Articles from: 2012

The Slut Paradox

Every man wants a slut, he just wants her to be HIS slut.

ANDREW DICE CLAY: Hey, is that your chick there?

GUY IN THE AUDIENCE: Yeah!

DICE: Damn she’s pretty hot!

GUY: Yeah,..

DICE: You been together a while?

GUY: About 6 months.

DICE: Nice. She faithful to you?

GUY: Oh yeah.

DICE: She good in bed?

GUY: *nods head enthusiastically*

DICE: She suck a good dick?

GUY: (laughing) Ohhh yeah,..heheh,..

DICE: I suppose the next question would be, “How do you suppose she got that way?”

If you had an idealized Quality Woman girlfriend who was smoking hot, well adjusted mentally, loyal, would make a good mother, came from a good family, etc. etc., but would only ever begrudgingly have sex with you, in missionary position only, never consider giving you head, and only once a month (in 13 minute increments) because she’d been conditioned to believe that sex was immoral and she didn’t want to be thought of as a slut, would you marry her?

This is the Slut Paradox that vexes contemporary man; what number of prior lovers can a woman have that would be acceptable for you? Seven? Five? How many hobby horses should there be on the cock carousel before a woman is a slut? Don’t bother answering this, because for your average (beta) man, the number – even if you could get full disclosure – is irrelevant to him.

You see, thanks to the pre-existing social infrastructure that the feminine imperative has established, the average man can’t believe his luck when he finally does become sexual with a woman – whether it’s his first time or it’s the hundredth with his wife. So high is her pedestal that it’s literally a twist of fate. The gods have smiled upon him with the sexual favors of a woman, and his good fortune is made all the better when his lover already knows how to perfectly suck his cock just like the women in all the porn he’s watched since he was twelve. No questions are asked – you don’t qualify a gift from the gods, you just accept it.

The Slut Paradox is a very complex issue because it wraps up so much social, emotional and biological importance and details. I’m using the ‘average’ man here as a starting point because he’s the social majority; he’s the benchmark for how both genders approach the paradox, because it’s his discretion to give a woman’s sexual past any kind of gravity. For as much as women will bleat on about “slut status” and double standards, it really all comes down to how the average – in this case beta – male contends with (or doesn’t) a woman’s sexual past. As enlightened Game-aware Men we’re largely exceptions to this rule, or at least blamefully aware of the mechanics of it.

In the initial attraction and arousal stages of a sexual pairing, the average guy doesn’t care about a woman’s prior sex life. It’s only after that pairing becomes solidified that it becomes a consideration.

Unless a woman is a porn actress, I don’t think it’s the number of guys that bothers Men; and I don’t even think it’s the details of how many dicks she’s had. What’s bugs men is that they want to possess her. Men want her genuine desire, but know other guys have had it already and moved on – and they’re cool with it, and she’s cool with it, but he’s not because he wants to own her. He wants to know that he’s getting the best of what she has to offer sexually and emotionally. He wants to know that HE’S the guy who brings out the slut in her that no other guy has experienced fully.

This is the root of the paradox issue. The average guy is playing by the feminine imperative’s stated rule set. He wants monogamy, he had to work at it. He had to negotiate with her for what she willingly, genuinely, desired to do with 5 other guys (assuming she’s honest). And on some level, he knows her desire for him is compromised because he had to plead his case with her so she’d warm up to him. Only now that he’s gotten what he’s idealized for so long he realizes other’s have had it before him without anything that comes even close what he invested to get.

Alpha Widows

Now before I get run up the flagpole here, I’m completely aware of the studies indicating a woman’s capacity to bond monogamously is inversely proportionate to the number of sexual partners she’s experienced prior to monogamy. I wont argue the merit of that concept, but I also don’t think that it fully encompasses the dynamic. I say this because, as Katy Perry so adequately illustrated recently, even ONE prior lover (or even unrequited obsession) can be Alpha enough to upset that bonded monogamous balance. These are the Alpha Widows – women so significantly impacted by a former Alpha (or perceptually so) lover that she’s left with an emotional imprint that even the most dutiful, loving beta-provider can never compete with. A woman doesn’t have to have been an archetypal slut in order to have difficulty in pair bonded monogamy.

