Social Commentary

I want to make a brief side trip from seduction today to talk about a broader social distinction you will run into that it’s vitally important to understand.

That is the distinction between artificial hierarchies and personal appeal.

In the broader social arena, when it comes to getting hired on jobs, or dealing with legal issues, or negotiating mano-e-mano, or differentiating even between social circle game and cold approach pickup, you’ll find that most people seem to be stronger in one area – navigating and leveraging artificial hierarchies, or appealing to and swaying individuals personally – than they are the other.

And when you’re in your element, you will often find things easier; conversely, when you’re out of it, things will often become fiendishly hard and you will not know why.

The reason why frequently is because you’re trying to achieve your objectives using the wrong strategy for the situation at hand... because each of these two types of power structures require very different approaches.

Very few people ever come to grasp this well enough to move fluidly back and forth between the two.

I happened upon an article entitled “An Open Letter To My Future Wife: How I Plan To Make You Happy Every Day Of Your Life” earlier today, written without a doubt very sincerely to the author’s imagined future wife – here’s a short excerpt:

“I promise to do my best to make you beam daily, so count on many surprises. Your smile will be my priority. I get weak knees when anybody smiles, so just imagine the effort I will make to be the source of yours.

I promise I will always look at you with the same adoration as I did the moment I realized I loved you.

I promise to try to ignite the same sparkle in your eyes I see when you’re surprised, inspired, motivated or when you are about to lean in to kiss me.

I promise to hold your hand when we’re 80 years old with the same liveliness that I did when I crossed that line to hold yours for the first time. I vow never to let the excitement of dating me die down; I will surprise you with the location, the reason or the activity itself.

I promise to keep you guessing where we’re going next.  I promise to do my best always to interest you. I will keep reinventing myself, gaining new hobbies, new knowledge and new interests to keep you — and myself — entertained.”

... and it goes on like this for quite a bit.

At the bottom of the article are plenty of Facebook comments from girls praising (sort of) the article, of course, saying things like:

There’s even a female commenter saying (jokingly) “Marry me!”

But of course, no one’s actually lining up to marry this guy... despite all he’s promised.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, a 22-year-old named Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree, stabbing to death three people, shooting three more, and then turning the gun on himself.

Before doing so, he posted a video on YouTube in which he talks about his rationale:

Out of curiosity, I watched it, though I usually prefer avoiding the news since there’s always another death, always another killing... yet in a rather mixed batch of emotions, covering everything from horror to rage to sadness to recognition, I knew exactly what I was seeing.

Because I think a lot of young males in Western society go through what Elliot went through – I know certainly I did – and while it’s easy (and undoubtedly true) to say that had he hung in there a few more years, his life would’ve gone dramatically differently, as would have the lives of his victims, it’s worth taking a moment to understand what was going on inside the man that prompted him to do things he could never take back...

... and also, for anyone bothered by thoughts of following a similar path, what he should have done instead.

Selfishness has never been a glorified trait among humanity. Caring chiefly about one’s own needs is frequently named as one of the greatest threats to society and causes of degeneration and degradation within it.

After all, a selfish man is supposed to be a guy who offers nothing to society. He’s nothing but some leech that cares about himself, and he’ll go to great lengths just to put down others so he can stay on top.

…Right?

Au contraire. Used in the wrong capacity, sure, selfishness could certainly hurt others. However, being selfish, in of itself, is not bad. Thinking about it as a negative trait, however, may certainly be introducing a daily dose of cognitive dissonance to your life.

Such dissonance comes to the fore as you finally realize the inevitable fact that everyone has selfish tendencies.

We all aim to promote ourselves first, followed by others. Throw a big steak in front of you while you’re starving, and have the option to leave it there for someone else or die, and you’re eating that steak.

Survival is coded into our biology.

However, society promotes the idea that leaving the steak would be more admirable. Promoting ourselves over others is bad, and we should instead seek to help others over ourselves.

The conflict between society’s vaunted ideal of selflessness versus your biological desire to tend to your own needs mounts and builds, and eventually people are left attempting to help each other become better, but never helping themselves become better, even though they are the only ones who can do so.

And that, my friends, leads us in a perfect circle of solving nothing.

