Jacob M. aka Hermes offers his take on game. An excerpt:
That’s why I think the most mistaken statement Kathlene makes is, “The Roissyist men resent having to be the “beta providers” because they resent their jobs.” She seems to think any of us can become a “beta provider” if we want to, but we don’t want to. No, we do not resent having to be beta providers; on the contrary, that’s exactly what we always wanted–but we are being denied the opportunity to do it. We were raised to believe that women like “nice guys.” We were told by our parents, teachers, church leaders, and the media that women just wanted marriage and family, and that if we pitched ourselves as a family-oriented, commitment-oriented guy with a steady job, women would find us attractive. We watched from the sidelines in high school as the girls threw themselves at the captain of the football team or the guy who played guitar in a band, but we were told, “just hang on–once you get out there in the real world, those guys will be losers, and you’ll meet a nice sweet girl who’ll be happy to become your wife and have children with you.” We have always been prepared to believe that a life devoted to marriage and family was more satisfying in the long run than the chance to score with multiple hot babes that the “alphas” got for a few years when they were young. But when we entered the adult world, we found that the women were still throwing themselves at those athletes and guitarists. They can afford to; they have their own jobs and don’t need our support.
On a related note, Dennis Mangan has ripped to shreds the shameful VFR entry that Hermes references. Check it out too. See here and here for other entries.
{ 76 comments… read them below or add one }
The trouble I see here is that the advice being given to Jacob in that thread is the same old, same old. Keep moving. Use an internet service. Keep holding out, someone will come along. And so on. All of the trite nonsense from the past which refuses to recognize that the entire situation has changed.
As Jacob points out himself, the professional status of a man is largely irrelevant today. Women, even conservative, Christian women, are economically self-sufficient, and many are quite professionally successful themselves. They are simply not evaluating men on that basis any longer, nor on the basis of stability. The Christian churches Jacob attends are filled with responsible, stable men … whom none of the single women there are interested in other than for a handful of the “cool” ones. That’s the reality on the ground, even in the Christian communities: women have changed in terms of whom they are looking to mate with. It really *is* that simple.
Having some Game can help guys like Jacob get an “edge” to be one of the “cool ones” that the Christian women he is meeting will be attracted to. This is a very pragmatic reality. I fail to see why it should be viewed as such a negative thing. No-one, including Jacob, is suggesting that all men should become amoral rakes like Roissy. What *is* being suggested, however, is that unless you have an edge of some sort, women are not attracted to you — regardless of your stability, looks, professional pedigree, Christian values or what have you. You need to have something else, and it’s not what Auster calls “fun” — it’s a kind of edgy masculinity which makes you stand out and which women really like, even conservative, Christian ones.
The rest of the advice given to Jacob in that thread is beyond useless. It’s the same old, same old, that I am sure Jacob has already done in spades. Those methods are not working for people today, because standards for men and women alike have changed, and have been heightened. As a result, Game is now on the table as a tool for men like Jacob.
The underlying post by Ian B. was indeed shameful — he was basically suggesting a genetic annihilation of secular beta males. And it’s these people who are worried about Game leading to nihilism? It seems to me someone needs to take a look in the mirror.
Ferds,
Again, I don’t know why you give so much importance to a no-name like Auster. He is not a Tier 1 or even Tier 2 rightwing blogger.
Focus on getting this blog on the radarscreen of Allahpundit (of Hotair), Glenn Reynolds, or John Derbyshire. All 3 already sort of ‘get it’, and all 3 are vastly more visible than Lawrence Auster.
Women’s DUI arrests have gone up 29%, while men have fallen 7%, over the last 10 years.
Let’s see Social Cons say that this is because men stopped listening to socialcons.
Let’s see Social Cons say that this is because men stopped listening to socialcons.
Tood –
I think they would simply say that this is another example of the failure of males to lead — if males were effectively leading as they should be, women would not be getting DUIs.
That is precisely the way the chivalry-addled socons think.
Men are moving towards Game (or otherwise avoiding marriage) in droves, while they are moving away from Church at the same rate. SoCons are obsolete.
It is often said that the right understands the left to a far greater degree than the left could ever understand the right (particularly since leftists are people who never outgrew childish beliefs that are unrealistic to adult minds).
SoCons are similarly inferior to us. We understand their goals and views totally, but they totally fail to comprehend ours.
We understand their goals and views totally
Lol. Libertarians and other right liberals don’t understand human nature at all. We are not free floating utility maximizers.
You might want to start here:
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/09/why_i_am_a_social_conservative.php
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/too_soon_to_tell.php
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2I2ZTMzYWU2YWE2OTIwZDA2NzJiOTUzNTM5MTMzNDE=
Thursday,
Bull. Practitioners of Game have a far deeper understanding of the Christian Right, and their areas of cognitive dissonance, than the Christian Right could ever know about Game. Your brief comment merely proves these, as you reveal that :
1) You think ‘Game’ is ‘liberal’, it is not.
2) You call the hard left ‘liberal’ which itself is shamefully ignorant. By giving rigid leftists the right to use a positive term like ‘liberal’, you have already lost the battle.
3) On the matter of feminism, social cons are now on the opposite side of fiscal cons. That is why social cons are too afraid to admit that US divorce laws are very unfair to men, and very contradictory to notions of personal responsibility, meritocracy, and each person having a right to what they earn.
Social cons are just as much to blame as radical feminists, as social cons have been enablers of the anti-male agenda.
1) You think ‘Game’ is ‘liberal’, it is not.
Are you retarded? I never said that.
2) You call the hard left ‘liberal’ which itself is shamefully ignorant. By giving rigid leftists the right to use a positive term like ‘liberal’, you have already lost the battle.
