Unplugging

Mid-Life Crisis

After watching last Friday’s video a few times I thought about how ironic it is that a man should be made to feel infantile, or “less than responsible” for indulging in his own wants. For certain a surprise sports car purchase may be an extreme example, but sometimes over-exaggeration is necessary to illustrate a larger point. That larger point is the nature of defacto personal and social control women exercise over men. It’s part of the feminine Matrix to think that ‘responsibility’ should be uniquely framed in what best serves the feminine. We literally don’t know any other way to interpret it most of the time.

When a man begins to ‘go rogue’ the feminine imperative has many pre-established social conventions to mediate this. Obviously designating ‘responsibility’ to serve the feminine frame is the social control, but there are other powerful conventions that the imperative uses. One of these is the Myth of the Mid-Life Crisis.

A lot of hokey comedies have been produced covering mid-life crises. Usually the main characters are cast as overweight schlubs trying to recapture their by-gone days. In real life men are ridiculed, usually around age 40, for losing their mojo and acting ‘irresponsibly’ or ‘erratically’ in some silly gesture of reclaiming his independence. However, this masculine shaming hides a more desperate latent purpose for the feminine.

The SMV Crossover

The most stereotypical mid-life crisis occurs for a man around age 40. It’s important to remember that a man’s SMV really begins to peak between 38-42. It’s at this point that men have the best chance to truly unplug from the Matrix; and it is also at this point that the Threat of a man becoming self-aware of his now fully developed SMV has it’s greatest urgency for women to repress him from realizing it. Even life-long blue pill men generally come to an understanding that their wive’s SMV has dropped and their own SMV is greater. For the first time in his relationship history, he faces the Cardinal Rule of Relationships from his own perspective – women need him more than he needs women.

The feminine imperative has come to expect this awakening. In decades past, before there was a formalized Game, before there was the connectivity we have today, the feminine imperative relied upon social controls that limited a man’s becoming aware of his SMV. Through pop-culture and mass media men were taught to expect this ‘crisis’, even enlisting men to promote the idea. However, the imperative cast the ‘crisis’ as irresponsible and juvenile. It relied upon the time-tested shaming of masculinity in the hopes men would self-regulate when the time came that his SMV outclassed that of the women in his life. So we got hokey movies, and ridicule of men wanting to trade-up their wives for ‘trophy wives’.

Mid-Life Awareness

Probably the most common story I experienced when I did peer counseling back in Nevada was the disillusioned married guy. Most of these guys were professionals, mid to late 30’s and all their stories were the same; “I feel like I’ve done everything anyone ever expected of me for the past 10-15 years and I get no appreciation for it.” These guys “did the right thing” and either their wive’s were unresponsive to them or they still viewed these men as a “fixer upper” project that they were constantly working on.

This experience is what helped me to better understand the myth of the Mid-Life Crisis. Men, in most western culture’s do in fact experience a mid-life crisis, but this isn’t due to the trivialized and oft ridiculed by pop culture reasoning. Women, and feminization, would have us believe that men experiencing a mid-life crisis need to buy a sports car or divorce their wives in favor of a ‘trophy wife’ due to some repressed need to recapture their lost youth. This of course fits into the feminized myth that men are egoisitic, simple creatures and masculinity is infantile in nature, but this only serves to reassure women that they “still got it” at 40.

The truth about men’s mid-life crises isn’t about recapturing youth, it’s about finally understanding the trappings they’ve been sold into through their 20’s and 30’s and coming to terms with that often horrible truth. Some men do in fact buy the sports car, get the new hottie wife or act in some fashion that appears reckless and irresponsible. This isn’t due to infantilism, but rather new understanding of their own position as men. They’ve “lived responsibly” for so long and for so little appreciation that when that true realization is made they feel the need to move. They’ve become respected, put in the hours, the sacrifice, the censoring of their own views. They realize now that they’ve sold off true passions in favor of maintaining what others have told him was his responsibility – whether it was his choice or not. And all for what? A fat wife? A shrew? Maybe even a fantastic marriage and a wonderful family life, but also a nagging doubt about not seeing enough of the world by 40 because of it.

I worry about men who don’t come to this crisis, these are the men who are truly lost. These are the guys who remain life long AFCs, happy in their ignorance.

Case Study – Adam’s Lament

 

The following dialog is from a recent consult (published with permission) from a young man, Adam, who’s becoming red pill aware in the wake of a breakup. I’ll let his quotes tell the story here:

 My girlfriend broke up with me last month due to her want to find herself and her self-imposed reasons to remain single (she just turned 22 and I just turned 24).

