Idealizations

The Ballad of Clark Kent

When Lois Lane met Superman he was fighting crime, could bend steel in his bare hands, stop locomotives, leap over tall buildings in a single bound; shit, Superman could fly! Then one day he met Lois and swept her away, rocked her world in the sack and fell in love with her because thats what Super-Men do. After a year of this whirlwind Lois starts to feel her relationship with Superman was lacking something, “Why does he have to always be out there fighting crime, huh? Why does he always have to prove he’s so Macho? Does it threaten his Ego? He really needs to get in touch with his feminine side. What about MY needs and why can’t he just grow up and get a real job? I’m not getting any younger you know, he’s got some responsibilities to live up to. When am I gonna see a ring?”

So eventually this wears down on Superman and he submits to Lois’ requests (demands?). After all he ‘should’ really ‘grow up’ anyway, right? It’s the right thing to do. So Superman changes his name to Clark Kent (Super-‘MAN’ was so male self-aggrandizing anyway) and lands a job as a reporter at a great metropolitan newspaper. Clark begins wearing glasses – even though he can see X-Rays, and shoot lasers out his eyes, he wears them because Lois says it makes him look distinguished, intellectual and SHE likes them.

Time goes on and Lois and Clark marry. 5 years into the marriage Lois gets bored. Same old, same old. Clark is so mundane and unassuming. She longs for the days he would fly and do that funny steel bending trick he used to do when they were dating. He hasn’t done any of that for so long; not because he can’t, but because he’s afraid she’ll get upset with him and not put out that evening if he gets ‘cocky’ with her. In fact she’s not putting out even half as much as she used to these days. Clark just doesn’t arouse her as much as he once did and she just can’t seem to put her finger on the reason for it.

Then one night Lois ran into a wealthy fellow named Bruce Wayne at a charity mixer. Bruce was dark, mysterious and in great shape! He couldn’t fly, but he made up for that in so many other ways. He fought crime! He wore a mask and spoke in short, purposeful sentences, never mincing words. He didn’t wear glasses (that was so retro!) and he came and went at the time of his pleasing, not hers. He sent tingles down Lois’ spine (and other places that hadn’t felt tingles in a while) when he began seeing her.

The weeks went by until, after a 60 hour work week at the Daily Planet (swanky apartments don’t rent cheap), Clark made his way home on the subway (since flying had been out of the question for a while now) and picked up a dozen roses to surprise Lois with (he thought she tended to put out when he showed his ‘feminine side’) when he got back to the apartment. However it was poor Clark who got the surprise upon discovering Bruce Wayne bending Lois over the kitchen table when he opened the door. Bruce propmptly toweled off while Clark, slack-jawed with horror, watched speechless.

“How could you? After all we’ve meant to each other!” Clark began to cry as Bruce excused himself from the now estranged couple. Clark was used to crying a lot now to show his sensitivity.

“What could you have possibly seen in a guy like that?!” He shrieked like a school girl.

“Well,..I couldn’t help myself” Lois said indifferently, “Batman is a Superhero.”

And that’s the danger, where do you end and she begins? The reason I wrote Identity Crisis (almost 5 years ago) was exactly this: Men tend to adopt a position of constantly qualifying for a woman’s intimacy, and understandably women reinforce this because to puts them in control of the frame and aids in their sexual selection. Most guys willingly make fundamental changes if they believe it will increase their chances of qualifying for a woman’s intimacy. Are they genuinely inspired, or are they deductively reasoned changes meant to qualify for her acceptance – A+B= sex?

The real insidious part is that the more deprived a man is of that intimacy, the more he’s likely to convince himself that the change is genuine. Whenever I hear a guy or a woman say “we’re working on our relationship” or “relationships are a lot of work and compromise”, it translates to the man changing or compromising to better fit the woman’s ideal. He’s being ‘fixed’, he’s broken and he needs to change. It often gets to the point where the guy will believe that there IS something genuinely wrong with him – it’s her reality he must conform to because the feminine reality is the ‘proper’ reality. The rude awakening comes when she discovers that the man she’s fixed her husband to be is the polar opposite of the Man she was attracted to at the start.

Musings at the Gym

Why is the assumption always that if a person is exceptionally good looking, fit, and prides themselves on the personal dedication and discipline needed for being so, that they are necessarily compensating for a lack of “depth”, personal, or emotional intelligence? Why should outer beauty necessarily imply inner ‘brokenness’? Can’t a person be both physically and emotionally healthy?

I find it fascinating that it’s often the same people who tell you “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover” in regards to a less than physical ideal (being polite) and personal merit, are usually the first people to tell you how “shallow” a person must be if they devote what they “see” as too much time to improving their appearance. I’ve been a bodybuilder for over 20 years now, my brother competed on the amateur circuit when we were younger, I’ve met a lot of fitness competitors and just average men and women who pride themselves on their physique, and I have to say the majority of them were very positive, intelligent and psychologically healthy people.

