Articles by Rollo Tomassi

Author of The Rational Male and The Rational Male, Preventive Medicine

Case Study – Creative Intelligence

Below I have posted descriptions of 4 men from a case study I was involved with as part of a graduate study for personality psychology. Before you ask, no, this wasn’t an original study, however it was a measures experiment we performed to see how the results matched with our own university.These descriptions are excerpts from that case study comparing female mate selection. They were presented individually to 101 university women between the ages of 18 and 36. All were single/unmarried and none were aware of the intent of the experiment. I’ll present more details of the experiment after you have chance to respond so as not to spoil your genuine responses. Here are the descriptions:

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M is an art student. M has always had a passion for painting and plans to pursue a career in art. He creates paintings of people and complex landscapes. His paintings are so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photographs. The consensus amongst his art professors is that he is, by far, the most talented student they have seen. One professor, an expert on lifelike paintings, says he believes M is one of the most talented artists ever to produce these paintings. To make extra money to support his schooling, M has sold a few of his best paintings. They have sold for between 100 and 200 dollars. One professor lamented that M’s paintings are worth far more, but like so many other artists, he will probably never make very much money selling them.

L is an art student. He paints abstract paintings. L came into art by chance. He took an art class as an elective because it fit well in his schedule. For his midterm project, he produced an abstract painting after an hour of “fooling around” with the paint and canvas. The majority of the painting actually consisted of paint he accidentally spilled onto the canvas. A very wealthy man who was looking for art for his home discovered L’s painting in the student art studio. He paid L $5,000 dollars for the painting. Some of the man’s other wealthy friends liked L’s painting and commissioned a total of $100,000 in paintings from him. L and his art professors were shocked at the success of L’s paintings, because, in the words of one professor, “he has no real talent, just some good luck.” L continues to capitalize on his success by selling his abstract art.

L and M are considered highly desirable by other women on campus and very attractive. Friends of L and M say that they are dependable, kind, and generous friends.

J is an entrepreneur who had great success in his first business venture. He started a small software business in a friend’s garage. His product was a new kind of software for improving factory designs to radically increase the profitability of manufacturing. Within his first year, J secured contracts with Ford, General Electric, and Boeing. In the next three years, J sold his software to most of the top manufacturing companies in the United States and several of the top companies in Asia. After 5 years in business, J’s company was valued at 120 million dollars and had 250 employees. The Wall Street Journal credited the success of J’s company to the “brilliance and novelty” of J’s product and to J’s “sheer genius as a businessman.” However, J’s company fell victim to misfortune the next year. After J rejected a take-over bid from Microsoft, Microsoft filed a lawsuit claiming that J’s software infringed on some of their patents. Although most experts agreed that the suit had no merit, the cost of defending himself against the lawsuit created huge cash flow problems for J, which drove the company into bankruptcy. Although J has very little money left, he has recently begun a new business venture to sell another of the software products he has invented.

R recently inherited 20 million dollars from the couple who had adopted him when he was a year old. They died in a car crash, having made their fortune in commercial real estate. Before they died, R worked as a sales person at a computer company. Although R worked at the company for several years, he had not advanced past his starting salary or rank within the company. He went to a community college, but after graduation he didn’t feel sure what to do with his life. A friend who was working at the computer company suggested that R join him and work there. In R’s words, “I guess I’m just not very good at this job. At least now I won’t have to worry about money any more.” R and his adoptive parents were very close, and he was deeply saddened by their deaths.

J and R are both attractive and in their mid-twenties. They were recently nominated as two of the most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles.
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Bear in mind, these guys a theoretical archetypes, how they relate to women is irrelevant. How the subject women percieved them is what’s being assessed. Of these 4 men, which do you suppose was rated the highest in desirability with which to have a short-term sexual affair with by these women? And which man was rated the highest in desirability to enter into a long-term relationship with?

This study was done to determine comparative priorities in women with regards to male ‘creative intelligence’ vs.‘provisioning ability’ in female mate selection. I would’ve titled this thread as such, but I wanted to get some unbiased and impulse responses from readers here to see what the perceptions of these archetypes were from men and the reactions guys expected from women to these archetypes.

