Perfecting the Fantasy

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

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

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

Creating the Fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stripper Effect

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

Gut Check

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell

Back in 2003 I lived in Reno, Nevada. I can remember one distinct morning I was driving from the gym into work and I was waiting at a stop light. It was around 8am and as I slowed and stopped at the intersection, along drives my wife in her car coming from the cross traffic. I knew it was her, I saw her in the driver’s seat and I knew the car (because I had bought it). I have to ashamedly admit that the first thing that crossed my mind was that she was running around on me. Instant jealousy, instant suspicion. I felt that all too familiar rush of chemicals flood my bloodstream as I wondered just what the hell she was doing at that time of the morning in that particular part of the town. I later realized that she had chosen that particular route to avoid an accident that was snarling traffic on the freeway to get to an early doctor’s appointment, but I can’t deny that my first impulse (however fleeting) was one of jealousy, suspicion or potential betrayal. My wife of (then) 7 years, who’d never in that time gave me pause to question her fidelity triggered, for about 10 minutes, a jealousy-suspicion – the effects of which we’re quantifiable in that adrenaline-endorphin rush leading to irrational imaginations.

Although I like to pride myself on pragmatism and rationality, I wont deny that my first impulse was suspicion. I think this is a fascinating aspect of our psycho-evolutionary development as a species so I did a bit of research. It was easy to find study after study of this jealousy effect not only in humans, but primates and most advanced mammals – hell, even some birds get jealous! All of this is triggered by certain environmental prompts according to situation, species, conditions, etc. A very complex cocktail of hormones is released into our bloodstreams when such conditions are met, leading exactly to the feelings and irrationality I experienced that morning. Jealousy is a very well studied dynamic and one that has latent survialism functions. Obviously one of our biological imperatives in this life time is ensuring the fidelity in the choice of our partners with whom we’ve decided to share parental investment (or potentially will share it with). So imperative is this that our own biologies have evolved to react to even the suspicion of infidelity. This is the root of these very volatile emotions.

Sherlock Holmes

One of the more common question I’ve been asked for advice on is whether a guy is justified in his “snooping” or spying on a lover. It’s always an interesting dynamic because it graphically illustrates the conflict between a man’s base, evolutionarily hardwired imperative to confirm fidelity in his (potential) parental investment mate and a socio-psychological countermeasure on the part of feminization and it’s primary imperative of hypergamy. That’s a lot of $10 words so let me distill it a bit more. Men are presented with an internal conflict that pits their instinct for suspicion against a social convention that accuses him of “trust issues”. As with most feminine social conventions, shame is the operative here, but he loses respect whether his suspicions are confirmed or not. If a man ‘spies’ and/or pieces together inconsistencies that confirm his suspicions, he still spied and is therefor guilty of “not respecting her privacy”. Needless to say a woman is socially reinforced for trusting her ‘feminine intuition’ if her suspicions are confirmed, but men cannot win in the game of relationship espionage.

To further complicate matters, a man must also struggle with his rational nature in the context of this feminized frame. Logic and rationality tells him that maybe his suspicions ARE unfounded and that he does in fact have a problem with trusting. It’s very easy to find reasons why your suspicions are really baseless, but that reasoning still grates against what your gut instinct is telling you.

The irony of it is that there’s really not much purpose in spying if you’re properly spinning plates as you should. Most of the men I’ve counseled on their suspicions all had one thing in common, they were over-invested in their relationship to the point that they had no other viable options. They HAD to spy, but in all their stories each of them were really only confirming things that they already knew. They were willfully ignoring the message in the Medium because their hindbrains knew that they had no other viable options to fall back on. They instinctually understood the inconsistencies in their women’s behaviors, mannerisms, nuances, etc., they knew and confirmed what had changed, but explained them away for fear of losing her. Men (alphas) with options don’t have ‘trust issues’ simply because when one of his plates has cause to consider putting him off for another lover he has 2 or 3 more women on his roster ready to fill her place.

