I find myself in the embarrassing position of having generated a theoretical insight for a movement I don’t respect very much.
My feelings about the “Red Pill” movement are a lot like my feelings about feminism. Both started out asking important questions about why men and women treat each other badly. Early on, both began to develop some answers that made sense. Later, both movements degenerated – hijacked by whiny, broken, hating people who first edged into outright craziness and then increasingly crossed that line.
But the basic question that motivated the earliest Red-Pill/PUA analysis remains: why do so many women say they want nice guys and then sexually reward arrogant jerks? And the answer has a lot of staying power. Women are instinctive hypergamists who home in on dominance signaling the way men home in on physical pulchritude. And: they’re self-deceivers – their optimal mating strategy is to sincerely promise fidelity to hook a good-provider type while actually being willing to (a) covertly screw any sexy beast who wanders by in order to capture genetic diversity for their offspring, and (b) overtly trade up to a more dominant male when possible.
(This is really complicated compared to the optimal male strategy, which is basically to both find a fertile hottie you think you can keep faithful and screw every other female you can tap without getting killed in hopes of having offspring at the expense of other men.)
What I’ve figured out recently is that there’s another turn of the vise. Sorry, nice-guy betas; you’re even more doomed than the basic theory predicts.
There’a a social-status component to the female game; using it to compete for the attention of fit males. Women are very, very concerned with how their mating value is perceived by others in their social group – they will take extreme measures all the way up to plastic surgery to boost it. Also, female mating value is increased by social status, even though status is not as overwhelmingly important as for males.
Some time back, I tripped over someone else’s realization that this gives women an incentive to be publicly cruel when they reject suitors.
A man courting a woman is implicitly making a status claim: I am good enough for you – in Red Pill terminology, my SMV (sexual market value) meets or exceeds yours. Because other women use male attention to measure SMV and status, such a claim can be threatening to its target because, from a low-status male, it threatens to lower her status, especially if she accepts it.
A woman can deal with this by not merely rejecting a man she evaluates as not being worthy, but publicly insulting him for trying. “How dare you think you’re good enough for me?” is different from a simple “Not interested” because it’s a status defense.
Thus, hot chicks are systematically cruel to beta nerds. It’s a way of socially protecting the proposition that their SMV is high enough to capture a real alpha, and their status among peers.
But – and here’s my insight – it’s even worse than that.
Consider two cases. Bob is slightly lower status than Alice. Ted is much lower status than Alice. Both of them court Alice. She doesn’t think either has SMV to match hers, so her response is to reject both. But: Which one is the bigger status threat?
No, it’s not Ted. The status difference between him and Alice is quite visible to her peers; he can be easily dismissed as just nuts for pitching out of his league. Bob, on the other hand, may look plausible – and the closer to good enough he looks, the more likely it is that the status claim he makes by courting Alice will adjust her status downwards among her peers.
So it’s Bob who will get the cruel, status-defensive rejection, not Ted.
That’s right, guys – being in her league, or nearly so, increases the chance that she’ll have to be nasty to you to protect her game position. The well-spoken, decently groomed nerd is going to get it in the neck from popular hot chick the worst.
However, this analysis does present actionable advice. Because being Bob – being nearly good enough – also increases your odds of being able to raise the SMV she perceives just enough to connect. The advice is: don’t be a social threat. Pitch her privately, not publicly. Give her deniability on your status claim.
At the very least this will give her room to consider whether she likes you without being socially panicked about being seen with the wrong guy.
Spot on.
This, however:
——————–
> However, this analysis does present actionable advice. Because being Bob – being nearly good enough – also increases your odds of being able to raise the SMV she perceives just enough to connect. The advice is: don’t be a social threat. Pitch her privately, not publicly. Give her deniability on your status claim.
——————
is still a losing strategy. If you’re not actually bona fide higher SMV than she is, she’s just not going to accept a sexual proposition. And even if (as beta males usually do) your pitch is more along the lines of “let’s start a relationship!” and she accepts, you’ve just put yourself on a short road to inevitably being dumped, probably before sex happens.
The only sound advice for a beta is a combination of getting richer/more powerful and adjusting his standards downward. If you’re a 5 on the male SMV scale (which is to say, you’re not tall, not rich and not the boss at work, but you at least have a full time job and all your teeth) then getting with a female 4 (which is to say, plain but not ugly and overweight but not grossly so) is better than dying a virgin–and much better than targeting 7’s and suffering through a lifetime of embarrassment AND dying a virgin.
The Red Pill/PUA movement is doing widespread harm to men in ways that compare interestingly to how modern feminism is doing widespread harm to women.
> If you’re not actually bona fide higher SMV than she is, she’s just not going to accept a sexual proposition.
Indeed. But if you’re Bob, you may not – in fact probably do not – know whether you’re just over the line or just under it. And you’re only going to find out by trying. This is when “don’t be a social threat” becomes useful advice.
@Mash
“is still a losing strategy. If you’re not actually bona fide higher SMV than she is, she’s just not going to accept a sexual proposition. ”
In the long run, Bob will do better to raise his SMV (and/or lower his expectations) as you suggest. but Eric’s suggestion will save him much short-term pain. If Bob courts Alice privately, her rejection of him, and his pain and embarrassment, all can remain private. Moreover, by getting a private rejection, Bob would avoid a public humiliation which would make his future prospects with other women even worse.
Interesting theory, but while you’re connecting the dots, you should keep the pen moving — if this theory is valid, then there is no reason to believe that the dynamics that drive pre-relationship rejection would not also apply when ending a relationship.
In other words, if it is paramount to a woman to ensure that a suitor’s SMV doesn’t bring hers down, then it is probably also paramount to ensure that when the relationship ends, her SMV remains intact or is even enhanced.
One expected outcome of this corollary would be that most relationship breakups are initiated by women, and the statistics seem to back this up.
This might partly explain why the much-misunderstood “neghit” strategy actually works so well. If “pitching out of your league” is a status putdown anyway, you don’t really lose much by making the challenge overt. In fact, this provides you a valuable opportunity to fine-tune the message you want to send (good “negs” often involve a carefully-chosen mixture of overtness and ambiguity), which can attenuate any threat to her SMV.
@Catherine Raymond:
Unless, of course, Alice feels that making it publicly known that Bob had the temerity to approach her will raise her SMV. The worst case scenario for this is probably when Alice perceives Bob’s “global” SMV to be higher than hers, but she, for whatever reason, isn’t attracted to him.
Of course, since it was all done in private, it’s just her word. It would almost be like, oh, I dunno, some skinny skank asserting that some high-status male was attracted enough to her to grope her at a conference.
>It would almost be like, oh, I dunno, some skinny skank asserting that some high-status male was attracted enough to her to grope her at a conference.
Hm. You’re right. That does make the most sense as a status claim. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Also, be fair. The woman isn’t my type, and I’m certain I didn’t grope her, but she’s not horrible-looking. If men are still avoiding her in droves it’s because her attitude is putting them off. not her looks.
Catherine:
——–
In the long run, Bob will do better to raise his SMV (and/or lower his expectations) as you suggest. but Eric’s suggestion will save him much short-term pain. If Bob courts Alice privately, her rejection of him, and his pain and embarrassment, all can remain private. Moreover, by getting a private rejection, Bob would avoid a public humiliation which would make his future prospects with other women even worse.
———
Absolutely. But he’s getting rejected either way and so it’s still a vastly inferior strategy to one that might result in his being accepted.
Eric:
———-
Indeed. But if you’re Bob, you may not – in fact probably do not – know whether you’re over the line or under it. And you’re only going to find out by trying. This is when “don’t be a social threat” becomes useful advice.
———–
Yes, that is a good point. Being aware of what your SMV actually is is an important beginning to a strategy toward improving it and/or adjusting your standards.
Back in my youth I had the probably rarer opposite problem. I was outspoken, clashed with authority figures if I didn’t respect them, and so on. But privately I was convinced my SMV (long before I had a clue what that term meant, mind) was zero while apparently doing an excellent job hiding the fact, and was utterly clueless about signaling (and still hoodwinked by the greatest lie ever told: that women aren’t interested in sex). Not even close to willing to ask any girls to prom, I was astounded when a girl asked ME to prom–and then assumed she was just being nice or something.
After the fact I heard from numerous laughing acquaintances that through high school and most of college I was widely assumed to be gay, which looking back makes perfect sense.
The ramifications were opposite but it occurs to me now that the fundamental problem was the same as it is for J. Random Beta Nerd: unwillingness to test one’s SMV -> no clue what one’s SMV is -> vicious loop.
My personal experience as a reasonably sexually succesful “high test nerd” has simply been that dating “nerd women” is a bad idea. They’re surrounded by a culture where women are a minority (where the rest of the world is fairly even) and as such, they will ALWAYS be surrounded by beta men who shower them in attention, and it really skews their ability to be good monogamous partners.
You’re much better off finding women from other groups prone to thoughtfulness that match your level of intro or extrovertedness on an individual level. My wife is a shy reader and history lover who couldn’t give a shit less about technology or science fiction, and we couldn’t be happier.
If prostitution was legal and general happyfun sluttyness was seen as a viable, valid, and important life-stye choice for women of low virtue then low to mid-level SMV males could get laid all they could afford to and never even have to deal with higher SMV females. Who in turn would never have to deal with them. Win win!
Unless of course that means that the average level of female SMV would decline because there were fewer men bidding it up. I could see certain women not being happy with such a scenario.
@esr: “Women are very, very concerned with how their mating value is perceived by others in their social group – they will take extreme measures all the way up to plastic surgery to boost it. Also, female mating value is increased by social status, even though status is not as overwhelmingly important as for males.”
Women are certainly immensely concerned with how they look, and the multi-billion dollar fashion industry is evidence of the fact, but I wouldn’t go as far as placing mating value as the *only* reason.
I was at lunch with a group years years back, and happened to be seated next to two women discussing dress at an upcoming event. One said to the other “We’re crazy about this. It’s not like there will be guys seeing us.” I kept my mouth shut, but my thought was “It’s not about guys. It’s about status among other women, and it doesn’t matter whether males are present. You are making a statement of ‘I am doing better than you!’ and demonstrate it by being better dressed.”
This sort of behavior takes place long after mating has occurred. The underlying question is what your status is in your peer group, and how you display it. You get the sort of behavior in the anecdote about the wealthy matron discussing remodeling her home with an interior decorator:
“Perhaps madame would like something in French Provincial?”
“Provincial Schmovincial! The neighbors should walk in and drop dead is what I want!”
Precisely how that is achieved is a detail.
Status markers will differ between men and women, but perceived status will always be a factor.
______
Dennis
>I wouldn’t go as far as placing mating value as the *only* reason.
I wouldn’t either, but it’s a reasonable first approximation for my purposes in the OP.
This is basically Maggie McNeill’s model of why feminists want sex work banned.
Ima fix that for you
>The only sound advice for a beta is a combination of getting richer/more powerful.
That’s it. None of this ‘date down’ nonsense. The Red Pill subreddit is pretty much the leading and defining forum for the moeity, and I follow it closely. The unspoken consensus there is clearly in favor of not lowering your standards. They are more likely to recommend prostitutes, and even that is considered a dubious proposition by many.
>The Red Pill/PUA movement is doing widespread harm to men in ways that compare interestingly to how modern feminism is doing widespread harm to women.
Cites or it didn’t happen, please.
@esr: > Also, be fair.
Well, I typed too fast and probably should have edited out that word before I pressed enter. However, the first definition I see online is “a sleazy or unpleasant person” which has nothing to do with looks, and everything to do with what she’s written…
ISTM that you’re describing what’s known as countersignaling, as seen from the woman’s point of view. Countersignaling predicts that middle-status folks will signal hard that they’re not low-status. But high-status folks can’t be confused for low-status ones, so they don’t invest as much in signalling.
The woman is much higher-status than Ted, so she doesn’t need to signal strongly to onlookers that she’s above him, and rejects him gently. If she’s really high above him, she can go out of her way to be kind and help him on his way, the way you might a physically or mentally disabled person. When someone’s weak enough, it’s fine to be kind to them, because it’s unimaginable that they might be your peers.
But she’s only slightly higher status than Bob. Onlookers can suspect (or predict, or determine) that her status should lower a bit just for associating with him, even if she rejects him. So she must reject him strongly and do so while claiming higher status n she might otherwise have; she must make it look as though the rejection is due to a huge status difference and not due to her simply disliking him.
Asking girls out in private seems like common sense to me. I’ve never asked a girl out in front of her friends in my life. It’d be impolite.
What I’ve always found really confusing about all of this is the fact that I consider myself to be a “nice guy” and yet have never had any trouble attracting female attention. In fact sometimes I’ve attracted too much (sounds weird but I try to avoid drama). I’m decently physically attractive. but not extremely so.
In a 1968 (or 69, not sure) issue of Analog, John W. Campbell wrote an op-ed basically saying that while statistical modeling works on predicting behaviors of large groups, applying those same techniques to individual behavior doesn’t work that well. From what I just read about the “red pill” movement (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-red-pill-reddit-2013-8), This seems like what they are trying to do, with an emphasis on game theory.
“Red Pill” sounds a bit like Voodoo to me.
You are advocating Betas become PickUpArtists so they can have (or at least appear to have) higher SMV.
Your publisher (and I really do wish you would review Awake in the Night Lands) is affiliated with a manosphere blog which also notes MMV – Marriage Market Value.
In response to the natural impulses, for thousands of years the successful cultures (Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, etc.) have created structures where males can get women, but women were locked with the men into fidelity. Hence bastardy and cuckoldry.
I suspect being libertarian you support the destruction, but do note the consequences. Memes and Genes have effect.
Europe is dying. There has been no mention so I assume you and your wife’s genes are a dead end. Meanwhile inner city single mothers are breeding. Islamists are breeding. A few very conservative Christians are breeding. Atheists and Agnostics are a genetic dead end.
(My personal opinion of genetics and such is more subtle and complex, but I don’t have a chapter sized space – It starts with DNA as being more like an active canvas javascript web page instead of static HTML).
With Contraception, Hypergamy and Pulchritude rule. But doesn’t produce offspring. Larry Niven (earlier, less trashy works) included the Kzinti whose females were non-sentient. How many smart career women do you know that have even one child?
It is one thing for a woman to go to a Catholic College to get a PhD, marry, homeschool the brood while the husband leads, protects and provides, and another for a woman to embark on a STEM career with lots of debt so she can’t be a mommy until she is borderline sterile (and may need donated eggs if not IVF), and eventually die a spinster.
But your feelings about the “Red Pill” movement are as irrelevant as any other feelz. Reality matters – Reality Judges (to quote Ayn Rand who also had no offspring).
It is a humorous observation that nine women cannot have one baby in one month. But the greater irony is (if you add the health benefits and OB/Gyn science) that women are needed for about 2 years or so per baby. Women are the limiting factor in fecundity (Isaac Asimov in one of his non-fiction works said as much).
Having reason, our ancestors (“Tradition – the democracy of the dead as GK Chesterton called it) condemned unbridled hypergamy once they recognized it and its implications, but also male misbehavior. Monogamy and marriage was instituted. And it was enforced by custom and reason more than by the sword.
