Services Rendered

Buy a man a whore and you get him laid for an evening. Teach a man Game and you get him laid for a lifetime.

If you aren’t already familiar with the writings of Ferdinand Bardamu, owner / proprietor of In Mala Fide, I’d suggest you take a half an hour or so of your blog reading time to peruse his work. I pay homage to the Man primarily because he’s got an original insight, particular when it comes to observations of intergender dynamics. Today’s offering was the topic Why You Shouldn’t Trust Men Who Can’t Get Laid, and it’s really a brilliant observation that served as a recent springboard for another topic I’ve been asked to cover numerous times – the role of prostitution in intergender relations.

Ferd’s observation was that of what appeared to be a  dweeb relatively socially inept guy getting his hands buffed by a tag team, mother & daughter working a mall kiosk:

My friend pointed at the kiosk outside of FYE, where a dweeby youngish kid was having his hands washed in a sink.

The Israeli mother-daughter duo who ran the kiosk were well-known for the scam they were running — selling massively overpriced soaps and shampoos supposedly containing Dead Sea salt. They used a combination of hard sell techniques, sexual charm and guilt to reel in people and get them to leave with their wallets a little lighter. Watching the busty mom ring up items on the register while her college-aged daughter soaked the dweeb’s hands, visions of incestuous threesomes danced in my head.

It would have been easy to go, “Haha, what a loser, he just got swindled into spending $80 on bath soap.” But looking at the guy, I realized something else. He wasn’t inherently repulsive-looking — messy dark blonde hair, skinny, glasses — but his slumped posture and look of defeat suggested loserdom, of many lonely nights masturbating in the glow of a computer screen. This was probably the first time in eons that a woman touched him or talked to him outside of a professional context. How could he resist? He couldn’t. I felt sorry for him.

The kid at the mall was essentially a ‘John’ for a couple of mother & daughter prostitutes. What was he paying for? Physical contact from a woman. It’s an indictment of the point to which our society has progressed to that women can now sell themselves without actually having to deliver sexual services. So disconnected have men become that even women’s feigned interest and the vaguest passings of kino / touch can be monetized. Women have learned that men will pay to be nice to them.

Strippers know this very well. What mom and daughter were doing here was tapping into providing a need for attention starved men. There are other examples of this, however the operative point is understanding the elemental exchange in the transactions men agree to with women.

The blogger Advocatus Diaboli has written extensively on the subject and his preference for relying on escorts as a means to satisfying is sexual needs. He sums his position up succinctly in the commet thread of Ferd’s article:

That is precisely why using escorts and buying sex is so liberating. The only thing between you and hot ass is whether you can pay or not..

Paying For It

This is a very uncomfortable principle for Game-aware men to confront. I think what a lot of guy’s fail to grasp is AD’s reasoning behind his decision to use escorts. There will undoubtedly be the predictably ingrained responses about him being a core misogynist, he has psychological issues or he was so burned in the past by women that this is his misguided retribution for all of that. I’ve read his blog for over a year now and my opinion is that he’s really being more pragmatic than he is lashing out. The guy impresses me as someone who’s done a lot of critical thinking and came to the conclusion that the solution to his need for sex is just deductive reasoning.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for guy’s invested in the tenets of Game – because it essentially invalidates Game in a practical sense. I’d argue that it doesn’t invalidate Game from a theoretical perspective, but in practice, if you can buy the means to your sexual satisfaction what’s the point of practicing Game?

What I think hits so close to the mark for most guy’s calling him some hapless loser for paying for sex is that they CAN see his logic, but still choose to play by a set of rules they think is morally or socially correct. They still believe in a social contract between men and women that dictates that if they’re not directly paying a hooker for services rendered, they’re not technically paying for sex. It’s scary for them to see the cold facts in light of investing themselves in the hope that women will love and understand them in ways they think they can or should. They’ll recoil from the discomfort of confronting this by calling him maladjusted, but it’s due more to his exposing incongruent ideas with experiences.

Public Relations in the SMP

Needless to say, the feminine imperative will always default to demonizing prostitution. It has a vested interest in maintaining a supreme valuation of gender, both amongst women themselves and for the purposes of shaming men. The sad fact remains though; you will always pay for sex in some form. You can finance it in the long term (marriage), you can beat off to the advertising (porn), you can rent it for an evening (prostitutes) or you can pay for it by more conventional means, but rest assured, you will pay for it. All AD is really doing is distilling this idea down to core elements and looking for the best service for his money.

Once you’ve crossed that line, Game, in practice, becomes irrelevant (for purposes of becoming sexual with women at least). I’ve got to admit, I have far more respect for AD than I ever would for guys subscribing to the “true forced loneliness” idea, and when you think about it, isn’t removing oneself from the game the ultimate goal of the MGTOW denomination of the manosphere? AD has at least, if not more, sexual experience with a larger variety of women than most betas or even some self-evincing PUAs do based on numbers alone.

Furthermore, a guy can flex a sense of confidence around ‘unpaid’ women when he’s safe in the knowledge that he could have (and has had) sex with women who’d otherwise be higher than her own sexual market value. It’s much easier to display the devil may care attitude women find so attractive when you really have nothing to lose. So from a certain perspective, using escorts can be a form of plate spinning. Granted, you are paying for the experiences, but it may be worth the trade off when you consider the time and cost invested in maintaining a solitary ‘unpaid’ plate.

