Soft and Nice: Qualities That Male (and Female) Bullies Can’t Resist

Someone who took a course in “picking up girls” mentioned that he has spoken to a few of the guys who took the course with him years ago. He complained that they are now “hard-edged” and had a “locker-room mentality” that was downright mean-spirited, in his words.

After writing a comment, I realized it wasn’t the typical sympathetic “me too” pat on the back, or feel-good chatter about finding “balance” or “passion”. Note that the “you” referred to below could be any “you” who you know in life, or you in particular. The ideas apply to everyone who has dealt with feeling excluded from a group — which is probably everyone on planet Earth, regardless of gender.

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Possibilities:

A. “exclusionary stuff they got from others growing up”

B. “they think that you gotta be TOUGH to do this”

I’ve rarely met anyone who responds well to “emotional vulnerability”, male or female — particularly when there’s nothing to be gained from listening to someone being “vulnerable” at you.

Learn to express yourself in ways that don’t make you seem “angry/haughty”, and also don’t leave you open to the “locker-room meanness” that you’re complaining about.

Honestly, it sounds like you’re whining about how other guys aren’t being nice enough to you. Don’t expect anyone aside from your family (if you’re lucky) to be “nice” to you just because you choose to be “vulnerable” to them.

Who told you that it was anyone’s responsibility to be soft and nice to you?

I’m honestly curious, because that world doesn’t seem to exist aside from in the minds of people who desperately want to feel special. The irony there is that everyone believes they’re special, and that means that very few people have any time left to care about anyone but themselves. Then they get their special feelings hurt and become angry and haughty, and try to “pass it on” to the next person.

Realize that learning how not to see yourself as a soft little victim of those mean locker-room boys isn’t just useful in pick-up (note: women can and will be more cruel to you than men ever could). Learning to communicate using the requisite qualities for the specific situation (softness, toughness, and whatever else in between) is a skill that you will need to navigate _life_ effectively.

This is both your problem and your opportunity. Stop whining and start learning.

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P.S. There are times when others may commit acts of emotional abuse against you. Women will often do this as a form of punishment — especially if you’re not projecting the “alpha” qualities that she may believe are necessary in a man (beliefs that often arise as a result of her own arbitrary social conditioning). In fact, much of the so-called “inner game” of seduction is obsessively preoccupied with that “Be Alpha” fantasy.

You may be dealing with relatively new “pickup artist” guys who are still trying to sort out what that means, and how to integrate the appearance of being the “Alpha ape” into their previously “Beta” personalities. If you feel like someone is truly trying to victimize you, either fight back or leave.

There are times when we actually may be victimized; that is, helpless to stop abuses being committed against us in the moment due to lack of skills, being outnumbered, or being psychologically unprepared. No single human being is infinitely or indomitably strong.

I don’t want to trivialize the word “victim” under some blustery idea of “acting like a man”. In the social sphere, however, you’re the only one who will care enough to stand up for yourself — or exit and find a new group or partner. The first step in changing your outcome is to become aware that you have a choice, whether you’re dealing with men whose respect you want to earn or women whom you seek to share a mutual experience of love.

Seduction, Feminism and the Self-Help Industry

In response to the article:

Why Women Lose the Dating Game

This type of woman is essentially the focus of my blog (DSR401).

The effect is even more pronounced in online dating. I call it the “Internet Prince Charming Effect”.

Women online — even deep into their thirties — believe that their perfect Charming Prince is just one click away.

The frightening fact of the matter is that most women have absolutely no idea how their own bodies work. At age 36, the chances of having children with congenital diseases (like Down’s Syndrome, a form of retardation) or developmental disorders (like autism) skyrockets. After age 40, many women think that they’ll just use the technological marvels of in vitro fertilization and magically have a baby — but the odds are less than one in four that she’ll be successful. The Hollywood image of older women having perfect little bundles of joy at any age hides the reality of how many times it doesn’t work, and the financial/physical/emotional hardships involved.

Look up the term “elderly primagravida” and read more for yourself.

This article barely scratches the surface of the real reasons why men don’t want older women. Personally, I would only date a woman older than 36 for fun, or if we were mutually willing to adopt. There’s no point in risking the wellbeing of our (mine+her) child for the sake of her idiotic fantasies of being an older mother at the expense of an unborn life.

“Having it all” was always a bizarre fantasy that made no practical sense. If a woman wants to have children, she will have to take time out from her career. By the time she gets back to work at full strength, all the up-and-coming younger women (and men) will have taken her place. This is already happening, and yet women still seem strangely surprised.

And when you look online, the masses of women over 30 seem to still be completely oblivious and just as egotistically “picky” as they were in their twenties. Honestly, it’s sad because one day they will wake up with either an empty bed or a body that doctors will tell her is no longer fit to have healthy children with any reliability.