Islam may be a meme – but even if you feel bad, or disagree, or even if it is technically unreal, batshit crazy, it produces offspring, both memetically and genetically. The future belongs to those who show up for it. In 100 years some of your work product might be left, I hope the world wide Caliphate will be able to appreciate it. (Note the “oppression” might not be as much actually oppressive but merely negates the hypergamy and infidelity).
The problem with liberty is that what might be wanted and good for the individual might be toxic to the culture and the collective – even liberty itself.
This is why I hated high school … and also Facebook … as if there were any difference between the two.
I do a variant of game theory modeling in the arena of cultural evolution (yes, I know this a controversial term). These techniques are only useful for large population dynamics and, at best, offer insight into trend probabilities.
Back on topic. To the best of my knowledge, I have never consciously understood, nor engaged in, the mating practices described in this post. Like many here at A&D, I am most attracted to women with high intelligence and the courage to display it. This is not something that you can typically judge accurately at parties or the bar scene. My advice would be “don’t overthink this” and don’t give a damn what others may think. And if someone puts you down publicly, then they should get your game face, which either results in them pissing their pants or a full-on fist fight ensues. The latter is primal, and not a bad thing, even if you lose once in a while.
> Europe is dying. There has been no mention so I assume you and your wife’s genes are a dead end. Meanwhile inner city single mothers are breeding. Islamists are breeding. A few very conservative Christians are breeding. Atheists and Agnostics are a genetic dead end.
They aren’t – you just don’t notice them as much. But the flip side is that educated and productive workers are worth a lot more than babies. Also: when your spouse divorces and takes those babies away because you weren’t RedPill/PUA enough, their worth drops even more. In fact, it becomes economically negative!
@ esr:
And where is Carol in all of this SMV to-ing and fro-ing?
I can only assume the more regular wits around here are off having a life for this not to have been asked err now.
Lolerskates.
This sounds plausible, but with so many similar arguments and ‘just so stories’, has exactly zero science to back it up. In fact, I doubt you could even mould this into an actual testable hypothesis, it is that bad.
Looking forward to more news on how you are helping to fix time with NTPsec, similar posts to your SPDX post (very interesting), and similar.
On a somewhat more serious note; Vox Day recently posted ( here ) about the dilemma of the successful PUA (and that term may not actually apply). Once a man enters into a relationship with a woman, his most useful Game tool (Nexting) is no longer of use to him. This strikes me as a systemic failure of the Game hypothesis, unless the theory is advanced to address all of the potential male/female relationship variations.
Anyone have any thoughts on how (or how not) this relates to esr’s observation, or just Game more generally? It strikes me that successfully transitioning from “pursuit” to “partnership” ought to be a culminating goal of Game.
I don’t really understand why everyone is so down on “betas”, as the internet seems to refer to people with a civilized attitude towards courtship and marriage. Maybe people have the instincts that these communities claim we do. Maybe in the absence of self discipline (a highly desirable trait, btw, on either side of the equation) certain kinds of men will try to be promiscuous alpha-jerks, and certain kinds of women will seek them out. What isn’t mentioned is that this instinctive status and desirability of the “alphas”, and the beautiful-popular-women is a complete illusion in our modern context (and really any society outside of an animal herd or a nomadic zero-sum tribe dominated by the brute strength of an alpha and his cronies).
As far as I can tell, the “alpha-way” will lead to exactly the sort of lives you see in broken down inner city ghetto culture: Drama, violence, broken homes, and untrustworthy relationships that never last. The super-rich can paper over the disaster that their personal lives become with tons of stored money or automatic income. Everyone else who tries this ends up in the gutter.
As far as I can tell, the “beta-way” is more or less the foundation of what we think of as civilization: In exchange for a little bit of self-discipline, people get stability, security, actual love and commitment, and actually get to raise their supposedly genetically “inferior” children, rather than have them end up on the streets.
Seriously, when did the sort of dumbass animal instincts and status games we see in high-school become any kind of guide for life? Following those instincts seems to be an excellent way to end up back in the jungle.
>I don’t really understand why everyone is so down on “betas”, as the internet seems to refer to people with a civilized attitude towards courtship and marriage.
I don’t see that anyone here is hating on or despising beta males. Why do you get that impression?
Oh, and alphas can have civilized attitudes too. It’s not that alphas are intrinsically jerks, it’s that we have an easier time getting away with being jerks. Doesn’t mean we have to be like that.
Maybe I was confusing the attitude of the PUA community (betas are chumps and losers) with the attitude of people talking about the subject in general.
>Maybe I was confusing the attitude of the PUA community (betas are chumps and losers) with the attitude of people talking about the subject in general.
Not a completely unreasonable mistake, but I don’t think this blog attracts PUAs that much.
tz: Isn’t it a good thing that atheism isn’t genetic, then?
Will Brown: Among my friends who’ve gotten into the PUA scene seriously, all of them married by 30, and seem happy with it. For them, it was about having some fun while they’re young enough to have the time to invest in it, then cashing in their chips while they’re ahead, using their skills at getting women to get a keeper. Seems a good strategy to me.
Nobody’s hating on “beta” males — the whole point is to figure out how “betas” (aka nice guys, aka gentlemen) can hold their own against douchebag “alpha” bad boys.
The PUA movement’s strategy is to adopt the bad boys’ mannerisms and tactics, which seemed to me a lot like staring into the abyss and hoping it didn’t stare back into you.
Dating sites allow for the private pitch, especially where, like OK Cupid, there’s no mechanism (that I’ve discovered) for social retribution for the Bob scenario.
Does it even make sense to think of the “sexual marketplace” as a marketplace? It’s a weird market. When you go to the store looking for batteries, you are only concerned that it puts out the right voltage and lasts a while. You don’t care where it came from, who made it, how it works internally, etc. And if they end up being duds you go buy new batteries.
In the “sexual marketplace”, every pair makes one and only one trade, if things work right. It’s traumatic to have a redo. You are concerned about a vastly complex evaluation of if you can make a life with someone else. You only have 1x your entire future life and happiness to spend. Does this “market” really clear at all? Why should Bob’s evaluation of Eve (and vice versa) have anything to do with {Alice, Charlie, … Zack’s} evaluation of Eve?
@ams: There are differences to be sure, but they are far fewer if you think of the market for jobs or houses rather than the market for batteries.
———
Dating sites allow for the private pitch, especially where, like OK Cupid, there’s no mechanism (that I’ve discovered) for social retribution for the Bob scenario.
———–
Note to impressionable readers of any gender, age or situation: avoid online dating sites like the plague. That way lies madness.
The cruel snub from a once-friend turned social climber trading up, is a trope for a reason I suspect.
Eric, I absolutely must give you a great big “Thank You Very Much” because your insight on this particular matter is gigantically helpful right now with an ugly memory that’s been crawling around my head recently. Your top post totally rocks!
Yay Eric!
@ Mash: After the fact I heard from numerous laughing acquaintances that through high school and most of college I was widely assumed to be gay, which looking back makes perfect sense.
I think I had the same problem; clueless about signaling with lots of my fellow males calling me “faggot” or “Gay” or whatever. Now I know why!
Stepping aside from “Game” theory for a bit:
Our culture teaches young men a truly horrible set of dating practices.
The standard dating practice is “guys are the initiators, and they should only initiate after they’re certain they feel true love to the object of their desire; she may be started by the admission, but eventually, she will succumb to his charms.”
It’s the basic plot of every RomCom ever written: Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy proves worth and gets Girl back.
What it completely ignores is that the women are the ones who get to say “No.”
It asks that men make the emotional investment up front…which means that when the women says “No” he’s spent three weeks building this stupid fantasy about how his qualitative benefits will win her over…and she’s saying “No.” And then he has to deal with bruises to his ego and recovering from that, and is wondering why all the scripts he thought should work aren’t…
In reality, he needs to get to “No” with the minimum investment on his part; this is a numbers game, not a qualitative game. It’s far better to get to “No” in two days rather than three weeks. The added benefit is that when you get to “No” in less time, the recovery from rejection is orders of magnitude faster.
@TomA –
> Like many here at A&D, I am most attracted to women with high intelligence
> and the courage to display it. This is not something that you can typically
> judge accurately at parties or the bar scene.
Curious…. I met my wife at a party my roommate threw, which invited a bunch of people (most of which, men and women, were relatively high-intellect, as was he (and I)). I remember being specifically attracted to this woman by sitting on the couch with her and discussing her just-completed comprehensive exams for her PhD, as well as the rest of her research material.
Guess I’m either [a] atypical, or [b] very luck to hang out at the right kinds of parties :-}
I’ve often thought something kind of along these lines. I remember thinking that: the Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet, racism and identity politics, Nazis and Communists, Red Pill and angry femisnism all have enough in common that members of one group (at least unconciously) see members of the other group as a sort of “distorted” mirror image of themselves which make them hate each other even more.
Unrelated to the topic of this blog post, but sometimes I wonder if a mild version of this is why “libertarians” can’t seem to get along – there’s a split on natural rights vs consequentialist libertarianism.
I wonder if the strong reaction to similar status SMV is due to the uncanny valley effect. The minimal differences are distorted to allow a rapid decision which would default to reject. So, the female would perceive her unwanted admirer as having a much lower SMV: a creep, weirdo, etc.
Any minor difference in SMV is irrelevant to the male, they would seize opportunities as they arise.
> Later, both movements degenerated – hijacked by whiny, broken, hating people who first edged into outright craziness and then increasingly crossed that line.
I have a theory why. https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/the-suppression-feedback-loop/ TL;DR if a theory makes one a social outcast, it is going to be disproportionately popular amongst those who where social outcasts anyway, and have little to lose. Outlaw/shame guns/certain ideas and mostly outlaws/men of low status will have them. Same logic.
This then of course retroactive verifies the suppression / shaming: guilt by association and all that, i.e. once guns are associated with criminals or certain ideas with “mouth breathers”, of course people are okay with even more suppression.
One generic (hypothetical) fact about human nature is that low prestige makes it less likely to get sympathy / compassion from others or even justice. Prison rape is one of the most abhorrent things today -just how is it fair to condemn a thin, non-fighty pickpocket to a year of rape as a punishment? – but it happens with the lowest status men, so who cares. At some level it is the instinct of male expendability, compassion is not an infinite resource so largely reserved the non-expendable humans like women, children and higher status men.
Thus, we have a perfect feedback loop. Pick thing X and outlaw it or shame it. Pretty soon outlaws or low prestige men with cluster around X which makes everybody think it was a great idea to outlaw or shame X because just look at what characters are associated with it.
About Red Pill: the core ideas have long ago became mainstream in the Reactor and probably elsewhere as well, I think even in mainstream culture more or less or at least amongst everybody slightly right from center. So as a separate subculture it outlived its usefulness and indeed it has these tendencies, perhaps maybe it is a general problem with late adopters? As RP was cool about 5-10 years ago. But I should add it is mostly on Reddit, the mainstream Manosphere blogs not so. A problem there is the intersection of Reddit culture – videogamer loserdom – and RP and perhaps not RP as such.
I don’t really know what to think – I don’t want to throw under the bus guys whose ideas are useful, true, and I have also accepted their core theory and am grateful for the enlightening. But I will keep out of TRP on Reddit and places of a similar mood, that much is sure.
Anyhow, as the basic ideas are pretty close to mainstream anyhow, or at least on the Right, it is possible to learn about them and use them without having to associate much with the guys who harp “all women are cheating whores” as this _ressentiment_ attitude is not useful.
One problem is the “beta chumps” thing – they tend to forget beta means the Second Best type of man, the decent dad type, who is still at some level dominant and patriarchical and proud and confident, just not on that super caddish level as a Tucker Max type real alpha. The “beta chump” is closer to delta, gamma or even omega – and Vox Day on Alpha Game Plan is actually doing a good job clarifying it – “gamma rabbits” are below “betas”.
Bob is beta or delta, Ted is gamma or omega here. Really everybody who is beta-chumping on Reddit should read this: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html
@Mash
>And even if (as beta males usually do) your pitch is more along the lines of “let’s start a relationship!” and she accepts, you’ve just put yourself on a short road to inevitably being dumped, probably before sex happens.
This is complicated. At some level yes. The level of libido is largely a function of T, and male attractiveness too. They correlate. Low-T romantic relationship type guys usually figure out by 30 they have to at least imitate some kind of a burning desire or it won’t work out well. They have to unlearn too much gentlemanliness and at least on a joking level learn to “objectify”.
The issue what makes it complicated is that the “creep”, the unattractive man seems to have high libido, so how is T really working there?
@Ken Burnside
Rom Coms are written for women. Looking at it from that angle, it is a status boost for a woman to get unconditional devotion from a fairly decent looking guy and not giving in easy is another boost. It is not supposed to work for men, it is supposed to make a female audience feel good. And it is almost honest – these are called “chick flicks” so there is a chance some guys figure out it is not meant for them. But teenage boys tend to be “vulnerable” to such romantic notions.
The greater is issue is that we don’t have many mating oriented movies for men – men’s movies are about war and suchlike. Or that we don’t have the kinds of male circles and subcultures where it is totally obvious that Rom Coms / chick flicks are not meant as an educational material for them because the actually succesful guys taught the rest to not take them seriously, largely 30+ men who have figured it out teaching the teenagers.
@TomA @John D. Bell
Satoshi Kanazawa has a theory that IQ tends to suppress natural instincts, hence the often lacking “common sense” of intellectuals. It seems to be the same with sexual instincts. It seems intelligent people mate very differently than the rest. If you go to any environment selected for low IQ and also mostly young people, but not McD type losers but more like attractive women and athletic men, so a place somehow selected for all three, you get an incredible amount of natural-instinct “Redpillery” going around. I have seen this a couple of times, like being invited by some 19 yo plumber type guy to a party, it is as primate as it gets. Where the average IQ is around 80-90 the men boast their heads off and constantly try to suppress and dis each other, the women behave like b…es in heat, they are unashamedly attracted to the most dominant guy and not the actually interesting accomplished guys, and their attraction is not in a romantic way but in an animalistic do-me-right-now-you-stud way, and at the end the lower status men who did not find a partner and got zombie drunk end up fighting each other. Did anyone see this episode of Bones? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1628119/quotes?item=qt1550397 it was like that, roughly.
What the “model” of the OP is missing is the fact that women will rate a man ALSO by the attention he gets from OTHER women. A man with a female friend is more attractive (albeit less available) than a man without. Especially, if this other female is itself “hot”. Then there is the rumor that a man caring for a baby or small child immediately becomes more attractive to women.
How would that help nerds?
Get out in the company of attractive women, even if they are not “interested in you”, say, relatives of coworkers? Accompany an attractive female relative with a small child to the park or other social gatherings, even baby-sitting for her? You cannot make out then and there, but you get your face known. And learning to handle small children might get you massive bonus points with a sizable fraction of girls and women. Even if it does not work in getting you a girl friend like advertised, the social skills learned will help you out a life-time.