Liberalism is the attempt to give equal freedom to everyone. There is right liberalism (which includes libertarians, neocons, and fiscal conservatives) and there is left liberalism. Right liberalism tends to emphasize procedural equal freedom while left liberalism emphasizes substantive equal freedom. Procedural equality gets squashed because no one really cares about procedure and the whole thing degenerates into a Who? Whom? struggle. A traditional conservative like Jim Kalb knows way, way more about all this than any libertarian.
3) On the matter of feminism, social cons are now on the opposite side of fiscal cons.
There is no fiscal conservative opposition to feminism. What a joke.
Again, one really needs to read Jim Kalb on liberalism, both right and left.
Ah yes, the ad hominem. The last resort of the defeated debater (which is what Thursday is).
1) Social cons have the least understanding of human nature of all ideologies. Part of this is because they don’t even believe in evolution. We could call Social Cons dinosaurs, but they wouldn’t understand the metaphor.
2) The far left is illiberal, as they are intolerent of any dissenting views, and quite fascist. That is why they hate Fox News, even the other 7 out of 8 networks are left wing. Anything less than 100% control is anathema to them. By calling them ‘liberal’, you are already losing the battle to them.
3) Fiscal cons oppose the divorce laws vehemently, as they are very much the opposite of all fiscal con values of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and having rights to what you earned.
Since Social Cons cannot even begin to admit how incredibly anti-male the divorce laws are, and how this is the source of all the changes against their wishes in America, Social cons are shambolic failure. There is no reason for the average man to give any further importance to the Social Con agenda that has totally used and discarded them as human beings.
Novaseeker — Can you point me to the underlying post by Ian B?
I would like to see it for myself (I don’t doubt that much of the Social Con overstructure believes in the genetic culling of “beta males” to produce basically a bunch of guys somewhere between William Bonney and John Wesley Hardin).
What has eluded the tradcons? Your goals are clear up to a certain point. Game practitioners, who do not take the Roissy route, seek to save Western Civilization by attracting women. Yet I have never heard them ask, with this conjugation being accomplished, “But then what?”
It’s here: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014000.html
Commenters here seem to assume that my positions are the same as those of the standard social conservatives. Not true. For example, I do not share the common view among social conservatives, referred to several times at this site, that women are the repositories of wisdom and virtue who civilize men. Also, most social conservatives think that family issues are everything and they have the standard race-blind liberal views on race. I obviously do not. I share with social conservatives an understanding that that human beings need a basic familial and social order in which to thrive, and that the liberalism of personal autonomy does not provide this. However, I do not call myself a social conservative. I call myself a traditionalist conservative or just a traditionalist.
People have said in this thread that Game is replacing social conservatism or traditionalist conservatism: “Men are moving towards Game (or otherwise avoiding marriage) in droves, while they are moving away from Church at the same rate. SoCons are obsolete.” But as the commenter Posec has pointed out, once Game has helped a man find and keep a mate, there is nothing else for it to do. Meanwhile, there is still the totality of our profoundly damaged society to be saved, rebuilt, protected, and nourished. Marriage, children, sex roles, resistance to the feminist and homosexualist campaigns to undermine the family, resistance to the provider state which takes over the functions of the family, restoration of standards in education, the expulsion of feminism and multiculturalism from the schools, weeding away the unconstitutional growth of government, overturning the illegitimate court decisions that have stripped the power of self-government from states and localities, defeating the egalitarian fiction that all races have the same abilities, overturning anti-discrimination laws, stopping and reversing Third World immigration, stopping and reversing Islamic immigration … These are just some the problems to be addressed. And Game is irrelevant to all of them. So in what sense is traditionalist conservatism obsolete, and Game taking its place?
People are really drinking something, if they think a self-improvement technique to help a man attract a mate and heighten his personal efficacy in life is tantamount to a governing philosophy for society. But that’s the typical modern delusion: people get into one specialized aspect of things—libertarianism, feminism, Game, the economy, whatever—and they think that aspect is the answer to everything. They lose the big picture. Traditionalism is about trying to see the big picture of what man is, what society is, and what they need to thrive.
That’s interesting, the discussion about the way women aren’t looking for the same things as they used to (the first comment). It’s just bizarre, on dating sites. It gets so it’s not good for a person to use them. It’s unhealthy, in a lot of ways. It seems like it is for women, too, after awhile. It just gives you the impression that nothing makes any sense and that everything just boils down to the whims of people. I don’t even know what the problems with those sites are, actually. They’re just like these places of oblivion, where everyone’s there and no one’s communicating. The men are, but the women aren’t responding. I’ve heard about guys who get no responses at all–none–for months. I was “successful” at it, and it was still bizarre and not good.
If only Gamers would apply the same understanding to racial realities as they do to sexual relations.
This is, of course, correct — “Game” is not a systemic worldview, nor is it intended to build one, or replace one. Sure, Roissy has his own nihilism, but Roissy is not “Game”.
The issue, though, relates to the kind of problem reflected in Maslow’s hierarchy — namely, if men are finding such difficulty with family formation and family stability as is being reported widely in the culture, they aren’t going to get to the point of the hierarchy where they actually care (again) for higher ideas. They are simply too caught up in getting that level of the hierarchy to work, in a world where doing so is becoming less and less possible for many men (and women, too, for different reasons).
Game is one option to get people to have that aspect of the needs hierarchy satisfied and working well, to serve as a foundation for focusing on other things. Sure, it *can* be used to become an obsessive skirt-chaser. But it can also be used for other things. And, as you say, no self-help tool in itself encapsulates a workable worldview. But at the same time, if people never get beyond a certain struggle to have basic needs met, their interest in broader worldviews declines substantially, as they are more focused on more basic issues.
