If we don’t take action soon, we are going to be in for an era of total douchebag domination. More and more nice guys are going to figure out that with an attitude and poor treatment of girls they are going to get what it is that they want. Every day we are losing more good guys to the dark side here.
–Susan Walsh
That classic quote is from Douchebag Math 101 (8:15 in) by Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (some language NSFW):
Susan’s demeanor is a combination of business school and married mom, and makes her the perfect person to deliver this message to those who are unaware of the current SMP.
Heh wonderful Dalrock! A video is more than 1000 words 🙂
Good summary video but I think to appeal to women’s consciousness is kind of futile effort. Not before women are economically driven to deal with the consequences of their actions, more girls will pick the dad guy. But at the moment there is not enough incentive for most of them to follow this path. A relevant post is by PM: http://theprivateman.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/women-and-the-saber-tooth-tiger/
Men respond to the environment. They adapt.
Soon most men will realize they are better off being a douche, and no worse off for it.
It will be almost impossible to get them to change once this happens.
Men respond to the environment. They adapt.
Soon most men will realize they are better off being a douche, and no worse off for it.
It will be almost impossible to get them to change once this happens.
Amen, sir, amen! Guys look at what works, and they make the needed adjustments…
The video claims that 20% of the men get most of the sex, so when more men go cave-style what percentage would we get? Like 40-50%?
Men respond to the environment. They adapt.
Soon most men will realize they are better off being a douche, and no worse off for it.
But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.
I’m having a difficult time getting past the opening quote. Look, there’s a difference between “losing” and “loosing”.
Consider these two sentences:
“I’m losing the Kraken!”
“I’m loosing the Kraken!”
Which sentence means what? They surely do not mean the same thing, right?
There’s a difference, an obvious difference, and for crying out loud, any educated person ought to know the difference, and not write “loosing” in the place of “losing” (ditto for “looser” vs. “loser”). If anyone reading this can’t see why “we are loosing young men” grates like fingernails on a chalkboard, then rewrite it as “We have loosed young men” vs. “We have lost young men”. I hope the difference is painfully obvious.
Cripes. Words mean things. Let’s all choose the right words, with care. Using the wrong word is like giving a big presentation with a string of mucous hanging out of one’s nose…distracting at the very least, and calling one’s competence into question as well.
[D: That one was on me. It is fixed now.]
All this is much ado about nothing. A few women here and there taking a red pill of sorts will do nothing to change the SMP. Collectively, women have neither the incentive nor the reasoning capability to get behind the changes required.
The only thing that will force things to change is “the singularity.” It’s coming but it’s a ways off, perhaps ten or twenty years.
But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.
Really? You don’t think guys tailor their game for the audience? I always notch up/down my sarcasm/wit/whatever depending on who I’m talking to, guy/girl/coworker/boss/etc.
BUT – for those less inclined to adjust their tact on a case by case basis….then, being an asshole 24/7 is a lot more rewarding than being beta 24/7.
“But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.”
Not universally true. I’d go so far as to say that the majority of “good girls” will happily go for an asshole, only to later regret it – genuinely, in an emotional sense, even though the tingle will still be there. I’ve been a nice guy most of my life, but the last few months of steadily increasing douchebaggery has shown a definite, positive change in the responses I get from so-called good girls that I’ve known for years. Not to mention a few hookups.
Whether it’s because she likes assholes or wants assholes to like her makes no difference to me. What they “really want deep down insiiiiide” makes no difference to me. And most of all, what comes out of their mouths makes no difference to me until I see that it closely matches up with their actions and history.
Women get more of what they sleep with, and less of what they “friend zone”.
This rule cannot be broken.
thought you said this would be good? This is basically just 10 minutes of rationalization with the correct answer tacked on; an answer no-one will buy because the rest of the video doesn’t actually justify it. Women aren’t chosing douchebags by accident, they’re choosing them because their biological preferences are no longer reigned in by social convention – mother nature, in her infinite wisdom, caused having sexy genes to be a higher priority than having committment, and women are running with what their body tells them is right. (As an aside, this really shouldn’t be surprising; any economist, or dietician for that matter, can tell you we’re wired for short-term gains at the expense of long-term benefits, that’s why advisors make hundreds of millions of dollars telling clients to save money, avoid unnecessary expenditures, and focus on safe investments with relatively low, but almost guaranteed returns over the long run; in the same way, there are also fortunes being made by people telling others to basically eat less and work out more.)
Not only are women driven to choose the sexy, dangerous man (a topic you’ve covered repeatedly), and rationilize that decision, but they’re also driven to rationilize their rejection of “nice guys” by insisting all nice guys are actually devious assholes trying to con them! Seriously, talk to your average college-aged girl, and ask them what they think of nice guys – you can see the alarms going off, the eyes widening in horror – and it will do you not an ounce of good to point out how illogical this belief is; surely, these devious cads would actually pick a strategy that would work, and neither they, nor any girl they know, can think of an instance where a nice guy feigning betaness for the sole purpose of seduction (as opposed to a friend that just happens to fall in love) has actually suceeded in the task, but they know the truth!
Unless Susan, and others like here, can actually bring themselves to tell women that their sex lives, just like their health, finances, everything else, requires discipline , and that “listening to their heart” and “do what feels good” is more likely to be the wrong thing to do rather than the right, videos like this will accomplish nothing.
Indeed. This is a clear and present threat to using sex to trap “good guys” into getting married. If you can’t over-ride his brain with a heavy sex-push and use that mistake to force a relationship and marriage, then how are you supposed to trap a man?
Very, very unfair.
Also, I’d like to say once the sex-push has succeeded the victim has no right to terminate the relationship for any reason. Likewise, the woman can do as she pleases.
Uh…be a ‘douchebag’, just to win her heart?? No thanks, I don’t think so! Not deal with her at all?–now, that’s much better. I’m on a ‘woman-less’ diet…no need to be an asshole to a gal who despises you all the way–nice or not!
EmanTheDesperateHouseboy
I’m all for douchebaggery. Anything that will create involuntary childless spinterhood is fine with me. BTW check this out, this reminds me of my Marine Corps days in southern California.
http://www.cracked.com/funny-420-douchebags/
“Good summary video but I think to appeal to women’s consciousness is kind of futile effort.”
Exactly. Women have ALWAYS been attracted to cads (or alphas, to use Roissy/Heartiste’s terminology). The link to Private Man’s post above does a decent job of explaining why evolution has created those attraction triggers for women, and how that translates into cad attraction today.
You can’t just tell women to stop being attracted to cads/alphas, in the same way you can’t tell men to stop being attracted to large breasts/symmetrical features/younger women. It’s in their DNA.
The reason Dating 1.0 worked for so long was because women needed the protection and resources that at the time could only be provided by men. Feminism allowed women the freedom to provide that for themselves, and now they have no reason to constrain their natural desire for cads. Thus the change that Susan has so deftly explained.
“But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.”
I’m a good boy that’s been friendzoned more times than I care to count. Mostly to these girls that are supposedly “good,” too. Stable families. Solidly upper-middle class. Strong religion. Friends. Little drugs or alcohol.
Everyone rides the carousel.
I caught that video a few months ago, and what blows my mind is how much sense it makes when the rest of her blog was still a bunch of Cosmo-esque “men are such jerks, how to girl-game your bad boy into committing” type of stuff.
Maybe this was the first red-pill moment for Susan.
It is astounding the power and prestige that douchebags hold on college campuses. We’re supposed to believe (a la Hanna Rosin) that these college-educated women are going to be taking over the world, and they’re crawling over each other to put the rugby team’s dicks in their mouths. That’s not an exaggeration – if you haven’t been in the college party scene in the last ~5 years you wouldn’t believe it, but the alcohol-fueled college sexual marketplace is a total shitshow.
You won’t get childless spinstery. You’ll get lots of single moms. I’d take issue with Chels that “this only works on skanks etc.” Most women most of the time, tingle for the A-hole: Don Draper, Edward Cullen, the Situation, the clothes, sophistication, and money may vary but they are all D-bags.
And it matters WHEN and in what order a woman takes a lover. A woman who is young and with few lovers is worth far more than the same woman years later after the D-bag parade. Susan Walsh is already too late. Women expect to have their cake and eat it too, and instead will only get D-bags. The idea that women can “time the market” falls apart with information (D-bags get the best girls when they are younger, prettier and with far fewer partners). Women are in competition too, that former nice guy can go total D-bag and get a far hotter, younger, nicer girl.
So its the end of traditional marriage save for the rich elite below celeb level, who husband (heh) say an estate of “only” $20 million or so, everyone else has rotating D-bags, which most women want most of the time and when they are most desirable and can have any man anyway.
“I’ve been a nice guy most of my life, but the last few months of steadily increasing douchebaggery has shown a definite, positive change in the responses I get from so-called good girls that I’ve known for years. Not to mention a few hookups.”
Bob is right, and it’s amazing to watch. There has been much discussion at Susan’s blog about how even as women whine and cry that they want “relationships,” men who OFFER relationship commitment get friend-zoned quicker than if they’d played it cool.
Men with large number counts and thus large data sets on various mating strategies (Yohami is one of them) note that offering “commitment” before the woman asks for it is a sure way to get bounced out of her tingle zone. It’s astounding how much the behavior of young women directly opposes the words coming out of their mouths, and opposes the cultural messages we’re raised with.
