking about themselves. Lethargy, for the most part, can be the primary reason most guys don’t want to change. It’s far easier to create rationales for oneself as to why they are happy in their present condition than it is to critically confront and initiate real change.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you some standardized program to help you magically turn into the Man you hope to be. Only you can determine that course, but I will say this, the Man you wish to become requires you to take action. The goal posts for your own satisfaction will always keep moving away from you, and that’s a good thing. This is what inspires us to grow and mature and develop a capacity to overcome challenges. However, all this requires action on your part.

You can pore through all of the advice and sift out the wisdom from this blog and the community at large, but none of it will amount to anything for you if you wont act. I can’t begin to recall all of the times I’ve counseled young guys, giving them all manner of advice and encouraging them to put it into practice, only to have them constantly bemoan that they can’t find the motivation. More often than not it takes some traumatic experience or they have to be reduced to having nothing left to lose before they’ll really have the fire lit under their asses to become more than they are.

I don’t consider myself a motivational speaker, but at some point you have to cross the abyss and change your mind about yourself.

Learn to Read

The most important element of Game a guy can master is developing an ability to do cold reads. Have you ever been to a carnival and had some guy guess your age or weight within a certain range? Those guys are masters of the read. PUA skills are all useful tools and can be applied in a variety of settings, but being able to “read” your target will improve any other PUA techniques you apply. Once you’ve ‘read’ your mark you’ll have a better idea of what will or wont be useful in a given set, and this then will instruct you on which Game tools will work best for that job.

Most aspiring PUAs read up on technique, learn a few scripts, and indiscriminately fumble into an approach without concern that they’re simply barking up the wrong tree. Other times they use some pre-packaged C&F that may have worked for the seminar’s teaching PUA in a completely different environment with a completely different set of conditions with regard to the girl. What may work on an HB 9 at a high end martini bar wont play with an HB 8 Goth girl at a Slipknot concert. One of the first fallbacks critics of Game like to use is that Game appears to presume one-size-fits-all and all women will respond equally well to some standardized script. This is a very weak criticism since obviously the ‘art’ of pick up relies on how deftly a Man uses, and understands how best to apply it. The foundational principles of Game work on ALL women, however it’s the correct application of Game that separates those who’re successful at it from the frustrated chumps who try out a few techniques and get humiliated.

Obviously different approaches are warranted for different situations, but reading subtleties and looking for cues with a good read when you see a woman you’d like to approach, one who’s giving you IOIs already, or even a girl you’re already familiar with is important. A lot of mPUAs like to promote a 3 second rule in an effort to get AFCs past the “stage fright” period of cold sell approaches. This has it’s merits for guys unaccustomed to engaging with a woman, but once you’re comfortable enough in meeting new people on the fly you have to develop an ability to read your target and this takes a bit of calculation initially.

Assess the Environment

For example, lets assume you’re going to a bar or club to sarge. Before you even set foot in the establishment make some mental notes – What kind of woman goes to a place like this? What day of the week is it? Are you on vacation at a resort? What kind of place is this (a goth bar, a martini bar or Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville all require shifts in approach)? What’s the typical age range for the place? Is it ladies night? What part of town are you in? Understanding your venue is vital. What works on a college campus at noon, isn’t going to fly at midnight at a rave.

Assess your Target

Once you’ve established a good understanding of environment lets go further and assume you find an attractive target. First, and most important, has this girl given you IOIs? Eye contact, hair twirling, leg shifting? You need to train yourself to look for the nuances in body language. If so you’ll have to adjust game for that, if not, you’ll have to adjust to catch her attention. Next, read her appearance – what is she wearing? Is she in business casual (just got off of work), or made up in a short red dress (obviously looking)? Jeans and a tight shirt? Is she wearing a wedding ring? Estimate her age and education level (using “chick crack” works wonders for the less educated). Women are by nature attention seeking; virtually everything about a woman is written into her appearance, particularly so while deliberately presenting herself in a covertly competitive social situation (i.e. a club where people go to meet other people).

Assess the Social Conditions

After an initial read, then look around your target and read the social setting and immediate environment. Is she part of a group of girls (most likely)? What do they look like? Are they feeding her, or feeding off of her attention? Is it a bachelorette party? Are there male orbiters circling them or in their party? Any AMOG potentials? Do any of them look related (obvious twins or a family resemblance)?