That’s interesting. They could apply that pragmatism and honesty. There’s something about young people on dating sites. It’s like all the people (men especially, but also women, despite their need to believe otherwise) are so lacking in power that they just aren’t really able to act like human beings. Many of the women can’t get excited about anything or won’t allow themselves to, and everyone just needs to hold onto his or her little bit of power and never give an inch (in terms of open communication). It’s not a human form of interaction. It’s alien in some way. If it were analogous to an interaction in a bar, the men would be crippled and hobbling around, mostly invisible to the women, and the women would have very dark glasses on and wouldn’t be able to really hear or see the men, etc.
Fine, then you’ve agreed with my point, that it’s absurd to say that traditional conservatism is obsolete and that Game is replacing it. The most that Game can do, even assuming its most expansive claims for itself are true, is to help men satisfy the first level of their needs hierarchy. Game is not about politics, culture, the organization of human society or even about the organization of the family, which traditional thinkers and the Church have been addressing for thousands of years.
In this light consider statements like this:
“Practitioners of Game have a far deeper understanding of the Christian Right, and their areas of cognitive dissonance, than the Christian Right could ever know about Game.”
“SoCons are similarly inferior to us. We understand their goals and views totally, but they totally fail to comprehend ours.”
No. The only area that Game might understand better than the Christian right is … Game itself. On all larger questions beyond that first level of needs, Game has nothing to say. (I understand that commenters here are critical of current divorce laws because they favor the woman too much, but one does not need Game to understand that issue.)
However, maybe I’m wrong and Game really does have a much bigger agenda, in which Game becomes the all purpose model of everything.
So, all you Game triumphalists out there, try to imagine:
The federal Constitution and the state constitutions written according to Game;
Federal, state, and local governments organized according to Game;
Police organized according to Game;
Military organized according to Game;
Contract law, property law, tort law, and criminal law written according to Game;
Marriage defined and marriage law written according to Game;
Level of taxation decided on according to Game;
National level of spending versus investment decided according to Game;
Size and reach of federal government decided according to Game;
Trade policy designed according to Game;
Immigration policy (should America continue on its course to rapidly becoming a nonwhite country, or should it arrest and reverse it?) decided according to Game;
Racial policies, non-discrimination laws, racial preference policies decided according to Game.
Contents of school curricula, of teaching of literature and history decided according to Game.
Unless folks are prepared to say that Game has answers to these and dozens of similar questions, let’s please have an end to this silly triumphalism about Game replacing traditional conservatism or any other political or cultural belief system.
I appreciate your comments, Mr. Auster. To agree with your point, attempting to replace traditionalism with game is like trying to replace a car with a fuel injector. Game’s utility to traditionalism is as a part of it – it cannot take its place because it is not a complete ideology.
Lawrence Auster,
Two points :
1) Game is not only about first level. There is Long Term Relationship (LTR) Game as well. Many have saved their marriages through the principles of Game, as the tests that a woman throws at a man never end.
Roissy had an article just last week about how a reader saved his marriage using the principles of Game.
Let me put it this way : Managing a woman is something young men from South America and the Meditterannean Europe are taught from an early age as part of their culture. Game is merely teaching American and Asian men much of the same principles.
2) The absolute highest priority for social conservatives MUST be to fight against the anti-male, anti-family divorce laws. As we fiscal conservatives know, incentives matter. When taxes are lower, we get more productive work. When Al-Qaeda is attacked and destroyed, they don’t attack the US in 8 years since 9/11. The same applies to divorce.
The legal system today, due to feminist lobbying in secret, given women a big incentive to leave their marriages, damaging their children and husbands in the process. Even if she decides to leave, the man has to pay her. Even if SHE committed adultery, the man has to pay her. Pre-nups are routinely overturned. Divorce laws are heavily steeped in leftist principles (no fault concept, the richer has to pay the poorer party irrespective of the actions of the poorer, etc).
The divorce laws, which keep getting more anti-family and anti-male every decade, are the single biggest cause of the collapse of America’s moral fabric. To ignore this is to ignore the forest from the trees in the most extreme possible way.
Social cons HAVE to fight the perverse incentive structure of modern divorce laws. If they do, the Game community will be their staunchest allies. Remember that many Game practitioners wanted nothing more than to have a traditional family and die surrounded by grandchildren. The extreme risks that this entails among the absurd modern divorce laws is why many of us have turned to Game, and created an America of ‘more Cads, less Dads’.
You must recognize this.
They do. Go read Roissy’s comments on almost any day. Just about the most brutally honest assessment of racial realism I have ever seen.
The Roissy article on saving marriage is here.
“No. The only area that Game might understand better than the Christian right is … Game itself. On all larger questions beyond that first level of needs, Game has nothing to say.”
This is where you are mistaken. Game only works because it rejects the premises of femisism. Thus it disproves the premises of feminism to all who encounter it and witness its effectiveness. The premises of feminism are the same premises that underlie the entire liberal program.
You have written about how you came upon the reality of racial differences during the Bell Curve wars. Surely that served to cement for you the understanding that liberalism is a false idol. Game will do the same. That is why game matters–it undermines the foundation of liberalism.
Please tell me briefly how Game undermines feminism and liberalism in ways that other critiques of feminism and liberalism do not.
Also, for your argument on this to be persuasive, you should not use as your authority the writings of a pornographer.
I have not read much anywhere regarding the prospect of the ideas embedded in PUA-Game replacing the traditional conservative worldview. The limitations of Game that you mentioned are a good start, imho, although the list could easily be lengthened.
However, what does look increasingly likely is that the insights regarding womens nature coming from Game/The Roissy-ites are not going away and will become mainstream. They are too true and too well displayed by too many modern, emancipated women for anything else to happen.