You’ll notice that care was taken in these archetype descriptions to balance out the physical attractiveness of each man (i.e. both artists were considered equally attractive by peers and both businessmen were ‘eligible’ bachelors). What was at issue wasn’t their extrinsic characteristics – comparative physiques or obvious Alpha presence – but what women chose in regards to these men’s intrinsic characteristics. The theory being that Creative Intelligence is of a higher mating value in the short term while a better Provisioning ability is more desirable in the long term. Bear in mind that hypergamy influences the decision making process for both of these sexual strategies. Also added was the caveat that legitimacy of provisioning ability, and the potential for future provisioning in it’s absence (i.e. the down on their luck men), played a factor in this mate selection.

Creative Intelligence

So what exactly is “Creative Intelligence”? Although there is no firm consensus on how to define it, we often know it when we see it. We also know a bit about it from a century of creativity research. Within humans, creative intelligence is closely associated with the highly heritable general intelligence, and creative intelligence seems to rely on the generation, selective elaboration, and skillful implementation of ideas and strategies. In other words, creativity represents a strong capacity for successful improvisation, thus it became a desirable, selected-for species survival trait.

The problem is that creativity sounds desirable, as does intelligence, so “creative intelligence” can become a vague term that seems useful for solving any behavioral problem, whether technological, ecological, social, sexual, or cultural. Many plausible adaptive functions explain the origins of human creative intelligence. These include: tool-making and tool-using, hunting, foraging, and food preparation methods, social strategizing within and between groups and sexual courtship dynamics (i.e. hunter-gatherer proto-Game).

Sorry for the psych lesson, but we had to be specific.

Trade Offs

As I elaborated in Schedules of Mating, most women face trade-offs in mating. In selecting a long-term mate, it makes hypergamic sense for women to put greater weight on traits that advertise ability and willingness to invest in protection, provisioning, and care of the woman and her offspring. This will favor the evolution of ‘good dad’ indicators – reliable cues of paternal investment ability and willingness to participate in those responsibilities. In our past, women of very high mate value (HB 8 and above) had the luxury of attracting a long-term mate who has both good dad potential and good genes. Fast forward through the ages and women have progressively had to settle for a committed partner who is not ideal either paternally or genetically. Then add to this the increasing complexity of men adapting to mimic these cues in order to facilitate their own breeding strategy. Consequently women are, by order of degree, incentivized to secure better genes or better paternal care from short-term or extra-pair partners, while simultaneously seeking long term provider males. Either would help at any time.

In this study, the idea was that, issues of relative attraction and arousal being satisfied, women will prefer a male possessing a higher capacity for Creative Intelligence in short-term sexual encounters to ensure the best possible future options for her offspring, while choosing a mate with better Provisioning ability for long term parental investment.

Art and business were chosen as two contrasting domains of work. Each requires distinct styles of creative intelligence, but both demand combinations of practical and theoretical skills, individual effort and social interaction. Hence, merit-based success in either domain may function as a mental fitness indicator. In each domain (art or business), one vignette described a man who showed high creative intelligence in his work, but who was poor due to bad luck and adverse circumstances. The other vignette in each set described a man who was average on creative intelligence, but who was wealthy due to good luck and beneficial circumstances. All vignettes made clear that each man’s creativity level was largely endogenous, reflecting natural (and presumably heritable) talent, but that his wealth level was largely accidental, gained through no merit or fault of his own.

Results

Each woman completed two forced-choice questions: (1) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a short-term sexual affair?”; (2) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a long-term committed relationship?” (L or M in the artist vignettes, and R or J in the entrepreneur vignettes). Next, participants rated the desirability of each man as a short-term mate and as a long-term mate on two 9-point scales (where ‘1’ = not at all desirable, ‘5’ = average; ‘9’ = extremely desirable). The rating questions were as follows: “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a long-term partner?” “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a short-term partner?

In this study M was overwhelmingly chosen as the short term partner. 89% of the participants chose the naturally talented, but out of luck artist for a short term sexual encounter. 7% chose L the rich artist, 3% chose J the poor/talented businessman and 1% opted for R the wealthy/untalented businessman.