So again I’ll ask, how many is too many? For an Alpha Widow, one’s enough. It’s my contention that the Slut Paradox isn’t a numbers game so much as it’s an Alpha impact game. What if your new partner has only banged a mere 2 men before you, but engaged in intense sexual experiences she feels self-conscious about doing with you? Is she a slut?

As a final thought, I should add that women have long been aware of the utility that the Slut Paradox represents in maintaining primacy for their sexual strategy. I elaborated on this in the The Tool of ASD,

A League of Your Own

“Rollo, I’m newly Game-aware, red pill guy and I’ve been meeting girls with more and more success since my conversion, but I can’t help the feeling that the really hot girls I want to get with a so out of my league. 

Any suggestions?”

Iron Rule of Tomassi #8

Always let a woman figure out why she wont ƒuck you, never do it for her.

An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors. As I’ve detailed in many prior comments and posts, this means that a woman’s sexual strategy necessitates that she be in as optimized a condition as her capacity (attractiveness) allows for her to choose from the best males available to satisfy that strategy.

This is really the definition of hypergamy, and on an individual level, I believe only the most plugged in of men don’t realize this to some degree of consciousness. However, what I think escapes a lot of men is the complex nature of hypergamy on a social scale. For hypergamy to sustain it’s dominant position as the default sexual strategy for our society, it’s necessary for the feminine imperative to maintain existing, foster new, and normalize complex social conventions that serve it. The scope of these conventions range from the individualized psychological conditioning early in life to the grand scale of social engineering (e.g. Feminism, Religion, Government, etc.)

One of these social conventions that operates in the spectrum of the personal to the societal is the idea of ‘leagues’. The fundamental idea that Social Matching Theory details is that “All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themselves.” In a vacuum, this is the germ of the idea behind the ‘leagues’. The social convention of ‘leagues’ mentality is where ‘all things are not equal’ and used to support the feminine imperative, while conveniently still supporting the principle of social matching theory.

The latent function of ‘leagues’ is to encourage men to filter themselves out for women’s intimate approval.

As social conditions progress and become more complex, so too do men’s ability to mimic the personal attributes of providership and security. In other words, lesser men become intelligent enough to circumvent women’s existing sexual filters and thus thwart their sexual strategy. These ever increasing complexities made it hard to identify optimally suitable men from the pretenders, and women, being the primary sexual selector, needed various social constructs to sort the wheat from the chaff. With each subsequent generation they couldn’t be expected to do all of this detective work on their own so the feminine imperative enlisted the aid of the men themselves and created self-perpetuated, self-internalized social doctrines for men to comply with in order to exist in a feminine defined society.

The concept of leagues is just one of these doctrines. Your self-doubt about your worthiness of a woman’s intimacy stems from a preconditioned idea that ‘you’re out of her league’. The booster club optimist idea that “if you think you can’t, you’re right” is true, and boundless enthusiasm may overcome some obstacles, but to address the source of the disease it’s more important to ask yourself why you’ve been taught to think you can’t. A lot of approach anxiety comes from your own self-impression – Am I smooth, hot, affluent, funny, confident, interesting, decisive, well-dressed enough to earn an HB 9’s attention? How about an HB 6? Our great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.

I’m not debating the legitimacy of the evaluative standards of the sexual market place – it’s a harsh, often cruel reality – what I’m really trying to do is open your eyes as to why you believe you’re only meritorious of an HB 7. Looks count for a lot, as does Game, affluence, personality, talent, etc. but is your self-estimation accurate, or are you a voluntary participant in your own self-devaluation in the SMP courtesy of the leagues mentality the feminine imperative would have you believe?

The Economy of the League

As I stated above the purpose of fomenting a stratified League mentality in men serves to autonomously filter the lesser from the greater men for women to chose from, however, it also functions to increase the valuation of the feminine as a commodity. Like any great economic entity, the feminine imperative lives and dies by its ability to inflate its value in the marketplace. Essentially the feminine imperative is a marketeer. One of the sad ironies of this, and the last, century is that the feminine imperative has attempted to base women’s SMP valuation on a collective importance to the detriment of the individual woman’s SMV. For men this is inverted; a man’s sexual valuation is primarily individualized, while men as a collective gender are devaluated in the SMP.