In other words, saving Western Civilization is still the ultimate Right Thing to Do, it is just that this will have to be done without putting women on much of a pedestal, and with the awareness that most womens deepest sexual instincts are no different than a chimps – they only want to mate with elite males and will hook up with ordinary nice guys if they have no choice. The hind-brain-vagina connection always lights up brightest in response to the type of man that is unlikely to be an ideal, stable provider. .
This is what women have spent the last few decades teaching men. And it sure looks like all they needed was the opportunity(birth control, anonymity, etc.) to throw off the older masks that they wore.
What position have social conservatives taken, or failed to take, which helps support these destructive divorce laws that give women an incentive to leave their marriages?
“the awareness that most womens deepest sexual instincts are no different than a chimp’s”
If you think that this is true, and if you think that speaking about human beings in this way can be the basis of any politics at all, let alone of some alliance between bio-cons and social conservatives, let alone of saving Western civilization, you’re living in a fantasy.
Look at what you’re saying. You’re saying that the way to save Western civilization is to regard women as the equivalents of chimpanzees.
Lawrence Auster:
Please tell me briefly how Game undermines feminism and liberalism in ways that other critiques of feminism and liberalism do not.
Up until recently, such critques of feminism were largely academic. Ideas for impotent intellectuals to toy with, but garnering no real traction on the ground.
Game — as it appeals to the very real, very immediate and very strong desires in men EVERYWHERE — absolutely requires its ideas about human nature to be “field-tested”. They HAVE to be useful.
What I think is happening is that more and more men who never would have given a second thought to feminist apologia, are now having some very basic notions of theirs upended. In so doing, such un-intellectual “foot soldiers” are now coming to see in a much more prosaic way that the feminist memes which infest our culture are complete rubbish.
I think this could have some very real social effects.
Perhaps not *exactly* in the way either you are I would prefer, but effects nonetheless, and which present a real challenge to the feminist orthodoxy.
Traditionalists of every stripe have been very comfortable talking about the animal, brutish, hind-brain side of men, especially in regard to sexual instincts. The idea that mens sexual nature is something that must be channeled and controlled – and thus partly frustrated – for the sake of civilization is accepted without question.
It obviously makes traditionalists uneasy to think of their equally human female counterparts as having deep instincts that are equally unruly and problematic for civilization. Why this is true makes for interesting speculation but it cannot be denied that it does make them more uneasy than contemplating mens bestial component.
No more tiers of reply are allowed in this thread so I reply to you here.
First, I shall ignore your ad hominem. Who it refers to I do not know–I only referred to your writings and to the Bell Curve wars broadly.
Second, game refutes feminism, and liberalism more broadly, by proving that women are most attracted to men who are socially dominant. You have discussed this on your site with disapproval. Nonetheless, it is true. All game tactics and techniques are attempts to act socially dominant (in particular, dominant over yourself. One need not dominate others to succeed with game–though many women are attracted to that–but more important is that one must not be submissive to others).
Liberalism is the worship of cooperative submissiveness (in white males, at least), and suggests that meek and cooperative males will live happier lives. In reality, as the alpha-beta dichotomy proves, they live lives of involuntary celibacy. The males who are rewarded are those who are willing to go out and assertively compete for female attention.
Liberalism also claims that essentially all human drives are the product of socialization. Game proves that actually women and men have innate drives based on their biological realities, and that those drives are completely different. This disproves blank-slate liberalism, and proves that men and women have drastically different tendencies. From this fact follows that men and women have different abilities and shortcomings, which should have socially relevant implications.
Rum is onto something. Traditionalists have done a fairly good job of recognizing female imperfectness in areas other than sexuality, and their critiques of feminism often had traction because of this. But traditionalists haven’t really come to terms with the dark side of female sexuality. Traditionalists never really addressed why women were attracted to rakes and bad boys in the first place, nor why they would leave good men for the same. It was all chalked up to some sort of “trickery” on the part of the rake or some inadequacy on the part of the nice guy husband.
As Jacob M. has mentioned, Western Civilization had done such a good job of suppressing female sexuality for the past few hundred years that it became the conventional wisdom that women didn’t really have any sexual desires. According to this line of thought, what most women really wanted was committment and family and while they were willing to give men sex in exchange for these they weren’t really interested in sex in and of itself. Oh how wrong we were.
Lawrence Auster,
Well, read this.
The Devlin essays themselves no longer appear to be up, but explain the whole thing very well.
Social conservatives are partly to blame for the divorce laws becoming this bad, by not opposing the very left-wing and anti-family fundamentals of these laws. Even conservatives are subjected to the left-wing notions of no-fault divorce, the requirement of the husband to support the wife financially after divorce even if SHE initiated divorce, and the requirement for the husband to pay the wife even if the wife commits adultery.
These are very contrary to all conservative notions of personal responsibility, family strength, and a person getting to keep what they earned. Yet, social conservatives let this leftist cancer spread into the divorce laws, that are the most damaging force in America today.
This is a huge dereliction of duty on the part of social conservatives. They let this happen in the last 30 years.
Women are most certainly not like chimpanzees.
Women are, however, far more ruthless than men when it comes to screwing over someone who once loved you. Furthermore, the woman has the power of the state backing her. The divorce laws are extremely favorable towards a woman seeking to ruin a dutiful husband without any consequences to her. Women initiate 70-90% of all divorces, either directly, or indirectly by having an affair, forcing the man to file for divorce.
That social conservatives, who are acutely aware of judicial appointments on issues like abortion, have let judicial activism allow so much leftism to pervade divorce laws (which affect ALL married people, Democrat or Republican) is a huge dereliction of duty on their part. They really, truly missed the forest from the trees.