J was also rated highest for long term relationship, but not as significantly as M in the short term. 67% of our subjects chose J, and surprisingly 17% chose L (rich artist). R was rated at 12% and M took 4% for the long term choice.

Build a Better Beta

For women, nothing is both as frightening and arousing than a Man aware of his own value.

I got a metric ton of feedback with regards to my Mrs. Doubtfire post and the notion of Game being co-opted to serve the feminine imperative. This sparked an interesting exchange on more than a few blogs and forums. All of this led me to do a bit of research into how Game principles, not necessarily Game in practice, is being subverted to address feminine-centric mandates. Even the idea of ‘false flag‘ blogging in the manosphere has been suggested as a means to more effectively establish a male-specific popular perspective that might be considered more legitimate.

The problem intrinsic to all of that is that masculinity is now so ridiculed and delegitimized in our feminine-centric reality that any (lame) attempts at subterfuge only make the manosphere look even more like the boys club in the treehouse shooting spitwads at the “mature” girls below. It’s going to come off as game-playing and juvenile, and only serve to make any legitimate point or appeals to logic appear self-serving. That said, I do understand the necessity to be covert in expressing the principles behind Game from a pro-masculine perspective. Men blogging in the manosphere, whether it’s Game theory, PUA, MRA or MGTOW, all assume a horrible risk for publicly expressing their views that a proponent of feminism would rarely need to consider. Professionally, personally, and to an extent, even physically, manosphere bloggers paint a big target on themselves that very few people would sympathize with their being damaged for their outspokenness. If it looks like patriarchy, it’s OK to set their home on fire, and a feminized world of angry women and their identifier mangina sycophants will line up with torches to do so.

Building a Better Beta

None of this is really even a concern for the proponents of a fem-centric culture; they can rest comfortably in a self-affirming, social echo chamber without any real fear of persecution or risk to their career or reputations. However, the utility of exploiting Game in theory (not in practice) to better serve that female centrism hasn’t gone unnoticed. This has given rise to what might be called “sanitized Game” – take the primary elements of Game to build a better Beta. With such an overwhelming social undercurrent for men to ‘Man-Up’ today it’s really simple pragmatism to reinterpret Game to serve the expectations and entitlements inherent in fem-centrism. Thus we see Game concepts being co-opted by social conservatives, so-called female manosphere sympathizers and christo-religious revisionists all blogging in disclaimered agreement with Game principles insofar as it serves their particular delusion. What they fail to recognize is that, for all of their efforts to contort Game into their personal agenda’s boxes, they’re still living in and fostering a feminine-centric imperative. If there’s a definition of the Matrix, this is it.

I would argue that most, if not all, are unaware that this is the latent purpose they’re serving. The overarching  point is to create a more acceptable man for a female defined goal, NOT to truly empower any man. There is no feminine opposite to this; there is no counter effort to make women more acceptable to men – in fact this is actively resisted and cast as a form of slavish subservience. This is the extent of the feminine reality; it’s so instaurating that men, with the aid of  “concerned women”, will spend lifetimes seeking ways to better qualify themselves for feminine approval. That’s the better Beta they hope to create. One who will Man-Up and be the Alpha as situations and use would warrant, but Beta enough to be subservient to the feminine imperative. They seek a man to be proud of, one who’s association reflects a statement of their own quality, yet one they still have implicit control over.

Whether the reasonings are moral, entitlement or ‘honor bound’ in nature the end result is still feminine primacy. The sales pitch is one of manning up to benefit yourself, but the latent purpose is one of better qualifying for normalized feminine acceptance. What they cannot reconcile is that the same benefits that are inherent in becoming more Alpha (however you choose to define that) are the same traits that threaten his necessary position of subservience as a Beta. This is precisely why ‘real’ Game, and truly unplugging, cannot be sanitized. This social element wants to keep you plugged in; more Alpha, more confidence, more awareness, is a threat to fem-centrism. It’s great that all this Game stuff has finally got you standing up for yourself, but remember who’s got the vagina.

