(3) Journeyman

The cocky owner of a small business bends one of his female employees over his desk after hours on a Friday afternoon, when the other employees have gone home, including a pair of male office workers who’ve been competing for that same female coworker of theirs for months.

Across town, an arrogant-but-charismatic high school running back trots off the football field after a loss. Most of the team’s down in the dumps, but he’s not; he’s taking one of the cheerleaders for a “ride around town” tonight. She’ll be the fourth cheerleader he’s slept with from his school’s squad.

That night, a trio of cute girls in flashy, sequined dresses stay past closing time in a semi-popular nightclub there in town for an “after party” that involves them, a bartender, a doorman, and the club owner. All three of the girls are naked in under an hour, and though the routine is getting a little old for each of them, all three of the men still enjoy sleeping with his new girl.

At the same time that evening, a psychologist has a discrete liaison with one of his troubled-but-sensual patients. She knows he’s married and has a family, and the last thing she wants to be is a home wrecker... but she really can’t help herself.

There are a few somethings each of these situations have in common with one another: they are male authority... and female lust.

But the greater irony under all these tales is the one that many average men who haven’t experienced such dalliances themselves spend time boiling with envy over, and vainly try to point out to any woman they can catch the ear of: outside of these environments, with this artificial position power they’ve constructed for themselves or happened into, these men are nobodies... and without that authority those men have, these women probably wouldn’t be very attracted to them.

Yet nevertheless, they are.

I don’t like veering too far off-topic from seduction and relationships too often, since I’ve watched many a website, television show, or business slip into decline after losing its focus, becoming too scattered and spreading itself too thin with the material it covers. But, since a number of readers have specifically requested this, here’s an article on how I run my time management.

Personally, I’ve never given much conscious thought to time management. I’ve just always found myself with everything I need to get done done, and lots of free time to spend however I like – sometimes on personal development, sometimes on relaxation and recovery. Time management is more of an unconscious drive for me than anything. The past few years I’ve been busier than usual, since it’s been my trial-by-fire in learning how to build businesses (and having many of those businesses fail along the way), but even then, I’ve mostly gone through stretches of a few months of extreme busyness at the time, before correcting things and returning to a more balanced lifestyle.

I haven’t read much on time management itself, because most of the people writing on time management I find are people who haven’t really done things with their lives that I’d care to emulate. It seems like most of them spend their time writing books about time management, and most of their productivity consists of writing books about productivity. However, I do come across bits and pieces here and there from various people that I find useful and incorporate, and that help make me even better able to manage my time.

So, without further ado, and with no claims to being some great time management guru or anything of the sort, here’s how Chase Amante personally approaches the subject of managing his time; a companion piece to the one I did on time efficiency (you should probably read that one before reading this one, if you haven’t already read it).

Drexel recently wrote a very choice article titled “Creating an Environment for Bondage and Sexperimentation”, and I wanted to continue to expand on this theme and really examine why women actually love BDSM to the extent that they do.

If you’re at all unfamiliar with the term, BDSM is an abbreviation for three distinct sex-related word pairs: bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), and sadism and masochism (SM). Sounds like quite a handful, pretty far outside the ordinary, doesn’t it? But it isn’t so extraordinary as you might think.

Don’t believe that each and every woman in your life hasn’t fantasized about some form of BDSM at least once in her life? Just go ahead and ask all the women you know well. I’m sure you’d be surprised at the result. So let’s look at the motivations and hidden desires that lead to women fantasizing about BDSM.

Quick preface: this article assumes you’re coming from a place of social awareness and aptitude, professional or romantic capability (as the case may be), and at least enough confidence to tell it like it is and not be shy about doing so. If yes, you’ll love this piece; if not, focus on elevating your social, professional, and/or romantic competence first, then circle back to this, because you genuinely need to be the one with the social skills upper hand to pull this off.

