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I really hate it when I come up with a decent blog comment that gets buried amongst 700+ more self-evincing posts and trails off into the internet ether. Such was the case over at Aunt Susan’s (once again). Use a topic like Guys Acting Like Jerks to get into a Relationship on a “Blog Her” site that women feel relatively more comfortable posting on than Jizzabel and you’re going to get a shit load of comments. Just as an aside, is anyone really surprised that it’s now women receiving public recognition for acknowledging psychological and sociological principles and dynamics that the manosphere has covered (via Game) for over a decade now?

So, guys acting like jerks to get into a relationship? Ladies, get used to the idea that the guy who you’d consider for a monogamous relationship is going to at least start off with asserting his pseudo-jerk cred. This is the logical reaction for a guy who’s been so consistently flaked on using the Nice Guy route that he fearlessly experimented with the Jerk energy and was more consistently rewarded with your intimacy and attention. And gentlemen, get used to more flakes, it’s a symbiotic self-perpetuating dynamic.

I really don’t see how this is at all shocking to anyone, women get the men they create. I think Roosh pretty well summed up this dynamic in the Future of Game:

Flaking Will Reach Epidemic Proportions

Western culture is teaching youth to glance upon the field and carefully analyze all available options before making a decision, or simply not make a decision at all. Therefore dates scheduled more than a day in advance will be rare. There will be no concept of keeping your word, being honorable, showing up, or acting respectful. Everyone will be looking out for their own. Whereas for night game in the past you had to make out with a girl to decrease the chances she’ll flake, today you have to fuck her. That’s right—to get a first date you have to already have had the one-night stand with her. This is the only way I’ve found that decreases flaking to an acceptable level in even today’s climate. If I only made out with the girl, or god forbid didn’t even kiss her, the odds I will see her again are far from assured. The dirty truth of game is how often flaking occurs, and it will happen at such a frustrating level that I’m certain more men will turn into homosexuals or resort to sex dolls because of it. This feature alone will cut the game careers short of many men who simply can’t handle the frustration and rejection. You’ll have to really want it to succeed.

Bear in mind that Roosh is prognosticating all this based on current trends and foreseeable outcomes. What I thought was interesting was the idea that even if you’re kiss closing upon your first encounter, odds are still better than half that a woman will flake for even a first date (adjust for demography accordingly). Only an F-Close really locks down a first date, and this is becoming the norm as it is now.

I’d like to consider that there’d be a few mitigating factors for flaking as have been mentioned already – the age / maturity level of a woman, differing social / sexual value of a potential mate, geographic regions and the social interactions that characterize them, but on a whole these are outliers. Generally men and women are going to be looking for as ideal a situation as their conditions permit, yet in spite of these outliers women still default to flaking on guys as commonplace. At least commonplace enough that it’s an increasingly reoccurring complaint for men.

Stoically walking away or NEXTing a flake isn’t enough. You’re not going to teach a flake a lesson when she has 6 more guys lined up (or at least she thinks she does courtesy of socia media) and all perfectly willing to put up with her flakiness if they think it means they have a shot at fucking her.

What I also thought was interesting was the 1st night lay = non-flake first date proposition. This doesn’t sit well with AFCs & White Knights because a 1st night lay or an ONS is too foreign an idea for most of them. However, now the prediction is for this to be a matter of course to GET a first date.

“Rollo, I’m sick of all these flaky attention whores, how do I reduce their flakiness?” – fuck her the night you meet her!

Now take all that to the extreme as Roosh has done, even insisting that if he kiss closes on the first meeting, odds are she’ll flake, and you can see the tears of desperation welling up in the eyes of AFCs and lower SMV women who thinking they bear the brunt of their sister’s cruelty. The bar just got set even higher for chumps everywhere as they were beginning to think Game could be their panacea.

As technology expands (social networking for example) women are finding new avenues to satisfy their attention cravings. They’re vicariously living more and more in the virtual than the actual, and finding an ability to really connect becomes blurred. In the future, Game is going to have to develop ways to break into that blurring and leave a lasting impression in the “real world”. Depending upon the circumstances, a first night lay should leave a lasting impression, but this illustrates the bigger point in that women are becoming increasingly less receptive and responsive to anything less than a sufficiently immediate shock to their dulling sensibilities. A woman outright flaking on a guy is now met with no more concern than if she’d unfriended or put someone on ignore on Face Book. That’s the association now, while at the same time she’s receiving positive reinforcement from any number of virtual sources online.

Here’s a secret – there’s no such thing as contentment.