On the other hand, I understand that a man alone with a small child will get jailed in the USA. So scrap that advice.
Correction:
“Get out in the company of attractive women, even if they are not “interested in you”, say, relatives or coworkers?”
2015-11-03: “Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a ‘women in tech’ advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.”
2015-11-08: “The advice is: don’t be a social threat. Pitch her privately, not publicly. Give her deniability on your status claim. At the very least this will give her room to consider whether she likes you without being socially panicked about being seen with the wrong guy.”
dafuq?
Yep, I think I just counted coup on you again.
>Yep, I think I just counted coup on you again.
Advice for men in general should not be confused with advice for a specific group of leaders who are being targeted.
Besides, what would you be doing courting a woman at a technical conference, anyway? I don’t recommend it.
Winter, that’s a terrible idea. You want to show your nurturing ability in a way that’s actually sexy to women, and caring for a small kid is about the most unsexy thing you could imagine. Instead, go to that park with a decently-sized dog that you’ve pre-trained to fool around a little bit – maybe he can bark on command, or the like. Then you definitely get to show your nurturing side to women who would be interested in that, but you’re looking quite dominant at the same time because you’re so good at “keeping him in check!”
@guest
“… , and caring for a small kid is about the most unsexy thing you could imagine.”
Maybe, I observe a lot of female attention and it is not what women report to me. I have no means to check it directly either way.
Given that there seems to be a majority of cat-loving women in my surroundings, I have doubts about strategies involving a dog.
>Then there is the rumor that a man caring for a baby or small child immediately becomes more attractive to women.
Yeah, I do that in public multiple times a week, 90% of female attention is on my daughter, how sweet etc. and whatever approving signals I get are more of a friendship than lust type signal. I am seen as a domesticated wild animal basically, a nice big wolf to pet as he is not biting anymore. I am okay with that, being a father has certain necessary trade-offs, basically I love my family far more than I care about lust signals from stranger women: but being a simulated father would be really silly. The whole game is that the wolf should charge a high price for his eventual domestication. After it happened, the game is more or less over, so why simulate that.
(One milestone of whether you have figured it out or not is if you begin to marriage as not something the man should talk the princess of his heart into, but a golden cage a woman should lure and trap a wild man into by offering all kinds of good stuff.)
@TheIndividualist
“Yeah, I do that in public multiple times a week, 90% of female attention is on my daughter, how sweet etc. and whatever approving signals I get are more of a friendship than lust type signal.”
Yes indeed. You have to sow when you want to harvest. We are talking about “betas” who want to connect to women, any women, not “alphas” who want to get laid now.
We are talking about men in the category:
For these men, having been seen with 1) attractive females (for whatever reason) or 2) caring for small children is a protection against this type of “status seeking insulting”.
If you have talked to a woman before when she was cooing a child in your care, she will be less likely to insult you when you try talking to her at another occasion. She has already acknowledged you as a somewhat useful human being. Still, a man in such a situation has to be (very) polite and very, very slow moving.
@TheIndividualist
“Yeah, I do that in public multiple times a week, 90% of female attention is on my daughter, how sweet etc. and whatever approving signals I get are more of a friendship than lust type signal.”
Continued:
Suppose, you are a beta, or gamma, male and have basked in the under 10% attention to you in the park with your little nephew/niece, which is still more female attention you get in a week.
Now you meet one of those gorgeous hot women at a social occasion. Having talked to her earlier, you can have a short chat with her and her company. Just social small talk, all perfectly acceptable, status wise. Suddenly, you are that guy who chats casually with smoking hot women. Many bonus points with all the women who saw yo doing it.
I know, all this is a long shot. But it is a way do decrease your social threat status.
I can’t say I particularly disagree with anything in this article, but it says all the right things to make the SJW crowd and most mainstream draw a lot of conclusions about you of which none are favorable. They’re going to point to this and say “see, bitter angry beta male who hates women and is filled with conspiracies about the sexes!”.
Unfortunately, the only winning move is to say nothing… :/
@esr
“Besides, what would you be doing courting a woman at a technical conference, anyway? I don’t recommend it.”
Is there a difference between “courting” and “flirting”?
In my experience, few women protest when men make them feel attractive. Which is very different from trying to talk them out of their clothes.
>Is there a difference between “courting” and “flirting”? In my experience, few women protest when men make them feel attractive. Which is very different from trying to talk them out of their clothes.
Well, there’s your difference :-)
> few women protest when men make them feel attractive. Which is very different from trying to talk them out of their clothes.
In my experience, I don’t know many people who advocate for “trying to talk [women] out of their clothes”. Attraction is not logical in that sense: you can’t persuade someone to _find_ you attractive! If you succeed, it’s _always_ because you’ve made them feel differently – no matter whether you realized this at the time or not.
You folks should keep in mind the primary reason why all the nasty, sexist, bigoted things the TRP guys say about females that you find so objectionable are nevertheless acceptable to them.
Do any of you even know why that is?
For those who don’t: it’s because they grew up hearing the same sort of things about themselves as males, if not worse, and if not being told them directly. It’s been stuffed in the op-ed sections of the mainstream newspapers they read; it’s been ubiquitous throughout the mainstream advertising, television, and movies they watch; it reaches peaks of almost unbelievable abuse sometimes in women’s programming, such as The Talk episode where Catherine Kieu Becker was effectively held up as an icon for seducing her estranged husband, drugging him, tying him to the bed, and then, while he was still conscious, though drugged, cutting off his penis, taking it into the kitchen, stuffing it into the kitchen sink disposal, and grinding it up.
While he could hear it happening.
I would like you to think about that for a moment. He apparently didn’t do anything to her except find another woman and try leave her, probably because she was the crazy evil. And he got to be drugged, tied down, have his penis cut off, and hear it be chewed up in the garbage disposal for his trouble.
Okay, so she definitely was the crazy evil.
But don’t imagine it happening to you. Imagine it happening to some man you actually care about. Imagine it happening to a son or brother or friend or colleague, any man you really, genuinely care about beyond just what he can do for you for as little reciprocation on your part as you can get away with.
The hosts *and audience* of The Talk (and it’s the audience reaction that really makes the horrific point in this), unlike, I hope, all of you, found this hilariously amusing. There’s a good summary of the ‘high’ points of the episode here: https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/17517-cbss-the-talk-cal . Unfortunately, even they miss the deeper, more serious problem — the audience’s reaction. The audience *loved* it. They loved the hosts’ approving reactions, and jokes, and rationalizations. And the applauded, and whooped, and cheered.
You don’t get an audience like that by chance. You get an audience like that through *training*. Years and years of behavioral programming and training.
These Red Pill guys you sneer at for their oh-so-awful behavior? How many do you think were raised by women just like those in the audience? How many do you think grew up around women with attitudes like that, have dated women with attitudes like that, have had to work and study and just try to live alongside women with attitudes like that?
How many do you think have been getting similar if not worse crap shoved into their faces their entire lives? I have, BTW; worse than most of they do, because I actually get up and advocate for these guys.
Anyway, you can watch both segments for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKgwczruOSQ
And the show is still on the air, and they hosts are still getting paid to do it, and the audiences are still attending, and the ratings are still good enough, and the advertising money targeting the home leisure female market is still rolling in.
And it’s been nominated for the Outstanding Talk Show/Entertainment Daytime Emmy every single year starting in 2012.
And the hosts were also nominated for Outstanding Talk Show Hosts in 2014 and 2015.
And then you people complain about TRP guys trying to work out their rightful, *healthy* anger at how they’re treated, not just by women but by society in general, including other men, in just about the only significant english-speaking public forum in existence that allows it.
I guess you people haven’t read any of the posts from TRP newbies about how everyone around them, friends and family and everyone else, is trying to drag them back down into the bucket instead of encouraging them to keep improving themselves. By my estimate, there’s at least a couple of those every week on average, and sometimes more. If I went and looked, I could probably find many more repeating abstract examples.
On the gripping hand, though, isn’t that your responsibility?
I guess you just don’t notice all the much more nasty, sexist, bigoted things said and conveyed about men and boys on a regular basis in comparison, in far more many, far more respected public venues. And that’s *not* including all the feminist, GAWKER, Double X, SJW, Gamergate, etc. abuse poured out on these guys’ heads; that’s just the average everyday stuff, like the default rapist characterizations in the media, and the total lack of concern for men’s issues, and the advertising crap that portrays women as cool masters of the universe and the men around them as helpless hapless hopeless dopes. It’s even in the churches now.
So here’s a little thought experiment for you. Imagine 5 Red Pill guys that match your stereotypes. Imagine them discussing a man who drugged his estranged wife, tied her to a bed, sheared off her clit, labia, and vaginal skin, and ground it up all in the garbage disposal while she could hear it happening. Even imagine they’re not being taped in front of a live studio audience for broadcast; just in private together.
If you imagine their reactions to hearing about this guy as anything but variations on “Monster, must be killed, ASAP” you don’t have the slightest idea what kind of people you’re talking about.
Now, what was that again about “whiny, broken, hating people who first edged into outright craziness and then increasingly crossed that line”?
Because I’m pretty sure that no men’s forum of any kind I’ve ever found anywhere at any time has ever descended to anywhere near that level. The Talk’s Becker episode and followup stuck in my brain because of their sheer outrageous excess, so if I’d ever seen anything like it anywhere else, I’m confident I would remember that too. And I don’t.
Penultimate point: by my recollection, a couple of weeks before the Becker story came up, Sharon Osborne did an Entertainment Tonight segment where she talked about the Schwarzenegger maid affair and said she’d have cut off his penis and thrown it in the garbage disposal.
Did Catherine Becker see that segment? Did the general acceptance of that kind of nastiness, when directed against men, allow it to be broadcast, and thus put the idea in Catherine Becker’s head? Let alone, yes, here it comes, the general acceptance of routine and ritual male genital mutilation for generations?
Ultimate point: you fainting maidens with your ‘Oh! Mah *puritah!*’ Red Pill shunning. . .what have any of you ever done for men’s issues, really? Anything of any significance?
Do you understand that if you haven’t, you’re really just not qualified to judge these guys like that? You don’t have the chops; you haven’t paid the dues. You’re just wannabes, posing for effect, trying to show off how enlightened and superior to them you think you are. But you have nothing to contribute to them in the first place; you’re of no use to them, so. . .you’re just posturing for the folks in here and/or around you. You, and your opinions of the Red Pill guys, and the PUAs, and the MGTOWs, and so on, are essentially irrelevant to them. . .apart from how your negative characterizations of them are just, to them, more of the usual pressure to submit and surrender and serve you.
I don’t know what you see when you look at them, but when I do, I see a lot of guys in a lot of pain that they don’t deserve in the slightest, trying to make sense of it all together. And I’m pretty sure my eyes are better than yours.
And I’m absolutely sure my heart is.
>Advice for mewn in general should not ne confused with advice for a specific group pf leaders who are being targeted.
Good thing I didn’t do that, then, since the “honeytrapping” conspiracy wouldn’t be possible ITFP without the advice for a specific group of leaders *being applicable to all men in general.* No confusion involved.
To make a honeytrap — or, in this case, actually a badger game — work against a leader, in just about any hierarchy, the social conditions that make it possible almost always *must* apply to all the men in the hierarchy all the way down, and usually outwards to their interconnected social circles as well.
Otherwise, it just gets. . .quietly handled. By top men.
There’s also this
>I have to see it as an an attempt to smear and de-legitimize the Linux community (and, by extension, the entire open-source community) in order to render it politically pliable.
which means, alas, alackaday, O Eric, your own *compulsive* extension to the entire open-source community justifies my extension to men in general as well. If you may do it, so may I.
Game. . .
Plus, there’s this,
>Nevertheless, this report is consistent with reports of SJW dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere
and
>I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.
Which means, because there are other consistent reports of similar traps from elsewhere, and because people in general are copycat followers, and women particularly so, it’s actually safest to assume that other women not in tech groups will replicate the behavior as well.
To say nothing of how they already have been doing such things since probably forever. Which, combined with this conspiratorial planning, strongly suggests an increase in rate of occurrence.
. . .set. . .
Aaaand not to mention how you used the wrong term of art to describe the practice in the title, although I would not be at all surprised if that was intentionally done to take advantage of the wordplay.
However, what your correspondent describes is much more a badger game than a honeytrap, which is usually about testing fidelity. The point, ultimately, is that if we have enough terms of art to make such fine distinctions between them. . .then everyman should be wary.
And that’s just in the OP. I haven’t even started looking at your later comments in-thread yet.
Okay, one:
>>Well, that and treating all women as being guilty-until-proven-innocent of being a member of such a group. You did say don’t be alone with any “female”, not with any member of such a group.
>Sure, but how is one to know which category one is dealing with? It’s not imputing guilt to all snarks to observe that some of them might be boojums, and you can’t tell which in advance.
. . .and match. That right there seals the deal. How is the non-leading man to know which category one is dealing with, a conspiratorial femelitist, or just the average slore taking advantage? How is the non-leading man to know if the bait is just doing a practice run for one of the leaders, or is a real but otherwise uninvolved threat?
>Besides, what would you be doing courting a woman at a technical conference, anyway? I don’t recommend it.
I wouldn’t be courting a woman there. Women would be courting me. It’s been that way since I was around 13. I was a natural DGAS sigma who got thrown into a summer advanced science program with a bunch of smart hot girls in the same age range. The first evening there I got pennied into my room. The culprits kept stabbing from the outside of the lockplate at the knife I was using to try to push the packet out, so I sealed my top male rep there for the summer simply by regularly banging on the water pipes under the sink until it drove EVERYONE in the dorm crazy. There was an audience outside when the Rep finally managed to dig the packet out and released me. It was all easy rider for me from there. I’m told I had girls competing just to pick up my mail for me. I had no idea, because the one who won the privilege was just sliding them under my door, and the carpet edge there was loose and high, so they kept going straight under and piling up. I didn’t find them until the last third or so of the program, and only because she told me she’d been bringing my mail, and. . .well, never mind. You can imagine how she made it up to me.
Good times. Good, good times.
So, thank you, but I wouldn’t take your recommendations on courting unless they were gold or otherwise plated such that I could pawn them for some quick cash. I don’t need them, and I doubt you need mine, di catenas boyo.
Well, I might sell them here, too, if the fan markup turned out high enough.
@ John D. Bell
I think it’s great that you met your wife at a party, and you make some very good points. It can happen anywhere and not all parties are combat arenas. My objection has typically been that parties and bars tend to be very loud and it can be difficult to talk over the noise and distractions.
I second Winter’s advice. You can never go wrong complimenting a woman and use your brain to make sure it’s something real and sincere.
TheDividualist:
————
One problem is the “beta chumps” thing – they tend to forget beta means the Second Best type of man, the decent dad type, who is still at some level dominant and patriarchical and proud and confident, just not on that super caddish level as a Tucker Max type real alpha. The “beta chump” is closer to delta, gamma or even omega – and Vox Day on Alpha Game Plan is actually doing a good job clarifying it – “gamma rabbits” are below “betas”.