This used to make me angry. No more. Now I realize that you just have to watch actions, not words, and that humans – all of us – are MUCH more slaves to our base instincts than any of us, especially the more intellectual among us, would like to believe.
Epilogue to my comments: you don’t have to be a total miserable asshole to get a lot of tail. Just take a few of Roissy’s commandments to heart: be irrationally self-confident, don’t make a woman your mission and always keep two in the kitty (until and unless you “commit.”)
“But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.”
It’s funny how the number of women that claim to not like assholes is so much larger than the number that actually don’t.
I am the walking embodiment of almost everything women claim to want. I’m very attractive, I have a successful career, love kids, and even used to be a firefighter at one point in my life. But until I learned to be a douchebag to attractive women, I rarely got anywhere. If women really wanted what they claim to be searching for, I wouldn’t have had to be the way I am to get anywhere with them.
Oh, and before taking the red pill, I actually wanted marriage and kids. Now I realize what a fools errand that is. Ironically, I’m more likely to become a father now than I was when I was married.
It’s funny. For hundreds, no likely thousands, of years there was a simple and very effective mechanism in place to fix this very issue. Actually, the mechanism kept the issue from ever raising its head: I’m talking about simple female “slut shaming”. Yes, Susan nails the description of the problem. But she can’t quite express this most effective solution.
chels says:
“But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior”
hahaha, please, you’re making me laugh so hard i’m tearing up.
“Men respond to the environment. They adapt.
Soon most men will realize they are better off being a douche, and no worse off for it.”
If one is one is adapting to what others like in hopes of gaining approval, then it’s less of a response and more of a reaction. As you said, men respond. Others react.
Don’t expect any real solutions from Susan Walsh. She won’t encourage slut shaming or any other solution that works since it exposes the fundamental truth that all problems in the SMP are the result of women. Her entire blog is about trying to find some way, any way to pin what women have done on to men so women don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. Susan Walsh started her blog just to bail out her daughter.
Susan Walsh has accomplished nothing because all of the women on her blog think that it’s other women that are the problem, but in reality they’re part of the problem too. She also refuses to deal with real problems like the divorce industry and the false rape industry which makes relationships with women more dangerous. Being a douchebag mitigates some of the risk of those problems, so that’s another incentive for men to become douchebags, but you won’t be hearing Susan Walsh talk about that because that would point out the women are the problem again.
I hope the women reading this thread will watch the video and read the comments very carefully. I know some will be here shortly, well, one in particular, waving their hands and shrieking a swelling chorus of “NAWALT!!!”
All the screams and shrill cries of NAWALT are for naught to me. It just is not credible at all. Men are figuring out that women don’t say what they mean, and they don’t mean what they say. Men are on to their hypergamous instincts, and are playing hard to get. They know that once women lose the gina tingle, they just dump or divorce the men. That’s why they can’t find willing men to marry.
Women insist on making men bring the tingle and they demand that men act as trained dogs, ready to jump through their hoops. They want men in a state of perpetual audition for their charms. But the inevitable response has been that men will just take whatever they can, whenever they can, from as many women as they can, while giving up as little as they can. And it won’t be enough to say “it’s time for men to commit to us”. Nope. Men’s reply will be “if you don’t want me, there are 20 others who do. And even if there aren’t, you’re not worth it.”
I could not advise anyone to marry in this SMP. Were I single now, I wouldn’t marry.
aaaaand, Jennifer’s appearance in 5…..4……3……2……
If men respond and adapt to the situation out there, society is in for a bit of a shakeup. Smarter men will start learning game from women, and the percentage of alphas will increase. This is undesirable because young women’s instincts are prone to produce the douchiest alphas, as opposed to what Athol Kay would call the Gamma (probably akin to Roissy’s Lesser Alpha).
The only alternative I know is to correct the behavior of women en masse. Dalrock hit the nail on the head when he said society needs to put pressure on the young women. It needs to be a coalition of mothers, female elite (basically, the feminists need to renounce feminism and substitute it for a less destructive ideology), and the media. Since this will almost certainly not happen, it’s up to men to attempt to steer the evolution of alpha in a more positive direction.
My personal emphasis would be to give out alpha classes to the more moral seeming betas.
I just thought of something. Let me throw this out there.
Susan’s suggestion is that young women should simply not date the cads at all, and instead go for the “dads”, i.e., the “nice guys” who will offer commitment.
The problem with that solution is the women aren’t attracted to those “nice guys”. Women want commitment from those “nice guys”, but everyone knows the women will be “settling” for those nice guys. No tingle, no attraction. Doesn’t that run afoul of Dalrock’s sound advice to women not to settle for a guy they aren’t head over heels in love with? And I know head over heels in love isn’t the same as the gina tingle. But the tingle, the initial attraction, has to be there, or it’s not going to work. So if we follow Susan’s advice for the women to dump the cad and get with the dad, the women are settling. They aren’t attracted to the dads, leading to marital misery and divorce. And isn’t that what Dalrock and Susan are trying to avoid?
“Smarter men will start learning game from women”
I really doubt that, Ceer. There are only a handful of women who have even the most fundamental understanding of game. Well over 90% of men who learn game will learn it from other men.
Hilarious but effective footage of a nice guy turning on the douchebag:
I quit treating women well, most do not deserve it. Quite liberating. I treat them no different than I treat men.
Basically, every woman wants to cheat the system. Women want a world for a productive, provider betas to invent, innovate, provide and protect.
But each woman wants to actually marry an alpha, and who cares if he is productive. the betas are for “other women”, as in ‘I sure wish I had someone to set you up with’.
Why bother with American women – they are overgrown children and incorrigible (attention) whores.
Problem with this video is that it assumes women have control over their attraction cues, simply won’t work. The male equivalent would be to tell guys to marry obese chicks because they won’t cheat, simply won’t happen.
Go tell Alyssa Bereznak that Finkel is a better bet than some douche, won’t happen, she might marry a Finkel out of necessity but eventually the attraction cues will take over and invariably divorce.
Cause and effect, no point blaming the effect, to truly change the situation the causality must be changed and that must involve dire consequences for choices, meaning no social welfare net and wealth transfer mechanisms.
“that must involve dire consequences for choices, meaning no social welfare net and wealth transfer mechanisms”
True. Until young Women face ending up on the street or a lifetime of poverty for their poor choices, they won’t change. It will only be necessity that forces change. Given the option/choice/freedom they will continue as they are now, i.e. D-Bags/alphas/playas all the way.
Also, what about the knock on effects of more and more beta males becoming assholes.
Society functions on beta males having been socialised to be civil/co-operative/relatively polite.
Once a critical mass of former beta males become assholes, society becomes dysfunctional.
In other words IMO, it is unlikely that the learned asshole behaviour will just be confined to the SMP – asshole behaviour will increasingly manifest in areas outside of the SMP, i.e. in normal day to day work/social interaction. And as civility/politeness/co-operation becomes increasingly rare, society starts to become unglued.
Dalrock, props for ‘fessing up. If I ranted too much, eh, nothing personal. It’s just that sometimes I read text and feel about to lose my mind (or maybe even loose my mind…) because of such things.
Disclaimer: have not viewed the video. This link is not so fast at this time.
Now, I’ll pause to put on a tweed jacket with leather elbow pads, and find a pipe so I can philosophize. Wait, I just remembered, I don’t smoke. Oh, well. Guess I’ll not change clothes, either.
Maybe it’s the late hour, but it seems to me that likely what the vid describes, certainly what many of the varied participants in the men-oriented blogs see is a form of “prisoner’s dilemma”. (This is a real example of “Game Theory”, not to be confused with Game.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Women ostensibly want “nice guys”, i.e. betas, but reward alpha players more and more. Men who are betas see the disconnect between women’s words and women’s actions, and react in a variety of ways ranging from MGTOW to alternate realities such as gaming (or writing blogs — or commenting on blogs…uh, oh), to joining various groups to, of course, learning Game. Some who learn Game become players, essentially predators. This last group is causing some consternation among women. So women call upon men to be “nice guys” and marry them, and men respond by pointing to the now well known “carousel” and/or the divorce machine, and say “Meh. Not sure why that’s a good deal”.
Women could change this, in theory. However, to women there’s an excess of douches and jerks and creeps, and a shortage of niceguyz, so getting off of the carousel will leave them lonely and manless, and one thing I’ve learned in the last few years is that many women are very unsuited to be alone. Reading privateman’s article on saber toothed tigers was a real “aha!” moment on that score. But on the other hand, so long as women seem to be rewarding the douches they allegedly dislike, observant men will continue to draw conclusions.
From a man’s point of view, women need to basically start walking the walk. Talking about how they want a NiceGuy(TM) while doing their best to live a “Sex and the City” life isn’t fooling anyone. A man who has learned, or relearned, to be more masculine – to be more Alpha – needs to know it is worth his investment – physical, financial, emotional – to get involved with a woman in any sort of LTR, especially marriage. Because marriage 2.0 is not a prisoner’s dilemma, pace’ Doomed Harlot Posuer, men risk more and all too often gain much, much less than women do by marrying. Divorce theft is real, cuckolding is real, and more mundane conflicts that will arise when the man clearly has a higher need for sex than the woman does, all add up to make marriage, or even an LTR, look not very attractive.
