Social Commentary | Page 2 | Girls Chase

Social Commentary

Zero-Sum Power Dynamics & Empowering Others

Chase Amante's picture
zero-sum powerWhen people want power from you, they may pretend it’s in your interest, too. But is it? Power grabs may be cooperative, competitive, or competitive masquerading as cooperative.

I'm going to give you a way to think about power that will make many things in life clearer to you.

It is the perspective that contests of power are always zero-sum games, where anytime one person gains power, another loses it. There is no 'free creation of power' from nothing into a kind of power void. Power is always either seized or yielded by one person or group from/to others.

However, it is possible for individuals or entities to work together against external competitors to increase power jointly, at the expense of some external opponent.

You have probably been taught to not think about power this way.

You have been taught that power is 'inclusive'; that you can have power, and someone else can have power, and everyone can have power!

But the actual fact of the matter is power is exclusive; the more power one person or entity accrues, the more someone or something else loses it.

This is necessary to understand for interpersonal dynamics, and understanding societal power dynamics as well.

“20% of the Men Are Doing 80% of the Dating”

Chase Amante's picture
20% men20% of the men are getting 80% of the women. But are they? We play it out, going step-by-step, looking at all the numbers.

"20% of the men are doing 80% of the dating."

Such goes the conventional wisdom pumped out of the manosphere these days.

I have heard this statistic bandied about just about everywhere, including by guys in our own community.

It's ubiquitous.

However, I've never seen anyone actually work out the numbers on it.

What would a city look like if 20% of the men did 80% of the dating?

You need a fairly good grasp of the 80/20 principle (also called the Pareto principle, first identified in 1896) to really understand this.

I recently reread the book 80/20 Sales and Marketing, by Perry Marshal, a force behind the re-popularization of the concept in the mid-2010s.

First, I'm going to introduce you to how 80/20 works.

Then, we're going to put all the single people in a hypothetical city into 80/20, and we'll see what that looks like, and how closely it matches what we see in the modern sexual marketplace.

Are You Free or Do the Glowing Screens Direct You?

Chase Amante's picture
free from glowing screensThere’s one reality on the glowing screens. There’s another one in the realm of the five senses. You can only live in one of them. Which one do you choose?

The other day I talked a bit about screens warping men's perceptions and making them think women all lust after men with giant muscles.

This is not the only way screens have been warping people's perceptions, however.

It is just the tip of the screenberg.

For some years I, like most people I suspect, had been held increasingly captive by the state of the world.

Popular revolts, widespread protests, political polarization, transnational saber-rattling, and of course, unprecedented government lockdowns resulting in a rolling back of civil liberties in a way unprecedented since the flowering of modern liberal democracy.

Not to mention masks everywhere, gym closures, nightlife closures... and a bizarre new dystopian system where the initiated gleefully compete to boast about their excellent compliance with the rules, even as they label and shun those who refuse to comply with the same facility.

In the midst of this cultural collapse/upheaval, I've talked to more and more people who've become much more apathetic about things they used to care about than they ever were before.

The decline of dating is only one example; it's a widespread one, and one I covered (along with the statistics to back it up) here.

Yet even I found myself slowly sinking into a tar pit of progressive apathy, transfixed by the state of apparent global chaos. When you wake up and check the state of affairs and it's one item of shrieking disastrous apocalyptic news after another, who has willpower enough to do anything worthwhile with the rest of his day?

But what happens when you don't wake up and check a bunch of things... but instead just live your life?

Post-COVID Nightlife Observations

Alek Rolstad's picture
post-covid nightlife observationsNightlife has opened up many places again, now that COVID restrictions have lifted. How has women’s nightlife behavior changed – and how’s it remained the same?

Hey guys!

Today’s post is sociological. I’ll share my latest nightlife observations post-COVID-reopening. As I write this in August 2021, many have been desocialized from measures adopted due to the great COVID-19 pandemic.

If you live somewhere where things are not reopening yet, this post will still be useful since it can give you some idea of what to expect when reopening happens.

Looks-Money-Status: Has the Game Changed?

Chase Amante's picture
looks money statusThe world’s changed, and so has the game… for some men. But the changes to the game that’ve come to looks-status-money men haven’t come to all men. Why’s that so?

