Plate Theory VI: Abundance & Scarcity

Law 16: Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
Too much circulation makes the price go down: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.

Plate Theory is for your benefit, not for women’s. That might sound harsh, but it’s a method intended to increase your value as a commodity that works on two levels. First, the external – by practicing honest, non-exclusive dating you communicate to your prospective plates that you are in demand. I’ve gone so far as to tell men to foster this sense by never answering the phone from Friday to Sunday evening, even when they have no other plans. The perception that your attention is sought after increases it’s value – it’s when men are too eager to get with a woman that their attention becomes worthless and IL declines. Nothing serves a man better than having 3 or 4 women competing for his exclusive attention and fostering in them that feminine competitivie anxiety in as subtle and covert a way as possible. It’s a real art that women are all too familiar with. Women are natural plate theorists, they simply use their varying degrees of physical attractiveness to line their plates up.

Secondly, plate theory is for a man’s own internal benefit. As I said in my original thread, it’s much easier for a man not to give a shit if he truly doesn’t give a shit. It’s far easier to deal with women on the basis of indifference when you have a subconscious knowledge that there are at least 3 other women who’ll be happy to have your attention if one plays games with you.

You will invariably pass most shit tests in this fashion. The reason men fail most shit tests is because they subconsciously telegraph too much interest in a single woman. Essentially a shit test is used by women to determine one, or a combination of these factors:

a.) Confidence – first and foremost
b.) Options – is this guy really into me because I’m ‘special’ or am I his only option?
c.) Security – is this guy capable of providing me with long term security?

By practicing Plate Theory, your mental attitude will be such (or should be such) that you will pass most shit test based simply on this practice. Abundance thinking is the root of Plate Theory. A lot has been written about approaching women (and really life in general) from a position of Abundance. People often make the mistake of assuming that having a wide variety of choices tends to cheapen the commodity, and to a degree this is accurate, but it also allows for a better, learned awareness of which choice amongst the pool is common and which is of higher quality.

,…but Rollo, I’m so busy that I have no choice but to ignore and postpone. They sense it and seek me out. I worry that I’ll create crazies. My weekends are jammed. At what point do we stop?

This is a the best problem you can have. You’ve successfully flipped the script; you’ve gotten to a point where it becomes instinctive and your plates actively seek out your attention. By default, you’re creating value by scarcity. At what point do you stop? How old are you? If you’re under 30 stay in the game. If you’re over 30, stay in the game, but cool things off occasionally – the only time a man should even contemplate monogamy is after experiencing abundance. If you’re innundated with women occupying your weekends, consider hooking up with a proven plate on a Thursday evening and reserve your weekends for your other pursuits.

Also, don’t be afraid to clear your schedule to hang out with friends or do other things that interest you. Remember, scarcity increases value. Too many guys think that plate spinning is something that needs a constant effort, it doesn’t. In fact applying yourself equally across all your active plates only pushes you closer to settling for one or two. Most guys think that they have to continually spin their plates, you don’t; if you’re doing it correctly they’ll spin themselves for you. The anxiety is that if you don’t keep applying attention to any one plate she’ll lose interest and fall off. Sometimes this is the case and you have to be prepared to accept it, some plates have to break in order to spin more, and that’s OK. More often than not however, your scarcity will create value and mystique, thus they will pursue you for their affirmation.

Plate theory of course can be a means to an LTR, but bear in mind that it’s essential that you practice it long enough and effectively enough to determine what a quality woman means to you and how to recognize her. As with most Game skills, the AFC will use them to some degree of success up to the point that he finds his idealized “girl of his dreams” and launch into a self-destructive LTR because his idealization was based on juvenile impressions rather than a mature understanding of what a quality woman’s characteristics are. This is all due to a lack of concrete experience.

Spin plates for as long as possible, because once you do commit to an LTR, even with the tightest of Game you will lose a measure of the competitive anxiety that made your attentions valuable to any one woman. All your plates fall off AND the girl you’re engaged in an LTR with relaxes. This is root of why men find that the woman they had hot sweaty monkey sex with when they were dating becomes more sexually reserved a few months after they’re a couple. The competitive anxiety is relieved and therefore sexual frequency and quality is no longer a proving trait for her. That’s not to say there aren’t methods to stoke this anxiety in an LTR, but, by comparisson to being single, the frame of the relationship doesn’t have to be contested when she and you understand that she is your only source of intimacy and sex. In a committed relationship, you simply cannot spin plates.

Borderline Personality Disorder

“Were you just looking at her?!! WERE YOU?!!,..I bet you just wanna fuck her don’t you?,.. DON’T YOUUU!!!”

One curious aspect of the manosphere community is it’s tendency to pick up on what I’d call ‘pet pathologies’. It’s very easy and comforting to ascribe a general lack of social intelligence or a retardation in social maturity on Asperger’s Syndrome. I’m not suggesting that Asperger’s isn’t a legitimate pathology, but I think the frequency with which men will conveniently attribute their social awkwardness to it delegitimizes the real illness. Most Betas often report a discomfort with approaches and Game in general because of varying degrees of social anxiety that they’ve internalized for the better part of their lives.