People who look good, generally, exemplify the hard work and conviction that’s necessary in staying that way. It’s not just the physical that makes them attractive; it’s the subconscious understanding of the dedication necessary to be so that’s attractive too. When you look better than the norm, especially in an era and culture where 66% of the population is clinically overweight, there’s an ambient understanding that it takes a mind for dedication and conviction to be so. That’s not to deny that some people don’t hit the genetic lottery jackpot, but largely, maintaining a great physique is the result of a focused effort.

The gym is the perfect environment for sexual equalization from a physical standpoint. In a club or at a party or any other social gathering our masks are on; we can hide deficits more easily with clothing, the lighting and sounds is conducive to giving us more appeal, our inhibitions may be altered due to alcohol, etc. But in the gym all of that is out the window. Oh, women attempt to hide their fat butts with sweat shirts tied around their waists, but everyone is sober – in fact we’re in a better than normal state of awareness from the exercise – both sex’s physical deficits and assets are out in the open.

It’s Darwinism at its finest and both sexes strive for attention in some form or another. Guys can only rely on their physical presence & prowess, and whatever Game they possess to impress since there’s generally no way to judge a man’s socioeconomic status in the gym. Women are stripped to a primal physical competition where they’re judged on their physical form which is men’s primary criteria for mate selection. This is why you commonly hear women complain about ‘hating’ going to the gym and why female specific gyms are profitable; it has less to do with the actual exercise and more to do with an inability to cope with the intense competition present on a level that most are unacustomed to in other social environments. This is why there is such a market for ‘women’ only health clubs such as Curves and Planet Fitness (yes PF gyms are for women), in fact I’ve yet to encounter a men’s only gym and I’d speculate that this is due to men experiencing far less intimidation in a gym setting.

I really wish I could type away here and tell you about all the hotties I see at my gym everyday, but that’s simply not the case. I can tell you I’ve seen a drastic change in the women who populate the “fitness clubs” now, and it’s not for the better. I’m sure I’ll read someone in the comments relate how they have gorgeous attention whores at their local gym, but that’s simply not my experience these days. The women at the gym NEED to be in the gym. Mostly overweight, mostly self-conscious, I can tell by the effort each post-Wall woman exerts as to whether they’re recently divorced (or planning to be). Just on observation, I see far more men in MUCH better shape than the sample of women present. I’d guess it at 80% – 20%, and that’s here in Florida, I can just imagine what it might be in other regions. Even the cardio and zumba classes are overwhelmingly filled with thick soccer moms, “doing it for fun”.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

I’ve recently finished reading “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”  by Ogi Ogas PhD. and Sai Gaddam PhD. and I’d have to place it next to The 48 Laws of Power as a seminal work for the Game community. It statistically confirms a lot of Game principles, but at the same time it will challenge more than a few. Highly recommended.

As expected it appears that yesterday’s Women’s Physical Standards post drew a bit of consternation from both sides of the aisle. Women predictably want to cling to what’s always been a useful canard for their victimhood psychology (i.e. men fixate on specific physical perfection) and ‘community’ men, predictably, want to point out that it’s not JUST looks that gets a guy laid. One of the most sacred cows of the Game community is the ‘Game trumps Looks’ debate. Nothing inspires a more heated discourse than when making physical comparisons and drawing conclusions from observable events and behaviors in this regard. But that’s not what I was getting at in yesterday’s post.

Oh, I’ll get to that in time, but what I was driving at in that topic was dispelling the popularized notion (as lamented by the Body Shop’s and many more positive body image ad campaigns) that men have some twisted, media-fueled physical ideal that women can’t possibly attain and that, statistically, it’s really women who have a far more rigid standard for male beauty than they’ll ever publicly admit. Understandably this makes guys squirm for the same reason it makes women squirm; trying to live up to a rigid physical standard.

On the flip side of that coin, I’m fully aware that there are a host of other factors that influence a woman’s overall attraction for a man, (the classics of status, power, affluence, Game, and Alpha dominance come to mind)  but I was comparing the isolated physical standards for both genders. I also understand that attraction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however, raw physical arousal – the precursor to a more protracted degree of attraction – often does. George Clooney and Johnny Depp are sex symbols, but Bill Gates (younger, richer and more powerful than either of them) is not. Women’s chances of marrying any of them is infinitesimal, however, when women fantasize about sex, it’s with the good looking guys, because all they’re thinking about is sex from an arousal perspective.

Now, all that makes for a good response in the comments thread, but I wouldn’t have composed any of this into a fresh post had it not been for another related issue I’ve been recently debating. And this is the issue of how easy-access contemporary pornography has become the greatest catalyst in changing the inter-gender landscape since birth-control and the sexual revolution.

Has high quality ubiquitous porn changed Generation Y men? This may seem like a stretch, but in the same way that women want to cling to the idea that men harbor impossibly high physical standards, the comparative argument holds that women also apply this template to the influence of pornography on men’s sexual appetites. Feminine-centric porn complaints generally lump all porn into the same stereotypical profile. By ignoring the overwhelming variety of porn that any given man may “consume”, the sympathetic reader (mostly concerned women and their white knight sycophantic men) are left to presume “porn” means the unattainable, blonde hair, blue eyed, perky-boobed, perfect bodied girl in nothing but high heels and ready to take the money shot in her mouth. Porn hating women love this caricature of porn because, in this characterization, it’s just as unattainable for them to live up to as it is for most men to actually experience. Needless to say the latent purpose of maintaining this opinion is ensuring a position of sexual selection based on feminine-centric criteria. Biomechanics are a bitch, and reducing the threat of sexual competitors provably outperforming them by example (in porn) is increasingly more imperative as access to the “performances” become more easily available. The logic is one of ignorance is bliss; the less exposure a man has to sexual variety the more valuable her sexual agency becomes to him.