Cost and Benefits

Whenever anyone makes a cost to benefits comparison in regard to sex with women it’s inevitably going to draw up some very uncomfortable truths. On a very base, psychological level, guys want desperately to believe that there exists some woman with the capacity to love and relate to them unconditionally, in spite of an inherent, predictable and provable hypergamy. Prostitution and social interdependence with men has been what has historically kept that hypergamy in check. Post sexual revolution, Game has evolved as a countermeasure to hypergamy, but it’s hard to ignore the utility of a classic like prostitution.

Even for the MRA guys who are well versed in the nuts and bolts of gender dynamics from a social and biological standpoint, it’s too terrible a thought to think that all the results of their efforts really just hinge upon how well he’s able to satisfy her base hypergamic list of prerequisites instead of some more esoteric value they both share together as a couple. It devalues that humanity, in a way similar to confronting nihilism, or having a deeply held ego-invested belief empirically dispelled.

Naturally, women will reinforce the opposite perception. It’s in the feminine’s interest to shame and deride any man pointing out the Achilles heel in their equation. It’s equally important to shame and deride her sisters who’d make a living from practicing the same truth they need to repress. Gold Diggers, Attention Whores, they’re both threats of overtly exposing the mechanics behind the feminine imperative – which is essentially an exchange of provisioning for sexual service –  so they must be marginalized and shamed to keep the social convention operating as discreetly as possible.

Sexuality defines our relations with women. Sex is the deal breaker. Sex is the glue that holds relationships together.

Sex is the deal breaker, without it a woman becomes your mother or sister. How you choose to address that need for sex, what price you’re willing to tolerate is at the heart of what AD is getting at in his posts. Why would anyone pay for a substandard experience at an exorbitantly overblown price? $80 will legally get you a reasonably satisfying blow job in Nevada. $300 might get you laid with an HB7 for an hour.

For Better or Worse

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, what I’m driving at here isn’t an endorsement of opting for prostitution. It’s in the interests of understanding Game in its totality that I’m exploring this. I’ve never directly paid for sex – and I lived in the state of Nevada for 8 years. I have however paid for sex (and probably far more than the direct route) in the traditional sense by over-investing in women’s intimacy for minimal or mediocre returns. I should think that this is a common thread for most men whilst plugged into the social contracts the Matrix normalizes for us. Either we don’t know any better (lack of options) or we’ve been convinced that the experience is priceless (pedestal mentality).

One of the primary reasons I disagree with the MGTOW or TFL movements is this desire to remove oneself from interacting with women. Basically they don’t want to play by the rules of the female imperative, and while there’s merit in rejecting it, I fundamentally don’t believe that abdication is desirable or even achievable. Isolation is dangerous – building fortresses around yourself  only cuts you off from information and experiences that will help you become a better Man. And while I think it’s an unavoidable reality to pay women for sex in some context, I would still advocate for learning Game (theory and practice) to maximize a Man’s potential for getting the best return on his investments. The Game-aware man is a student of the sexual market place, and he knows that it’s essentially a commodities market.

The Slut Paradox

Every man wants a slut, he just wants her to be HIS slut.

ANDREW DICE CLAY: Hey, is that your chick there?

GUY IN THE AUDIENCE: Yeah!

DICE: Damn she’s pretty hot!

GUY: Yeah,..

DICE: You been together a while?

GUY: About 6 months.

DICE: Nice. She faithful to you?

GUY: Oh yeah.

DICE: She good in bed?

GUY: *nods head enthusiastically*

DICE: She suck a good dick?

GUY: (laughing) Ohhh yeah,..heheh,..

DICE: I suppose the next question would be, “How do you suppose she got that way?”

If you had an idealized Quality Woman girlfriend who was smoking hot, well adjusted mentally, loyal, would make a good mother, came from a good family, etc. etc., but would only ever begrudgingly have sex with you, in missionary position only, never consider giving you head, and only once a month (in 13 minute increments) because she’d been conditioned to believe that sex was immoral and she didn’t want to be thought of as a slut, would you marry her?

This is the Slut Paradox that vexes contemporary man; what number of prior lovers can a woman have that would be acceptable for you? Seven? Five? How many hobby horses should there be on the cock carousel before a woman is a slut? Don’t bother answering this, because for your average (beta) man, the number – even if you could get full disclosure – is irrelevant to him.

You see, thanks to the pre-existing social infrastructure that the feminine imperative has established, the average man can’t believe his luck when he finally does become sexual with a woman – whether it’s his first time or it’s the hundredth with his wife. So high is her pedestal that it’s literally a twist of fate. The gods have smiled upon him with the sexual favors of a woman, and his good fortune is made all the better when his lover already knows how to perfectly suck his cock just like the women in all the porn he’s watched since he was twelve. No questions are asked – you don’t qualify a gift from the gods, you just accept it.

The Slut Paradox is a very complex issue because it wraps up so much social, emotional and biological importance and details. I’m using the ‘average’ man here as a starting point because he’s the social majority; he’s the benchmark for how both genders approach the paradox, because it’s his discretion to give a woman’s sexual past any kind of gravity. For as much as women will bleat on about “slut status” and double standards, it really all comes down to how the average – in this case beta – male contends with (or doesn’t) a woman’s sexual past. As enlightened Game-aware Men we’re largely exceptions to this rule, or at least blamefully aware of the mechanics of it.