Gut Check

Whenever you feel something isn’t quite right in your gut, what this is is your subconscious awareness alerting you to inconsistencies going on around you. We tend to ignore these signs in the thinking that our rational mind ‘knows better’ and things really aren’t what they seem. It’s not as bad as you’re imagining, and you can even feel shame or guilt with yourself for acknowledging that lack of trust. However, it’s just this internal rationalization that keeps us blind to the obvious that our subconscious is trying to warn us about. Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. So when that predictable behavior changes even marginally, our instinctual perceptions fire off all kinds of warnings. Some of which can actually effect us physically.

It’s at this point most guys make the mistake of acting on the “good communication solves everything” feminized meme and go the full disclosure truth route, which only really leads to more rationalizations and repression of what’s really going on. What they don’t realize is that the MEDIUM is the message; her behavior, her nuances, the incongruencies in her words and demeanor (and how your gut perceives them) is the real message. There is an irregularity in her behavior that your subconscious is alerting you to which your consciousness either cannot or will not recognize.

With so many varied stimuli in our environment, human beings had to evolve psychological mechanisms in order to cope with so much information. We simply cannot apply our focus and concentration on every stimulus bombarding us so we employ a peripheral, subconscious awareness of it until it warrants our attention. A lot has been written about human’s ability to multi-task, but it would be impossible to multi-task without this peripheral awareness.

What the ‘trust issues’ feminine social convention does is turn that peripheral awareness into a liability in order to promote the agenda of hypergamy. Trust your gut, but don’t trust it where a woman is involved. This is a very devious social convention in that it attempts to short-circuit millennia of evolved instinctual cues that confirm men’s interests in parental investment while promoting female hypergamy as the primary breeding strategy.

How to use the Medium

Now, for as much as that all sounds like some grand conspiracy, understand that this all operates under the surface, and for the most part is simply accepted as the norm. It is possible, not to mention profitable, to flip the script on women. For instance, when you just marginally deny her your (probably far too available) attention, what happenes? Does she resort to some vocalized confessions of you becoming distant, or express some need to rationally communicate to solve a problem? No, her gut instinct recognizes irregularities in your usually predictable behaviors and she reacts by changing her behavior accordingly. You ‘caffeinated the hamster’, and she takes the initiative to react accordingly without you having to say a thing more than give her some plausibly believable breadcrumb of your reasoning.

Bear this in mind; women just want to hear the music and dance; they rarely care about the lyrics, or the measure or the reasons that went into creating the music. The medium IS the message. Be the medium, understand the message in it, but NEVER attempt to explain the medium to her. That ruins the music.

Law 9: Win Through Your Actions, Never through Argument
Any momentary triumph you think you have gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

The Beta Hamster

I’ve never had meaningless sex; I meant to bang every woman I’ve ever banged.

It’s endlessly entertaining to read the rationalizations men will create in order to better identify with what they’ve been conditioned to think is expected of them to achieve the ‘precious gift’ of a woman’s intimacy. They get quite creative sometimes. Aunt Susan has (yet another) anecdotal analysis of Casual Sex highlighting exactly these anonymous stabs at male pre-qualification courtesy of Reddit. And once again, in classic feminine form, the thread becomes this echo chamber circle jerk of male identifiers qualifying themselves to the equally anonymous women – parroting the ‘right thing to say’, and we all renew our faith in humanity and the hope for men who really ‘relate to what women want’.

I think I covered this identification motive as a primary element of Beta Game fairly adequately in Identity Crisis, but lets look under the hood at this specific dynamic. The inherent problem with doubting what is intended as the noble motives of a guy to eschew casual sex is that you risk appearing shallow for doing so. Betas generally love to wallow in preconceptions of nobility and delusions of being more ‘deep’ than the general mass of men that they hear women complain of. They think it gives them an edge. It’s an integral part of the beta mating strategy; the more alike you are with women the more they’ll appreciate you as being unique and reward you with sex.