I would like to gloat and say that nature punishes the stupid, but it’s not completely women’s fault. Part of the problem is biology, another is mentality, but the other, larger part is society.

The real problem underlying all of this is the changing economic landscape, fueled by the self-help “movement’s” corporate-sponsored mythologizing about the “self-made man”. Well, behind the self-made man was a woman who kept the house, raised the kids, and supported her husband in a lifelong marriage. Now she’s devouring the same facile “literature” about becoming your best, most employable (and agelessly sexy, Alpha Female) self and she wants to be the Wonder Woman Who Has It All.

Instead, both genders end up with nothing. The woman ends up alone in her 30s at a mid-level executive position with no career security and a sagging body that she is too busy (and if she’s honest, never learned how and couldn’t really be bothered to learn) to care for. She’s too busy financially “hedging her bets” (a.k.a. socially acceptable greed) and searching for her True Special Purpose in life while hating the men who no longer want her. The man ends up dating younger women because he doesn’t have any solid prospects, either, and a guy’s attractiveness actually increases, then declines slowly until about age 36.

Coincidence? I think not.

(Plus, despite what women will tell you, there’s almost always at least one very, very good reason why a single, never-married, childless woman in her mid-thirties hasn’t been able to keep a guy.)

Both sides are getting conned by the self-help industry. Underneath all the “you can do it” slogan-slinging, the reality is that the only winners are the corporations that use their workers as disposable units of production (and the marketing gurus who are manipulating the gullible, stealing from the ignorant and engineering society’s consent). And we get articles like this one that make it seem like men are “winning the game” in their 30s, when the reality is that no one wants the game that we’re being forced to play. Now that we’re here, everyone’s scrambling to come out on top — when they’re actually climbing in the wrong direction.

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Someone responded with a comment asking for more information about the self-help industry’s “corrupt strategy” (in the sense of a conspiracy theory).

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Response:

I don’t see a “corrupt strategy” in the self-help industry. Look at the timeframes for the rise of profits for the self-help industry and the decline of social mobility, for example, and you’ll see that no conspiratorial “strategy” is necessary.

1. Since 1968, the top fifth gained eight percent; the middle class lost seven percent, and the bottom fifth remained at less than four percent of total income in the United States. The U.S. has the highest level of income inequality in the world.

If income were equally divided across households, each quintile (fifth) would account for 20% of total income. The Congressional Budget Office and others have documented that the bottom fifth has long accounted for much less than 20% of total income. The bottom quintile’s share of income has remained little changed for the past few decades at less than 4%, according to Census Bureau data. In contrast, the income shares of the top fifth and the top 5% of households appear to have trended upward. The top fifth’s share of total household income rose from 42.6% in 1968 to 50.2% in 2010; the top 5%’s share, from 16.3% to 21.3%. (Estimates derived from federal income tax data suggest that those at the very top of the income distribution have experienced greater gains.) The middle class, defined as the middle 60%, received a disproportionately smaller share of the total economic pie in 2010 (46.5%) than in 1968 (53.2%).

Two explanations are most often offered for the changes in recent decades in the U.S. distribution of income. They are skill-biased technological change (SBTC) and globalization.

Based on the limited data that are comparable across nations, the U.S. income distribution appears to be among the most uneven of all major industrialized countries and the United States appears to be among the nations experiencing the greatest increases in measures of inequality.

Source: Linda Levine, Specialist in Labor Economics for the Congressional Research Service [PDF]

2. We all know what happened in 2008. Hint: the Great Recession. You can look further back into the historical record for yourself (I would imagine that 1968 would be a useful place to begin).

Americans spent $11 billion in 2008 on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stress-management programs–13.6% more than they did back in 2005, according to Marketdata Enterprises, an independent Tampa-based research firm that tracks everything from adoption agencies to funeral homes. Latest forecast: 6.2% annual growth through 2012.

Source: “What People Are Still Willing To Pay For”, forbes.com

3. If you don’t “improve yourself”, it’s your fault.

Surrounding SHAM (The Self-Help and Actualization Movement) is a bulletproof shield: if your life does not get better, it is your fault–your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help–or at least the same message repackaged into new products.

Source: Michael Shermer, “Sham Scam – Scientific American”

(Sound familiar?)

SHAM takes advantage by cleverly marketing the dualism of victimization and empowerment.

Source: Shermer, ibid.

This conversation is veering way off-topic, in any case. I think that any oppressed group would do well to fight for their rights, whether they happen to be women or anyone else.