All one need do is look at the sex category sections of any free video porn site (Pornhub, Red Tube, Tube 8, etc.) to see what a parody this really is. Porn’s not just the 80’s standard blonde and brunette in a threesome with some random guy rented from the VHS store. It’s amateurs, asians, lesbians, interracial, orgy, fatties, skinnys, matures, teens, etc. Just name the body type, sex act, racial profile, age, hair color, etc. and there is a pornographic niche for it (Rule 34). Considering the sheer amount of sexual variety available for a myriad of preferences, women bemoaning their inability to “live up to” porn star requirements is ludicrous and indicative of their complete lack of understanding the male sex dynamic. As I stated in yesterday’s post, name the niche and there’s a fan-group ready to bang you.

For the past several decades it’s been a very easy sell for women to characterize porn as degrading women, or setting an impossibly idealized standard of sexual expectation; that is until the rise of digital media and the capacity to empirically track the access to it. A Billion Wicked Thoughts admirably compiles the statistic ‘evidence’, the hard web-trend data of more than a decade, that disproves the idea that porn is ‘one-size-fits-all’. All the self-reporting and biased corollary studies on porn’s influences of the 80’s and 90’s are wiped away in one stroke with the statistically verifiable data of online porn consumption habits – leaving all of us with the question of what were they trying to prove then?

I’ll save the debate on whether porn’s influence is retarding men’s overall maturity by too easily satiating their libido for another thread, but I can’t end this without also pointing out that a great many statistics revealed in this book also contradict more than a few presumed tenets of Game theory. Among those is the same one I’ve just pointed out for women; men have a plethora of sexual tastes and fetishes, not just the “perfect 10”. You simply can’t ignore the statistical variances in men’s appetites for MILFs, Matures, Asians, Big Asses, Chubbys, etc. and come to the conclusion that there is a one-size-fits-all sexual type preference for men. You can argue as to why men opt for these variances, but you can’t argue they don’t opt for them.

Women’s Physical Standards

“Your charming personality and bulletproof Game won’t make you look any better when your shirt comes off.”

This may come as a shock to the “men have impossibly high beauty standards” gnashing of feminist teeth, but it is in fact women who have a much higher standard for an idealized male physique. For all the endless kvetching from women about men wanting “living barbie dolls”, it’s men who’ve historically displayed much broader interests in female body habitus than women ever have.

You see, men will very readily cater their physical sexual “preferences” in accordance with what has proven sexually successful for them in past experiences. In other words, men tend to return to the same watering hole they found to be plentiful in the past. These preferences of convenience manifest themselves as ‘fetishes’ for men. And you don’t even need all that extensive research to prove this.  All one need do is search the vast variety of porn available catering to the physical attributes that men will fetishize. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass, small ass, every hair color of the rainbow, shaved snatch, hairy snatch, teen girls to MILFs and older, tan, pale, ultra-thin to the ubiquitous BBWs (Big Beautiful women). Ladies, name the physical attribute(s), and there’s a fan-group just waiting to bang you. Rule 34 was never more provable than in men’s willingness to fuck damn near any physical demographic of women – just ask the female midgets catering to that fetish of porn.

On the other hand, from a purely physical perspective, it’s women’s idealized masculine form that hasn’t changed in millennia. While there may have been a rubenesque period when men loved the fatties of the 1600′s, no such era ever existed for women’s physical preferences. The classic broad chest, wide shoulders, six-pack abs and squared jaws of greco-roman athleticism are still the idealized male form that has graced EVERY romance novel cover in existence. I’m still waiting for someone to post me a link for a dating site that caters exclusively to women’s fetish of BBMs – average to good looking, fit women specifically looking overweight men. Executive Introductions caters to women seeking affluent, influential men, but women just looking for overweight men, that site doesn’t exist.

Now, with this, don’t think for a moment I’m refuting the prevailing bio-mechanical wisdom that prompts the vast majority of men towards the sexual want of a slender and archetypically sexy woman. That’s hardwired for us, but ladies, stop your bitching about men’s perception of beauty and how unfair it is to be subjectively compared in the physical as a basis for your personal worth. By historical comparison, women’ve got it easy when it comes to physicality. Unless you are an extreme outlier of physical deformity, there’s probably a niche of porn that specifically caters to your body habitus. And in terms of effort, it takes far more sweat and determination for men to build a man’s body into a masculine physical ideal than it will EVER be for women to achieve a form that men wont find sexually appealing to some degree. Try to keep that in mind when you’re complaining about the stress you’re experiencing in contemplating the social implications of getting a boob job or how expensive your next botox injection will be.