So, it’s a much simpler premise to attribute this to a psychological disorder than to admit that they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them in unlearning the hinderances the’ve been conditioned to believe about themselves for so long. I’m not saying guys (why is it rarely women?) don’t have Asperger’s, but I think some real introspection is due before diagnosing it for themselves. Another neurosis that gets attributed to women in the manosphere is BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder:

*DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships,  self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following: Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days). Chronic feelings of emptiness. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights). Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

I struggled with deciding whether to write about this because in our current intergender environment, it’s very easy to conveniently ascribe these symptoms and tendencies to the ‘psycho bitches’ that men often complain about. She’s crazy in bed, but she’s also crazy out of bed. I would doubt that there’s a man dating in the last decade who hasn’t encountered one or some combination of neurosis listed in this clinical diagnosis with a woman he’s dating or has dated.

As the gender landscape has developed in the last 40 years, so to has the variety of  psychoses. So it’s for this reason that I think understanding true BPD neurosis in comparison to the common anxieties of insecurity that women are prone needs to be explored.

True BPDs

I had an LTR with a BPD woman for 4 years when I was in my 20s and I can tell you from experience, it’s nothing to laugh at or take lightly. It’s particularly damaging for AFCs locked into a BPDs negative feedback loop, especially when he’s developed a soul destroying ONEitis with her and associates himself as the source of her depression / psychosis.

True BPDs progressively convince their victims that they are the source of her neurosis. You are not yourself, you are who she’s molding you to be, and eventually you’ll come to believe that it’s in your best interest – indeed, your responsibility – to be who she wants you to be to sustain that neurosis.

You will gradually give up on your family and friends (or they give up on you), you will drop all ambitions and passions that directly focus on you, and you will abandon any genuine, independent identity you held for yourself, all because these are threats to the neurotic narrative she constructs for herself and lives out.

She will reward your conversion to her psychosis with the intermittent reward of crazy hot sex, but this is simply the reinforcer to keep you locked into her narrative. The YOU you know will cease to exist and the character she creates for you will take over. This is especially true for beta chumps who see their BPD as their best, only option for a long term romantic prospect. She’s an HB 9 (to him) and he’s never fucked better than a 5 in his whole life, so the risk of catastrophic loss is real and ever-present. It’s fate that brought them together, and if he can only help allay her fears they can live happily ever after.

In the latter stages of a BPD relationship you will get to the point where her overt cuckolding of you is an acceptable situation. You think you’ll mitigate it by negotiating some “open relationship” status with her. You will internalize the reasoning that negotiating for her desire is preferable to losing her. You’ll propose that an open relationship means you’re both free to fuck other parties, when in reality it’s the only way you can rationalize for yourself the fact that she’s going to go fuck other guys, and you’re going to accept it because you’re locked into her neurosis. It’s your fault she feels compelled to fuck other guys – and you’ll believe it.

That, or the mere suggestion of you being interested in sex with another woman will send her into fits of jealous, histrionic rage. You’re living in fear. You’re afraid she’ll commit suicide if you uproot yourself (a classic BPD unspoken threat), but trust me on this, it’ll be you who swallows a bullet long before she ever will. I’ve personally known two men who’ve done just this, and another who hung himself as the result of a BPD relationship.

I know it seems like most of the friends you still do have are simply passing you off by saying “get out” and move on, but your life literally depends on you doing so. Cutting you off and disengaging you from external perspectives about your twisted relationship is essential to a BPD’s neurosis. Eventually your friends and family will give up on the ‘new you’.

Also, I must add this, when and if you do finally muster the self-concern enough to actually leave her, expect a complete about-face in her mentality and behavior. The one thing a true BPD loathes more than her victim is the thought of having to ensnare another. There are plenty of other Beta chumps ready to fill that role, but the comfort and easy predictability you represent to her in the present builds an emotional dependency. BPDs will fight like wild animals not to lose their victim, so expect an extinction burst from her the likes of which are unimaginable.

For a guy so accustomed to her neurotic behavior, his first impression is that she’s making some real change for him in order to “improve the relationship.” It’s not, but so radical a shift in her behavior will convince you otherwise, and cause you to doubt her deception, particularly when you yourself have no options and believe you’ll never do any better than her.

NEXT

The opposite of love is not hate – the opposite of love is indifference.

I think one of the biggest mistakes guys against a 3 Strikes rule make is assuming that it means a guy would be so preoccupied with sex that you couldn’t wait for 4-6 dates. They assume that a 3 Strikes rule (or any rule dependent upon sexual reciprocation) makes them Players at best, superficial and sex-concerned at worst. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The mistake is to presume that a 3 date policy is some form of punishment for the girl for not having ‘put out’ soon enough to verify interest. It’s not punishment, it’s a fail-safe that serves to protect a guy from some protracted personal investment for a very limited return. For example, I play golf and when I want to improve my game I hire a golf pro. I pay him $120 for 3 lessons, so $40 per lesson (very similar to the $40 per date rule popularized by Tom Leykis). At the end of my 3rd lesson I assess whether or not my game’s improved and I can decide to continue with him or, if I see no improvement I can choose to find another pro and do the same. There are a lot of golf pros ready to work with me. I’m not punishing the pro for doing this, I’m simply looking for the best value in an area I wish to improve in. If I think my swing has improved or I notice my average go up, I’ll continue with with the pro.

The misunderstanding is to see a 3 Strikes rule as a threat. “She’d better put out after tonight or I’m outta here”. I can see why that would place a burden upon a woman, but you must take into account why a 3 Strike rule would even be a necessary concept. 3 dates (and I mean real dates, none of this coffee / lunch crap) over the course of 3 weeks should be ample time to make the assessment as to whether a woman has interest and attraction enough to become intimate. Anything beyond this is indicative of filibustering on a woman’s part and usually points to an only lukewarm IL if at all. In this way a 3 Strike rule benefits both men and women; why would either sex want to engage in a relationship that was lackluster from the start? Why would either want to be involved with a person who was settled on or settled for?