All of this will help you apply your game more directly. C&F, neg hits, shut-outs, takeaways, openers, all of that can be more refined and more purposed if you take the time to observe your target and then make some calculated assumptions. If you find that you struggle with sustaining a conversation with a woman, usually this is due to a poor read of her prior to an approach. A lot of guys will argue that it takes too much effort to be that analytical, but after a while you’ll become sensitive to this reading ability and it will become second nature.

The Pheromonal Beta

You choke the chicken before any big date, don’t you? 

Anyone who’s seen Something About Mary is pretty familiar with the now classic ‘Hair Gel’ incident.

Dom: You choke the chicken before any big date, don’t you? Tell me you spank the monkey before any big date. Oh my God, he doesn’t flog the dolphin before a big date. Are you crazy? That’s like going out there with a loaded gun! Of course that’s why you’re nervous. Oh my dear friend, please sit, please. Look, um, after you’ve had sex with a girl, and you’re lying in bed with her, are you nervous? No, you’re not, why?

Ted: Cause I’m tired…

Dom: Wrong! It’s ’cause you ain’t got the baby batter on the brain anymore! Jesus, that stuff will fuck you’re head up! Look, the most honest moment in a man’s life are the few minutes after he’s blown his load – now that is a medical fact. And the reason for it is that you’re no longer trying to get laid, you’re actually… you’re thinking like a girl, and girls love that.

Even if you’ve never seen the film, it’s likely you’re at least peripherally aware of the Beta Game principle Dom is explaining here. Can you spot the inconsistency?

“.. you’re thinking like a girl, and girls love that.” No, they don’t. Sorry Dom, they want a loaded gun.

Desexualization as Game is one of the primary mistakes betas make. This is the ‘Something About Mary’ effect; the presumption that your biological impulse to desire sex is a hinderance to getting sex. From a rational standpoint this is ridiculous, but betas eat this idea up because it dovetails nicely into their misguided sexual conditioning that assumes like attracts like – identify more with the feminine to be more attractive to the feminine. Watching this movie is like an effort in deconstructing all the Beta Game tenets of the past 40 years.

I apologize for not having the sources to site for this, but I can remember reading case studies on the bio-chemical effect of human sexual interaction doing grad work in college. I believe they were done by Dr. Martie Hasselton, but they outlined the endorphin and hormonal profiles present in healthy adults bloodstream’s while in various phases of attraction, arousal, pre-sex and post-sex interaction between couples. The most dramatic one to look up is the similarities in the chemical properties of dopamine and heroin for people experiencing “love” or “infatuation” depending on who’s doing the study.

Even more fascinating is the effects hormones play on portions of men’s brains when assessing sexual cues in a potential sex partner. Healthy testosterone levels literally causes men to perceive women as sexual objects; stimulating the same portions of our brains used for cognitive problem solving. However, testosterone is mitigated by oxytocin, the hormone secreted just post orgasm. While testosterone is responsible for sex drive and aggressive impulses (not to mention muscular development, deepening of voice and hair growth), oxytocin is linked to feelings of nurturing, trust, and comfort. Oxytocin is believed to be a primary influence in post-sex, and post pregnancy, emotional attachment in women who produce the hormone in much higher amounts than men. Postpartum depression is actually a withdrawal symptom triggered by the decrease in oxytocin (and progesterone) in post-birth women.The effect of post-orgasm oxytocin in men is similar to women, however in men it is also serves as a buffering agent to heightened dopamine and testosterone levels.

Oxytocin plays a critical part in regulating a man’s testosterone levels. Just post-orgasm, the human body flushes oxytocin into the bloodstream to balance out the endorphin and dopamine high of sexual arousal. While this hormone promotes feelings of trust and comfort in men, it also serves to ‘calm the guy down’ sexually. Oxytocin is a testosterone buffer in men, thus resulting in you going limp for a while after busting a nut. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense in that it ensures the sperm deposited stays in a woman’s vagina, thus increasing fertility odds, instead of being shoveled out by a still erect penis. Not only that, but oxytocin serves as a ‘pair bonding’ hormone in that it fosters feelings of protective trust in men. Oxytocin discharge in humans is also triggered by pheromonal and environmental prompts.