The first consideration I’ll make is that both of you are far too young for a monogamous relationship. Your 20s should be a period of learning for both sexes. Unfortunately it’s becoming more common for guys to hear this and take offense due to this socialized romantic notion that an LTR ought to be some idealized goal state, but the truth of it is that an LTR in this period of a man’s life more often than not becomes debilitating in his maturation.

What young men raised on Disneyesque romantic ideals fail to consider is that a mature LTR requires responsibility, liability and accountability that limit a young man’s potential and paralyze him in the prime years of his life. These are the years that should be devoted to ambitions and passions that will lead to financial and personal success (i.e. college, career, etc.) and contribute to his peak SMV later in his life.

Too many men lament later in life that they should’ve done more in these years preparing for their own successes rather than becoming saddled in dead end relationships. They lament their lives that could’ve been once they realize that their SMV maturation happens after  women’s peaks. Time and the freedom to maneuver within your interests are a man’s most valuable resources. As a Man on the other side of this I can tell you that there are few material things I have a want for now, but time for myself and my passions, that is constantly adjusted by my career, my wife, my daughter, my commute in traffic etc., is the most precious thing I can think of. Why young men who would otherwise fiercely defend their own independences would so readily and voluntarily give this up in order to secure the intimacy of a single woman is one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on men by a feminized, romanticized society.

Also understand that your Ex is going through a similar phase as well. Between the years of 18 and about 26 are the prime years for a woman to weigh her hypergamous options. I call these the “party years” for attractive young women. Generally they include college, but it’s during this period that women explore the benefits afforded to them by their peak SMV and looks.

The hard truth is that most women on some level understand that this period represents the peak of their sexuality and attractiveness and this is their best chance to explore sex and relationships without consideration for limiting the conditions they place on their intimacy. All women have an innate understanding that the older they get the less sexually marketable they become.

This frustrates young men (particularly plugged-in betas who internalized an ideal that an LTR is a goal state) until they come to the realization that the older a man gets, the more sexually marketable he becomes since this generally implies he has attained a certain amount of confidence, professionalism, status, affluence and a list of other conditions women value in trading their intimacy for long term security. At 22, these principles go unrecognized in women, yet their behaviors are predictable enough to prove that these conditions and understandings are in play later in life.

She complimented me when we dated for the 5 month relationship that I was the best catch she had found so far, but the timing was off in that she met me at a time where she was trying to force herself not to be co-dependent (she broke up with her last b/f of 1.5 years so she could find herself and remain single) it didn’t last long because she found me 2 months later and dated me for the second half of this year.

You were flattered by her compliment because it affirmed your ego-investment in LTRs as a goal state as correct. Your frustration is that her behavior and her stated reasoning for it confounds this ideology. Lets also consider that if she had a year and a half “relationship” with a previous boyfriend, a half-year with you, and she’s now 22, her relationship experience has been limited to adolescent socializations. She still uses whatever behavioral skills she learned in her adolescence. Not a good benchmark for validating you as the “best catch she has found so far” to put it mildly. Rather, this is a convenient way of “letting you down easy” in order to preserve her own ego and hopefully make you feel better for going off to do what she really wants to do anyway.

She was my first g/f in nearly 6 years and also the girl I lost my virginity too.

And here’s the rub. I swear, basic math skills are all a red pill advocate needs to pick apart situations; If she was your first girlfriend in 6 years and you are now 24, this would mean the last girl you considered a girlfriend was back when you were 18. Again this implies that you yourself are employing an adolescent social skill set in evaluating what course you think inter-gender relationships ought to follow. There’s no shame in this, I’m not pointing it out to put you down, but understand that this is how you and she are operating even if you’re unaware of it.  

You also lost your virginity to her. Stop thinking of it in these terms, this is what I’d expect to hear an emotional girl say. Only women”lose” their virginity, this is part of the feminine imperative’s controlling of the language. When women ‘lose’ their virginity it perpetuates their vaginas as the precious prize while also continuing the narrative of default female victimhood.

For you it was the beginning of opening a new part of your maturation process since sex (even casual sex) always implies new responsibilities that must be compensated for. However I do understand your attachment to her due to this and the fact that you’ve internalized monogamy as goal state myth. We all have a life long affinity for our first sexual partner since they are the ones with whom we share this life experience – you never forget your first.