It’s urgency and anxiety that makes for genuine, chemical-fueled sexual desire – not comfort, not familiarity. This is precisely why I say Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait. It’s not that you can’t have sex with her, it’s that the sex is compromised, internally debated, choice-of-necessity sex. It becomes mundane before anyone’s clothes come off.

The Power of NEXT

I used the above situation as a prelude to illustrate the power of tapping into one of the most elusive and difficult to internalize principles of game – the power of NEXT. It’s very easy to casually type, “just NEXT her man” when you have no personal investment in the advice you give. It’s standard male deductive-logic pragmatism, and rightly so, to solve the problem by eliminating the source. Likewise when you lack a real understanding of the personal conditions and mental schemas the average guy (i.e. Matrix-Beta) is predisposed to, telling him to simply NEXT the only plate he’s got spinning is about as useful as telling him to Just Be Himself with the next girl he happens into.

Spinning Plates is actually the best starting point for mastering the power of NEXT. When you have other irons in the fire it’s much easier to shift the focus of your attention to another woman; at least in theory. There’s a certain degree of emotional dissociation that needs to be made and this is usually dependent upon the personal investment a Man puts into any one woman. Far too many men, and even practiced PUAs, have a very hard time with NEXT not only because of this dissociation, but also the doubt that comes from “what might’ve been.” Couple this with a soul-mate myth inspired ONEitis and you can see why most guys will fight to their own bitter end not to NEXT the girl they’re with.

It’s exactly this doubt that makes men think they’d be throwing the baby out with the bath water by NEXTing a woman. A lot of men think that NEXTing a girl is some knee-jerk response from guys who don’t have any other ideas of what to do, when in fact it should be a practiced, default response for the first indication that a woman is attempting to set the frame in her favor by manipulating a guy using her intimacy as a carrot to pull the cart. It’s men without options that find NEXTing a girl in some way ‘wrong’, and to a man with only one plate spinning this is entirely counterintuitive, but it’s important to remember that Rejection is better than Regret – even if you’re the one doing the rejecting. It’s better err on the side of NEXTing than be dragged into the quicksand of a woman’s frame.

Tactical NEXTing

The opposite of love is not hate – the opposite of love is indifference. When your silence inspires more anxiety than any spoken threat, that’s when you’re an Alpha.

Learning indifference is the key to mastering the power of NEXT. Women are masters of indifference for the same reason Men with options (i.e. Plate Spinners) find it useful; they derive confidence from having options. Since women (in their prime) are the primary sexual selectors, indifference is their natural default state. It’s only Men with options who make an impact enough to rattle a woman out of this default indifference and fire her imagination (caffeinate the Hamster).

NEXTing as a tool is one of the best ways to determine real interest level in a woman. Dumping a woman is one of the highest forms of DHV that a man possesses. Nine times out of ten the NEXTed woman will attempt to reconnect with the guy who’s got the personal confidence enough to walk away from her. Why is this? Because it shakes up the routine which you slip into by playing in her frame. In behavioral psychology terms she’s about to go into what’s called an extinction burst. You’ve removed her source of reward (i.e. attention, comfort, familiarity) and now she will frantically attempt to restore it. Uncertainty is exciting, particularly after you’ve set a pattern of behavior that she thinks is secure. Unpredictability is good. The guy who can walk away from a less than optimal situation is a man communicating that he has options and the confidence to be uncompromising (or at least less compromising) in what he’s willing to accept. The secret is that pussy is an easily had commodity and it’s up to a woman to convince you that her intimacy is in someway unique among all others. The hard truth, that she’s well aware of, is that no amount of sex is an equitable trade for a man’s complacency and/or compromising his identity.

In fact, a woman want’s you to walk away; it communicates that her intimacy has no control over you putting you decisively in control (where she wants you to be), increases her desire by planting a seed of doubt of her estimation of you, proves you to be (at least in appearance) a man with other irons in the fire, and finally, confirms for her that your attentions are valuable to other (potential competition) women.

Permanent NEXTing – Going Dark

There will come times when NEXTing a poisonous woman becomes a necessity. For any number of reasons, extracting her from your life may be essential to saving your own life. NEXTing under these conditions (really a break up) takes on much more gravity since the woman you’re cutting off will still experience the same extinction burst despite the factors (perhaps her own fault) that led to it. The same basic principles of emotional dissonance apply, but the emotional investment may make it impossible to achieve true indifference. It’s during these extinction burst when she opens up sexually to retain a your failing interest that prove the most difficult for men to resist. A starving man can’t help but want to eat from the most convenient buffet prepared for him, even when aresenic is on the menu.

As I mentioned in War Brides, women have an innate, hard-wired psychological facility in achieving this degree of indifference that men can scarcely believe they’re capable of – even after decades of an LTR or marriage. So imagining and enacting a disconnect of this emotional magnitude is kind of a foreign concept for men to embrace themselves. It not only goes against our deductive, problem solving natures, but it also conflicts with a feminine primacy acculturation that teaches us to stick with her no matter what, “all for love.”

Keep that in mind; the intent of your leaving isn’t punishment for her misbehavior, nor is it meant to teach her a lesson to learn from, it’s to save your own life from further damage. As I stated earlier, NEXTing a woman is DHV (demonstrating higher value) of the highest order. True or not, It implies you had other, better options than her. NEXTing her implies you’ve just gone from a comfortable, familiar beta to the indifferent Alpha that she never realized you had a capacity for. What serves as a benefit in Tactical NEXTing is liability in a Permanent NEXT, you 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.