In the initial attraction and arousal stages of a sexual pairing, the average guy doesn’t care about a woman’s prior sex life. It’s only after that pairing becomes solidified that it becomes a consideration.

Unless a woman is a porn actress, I don’t think it’s the number of guys that bothers Men; and I don’t even think it’s the details of how many dicks she’s had. What’s bugs men is that they want to possess her. Men want her genuine desire, but know other guys have had it already and moved on – and they’re cool with it, and she’s cool with it, but he’s not because he wants to own her. He wants to know that he’s getting the best of what she has to offer sexually and emotionally. He wants to know that HE’S the guy who brings out the slut in her that no other guy has experienced fully.

This is the root of the paradox issue. The average guy is playing by the feminine imperative’s stated rule set. He wants monogamy, he had to work at it. He had to negotiate with her for what she willingly, genuinely, desired to do with 5 other guys (assuming she’s honest). And on some level, he knows her desire for him is compromised because he had to plead his case with her so she’d warm up to him. Only now that he’s gotten what he’s idealized for so long he realizes other’s have had it before him without anything that comes even close what he invested to get.

Alpha Widows

Now before I get run up the flagpole here, I’m completely aware of the studies indicating a woman’s capacity to bond monogamously is inversely proportionate to the number of sexual partners she’s experienced prior to monogamy. I wont argue the merit of that concept, but I also don’t think that it fully encompasses the dynamic. I say this because, as Katy Perry so adequately illustrated recently, even ONE prior lover (or even unrequited obsession) can be Alpha enough to upset that bonded monogamous balance. These are the Alpha Widows – women so significantly impacted by a former Alpha (or perceptually so) lover that she’s left with an emotional imprint that even the most dutiful, loving beta-provider can never compete with. A woman doesn’t have to have been an archetypal slut in order to have difficulty in pair bonded monogamy.

So again I’ll ask, how many is too many? For an Alpha Widow, one’s enough. It’s my contention that the Slut Paradox isn’t a numbers game so much as it’s an Alpha impact game. What if your new partner has only banged a mere 2 men before you, but engaged in intense sexual experiences she feels self-conscious about doing with you? Is she a slut?

As a final thought, I should add that women have long been aware of the utility that the Slut Paradox represents in maintaining primacy for their sexual strategy. I elaborated on this in the The Tool of ASD,

A League of Your Own

“Rollo, I’m newly Game-aware, red pill guy and I’ve been meeting girls with more and more success since my conversion, but I can’t help the feeling that the really hot girls I want to get with a so out of my league. 

Any suggestions?”

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.

This is really the definition of hypergamy, and on an individual level, I believe only the most plugged in of men don’t realize this to some degree of consciousness. However, what I think escapes a lot of men is the complex nature of hypergamy on a social scale. For hypergamy to sustain it’s dominant position as the default sexual strategy for our society, it’s necessary for the feminine imperative to maintain existing, foster new, and normalize complex social conventions that serve it. The scope of these conventions range from the individualized psychological conditioning early in life to the grand scale of social engineering (e.g. Feminism, Religion, Government, etc.)

One of these social conventions that operates in the spectrum of the personal to the societal is the idea of ‘leagues’. The fundamental idea that Social Matching Theory details is that “All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themselves.” In a vacuum, this is the germ of the idea behind the ‘leagues’. The social convention of ‘leagues’ mentality is where ‘all things are not equal’ and used to support the feminine imperative, while conveniently still supporting the principle of social matching theory.

The latent function of ‘leagues’ is to encourage men to filter themselves out for women’s intimate approval.

As social conditions progress and become more complex, so too do men’s ability to mimic the personal attributes of providership and security. In other words, lesser men become intelligent enough to circumvent women’s existing sexual filters and thus thwart their sexual strategy. These ever increasing complexities made it hard to identify optimally suitable men from the pretenders, and women, being the primary sexual selector, needed various social constructs to sort the wheat from the chaff. With each subsequent generation they couldn’t be expected to do all of this detective work on their own so the feminine imperative enlisted the aid of the men themselves and created self-perpetuated, self-internalized social doctrines for men to comply with in order to exist in a feminine defined society.

The concept of leagues is just one of these doctrines. Your self-doubt about your worthiness of a woman’s intimacy stems from a preconditioned idea that ‘you’re out of her league’. The booster club optimist idea that “if you think you can’t, you’re right” is true, and boundless enthusiasm may overcome some obstacles, but to address the source of the disease it’s more important to ask yourself why you’ve been taught to think you can’t. A lot of approach anxiety comes from your own self-impression – Am I smooth, hot, affluent, funny, confident, interesting, decisive, well-dressed enough to earn an HB 9’s attention? How about an HB 6? Our great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.

I’m not debating the legitimacy of the evaluative standards of the sexual market place – it’s a harsh, often cruel reality – what I’m really trying to do is open your eyes as to why you believe you’re only meritorious of an HB 7. Looks count for a lot, as does Game, affluence, personality, talent, etc. but is your self-estimation accurate, or are you a voluntary participant in your own self-devaluation in the SMP courtesy of the leagues mentality the feminine imperative would have you believe?