 I matured a lot and unfortunately didn’t find your blog until too late. I’ve read all the articles online and now started reading the DJ Bible at SoSuave so I won’t get so screwed next time and be able to walk away sooner instead of dragging it out.

Good.

Do you really think she broke up with me because her reason?

No, I think she’s obeying her hypergamous biological imperative that the phase her life is in is dictating for her.

Personally, I think it’s a copout and she’s afraid of commitment.

This is, to the letter, exactly what I’d expect a girl to say about a guy when she is 30+ years old and ready to cash her chips in on marriage. The irony of a guy using the same jingoisms (“commitment phobic”) women use to describe the men they want to coerce into monogamy with them is an indictment of the power of the feminine imperative. Stop thinking like a chick and start thinking like an adult man with a firm understanding of his own masculinity. You MUST unlearn the idea that an LTR is the key to life’s happiness; it is not.

I think that she’d rather be able to have one night stands where she lives (bay area) whereas I live in San Diego.

Of course she would, she’s in her party years and it is what it is – so long as she’s mature enough to acknowledge and accept responsibility for her actions (doubtful). Also, this isn’t a statement on yourself, stop interpreting it like it is. She’s not a worse person for not subscribing to your romanticized conditioning of how women ought to want commitment. On some level of consciousness she understands the hypergamic opportunities this period of her life presents her with and her behavior is the result of this. 

Will she regret this part of her life later? Most likely. Will she look back to you as someone significant to her during her 20’s when she’s 30 and ready to cash her chips out? Probably not, but this isn’t your concern. This episode represents a point of departure for your life – departure from your old adolescent self into a mature, Game aware Man. You’re unplugging.

What’s more concerning to me is that after all you’ve described to me, this half-year “relationship” is long distance. Are you kidding me? How often could you have had sex with her while you’re on opposite ends of the state? You’re pining over an LDR and my take on this is that there is no such thing as an LDR; you do not have a relationship with her, nor did you ever really have one.

One or both parties in an LDR are going to “cheat” – though I can’t really call it cheating since it’s simply behavior manifesting itself in conditions that aren’t conducive to what our natural impulses are. Adam, this girl hasn’t hurt you, she’s helped you. By breaking it off she’s given you the freedom you need to grow beyond these silly adolescent ideologies that an LDR should ever have been an option for a mature Man.

She’s an atheist whereas I am a Christian and that kind of bugged her even though I dropped some values to date her…



For men, sexual impulse will almost universally trump moral conviction when the opportunity presents itself. Again, no shame here, but it’s telling that you’d expect her to appreciate your having sacrificed some (loose) convictions for doing what you wanted to do anyway. You’re not a martyr for dropping any values for having sex with her and it doesn’t place you on some moral high ground that she should change her mind about entertaining an LTR with you.

She said even if I moved up north to be with her or her down here she’d still break up with me to “find herself” because of her major need to be single.

They very fact that you considered altering the course of your young life to better accommodate your idealized relationship with this girl by relocating to San Francisco ought to scare the hell out of you. Are you so optionless that a girl 600 miles away is a better prospect than exploring other women in your own area? I can’t tell you how many men I’ve counseled who’ve irreparably damaged their lives, made career choices they’ve regretted for decades and voluntarily killed any hope of genuine ambition they may have had by doing exactly what you considered here – changing their address to better facilitate a ONEitis hope that the one girl who ever fucked them would eventually become their soul-mate wife.

I just don’t get this girl. After a month of blackout and breakup now she’s really trying hard to be friends. I suspected her screwing a guy before she came down to see me, so maybe that’s why she called it off when she did.

So what? Spin more plates. If you had other potential women interested in you it would make no difference whether she wanted to play “friends” with you or screwed some other guy.

I was an AFC then, but I still spoke up for myself and stood my ground. Basically, I gave her an ultimatum.

Sorry Adam, but you still are and AFC or at least an rAFC. Ultimatums are declarations of powerlessness; by doing so you’ll kill any interest a woman may have had for you as this is the last resort of a lack of confidence. This is the kiss of death. You get points for manning up and speaking your mind, but it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.

I said if we have sex then we need to be exclusive. It’s all or nothing and if she doesn’t then she needs to be out of my life because I couldn’t trust her with all the guys I knew that were trying hard to sleep with her.

For as noble as your intent, she will only interpret this as a supreme insecurity on your part. You’re not going to talk her off the cock-carousel, neither should it be your responsibility to do so.