The best thing you can do is go dark. Block her calls / texts, drop her from Facebook if you have one, cut off all contact. No messages via friends, no “hey howya doing?” nothing but indifference. You’re off the grid for her.

Learning indifference is the key to the power of NEXT. Presuming and cultivating that presence of indifference makes your attention that much more valuable and makes a permanent NEXT a much easier transition.

Setting the Rules

From SFS on SoSuave:

Been with my GF for 18 months now , tonight she tells me that we have a dinner with her family to celebrate her cousins B Day at a restaurant on Saturday.

At first I agree, then remember that my SF 49ers are playing a huge game, I tell her dont think Im gonna be able to make the supper because of the game.

She gives me a weird look shrugs her shoulders and give me the sarcastic do whatever you want babe.

To me this is a not brainer, staying home to watch the games.

Thoughts ? I wonder if she will really be upset.

Her cousin is like a brother to her.

I should probably set these rules early on.

Real simple, what do YOU want to do? Who’s frame are you living in?

You can rationalize a reason for either choice: 49ers playing a game that will never be repeated vs. her cousin’s B-Day that will, in all likelihood, come again next year, or you can make the case that football is frivolous compared to the cousin’s B-Day – it make no difference. It doesn’t even have to be football, it could be anything you have a passion for. What matters is that you set a precedent for controlling the frame of any future relationship.

Self-love is not so great a sin as self-neglect. She serves at your pleasure. That’s not to say you’re a callous inconsiderate asshole, just that your sacrifice (which will never be appreciated in girl-world) for commitment demands that you be the primary partner. Consider the magnanimity of you choosing not to watch football in order to do something for/with her in the future after having put her and the cousin off in the past. If you had caved in and went to the B-Day, she would never realize the future importance of you putting off watching a game. She could never appreciate the significance of your passion if you demonstrate that it doesn’t mean that much to you in the first place.

A lot of men who find themselves in relationships where they feel unappreciated by their committed partner are often there because they simply lacked the balls to make their primacy real for her in the beginning. As the majority of men are optionless Betas it comes as no surprise that most will readily sell themselves out in the beginning to keep the peace and keep the pussy open. Only later do they discover that their early supplications are precisely the reason she lacks respect and loses the lust for him. Men think, “she’ll love me more because I’ll do anything for her” while women think “he’s spineless and weak because he’ll do anything for me.”

Demonstrate, do not Explicate

In the greater scope of things, women can never appreciate the sacrifices men make in order to satisfy women’s socio-sexual imperatives. However, Men do possess the capacity to impress upon women the importance of their purpose or passions. In fact, when done with the appropriate art and intensity, impressing this upon women can be a fantastic tool of Game to stimulate genuine interest as well as ‘gina tingles’. Competition anxiety is a powerful force in the sexual marketplace for women, but within the confines of an LTR this stress tends to subside into a relaxed comfort and familiarity which is the antithesis of the lust-fueled sexual urgency prompted by the imaginings of losing a high value man to another competitor in the hypergamic arms race. To counteract this future situation, what needs to be established early in an LTR is a man’s genuine passion for something other than her. From the 16 Commandments of Poon:

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

Since women fundamentally lack an appreciation for a Man’s experience, convincing a woman of your purpose or passion requires breaking a few eggs. You cannot be afraid to let things get messy. Demonstrating this purpose to her, early in the relationship, and particularly at the risk of destroying the relationship, is the lynchpin to authoritatively defining the future frame of any relationship. This applies equally to both LTRs and/or nonexclusive plates you’re spinning.

When she enters your world, she has to experience it first hand for it to have any legitimacy for her. This requires that you demonstrate what it means to live, or be in love, with a Man who’s purpose is NOT dependent upon her. You cannot explain to a woman what things are like to be with you – it only resounds with a puffed up rationalism that she cannot relate to, and thus has NO legitimacy for her. You have to make it real for her; your passion, your purpose, you direction and vitality must become the ‘other woman’ in the relationship. If that amount to something as simple as putting her off to watch an NFL Playoff game, so be it. If it requires you to be on an extended deployment in the middle east, or if you can think of nothing else but climbing K2, so be it.

Once a woman understands the gravity and legitimacy of your purpose / passion, only then can she come to appreciate the significance of you foregoing or postponing the dictates of that purpose for her. She will never feel more important to you than when you (occasionally) lift her above that legitimate, verified purpose.

Women will never appreciate a relationship that is a Man’s greatest ambition. For a very gritty depiction of this watch the movie Blue Valentine.

Why Marriage Needs Men

I’d very much like to leave religion, at least in the organized sense, as a topic for another blog, however, as it applies to Game and intergender social dynamics it’s occurred to me that this isn’t entirely possible. Since its inception the SoSuave community has had a strict policy against threads specifically exploring religious topics. For obvious reasons these tend to get rather heated in terms of discussing theology, and most simply devolve into flame wars with no real purpose. Yet, in terms of how religion and moralism apply to the intergender landscape and sexual marketplace, I think it does a disservice to a fuller understanding of how the sexes relate to one another. In my tenure as a SoSuave forum moderator it pains me to have to delete so many promising threads because the topic strayed form “Game and religion” into “My God can beat up your God.” So my disclaimer for this blog is this; any time I delve into the subject of religion, moralism,  ethics or anything that might be construed as esoterically inspired, understand that I do so in an effort to address how it influences the social dynamics between genders. Never is it an attack on individual beliefs, rather consider it a critical analysis of how those beliefs interact with the reality we live in.

