Game

The Mechanics of Kino

It’s no secret that I think one of the best ways to practice Game is to understand the mechanics behind Game. It’s very important to remind ourselves why what were doing is (or should be) effective and what exactly that effect is to predict an outcome. Ironically I take the most amount of criticism for disassembling Game mechanics from both sides of the debate. Women naturally hate explanations of the crimson arts because in revealing the blueprints for how Game techniques and principles functionally operate, they acknowledge their Achilles heels and feel forced to scramble and misdirect or mischaracterize Game for fear of the sisterhood being wantonly manipulated by less than scrupulous men.

Male Game critics (i.e. manginas) have similar misgivings, but I also get a bit of flak from Game practitioners who’s only real concern is making the technique work without any care for functionality. Lastly, there are guys who think it’s really kind of remedial to review Game principles and prefer my theory over the “under the hood” disassemblies of Game.

I think stressing the importance of Game mechanics is necessary. I was actually taken aback a little by the responses I got from my Learning to Read post. “Stick to theory man, we know this shit already.” With all of the current debate about how Game is evolving and to what end I think it’s really necessary, occasionally, to explore the fundamentals more thoroughly. We assume (myself included) that anyone reading a manosphere / Game blog must be familiar with the techniques and concepts behind them, however I’m increasingly having to defend core principles of Game precisely because opponents lack even a basic understanding of the mechanics of a particular principle or technique. If you’re unfamiliar with the functionality of Neg Hits, why would you think a woman wouldn’t react to them with anything but offense and insult?

So, it’s with all this in mind that I will occasionally return to the basics and hopefully help further a more thorough understanding of why Game works. Try to remember that the freshly unplugged guy still in the discovery phase of his awakening doesn’t have the benefit of having read Mystery Method or even knowing what alt.fast.seduction ever was.

The Mechanics of Kino (kinesthetics)

Human beings require touch and physical affection to bolster praise and self-affirmation.

Children need this in great amounts when in their infancy and I’d argue into their teenage years as well. Babies need contact with their mothers and all OB/GYN neonatal caregivers are instructed to pick up and cuddle newborns since this human contact is essential in triggering hormonal and immuno-chemical changes that benefit the survival of the child.

All mammals to some degree employ this physical connection to one another and so do we. A pat on the back, a hug from a parent, an embrace between lovers, or even sick or elderly people petting a dog or cat — goes a long way for stimulating not only the sympathetic nerve and immune systems, but also the psycho-biological feelings of well-being that come from the endorphins that accompany the stimulus. That’s the nuts and bolts of Kino. Your touch is a stimulus, but it’s how that stimulus is interpreted that makes or breaks how it’s employed.

Casual Kino

Casual kino is something we already do to a greater or lesser degree unconsciously. The act of petting a dog is Casual Kino. Once your subconscious (and sometimes conscious) has determined whether an animal is friendly, the natural unconscious impulse is to pet it. Why do we do this instead of just going on about our business?

The latent reason is because we want to gain its favor (some would say to ’tame’ it), but we also experience physical pleasure from that simple act of stroking a cat, petting a dog, etc. This same Casual Kino holds true for people as well. This type of Kino isn’t meant as intimate contact so much as subtle reassurance of acceptability by that person. In other words, to tame them.

There are also cultural and conditional rules that make Kino more or less acceptable. Dutch men and women for instance greet women with three kisses on alternating cheeks and in other cultures certain acceptability of subtle gestures of Kino are expected. Unfortunately modern westernized American culture is probably the most uptight in this regard. While contact between unrelated males is usually limited to a handshake or a pat on the back, the older an individual is the more acceptable it becomes to be more affectionate with them — as if there is an unconscious understanding in humans that the older an individual is the more affection that person needs to stimulate these health benefiting responses.

I’m sure you’ve encountered the ’touchy-feely’ kind of people? Try to remember what it was about them that made them remarkable. Did they make you more comfortable or less comfortable in their presence? In some instances I’m sure you could call Kino ’groping’, but this is when the line between subtle Kino and intimate Kino has been crossed. Likewise the touchy-feely person betrays a neediness for this contact, most certainly as a result of deprivation, thus conveying a subconscious message that the person hasn’t been found acceptable for touch for any number of reasons in the past.