Adam, you need to let go of this notion that you require exclusivity in an LTR, particularly at your age. It’s self-defeating.

You have to unlearn this misguided idea that exclusivity is a necessity at your stage of life. All the Game skills in the book wont help you get past this basic idea. You will only settle for the first girl to respond to them. My advice to you is to NEXT this girl and get out into the field and sarge. Stop it with this LDR crap, they are fundamentally flawed and are only exacerbated by the ONEitis you have for this girl and will fluidly develop for the next one because it fits your old paradigm.

(Don’t) Be Like Mike

If you haven’t seen the movie Swingers I highly recommend it. It was one of the first real attempts to reveal the rudiments of Game in the mid 90’s, and considering this decade was the apex period for the feminine Matrix it’s all the more notable.

Not only did Swingers capture the character of the Alpha and Beta mindset, it also contrasted the two by casting both its main protagonists as such. Looking back from 16 years ago this is remarkable considering the almost complete absence of anything resembling the manosphere or a greater understanding of intergender relations, much less the awareness of the society feminization had created.

In the embedded clip we watch Mike epically fail to consolidate on a number close. It’s funny because we see our blue pill selves making the same mistake. It’s uncomfortable humor watching this from a red pill perspective; like watching Titanic, you know the ship is going to sink, you even know how the ship goes down, but you can’t help watching anyway.

I get this feeling a lot when I’m doing a consult, or I’m audience to some guy making the same mistakes my unenlightened blue pill self made. You couldn’t tell me shit back then; it was all blind emotion and bewilderment with the expectation that women would be more understanding, more forgiving of even a marginal error in judgement. It’s with great difficulty that I force myself to allow guys like Mike to make their own mistakes.

Flushing the Nest

Esteemed SoSuave member HITHARD relates a recent flushing of a nest:

It must be an attitude shift or something. But every time I come back to the SS forums my relationships blow up. I don’t notice myself doing anything different but if I’m with a girlfriend they must notice a change and purposely start pissing me off. Perhaps it’s a good thing, a wake up call that I’m not with the right girl and I should go back to FB for a while. My now ex started getting bitchy last week and it just escalated from there. I’m pretty laid back – but arc up if someone tries to stand over me or dictate terms. Her jaw dropped when I told her to pack her things and leave. She hasn’t been living here on a permanent basis but had managed to horde a bit of her stuff over here in the past three months. She was a really nice girl, very pretty good with money. But she started to not so much nag, but nitpick at me and I’m over that at this stage of my life. It’s either something she has managed to hide for all these months or I bring it out in her. Either way it’s a no go from here. Am I being selfish over this?

So perhaps SS is bad for me short term but a deal saver long term. Or it’s a subconscious thing of ‘relationship is already over time to go on SS’
After all the FB, plates and relationships, I do look around and am just not impressed with the quality of the women out there.
I do worry I’m starting to form a trend of breaking it off with women when I get bored or irritated though. My longest LTR was with what I think was a BPD chick long before what I knew what BPD or the SS forum was. I sometimes worry if that has left a lasting effect.

There’s always going to be a contingent of guys – mostly White Knights, but some well meaning red-pill men too – who’ll presume you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater when ever they read a situation like this. A Scarcity Mentality is one of the hardest mental schemas Men deal with in transitioning over to becoming Game-aware. For most, the better part of half their lifetime has been spent in a psycho-social condition that’s taught them women are to be prized, and her intimacy is a rare and precious gift, rewarded to only the man who can prove himself worthy of it.

It’s a hard schema to unlearn, and even the most unapologetic of PUA still feels that twang of doubt about a decision to NEXT a girl he thought might be of LTR potential. So it’s no shock that to NEXT a woman for what appears to be some minor infraction of nitpicking seems like a wanton overreaction – like stomping on a flower before it has a chance to blossom. Necessitous men, and men recovering from being so, will often adopt the same mentality women will when they hear about situations like this, and call it callous, or selfish, maybe even vindictive of past hurtful experiences. The reason for this is because these men, and women by default, still view monogamy from the perspective of the feminine imperative. Monogamy is meant to serve the feminine, so any action that controverts that, no matter how justified, is by definition selfish.