In addition to all of this, there’s the role that pheromones play in regard to sexual attraction and arousal. You can google these, but there are several pheromonal studies that indicate that men with differing scents from those of women tend to attract opposite scents in women. From an evolutionary perspective the conclusion drawn is one that people of similar genus or genotype (i.e. blood related family members) will be less aroused sexually by persons of the their own genotype, thus ensuring biodiversity (nature’s prevention plan against inbreeding). However in the same “sweaty t-shirt” studies, the perspiration of men with higher testosterone levels were deemed more sexually viable or arousing by women than men with lower T levels.

You can attribute whatever legitimacy you want to studies like this, but the evidence points to higher testosterone levels as playing an influential part in sexual attraction. Also bear in mind that pheromones influence women living in close proximity to each other to synchronize their menstrual cycles – another evolutionary mechanism believed to ensure fertility and communal support for social animals.

The Pheromonal Beta

From a bio-mechanical perspective, the indication is that men who consistently masturbate are essentially broadcasting their status as Pheromonal Betas – and women’s bio-chemical mechanics subconsciously registers this for them. Higher testosterone males manifest their sexual viability in both sexual assertiveness and scent. If you are chronically depleted of testosterone, and/or subjected to the calming effects of oxytocin your sexual viability is at a disadvantage. In fact, from an evolutionary standpoint, the beta males of our feral hunter-gatherer beginnings would be more prone to masturbation as a sexual release since, theoretically, they would’ve had less access to breeding opportunities than Alpha males. It would then follow that definitive, subconscious behavioral and chemical cues would evolve to aid females in selecting the best mate for parental investment.

So, for as much as beta guys would like to have you believe that snapping your radish before a date will improve your chances of fucking the girl, odds are you’re shooting yourself in the foot. This stupid belief is rooted in the “Something about Mary” myth that women don’t want an overly sexualized man, but the biological truth is far from that. The myth is one that women need to be comfortable with a guy in order to sleep with him, so men will actively desexualize themselves in order to comply. However, all indications point to a need for sexual anxiety and tension in arousal to prompt sexual intercourse.

Comfort and trust are post-orgasm conditions; anxiety, arousal and sexual urgency are pre-orgasm conditions – and both have their own unique hormonal signatures.

Disclaimer

And now for the disclaimer; I’m not a endocrinologist, biochemist or physician. I’ll admit this is a work in conjecture, but it’s plausible conjecture. For the record, it’s not about ‘less’ desirable pheromones, it’s about a lower incidence of any sex-cue pheromones due to depletion. It stands to reason that women would be more attracted to men motivated to being sexual with them, manifesting this in chemistry and behavior, than sexually unmotivated men manifesting signs of disinterest.

I used to think that the primary issue with beating off was this feminine double standard – women masturbating is sexy, arousing and, nowadays, socially empowering. For men, masturbation is a perversion. It implies an inability to be ‘man enough’ to fuck a real woman; whacking off is failure for a man, but victory for a woman. Why would this social conditions exist, and what is it’s latent function?

I still see the double standard in all that, and while I think it’s valid, it kind of only brushes the surface of self-pleasure from a social convention perspective. Sigmund Freud once said, “all energy is sexual”, meaning that subliminally we will redirect our motivation for ungratified sexual impulse to other endeavors. Thus it’s men, being the sex with the highest amount of libido inducing testosterone, who must look for far more outlets to transfer this motivation to than women. So is it any real surprise that it’s historically been Men who’ve primarily been the empire builders, the conquerors, the creators, and destroyers who’ve (for better or worse) moved humanity the most significantly?

Masturbation defuses this impulse. It kills that drive, or at least sublimates it. So wouldn’t it stand to reason that a global social convention that shames men for masturbation would be beneficial to a society interested in expanding? So the cultural meme becomes men who jack off are losers, and Men who don’t thereby prove their sexual viability (because if they’re not beating off they MUST be fucking women semi-regularly) AND become motivated to redirect that impulse to the betterment of themselves and/or society.