Slang dictionaries never fail to interest me. A few days ago I ran across one serving the PUA (pick-up artist) subculture, a network of men (and a few women) who have attempted to systematize and explain tactics for picking up women. Chasing links from it, I found a network of blogs and sites describing what they call “game”, which has evolved beyond mere tactics into a generative theory of why the tactics work; indeed in some hands (such as the ferociously intelligent PUA blogger Roissy) it seems to be aspiring to the condition of philosophy.
I’ve found reading about this stuff fascinating, if not quite for the usual reasons. I’m what PUAs call a “natural”, a man who figured out much of game on his own and consequently cuts a wide sexual swathe when he cares to. Not quite the same game they’re playing, however. For one thing, I’ve never tried to pick up a woman in a bar in my entire life. College parties when I was a student, yes; SF conventions, neopagan festivals, SCA events, yes; bars, no.
Also, and partly as consequence of where I hang out, it has been quite unusual for me to hit on women with IQs below about 120 – and it may well be the case that I’ve never tried to interest a woman with below-average intelligence. (Er, which is not to say they don’t notice me; even in middle age I get lots of IOIs from waitresses and other female service personnel. Any PUA would tell you this is a predictable and unremarkable consequence of being an alpha male.)
Because the women the PUAs are after aren’t the kind that interest me, much of “game” as described in the PUA culture fills me with a mix of recognition and revulsion. And a third, more complex reaction that is the real reason I’m writing this essay.
One one hand, I recognize techniques like kino escalation. Oh, do I ever! Adroit use of that one has gotten me into the sack more times than I can count. On the other hand, I’m basically incapable of what PUAs call the neg; I can’t insult a woman even by implication unless I think she’s done something to specifically deserve it, and the thought of flinging negs to score sex disgusts me in a very fundamental way.
On the gripping hand…I recognize a harsh truthfulness in a lot of what the PUAs are saying. Crudely put, the “game” advice for most men (the population PUAs call AFCs or “Average Frustrated Chumps”) reduces to behaving like an asshole so women will mistake you for an alpha. I really am an alpha, so I don’t have to asshole-fake it – but it is nevertheless quite clear to me that the PUAs are on to something. This is frequently a successful strategy; I’ve been outcompeted by it myself on several humiliating occasions. Furthermore, the PUAs are probably correct in asserting that for many AFCs it is the best strategy available, and never mind that the thought of running it myself turns my stomach.
In the PUA’s disturbingly persuasive analysis, I’ve had the luxury of not treating women like shit only because I have often had USPs for the brighter-than-average women I was interested in, notably in the combination of alpha-male qualities with high intelligence and expressive skills. Without those USPs, argues the PUA, my choices would have reduced to “frustrated loser” or “sexually successful douchebag” – and, looking at my own experience and that of my less successful peers, I find myself unable to refute this.
That is kind of horrifying if you think about it. Possession of USPs is rare by definition, and if you have one you’re more than averagely likely to be an alpha anyway. The PUA is telling us that human beings are designed in such a way that the most reliable way for the large majority of beta males to get sex is to behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks. This would be appalling enough as pure theory, but the PUA makes it worse by applying it to actually have lots of sex. “Success” one blog unsparingly observes “is defined by penis in vagina.” Never take your eye off that ball, says the PUA. Much as one might like to dismiss this as crass reductionism, evolutionary theory makes any countercase rather difficult to argue.
How did our poor species get into this hole? The PUA community gravitates to evolutionary-psychology explanations for human behavior as much as I do, it’s one of the interesting things about reading their stuff. It’s remarkable how often they manage to apply facts about human reproductive biology in a tactical way. The use they make of evo-bio concepts like hypergamy, peacocking, and sexy-son theory is, I find, sound and justified. The kind of pitiless clinical eye they turn on human mating interactions could scarcely be bettered by most scientists.
But the PUAs don’t, at least so far as I’ve yet seen, have a generative explanation for why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys. They accept this as the foundation of game without asking what circumstances in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness stuck women with apparently counterproductive wiring.
I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status. Perhaps they were much more risky to fake in a small society where beta males were almost constantly under they eye of senior alphas with hard fists.
Meanwhile, back in modernity, we’re stuck with the consequences – men who have been trained to be imitation-alpha jerks and abusers by women who are sexually fickle, manipulative and cruel towards beta males. It’s not a pretty picture, not if you’re looking in from halfway outside it like me and certainly not if you’re stuck in the middle of it as an invisible AFC or a woman wondering why she’s surrounded by douchebags.
I don’t think the PUA crowd has any solution to the problem of how men and women can stop treating each other like shit. Nor do they claim to; the PUA attitude is that you just have to play your cards as best you can under a set of constraints that is intrinsically tragic. But I think the spotlight glare they’re putting on actual mating behavior – as opposed to the lies we tell ourselves about how we behave, or how we think we ought to behave – is a valuable first step.
The truth hurts, but it also helps. Understanding that you’re being yanked around in unhelpful ways by your instincts is the necessary first step to gaining more control of your choices. This is why I think the people who should be paying most attention to PUA theory are women – and not for the most obvious defensive reasons, either.
If you are female, you may be thinking “OK, I should learn game so jerks won’t be able to play me.” Well, that’s nice, but almost completely irrelevant. Because what both evolutionary psych and PUA tell us is that in cold fact you want to be played by an alpha – and failing that, at least someone a bit taller, a bit older, a bit smarter, and a bit higher-status than you. The fact that you want to be better at detecting imitation alphas changes nothing essential; women have been polishing that counter-game as long as men have been practicing theirs.
No. The reason women need be paying attention to PUA goes much deeper than just notching up another escalation in the jerk-vs.-bitch arms race. It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. In pervasive female self-honesty begins the only hope of not training up more generations of jerks. And it’s there that the pitiless, revealing glare of the PUA spotlight might help.
Yes, I know what kind of reflexive screaming that last paragraph is going to trigger. Feminists will lash at me for suggesting that this is womens’ problem to solve; shouldn’t at least half the burden of self-awareness and change fall on men?
In fact, it can’t be that way, and it can’t be for a brutally simple reason. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a member of a culture in which women have far more power to control mens’ sexual experience than the reverse. The only exceptions to this rule have been barbaric hellholes in which women were treated as chattel.
Ladies, with having more power over sexual outcomes there comes more responsibility. And there’s this, too; just suppose the great mass of men stopped thinking with their dicks and 99% of them suddenly became sensitive New Age guys eager to commit. Until most women stopped being cruel to betas and rewarding men who behave like dominating jerks with sex, nothing….nothing would change. PUA game would still work. The tragedy to which it is a minimax response would still be in motion.
I don’t have any final answers either. But, gentle reader…if you’re a beta male and not a natural, learning some PUA game might sound icky but it would sure beat masturbating to porn for the rest of your life. And if you’re female, think hard about the last guy you slept with and the last guy you friend-zoned. Maybe you owe yourself a rethink and friend-zone guy an apology, of the kind best delivered naked.
Or to put it another way. Males have nothing to gain by defecting from the system unless Females defect as well.
P.S.
Maybe you yourself => Maybe you owe yourself
you want to played by => you want to be played by
ESR says: Typo corrections applied, thanks.
Apparently, young beta males are doing just “fine” (by the metric of lots of sex) at least in a few places:
http://www.slate.com/id/2286240
Is this a whole new set of psychological problems, or just the pendulum swinging a bit the other way?
>Is this a whole new set of psychological problems, or just the pendulum swinging a bit the other way?
A whole new set, I think, or at any rate one that’s orthogonal to what I was writing about. What’s happening here is that women in places short of hypergamically-eligible males are having to (a) lower their standards, and (b) compete with each other by sexual availability. But within this frame, PUA will still work because they’ll still preferentially seek alphas and imitation alphas.
It certainly is nothing new that women like badboys or alphas. I think we all observed it in high school.
So I wonder: do chicks dig Hitler? Does the fascist leader make their coons moist?
I mean he is (or was) the ultimate badboy right?
Anyone think this partially explains the appeal of fascism, with it’s emphasis on aggression, action and violence?
This would help to explain how often he and the nazis get brought up, godwin’s law and all that…
God we humans are a screwed up species.
> But within this frame, PUA will still work
Sure, but non-PUA techniques should work as well. Especially if the women really are looking for commitment.
>Sure, but non-PUA techniques should work as well. Especially if the women really are looking for commitment.
Depends on how strongly you mean “work”. The relatively small minority of genuine alphas or beta with USPs can go with non-PUA, because they already have hypergamic eligibility. Among the majority of AFCs who don’t have hypergamic eligibility, game will still beat non-game. Non-PUA players will still be at a competitive disadvantage even with women “looking for commitment” because they’ll never make it onto the womens’ radar – or, if they do, they’ll tend to be friend-zoned.
Wow you really do write well. Glad I subscribed to your blog.
Also: ” I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status. ”
What’s EEA stand for?
ESR says: Environment of Ancestral Adaptedness. How we lived for the 99.9% of our species history before cities, agriculture, and writing.
I certainly agree with everything you’re saying, but I think there’s one fairly large, and interesting, blind spot in PUA theory, although it’s mostly there intentionally. The assumption is that what you want is a one-night stand with the sort of woman who gets hot when you insult her. Now, I’ve got nothing against casual sex – I’d be happy to have more of it in my life – but being a PUA seems like a good way to either wind up married to a vapid bitch you can’t tolerate, or single at age 40 and wondering why you never seem to get laid any more. Certainly the PUAs I know seem to be trending that way with their lives – one in particular acknowledges it – although they’re still young enough that it’s guesswork. Objectives determine tactics, and if your objective is a woman who won’t go from bar to bed in an hour no matter what you say, then trying to get her there is an exercise in futility. Not that there’s nothing to be learned from them even then, but you need to be careful what parts of it you adopt if you define success differently than the ever-so-subtle fellow above.
>The assumption is that what you want is a one-night stand with the sort of woman who gets hot when you insult her.
Many PUAs deny that this is always true. Roissy is interesting partly because he can be taken as a representative of what might be called the “romantic” school of PUA; he insists, apparently sincerely, that love is the most important thing, and that PUA is an enabler for more kinds of intimacy than the one-night stand.
Not having practiced full-blown PUA myself I’m not in a position to either support or criticize this position directly. I will note, however, that it is consistent with the evo-bio thesis that women seek alphaness more determinedly in long-term partners than in short-term ones. Women do one-night stands with attractive betas to capture immunoglobulin-diversity and sexy-son effects, but they want lifetime mates to be alphas in order to secure providership for their offspring.
The thing that intrigues me most about game is the idea that by emulating alpha behavior with an understanding of why it works could result in acquiring actual alpha thought processes; that you can train yourself to be an alpha if you apply game to all aspects of your life.
I also suspect that the more you understand about how game works, the more you understand about Roissy calls the “rationalization hamster” he sees in women’s minds, the less you have to be an actual asshole. I see guys out there, and read about them online, who essentially only a play a neg game, and they don’t understand why they’re not getting laid.
Finally: there have been two insights in my life that changed the way I see and understand entertainment media. One was waking up to arguments for the right to arms, as opposed to the straw-man arguments against gun control presented by the controllers, and thence to the difference between real conservative/libertarian ideas, and how they are portrayed by liberals.
The other was discovering game, and that happened for me only within the past year or two. Once you see it, the emasculating attempt to suppress it in the media becomes very clear. I’ve recently started the exercise of classifying TV men, and the specific actions of TV men, as alphas, betas, sigmas (guys, often with a techie bent, that truly do not care about game; they’re orthogonal to the alpha-beta axis, and get all the action they want. I think Gregory House , M.D. is a classic sigma.), and herbs (guys who have allowed the women in their lives to reduce them to plants). Alphas and sigmas are almost nonexistent; betas and herbs are ubiquitous, and are either celebrated as models, or the butt of jokes.
To tie it all up: Statism, whether you call it liberalism, progressivism, socialism, whatever, is essentially about turning everyone into betas or herbs. Individualism, in all its forms, is about turning everyone into alphas or sigmas.
This is why game is so reviled by leftists, and leftist feminists: not that it belittles women, but that it espouses the alpha mindset, and alphas cannot be controlled, only lead.
ESR: You meant “led”, I think. But yes.
Let me try to define “sigma” a little more sharply: a sigma is a person who has little interest in the control aspect of the alpha-beta-herb axis. They are adept at evading control, and the only control they exert is being right more than their peers. They are interested in getting things done, not in getting others to do what they’re told.
>Let me try to define “sigma” a little more sharply:
I don’t doubt that your sigmas exist in a general, political sense – a strong case could be made for me being one. (I’ve previously heard the type referred to as gammas, by the way.)
However, as a mating strategy, I think actual sigmas would be off the radar for women. I think your sigmas actually get laid with a combination of alpha behavior and USP that’s only only elicited by sexual competition.
>if your objective is a woman who won’t go from bar to bed in an hour no matter what you say, then trying to get her there is an exercise in futility.
PUA theory would tell you to forget that woman and go sleep with ten others. Just sayin’.
I stopped reading after “the kino escalation” link.
Took me 2 hours to get back here..
Erbo, I’m aware of that. Two things, though: 1) That leaves a pretty good crowd of women(probably a significant majority of the population, though I’d wager they’re deeply underrepresented in bars) who are being chased by a below-average number of guys. Sounds like a possible competitive advantage. 2) One woman twenty times is better than ten women once.
ESR, most of my knowledge of it is from a few of my friends who are big into it, both in theory and in practice. Let’s just say that none of them really belong in that school. Still, it’s an interesting point. I think by its nature PUA theory tends to gravitate towards women that I find rather unappealing, but there’s exceptions aplenty in any large population, and it’s not like a good PUA lacks opportunity to sift.
I came across game/PUA sites about half a year ago, and have been reading them with great interest. (I love the internet: you open one little obscure door and find an entire universe on the other side!) Since I have been married for almost ten years now, the strategies and insights offered on PUA sites are not directly relevant to my current situation. However, I have gravitated toward “married man game” sites, and found some interesting things there. For example, Athol Kay at http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/ describes how to apply game in a long term relationship such as marriage. His take is that you should balance alpha characteristics (to retain her interest and attraction) with beta characteristics (to satisfy her need for stability and shelter, particularly when children are involved). It’s a balancing act, and you cannot compensate for a lack in alpha with more beta, or vice versa.
This one’s pretty simple: they want the nice guys to hang around because they’re going to need their help to raise the bad boys’ kids.
Doesn’t everyone get IOIs from waitresses? I’m certainly not alpha but I get them all the time — it’s just good customer service.
Ever wonder why physical courage is so much easier than social courage? In the EAA ostracism would kill you (or at least your genes) more surely than any physical danger.
>Doesn’t everyone get IOIs from waitresses?
Probably, but what varies is how much the smile reaches the eyes. When they perceive you as alpha there’s more real flirtation and less going through stylized motions. Another correlated difference is how much or little physical distance they maintain.
It’s actually amusing (and sometimes informative) to watch a waitress work several tables and track the variations in her body language according to how she ranks the males at each.
How does EEA stand for Environment of Ancestral Adaptedness? Even on a good day I can’t see that happening.
I’ve been reading Roissy’s blog because somebody pointed to him as a misogynist. I don’t think he is. I think he loves women and wants them to be happy. And he does this by being an alpha (or faking it) and letting women fuck him. But yeah, I can see how treating women like shit will keep their attention, and I can also see how I would despise myself AND the women I was able to fuck via those means (good thing I’m married to a high-IQ woman).
>SF conventions, neopagan festivals, SCA events, yes;
Any guy who can’t get laid at any of the above should hand in their testicles and join a monastery.
>Any guy who can’t get laid at any of the above should hand in their testicles and join a monastery.
Ah, that’s too harsh. It’s a competitive environment (if on different terms than a bar) and some men lose. This doesn’t make them ball-less.
With dozens of vagina trophies (limited only by self-imposed constraint), my experience is female attraction hinges on demonstrating effortless control, because a female is an observer and receptor of justice. She waits a man to show her how and why she was born a woman, and none of her rudderless preconceptions retain meaning when she is in his presence. Subconsciously she wants to maximize her narrow reproductive window in terms of priorities in social status. Unfortunately the “modern” man is in control of practically nothing, and considerably less than the TV controls. Attaining score via the jErk-off is so demeaning for the man, deluded he is from his inability to conquest through more truthful manifestations of real independence. Unfortunately most people live in an enslaved society, and mass media is a huge factor. The choice is play the game, or move the goal posts and be the game. I think there is nothing women can do to improve the situation, the men are the leaders. The females are waiting for real men. In my game, she thought she was a feminist.
I think he meant Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.
ESR says: Yes, that was a thinko on my part.
DJMoore, you left out one thing: politicians are the alphas. One candidate for Senator in Minnesota of my acquaintence was in bed with his girlfriend when his mistress caught him; she told his wife. You can be sure that she walked away with part of his fortune. The wife, that is. The mistress just got fired. Yeah, she worked for him. Not the wisest person.
“Also, and partly as consequence of where I hang out, it has been quite unusual for me to hit on women with IQs below about 120 – and it may well be the case that I’ve never tried to interest a woman with below-average intelligence.”
This sounds like a lack of dedication and rather unkind towards these women. ;-)
If all you want is lots of sex, that is easy, marry a woman who loves you. PUAs simply seem to have a problem forming stable emotional attachments and a considerable lack of empathy. Such games remind me of Antisocial Personality Disorder (psychopathy), and from your description I would not be surprised if they score high on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (actually, I expect them to score high)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
Also, the femal side of PUA games sound a lot like what is known from songbirds.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_07.html
Just as men fall for a nice smile, long hair, and the right curves, women fall for anything that implies social success. They cannot help it. But I think for most (healthy) women the spell will last even shorter than for men. And indeed, as others have commented, people who lack empathy tend to end up very lonely.
>This sounds like a lack of dedication and rather unkind towards these women. ;-)
No, it’s just selection. Unlike a lot of men, I never intentionally did one-night stands – when I found a woman who interested me, my minimum objective was to keep her around as a friend-with-benefits (see “Casanova”, above). Thus, I looked for women I’d be able to have an actual conversation with…and given my IQ and interests that excluded the lower 50% of the bell curve pretty hard.
Because I’m male, I suppose my limbic system might have made an exception for truly world-class hotness with no brains. But, looking back, I don’t think that case ever happened. You may suppose that I am virtuous, or that I traveled in circles where this combination was exceptionally unlikely, or both. I think it was a bit of both.