Being content implies that life is static; it’s not, and to be honest, how boring would that be anyway? Life consists of varying states of discontent: why else would you bother doing anything? But the good news is that it’s more fun and more beneficial to manage discontent than to endure contentment (which you can’t anyway since it’s transitory at best). The trick is to understand that there are 2 kinds of discontent – creative and destructive discontent. What you choose to do with that discontent makes all the difference in the world. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done. Don’t allow yourself to fall back into old destructive habits of dealing with discontent. Don’t bother with anti-depressants and self-help books when a good hard workout at the gym would serve you better.

The truth is I’m always discontent, but constructively so. The minute you can look yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you see you’re sunk. You can always improve, even after achieving things that were once very important and difficult to attain. Happiness is a state of being, it’s in the ‘doing’ not the ‘having done.’ It’s not about endlessly chasing your tail, it’s about being better than you were the day before.

Creating the Fantasy

There will always be an element of fantasy and idealism that can never be realized, but always be sought after. Women (and really any gender) will always be happier in that discontent, because it makes the times that it’s gratified all the sweeter. The idea of Romance just happens to be women’s food of choice. In fact it’s very similar to shopping; it’s not the buying that gets them off, it’s the act of shopping, it’s prolonging that purchase to better savor the experience. It’s foreplay. Forestalling the climax to heighten the experience.

When I was 26 I had a workout partner named Dean. Dean was drop dead gorgeous, unbelievably cut and women would flock to the guy regularly. Dean was the guy you’d see on hotchickswithdouchebags.com with his arm around some impossibly hot HB9.5. He was also a male stripper at one of the strip clubs that had a male revue night once a month. The guy made money hand over fist and was always a crowd favorite. I was dating a stripper named Angie at the time so I was pretty familiar with the club owners. One thing I noticed about the most successful male strippers was that they were almost universally the ones who sold a story to the women in the audience as part of their act. Dean used to do a Fireman skit that would drive these women (young and old) into a frenzy. Another guy would do the hot executive fantasy in an Armani suit and give away flowers to the ladies – classy, but building up to him stripping down to a thong. The guys without an act never made as much in tips. It wasn’t as satisfying for the women as the fantasy aspect that Dean and a few others would sell. Women get off differently than men. For a guy, a hot stripper in nothing but a g-string grinding out a lap dance is enough to get him aroused. Women need that ungratified fantasy to get them aroused. They want a character to play the role they have in their head.

It’s the anticipation. I could go into detail about how all the most traditionally romantic behaviors women associate with romance originated in courtly love contests with suitors trying to out do others with poetry, sonnets, acts of devotion, etc. but these are the behaviors, not the motives that prompt them. Women need a build up. Yes, romance has an unbelievable potential for manipulation, but it’s that nagging, itching, sexual anxiety that, as much as they’d like to protest the opposite, is what they enjoy the most. Uneducated men simply don’t make this romance-to-anxiety connection and the prospect of being romantic gets distorted and borken down into simple acts – “if I bring her flowers, she’ll be inclined to fuck.” This is the AFC who thinks comfort and familiarity are the path to intimacy – wrong!

I’ve always made a point of guys encouraging and propagating a woman’s anxiety. Whether that comes by way of perceived sexual competition, uncertainty of sexual satisfaction, teasing, flirting, neg hits or positioning her into qualifying for him, the point being a sustaining of the discomfort of that anxiety. It’s the discomfort that heightens her arousal, peaks her interest and makes her pursue.

Far too often this is a principle that’s entirely lost on damn near EVERY AFC. AFCs think that perpetuating anxiety is counterintuitive because they believe in the filtering social convention that women want comfort, rapport and familiarity in order to become sexual. They swallow the “friends-first” mythology and so, deductively, they spill out their life’s story as fast as possible in an effort to make her as comfortable as possible (and get sexual as fast as possible). The AFC isn’t perceived as a woman’s idealized character for exactly this reason. There’s no fantasy entertained, no anticipation and his attention is worthless because she doesn’t have to earn it. He gets frustrated because he’s doing all the Romantic ‘things’ but she still isn’t sexual, and most likely sees him as a friend, all because he’s gone wholly over into the comfort and rapport stage by preempting the anxious, sweaty, nervous, uncertain arousal stage that she love every moment of, but will never admit to enjoying.

Law 32: Play to People’s Fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

The Stripper Effect

There is a male counterpart to this need for fantasy. If you’re approached by a woman obviously not in (what you believe) is your “league” and she’s expressing blatant IOIs and approaches you, this is what I term the ‘Stripper Effect.’ Men are so accustomed to having to be the initiators and dealing with rejection (and potential rejection) that they’ll willingly pay for the attentions of an attractive woman giving them a $20 lap dance and this becomes physically and psychologically gratifying.

“Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.”