The Evolution of Game

In the beginning, Game was about little more than racking up lay-counts. For some guys this will never change; you can’t ignore the purely seductionist intent of the origins of Game. Game was (is) for getting laid, and along with that now comes a sort of stigma of the Player. It’s against the interests of the feminine imperative that a man might conceivably have some kind of secret, learned system that bypasses her (mythological) feminine intuitions and natural reservations. That’s a power that men have sought for millennia. Some might realize it to a degree through power, fame or fortune, but to distribute this figurative ability en masse would be a power shift that would put women at men’s mercy. With great power, should come great responsibility. This is the fear that Game represents to the feminine – even the concept of men ‘understanding’ women’s natures must necessarily be ridiculed and shamed even in the attempt. When women are knowable they lose the power of their only actionable agency over men.

Game has evolved into much more than just a set of replicable behaviors for PUAs to ply their craft and get laid. Somewhere along the way a man wondered why these behavior provoked the responses they do in women. What were the core elements that these behaviors and attitudes were operating on in women? Game is still about getting laid, but it’s progressed beyond just the practical. Game is really a catch-all term now for lack of a better one. It’s moved on to the theory, the principle and the psychology that makes us better Men, and makes women knowable. It’s very important that the vision you have of being a “better Man” originates with YOU, not with the idealisms of a plugged in moralist or women so fearful of your new awareness that they’ll make concerted efforts to supplant it with what makes you a better servant of their insecure imperative. Resist the idea of becoming a better Beta in girl-world and focus on being that Alpha Man as you define it.

The Myth of the Biological Clock

Popular culture likes to teach women and, by association, unenlightened men that there is an innate biological clock inside each woman that slowly ticks down to a magical period where her maternal instincts at long last predispose her to wanting a child. Perhaps, not so surprisingly, this coincides perfectly with the Myth of Women’s Sexual Peak as well as conveniently being the age demographic just post or just prior to when most women hit the Wall.

The concept of a biological clock sounds very convincing on the face of it – it’s “biological”, and when it comes to feminine social conventions, nothing convinces women more than their bodies, their selves. In girl-world biological reasonings are always suspicious rationales for men’s bad behavior, but when applicable to women, biology is “Mother Nature”, and you don’t argue with that bitch.

Unfortunately, and as fate would have it, the hard science of biology often tends to crash headlong into feminine social conventions. Lo and behold Many Women Underestimate Fertility Clock’s Clang. Who’d have thought? It would appear the cold hard science of women’s actual fertility window doesn’t exactly coincide with the articles of faith that feminine primacy is teaching them.

A new survey finds a big disconnect when it comes to fertility. The age women think they can conceive a baby is far different from what their bodies are actually capable of. This poses an increasing problem, as more women wait longer than ever to have children.

What’s the chance a 30-year-old can get pregnant in one try? Many thought up to 80 percent, while in reality it’s less than 30 percent. For a 40-year-old, many assumed up to a 40 percent success rate. It’s actually less than 10 percent. And when you keep trying? The survey finds many think you can get pregnant more quickly than it actually happens. It also shows many women underestimate how successful fertility treatments are.

Not only is the myth of the biological clock inaccurate in terms of when a woman should get pregnant, it’s dangerously misleading in the odds of becoming pregnant.

“The first thing they say is, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me this?'” says Barbara Collura, who co-authored the survey and heads Resolve, the National Infertility Association. She laments that no federal agency pushes this issue, and neither women nor their OB-GYNs tend to bring it up. Though, Collura admits that fading fertility is a hard message to deliver.

“Let’s be honest, women don’t want to hear that they can’t have it all,” she says. “We can have a great job, we can have a master’s degree, we don’t need to worry about child-bearing because that’s something that will come. And when it doesn’t happen, women are really angry.”

I wont argue that women actually possess maternal instincts, I will argue that their understanding of when they manifest has been deliberately distorted by a feminine-centric cultural influence. If women are “angry” about the revelation their inability or difficulty to conceive in their post Wall biological conditions presents, their anger is misdirected. Rather than come down from the heady pedestal of ego-invested female empowerment psychology, they’ll blame men for not being suitable fathers, or lacking a will to “play-by-the rules” and satisfy the dictates of the feminine imperative by whiling away their time in porn and video game induced comas.