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P.S. Michael Shemer on why fire-walking ala Tony Robbins is also a scam:

I’ve done three fire walks myself, without chanting “cool moss” (as Robbins has his clients do) or thinking positive thoughts. I didn’t get burned. Why? Because charcoal is a poor conductor of heat, particularly through the dead calloused skin on the bottom of your feet and especially if you scoot across the bed of coals as quickly as fire walkers are wont to do.

P.P.S. The Tony Robbins Gang somehow managed to bungle even that, and twenty-one people were burned while walking over hot coals at one of his recent “inspirational” mega-events.

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Someone responded with the question “why” in regard to the following quote from my comments above:

The more people buy into the “help yourself because no one else will” ideology, the easier they are to control.

Response:

Because the “self-made man” is a myth and always has been. There are a (very) few people who have been able to rise to the top seemingly “by their bootstraps”, but the vast majority either had early successes that gave them access to resources (mentors, benefactors, etc.) that others didn’t have, or they were supported by family and/or community members who helped them achieve their goals (and nevertheless, luck always plays a major role in any “rags to riches” success story).

For the average person, then, the typical “help yourself” dogma means practically nothing. You might as well “self-help” yourself to a lottery ticket by those odds.

There is an old term called “divide and conquer” which applies in this situation — if individuals are led to believe that no one will help them, you will see more people acting to protect themselves (and their ethnic/social/other “tribe”) against threats that are often imaginary or diversions from the real problem.

Examples of this in history are the imaginary rise of the Angry Irish, Japanese (after World War II), Jewish, African American, and Latino Man (and now Muslims) as an anticipated result of the periods of civil unrest in the United States, and now the imaginary rise of the Vengeful Woman as a result of feminism. The reaction to civil rights (and immigration) was and is often mindlessly violent. The majority of hatred actually derives from economic insecurity over the potential for lost jobs.

Many men, stripped of their traditional roles, similarly act belligerently toward women. Women react with an equally stupid “fake feminist” agenda of hatred toward “loser” men, and now we have a completely meaningless media-driven “gender war” that has no point or purpose aside from selling more self-help books, advertising-driven talk shows and so on.

Another example of “divide and conquer”, as mentioned above, is the changing economic structure. We see people actually going along with the idea of destroying labor unions, agreeing with mandatory overtime, taking work home after hours, being forced to pay for their own healthcare, being offered no maternity leave to care for newborn children, etc. — because they believe that this is “the natural way of things” (also known as social darwinism) rather than a dismantling of the idea of corporate social responsibility. We are now the consumerist servants of a profit-creation scheme (the corporation) that never dies and never has to give back anything to the communities from which it sucks ever-increasing profits.

The more we are told that we can be “self-made”, the more easily we are divided from each other. The more divided, the more we look out for ourselves (personal greed or “hedging our bets”). The more individually greedy we become, the less we see the big picture. The less we see the big picture, the harder we can be made to work for less, the more we work against our collective interests in favor of scrambling for each extra dollar, and the more money can be made at our expense.

And, of course, the more all this happens, the self-help gurus tell us “we can get ahead if we just work smarter/harder, think and act more positively”. The gurus rake in profits as people desperately grasp for any illusion of control or a sense that someone cares for their wellbeing. Selling a “lifestyle make-over” is one of the most cynical games that anyone can play against anyone else, and now it’s becoming a billion-dollar industry of so-called “professional coaches”.

Corporate profits have been exploding whereas real individual wages are actually shrinking. The myth of the transcendent Superman or Superwoman lying dormant inside each of us is a lie that belongs in comic books and movies — not in reality where our ability to survive and thrive depends upon our reliance on each other and society.

Female Pickup Artists, The “Girl Game” Version of Seduction, and Female Bullies

Context: a newbie female pickup artist for some reason posted a “field report” of her experiences to seddit.

Many guys expressed confusion about where women learn seduction-related tactics and techniques. This was my response.

And to all the guys wondering about “female seduction material”, this is a great example of how modern society has brainwashed practically every man into near-complete perceptual blindness.

Guys — look around you. The magazines at the grocery store checkout counter (Cosmo, etc.), romantic comedies, television shows, every billboard on the freeway that features a man and a woman… these are all the cues that a woman needs in order to “have game” when manipulating men into wanting sex (or long-term relationships, marriage and even children). How do you think that women learn how important putting a mask on (layers of makeup) and heels are in everyday life? It’s all part of the game.

A secondary source of women’s social programming is romance novels. What’s the percentage of all books sold in the United States? Almost half are romance novels. Who do you think is buying those books? Those are women’s dirty little secret dreams written down in paperback (and increasingly digital) form. Those dreams are only “dirty” or “secret” because they contradict what a woman will ever tell you to your face, like the unusually high prevalence of non-consensual sex or rape fantasies that the average woman has, and that you’ll find in abundance in romance novels. Not exactly the typical pseudo-feminist line that you’ll hear the typical woman parroting when she’s trying to get you to act like a “gentleman” by paying for her meal on the first date…

The vast majority of what is called modern-day “seduction” or “game” is little more than a reverse-engineered version of what women are already doing to men.