I suppose that any admission by any woman with an audience of other women that maybe, just maybe a bit of behavior modification is in order is a step. Although IMO the heart of the matter is the dehumanization of men that 20-30-40 years of feminist propaganda has taught. So long as a significant number of women regard men as a cross between a kind of vending machine and a pack mule, the prisoners dilemma will continue. Unlike hypergamy and attractors, this attitude is cultural, not a product of evo-bio, and so it could be changed, in theory.
In theory.
These comments are great. What is really something is that they are almost all in agreement. I’m going to have to save this one for the wife. A lot of basic man knowledge here for fathers in plain site.I have two daughters and this kind of thing will be interesting (maddening) to watch as they get older. M guess the best approach is to not play house and speak so frankly and honestly to them on the subject that it removes all pretense and kills the I’m a good girl romance. I guess that is where the term slut comes from. A woman making decisions and living for the tingle is straight up being a slut no matter how it is dressed up as love,romance or liberated independence.
Hi Dalrock,
I’m flattered and honored by the feature, thank you. Just a few quick points:
1. I sincerely believe that women get the men they deserve in every SMP.
2. I am a proponent of slut shaming, and have written about it often. Intrasexual female competition always influences sexual mores. Today the sluts have a large advantage, but it is a short-term advantage, as men still appear to be unwilling to marry sluts for the most part. Chaste women have no short-term advantage to offer, and delayed gratification is always a hard sell.
The only thing that may be effective is the growing visibility of spinsters. With college enrollments in the U.S at 60F/40M, a third of college-educated women will not have the opportunity to marry men of the same educational level. Hypergamy makes “marrying down” unlikely in large numbers. This will create an enormous spinster class among the women now 18-30. It’s possible that will affect female behavior, though the hamster is a powerful little rodent.
3. I agree that attraction is not a choice, but attraction cues are malleable. Today we have douchebags enjoying enormous preselection. While it’s true that women seek dominant males, they select for other traits as well, and I think it’s entirely possible that the pendulum could swing back enough to make the “ideal” man someone with a mix of traits a la Athol Kay.
Also, female sexuality lies on a spectrum. There is some evidence that the most promiscuous women have higher testosterone levels than most women. And it is the most promiscuous women who hop into bed with dominant jerks every chance they get. I’m not saying some women are invulnerable to Game – all women respond to male dominance. Just that there is a range of preferences among women, and if promiscuous women weren’t setting the cultural standard I think we might see a shift there too.
4. I define a cad as someone who uses deceit to get sex. Strictly speaking, players are not cads in my view, though I don’t recommend them as partners. So the range of dads is really quite large, including betas, greater betas and even some alphas. Just as men have a threshold for physical attraction, women have a threshold for dominance.
Susan Walsh
The only thing that may be effective is the growing visibility of spinsters. With college enrollments in the U.S at 60F/40M, a third of college-educated women will not have the opportunity to marry men of the same educational level. Hypergamy makes “marrying down” unlikely in large numbers. This will create an enormous spinster class among the women now 18-30. It’s possible that will affect female behavior, though the hamster is a powerful little rodent.
Looks like we are heading in the same direction. Spinsterhood without wealth transfer intitlement and that hamster will get new instructions on how to turn that wheel. Poverty and lack of security at someone elses hand are some powerful motivators. (A woman will vote security over freedom every time)
As Dalrock has posted before Spinsterhood right now is a choice women make by mistakenly following femminist lies. When spinsterhood becomes a decision men make for a women feminism dies a very quick death. Live by the hamster die by the hamster real fast. The key is to have the spinster class not on the receiving end of wealth transfers. (never married and childless) otherwise we will have what we have in the poor black communities. Which is sustainable for the woman but not for society at large. The removal of the sustainability for women is importnat to modify behavior.
That’s why it is very important for people like yourself to stay out there for you will be the ones to hit the reset button and teach women how to go from feral to civilized.
Susan Walsh: “The only thing that may be effective is the growing visibility of spinsters. With college enrollments in the U.S at 60F/40M, a third of college-educated women will not have the opportunity to marry men of the same educational level. Hypergamy makes “marrying down” unlikely in large numbers. This will create an enormous spinster class among the women now 18-30.”
I agree that spinsterhood, couplied with forcing spinsters to fend for themselves, might affect female behaviior. The obvious motivator is the all too familiar signt of a woman whose young adulthood is wasted on the carousel, she’s now late 20s or early 30s and never married or an early marriage ended in divorce, has racked up a double digit sex partner count and has no children. Her chances of getting pregnant are very low. Her chances of finding a husband are even lower than that. She finished college but has a dead end job and faces the prospect of working that job for the next 40 years with no ability to accumulate any kind of wealth, and also with no men interested in her beyond pump & dump. She has no ex husband paying her alimony or child support. Her bio clock is roaring like a freight train but her ability to have children dwindles by the day. She has no inherited wealth. She is alone and will have to do it all herself. For the rest of her life. I have just described millions of women right now between the ages of 18 and 40.
I’ve seen some women respond to this, but only if they are honest with themselves and only if they ingest a red pill.
Susan, I’d be interested to hear if any of this is registering with your focus groups at all. These things are being said over and over and over, repeatedly ad nauseam ad infinitum at your site, here and other places. It just doesn’t seem to be getting through. What’s your take?
Interesting post.
The DM posted a story today about how “The Rules” (game for women) is now outdated.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2039387/Time-break-The-Rules-Why-sleeping-man-night-dating-disaster.html
excerpt:
OUTDATED? SOME OF THE 35 ‘RULES’
– Don’t rush into sex, wait at least three dates
– Don’t talk to a man first (and don’t ask him to dance)
– No more than casual kissing on the first date
– Don’t meet him halfway or go dutch on a date
– Don’t call him and rarely return his calls
– Don’t live with a man (or leave your things in his apartment)
– Don’t accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday
The comments are fairly mixed.
Johnycomelately says:
“Go tell Alyssa Bereznak that Finkel is a better bet than some douche, won’t happen, she might marry a Finkel out of necessity but eventually the attraction cues will take over and invariably divorce. ”
Susan Walsh says:
“Chaste women have no short-term advantage to offer, and delayed gratification is always a hard sell. ”
There’s a funny common thread to both of these comments. An overriding theme in many of the game blogs is the very skewed self-image most women seem to have. They think that, just because an 8 will pursue them briefly, and possibly bed them, makes them an 8 as well. Someone like Alyssa, if she does ever marry someone after “settling” for a guy that probably already outranks her, will most likely spend her time longing for the men that completely outrank her, but might sleep with her a few times out of convenience.
As a churchgoer, I see a similar issue with the available women there. If you sit in the small groups, the available women turn every topic into a chance to complain that God isn’t giving them what they want (i.e., their dream husband). These same women are generally overweight and abrasive (6s at best, even before the personality issues), but feel they deserve a 10. The ones close to their 40s who are never married are the worst. They have such a detailed checklist that no living man can possibly meet it. If one did, they can’t grasp that he could do far better than a woman who was probably very attractive 20 years ago, has lost most of her fertility, and is terribly bitter and ascerbic to boot.
@TFH (regarding the prospect of women changing en masse)
Agreed. However, this isn’t what is needed. Individual women on the margin will make better or worse decisions. Right now many women still marry in their early 20s, and many other women are riding the carousel a la “last one down the aisle wins”. In between are the women who could fall either way; these are the ones I’m referring to when I say on the margin. Women are painfully aware of their sexual competition with their peers, which in this case are other women on the margin. These women have a choice; slut it up or find a greater beta to commit to. This is where meaningful change in either direction will occur. As it does occur, the location of the margin will change, but the margin will still exist.
We won’t influence men en masse, and we won’t be able to do this for women either. But we can influence individual men and women to make decisions more in their own best interest by helping them understand the landscape they are in. Since the solutions are largely individual, we don’t need to influence either one. The woman who stays on the carousel is doing her sisters on the margin a favor by making it that much easier for them to find a desirable beta to commit to. The men who won’t listen and marry sluts and/or frivolous women are doing other men a favor by making it that much easier to find a non slut who takes marriage seriously. Given enough time the short term solution sets the stage for a longer term one, as the culture is changed one good decision at a time.
There’s a real problem with the spinster class and it’s creeping up slowly.
Spinsters will bankrupt the nation.
This is basic mathematics and, as I recall, Dalrock posted on this very issue.
Spinsters aren’t saving for retirement. Because women are under the delusion that a good husband (with the accompanying financial assistance) is easily available, they simply aren’t preparing themselves financially.
The online dating profiles of women over 40 still astound me with lists of demands and requirements in men. It’s as if they’re still 25 years old, skinny, and at the height of their sexually desirability.
Susan Walsh should be counseling single women over 40.
Our country will eventually face a demographic time bomb of poor, sick old women
On a side note, I’m kind of surprised that my saber-tooth tiger post was so popular.
With college enrollments in the U.S at 60F/40M, a third of college-educated women will not have the opportunity to marry men of the same educational level. Hypergamy makes “marrying down” unlikely in large numbers.
The difference is that 20% of women are better educated than men, so where do you get the 1/3 part?