On my article about your opinions of women betraying your success (or lack thereof) with women, a reader writes

Hey Chase,

How Playboys' Personalities Differ from Ordinary Men's

Chase Amante's picture
playboy agreeablenessPlayboys aren’t like ordinary men. Students must realize that while you can adopt the playboy’s material to have more success, his goals will tend to be different than theirs.

Yesterday I wrote an article on having healthier relationships by focusing on turning relationships mutual, rather than adversarial. Not 'compromise', not 'give and take', mind you; mutual.

When I wrote that article, I dove into the research on agreeableness. I thought agreeableness might play a big role in that article, but it ended up with a small part.

However, I did find it relevant for a different conversation I was in. It consisted of a few long-time players I know, both in their 40s, who are in the midst of their wife hunts. The discussion they had, which I joined in, was why do so few playboys and seduction coaches marry beautiful, wholesome wives from their home countries in conventional monogamous marriages?

Obviously there are men who marry beautiful, wholesome wives from their home countries in conventional monogamous marriages. But this is typically not seduction coaches or natural playboys. Instead these men normally do one of the following:

  • Marry a (sometimes beautiful) girl from their home country but have a non-monogamous marriage (i.e., they're swingers or they have an open marriage)

  • Marry a girl from their home country in a monogamous marriage, but the girl is very unattractive (even if the guy in question historically dated good-looking girls)

  • Marry a beautiful, wholesome girl into a wholesome relationship, but the girl is not from their home country (even if the guy has dated more girls from his home country than any other point of origin)

Their concern was, "Maybe the guys who are teaching this stuff and the guys who are learning this stuff are not so perfectly aligned."

The friends I had this discussion with are fairly advanced playboys, who have been in the seduction community for 15+ years, have perfectly respectable notch counts, and have studied under many of the more notable pickup instructors over the years.

Both are in the midst of 'wife hunts' and, struggling with this (i.e., they lay hot girls, but then those girls don't stick around... or they get girls who want to stick around, but those girls aren't hot, or they have problems), have started to question some of their methods and teachers.

The question I'll pose for today is... what is the difference between advanced seducers and ordinary men?

And does this mean if you are like 98% of men, and you are just an ordinary guy searching for an ordinary wife, you should be doing something different than what these teachers tell you?

Men Need Their Own Space to Stay Psychologically Healthy

Chase Amante's picture
male spacesMen more and more find themselves enmeshed with women in every aspect of their lives. But this isn’t healthy for men – or men’s relationships with women.

In a recent comment, on the first article in my series on ghosting, a reader asked about feeling jealous over young women's seeming comparative ease in the dating market:

Chase when I read your analysis on how men ages 18 to 25 always struggle the most when it comes to relationships with women I just can't help,but feel cynical and jaded with how unbalanced the marketplace is. I'm headed towards the latter end of that age range and haven't had much of a dating life. I'm sympathethic towards women and know that they endure struggles of their own in life and in dating and I genuinely love women and recognize that most women are sweet and nice,but thinking about how much less women struggle compared to men and how they don't have to work as hard to improve their dating lives or even HAVE a dating life which a lot of men don't have I sometimes lack empathy for them and some bitterness will creep in if something reminds me of this imbalance.

I know in a old article you said we shouldn't compare ourselves with women because we're not competing with them,but it almost feels like men are engaged with women in a tug a war and men are at a disadvantage at least in the West. A moderately attractive woman will have significantly more options than a moderately attractive man and don't have to go through the lengths and struggles a man has to do to even be a viable dating option. Even a older less fertile women will still have suitors,but a older man may not.

I'm working on myself so i'm not just ranting about how difficult dating as a unestablished man is while not doing anything to change or improve. I've taken coaching,a bootcamp, and have a online group where I can discuss game with other people,set approach goals and hold each other accountable. Early on when you were learning pickup what helped you accept the uneven dynamics of dating in the West? Does it just take some success for you to be at ease with how the dynamics are?Do you really have to be in the 1% like some coaches suggest for dating to finally work in your favor and to be at an advantage over women?

Of course, the answer for me is that when I was clueless with women, a guy whom women unequivocally rejected, who could never get dates, and was always alone, I never felt jealous of women or felt like I was in a tug-of-war with them.

Instead, my competitors were men. Women were the objects of my pursuit; men were the competitors I was going up against (and losing against).

We don't envy the fox eluding us in a chase. We envy the other hunter who catches her.

However, this phenomenon of more and more men envying women, and on the other side more and more women envying men, is one I think worth a closer look.