Women give men backhanded compliments to test him and force him to further qualify himself — these are now called “negs”.

Women are “peacocking” constantly — why do you think women hide their looks by wearing layers of make-up? Why does the average woman accentuate their breasts, hips and bums by wearing high heels that destroy their natural posture and deform their feet?

Women try to shame men — the more publicly, the better — for doing anything that resembles the techniques that women have already perfected and are using all the time (you’re automatically a “loser”, “misogynist”, “sociopath”, etc.). They use shame because it works. How do they know that it works? Women know that it works because they’re already using it to create alliances, strengthen bonds, alienate and ostracize _each other_. In PUA lingo, this is an aspect of what’s called “social circle game”.

Women are consummately skilled in emotional manipulation, mostly because they grow up doing it to each other. If you can’t use your fists, you will use your mind. Girls psychologically bully each other more than boys; anyone who has ever watched the games that girls play against each other in high school knows this already. If you haven’t been to high school, just look at the way that anonymous women savage female celebrities online (for being “fat”, “ugly”, “slut”, etc.), where the filters of social conduct are largely absent. It’s a simple conceptual jump (barely a hop, really) to use such tactics against boys and men as we age. A main reason why guys need to learn seduction at all is because women are already using it against us.

This is “girl game”.

If you believe the standard line that she wears makeup, heels and plays emotional games because it “makes her feel good”, you’re proving my point. She’s simply lying, and you’ve been so well-conditioned over the years that it becomes impossible to see beyond the charade. Likewise, any woman who accuses men of playing “games” is also lying — in this case, playing the victim is just another strategy to force guys into the “supplicant/Nice Guy” role if he’s too clueless to see what’s actually happening.

What you also don’t see is the conformity-based mentality that women use on each other to enforce the social norms regarding “how to get a guy”. Women regularly categorize themselves and each other based on what “type” of guy they can attract. Her social status in her peer group depends on it; this is why most of the “game” that guys talk about on /r/seduction works at all. These are all direct or indirect ways of communicating high status to women, regardless of your actual personality.

Women are sexually stereotyping you all the time. How do women learn “girl game”? Fashion, media and their peers are constantly re-indoctrinating them as to how an “Alpha” male looks, speaks, moves and acts. The female “winner” is the one who can wrap that guy around her finger and get him to do whatever she wants.

Women don’t need “game”. Every woman is a player by default.

(Note that it’s not a misogynistic “us guys against those women” perspective. Everyone uses “manipulation” to get what they want. The problem arises when people — women in this case — lie about their motives, or try to pretend that they are passive “victim”/recipients of someone else’s advances. To test this for yourself, ask any woman you know “who actually starts the sexual attraction between a man and a woman?” or “who is the one who accepts or rejects the other?” Practically every woman who answers honestly will tell you that she perceives herself as being in control at all times.)

P.S. How ironic. About an hour after writing this, a female troll (most likely drawn here by this topic) tried to shame me for being on /r/seduction, even though female trolls have absolutely no excuse for being here at all. Click here to read our exchange.

Do The Cuffs and Collars Match? Embarrassment, Rejection and Social Control In Relationships With Women (and Other Men)

A common theme for many people, both male and female, is embarrassment — specifically, embarrassment that a person has felt in the past and anticipates for the future.

Question: Is it a good idea to study pick-up and seduction in order to get past feelings of embarrassment related to women, sex and dating?

Typical embarrassment-related issues include the following:

– the fear of that others will “out” a guy for studying “pick-up” (i.e. social skills applied to sexual relationships with women).
– the expected embarrassment of looking back when you’re old and gray and knowing that you didn’t study these “sexual social skills”.
– the embarrassment of being too young or too old (the measure is relative, not absolute) to study such sexual social skills.

Your entire brain and body may be stuck on the idea that you absolutely shouldn’t approach women, and yet, when you’re in a socially “sanctioned” event like a cocktail party, your problems may drastically diminish or even disappear.

Embrasse Moi?

Embarrassment is a mental habit that, by definition, shows up at inopportune moments. There might have been a time when someone used shame against you as a social control tactic (women try to do this to men all the time, precisely because it works so well against the average guy). If you grew up in a sexually repressive culture or under strict religious rules about “the sins of the flesh”, shame is at work there, too, for various reasons.

There’s also the well-known and often-repeated fact that social rejection physically hurts.

