Insights from the Mind of a Seducer

You can't win every fight. But how you handle the situations where you must back down a bit determines how those you're in the fight with treat you.

Jimbo commented in my article on meeting girls while staying safe in a paranoid dating society, asking me to review a recent, controversial article on the Washington Post. The article was titled "Thanks for not raping us, all you 'good men.' But it's not enough."

The article itself is a screed against the male sex, both the 'bad men' who aren't conciliatory and inclusive enough toward women, and the 'good men' who are, but who lack the spine to put the bad men in their place and don't in any event ever really change things to make the world a sufficiently female-inclusive one.

I don't want to comment much on the argument itself... I don't think I need to, given our audience. The positions and arguments are nonsensical; the beliefs hyperbolic. The vast majority of commentators in the comment section of the article take the author to task for her abusiveness toward her cowed, yoked husband.

And I'll comment only briefly on the dynamic. It looks like the dynamic you get in a long-term relationship with a strong-willed, opinionated woman, and a quiet, acquiescent man. The woman becomes increasingly emboldened, abusive, and sometimes vampiric over time. The man, with his quiet acceptance of her behavior, serves as her enabler and as a source of narcissistic supply. You can have this dynamic with the sexes reversed too: domineering husband, codependent/enabling wife, or domineering wife, codependent/enabling husband. It's an unhealthy dynamic for both parties, and it's created by both parties. A domineering partner cannot domineer without the retreat and acquiescence of the codependent one. You're only seeing one blowup fight in this article... but in my experience looking at the woman's writing style, how she frames the fight, and her pride in putting it out there and expecting to be patted on the back for her righteousness (rather than ashamed at this uncharacteristic explosion, which is how most women are when they do something nasty that is truly out of character), all that fits the pattern of a domineering partner enabled to the point of delusions of grandeur ("Fighting the good fight -- for all womankind!") by her codependent.

That out of the way, what I'd actually like to focus on in this article is the husband's reaction. Because there's a telling passage in the article about how this fight went:

"My husband of 50 years did not have to stifle a laugh. He took it dead seriously. He did not defend his remark, he did not defend men. He sat, hunched and hurt, and he listened. For a moment, it occurred to me to be grateful that I’m married to a man who will listen to a woman. The winds calmed ever so slightly in that moment. And then the storm surge welled up in me as I realized the pathetic impotence of nice men’s plan to rebuild the wreckage by listening to women. As my rage rushed through the streets of my mind, toppling every memory of every good thing my husband has ever done (and there are scores of memories), I said the meanest thing I’ve ever said to him: Don’t you dare sit there and sympathetically promise to change. Don’t say you will stop yourself before you blurt out some impatient, annoyed, controlling remark. No, I said, you can’t change. You are unable to change. You don’t have the skills and you won’t do it. You, I said, are one of the good men. You respect women, you believe in women, you like women, you don’t hit women or rape women or in any way abuse women. You have applauded and funded feminism for a half-century. You are one of the good men. And you cannot change. You can listen all you want, but that will not create one iota of change."

This fight could've been over in three minutes instead of 30, the screed avoided, and this clusterbomb of an article the author wrote never written, had the husband done the one thing his wife and I both agree he failed to do:

Grow a pair of balls, straighten his spine out, and stand up for something for once.

The only thing his wife and I disagree with is what he must stand up on -- but as we'll see in just a minute, even then, we don't really disagree.

We each fall somewhere on the 9-sided moral alignment die. Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Evil… where do you fall, and how does it impact things?

This should be a fun article. Or even an insightful one... depends how much you like personality tests.

... but most of us like personality tests, don't we?

And this one's a fairly useful one, as far as personality tests go.

A recent study discovered six 'dark' traits (egoism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, psychopathy, and spitefulness) all stem from the same underlying 'dark core'... something the researchers dubbed 'the Dark Factor of Personality'. The result is that if you have one dark trait, you are likely to have others -- because they all come from that same dark center.

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about dark and light. I discussed the phenomenon of younger 'dark' guys who reform when older in "The Civilized Man." I talked about the choice between goodness and wickedness in "The Good King." And I went in-depth on some of the research into the 'light side' of personality in "Be the Lightbringer: Dating and the Sublime Benefits of Positivity." And of course, aside from these, we've always urged you to do right by women and other people, and avoid bitterness yourself... as much for your own sake as for others'.

The seduction space can serve as a magnet for dark characters... even if most of the men in it are neutral- or light-oriented. The dark characters rarely reach levels of prominence within the community -- whether it's more because their methods repel the non-dark men too much, or they just don't care to help/teach other men enough to carve out a niche, I couldn't say. But there are guys like this who become instructors, or rise to this or that level of prominence within seduction communities... sometimes concealing their dark side, sometimes wearing it on their sleeves.

One of the reasons I won't teach 'dark side tech' -- things like reverse supplication, sexual power reversal, one-sided monogamy, taming/dependency, or the infamous October Man sequence --is the existence of 'dark-side' guys within the community (all the non-dark guys who'd cause damage purely by accident are the other part of the reason). If everyone was light-side, we could perhaps talk about this stuff and trust most guys to use it responsibly... but not everyone is, so this stuff stays tucked away under lock and key.

Why do people have these different dispositions? How different are the dispositions anyway -- are people just a little different from one another, or are the differences BIG? And how do these differences come about in the first place?

By pure chance, one day I came across a Dungeons & Dragons 'alignment test'. The test allowed you to sniff out where on the 'alignment scale' you fall... good or evil? Lawful, neutral, or chaotic?

I thought it would be a fun thing to play with. But in fact, it's turned out to be accurate for real people I've used it with, to quite a surprising degree.