The Economy of the League

As I stated above the purpose of fomenting a stratified League mentality in men serves to autonomously filter the lesser from the greater men for women to chose from, however, it also functions to increase the valuation of the feminine as a commodity. Like any great economic entity, the feminine imperative lives and dies by its ability to inflate its value in the marketplace. Essentially the feminine imperative is a marketeer. One of the sad ironies of this, and the last, century is that the feminine imperative has attempted to base women’s SMP valuation on a collective importance to the detriment of the individual woman’s SMV. For men this is inverted; a man’s sexual valuation is primarily individualized, while men as a collective gender are devaluated in the SMP.

What I mean by this is that, as a collective entity women’s sexuality cannot afford to be perceived as anything less than the more valued prize. If all vaginas are considered the gold standard then men’s sexual default value will always be lower. By this definition men, on whole, are out of women’s league.

For further consideration lets assume that average men, most being varying degrees of beta, are blessed with the ‘miraculous gift’ of an average woman’s sexual attentions. The power dynamic is already pre-established to defer to a feminine frame, so it’s small wonder that men would be prone to ONEitis even with an objectively average woman. This is the intent of the League schema – to unobjectively predispose men to commitment with women who under objective condition couldn’t enjoy the same selectivity. Roissy once postulated that for a healthy relationship to exist the Man must be recognized by the woman to be 1-2 points above her own SMV. This is a pretty tall order considering the feminine imperative’s emphasis on women’s sexuality being the more valued as default. And this is  to say nothing of contemporary women’s overinflated self-evaluations due to the rise of social media.

Gaming the League

All of the above isn’t to say that there isn’t a kernel of truth to the notion of leagues; it’s just not the “truth” men have been led to believe. For as much as the feminine imperative would have men subscribe to Leagues, it equally seeks to exempt women from the same League hierarchy by evaluating women as a whole. Needless to say men have their own rating systems – most popularly the ubiquitously physical HB 10 scale. I should add that it’s a foregone conclusion that any rating system men would establish for women in the feminine reality would necessarily need to be ridiculed, shamed and demonized, but you knew that already.

Irrational self-confidence is a good start to circumventing and unlearning the concept of Leagues; unlearning this conditioning being the operative goal. The Game-aware Man can actually use the concept of Leagues to his advantage with enough guile. When you approach a woman without regard to a League mentality or even a Zen-like obliviousness to it, you send the message that there’s more to you than a feminine reality can control. It’s exactly this disregard for the influence of the feminine imperative that makes the Alpha attractive; he’s unaware of, or indifferent to the rules his conditioning should’ve taught him earlier. Just in the attempt of Gaming a woman obviously “out of your league” you flip the feminine script by planting a seed of doubt (and prompting imagination) about your perceived value. Doubt is a very powerful tool, in fact the very concept of Leagues is founded upon men’s self-doubt. Turn that tool to your advantage by disregarding women’s social convention of Leagues.

Five Minutes of Alpha

Back in September of 2010 the inimitable Roissy (aka Heartiste) graced the manosphere with an insightful post about Katy Perry and an intriguing meltdown she had whilst spotting an old high school crush she had in the audience at one of her shows. My how time changes the landscape of our realities in so few years.

As is Roissy’s gift for prophecy, he accurately summed up the whole affair thusly:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Flash forward to January of 2012 and we find our previously boastful, pre-marriage Katy Perry in divorce proceedings with a situationally famous Russel Brand. But,…wait you say, isn’t this the same Katy Hudson Perry who so publicly shamed her first Alpha love Shane Lopes?

Perry dedicated her next song, a kiss-off anthem from her double-platinum 2008 disc “One of the Boys,” to her former crush and even tweaked a lyric in the middle of the song for the occasion, singing, “I can’t believe I fell in love with Shane Lopes.”

At the end of the tune, she looked directly at Lopes, held up her hand — which prominently displays her engagement ring [ed. Russel’s dowery investment] — and said, “That’s cool, I got mine,” and mockingly blew him a kiss.

Yeah, that same one. Yet the plot still thickens with the billboard chart topping hit/video released by Hudson Perry aptly entitled “The ONE that got away” (*apologies for subjecting my readership to this audio mayonaise), wherein we find a visibly aged Katy retrospectively pining away for her post high school Alpha artist lover of a bygone decade in the luxurious home of whom we presume is her aging beta providership for the duration of her soon to be ending life.

For all the internal conflicts and psychology that caffeinates the rationalization hamster in women, I’ll admit that it occasionally makes for some convincing artistic statements. I was almost feeling sorry for the young Katy, that is until her past lover comically swerves to avoid a Laurel Canyon rockslide and dives off a cliff in his 70’s Mustang. The premise that the guy plummets to his death then absolves our heroine of the liability of her next most significant life choice; settling for the unexciting beta provider responsible for what we presume is the duration of her lavish, yet empty, life. He’s not the One that got away due to any reason she implicitly enacted, he’s the one who was blamelessly taken from her by fate. Tragic reality replaced by fairytale .

Poor, poor Katy. Her Alpha love is forever denied to her. I wonder how Russel Brand feels after watching this? Like maybe a (situationally) Alpha  high school QB with little more than a GED can still upstage a Hollywood actor if his impact is significant enough on a woman? I can’t help but imagine that Katy is oblivious to the irony of all this. That’s the real tragedy; that women would be  convinced of this soul-mate pornography, while still subject to the War Brides dynamic. Still more ironic is Katy Perry’s story as a parallel to contemporary western women’s. Party and dance, settle in with the provider before the inevitable Wall impact and pine for the One that got away.