There may have been a time in your life when you didn’t exercise for a long interval due to illness, injury or apathy. Instead, perhaps you sat on the couch (maybe watching entertaining videos about pickup and seduction, even). What happens when you finally get up and start moving? It hurts. You’re physically stiff and weak; everything feels totally wrong. Part of you just wants to go back to sitting on the couch, to enjoy the entertaining sideshow while stuffing your face with natural painkillers like chocolate, sugar and saturated fat.

Learning “sexual social skills” is the same way.

Never Talk to Stranges — Unless You Want to Find New Friends (And Lovers)

Many people have no problem approaching women when they’re “supposed to” (cocktail parties, for example). This shows that for some, social skills themselves aren’t necessarily the problem.

The next step is to realize that the sexual form of social skills are completely healthy and normal. It’s true that other people will often try to leverage social norms like the “never talk to strangers” rule against you. Who is first taught that rule? Children, in grade school or even earlier. Anyone who still believes that they’re supposed to be afraid of strangers is probably living a very small, limited life (this is more common than you might think). By contrast, everyone who has a well-developed lifestyle has at some point had to make new friends — i.e. talk to strangers.

The “don’t talk to strangers” social norm is great for protecting second-graders, but not so useful once you’ve learned to differentiate between potential friend and foe. Women in general are socially skilled (they’ve been competing against each other for status since grade school), so if they try to shame you, often it’s for the sake of control (i.e. power and the quick ego boost of cutting someone else down) rather than genuine fear of a “scary/creepy/etc.” guy.

Men who want to throw scriptures at you — either of the social programming kind (“you’re studying pickup? What a loser!”) or any other kind of rote tactic — are doing the same thing. Recognize that most guys have no reliable skills, techniques or strategies before they start to study pickup or “seduction”. This is why finding a woman is referred to as “getting lucky”.

What does that mean? It means that the average guy is embarrassed, too, but he’s stuck where you used to be. The typical guy doesn’t even know that “sexual social skills” exist, so when he sees it, his first reaction is to curl up on the couch and stuff his face rather than stand up and get moving. Anything beyond his limited range of motion is threatening because he might get “hurt”, just like your muscles will hurt the day after a challenging, safe, relevant and effective (if you stick with it) workout.

Not In This Lifetime: Sexual Social Skills vs. Self-Isolation

At least in terms of online dating, I’ve found that the older a woman gets, the more likely she’s single for a good reason (i.e. personality flaws that make relationships difficult), but given the divorce rate, plenty of young women in their biologically “hot” years (age 18-25) have similar problems.

Learning to effectively screen potential mates can save you massive amounts of time and frustration.

It’s also easy to fall into the habit of projecting yourself into the future, then collapsing your anticipation of future failures into the present moment. This manifests itself as what’s called “anxiety”. Note that learning social skills — sexual and otherwise — becomes even more important, not less, as you age. Social isolation is one of the primary problems of modern, urbanized society. This means that you have the entire rest of your life to either be isolated (loneliness is optional), or improve your range of social motion in all directions, including your strength, endurance, skill and flexibility in dealing with women. Half of all marriages end in divorce and fewer people are getting married at all, so there will be no lack of single women to “game” as you grow older.

It might be useful to take bootcamp run by pickup artists***. Equally useful could be to buy a book for about twenty bucks from your local bookstore that contains exercises for dealing with social anxiety. You might take a look at clarifying your criteria regarding valid opinions from other people: the opinions that you’re willing to listen to may be very different from those that you learn to recognize as social control tactics, or habitual “scriptures” that are otherwise not worth your time.

A Terrifying Shortcut to Finding Social Freedom

There is one shortcut, though. It’s both exciting and probably terrifying to you right now. You undoubtedly already know what I’m about to say, so you can probably guess the shortcut before you even read it.

The shortcut is this: actually expose yourself to embarrassment. Go out, walk up to a woman and do something completely weird. Use a pickup line that really isn’t “you”. Wear mismatched socks. Sing to a woman instead talking to her. Cut your hair in a strange way or wear unusual clothes just to see how people will stereotypically react to you. All of these techniques will show you that “strangers” aren’t looking at you, anyway — they see their own preconceived notions, often conditioned through social programming over the course of their entire lives. The embarrassment that your brain and body feels is a similarly conditioned reflex that is no more “natural” than discriminating against people who have red hair, for example (or any other form of racism or sexism).

Once you fully experience and internalize the “normality” other people’s bizarre knee-jerk reactions, you might notice more of your own. You may even wake up one day and become aware that only a miniscule percentage of the human population are conscious of their habitual behavior patterns at all (regardless of their lip service to the contrary). And once you see that clearly, the future will become your playground. All the adults still living by childish rules like “sex is scary and bad”, “never talk to strangers” or “you’re weird if you purposefully study social skills” will have shown themselves to be the ones trapped in the arrested development of very old, yet stubbornly ignorant children. The avenue by which you choose to arrive at that understanding is up to you, and the opportunities to see it clearly grow with every passing day.