Using Kino

The trick to effective Kino is to make the contact seem casual and subtle without crossing into betraying intent of intimacy seeking or to present the appearance of ’needing’ the contact.

For instance, we may consider a slight squeeze back from a woman whose hand you’ve just grasped as an indicator of interest (IOI), but this connotes something different than the woman who grasps your inner thigh while sitting down for drinks or dinner. The same holds true for men in the opposite role of delivering a message with touch, only it is much more exaggerated.

Bear in mind that women are far more adept at interpersonal communications than men are aware of. They covertly communicate with innuendo, subtle and carefully chosen words, visual and non-verbal communications to be sure (i.e. dirty looks) and, of course, touch. They will understand a male’s intent when he is unaware that he is even communicating it to her — and nothing belies this intent better than carelessly applied Kino.

Strategic Kino

Casual Kino is easy to understand, but Strategic Kino is an art. Recall that physical touch engenders bio-chemical changes in a person — this is the basis of Strategic Kino. In this Kino we establish a reward-reinforcer relationship with our target.

This principle is rooted in behavioral and child psychology — we reward children with praise and affection for a desired behavior, but remove it when an undesired behavior is performed. This is effective because of an actual physical need for this contact. Reinforce desired behavior – deincentivize (not punish) undesired behavior.

It should also be emphasized that this Kino is only ever effective after a dominance / affirmation seeking relationship is established. Using effective Neg Hits, demonstrating higher value (DHV) and making your target see you as the PRIZE is essential. Kino without a pretext of higher value only worsens your approach and you slip into the creepy zone. Strategic Kino is just one tool in a Man’s tool box and using Kino prior to setting yourself up as the objective for her will in all likelihood turn her off to you. You have to establish a perceived value for her prior to initiating any casual touching.

That said, the principle of Strategic Kino is to reward your target with touch for appropriate responses while in conversation. Your target should be isolated to ensure there is no external interference. This Kino is akin to shutting your target out in the initial stages of opening to a group by keeping your back to her and only recognizing her when she becomes insistent. Your touch becomes comforting to her once you’ve established a baseline for this sense of comfort.

Remember, there is a bio-chemical element to touch, so on a subtle level her body becomes accustomed to this. When it is removed (and you’ve made this touch valuable), she will covertly understand that this touch implies approval and acceptance, and the absence of it connotes a lack of affirmation.

As with most things Game, what you’re looking for is reciprocation of your effort on which you can then amplify to a next level, ultimately resulting in intimacy and/or sex. Game is a dance and a language – as a Man you need to lead and direct the intercourse, but it’s vital to see the signs of reciprocation and the willingness of a woman to dance with you. Returned kino is an excellent IOI (indicator of interest) and confirmation of a willing ‘dance’ partner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sorry,..

Apologizing for a lack of Game isn’t Game.

One disservice I think most men tend to overlook is an attitude of self-depreciation that they’ll resort to as a means of engendering interest in a potential woman by attempting to play to her sympathies.

Case in point (posted with permission):

Subject:
My apologies for being a complete douche
Body:
I actually wanted to call and talk to you tonight, but I just moved into my new place today and lost track of time and now its after midnight. Anyways, I was a complete tool the last time we talked. I thought about what you said to me, and I really have been lame lately. I think back to our first couple of “dates”, and I realize what a complete and boring reject I was. Those weren’t so much dates as me trying way too hard to impress you as someone that was mature (bad word choice, but I dunno what I was doing) and not myself. Anyways, I now realize I need to get this pole out of my ass and start having fun again in my life. Which is why I have been in a drunken stupor for the last 2 weekends.

I hope we can start hanging out again, because I do enjoy your company. But I promise if we do, I will drink, relax, and not be such a wallflower. I also promise no more gay-ass text messages. I hate when people do that to me, so I can only imagine how retarded i look when I do it.