Why men need marriage.

Today’s topic article comes to us courtesy of Pastor Mark Driscoll. I briefly touched upon Driscoll’s pollyanna, socio-religious propositions in Could a Man Have Written This? and reference him in Build a Better Beta. Driscoll’s article, while ostensibly written to advertise his latest book, is really an essay in irony. This irony is literally written into the article’s title, and I’m certain that Mark is entirely oblivious to it. You can go ahead and read his very simplistic overview of modern gender relations; it will scarcely impress all but the most green of noobs in the manosphere that Driscoll is firmly planted in the world created by the feminine imperative. Even in just asserting ‘men need marriage’ we get an appetizer of the gruel of male shaming yet to be served. Sadly, he’s not covering any new ground that Kay Hymowitz and the bleatings of Kate Bollick haven’t already beat him to the punch with.

I don’t think I need to go in to too much detail about Driscoll throwing rocks at the moon to make it go away. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Game can see him for what he is. My concern is that HE doesn’t see himself for what he is. I’m concerned because I think his head is in the right place, but he so lacks any real-world experience with the sexual marketplace that he’s unaware of his participation in promoting a world view he’d otherwise be adamantly opposed to. Driscoll shares in the major failing of Social Conservatives in terms of understanding Game; they are the unwitting instruments of the feminine imperative.

Driscoll’s intent is to see men returned to some semblance of traditional masculinity, with all the benefits and liabilities that antiquated romanticism implies, but he employs the chief ideologies and tools of the feminine imperative to do so. The shaming conventions, implied lethargy, shirking of male-attributable responsibilities, et. al. he uses are the same clichés the feminine imperative has established as the articles of Man-Up! 2.0. Mark is blissfully unaware of the Male Catch 22:

Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

Mark Driscoll’s presumptive starting point is putting men in the subservient role, while expecting them to Man-Up, take control, and be better men all with the idealized goal of becoming more appropriate, more suitable men for women. Marriage is the goal and the cure to prolonged adolescence – in other words better serving the feminine imperative qualifies men to be adults. From Could a Man have Written This?:

In girl-world, what directly benefits women necessarily is presumed to benefit men, so what we’ll see is a new wave of [female] bloggers bastardizing the world-worn ideas that the manosphere has put together and repackaging it in a female context. It’s Man Up 2.0; make a token push to “re-empower” men just enough for them to idealize the romanticism of the responsibilities required for living up to women’s expectations.

Without an afterthought Driscoll titles his diatribe “Why Men NEED marriage” with the presumption that getting married will force men to Man-Up. This is the extent of his critical thought, because he has no realistic frame of reference beyond what his self-righteous Matrix-think conditioning will permit. He’s batting for Team Woman (not unlike another infamous female blogger), but would have us believe it’s for our own good.

Sanitizing Game

Recently there’s been an upswing in a social conservative push to ‘sanitize’ Game; essentially taking the drive and principles of the manosphere and converting them to fit into their doctirnal narrative:

A major illustration of this can be found in the ‘late-to-the-party’ resurgence of masculine ideals in mainstream evangelical christianity today. Like so much else in christian culture, they’re happy to use the popularity of a secular phenomenon and repackage it as kosher, the manosphere is no exception. Hacks like Mark Driscoll and more than few other “relevant” new order evangelical pastors have co-opted manosphere (MRA?) fundamentals – even ‘purified’ forms of Game – as their particular cause du jour for returning men back into their roles of accountability to the female imperative. This of course has an overwhelming appeal to White Knight prone guys, but the push is disingenuous for the same reason ‘pro-men’ female writers are – they still use the girl-world, female imperative rule book to define their outlook.

Rediscovering masculinity is the new black in ‘relevant’ church. It sells very well, and in and of itself it’s not too dissimilar from the perspectives of the manosphere about owning your gender. The similarities end in the application. While it maybe cathartic to beat your chest and pretend to fight like a UFC fighter at some ‘christian’ men’s weekend (evangelicals men have inexplicably embraced MMA fighting in the last 5 years), the takeaway message is still one of apologizing for their testosterone. They can only own their masculinity insofar as it doesn’t upset the feminine imperative.

Never take dating advice, or really any opinion of intergender relations seriously when it’s coming from moralistic guys who’ve never had the benefit of past, first hand experience with women. Evangelical understanding of gender relations is based only upon a very insular and anachronistic perspective. Consequently, what constitutes their understanding is derived from living vicariously through their unchurched friends, romantic comedies, reading statistics that agree with their perspective, all in an effort to make themselves feel better about having married the first girl they met at church camp.

Driscoll is a fantastic illustration of a guy who’s been entirely out of touch with the social changes and the sexual marketplace since he got married.

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For further reading Dalrock has an excellent breakdown of this article here.

Just Be Yourself

We are who we say we are.

Is the woman who applies make up everyday ‘being herself”? How about the woman with implants, is she ‘being herself’? What about the woman wearing high heels becasue it boosts her height 4 inches? Is the girl you see in nothing but party pics on FaceBook being herself? Lets turn it the other way, what of the woman wearing a business suit that emphasizes her shoulders with pads in the jacket is she ‘being herself’? If she colors her hair does this make her less genuine?

If being ourselves is an idealized state then I should reasonably be able to expect a like-minded fitness model to be attracted to me even if my greatest passion is to sit on my couch, eat a large pizza and wash it down with a 6 pack of Michelob while watching Monday Night Football, right? After all, I am just being myself – it’s who I am.