***Update: A critical point was left unmentioned above. More important than taking a bootcamp or buying a book is being ready and willing to dedicate yourself to the continuing process of change over time. Many people can have a “life-changing” experience at a bootcamp, seminar or other “immersion”-related event of some kind — and when they get back to their familiar environment, they slip back into old habits.

The key to change often (but not always) takes place long before any drastic action is taken. The real question to ask yourself before you start is, “am I ready to make as many mistakes, as quickly as possible, and to learn from those mistakes as fully as possible, in order to attain my goal?” In order to do that, you have to define the deeper values that drive your sense of purpose, and connect those values to the goal(s) that you’ve set for yourself. The values come first; if necessary, allow the goals to change. Once you’ve done that, the rest is relatively simple. Self-reliance is less expensive in the long run (and probably in the short run, too) than any bootcamp — and social support is accessible from local groups, online and elsewhere.

The Hidden, Unglamorous and Crucial Truth About Seduction That Everyone Wants Desperately to Ignore

There’s only one real “wisdom” about any kind of “game” — inner or outer. Regardless, someone will probably find a way to trademark and market “lateral” game, “inside-out” game, “fuzzy” game, or maybe even “quantum nonlocal effect-her-at-a-distance” game (wait, isn’t that what Ross Jeffries is doing nowadays? But he aptly calls it “magick” — note the authentically witch-y spelling). Note that “magic game” (as in, David Copperfield) has already been taken by the tall Goth-looking club kid with the fuzzy hat, but feel free to “recycle” it and claim that the insights are new like everyone else does. Evolutionary pseudoscience and fake philosophical self-help have been done to death; maybe pretend-physics is the “next frontier” of breakthrough pickup knowledge that will revolutionize everyone’s ideas about women.

After all, women are evolving extremely quickly nowadays — not at all like the rest of us, who have been more or less the same as a species for about, let’s say, 50,000 years. We need to evolve with these women or they won’t need us anymore. And then all we’d have to do with our time would be to walk around “limp-dicked” (I quote someone here) and emo, “pumping our state” by bitching on the Internet about how masculine and “Alpha” we need to be in order to take the world back from all of those damn blue-pill swallowing skirts and their billions of mindless minions (the “unthinking masses” whose lives are a “waking trance” and whose first name all happen to be “Chode” for some bizarre reason).

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Tyler isn’t “for real”. He’s some random guy who dates women for a living and brags about being a hypercompetitive workaholic, periodically whining about how Neil Strauss’ exposure of him in “The Game” forced him to learn inner fortitude to overcome all the haters (“I was afraid of getting hit in the head while walking down the street for _six straight months_ after The Game was published,” mopes Tyler in his most sociopathically sympathetic little-girl voice). I don’t hate Tyler, by the way. The problem is that his name is unavoidable in discussions about seduction, and people automatically believe the nonsense that he and the RSD marketing crew say about themselves. For every TofuTofu who says that Tyler is legit, there are others who’ve seen him crash and burn, or pull 7s and “magically” upgrade them to 10s when he brags about them in his seminars. (The 1-to-10 rating system itself is imbecilic; we know that already]. For every one part of Tyler’s “realness” that is legit, there are two parts that are unsubstantiable self-mythologizing hype. Most desperate guys looking for help are so gullible and thirsty for a holy water-selling messiah that they don’t want to see the difference.

And the less said about Jeffy, the better at this point. He obviously needs help (in fact, his persona is largely based on his mental problems). I would imagine that many guys who idolize him see a reflection of their own unmet needs as well. Clinging to fantasies of running from woman to woman in order to solve your deeper, non-woman-related problems is bad enough. Climbing into a groupthink filter bubble and living there, slathering fresh coats of paint on the “rape van” and using a decent vocabulary to pander for props as Jeffy does every week in his free videos is just sad.

It is amazing that there are thousands of young guys who look up to the RSD Marketing Crew as a team of saviors rather than a just another group of “chode crystal” dudes who obsess about game. Tyler is nothing more than yet another random fast-talking “reformed AFC” with Youtube-driven delusions about being a self-help icon. His life is completely dominated by meaningless sex with mostly average-looking women and pretending that he is a master businessman when his only real strategy is to undercut everyone else (a bad idea over the long term). He has no other readily apparent skills in life (aside from bragging about his undergraduate philosophy degree, which incidentally has nothing to do with picking up women aside from sounding impressive to guys who want a meaningless “credential” to lean on when choosing a guru).