>If all you want is lots of sex, that is easy, marry a woman who loves you.
Check. Did that. Still with her and several regulars who’ve met us in person will certify that our relationship is as solid as a granite mountain.
However…it is not news that many men value having sex with lots of different women. Trust me when I tell you this is not incompatible with solid as a granite mountain. It is oversimplifying and wrong to assume that men with a yen for diversity are shallow Lotharios incapable of forming a stable attachment. Some fulfill that stereotype; others do not.
@Russel Nelson
“I’ve been reading Roissy’s blog because somebody pointed to him as a misogynist. I don’t think he is. I think he loves women and wants them to be happy. And he does this by being an alpha (or faking it) and letting women fuck him. ”
Sounds like Casanova, who also tried to please women, all women.
The others look a lot like Don Juan who destroyed the women he “dated”.
>Sounds like Casanova, who also tried to please women, all women.
Or like me, when I’m in cherchez-la-femme mode.
The Casanova vs. Don Juan distinction is a useful one. Thanks.
Hence, Jersey Shore.
Russell Nelson Says:
“DJMoore, you left out one thing: politicians are the alphas.”
Quite right, I should have said.
Which raises another question:
Do female politicians seek out sex as much as male politicians do? And what kind of partners do they prefer?
My guess is that no, they don’t.
Irresponsible WAG (Wild Ass Generalization):
Male politicians seek power because it’s a good way to get girls.
Female politicians seek power to control their unruly children.
When female politicians do look for sex, they look for partners who can match them or even (in principle) overpower them: other politicians or beefcake.
They marry men who will stay in the background.
You did not comment on the political aspects of (particularly) Roissy’s writing.
The point is that there were social mechanisms in place that punished men for being assholes, and punished women for encouraging men to be assholes — mechanisms that directed male competition for females in a productive direction. Those mechanisms were deliberately destroyed in the name of freedom, in the second half of the 20th Century.
@esr
“Trust me when I tell you this is not incompatible with solid as a granite mountain.”
I have heard that such things happen. There is the “network effect” that makes that life gets exponentially more complex the more people get involved. More complexity means more risks which might explain why “open relations” tend to be rare.
There is a “theory” that monogamy developed to prevent violent competition between men and ensure care for women and children. As it is women who tend to get “stuck” with the care for the children when things go wrong, they have good reasons to be more protective against risks.
@esr
“However…it is not news that many men value having sex with lots of different women.”
South Park had a nice episode on that featuring Tiger Woods. But most men (almost all of them, that is) have to chose between lots of sex and lots of different women. Simple time management, lots of different women take lots of time. And eventually, men will grow older.
However, there must be more. Because if you have even a little financial success, you can have paid-for sex every night with a different woman. So it is not just the sex with a different woman. I suspect that the personal attention, “admiration”, and the social status play a big part too. Or, PUA are just lonely and do not know how to keep friends ;-)
This a good article and conversation. The only thing I’ll add is that there is a common misconception that is being repeated here that high IQ women are much less ‘afflicted’ by the instincts at play. This is not at all the case.
It’s true that some of the most base and simple tactics PUAs use (think fake palm-reading) are likely to fall flat on a highly intelligent woman. But the underlying psychological dynamics are the same, which means that other tactics with similar parameters work just as well, if not better. And many of the tactics (including negs) are universal.
So all this high and mighty “I’m a 150 iq and I only bang 130 iq cuties so I’m above all this” stuff is nothing but hubris.
If someone’s after young, skinny, high-maintenance blondes it’s probably about homosocial status. If someone’s after curvy redheads, it’s probably about sex.
Internet gold.
We can mo more magic up “pervasive female self-honesty” than we can magic up “not training up more generations of jerks” (and a pony).
What reward pattern do men offer women? What effect do norms against female promiscuity have on female self-honesty?
This is rewarding even worse behaviour: http://xkcd.com/513/. Feminists call this sort of man a “Nice Guy (TM)” — “nice” being ironic in this context.
I think you should hold your nose long enough to learn some feminist theory, PUA theory is so much funnier when you understand feminism, and visa versa. There are some strong similarities between both theories (the following argument works in either community: people like sex; women are people; therefore women like sex). The language of pick-up tends to be incredibly misogynist, but the underlying theory doesn’t have to be.
People want to sleep with someone as attractive as themselves or more so. Due to this selection bias we all experience a world in which the opposite gender has more sexual power. Average guys have less power than pretty girls, and pretty girls have less power than desirable men. To work out which gender has more power, you need to look at who’s at the top of the pile (hint: it’s Charlie Sheen).
I think women would be absolutely horrified at this prospect. The whole SNAG snafu was a result of women gaining enough power to make demands on men but not enough power that it was safe for them to be honest about what they actually wanted.
>However, as a mating strategy, I think actual sigmas would be off the radar for women.
Only because “sigmas” are rare, and hard to read.
>I think your sigmas actually get laid with a combination of alpha behavior and USP
>that’s only only elicited by sexual competition.
I don’t think “sigmas” are that into sexual competition.
To quote the 80s Philosophers Tim Rice & Björn Ulvaeus:
“Get Thai’d! You’re talking to a tourist
Whose every move’s among the purest
I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine”
There is no doubt or arguement that sex is huge driver of social interaction, that guys (and women) are always looking, always “thinking”, but most people–or at least most adults–have the ability to suppress their appetites for long term gains.
I love pasta. Seriously love it.
Haven’t had a plate in, crap, can’t remember when. I used to eat two loaves of bread a week by myself. Now we don’t even keep the stuff at home. Potatoes, Rice, things we used to have with every meal. Now it’s occasionally and as a side dish, not as the primary source of calories. I like to bicycle, and cross country ski, but I spend more time these days lifting weights and stretching (both of which I hate) why? Because it makes for a better me. Thinner and stronger, better at moving and shooting.
My wife is not “top of the line” in terms of looks, but she’s compatible, and that’s enough.
And there’s a lot of guys who think like that, guys who will talk a good game, but unless they’re in a fairly narrow range of drunk they’ll flirt, but go home alone.
As for women today the cost of cheating is just too high–at least for women with developed pre-frontal lobes and some awareness of the world around them.
Do note that everything I said is basically modulated against http://briandeer.com/wakefield/crank-features.pdf (Google “Unskilled and Unaware of it” aka “Dunning–Kruger effect”). Most people have no idea how limited they really are. This is what leads to politicians thinking they can have a girlfriend, a mistress and a wife and NOT get caught. Chances are the wife knew, and as long as she had a nice house, great parties and the pool boy she was fine with it. When she was publicly embarrassed, well, half of a LOT is better than nothing.
However most guys don’t have a lot, and half of “enough to live on” isn’t.
Wow. That was inarticulate.
Lemme try again:
Evolutionary strategies change with environment. If you’re in a cold climate having a low surface area to body mass physique is better than a high surface area to mass body. In equatorial regions it’s generally the reverse.
Until the advent of central heating and air conditioning. Now much of the evolutionary advantage of being stout in Moscow disappears (at least evolutionarily).
Having a “friend” around to raise your kids while you play Mr. Pokey with strangers/your husbands boss was fine until genetic testing came along (I am fairly certain that in the next decade laws regarding the paying of child support for other dudes kids will change). Oh, and we find out (maybe) that the more a man is convinced that his daughters are in fact his, the less likely he is to sexually abuse them.
It used to be as a man you didn’t admit that your wife had cheated on you (if you could avoid it) because it reduced your stature. These days you just toss off “all women are sluts anyway” and go out drinking and whoring. It used to be as a woman that you would tolerate the cheating up to a point (because before reliable birth control getting pregnant was always a risk, and that had other side effects.).
Of course the evolutionary pressures on men and women are different–women have a limited ability to reproduce–fewer baskets that need to be guarded better–men have the opposite pressure FROM A PURELY EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE.
But we don’t live on the Serengeti any more, we aren’t irrational animals. We are (barely in some cases) civilized, and have social pressures and long term goals that change and channel our base desires.
Rossy and crew like to talk about the 50% of marriages that end in divorce–the vast majority of those being (essentially) child marriages. I suspect strongly (without looking at the data) that marriage failures look more than a bit like electronic component failures–many in the first few years, with few in the mid-term, and then tailing up towards the late 50s and 60s. I’d even go so far as to bet that most 2nd marriages are “keepers”.
In other words, unless there are an AWFUL lot of alphas then MOST people mate more-or-less for life and stick with it past their fertile periods.
And yes, the last 10k years is a thin veneer over the EEA period, but the prefrontal lobe is what lifted us out of the mud, if we don’t start insisting people use it, we’ll be back in that mud.
Rossi disgusts me. He’s smart enough to know what would happen to society if a large number of people tried to live like he does. Heck, we see it in San Francisco–extremes of sexual licentiousness lead to all sorts of problems.
I know The Church ain’t popular here (and I’ve got my issues with it to be sure) but note what F.A. Hayek said:
“Our morals are neither instinctual nor a creation of reason, but constitute a separate tradition – between instinct and reason – a tradition of staggering importance in enabling us to adapt to problems and circumstances far exceeding our rational capacities. Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. Surprising and paradoxical as it may seem to some to say this, these moral traditions outstrip the capacities of reason.”
Some lessons you abandon at your peril.
Let me try to explain in a different way. The responsibility or genetic purpose as a man, is to know himself (i.e. principles in life), and be able to make the world in that image. The women who want to be a queen in the social structure he leads, will subconsciously view him as an alpha male.
I read many comments here that demonstrate betas or worse. No offense intended, but a man is leader, else he isn’t a man. The way to respect a woman is to lead her, not follow her like a dog. She can have a dog for that. Successfully leading, makes a marriage more attractive. An woman much prefers to nudge a man, than to lose all respect for him by having to tell him. The key in natural selection is don’t select women who FAIL to appreciate your principles, who can not help your game win. Send them to your competitor to weaken his strategy, they will come back after they’ve failed and respect you.
The reason we have the jerk-vs-bitch culture degeneration, is because the society-at-large is mind controlled and very little opportunity for men to demonstrate their differential attributes (e.g. providing strategic protection in the wild, etc), thus the woman’s options are typically between the ephemeral illusion of an independent leader, or the sad reality that there are not many. Thus I hope it is clear that women can not lead the culture away from the jerk-vs-bitch theater. Those who prescribe to the equality of the sexes, are grossly disrespectful of opposite sex and their own, and are the antithesis of an alpha-male.
The highest echelon of the alpha-male category is the most elusive, and reserved for those who are subliminally leading the culture on existential philosophy.
“So I wonder: do chicks dig Hitler?”
The cultural artifact here is “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” by Mr. T Experience.
I’ve been a regular Roissy reader for the last two years, so a few minor points to make here (Eric’s post is otherwise highly perceptive as usual.)
“It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men.”
The Roissysphere famously refers to this phenomenon as The Rationalization Hamster, and the consensus appears to be that women are incorrigible with regard to this, so asking them to change this may be akin to asking a teenage boy to stop fapping.
“On the other hand, I’m basically incapable of what PUAs call the neg; I can’t insult a woman even by implication unless I think she’s done something to specifically deserve it, and the thought of flinging negs to score sex disgusts me in a very fundamental way.”
The neg must be seen as fundamentally an equalizer of relative status in field, and, arguably, what a woman has done to deserve it is to think she’s “too good for you”. It is intended to puncture bloated egos, especially of highly attractive women with “bitch shields” who will literally not give you the time of day unless you deploy it.
Also, the actual use of the neg varies in intensity — there’s a continuum of intensity from something as relatively harmless as simple teasing (which women typically enjoy) to something stronger.
@WOB’L
“Having a “friend” around to raise your kids while you play Mr. Pokey with strangers/your husbands boss was fine until genetic testing came along (I am fairly certain that in the next decade laws regarding the paying of child support for other dudes kids will change).”
Nope. The reason people, and women especially, are not into public sex is that the best strategy is always to let every man in the believe that your children are his, all of them. You already see that in chimps. A female chimp will make sure to mate with the Alpha male during every cycle so he will never be sure whether her offspring is not his.
“Oh, and we find out (maybe) that the more a man is convinced that his daughters are in fact his, the less likely he is to sexually abuse them.”
Actually, that is the easy one, it is the same as with siblings: Men who cared for baby/toddler girls are less likely to abuse them.
“It used to be as a woman that you would tolerate the cheating up to a point”
Mostly the point was a pure cost-benefit analysis: What does it cost me if I leave, and what does it bring me.
“Of course the evolutionary pressures on men and women are different–women have a limited ability to reproduce–fewer baskets that need to be guarded better–men have the opposite pressure FROM A PURELY EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE.”
A common misconception. A man who does not care for his children will depress their chance of reproducing. Especially in the old hunter-gatherer times, a mother would perform “post-natal abortion” if she would get a child which she could not care for. The real evolutionary trade off is number versus quality of offspring. Siring a lot of children with different mothers will get you few surviving “low-quality” offspring. Caring for a few children with a single woman might produce successfully reproducing high quality offspring.
Given the popularity of marriage (all human societies have a majority of men who marry, or strive to marry, one or more women), the trade-off was squarely in the “men should care for their children” camp.
“I know The Church ain’t popular here (and I’ve got my issues with it to be sure) but note what F.A. Hayek said:”
The Church is a label stuck on whatever traditions society had. There is very little, if anything, that Christian Churches added to the existing cultures but new labels. Basically, Catholicism incorporates the Western Roman values, Orthodoxy Eastern Roman values, and Protestants German values. Their sexual mores are those of an agricultural European society.
Trace the modern borders of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches in Europe. You will find it still traces out the old borders of the Western and Eastern Roman empires quite faithfully with the Catholics (and Anglican) in Western Roman, Orthodox in Eastern Roman, and the Protestants in the German areas. Ireland and the Slavic areas are exceptions as they were late-comers to the game and could “chose”.
It is eerie enough that the Catholic church still has the Rhine and Danube as its border in the North and Dalmatia in the West. After 1500 years!
@Imbecile
“No offense intended, but a man is leader, else he isn’t a man. ”
Nomen est omen?
So there is only a single man? What are the others.
@Imbecile
“The key in natural selection is don’t select women who FAIL to appreciate your principles, who can not help your game win. ”
Eh?
The key in natural selection is to get healthy reproducing offspring. Which in practice meant for 99% of human history that a man needed a wife who could do all of the work independently during times her man was not available and vice versa. People who could not care for themselves with surplus could not raise children. And people who alienated their group members did not have to worry about their offspring. They would not survive long enough.
“…until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. In pervasive female self-honesty begins the only hope of not training up more generations of jerks.”
“Oh, would some Power the giftie gie us,
to see ourselves as others see us..”
Its a general human problem, we all suffer from it.
Research suggesting that that people accept proposals of casual sex from strangers based on whether they expect to enjoy it minus expected risk. Personal drives don’t line up neatly with evolutionary theory.
How about as long as most men are bigger and stronger than most women? Someone who poses a credible physical threat is going to be viewed as a riskier sexual proposition, even if it means a higher rate of false positives.
I suspect you rather would have been turned off between the time your limbic system kicked in and the time you got to the bed.
There’s something definitely physically repulsive about a girl with nothing going on upstairs, even if she has a nice body. I noticed it the first time I saw Britney Spears.
On the other hand, if a woman with serious geek cred is in the room I get weak in the knees. She can get away with being a lot less good looking with the same effect. This is a more powerful attractant than any physical characteristic or combination of physical characteristics.
Having years ago been flipping through channels and witnessed two women on Jerry Springer or equivalent fighting over a snaggle-toothed, inarticulate asshole, and on a more personal level observed women who claim they want to be respected almost always going for the Bad Boy, none of this comes as a surprise to me. And there is absolutely no one to blame for this but the women themselves, including the mothers who decide they don’t need to be married to “they baby daddy”, and thereby deprive those babies of role models: for the boys, an example of how to be a man, and for the girls, how to choose one.
The Leftist “progressive” policies have done their best to make fathers irrelevant. We reap the whirlwind.
And a nit to pick:
“is womens’ problem to solve”
“power to control mens’ sexual experience”
A problem owned by more than one women is the women’s problem, An experience involving more than one man is the men’s experience. The rules for possessives of nouns are really very simple:
0) These rules are for NOUNS, not PRONOUNS, which almost never use apostrophes in formation of possessives.
1) The possessive is normally formed by adding ‘s to the end of the word. Do this unless one of the following exceptions apply:
2) The possessive of a PLURAL that already ends in s is formed by adding a bare apostrophe to the end of the word. [“Cell phone makers’ choice of operating systems…”]
3) Depending on style guide, some or all SINGULAR nouns that already end in s are formed as in 2. [“Carlos’ mother made sure he spoke English half the time at home.”, but some would have that as “Carlos’s”]
My personal preference is to treat all nouns ending in s the same, regardless of whether they are singular or plural, and affix the bare apostrophe. It collapses the rule set to only two cases and eliminates the need to memorize exceptions.
Note that in the case(s) where the word ends in the apostrophe, removing that apostrophe results in the original, non-possessive word. There is no such word as “womens” in the English language, and the word “mens” is not the plural of “man”, but a loan from Latin used entirely in legal terminology.
“I suspect you rather would have been turned off between the time your limbic system kicked in and the time you got to the bed.
There’s something definitely physically repulsive about a girl with nothing going on upstairs, even if she has a nice body. I noticed it the first time I saw Britney Spears.”
I’ve noticed the same tendency that Eric described in myself – world-class hotness makes up for a multitude of sins, including a significant IQ gap (although in my case it’s obviously smaller.) If the girl is very hot and likes you, that’s when the Male Rationalization Hamster kicks in.
re: “Sigmas”
Actually, I think extroverted Sigmas are (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) likely to be perceived by women as Alphas; ESR has suggested a similar strategy in a different context, IIRC, as the “prince from a distant land” technique.
Sigmas = NT types in temperament theory? Almost sounds like it.
esr> However, as a mating strategy, I think actual sigmas would be off the radar for women. I think your sigmas actually get laid with a combination of alpha behavior and USP that’s only only elicited by sexual competition.
Being more a sigma myself, I’ve always figured that, because I really don’t give a crap about game, many women take that as a sign I’m an alpha. The fact that I’m willing to take the alpha position if there’s no genuine alpha in the group (or if the alpha becomes incapacitated for some reason) only reinforces that mistaken identity.
On the other hand, if a woman with serious geek cred is in the room I get weak in the knees. She can get away with being a lot less good looking with the same effect. This is a more powerful attractant than any physical characteristic or combination of physical characteristics.