Believe and so you shall become

The hardest distinction the uninitiated have with the JBY (just be yourself) dynamic is that personality is malleable. Personality is always in flux. The person you are today isn’t who you were 2 years ago, nor the person you’ll be 2 years from now. There are traits and characteristics we may carry with us for a lifetime, but even these are subject to change depending upon circumstance. You define what being yourself is at any given moment and it’s relative to your personal conditions and environment. So where do you draw the line? When does a genuine change of character become legitimate rather than being ‘shallow’ or ‘superficial’? Those are just catch terms that women (and too many chumps) have used with success over the centuries and men have internalized as being states of perception that women think are undesirable, yet they never accurately define. Rather, they stay intentionally ambiguous and relative to an individual woman’s interpretation, while their behaviors indicate their own motivations.

You are who you believe you are, and you are who she perceives you to be.

One of the hardest things for anyone, male or female, to hear is that they need to change their lifestyle because it implies that their just ‘being themselves’ is in some way at fault for their present conditions. It’s analogous to telling someone they’re not living their lives ‘correctly’ or that they’re raising their kids wrong. If I have a friend that is shooting heroin and I actively encourage him to stop and make an effort to help him ‘clean up’, society calls me a hero or a savior. When I encourage my friend to quit smoking before she gets cancer, I’m a concerned good-friend helping my friend with a health risk behavior. But when I tell a friend he needs to change his approach to women and this is a reason for his unhappiness and he needs to change his outlook on, and approach with women, look better and feel better, then I’m a ‘shallow’ prick and insensitive to his ‘problem’. Worse still is even attempting to offer constructive criticism, in as positive a light possible, that a person can improve themselves by changing their outlook and modifying their behavior.

Personality is not only malleable, but it can change dramatically under specific conditions. An easy example of this is veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. These men were exposed to traumatic environments that fundamentally altered their personalities. While this is an extreme illustration it proves that becoming a ‘different person’ is a matter of conditions. If my conditions are such that I enjoy sitting at home eating a whole pizza, washing it down with a six pack of Budweiser and watching Anime on a Friday evening, can I realistically expect that hot fitness instructor at the gym to come on over and genuinely want to fuck my brains out? And why not? After all I’m only being myself and she should “love me for who I am”, right? If this were my case, the conditions that define my personality are incongruous with attracting and/or maintaining a relationship with someone whose conditions are not my own.

JBY is an operative social convention that aids hypergamy.

Women are only too happy to endorse and reinforce JBY for the conscious reasoning that it ‘sounds like the right thing to say’. It’s an unassailable position; who wouldn’t want you to be you? If what counts is all on the inside then anyone telling you to change MUST be manipulating you for their own selfish reasons. This dovetails nicely into the popularized fat-acceptance self-acceptance mantra most women will fall back on when the impact of the Wall begins to manifest itself in their physiques and they want to be loved for “who they are” rather than what they used to look like. However, on a subconscious level, the latent purpose of fostering the JBY social convention in men is yet another sexual selection filtering mechanism. Actually it’s more of a filtering failsafe in that by socially mandating a genuineness in the general populace of men, women are more secure in the accuracy of their sexual assessment of men. If all men are Just Being Themselves and are encouraged to be the person they ‘truly are’, this then aids a woman in determining which man will best satisfy her hypergamy.

As I’ve stated in many a prior post, women claim to want honesty from men, but no woman wants full disclosure. In a general sense I advise this because it serves to sustain a Man’s aura of mystery, only to be progressively discovered by women with the appropriate levels of interest and responsiveness to men. However, another reason to remain deliberately ambiguous is to defuse the JBY dynamic that women assume would be a man’s default psychology.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #8

Always let a woman figure out why she wont ƒuck you, never do it for her.

An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors. As I’ve detailed in many prior comments and posts, this means that a woman’s sexual strategy necessitates that she be in as optimized a condition as her capacity (attractiveness) allows for her to choose from the best males available to satisfy that strategy.

JBY is a tool in maintaining the feminine imperative as the social imperative. Furthermore JBY serves in optimizing hypergamy in aiding a woman’s sense of security about assessing which man will best suit her hypergamy. Ironically, the JBY dynamic gets upended once a monogamous relationship is established by a woman’s anxiety for ‘fixing’ her partner once in that relationship. What was once the pseudo-genuineness of just him being himself is replace by “I’m working on him” in order for him to become the ideal man to meet with her hypergamic approval – thus exposing the calculated nonsense JBY really is to begin with.

We are who we say we are

We can alter our own personalities and have them altered by our conditions or any combination of the two, but to suggest that personality is static is a falsehood. The trap is to think that altering personality is in anyway disingenuous – there are certainly teriffic ‘actors’ or ‘poseurs’, and the like, that when we are confronted with them we sense (or even know) that they are pushing an envelope that they may not be entirely comfortable with, but there is merit to a ‘fake it till you make it’ doctrine. We only percieve it as being ‘false’, ‘superficial’ or as “trying to be something your not” when we have a concept or knowledge of a previous set of personality behaviors. If you met a likable cocky-funny guy at a club this weekend, how are you to know whether he’s the real deal or stretching the limits of his personality if you’ve never met him before?