We’ve had a number of people on here ask about office politics: how do you deal with it? Indeed, office politics can be a quagmire... you get stuck in it, and it can feel almost impossible to get out. All your attempts to are like wading through waist-deep mud.

But the solutions to office politics are not exclusive to the world of checkout counters, clock-in devices, and cubicles. Rather, by and large, they’re the same exact things you’ll use for dealing with any passive-aggressive situation.

Because, just like other forms of passive-aggression, most aspects of office politics only work if you insist on playing by their rules... instead of you getting them playing by yours.

Back in late 2006 and early 2007, I was on an invitation-only social networking site called Late Night Shots. It was a site that allowed those on the Washington, D.C. social scene to “see and be seen” by others – set up profiles, find out where everyone was gathering at, and the like. Sort of a private Facebook for the D.C. socialite crowd.

One of the more interesting features of LNS then was an anonymous message board where people could ask all sorts of dicey questions and give all manner of unbiased, unfiltered replies, since their answers were in no way tied to their profiles or real world identities.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the gossip section of those boards (”Who’s dating whom in the scene?” “What new girl has rocketed to the top of the scene the fastest?”), although it did make for good occasional reading on how different people evaluated social status competitors in the scene (and worked to build up their and others’ reputations, or tear others down through rumors). What interested me more were the various relationship topics that got posed and debated to death.

One of the most frequent of these was the question of “Do women’s pasts matter?”

While nearly all of the female commenters seemed to argue quite vehemently that they didn’t matter one bit, the male commenters were divided right down the middle in their positions: half that they did, half that they didn’t.

Among the half arguing that they didn’t, there was a further divide: the men who didn’t care about women’s pasts because they had no intention of ever ending up in any form of committed long-term relationship... and the men who didn’t care because they legitimately thought a woman’s past had no bearing on her future.

I’d argue that the past matters even in a fling, hookup, or a casual or open relationship... simply because crazy girls can wreck your life in all kinds of terrible ways even when you’re keeping things arms-length with them, and a one-night stand with the wrong kind of girl can quickly turn down Bad News Lane if she fixates on you or brings other bad stuff into your sphere. But what about commitment? How much a woman’s past matter if you want something serious?

As a student of psychology who worked in the field for years, I have arrived at the belief that the single most important predictor of behavior is context. By this, I mean the immediate environment surrounding the behavior – the people, the atmosphere, and all sensory input streams.

I mean, think about it for a second. Doesn’t it sometimes seem like you have a different personality depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing, or where you are? Have you ever done something, then looked back at it later and thought, “That just wasn’t me! I never do stuff like that!”

It’s almost like there was someone else controlling your actions, because the truth of the matter is that... it was a different personality. It was just as much “you” as the “you” you like to think is “you”, but it was simply expressing a side of itself that you had never experienced before. And, if I had to guess, I’d say you were in some kind of special circumstance when that happened… weren’t you? Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were intoxicated, maybe you were hanging out with people with whom... for some reason, in that instance, it just seemed like an okay thing to do. Right?

So, as with nearly all phenomena I encounter in my journeys and adventures, I asked myself the question... “How can I use what I’ve learned to improve my sex life and the sex lives of my special lady friends?”

At the start of the new year, there was a thread on the boards with suggestions for new articles this year. Zac suggested one on the tendency of women to always have men in their lives... and that this should never be an obstacle for you when meeting new women.

It’s a curious thing for me to think about. This concept is one I spend zero thought cycles on myself, and it always strikes me as a little odd and funny when I see men talking about it now... mostly guys on the boards talking about their concerns about approaching: but what if she has a boyfriend?

Not just boyfriend, though; but what about that guy she’s talking to? Or, yeah, I see her by herself right now – but what if there’s someone else nearby? What if she has a lover and I don’t know it?

The fact is, EVERY woman you meet is going to have SOME guy in her life, in SOME capacity. There is some man who is important to her who is “limiting” her choices in men in some way.

The thing about approaching though is this: you’ve got to learn to disregard these men as abstractions and approach away, anyway.