That’s because the brain is the largest sexual organ in the body.
@The Monster
“And there is absolutely no one to blame for this but the women themselves, including the mothers who decide they don’t need to be married to “they baby daddy”, and thereby deprive those babies of role models: for the boys, an example of how to be a man, and for the girls, how to choose one.
The Leftist “progressive” policies have done their best to make fathers irrelevant. We reap the whirlwind.”
Why do you think Left Wing politicians are so powerful?
This is really very simple micro economics. A man’s role in the family is to share care for the children. For that he has to supply food/money/protection in surplus of what he consumes himself. And the surplus has to be enough to earn his place. If poverty, hardship, or personal incapabilities prevent him from supplying a surplus, the mother will have to decide whether she can care for him too, and if she can, whether she wants to.
You find this pattern everywhere in the world where there is a very high unemployment and poverty combined with economic insecurity and work migration. Say, day-laborers on Central American sugar cane plantations. You especially see it in areas where male survival is very low. Male survival and economic prospects can be so low that neither man nor woman would commit to a shared future.
>It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men.
It’s not going to happen. One of the things I think Heinlein got most wrong is his “women are more practical than men” and other female superiority beliefs; I shared them when I was younger, but long experience has shown them to be almost entirely wishful thinking. In almost every category of behavior I can think of the highest levels of competence are almost exclusively male; even whose of average competence there are usually more men than women. I regret this, I actually prefer the company of women as friends to that of men, but reality doesn’t care what I would prefer to be true.
What change would there be to incentives if some women stop sleeping with the PUA-technique men? Nothing, unless they start having casual sex with men who apply other techniques. If you want to change the techniques used by men who want to have casual sex, then you need to change the techniques that result in casual sex – ie you need to start having casual sex with different men.
I think this is the point that several men were trying to make about women’s behaviour changing not having the required effect.
Of course, then there’s the problem that is women were to switch to having sex with guys who were nice, they just enhance the Nice Guy™ problem:
If you read the right sort of feminist blogs, they complain about the Nice Guy™ – the guy who is nice in order to get women into bed (usually they’re insecure beta / sub-beta males). They complain that women treat them badly, when in fact they are just terminally clueless. http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/niceguys/niceguys.shtml is a good intro.
The problem with the idea that women should sleep with men who are nice to them is that the PUA will just start behaving like (a more competent version of) the Nice Guy™. If he stops faking alpha-ness and starts faking niceness, then how much of a benefit is that really?
“It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men.”
Interesting. Consider this hypothesis:
Perhaps this is cultural knowledge that we once possessed but lost through lack of use. Think atrophy of the appendix. Except that maybe we did need it, but it just takes “historic timescale” (ie, several generations) for the conditions which necessitated the development to reassert themselves.
Consider the possibility that much of the “culture war” may very well be the necessity of this behavior pattern. Words like “puritanism”, “feminism”, “tolerance”, “gay marriage” and so on are manifestations of the evolution of these behavioral patterns. Only some of these behavioral patterns are encoded in genes – others are social norms, “memes”, but they evolve all the same.
Did puritanism once exist for a reason? Will we soon rediscover what that reason was?
Consider that we may be witnessing global competition between different social constructs, with names like “Sharia” or “Western” and others. Western may have scientific advantages, while Sharia may have reproductive advantages.
Ultimately, we are very small participants in a very large game/marketplace/experiment. The outcome will be interesting.
ESR, that whole alpha beta delta gama sigma lambda division comes from Vox Day; Roissy uses a much simpler alpha/beta distinction. Alphas get laid, Betas don’t. In Vox Day’s classification, Alphas and Betas get laid, Deltas rarely do, Gamma’s never. Sigmas are distinguished from Gammas because Gammas are true social losers who can’t get laid and are undesirable. Sigmas get laid, but just choose to opt out of authority structures. They are alphas who don’t have an interest in being leaders, although people keep trying to make them into leaders.
>they want lifetime mates to be alphas in order to secure providership for their offspring.
This is a different take from what Robin Hanson and many other evo-psych advocates present. In their view, women mostly want secure beta-male providers at home, and children by men that are as alpha as possible, which is why they sleep around with alphas even after they are married.
Also, there is a good bit of doubt about the importance of the EEA, since evolution has never stopped, and likely sped up recently; see Cochrane and Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.
Dude. It’s Jerry Springer. Those women were probably plenty snaggle-toothed and inarticulate in their own right.
Women are more practical than men, which is why the distribution curve of excellence for them is tighter. Being awesome at something requires extreme amounts of dedication and risk-taking which women are less likely to do, not wanting to squander their childbearing years on something which may or may not pay off. (Eric wrote an essay about this as regards software which I think is only partially correct: he attributes this as the reason why you see so few women in programming, which is wrong. The primary thing keeping women out of the software field — according to the women themselves — is sex discrimination: any climate where you post a perfectly legitimate question with a female-sounding nick and your would-be colleagues respond with “tits or gtfo” is not welcoming to women.)
I said “policies”. There are allegedly “moderate” and even “conservative” politicians who sign on to some sort of “middle way” compromise that moves toward the “progressive” goals, just slower than the hard Left Wing would want.
These policies are now so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t matter who controls the White House or Congress; they simply cannot be undone. Because the implementation of those policies requires armies of government employees who (perhaps rightly) fear they cannot find gainful employment anywhere other than government service, their unions will fund disinformation campaigns against anyone who dares to try rolling them back.
The standard distribution of nearly every measurable characteristic is smaller for women than men for the simple reason that in the EEA, individual males are expendable, but premenopausal females are not.
Evolution lets men be guinea pigs (and encourages us to be just plain pigs). If a few turn out less than optimal, their chances of reproducing go down. The average-and-above males can take multiple mates if need be, to keep the fertile females in the baby-making business as long as they can. Women who engage in the dangerous tasks that require “excellence” l reduce their expectation of lifetime child production, no matter how excellent they are at those dangerous tasks. So they don’t do that. (Childbirth itself is plenty dangerous in the EEA.) Anything dangerous is for the men to do.
All of the statistical differences between men and women can be traced to the simple fact of male expendability, if you think them through.
@Jay
Sharia?
Given the world wide failure of fundamentalists to achieve anything but desrtuction, mostly of fellow fundamentalists, I do not see how.
Infia or China I could see.
And puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”.
“Consider that we may be witnessing global competition between different social constructs, with names like “Sharia” or “Western” and others. Western may have scientific advantages, while Sharia may have reproductive advantages.
”
Isn’t this experiment basically about resource competition between “smart genes” and “dumb genes”? In modernity, “smart genes” are favored; the only way “dumb genes” can jockey for resources is by politically organizing into structures where “smart genes” are kept in check, via demographic power etc. Hence, the proliferation of Sharia in the relatively low IQ regions of the planet. It seems to me that a below average population mean IQ is pretty much a universal law when it comes to Sharia-friendliness.
“If all you want is lots of sex, that is easy, marry a woman who loves you”
Isn’t this a bit circular? Obviously if a woman loves, you’ll get lots of sex, but it addresses nothing about mechanics of “love” (or more precisely “attraction”.)
@Winter
Most people have already chosen sides in the culture war. That’s fine. So have I. But don’t let the fact that you are on one side or the other obscure that there -is- a bigger picture.
I don’t see how they would either, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. I’m don’t really see why Rome fell, and into the Dark Ages no less. But fall it did.
The point is that these “isms” are somewhat new, and untested. We are watching the arc of history unfold, much of what we see described here is the consequence of the isms that have flourished in the last 100 years. But as they have flourished, and changed the social ecosystem, the other members of the ecosystem have adapted. They prey species the new isms may develop new defenses. And new “predators” may evolve, for which the new isms are themselves the prey species.
These analogies are necessarily rough. I am not sure we have the language to discuss it without analogies yet.
@JB
“Isn’t this a bit circular? Obviously if a woman loves, you’ll get lots of sex, but it addresses nothing about mechanics of “love” (or more precisely “attraction”.)”
No. Finding a woman that loves you is just a question of testing a lot of women and learn some very basic rules of politeness. What gets in the way is setting requirements for your mate and general failure to adapt minimally. And a lack of time invested.
I have yet to meet a man who did not meet women who were willing to try. Men who passed their turn waiting for a better deal are 13 a dozen.
@The Monster
In my experience policies follow reproductive strategies, not viice versa. Atempts to influence reproduction by policy have been universaly unsuccessful.
The behavior you are refering to predates every policy you mention. It was probably prevalent in the 19th century or earlier.
Sorry, one correction to my own post. The draconian and inhuman Chinese one child policy is the one “successful” reproduction policy. It illustrates the continuous level of coercion and force needed to really change reproductive strategies.
I expect Chinese women to revert back to large families the day the coersion stops.
“No. Finding a woman that loves you is just a question of testing a lot of women and learn some very basic rules of politeness.”
It is a basic tenet of the Game community that KEEPING a woman in love with you (“finding a woman” is hardly a sufficient condition for what you described above) isn’t a matter of random chance or “politeness” for that matter. Passing “shit tests” is a necessary aspect.
What do you folks make to the shift of expecting men to put a lot more into raising their children? (As distinct from supporting them.)
I don’t think Chinese women will revert to large families if there’s much available in the way of pensions and/or government safety net.
Interesting reading.
I did a span, 20ish years ago, where I played more or less by the rules described by Roissy et all. This stemmed from me being particularly angry at the end of a relationship and, well, working it out.
Nothing wins the attention of interesting women like having validated self confidence. This is the difference between 22 year old me mimicking the ‘aggressive asshole’ technique for picking up women at bars (and being very clinical about it) and the 40 year old me having achieved a small amount of notoriety and fame.
I have used ‘negs’ – Eric does misunderstand them; they’re meant to be a signal for “I see through your bullshit, but understand why you have to do it.” I use kino escalation. I am, when seriously flirty, sparing with my words.
I make it abundantly apparent that I am interested in them, that they can demonstrate that they are worthy of my interest, and that interest is worth pursuing to them. I make eye contact, I think quickly on my feet, and women like a man who can say something clever without it being rehearsed.
The thing that baffles me is the number of “wanna-be kajira-slaves” I run across, and who see me as their idealized embodiment of alpha-ness. I value intelligence and independence, not clingy “I’ll give you sex and you take care of EVERYTHING” codependency.
(I do see why I show up on their “ooh, interesting” radar, given what I seem to be the alternative -to-. On the other hand, several men I know, who if they could communicate enthusiastically about something they were *doing*, would probably think the social arrangement of “I put out, you take care of EVERYTHING” from a woman who figures her bust and butt are her primary assets, was worthwhile. I find the “IPOYTaCOE” strategy to be clingy – and disturbing enough – that I distance myself from it at the first whiff.)
You write:
“why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys.
I’ve thought about this, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must have been reliable indicators of superior status”
This (from the Wikipedia article of the same name) is:
“A just-so story, also called the ad hoc fallacy, (is) a term used in academic anthropology, biological sciences, social sciences, and philosophy. It describes an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans”
For your explanation to be true you have to go for 100% nature in the “nature vs. nurture debate” but, (Wikipedia again) : “In only very few cases is it fair to say that a trait is due almost entirely to nature, or almost entirely to nurture”, i.e. traits are very unlikely to inherit for hundreds of thousands of years. Also note that the PUA thing is really recent.
And:
“I’m what PUAs call a “natural”, a man who figured out much of game on his own and consequently cuts a wide sexual swathe when he cares to. Not quite the same game they’re playing, however. For one thing, I’ve never tried to pick up a woman in a bar in my entire life”
My explanation, more likely to be true on why women who like to get picked up in bars (women PUA’s) go for the bad boys (and the men PUA’s for the bitches) is this:
Women and men PUA’s are into one night stands. Fucking the same one two nights in a row is a waste of time. After all, your “score” in the game is based on how many different ones you get. The last thing they want is a “nice” man or woman who afterwards keeps calling them, sending flowers etc. thinking there is a relationship. Behaving like an asshole or bitch seems to guarantee to the other that you are not going to do that which makes you more attractive (to a PUA).
Erik, I can tell you that the PUA stuff largely works.
I don’t entirely believe the evo-bio patter on it, but it does work. It’s worked for me in the past as a ‘fake alpha’ and now it seems to work for me in the present as I’m moderately successful in my chosen field and present myself as available and interesting.
It’s a common assertion in the sex advice columnist business, that if men go for women as sex objects, women go for men as status objects. Women’s sex object status tends to decline as they age, men’s status object status can increase with age.
Be confident, be interested in something that she could want to learn more about, and don’t tie your self worth to her approval.
The Ad-Hoc fallacy is poorly named, because it is not actually a fallacy.
Theories are judged first by their explanatory power (second by their simplicity, see also Occam). The fact that the theory has explanatory power gives it immediate utility. It is certainly not evidence that the theory is false.
Further testing may reveal it to be false, but the fact it is explanatory certainly does not mean it is a bad theory. In fact, it has actually passed the first hurdle a theory must possess.
What is worse than a wrong theory is a non-descriptive theory (see XKCD’s “String Theory) – a theory where it doesn’t matter if it is true or not because it changes nothing.
I find this to be a fascinating corollary of the conclusions in Bowling Alone; I find it entirely plausible that one of the reasons for constructing a wide variety of civic structures (bowling leagues, Rotary/Lions/Kiwanis, etc.) was to provide wider opportunities for men to be alpha (or at least beta-plus) in some arena.
Additionally, I suspect that Eric is underestimating the effects of the differences in communication and society size between the EEA and now; thirty years ago, most high-school boys who wanted to play sports had a good chance at landing a spot on some team, but with schools twenty times as large and teams no larger, the odds are much slimmer. Similarly, while in a prehistoric clan there would be one clear alpha male, there would have been other social niches that brought enough respect for the holder to compete.
@Winter:
>A common misconception. A man who does not care for his children will depress their chance of reproducing. Especially in the old hunter-gatherer >times, a mother would perform “post-natal abortion” if she would get a child which she could not care for. The real evolutionary trade off is number >versus quality of offspring. Siring a lot of children with different mothers will get you few surviving “low-quality” offspring. Caring for a few children >with a single woman might produce successfully reproducing high quality offspring.
Your analysis is incomplete, which I believe has led you to completely misunderstand the game. A man does not need to care for his children, IF he has OTHER men who care for them. Which is where the whole emphasis on female fidelity comes in- there is no point at all in the “care for a few children with a single woman in order to produce few but high-quality offspring”, if your woman has been cheating and you’ve been putting all your time and energy into raising the quality of someone else’s offspring. If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, you not only need to watch that basket, you need to make sure it’s YOUR BASKET.
Just to add:
“The PUA is telling us that human beings are designed in such a way that the most reliable way for the large majority of beta males to get sex is to behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks.”
In the contemporary Western social context, yes. Which is why there’s an inherent respect for social traditionalism in the Roissysphere: a recognition that beta males are the left-behinds of feminism and social liberalism/libertarianism/libertinism in general.
I’ve noticed the same tendency that Eric described in myself – world-class hotness makes up for a multitude of sins, including a significant IQ gap (although in my case it’s obviously smaller.) If the girl is very hot and likes you, that’s when the Male Rationalization Hamster kicks in.
I have to agree with this point. Hotness makes up for a lot of things.
I do not understand men who do not even try to pursue hot women. That’s limiting your dating pool for no good reason, and in fact, you end up removing the most desirable women from your dating pool.
You want to find that hot woman with geek cred? They exist you know. Or that hot girl with brains? They exist too. And your best chance at finding one is to date a lot of hot women.
Conversely, if you are bad at getting a hot girl interested in you, then when that hot geek girl does shows up, you will be just as bad at picking her up too. So no matter what your taste in women is, you are always better off learning the game. This PSU stuff? It completely reminds me of college, and it was one of the most useful things I learned.
To Ken Burnside:
My point is not that PUA doesn’t work, but that it more likely does because of “guaranteed one night stand” than “early humans .. small hunting bands”
To Jay:
You say:
“The Ad-Hoc fallacy is poorly named, because it is not actually a fallacy.”
and
“What is worse than a wrong theory is … a theory where it doesn’t matter if it is true or not.”
I say:
An “unverifiable and unfalsifiable” theory is even worse, for you cannot even tell if it is true or not.
Further testing may reveal it to be false, you say. No, cannot be done. It’s unverifiable and unfalsifiable. This is what makes it a fallacy.
As for your: “Theories are judged first by their explanatory power” no, they are not. If a child asks you “Why is the Moon yellow?” you can say “Because it’s made of cheese”.
Plenty explanatory power, the child may well believe you, but not good theory.
@Erik
You seem to believe that the objective of PUA is the one night stand.
That is NOT the case for anyone who is any good at picking up women.
Women are good sources for meeting other women, so the one night stand is the equivalent of bridge burning.
Thus, anyone who is any good at dating will make every effort to turn a one night stand into a longer term thing, even if that means a friend with benefits, a one month fling, or a friendly ex relationship.
“. . .behave like narcissistic, dominating, emotionally-unavailable jerks.”
Typical femelitist inverse projection.
“Narcissistic” = “Focuses too much on himself instead of ME”
“Dominating” = “Does what he wants to do for himself instead of what I want him to do for ME”
“Emotionally-unavailable” = “Emotionally self-determining instead of being emotionally manipulable by ME”
“Jerks” = “Follows his own code/standards of behavior instead of submitting to MINE”
If a child asks you “Why is the Moon yellow?” you can say “Because it’s made of cheese”.
Plenty explanatory power, the child may well believe you, but not good theory.
It’s possible the moon is yellow because it is made of cheese. This theory passes the first test.
Now you simply need to determine if the moon is made of cheese. If it is not, you reject the theory in favor of a different one. This is not rocket science.
It is culinary astronomy.
I’ll tell you women need to learn — they need to learn that it’s not a woman’s job to turn her man into her own personal houseboy. It drives me crazy to see good men who are really into their girlfriends/wives, but who are also afraid of them. You know it’s just a matter of time before they start to hate each other. It breaks my heart.
Women fall in love, then at some point start thinking that what they really want is a man who doesn’t leave his dirty socks on the floor. They end up with a man they don’t respect and don’t find sexy. Gee, how’d that happen?
Too many women twist things up in their heads and start equating things guys do just because they’re guys with “he doesn’t love me.”
We have to learn to let men be what they are, and take delight in that, even if it means having to pick up the dirty socks ourselves.