Law 25: Re-Create Yourself 
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions— your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

The Curse of Jung


The sexual revolution represents a far more significant turning point in human events than I think most people living post-sexual revolution will ever fully appreciate. I was born after it, and I would presume most of the influential participants involved in our current gender discourse today were also products of a post sexual revolution acculturation. The vast majority of authors dutifully typing away on both manosphere and feministing blogs are, for the better part, results of the social-gender restructuring that occurred in the late 60s. With this in mind I think it’s important to reflect on the era prior to this to really grasp the significance of that change, and to understand how we’ve come to take certain aspects of our new gender reality as simply matter of fact. It’s hard to believe there was a time when we didn’t need to ask why men were Men.

1950

A lot of critics of really anything pro-masculine today will always fall back on the canard that the ‘misogynist’ author would “love to return to the 1950’s”. The epithet “misogynist” is as useful as “homophobe” for the same reason that it’s an easy throw-away label to help disqualify a dissenting point of view. If it’s hurtful or forces critical thinking that challenges an ego investment it’s far easier to categorize the offender as holding to outdated modes of thinking. Make your opponent’s views an anachronism and your perspective appears more valid simply because it seems the more novel and developed. But were the 1950’s some gilded age of masculism? What about the 30’s or 40’s, or even the 19th century? Feminists and feminized men fondly resurrect the specter of the 1950’s as if the decade were some apex turning point in women’s enslavement; like the Hebrews under Pharaoh’s yoke yearning for the promised land. All the men who held any sway over society are caricatures of white, middle class boors – more Archie Bunker than Ward Cleaver, but even Ward’s benevolence and bearing would be suspect of passive-aggressive patriarchy.

What’s tragic in this silly dismissal of a masculine mindset is that it presumes any man in this, or the past three generations could ever have any realistic frame of reference for life in the 1950’s. This is doubly true for contemporary women using this shaming association, but in recognizing this we have to open up a new pandoras box. What else is the feminine imperative using (deliberate or unconsciously) as “common sense” to rise to prominence?

Modern feminist understanding of gender, and really our feminized society as a whole, is based to it’s very foundations on an anachronism even more outdated than some mythologized chauvinist era when “men had it so good, while women were their doting, unwitting slaves.”

The Curse of Jung

I go into a lot of detail describing feminine social conventions on this blog. Some people think it’s unfair to target just female conventions; there are after all many other social conventions that apply to men as well. I’d agree with this of course, and besides this blog’s focus being given to the social/psychological aspects of Game,  those male conventions have already been (and still are) the subject of, literally, centuries of analysis and scrutiny. However, I’m going to focus on one to illustrate the progression of  the cultural shift that was prompted by the sexual revolution.

Among the many archetypically masculine traits is a man’s reservations of emotion. For various biological and neurological reasons, men are the more rational of the sexes. This isn’t to deny them an emotional element. Indeed I’ve described men as the true romantics, however, classically men have to a better degree than women, been the more reserved gender when it comes to expressing emotion. What I’ve just described here is one of the base tenets of Carl Jung’s school of psychological theory. It’s kind of ironic that Freud would be so vilified by modern feminism, yet find his protege Jung would contribute so much to the fundamentals of the feminization of society.

One of the key elements Jung introduced into western culture’s popular consciousness is the theory of anima and animus; that each individual, irrespective of sex, possesses greater or lesser degrees of association and manifested behavior of masculine and feminine psychological affiliations. In 2012, when you hear a 6 year old girl tell a 6 year old boy “you need to get in touch with your feminine side” in order to get him to comply with her, you can begin to understand the scope to which this idea has been internalized into societies collective consciousness. So long and so thoroughly has this theory been repeated and perpetuated that we can scarcely trace back it’s origins – it’s simply taken as fact that men and women possess varying degrees of masculine and feminine energies. First and second wave feminism founded their psychological premises of gender on Jung’s ideas and so evolved the reasonings for a push towards the social feminization we know today. The seeds for the feminine-centrism we take for granted today were planted by a Swiss psychiatrist in the early 1900’s.

Whether or not there’s merit to Jung’s ideas, there’s little doubt of the impact they had on fem-centrism. Early feminists saw Jung’s theory as the perfect springboard to further a pretense of ‘gender equality’; thus making individual gender balance (i.e. androgyny) a new idealized goal state. Men simply needed to be perfected by exploring their ‘feared’ feminine natures, and women needed to be allowed the opportunity and freedom to masculinize themselves in order to perfect that androgynous balance. Introduce convenient, feminine controlled hormonal contraception and viola, gender equalism was born.

Dangerous Thoughts

I’m going to introduce a radical thought into the gender landscape that’s been manicured by the feminine imperative and Jungian theory for so long; what if it’s a good thing Men should be masculine and women should be feminine? What if it’s beneficial to our species survival that our very biologies are complimentary to our gender? What if we should be teaching our boys to get in touch with their masculine sides? What if gender is actually more nature than it is nurture? What if Jung got it wrong and we’ve allowed the feminine imperative to standardized our perceptions of gender for over a century based on an incorrect presumption?

The prevailing feminist wisdom clings to the Jung inspired notion that gender is a just social creation and one that sustains a Patriarchal hierarchy. All we need do is dress our children in as neutral an environment as possible and society will progress towards a more idealized, more humane, androgynous norm. But this is counter to the new data we find with ever increasing regularity, both in clinical studies as well as a better scientific understanding of neurology and endocrinology and their relation to sexuality and gender identity. In the early 1900’s Jung lacked even a fraction of the knowledge we’ve studied and proved about the human animal in 2012. In addition to this we have over 100 years of advances in fields of psychology that didn’t even exist in Jung’s time. We’ve seen the social impact of over 40 years of feminized Jungian theory – are we seriously going to continue this ideology, oblivious to the long outdated legacy it has on contemporary culture? Are we going to allow the originator of Beta Game to continue defining what constitutes masculinity and femininity in our society?