————
This is correct. This isn’t my theory, can’t remember whose it is, but it rings true to me: that the tradition of monogamous marriage has been a powerful cultural stabilizer, and the reason why is that it stabilizes the 90% of males who are in the beta category–neither dominant alphas who either become chief or die young trying nor low-IQ lifetime criminals.
I wrote a too-long series of paragraphs elaborating on that point, but realized upon re-reading that it would be a waste of your time to read it. I’ll simply say that the disappearance of traditional marriage from our culture–people still get married out of cultural habit, but no one seriously views it as a binding, irrevocable contract anymore–very well may represent progress, but during the transitional period we’re in right now, it’s resulted in unprecedented numbers of sexually frustrated males, most of whom a century or three ago would have married young and spent their lives working farms or in factories and having sex once or twice a week. The (especially young) male brain is prone to coming unhinged if he’s never having sex and isn’t occupied every hour of every day with something strenuous (like war).
But it’s a problem with no viable solution, far as I can tell. We ain’t going back to Roman Catholic marriage traditions, nor should we.
>But it’s a problem with no viable solution, far as I can tell. We ain’t going back to Roman Catholic marriage traditions, nor should we.
I like how you spend two long paragraphs talking sense, but then you get so embarrassed that you tack on this bit which doesn’t make any sense just to pay lip service to Liberal Doctrine.
If you saved those too long paragraphs, at least I wouldn’t mind if you posted them. Though, paragraph breaks saves … – maybe not lives, but at least attention spans.
> To make a honeytrap — or, in this case, actually a badger game — work against a leader, in just about any hierarchy, the social conditions that make it possible almost always *must* apply to all the men in the hierarchy all the way down, and usually outwards to their interconnected social circles as well.
The social conditions making it possible isn’t the same thing as there being a significant risk of it actually happening. Sure, you could be targeted. But if you’re not “important”, nor does anyone have a personal grudge against you, it’s extremely unlikely to the point of making it irrational to prepare defenses about it.
Regarding caring for small children and attractiveness, it depends.
It won’t get you anywhere with women lacking, or just not in touch with, maternal instincts. With more nurturing types, or women of a certain age with ‘ticking clocks’, yes it’s a huge turn-on.
I have 2 small children, and stories. :)
TomA, this post actually explains why complimenting can be a bad idea. It is a sign of weakness and it encourages her to put you down. If you’re going to compliment her, make sure it fits nicely as _qualifying_, i.e. that part where you’re essentially saying: “I admire you so much and I want to get to know you because of .” Yes, it’s probably BS and she knows it’s BS. But it’s the right social context to plug those nice things you’ve noticed about her – and that’s what matters.
TomA, this post actually explains why complimenting can be a bad idea. It is a sign of weakness and it encourages her to put you down. If you’re going to compliment her, make sure it fits nicely as _qualifying_, i.e. that part where you’re essentially saying: “I admire you so much and I want to get to know you because of < these awesome things that make you really unique as a person! > .” Yes, it’s probably BS and she knows it’s BS. But it’s the right social context to plug those nice things you’ve noticed about her – and that’s what matters.
I think Acksiom nails it and really the entire issue with this premise or even the Red Pill scene is you are still playing women’s game so really it’s a loss regardless as a beta, you either under with a low SMV woman and/or you end up a resource gatherer. I tell all betas I meet, especially the ones that don’t realize it until their mid-30’s, the same thing, just find a two or three regular repeat long term sex workers / sugar babies of the highest value you can afford, import a throw away sex toy green card wife and trade her out every three to seven years, or import a longer term wife [those last two differ vastly on cultures, i.e. importing a low class but hot Japanese, African, or Arab girl past her local cultures prime marriage age (or is marriageable for other local reason) falls under latter, importing a low class high SMV young Filipino or CIS’er the former]. Beta’s need to just quit playing the game and capitalize on their real assets: American citizenship, decent income, and stability .. all things which sex workers value as do foreigners because your SMV, while low in the US, goes up significantly in their countries. People forget the sex and marriage market has always been an international commodity, people been doing mail order wives and the next village over for time immemorial; the biggest trick the modern Feminism movement did was convince men that those two activities are “bad” or make them “less manly”. Sheen said it best “You don’t pay for sex, you pay for them to leave in the morning”; the more men that realize that the better off most would be instead of wrapping up their masculinity and self worth in “Can you pick up a chick?”; it’s the wrong question.
@ guest
I have never had a bad experience complimenting a woman; they all seem to appreciate the attention naturally and positively. I would suggest that you start developing this habit in a safe setting (mother, sisters, aunts, neighbors). It takes some practice (especially to be sincere rather than automatic), but you will learn that compliments are foremost an act of kindness and consideration. Do this for a few months and you will soon develop a reputation that attracts the attention of unattached woman. I truly do not grok this Greek alphabet stuff, but if a woman is so stuck up that she feels the need to dis you; you absolutely do not want her kind of trouble. And don’t be disheartened. There are still gems out there. More than a few frequent this board.
@Peter
“… just find a two or three regular repeat long term sex workers …
import a throw away sex toy green card wife and trade her out every three to seven years, or import a longer term wife”
Your advice is straight out of Kafka’s “Der Process”. And we all now how the ” hero” ended.
I can assure you that your advice, when followed, leads to a troubled and lonesome life.
In the end, almost every man can find a woman who will love him. In the end that will make for a much happier life.
Or Beta Nerds just need to focus on hooking up with other Beta Nerds to produce genius offspring.
Two thoughts:
1) If a woman trusts you enough to be willing to entertain a proposal from you in private, you probably don’t need to worry about being publicly shamed. That is, there’s enough of a trust relationship of value worth not discarding.
2) Women have already adopted the male breeding pattern without us recognizing it. On average, men make more money than women. Disproportionately (due to graduated income tax), men pay more income tax than women. Yet women and their offspring disproportionately end up the beneficiaries of those tax benefits (food stamps, public education, etc.). This gives women many of the traditional advantages of being the wife of a high-status male without actually having to do the work.
I think (since I didn’t see it in a glance above), that a comment I skimmed on the G+ version of this post deserves a mention here, in its substantive point.
That point being that the woman described here is a small minority of women; most of them are not horribly, viciously, screechingly group-status-obsessed*, at least in my experience.
Likewise from the G+ thread, status varies depending on the relevant groups.
“Alpha” or “Beta” – to the extent I accept alpha/beta/whatever labels as not simply BS – is status within a given group.
It’s important to remember that that group is not “all human beings” or “all men” [or women]; it’s much more limited than that.
Thus all of us have multiple statuses; I’m sure in an athletic competition I’m not even in the running; likewise any religious status signaling is something I score a flat zero in. In various intellectual or general competence areas I might well be an “alpha” – thus it’s important to note what areas of status a potential mate might care about.
“Generic woman you’re trying to pick up in a meatmarket bar” is about the least interesting thing to anyone who isn’t simply looking for sex-and-nothing-else, but that seems [unfairly?] to be the significant target of “Red Pill” types; I can’t help but think that flavors their analysis.
(* My personal opinion on the matter is that detecting those ones and avoiding them actively is dodging a bullet.
The last thing I want anything to do with is someone who only/mostly cares about status signaling, whether the context is sexual or otherwise.
I like women [as many women like men] who are self-confident and don’t need/want signaling validation or benefits in their mate to the detriment of other values.)
Unrelated to the topic of this blog post, but sometimes I wonder if a mild version of this is why “libertarians” can’t seem to get along – there’s a split on natural rights vs consequentialist libertarianism.
That’s an interesting insight, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
There’s also a split between the Hayekians (“reform the State, make it more Libertarian, get it out of the economy”) and the Rothbardians (“eliminate the State as inherently corrupt”) and the Nozickians/Minarchists (“we can’t eliminate the State, but it should be as restricted as possible”) – and it’s more annoying when the polar opposites each accuse the other of Not Being Libertarians At All.
> Like many here at A&D, I am most attracted to women with high intelligence
> and the courage to display it. This is not something that you can typically
> judge accurately at parties or the bar scene.
I disagree. You initiate conversation with physically attractive women first, and then, should she seem too vapid, you bail. And you can easily evaluate both at a party or a bar.
Thus, the order of interaction is (1) is she hot, then (2) is she smart.
The only time the order seems switched is when a guy’s going through a dry spell. The longer the dry spell, the less hot, the less smart the girl needs to be.
Honestly, I am surprised that you have observed this behavior — a woman deliberately humiliating a guy when he hits on her. Of course the female sex has its share of sadists who like to do mean things to guys, but they are not all the common in my experience. I think that generally speaking when a guy hits on a gal in a non jerk way, generally speaking she will try to let him down easy. FWIW, women are much more cruel to other women than they are to men, probably for the SMV reasons you discuss.
However, there are three exceptions to this rule, I believe (referring to stranger hitting on random woman, prior relationship has its own set of rules):
1. He is an ass about it. This means rudely interrupting or imposing himself in a social situation that he isn’t welcome, and obviously isn’t so. Or he is rude, obnoxious or grabby. Or related subcategory — he won’t take no for an answer.
2. When she has been hit on constantly throughout a time period and it is extremely distracting from what she is doing (hanging out with her friends, enjoying the con or whatever.)
3. She is extremely horny and wants to get laid, but you are not the guy she wants, then it will piss her off that you are getting in the way.
There are probably others, but those would be the main ones.
@ thsu – “the order of interaction is (1) is she hot, then (2) is she smart.”
That’s largely true for the hormone years (teen through mid 20s). Later in life you will find that smart is hot. As I mentioned up-thread, bars and parties tend to be noisy and therefore difficult to talk/ascertain intelligence (plus booze and posturing are a hindrance).
Back in high school I dated a guy who was lower total social status than myself by a tiny margin. For about 3 days. I didn’t care about his status. I liked him. He was nice, kind, a proto-geek who shared my enthusiasm for HP programmable calculators. When my peers started abusing me and threatening me for dating him I dumped him like a hot potato. I wasn’t going to go back to being beaten up routinely. I’d been through that earlier in high school, and nobody was worth going back to that. I’ve often wondered what happened to him, but at the time I felt physically threatened. So not all turn downs are about SMV. Sometimes there are genuine non-status threats.
@Warren:
Yeah, and maybe it’s not just prostitutes that could cause the decline.
Good sex toys for women are empowering, but the ones for men are terrible and we should be sure to keep it that way and outlaw better ones that are under development.
Now, I’ve never personally used a sex toy and have no desire to, but seriously, some crazy-ass woman trying to dictate that guys shouldn’t be allowed this sort of alternative is pathetic and desperate.
Sigivald on 2015-11-09 at 17:58:46 said: The last thing I want anything to do with is someone who only/mostly cares about status signaling, whether the context is sexual or otherwise.
We all care about status signaling. It’s an instinct. We do it and respond to it unconsciously. Most people are partially aware of it; a few people are focused on it. But almost no one ignores it.
Jessica:
————
Honestly, I am surprised that you have observed this behavior — a woman deliberately humiliating a guy when he hits on her. Of course the female sex has its share of sadists who like to do mean things to guys, but they are not all the common in my experience. I think that generally speaking when a guy hits on a gal in a non jerk way, generally speaking she will try to let him down easy.
…
1. He is an ass about it. This means rudely interrupting or imposing himself in a social situation that he isn’t welcome, and obviously isn’t so. Or he is rude, obnoxious or grabby. Or related subcategory — he won’t take no for an answer.
———-
In my experience this is accurate with the significant caveat that (again, in my experience) the not-quite-good-enough guy gets only *one* strike. If he misses or ignores the “not interested, please move on” signal in her initial polite response and makes a second go at it, THAT’S when she’s prone to unleash hell on him, if other women are watching.
And tying that together with ESR’s observation upthread–the inexperienced beta nerd is very much prone to missing the signal. And worse, he’s often also been deluded all his life into believing he should just buck up and try harder.
I sometimes really do wonder whether the US is inhabited by a different species of human…
@K_
“I sometimes really do wonder whether the US is inhabited by a different species of human…”
The weird thing is, I have lived for most of my life in the silly believe that US TV shows were a kind of deep Fantasy. Then I found out that reality is even worse. Imagine the shock.
>We ain’t going back to Roman Catholic marriage traditions, nor should we.
I am actually somewhat optimistic about this. There are certain factors:
1) conservatives having more children
2) Young people rebelling against parents: with liberal parents, it easily becomes “reactionary is the new cool”
Of course 1) and 2) contradicts and could as well cancel each other… but one of the two may win over the other.
3) Roosh: “Game could potentially save Western civ” – if more young men realize the buff, agro MMA fighter has better luck with women than the nice guy, they work on alphaing up, and a new barbarism can have an effect of re-establishing traditional civilization. It is not exactly clear how… maybe, lessay, we produce a large number of such alphas again and women start to think it is better to marry them than to be a notch, and such a man charges a high price for his domestication – basically, demands submission or no deal. So there is this deal offered, submit or be a notch, a one night stand. And may well be that the first is accepted. Libido can be a powerful force and Theodore Dalrymple wrote a lot of British women even love men who beat them up and generally are gigantic asshats (again, this is not what I am hoping to come back, I am hoping for a more decent alphaing up), but “he is a good shag” and that is more important for them. Obviously said asshats aren’t good shags because they care about complicated bedroom gymnastics: it is their dominant vibe that makes their women hot.
So wait and see. Evolution doesn’t stop – and forget group selectionism and any kind of aggregate social utility: it is highly individual, whatever behavior gets the notch – or hot wife – wins, gets selected for, not just genetically but also culturally. It is a more powerful force than e.g. the growing uselessness of highly masculine traits in the economic engine and thus the obsolescence of masculinity. That is group selectionism and that is always a weak force. It is always individual competition and not even for the money but for the girl. We behave not in socially optimal but individually optimal ways.
My favorite term is “guido reaction” here. They are ridiculous? Meaning, low-status amongst intellectuals? They are banging hot lower-class chicks in skimpy outfits. At some level the men who point and laugh at guidos start to wonder what exactly is their snobbery buying them… (And guido ridiculousness is mostly a US trope anyway, the Indian guidos in British dance clubs, or basically every richer young man in Moscow thinks otherwise.)
Believe in individual selection, individual mating success always trumping social utility or social trends and ideology. Even “progress”. There are few things as solid on this planet as young men doing whatever it takes, including being clowns, to get the girl. And even if educated whiteys not? There are other contestants.
@TheDividualist
“1) conservatives having more children”
Mostly: 1) Poor people have more children
Poor children want to get rich, and then have less children themselves. World-wide, the game is over and average number of offspring per woman is 2.5. The absolute number of children in not going to rise anymore and will stay at around 2B.
@TheDividualist
“(And guido ridiculousness is mostly a US trope anyway, the Indian guidos in British dance clubs, or basically every richer young man in Moscow thinks otherwise.)”
Note that Russian women are, how shall I say, high-maintenance, in skimpy outfit or otherwise (got that info from several sides, male&female). They are for the brave and fearless. Expect to lose, though.
> Note that Russian women are, how shall I say, high-maintenance, in skimpy outfit or otherwise (got that info from several sides, male&female). They are for the brave and fearless. Expect to lose, though.