One of the major hurdles I had to really come to terms with when I decided to start getting involved with the new male paradigm was why I was so passionate about it in the first place. Ever since I began contributing at SoSuave and the manosphere in general, I’ve always tried to make a point of not emphasizing my past sexual and relational experiences to base more global ideas upon. Women’s default position is to do just this; personalize the instance to come to a universal conclusion. Not only is it the pinnacle of solipsism to think your experience should define the frame for everyone else, but it myopically ignores that exceptions usually prove a rule.

That was my basis for not wanting to relate too much of my own experiences. People can draw too easy a conclusion from the conditions that molded your point of view. This is actually one of the easiest ways to read a woman because their experiential sense of self-importance tends to define their reality. I wanted a more pragmatic approach, and this all came at a time for me when I decided to add a second major to my university studies – behavioral psychology with an emphasis on personality studies. Game, or what would become Game, influenced this decision for me. I wanted to know how the TV worked instead of that it just worked when I turned on the power.

All that said, I was still left with the question, why the fuck do you even give a shit whether guys unplug? I unplugged without the support of an internet community of Men comparing experiences, why even bother? I have had what most Men would consider a very good marriage for over 15 years now. I have a whip-smart daughter, I make good money, I’m successful at what I do, I’m well travelled, why is it so fucking important to make my voice heard?

It’s when I’m forced to answer questions like this that I have no choice but to apply my own personal experiences to the equation. I’m loath to do so because it’s far too easy for critics to mold them into some purpose that serves their perspective – he’s bitter, he got burned, this is his catharsis, he’s vindictive, etc. However, it’s necessary to present these experiences as observations for a better understanding. I wont pretend to be unbiased, no one is, but I do take the pains to be as self-analytical as I can in what I offer.

So you want to know what my problem is?

My problem is living in a world teeming with young men who’ve become so conditioned to believing that anything remotely masculine is to be ridiculed, vilified and subdued until they have no concept of what it truly entails much less pass off even the possibility that it could be something positive and attractive.

My problem is when a personal, AFC friend swallows a bullet because he literally “can’t live without” the girlfriend who left him.

My problem is watching a pastor’s pretty wife leave him and 4 children so she can pursue her hypergamy after 18 years of marriage because he pedestalized her and deprecated himself every day of their marriage.

My problem is when a 65 y.o. life-long chump cries in my lap about how he’s been consistently blackmailed with his wife’s intimacy for the past 20 years of their marriage and won’t man-up for fear of losing her.

My problem is talking a close friend out of killing the wife he married too young at 19 and the man she just cheated on him with in the parking lot of the motel he’s spent all night tracking her down to find with their 3 children crying in the backseat of their minivan at 4am.

My problem is civilly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with a hyper-religious sister-in-law and the new millionaire husband she married just 8 months after her former AFC husband of 20 years hung himself from a tree when she decided “he wasn’t the ONE” for her. My problem is staring at the brand new tits and Porsche she bought herself with the money from the home he built for her that he busted his ass for just 3 months after he was in the ground. My problem is emphatically teaching my 22 y.o. nephew how not to be the AFC his father was, while tactfully pointing out the hypergamy of his vulgarly opportunistic mother.

My problem is watching my father, though decaying from Alzheimers, still playing out the Savior Schema in an effort to get laid that he’s thought should work for his entire life at 68 y.o. My problem is watching him feebly  default to a behavior that obsessively motivated him to succeed until he was forced into early retirement at 53 and his 2nd wife left him promptly after that.

My problem is consoling a good friend whose fathered 3 daughters with 2 wives and is being emotionally manipulated by his 3rd (another single mommy BTW), who’s become so despondent that he dreads going home from work to deal with his personal situation and waits with anticipation for the weekend to be over.

My problem is counseling a guy who thought the best way to separate himself from “other guys” was to be ‘chivalrous’ and date a single mommy with 3 children from 2 different fathers, only to knock her up for a fourth kid and marry her because “it was the right thing to do.”

My problem is dealing with a 17 y.o. girl who’d just witnessed her new boyfriend being stabbed 30+ times by her ex boyfriend because he believed “she was his soulmate” and “would rather live in jail without her than see her with that guy.”

My problem is trying to explain to ‘Modern Women’ that – after 15 years of marriage, my wife could still model swimwear and confidently respects my judgement and decisions as a Man – I didn’t achieve this by being a domineering, 1950’s caveman-chauvinist who’s crushed her spirit, but that it is an understanding and adherence to living a positively masculine role.