As well, I don’t think that college education should be how the opportunity to marry should be measured, but rather income. Those men that are not going to university could be going to community college instead or they might open up a successful business, but in the long term, they might end up making more money than a woman who for example, majored in art or communication studies or something irrelevant like that. Women don’t really care about degrees, but money.
Spinsters will bankrupt the nation.
I’m not sure how significant their numbers are, but my mother has a lot of spinster friends, and they’re all very well off, making over 100K/year each.
Brian: “As a churchgoer, I see a similar issue with the available women there. If you sit in the small groups, the available women turn every topic into a chance to complain that God isn’t giving them what they want (i.e., their dream husband). These same women are generally overweight and abrasive (6s at best, even before the personality issues), but feel they deserve a 10. The ones close to their 40s who are never married are the worst. They have such a detailed checklist that no living man can possibly meet it. If one did, they can’t grasp that he could do far better than a woman who was probably very attractive 20 years ago, has lost most of her fertility, and is terribly bitter and ascerbic to boot.”
Oy, don’t get me started. More evidence for detinennui’s Law: A woman’s spiritual condition does not negate the female biological imperative nor the female psychological traits; and in fact may amplify those imperatives and traits.
and
the First Corollary to detinennui’s Law: There is no real difference in today’s SMP between the sexual selective behavior of Christian women and their secular sisters.
the Second Corollary to detinennui’s Law: A woman’s profession of belief in God or some other supreme being does not in any way negate or counteract her tendencies to hypergamy.
Chels –
Imagine there are five college graduates; three females and two males. Each represents 20% of the college graduate population. Assuming both males marry females with degrees, that means one out of the original three female college graduates has no male college graduate available to marry – one out of three, of 1/3. And these numbers include community colleges.
Opening up a successful business is a bit more complicated than you would seem to think, or every guy would do it rather than a small minority. Hell, I’m an engineer, but it’s going to take a while before even I have the credit necessary to take out the loan to start my own; I can only imagine how tough it is for a kid fresh out of high school, or even the same kid ten years later.
There’s a reason someone in the manosphere claimed learning game is worth millions of dollars.
Chels: “But that only works with the whores and sluts; it doesn’t work with the good types, who are just going to get put off by assholish behavior.”
I will partially agree here. Yes, but that’s not the whole story. The problem with this is it is too binary: there are good girls and bad ones… now who’s under the virgin/whore delusion?
Instead, I see it more like this. There *is* a small group (A) of “good girls” who are really cad-resistant, so being a dbag will never work on them, fair enough. Maybe you’re one, along with other outliers like Stephenie. The vast majority of girls (B) are in-between on a continuum. Some will make a mistake or two, some will make lots of mistakes and rationalize it away. Then there’s thesmall group (C), perhaps the size of the cad-resistant ones, who are the sluts.
And even this is an oversimplification.
From a guy’s perspective, douchebaggery works on B & C so effectively, that the possible loss of A really doesn’t mean anything. It’s statistical noise.
With college enrollments in the U.S at 60F/40M, a third of college-educated women will not have the opportunity to marry men of the same educational level. Hypergamy makes “marrying down” unlikely in large numbers.
Chels
Suppose that Tiny State U has 100 students. 60 of them are women and 40 of them are men. Now suppose that all 40 men select a wife only from the pool of Tiny State U, and therefore 40 of the women marry. The other 20 do not marry. 20 / 60 = 2/6 = 1/3 = 33.33% unmarried out of the TSU cohort.
Your observation regarding the value of a college degree vs. other career paths is a good one. Since the 1970’s, in the US a college degree has been used by employers as a filter, a proxy for IQ tests. However, the proliferation of essentially useless degrees is having a dilutive effect upon the value of the typical B.A. and “college” itself is in a Federally funded bubble. A man who owns a plumbing company, a heating/airconditioning company, an electrician service, etc. is very likely going to earn more than the typical BA in English literature, art, and many other degrees. However, I suspect for many college educated women with attendance – award degrees, associating with a man who doesn’t have a 4-year ticket will look a whole lot like “settling”, with all the risks of divorce theft that implies under marriage 2.0.
With regard to your mother’s friends, all I can say is “sample error”. I used to know a couple of technicians who worked in a plasma donation center, everyone they knew earned $40,000 or less, often much less. Yet I’m not going to make statements about average income based on that group. Because the sample is skewed to the low end of the income scale for various reasons. Your sample is skewed to the upside for other reasons.
I’m inclined to agree with Whisky on the impact. From what I can tell, “sperm banks” were set up back in the 1950’s to 1960’s as a means to enable infertile married couples where the woman was ok and the man was infertile, to have children. Originally donors were supposedly screened to look as close to the man as possible, and use of the sperm bank was limited to married couples.
I don’t know when the last policy changed. Probably in the late 70’s or early 80’s. I know of a single woman who chose to get pregnant that way in the early 1990’s, and she wasn’t alone. Single women and homosexual couples are now the leading customers of sperm banks, to the best of my knowledge. There’s no reason for a single, never married woman not to have at least one child if she’s determined to.
Of course, there’s another way; select a suitable “donor” from the men who are willing to hop in the sack and spend a few nights during ovulation with him, maybe even have a fling for a couple of months. Lie to him about being on hormonal birth control, and then claim the pregnancy is a “birth control failure”. I know of one or two women who have born a child that way.
So what does the future look like in a world where increasing numbers of 30-something women are never-married mothers with one, or at most two, children? What socialization will their sons and daughters get, what attitudes about men? How hungry will those children be for “belonging”?
Why am I reminded of Weimar Germany?
Women want nice guys!
“Every woman I have ever known has said something like this: “I just want a nice guy who will treat me right.” This is partially true. When she says this, what she really means is: she wants a good looking, confident alpha man who will be nice to her, commit to her only, have sex only with her, and treat her right. This is why the manosphere is rife with stories of women who say they want nice, sensitive, caring men; yet they repeatedly date and have sex with “bad boys” or layabouts or thugs. This is because they want a confident man, not a “nice guy”.
Truthfully, can anyone imagine any polite woman announcing in public: “I just want that beautiful drummer up there with the tattoos and the long hair to screw me until I can’t walk, and I bet I can get him for more than a pump & dump”? Certainly, some women act precisely like this, and many more have certainly felt it, wanted it and believed it.
Women say they want stability, predictability and routine. Perhaps women want this most of the time. But they also want their lives laced with excitement, mystery, spontaneity and adventure — and they gravitate to men who can give them a taste of it.”
http://badgerhut.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/guest-post-the-female-condition/
Especially, once they are used up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6nqMH1IYn0
…A woman’s spiritual condition does not negate the female biological imperative nor the female psychological traits; and in fact may amplify those imperatives and traits…
…the Second Corollary to detinennui’s Law: A woman’s profession of belief in God or some other supreme being does not in any way negate or counteract her tendencies to hypergamy.
I’ve noticed that some unmarried women are very interested in young men who either feel a call to the ministry, or are PK’s, as opposed to those men who may just work in regular positions like ushering and bus driving. Of course all jobs in God’s kingdom are important. God is no respecter of persons. They just don’t all appeal to women.
There have been cases of girls going to Bible college for the sole purpose of getting a minister husband. I believe it takes just as much of a call for a woman to be a minister’s wife as the man being a minister. When you understand the sacrifice and hardship this lifestyle requires, a young man is well advised to wait on the Lord to find the right partner. I personally have sat under pastors whose wives were a major factor in their downfall because they married a woman who was more interested in financial security and comfort. They wouldn’t accept the idea of submission either.
These women look at ministers, particularly music ministers, like rock stars. It’s a female version of the same problem Jesus charged the scribes with. (Mark 12:38-40)
I guess that’s why Paul said it was better for a man to be unmarried.
Nice guys offer commitment without the girl earning it which is a demonstration of lower value. These guys also should not offer certainty and security before attraction was established.
I guess some girls hope to catch the alpha and to make them into a beta when they finally feel they are no longer in love:
– http://xsplat.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/why-do-women-try-to-emasculate-men/
Instead of looking at college degrees, it’s more important to look at income because men do outearn women, and since women care about money, I don’t think the achievement gap is going to lead to a spinsterhood of big proportions.
The vast majority of girls (B) are in-between on a continuum. Some will make a mistake or two, some will make lots of mistakes and rationalize it away. Then there’s thesmall group (C), perhaps the size of the cad-resistant ones, who are the sluts.
Of course that it’s not black and white, there’s a continuum, but then those who make a lot of mistakes should also belong to group C. As well, men’s preferences also exist on a continuum, and while a few want only virgins and a few will marry someone who has 20+ partners, most men are somewhere in the middle, as are the women.
This is because they want a confident man, not a “nice guy”.
“Nice” and “confident” are not mutually exclusive.
TFH – ”You will almost never in this world find a man who learned from women, how to do well with women.”
Well… not because the women were actually making a effort tot teach the men. But, men do learn about woman from women all the time. When they actually take the time to observe what’s really going on, that is. Or, to be more accurate woman accidentally teach men what works to attract women by their actual behaviors.
TFH ”Perhaps you are not aware how many beta males double down on their denial that Game works”
And a heavy dose of denial is what they take. The actual behaviors of women being so very obvious.
[Hey, isn’t it about time for Eric to pop in and claim Game doesn’t work because women only like a**holes and thugs – the sort of guys who have natural Game?]