What I mean by this is that, as a collective entity women’s sexuality cannot afford to be perceived as anything less than the more valued prize. If all vaginas are considered the gold standard then men’s sexual default value will always be lower. By this definition men, on whole, are out of women’s league.

For further consideration lets assume that average men, most being varying degrees of beta, are blessed with the ‘miraculous gift’ of an average woman’s sexual attentions. The power dynamic is already pre-established to defer to a feminine frame, so it’s small wonder that men would be prone to ONEitis even with an objectively average woman. This is the intent of the League schema – to unobjectively predispose men to commitment with women who under objective condition couldn’t enjoy the same selectivity. Roissy once postulated that for a healthy relationship to exist the Man must be recognized by the woman to be 1-2 points above her own SMV. This is a pretty tall order considering the feminine imperative’s emphasis on women’s sexuality being the more valued as default. And this is  to say nothing of contemporary women’s overinflated self-evaluations due to the rise of social media.

Gaming the League

All of the above isn’t to say that there isn’t a kernel of truth to the notion of leagues; it’s just not the “truth” men have been led to believe. For as much as the feminine imperative would have men subscribe to Leagues, it equally seeks to exempt women from the same League hierarchy by evaluating women as a whole. Needless to say men have their own rating systems – most popularly the ubiquitously physical HB 10 scale. I should add that it’s a foregone conclusion that any rating system men would establish for women in the feminine reality would necessarily need to be ridiculed, shamed and demonized, but you knew that already.

Irrational self-confidence is a good start to circumventing and unlearning the concept of Leagues; unlearning this conditioning being the operative goal. The Game-aware Man can actually use the concept of Leagues to his advantage with enough guile. When you approach a woman without regard to a League mentality or even a Zen-like obliviousness to it, you send the message that there’s more to you than a feminine reality can control. It’s exactly this disregard for the influence of the feminine imperative that makes the Alpha attractive; he’s unaware of, or indifferent to the rules his conditioning should’ve taught him earlier. Just in the attempt of Gaming a woman obviously “out of your league” you flip the feminine script by planting a seed of doubt (and prompting imagination) about your perceived value. Doubt is a very powerful tool, in fact the very concept of Leagues is founded upon men’s self-doubt. Turn that tool to your advantage by disregarding women’s social convention of Leagues.

Five Minutes of Alpha

Back in September of 2010 the inimitable Roissy (aka Heartiste) graced the manosphere with an insightful post about Katy Perry and an intriguing meltdown she had whilst spotting an old high school crush she had in the audience at one of her shows. My how time changes the landscape of our realities in so few years.

As is Roissy’s gift for prophecy, he accurately summed up the whole affair thusly:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Flash forward to January of 2012 and we find our previously boastful, pre-marriage Katy Perry in divorce proceedings with a situationally famous Russel Brand. But,…wait you say, isn’t this the same Katy Hudson Perry who so publicly shamed her first Alpha love Shane Lopes?

Perry dedicated her next song, a kiss-off anthem from her double-platinum 2008 disc “One of the Boys,” to her former crush and even tweaked a lyric in the middle of the song for the occasion, singing, “I can’t believe I fell in love with Shane Lopes.”

At the end of the tune, she looked directly at Lopes, held up her hand — which prominently displays her engagement ring [ed. Russel’s dowery investment] — and said, “That’s cool, I got mine,” and mockingly blew him a kiss.

Yeah, that same one. Yet the plot still thickens with the billboard chart topping hit/video released by Hudson Perry aptly entitled “The ONE that got away” (*apologies for subjecting my readership to this audio mayonaise), wherein we find a visibly aged Katy retrospectively pining away for her post high school Alpha artist lover of a bygone decade in the luxurious home of whom we presume is her aging beta providership for the duration of her soon to be ending life.

For all the internal conflicts and psychology that caffeinates the rationalization hamster in women, I’ll admit that it occasionally makes for some convincing artistic statements. I was almost feeling sorry for the young Katy, that is until her past lover comically swerves to avoid a Laurel Canyon rockslide and dives off a cliff in his 70’s Mustang. The premise that the guy plummets to his death then absolves our heroine of the liability of her next most significant life choice; settling for the unexciting beta provider responsible for what we presume is the duration of her lavish, yet empty, life. He’s not the One that got away due to any reason she implicitly enacted, he’s the one who was blamelessly taken from her by fate. Tragic reality replaced by fairytale .