And my biggest problem is seeing 14 y.o. AFC symps all ready to sacrifice themselves wholesale to this pitiful, mass-media fueled, pop-culture endorsed, idealized and feminized notion of romantic/soulmate mythology, all because some other AFCs trapped in the same quicksand they are, are affirming and co-enabling each other to further their own sinking and spread this disease to other AFCs. It’s infectious, and complacency, like misery, loves company. My fear is that I’m only one Man, and I can’t possibly be enough to kick these guys in the ass like their AFC fathers were unable or unwilling to do.

This is why I bother. It really is a matter of life or death sometimes. Understanding Game, for lack of a better term, how and why it functions, is literally a survival skill. Think about the importance of the decisions we make based on uninquisitive, flimsy and misdirected presumption we have been conditioned to believe about love, gender, sex, relationships, etc. Think about the life impact that these decisions have not only on ourselves, but our families, the children that result from them, and every other domino that falls as a repercussion. We rarely stop to think about how our immediate decisions impact people we may not even know at the time we make them. What we do in life, literally, echoes or ripples into eternity. That’s not to go all fortune cookie on you, but it is my reasoning behind my desire to educate, to study, to tear down and build back up what most would ask, “why bother?”

I know, I know, Nice Guy vs. Jerk has been done into the ground many times, but I just did a consult with a young man about this and I thought you all might like to read my take on it. I think one of the easiest targets for Game hate is the terminology. It’s far too easy to apply subjective definitions to archetypes like ‘Nice Guy’ or ‘Jerk’. The standard binary response is usually, “So, I gotta be a complete asshole all the time or girls wont be attracted to me? Screw that man, I’m not into game playin'”

You can sift back through any number of forum pages of advice I’ve offered and read me over and over again telling young men to “get in touch with their inner A-Hole.” In any of my posts, never do I state to in fact become an A-Hole. The two most common questions I get asked advice for is “Why do girls love Jerks so much?” and the “How do I get out of the friend-zone?” line. Both of these illustrate different ends of a spectrum. Try to think of it this way: On one end of the spectrum you have the consummate Jerk – he’s obnoxious, an A-Hole, borders on abusiveness, but women flock to the guy in droves. On the opposite end of the scale we have the ultimate Nice Guy who does and embodies everything any girl has ever told him he needs to become in order to achieve their intimacy and has internalized this doormat conditioning into his own personality. This is the guy who’ll spend countless hours on the phone being ‘friends’ with a girl or spend fortunes on gifts for her in order to buy her approval.

I think it’s important to look at the roots of the terms “Jerk” and “Nice Guy.” Lets not forget these characterizations exist because women gave them these names and classifications based on their own common evaluations. Women defined these terms, guys simply made the association with them. We tend to see these as parodies or caricatures now; abusive wife-beating Jerk or doormat Nice Guy. These are two extreme ends of the spectrum and when considering them after candid assessments, the mistake becomes falling into a binary all-or-nothing interpretation.

Most men WOULD prefer to inch towards the jerk end of the spectrum, if at all, and assuming they come to believing things aren’t as they previously believed. The more common mindset for beta males is to expect that women should appreciate them for being the ‘nice’, dependable, self-sacrificing guy that every woman since his mother has told him he should be. It’s far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want. It’s the lazy man’s path to disqualify or cheapen things that he desperately wants, but lacks the motivation to change himself to get. So the hot, ‘quality’ girl he wanted before, becomes the ‘trashy club slut’ after she rejects him. The real quality girl should love/desire him unconditionally, “for who he is” rather than force him into improving himself, which in this instance means he ought to become the caricatured Jerk archetype he’s been taught to hate. Most people resist becoming what they hate, even if it’s a change for the better.

We ought to worry less about social implications of converting nice guys into jerks than making them self-aware to begin with. The risk of creating a bona fide Jerk in an effort  is a decent trade off.

“Self-love is not so great a sin as self-neglect. – Henry V

Pride is one thing that people get very confused about. It’s a healthy thing to have pride of oneself, to be proud of our accomplishments; it’s a very real source of self-confidence. Humility is an admirable quality, don’t get me wrong, but humility is only genuine when you’re confident of your own abilities. It takes a humble Man to walk away from a fight that he knows he could win, but chooses not to engage in. Generally humility is only self-gratifying, because only rarely will others appreciate it as humility (those familiar with your abilities) and not view it as cowardice, or at best a lack of confidence. Pride often appears arrogant because people of lesser accomplishments become envious, and people of better accomplishments think less of them than you do. It’s very important not to appear too perfect, but it’s equally important not to seem spineless.

It’s quite another thing to be “prideful”and this is where the disconnect comes for a lot of AFCs, particularly ones with strong ego-investments in morality, chivalry, honor, etc. My old AFC self used to struggle with this as well. The AFC sublimates himself; he self-deprecates because he believes, erroneously, that this ideology will separate him from the herd, make him “not-like-other-guys”. He mistakenly believes that he’s unique in this when actually he’s in the majority. Why? For the answer all you need do is look at the most common threads from guys just recently discovering the community.