Because it is affecting more and more people.

It is leading more and more people into some very weird and unproductive places.

Game Is in Your DNA (But It Might Be Suppressed)

Chase Amante's picture

By: Chase Amante

game is with usThe ability to meet, flirt, and seduce (i.e., ‘game’) is embedded in the genes of every man. Unlocking that ability, then honing it with practice, rigor, and skill, is another thing…

In a comment on another article of mine, reader Ciro says

Historically speaking game as you call it, was never a factor in the past for getting women. Women needed men to provide for them, that's why game was never something you had to learn. Your grandfather and my grandfather didn't game women because a) they didn't have to and b) they wouldn't even know how to. Who would have taught them? Only recently women have become indipendent financially, now they can choose their men. They don't have to settle for the unattractive guy with a good job anymore when they are 21 only (yet some still do at a certain age). If game was a natural thing then why do most men have no game whatsoever? Why isn't game imprinited in our DNA if that is how you attract women? It should be natural.

This is a position I've seen around the Internet, on men's sites, and all over the place, really.

At first blush, it might seem to feel correct. There was no Girls Chase in 1960, after all! Nobody needed to read How to Make Girls Chase before the Summer of Love! They just went and hooked up!

However, it relies on some fundamental misunderstandings of why seduction became so prominent in the 2000s and 2010s (before sliding back into obscurity again in the 2020s).

The fact is, game has always been with us -- and it is, indeed, embedded within our DNA.

FaceTune: The Online Dating Scourge

Chase Amante's picture

By: Chase Amante

facetuneWomen on dating apps use FaceTune to make themselves look like completely different people. If you’ve wondered why your online dates don’t look like their pics, FaceTune is part of it.

For years I've told men to get off social media and limit their exposure to online dating (it is okay to use it, but it should only be a supplement, never the main course).

Nevertheless, we get guys pouring in who continue to ask the same questions again and again:

  • "How can I be really HOT on social media and build a huge following?"

  • "What do I need to do to CLEAN UP in online dating?"

  • "Can you use social media to set up lots of dates & get laid?"

  • "Why don't you guys cover more online dating tips? Meeting people in-person is so 2000s!"

But of course, get guys to be honest with you about the results they get from online dating and social media and they will admit they're let down by most of their matches.

15 years ago you could do online dating and sometimes get catfished by some chick who showed up 100 lbs. heavier than her photograph or mysteriously way uglier than she looked in her pictures. It happened to me a few times.

But if you knew what to look for, you could generally tell; fat girls have their ways of hiding fat in their photos, which girls who aren't fat don't need to turn to. Ugly girls use angles and lighting to fool the eye, while good-looking girls simply take normal pictures all straight-on. So you could just keep an eye out for 'fat girl angles' and 'ugly girl tricks' and avoid any girl whose pictures consisted of nothing but those, and you'd almost never get catfished.

Now, though, it's an epidemic, with women showing up in-person who look nothing like what they do online. What's the cause?

Based on my discussion with a few friends recently, the cause seems to be a very specific one: an app that's been on the market for years, but has gradually gone from being a thing a few women used here and there to touch up their photos a bit, to something every girl online dating in some places will use heavily simply to keep herself in the game.

The name of that app is FaceTune.

Mouse Utopia: Are We Living in the Human Version?

Chase Amante's picture
mouse utopiaJohn B. Calhoun’s rat and mouse utopia studies show what happens in abundant-yet-overcrowded conditions. Ominously, his findings echo what we see around us in people today.

How much of our modern social ails can be understood by population pressures due to overcrowding?

Certainly we don't want for food, water, or things to do. Our economies are massive; massive enough to comfortably support everyone within them (and far more).

Yet, is this sufficient to produce a utopia... or have we run up on a physical limit that plunges us increasingly into dystopia?

In the 1960s, researcher John B. Calhoun coined the term 'behavioral sink' to describe the situation where behavior collapses due to overcrowding. Based on multiple studies performed by him and replicated by others, Calhoun discovered that mice in overcrowded situations tended to develop a series of pathologies that made them become increasingly dysfunctional socially.

Ultimately, the mice in the experiments became so dysfunctional that, despite plenty of food, water, and nesting areas, and despite being in perfect physical health, they became psychologically unable to reproduce, and completely died out.

What happened, and what can we learn?