Social Commentary

The most attractive thing to women is neither youth nor beauty. So why do so many guys think girls only want good-looking guys or young guys?

Okay, I want to talk about the “girls only date good-looking guys” or “girls only date young guys” thing. I have more intellectual articles against these positions and I’ll share them with you in a moment. But intellectual arguments aren’t always the best way to get the message across, especially when guys are deep in a certain viewpoint.

First let me share a comment from a reader of my “When Do You Get Too Old to Party or Meet Girls?” article from last week:

“Keep deluding yourself that youll be more attractive to women as you get older. I have never heard a younger woman say Kevin Spacy or Sean Connery was “hot.” Only older women. Women in the past had to settle down with older men because they didnt have the means of supporting themselves. Thats it. If she had the choice and the income theres no way she would choose him over a younger guy. Plus, do you think its right that older men had relationships and children with teenage girls? Its a pretty messed up system because a girl hasnt even lived her life, and you know if the girl could support herself theres no way she would go for that older man6. Girls go for older men because of convenience, not because of attraction.”

To which I responded with a screen grab of a bunch of young chicks swooning over Old Man Connery on Yahoo Answers, plus a picture of Sean having a merry laugh:

There are loads of men everywhere, including in the West, which is an environment more shifted in favor of younger men than anywhere else on Earth, who remain very attractive to younger women even into quite old age. And there are loads of men everywhere, including in the West, which is an environment more shifted in favor of good-looking men than anywhere else on Earth, who are very attractive to women despite plain or terrible faces. This is undeniable. The only way you can pretend these men don’t exist is if you plug your ears and shut your eyes and make loud noises to yourself every time one of these guys crosses your path.

But this willful blindness/ignorance guys engage in about this subject runs deeper than just “I don’t think that ever happens or if it does it must be super rare.” It’s actually about guys with zero or very little experience with women, who do not understand women, trying to tell men with lots of experience with women who understand women very well that actually those men have no idea what they are talking about and in fact women are actually some other way.

The guys who say stuff like this are never guys you would take woman advice from in the real world. From 30 feet away you can tell these guys don’t do well with girls and don’t understand them.

I’m not trying to pick on these guys. There are a lot of men who don’t understand women, and it’s always been that way historically. Women are hard to fathom. This entire website is dedicated to helping men who don’t understand women come to have a better understanding of them.

But when you get guys who do not understand women trying to talk about how they know women so well and that actually all these things that are commonplace things that happen with women are in fact impossible and never happen, you get this weird bizarro world perspective on dating emanating from certain corners of the male sectors of the Internet.

And we need to talk about that.

Girls play the role of cocktease or attention whore (or worse) because these roles can be fun. But what’s the psychology behind this kind of “fun”?

There are short term and long term impacts on the fruits of our actions in the mating game. In the short term, we can create a really fun seduction, great sex with a beautiful woman, and the potential beginning of an ongoing relationship. Some choose to stay at Point 2, while others go on to Point 3. In the long term, we have the power and ability to grow powerfully with another human, with or without children, as we also have the power to experience many different women. Unfortunately, we can also create an opportunity to ruin our lives through some unforeseen consequence of an action – perhaps the wrong action at the wrong time – or just merely dealing with the wrong person.

In our modern era, women hold immense power to dictate social ramifications of sexual encounters and relationships gone awry. In this more cautionary article, I wish to make you aware of some less-glamorous aspects of the mating game – situations that if not handled correctly can create extreme unhappiness, commitment problems, legal problems, and financial problems. Better to be aware of these as they are happening than to find yourself on the losing side of a challenge.

I recently picked up a book while visiting Boston, called Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne. This book was first published in 1964 and is meant to be a handbook for psychiatry, yet I felt compelled to write this article when I realized a strong connection between patterns outlined in the book and many firsthand experiences of myself and friends. The book is quite academic and covers far more than just sexual scenarios, so to save you from reading it (it was quite boring admittedly), I’ll cover some dynamic patterns I’ve seen repeatedly that may be confusing to participants in the game.

I hope this summary and analysis of Games People Play helps you identify how to handle complex social-sexual situations, which when mishandled, have resulted in life-altering lawsuits, loss of credentials, loss of work, and worse.

Inside every man is a beast. Yet how to use this beast in the context of civilization? In civil society, the man must tame his beast – but not kill it.

The end is nigh.

• In part 1 of this series, we discussed how we live in a primal and violent world that has little mercy for weakness.

• In part 2, we talked about how you need to cultivate a primal ferocity if you want to survive in this world, let alone thrive. This ferocity helps you socially and sexually.

• In part 3, we covered some habits and mannerisms that will help you cultivate and demonstrate your ferocity.

• Then, in the penultimate article, we covered how to transmute this animalistic energy into the bedroom and make your girl’s bed rock like a Flintstone.