The Rush

For today’s post we’re going to do a little experiment. Before you press the play button, take a deep breath, and while it is work-safe, you may want to plug your headphones in or be in someplace where you can be uninterrupted for 10 minutes. Be forewarned that any women within casual listening distance will likely be provoked to indefensible, yet hysterical defense of the sisterhood after eavesdropping. Pay attention to your heart rate and do quick self assessment of your mood. As you listen to this, be aware of the chemical reaction percolating in your bloodstream as the inevitable end comes. Then be aware of how you physically feel afterwards. Ok, press play.

 

All done? How was that for you? Heart rate up?

 

I must admit, I got an adrenaline rush out of that. Kind of like watching a car wreck in slow motion. However, I find that kind of ironic since any number of daytime shows (i.e. Tyra Banks, et. al.) have been basically doing the same shit for decades now. A lot of guys acknowledge the power of the chemical rush, but it’s only episodes like this that make it real for them. I’m sure most of the guys hearing this felt it; the high of adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, etc., this is the chemical cocktail that women come to crave. I’ve read the chemical profile is very similar to that of heroin. Indignation triggers it for women in the same way sex and death trigger it for Men.

The main reason I wanted to pick this apart is because there’s a lot of elements to the whole incident. There’s so much at play in this, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s interesting to read the responses to gauge what impacts people first. Women naturally lean toward the guy being classless for opting to hash this out in a very public forum, yet it feel fully justified for doing it themselves for decades. White Knights will come out of the woodwork to defend the indefensible in spite of the circumstance responding viscerally to a woman weeping. How did you feel when you heard the girl cry? We can pour through the reasons why the guy was a chump to have been living with her for as long as he did, but think of this more from the perspective of the physical effect it has upon the listeners.

Funny how even when a woman confesses to her infidelity we’ll look for ANY angle available to still cast her in the victim’s role. We’ll readily analyze the guy’s history, we’ll euphemize her misconduct as a “mistake” (or she’ll do it for us), and we’ll speculate “where her heart is really at.”

 

“but, Rollo, dumping the hor in private would have achieved the same end.”


I’m not so sure about that. I’ll be the first to advocate against revenge, but for pragmatic reasons (wasted effort), not so guys can cling to some self-righteous high ground. If the guy is resolved to break it off with her, and he has the opportunity to rub it in (on valentines day, caught red handed, thinking a proposal is due, etc.), but instead holds back and discreetly pulls up stakes, does it have the same impact? Would she genuinely appreciate the gesture? How would she ever know that he could’ve resorted to publicly humiliating her yet chose not to?

The guy opting for the “high-road” would be the only one capable of appreciating what he could’ve done if he hadn’t, and even his expressing his option to do so makes him sound vain and conceited. By all rights this woman was under the impression that he was going to propose to her on-air and was utterly crushed instead. How does a woman spared from this ever make that kind of acknowledgement?

The answer is she doesn’t. I’m not saying he should’ve done it, but in light of the life-altering gravity of entering into as binding a commitment as marriage (a topic of much discussion in the manosphere), I can understand why he’d consider it. We can call him a chump for living with the woman for 5 years, but he’s a chump who’d made the decision to commit and had the ring to prove his intent. She on the other hand, knew he’d decided to enter into this commitment, and not only betrayed that, but KNOWINGLY, and happily, was ready to let him propose in spite of herself.

 

“Is justice somehow rendered as “less than justice” when it is administered by your OWN HAND?”

 

Therein lies the rub. There will always exist an element of bias (revenge) whenever one enacts what they perceive as justice. Women are almost universally absolved of this. Carrie Underwood can write a chart topping song about vandalizing the truck of a cheating lover that women (and men) will gleefully memorize the lyrics and sing along with, but let a man publicly humiliate a caught-in-the-act, cheating lover and “he’s less of a man” and runs the risk of having his personal life ruined as a result.

As far as this guy breaking Iron Rule #4; yes, the guy’s a fool for having done so for 3 years, and I’d go so far as to say an even bigger fool for being monogamous with a solitary woman for 5 years during his prime (I assume Chris was in his 20’s). My point was to illustrate his degree of commitment (he bought a ring) not to justify his having lived with her as long as he did. Contrast this incident with Tiger Woods situation: a lot has been made about commitment being tantamount to male virtue, so my emphasis was his readiness to commit and the gravity it bears on a man’s life.

There was another aspect that I hadn’t considered in this. I don’t entirely believe that reversing the roles to understand a contrast would be applicable in this case. Generally women don’t ask men to marry them. I understand it happens, but never to the degree that a man must prepare to make a proposal of marriage. Chris had resolved in his mind to marry the girl, and acted on this resolve by buying a ring and planning to propose on V-Day. Men are the True Romantics; Women simply do not have a parallel experience for this.

I understand this is a bit of a stretch, but for a moment lets assume Chris knew exactly the future liabilities of his commitment – all of those high-road, morally binding liabilities Tiger reneged on in his marriage – should his response to her deception be any less measured than what he did when you think of what he’d almost committed to?

Think of the impact his commitment to her would’ve entailed; think of how it would effect their families, his career and / or educational opportunities, their future children and their personal decisions, his finances, his psychological well being, their quality of life, and the list goes on, but essentially he was betting his future life on this girl. The guy was a hair’s breadth from making that commitment when he discovered the deception. I think she got off rather lightly.

 

*I’ve got to give props to the guys over at the BodyBuilding.com forums for rediscovering this link for me. I had originally used this audio in a SoSuave forum post back in February of 2010 and lost the audio link. Thanks guys.