Poor, poor Katy. Her Alpha love is forever denied to her. I wonder how Russel Brand feels after watching this? Like maybe a (situationally) Alpha  high school QB with little more than a GED can still upstage a Hollywood actor if his impact is significant enough on a woman? I can’t help but imagine that Katy is oblivious to the irony of all this. That’s the real tragedy; that women would be  convinced of this soul-mate pornography, while still subject to the War Brides dynamic. Still more ironic is Katy Perry’s story as a parallel to contemporary western women’s. Party and dance, settle in with the provider before the inevitable Wall impact and pine for the One that got away.

The Rush

For today’s post we’re going to do a little experiment. Before you press the play button, take a deep breath, and while it is work-safe, you may want to plug your headphones in or be in someplace where you can be uninterrupted for 10 minutes. Be forewarned that any women within casual listening distance will likely be provoked to indefensible, yet hysterical defense of the sisterhood after eavesdropping. Pay attention to your heart rate and do quick self assessment of your mood. As you listen to this, be aware of the chemical reaction percolating in your bloodstream as the inevitable end comes. Then be aware of how you physically feel afterwards. Ok, press play.

 

All done? How was that for you? Heart rate up?

 

I must admit, I got an adrenaline rush out of that. Kind of like watching a car wreck in slow motion. However, I find that kind of ironic since any number of daytime shows (i.e. Tyra Banks, et. al.) have been basically doing the same shit for decades now. A lot of guys acknowledge the power of the chemical rush, but it’s only episodes like this that make it real for them. I’m sure most of the guys hearing this felt it; the high of adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, etc., this is the chemical cocktail that women come to crave. I’ve read the chemical profile is very similar to that of heroin. Indignation triggers it for women in the same way sex and death trigger it for Men.

The main reason I wanted to pick this apart is because there’s a lot of elements to the whole incident. There’s so much at play in this, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s interesting to read the responses to gauge what impacts people first. Women naturally lean toward the guy being classless for opting to hash this out in a very public forum, yet it feel fully justified for doing it themselves for decades. White Knights will come out of the woodwork to defend the indefensible in spite of the circumstance responding viscerally to a woman weeping. How did you feel when you heard the girl cry? We can pour through the reasons why the guy was a chump to have been living with her for as long as he did, but think of this more from the perspective of the physical effect it has upon the listeners.

Funny how even when a woman confesses to her infidelity we’ll look for ANY angle available to still cast her in the victim’s role. We’ll readily analyze the guy’s history, we’ll euphemize her misconduct as a “mistake” (or she’ll do it for us), and we’ll speculate “where her heart is really at.”

 

“but, Rollo, dumping the hor in private would have achieved the same end.”


I’m not so sure about that. I’ll be the first to advocate against revenge, but for pragmatic reasons (wasted effort), not so guys can cling to some self-righteous high ground. If the guy is resolved to break it off with her, and he has the opportunity to rub it in (on valentines day, caught red handed, thinking a proposal is due, etc.), but instead holds back and discreetly pulls up stakes, does it have the same impact? Would she genuinely appreciate the gesture? How would she ever know that he could’ve resorted to publicly humiliating her yet chose not to?

The guy opting for the “high-road” would be the only one capable of appreciating what he could’ve done if he hadn’t, and even his expressing his option to do so makes him sound vain and conceited. By all rights this woman was under the impression that he was going to propose to her on-air and was utterly crushed instead. How does a woman spared from this ever make that kind of acknowledgement?

The answer is she doesn’t. I’m not saying he should’ve done it, but in light of the life-altering gravity of entering into as binding a commitment as marriage (a topic of much discussion in the manosphere), I can understand why he’d consider it. We can call him a chump for living with the woman for 5 years, but he’s a chump who’d made the decision to commit and had the ring to prove his intent. She on the other hand, knew he’d decided to enter into this commitment, and not only betrayed that, but KNOWINGLY, and happily, was ready to let him propose in spite of herself.