The Spinning Wheel

For beta men this mindset also has the added bonus of giving the perception that he is unique among men in his ability to place the importance of relationship above his natural impulses. In publicly confirming his stance on placing relationship (women’s first security priority, i.e. wait for sex) above his ever-present physical need for sex, his subconscious hope is to appear so in control of his feelings and so above his feral nature that women will have to appreciate him as a paragon of female identification. That’s some REAL pre-fucking-qualification there Mr. Alpha. This guy not only has the capacity, but also the depth and conviction to turn off his sexuality in order to better comply with the relationship security priority women need to enable their own sexual strategy. This is the ultimate in pedestalization of womankind – to put women’s emotional criteria above his physical need for sex. And the god of biomechanics laughed atop his throne of genitalia.

The Beta Hamster

It’s very difficult to criticize social dynamics rooted in personal feelings. All one need say is “it’s just how I feel” and the discussion grinds to a halt because who am I, or who are you, to doubt the veracity of what they’re telling me? Add to this that it’s men who are the true romantics of the sexes and it gets even harder to be suspect of an underlying self-serving motive. In fact it may not even be a conscious effort on the part of a guy to express this. Feminization has conditioned into society a greater, almost default validity for personal feelings. As men have become increasingly adaptive to a feminized culture, placing primacy on identifying with, becoming more like, women, so too have they developed their own version of the female imagination – the feminized-male version of the mental Hamster that spins the wheel in women’s heads. The doubts, suspicions and anxieties caused by the male Hamster are directed towards an idealized female-centric goal state which they mistakenly believe is a male-centric goal state.

Behaviorism

Self-reporting has always been an unreliable measure in psychological analysis, particularly when the one doing the reporting isn’t aware of the latent purpose of the psychology behind those ‘feelings’ they’re sharing. The only truly reliable, provable means of demonstrating motive or intent is observable behavior. It’s kind of a cliché in the community now, but bears repeating: never believe what a woman says, believe what she does. We use this meme more liberally with women because men make the mistake of wanting to believe that women are more rational agents than they are emotional agents, but this should really apply to men as well, and particularly when men are predisposed to women’s mental models.

From a behavioral standpoint, we’re going to see a lot of incongruent behaviors vs. the Beta Hamster’s rationalizations. To begin with, I’m not going to deny that there is some base element in men that desires a real emotional connection with a woman. However, sex is a man’s priority, it’s a biological imperative, and actively denying that it isn’t or creating mental schemas that attempt to sublimate this imperative are disingenuous at best, psychologically retarding at worst. Sex is the glue that keeps a relationship together, and it’s sexual arousal that prompts a relationship in the first place. Deemphasizing sex, actively desexualizing yourself in the hopes that it will make you more sexually arousing is an effort in self-defeat.

To paraphrase Joe Rogan, men will blow themselves up for the very unlikely possibility of sex in another dimension. That’s the degree to which men place a value on sex, any sex, meaningful, a fuck buddy, a hooker, any sex. Pornography isn’t a multi-billion dollar industry because guys are concerned with adding some nebulous ‘meaning’ to sex. Women are concerned with applying meaning to sex because it is integral to their long term mating strategy and locking down a commitment of male provisioning. The men who claim to share in this importance (at least initially) are listening to the Beta Hamster and repeating what it says to them back to the women they hope to fuck. Even anonymously on a Reddit thread, they can’t let the pretense drop for fear that they’d miss a potential opportunity to prove themselves as ‘deep’ meaning oriented guys.

I have to laugh when men make these self-effacing claims to be seeking more ‘meaning’ after they tire of their long string of ONSs or ‘cheap sex’. Statistically, most men never even approach a lay count that could validate such a claim. According to the most recent studies I’ve read, most men have an average of 7 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime. That may be changing, but even if it were an average of 10 or 12 it would still make the rationale for seeking ‘meaningful’ sex as a result ridiculous, as well as suspect of a feminine-identifying mating strategy. Add to this that 80% (a conservative estimate) of men are plugged-in betas, hopelessly lacking the social skills and motivation to rack up a lay count that would ever justify this reasoning. So what is it that compels them to concoct these self-convincing rationalizations? The Beta Hamster.