Plate Theory V: Lady’s Game

I had a good amount of response on last Friday’s Plate Theory post asking for a more complete idea of women being natural Plate Theorists, so I thought I’d elaborate on this.

Female Plate Theory

For as often as I’ve mentioned women being natural plate theorists, I don’t think I’ve ever gone into detail about it. I think it’s pretty well established that I completely disagree with idea that women will only fuck one guy at a time. I could outline several women I know from experience in this, but really, observing behavior will bear this out fairly predictably. I will however agree that they are predisposed to, and are socially encouraged to, seek monogamy, but as in all things female the talk rarely matches the behavior. Sexuality is a woman’s first, best agency and even the homeliest woman know this – even when they’re just complaining about other women using it.

The principle that a woman’s first priority is to seek out security is true, and we’d be wise to bear this in mind when evaluating motives for behavior, but their methodology is what’s in question here. There is an understandable confusion for guys in this respect. On one hand women present a constant facade that the fear of being perceived as a slut (i.e. concurrently fucking more than one guy at a time) is primary to their self-respect and respectability. However, this has to be tempered with the desire to experience a variety of men in order to ensure the security/provisioning from the best among them. So in order to facilitate this women must practice a kind of calculated hypocrisy that is socially reinforced by the gender as a whole as well as some men (usually those so optionless as to excuse the behavior in order to get to her sexuality, or guys so conditioned that they overlook it as normal).

It is socially acceptable for a woman to blatantly spin plates.

Does this sound outrageous? While a woman who makes her sexual practices a bit too overt runs the risk of being perceived as a slut (which is dubious in this age as it is), most relatively attractive women covertly have a constant bullpen of starters ready to go to bat at any one time – these are also known as ‘Orbiters’. These are the attention providers, the “maybe” guys. And it makes little difference in terms of available options which she chooses at any given time, the very fact that she has five or six of them pursuing her is enough to boost her sense of self-worth, her social status within her same-gender peers, and give her the confidence to drop any one of her plates at a moments notice for any reason knowing that 2 or 3 more guys (or 20 more on facebook) stand ready to take his place, no questions asked and prepared rationalizations at the ready.

In addition, this practice is socially reinforced by women doing the same thing and the social conventions constructed to excuse the behavior. It’s the unspoken rule of a woman’s prerogative; she can always change her mind. This is a powerful tool for women –  in any situation, if a woman doesn’t choose to be sexual it is necessarily forced (or obligated), even when it’s after the fact. Either the “Jerk” forced her, physically or emotionally, or she had thought she wanted to, but later reconsidered – it makes little difference. In all social situations the default is to side with the feminine, the “weaker sex” – women, from sympathy or empathy, and men, from a desire to eventually become intimate with them. Dalrock expertly describes this convention in his “Don’t hit me, I’m a girl” post.

In either instance, the feminine prerogative is socially reinforced. That’s important to understand because even by my focusing on it here as a male, my motives for doing so become suspect. That’s how embedded this dynamic is – to question it risks ostracization. However, I also understand that for the greater part of women, this plate spinning dynamic isn’t a conscious effort on their part. In fact I’d suggest that it’s so thoroughly recognized that women default to it autonomously. Also, this is a good example of the first principle of power – when you have power, always feign powerlessness.

Free Reign

So, with a firm understanding that their behaviors will for the most part be excused, they are free to practice the feminine form of plate theory unhindered by social reprisal. The feminine plate spinning involves much more than sex though. Remember that attention is the coin of the realm in female society. The capacity to command attention determines self-esteem, peer status, sexual selectivity, and a host of other factors in a woman’s life, so spinning plates becomes more than just a “which guy am I gonna bang tonight” prospect. This dynamic and these factors are what makes women natural plate spinners. Even when a woman has no intention of ever becoming sexual with a “maybe” guy, his attention still has some value to her. It appeals to the long term prospective for security that’s a continuous subroutine running in her hindbrain. This is the rudimentary psychology behind hypergamy.

Now, combine all of this with women’s native language – covert communication – and it’s natural for a man to assume that a woman will only ever become sexual with one guy at a time. This serves the latent purpose of keeping him in a kind of stasis. If he assumes women will only be sexual under the precondition of commitment she is free to spin plates (essentially weighing options) as she pleases and sample at will what she sees as in her hypergamic best interest at the time. If the carrot looks good enough the guy will patiently pull the cart until such time as another, better carrot comes along. Either way he’s in that stasis. If a guy were to see her social and psychological machinations for what they are, he’d never pull the cart – so it serves women best that men think commitment should always be required for intimacy, even in the face of her behavior directly contradicting this.

Plate Wars

Lastly, this social dynamic serves as a very effective weapon for women against each other. As I stated in the last Plate Theory post, competition anxiety between women is something men can exploit for their own plate spinning, but the reason it is useful is because women so readily use it against each other. For a woman to say another is a “slut” translates into an overt betrayal of this unspoken social contrivance. She essentially is saying, “the rules are that women require commitment for sex, but here’s one who’ll never be worthy of any guy’s commitment because she wont play by the rules you suckers think she will.”