 

“Is justice somehow rendered as “less than justice” when it is administered by your OWN HAND?”

 

Therein lies the rub. There will always exist an element of bias (revenge) whenever one enacts what they perceive as justice. Women are almost universally absolved of this. Carrie Underwood can write a chart topping song about vandalizing the truck of a cheating lover that women (and men) will gleefully memorize the lyrics and sing along with, but let a man publicly humiliate a caught-in-the-act, cheating lover and “he’s less of a man” and runs the risk of having his personal life ruined as a result.

As far as this guy breaking Iron Rule #4; yes, the guy’s a fool for having done so for 3 years, and I’d go so far as to say an even bigger fool for being monogamous with a solitary woman for 5 years during his prime (I assume Chris was in his 20’s). My point was to illustrate his degree of commitment (he bought a ring) not to justify his having lived with her as long as he did. Contrast this incident with Tiger Woods situation: a lot has been made about commitment being tantamount to male virtue, so my emphasis was his readiness to commit and the gravity it bears on a man’s life.

There was another aspect that I hadn’t considered in this. I don’t entirely believe that reversing the roles to understand a contrast would be applicable in this case. Generally women don’t ask men to marry them. I understand it happens, but never to the degree that a man must prepare to make a proposal of marriage. Chris had resolved in his mind to marry the girl, and acted on this resolve by buying a ring and planning to propose on V-Day. Men are the True Romantics; Women simply do not have a parallel experience for this.

I understand this is a bit of a stretch, but for a moment lets assume Chris knew exactly the future liabilities of his commitment – all of those high-road, morally binding liabilities Tiger reneged on in his marriage – should his response to her deception be any less measured than what he did when you think of what he’d almost committed to?

Think of the impact his commitment to her would’ve entailed; think of how it would effect their families, his career and / or educational opportunities, their future children and their personal decisions, his finances, his psychological well being, their quality of life, and the list goes on, but essentially he was betting his future life on this girl. The guy was a hair’s breadth from making that commitment when he discovered the deception. I think she got off rather lightly.

 

*I’ve got to give props to the guys over at the BodyBuilding.com forums for rediscovering this link for me. I had originally used this audio in a SoSuave forum post back in February of 2010 and lost the audio link. Thanks guys.

Plate Theory V: Lady’s Game

I had a good amount of response on last Friday’s Plate Theory post asking for a more complete idea of women being natural Plate Theorists, so I thought I’d elaborate on this.

Female Plate Theory

For as often as I’ve mentioned women being natural plate theorists, I don’t think I’ve ever gone into detail about it. I think it’s pretty well established that I completely disagree with idea that women will only fuck one guy at a time. I could outline several women I know from experience in this, but really, observing behavior will bear this out fairly predictably. I will however agree that they are predisposed to, and are socially encouraged to, seek monogamy, but as in all things female the talk rarely matches the behavior. Sexuality is a woman’s first, best agency and even the homeliest woman know this – even when they’re just complaining about other women using it.

The principle that a woman’s first priority is to seek out security is true, and we’d be wise to bear this in mind when evaluating motives for behavior, but their methodology is what’s in question here. There is an understandable confusion for guys in this respect. On one hand women present a constant facade that the fear of being perceived as a slut (i.e. concurrently fucking more than one guy at a time) is primary to their self-respect and respectability. However, this has to be tempered with the desire to experience a variety of men in order to ensure the security/provisioning from the best among them. So in order to facilitate this women must practice a kind of calculated hypocrisy that is socially reinforced by the gender as a whole as well as some men (usually those so optionless as to excuse the behavior in order to get to her sexuality, or guys so conditioned that they overlook it as normal).

It is socially acceptable for a woman to blatantly spin plates.

Does this sound outrageous? While a woman who makes her sexual practices a bit too overt runs the risk of being perceived as a slut (which is dubious in this age as it is), most relatively attractive women covertly have a constant bullpen of starters ready to go to bat at any one time – these are also known as ‘Orbiters’. These are the attention providers, the “maybe” guys. And it makes little difference in terms of available options which she chooses at any given time, the very fact that she has five or six of them pursuing her is enough to boost her sense of self-worth, her social status within her same-gender peers, and give her the confidence to drop any one of her plates at a moments notice for any reason knowing that 2 or 3 more guys (or 20 more on facebook) stand ready to take his place, no questions asked and prepared rationalizations at the ready.