As a long time Churchian myself, I observed the real behaviors of young women in my (Christian) peer group in the late 70’s & early 80’s. It was much the same as it seems to be today. Us “nice guy’s”, who were brow-beaten about controlling our sexuality, and being respectful to young women, watched over and over again as the most attractive half of the girls routinely rejected us “nice guys”, and ended up with either A) some rich a**hole who treated them with disrespect (usually using them, and dumping them to go on to the next – often another girl from the same peer group), B) some “higher” jock (a sports teem captain, for example), who treated them the same way, or C) (horror of horrors) some “thug” bad-boy [Oh, of course, they were simply trying to “save” him, and lead him to Christ, yada, yada, yada – funny how that NEVER worked].
Anyway, much as TFH suggests, my first reaction was to bury myself in denial, and to double-down on the “nice guy” sh*t.
By the time I left for college, I had essentially given up on the girls I knew via Churchianity – not because I’d actually caught-on, but because I felt like I was simply to “beneath” them to even try and “win” them. (The churches ways of teaching boys left a lot of us in that sad boat).
Anyway, before I go off on some long rant about all that I’ve observed and been through, by the time I first heard of the concept of Game (oddly enough, beginning with the 1995 movie “Friday”, and taking another decade plus to have it really finally sink-in by reading Roissy), I realized that I’d personally been witnessing the very things they (Roissy, mostly) were talking about for 30 years – female hypergamy, pre-selection, attraction to “doughbags” – all of it.
Now, I know some of you have little patience for men who seem to cling in hopeless desperation to their “blue pill” ideologies; but, as one who was so steeped in Churchianity’s “Nice Guy” BS that it took decades to unlearn, I’d urge those of you who were bright enough (or maybe just lucky enough) to catch-on more quickly to try to have more patience so as to better teach those who have not been so adroit.
While I hate to single him out to use as an example, Eric is, in fact, the perfect example of what I’m talking about. He’s a guy who definitely “gets” the sad state of male-female relationships, and who even understand the female pathologies which have lead to that situation. Yet, he has a profound misunderstanding of what Game really is (and loudly displays that ignorance…repeatedly).
Now, those who know better have a choice. You can get annoyed at Eric’s stubborn refusal to understand the seemingly obvious, or you can try to continue to try to instruct him – pointing out that he already actually knows the truth, and that he just needs to embrace it.
He’s really not unlike so many of those “nice guys” who increase their dosage of blue denial pills in the face of uncomfortable realities they are themselves observing with regard to the women around them. They can be changed, they can be helped. I say this as one who managed to pull my own head out – albeit only after years of confusion. There is hope.
Chels – “Nice” and “confident” are not mutually exclusive.
While it’s true that they are not mutually exclusive, they are most certainly not equally weighted by (the vast majority of) women.
Despite the misunderstanding of some, what we often call Game is mostly (probably 90%) just confidence. What ever “Game” interactions a man has are really just manifestations of his confidence. If he’s using “A**hole Game”, he’s projecting confidence that he doesn’t need to be nice to succeed with the girl he’s “Gaming” – which she perceives as him being at a higher SMP value than herself, and thus she will tend to be attracted to him – whether she likes it or not.
Likewise any of the other named manifestations of a man’s “Game” are based on the man’s confidence to project that he doesn’t feel at all beneath a given women. That confidence in his own ability to get some other women should she refuse him is what will end up being an attractant to her.
So, yes, a confident guy can be nice as well – and to some extent, women would actually prefer that he be both. But “nice” has definite limits. If he begins to seem as if he is being nice in the hopes of impressing her (i.e. too nice), them he projects the notion that he IS beneath her, triggering in her the correlating notion that she can do better than him (in terms of a mate).
Woman may not like to have to admit it, but this is a bad thing for a relationship.
Dalrock, I agree with you re addressing those on the margin. That’s all I aim to do, really. I don’t think wholesale change in the culture is possible, barring some radical development like a new sexually transmitted virus that is especially lethal.
I think of the SMP as a game of musical chairs for women. It’s a bit more complicated than that – several levels of play. But in essence what I’m trying to do is give motivated women who are already primed to listen (and there are many) strategies for being one of the women who is not left standing. Those women will succeed one by one.
The day of reckoning for feminism is coming, but I fear it will be a long while yet. In the meantime, there will be winners and losers. Game gives men the ability to win. Managing sexual activity carefully while selecting for positive traits (and filtering for negative traits) gives women the ability to “win.”
slwerner, you just described my teen years to a T. Have you been stalking me for the past 30 years? Heh.
The first time I saw anything like Game was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where one of the characters gives Rat pointers on how to interact with the Jennifer Jason Leigh character on his date. I thought “he’s not a nice guy and everyone knows girls don’t like bad boys” and “this will never work”.
Growing up, in high school and church, it’s always the same: nice guys finish last and the girls go for the jockheads, the thugs, and the bad boys. I just never understood why. Parents were no help. With them it was just “Don’t worry. You just keep it in your pants, don’t shame us by knocking up a slut, and you’ll be fine later.”
In college I was torn between being a “nice guy” and dating around. There was a lot of shaming in college: If you were a “nice guy” you were supposed to be looking for a wife because all the women said they were looking for husbands. If you wanted to date around there were some women who would do that but you weren’t going to get sex that way. The only guys who got the easy NSA sex were the top dog apex alphas. THe “niceguy” side won because I did not understand rejection. A few rejections, including a couple of nuclear ones, pretty much persuaded me to get out of the dating scene (so I thought) more for the purpose of avoiding rejection than enhancing my life.
Chels
Instead of looking at college degrees, it’s more important to look at income because men do outearn women, and since women care about money, I don’t think the achievement gap is going to lead to a spinsterhood of big proportions.
Men out earn women in the aggregate because there are more men at the extreme far right of income distribution than women, plus the effect of women over 60 who do not earn much. Averages can be misleading as measures of central tendency. Median can be more useful. I do not know what the median income of women vs men is, but suspect it is getting closer to parity. Why? Because in the under-30 cohort women are at parity, or earn even more than men do in some fields. The growing imbalance of men and women in college (which, unlike the previous imbalance, is perfectly acceptable, legal and to be celebrated) can only exacerbate the income disparity already seen in the 25 – 30 age group. Furthermore, as that group ages into their 30’s, the women will continue as a group to progress farther and faster than the men, thanks to Affirmative Action, which will only make hypergamous women more frustrated. They will stand on their AA glass floor and yearn for the alphas above them, as they ignore all the men under their economic feet.
This will lead to a growing number of 30-something and 40-something never-married women, absent some change in social practices. Because hypergamy is not going to go away, ever.
detinennui32 – ”slwerner, you just described my teen years to a T. Have you been stalking me for the past 30 years?”
Okay, you got me. Yes, I’ve been stalking you…and the tens of millions of other guys who had the exact same experience.
That so many of us saw the same thing going on, in so many place and situations, and over many decades simply speaks to the “universality” of the realities of female attraction cues, hypergamy, and the lot of those “issues” which were deliberately overlooked by polite society for so long.
Of course, since polite society has been too cowardly to address what has been going on (for decades), men have been left to figure it out for themselves. Predictably, many men are finding that becoming a “douchebag” does lead to “success”, and it therefore follows that they chose to become so.
What is, IMHO, missing is NOT the message that woman should simply reject the cad and chose the dad, but rather that most of the dads can become more attractive to women by improving their self confidence. The most beneficial (to women) way to “steer” such transformations would be for women to actively aid a dad-type guy they like in developing his confidence such that he will become more alpha-like: as opposed to simply picking a guy who is already alpha (player, bad-boy, or even a nice polite guy who’s observable alpha) – or should I say, competing against many other women for such a guy.
If women were clever enough to take the tact of choosing an upper-beta “nice guy” and encouraging him to be more alpha, not only could they help him retain his good (non-douchebag) qualities, but they won’t have to compete so fiercely (sexually) to land a guy that they can find long-term attraction to.
Okay, my idea is probably as “pie in the sky” as Susan’s urging women to just chose dad’s, but I think it’s more workable in terms of creating stable long-term relationships and marriages.
Anonymous Reader – ”Men out earn women in the aggregate because there are more men at the extreme far right of income distribution than women”
This is a very meaningful consideration.
I once had the opportunity to (try to) explain the apparent income gap to a colleague (a woman making ~$100k using the fact that she was a fan of a local sports figure who (at the time) had just signed a contract for ~$10 million/yr.
I though the math would be simple for her to grasp, in pointing out that his income alone balanced out that of 100 woman making $100k/yr in terms of calculating pay difference between men and woman.
Bounced off her like water off a duck. She held a PhD in a mathematically intensive field, so I’m sure it was a willful and suborn ignorance on her part.
slwerner:
This: “If women were clever enough to take the tact of choosing an upper-beta “nice guy” and encouraging him to be more alpha, not only could they help him retain his good (non-douchebag) qualities, but they won’t have to compete so fiercely (sexually) to land a guy that they can find long-term attraction to.”
is the answer to this: “So if we follow Susan’s advice for the women to dump the cad and get with the dad, the women are settling. They aren’t attracted to the dads, leading to marital misery and divorce.”
Thing is, women aren’t going to do the hard work of encouraging men to be more alpha, because they don’t know how. All they know is they had the tingle but now it’s gone, They’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. . Men have to do it.
detinennui32 – ” Thing is, women aren’t going to do the hard work of encouraging men to be more alpha, because they don’t know how.”