Well, Russian men are, let’s say, not uniformly successful. The society is archaic in many ways and inequality is very high, even when compared with the US. So perhaps Russian women are ‘high-maintenance’ because they’re (quite sensibly) competing for a small minority of “Big Men”, but the average Western guy could still do fairly well with them.
@guest
“So perhaps Russian women are ‘high-maintenance’ because they’re (quite sensibly) competing for a small minority of “Big Men”, but the average Western guy could still do fairly well with them.”
What I understood was the opposite: Russian women are trained to fend for themselves and they know they live in a hostile society.
The story I heard was that the men in Russia are beaten into submission in the army during their time as conscripts. The level of abuse in the Russian army is incomprehensible to Westerners.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/10/19/russia-systematic-hazing-serious-abuse
Also, (maybe as a side effect) substance abuse among men is truly unbelievable.
In the end, it falls onto the women to stand up to “defend” their families, and they are prepared for that.
So, if any of you thinks about importing a Russian bride, prepare for interesting times. Whether “interesting” has to be taken in a positive or negative sense depends totally on you.
I’m no hacker snd I’ve never been one to buy into the debate as to Eric’s mad haxorz skillZ or otherwise, but it is pretty difficult to argue against the success of his strategic open source proselytising.
However every now and again I check an A&D thread like this one (and the previous one, or any of the nutty gun ones) and I can’t help wishing that Eric would dial down the crazy and get back to what he is good at.
This sort of poisonous bullshit is what makes everyone else in the world point and laugh at the stinky neckbeards in the corner who need ribbons to tell each other how to behave at conventions.
Imagine someone casually stereotyping some protected minority group like that. You could have launched the Apollo 11 with nothing but the virulent outrage.
Winter, yes, that was obviously meant in the context of relationships. But then again, many other archaic societies (read: not merely ‘traditionalist’ or ‘old-fashioned’ but quite deeply dysfunctional) see women “stepping in” in much the same way, which they’d be disinclined to do otherwise. It’s like women – and gynocentric societies – are the last line of defense against total social dysfunction.
@TomM
>makes everyone else in the world point and laugh at the stinky neckbeards
Makes the first-worlder broadly liberal-leftist intellectual class point and laugh, maybe. If you think plumbers in the US or those who like Trump or basically anyone in Russia or Argentine is sharing the same value system, you really need to get out more.
If for example – although it is unlikely – ESR would manage to fully alienate this intellectual class from hackerdom while importing basically everybody else into it, the trade-off wouldn’t necessarily be bad. Well, it’s complicated, these intellectuals are often good programmers, see the late Aron Swartz, who was really really smart and a good programmer, but they also push too hard for non-meritocratic selection. And everybody else on the really broad average does have a lower IQ, but accept meritocratic selection. So if the whole thing was a huge corporation, you would be running it, and you had to choose between a bad selection method used on a good recruiting pool or a good selection method used on a worse but huge recruiting pool, which one would you choose? I’d choose the second.
A related problem is entryism. Research it. Even from a fully politically neutral angle, the problem with entryism is that when it succeeds it diverts resources away from the original goals of the organization and thus makes it unsuccesful. So e.g. when sci-fi is used to advertise social justice, it becomes bad sci-fi and people don’t buy it and sales suffer and so on. Preventing entryism is hugely important and one good way to do it is basically to make your org look a bit bad. A bit nutty, in your terms. The kind of place a self-respecting, social justice conscious intellectual would rather not go. Full of stinky redneckbeards, eww.
I sense you are insecure about ESR potentially reducing the status of programmers in the eyes of the campus cool people and the Valley Mag, because you probably internalized that whatever these people see cool IS cool and not being cool would feel terrible, but I think the whole idea is to learn to get over that.
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the tide is turning against this intellectual class, slowly. We have a highly intellectual analysis of “Brahmin” attitudes if you just read Moldbug’s blog or Nick Land’s or many others which can be used to find weak spots, we have a PUA redpillery that undermines much of this system by actually being successful with women, or maybe look at who is actually winning with GG or what VD managed to achieve against the sci-fi elites, a fair judgement would at the very least be a tie in both cases, and you can see that the territory dominated by this class is slowly shrinking already. Some men, like VD acquire basically infinite amount of negative prestige in the process, but e.g. if you are just a normal guy who likes his sci-fi without ridiculous gender-and-race focus he did achieve some breathing room for you or your authors with it. Actually, from my angle ESR is being moderate.
@guest
” It’s like women – and gynocentric societies – are the last line of defense against total social dysfunction.”
You can easily remove the “It’s like” from that sentence. In the absence of endemic violence, men are only tolerated as long as they add a net contribution to the household. And actually, that is a very sensible strategy.
@ TheDividualist
Look, I’m sure there are lots of guys Just Like Us who like being told by wise old dudes like Eric that their dysfunction is a product of the Evil Feminazis (or whatever).
It is, nevertheless, batshit crazy.
In fact, I propose an evolution of Godwin’s law, to wit:
In any Internet discussion about gender politics, the first person to mention “PUA”, “Game”, or “The Red Pill” not only loses, but is on their way straight to jail and must not pass Go.
At some point we all need to stop being eighth graders.
TomM, Game/PUA is indeed important as an acid test for a whole lot of theories about gender. It makes people point and laugh at us? Maybe, but so what. People pointed at Galileo and tried to silence him – because he had the temerity to look through a telescope and report on what he was seeing. “E Pur Si Muove!”
@ guest
I think we are on safe ground in saying Blanc is no Galileo.
But, you know, if your persecution complex is working for you, why change?
I would agree… I just don’t think that’s what any side really wants. Except maybe the neckbeards, who seem to really just want everyone to shut up and show them the source code. (preferably source code that was worth commiting in the first place)
> is no Galileo.
Well, I’d certainly hope so. But I’m not too optimistic about the future. Religious dogma is actually quite powerful in the modern, ‘secular’ West. It’s just that the religion, and the ordained priesthood, have changed.
@TomM
>Look, I’m sure there are lots of guys Just Like Us who like being told by wise old dudes like Eric that their dysfunction is a product of the Evil Feminazis (or whatever).
Imagine the whole thing from the opposite side, as a mental exercise. Imagine a feminist saying men’s dating traditions are based on an assumption of patriarchy such as women needing a provider and therefore men needing to put less effort into being attractive and more effort into being productive. And now that there is less patriarchy, they find their old dating routines don’t work well. Would that make more sense for you? Because it is from the practical level would be exactly the same argument, just with different value judgements and different basis (society/biology) but would still work out the same way.
I mean, let’s agree in some facts. Something has changed in society, feminism wasn’t exactly a failure from its own perspective, and thus women do need male providers less. I think the whole political spectrum agrees so far because this is an easily verifiable fact. It is also an objective fact that single mother welfare reduces the need for a male provider. The only thing people can argue about is how much this matters, but the fact is clear enough and it is meant exactly for this purpose – the British government is advertising “don’t commit welfare fraud by pretending your live-in boyfriend is not living there”, I saw those a decade ago and it was still Labour. Are you onboard so far? As it would be hard to argue with this.
And by any sense of logic, this HAD to change how dating works. HAD to. Cannot possibly imagine by any stretch of imagination that it didn’t and thus the same dating strategy that worked in 1950 and can be picked up from old books can still work.
Which means today it is far more important to be extroverted, social, and pick up cues from your own cohort, how people of your own age date. Have a social life and all that.
This… is something geekdom is not traditionally good at. Geekdom is a high functioning autism refugee after all. Geeks are far more likely to read The Great Gatsby or insert any old book and learn dating from it. Which is not going to work anymore.
Whether it is seen as blaming evil feminazis or you can try to put a positive spin on it and call it Progress Against Evil Patriarchy is just a value judgement. And ESR is not putting much of a spin, I think he is reporting it neutrally.
BTW todays Red-Pill culture indeed has sucky elements, because it has an intersection with late-adopter videogamers and whiny MRAs, but it doesn’t matter anymore because the useful ideas became mainstream or is closely so. I mean, the Daily Mail may be a rag, but is certainly close to mainstream, and look at this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1381601/Sexpert-reveals-wife-slept-5-000-times.html (the article is very very skirting around the “controversial” side but it advertises Athol’s book, which doesn’t).
@ TomM – “point and laugh at the stinky neckbeards in the corner who need ribbons to tell each other how to behave”
If your goal was to persuade Eric to censor A&D (and discourage future blog posts about SJWs), then the above insult was an unintelligent way to go about it. Either you knew this, and just intended to be ad hominem, or you’re unaware of your limitations. In either case, let me disabuse you of your misconceptions. I do not siink, have a neckbeard, nor wear ribbons. In addition to my work, I ride a mountain bike and rock climb in Colorado. If you would like to stop by and try that insult in person, I look forward to your visit.
Ugh, let’s everybody read The Sleepwalkers from Koestler and stop worshiping Galileo once and for all. Summary: http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/data/sci_fraud_1499.html
We have far better examples these days, scientists who weren’t frauds. James Watson, for starters.
@TheDividualist
> And by any sense of logic, this HAD to change how dating works. HAD to.
But dating has changed dramatically. And that is a good thing I think. For one thing I think modern dating is far more open to the idea that women are sexual creatures and they are far more at liberty to express their sexuality that they were in the past.
BTW, two of the cultural influences that dramatically changed that are more “female” originated items, specifically the TV show “Sex In the City” and the publication of the book “The Rules”, which is arguably the female equivalent of PUA. I think both those things were empowering to women.
Some of the PUA stuff is puerile nonsense for sure, but ultimately what they talk about is guys adapting themselves to behaviors that are attractive to women, and I’m not clear why that is a bad thing for anyone. I guess the primary downside is that it makes LTRs harder to come by, but I think that is more a consequence of other factors, primarily the fact that men don’t need to commit for sex, and women don’t need a man to commit either (All a matter of degrees of course.)
You might say it is manipulative, but EVERYTHING is manipulative. I mean a woman applies makeup and dresses a certain way to present herself as more attractive. Guys do similar things, though the signals they use are different. These things are really just manipulations of the truth to improve chances in a dating situation, and no less manipulative than the PUA guys.
So why exactly is that bad? If your sister takes you to the mall to get your cleaned up and looking nicer to help you find a girl, is she being manipulative? If your buddy tells you “Dude grow a set of balls and go ask her out” is that being manipulative? All PUA is is doing those very things in a systematic way, and especially so when it is emphasizing what they call “inner game”, which is to say becoming a better person, a more masculine, self empowered man. I think that is awesome.
>All PUA is is doing those very things in a systematic way, and especially so when it is emphasizing what they call “inner game”, which is to say becoming a better person, a more masculine, self empowered man. I think that is awesome.
Indeed it is. In my own way and from my own angle I’ve pushed a similar agenda on this blog.
TomM, simply declaring your opponents arguments as losers doesn’t actually work in general. Godwin had some success with Godwin’s law only because everyone involved, even those making the comparison, knew they were hyperbolic.
The whole PUA idea looks to me as a strategy founded on the premise that “chicks dig jerks”, or more precisely “chicks dig a certain sort of jerk”. Thus, act like the right kind of jerk, and chicks will dig you too. The rest is detail. If this works (and it seems to), it provides strong evidence for that initial premise. Ignoring that is ignoring data. Rejecting that data because it leads to conclusions which contradict cherished principles is very bad science.
(as for the question of whether if you act like a jerk, you actually ARE a jerk, I don’t think the PUAs care. If the abyss stares back at them, they’ll just try to pick it up)
Re: PUA / chicks dig jerks. The problem is this statement can be interpreted on a really broad scope. Who is a jerk? A man who isn’t totally submissive? Or a wife beater? Even worse?
Theodore Dalrymple writes extensively about how brutal wife beaters are defended by their wives because they are a good shag, but this apparently an underclass chav type phenomenon in the UK, basically confined to social housing. Intelligent women demand less of a jerkdom but not sure how much less.
On the Art of Manliness a psychologist tried to debunk this stuff but apparently just debunked a particularly vicious interpretation of it, and actually confimed a milder interpretation: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/07/the-myth-of-the-alpha-male/
“To put this study in a real-world context, the guy in high school that all the girls go for is the guy who can dominate a player from a rival school on the football field on Friday night, but who’s likeable and friendly to his own classmates during the week.”
This seems to be what works with higher class women, domineering or aggressivity not, being dominant yes, in a calm and friendly way. Sometimes it is described as “like you treat your kid sister”. The author is a bit confused there, not understanding the difference between dominance and prestige, he tends to see things under prestige that belong under real dominance. Prestige means likedness, not respectedness actually. The guy in the authors example is actually a dominant orangutan, it is absolutely not required for the dominant one to behave like an ass, that is a weak move.
The most probable reason how this works is that intelligent women pick up that overly domineering / aggressive attitudes actually mean low dominance.
Example. Posture. The attractive posture is NOT standing like boxer, but literally the opposite, as defenseless as possible, to demonstrate that no one dares to attack you. Drink on hip level, not chest, chest open, genitals undefendend (legs shoulder wide), the other hand in a back pocket or something, purposeful imbalance like half ass on a bar stool, so basically a posture that would be horribly inefficient for fighting and thus is loudly advertising you are not expecting one. Compare it with the boxers posture which is defensive but also aggressive and it is clear to see the difference.
This is all fine but it is pointless to criticize a small number of overly domineering PUAs when most guys who are able to read and article have the opposite problem. What is the use in beating up “toxic masculinity” which is extremely rare amongst people who actually read and not about extreme male submissiveness.
For example, in popular culture there is this trope or joke that if you piss off the missus you are sleeping on a couch. Have you ever considered what an extremely submissive move it is to let yourself be thrown out from your own bed or your side of the bed? It is clearly even below equality, because equality would mean they both have full jurisdiction over their side of the bed. I can’t even imagine my wife even trying such a thing, I would probably stare incredulously and say you decide where you want to sleep but you don’t get to decide where I am going to sleep so if you want to sleep alone, you go to the couch.
So it seems to me at least from pop culture that plenty of men are so submissive that even egalitarianism would be an improvement over them.
So we have this extremely wide range of jerkhood 0) murderers, who get love letters in prison 1) Dalrymples brutal wife beaters 2) PUAs who get too domineering but just verbally 3) dominant-not-domineering real alpha, so the kind of man who is naturally respected 4) prestige guy, not respected but likeable 5) actually egalitarian marriage which given that democracy never works even with two tends to be libertarian: both have full jurisdiction over separate things, over their own things 6) submissive puppies whom their wife can send to sleep on the couch.
Try to keep this wide range in mind when discussing these things.