She is tacitly disqualified for a man’s commitment and is, at least in the accusing woman’s mind, a reduced threat in this feminine competition. She becomes exposed in the same game they’re all playing and in being so loses attention and therefore status and personal esteem. It seems petty to guys, but it’s really intra-gender warfare. Think of how many times an exceptionally attractive woman, that is completely anonymous to a group of women you happen to be with, berate her based on appearance alone. “She’s must be a tramp if she dressed like that.” These are the same women who’ll berate a man for basing his estimation of a woman on her outer appearance. This is feminine competition anxiety. Ask a woman to name the most attractive female actress they can think of. Odds are it will be a woman (who as a guy you’d never think of) who presents the least threat of this anxiety.

Gentlemen, as I’m fond of saying, women will fuck. They may not fuck you, they may not fuck me, but they will fuck someone. The girl who bangs the hot guy at the foam party in Cancun on Spring Break within 5 minutes of meeting him is the same girl who want’s you to believe that they’ll only fuck one guy at a time and then after commitment. All women are sexual, you just need to be the right guy at the right time for the job.

Plate Theory IV: Goal-State Monogamy

Whenever a guy uninitiated to the concept of spinning plates reads the theory for the first time his first response is usually rejection of it because it conflicts with their monogamy-as-goal mindset. Understand, this is always going to be a tough stretch for any AFC of course, but also the ‘natural’ guy who doesn’t have much trouble attracting women. Monogamy-as-a-goal is a feminine imperative social contrivance, but it also has roots in our natural desire for security, so it makes anything even remotely like plate spinning counterintuitive. The feminine imperative pounds into men’s collective consciousnesses over the course of a lifetime that monogamy will cure loneliness, make them responsible, provide them with a constant supply of sex, and a host of other things that assures them it’s “the right thing to do” and in their own best interest. This then leads the more option-less individuals to develop and practice AFC methods and rationales in accordance with what they believe (and have been told by) women is required of them in order to achieve their monogamous intimacy.

So understandably when the principle of being non-exclusive is presented to them in a rational way (in stead of a ridiculed way as it’s normally passed off as) it conflicts with this perceived path to happiness in monogamy. The very idea that any man would be better off with more options in this arena of life, or could feasibly and logistically pull it off seems foreign. As a counter to this he makes up rationales as to why it wont work or wont work for him.

Logistics

“I can’t spin plates because I have too little time, I can’t manage more than one without the other finding out, etc.”

If you are indeed spinning plates in a healthy, upfront, non-exclusive way this should never be an issue. There are Game-aware Men with less time than most who manage 4-5 different girls in a week without having them consume all their leisure and business time. I don’t suggest that you go this route per se, because for the better part PUAs rely on a dishonesty in non-exclusivity. However, the reason they are capable of this is because they’ve perfected plate spinning effectively enough to have the plates spin themselves.

Most uninitiated AFCs reason that they MUST, at all costs, apply a constant effort to each and every girl they encounter at risk of losing a “good one.” Besides this being indicative of ‘soul-mate thinking’, what they fear is losing a plate because they are unaccustomed to having the leisure to do so. This is evidence of a scarcity mentality that is a result of their monogamy-as-goal preconditioning. Plate Theory necessitates an attitude of fearlessness – not carelessness, fearlessness. When you’re practicing Plate Theory your plates should call you. You are the PRIZE and the Prince who’s time is valuable and sought after. You should be the object of women’s pursuit. That said, you still have to make an effort to see them and keep the attention you do apply to them valuable, but this must be done with the attitude that if one plate falls you’re confident in your other options or your ability to generate new options.

Personality Type

“I’m just not like that. I don’t want to be considered a playah. I could never do that to a woman. How can anyone be like that?”

This rationale is a common one and not limited just to AFCs. There are plenty of otherwise confident, positively masculine men who’d still think they owe it to women to allow them to set the frame of their relationships without any fear of competition anxiety. Players are men who’re dishonest – they are not spinning plates because they are isolating each plate independent of the other, and this goes back to logistics. Of course you can’t find time for anything else if all you do is try to coordinate each individual story with each plate for fear that they discover each other. The plate spinning Man has no need for this, because he NEVER IMPLIES EXCLUSIVITY TO ANY PLATE. Either they accept this or they’re not a plate to consider. Done in a frank, honest, yet indirect above-table way you will not be a ‘Player’ and you will establish yourself as Man who’s attention is worth competing for.

Women would rather share a successful man than be saddled with a faithful loser. This perfectly sums up Plate Theory vs. Monogamy-as-Goal mindsets. Men in general gravely underestimate the power of female competition anxiety and how useful it really is. As I’ve said before, women are natural plate theorists – they are accustomed from a very early age to mitigate multiple sex-interests, they simply learn how to balance their indirect communications with that anxiety in their own plate spinning. Anxiety in women is good for men. Even when they make no effort to use it or would never consider it if they knew it’s usefulness it is ALWAYS present. Everything a woman does on a daily basis is colored by competition anxiety. Make up, clothing, shoes (God, the SHOES!), indirect communications with men and women, social contrivances, comparing and evaluating dates and possible suitors, EVERYTHING is bourn from this competitive desire to achieve security with the best possible guy and make damn sure the girl next door doesn’t get him first. This anxiety is analogous to men’s consummate fear of rejection and all of the myriad rationales he’ll create and the Buffers he’ll devise to avoid it.