I almost think that the left created abortion and gay marriage as issues to distract the easily tricked social cons, in order to quietly make judicial changes in divorce law that advance the leftist agenda far more than any other issue. They successfully distracted socialcons, so that they could quietly do the real damage in the divorce laws.
BTW Devlin is a traditionalist conservative.
Lawrence Auster:
If you think that this is true, and if you think that speaking about human beings in this way can be the basis of any politics at all, let alone of some alliance between bio-cons and social conservatives, let alone of saving Western civilization, you’re living in a fantasy.
Look at what you’re saying. You’re saying that the way to save Western civilization is to regard women as the equivalents of chimpanzees
It has been said before that “all morality relies on the sense of smell”, and while it understandable that one would wish to turn away from notions one finds odious, it neither serves the cause of truth nor the task of managing one’s affairs in the world.
Right here we see the problem, at its root.
Because religion is in large part an endeavor to make a Human out of Man, religion will always appear naive to those of us who have grasped reality by the horns, warts and all.
Unless Auster and others like him can get past the indigestion of swallowing Bitter Pills, they will go the way of the dinosaur.
We simply MUST come to terms with female sexuality. There is no going back. The genie is out of the bottle.
But his essays show an accurate understanding of the female psyche, and he slams other social cons for their empty sermonizing that has let feminism go unchecked, and Beta males feeling utterly screwed and discarded by social cons.
Remember that Lawrence Auster is a 60-year-old social con. He grew up in a different time, and in those days, being a Beta provider had its rewards.
There is no way he can possibly know about how 28 year old women in urban America have become. He has no way of knowing how uncouth the younger generation of women have become.
Also, to understand Game is to understand female psychology, whether the man chooses to sleep with women or not. To dismiss Game is to dismiss the realities of female psychology. Thus, those who don’t grasp Game are not really equipped to discuss the subject in the first place.
What position have social conservatives taken, or failed to take, which helps support these destructive divorce laws that give women an incentive to leave their marriages?
@LA –
They haven’t lifted more than a token finger (and even that very occasional) to question no fault divorce, the overwhelming presumption of mother custody, the reset of child support levels in the 1980s, the unconstitutional nature of DV laws and their abuse in divorce cases and so on. Not a finger. And in fact many social conservative politicians have had their hands in writing such legislation, based on chivalrous ideas about women, and the continued, and false, perception that male misbehavior is what drives the divorce rate. So, no, social conservatives have been no friends to men at all where it matters most — in the most important details of their lives — while de facto supporting the agenda of the left and the women’s movement.
Look at what you’re saying. You’re saying that the way to save Western civilization is to regard women as the equivalents of chimpanzees.
Here you’re engaging in hyperbole for effect.
As others have pointed out just north of me in this thread, the issue is that social conservatives are quite open to viewing male sexuality as base, animalistic, predatory and wild, and in need of control, channeling and suppression for the social good. That’s all well and good, but when it comes to women social conservatives are out to lunch. Are women pure chimpanzees when it comes to sex selection? No. But are there strong elements of female sexuality that are just as crude, base, wild, animalistic and, in their own ways, predatory as male sexuality? Yes. Game helps people understand this by seeing, in action, what females actually respond to sexually — regardless of commitment to another man, marriage or anything else. Female sexuality is just as unruly as male sexuality is, and social conservatives need to stop shielding women simply because, traditionally, women were considered to not have a sexuality which was wild, base, unruly and so on. That is the issue that social conservatives and at least some trads are out to lunch about (Devlin excepted).
And yet, as you admit, it was, quelle surprise, a social conservative who has most profoundly articulated what has been going on. Meanwhile, libertarians like Tyler Cowen were calling Devlin evil.
Also, as Jacob M. (Hermes), another social conservative, has noted, except for Roissy PUAs generally don’t provide much in the way of trenchant social analysis. They just want to get laid.
Also, as Jacob M. (Hermes), another social conservative, has noted, except for Roissy PUAs generally don’t provide much in the way of trenchant social analysis. They just want to get laid.
Thursday –
This is very true, and cuts in a few ways.
One is that it overstates the socio-political aspects of Game — for most people, there are *none*.
Another is that the realization of my first point can lead one to understate the socio-political aspects of Game — because everyone who runs Game will end up with a gender realist view of women, which in itself has socio-political implications, at least in terms of policies, if not in terms of worldview.
I would surmise that the reason for (the most prominent) socons capitulating to the onslaught of the Left– feminism, cultural Marxism et al–may lie in them not being aware of the intellectuality that undergirds their own traditions. Either that or, knowing full well the veracity or their positions, they still could not but fold before the forces that assailed them. The truly disconcerting answer could be the latter and it should not be held against them. If the former, however, it is due to them being incurious and inept which means that the solution would be the remedying of ignorance and indifference. As has been conceded, “Game’s utility to traditionalism is as a part of it – it cannot take its place because it is not a complete ideology”. In all, “game”–I’d prefer bildung–can not discard the vehicle but it can avoid the various models of those socons who were complicit in assisting Leftism.
Because religion is in large part an endeavor to make a Human out of Man, religion will always appear naive to those of us who have grasped reality by the horns, warts and all.
-well, youngster, you are showing yourself a fool. Religion is original to humanity; it begins precisely with the differentiation of man and animal through the human sharing of the sign. As such, it can be many things but it can’t be divorced from any proper accounting of human reality. Religion, in the particular instance, may or may not be naive. But it should be needless to say that the most learned men of religion know much more than any arrogant (biological) reductionist can know. Does my response make you feel resentful? Well, my friend, that is a particularly human and “religious” or sacred/sacrificial sense of Being; it is not a mere “emotion”.