Which is, in part, why I acknowledge that my idea is rather “pie-in-the-sky”. The other part/consideration being that not only would it require woman assessing long-term, but it would also require them to “invest” long-term – neither of which is an easy sell to women today.
Still, I would point out that Athol Kay gets numerous “how can I get my guy to alpha-up?” type questions from woman. There may be some women who’d also be willing to take on the challenge even before finding themselves “stuck” in a relationship with a guy who needs some improvement.
As well, some time back, on some other blog (the details lost to me now), there was a bit for women on “building your own alpha”, which IIRC, was basically similar to what I suggested in my last post.
There may still be some hope.
@Dalrock:
I contend that you can’t really influence people en masse directly. The only way to do so is by changing the incentives, not just the message. The original reason for women to choose beta was because life was really hard without one, and bringing up a child nearly impossible. Therefore, women were incentivized to choose betas.
The thing that has changed is the emergence of big government. Now, a woman doesn’t need a man directly: she can just marry all of them indirectly through the mechanism of taxation without having to marry an icky beta. Before, she directly needed the beta; now, the actual beta is optional. So, she has an incentivize to ride the carousel and try in vein to catch the alpha. Slut shaming was just a cartel to keep the price of sex high, and the reason that it existed was that catching a man was serious business and women knew that sex was the main thing they had on offer. Slut shaming is ineffective now because no woman needs a man. That’s why the message of Susan and others is ineffective: just telling women to choose betas doesn’t remove the underlying incentives.
The only way to change this is to remove the incentive, which is big government. If the cost of single motherhood were directly laid on the mothers themselves, there would be a huge incentive for women not to become single mothers. Now, single mothers instead receive all kinds of handouts: being a single mother is an actual a viable path now.
To me it’s obvious that the path to fixing all this is to remove big government. However, that’s politically impossible. I agree with Greyghost when he said “A woman will vote security over freedom every time.” Women don’t materially care about abstract ideas like liberty, freedom or responsibility. They respond to panem et circenses, which is why all of our political candidates dish that out. Women, much more than men, vote as a block and any candidate who doesn’t pander to them can’t win. And can you imagine a candidate running on the platform of “Look, chicks, this Great Society crap has gone on long enough and is like a cancer that is removing all the incentives for productive behavior, so we’re going to take the right to vote away from you for a couple of generations while we fix everything?” He’d instantly be branded a crackpot by virtually all women (probably including Susan) and a huge pool of manginas. Even candidates who run on a less extreme platform (e.g., Tea party) get branded
So the problem is intractable for the moment. Big Government in its present form can only be sustained by borrowing and fiat currency manipulation. That works pretty well until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t it usually fails pretty spectacularly. (See the history of Mexico, Agentina, Brazil, Russia, Germany and lots of banana republics in the last hundred years for a few examples.) It’s coming here, too, because present levels of government spending can’t be supported by net productivity at any level of taxation. It’s just a matter of time until we have our own currency crisis because the political will to solve anything responsibly just isn’t there. When the end of free government cheese comes to an end, the provider beta will look relatively more attractive to women.
@OffTheCuff:
I think it’s harder to separate women into distinct groups. There really is no Madonna/whore division: all female behavior fits on a distribution like a bell curve. Furthermore, the same girl can appear like a good girl in front of the “nice guy,” but go sleep with the bad boy/cad/alpha on the first or second date. Of course there are extremes, who behave like (A). The problem is that set (A) is very hard to distinguish from the subset of (B) who will string him along for free dinners and attention. (As I was many times before taking the red pill.) The only way to be able to distinguish between true (A) girls and (B) girls is to have a lot of experience with women… and the only way to get a lot of experience with women is to seduce a bunch of them. The guy that (A) is looking for isn’t the dorky guy who makes mistakes in seduction, dresses funny and doesn’t escalate. To catch (A) you have to be confident with women but not come off as a cad. You actually need pretty good ‘game’ to catch an (A).
This is the part where I yawn. Dalrock, your board needs some smiley icons. I participate on some other chat boards where you can add all kinds of “smiley” icons to your post. If this board had an “eye rolling” icon, then I could use it in response to statements like the above. Young women simply aren’t good judges of male character, and their ability to discern between a man who will truly commit, a man who will just troll her along and waste her fertile years, and a man who is just a cad is pretty limited. Youth and beauty truly are a curse on young women: at the peak of their power they don’t have the discretion to use it for their best benefit. You can tell a 22-year-old but you can’t tell her much. Her hamster just runs too fast, drunk on her own sexual power.
detinennui32
With the way women are bombared with the view of men as creeps, jerks, liars, and bafoons, at every turn thru out the culture. Women will never encourage a man to be Alpha. Also a womean encouraging alpha in her man is not very romantic. ( “he should just know”) The goal IMHO for any man that has an interest in this subject to be to get as many men as possible off the blue pill.
The man you described in your comment is a typical nice guy tale. You seem like a thought man with sense and I would love to work with a 12 year old version of that man to make him some one my daughter would want. I have 10 year old and 8 year old daughters and i asked them about justin Bieber and both answered in unison that he was a wimpy guy. That was a “tell’ that I think sailed over my wife’s head but I know what it meant. A beta man that will apply game to the same level of purpose that they apply to their over all sense of honesty and hard work in general will save the west.
It is truly an Alpha world. I’ve been stuck in loveless/sexless LTR’s for almost 30 years of my life, while my friend who never held a job longer than 5 months, is 60 pounds overweight, drinks and smokes to excess just came by show me his latest conquest: Two beautiful women who claimed to be in a committed same-sex relationship passed him around for a weekend.
I’m hardly a passive Beta, but I find no joy in manipulating women, and at 43, I don’t care. Women don’t interest me anymore. However, at least my GF never pressures me on marriage. She is well aware that there’s no point in buying the cow when the milk dried up 6 years ago!
This is the new norm in relationships. Disgruntled men, who could give a crap if their partners left or not, and confused, entitled, princesses befuddled by their lack of power in the SMP.
Really, MGTOW seems the only reasonable answer. Whether or not women get their stuff together is academic. It certainly won’t change in my lifetime.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36498826@N02/6155679559/in/photostream
greenlander
Purpose of MGTOW and the pushing of the pick up artist is one way of removing the incentives even with the government in the way. The only real obstacle is a way for men to control their fertility with out cooperation from a woman. (A male pill.)
Feminist take on Nice Guy™
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/06/12/nice-guys/
@ greyghost:
Agreed 100% and thanks.
I have a daughter and a son. For my son I’m trying to teach him the best I know how not to make the same mistakes I did.
I will teach him:
1. Get out there and talk to people. Do not sit in your room, watching TV or surfing the internet. Get a good group of male friends. Don’t ditch them just because you have a GF. Approach girls. Care about your physical appearance.
2. Rejection is going to happen. There is no way around it. You will have something like an 85% to 90% approach rejection rate. For every successful approach there will be 9 rejections.
3. Whwn you’re rejected, shake it off and go immediately to the next set.
4. When you have a relationship breakup, figure out what, if anything, you did wrong, make the necessary corrections, and get back out there.
5. If a girl flakes or LJBFs you, blow her out.
6. Do not fear ending a relationship that no longer works. If you want a relationship with another woman, you will probably be able to get one.
7. A woman acting like an entitlement princess, attention whore, status whore or needy/clingy will not get better and isn’t worth the hassle and aggravation. You need to end it.
8. Ignore fitness tests.
This will lead to a growing number of 30-something and 40-something never-married women, absent some change in social practices. Because hypergamy is not going to go away, ever.
That, or it could just lead them to settle–after all, any guy is better than no guy.
Chels – ”That, or it could just lead them to settle–after all, any guy is better than no guy.”
Oops! It appears that you accidentally hit the “post comment” button before you finished your sentence.
”That, or it could just lead them to settle–after all, any guy is better than no guy…for now”
There, fixed it for you.
And, that’s really the problem with “settling”, now isn’t it. You take what you can get right away, because you cannot get what you really wanted. But then your stuck, and wanting to see if you can’t maybe trade-up to something better.
The Holy Grail of male empowerment would be private, safe, effective male birth control. Sure the vasectomy counts but it’s way too permanent.
Men are already the gatekeepers to commitment. Imagine when men become the gatekeepers to reproduction? That’s some serious civilization change, right there..
@Chels, slwerner:
“That, or it could just lead them to settle–after all, any guy is better than no guy…for now.”
This is a really important point, and one that many women simply miss. If a woman settles, she always feels like she missed out. Her beta husband no longer seems so attractive 20 years and 50 pounds later.
I’ve recently taken this mental attitude with my own wife of 15 years. It’s unspoken but goes something like this:
“I know I wasn’t everything you wanted. I know you didn’t get everything you wanted when you married me. I know I wasn’t your first sexual partner. And hey, I didn’t get everything I wanted in you, and you weren’t my first sex partner either. I got most of what I wanted, and everything I needed. I love you, I want you to be my last sexual partner, and I am committed to our marriage. I expect the same attitude from you.