Now, for the culmination of the series, I want to cover how to be primal but civilized and how to understand the difference between cold, civilized power and primal power.

What’s a normal day look like for a regular girl? Work, friends, gym, guys – lots of guys, of all kinds – and that’s just the start.

Monica’s phone alarm goes off. It’s 7:00 AM. “Ugh,” she groans. She stayed up too late to watch that stupid show again. It always seems like a great idea when she’s into it. And then it seems like dumbest, most vapid thing ever when she wakes up sleep deprived the next day. She slides her finger across the phone screen to disable the alarm, and rolls out of bed.

She shambles over to the bathroom, yanks her panties down, and plops down onto the seat. Pee hisses out. She feels relieved. She gives a few wipes, flushes the toilet, and gets up to go into the kitchen.

Breakfast... should she or shouldn’t she? She stares into her cupboard. She’s skipped it every other morning this week so far. “No breakfast” is part of her master plan to shed this light extra layer of blubber that’s crept onto her waistline. Nobody else seems to have realized she isn’t super super skinny anymore yet, but she’s realized it. Hunger overrules the desire to drop a few pounds and she pours herself a bowl of cereal. Well, at least it’s healthy cereal, she reasons. She munches on her breakfast at the table while she reads on her phone.

Looks like normal drama on her social media today. That crazy single mother Abigail in her network had posted another two-paragraph self-justification dressed up as life advice. This time she’d posted about how life is all about experience and travel and not being held back from going for the man you want. That got her a slew of likes and praise (“SO TRUE!”)... until Maria couldn’t help herself and weighed in: “That’s maybe also why 2 kids, 2 dads, still single though, right? #lifechoices.” The comments on the post exploded after that. Monica snorts out a laugh. Maria is her workmate who never held her tongue (or her punches). About 90% of the comments under Maria’s remark are other women scolding her. But Monica knows most of those women secretly hold opinions closer to Maria than to Abigail. She thinks about clicking ‘Like’ on Maria’s post, then decides she doesn’t need to get involved in that debacle.

After breakfast, she puts her bowl, spoon, and glass in the sink. There are a few days’ worth of dishes in there. Gotta clean those before they start to attract bugs, she thinks. She quick washes any milk and crumbs out of the bowl, then leaves it for a proper wash later.

She puts her hair up in a bun and takes a quick shower, using the handheld showerhead to rinse. She spends a little too long with the shower jet aimed at her clitoris. Then she moves down and rinses her legs. She gives herself a quick scrub with some soap and a pouf, then another rinse, then it’s out of the shower. She dresses herself in a neat, tidy little business-y outfit, brushes her teeth, does her hair, and grabs her purse and her duffle bag with gym clothes, then it’s out the door and off to work.

Despite the trappings of civilization, we’re all animalistic savages at heart. In Part 1 of this series, we’ll explore just how central to humans is sex.

We live in a brave new world.

Our hunter-gatherer days came to an end with the advent of agriculture, which allowed us to settle permanently in one location and call it home. This escape from the daily struggles of travel and hunting allowed us to build and to think.

Humanity gained the time to erect tall structures and new philosophies. These ideas seeped their way into every citizen's mind, and our animalistic natures began to shift into something different.

Eventually, this cohesion of custom and habit we call culture brought us to the next great leap – the Industrial Revolution. With new forms of power in our hands, modern technology was born.

Technology quickly evolved into what it is today, granting us the power to unleash our animal instincts with the touch of a button by sending some random girl across the sea a picture of our dick.

We may live in civilization, but we are still animals.

Our entire lives still revolve around the most basic of desires – to fuck, to eat, to kill, and to survive.

Despite our evolution, we still rely on leaders. We need someone to tell us what to do and how to think. And we choose the most powerful leaders (or at least the one who makes us feel more powerful). This was Donald Trump’s trump card in the U.S. election. With slogans like “Make America Great Again” and his focus on buzzwords like “winning,” he energized his base to feel like winners. Hillary Clinton, while very popular and persuasive in her own right, relied on victim mentalities and moral superiority. These make people feel safe, but not powerful. Whether it's through fear, respect, or love, we tend to choose the more powerful force to guide us.

We only value what is useful. If you are not creating, leading, or destroying on behalf of a culture, you are relegated to the bottom and given only the meager scraps of the resources. At the heart of all this is the “givers vs. takers” dichotomy. Those who provide value are, not so ironically, given the most in return. Powerful people are given passes for crimes and moral indignities that lower-value people are not. Whoever is useful to the herd survives. Whoever is not is left behind.

We pretend to act on logic or virtue, but this is an illusion. We act because of emotions. You cannot “logically act.” It’s an oxymoron. Logic isn’t a fuel for action, it’s the glue that binds thoughts together. You can want to do something then logically decide it’s not the optimal move – if you have good self-discipline – but even that “better, logical” decision is still based on emotion. You are sacrificing one desire that is recognized as short term or too dangerous for a long-term desire that will ultimately provide more pleasure. Nevertheless, the action is still motivated by emotion and feeling. Even the grandest philosophies and most noble virtues are inspired by emotion. We are forever animals looking for the greatest pleasure and the greatest resources of pleasure.