I have no doubt that there are some guys who go from zero to PUA and then parley that into some kind of seducer-hood. I would also argue that they are the rare exceptions. Guys don’t search out community forums or blogs like this because they’re getting too much pussy. They search it out because what they’ve been doing isn’t producing the results they want. When you think about this, they’ve been doing exactly what others criticize Game for – they’re working from a script. We like to point out the flaws in autonomously adhering to a script with regards to PUA techniques; you become a social robot, not “yourself”. But from an opposite side, what you’re doing now, or have done, as an AFC (Beta Game) is equally as scripted. The only difference, and far more insidious, is that they’ve internalized these AFC “scripts” that society on whole has conditioned into them as personal investments over the course of a lifetime.

After dropping your AFC mindset for a one based on self-interest, what happened? You probably began to see results. You can hook up with women the calibre of which were previously unavailable to you before, and all it took was replacing your chump behavior and mentality with one of self-concern and self-priority. You might’ve felt like an asshole, people may have said you’ve changed or become bitter, or you’re being someone you’re not, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

One of the biggest dangers of the PUA ideal is that it does nothing to address the root problem of AFCism (for lack of a better term). AFCs don’t want to stop being AFCs. Largely, they just want their ONEitis (or their “dream girl”) to hook up with them long term and then drift back into a comfortable ‘just being themselves’. According to The Game even Mystery, with all his PUA prowess, degenerates into a simpering, borderline suicidal chump when he realizes that his PUA scripts do nothing in an LTR with Katya (his ONEitis). The most notorious PUA in modern history was still an AFC, because he hadn’t killed that mentality, that AFC internalization – he hadn’t killed his inner AFC.

Another very common occurrence is the “reformed” AFC who makes progress toward becoming more Game savvy, and as a result gets his “dream girl”, only to lose her after reverting back into an AFC frame once he’s in an LTR with her. I’m not a big Ross Jefferies fan, but he did say something very profound once, he said “teaching PUA skills to these chumps is like giving dynamite to children.” This is probably truer than he realized, because the potential for disaster is much higher. Most guys want that silver bullet, the magic formula that will get them the girl, but it does nothing to prepare them for the idyllic LTR their beta nature has fantasized about for so very long. They don’t become Men, they become children with dynamite. So are we really surprised when the guy who finally gets his Dream Girl as a result of learning Game becomes despondent and suicidal when he loses the “best thing he’ll ever have” when she leaves him? Are we shocked when his ONEitis turns out to be a BPD girl and his life’s ambitions fall into a death-spiral because he was unprepared to deal with a post-Game LTR?

The problem with just employing PUA skills to get any woman is that sometimes it actually gets you ANY woman. There’s no vetting process, no discernment, taught as part of technique. AFCs get so impressed with their new found PUA confidence and getting hotter women, getting their old friend-zone girl interested, or getting women at all, that they have no motivation to think about who they should get involved with. They’re unprepared for emotionally manipulative women, and particularly when they’re more attractive than anything they’d ever had before. They obsess. They predictably get ONEitis, but they develop a ONEitis and in such an extreme case they can be suicidal about a woman they’d previously never been able to attain.

PUA skills are tools, and valuable ones at that, but adopting a positive masculine mindset prepares an AFC for more. An AFC needs to divorce himself from deep set social and psychological schemas – he needs to unlearn the self-delusions that a lifetime has conditioned him to internalize into his personality. Giving an AFC Game skills before this transition will only condemn him to disappointment and despair in an LTR. The more important lesson is learned in the discarding of that old, beta, way of thinking, while understanding the tools and techniques to apply the new, confident, positive masculine mindset.

After detailing the Qualities of the AFC, I feel it’s necessary to illustrate that social conventions aren’t the exclusive realm of the feminine imperative . AFC have their own set of social conventions – those which are commonly practiced and self-reinforced by the Beta mindset. I realize that more than a few of these conventions are going to get under the skin of some readers, however, as you read this, please try to do so objectively. I’m writing this as an observation; it’s not intended to be a personal affront to anyone.

You could simply call AFC Social Conventions AFC ‘rationalizations’, but I think this ignores the socially reinforcing element of these conventions. When I wrote the Qualities of the AFC I outlined the characteristic traits, behaviors and core mental schemas of what are commonly believed to be AFC qualities. This was a brief list to sum up a few root elements in identifying and dealing with a Beta mindset and aid in unplugging an AFC. Social conventions are different in that they are socially reinforced (usually by both genders) rationalizations for behavior. Technically some of the AFC qualities I outlined previously could be considered social conventions as well, but I was attempting to address the symptoms rather than the disease.