I know you are human, and female, and hypergamous. I know I have to bring the tingle and excitement, or you’ll either (1) become miserably unhappy; or (2) start straying and wandering. So I’m going to do my best to give you that. I expect you to respond, to keep yourself reasonably attractive, and to keep yourself faithful to me. I will lead. I expect you to follow my lead and provide me with counsel if you feel strongly about the direction I’m going.
Although I love you very much and want our marriage to work, you are not irreplaceable. Any move by you into adultery, abandonment, abuse or addiction will almost certainly end our marriage. My policy on infidelity is zero tolerance. If you cheat on me, we’re done. I won’t tolerate maltreatment in private or any kind of disrespect, public or private. These will be confronted and met with pushback. I won’t stay married to you if the maltreatment continues and crosses the line into abuse.
I might not be able to make you love me. I cannot stop you from following your hypergamous instincts if you find a man who you believe is higher value than I, if you so choose. I can, however, force you to make a clear choice, and I can insist that you live with the consequences of the choices you make.”
“Men are already the gatekeepers to commitment. Imagine when men become the gatekeepers to reproduction? That’s some serious civilization change, right there..”
I can just imagine the sound of the shaming language at jet engine decibel levels being directed at men for not allowing women to have a child, err…… hostage, err…… annuity, err…… meal ticket.
Detin, all that sounds reasonable..How is the situation btw?
Fine, chels.
Given enough time the short term solution sets the stage for a longer term one, as the culture is changed one good decision at a time.
Very good position I’m usually a results orientated person and want big results right there, but I had been recently reading some marketing books to sell my books and there is one about how Starbucks became a great business selling coffee one cup at the time. I think this is probably the best approach to no despair. changing the SMP one person at the time and in the long run it will work, long is the part I need to accept.
Instead, I see it more like this. There *is* a small group (A) of “good girls” who are really cad-resistant, so being a dbag will never work on them, fair enough. Maybe you’re one, along with other outliers like Stephenie. The vast majority of girls (B) are in-between on a continuum. Some will make a mistake or two, some will make lots of mistakes and rationalize it away. Then there’s thesmall group (C), perhaps the size of the cad-resistant ones, who are the sluts.
This is a very good breakdown and I happen to agree. I usually have a rule of 10-80-10 about many social behaviors including sexual selection, hence the ones in the middle are the ones screwing everything up and I think that is were society came from, regulating the majority in the middle with incentives for monogamy and choosing dads, while severely punishing rotating polyandry, cheating and choosing cads. Feminists love to say how unhappy women in the past were but I wouldn’t be surprised if only 10% hated the kitchen and their traditional roles and with their campaign they managed to convince a huge portion of the 80% that they were indeed unhappy and they would be happier if they had the things the “average” male had, although we know they only register for Alpha men so it was what the minority of men had.
I personally consider myself a Beta Lover though not necessarily a Cad-resistant. To resist cads there should be something to resist too and since I don’t have any attraction to cads, is not like I’m actively blocking them, they just register in “Ewww” box right away, YMMV.
Young women simply aren’t good judges of male character, and their ability to discern between a man who will truly commit, a man who will just troll her along and waste her fertile years, and a man who is just a cad is pretty limited.
You should check on the loving advice thread of HUS, there is some women ickied at the idea of their fathers doing the talk, society had fathers to serve as filters at the age most young women have no idea what a real man is, but the way women are raised now they rather hear nothing about their sex lives from their parents. It reminds me of the Jezebel’s calling a dad creep because he asked what to do when a daughter had slutty friends one of the commenter say that if he cares so much about her daughter friends sex lives he is a creep or something along those lines…really change has a ton lot of roadblocks everywhere and guys are only hearing “shame, shame. shame” to every feedback they might offer hard for them to wake up to the reality among so much background noise. Welcome to Matrix.
The Male Pill, the restorer of politeness
“Nice” and “confident” are not mutually exclusive.”
Lol.
Oh, that’s a good one. Ok, yes, nice and confident are not mutually exclusive according to Merriam Webster, but according to the Encyclopedia Womanica, here are what the words actually mean, and you’ll see why I find this expression so funny in just a moment:
Nice (nye’ ss) (adj) A creepy man, a stalker, a desperate creep, a “looser”,(most of them can’t spell loser correctly anymore),an almost-rapist, sometimes, a fictional creature women claim to want to have a relationship with who has no personality of his own but is essentially a eunuch who wants to buy and do things for women without receiving anything in return from them except occasional abuse.
Confident (CON’ fuh’ dint) (adj) An exciting man. An unemployed crack dealer. An ACTUAL rapist. A sociopath who physically and sexually assaults everyone in sight because he is overcompensating for abuse he suffered as a child. An ACTUAL loser. A punk who makes up for his personal, social, and financial shortcomings by acting as if the world owes him something and stealing or coercing everything he has from other people; also a male role model for women.
These are the true definitions of the words, according to women, as can be easily discovered by simple observation.Also, according to women, all men fall into one of these two camps, making you inferior no matter which set of traits are most prominent, the only difference is that the “confident” man gets laid. The 80% of us who fall in the middle do not exist at all.
TL;DR
Nice is code for “creepy”,even when it means “nice” in the traditional sense.
Confident is code for “psychopath” and actually never means “confident” in the traditional sense, as in an assertive but positive person. I don’t think women even have an understanding of that sense of the word, because every time they are being, in their own words, “confident”, they are actually acting like the damaged male psychopath described above.
@slwerner: “If women were clever enough to take the tact of choosing an upper-beta “nice guy” and encouraging him to be more alpha, not only could they help him retain his good (non-douchebag) qualities, but they won’t have to compete so fiercely (sexually) to land a guy that they can find long-term attraction to.”
I think most women want men to be perceived as alpha when they meet them. No matter how he got there, i.e. being a natural, having practised game etc. Training her man makes her feel like she got a fake alpha. Although women do that with make-up, high-heels etc. all the time. Also compare: http://xsplat.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/women-cant-be-direct-because-the-instinct-to-lead-men-on-into-the-slavery-of-the-friend-zone-is-a-time-suck-that-benefits-women/
Anonymous Reader – ”Men out earn women in the aggregate because there are more men at the extreme far right of income distribution than women”
slwerner
I once had the opportunity to (try to) explain the apparent income gap to a colleague (a woman making ~$100k using the fact that she was a fan of a local sports figure who (at the time) had just signed a contract for ~$10 million/yr.
Of course, in so doing you ran headlong into her Apex fallacy. The more I study applied female psychology, the more I encounter Apex in various permutations. I’m coming to believe that Apex is a standard form of processing reality for women, likely tied to their hypergamy. The hypergamy engine leads women to focus on the biggest Alpha around that they have a chance to snare, and that must all but inevitably lead them to regard Alpha men as “men”, i.e. the norm, “what all guys are”. Couple this with Affirmative Action /EEOC mandates and the contempt that women naturally hold for beta men, and what do we see? An army of frustrated women stamping their feet on the glass floor they rest on, as they yearn upward at Alpha’s shrieking “Where are all the good men? Why can’t I snag one?. one minute and Unfair! Men get all the goodies! Unfair the next.
Apex fallacy, a bug or a feature, it appears to clearly be embedded in the female mental O/S.
@Anonymous Reader: This reminds of this famous craigslist post: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/beautiful-25-year-old-girl
Girl says:
“I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not fromNew York. I’m looking to get married to a guy whomakes at least half amillion a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle-class in New York, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.”
Male banker replies:
“This led to an equally candid response from a (male) merchant banker: In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity. You’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35, stick a fork in you!”
RL – ”I think most women want men to be perceived as alpha when they meet them. No matter how he got there…”
Of course you are correct. That is what woman want. That’s why my suggestion starts off with the words ”If women were clever…”, because that “if” is a big one.
I was just suggesting a highly idealize way for some virtuous (and wanting to stay that way) woman to go about getting a man who will be alpha enough for them to admire and form a lasting and stable bond with.
I was basically offering it up against Susan’s overly simplistic advice to women to forgo the cad and pick the dad, which isn’t terribly realistic because, as you point out, ”… most women want men to be perceived as alpha when they meet them…”.
The problem is, as Susan’s visual aids in her video allude to, those top ~20% of men who are already perceived as alpha have lots of options as ~80% of women are hoping to “land” one of them. As she notes, that creates pronounced “competition”, which leads to the liberal employment of sex by women in a more-often-than-not futile effort to try to gain an edge over their competition.
My suggestion is a way to make Susan’s pitch more attractive to women, in say the ~50-80 percentiles to begin to revert back to the older style of pairing-off based on comparable SMP rankings (her first visual aid), but encouraging them that they can look for a man in the same ranking range who is a decent man who just needs a bit more alpha character to round out his comparable attractiveness to her.
I also noted that quite a few women seem to be reading Althol Kay’s work. Thus, I’d like to believe the potential exists for some quality women, who don’t want to have to put-out to compete, and who have come to understand how alpha-ness can be built up in a man, to take the initiative to find a man of comparable rank to themselves who they can encourage the development of “good alpha” traits in.
Perhaps it is wishful thinking. But, perhaps less so that just telling women to “settle”.
“Nice is code for “creepy”,even when it means “nice” in the traditional sense.
Confident is code for “psychopath” and actually never means “confident” in the traditional sense, as in an assertive but positive person. I don’t think women even have an understanding of that sense of the word, because every time they are being, in their own words, “confident”, they are actually acting like the damaged male psychopath described above.”