In the time I’ve been writing in the manosphere I’ve read more stories about how Game saved an LTR more so that the reverse, but that isn’t to say there aren’t breakups that result from a new Game-awareness. Hithard’s self-evaluation about his NEXTing isn’t unexpected. His story isn’t the first I’ve encountered about “Game destroyed my LTR” – that Scarcity Mentality self-doubt needs a scapegoat and Game is an easy foil for this, especially for guys who’ve just unplugged, pushed the envelope back against the shit they were accepting up to that point and the LTR imploded. In virtually everyone of these instances where a man reclaims his balls and the result is a breakup, inevitably the guy realizes what a tough, but ultimately good decision it was to rid himself of a toxic woman, or a woman too insecure in herself to want to relinquish frame after having been in control for so long.

Often enough, a breakup is the red-pill solution.

Flushing the Nest

However, I know Hithard (virtually) well enough to know this isn’t his case. He’s been unplugged for a while now, so my guess is twofold:

First I think there’s more to the ‘nitpicking’ and the nesting that this girl was initiating than he’s going into detail about. I think he’s trying to be more judicious about this because he’s seen (or is subliminally aware of) behavioral cues and attitude cues that are familiar to him from his prior (BPD) LTR, and wants to give her the benefit of that doubt.

He’d hit the 3 month point, and this is usually the time when a woman starts to get comfortable enough with a guy to attempt a frame grab. The obvious tell was how she was semi-permanently establishing a nest at his place. Never a good idea, but entirely expected of a woman who feels the urgency of sex decline with her competition anxiety. I don’t know for certain that this is Hithard’s experience, but it follows a very consistent pattern. At the very least she’s reached a stage at which she feels comfortable enough to make demands of behavioral change (nit picking, nagging, complaining).

On a basic, relational level these are shit tests, but these are now the variety of shit test that qualifies for LTR frame control, as opposed to the types of shit test a man receives whilst dating when the urgency of competition anxiety mediates a woman’s delivery. For example, while single, only the most vapid, self-absorbed women will feel comfortable in making the demands most other women will commonly expect of their LTR man. When single, the art of the shit test is in its nuance and subtlety, when monogamous the shit test is overt and unmistakably direct.

Secondly, after a certain age (SMV), and after some degree of prior relationship chaos there’s a want for some sense of stable normalcy. Most guys are all too willing to compromise what seem, at the time, like small concessions to their women’s demands in exchange for keeping the peace and the legs open. The problem is that this progressively becomes a situation of death by a thousand paper cuts, or frame control by a thousand conceded nitpickings. For beta men, frame control is ceded as part of their wedding vows, but of the Alphas I know who were “fixed” by their women, their backsliding into beta-dom was the result of an incessant etching away of that Alpha dominance by a steady stream of small shit tests and concession of frame by little compromises.

Dumping a woman is DHV (demonstrating higher value) of the highest order. True or not, It implies you had other, better options than her. Dumping a woman is the antithesis of the Scarcity Mentality and it broadcasts this not only to her, but her girlfriends as well as any other girls in her (your) social periphery. Dumping her implies you’ve just gone from a comfortable, familiar beta to the indifferent Alpha that she never realized you had a capacity for. My guess is Hithard will hear from her again. At first it will be desperate and crying, later it will be casual with feigned nonchalance – don’t take the bait.

Whether or not Hithard takes her back or bumps her down to fuck-buddy status, the message is now clear for her – he will control the frame. She will enter his reality or not at all. Most freshly unplugged guys have a very tough time owning this, because for most of their lives it’s been endlessly bashed into their heads that they don’t deserve it. This is the conflict Hithard must resolve.

Hypocrites & Little Emperors

Over the weekend I read an interesting post from Vox regarding hypocrisy (great song BTW) and the impressions we as Game-aware men sometimes indelibly leave on guys who actually make the transition from from the Matrix to being Game-aware:

It is true that adulthood and maturity are drenched with hypocrisy, because we are all largely incapable of living up to our ideals, morals, and standards. But that doesn’t mean that wallowing forever in that point between childhood and adult is desirable, or even possible. With regards to Game, it is perfectly understandable that gammas and deltas might look at the decadent world of the alpha and think it looks like paradise, complete with 72 cheerfully compliant non-virgins, but that is as much of an illusion as the world of the blue pill.

For obvious reasons, nothing motivates a man’s imagination better than the potential for sex. On the most rudimentary level, the male ideal – the counter to feminine hypergamy – is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. The most extreme idealization of this (72 virgins in heaven) is too far fetched for all but the most mentally imbalanced and religiously fanatical. However, men’s rational predispositions want to temper the unbelievable with the concept of the fantastically attainable. Think of it in terms of porn; most men tend to click past the videos of “porn stars” – huge breasted, HB10’s®, overly made up, in lingerie and high heels, all eager and willing to perform any feat of sexual acrobatic – they’re too improbable, too unbelievable. But give a guy a tempered, believable, sexual vignette, one into which he can relatively assume the POV perspective of the male, and now you’ve got participant. You’ve got a believer.