Didn’t know Roissy had taken up writing again. I remember he stopped, hard, when his real-life ID got outed, and spent a lot of time scrubbing his archives. Worked at FINRA, iirc (and introduced himself and his employer to *enormous* headaches). Maybe he has a new job now?
Sure it’s the same guy?
Thank you for the post and link back.
The PUA community has been marketed and geared towards quick solutions, in the case of men, one night stands or how to bed her. Much like business can be dumbed down to “making money” the PUA industry can get you “laid”.
I do believe that there is credit to intimate relationships and value in the community as a whole. Once you get past the marketing, there is a lot of value in the things we teach.
Yup. ZZ Top puts this well: “‘Cause every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man.” Being well-dressed is a sign of social status, of course.
Nina Paley nicely summed-up the `female part’ of this, though from a slightly different angle, in a recent `Mimi & Eunice’ comic:
Though, she points out in the following comment:
And, yeah—I think I can identify with that, even though my wife thinks I’m an alpha….
>Sigmas get laid, but just choose to opt out of authority structures. They are alphas who don’t have an interest in being leaders, although people keep trying to make them into leaders.
That would be me. Almost 40….balding and would have no problems in the PUA area if I so chose. Married happily and would not risk it for fleeting physical pleasure.
I still remember 20 year old me. There were many IOI from girls my age, just not what I was interested in at the time. (for the most part….older women were my interest….and they were interested in me as well. Not….OLD….more like 10-20 years my senior…and not desperate housewives, nor stupid. I guess I was cougar bait, I’m not quite sure how that fits into the whole bio/evo thing). Wound up dancing with my very attractive math teacher at my senior high school prom…which resulted in an invite to her hot tub…that was the beginning…..my wife is older than me, only by a year….but, there was a definite trend.
I could never stand bars or clubs.
I feel for those that seek one empty conquest after another.
Being an asshole just to get laid by some co-dependent trailer trash would cause me to have a terminal case of self disgust.
To me the minimum is friends with benefits…and it must be mutually rewarding, otherwise risk/reward -> infinity.
I agree with those that state the brain is the largest sexual organ.
but I’m strange….thank the chaos.
An interesting thread…too bad there are only two female posters.
Kristen>We have to learn to let men be what they are, and take delight in that, even if it means having to pick up the dirty socks ourselves.
The other side of that coin is guys need to learn to be who they are and be willing to lose her if she can’t take it. No matter who she wants a guy to be, he will eventually be who he is, and it’s better get that crap out of the way BEFORE the lawyers get involved.
>The other side of that coin is guys need to learn to be who they are and be willing to lose her if she can’t take it.
This may actually be the true acid test of alpha/beta.
I seriously doubt an alpha who is not an asshole will assume the position…..just for a little action.
Betas are obsessed because they must be…and they will do ANYTHING..ANYTHING just to score…just this once…please…
They are like rats hitting the bar for a dose of cocaine.
Where is the self respect in such behavior? If I were a female…it would turn me off.
“If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a member of a culture in which women have far more power to control mens’ sexual experience than the reverse. The only exceptions to this rule have been barbaric hellholes in which women were treated as chattel.”
Well, where you stand depends on where you sit, no doubt. I’ve had maybe 30-40 close intimate relationships with women in my life, a few sexual, mostly not. These include mother, wife of 31 years, daughter age 23, and female LTR of 20-odd years, but lots of very good friends too.
You know what? All of them that I’ve been close enough to discuss the question with have been raped at least once — as in, experienced oral, vaginal, or anal penetration by a man who either physically forced them to do so or coerced them to accept it by the fear of physical violence. As far as I can remember, none of them reported the rapes, mostly out of a conviction that either they wouldn’t be believed, or that they would be treated far worse by the legal system than their attackers.
Fast-forward to today. I’ve got a broken metatarsal in my left foot right now, so I’m walking around with a cane and a support boot. It’s amazing how people will move out of my way and even give up their seats on the subway (*not* a thing New Yorkers normally do) just as a result of those social signals. While waiting for the train, I walked over to a bench on the platform, one divided into seats by slats on the horizontal part, but without real separators. At the end of the bench the arrangement was woman – empty seat – man – empty seat -woman. The woman at the end looked up at me and smiled. Startled, I smiled back — not something I would normally do. I went and sat in the empty seat next to her, not because of that, but because it looked a little more roomy than the other seat. She *cringed* away as I sat down, as if I were about to strike her a blow. I realized that the smile had been one of fear. So I carefully paid her no attention thereafter and waited rather uncomfortably until the train came.
Whether you call this culture we live in a barbaric hellhole or not is up to you. But if those women, that woman, weren’t chattel most of the time, it lasted only until some man decided to restore them to their former place. And got away with it.
>You know what? All of them that I’ve been close enough to discuss the question with have been raped at least once
Depending on how strictly you define “intimacy”, my relevant sample size would be either in the same range as yours or quite a bit larger. I have heard exactly two such reports, one of which I am dubious about. And I’ve never seen the cringe reaction you report.
I do not report the above in an attempt to cast doubt on your claim, but to show that argument by anecdote is not worth much.
I think a better argument that we do not live in a barbaric hellhole is the things men say to each other when women are not present. If your sample were representative, I think that talk would be very different than it is.
(1) Being an “alpha male” is like being funny: the more you talk about it, the less likely you are to be it (take note Eric, in case you want to keep up the charade), and
(2) most people are shallow and unintelligent (see: this thread). Thus, biasing your selection by way of deception is self-defeating unless you suffer fools gladly.
@Greg
@Winter:
“Your analysis is incomplete, which I believe has led you to completely misunderstand the game. A man does not need to care for his children, IF he has OTHER men who care for them. ”
Which is why other men will go to some length to prevent doing just that. This has been studied extensively in birds. With cuckoos as the paradigmatic example.
Human behavior of today indicates that the optimum was for a man to raise at least one family himself, and try to please as many other women as he could. For women the optimum seems to have been to keep her “man” pleased and keep him thinking all her children are his.
Hmmm . . . quite interesting as usual, ESR.
I wonder how what you are saying applies to an environment such as where I live*, where:
– There are more females than males (for multiple reasons, can be readily observed)
– Females are sexually aggressive (I do not know whether it is due to genetic or environmental factors or both, but, women here are HORNY)
– Females are disproportionally attractive (once again whether due to genetic or environmental factors or both I have no clue, but, the norm is very attractive)
which leads to a situation where women compete for men.
I can assure you that the place is strange in that sense (and many others).
Even a fellow with a terminal tan, very poor social skills, and no money such as myself does, indeed, get LAID, and often, and by different women . . . ha!
:)
*: Colombia
@Maurice Roman
“due to genetic or environmental factors or both ”
Mixed genetic background creates healthy and beautiful people. Probably also good food and few illnesses when young.
You know, I was kind of puzzled on why you had never (to my knowledge) mentioned PUA on your blog, seeing as you’ve written a pick-up manual yourself in the past. It was pretty cool to get confirmation that you indeed know of this subculture.
@Winter:
That sounds right. There is certainly a diverse genetic mix here: Indian, African, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and plenty of French and German.
As far as the food, the beef is mostly grass fed (which I read makes it healthier to consume) and the produce is always quite fresh, with a wide variety of fruit, many of it citrus.
I often wonder whether all the good looking, hot, and friendly women folk are one of the main reasons why the place is, literally, NUTS.
Because it is.
But it does have its advantages :)
Esr, what email currently works for you? Been trying to reach you.
@Imbecile
[i]”I read many comments here that demonstrate betas or worse. No offense intended, but a man is leader, else he isn’t a man.”[/i]
I don’t subscribe to negative gender stereotypes, personally; whether applied to myself or anyone else. I’m also aware that you’re likely to assume that said interpretation of masculinity is the one that everybody ought to adopt and emulate, simply because in some respects, it’s possibly worked out so well for you. Contemporary mainstream society is basically designed by the psychopaths, of the psychopaths, and for the psychopaths…and the alphas of the world would be advised to spend time in fervent prayer that it stays that way. Life will not be good for you if it does not.
I’ll also admit quite openly to doing the “masturbation to porn,” thing that ESR mentioned; with one exception, I’ve spent close to the last 20 years doing so, and will probably spend the rest of my life doing so, in addition to dying alone, etc etc.
I’m sure everyone else here will be quick to adopt the stance that I’m contemptible and pathetic for such; but the one core concept that I caught onto, at a very early age, was that as ESR himself admits here, for the most part, the gender relation game is completely messed up from beginning to end. After observing my parents crash and burn, and then being personally exposed to a few other mishaps, I basically decided that the entire thing was for the birds. I suspect I’m probably quite rare where that is concerned; in terms of accepting it, I mean.
I won’t become a PUA because I feel that I have a moral responsibility to women not to, even if it does mean spending the rest of my life alone. The one relationship I was in, was actually as a result of using limited game; I cynically manipulated and lied to an emotionally unstable, and somewhat parasitic, but otherwise basically decent and loving woman for nearly six years, and left the relationship primarily because I had got to the point where I couldn’t stand to lie to myself or her any longer. ESR is right that women are attracted to assholes, but I refuse to become one; both for my own sake, and theirs. My soul is not for sale.
I admit; I despise alphas. I hate the concept. It’s basically a justification for subjugating everyone else around you, of either gender, and treating them in a deplorable, psychopathic manner, and then holding that up as something superior that everyone else should aspire to.
I’m not going to call you an alpha male, Eric; even if you call yourself that. There are very few other people who I admire to the degree that I admire you, and I would not give you what in my own mind is an insult of that magnitude. You are a lot better than that, and you deserve better.
>I’m not going to call you an alpha male, Eric; even if you call yourself that.
Interesting that you consider the term an insult. As I use “alpha”, it simply means someone who is equipped for leadership roles by psychology and temperament. You can tell you are one if your experience of life frequently includes being sucked into leadership vacuums. It’s not about having some sort of dark desire to dominate people, though of course there’s a subset of alphas that has that.
In the PUA context, “alpha” has the additional overlapping meaning of someone who has high hypergamic value to women. These two traits tend to be correlated and to reinforce each other.
Petrus: what, there are only two options in life? Be an asshole to women XOR be a nice guy who uses his tears for lube.
This is pretty interesting reading: http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/01/little-more-on-alpha-and-beta-male.html
Stop holding on to such limiting beliefs!
As I use “alpha”, it simply means someone who is equipped for leadership roles by psychology and temperament.
This is interesting, could you unpack it a bit more? I assume one component of it would be having a strong internal locus of control?
>I assume one component of it would be having a strong internal locus of control?
Probably, though that’s not the first trait that would have occurred to me.
I don’t really know what makes alphas; I wasn’t always one myself, formerly having been what another commenter describes as a sigma. In fact, for personal values reasons I denied to myself that I was an alpha until long after a third-party observer would have said so, facing the reality only when my pattern of constantly being sucked into leadership vacuums became undeniable.
I will further note that alphaness is not altogether a happy trait to have. The getting more sex part is nice, but the constant “somebody has to do it” presented by the leadership vacuums around you can be a serious pain in the ass. Especially if, like me, you have values conflicts about being an authority figure.
Interesting. So you were more of a strong-loner, “not to be fucked with” type before, and moved gradually to a more alpha, take-charge, reach-out-to-the-group leader role? This sounds relevant to my own situation, so any added anecdotes and musings would be much appreciated :)
>Interesting. So you were more of a strong-loner, “not to be fucked with” type before, and moved gradually to a more alpha, take-charge, reach-out-to-the-group leader role?
That’s correct, except that there was never a lot of “reaching out” involved on my part. The damn leadership roles reached out and grabbed me. Once I realized I was stuck with them, I just tried to handle the job as competently as I could.
I’m not sure what else to tell you, except that I still think people who crave leadership roles are not to be trusted. The reason I denied I was an alpha for a long time is that I had some confusion in my head between the sort of person who wants to run things and the kind of person who can’t help doing it.
Perhaps I will blog about this. I have a particular story in mind that won’t really fit in a comment.
Alpha man/woman is a technical term originating in field ethology.
Read Jane Goodal and even better Frans de Waal. You find them in Chinps and Baboons, but not in Bonoboos. They are weak in Humans. Think the likes of Ghadaffi and Sadam Hussein.
Gotcha. And please do.
So maybe we could say Esr is like Cincinnatus: will pick up the consular rod&axe and “git r done” if they really nag him about it, but will go back to farming out in the countryside after it’s over.
>I will further note that alphaness is not altogether a happy trait to have. The getting more sex part is nice, but the constant “somebody has to do it” presented by the leadership vacuums around you can be a serious pain in the ass. Especially if, like me, you have values conflicts about being an authority figure.
No matter where I find myself this pattern occurs. People just seem to gravitate towards me as a leader. They come to me with their personal problems…etc. When the current *leader* is not performing up to task, somehow it always falls on me to be the one to confront them.
I have always felt like this is all just a PITA and wondered why everybody else couldn’t stop acting like a bunch of two year olds.
In my current job, this quality is an asset and isn’t such a problem as I am there to impart knowledge. When in a supposedly professional working environment, it puts you constantly in the cross hairs of the sociopaths, whom I despise. I have never been good at disguising my feelings….so it makes for more conflict and unpleasantness than I desire in life.
It would be interesting to see research on just how much conscious knowledge of such techniques by a woman would allow her greater control over mate selection.
In any case – not entirely sure that the answer lies with women. If men mass adopted game technique there is some reason to think that its effectiveness would weaken. After all – we are clearly capable as agents of recognising when various signals of quality are no longer reliable and adapting our behaviour to suit (even if it takes us a little while). The problem may be in fact that the game and its ilk is still locked within the domain of nerd type personalities without yet main streaming. Perhaps if Mystery developed a tv version of his book that didn’t completely suck there would be more hope.
The question I find more interesting is that assuming mass adoption forces changes in female behaviour – what will they select as the new signals of quality? What benefits would women ever perceive in choosing beta males over alpha? Here’s one possibility:
My view – as much as ESR will likely think it ‘sloppy’ thinking on my part – is that they would do well to select for a capacity for intimacy – although I think that there are many forces militating against that development. Essentially – an intimacy requirement increases the economic cost of mating. And this would serve as a natural impediment to gaming. Such an increase in cost will become more feasible if overall wealth continues to rise.
Another aspect of intimacy (if you believe it to have developed a bit beyond cuddling… mmm yummy bait…) – is that it allows people to deploy symbolic systems that are unique to their relationship and therefore difficult to game. Part of what I think constitutes a successful long term relationship is the special communication system that two people develop – that shared language of gesture and routine that only they know and understand.
Irrespective of the likeliness of such a scenario – it at least can give one hope that the arms race might actually lead in a positive direction. It provides me more hope than the scenario of relying on mass female enlightenment.
In re prevalence of rape: Eric, I suspect that what I think of as your sunny attitude about sex– “I enjoy sex, sex is wonderful!”– might make it less likely for you to be told about having been raped.
The most recent plausible thing I’ve seen on the subject suggests that the majority of men are not rapists (though I wonder about the numbers in cultures which assume that there’s no such thing as marital rape because the wife has given pre-consent), but there’s a substantial minority of men who are serial rapists.
In re alphas being sucked into leadership roles: I think it’s both true that there are people like that, and those who feel a strong drive to be in charge. Even the latter aren’t necessarily a plague if they also have a drive to be a capable custodian of the group.
I’ve read that leadership is more likely to be handed to tall people, though that doesn’t apply to Eric or to someone else I’ve read who keeps getting handed leadership but is 5’10.– and has no interest in leading.
Households: Anyone here believe that it’s possible for a happy married couple to collaborate fairly equally to manage money and housework?
I used to have a similar mindset to the ‘PUA’ guys earlier in life. It’ll eat you from the inside out with sleeziness, and you’ll hate the kind of women you pick up. I’m by no meens an alpha, just not a painfully introverted beta, and I still do okay in the mating game with women actually worth talking to.
I think its more about keeping your interesting to interested proportion in order to get the same effect without intentional manipulation. Have things to say and a tad bit of worked up charisma to say them. And then don’t become overly interested in the first girl to talk to you. If you immediately begin to ignore everything else, hang on her every word, sympathize or agree with things you wouldn’t from someone who didn’t have breasts, that’s what’s going to mark you as a chump. Not being nice or unmanipulative.
I also thought the blog post from the one PUA guy about online ‘game’ being pointless was kind of insightful into their mindset. Its like he never considered the option that maybe its completely doable but goes by a different rulebook when people have the time to consider their actions without the intensity of direct interaction. Those ‘adoring betas’ with their ‘supportive comments’ are the ones getting laid from facebook, its why they bother.
Just gotta have some standards for yourself. But, past all that, I do agree with your conclusions about why ‘game’ does do its job. I just don’t find it as bleak, because its also completely unecesary, just an unfortunate human hack.
I should add.. an unfortunate human hack for women with daddy issues. Just so happens most women tend to in this society.
>Households: Anyone here believe that it’s possible for a happy married couple to collaborate fairly equally to manage money and housework?
Yes. We do. My wife and I share cooking, cleaning, etc. When you have a dishwasher and a washing machine, it isn’t like it takes a lot of time. I like to cook.
RE money. We have found that each person should have a bank account they are in charge of. Large expenses are shared. Bill payment is automated as much as possible. Where we get into trouble is when one person is in charge of the bank account and the other has to buy things and forgets receipts…..I think our solution is workable.
Of course both must be of the same temperament when it comes to money. If one of you is the shop till you drop…gotta have that shiny shit, monkey…and the other is stocking bananas for a rainy day…it WILL get ugly.
Fascinating discussion, from all sides.
There’s one side missing, though: women who enjoy being sexually intimate with men showing alpha behavior. I’m actually rather intrigued that women don’t seem to want to admit to that, although not at all surprised, given that our culture strongly advocates sexual equality, or even deprecates attributes traditionally regarded as male. (Go ahead, find the advertisement or sitcom portraying alpha males in a positive light.)
What’s that like? Are lurid paperback romances involving pirates actually fantasies revealing the experiences most women crave? How about Jane Austin, writing in an age when women were assumed to be submissive to their mates? (I am ashamed to admit I don’t even know if that’s an accurate assessment of Jane Austin’s novels. Maybe if I think of them as alien contact SF….) Are websites catering to a sexually submissive audience perverted or just honest?