If you give away valuable information, it becomes worth zero in a market economy (an exception to this may be open-source software, and even then only up to a point). We see this in the free RSD videos that rack up thousands of hits and are basically an alternative form of entertainment for guys who are too scared to take any real action, and don’t realize how much of their lives they’re wasting forming man-crushes on Tyler, Jeffy and the others who have nothing new to say — yet are compelled by their boneheaded business model to say it over and over until their followers become an indoctrinated herd of mind-numbed worshippers.

There is no such thing as “for real”. If there was, seduction really would be a science like physics or social psychology and all the abstract theorizing would be linked to “real” results (or at least a unified discipline that wasn’t dominated by charismatic sociopaths and emotionally damaged rape van drivers).

There’s only one real “wisdom” about any kind of “game”. This is the wisdom that would put all of the “gurus” out of business if their work is based on some kind of magic bullet “technique” or some bogus notion of “pickup-as-a-lifestyle” — or the deification of a specific person being “for real”, as if he has special pickup artist supernatural powers.

The most useful information that exists on seddit or anywhere on Earth is this — and I’m going to give it to you for free because you know it already.

The only real wisdom about seduction is this: it’s all a numbers game. The more you do it, the better you get. Pick any of the popular methods and stick with it for a few years. No matter what you call it, it’s all the same game — also known in the real, non-seduction world as learning. Learning is hard, which is why most people would rather sit on their favorite Youtube channel and become someone else’s cheerleader in the comments section, rather than getting up and making something happen over the course of years. This is part of the hidden cost of “free”. No sacrifice, no motivation. Of course there are exceptions, but the RSD strategy is ultimately more destructive than anything a “bra-burning radical feminist” or “blue-pill chode” could ever propone.

In a way, Tyler lives up to his namesake character in Fight Club (which itself is sort of hilarious); he subverts the accepted social narrative in order to glorify and glamorize himself. In the reality of his actions, he is the polar opposite of the “real” Tyler Durden in that his whole life is based on supplicating to women (i.e. obsessing over pickup) in order to “score” meaningless sex, “bang more 10s” and make himself rich at the expense of his equally-competent competitors and dotingly faithful customers. Is that the best that a highly intelligent, driven guy like him can do with his life? Really? I have a feeling that Jeff is another brilliantly intelligent person whose life was completely diverted by the better-dead-and-gone ghosts of his past.

The saddest part is that either of them could have done anything with the past ten years of their lives and been successful. Instead of pouring their efforts into something truly valuable, they chose to swindle thousands of vulnerable guys out of their time, and quite often, their scarce financial resources as well. And the entire field of seduction suffers because they are forced onto the same treadmill of giving information away for free and becoming a sideshow for a subculture of guys who definitely don’t need yet another form of passive entertainment. Blaming the game isn’t the answer when the players are the ones making up the rules, and those rules include pulling the wool over the spectators’ eyes — and when the game itself is one where there should be no “spectators” in the first place.

But that’s too real. It’s a truth that no one would want to buy, and few would even watch for free. Might as well set up shop as a Youtube superstar, give the trusty old van a new paint job and set about “making the myths” at your local karaoke dive bar. There’s a sucker (I mean, customer) born every minute, so there’s no time to waste. Maybe that’s the real message underlying the game. Are you ready to be “whisked away” to a wonderland of con-artist pickup-and-seduction superheroes? Are you prepared to fully “buy-in” and start “hitting it hard” in hopes of one day attaining the magical powers? If so, recognize that you just might get what you pay for — but it might not be what’s advertised on the endless weekly infomercial series. In the real world, that’s called a “bait-and-switch”; in the bubble world of the RSD Marketing Crew, it’s called business as usual. And yes I know, you knew that already, too. Maybe it’s time to start listening more to yourself, and donating a little bit less of your time, energy and money to the gurus. Don’t worry; they won’t starve. They’ve already fattened their wallets enough off of your generosity.

50 Shades of… what, exactly? Seduction, Mummy-porn, and How to Avoid Becoming a Clichéd Freakshow.

This entry deals with why the phrase “appeal to a woman’s fantasies” doesn’t mean “act like a character from a romance novel”.

Question: should you read romance novels and “reverse engineer” them to become the man of every woman’s dreams?

In theory, I suppose this might sound like a smart idea. Books like “50 Shades of Grey” sold a mind-boggling number of copies. It indulged the purported “dark side of sensuality” with plotlines that entailed something resembling S&M (actually, it’s “SM” — as in “sadomasochism” — but never mind).

So the same way that Mystery reverse-engineered male-female social dynamics, Neil Strauss reverse-engineered Mystery, and Tyler ripped off Mystery, Neil Strauss, Seth Godin and David DeAngelo (not to mention Eckhart Tolle and Tony Robbins) to give birth to RSD, it probably sounds like a perfectly clever move to ape the main character of a romance novel in order to “bang more 10s”.