To varying, subjective, degrees of fantasized believability, a lot of newly unplugged red-pill men can visualize themselves in some, albeit limited, capacity to experience the Alpha’s porn. However, I don’t think Vox goes far enough in fleshing out the Alpha fantasy though. A majority of men (i.e. betas) wouldn’t entertain the notion that they could experience the, now stereotyped, hedonism of the rock-star bad boy PUA Alpha for the same reason overdone ‘porn stars’ don’t appeal to them – it’s too slickly unbelievable. What they will believe, and probably to their detriment, is that they can enjoy the Game well enough to fit their personal capacity to get with their ‘believable’ ONEitis girl who they just know is their perfect soul-mate. They’ll play the Game realistically and long enough insofar as it grants them access to the ‘type of girls who’d always rebuffed them.’

Rubrosa from the Sosuave forum picks up the continuation of this fantasy:

Every religious nut I’ve ever encountered who has passed judgement on me and my “sinning ways” has had a past which was heavy on the sex and drugs. In other words, they pissed all the “fun” living out of their system before they became “Born Again”. Now they preach “The Way.”

There seems to be a theme in certain parts of the manosphere (which I agree with) which states more or less the following:
It’s not about the chicks…it’s about you improving yourself….which gets the chicks.

I have a friend who’s a very successful Businessman/Playboy. We both have similar experience in terms of our journeys in dealing with the opposite sex. We were laughing at his story about how he didn’t feel like screwing this one girl only because he didn’t feel like driving that evening. I joked that if he was 20 years old, he would have made the drive. He laughed “Are you kidding? Back then I would drive 3 hours to get laid!”

I think that maybe I’m like those wackjobs who preach only after they’ve sinned. Does all my advice fall on deaf ears because no matter how much advice one hears, experience is the only true teacher? I have enough experience and Game savvy to where I can bang a different chick every night of the week with some reliability…so it’s somewhat EASY for me to say “It’s about you, not the chicks !” Kind of like a rich John Lennon singing “All you need is Love ”
I feel guilty in some weird way because I’m saying that chicks aren’t a priority maybe because I have a large supply.

Rollo ? Your take ?

I don’t read Rubrosa as making a religious statement here so much as he’s drawing comparisons in hypocrisy. ‘Do as I say, not as I’ve done’ is what he’s concerned with. The religious are easy targets in this regard, but really, everyone’s a hypocrite to varying degrees.

When I was a young AFC in my late teens I would’ve honestly been appalled by what I advocate on this forum today. My outlook at that time was incorrect and influenced by persons, conditions and social conventions of which I was totally unaware. The 19 year old Rollo Tomassi would’ve advocated the exact opposite of the 44 y.o. Tomassi would now. Does that make me a hypocrite today? Or, what if my outlook was correct and through the course of life and events I changed my way of thinking and lifestyle for a period of time, only to later go back to what had originally been truth to me later?

Life is learning. A hypocrite is someone who’s words and actions are incongruent, certainly in the present, but maybe not so much the past. I give advice here based on what I got so horribly wrong in the past, not because I did everything perfect from the get go. This is why it’s a dangerous business to build your reputation on moralism or absolutism. What your life experiences teach you will eventually come into conflict with convictions in spite of how rock solid you believe they are. And it’s then that people will call you to the carpet for being something you say you are or you aren’t.

Hail to the Emperors

Now, more to the point, yes, it is all about getting laid, AND it’s also about improving oneself too. Pussy has inspired more men to become great than any other factor in human history. I think what’s missing here is that the drive to succeed and the drive to get laid are mutually beneficial, and often symbiotic. The problems arise when you attempt to separate these two influences and turn them into absolute binaries.

Pussy = Bad.  Being a Little Emperor = Good

Pussy = Good.  Being a Little Emperor = waste of time, or just a means to pussy.

It doesn’t work this way.

When people say “If all you’re living for is fucking and women, then I pity you for not living right.” what they’re doing is making a binary judgement call while using themselves as a referendum. When one guy feels he’s living ‘by the rules’ then everyone else has to play by them too in order for him to validate his existence.