@Jessica well it has good and bad aspects. The problem is, at least currently, that most men are unable to really live up to the sexual desires of most women and thus it results in soft polygamy. This is not optimal, as many men stay single while many women have no bargaining power as mere replacable harem members. And perhaps fixable, precisely by these things. Some of the more hardcore Redpillers posit that hypergamy is eternal and thus even if every man was super attractive the slightly even more attractive elite would have harems so only suppressing the sexual instincts of women works for monogamy. I really don’t know. I suppose we could strike a compromise of solving womens sexual needs inside monogamy – make most men far more attractive then shame cheaters and harem member women / harem “owner” guys. This is going to be interesting because it looks like after gay liberation the next step is poly, but what not everybody seems to realize is how it is actually having a direct effect on other people in a way gays don’t. Monogamy is necessary simply because having a partner is a basic need and it is not cool to have extremely attractive people monopolize the dating pool which happens with poly. Also because kids.
Anyhow, in the longer run, the solution, if there is any, is “send Johnny to the power lifting gym, save monogamy, save the family” and is probably something better than what happened back then when womens sexual nature was denied, but as currently most men are still sleepwalking about it it is currently trending towards a destructive poly direction and that is not better. It is not even a very good deal for women as being a harem members means being replacable and having low bargaining power.
@The Nybbler
> The whole PUA idea looks to me as a strategy founded on the premise that “chicks dig jerks”, or more precisely “chicks dig a certain sort of jerk”.
If that is what you derived from PUA then you need to read it again. However, it gives me the opportunity to comment on the “chicks dig jerks” trope anyway. I think that that is not true at all. It is not the jerkishness that is attractive, it is qualities that often cohabit with jerkishness that is attractive. Specifically, confidence, non neediness, taking the lead, and various other masculine traits like that. These are traits that “jerks” have in abundance, mostly because they don’t feel the need to adapt themselves to various social conditions.
What is unattractive about “nice guys” is not the niceness, but the fact that the niceness prevents these masculine characteristics coming out. For example, Bob asks Alice on a date. He wants her to have a nice time so asks here “Where would you like to go.” Alice is thinking “What a pussy, he can’t even make up his own mind where to take me.” Alice declines and then some guy says “Jump your ass on the back of my bike, I’m going to give you the ride of your life…” and within an hour she is banging the guy on the side of the road somewhere.
The badness part is occasionally attractive in a limited way of “living on the edge” and most women do like the “I’m being a naughty girl” thing too. But you don’t have to be a jerk to manifest these masculine qualities. And this is why “inner game” teaching, as I mentioned before, is a really good thing.
@esr
> Indeed it is. In my own way and from my own angle I’ve pushed a similar agenda on this blog.
I agree entirely.
ams: Does it even make sense to think of the “sexual marketplace” as a marketplace? It’s a weird market. […] In the “sexual marketplace”, every pair makes one and only one trade, if things work right. It’s traumatic to have a redo. […] Does this “market” really clear at all?
I think the problems you’re describing here are commonly cited in the context of the mating market being a matchmaker market, as opposed to a commodity market. In a commodity market, you almost never care who buys your commodity or who sells one to you. Such markets clear according to very understandable supply and demand laws. In a matchmaker market, such as in mating or in considering an applicant for a highly skilled work contract, you care very much.
I suspect commodity and matchmaker are landmarks in a continuum of market scenarios where if you move from the former toward the latter, the transaction costs get larger, the commitment lengths grow longer, and the secondary effects of transactions grow more numerous and complex.
For a more expert take on matchmaker markets, you might try Alvin Roth’s new book: Who Gets What – And Why.
@TomA
> If your goal was to persuade Eric to censor A&D (and discourage future blog posts about SJWs)
Let me spell it out a little more carefully before the red mist consumes you.
Eric is of course free to write whatever he wants on his blog. When he sticks to his knitting the product can be genuinely valuable.
However, the shine can and does get taken off when he loops off into reactionary, contrarian diatribes about race, gender and (deep breath) climate change.
Also – Eric doesn’t have, in the photos I’ve seen any way, a beard either. But lie with dogs, wake with fleas (that sort of thing).
>However, the shine can and does get taken off when he loops off into reactionary, contrarian diatribes
I take “contrarian” as praise – and I take “reactionary” as praise, too, for though I am not one I am proud to have the kind of malignant idiots that could mistake me for a reactionary as enemies.
@ TheDividualist @ Jessica
Sorry, but I don’t buy into this highfalutin psychoanalysis of stereotypes. Nothing says low self esteem like banging an easy bimbo (on both sides).
Evolution does not select for low self esteem, but modern cultural memetic dysfunction can sure screw with some people’s heads. For me, any relationship worth having is worth making the effort to earn it.
@TomA
> Nothing says low self esteem like banging an easy bimbo (on both sides).
Why? Justify please.
@ TomM
Yes, I understand that in your opinion Eric should refrain from non-hacking topics. However, you may wish to direct your attention to the Blog’s title – “Armed and Dangerous, sex, software, politics, and firearms, life’s simple pleasures”. If that isn’t a clue to the blog’s range of subject matter, then you are not intelligent enough to hold your own here.
@ Jessica
Our species evolved in an ancestral environment of great hardship and existential threat. We are made to overcome difficulty, not take the easy road. That is how we improve, and our natural psychology rewards this instinct with affirmation and high self esteem.
Mastering a deception technique (or falling prey to it) for short term hormonal gratification is anti-evolutionary for our sentient species. Yes, casual pick-up sex happens all the time; but you do not improve your life by easy conquest and acquiescence.
@TomA
> Yes, casual pick-up sex happens all the time; but you do not improve your life by easy conquest and acquiescence.
Yeah, but you do have a great orgasm…. Eating pizza doesn’t make you a better person, but it sure is fun…
@TomA
“Our species evolved in an ancestral environment of great hardship and existential threat.”
Most evidence from antropology and archeology points to parties and festivities as being an essential part of human life in the pre-history. At least it included at lot of singing and dancing.
Also, I do not see what the problem is of a man making a woman happy? Or vice versa.
@ esr
> I take “contrarian” as praise
Interesting. I agree that it can be great fun to say things with the primary goal of annoying people that you disagree with.
@TomM:
You really don’t get it, do you? Annoying you and your ilk is not the primary goal, but it is satisfying validation for esr when the only people arguing strenuously against his viewpoint don’t make any sense. If you have any serious arguments, by all means, make ’em.
@TheDividualist
So one thing I like about these conversations, and most blog conversations that I follow, is they come from a very niche cross section of life; i.e. middle to upper middle class, urban, and educated. That doesn’t invalidate any of the points but it does color the commentary. For example:
“in popular culture there is this trope or joke that if you piss off the missus you are sleeping on a couch. Have you ever considered what an extremely submissive move it is to let yourself be thrown out from your own bed or your side of the bed? It is clearly even below equality, because equality would mean they both have full jurisdiction over their side of the bed. I can’t even imagine my wife even trying such a thing, I would probably stare incredulously and say you decide where you want to sleep but you don’t get to decide where I am going to sleep so if you want to sleep alone, you go to the couch.”
So it is pretty well established women are more physically abusive that men and the way this normally goes, if you refuse to leave the bed, is you are assaulted and, if attempt to defend yourself, arrested when the police show up. That’s not hyperbole, talk to anybody who deals with family violence (lawyers, victims, perpetrators, etc). Reality is relationships, especially marriage and especially if you have kids, are rarely a partnership of equals .. exiting isn’t free.
Shaming a guy for not being high-status enough for a woman doesn’t need to be public to be effective.
@ Winter – “parties and festivities as being an essential part of human life in the pre-history”
You are correct, and an important aspect of many of those festivals was to promote fecundity. We may even be wired such that dancing stimulates sexual desire.
Please don’t misunderstand my prior comments. I get as horny as anyone else and when I meet an extraordinarily intelligent woman wearing glasses, I wanna jump their bones in a heartbeat. The species, however, benefits most when woman force men to earn their favors via accomplishment rather than subterfuge.
@ Patrick Maupin
> You really don’t get it, do you? Annoying you and your ilk is not the primary goal, but it is satisfying validation for esr when the only people arguing strenuously against his viewpoint don’t make any sense.
You make a good point indirectly – I admit to being constantly surprised at the level of non-sense promulgated as wisdom in these sort of threads – which tend to comprise a lot of bloviating and assumed conclusions (and, if we’re super-lucky, some links to other random blogs where someone says something which the poster either agrees or disagrees with). In other words, the quality of debate is not high.
Which is actually another reason I think these nuttier posts of Eric’s are unhelpful – they tend to attract the most enthusiasm from the extremes.
Out of interest, what group of people do you think to be my “ilk”?
@TomM: Out of interest, what group of people do you think to be my “ilk”?
People who transparently attempt to shut down debate with vague complaints about how the quality of discourse is not up to snuff, for a start.
@Jessica
>But you don’t have to be a jerk to manifest these masculine qualities.
Correct, but you are talking from the angle of intelligent, well-adjusted, low time preference women from functional families. On lower levels of the ladder it is often actual jerkhood.
Time preference is old science anyway. Currently it is called Fast/Slow Life History Strategy.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201008/life-in-the-fast-lane-part-iii-romantic-attachment-in-the-fast-lane
@everybody try to read all six articles, they are extremely relevant, one of the best researches on human nature I ever saw, and basically settle a lot of things I wished I knew about life when I was 16 and a lot of things that get argued about. You could build a whole ideology on just the research cited in these six articles.
>Out of interest, what group of people do you think to be my “ilk”?
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/half-lifts-workout-says-social-class-85221
Not SJW, but still these, hm, sophisticated social circles, would be my guess. I love this article, it is one of the really rare cases when a fish realizes there is such a thing a water and it is wet. Perfectly honest insider view. Highy recommended to all here.
@TomA
“The species, however, benefits most when woman force men to earn their favors via accomplishment rather than subterfuge.”
Actually, the “species” benefits mightily when women cheat on men with “bad genes” behind their back and then make the cheated men raise the children resulting from encounters with men with “good genes”. The overall gene pool will benefit.
This is exactly what happens in several (most?) species of nesting birds. Evolution at work. And every investigation of real paternity shows this is also a factor in human societies. Who are we kidding, cheating is part and parcel of every soap opera and most of the books published.
Hey, TomM:
What Have You Done For Me Lately by Steve Goodman is available on Spotify for those who don’t know the tune. And probably elsewhere, but Spotify’s legal. I recommend the Earl
What have you done for us lately
You act like we all owe you gratitude
What have you done for us lately
To justify your gimme attitude
Why should we care if you’re overwrought
Take all your spoiled bratty crap and stick it up your nose
What have you done for us lately
Why shouldn’t we start doing without you
Your tone’s conceitedly demanding
But we’re not servants at your heel
Your comments just aren’t as outstanding
As you appear to think that we should feel
We’re more fed up with you than vice versa
Your behavior is an infantile display
It’s not our job to care about your puckered derriere
So why shouldn’t we flip you the bird and say
What have you done for us lately
Why shouldn’t we start doing without you
What have you done for us lately
Don’t you know life’s a two-way avenue
What have you got to offer us you gamma wannabe
That would be worth the slightest limit on our liberty
What have you done for us lately
Why shouldn’t we start doing without you
What have you done for us lately
So far you’ve only shown ineptitude
What have you done for us lately
Your greedy whines are juvenile and rude
Go find a little sheepbridge with a comfy undershelf
Because you desperately need to get the flock over yourself
What have you done for us lately
Why shouldn’t we start doing
Without your boo hoo hooing
Why shouldn’t we start doing without you
*That* is why I won’t do two shows a night anymore, babe. I won’t; I won’t do ’em.
@ Winter – “Actually, the “species” benefits mightily when women cheat on men with “bad genes” behind their back
Yes, I know about this mechanism in the natural world and the benefit of gene diversification in enhancing the rate of adaptability. Like many innate behaviors, it exists because it works.
The same can also be said for many other pervasive behaviors that have become dominant traits of our cultural evolution; such as a proclivity for religious practice, traditional marriage, and a proscription against adultery. These also “work” in the sense that they enhanced our rapid advance into civilization and the explosion of change and adaption that has occurred during the past few millennia.
Evolution has always had competing selection drivers and it will likely take a while before one emerges as singularly dominant. Roaming may be a natural instinct, but anything worth having is worth keeping.
Interesting thought:
Could much of Alpha behavior be linked to high perseverance-in-the-face-of-adversity levels? If, as Paul Graham noted, being socially popular indicated that people were willing to put effort into being popular, it would be an outward manifestation of a useful attribute. At least, in the evo environment where perseverance could mean the difference between surviving and starving.
>But it’s a problem with no viable solution, far as I can tell.
[smirk] Have you tried asking the men’s movement?
Never mind, I already did it for you. There’s several mutually reinforcing. . .advances, if not solutions, that should restabilize things some.
The main one is Vasalgel, which is on track for human testing and FDA approval in the very near future, as in before 2020. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically the western redo of the Indian male birth control RISUG model; Glove American Style, if you will. With RISUG, a permeable polymer is injected into both vas tubules, and as the sperm pass through it, they’re essentially neutered. RISUG has been successfully tested in humans with only the side effect of minor scrotal enlargement in a few cases, and has achieved 99+% effectiveness over a decade. Another injection of solvent flushes the polymer out again when the man is ready to regain full fertile function; it’s taken RISUG injectees about 3 months to do so. RISUG also has decades of successful testing behind it, but apparently the Indian government is still blocking its release.
Vasalgel is similar but apparently blocks almost the entire vas, permitting only the liquid portions of the ejaculate to pass. As with vasectomy, the sperm are absorbed back into the body.
And It’s a terrifying Black Swan already lining up on the runway. The Parsemus foundation, which is the non-profit behind Vasalgel, is aiming for human testing to begin in 2017 with commercial release soon afterwards.
I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to happen when this stuff hits the market. I do think the negative impact on marriage from paternity fraud prevention is going to be severe at first. The best estimate of the number of paternity frauds in the usa overall that I know of is 2%, but the same research indicates there are large variations between different demographics, so. . .it’s almost all guesswork from there.
In the long run, though, I think women will be faced with some gritty realities our ad-based information sources have been concealing for years, such as the actual fertility dropoff with age, and this will be to the actual benefit of everyone, not just marriage-minded men. Real women will face serious competition from simulated ones, and men’s virtual alternatives and default reproductive veto will make both them and their communities start picking up their end of the marriage contract responsibilities again.
Remember, folks, marriage isn’t just a contract between a man on one side and a woman on the other. It’s also a contract between a man and a woman on one side and community on the other, and for decades now the communities have been not just dropping their contractual responsibilities to husbands, but even actively violating them through female chauvanistic discrimination. Which leads us into the Bradley Amendment nightmare, and the CSE matching funds pernicious incentives, and so on, and that’s enough of that for now.
The lesser advances are more the integration of several at once, specifically good-enough-quality mass market VR, automated male sexual toys with feedback sensors (not just full ‘sexbots’ but items like the chinese medical ejaculator, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHi8hTvT3II ), and the hidden kicker I don’t remember seeing anyone else ID yet: 1st person PC games with seducible female characters that work with all these systems, including trainable neural nets using the feedback sensors in the sexual toys.
For those who scoff at ‘sexbots’ ever mattering, it’s important to remember that they won’t be competing with the most attractive women; the anticipated equation is along the lines of Real Female 5, or 6, or 7, depending on the individual estimating < Personally Customized Sexbot 10 We ain’t going back to Roman Catholic marriage traditions, nor should we.