It’s a far healthier mentality for men to embrace their own sexuality. God forbid a woman actually might think you find her sexy and want to fuck her. Despite their protestations, women want guys to want to fuck them. Women often complain that the reason they don’t feel sexual is due to their not feeling sexy, and they wont feel sexy if you approach sex from an asexual starting point because you think it adds ‘meaning’. Of the 40+ women I’ve had sex with, not one do I regret banging. I most definitely regretted some of the ensuing drama as a result of a few of those relationships, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sex. Sex for the sake of sex is OK. Trust me, after the one thousandth time you’ve had sex with your wife or LTR, sex for the sake of sex is fantastic. Stop writing poetry about sex and get fucking.

What’s your problem?

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

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

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

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

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

So you want to know what my problem is?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitter Misogynists

When men can be convinced to participate in women’s social conventions half their work is done for them.

One of the surest indicators of an AFC-beta mindset is the automatic presumption that anything remotely critical a man would say about women, or the feminine, is by default, equated with misogyny. All a man need do is open his mouth, in the most objective way he can muster, about anything critical of the feminine and he’s instantly suspect of sour grapes. He must’ve been burned, or is bitter and on the verge of desperation just for even a passing mention of some critical observation of women’s incongruent behaviors.

What an amazingly potent social convention that is – when a man will censor himself because of it on his own. The most successful social conventions are ones in which the subject willingly sublimates his own interests, discourages questioning it, and predisposes that person to encourage others to participate in it.

“You’re just bitter because you got burned by some bitch in the past and your misogynist ideology is just your way of lashing out.”

I hear this a lot from both men and women. It’s an easy response to parrot and it’s very useful. It foists the responsibility of confronting one’s critical ideas back on the man, all while shaming him for forming an ideology based on what he (and now a community of many other men) confirms by observations. It’s like a JBY (just be yourself) response; it sounds right, everyone uses it to the point of cliché, and it misdirects and discourages any further critical analysis.

This is a feminine social convention that’s in the same vein as shame. Any guy that has a point about the feminine, no matter how valid, can always have his argument poisoned because he’s a guy, and most guys are frustrated that they aren’t getting laid, and this is his petty way of venting. When men can be convinced to participate in women’s social conventions half their work is done for them. In presuming a default state of male misogyny, it implicitly denotes a default state of  ‘correctness’ or blamelessness of the female. In other words, you’re guilty and must prove innocence.

The protector dynamic has evolved into a beta breeding methodology. It’s like a Darwinistic version of Cap’n Save A Ho – so at the slightest critical word about a woman it’s, “See how quickly I come to a woman’s defense? What girl wouldn’t want a great protector like me? I’m unique. I’m not like those bitter ‘other guys’ so your best emotional/sexual/parental investment would be coupling with me as evidenced by my example.” Of course that isn’t their conscious, cognitively recognized reaction, but it is the subroutine that’s running in their unconscious. When this psychological schema is a practiced breeding methodology it becomes second nature; so much so that when ANY opportunity arises to display it (even under the conditions of anonymity), the guy snaps to attention. It’s really a Beta attempt to DHV (display higher value), and in and of itself it’s not necessarily a bad impulse,it just that it’s used to further a feminized social convention.

Whiners and Losers.

“Game Blogs, PUAs, MRA guys, they’re all a bunch of whiners who’d rather kvetch about feminism and real or imagined wrongs than just get up and get along.”

The problem I think most people have with the tone of what Game has, or is evolving into is that essentially Game is a masculine response to what feminism (really feminization) has evolved into.While I can empathize with the feeling that Game can assume a plaintive tone at some blogs – particularly MRA oriented ones – contemporary Game is really a countermeasure to the social conditions feminist ideology has embedded in our culture for the past 50+ years. However, the social framework has been established as such that even my pointing this out makes me suspect of complaining or “bitter”. See how that works? My belief is still, ‘don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better’, but it’s been built into feminization that to even analyze and have critical opinion of it makes you a whiner.