Jacob M. (Hermes) wrote:
The older generation of men grew up, so to speak, inside The Matrix. They hold to chivalry because they believe women by nature are pure, innocent, and good, because in the world these men grew up in, that’s how they were bred. Our civilization’s campaign to make women that way was so successful that after millenia it seemed they really were that way, so that these guys never had a chance to see women’s untamed nature.
So if Devlin gets it, why don’t you?
You totally mischaracterize Game practitioners, despite oceans of contrary evidence (our own presence here, for starters).
Adam
You have stood up for True Religion & that sort of thing, but mainly you are changing the subject.
If traditionalists are found to be hopelessly naive and wrong about the sexual instincts of the females of their own species, they cannot expect to be looked up to as “wise elders” worthy of respect for what they might teach the young. If SoComs and traditionalists do not align their worldview correctly with this part of Truth, they will be ignored. And you guys are well on the way, imho.
You totally mischaracterize Game practitioners, despite oceans of contrary evidence (our own presence here, for starters).
Do you cite any specific instance of that? No, you don’t. Because there wasn’t any such instance.
Social conservatives and traditionalists have relied on traditions the explicit rationale for which were either forgotten or never even explicitly articulated. These traditions simply worked. Hence, these traditions were easy prey for those who proposed easily explained “solutions” for correcting the inevitable inequities that any social arrangement produces. It is only with the great progress that Darwinism has had in the past few years in explaining human nature, that many of the unarticulated rationales for various traditions have finally been articulated. The Darwinians are only explaining what the traditiionalists knew all along, but could not say.
But it is just an act of religious faith that lead you to believe “traditionalists” are naive and wrong about the sexual instincts of the females. Where’s your evidence? Merely alluding to the fact that a countervailing ideal of feminine virtue has been championed by “traditionalists” does not mean that those so championing have no idea of the baser possibilities of the female condition. It is naive to think it is some secret or great recent discovery that woman is capable of sexual degradation and social nastiness.
Frankly, any serious “traditionalist” would surely be interested in why certain values, like monogamy, the Western nuclear family, patriarchal religion, became established. And in so pursuing the question, he would be sure to come upon evidence of the sexual and moral disorder of certain ancient and modern societies to which Judaism and Christianity were in good part a response.
Adam:
As my quote from Jacob above notes, the campaign to tame female nature was so successful that traditionalists forget that it needed taming.
But you are right that there is no necessary connection between traditionalism and naivite about female sexuality.
So, are you saying that true Traditionalists champion an interpretation of female sexuality while knowing from a study of history that it is highly misleading? How does this help the Traditionalists? To look, better, I mean.
There is a deep issue, a deep problem for Traditionalists in regard to reconciling monogamy with female hypergamy (sexually desiring only a small percentage of men and not necessarily the most virtuous).
Monogamy invites the average man, in this scenario, to make a lifelong committment to a woman who, on average, never will desire him sexually. It is a mathematical certainty. If he was led to believe otherwise pre-maritally, he was being misled.
I suppose it all depends on how much a guy values the sex-thing.
The compromise was thus: women (or their controllers in their families) exchanged hypergamy (which at the time meant polygamy) for the increased resources and investment of a one-on-one husband. No doubt, for many women and their families of origin, this was a bad deal. Likely it was forced through as a means of maintaining social peace among men, as Robert Wright strongly suggests in his book “The Moral Animal”. The only women who, in a very bottom line way, benefit from monogamy in the mating sense are those who are in a position to have a monogamous marriage to one of the men who are desired by virtually all the women.
Look, I don’t think of myself as a “traditionalist” like Auster because I don’t pretend to have a particular program. I simply want to be realistic and conservative of that which I feel is essential to the ongoing renewal (which entails change, within a tradition) of society.
Having said that, there is nothing contradictory about championing norms that many will fail to live up to. It’s how most of us live our lives.
All norms are articulated in response to disorder. What’s more they are articulated in the course of events, the participants in which are trying to frame its meaning but without ever being sure just what the event means or how the event will be remembered. The result is that there is never any straightfoward explanation of just how a norm emerges from lived experience. For example, we can talk endlessly about a great book that puts new norms or ideas into exchange. But we can find no formulaic way to explain what, exactly, makes the book great or how it emerged from experience. There is a quantum of mystery to the emergence of the transcendent norm that simply has to be accepted as part of the human condition.
All culture is transcendent – it has no material reality. Words, for example, only have material reality as letters or sounds, but the words that our minds somehow realize by associating letters or sounds are truly transcendent, as are all social norms – they are not imprinted on our neurons, genes, or in any material reality. Humanity is inconceivable without the transcendent, which is just why attempts to explain women and men by recourse to materialist reduction are bound to make you look naive.
It’s naive to think women are programmed to desire one kind of man. Desire, unlike animal appetite, is learned, from others. If the women I admire or compete with like a certain man, then I am more inclined to like him too. The weirdest things can become desirable, in the right social context.
Desire is supplementary to our biological drives. Yes, biology pushes us in certain directions but it is not deterministic. A woman can learn many desires and can learn to love a man in a way that cannot be explained by any reductive reason. That, after all, is what love is.
I’m not sure that in a social milieu of enforced monogamy, as existed in the past, the average woman would never desire the average man sexually. After all, it’s not as though arranged marriage was the norm in pre-1960′s America. This is just speculation on my part, but if men were seen by society as being superior to women, had more education and a lock on good jobs, wouldn’t men therefore possess a certain degree of alphaness, and thus attractiveness to women, merely by being men? Wouldn’t having a job that paid enough to support a family and being perceived by society in general as a leader, make the Average Joe attractive to the Average Jane?