“I just feel like it’s something else they lump onto women that we have no control over,” says filmmaker Monica Mingo, who’s blogged about her decade-long effort to conceive. She says the real issue is society at large, which is pushing back the age people are expected to settle down and have kids. Mingo didn’t even meet her husband until she was 32.

“You tell us your fertile years rapidly decline in your mid-20s,” she says. “Well, if I’m not dating anyone, and I want to have a family, what’s that information going to do for me?”

Well for one thing it might force you to come to terms with the course you want to set for your future life with an informed choice, rather than blaming it on so-called “Kidult” men when you do realize you want kids. I guess that’s asking too much when you’re in your prime party years at film school. Sorry Monica, time’s up, and you did have control over it in your pre-Wall years. All the haggard ghosts of feminism are cackling heartily around the cauldron of boiling good intentions in hell.

What were seeing here is a collision of hypergamy and feminine primacy smashing against the harsh reality of biology. The feminine imperative needs to create a new social convention to make this incongruent reality agree with its doctrine. It’s been done before with the convenience of Sexual Fluidity. Blame men for not living up to the tenets of the “having it all” ideology and create a convenient new social convention that shames men in its retroactive resolution of the problem it caused itself.

Command Presence

A few years back I went to a popular martini bar for a mixer event that one of our agencies was throwing for my company. It is a very upscale bar, all the waitresses were easily HB 8s & 9s and the bartenders looked as if they got the job based on how close they resembled male models. If you know any about Central Florida and the sordid details about Tiger Woods’ affairs, this was one of his primary spots for a hook up. Whenever I’m in a professional / social outing such as this I tend to pay attention to social dynamics and take mental notes. I’m almost always in behavioral observation mode (which sometimes bugs me I’ll admit) and I apply these observations to what I know. I sometimes feel like Jane Goodall in Gorillas in the Mist when I’m at promo events. This night was one of those instances.

At the time I’d been studying what is called Command Presence. If you work in law enforcement, emergency services, or served in the military you’ll know this term. My brother was formerly in law enforcement and he explained it as taking control of, by appearing to have, authority in confrontational or high stress situations. When a cop stops you for a speeding ticket he is trained to instinctively adopt a Command Presence when approaching your car. This is what makes people think cops, generally seem egotistical or arrogant, but it’s this ‘presence’ that leads them to this. Google search ‘command presence’, there are hundreds of articles on it.

I decided this evening to experiment a bit with Command Presence. Rather than wear my usual club crawler attire I wore well tailored suit and tie with some very expensive dress shoes. I never wear a tie, even at work. I’ve always felt a good physique is the best form of peacocking and this met with a lot of success in my past, but a man in a well tailored suit projects a different presence and prompts different (though favorable) responses, not only from women, but men as well.

Command Presence is founded on the associations with an appearance of authority, so it helps when you actually do own that authority. I’m the art director for a major brand of vodka and liquor import company and this place had the full line of bottles I designed, as well as their proprietary vodka being my creation. I am the ‘authority’ in this regard and this is always an easy ‘in’ with club people. Within the first 5 minutes of being there I’d gotten multiple IOI and AIs from an exquisite brunette (HB 8.5 easy) after a deliberate push to use Command Presence and taking with her.

Next was the HB 9 waitress that led me up to our VIP section. Maybe 24 y.o. and absolutely stunning, she pulls me away from the bartender and kino-walks me to where our party was meeting. This isn’t a stripper, or a paid hostess, she fetches drinks. She initiates convo with me and I use my art director routine that worked with the bartender. All time I maintain an air of authority and take the fatherly role with her. She’s visibly impressed, more IOIs, and goes off to bring me a martini.

Later I’d met up with some web agency people and some coworkers from my office. We’re launching a new micro-website that I worked on with them. I worked with most of the creative team, but I hadn’t met the PR or research people. One of these was a fantastic blonde named Tawny. Maybe 25, an unbelievably hot HB 8.5, had a boyfriend, but not present. Our logistics girl was a squat, Puerto Rican lesbian and she whispers to me that she could get her before I could. I reminded her I was married and wouldn’t take her bait, but it was game on from that point. She already knew who I was so that angle was done. I got good eye contact from her and caught her looking twice before I introduced myself formally. I then went Dean Martin on her and added the Command Presence to my ‘knowing all about her’ attitude. She ate it up and it was at this point I had to dial it down because she was talking about sticking around after the party had broke up and I wasn’t about to consolidate anything.