-allen

This was an actual email passed on to me from a young woman I counsel after she blew this guy off over the course of three dates, and is one of many emails and IM texts I’ve gone over time and again with with women. This is a textbook example of how men will resort to self-depreciation tactics in order to provoke an “It’s OK, I understand” sympathy response from a woman with the expectation that she’ll take ‘pity’ on him for being a “flawed man” and give him a second (or third, or fourth) chance.

This is a direct manifestation of men being socially conditioned to recognize and acknowledge their weeknesses, and in confessing them they will become strentghs, and ergo, attractions (since they mistakenly believe that doing so will make them “not-like-OTHER-guys” and therefore unique). “You see? I’m really a sensitive, introspective guy willing to cop to his own character flaws, please love me.”

Iron Rule of Tomassi #9

Never Self-Deprecate under any circumstance. This is a Kiss of Death that you self-initiate and is the antithesis of the Prize Mentality. Once you’ve accepted yourself and presented yourself as a “complete douche” there’s no going back to confidence with a woman. Never appeal to a woman’s sympathies. Her sympathies are given by her own volition, never when they are begged for – women despise the obligation of sympathy. Nothing kills arousal like pity. Even if you don’t seriously consider yourself pathetic, it never serves your best interest to paint yourself as pathetic. Self-Depreciation is a misguided tool for the AFC, and not something that would even occur to an Alpha.

People seem to get confused about how self-deprecation really functions. I’m not suggesting that a Man take himself so seriously that he can’t laugh at himself; in fact a brilliant tactic is to present a prevailing, ambient sense of seriousness, then admit to and laugh at whatever goof it was that removes you from it. Nothing endears a man more to a woman than to think only she can break through your shell and get you to find humor in yourself. However, true self-deprecation is self-initiated. It’s not the “ha ha look I slipped on a banana peel” sense of deprecation, it’s the “I’m a complete douche, but really worth the effort” apologetic sense of deprecation. There is a marked difference between being pathetic and being able to laugh at yourself in good faith.

I’m not advocating that guys never own up to mistakes or wrongs they do; you should apologize in given situations depending on the conditions and do so appropriately, however Self-Depreciation is another mental schema entirely. Humility is a virtue (up to a point), but it’s simply not a virtue that a woman you’re interested in will ever appreciate in the manner you intend, and in fact often conveys the opposite intent. Virtuous humility is no substitute for self-confidence. If you are already involved with a woman, she may develop a socially mandated sense of appreciation, but again this is only up to the threshold of you trading her estimation of your confidence for your ability to address fault on your part. When a woman delivers a shit test based on this, and a guy submits through self-depreciation it’s damage done that’s not easily undone. Admitting fault is not a strength that inspires women, it’s still about the fault. It may be the honorable, necessary, truthful thing to do, but don’t believe for a moment women will value you more in the confession of fault.

That said, true self-depreciation is pervasive. Contemporary men have become so steeped in deprecation and male ridicule by popular media that it seems a normative way of attracting women. The message is ‘women love men who laugh at Men’. Thus, you have to be hyper-aware of it and unlearn it. You have to catch yourself in mid-sentence so to speak. Women operate in the sub-communications and when you overtly admit to a lack of confidence in yourself or your gender you may as well just LJBF yourself. That’s a strong impression you wont recover from easily if ever. Women want a competent, confident, decisive Man from the outset, not one who’s self-image is that of a “complete douche” or even a partial douche. The stereotype of the quirky, but lovable guy who bumbles his way into a woman’s heart may work for romantic comedies, but not in the real world. I should also add that when you become hyper-aware of this you can also turn it to your own advantage when AMOGing a competitor or you’re sarging a girl with a self-depreciative boyfriend or suitor. It’s all too easy to reinforce her estimation of a guy like this by covertly confirming it for her, while at the same time playing up your own confidence and value.

All of this is not to say that it’s wrong to recognize your own weaknesses and understanding when you’re in the wrong. It’s simply how you go about addressing it that’s the point. There are plenty of ways to assume the responsibilties of fault that aren’t self-depreciating. The easiest way is to always adopt the attitude that you’re ‘getting better all the time’. This mentality fosters confidence and projects ambition, whereas self-depreciation shoves your nose in the dog shit and says “please love me anyway?”