There is no going back.

NEO: “There’s no going back now is there?
MORPHEUS: “No. But if you could, would you really want to?”

One dynamic I encounter from guys who’ve experienced the ‘community’ in varying degrees is a desire to go back to their previously comfortable, ignorant bliss. The reality they become exposed to is too much to bear and they spit the red pill back up. They want to plug themselves back into the Matrix.

No person both frightens and disgusts me more than one who understands truth, but willfully opts for denial. It’s not the desire to do so that disgusts me, I understand the desire, it’s that there is no going back. Even if you never read another post or blog and regressed back to your old ways, you’ll still make the associations, see the signs of what others have analyzed in your own periphery, in women’s and the world’s behaviors and motivations, and you’ll be reminded (even if subconsciously) of that truth, or at least the uncomfortable push to get at the truth. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done.There is no going back now. Don’t wish it were easier. Wish you were better.

There comes a point of conflict (or revulsion if you want) after a guy has been unplugged from the Matrix long enough where he begins to doubt himself and what he’s seeing go on around him. All of the gender dynamics and the complex, but discreet, interplay between the sexes that’s been such a mystery for so long starts to become apparent to him. The Neg Hits he never would’ve dreamed of attempting in his AFC days become so predictably reliable at sparking interest that it becomes depressing. A backhanded compliment shouldn’t work; it goes against everything any girl has ever told him will endear him to a woman, but once he musters up the courage to experiment, he finds that they do.

What’s depressing isn’t that a well delivered neg, or C&F, or harnessing the attractive Alpha Asshole energy could actually generate sexual interest in women, it’s the principle behind them – the reason why they work – that prompts the internal conflict. Are women, generally, more like this than not? So a guy experiments a little more, and tests other theories, and discovers that with some minor variations, yes, for the most part the principles are valid if not predictable. This then becomes a real tough pill to swallow, especially when you consider ideas like the ruthlessness of feminine hypergamy. It’s very despairing, almost nihilistic, to a man fed on a steady diet of the flowery tropes of feminization for the better part of a lifetime. It’s very hard to measure oneself up and adjust to a new understanding of how women operate. He can’t reconcile what he’d been told and conditioned to believe before (the soul mate myth, pedestalize her, just be yourself, etc.) with this new paradigm. So either he learns to live with this new understanding, benefit from it and grow into a new role for himself, or he rejects it and vilifies it wholesale.

“Women are really not as bad as these misogynists, these bitter, burned men would all have us believe. They’re shallow and soulless to think women are all out to get them. They over-analyze everything when they should all just be themselves and let fate or some divine force pair them up with their soul mates. I pity them, really I do.”

I’ve heard all of these regressive rationales from boys as young as 14 to men as old as 75. It’s a comfortable ignorance to believe that things are just unknowable and beyond one’s control or efforts to really understand. And to make matters worse, there’s a long established system of social conventions ready to reinforce and affirm these rationales; ready to reinsert him back into the Matrix and tell him he’s unique and special (“not like other guys”) and will be rewarded with female intimacy for rejecting it.

Alpha

The Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington.

What I’m about to type here is not going to make me any new friends. I know because any discussion of what constitutes Alpha characteristics in a Man always becomes clouded by the self-perceptions of how well we think we align with them. As I’ve covered in prior postings, the ‘community’, the ‘manosphere’, the new understanding of gender relations that’s picked up momentum for the last 12 years has always generated it’s own terminologies for more abstract concepts. The danger in this is that these terms lack real, universal definition. For purposes of illustrating a concept these terms are usually serviceable – we have a general understanding of what makes for a ‘Beta’ or a Herb, or a man who falls into a ‘provider’ mentality. Even ‘Alpha’ in a specific context is useful as an illustrative tool, when the subject isn’t directly about ‘Alpha-ness’. It’s when we try to universally define what constitutes Alpha that the sparks start to fly. So before you continue on reading further, think about what you believe makes a guy Alpha. Got it in your head now? Good, now put all of that aside, purge that from your head, and read the next few paragraphs from the perspective that you don’t know anything about Alpha.