One thing I think older single guys miss out on is exploiting the maturity and wisdom that younger women expect them to have. Think Rat Pack guys, Dean Martin, Sinatra, Hefner, these guys were PUAs well into their 60s (even when they were married). Sure they were celebrities, but modeling that attitude into your 40s can take you a long way with younger women.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) the Command Presence thing was working almost too well. At about the point I was trying to separate my attention from Tawny the waitress brings me a martini. This engagement made for one of the more fascinating observations of female communications I’ve seen. Tawny was sexy and in a busness casual outfit that certainly made her hot, but waitress (never got her name) is in tight black form fitting pants and a tight halter displaying a great rack and a perfectly flat stomach with navel piercing.

I’ve previously gone into about how women communicate on levels that men are rarely aware of and here I had the perfect opportunity to see this in actions. Facial gestures, applied kino, innuendo, subcommunication, you name it was all there. Tawny of course has the high ground because waitress is on duty and thus is in a service role, but wow.

I still have to pry myself out of the Tawny predicament and lead a bit about the boyfriend, to my surprise she says he’s not really her boyfriend anyway, “more like a friend.” Now I’m in trouble, but I hold the Presence and give her the principled opt out “it’s a Tuesday night and I probably shouldn’t even be drinking because it messes with my morning workout” Oops, shouldn’t have added the last part, but that was my non-Presence slipping in. I excused myself around 8:30pm, but not without her letting me know she hopes I’ll drop by their studio sometime soon. Pfeww,..

I posted this to encourage older guys to adopt a Command Presence as a means to interact, but it doesn’t have to be an act for you. The part of the story I ommitted is that while I got a lot of female attention this night, I also got solid in networking with some very influential men who picked up on this. They sought out my association. I could say it was an Alpha thing, but I think it’s about the application. I have legitimate confidence and I expressed it with my attitude, expression and appearance. Yes, I have legitimate authority in this instance, but I owned it in a way that was respected. Too many, tragically older, men are afraid to own their authority and/or confidence.

Amused Mastery & Command Pressence

As I began with, this experiment was from a few years back, and since then I’ve seen how Command Presence dovetails very well into Roissy’s principle of Amused Mastery. Amused Mastery is a good compliment to Command Presence. It tempers the ass-holish impulse that can result from taking Command Presence too far. It smooths down what can be taken for arrogance.

I think a lot of guys get hung up on the term “aloof”. The word conjures up the idea that a guy has to pretend to be looking down his nose at some girl he’s interested in in a lame effort to get her to qualify to him. When people read how a guy needs to perfect being “aloof” they tend to think “haughty” or feigned disinterest. Throw that term away right now, because you don’t want to be “aloof”. What you want is Amused Mastery.

Amused Mastery puts you into a position of maturity while still remaining playfully approachable and forcing a woman to qualify to you by acknowledging your mastery of her (really all women by association) and your surroundings. An attitude of Amused Mastery implies to women that by virtue of your maturity and/or authority you’ve “seen it all before”, you already know what women mean when they say or do what she is doing, and it’s amusing to you. You’ll play along, but only so far as to cleverly poke fun at her attempts to get you to qualify to her. It means you never take her seriously, like a bratty sister.

I’ll admit I never fully appreciated the potential of Amused Mastery until I had a daughter. I find myself naturally using it with her because that’s the actual, unforced relation I have with her. Especially now that she’s 13. However, I also notice my wife finds Amused Mastery just as appealing, to the point that she includes herself in my Mastery over my daughter. Command Presence is useful when others are only peripherally familiar with you, Amused Mastery is what you need to employ when you’re dealing with people who have familiarity with you.

It’s particularly effective for older men / younger women Game. Assuming you’re in reasonably good shape and have some degree of affluence, being older gives you a degree of authenticity. With maturity comes an expectation of knowledge and experience for Men. I’ve used Amused Mastery with my “pour girls” at promo events and it’s like cat nip for them. You become that Father figure to them (FILF?) that they crave, but can’t seem to get from younger guys.

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.