The Real RSD: Positive Thinking, Seduction, Insecurity, Power and “Misogyny” in Dating, Sex and Relationships

During a recent discussion of “old school vs. new school” seduction, I offered what another member called a “passionate take-down” of RSD. RSD is the pickup artist company whose figureheads are Owen Cook (“Tyler”) and Jeff Allen (“Jeffy”). Click here to read it.

As a result of that comment, someone asked me to start a conversation about “positivity” in the context of seduction, dating, sex and relationships.

This is that conversation (or at least, the first of them started by me).

—

Smile or Die: From the Inner Game to The Bigger Game

Many guys approach women, and the art of attracting them, from the perspective of personal and sexual validation. If you are unskilled, you might be derided as a “keyboard jockey” or “frustrated chump”, someone whose “inner game” is reflected in his inability to smoothly escalate his way into a woman’s pants. In the modern-day seduction world, this is often seen as an intrinsic personal failing, as if pickup artists have somehow successfully conflated getting laid with becoming an enlightened human being.

The stereotypical “sexy bad boy”, of course, is the opposite of enlightened, and guys who ascribe to that model get laid like rock stars, or at least they have more than enough sexual choice.

From perhaps the largest perspective that matters in our day-to-day lives, positivity also falls short. The modern versions of our “self-help” and “positive thinking” stem from the corporate enslavement of the common man over the past thirty or forty years. As wages stagnate and human labor becomes increasingly redundant (or dramatically less valuable) in many industries, the common man (and woman) are forced to constantly re-invent themselves in order to eke out a living. In the jargon, the average person is made to compulsorily “re-educate” their skillset, “self-improve” their attitudes to fit the fake always-sunny corporate culture, and “self-help” themselves because no one else will. This creates an unnecessarily dog-eat-dog mentality among people in the work world, and this is naturally reflected in their personal lives where it matters most: survival, reproduction, dating, sex and relationships.

The “real RSD” is that there are real socioeconomic dynamics at work, far beyond the platitudes, sociopathic pickup theories and racist/sexist undertones proponed by the likes of Tyler, Jeffy and many others besides the “RSD boys” (who seem to be the most successful snake-oil peddlers among the ranks of “self-help+seduction-as-a-lifestyle”-shilling charlatans).

For a taste of what this means, see Jeffy’s Great Jezebel Meltdown of 2012-2013. I generally dislke Jezebel as a perfect example of pseudo-intellectual fake feminist chest-thumping, but the facts of women’s experiences with Jeff run almost directly counter to anything that he preaches from the pulpit of his weekly videos and the rest of the RSD gospel. This is a problem that is endemic to the seduction world’s overall sandwiching of “self-help” and “seduction”, as two topics that have no natural (or really, agreeably coercible) relationship to one another.

Perceptual Blindness: The Reality of Scarcity and Falsehood In “Positive” Thinking

What we see, then, is that scarcity is real. Entire industries are being destroyed by technology, offshored or overwhelmed by overqualified and underemployed candidates. More women are entering the workforce as well, often replacing men in traditionally “male” occupations. This puts a strain on the concept of masculinity for many men. In a move that is deadly to both male-female attraction and personal identity, boys who grew up in single-parent households (or ones where the father was absent or working most of the time), men often turn to women and each other for guidance.

Women now have started to repudiate men for this tendency, using shame tactics like “outing” men on blogs and re-framing the term “Nice Guy” to mean “stalker, closet psycho, creep or sociopath”. We now see scores of websites dedicated to women’s seemingly insatiable need to scornfully re-post men’s private messages to them, and endlessly recount dates in gory detail where the guy is almost always cast as some kind of subhuman villain.

Any guy who has spent time on a dating site has seen the massive number of women who gleefully use double-talk to drive home the point. “I’m a positive, glass-half-full, non-judgmental, optimistic person,” she blatantly copies from other women’s profiles. Just a few paragraphs down, her tone does an about-face: “Message me only if you’re not a sociopath, and only if you meet my other criteria”. Her Prince Charming-seeking “criteria” are about as strict and pie-in-the-sky as those of many employers who reject applicant after applicant while officially complaining of a “qualified worker shortage”.

Many men, desperately chasing women, ape women’s “positivity”, putting on the fake smiley “plus face” of a docile service-industry employee while denying that there is any underlying problem at all.

For Whom the Emotional Bell Tolls: The Negative Outcome of Positive Thinking

Just yesterday, the ramifications of “positivity” became starkly clear to me. One member of Reddit published a self-hatred filled post about being unable to “get back in the game”. He touched on numerous self-image related problems that I could summarize here as loneliness, awkwardness, issues surrounding deservingness and fear of being “phony”. This culminated in a vicious internal dialogue that was literally on display in his post.

What were the prescribed answers to his problems? “Have the nuts to laugh at your failures”, one responder wrote (not likely if he thinks that self-hatred is the problem). “Get out of your head”, says another (he already said that this _is_ his problem. This is like telling him, “fix your problem and you’ll be fine”. Unhelpful to say the least.) “Give yourself permission”, “kill your inner voice”, etc., etc., etc. There was even an obligatory reference to Eckhart Tolle, who unsurprisingly is mentioned about a thousand times by Owen Cook (“Tyler”) from RSD. Tolle’s works may be valid, but they’ve also been spun into unrecognzability by the profiteering likes of Tyler and the legion of misled self-help junkies.

All of those suggestions are tied to the idea that you can magically “become positive” and “feel better” in some sort of quixotic quest toward success with women, and by extension, in life. The only useful suggestion was to use the help of a community rather than try to go it alone. The problem is that the so-called “seduction community” is run through with references to feel-good “positive thinking” that clearly fuels an entire industry of guys who keep coming back for more instead of actually solving their problems. When they are successful, they thank “the community”; when they fail, they blame themselves. This is how the “self-help” game itself is structured.

Why don’t the real Bad Boys care about all this self-help happy talk?

Perhaps because, as I mentioned in the “passionate take-down” of RSD (and as you’ve seen in this entry) self-help is mostly a scam perpetuated by those who either want to sell you something — or force you to run faster, jump higher or bow lower in order to make a dollar. One or two operators in the field are genuine, but few people know how to distinguish the Tony Robbins-type trash from genuinely useful advice.

Sex- and Gender-Bullying and the Misappropriation of “Misogyny” By Women

Many women whine that it is “misogynistic” to recognize the fact that women are just as clueless about what they want as men. Many women use sex- and gender-based bully tactics and fake appeals to “feminism” to rationalize shaming men — as equally fake symbols of “the patriarchy conspiracy” to suppress women — into silence. One woman tried to do this to me just yesterday (click here to read our discussion).

As I wrote to the self-hating Reddit member mentioned above, women aren’t the core problem. If you bring women into your life before you’re able to distinguish between an sexually/emotionally manipulative jerk, an Machiavellian “amateur psychoanalyst” (click here for an example of this on Reddit) and a genuinely empathetic, sensually self-aware woman, all the positivity in the world won’t save you from the suffering that you’ve brought upon yourself. This is one of the key problems that seduction and self-help will never fix, because they aren’t even looking in the right direction.

This entry wasn’t intended to give a quick-fix easy answer. It was intended to provoke discussion, or at least independent thought within the reader. What you do with these words is your choice. I hope that you enjoyed, disliked, or at least learned something from it. Thanks for reading and I welcome any thoughtful feedback that you may have.