I was first introduced to the Alpha Buddah courtesy of Roissy and this post “Umm, sorry?” You can go ahead and read this from the Chateau’s perspective, and I think the analysis is pretty good. I call Corey the Alpha Buddah not in the hopes that men will aspire to his almost Zen like ‘being’ in Alpha, but rather to provide an example of Alpha in it’s most pure form. He literally IS Alpha, unclouded by pretense, afterthought, or conscious awareness of any influence that could have a hope of prompting introspection about his state.

Corey Worthington is a piss poor example of a human being, but he’s a textbook example of Alpha. I could use a lot of adjectives to describe this kid, but “beta” wouldn’t be one of them. What’s funny, and a bit ironic, is this kid has probably never come across Mystery Method or “the community” or even heard of ‘peacocking’ and he gets naturally what millions of guys pay small fortunes at PUA seminars to acquire over the course of a lifetime. He’s a selfish little prick, but what makes him insulting to ‘normal’ men is his having the natural, internalized Alpha bravado so many AFCs wish they had. If you could bottle and sell this Alpha essence, you’d be rich beyond imagine.

Right about now all of those self-affirming preconceptions you had about Alpha-ness (that I told you to stow away before reading this) are probably yelling to be let out of the mental box you put them in. “,..but, but Rollo, how can you possibly think this arrogant douchebag kid could ever be an example of anything remotely Alpha?!” You’ll be pleased to know I fully empathize your outrage. You work hard to be a “better man”, you put in the self analysis, you paid your dues coming to terms with unplugging and reinventing yourself. You’re a success, Corey is fuck-up. Corey’s not a better Man than you are, however, he understands Alpha better than you do.

Alpha is mindset, not a demographic.

Alpha is as Alpha does, it isn’t what we say it is. There are noble Alphas and there are scoundrel Alphas, the difference is all in how they apply themselves. There’s a tendency to approach every “Alpha” argument from what a guy thinks is righteousness; ergo, his personal definition of Alpha is what appeals best to his sense of virtue. He earned his Alpha cred, played by the rules, and by God people (women) should respect that. However, the sad truth is that prisons are full of Alpha males who simply channeled their drive toward destructive and anti-social endeavors. There are plenty of examples of indifferent Asshole Alphas who you wouldn’t say are upstanding moral leaders at all, yet women will literally kill each other (or themselves) in order to bang them because they exude a natural Alpha-ness. Just as Corey does here. There are Alpha drug dealing gang leaders, and there are Alpha husbands, fathers and leaders of industry. It’s all in the application. Genghis Khan was Alpha as fuck, and a leader-of-men, but probably would be on most people’s douchebag list for that era. Here’s an illustration:

 

Guy’s like Corey infuriate men who have invested their self-worth in the accomplishments of what they think ought to be universally appreciated and rewarded. So when they’re confronted with a natural Alpha being undeservedly rewarded for brazenly acting out of accord with what they think the rules ought to be, they seethe with resentment. The natural response in the face of such an inconsistency is to redefine the term ‘Alpha’ to cater to themselves and their accomplishments as “real men” and exclude the perpetrator. The conflict then comes from seeing his new definition of Alpha not being rewarded or even appreciated as well as a natural Alpha attitude and the cycle continues. Your respect (or anyone else’s) for an Alpha has nothing to do with whether or not he possess an Alpha mindset. 3 failed marriages and 100+ lays has nothing to do with his having or not having an Alpha mindset. There are many well respected betas who’ve never had a passing thought of infidelity, or may have 300 lays either with prostitutes or because they possess fame or stunning good looks and women come to him by matter of course.