BTW, hi Thursday; nice to see you around the blogosphere. Thanks for digging up that quote of mine from Novaseeker’s. I had forgotten about it and certainly never thought it would spark more discussion.
Biocons are simply offering a corrective.
Suggesting that biocons are determinsts is setting up a straw-man to attack. I know of *no* biocons who hold that culture plays no role. I do know of many non-biocons who hold, more or less, that biology plays a very small role, if any — it is the transcendent traditional cultural values that mean everything. In that, they are aligned with the left in a belief that culture determines everything. Biocons offer a corrective to that — not in claiming that everything is determined by biology alone, but that the biological needs to be given its due place — and that due place is not a minor role that takes a back seat to transcendent culture.
In this modern world, rampant female promiscuity provides for unprecedented amounts of honest data and feedback about what makes women want to have sex with one guy and not another. I mean, rejection vs. takes you home and rides you is real feed-back you can trust regarding female preference for sex partners.
Guys can discuss the transcendant nature of love and/or study what gets women wet and eager. If these two things overlap to a large degree, the average well intentioned, eager-to-please guy will have nothing to worry about.
I have to agree with Jacob and Adam. Women can fall in love with betas, in the right circumstances. One of those circumstances is her not having a lot of sexual experience. Women bond to men simply by having sex with them. If a man is the only person a woman has been with, that by itself will create a strong bond between them. Another circumstance is the lack of an easy out from the relationship. We tend to love the things we have to love.
The one comment I would have about this is that women’s behavior today is not “natural”, because the natural consequences of this behavior have been removed (via contraception, abortion, and de-stigmatization of extra-marital sex). So what we are seeing is not “women in their natural state” but rather “women when all of the natural repercussions of engaging in sex have been removed”. It’s a very modern and contemporary phenomenon. So I guess I would say that the current behavior is how women behave when they are free of cultural and natural checks on their behavior.
Hermes
Yes indeed, if we lived in a very different kind of society than 21st Century America things would be different.
I think that a sane, healthy society would put considerable effort into making the average guy seems sufficiently hot to the average girl. Instead, ours has been doing the exact opposite for decades. With consequences.
For those commenting here, if you successfully reconstitute yourselves via ‘game’ and attract an unfailingly devoted girlfriend or wife, then, having achieved this preliminary step, what steps would you take to bring about your conservatism?
For those commenting here, if you successfully reconstitute yourselves via ‘game’ and attract an unfailingly devoted girlfriend or wife, then, having achieved this preliminary step, what steps would you take to bring about your conservatism?
That depends on how each individual wishes to organize his life, but the married “Gamers” don’t just use Game to attract a wife, but to maintain her attraction to her in the marriage, and thereby much more successfully avoiding the leading contemporary reason for divorce: female boredom with their husbands and married life due to losing attraction. A marriage where the husband is regularly running “LTR Game” will generally be quite conservative, because the man will be quite dominant in the relationship (not domineering), but how that plays itself out in each household is different.
Unbelievable! Bilogical determinists and “realists” who argue that women as a group are as salacious, predatory, violent, and promiscuous as men -if not even more so!
Ironically and paradoxically, if you want to understand the nature of male and female sexuality, unalloyed by that of the other sex, study the behavior of homosexuals and lesbians. Homosexuals are widly, often suicidally, promiscuous. Lesbians are monogamous.
Also, men commit 100% of rapes, roughly 99% of violent sexual assault, and well over 90% of all acts of child molestation. For obvious anatomical reasons, women can’t rape anyone in the pure and literal sense of the word. And when women commit violent sexual assaults, it’s usually with male accomplices, often under the duress of a violent male, and the vicitms are almost always female. Violent sexual assaults of males by females alone are so rare as to be statistically nonexistent.
Lastly, it’s estimated that some 250,000 males are raped in prisons and jails each year. How many violent sexual assaults are committed by women in jails and prisons?
SMK
Women do not need to committ violence themselves to create societal chaos. It is enough for them to demonstrate a strong sexual preference for men who commit violence.
And if you really believe Lesbians are monogamopus and non-violent, there is not much hope for you.
These comments are a risible and grotesque amalgam of “Roissyism,” F. Roger Devlin and his wet-dreams of “feral women,” father’s rights victimology, and “masculism.”
I see you link to Mary Nemko and Glenn Sacks, both left-wing “masculists.” Nemko is an associate of Warren Farrell, and Sacks apotheosizes Farrell as the “inellectual wellsping of the men’s movement.” “The Myth of Male Power, “the bible of the “men’s movement,” is arguably the silliest book ever written by someone widely regarded as a “serious scholar” and professional.
Although there’s a taliban-wing of the father’s right movement that would like to reverse the gains of 19th century feminism and turn the U.S. into a Westernized version of Saudi Arabia, virtually all “masculists” are left-liberals, sexual egalitarians, absolute cultural determinists, and male feminists who came to feel betrayed by “radical feminists” whom, ludicrously, they caricature as “neo-Victorians” and “biological determinists.”
“Masculism” is feminism, feminism for males. They espouse the basic dogmas of feminist ideology, environmental determinism and sexual egalitarianism, and support 80-90% of the feminist agendum: ERA, “gener-neutral “laws with no exceptions; women in combat, total sexual integration of the military, police forces, fire departments, male prisons, etc.; androgynous pedagogy, homosexual marriage, etc.
And vicitmization for males. As Paul Gottfired observed, “masculsts” and feminists are “victimologists wearing interchangeable masks. “The only difference between “masculists” and orthodox feminists is that the former believe that men and boys are now more victimized than women and girls by “sexism” and “traditional sex-roles.”