One of the things you realize when you first start flirting with women more and more is that many of these things you’d previously assumed were bad to say because women would find them ‘offensive’ actually turn out to win you points with girls.

You tease a woman about how all women care about is gossiping and backstabbing, and she laughs and punches you in the shoulder.

You have a girl who’s on the fence about going along or not with something you’ve invited her to, and you bullishly insist, like the asshole bad boy you are (or are trying to be), and she relents and goes along with it... and immediately, you notice a big spike in her attraction to you.

She asks you if you believe in equality in relationships, and becomes submissive and affectionate after you tell her you find it impossible to buy into that nonsense, because the fact is that men are men and women are women and relationships work better when each accepts their roles and lives up to them.

All these things are things that shouldn’t happen, you’d think, if you’ve spent much time consuming the media on TV or the Internet or you’ve spent a lot of time listening to what women say they want.

Yet, they happen anyway.

Commenting on “What to Do When a Girl Won’t Go Home with You”, Blogster asks about what women’s responsibilities are in the mating game and where a man must “draw the line” when it comes to trying to make a girl his:

“Do take your point on this one. However, at what point does all the game advice for men cross into the territory of a woman’s jurisdiction?

With each piece of advice about how to handle situations and tighten your game, it sees more and more of the woman’s responsibility being transferred over to men.

One of the admirable traits of men generally is that we are self-motivated and proactive and take charge. We look for our own mistakes and correct. However I feel the manosphere and valuable dating advice sources such as girlschase makes the mistake of swinging too far with the attitude of ‘if it didn’t go well, you the man did something wrong, or should of done something better’. Accountability is good, assuming complete agency is ridiculous and unrealistic, as it assumes the man has the capacity to control all relevant circumstances affecting a pickup and that by improving and fine tuning technique results will come.

The implications for this are obvious – women are just automatons and have no individual preference, attraction will occur reasonably successfully if you master the right techniques smoothly and ultimately, that women have no agency as adults.

It also plays into and reinforces current societies frame regarding relationships – that the man must do all the work and its the man’s fault if something goes wrong or the seduction doesn’t occur.

Increasingly also I see double standards in advice being doled out. For example, a recent post spoke about how to deal with judgement. It says its crucial not to judge women, yet women are by far the more judgemental sex and constantly do so on a broader range of factors.

A man is expected to skilfully disarm a woman’s judgements, but a woman is not expected too because otherwise she ‘won’t open up’. Does it occur to you that maybe men don’t open up because of female judgement and thus lose out? Yet the onus seems always on the man. Put it this way, if your friend was constantly dodging responsibility and being unnecessarily judgemental would you pander to him?

A man is expected to overcome his approach anxiety by himself. Is there any advice anywhere that says about how women should ‘help the man through his approach anxiety’? Of course not, yet there is plenty of expectation that a man should smooth and ease the women in the last moments before seduction.

In this instance, I feel it pushes the ‘responsibility balance’ of game even further towards the man. Soon all the woman will have to do is show up!”

This comment no doubt reflects a lot of men’s frustrations over the travails of mating – I’ve heard them the world over, in any number of different cultures, and if you read back through history you can read of men from all ages complaining of the same things.

So what are women’s responsibilities in dating and mating? Do they serve as just passive recipients of men’s advances? And if at first you don’t succeed – how many times should you really try and try again?

A few weeks back, in the comments section of “Real Empiricists Test”, a reader asked the following question regarding the gulf between mainstream dating advice and what’s taught on this site:

“Is there an article on this, or maybe someone can answer this outright. But why is it that mainstream dating advice is so contrary to the dating advice given on this site ? Why is it that there is almost no agreement ?”

The short answer, of course, is that what we focus on here is entirely techniques and strategies that:

1. Achieve efficient, effective, reproducible results

2. Are tested out and balanced against alternatives and discarded if found ineffective
   

3. Are coming from people who’ve devoted a large chunk of time specifically to this field

... whereas most mainstream dating advice is coming from regular folk with limited experience dating and even less time spent studying and analyzing dating and sex and relationships and social dynamics both in the field and with other likeminded folk.

But the fact of that matter is, it goes a lot deeper than this. There’s more to this clash of ideologies than simply field experience vs. non, and it mainly has to do with who’s giving the advice, and what their objectives are in giving it.