Bear in mind that monogamy is a dictate of the feminine imperative. It is the social contract that the feminine ultimately needs in order to quell a constant desire for security in a very chaotic world. When you are predisposed to monogamy-as-goal thinking, or trying to break yourself of this, understand that this is a tool of the feminine imperative. That’s not to discount the overall merits of monogamy, but it is to make you aware of how it’s acculturated into men as a responsibility to providing monogamy. Men who find themselves in a state of internal conflict about abandoning monogamy-as-goal are really confronting a fundamental shift in their prior conditioning.

Point, Counterpoint

For women it’s the story of Me.

As I’ve mentioned in past essays, the communicative methods characteristic of each gender primarily stem from differences in both brain function and acculturation. Women tend to rely on emotive and experiential instincts to develop an opinion or belief; men tend to rely on deductive reasoning from generalized facts to specific premises to come to an opinion.

This then is reflected in either gender’s preferred method of communication – women in the nuanced and covert, men in the blunt and overt. Using this as a premise, I’m of the opinion that the vast majority of failings to come to what should be an easy, logical consensus among both genders is frustrated by each gender’s interpretation of a problem or a social issue.

From a male perspective there is an assumption that a well reasoned, well cited establishment of point will be understood and respected as fact for a general purpose of resolving a debate. Statistics, analysis, correlation of fact and connecting related ideas and information should all serve to make a cogent argument. This isn’t to say that men wont use personal experience to illustrate a point, but the purpose in doing so is rooted in making his example an easy to understand version of his reasoned perspective. For the greater part, men’s reasonings are derived from extrinsic sources, while using intrinsic sources to embellish or illustrate a specific premise.

Women on the other hand almost exclusively rely upon personal experience and anecdotal evidence to form a premise; only using extrinsic information to support their personal interpretations when the source agrees with that premise. The innate solipsism of women promotes a self-centric primary position as the beginning of forming a premise and then progresses to extrinsic sources for ancillary support.

Case in point: Careers and Marriage. This linked article is from a 2006 opinion piece published by Forbes Magazine. Bear in mind that this is roughly six years ago; well before the current ‘Man Up’ frenzy that the Hymowitz and Bollick’s articles inspired. As you read, notice the argumentative positions each author begins with. Michael Noer’s piece begins with a concise statement of premise and then followed by reasoned extrinsic data:

While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children. And if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Elizabeth Corcoran begins her counter opinion from her own personal perspective:

OK, call me a cougar. I’ve been working since the day I graduated from college 20-odd years ago. I have two grade-school-aged children. Work definitely takes up more than 35 hours a week for me. Thankfully, I do seem to make more than $30,000. All of which, according to Michael, should make me a wretched wife.

In spite of those dangerous statistics, my husband and I are about to celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. You’ll see us snuggling at a mountain-winery concert this month, enjoying the occasion. I don’t think I’m all that unusual–so it seemed like a good time to test Michael’s grim assertions.

Peppy, sassy, and containing all the elements of indignation that women crave to hold their interest while wrapped in a personalization that puts women (her deliberate target readership), into an associative role. Essentially she’s inviting women to live vicariously through her exceptional experience to prove a counterpoint.

Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse’s parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married–it’s just that they are less likely to be so than nonworking women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub

Here Michael reasons from statistical evidence and even makes a slight point of contrition to allow for exception to those statistics. Elizabeth then opts to redirect the debate:

The experts cited in his story think that professional women are more likely to get divorced, to cheat and to be grumpy about either having kids or not having them. But rather than rush to blame the woman, let’s not overlook the other key variable: What is the guy doing?

Note to guys: Start by going to the gym. Then try some new music. Or a book. Or a movie. Keep connected to the rest of the world. You’ll win–and so will your marriage.

It’s easy to see this as the shaming tactic it is, but it’s also an attempt to reframe the debate by focusing on what women always return to as preeminent in any debate – satisfying the feminine imperative. If Michael’s pont is in fact valid then the fault lies with men, not women. And how does a woman establish this premise? By casting herself and feminine primacy as the operative goal.

Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases–if, for example, both spouses have careers–the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.

Again, Michael provides expert witness to fortify his premise. Elizabeth continues with the story of Me:

For us, the list starts with taxes, vacation planning and investment management. My husband likes that stuff, and it leaves me yawning. Bless him for doing it. Give me the wireless Internet system, the garden or just about any routine home repairs, and I’m suddenly the savant. Tear us apart, and we’d both be pitiful idiots trying to learn unfamiliar routines.

Michael is right that longer work hours force two-career couples to try harder to clear out blocks of family time. When we do, though, we get to enjoy a lot more. We understand each other’s career jokes and frustrations. We’re better sounding boards on what to do next. And at dinner parties, we actually like to be seated at the same table.

Feel free to pick through the entire article, but you get the illustration here. Such as it is, I haven’t drawn attention to this to put women’s argumentative approach or opinion formation into a bad light. Rather I’ve done so to give Men a better perspective of what to expect when a difference of opinion arises. There is in fact some merit to calculating personal feelings and experiences into both sides of a debate. A feminine approach may help to buffer a man’s more cold understanding of fact, while a masculine rationalism serves to buffer women’s emotionalist perspective.

The problem with appreciating both of these approaches is that in the present feminine-centric environment we find ourselves in, feminine primacy takes precedent. A woman’s feelings and interpretations are the de facto correct ones, and statistical analysis or a more rational approach is an impediment to this. You’ll see this played out in any forum or blog comment thread in which there is disagreement between genders. For Men their position comes about by objective consensus and aggregate data; for women it’s the story of Me.