When another guy wins by not playing by the first guy’s rules he then needs to invalidate that win. Take a guy who did everything by the book, got married to the first girl he’d ever banged, went to college, has a decent job, has 2 kids, and sit him next to the high school drop out, who’s still unmarried, enjoys many women, stumbled into a well paying job and has few responsibilities. Who has the greater life experiences? Who’s “doing it right? Which one of these guys is more likely to try to invalidate the lifestyle of the other? Who envies who, and who is ‘happier’?

The 5 Stages of Unplugging

I read an article this morning about the 5 stages of grief (confronting death) and how they apply to coming into acceptance of a previously rejected truth. Yes, I know, there’s no end to the ridiculous interpretations of this played-out pop-psych list, but I was curious about how this might apply to an AFC coming to grips with unplugging from the Matrix, so I did a bit of searching and what did I find on my blog roll search but this:

1. Denial – Still Plugged -In: “These game guys are a bunch of clowns, there’s no way this works on women. Women aren’t stupid. What a bunch of misogynists.”

2. Anger – Post-Red Pill: “This is ridiculous! Why should I have to jump through all these hoops for women? I just want to be myself. Why couldn’t I have been a Natural Alpha®? I blame my parents/siblings/teachers/God/liberals/feminists/media/society, maybe George Sodini, Andres Breivik, James Holmes wasn’t so crazy after all.”

3. Bargaining – Unplugged: “Well maybe it does have some good points…but, forget the hot girls, they’re way outta my league. I’ll give it a try if it can help me get around the bases with a plain Jane. Do I have to wear the fuzzy hat and black nail polish?”

4. Depression – Bitter Taste of the Red Pill: “Wow, women really respond to this puffed-up act? And guys spend big bucks on it and wind up with more ass than a toilet seat? And I just joined up for this? The world is sad and so am I…”

5. Acceptance – Game Awareness: “Maybe this IS the way things really work. I guess I should give up the gender relations mythology I’ve been holding onto…hey, what do you think of these negs I came up with?”

6. Jaded* – MGTOW Permutations: “Fuck learning all these rules. Sex isn’t worth it and women aren’t that fun anyway. The last thing I want to do is learn routines or the 5 stages of pickup. There’s too many websites, too much to read, I can’t remember it all much less sort it all out. Who has all that time to go out and chat up women anyway? It’s not like I see any women under 40 at work at my engineering job to practice on. Video games and porn are more fun and more available. I just haffta look good and let the women come to me”

* This is a late addition to the list, hardly original and arguably relevant, but I added it for precautionary measures.

Before I get the predictable howls of “someone did this before you” (h/t Badger) allow me to put my spin on it. I get a ton of PMs from forum members, and read threads about guys with friends or relatives in, or just getting over, horrible relationships and how they’ve tried to unplug them only to run into stiff resistance. Looking at this process to acceptance it’s no wonder why.

So my discussion question for today is this; how did you unplug? Was there some moment of clarity that opened your eyes? Did you go through a process like the one described here? Are you maybe still struggling with a certain phase?

Denial

In most popular stories Betas may be protagonists, but they’re never really heros. Every movie, that I can remember, that has a beta as a protagonist has been a comedy; beta males are good for laughing at – no one actually admires them.

The same situation exists with Betas/AFCs you know. If you tell them the truth- they’ll say you hate women, or have dated the wrong types, or whatever else they can come up with to protect the mental model underwhich they operate. They’re invested in that mental model and they’re happy with it; to challenge it is to, almost literally, destory the world they live in. Not only will how they view the world be destroyed, but how they view themselves will be destroyed as well.

Ego Investments and Denial

The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. I use this term a lot on my blog so I thought it deserved a bit of explanation.

When a person internalizes a mental schema (see belief) so thouroughly and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such polarization and violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, etc. beliefs – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable evidence that challenges the assertions of their belief.

One common frustration that the Game-aware express is how dificult it is to open an AFCs eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or 2nd dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and the flaws in what is really ego-investments and conditioned internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a catagorical state of denial.

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof.

Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function.

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into a state of denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous AFC thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.

Solution: deny the mistake.

Therefore we see AFCs tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc. What they fail to realized, and what becomes cemented for them in denial, is that what they believe are their own, indigenous, self-righteously correct beliefs were designed for them by a fem-centric influence.

