(3) Journeyman

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.

340Breeze poses an intriguing “What if?” scenario over on the article about astrology:

“An interesting question is how do you think women would behave in general toward men (in terms of their attitude, expectations, submissiveness, physical attributes (caring about being fat vs slim), etc) if the vast majority of available men were completely unwilling to trade (access to resources, money, etc )for hopes of sex? I know this is unrealistic since clearly women have choice in men because: (1) men are the agressive sex meaning women have lots of suitors just by being a woman; and (2) men seem to want women’s vjs more than women want what men have to offer.”

I think this one’s worth addressing because I see a lot of frustration from guys on various corners of the Internet about desperate men trading their time and energy to women in exchange for the hope of a chance to maybe possibly someday if they’re lucky have a shot at entering said women’s vaginas.

The talk is that these desperate men make it harder for everyone else to get laid, and/or that women are becoming overly entitled as a result of it.

And to some extent... there’s a nugget of truth in there, yeah.

But to a larger extent, this is looking at the problem all wrong, with blinders on to the real setup – and the real solution.

Have you ever had dirty thoughts about a girl? Have you ever wanted to tell her exactly what you want to do to her until she’s hot and sweaty and ready to claw your clothes off?

Well, if I know most men, you’ve probably kept those thoughts and words to yourself. You may have even withheld them while you were hooking up with a girl for fear that she might get offended and leave. But let me tell you, she’s waiting for you to break out the dirty talk. So today I’m going to talk about how to dirty talk with women the right way, and how to take your experience and hers to the next level.

Something I see guys doing that always makes me want to hold up my hands and go, “Wait! Too extreme!” is getting miffed and walking away from women without giving them a properly put-together parting shot.

I was guilty of it for a long time, and when you’re still being emotionally affected by the women you’re meeting (i.e., before it’s become more or less pure process with little emotional involvement), it’s pretty easy to fall into this trap.

That is, the trap of realizing that things aren’t going your way with a given girl, getting upset, and storming off out of the interaction with a spiteful “Huh. She’ll realize what she’s lost when I’m gone!” attitude.

Ever do this? I bet you have, and if you’re like most men I bet you sometimes still do.

Thing is, how often do those girls you abruptly cut contact with like this ever get back in touch with you and turn things around? Never, right? Occasionally they may reconnect with you, but ever notice how they treat you rather patronizingly in those cases? They know they’ve gotten to you.

At best, all you ever get out of ending things with girls this way is a psychic victory... you get to think to yourself that you “won” because you walked off and left her hanging.

But you didn’t win, not really. You didn’t get the girl.

There is a way you can though – not all the time, but a whole lot more often than you will with the “get irked and storm off” approach, in any event.

I call it “the parting shot.”

Colt wrote yesterday on whether women really want to be treated as equals (or not), and it got me thinking about what men on the whole seem to want, and whether that's all that grounded in reality or not.

I talked before about my belief that most of the bitter women men think are out there are really just Internet bitter; in the echo chamber of the World Wide Web, it's pretty easy for one's thoughts to sound like extreme versions of themselves, and it's also very easy to treat others unempathetically, judge, excoriate, and attack, in spiteful ways online that we wouldn't dare do with even our worst enemies live and in person.

When you stop and think about it though, there sure are a whole lot of sensitive people right now ready to respond on a hair trigger with a vicious attack both online and (with a bit more subtlety) in real life, and there's a whole lot of lamenting about where all the "good men" and "good women" have gone, both from men and women. Why?

I'm going to propose here that there is a large undercurrent of wanting more than one's station in life among average men and women, without caring to elevate one's station accordingly. And that that undercurrent of wanting things without doing the requisite things to get them is what drives all this anger, torment, and strife.

It's simply a case of unmet expectations, played out at grand scale society-wide.

A little while back, Chase wrote a fantastic article on competition between men and women in the 21st Century. If you haven’t read it, read it here: "Conflict Between Men and Women in the 21st Century."

In this article, I’m going to expand on Chase’s foundation and look deeply into whether or not women actually want to be treated like equals by men. There has been much talk in our ever-changing society about gender equality, so most men assume that being treated equally in every respect is exactly what women are looking for.

But is that actually the case? Let’s dive in…