I’m going to define a few more examples of what I’m most commonly noticing as AFC mental schemas that are reinforced socially. A strong part of the internalization process of these conventions is that the reason they are socially reinforced is because they’re socially unassailable (or at the very least foolish to do so). In other words the common response to them would be to reinforce them more, rather than challenge them, and this then becomes an integral part of the internalization process.

The Myth of the “Quality” Woman

It seems like all I read about on SoSuave is a never ending quest for a “Quality Woman.” There’s always been plenty of threads asking for clear definitions of what constitutes a “Quality” woman and most conveniently set women up into 2 camps – “Quality Women” and Whores, as if there could be  no middle ground or grey area. How easy it becomes to qualify a woman based on her indiscretions (as heinous as they’re perceived to be) for either of these categories. This is binary thinking at its best – on or off, black or white, Quality woman or Whore.

I think the term ‘Quality’ woman is a misnomer. Guys tend to apply this term at their leisure not so much to define what they’d like in a woman (which is actually an idealization), but rather to exclude women with whom they’d really had no chance with in the first place, or mistakenly applied too much effort and too much focus only to be rebuffed. This isn’t to say that there aren’t women who will behave maliciously or indiscriminately, nor am I implying that they ought to be excused out of hand for such. What I am saying is that it’s a very AFC predilection to hold women up to preconceived idealizations and conveniently discount them as being less than “Quality” when you’re unable to predict, much less control their behaviors.

The dangers inherent in this convention is that the AFC (or the even the ‘enlightened man’ subscribing to the convention) then limits himself to only what he perceives as a Quality woman, based on a sour-grapes conditioning. Ergo, they’ll end up with a “Quality” woman by default because she’s the only candidate who would accept him for her intimacy. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by process of elimination. Taken to its logical conclusion, they shoot the arrow, paint the target around it and call it a bullseye, and after which they feel good for having held to a (misguided) conviction.

So why is this a social convention then? Because it is socially unassailable. Since this convention is rooted to a binary premise, no one would likely challenge it. It would be foolish for me to say “Yes Mr. Chump I think you ought to avoid what you think of as Quality women.” Not only this, but we all get a certain satisfaction from the affirmation that comes from other men confirming our assessment of what category a woman should fit into. Thus it becomes socially reinforced.

Beware of making your necessity a virtue in making a Quality woman your substitute for a ONEitis idealization.

The Myth of the Dodged Bullet

In my lifetime I’ve had sex with over 40 women and I never once caught a venereal disease, nor did I get anyone pregnant. I can also point to men I know who contracted Herpes from the only women they’d ever had sex with. The fact of the matter is that you can equally be a rock star and tap hundreds of women without any consequence and you can be a virgin saint and contract a disease on your wedding night. The myth of the dodged bullet is a social convention that’s rooted in the rationalization that monogamy serves the purpose for controlling sexually transmitted diseases and thus fewer partners are more desirable than many. From a statistical standpoint this may seem logical on the surface. Fewer opportunities for sexual intercourse would indeed decrease the risk from a single individual, but unfortunately this isn’t a practical estimate. You’ll also have to base the numbers not only on how many sex partners you and your monogamous partner have had, but also how many prior partners they’ve had and how many those partners had as well and so on exponentially. Despite of all this, the odds that you’ll die from a form of cancer, heart disease, smoking or obesity related diseases, or even an alcohol related traffic fatality far outweigh any risk of dying from a venereal disease in western society. The mortality rate for for contracting gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes and even HIV pale in comparison to many – in some cases more easily preventable – diseases.

Of course, since this is a social convention, I would be grossly negligent and severely lambasted by the public at large for even implying that I’m condoning, much less advocating, that a man explore his options and open his experience up to having sex with multiple partners. Again, this social convention is unassailable. But it sounds like it makes good sense, “boy, am I sure glad I got married/shacked up and didn’t catch a disease, pffew!” It sounds like conviction, when in fact it’s a rationalization for a lack of other realistic options with women or an innability to deal with a fear of rejection from multiple sources. Again, necessity becomes virtue.