This is what civilization is – a big game in which we argue, fight, kill, and steal to achieve the greatest pleasures available.

There can be virtuous notions behind our killing and stealing, but it’s impossible to separate our desires from these acts.

And at the heart of this grand game we play?

Sex.

Men don’t always stick around for a relationship after sex. Is this wrong and is there anything bad about it – or not?

On my Friday/Saturday night date post, a female commenter took issue with my advice to a male commenter that he take advantage of rebound sex to get over a harsh relationship he just came out of.

To her point, I was perhaps a little indelicate in how I suggested he do this (it was guy-to-guy talk; this is a men’s site, after all). However, she took the occasion to launch into a moral argument that casual sex hurts women, takes advantage of them, and uses and discards them like unwanted objects. Her comment arguing this is a bit long to quote (you can read her full comment here), so I’ll just quote what is the most important part to me:

“I have had conversations with girlfriends who have told me that a guy won’t go out with them if they don’t sleep with them. Women have been conditioned to feel they have to have sex, much much sooner than they would feel comfortable. We know from studies that men don’t develop the feeling of love until at least 3-6 months into the relationship, even while sleeping with a woman. What they develop are lust emotions.

Most women have given up on the idea of a man protecting them and *actually* loving them. Valor and honor and real love for another is almost absent in most dating. What you describe in your post is not love at all. It is using people for sex, using people for the thrill of feeling desires, of entertainment, but it is not love. You are incredibly insightful with how to manipulate women to get to your ultimate goal. What I am saying is that this is the opposite of what a man of valor would do. He would protect his woman from physical exploitation, not be the one to exploit her. And he is exploiting her, even if it’s with her permission, when he is trying to extract sex from her when he doesn’t even genuinely love her--- care for her best good.

It doesn’t much matter if rebound sex helps a person feel better. That doesn’t make it right. Maybe we can just numb our conscience to the point that it is dead so that we can pursue feelings of lust and pleasure without caring what is actually loving to others?”

First off, her science is wrong. Men are more romantic than women are, heal less completely from breakups than women do, experience love at first sight at nearly double the rate of women... and that immediate in-love love-at-first-sight feeling men get is not infatuation – relationships that spring from immediate in-love feelings are every bit as stable and likely to last as those that develop from slow build-ups.

But that’s beside the point.

Our commenter’s argument is that to sleep with her, then not see her again, or not engage in or want to engage in a long-term committed relationship with her is damaging to her. You hurt her, you injure her, and you just generally make her feel bad.

So is she right? Does sex minus commitment lead to a trail of broken hearts and cynical women?

The answer I’ll give you is “yes, but.” And the ‘but’ is quite important.

But we’re not ready for the ‘but’ yet. Let’s talk about the ‘yes’ first.

Lovers seduce women; fighters intimidate men. But why do men choose the specializations they do – and which should you choose?

I was probably about 20 years old when I accepted what was to me a weird fact at the time. That fact was that the toughest, manliest, most utterly male, intimidating men usually only dated girls who were just okay. They didn’t get gorgeous girls... not usually. They’d get girls with ordinary faces, ordinary brains, and maybe okay bodies.

I’d seen a similar trend in myself. In midway through high school I’d switched images: from nerd chic to the leather jacket bad boy look. And though I was unquestionably cooler and tougher looking, the fevered pursuit I’d had from popular, pretty girls over the previous four years died down. Men, however, respected me more than ever. I’d gained more male respect, but at the cost of female desire.

Fast forward a few years. I’d internalized the lesson that men who acted über manly had focused their efforts on appealing to male measurements of power and dominance... and cost themselves in women. It was a hard decision at the time, but at last I said “I will no longer live my life for other men.” And as I reinvented myself again, this time with an emphasis on what attracted women, I became more attractive to women once more, with some small cost to the respect other men held for me. I stopped being a fighter, and became a lover.

Ultimately, I’d say it was a good move for me, in many ways. Ultra maleness is not so conducive to being a writer or a business owner. Nor is it so good a fit for a man who wants to travel around and network with other people. Taking my foot off the masculinity gas somewhat freed me to not have to be a caveman in everything I did. And of course, the women... they’re much better for the guys who aren’t male caricatures.

Lovers vs. fighters is something Hector delved into with last week’s “A Feminine Man, Done Right, Can be Wildly Sexy to Women.” In that article, he discussed how a certain degree of femininity in men can trump overdone masculinity when it comes to success with girls.

Today, I want to go into the science and the psychology of it: why men choose the paths they do, and which one is actually the more fruitful path to choose.