In addition, this practice is socially reinforced by women doing the same thing and the social conventions constructed to excuse the behavior. It’s the unspoken rule of a woman’s prerogative; she can always change her mind. This is a powerful tool for women –  in any situation, if a woman doesn’t choose to be sexual it is necessarily forced (or obligated), even when it’s after the fact. Either the “Jerk” forced her, physically or emotionally, or she had thought she wanted to, but later reconsidered – it makes little difference. In all social situations the default is to side with the feminine, the “weaker sex” – women, from sympathy or empathy, and men, from a desire to eventually become intimate with them. Dalrock expertly describes this convention in his “Don’t hit me, I’m a girl” post.

In either instance, the feminine prerogative is socially reinforced. That’s important to understand because even by my focusing on it here as a male, my motives for doing so become suspect. That’s how embedded this dynamic is – to question it risks ostracization. However, I also understand that for the greater part of women, this plate spinning dynamic isn’t a conscious effort on their part. In fact I’d suggest that it’s so thoroughly recognized that women default to it autonomously. Also, this is a good example of the first principle of power – when you have power, always feign powerlessness.

Free Reign

So, with a firm understanding that their behaviors will for the most part be excused, they are free to practice the feminine form of plate theory unhindered by social reprisal. The feminine plate spinning involves much more than sex though. Remember that attention is the coin of the realm in female society. The capacity to command attention determines self-esteem, peer status, sexual selectivity, and a host of other factors in a woman’s life, so spinning plates becomes more than just a “which guy am I gonna bang tonight” prospect. This dynamic and these factors are what makes women natural plate spinners. Even when a woman has no intention of ever becoming sexual with a “maybe” guy, his attention still has some value to her. It appeals to the long term prospective for security that’s a continuous subroutine running in her hindbrain. This is the rudimentary psychology behind hypergamy.

Now, combine all of this with women’s native language – covert communication – and it’s natural for a man to assume that a woman will only ever become sexual with one guy at a time. This serves the latent purpose of keeping him in a kind of stasis. If he assumes women will only be sexual under the precondition of commitment she is free to spin plates (essentially weighing options) as she pleases and sample at will what she sees as in her hypergamic best interest at the time. If the carrot looks good enough the guy will patiently pull the cart until such time as another, better carrot comes along. Either way he’s in that stasis. If a guy were to see her social and psychological machinations for what they are, he’d never pull the cart – so it serves women best that men think commitment should always be required for intimacy, even in the face of her behavior directly contradicting this.

Plate Wars

Lastly, this social dynamic serves as a very effective weapon for women against each other. As I stated in the last Plate Theory post, competition anxiety between women is something men can exploit for their own plate spinning, but the reason it is useful is because women so readily use it against each other. For a woman to say another is a “slut” translates into an overt betrayal of this unspoken social contrivance. She essentially is saying, “the rules are that women require commitment for sex, but here’s one who’ll never be worthy of any guy’s commitment because she wont play by the rules you suckers think she will.”

She is tacitly disqualified for a man’s commitment and is, at least in the accusing woman’s mind, a reduced threat in this feminine competition. She becomes exposed in the same game they’re all playing and in being so loses attention and therefore status and personal esteem. It seems petty to guys, but it’s really intra-gender warfare. Think of how many times an exceptionally attractive woman, that is completely anonymous to a group of women you happen to be with, berate her based on appearance alone. “She’s must be a tramp if she dressed like that.” These are the same women who’ll berate a man for basing his estimation of a woman on her outer appearance. This is feminine competition anxiety. Ask a woman to name the most attractive female actress they can think of. Odds are it will be a woman (who as a guy you’d never think of) who presents the least threat of this anxiety.

Gentlemen, as I’m fond of saying, women will fuck. They may not fuck you, they may not fuck me, but they will fuck someone. The girl who bangs the hot guy at the foam party in Cancun on Spring Break within 5 minutes of meeting him is the same girl who want’s you to believe that they’ll only fuck one guy at a time and then after commitment. All women are sexual, you just need to be the right guy at the right time for the job.