Except, of course, for those who *want* to, right?
Regardless, there’s two other possible advances on the legal front. The first and most likely IMO is the passage of rebuttable presumption of equal custody at the local to state level, which the more organized and ‘successful’ male lobbying groups have been working on for years. I don’t know how much useful groundwork has been done, but it’s almost certainly still better than nothing.
The second is the more specifically targeted no-fault divorce reform proposition of marriage custody: the person who files for no-fault divorce to leave the marriage also leaves the kids behind. The default presumption is that they get no custody to start with and will have to negotiate more than that with the non-filing partner. Since that would cripple governments’ child support exploitation racket, it will probably take some small town or county hemorrhaging population to pass the reform out of desperation and break the dam open.
There is no ‘may’ about it; we already live in interesting times, and they’re just getting more so.
Oh dear, I smell burning html. Here’s the text that didn’t post above:
For those who scoff at ‘sexbots’ ever mattering, it’s important to remember that they won’t be competing with the most attractive women; the anticipated equation is along the lines of (Real Female 5, or 6, or 7, depending on the individual estimating) : is less than : (Personally Customized Sexbot 10) : is less than : (Real Female 8 or 9+). If a guy doubts he can ever do better than a 5, saving the world while nailing a harem of customized simulated 10s starts to look like a more than good enough alternative.
Add to that harems of PC game characters that in effect learn and remember what/how/etc. users like sexually, through those feedback sensors, and are built into epic gaming adventures, and the old Futurama “DON’T DATE ROBOTS!” joke doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous to me as it once did.
PC and console games alone are already hugely attractive timesinks, such that they continue to steadily eat the lunch of older entertainments. Adding VR sexual conquests coordinated with epic adventure narratives will just ramp that up more and faster. And again, for those who scoff, I point at Japan, where ero-sims have already become solidly mainstream. This is obvious extrapolation from existing trends and historic tendencies.
>We ain’t going back to Roman Catholic marriage traditions, nor should we.
Relevant:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/11/18/harvard_business_school_study_it_s_not_kids_but_husbands_that_hold_women.html
@Acksiom on sexbots.
Just a couple of things here:
1. Women already have sexbots that perform mechanically in a different league that any man could. However, they still have sex with men because mechanical is not what it is all about.
2. Men also have alternative ways of stimulating themselves which they all use extensively. However, they also still seek sex with women, and I doubt it is because the physical sensation is better or worse. It certainly isn’t because the real world women they are having sex with are hotter or kinkier than the perfect bodied models who are willing to indulge the most extreme fantasies that the Web serves up in abundance.
3. Follow on the 2 above, men don’t talk about virtual sex because there is a huge social stigma associated with it, which it is reasonable to expect would translated into more complete virtual experiences. It isn’t much of a conquest if you paid $3.99 for it. Guys rarely brag about the really hot porn chick they jerked off to last night. After all, guys can readily score with a super hot chick today for a few hundred bucks an hour, but they don’t usually brag about that either.
Having said that, I totally want in on the IPO for the sexbot making company.
> Yes, casual pick-up sex happens all the time; but you do not improve your life by easy conquest and acquiescence.
I just have to laugh at guys who actually believe this. As if you can reliably score casual pick-up sex with attractive women without a lot of hard work and a thousand hours of practice.
If you watch the videos of any of the successful red pill authors, they are invariably in good shape with outgoing, charismatic personalities. Qualities that took them years to achieve. Qualities that are valuable in all aspects of life, not just for being successful with women. Hell, study after study have that outgoing, attractive people regularly out-earn introverted, unattractive people.
Patrick, did you miss this?
>The Red Pill/PUA movement is doing widespread harm to men in ways that compare interestingly to how modern feminism is doing widespread harm to women.
Cites or it didn’t happen, please.
@ thsu – “As if you can reliably score casual pick-up sex with attractive women without a lot of hard work and a thousand hours of practice.”
I agree that it’s not an easy conquest if you put in a lot of hard work and thousands of hours of practice. And I also agree with Jessica that if PUA training helps make a man out of you, then it can’t be all bad. My point is that once you’ve made something of yourself, you don’t need deception to find a mate; they find you.
>2. Men also have alternative ways of stimulating themselves which they all use extensively. However, they also still seek sex with women, and I doubt it is because the physical sensation is better or worse.
I agree. This also means sex with women is competing with these alternatives for men’s resources (time and attention, forex). That makes me consider an analogy between these integrated systems I’ve described consuming that market similarly to e-books and publishing.
To be clear, I’m not predicting that’s exactly how it will work out. But the men’s liberation technology curve is finally reaching parity with the women’s of ~50 years ago. Like the industrialization of women’s traditional responsibilities via mass produced kitchen and household appliances and consumables, plus the pill, more and more of the dirty, dangerous, and deadly work that men still traditionally do is being automated. That means greater men’s liberation.
That liberty will show up somehow regardless of the accuracy of my specifics. Today’s young men are going to find frontiers one way or another. What we’re seeing with the manosphere etc. is part of that. So too are the mass migrations into Europe — mostly young men. There is too little for them where they were, and borders were lax. And now Croatia’s government has followed Poland’s rightwards in electoral response, to what is, frankly, a quiet invasion.
Plus, the gel. I don’t see it having a significantly less radical affect on society than the pill did.
>It certainly isn’t because the real world women they are having sex with are hotter or kinkier than the perfect bodied models who are willing to indulge the most extreme fantasies that the Web serves up in abundance.
Yes. One of the critical, maybe the most critical thing a lover does that porn doesn’t is individuate. That’s one of the reasons porn can have deleterious effects; fantasizing alone may be much less individuating than shared intimacy, but it does provide some self-individuation. However, porn use tends to atrophy fantasizing capacity itself, and without lovers to make up the loss from fantasizing, the person starts to break down from lack of individuation. Which is partly why I expect integrated male sex toy systems to adjust themselves to the user’s preferences, better simulating individuation. And thus they’ll be much more competitive with women than current porn. Sexbots etc. are basically the next evolution of porn, after all. Add the increasingly competitive power to attract men’s resources that modern games have to that, plus the default male veto on reproduction, and you’re looking at the conditions for a perfect social storm.
>3. Follow on the 2 above, men don’t talk about virtual sex because there is a huge social stigma associated with it, which it is reasonable to expect would translated into more complete virtual experiences. It isn’t much of a conquest if you paid $3.99 for it. Guys rarely brag about the really hot porn chick they jerked off to last night. After all, guys can readily score with a super hot chick today for a few hundred bucks an hour, but they don’t usually brag about that either.
Yep, because a prostitute’s individuation is less valuable than a lover’s, as she’s really just individuating your money.
>Having said that, I totally want in on the IPO for the sexbot making company.
I’ve been saying for years that when men’s liberation catches up with women’s, it’s going to be raining male market soup for anybody willing to hold out a bowl.
@ Acksiom
> integrated male sex toy systems
It seems to me there must be a reason why the manga about near-futures where people have sex with robots are usually pretty dystopian. I suspect that is because relationships between people involve more than sex and “individuation” (whatever that is). No matter how good a sexbot you build, there are some things that it will not do, up to and including the transmission of your genes.
> men’s liberation
Seriously?
@TomM
” I suspect that is because relationships between people involve more than sex and “individuation” (whatever that is). ”
When we look back to the time when slavery was normal we see that almost all slave holders marry. Even those sheikhs and sultans with big harems had “favorites” they spend most of their time with.
In the end, sex is better with a “person” than with a “body” or “toy”. The exceptions are generally people who have some kind of problem connecting with humans.
In this respect, men are not that much different from women.
@ Acksiom
Modeling of synthetic sex addiction behavior indicates that it may be virulent and intractable, much like cocaine addiction. It also promotes a significant reduction in fecundity.
The corollary for this discussion is that a war (or dysfunction) between the sexes may be a death sentence for the species.
@thsu
>I just have to laugh at guys who actually believe this. As if you can reliably score casual pick-up sex with attractive women without a lot of hard work and a thousand hours of practice.
Well, anyone can go to a legal brothel in Hamburg or Amsterdam. Of course it is not the same, but the most important not the same aspect is the ego boost, the pride that I really made this hot chick want me. And from the viewpoint of the really thirsty guy, I suppose they could be very similar.
Seriously, I think men who grow up in legal prostitution countries tend to have entirely different views of sex. Far less pedestalizing or fetishizing it. I think we value relationships more and love and romance. Sex is cheap. About €60 a go, according to the internet, as I personally don’t go to pros. Even the night club drink bill tends to be more… And where it is legal, they are not miserable methheads, they are normal party girls from Ukraine with weekly medicals. So while I don’t engage in it, it is good reason for me to not consider it a gigantic thing to pick up a hot babe in a night club. Of course, the sheer feeling of having earned it, the sheer difficulty, the sheer achievement and performance is big, nobody is denying that. But it is like a sporting performance, get it? Swimming over the Channel is a big feat. But the mere fact that you got over and now you are in Calais is not a really big deal at all, and this is roughly what such an upbringing teaches: a performance, a big deal, but the act itself is not such super valuable. So it is more like I respect a man who can run a marathon but just being in the location where the marathon ends is not such a huge thing.
And similar from such an angle, sexbots look just as ridiculous. Like an automatized restaurant in a place where human waiters are cheap and good. It must be an incredibly brutal ego hit, because you feel like maybe you would be even rejected by a pro.
If anything, people should invent halfway points between prostitution and normal relationships. Sort of some guys are 50% attractive and they make up the other 50 with money. This is theoretically often the idea but in practice it leads to gamma-cuck behavior. Apparently there is a strong Schelling point somewhere where a low attractive man stops being a real customer and is basically begging for it.
@Acksiom
>But the men’s liberation technology curve is finally reaching parity with the women’s of ~50 years ago.
Male contraception matters only if you are already alpha and getting a lot and are seen worthy for spermjacking (if that is really a thing, I doubt, but if it is a thing it probably happens to top level men). Usually the main problem of unattractive guys isn’t that their condoms aren’t reliable enough.
Sexbots look ridiculous to everybody who lives in a legal prostitution country, even more than robot waiters and that is ridiculous enough. They will make their users feel they are gigantic losers. Living in such countries makes men less pedestalizing about sex, but at the end of the day still everybody wants a real girlfriend and even love, not just sex, or at least the hormonal urges of romantic attachment. So it changes not a lot.
No, the original RP ideas was good. Create the technology of making men truly attractive, so that they can get the actual romantic attachment from women, the alpha kind. Be that exercise technology or communication. It is not gadgets you can buy yet, but… actually, cue.me is coming this Xmas, have you heard about it? It is a device that amongst others can measure testosterone at home frequently on the cheap. From saliva. So if someone blogs eating more broccoli will help with it, you can test if it is really working for your own body.
@TomM: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2520647&ty=h
>Male contraception matters only if you are already alpha and getting a lot and are seen worthy for spermjacking (if that is really a thing, I doubt, but if it is a thing it probably happens to top level men). Usually the main problem of unattractive guys isn’t that their condoms aren’t reliable enough.
Nnnnope: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/what-about-the-fathers/
RTWT+TC
@Acksiom – yes, this sounds correct. But I still don’t understand why those guys aren’t using condoms. I mean, since the beginning of the AIDS scare, 1980’s, a million advertisements were poured on men saying not using condoms is flirting with death, same thing in schools,sex ed. It affected me a lot, I wonder how them not.
Also, I always told my girlfriends to don’t use the pill because it is likely to get them fat (estrogen = food cravings, like during pregnancy) and screw up their libido. Continuous simulated pregnancy can’t be a good thing. So I don’t even understand why is The Pill the purported cause of so many social changes. Condoms made it irrelevant?
To be fair, I have heard that the real biggest alphas don’t, but again perhaps that is just a lower class thing because the paid athletes and suchlike I know do use it.
How is that even supposed to work for these women. Take the pill, get fat, have low libido, somehow still screw random guys in the disco because whatever, they are too alpha to use condoms, she can just hope she isn’t getting any AIDS – are some women really this dumb?
Heterosexuals in the west don’t get HIV. This is only slightly hyperbolic, as long as they stay away from: various fetish subcultures, prostitutes, sex tourism and hard drugs.
@TheDividudalist — Read The Whole Thing + The Comments. Some of your questions are answered there.
The pill is a major cause of radical social changes essentially because it gives women a unilateral *and* trivially concealable switch on pregnancy that men don’t have. A condom may say “I love you,” but it also says, “I don’t trust you,” at the same time, and the proportions of that change with context as well. Going off condoms is a huge leap of faith, but many men want to make that leap, sometimes hoping it will make her more sexually attracted to them. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it even makes her less so. Sometimes it makes her decide to have a baby regardless of what the guy wants for reasons ranging from her mystical certainty that it will finally bring them into perfect uniform alignment to pure, undiluted, evil greed. I don’t use the term evil lightly, but considering the likely horrible, life-blighting consequences to the children in such cases, I think it’s appropriate there.
Finally, condom use is problematic across the anglosphere because of the prevalence of routine and ritual male genital mutilation throughout the six nations, and particularly in the usa, which is majority male mutilated. When you’re already missing a plurality or even worse a majority of your sexual nerve endings through amputation, the sensitivity losses from a condom can be literally dysfunctional.
In my experience, when people tell evolutionary just-so stories about human behaviour, they are – without fail – indicating that they covertly approve of those behaviors.
People endlessly trot out these evolutionary hypotheses about why people cheat on their partners, but somehow you never see the same approach to explaining stealing, or spouse/child abuse, or school shootings, or any other actually-maligned antisocial behavior. That’s what lets you know that just-so stories are not actually about explaining a behavior, they’re about defending it.
I’ve figured out you can beat the system by dating an autistic transgirl.
@Anonymous – I’m not sure what this is directed at. Do you think ESR covertly approves of publicly humiliating guys who ask girls out?
>Of course, the sheer feeling of having earned it, the sheer difficulty, the sheer achievement and performance is big, nobody is denying that.
Except, of course, for all the guys that do. Not out of sour grapes, though that’s many of them, but sometimes because they come from a background of abundance, and for them, women’s attraction is deserved rather than earned. Guys like that often have low tolerance for difficult girls; they have enough non-difficult options that such girls simply aren’t worth the effort, and thus there is little achievement and performance reward involved. I’m like that myself; I can’t be bothered with girls who play hard to get and make me chase them, because I don’t have to, and I don’t enjoy it. I’m what manosphere writer Blackdragon calls a Pleasure of Sex guy, instead of a Pleasure of the Hunt guy as you appear to be.
It’s important to remember that we rarely if ever hear about how difficult it is for them from the guys who are successful by nature or were lucky enough early in life to achieve the abundance mindset. Not only isn’t it difficult, but they’re usually too busy enjoying their immediately present lives to spend time yapping online like this.
>Sexbots look ridiculous to everybody who lives in a legal prostitution country, even more than robot waiters and that is ridiculous enough. They will make their users feel they are gigantic losers.