Interesting that there have been so few female viewpoints expressed. Someone in this thread mentioned in passing that women’s sexual status tends to lower with age (since so much of it is based on physical attractiveness; this makes sense in EEA terms as youth signals fertility), while men’s status and attractiveness rise with age (because it is based on social status and wealth, which tend in increase over time in successful males).
Here’s a link to an interesting female viewpoint on the difficulty of finding the right man for a long-term relationship. It emphasizes that women tend to seek perfection in a mate, rather than good-enough.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/6651/
This thread has made think carefully about my own situation. I conclude that I’m an alpha female married to a sigma male (very happily, I might add). There has been almost no discussion in this thread of alpha vs. omega female status…
@Cathy:
That’s an interesting read. I could be all wet on this, but I think part of the issue is that at least some women who came of age at a certain time (mid 60s to mid 80s, depending on home environment, part of the country, etc.) seemed to have a sense of entitlement combined with an anger at men as a group that helped to put them, in particular, in this pickle. The author’s age could certainly put her in that bracket — about a decade younger than me. I don’t think there was that much angst about marrying perfection in my parent’s generation, and (even though they marry later) I don’t think there is as much angst about it in my children’s generation, either.
I grew up in a very liberal place, and in my late teens/early twenties, one winning strategy which I refused to apply was to play along with the kafkatrap and self-identify as the beneficiary of a patriarchal system that was devoted to keeping down half the human race.
Serendipitously, I was spending a lot of time working in the UK at that time, and I wound up dating a few English girls, and then marrying one. That worked well, partly because I was the outsider, and partly because, at that time (early 80s) women’s lib in the UK seemed to be about sensible things like daycare for working women, rather than burning bras (like the guys really hated that ??!?) and not making coffee in the office.
Afaik, burning bras was an urban legend.
A book about eating disorders among ambitious young women includes some dubiousness about feminism which never quite coalesced for me.
What may be going on is that one strand of feminism is to make it all right for women to go after what they want. However, there wasn’t really a process for them to find out what they personally wanted, and I think that if you push people to try harder without taking account of their personal desires, they just go after status.
> Afaik, burning bras was an urban legend.
Perhaps. I do know from personal experience that in the mid-to-late 70s there were a lot of topless women at Barton Springs pool in Austin. Still happens now, but back then it was a much higher percentage. Thinking a bit more about it, maybe it does make sense in a kind of passive-aggressive way: See this! You can’t have it.
> However, there wasn’t really a process for them to find out what they personally wanted
That’s putting it mildly. I would say that, in some quarters, the process was to actively discourage anything remotely resembling domesticity, and to instill FUD that any woman who actually wanted to get married and have children was, quite literally, sleeping with the enemy.
> I think that if you push people to try harder without taking account of their personal desires, they just go after status.
It seems pretty obvious that non goal-directed status-seeking is unlikely to lead to happiness, but maybe that’s just my outsider’s view…
Nancy Lebovitz wrote of what’s going on in feminism “…they just go after status.” Status is certainly important, but I’m not seeing much new in women’s behavior that looks like an increased drive for status. Some new patterns of behavior seem like the opposite; in particular, alcohol-lubricated hookups seem to have become more common despite not being particularly high status. And choosing the alcohol lubrication isn’t quite a choice to erase status considerations, but it does seem like at least a choice to muddle one’s view of them somewhat. Other new behaviors do seem to match a pursuit of status, but they don’t look like an increased urge to find status, but rather a change in the status values assigned to various outcomes. E.g., it’s a commonplace that children out of wedlock are no longer the taboo they once were. And I don’t think it’s a commonplace (and I don’t know whether that’s because I’m mistaken or because it’s an unmentionable truth) that by 1990-5 (dated by when I was making some decisions about marriage) it had become higher status for a woman to cynically divorce a settled-for man than to soldier as though she had some responsibility to do so just because he was honestly holding up his end of the marriage or because it might be better for the kids.
“sleeping with the enemy”
I had a girlfriend once who pushed me to a read book arguing that in vitro fertilization using ovum nuclei would allow women to finally free themselves of the patriarchy. She didn’t understand my lack of enthusiasm for the plan, and in retrospect, that’s probably about when we started drifting apart. I wish I still had my copy, though; many people don’t believe me. Yes, this was in the seventies.
“I’ve never seen the cringe reaction you report.”
I haven’t seen it very often, but I’m a notably un-observant person, which is what makes it all the more significant. I’m also a good deal larger than you are and, even with a cane, more physically threatening.
“I do not report the above in an attempt to cast doubt on your claim, but to show that argument by anecdote is not worth much.”
Well, if you want the U.S. statistics, the lifetime risk of rape for a woman is one in six. Almost everyone who deals with the issue considers that wildly too low to be realistic. But one in six is indisputable.
“I think a better argument that we do not live in a barbaric hellhole is the things men say to each other when women are not present. If your sample were representative, I think that talk would be very different than it is.”
It disgusts me what men say about women when women aren’t present, or (as on the net) they assume they’re not present.
A final thought. Most men are not rapists, no argument there. But the ones who are are extreme recidivists. When you ask male college students what they’ve done with women (and you don’t use the loaded words “rape” or “sexual assault”), about 25% admit to having committed acts that meet the legal definition of rape. That’s not even mentioning the ones who have the sense to shut up about their crimes.
>Almost everyone who deals with the issue considers that wildly too low to be realistic.
I suspect it’s wildly high, myself. The reason I say this is that I’ve read some stuff about how bored the operators at rape hotlines get – especially the on-campus ones where women all stoked up on feminist idealism think they’re going to be fielding a tidal wave of outcries and mainly hear crickets chirping. Their largest category of “rape” reports are of drunken fumbles after frat parties in which the issue of consent is rather blurred.
And don’t give me crap about women being afraid to speak up. Over hotlines run by organizations who actively need a rape epidemic to justify their existence? I don’t think so. Besides, the moment you suppose that an absence of women willing to say they’ve been raped is evidence of endemic rape, you’re in the land of the panchreston. And that should make you as suspicious of the rape-epidemic peddlers as I am.
>It disgusts me what men say about women when women aren’t present, or (as on the net) they assume they’re not present.
Don’t change the subject. It’s one thing to note, correctly, that men are often crude and uncouth and disgusting about women when women aren’t around. It’s entirely another thing to imply that such talk routinely includes approval of or apologetics for the violent coercion of women. It does not, not even in the Internet equivalent of dive bars. You have to go looking for that – and I’ve found it, occasionally, but only in places where the men know they’re pariahs.
I said: “And that should make you as suspicious of the rape-epidemic peddlers as I am.”
I will note, for the benefit of anyone who might misconstrue my attitude, that I teach people to use pistols for self defense. I preferentially teach women. And the specific reason I preferentially teach women is that I want them to be equipped to kill rapists.
@DJMoore:
From my direct observations in this country, women DO INDEED develop/display very alpha like behavior when the environment requires them to.
What I find interesting is that the women here can be so sexually aggressive and yet still behave like ladies.
Patrick Maupin: I don’t know why some feminists of that era didn’t wear bras. but I’m willing to bet that it wasn’t to torment men. Some women don’t find bras physically comfortable. I don’t know about toplessness at a hot spring(?).
If you want to see a cool essay about the attack on domesticity, read the introduction to by Cheryl Mendelsohn. She grew up an heir to sophisticated Italian and English home-making traditions, and expected home-making to be her profession. Then the culture changed, and she became a lawyer, and was in the closet for a while how important creating a good place to live was for her.
Eventually, she wrote a book about how much thought, skill, and knowledge could go into a home.
However, your take is much too specific for what I meant. I meant that feminism was built around women who had particular things they wanted to do, and were frustrated by the stereotypes they had to deal with. By the time you get to Perfect Daughters, Starving Girls, it isn’t just that domesticity isn’t respected, it’s that the only goals are getting expensive credentials and a high-paying job and being hot (which equals very thin, which is where the eating disorders come into the picture). In other words, it wasn’t just that domesticity was left out of the picture, everything that wasn’t a high-powered career track was left out.
I don’t know how typical my story is, but when I was younger, I had a background belief that men have desires and women have emotions– the distinction is desires are wanting something, and emotions are reactions to getting or not getting something. After a moderate amount of time of noticing that men had emotions, I realized that there was something very inaccurate in the back of my mind.
I agree with you that non-goal-directed ambition is unlikely to make people happy. Please remember that what I’ve posted on this is my best guess at what was implied in a book about a subculture which is somewhat alien to me.
If I’m right about what happened to those girls, it was about accidental effects of an ideology, not a conscious choice.
@Nancy:
Not a hot spring — 68 to 72 degrees F year round.
I am amazed at all that my wife puts into this realm.
Sure, but I guess I view domesticity as a reasonably good proxy for that set of things that some women might be doing if they were doing what they wanted to rather than what they thought they should be doing. Of course, not every woman wants to be domestic, and of course, the whole reason for the culture of abolishing domesticity was because domesticity itself used to stand for the set of things that every woman should be doing, so obviously it’s easy to extrapolate from that to the mindset that, if you get a chance to do what you want, it couldn’t possibly be running a household…
I think most boys used to learn at an early age to carefully hide their emotions. Judging by my daughters’ friends, this isn’t necessarily the case any more.
That’s probably true, but the ideology as espoused by a few of its more vocal adherents is almost designed to have those ill effects.
(Every ideology has its own set of bad effects, which are probably mostly eminently predictable, should anyone care to do so.)
Eric, my first thought wasn’t “women are afraid to speak up” (though there may still be some issues there), but “maybe someone is being innumerate”.
These are going to be very rough calculations, but suppose 5000 female students on a campus. They each have a 20% lifetime risk of being raped. Let’s call that 1%/year/woman while in college. So, in a given year, that would be 50 rapes per year on that campus, or one a week. Not all of them will be called in.
Assume two people on the hotline so that there’s a good chance that any call will be picked up immediately. There might be more people because they’ve heard “epidemic” and haven’t run the numbers. And everyone on the hotline will be spending the vast majority of their time doing nothing.
>So, in a given year, that would be 50 rapes per year on that campus, or one a week.
The article I read (wish I could remember the source) implied that the actual figure was far lower than that.
Later today I’m expecting two houseguests who are female and self-defense instructors. I’ll ask them some relevant questions.
ESR,
I think there is a rather big problem with your analysis: the whole PUA thing is about only a small (and fairly immature) subset of human sexual behaviour, and you seem to extrapolate their evol-psy analysis into a description of the whole of it, if I get it right.
Your analysis is all right for a 22 years old guy who wants to have sex with lots of women. However, it does not explain the more mature sexual behaviour, for example, mine at 33: I have zero interest in “scoring”: I am looking for a wife, who is going to be a good mother, and generally a suitable partner for starting a family with. I’m not thinking about sex, I’m thinking about a “dynasty” :) Similarly, lots of women above 25-35 begin to realize that exciting guys tend to be unfaithful, and their dating site profiles are all about “I just want a normal, reliable guy” and happily settle for the beta-guy who is nevertheless a good provider, has a good career, is trustable, spends the evenings at home and spends the weekends DIYing up the house and will probably spend the weekends with the kids. After a certain age, being a boring guy is not a disadvantage but an advantage.
This more mature sexual behaviour was actually the norm before the Sexual Revolution and then went out of fashion a bit, nowadays it might sound a bit outmoded to look for a wife/husband instead of a partner, but culture can rarely beat biology in the long run, and when our hormones begin changing around 25-35 we often begin desiring more mature, more conservative relationships, the problem is only that that the social pressure against admitting it is fairly high, however if one gathers the strenght not give a damn about current fashions of living but doing what one really wants, then quite often this is what one really wants. After all reproduction is the closest thing we can have to immortality, and from the age when one no longer feels forever young and invicible, and in his 30-years old body functioning less well than the 20-years old ones, in all those two-day hangovers and no longer having the desire to dance until 6AM and all that one begins to feel a certain hint of decay and mortality, it is perfectly normal to begin thinking about it.
On the female side there is a clear evol-psy explanation for it: younger women want men with perfect genes, older women want men who will be good fathers. On the male side there is something similar going on, after a certain age becoming the kind of person that actually cares about his offspring it is a better reproductive strategy than a “shotgun-marketing” attitude to sex.
So basically, masturbating to porn is definitely not for the “rest of the life” of the beta. After 30 things just fix themselves, and the reliable, trustworthy, kind, patient, financially moderately succesful beta will easily find a 30-35 years old woman who is looking for a husband and a father of her kids, and generally wants to settle down. (Maybe she will cheat on the side, but that’s a different problem, as the old Jewish joke says, better have 50% in a good business than 100% in nothing or a bad one.)
(Plus, by 35 most of the painful outwards differences between alphas and betas are gone. The alpha guy in marketing and the beta in programming wear the same smart casual clothes, low-maintenance haircuts, drive similar cars and are either fat or muscular but no longer wiry, and have a fairly small circle of friends, neither lonely nor “popular”.)
About the role of social status: this is a tricky thing. There are lots of myths in the circles of young circle men how the guy with the expensive clothes and the sports car always wins. Tried that, didn’t work.
Surprisingly enough, even giving to some poor girl working at a grocery store the strongest kinds of “I am a well-paid professional, your life would be more comfortable with me and I will buy you stuff” never worked.
At the very least it does not work so simply and primitively, checking the items on an economists’ list of status goods and conspicuous consumption and waiting for the win to roll in. Golden jewelry was still high on the official list of status goods when and where I grew up, everybody wore it who could afford it and those who could, made their gold chains big and heavy, but it made absolutely no difference in and of itself, if a teenage guy went to a music club with heavy jewelry borrowed from his father or with his own thin ones. I think status works in more complicated ways: being high status not generally in “society” but in a subcultural group where people know each other, there are visible feedbacks of status, and probably external status must be matched by internal confidence.
Thus, giving the money-signals or status-signals to some working-class girl didn’t work because the signals were totally different in my circles and hers, in hers, high-status men wore expensive tracksuits while in mine they wore expensive suits. It does not matter that in society in general the suit has higher status.
I think if one wants to find a woman mainly through status and money, one needs to find a low-status woman in one’s own circles and not in society in general i.e. not the grocery store clerk but the public librarian or elementary school teacher, who will be impressed by a suited dude taking her to the opera in an elegant car, while the grocery store girl will probably be only impressed by muscular dudes in expensive tracksuits and driving agressive cars.
I mean, this might work, but is not guaranteed, what is guaranteed that the simple flaunting of money or social status does not work. A few years ago I took unemployed schoolteacher working as an au-pair to the most expensive bar in the city, with zero results.
The experiment must be controlled for one variable though: pretending to be rich while actually being middle-class is what doesn’t work, maybe it is too transparent, perhaps actually being rich would work.
Discussion of whether those rape prevalence stats are reasonable– what definition should be used? Why women may still be reluctant to define forced sex as rape, let alone prosecute, and debunking the idea that rape is never about sex.
Shenpen, thank you– the evo-psych model of gender relations never made sense to me. Part of it is that it’s way too abstract. Species with males and females still have wildly different different ways of improving the odds of reproduction. People don’t behave exactly like chimps or bonobos, let alone anglerfish.
I think the highest proportion I’ve seen for children whose DNA doesn’t match their putative father’s is 10%, which suggest that a lot of women are pretty faithful.
> Well, if you want the U.S. statistics, the lifetime risk of rape for a woman is one in six. Almost everyone who deals with the issue considers that wildly too low to be realistic. But one in six is indisputable.
Not only is that figure disputable, it is hotly disputed. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 1 in 20 to 1 in 4. Part of the variation comes from, um, “flexible” definitions of rape, and part comes from differing methodology. At the moment I think 1 in 10 is more probably correct.
A bit off topic, but since the subject has come up about how supposedly women can’t get out of bed in the morning without clamping their chastity belt on and walking their big dogs everywhere they go I just thought I’d like to link to two posts that deal with the supposed epidemic of underreporting of rape.
First, despite the blogs name, I think a fair summary of rape law changes can be had HERE:
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/underreporting-canard.html
Short: Despite MASSIVE ..and really it is massive..changes in laws and policies and support structures for victims of rape over the past 30 years underreporting supposedly remains pervasive at greater than a 99.999 percent level. If one believes that, there’s a bridge I’m willing to sell you…
A quote:
Here is reality: no one — no one — knows the precise extent of underreporting, and no one ever has. In fact, the politicization of rape renders it impossible to discern whether underreporting even exists. See, J. Fennel, Punishment by Another Name: The Inherent Overreaching in Sexually Dangerous Person Commitments, 35 N.E.J. on Crim. & Civ. Con. 37, 49-51 (2009).
There’s also a list of ten changes in rape laws and policies . Remember that all of this has supposedly made no difference.
Here’s about rape on campus , and how the numbers actually reported come nowhere within a million light years as to being what the campus activists have been claiming for 20 plus years there SHOULD be.
http://communityvoices.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/opinion/the-radical-middle/27667–one-in-one-thousand-eight-hundred-seventy-seven
Read the comments. The comments are good and there’s only a few of them.
“So, in a given year, that would be 50 rapes per year on that campus, or one a week. Not all of them will be called in.”
The actual number would be more like 1 or 0 rapes per year. The notion that millions of women are being raped but don’t report it is misandrist fiction.
Damn, only 1 in 6 females in the usa raped over a lifetime? Wow. You women are SO LUCKY! Well, I mean, in comparison; I can only DREAM about a lifetime male genital mutilation rate that low, rather than the over 4 in 6 it currently is.
It would be nice if male genital mutilation actually was criminalized, too, like rape is. Well, criminalized for little innocent baby boys, I mean, the way far less harmful cutting already has been for little girls, and ONLY little girls, and at the federal level.
I also have to envy how virtually no one gets paid to rape women, the way people are paid to sexually mutilate little boys, often by the State. Let alone how the poor little boys’ foreskins are resold, and used as ingredients for cosmetic products for, well, almost exclusively women.
Oh, and how likely people are to praise and support women for speaking out about having been raped, in comparison to the degree, amount, and kind of abuse male genital mutilation victims routinely get when they speak up in protest.
Oh, and how almost everyone agrees that rape is a horrific violation, in comparison to how male genital mutilation is treated as a cultural and religious custom of value and merit.
It would ROCK to be a woman and not have had my clitoral hood and inner labia cut off and an inch-wide ring of my frontmost inner vaginal skin stripped out and the two resulting raw edges crushed together under thousands of pounds of force until they roughly and randomly sealed together, without anesthesia or even parental consent. That would be so great — so great that I don’t think I can really imagine it at all accurately. Because even just the idea of being able to reliably expect other people to respond with the kind of sympathy and compassion and support that rape victims usually receive is, just, well, it’s so alien to my actual experience, including the observation of how other men who speak out about having been sexually mutilated at birth are treated.