The take home message here is that you are not Alpha because of your achievements, you have your achievements because you are Alpha. You possess a mindset you either had to develop or it came naturally to you. I constantly field questions from young men asking me whether some action or behavior they displayed to a woman was Alpha, or Alpha enough. The real answer is that Alpha behaviors are manifestations of an Alpha mindset. And just like Corey the Alpha Buddah, the introspect required to wonder if something was or wasn’t Alpha wouldn’t ever be a consideration enough to ask. You almost need to have a childlike understanding to really appreciate what Alpha really is. Kids get Alpha. Even the picked on, introverted, beta-to-be kid has a better understanding of Alpha than most adult men do because he lacks the abstract thinking required to rationalize Alpha for himself. Most men, by our socialization, and to varying degrees, lose this in-born Alpha mindset over time. The naturals, the Corey’s of the world, have a better grasp on it’s usefulness and repurpose it; either to their adulthood advantage or their detriment.

The Blacksmith and the Woodsman

 

Once upon a time there was a woodsman who had an axe with a dull blade and a rough, black head. After a hard day of chopping he looked at the axe and swore to himself he would make it the sharpest blade with a head polished to a mirror of silver. The woodsman then promptly went to the blacksmith in the village and explained to him his plan. The smith then said, “Surely this axe can be as bright and sharp as you wish, if only you’ll turn the grindstone for me while I hone and polish it?” The woodsman agreed and for the next week he turned the stone for the smith.

Though it was harsh labor and the woodsman sweat enough to wet the very stone with which the smith ground the blade, he turned on. By the end of the first week the blade was a bit sharper and it’s shine still dull. “See me next week and we’ll have your beautiful axe glimmering.” said the smith.

And so the woodsman turned the stone for another week while the smith ground the axe. By this time the woodsman had grown weary, his back in stitches and his muscles aching, yet still the axe was sharper and it’s surface began to shine by the end of the second week. “I think I shall take my axe now” said the woodsman. The smith protested, “The blade is unfinished and it’s head only a bright silver, not mirror perfect as you wished. Turn the stone but a bit longer and we will have your axe bye and bye.” To which the woodsman replied “No, I am weary and besides, I think I prefer a silver axe to a polished one now.”

My apologies for going the fortune cookie route in this post, but I’d just read this story recently which was originally told by Benjamin Franklin. I began to think, how many men I know (myself included at one time) who’ve played, and yet still play, the role of the woodsman in this story. We become so fed up, weary, impatient or critical of our own failed attempts that we begin to prefer things that are inferior. In other words, we settle for less and convince ourselves that it’s what we really want.

When we do this it seems to us like success. It was still hard work, it was still character building, but not what we’d originally planned. A psychological experiment (about memory actually) once put a series of C and D student into a tutorial program to raise their grades, only the program was intentionally designed not to help them in any way over the course of 12 weeks. By the end of the 12th week all had completed the once a week tutorials and as expected none had grades any better than when they started (some even lower), but when asked if the class had helped them every one replied “Yes, it helped a lot.” The idea here is of course that we don’t like to think of our past efforts as being fruitless or a waste of time. Our own psyches will prevent us from accepting work for nothing so we’ll selectively forget the actual result against the perceived effort.

Now, to apply this to a Game mentality, how does this affect us? The easy comparison is the AFC who’s too afraid of rejection in the ‘outside’ world and withdraws into his own ‘inside’ world and “prefers” it. This is the guy who’ll readily supplicate to his GF because “that’s just how he is” or he “prefers strong willed women” while she psychologically and emotionally deconstructs him as a willing participant. The serial monogamist ‘prefers’ the safety of a relationship, any relationship, to having to confront this same rejection in the outside world. I can’t begin to count the times I’ve heard men in their 40’s and 50’s tell me that they got into a career to appease a woman or how they’d changed their majors in college to better facilitate a relationship. Their explanations are invariably, “I thought it’s what I wanted at the time”, but hindsight and the fallout from 10-15 years of ‘preferring’ one thing over another put them into the position of needing counseling.