Except, of course, for how it *doesn’t* work that way for everybody. Does the virtual distinction between e-sports and traditional ones make e-competitors, let alone their audiences, feel like losers? No, it doesn’t. The analogy is far from perfect but it’s also just the first one to pop into my head. People did, and still do, say similar things about e-sports, and it turns out they were wrong.
I will also point out that a robot waiter will not bug you every 2 minutes like Munch In Manhattan. Or, while back in the kitchen, ejaculate in your turkey sandwich before serving it. Unless you’re, y’know, deliberately paying for that. Humans also have a propensity for repulsiveness that robots would not share.
Aaaaand. . .a-whoomp, there it is; oh, how I love this modern world: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Munch-in-Manhattan-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8535199_.htm . I think I still have my original clipping of that in storage somewhere.
Yes, I have heard of cue.me, but thank you for pointing it out. Technology and men’s health is one of the subchapters of my current book project. I actually signed on with Scanadu years back, and now I’m trying to decide if I want a refund after the FDA forced their way into the deal.
If sexbots are not a threat to women, they should be promoting them. It will get all those bets impossibly hooked on hot looking things thereby making average women limp noodle territory.
Why? Because women want to use sex to hook a dude she hardly actually wants sex with to get things. Women totally think they are attracted to dudes that they benefit from but in reality are not attracted to, and will also consciously deny attraction to someone who she is attracted to that does not fit the image she has for an ideal interaction.
So um, fun fact.
Among wolves in the wild, it turns out that a “pack” consists of a breeding pair and their offspring for the past few years. The alpha/beta terminology comes from study of wolves, but captive wolves; scientists assumed that wolf packs were composed of unrelated individuals or small families and erroneously replicated this in captivity, leading to vicious aggression between the members of the synthetic “pack” until one individual (the “alpha”) was dominant and none dared challenge him.
But among wild wolves, finding a mate and forming a breeding pair are prerequisites for alpha-ness, not the other way around.
Another fun fact:
It turns out that human males are hypergamous also, but when it comes to looks. That complicates things for us guys whose sense of attractiveness has more inputs than “looks”, of course; while your average bro may want a nonthreatening basic bitch who is an 8 or 9 looks-wise, we smart-chick-lovers may be looking for someone who can actually outdo us in some way… and if she can outdo us she’s probably not looking for us.
>People endlessly trot out these evolutionary hypotheses about why people cheat on their partners, but somehow you never see the same approach to explaining stealing, or spouse/child abuse, or school shootings, or any other actually-maligned antisocial behavior. That’s what lets you know that just-so stories are not actually about explaining a behavior, they’re about defending it.
You would be mistaken.
Go to the search widget in the upper right, look up ‘high time preference’ and start reading.
I am old, fat, bald, not very rich, and married. And I do OK with women, which I attribute to the fact that women crave the gentle but firm touch of ownership. If you think women are your natural inferiors and natural subordinates, they are glad to believe it.
Feminism (and pretty much every male since 1820 is feminist) cripples your ability to get on with women.
You should hit on all women all the time, but do so in a manner that is subtle and deniable, so that if she does not appreciate it, she can pretend it never happened.
When I say all women all the time, I mean all fertile age women not already owned by a male. A bro does not hit on another bro’s girl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks
“On the evening of 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks—consisting of mass shootings, suicide bombings and hostage-taking—occurred in Paris, France, and Saint-Denis, its northern suburb.”
Acksiom on 2015-11-11 at 21:25:24 said:
“Today’s young men are going to find frontiers one way or another. What we’re seeing with the manosphere etc. is part of that. So too are the mass migrations into Europe — mostly young men. There is too little for them where they were, and borders were lax. And now Croatia’s government has followed Poland’s rightwards in electoral response, to what -i-s- was, frankly, a quiet invasion.”
FTFM.
And then I popped over to Chaos Manor to catch up after the past couple of weeks of Beast Mode, and what do I find:
“However there is another idea that’s been floating around for a few days at Chaos Manor. James Crawford wrote of the refugee flood and its application as shock troops. He also pointed out — what R.D.Kaplan referred to — as the disenfranchised warrior class of young men. They have no jobs and are at risk for becoming terrorists. And, how kind of the House of Saud to offer to build a mosque for every 100 refugees in Germany. No doubt they’ll also finance the vitriol laced Friday prayers that are sure to occur in at least a few of these mosques. . . .”
So, Eric, which would you prefer? More Red Pill guys, or more mass murdering totalitarian terrorists?
What was that again. . .*again*. . .about “whiny, broken, hating people who first edged into outright craziness and then increasingly crossed that line”?
I hear a lot of things telling men they need to settle.
Sorry men need to avoid women, not settle for ugly ones.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/french-police-detain-7-for-questioning-in-paris-siegethe-latest-from-paris/2015/11/15/7600c208-8b38-11e5-bd91-d385b244482f_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-high_paris-630am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory —
“Other assailants, however, appeared to fit an emerging pattern among Europe’s homegrown extremists — petty criminals who were radicalized and became far more religious than their parents.”
So, Eric, what’s your better alternative than the Red Pill for the guys like this right in your own backyard?
@Ackinson
“So, Eric, what’s your better alternative than the Red Pill for the guys like this right in your own backyard?”
I can give you the perspective from Europe.
Children of migrants face discrimination in Europe. More than their equivalents in the USA. This leads to higher unemployment and marginalizing of these children. It is almost a truism that unemployed, marginalized young men will move into crime and extremist political movements (see link for a more rigorous explanation). 20th century Fascism was build on this, and it still is. It played a role in pogroms, North Ireland’s “troubles”, South American’s civil wars etc.
This is all well known and has been studied extensively:
http://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01306/web/pdf/wdr%20background%20paper%20-%20cramer.pdf
In the face of this problem, the French have put all their eggs in one basket: Repression. It failed in 2004 with the suburb (banlieue) uprisings. It failed again a few days ago. Other countries with comparable migrant communities (UK, Germany, Italy) have been able to defuse the worst of the marginalization (although the UK has had its own serious problems).
As long as the French are unwilling and unable to solve the segregation and deprivation in the banlieues, they will run into uprisings and extremism. And this is all well known and discussed in France. But a large fraction of the population prefers ethnic cleansing as a solution (the FN), and the rest of the politicians cannot get their act together.
I think it’s very misleading to describe French policy towards their own ‘ethnic’ folk as ‘discrimination’ and ‘repression’. The French have tried their best to properly assimilate these folks into mainstream civil society. The root issue here is that these vulnerable people are effectively shut out of the labor market and productive employment. They’re only marginally employable to start with (and no, kvetching about “discrimination” does nothing to fix this. Social capital matters, educational attainment matters. Get over it already.) and the typically-French heavy-handed regulation of the economy does the rest. Que blowback and religious extremism as the natural response – idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and young male hands doubly so.
@guest
“The French have tried their best to properly assimilate these folks into mainstream civil society. ”
Not according to their own experts. If you look around in the other West European countries, you will see large communities of North African immigrants that are not in the same dire situations as the inhabitants of the banlieues.
“Their best” seems to be less than others were able to do.
> dire situations as the inhabitants of the banlieues.
Sure, and I’m not disputing the fact that the situation in France is especially dire. Did you actually read my comment?
@guest
“Did you actually read my comment?”
Maybe I misunderstood? I claim that the situation in neighboring countries shows that the if the French “did their best”, it was not good enough and they should look at how other countries responded to the challenge.
The “discrimination” of North Africans in France is well documented, but does not seem to be much worse than elsewhere in Europe. The segregation of North Africans into the French suburbs (banlieues) is much worse than elsewhere. The reaction of the French towards the social problems that come out of the discrimination and segregation is not to resolve the underlying problems, but only to use law enforcement to repress all dissent.
That has approach has failed, but the first reaction of the French politicians now seems to be to double down on the repression and segregation.
There is a gimpse of hope for poor BoBs out there. After getting rejected often enough and suffering the pain long enough he will find himself at a crossroads.
a) He can break and become Teds twink. No loss here, nobody will miss him.
B) He can find the inner strength to do the only thing that will help him in the long run. Improve himself to the point he brings enough passive value to the table for his target females. Brutal rejections may be just the thing he needs.
This post doesn’t say anything new to the PUA crowd. I remember this mechanism being spelled out by Roosh almost a decade ago. It feels nice hearing it independently rediscovered though.
I know I am a little late on this thread, however, I was watching a show about botany today and I learned something that I didn’t know before. Apparently when a flowering plant is fertilized it actually uses two pollen grains, both of which burrow through the stigma to get to the female gamete. The first grain transmits its genetic material to create a new set of chromosomes, the second grain is then absorbed into the new seed to provide energy and resources.
It made me think of the fact that a disturbingly large number of children are not genetically related to their putative biological father. And how in human females there is a reproductive strategy of obtaining genetic material from the high status alpha male, while settling down with the lower status beta male who, in gratitude, provides her with all the resources she needs.
Just an idle thought.
The are some things everyone seems to forget here:
(1) Assortative mating – people tend to flock to people similar to them. If you will signal that you are jerk, there will be girls who dig jerks and they will flock to you, but it doesn’t mean all chicks dig jerks.
(2) HBD – sexual strategies really seem to be different amongst different human populations.
From my own experience it is obvious that people who self-label as ‘nice guys’ are, generally, huge passive-aggressive assholes who suffer from lack of social skills.
You don’t need to go into some socialiological-evolutionary theory mode to figure out.
They are as big, or bigger, jerks then the ‘bad boys’ or ‘jocks’ they decry. The difference, from a female perspective, is that they are less desirable then the ‘bad boys’ because while the ‘bad boys’ are jerks… at least they are fun to hang out with. They go do things, they have social circles, they have parties, do adventurous things, have a sense of humor, don’t get butt-hurt over imagined slights, and so on and so forth. Yeah they are self-absorbed and ultimately will be destructive and uncaring in a relationship.
Meanwhile self-labelled ‘nice guys’ are are self-absorbed man-children who use passive-aggressive techniques and guilting to try to trick of compel attractive females to sleep with them. They are socially awkward and unpleasant to be around. They perform endless mind-games and are constantly trying to manipulate women in a inept and transparent fashion. They react negatively to perceived slights. They can’t take a joke and want to dwell on negative subjects continuously that they use to justify their social isolation. The world isn’t what they want and that’s not fair.
If they are lucky they can run into a woman who is attractive enough to meet their delusional and shallow standards and who has no boundaries due to some past trauma that they can mind-fuck into sleeping with them. She will struggle to deal with the inept, shallow, and needy ‘nice guy’ and become miserable in the relationship. Later on that woman, due to lack of boundaries, will be susceptible to other male predators and will quickly ‘jump ship’ to another male with more positive characteristics and better social skills. (aka: ‘The Alpha Jerk’)
In summary:
The difference between the ‘Nice Guy Beta’ and the ‘Alpha Jerk’ is that the ‘Nice Guy’ has all the same negative qualities of the ‘Alpha Jerk’ (ie: objectification of women, shallowness, lack of respect, manipulative, self-centered etc) without any of the positive qualities (sense of humor, social skills, physical attractiveness, goes on adventures, works at having fun with other people, etc). And add on to that they tend to have more negative qualities… (needy, continuous mind-games, passive-aggressive behavior, etc)
Women, of course, see this instinctively and while most have difficulty articulating their positions and feelings in a way men understand the ones that do have the ability to articulate this to ‘nice guys’ do not because there is no point to throwing your pearls before swine.
You got to understand, the personable qualities don’t determine your status.
Being alpha is not a personality. It is a position in a ranking system. You have to be an actual leader to be an actual alpha. The vast majority of women are having sex with virtual alphas. They are not bright enough to be objective about it. All they care about is how they feel in the moment. Guess why the violence and rape they get comes mostly from bf/hubby- its because she can’t stand an actual nice guy.
Okay, I ‘m a bit late to the party, but there is ONE thing I never understood about the hole alpha/beta thing:
Alphas (men and women) are by definition at the top of the pyramid.
So… If beta women scoff at beta men, with who they actually have sex with? The alpha men can’t realistically do all the beta women and they probably don’t want to.
So, do beta women just compromise or prefer to stay alone?
If it’s the latter, modern sex ethics were the cruelest joke on women. At least men have prostitutes for their 20s and mail – order brides for their 30s and beyond. If women stay alone after their beauty has faded, they are alone. Period.
I prefer a relationship with a winch well below my status, so that she will bend over backwards for things I want and the way I want. I don’t see the point of shooting for a higher status female. We aren’t fornicating to make children in the West. This gives me more time to focus on raising my wealth, so that the status that is well below mine is always rising. The older I get (51 now), the easier it is for me to nail a higher status chick.
>I prefer a relationship with a winch well below my status,
Winches well below your status are only useful when you need your ashes hoisted.
Ba dump-bump! Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I prefer to NSA from old women. Since I don’t need women for anything but sex, their status is irrelevant. Certainly, I’m not going to concern my self with status just for access to pussy. Status is to set the world proper, not get laid.
I’m tasting others at the limits of my status. I am referring to the strategy for relationship, which yes I find often feel is suffocating. I’ve also tried without any relationship, but this tends to be unhealthy for a man, because we don’t take care of ourselves nor do we produce or support any offspring. Perhaps the relationship is a mutually beneficial arrangement. And keeping it well below my status level makes it more beneficial for myself and the woman. You’ve apparently found a relationship that allows for your sexual freedom with a partner who shares stimulating interests. I applaud you for that accomplishment. I’ve never found an attractive woman who wants to talk tech shop or sports. And I don’t share the breadth and depth of your literary interests. I am a simpleton with some technical acumen and a love of aggressive sports. A jock who can code. Where is that soulmate? I gave up hoping for finding her. I had to partake from that which is not that which I can’t find. Perhaps it is my own limitations.
> I’ve never found an attractive woman who wants to talk tech shop or sports.
Correction. I found one who loved sports, was reasonably attractive and perfect figure. And she enjoyed listening to all my theories and she was very gregarious. So I married her in my 20s. But she wouldn’t allow for my sexual freedom, she wasn’t mathematical, she dragged me to boring parties with her boring friends, and her father wanted to dominate me. So I divorced her. Of course, I still reminiscence and love her. But it is difficult to cage me. My health suffered tremendously though for pursuing my wild oats. Optimal strategies don’t exist. Evolution requires the diversity of our experimentation. I’ve enjoyed a varied life. And I am not done yet.
And maybe that ideal relationship mate exists, yet she being so much in demand is above my status level.
It isn’t a relationship. It is a business contract who’s purpose is material position in the pecking order.
A relationship is not reliant on external factors….unless you think human relationships are about as meaningful is those of chimpanzees
Absolutely wonderful post and wonderful discussion.
Wow. You make women sound completely uninterested in penis…you know, like a really expensive prostitute.
Don’t overthink things.
As a woman I can say for sure that beta males who aren’t assertive repulse me. I can’t stand them and I have no respect for them. Men need respect and women need to feel special which is why old fashioned gender roles work best. Don’t be an asshole though it actually makes you look weak. Do however grow a pair, show interest and ask a girl out.