Barbaric hellhole? I’ll see your barbaric hellhole and raise you a genuine blue pill dystopian nightmare.
“It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. ”
I’ve pestered female friends about this for years. They’ll agonize over what to do about competing propositions from guys they know and random assholes for weeks, and then you ask them… “well, do you even like this guy?”. Response – 9 out of 10 times – “um….. I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it”. And yet, they’ll (eventually) admit that they divert guys into the friend-zone holding pattern virtually as soon as they meet them; “I don’t want to ruin a friendship” translates to “you were never in the running in the first place”.
Guys seem to be a lot more honest, at least with themselves. You look at a woman, and your mind is made up on the question of physical attractiveness almost instantly. After that, it’s up to you whether or not you care about intelligence, personality, etc. Some women just seem to do everything possible to hide from these sorts of judgments.
I’ve no idea what a USP is, but somehow I think I’m better off not knowing.
Few women can be self-aware enough to understand what really attracts them. Those who do are more likely to encourage alpha behaviour in a beta guy than to change what it is that they are looking for.
In the past year, a number of blogs have sprung up that deal with applying the insights of Game psychology to marriage and long-term relationships. Some of these bloggers are religious, monogamous, and otherwise socially conservative.
If Game (or more precisely Game’s understanding of gender relations) continues to go mainstream, the impact on society could be quite substantial. It could mean the end of feminism as we know it.
Whenever I read pua stuff, which I believe accurately describes female psychology, I get so disgusted with women that I loose all interested in dating and feel thankful that I am single and unattached. What I don’t understand is how anyone can feel satisfaction in a relationship that is based on pretending to be someone you are not, and who uses psychological tricks to get their partner to comply with their desires. In my opinion people who like that kind of thing are what make this world such a shitty place.
Hey Nancy, would you consider seeing a highest proportion for babies given back to the wrong mothers of 10% as suggesting that a lot of maternity workers are pretty professional?
Oh, and keep in mind that almost all of them have to know they’re lying to the mothers and simply don’t care as long as they can get away with it and still get paid.
@Shenpen: Glad to see someone arguing that we are not merely bundles of instincts. One thing that stands out to me about the PUA subculture, and such places as pickup bars and clubs… is just how animalistic the behavior is. (BTW, just because you failed in your “mating through display of status signifiers” experiments doesn’t mean the theory is bad, it just means you’re bad at playing counterfeit alpha.)
However, you seem to want to go the other way. I predict that you’ll have better luck if you give up hoping that we can all be creatures of pure intellect who make decisions solely based on logic. You’re never going to find a wife just by walking around presenting facts and statistics on how good a catch you are- or at least, you’re not going to get the kind of wife you expect, I assure you. *shudder* More to the point, you’re not going to get love, loyalty, trust, affection… those are (surprise!) emotional artifacts.
We have emotions and an animal heritage, and studying the PUA scene just may help us understand and come to terms with that, maybe even achieve greater balance in our relationships and ourselves.
FYI, this post has been Instalanched. I wonder if more crazies are going to wander in.
Re: Shenpen,
So, you want to be a useful tool for a women who can’t get any alpha guy to marry her and marry her when she is 35?
Good luck with that. You should find out how many “partners” she has had. It might change your mind.
If she rejected you when you were 22, do you think she finds you attractive when you are 32? No. She just thinks you might be useful, for a while.
Have you a good job, a house, and good income? Step right up, son. There is a gold digger who wants to meet you.
I got pretty heavily into PUA culture a few years ago. I found it after an engagement ended, leaving me feeling pretty snakebit for a long time. I moved on after a couple of years because, frankly, it’s a pretty empty existence — and while I did get friend-zoned more than I liked, the truth is I’ve been a lot more successful sexually than most men even without it.
Having been inside it, I can say that (at least as far as I and the people I knew personally were concerned) it was never about being an asshole or mistreating women. I get why it looks that way in the abstract, but I never applied it in that fashion. For me, it was about getting comfortable expressing the parts of my real self I’d become reluctant to show. As the saying goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And I’d erred on the side of being too timid far too often. Regaining a sense of ease and comfort making open expressions of interest–and finding that they were indeed attractive to women–was a revelation.
In short, I’d fallen into the trap of acting beta when I had no reason to. PUA broke me free of that and, once I got there, I didn’t need the Game any more. Since I’ve never needed a steady stream of conquests to bolster my self esteem, it didn’t get me what I really wanted. But for me, it wasn’t about being a jerk; it was about having and *being* fun. That I’ve held onto even though I don’t even think about Game anymore.
I have used the PUA techniques long before it became a cult and not just for sex. I was auditioning. When I found the right woman (comfortable with the ins and outs of the nasty alpha – she knows I have a roving eye) I married her.
My favorite “line”? “Sleep with me naked. No sex.” You could see the wheels turning. She thinks, “If I get naked there WILL be sex.” And then I would sleep with her naked. No sex. In about 3/4s of the cases she would come back gagging for it (there is nothing like an avid and conscious partner). Her thinking? “Is there something wrong with me? Is he gay? I have to find out.” And in the other 1/4 of the cases? I got to sleep with a naked woman. How do I know all this? The first mate dished to me long after we were married. We have been together 38 years now.
BTW what the female is looking for is as much commitment as she can get from the alpha. Funny thing is I committed before she did. We had been going together 9 years at that point – I had dated other women while we were courting – so when we got hitched she knew me. How did I know she was the one? She was comfortable with all my ex-girlfriends. She was still good friends with one years after we married.
Classically, alphas mate for life.
Socially, alphas know who they are, and what they want, and take care of that. As soon as they’ve taken care of that, they start looking after the well-being of others.
A beta, or “quality follower” is something to cherish, not to deride. Every leader needs somebody who has his back and will point out the bullshit in the pudding for him. There’s absolutely nothing there to deride — every Augustus needs his Agrippa.
Having no clear sense of identity, on the other hand, is a guarantee that you’re either never getting laid, or else are going to spend time, effort, money, and alcohol getting laid only by gammas just like yourself.
“You’re damned cute, and I’m interested, but I’m not about to puppy-dog you, either,” is as close to a “neg” as anybody with self-esteem ever needs to get.
I think that this idea that a friend zone is a dead end, well, I just don’t understand it. Maybe my USP is the ability to charm my way out of the friend zone and into her pants. Usually only works with smarter women, but then, they are the only ones I seem to be attracted to anyway. In fact, I don’t even know what this “friend zone” thing means.
A friend and I observed the phenomenon that women want to have sex with the bad boys some 30 years ago. We called it the “geek theory” (this was before “geek” acquired its current meaning). The author’s oberservations are hardly news.
My solution as a beta male was to just cruise the beach in the hottest set of hot wheels I could get my hands on. Alpha wheels seem to work as well as alpha bad boy behavior in my experience. It’s great to be able to score without being an asshole. Ostentatious, obnoxious showoff, maybe, but definitely not an asshole.
“I love your car, it’s so cute. Can I go for a ride with you?”
Acksiom Says: March 6th, 2011 at 1:06 pm,
What a whiner. From what I gather the cut male lasts longer. Women like that. Unless it goes on for “too long”. I always liked “too long.” The secret is to keep them excited so they don’t dry out in the middle. It is good to have something to offer besides sperm. A good time is a start. BTW my minimum for a steady was “can do trig” – partial differentials was a bonus. You want the best odds possible for making smart kids.
This more mature sexual behaviour was actually the norm before the Sexual Revolution and then went out of fashion a bit,
It has nothing to do with fashion. It is all demographics (at a population level study – individuals can buck trends).
Demographics
I had a background belief that men have desires and women have emotions …
In my experience it is the men who are romantics. Of course she LIKES romance – but it is as a signal not something she would subscribe to. She wants romance but can not afford to be romantic. There is very little romantic about dirty diapers.
I’m not sure what else to tell you, except that I still think people who crave leadership roles are not to be trusted.
A lot of truth there. OTOH I wanted a leadership role where I felt I was more competent than anyone else in the group. Otherwise I was content to follow. Competency is its own alphaness. I was never one to suffer fools. Gladly or otherwise.
The dividing line I think is “wants to be boss” vs “wants to be a good boss”. Good being – gets the job done on time (or better) and under budget.
Shenpen, if you’re 33 and looking for a wife, and can’t find one, you’re either a complete and total loser, or else you think you are. At your age, the beautiful women who have been telling guys “no, I’m too busy” are starting to find out that all the desirable guys have married already. From the results of your experiment, it sure sounds like you have no clue how to woo a woman. You need to take PUA theory a little more seriously than “experimenting” with it.
Rule #1 is that you have to believe in yourself first. It sounds like you don’t.
Darrencardinal asked:
“Do chicks dig Hitler?”
Man’s not exactly available for a PU at the moment. But when he was, the answer is — yes, they did:
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/love-letters-hitler.html
The tech community is full of people who are not good with non-verbal communication, in my neck of the woods the slang term for such is ‘Aspies’ (for Asperger syndrome). These are the people who *need* PUA theory the most, but are least able to get their heads around it. (Well not quite, I have seen even hopelessly socially inept individuals employ a crude form of kino escalation, more or less a sleazy backrub. But I digress…)
I suspect some folks in this thread might fit that label.
Re: kino,
Strengthen your hands and learn to give good shoulder and foot massages (don’t neglect the spine either). Especially the feet. It also helps a lot if you are attuned to the lady in question. Take a class if you need to. Or get a lot of massages and pay attention.
Very helpful in old age. When the hands start feeling arthritic/stiff give the old lady a foot massage. It will help your hands and her feet. The first mate tells me all her girlfriends are jealous. And who knows? When their husbands die….. Well as some one above stated – it is always good to have a recommendation from some one who has been/is close.
BTW if you are just doing the PUA thing just to get laid you are making a HUGE mistake. If there is no attraction (it MUST be mutual) you are wasting your time. For one thing the sex won’t be very good. It is not much fun getting it on with some one who feels pressured. See my above comment for details on how to avoid that. And when the lady thinks she has made the choice? Well. Let me tell you that it can get very interesting. Of course you have done as much as possible to get to your preferred choice.
Come at it with confidence. You don’t have to win all the battles. Just the last one.
I have a very adventuresome spirit and I must say that the greatest adventure I have had in life so far is raising four children with the able assistance of the first mate.. Always keep that last battle in mind.
You know the PUA stuff is a kind of yoga. You really have to pay attention to make it work.
Rule #1 is that you have to believe in yourself first.
Make a list of your good points and bad points. Change the things YOU don’t like. Stay awake. I was meeting the first mate regularly at a restaurant long before we started “seeing” each other. She was a waitress at a place I regularly visited at 3AM. The guys and I would tease her unmercifully. And then leave large tips to show we appreciated her good humor. She still remembers that. You will always be you. Take advantage of that.
I thank you for a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, and most of the commentary is illuminating, as well. I can’t recall if Ace of Spades or Little Miss Atilla was where I first was made aware of this subculture of “game,” but it is certainly interesting. A year ago it would have been an academic interest, I had been married happily for 25 years- then, she died. As did my first wife, before her. By my reckoning I was an Alpha who married an Alpha female the first time around, then became a Sigma who married another Sigma.
I’m sticking with dogs from here on out…
Fornication can indeed be a fascinating game. But when Crunch Time arrives on the Last Day, don’t stand there acting all surprised if someone in authority informs you that you’ve already had your reward.
Acksiom,
There’s a rule in the anti-racist/kafkatrapping subculture which I recommend: “Don’t compare oppressions”.
That subculture is a challenging environment for memes, and they’re trying to create social changes with as little pain for themselves as they can manage.
While they don’t want to hear that they’re being oppressive themselves, they’re trying to hold a coalition together, and “don’t compare oppressions” is not only repeated, it’s pretty much obeyed. This has the advantage for them of avoiding the “I don’t care about your problems unless you care about mine (which are much worse)” trap.
As for circumcision itself, I consider it presumptuous to impose it on infants, but it’s not a central issue for me the way it is for you.
It’s obvious that a small proportion of men are very angry about having been circumcised, while the majority don’t care much. I don’t know what’s going on there– whether the majority just isn’t willing to accept that they’ve been hurt, or whether some men have taken much more damage than others.
Hmm. I always knew I wasn’t an alpha…or at least not a genuine one. I suppose there were times when I could do a reasonable facsimile, but rarely did I ever do it on purpose. I was never really convinced that I was what would be called a beta either, I guess mostly because the idea of a beta as I’ve ever seen it presented made them seem like guys that almost always aspired to “alphahood”. I never really had that going on.
This idea of a sigma, though…maybe that’s what I am. I do, as someone noted above, care a lot more for getting things done than for playing games.
I’ve heard lately of this PUA stuff, but it just seems so pointless. I went through a period about 20 years ago where I would sleep with any woman who looked interestedly my way, and that lasted a year or two. It was the residue of the first relationship I ever had where I seriously thought I might marry the woman. But I never changed anything in my approach…it just seemed to happen naturally. I had sex with more different women in that 1-to-2 year span than in the rest of my life put together. But it didn’t work for me.
In the 20 years between that period and now, I’ve spent about 18 married (to two different women). And all I can say is…thank GOD I don’t have to worry about all that crap anymore. I have zero interest in going outside of my marriage for sex, and I’ve gotten no indication that my wife wants to either.
Interestingly, I have a friend who is a confirmed alpha (I only know maybe three of that rare breed). Recently he confided to me that his wife cheated on him. More, he said he has never had a relationship longer than a month or two where his significant other did not cheat on him. As I thought back over the maybe dozen and a half girlfriends I ever had, I realized that I had no knowledge of ANY of them cheating on me. I’m not saying they for sure didn’t…just that if they did I never knew about it.
One other note: one of the other alphas I know has a wife who hit on both me (hard) and a mutual friend. Given that…why on earth would I ever want to exchange whatever it is I am for alpha status? I have no desire to be cuckolded right and left.
To whoever mentioned the threat of PUA culture going mainstream, it already is in the form of Hip Hop culture. The ‘PUA’ types just put a bunch of labels on what pimps (in the litteral since) have been doing for centuries.
>>Oh, and how likely people are to praise and support women for speaking out about having been raped, in comparison to the degree, amount, and kind of abuse male genital mutilation victims routinely get when they speak up in protest.
>What a whiner
Thank you, M. Simon; I could not have asked for a better, more direct example.
>From what I gather the cut male lasts longer.
Well, you gathered poorly, then. The guys who have non-surgically restored, and their partners, know best, and they report that it improves their stamina, sensation, and satisfaction, among other positive aspects, while decreasing chafing, lubrication needs, and similar negatives.
So, no, actually, circumcision makes sex worse for both men and their partners. But don’t take my word for it; ask them yourself. Here’s a link to an active board: http://www.foreskin-restoration.net/forum .
I don’t think the female preference for jerks is something innately hard-wired due to hunter-gatherer society. Think on what that society was, for a minute. The “law” was that of tribe, clan, kin, and a basic flatness. Even the most skilled hunter can come up empty, and would have to share. If an “Alpha” takes a “beta” (defined as less charismatic, less dominant, less aggressive) man’s mate, then the beta’s response is basically to wait until nightfall, stick a spear up the backside of the Alpha and kin, and walk out of the tribe with his relatives. Leaving the tribe vulnerable to similarly situated enemies.
This has been the experience of anthropologists, and “War Before Civilization” by Keeley and Nicholas Wade’s “Before the Dawn.” A relative flatness of hierarchy, constant murder over women, and evolutionary pressure to reduce conflict by more equitable distribution of women and critically, attractive women.
Rather, it is AGRICULTURAL society, with a HUGE JUMP in population numbers, where picking the Alpha man gives far better reproductive success. A King, High Priest, or other arrogant holder of most of the agricultural resources can even if sharing among hundreds of women, provide more material benefits (food, shelter, safety) than all of the resources of a common man. Thus in hunter-gatherer societies an Alpha is not much better than a Beta male, but in Agricultural societies, with huge population increases, an Alpha is many, many, many times better. Most of his children will survive while few of the common man will.
What modern Christian society in the West did was put restraints on both Alpha males (even Henry could only have one wife at a time), and women. No harems like the Pharoahs or King David. Women, of course, hated it, and removed it as soon as they could to maximize their access to “sexy” (Agricultural Era A-hole King Types) men instead of ordinary men. Save for a cultural revolution based on trading security in chaotic, violent times (how able is an Alpha A-hole in modern society to provide security for many women? Not very much) there is no going back.
We are stuck with most kids being produced by most women, and about 10-15% of Alpha A-hole jerks. With most men looking on from the outside and doing whatever they can to avoid being taxed for other men’s children.
I don’t particularly like having been circumsized, but it doesn’t much bother me for the fact that I’ve still found all my sexual encounters satisfying for all parties. If that wasn’t the case though, I could definitely see that mild irritation becoming something more.
It definitely should be the right of every male to decide for themselves. Making sure not to have it done in your own children is the best way, imo, because most people who have it done, have it done because its the norm.
If you are attracted to youthful women with narrow waists, breasts, long legs, white teeth, small chins and big eyes, lecturing about how your sexual preference leads to shallow women who put a lot of effort into making their features look best and little effort into other things will do absolutely nothing to change your attraction.
Sexual attraction happens to you, it is not a choice.
If someone logically showed how selecting the fatty with a complextion problem was selecting the more moral, more motivated, more loving woman who spent a lot less energy on fashon and makeup tricks to enhance her carnal attractiveness, it would do nothing to influence your bedding preferences. It is the same for women. If the bad boy or alpha characteristics cause the attraction mechinism to go into gear, it is meaningless to argue she should like the provider beta because that will cause a better generation of men. No woman is going to sacrifice themselves by going to bed with a loser to enhance mankind in general.
No one is going to take one (to bed) for the species. I am not going to bed a fatty with pimples to improve womankind. It is just too personal a decision and we are all programmed to be smitten by what we are smitten by.
Should have put this in my post:
In a way your article is smaltz. “In American English, schmaltz (adj. schmaltzy) has also an informal meaning of excessively sentimental or florid music or art or maudlin sentimentality”. In other words, a pretty lie.
You posit that if women understood “game,” the self awareness would lead them to better choices of men leading to better behavior by men.
