I had an interesting conversation with a cocktail waitress recently about how she wore the sexy outfits she did because they reaffirmed who she was.
“I do it for me.”
“Really? Lingerie, high heels, push up bra, that’s all for you?”
“Of course. I’m my own woman.”
“So, it’s not about the attention and affirmation you get from the men around you.”
“Well, that’s nice, if it’s coming from the right kind of guy, but I don’t wear what I do for them.”
“So if I came over to your house unannounced at like, 4 in the afternoon, you’d be wearing all this while you were vacuuming the house and not in sweatpants and a t-shirt?”
“Well,..no, but that’s not the point, I’m more comfortable in sweats,..”
“I see.”
It was far too easy to box her into the corner she was painting herself into, but I wont be too hard on her since this crisis of motive is also found in men. I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard guys at Gold’s tell me the same thing as to why they workout.
“I do it for me! Yeah, of course, chicks check me out more now that I’ve dropped the fat and bulked up, but this is all for me man.”
I’ll admit, I was that guy at one time. For a guy it makes sense to cop the story of singularity of purpose since it implies that he’s his ‘own man’ and not improving himself to become more acceptable to the women he observably and admittedly wants to get with. This is the paradox of self-improvement – are you doing it for yourself or because you want to others to respond more positively to you? It doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both.
There are certainly many side benefits to bodybuilding – improved health, attitude, lower stress, life-preserving function that results from increased muscularity, etc. but the minute we drop ‘a better sex life’ into that equation then we have to qualify it all with the “I do it for me” standby; as if our motivating desire to get laid is any less important than all of that. I’ll tell you right now, with 25+ years of lifting on my record, while I enjoy a lower life/health insurance premium as a result, I enjoy sex far too much to ever let myself become a fat ass. I do it for me and I do it because Mrs. Tomassi (and other women) responds positively to it and I enjoy the results.
This is a fundamental question guys swallowing the red pill and adopting a new Game-aware life have to answer – who are you doing it for?
There are a lot of traps involved in answering this question; traps that other AFC crabs in the barrel will use to pull you back in, traps that will attempt to convince you that you’re ‘being someone you’re not‘ and traps that will flatter you for your insightful desire to improve yourself, but only insofar as it serves feminine purposes. This is a common tar pit for men on the edge of accepting Red Pill truth:
From the Unbearable Triteness of Hating:
16. Dancing Monkey Hate
Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.
If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Whether he was intending to or not, Roissy was of course responding to exactly this crisis of motive. I don’t specifically agree or disagree with all the tenets of men who identify as MGTOW (I understand the reasoning), but I must point out that, from what I read, the crux of their beliefs are rooted in this same motive crisis. Is what you do, who you are, what you believe, a genuine, organic result of your own decision making (doing it for you) or is all you are the result of a latent purpose to better please a woman (or the Feminine Imperative for that matter)?
Introspect
Aunt Giggles had a post about a week ago lauding all the introspective men concerned with their own self-improvement. Bravo! Bravo introspective Beta, dig down deeper and embrace your inner white knight. While it may range between ego-flattering to self-evincing, true introspection is only useful in the light of why you’re being introspective in the first place. You may get a pat on the back from the Feminine Imperative for introspectively aligning yourself with the Beta model it’s conditioned you for, or you may get a well needed cold bucket of Red Pill awareness splashed in your face as the result of your introspection, but the question is still who or what are you being introspective for?
With a crisis of motive, it’s very easy to not only cast doubt about the motives of others when they don’t agree with our own, but also to reaffirm our own faith in our own decision making. How many times have Game denialists said something like “those red pill guys are just misogynists, only interested in getting laid as much as possible”? This belief-disqualifier is based on the the presumption that sex is a red pill Man’s only, true, motivator – not himself, not for his own enlightenment, not of his own genuine volition. Red pill guys believe what they do to get laid and therefore dance to the tune women (or their sexual impulse) are playing for them. Distilled down to it’s base, the message is they aren’t acting as individual rational agents, but as robotic slaves beholden to external influences (in this case women or their sex drives). In other words, someone or something is controlling their decisions for them.
That’s some powerful affirmation for the one making accusations of disingenuousness, because it confirms for himself that not only is he a ‘genuine’ actor, but his insight must necessarily be more valid than the guy he’s judging. The problem with this, as I’m sure most are now aware, is that the accuser is already molded by outside influences himself. Thus, his motivation for accusation is suspect of a crisis of motive.
I understand this is some heady shit to take in, but I think it’s important to consider for guys on the cusp of Game-awareness, doubting their genuine want for changing themselves, as well as for guys falling back on motive crisis reasonings in order to justify why other men might disagree with them. I think an important question Men need to ask themselves is why am I changing my belief, my customs, my interpretations? It may be that it comes as a result of introspection, or a new awareness brought to them from an outside influence (the manosphere), but the answer to the question of who do you do it for is both yourself and the outside motivator.
So what made you change? Was it something I or another blogger wrote? Was it a traumatic experience that shocked you into awareness? Or were you just getting what you’d always gotten by doing what you’d always done?