The Tao of Game

There are a great many concepts in Game Theory that are difficult to accurately define. Understanding the intricacies of intergender dynamics is often a tough road to hoe due to individualized interpretations of what a particular term or concept should mean in a global sense. ‘Game Theory’ is even a term I’m kind of struggling with since people think it seems to exclude the actual practicing, or real world development of the same principles I explore on this blog. For the record, I believe it’s just as important to hone one’s PUA skills / tools as it is to understand why they work.

Ikigai

The concept of Alpha is another sticking point for a lot of men, both plugged-in or unplugged from the feminine Matrix – some even rejecting the concepts of alpha and beta wholesale. I find that for the most part people have a very tough time reconciling the unvarnished principles of Game Theory and, to a greater degree, the way Evolutionary Psychology compliments it, with a learned sense of moral or ethical justice they believe should be essential to human interactions. I think human beings, to varying degrees, have an in-born capacity for revulsion to ideas that reveal a very realistic, unavoidable nihilism existing in the fundamental nature of the world. By that I mean that we seem to have some feral-level refusal for what we think would be a hopeless situation. The Japanese have a term for this called “Ikigai“, loosely translated as “a reason for being”. It would not surprise me in the least if in the future we find that humans (and other higher order animals) have specific neural ‘software’ directly linked to this rejection of the hopeless. Obviously a neural wiring that promotes Ikigai would be a very valuable evolutionary survival asset for a species.

Paradoxically though, just in the suggesting of an evolved, biological root for rejecting nihilism, it confirms the validity of that hopeless condition. In other words, the same evo-psych-prompted root that grants us a capacity to desire justice or provides with us a sense of morality (however defined) is the same root that forces us to obstinately reject the reality of our situations. The same psyche that wants to reject environmentally valid concepts like alpha/beta, hypergamy, the SMP, or a plethora of other difficult to accept Game Theory ideas is the same psyche that wants to reject the hopelessness they may or may not represent.

Bear this in mind when you come across a new concept in Game. The reality we find ourselves in is very cruel when you approach it from a binary, right or wrong, absolutist standpoint. It may satisfy a need to feel self-righteous, but it’s never a good starting point for real understanding that may benefit you later. This is what detractors of evo-psych struggle with; factoring in a human element into environmental and biological determinants. We don’t call a cheetah running down a gazelle on the African savannah ‘evil’ or unjust, or the gazelle undeserving of death. It just is.

If I were to dangle a juicy raw steak in front of the nose of a hungry Doberman, could I blame the dog for taking a piece of my hand off with the steak when he bites at it? He’s just doing what a hungry dog does. When your wife’s vagina tingles in the presence of a Man displaying evolutionarily developed Alpha cues, or you get a hardon viewing the body of a beautiful naked woman, this is the biological imperative at work. It’s not right or wrong, it just is.

Biology Trumps Conviction

This position usually grates against the grain for people invested in the ideology of personal responsibility. They think it means biological determinism, and therefor grants a free pass for all sins. However, what I’m implying is that the overriding influence is that of our biology; there would be no need for convictions if it weren’t. The mistake lies in thinking that convictions are the measure and biology is the limiter. It’s not that you can resist temptation, but rather that the temptation exists in the first place. There is no temptation without motivation. What most people fail to grasp here is that no conviction to alter behavior, mindset, belief, etc. would be necessary for an individual if the operative state (biology in this instance) weren’t conflicting with what we perceive are in our overall best interests. Biology trumps conviction because it is the operative state for us.

Biology determines what convictions we need to construct in order to optimize our existences. We then compound this with progressively more complex layerings of “conviction” upon our state in order to address inconsistencies in our natural desires. And then, conversely, our natural impulses will prompt us to rationalize loopholes in the articles of our convictions which will allow for our biological imperatives to be expressed.

Take sex out of the equation for a moment. As an am-circuit bodybuilder I have to stay cut for an upcoming competition. So I effectively starve myself for the prior 6 weeks of all the food that my body instinctively wants. Every fiber in my body wants to pound down a slice of pizza, but my conviction to look good and be at my optimal best for the competition overwhelms that primal urge. You’d say “well, see, conviction trumps biology”, but the operative state is what my biology is prompting me to do; eat starchy / sugary foods in order to prevent starvation and maximize my survival capacity by retaining energy reserves in case of emergency. My hunger is the operative state; without it that conviction to repress it isn’t extraordinary. Conviction is subordinate to biology, because right after the pose-down I’m at the pizzaria eating 3 slices of suprema.

Because my biology is the operative state, inevitably conviction will be unsustainable to prevent it from manifesting in some form. Some of these are socially acceptable, some of these are socially forgivable, some of these will earn you a life in prison. Sometimes that means the girl gets drunk, he was cute and she bangs the guy in spite of herself. Sometimes it means celibate priests become pedophiles as their only means of sexual expression, and sometimes it means a homosexual comes out of the closet. There are social consequences for all these expressions to varying degree, but again, the motivator is  the biological imperative.

The sexual marketplace as we know it today is the result of biological opportunism intermingling with societal buffers that are in a constant state of flux. Religious convictions and appeals to moralism are no insulation against hypergamy and the sexual marketplace. In fact, often, the more ardent the conviction, the more influential the biological imperative.

I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our biologically derived impulses and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.