My point is, I would like to have the hot chick, not at any cost – if she is a psycho I’ll pass, but the hotness is the most important attribute. For women it is the same, if you do not cause the attraction gates to open, it does not matter if you have a credit score of 788. Game merely deals with this reality; it is the push up bra of the male.
Men may understand the construction of the push-up bra but that does not make a nice cleavige any less attractive or pleasure producing.
@ Josh – depends what you mean by mainstream. Yes – plenty of guys (naturals) use such techniques. But the PUA thing – at least my understanding of it – is relatively recent. It is characterised by a fairly nerdy, and generally socially challenged individuals, consciously learning the techniques that naturals and alpha males deploy without thinking about it. In this way they game the signals women use to select for strength. This explicit set of rules is almost certainly not mainstream in its application – by those who are not naturally pre-diposed toward their use.
Dan: That’s pretty much just what I meant man. Their community may be new, but the ‘game’ they’re pushing is already more then mainstream. Wannabe’s and poser’s are already actively immitating it with less self awareness. Their prevelence wouldn’t do anything hip hop culture hasn’t already, other then making it socially acceptable for nerds to go with it maybe.
Hell the term game itself comes from hip hop culture.
I’d also like to say a lot of the ‘naturals’ are a lot more aware then people think of what they’re doing. If you’re getting a lot of pussy, even if you’re not actively analyzing it, you start figuring it out.
Being of XX persuasion I agree with the thesis of this post. It is up to women to change.
But there is a problem. She changes. She realizes the guy she is sitting next to is really a great catch. She’s nice to him. He marries her. She is very happy and has his babies and loves him and them and would never think of leaving, even in the tough times.
Which is why it’s hard for women to change the culture of men not in committed relationships…the women who wise up are taken. Guys are left with the rest.
I think these guys really do teach a lot, as you point out, you don’t have to turn into one in order to figure out what you’re “doing wrong” with women. People would say “the worst thing she can say is no” oh I wish that were true, I was lucky if she only said no. laughing at me, or a whole group of women laughing at you, or turning around and walking away while you’re talking, were normal reactions.
But it was only after watching a video on body language that I really saw the difference between slouching and being shy, and looking confident. The same man looked like two different people. No wonder my friends kept telling me to stop slouching! Also as I became aware of all the signals I was sending saying “I’m not worthy” no wonder women laughed at me. And I finally understood why I couldn’t play “high status” in improv no matter how hard I tried: I had no idea what high status meant.
Finally one new years I decided to ask out every woman I was remotely interested in. Eventually after a lot of practice they stopped laughing said “no” respectfully, then more and more started saying yes. Seriously sometimes I think we need to bring back finishing schools (or classes). Why did my dad never teach me this? Or my buddies? Instead I learn it from jerks.
But a great book for these guys to read is probably No More Mr Nice Guy which is not a pickup book but a self help book, helping some me see they are not as nice as they may think, but rather manipulative and dishonest and enablers.
lubrication needs,
Well you just work harder at keeping her at maximum excitement then (I can see an opportunity there). None of the difficulties you claim cutting causes have been a problem for me. Thus I do NOT feel your pain. But if you want to feel your pain I have no objection. I have a lot of causes I’m interested in d*** snipping is not one of them.
Best pick-up tool ever invented: a two year old in a stroller on a warm summer day. They ladies come to you. Second best – already have a girlfriend.
M. Simon: If you’re having a daylong sexfest, she’s gonna get a little dry after a while, you can’t expect her cum to handle all the lubricating no matter how often she’s getting off.
The neg must be seen as fundamentally an equalizer of relative status in field, and, arguably, what a woman has done to deserve it is to think she’s “too good for you”. It is intended to puncture bloated egos, especially of highly attractive women with “bitch shields” who will literally not give you the time of day unless you deploy it.
And if you “win” you get to spend time with a woman with a well developed bitch shield. One day you will be down on your game and she will be up on hers and you will get quintuple bitched. Of course if you plan on never seeing her again at the outset….
# Josh Says:
March 7th, 2011 at 12:12 am
M. Simon: If you’re having a daylong sexfest, she’s gonna get a little dry after a while, you can’t expect her cum to handle all the lubricating no matter how often she’s getting off.
True. My come made up the difference. And of course there are always warm up breaks. Turning the tables if you get my drift. That can add considerably to the excitement with no shortage of lubricating fluid. I’m told it is an acquired taste.
>Second best – already have a girlfriend.
Or a wife. I’ve had several incidences of subconscious kino escalation at parties with other women….when we both suddenly went….oh shit…what are we doing. My wife was there…strange. Not intentional at all…..at least on my part.
I didn’t even know what kino escalation was…until I read the original post here and followed the links a bit. I knew the language though. Usually starts innocently enough. Somehow I have learned this along the way and employed it to an extent that it was subconscious, and apparently still do. Why do some learn it and others don’t? It’s not like I went to kino class.
Also reading through these posts….ugh.
Women are people too. It’s OK to be friends with them. I’ve had lots of female friends. You don’t have to bed every woman who crosses your path.
In fact I prefer the company of women to that of most men. I can be friends with them…doesn’t hurt my self esteem. If they are interested…great. If not… no biggie.
Trying to remove all the mystery from human interaction and reduce it to some sort of systematized vagina vector ray…is well….disturbing.
And since this came up way up thread:
A thermodynamic explanation of politics
It also explains city vs country mores and to a certain extent why you would use different strategies in different cultures.
Note that “game” is, in some sense, a pastiche of honesty.
After all, most of us to have something that is more important to us than a person who we just met. Likewise, we have no basis for saying that such a person is the ultimate.
Much of game involves acting that way. With fake game, one invents the alternatives. With real, one admits to the alternatives that exist.
@Jay
Not sure if you’re still reading comments here, but if you are:
Your comments @ March 4th, 2011 at 11:35 am and @March 4th, 2011 at 12:51 pm were electric – mostly because they track stuff I’ve been thinking about on sociological evolution for years. Until just now reading your comments I’d never heard anyone else thinking along those same lines.
Basically I see Society = Population (biology) + Culture (noetics/memetics/behavior). You can start as small as you want and recursively get larger and larger societies grouped together. Different societies are engaged in (Darwinian) competitive struggle, with Good and Bad defined, within each society, as that which makes the society stronger. That isn’t determined in advance by some rulebook, but rather, emerges over time as what has demonstrated as being adaptively suited to the situations that society finds itself in. There is both canalization due to physical circumstances (think the institutionalized selfishness of water in Herbert’s Dune) and due to cultural factors (John Locke’s notion’s of individual rights, and the Revolution in America that were founded on it, were continuous with the British evolution, going at least as far back as the Magna Carta, of greater liberty for even those who weren’t themselves monarchs).
Civilizations, in turn, are collections of interrelated societies, and “Culture Wars” are, exactly as you term it, the evolution within a society of social mores from those adaptive to one era, away from the era of its generation. Sometimes new cultures are more adaptive and succeed. Sometimes less adaptive, and they fail. From my perspective, too much of the “liberal/conservative” dichotomy arises because one group (typically the conservatives) feel rules are good *in and of themselves* while the other feels that there is no good (i.e. observable) reason to hang on to those rules. Both groups are wrong, of course, and the law of unintended consequences arises when either group blindly decides that its course of action can be undertaken without paying careful attention to the full range of causes and effects of the rule in question.
My ultimate view is that what is good or bad is by what is best for the species – and for that reason, among others, I vote for the West vs. Sharia. Among other things, I don’t trust Islamic culture to provide us with rockets able to shoot down any incoming asteroids that might head our way, and I like to prepare for the long haul.
I would like to say that my blog discusses things of this nature. I can honestly say that I *intend* to discuss these things on it, but… haven’t gotten around to it yet. The name of the subject – Naturalizing Sociology – is meant to be taking a look at human society’s purpose and evolution as *strictly* continuous with human biological history and evolution. So I’d welcome any further discussion of ideas along these lines.
Jonathan Caro Says:
March 7th, 2011 at 3:16 am
You will love my link at March 7th, 2011 at 2:18 am. It is an exposition on how cultures evolve to fit different thermodynamic niches. It also explains why different cultures find it so difficult to see the other culture’s point of view. It IS a matter of life and death.
> From my perspective, too much of the “liberal/conservative” dichotomy arises because one group (typically the conservatives) feel rules are good *in and of themselves* while the other feels that there is no good (i.e. observable) reason to hang on to those rules.
While one can go a long way with battling strawmen, it’s unclear why one would make the journey.
FWIW, strawmen is too kind. (Consider the current budget battle.)
While this blog is extremely well written, I find it sad that someone with a 120+ IQ would believe that having sex with a multitude of women is either self-satisfying or has some kind of socially redeeming positive effect on either of the parties.
The meaning of communication is the results you get. If the sophisticated, highly intelligent successful bullshit artist (PUA) wants sex, sex is what he/she will receive. This is just so much narcissistic crappola, it’s funny.
Men and Women have different emotional and sexual needs. Men are not women; women are not men. The short term and long term emotional and chemical reactions in a man and woman to sexual intercourse are not the same. Who woulda “thunk”?
Bullshit Artists (PUAs) with the primary goal of having sex with as many females/males as he/she can will never be satisfied with his/her “significant other” relationship.
Well, as compared with all the other men here, I’m probably somewhere down in the omegas. But I’m married and satisfied. But most of all, I also want to say that my approach to marriage is quite different from the rest of yours. It’s from a different culture, where marriages in general are arranged and after marriage divorce is all but unthinkable. Scoff as some of you undoubtedly will, but I and my other men and women who married this way–the vast majority of us–don’t ever regret this arrangement. We see marriage as a duty, a responsibility.
On the contrary, what all the comments on this article have in common (and in the article someone named Cathy pointed to in the Atlantic magazine) is that everyone is thinking “what can I get out of marriage” – it’s all about “me”. But does that not strike any of you as the a poor basis for a lasting marriage?
If it’s all about “me”, it is no wonder that your marriages don’t last. People marry for sex and prosperity, for sure. But along with with sex and prosperity comes responsibilities and duties to a whole range of people outside of the married couple — children, parents, and, dare I say it, society itself. What makes it all come together is that if there is a purpose at all to life that is not simply of our own making it has to come from God.
If anyone asks what “God” has to do with this, perhaps we can agree that it’s probably going to take some form of divine intervention to enact broad and vast changes to your social climate. It’s just not going to happen under a humanistic world view.
I don’t think I am an alpha, I am certainly a beta, but I tell you what, most of the men around me are less than betas. No fault of theirs I know. I do fine. I can live with not being an alpha.
Andy Freeman hit the ball right on the head. That’s what I was jokingly calling the interesting to interested proportion earlier. PUA theories ‘game’ is just a way of cooking the books in a really sleazy way, which is what men who make a lifestyle out of intentionally manipulating women have been doing for eternity.
KKD is right. We Americans, as the saying goes, will do the right thing, just after we’ve tried everything else. The solution is Christ.
Andy Freeman, conservatives in general dislike rules. Its just that we dislike the consequences of not having neccessary rules even more.
As to rules, I’d reccomend a book called ‘Rules’??????, not the one about dating. Its very thin, and describes the bueraucraticizing mentality that seeks to make a rule for every circumstance so as to remove the need for human judgment. Quite enlightening.
And liberals often love rules, just subversive ones.
I didn’t expect to see so much overlap between ESR and the Roissy crowds. Whiskey posting here? Wow.
I’m of the nerdy, smart, boring, stable guy persuasion. I used to be one of the shy, poorly-dressed, insecure, introverted geeks in the corner who failed utterly not only with women, but with social interaction in general.
A friend of mine had sort of unknowingly developed his own version of “game” — in high school, starting from essentially where I was at that time, he resolved to become “cool.” Being an analytical type, he determined what behaviors worked best to further this goal, and succeeded — becoming outgoing (previously introverted), social (previously private), well-dressed (previously poorly-dressed), dominant in conversation (previously shy), and engaging in the sorts of behaviors that popular high-school kids do (instead of playing video games at home).
After college, he ran me through the short version of what he had done — dress like this, take this attitude towards people, etc. This made an enormous difference for me. After that I also looked into a bit of “game” stuff, like David DeAngelo.
As a Christian, I find the typical goals of game pretty useless, if not distasteful. I was seeking a good Christian woman to marry, not a bunch of women to sleep with. However, I found that even for my purposes, elements of game were very useful, and lead to a tremendous increase in my success with women, before leading me to my wife. I think maybe the best way to describe my interaction with game is to say this: game allows a classic “nice guy” like me to treat a woman well without being perceived as weak and undesirable.
This seems like a contradiction, of course, like paying for the right to buy a useful service. But it’s worth it for me, because I want to treat women well, and often you have to “pay” for that by being more alpha than you otherwise would be. Basically it allowed me to learn how to be perceived as attractive by women, while not really changing the core of who I am.
As an engineer, obviously game appeals to the part of me that wants to understand things and work out exactly how they function. And I can see how people can easily take it too far, by allowing their core personality to change in response to what works best, as opposed to using game to enable you to be the most effective version of yourself that you can be. I think people lose sight of the point, which is to present themselves in a way that other people enjoy, rather than to grant themselves some sort of power over other people. If you’re an unpleasant person, then communicating yourself better won’t help much, you need to work on your personality first.
What shocked me about my friend was that he essentially rewrote his personality, based on what he himself wanted to be like. I’m not sure if that’s a core part of the “game” stuff (aside from changing your personality to get more women to sleep with you), but I found that when I tried it, it worked for me as well. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that I could change my personality by willing the change, but it turned out that it works. I think that’s a useful insight, whatever dubious motives and effects tend to be associated with “game.”
I think the problem is that the people who need the most help are the most likely to look at the mechanical elements that make game work and lose sight of the purpose, which is to allow you to communicate with other people in a way that presents yourself positively and enables more communication. If you’re not a good guy, then you’re just being a jerk by getting lots of women to sleep with you; the premise should be that you are a good guy, and want to enjoy a woman’s company, and you’re helping her to recognize that she’ll enjoy being around you. People who feel outside of normal communications easily get angry and bitter (I know I was), and I think game can become a way of getting back at the people who ostracized them — now I have power over you, so I take whatever I want since you misused your power over me for so long.
I guess like with anything, the efficacy comes from the good part — increased ability to communicate for people who really struggle with social dynamics — and not the bad part — the desire to use increased social skills to exploit others.
Also, I wanted to quickly comment on “nice guy” stuff. I was surprised to find, looking back on my “nice guy” past, how manipulative and selfish it was. My wife basically had/has no real understanding of dating or how it’s supposed to work (which lead to a very attractive woman being available to someone who was willing to step in and work with her lack of knowledge, win/win). When I first met her, two other guys were interested in her. One of them even had the advantage of having met her first, and started to pursue her. However, on the first day we met I completely blocked them out and got all of her attention for myself. They never had the slightest chance after that.
In the course of later explaining what they were doing, and what other “nice guys” had been doing toward her, I really started to understand that the “nice guy” thing is basically to keep giving the woman nice actions, with the expectation that eventually she’ll feel guilty about how much she’s been given for free or maybe subconsciously realize how amazing the guy is to have given her all this time and attention, and give romantic affection in return. Far from being selfless, as I had felt when I did it years ago, I realized that it’s manipulative, dishonest and selfish. I guess to me, game has at least the advantage of clarity. The woman pretty much knows what she’s getting. It may be unfair to utilize techniques that she almost certainly won’t be able to resist, but there’s a difference between laying a guilt trip on someone and putting a cookie on the counter. At least in the latter case they might know they shouldn’t do it, but they freely choose.
I started to realize the difference most clearly when I open doors for women. Before, I felt owed some kind of appreciative mention for being such a great guy and got a little annoyed when I didn’t get it; now, I don’t care whether they say anything, I’m just happy to have been of help. I don’t need them to tell me how great I am in order to do something good for them, and the difference shows me very clearly that that was not the case before.
Transitivity. Eric enjoyed Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”. Eliezer used to share the blog “Overcoming Bias” with Robin Hanson. Robin Hanson now links approvingly to “willing to dump a fuck in the distended porcine holes” Roissy. Therefore, Eric believes that Roissy is an intellectual whose ideas are worthy of serious consideration. (I’m a bit fuzzy on why Russ Nelson thinks that Roissy likes women, though.)
>Therefore, Eric believes that Roissy is an intellectual whose ideas are worthy of serious consideration.
You are so silly. I believe that Roissy is worth paying attention to because he writes intelligently.
Roissy is more poetic than intellectual.
This article is rather incomplete.
Read ‘The Misandry Bubble’ for a far more detailed explanation of the whole thing, including answers to questions that this author seems to struggle with.
@Nancy @Greg you misunderstood my point. I wasn’t saying we aren’t just a bundle of evolutionary instincts (although I do believe that, but that’s beside the point, that was not the point I was making).
My point is that our natural reproductional instincts are not just instincts for having sex, but quite often for, you know, actual reproduction, as in, marriage, family and whatever. Now I know that sounds like a big d’uh, but my real point was that people including women have wholly different preferences when they actually grow up – these days that tends to happen after 30 which is OK if we take the longer life expectations into consideration – and start to care more about finding a partner for marriage and family than finding a partner for sex. If I at 32 am no longer attracted to the “hot babes” because they simply emit the kind of “I’m gonna check the kids homework and make awesome dinner” waves, why should I assume women over 28-32 are still attracted to the kind of alpha-guys they were attracted to at 23? This I my point and I think ESR is completely missing this aspect, the maturing of preferences, or the turning of reproductive-instincts-channeled-into-lust-for-sex into, you know, a desire for actual reproduction.
(For a long time I believed my generation – 1978 – is the most screwed up ever and the world will end with us, but in the last couple of years there is a pleasant surprise, all my friends are settling down into long-term relationships thinking about marriage and family and essentially becoming just perfect bourgeois :-)
It is as if people had an instinctive knowledge about their life expectation and set the length of their life-periods accordingly. Does that sound feasible? It sounds strange but it is supported by observation, I think. In some Masai tribes with a life expectation of maybe 35 there are 14 years old boys behaving as totally serious, grown-up men. And in society with a l.e. over 70 there are 27 years old people behaving as teenagers. However, after a certain point, it is being 30-35 my generation almost everybody grows up, and that’s some good news I think.
(In fact I think the whole idea of a “teenager” is a very new concept and comes from longer life expectancies: four or five generations ago you were either a child, or an adult.))
“Roissy is more poetic than intellectual.”