Human beings have an amazing ability to normalize their own conditions. Anything can become normal. It’s how we normalize a condition that separates the reality of a situation from our perception of it. Now think for a bit of how this dynamic applies to yourself? What have you convinced yourself of for the wrong reasons? Are you in a situation now that began from your having settled for less that what you wanted? Do you struggle with an AFC who’s convinced himself that he prefers what he’s become?

It’s not enough to unplug from the Matrix. You have to unlearn what it’s taught you to master the new reality you find yourself in.

The Honor System

“An unfamiliar feeling for one of you, but a horribly familiar feeling for the other.”

The concept of Honor that men began has been made to serve a feminine purpose. I have no doubt that the principle of honor dates back from as long ago as we can track human civilization, but like so many other social foundation Men have instituted, the feminine will covertly position them to their own purpose.

In the introduction to the Art of Seduction author Robert Greene explains why there was an original need for seduction to be developed into an art. For this we can look back to ancient civilizations where women were essentially a commodity. They had no OVERT external power to control their fates, but they excelled (and still do) at COVERT psychological internal power, and this of course finds a parallel in men and women’s preferred communication methods. The feminine’s primary agency has always been sexuality and manipulating influence by its means.

Much in the same way that each gender communicates, so too is their method of interacting within their own gender. As Men we’re respected when we keep our word, sacrifice ourselves for a worthy cause (even to the point of disposability), solve problems rationally, our word is our bond, and a whole host of other qualifiers that make us respectable and worthy of integrity. We must be OVERT and above board; and when we encounter a man who is COVERT in his dealings we call him ‘shifty’ and think him untrustworthy. Even for the most noble of purposes, practicing the art of misdirection is not something men are respected for – at least not publicly.

It’s just this overt masculine interactive nature that women are only too ready to exploit. In combination with their sexual agency and influence they use this overt male social interactive dynamic to position themselves in places where they can use indirect power. Cleopatra was an excellent example of this – sending armies to war by appealing to powerful men’s pride and honor, while reserving her sexuality as a reward. Virtually every Feminine Social Convention is rooted in appealing to, or attacking male social institutions – a dedication to an idealistic sense of honor being chief among them. The obvious example is of course “shaming” and the “do-the-right-thing” social contract.

In fact to be a “Man” has become synonymous with living up to a feminine imperative that’s cleverly disguised as masculine Honor. It’s not that women created Honor, but rather that they’ve recreated it to serve their purpose. In the Biblical Ten Commandments we’re told not to commit adultery – don’t sleep with another man’s wife – which probably wasn’t too hard to abide by when polygamy was the norm. In fact multiple wives was a sign of affluence, it used to be the conspicuous consumption of the epoch. Why then is polygamy a social perversion now? What changes occurred that made polygamy honorable (even enviable) into a very evil taboo?

Along with language and culture, social conditions evolve. What we think of as Honorable today are the result of centuries molding. It’s very easy to romanticize about times when Honor among Men reigned supreme, and then lament the sad state of society today in comparison, but doing so is a fools errand. Honor in and of itself is, and should be, a foundation for Men, but it’s only useful when we understand it in the perspective of how it can be used against us.

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.

In contemporary society we have a very different understanding of what Honor was, or was intended to be initially. One of the psychological undercurrents I see in most AFCs is a strong, self-righteous dedication to a very distorted conviction of Honor. A main tenet being an unearned, default respect for women; essentially an unearned Honor placed on a woman for no other reason than she’s female. We learn this (usually) from the time we’re children, “never hit a girl”. Naturally, this has only been ferociously encouraged by the feminine since Victorian times because it served a latent purpose right up until on demand (feminine exclusive) birth control was offered, and then prompted the sexual revolution.

Today, we still have women using the anachronism that is male Honor in a manner that serves their interests, but it’s contrasted with a sexually emphasized opportunism. A Man’s responsibility should be “Honoring” her as ‘the fairer sex’ while recognizing her ‘independence’. The AFC gobbles this stuff up and in an effort to better identify himself with her ideals he begins to convince himself that he’s unique in that he better exemplifies this false-virtue, this feminine defined sense of Honor than “other guys”.