There’s only one flaw in that logic.

The flaw is this: there actually is a difference between fantasy and reality.

Many women read romance novels precisely for this reason — the same reason that anyone would read a novel. The escapist pleasure of something taboo (as, for many people, the idea of SM tends to be for whatever reason) compels her to seek it.

Offering her a hint of the “taboo” in yourself is fine.

Becoming a fake sadist by reading a watered-down version of that relational dynamic and acting like a complete freakshow in front of women is probably not such a smart idea.

Why not? Three reasons:

1. 50 Shades of Grey Isn’t Even A Real Example of S&M.

The writer’s account of S&M is a perfect example of what’s called “mummy porn”, and as the author said in an interview, “Well, yes, they are my fantasies lived out and ­ ­explored.” If you want a woman like the author, great. “After all, she said, ‘I wrote it for me.'”

Her intended demographic, in case you’re wondering, is an easily-embarrassed “48-year-old mum of two”.

2. After Reading 50 Shades, You Still Won’t Know What Women Really Want.

The problem with blindly following what it _seems_ like women want is this: phenomena such as “50 Shades of Grey” are often “viral” in nature — many women buy such titles because other women are talking about them. The sales numbers make it a popular topic of conversation rather than a real indication of what women actually want.

It’s somewhat like becoming an expert in manufacturing cronuts and serving them for dinner because a woman gushes on about how much she loves them with her coffee or tea. Eventually she’ll get tired of the cronut-overload. She may even start to wonder why you’re using such a weirdly obvious and one-dimensional tactic to lure her into your house week after week.

3. “Reverse-Engineering” A Romance Novel Character Like You’ll Find in ’50 Shades’ Is A Time-Wasting Exercise In Generic Clichés.

Two telling passages about erotic fiction elucidate the point.

From the first quote:

Despite the ‘Mommy Porn’ hype, FSOG contains little that’s genuinely scandalous. It’s a straightforward tale of Girl-with-low-self-esteem meets ridiculously handsome Boy, gets Boy, has lots of sex, angsts.

You might as well put in a set of fake fangs and pretend to be a character from the Twilight novel or movie franchise. Or actually, you might want to take your fangs out first, considering that 50 Shades began life as a piece of amateur Twilight fan fiction.

In other words, “reverse-engineering” a romance novel character like you’ll find in ’50 Shades’ is a time-wasting exercise in generic clichés. At the very least, trade your “50 Shades” for a copy of anything written by Anne Rice. Say, for example, the Sleeping Beauty trilogy.

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An Alternative: Don’t Be Scared — Actually Study A Little Real S&M.

From the article cited above, it’s easy to see that the faux-SM antics in 50 Shades of Grey really aren’t worthy of the frantic emulation that many “plain vanilla” people are showering it with. The second quote from the article above reads thusly:

The activities depicted in James’ books represent only a narrow sliver of that spectrum. There are many in the community who object to the BDSM label slapped on FSOG by the mainstream media.

When you compare FSOG to other texts labeled BDSM, it’s easy to see the gap between James’ sparkly slap-and-tickle and the real deal.

One of the great aspects about studying the source material (meaning sexual sadomasochism, not “Twilight”) is that you learn truly useful things along the way. Imagine being able to teach your lover a few things about alternative forms of sexual pleasure. Consider the benefits of learning how to apply “erotic power exchange” to your love life, the real way — that is, in the context of a trusting, consensual relationship that she will love (and love you more for bringing such knowledge into her life).

If she wants to be the sub to your dom, give her what she wants. The fake ‘vanilla’ mummy-porn version of sadomasochism is very much a waste of your — and her — precious time, energy, desire and as one writer puts it, “devotion”.

Plan F: Become An Unrepentant Fake Alpha Male Freakshow

If you want to pretend that you’re a fantastically fake, unapologetically hypermasculine Alpha Male romance-novel character, go ahead. Recognize, though, that the difference between 50 Shades of Grey’s sales numbers and the reality of what women actually want might render your newly-constructed persona to be the kind of clichéd freakshow that women will gladly write to their friends about.

Who knows, you might be the “star” of the next poorly-written (by her own admission, even) schlocky New York Times chart-topper. My guess is that the story would be a highly parodic romantic comedy, intentional or otherwise.

Click here to play: “Fifty Shames of Earl Grey”, A Fifty Shades of Grey parody short film.

Or, you could try the real “alternative” and learn something useful. Read some authentic literature about S&M. Maybe even be really “edgy” and join your local scene. You might just a find the genuinely sensual woman of your own fantasies along the way. At the very least, you won’t be conning yourself with fanciful delusions from the endless list of mommy-porn bestsellers.

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).

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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.