Well if my guess is right and his nickname comes from The Story of O, it might be true and it might also disclose, eh, some other stuff… some aspects of the PUA thing seem to have some hidden sadistic instincts in it to me. I know a whole lot about sadistic instincts, given that I unfortunately have some of them too, so it is not to meant as a condemnation, rather as compassion for a “curse”…
> PUA theories ‘game’ is just a way of cooking the books in a really sleazy way, which is what men who make a lifestyle out of intentionally manipulating women have been doing for eternity.
That’s the negative view.
The positive view is that a lot of “not getting laid” guys are telling a different kind of lie, a lie that is pretty much responsible for the whole “not getting laid” thing.
To the extent they see PUA as an excuse to stop that lie, to tell the truth, they’ll do much better.
I’m serious. Take the “I have alternatives/a life” stories. Who doesn’t have alternatives? Yet, lots of guys will act as if they don’t. In other words, they lie. It’s a different lie than lying about one’s alternatives, but it’s still a lie.
Switching to “I have alternatives/a life” is the important part. At that point, one can either lie about ones alternatives or go with the truth.
If you circumcise an adult male, he has already devoted neurons to the foreskin that is removed. If you circumcise an infant male, his brain is still plastic – the neurons that would be processing the foreskin are processing other parts of his shaft instead. In other words, a cut adult is really losing a lot of sensation. A cut infant loses much less, but gains all the benefits (improved endurance, reduced risk of HIV, etc.)
If you think your son will want to be circumcised, do *not* wait until he is older – the earlier the better. If you think he won’t, don’t. Parents do what they think is right for their children. Sometimes the children feel differently when they grow up.
I was circumcised as an adult. I lost no sensation.
A lot of people’s earliest sexual experiences fit the legal definition of rape. That doesn’t mean they’ve actually raped anyone, or ever would. It just means the legal definition is useful for the administration of law, but useless for finding out what’s actually happening. Statutory rape isn’t rape, it’s something that for convenience the law pretends is rape, and treats as if it were rape; there may be perfectly good reasons for that, but they’re irrelevant if the subject is actual rape, or “rape rape” as Whoopi Goldberg put it.
grendelkhan, I’m assuming that women actually LIKE to fuck. Now let’s assume the existance of actual alphas and beta (Roissy’s definition). Let’s also assume that women only fuck alphas. That’s a whole LOT of women who aren’t fucking. So if Roissy helps betas to act like alphas, he’s helping women get laid. And that’s good, because they WANT to get laid. So he’s doing a good thing.
Why should he do this? For the fame and fortune? Probably not a lot of fortune in his website. He could be doing it for the fame, but Roissy is an obvious pseudonym, so the fame seems scant. I think it’s reasonable to say that he’s doing it because he wants more people fucking, women and men both. Not plausible that he’s doing that because he hates, or even dislikes women.
Follow-up:
Here’s an example of how to get a result like that or higher. There are states in the USA where the age of consent is 18. Go to a college in such a state, and interview a bunch of 17-year-old freshmen, and ask them whether they’re virgins. Some will truthfully say no, some will lie and say no; either way, and no matter how old their partners were, they’ve admitted to “acts that meet the legal definition of rape”. Then you publish and people are horrified and you get a grant to do more research.
Shenpen, adults have done a lot to extend adolescence– restricting permission to work, to marry, and to have sex to higher ages, and requiring more and more years of education to get a decent job. There’s something going on, but I don’t think it’s an instinctive individual reaction to longer lifespans.
The thing that might be an instinctive individual reaction is the current emphasis on safety.
Part of the PUA canon is that women hold the power of sex over men, unless men get smart about it. Roissy, sounding a bit MGTOW, talks about how the failure case for women is becoming an old maid because they eschewed Nice Guys before their capital (their youth and looks) decayed. He does not, so far as I can see, talk about the general sexual happiness of women as an important goal, because, if anything, he seems to believe that women have too much sex with people he doesn’t approve of, not too little sex in general.
It’s entirely possible that Roissy wants to have sex with women, and appreciates certain women in certain ways, while loathing women-in-general. In much the same way that the “funk-filled bratwurst” go-round illustrated that while Twisty Faster may be a fan of Richard Dawkins, she is not a fan of men in general, Roissy’s numerous floridly “poetic” bits on women illustrate something analogous for him.
But this is pointless; I don’t give a tuppenny fuck about Roissy’s interior mental state. If he has some interior font of affection for women, it’s hidden under layers of hatred and disgust which are quite visible in his writings.
>Roissy, sounding a bit MGTOW, talks about how the failure case for women is becoming an old maid because they eschewed Nice Guys before their capital (their youth and looks) decayed.
Prior to investigating PUA I had noticed that warnings about this failure case are a rising theme in writings by women for other women.
>If he has some interior font of affection for women, it’s hidden under layers of hatred and disgust which are quite visible in his writings.
It’s tempting to write Roissy off that way, and it’s a mistake I nearly made. What prevented me is that I noticed a tang in his cynicism I’ve seen before in other writers. There’s a certain flavor of that which betrays bruised idealism, an unquenchable desire to love that which the writer ostensibly derides as worthless.
Additionally, I’m surprised to see this much misinformation about rape reporting, especially the throwing-hands-up “who could possibly know? I’ll just appeal to my intuition!” reaction that Eric’s shown. This is not the kind of question that hasn’t had anyone seriously looking into it over the last two and a half decades.
I think your threat model is incorrect. Much like the time when you insisted that an armed Jasper Schuringa would have done better than an unarmed Jasper Schuringa in subduing that Abdulmutallab fellow without explaining what the alternate outcome would have been, you seem to like guns for self-defense, which is, y’know, well and good for you, but you seem to think that adding them to a bad situation will necessarily improve it. The vast majority of rapes aren’t committed in situations where the attacker is a clear threat and the victim can draw on them and get a clear shot. It’s frequently the culmination of a campaign of intimidation or a pattern of abuse.
Mary Koss surveyed women and asked them a series of questions, positive answers to which translated into “attempted rape”, “sexual coercion”, “rape”, etc. She found that about 25% of women had been the victims of rape or attempted rape; 15% had been the victims of rape. The “1 in 4” statistic is a misreporting of the former number, probably because it’s much snappier than “1 in 6 and 2/3!”. You can read the original study, “Scope of rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students” in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55(2), pages 162-170.
One major criticism of Koss’s work is that one of the three questions she used to define rape, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?”, was too broad and vague. If this was the case, then changing the question to be more specific would have a significant change on the results. Schwartz and Leggett re-ran the study in 1999, with that question changed to “Have you engaged in sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to but were so intoxicated under the influence of alcohol or drugs that you could not stop it or object?”; see “Bad Dates or Emotional Trauma? The Aftermath of Campus Sexual Assault,” Violence Against Women 5(3), pages 251-271. They came back with a result of 17%.
The result has been replicated by other groups in the late 1990s using their own methodology: the DOJ’s Sexual Victimization of College Women study found a lifetime incidence of 10%, the National Institute of Justice’s National Violence of Women Survey found 14.8%, and the National Women’s Study, which found 13%.
This–the fact that somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 6 women have been the victim of a completed rape in their lifetime–is as well-supported a result as any in the social sciences. Eric, if you’re going to claim that it’s nonsense, you’re going to have to come up with a better reason than that is smells fishy to you.
>Eric, if you’re going to claim that it’s nonsense, you’re going to have to come up with a better reason than that is smells fishy to you.
I’m not claiming that it’s nonsense because it smells fishy to me. I’m claiming it’s nonsense because even as basic a check against crime statistics numbers as I did doesn’t support it. “Because it smells fishy” was just the motivation for looking.
Vox’s new blog is dissecting Erics posts. http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/
> The vast majority of rapes aren’t committed in situations where the attacker is a clear threat and the victim can draw on them and get a clear shot. It’s frequently the culmination of a campaign of intimidation or a pattern of abuse.
“a campaign of intimidation or a pattern of abuse” are two things that can easily qualify as clear threats. In addition, a clear threat can come from an acquaintance or even someone who was thought to be a friend.
Of course, the “abuse” matters. “I won’t like you if you don’t sleep with me” is not abusive.
As to the “vast majority” claim, let’s see the breakdown with definitions. Since two of the supposedly frequent cases are actually clear threats….
Are they actually rising, or are they just the sort of concern-trolling folks who’ve been doing this at a pretty steady rate ever since it became clear there was a living to be made warning women that if they don’t lower their standards, they’ll turn into spinsters, or be eaten by their cats, or the like?
Sure; I’ll buy that. He put women on a ridiculous pedestal, they failed to gobble his knob with sufficient hungry gratitude for his attention, thus, beaches and shores. Passive-aggressive Nice Guy nonsense and its attendant long-suffering entitlement complex leads one to take up PUAing.
Andy Freeman, the point I’m making is that sometimes rape doesn’t come out of nowhere; it’s part of an escalating set of boundary-pushing behaviors that doesn’t avail itself of a clear line-crossing moment where you have to choose between starting a fight and becoming a victim. It’s a qualitative, not quantitative claim; the “vast majority” wording was sloppy on my part. I’m outlining the sort of situation that comprises Eric’s threat model doesn’t make much sense, where having a gun or not having one makes the difference between being victimized and not.
>I’m outlining the sort of situation that comprises Eric’s threat model doesn’t make much sense, where having a gun or not having one makes the difference between being victimized and not.
This is, because, as always, you ignore the positive psychological effects of being armed and competent even outside of situations in which using the weapon is an immediate option.
There are a few problems with this, but the problem with reading through an RSS feed is that when I decide to catch up, I don’t notice that there’s a newer thread open, one specifically intended to deal with this subject. I’ll move the topic over there, starting with the apparent discrepancy between crime statistics, general victimization surveys and sex-crime victimization surveys.
I find myself shocked to evidently be an “alpha” under these definitions – despite not typically being a gigantic asshole.
(I think that for both esr and myself the choice of venues is meaningful – very similar, though not identical. Both sets have a significantly different population than the average bar, and their own subcultures, which anecdotally are more friendly to such things than the General Culture is.
I’m pretty sure I’d do less well than I do if I was just hanging out in bars looking for Someone To Fuck, than hanging around large groups of people with significant shared interests, and over time coming to realise there’s mutual attraction.
If I’m playing any “game” at all, it’s not the PUA one, and it’s one with a very long timeframe.)
> the point I’m making is that sometimes rape doesn’t come out of nowhere; it’s part of an escalating set of boundary-pushing behaviors that doesn’t avail itself of a clear line-crossing moment where you have to choose between starting a fight and becoming a victim.
We’re not talking about starting a fight vs becoming a victim. We’re talking about when it’s appropriate to use lethal force to in an attempt to stop a threat of grave bodily harm or death, which isn’t “starting a fight”.
Making that substitution, rape always has at least one such moment. The rape itself is one “clear line-crossing” and there’s typically another one before that. You seem to think that the latter being part of a pattern changes things, but it doesn’t.
Yes, rape itself is a “clear line-crossing”. Even the most conservative standards for “grave bodily harm” include rape.
Do you want to argue duty to retreat?
“And if you’re female, think hard about the last guy you slept with and the last guy you friend-zoned. Maybe you owe yourself a rethink and friend-zone guy an apology, of the kind best delivered naked.”
Easier said than done. That’s like telling a guy he should just “get over” his preference for thin attractive girls and have sex with ugly obese women for the good of society. I’m a young attractive woman, and when I think of the guys I’ve friend-zoned recently, it wasn’t just because they were “too nice” to me. The guys I’ve gotten naked with were nice to me too (at least at first); I’m not the type to have one-nighters with the nearest bad boy I met at a bar. The difference is the friend-zoned guys always somehow made me uncomfortable when they were pursuing me because they came on too strong. With a lot of them I wish that hadn’t been the case because I know they were good guys. I would have *loved* for them to have had even just a rudimentary knowledge of game because they would have known how to avoid giving me that creeped-out feeling that pretty much puts sex off the table. It seems like guys are either too beta or too alpha, and so as a girl you need to choose between having a boyfriend you’re not attracted to or a fuck-buddy whom you are. If you’re like me, and choose neither, it can get kind of lonely. And I definitely put a LOT of the blame on my fellow women because they are, after all, the ones that are lowering their standards just to get some hot sex. But a lot of the guys out there also just need to MAN UP. Don’t complain about girls not wanting to sleep with you if you are afraid to talk to them! It’s just as impossible for us to get turned on by a guy who texts us constantly or can’t look us straight in the eye as it is for you to get a boner for a 300-pounder!
I’d also like to say that, as a female geek who happily slept with classic nice-guys as friends in college (the game stuff never really worked on me), some of the blame falls on how guys treat women who DO have happy, fun, loving sex outside of a committed relationship.
It’s not nice to have someone you think of as a friend, who you know isn’t long-term relationship material, that you have a few great nights with suddenly tell everyone you’re a slut and get badmouthed. As nasty as women can be to other women who break the cultural norms there, the men were far, far crueler.
If guys want women to be more into having casual sex with a wider range of men, perhaps treating sluts nicer would be a good first step.
In my experience, the meanest people to women trying to have ethical non-relationship based sex are:
1. Women cheating on their husbands/boyfriends
2. Men who are cheating
3. General guys
4. Bitchy women
Most other people don’t consider it a big deal.
So yes, there’s a lot of truth here, but in all fairness I DO like nerdy guys, I DID try to sleep with a large number of them for fun, and I WAS treated like crap by those self-same guys. If men want women to start having fun with betas, perhaps the betas shouldn’t try putting down the women who are sleeping with them to try to gain more status from men.
My two cents.
PS- Eric, you really are a natural. We met at a con a while ago (I think it was PenguiCon in Austin?) and I had a blast rolling around on the floor playing with legos with you- in a non-sexual manner. :D I’m pretty sure you don’t remember me, but if you do, I’m the tall brunette with glasses and big boobs.
>If men want women to start having fun with betas, perhaps the betas shouldn’t try putting down the women who are sleeping with them to try to gain more status from men.
You speak wisdom that all the frustrated betas out there should heed.
>PS- Eric, you really are a natural.
Well, I knew that. But thanks for confirming it in public, as some of the PUA crowd have been dissing me pretty hard. Insecure deltas can be catty bitches, and that’s the guys I’m talking about.
Thank you sir, so so much. I’ve been struggling to understand game for a while and why i hate it. Well, I disliked even the more normal sounding parts for a while because of the seeming connivance of them, then realized that basic game is just acting masculine in a catchy way (though of course this serves mainly to attract women, not form the core of lasting relationships). But the asshole thing I didn’t get, and hated; reading this article was discouraging at first, because it’s so depressing to me that any girl would want an asshole. As a Christian my whole life, I’ve known what we should look for in a mate and the price that’s paid when we don’t, so this action from many girls bugged me. Now I get it, a lot more than i did before, and your answer is insightful as well as vital. To think, women started this too (teaching men to be assholes). Boy are we a confused world.
So basically you guys have the mind of rapists and hate women so it’s perfectly okay to abuse them then blame it on them.
You guys suck and it’s not women’s fault, it’s your own. I feel sorry for any woman that actually stays with you…not that any would.
@esr
> at least so far as I’ve yet seen, have a generative explanation for why women friend-zone nice guys and fuck bad boys
> the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that in the EEA, when early humans
> lived in small hunting bands, the behaviors modern assholes now use to fake alpha must
> have been reliable indicators of superior status
Another possible explanation which I find more plausible is negs may place females in the emotional state of being dominated by an alpha. A bitchy female is projecting that she views herself as worthy of only an alpha male, the bitchiness is to chase away the lesser males, so as to not clutter her limited time window for reproduction.
Temporal social status or raw IQ alone may not be a reliable enough indicator of the dominant or successful genetics over the long-term. Evolution may have evolved the alpha females to be seek other cues of competitiveness. And/or given the emotional lean of females which I suppose is necessary for child rearing, combined with the inexact means which a female can readily measure genetic fitness, the feeling of being dominated and mating with a potential alpha may be one possible strategy. We are not observing that all females pursue this “negs” metric strategy, though nearly all will chose to be dominated (in their “instinctive hindbrain”) by the metric or strategy they have chosen to determine alpha genetics:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4757&cpage=1#comment-393982
@JB
> The neg must be seen as fundamentally an equalizer of relative status in field, and, arguably,
> what a woman has done to deserve it is to think she’s “too good for you”. It is intended to
> puncture bloated egos, especially of highly attractive women with “bitch shields” who will
> literally not give you the time of day unless you deploy it.
@Ken Burnside
> I have used ‘negs’ – Eric does misunderstand them; they’re meant to be a signal for “I see
> through your bullshit, but understand why you have to do it.”
Both comments are congruent with my theory above.
@DJMoore
> To tie it all up: Statism, whether you call it liberalism, progressivism, socialism, whatever, is
> essentially about turning everyone into betas or herbs. Individualism, in all its forms, is about
> turning everyone into alphas or sigmas.
The alphas need the social control system. The sigmas can compete with alphas yet don’t crave control because they win without social control:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/05/explaining-sigma-again.html
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/01/roissy-and-limits-of-game.html
@M. Simon
> comfortable with the ins and outs of the nasty alpha – she knows I have a roving eye
>
> My favorite “line”? “Sleep with me naked. No sex.” You could see the wheels turning. She
> thinks, “If I get naked there WILL be sex.” And then I would sleep with her naked. No sex. In
> about 3/4s of the cases she would come back gagging for it… Her thinking? “Is there
> something wrong with me? Is he gay? I have to find out.” And in the other 1/4 of the cases?
> I got to sleep with a naked woman.
Clever but probably a beta prop. Alphas and sigmas have more important things to do in developing and maintaining their USPs and more open crotches to choose from than free time.
@lalalady
> It seems like guys are either too beta or too alpha, and so as a girl you need to choose between
> having a boyfriend you’re not attracted to or a fuck-buddy whom you are. If you’re like me, and
> choose neither, it can get kind of lonely.
The only way to pass on your genetics is to mate. Many females apparently choose a strategy that balances mating as high up genetically as they can, while not destroying the rearing potential of the offspring. One strategy is using betas for rearing assistance while mating with alphas. Others such as Marie advocate the more conservative strategy of mating and rearing with a beta (or perhaps a perceived “alpha” per my theory above). There are numerous possible strategies. Shenpen pointed out that older females are nearer to the end of their reproductive window and are more likely to prioritize a perceived beta for the rearing stage.
Thanks for the links mate, I’d love to interview you for Lingo (http://www.pualingo.com/pua-lingo-interviews/). Hit us up :)