“Masculists” and the posters on this blog are only united by hatred of women and those who realize that women have a civilizing influence on men , yes even today, and by the view of men as victimized, systemically as a group, by “feminazis” and “chivalrous” traditionalists.
Fascinating misandry, SMK, and just what we talk about very often. Thanks for proving our point.
SMK
Your rant missed the target if you were aiming at the Roissyphere. Farrel and the men-as-victim crowd are quite distinct from what I would call “gender realists” who are basically uninterested in such labels.
Run @ SMK“Your rant missed the target if you were aiming at the Roissyphere…”
I doubt trying to explain the difference to her is going to matter one bit, Rum. She undoubtedly already hates men, as a class, far too much to even care that not all men are the same.
I just wondering if her appearance here is just the beginning of a wave of feminist “shaming” attacks in a attempt to shut down the sort discussion that is going on (here, and elsewhere) regarding the use of “Game” and it’s derivatives, and the now stated understanding that women ARE NOT, in fact, perfect.
I suspect SMK is a female conservative who doesn’t realize that she is a closet feminist.
Raise the kids to be traditionalists.
Novaseeker – “I suspect SMK is a female conservative who doesn’t realize that she is a closet feminist.”
Given her glowing reference to Lesbians, I tend to take her as one herself. I cannot imagine a conservative women, even one deeply steeped in feminism, using lesbians (or gays) as a positive “model”.
Also, she seems to be entirely dismissive of the idea that men are in any way being disadvantaged, and she rattles off number of unsubstantiated claims mean to portray men (as a class) as mere perpetrates of the “wrongs” of modern society – straight up Lesbian/Feminist agitprop.
I do tend to think that young people of both genders are a disadvantaged group and that men are especially disadvantaged. I don’t think of myself as being disadvantaged, but I make very little money through what’s basically online coding or processing of research data for a professor in the rhetoric/writing department at the university I go to. I haven’t made much money at my other work, either, unfortunately, although I enjoy it a lot. A lot of young people are just in a state, in their twenties, that isn’t conducive to anything resembling health in relationships or in many other areas, either. When I used to read through a lot of dating profiles and get a sense of things, by communicating with people, I got the sense that many people were…not in a good state. For some reason, there’s this unspoken message, in society, that any sort of self-reflection (I’m talking about this among young people, but it’s not just young people who are affected by it) is a sign of weakness or something. I don’t even know how to describe it, and I’m not talking about game. It’s as if young people are terrified of exploring motivations and trying to understand their motivations for doing things.
*Cough*
Its sad indeed that my box.net link of the Devlin articles do not work anymore.
I think it happened about the time Lawrence Auster linked to them in a blog comment. Box stats said the Devlin articles were downloaded 400+ times (in under 10 days!). And Sex and Culture, a real bandwidth hog, 50+ times. I guess Box shut me down.
I emailed them, they said..”Well it works for us, why not try another browser?” Pure BS.
But I guess those articles are up all over the web now, even the Occidental quarterly have Devlins articles up for free, and Sex and Culture by J.D. Unwin is on bittorrent.
So its not worth the trouble to get it up on a new host – google wont rank the new host high up thus it would be hard to find, and I as a blogger – am 95% dead :)
C’est la vie – was fun getting the word out on Devlin, and BTorrent allows reaching a whole new younger group rather than people who are already inclined to agree with them. :-)
Mister MensaRefugee-
If you helped proliferate Devlin’s work, big thanks. Almost every man who reads those articles is a man who now knows the rules rather than relying on the kindness of strangers.
Danke.
Im just trolling google updating links now that box.net has changed its system and in their infinite wisdom made google searches for those devlin articles defunct.
Guys, the old address was
http://public.box.net/mensarefugee26388
The new *WORKING* address is
http://box.net/mensarefugee26388
Mat 24:12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
Social cons have the least understanding of human nature of all ideologies. Part of this is because they don’t even believe in evolution. We could call Social Cons dinosaurs, but they wouldn’t understand the metaphor.
Christianity does comprehend human nature and its fallen nature. Evolution does not understand human nature: human nature is evolving and therefore is not permanent and can be manipulated. At no time can the evolutionist pick a point in human history and declare that this is human nature: One cannot logically declare “It is in the trees we developed this nature,” or, “No, it is upon the savannah”; for then, contrary to your very belief in evolution, you have locked human nature into an era of “long, long ago, in a distant grassland….The Marxist, the political evolutionist, is more honest: you, sir, are the Marxist’s dinosaur – did you get that?
If I recall correctly, it was the first Huxley who, when questioned why he supported evolution, replied quite openly that it was about sexual freedom: there can be no sexual morality if the sex drive is merely an evolved/evolving feature of “humanity.” The libido is merely a natural drive seeking expression and is but held in chains by the temporary customs and ethics of the community: the sexual avant garde becomes the hammer of evolution upon the current evolved state of “man” – those who mindlessly cling to the old customs of patriarchy and “manhood” are the dinosaurs. Feminist sapiens is the new man! — did you get that?
The religion of evolution is the means by which man can deny his iniquity and give it free reign without judgement: only those still locked in the past criticize the next higher step taken by the advancing sexual elite: would you stay in the trees screeching or come down to build a great new tribe or monkeys? We will walk upright into our bright sexual future! Did you get that dinosaur?
In the eyes of the Marxist/Feminist evolutionary elite, the remnant of the patriarchy are the extinguishing lines of “humanity”; and the Gamer is a competitive offshoot of that branch that needs to be merely cut off. Did you get that dinosaur?
By denying our iniquity, by denying that we are lawless-fallen, new customs and ethics have arisen governing the relations of men and women and husband and wife destroying the old bonds: iniquity has increased and love has truly grown cold.
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