Hehe! I have never met a self professed “confident” woman who did not fit that bill. The few women who are confident in the traditional sense do not use that word.
Nice guys are boring and bland, wussy, and often needy/clingy, all of which is unattractive. That’s why the so called “nice guys” finish last. And as many are figuring out, Game is the answer. It’s not a magic bullet though, it’s a holistic self-improvement to become interesting, shed the wussy aspects of oneself, and to just become a cool fun person overall. That’s not being a douchebag, but it does put you up in their 20% of guys getting laid regularly if that’s your thing.
Nutz – ” Nice guys are boring and bland, wussy, and often needy/clingy, all of which is unattractive. That’s why the so called “nice guys” finish last.”
I just got around to reading the following post by blogger Whiskey
Anna Faris and What’s Your Number: Redefining Female Sexuality
Which includes these observations that seem to echo what you’ve stated:
* “Women have been trying to tell men in the West what is wrong. They just are not sexy enough, dammit! Useless, inferior, beta males.”
* “If your girlfriend does not want to sleep with him, he’s a useless, inferior, beta male.”
* “That this is not a realistic expectation, for the 99.99% of women who lack the supermodel beauty of say, Giselle Bundchen needed to attract a Tom Brady in the first place, has not yet penetrated. But clearly women are not happy with all these partners, preferring in the main to have one great, sexy, dominant, super-guy. And complaining when they don’t get one.”
I wonder if we do a disservice to the men pre feminism by suggesting that they were all a bunch of beta shlubs who had wives simply because women were so dependant on them. When I look back at my grandfather and a multitude of great uncles, these were manly men. And not of the asshole tradition. Many served in the war, had their own businesses, religious to varying degrees, and were involved in the community. They were masculine, faithful as far as I know, and confident.
My grandfather was a man at 14. He went into business with his 13 year old brother building barns. He spent the next few years learning everything he could about construction, and he and his brother had a very successful construction business, adding several other business ventures to the mix. By the time he was 12, he knew how to hunt, fish, track, build a house , fix and repair farm equipment,and work a farm.
We live in an age of prolonged teen age hood. I wonder if men carried themselves differently back then because they knew how to survive on their own. Really survive, without the help of civilization or the government or fema in cases of disasters. Without the electric company or the gas company or pizza delivery. Able to survive in a war zone. We keep hearing that women want the asshole alphas, but I wonder if they are just settling for any vestige of strong manhood they can get. Because prolonged teen age hood has made even the memory of manhood fuzzy and distant.
jv,
I think you’re getting close, but there is also an old saying:
Behind every great man is a great woman. Women have forgotten how to play that role (hint: it’s not a one-way street). Where have all the good men gone? Women quit making them.
There’s plenty of blame to go around in all directions.
A couple hopeful notes:
Strauss and Howe predicted a lot of this stuff 25 years ago in their Generations book. By the 80-year-cycle they’ve identified for gender-roles we hit max androgyny five-ten years ago and so are feeling the effects of that today, but the pendulum has already started to swing back.
The teenagers I work with are very much more into different gender roles than my x-er peers who bore the brunt of the androgyny wave (you’ll notice that the bitterest betas are x-ers). The girls still aren’t lacking much for self-esteem (except in traditional male pursuits, which they are avoiding dramatically – a female colleague of mine who teaches computer programming is down to three girls with nearly 100 boys, makes her worry about the future of feminism), but I don’t get the sense that its at the expense of the boys, who they get along with remarkably well – with a lot a good-natured teasing both ways.
Less boys are going to college or are on the honors track, but I think that’s just because they caught on to the bullshit earlier and the girls are now starting to suspect it too, and so don’t disrespect the boys much for their different choices. A lot less status with that degree (and all the loans) in this job market.
One thing that has amazed me is all the IOI’s I get from female students. It’s not douchebaggery that’s earning those – its the, yes, confident and no-nonsense, but wholly beta-style concern for the good of my students that does it.
It’s a far cry from the values x-er women displayed and display, that’s for sure.
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The problem with this video is it completely ignore the male perspective. Men want to have sex with a lot of women. That is very desireable, and we will make trememndous efforts to make that happen.
Women waiting for the “nice guy” isn’t going to get Betas laid.
I think an analogy that Athol has used to illustrate the dynamics which go into a successful marriage – that of the Captain of the ship and his first mate – fits here extremely well. It might be said that a good marriage requires a good Captain AND a good first mate. It isn’t that women “quit making good men”, it is that they thought they wanted to have the Captains spot and started competing with men for it rather than perfecting their own art of being the best first mate they could manage to be.
There is a bit of truth in the idea of women pushing their husbands to achieve more and become more alpha. I am reminded of a scene from the 1971 movie “The Last Picture Show” (Cybil Shepherd’s breakout role) between Cybil’s character (Jacy Farrow) and her mother (Lois Farrow, played by Ellen Burstein), regarding the girls unambitious beta boyfriend –
Great to see you still commenting here, zed.
@ deciderius
I’ve noticed that the younger set are more into gender differences than gen x. A nicer bunch too.
As a gen x woman, I think my saving grace was that I married very young. Sadly , my husband, like many in my age group, couldn’t keep away from dangerous flirtations with drugs. It was the undoing of our marriage.
@ zed
The captain first mate analogy is one that my marriage lived by. Again, marrying young was a good thing in this regard. You have more real life application to figuring out solutions, less time being indoctorined by the culture , university, friends and family.
Ms. Walsh
In the meantime, there will be winners and losers. Game gives men the ability to win. Managing sexual activity carefully while selecting for positive traits (and filtering for negative traits) gives women the ability to “win.”
For some definition of “win”. It appears to me that your definition is “college aged women get married”, and maybe have bay-bees so someone gets a grandchild. A short term goal that has definable victory conditions. It appears to me that the only reason you care about the current SMP/MMP is because women are finally being affected, and therefore if there was a way to turn the clock back just 10 years, you’d go for it.
If it hurts women and men, you care – but only because it harms women.
All right, then I’ll explain a piece of reality to you a bit differently. Divorce theft is real, whether you like it or not. This bad news is more and more commonly known by young men, the age group who might marry your young women. Some of them know it the hard way, by having seen their own fathers put into the divorce industrial machine, others learn it other ways. The word is filtering back from the 28-50 year old men to the younger men of the dangers of marriage.
So it isn’t going to be enough for your young women to filter men; they are going to have to learn to be worthy of the men they seek. And that means, among other things, that men are human beings – not robots, not sperm/cash vending machines, not pack mules. One thing men care about is whether promises are kept or not, and that words mean things.
So if your “win” isn’t just getting married but includes being married, you might want to be aware of the bigger picture, and how men are harmed by it. On the other hand, if your “win” is just “first one down the aisle”, then you are arguing that the current legal / cultural configuration, which causes harm to men and their children with monotonous regularity, is just fine except for a little tweaking to make it easier for teh wimmenz to get married. If that’s the case, then you are no friend of men.
Desiring to cause harm to men is misandry, period. So which is it, Walsh?
PS: Do tell me how you are able to detect entitled women with a glance, some time. I’m definitely willing to learn your methods.
“Behind every great man is a great woman”
You mean beside every man. Men and women lead each other in different ways in the relationship, and this is why the “Captian/First Mate” thing is distasteful to me.
Susan is right, women will have to change before these men change. What men need in life, though, is to be strong and good; they shouldn’t let women define them.
Desiderius, you’re a wise man with smart students; women are attracted to kindness more often than the bar baristas would have you think.
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greenlander wrote September 20, 2011 at 12:32 pm:
Of course you can use some interesting (unicode) characters:
☺ (White Smiling Face)
☻ (Black Smiling Face)
☹ (White Frowning Face)
Also perhaps
♣ (black club suit)
♦ (black diamond suit)
♥ (black heart suit)
♠ (black spade suit)
† (dagger)
‡ (double dagger)
/ Kari Hurtta
Susan Walsh: a dyed-in-the-wool milquetoast Baby Boomer.
Her background reveals more than her deluded ideas – Ivy league school alumni in a useless degree, once a high-powered alpha female whose job was to “identify challenges and obstacles and form strategies and solutions” for Fortune 500 companies and a retired carousel rider (when her dating options weaned out).
Of course, while most Americans made a decent living in the 60s, Susan was the rich girl who rebelled against her parents values. The same class that brought you feminism and liberal thought (read:feeling). The same class that ditched anti-materialistic and quasi-spiritual hippie tropes for mass consumerism and yoga mats.
Baby boomers like Susan “still got it” and “know what’s best for the kids”. They will remain selfish (despite unselfishness being a harpy’s favorite quality in a man), will remain immature and will remain ‘hip’ and ‘trendy’, lecturing the young on how to find your way on a big bad world that has massively transformed since the late 70s.
Susan will remain oblivious to the fact that her ilk ruined male-female relationships and will continue to live in her expired theme park of delusion till the system implodes and the digital natives, entering a scarce and cut-throat job market, will look at her with scorn and ridicule.
In the meantime, Susan can take her professional question-dodging skills and her overstretched rhetoric and RUN FOR OFFICE. Then we’ll see a more recent (and well aged!) face from her.
I can’t see the video. D:
[D: Susan has changed her view on this, so I assume that is why she has since made the video private.]