Location, Location, Location

Another common contrivance is the presumption that less than desirable (low quality) women will necessarily be found in bars & clubs (or other places of “ill repute”). Thus the chump will only too eagerly avoid these places. This is, yet again, another example of the binary logic of an AFC and completely ignores that A.) women with whom they might make a successful connection with do in fact frequent clubs and B.) less than desirable women can also be met in “alternative” meeting places too (coffee house, university campus, library, Bible study or any number of other “safe places”). However, making approaches in a club are difficult for the inexperienced Game adherent and AFC alike. There’s a lot of competition and a LOT of potential for ‘real time’ rejection for the unprepared. By masking this deficit in game with condemning such places, the AFC thinks he’s killing two birds with one stone – he’s protecting his ego from very real rejection and he’s lauded by “proper” society (see people who go to clubs anyway) for being an upstanding individual for avoid those “dens of iniquity.”

The Myth of ‘Other Guys’

This is perhaps the most dangerous AFC social convention.

We’d all like to think we’re unique and special individuals. It’s a comforting thought, but our uniqueness means nothing if it isn’t appreciated. We’d all like to be beautiful, talented, intelligent and extrordinary in some way to some degree and have others notice these qualities unequivocally. This is the root for the Not Like Other Guys convention. The idea is that the AFC can and will be appreciated in a greater degree for his personal convictions and/or his greater ability to identify with women’s stated prerequisites of a man by comparing himself to the nebulous Other Guys who are perceived not to abide by her stated conditions. The intent is to, in essesence, self-generate social proof for attraction while substituting a real social element with perceived or reported social evidence. The fallacy in this schema is that it’s always better to demonstrate social proof than to explicate it, but this is lost on the AFC subscribing to this convention. This only becomes more compounded by the reinforcement he receives from other AFCs (and really society at large) sharing his desire to outshine the phantom Other Guys. He’s patted on the back and praised by men and women alike for voluntarily molding his personality to better fit a woman’s perceived ideal and told in so many words “oh AFC,..I’m so glad you’re not like Other Guys.”You can’t fault the guy. He genuinely believes his Nice Guy personal conviction and everyone applauds him for it.

In closing I’d argue that 95% of men aren’t even aware that they’re repeating / reinforcing a social convention at all because the convention is so embedded into social consciousness it’s taken for granted. The most effective social conventions are ones in which the subject willingly sublimates his own interests, discourages questioning it, and predisposes that person to encourage and reinforce the convention with others. This is the essence of the Matrix; anything can become normal.

I encounter AFC mentalities all day long in my line of work, and I don’t encounter them strictly from men either. More often than not I find myself in some social/work environment where it’s women fomenting an AFC attitude and it’s men who jokingly play along with them in an attempt to identify with these women in order to qualify for female intimacy. It’s this pop-culture ‘agreeability’ factor that is taken as an unquestioned norm. It’s expected that female-centric social conventions should simply be a matter of fact without any need for critical thought.

For a positively masculine Man there is no better opportunity to set yourself apart and start to plant the seeds of critical thought into AFCs than when you’re presented with these social situation. I think most men lack the balls to be a firestarter at the risk of being perceived as some caveman, but it’s a good opportunity to truly set yourself apart from ‘other guys’ when you do.

Below is a response I gave to a guy I was counseling and I thought it sufficiently insightfull to post here in regards to a pretty common topic that comes up here. I think you’ll agree.

 Rollo, is it possible to identify with women without compromising yourself?

If it is a conscious effort on the guy’s part, no.

You bring up a good topic though, obviously when I refer to ‘identifying’ with a woman, this could use some explanation. What exactly is ‘identifying’ with a woman? The root of this word is ‘identity’, meaning who you are and what characteristics, traits and interests constitute your individual personality. ‘Identity’, in a way, is a pretty subjective and esoteric term – kind of like trying to define what art is – it can be argued that ‘identity’ is what you make of it. While at university, my field of specialization in behavioral psychology was personality studies, and I can tell you there are a lot of theories and interpretations of what constitutes identity. However, one article that is agreed upon almost universally is that identity and personality are never static and are malable and changeable by influencing variables and conditions. A very pronounced illustration of this would be soldiers retuning from combat with post traumatic stress disorder, a very identifiable and verifiable form of psychosis. These men are changed individuals and their identities are altered from the time they were subject to the psychological rigors of warfare to returning back to a normalized life. Some have the resiliencne to adjust their personalities back to a somewhat norlamized state, others sadly do not. Yet in each case the change was influenced by conditions and environment.

Likewise, most young men are subject to their own set of personal conditions and environments, and their personalities and identities reflect this accordingly. The guy who’s naturally “lucky with the ladies” is going to reflect this in his identity. The young man who doesn’t receive regular female attention for whatever reasons is going to manifest this condition in his identity. The guy who is focused on his own ambitions is going to reflect this in his own personality as well, but for all, when conditions are such that they feel deprived of certain experiences in their own life, this creates a conflict between a former identity and the altering of, or forming of a new one to meet the need for this experience. Couple this with the natural chemical/hormonal deisire for sexual experience and you can see how powerful an influence deprivation becomes.