Filibuster

ThirtyzDude from the SoSuave forum has just recently seen the light of pragmatism with regards to Spinning Plates. For me, one of the best things about the newly Unplugged is reading their fresh perspective of women’s behaviors in their, now, Game-aware context. Sometimes their fresh observations come as a jolt to their system. They realize, with some measure of shock, that the behaviors and rationales they’ve been conditioned to take for granted on for so long are actually strategies to insure the best hypergamic result for women.

Other times, their observations are truly revelatory,..

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend with many of these women: the ones that are willing to have sex within 3-6 dates typically don’t talk about it – when it happens it happens. When they talk about sex a lot, and try to convince me that they really like sex, it often doesn’t happen. They begin to make excuses, they say they want me but they don’t want to do anything they regret. My thoughts when this happens: wtf?

I partially covered this dynamic in the now infamous Wait For It? post:

If  she’s perceiving your value as as high as it should be, she wont hesitate longer than a few dates to become sexual – and she certainly wont tell you she’s making you wait. Hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock.

One of the more frustrating situations I often encounter comes from guys who’ve been OVERTLY told that they’re being made to wait for sex until some circumstance or criteria is met for the woman. The standard filibuster (or loss-leader as the case may be) usually comes with the reasoning that she “needs to feel comfortable” before she has sex with a guy. Even more distressing is the guy who was getting laid, only to be told the same thing by an existing girlfriend. If you find yourself in either of these situation there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

Filibustering

If you find yourself at 2am with a woman you want to bang or, God forbid, a group of women who want to go out for pizza or tacos (usually to sober up) after dancing at the club, understand, you’re being filibustered. When a woman has minty fresh breath and is one drink in, you’ll be getting laid, however, you will not be having sex with a woman when she’s full of pizza, coming down from a buzz and her breath smells like garlic.

I can remember a time in my twenties when I had a policy of never taking a woman I wanted to bang out for dinner. This was partially due to me being broke most of the time, but also because I found that the girls who suggested such-and-such restaurant as a date venue were never up for sex that night. These were typically the girls who “wanted to know I wanted them for more than just sex.” If you ever hear a woman utter that sentence, know that it’s a prime example of a filibuster. It sounds like prudence – she wants to vet you for boyfriend status – but the truth is she’s putting you off while she waits to see what her other 3rd (or 4th or 5th) party options might develop into.

Women with a high interest level wont confuse you, but if she’s not thoroughly convinced of your status a woman will generally default to some form of filibuster. This goes back to the medium being the message for women, however, for men, one of the more confusing strategies of hypergamy is the female filibuster because it appears to promise a future reward if a guy is patient enough to wait for it.

Girls don’t talk about the sex that they’re going to have – they talk about the sex they’re not going to have.

ThirtyzDude makes an astute filibuster observation in his post; the more a woman talks about sex and tries to convince you of how much she likes sex, the less likely she is to actually want to have sex – with you. There’s a certain self-convincing that goes along with this for women who’ve already assessed for themselves that they will not be fucking you. The necessity to convince themselves, and you, that they are in fact sexual conflicts with the subliminal assessment that they don’t want to bang you.

Like ThirtzyDude I discovered that the women who were going to be sexual (DTF) didn’t feel the need to prove to themselves, and me by proxy, that they liked sex. This isn’t to say the DTF women didn’t talk dirty or act flirty, but their sexual interest was communicated by covert innuendo, never overt declarations. In other words the sale was assumed and we could progress on to verbal foreplay, not brinksmanship.

There’s a trite cliché that guys like to assume about women; a woman knows within five minutes of meeting you if she’ll bang you. I don’t necessarily agree with this notion, but I do think that a woman knows within five minutes of meeting you if she WONT bang you. You’ll often see this played out when women insert casual filibusters into conversation about having a boyfriend (boyfriend disclaimer) with guys who’ve too blatantly telegraphed their over-interest in becoming intimate with her. Attraction is not a choice, but too many guys think that it could be if they were convincing enough.

Generally, women who enjoy sex don’t go about advertising it, they just do it. I’ve stated before, a woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. That may seem like a simple matter of logistics, but a woman who wants to bang you will find ways to fuck you that include self-rationalization, denial and lies of omission in order to bang you when her interest level is such that she’s motivated.

When a woman, and in particular one whom you’ve yet to bang, overtly explicates how much she enjoys sex, in essence she’s playing a slut by proxy. The strategy is to convince men she’s just as sexual as the women she doesn’t feel comfortable competing against. She can’t, or wont, match a “slut” by playing her game in real life, but she can allude to her alleged sexuality safely behind a filibuster. The real conflict arises when it comes time to have sex and her bluff is called.