Far too many young men maintain the notion that for them to receive the female intimacy they desire they should necessarily become more like the target of their affection in their own personality. In essence, to mold their own identify to better match the girl they think will best satisfy this need. So we see examples of men compromising their self-interests to better accomodate the interests of the woman they desire to facilitate this need for intimacy (i.e. sex). We all know the old adage women are all too aware of, “Guys will do anything to get laid” and this is certainly not limited to altering their individual identities and even conditions to better facilitate this. It’s all too common an example to see men select a college based on the available women at that college rather than academic merit to fit their own ambitions or even choose a college to better maintain a pre-existing relationship that a woman has chosen and the young man follows. In order to justify these choices he will alter his identity and personality by creating rationales and new mental schema to validate this ‘decision’ for himself. It becomes an ego protection for a decision he, on some level, knows was made for him.

This is just one glaring example of this identification, but thousands more subtle ones exist that men (and women) pass off as social mores and contrivances. The guy stuck in the ‘Friend Zone’ who got the LJBF (“lets just be freinds”) line when he attempted to become intimate with his target, will happily listen to her drone on for hours on the phone in order to find out how better to alter himself to fit her conditions for intimate acceptability. He will readily “change his mind” about even his own personal beliefs if it will better fit what he perceives as her criteria for compatibility with her. This is the compromise of identity – to fundamentally and voluntarily alter one’s own personality to achieve the acceptability of another. When we are directly and overtly faced with this sort of challenge to our beliefs we naturally recoil – you are your own person and would resist were your employer or parents to tell you how you should vote (political belief), but when it comes to personality and sexual/intimacy interests, and done voluntarily it’s suprising to see the limits of what men (and to an extent women) will do. Men will entertain the idea that a long distance relationship (LDR) is a desirable arrangement even if intimacy has never occured because the potential of that intimacy is perceived. These same guys will espouse every reasoning they can conceive as to why their “relationship is different” and that they ‘believe’ that “love conquers all” only to come full circle when he or she ‘cheats’ or breaks off the relation and the man comes back to his prior (though he thinks new) understanding that LDRs are in fact a bad prospect. His identity changed and then changed again to accomodate his conditions.

However, it’s not that he never truly changed or had the belief in the first place. Were these guys to take a polygraph test at the time they would indeed pass when asked if this was what they actually accepted as truth. Men will do what most deductively solves a problem and in this he is only following the tenants of pragmatism. “I need sex + women have the sex I want + I must discover what women want to give me sex + ask women + women want X = I will do X to get sex and alter my own identity in order to better facilitate X.” It should be this easy, but that’s rarely the case since more often than not women are unaware of what X really is, or X is subject to constant change depending on her own conditions.

Now, after all of this, is it possible that a man and a woman may in fact share genuine common interests? Of course. You may indeed find a perfectly beautiful woman that enjoys Nascar or Hockey as much as you. You may find a woman you’re attracted to who genuinely shares your passion for deep sea fishing. It’s not uncommon to share common interests, it’s when you alter your interest to better facilitate a connection that you force it. Making this determination of genuine interests and created interests is the hair that needs splitting. I’ve personally counseled guys who have literally changed careers to be in a better place to proposition a girl they fancied. I know men who’ve moved thousands of miles to live closer to women who’ve never reciprocated their interest in them, yet they continued to attempt to identify themselves with her. I know 65 year old men in 40 year marriages, who even after intimacy was resolved years ago with the woman, are still attempting to identify with their wives because they’ve internalized this identity compromise as a standard means to getting sex from her. Her expectations of him have become his identity and at 65 this mental schema has become so ego-invested that no amount of shedding light on his conditions will ever convince him anything to the opposite.

The most ironic thing about this ‘Identity Crisis’ is that the least attractive thing to most women is a man who is willing to compromise any part of his identity to placate to her, much less a wholesale sell out of it. Women are naturally attracted to that masculine independence as it represents a very strong cue of security and the potential to provide that security to her (and any children she may have). Women don’t want a man who’ll “do everything she says” because this sends the message that this man can be bought with even the prospect of a sexual encounter. Why would that indicate anything more than insecurity and a lack of confidence? Women want to be told “No”, and constantly test a man’s resolve to say this to her (i.e. shit testing) in order to affirm that she’s made the right choice (even in marriage) of a guy who’ll put his sexual impulse (knowing full-well how powerful it is with men) on hold to hold fast to his own self-interest, beliefs and ambitions. It covertly communicates to a woman that his goals and determination trump her one power over him – her sexuality. That is the man who is the PRIZE, the ‘great catch’, the male to be competed for with other women.