Game in Hobbiton, or, Bilbo demonstrates the neg

Sometimes a brass tacks example can be helpful, especially for those who prefer the concrete over high-falutin abstractions.

Backhanded or ambiguous compliments are a “tool” of charmers and rhetoricians which have been around since Hobbits tilled the soil of the Shire. Variations on the theme are as multifarious as the variety of human conversation. By creating some ambiguity and personalizing the interaction, they engage the mind and emotions of the listener.  Whatever you may think of Bilbo’s speech, he clearly had the attention of his audience.

They are also as obvious as the nose on your face: one would have to live in an isolation chamber or a bomb shelter to fail to encounter them from time to time.  So we should attempt to distinguish between the neg, as a tool in the secret gnostosexual toolbox of Game, from conversationally ubiquitous backhanded or ambiguous compliments in general.  In order to do so we shall consult The Prophet (content warning):

You’ll also note that a lot of these unnervingly ambiguous observations focus on a girl’s presumed inability to cut loose and have some fun. They are designed, in other words, to eradicate anti-slut defenses and persuade her to open up… to you, the fearless judger of her feminine worth. Some others focus on her social naivete, or her craving for attention. Sprinkle to taste. Some of these negs fall under the category of cold reads; the difference being that cold reads are usually unambiguous compliments worded to entrap a girl deeper into conversation by getting her to talk about herself.

Seduction is the art of contrived concealment. You want to seduce without revealing the machinery of your mind, or the purpose of your words. You introduce the dangerous idea, and if you are successful, she picks up the idea and joins you in her own seduction.

When it comes the to prescriptive canon labeled “Game”[1] (again, content warning) Christians know right off the bat that some things are off limits.  For example “always keep two in the kitty” (that is, keep a harem of women and “spin plates” so that no one woman ‘controls'[2] you) is clearly contrary to Christian doctrine and morality.  Not to mention stupid and a sign of low self-esteem.

The problem arises with more subtle or ambiguous “tools”.   The “neg” as described by the putative experts on Game is obviously morally evil when it functions to eradicate anti-slut defenses.  It is also morally wrong when it functions as a kind of lie.  Without actually getting into the breakdown, here, what is clear is that open-eyed wise discernment is needed — if there is anything good left over here at all that Tolkien hadn’t already demonstrated decades before Roissy was in diapers.  Separating the gold from the dross in “Game” isn’t just a matter of picking which tools are good and which are evil.  Each tool has to be broken down and re-discerned, re-filtered, re-constructed so that the remainder after discernment is morally acceptable.

This brings me to what I would ultimately like to propose in this post.  Lets call it Rule 36: Any man who has the wisdom and discernment required to extract what is good from “Game”  without being perverted by what is not, does not need to go to perverts for advice.

Deficiencies in fatherhood cannot be filled in by the Church, and they cannot be replaced by the “wisdom” of sexual perverts.  Note the word cannot.  If the Red Pill is supposed to be about accepting reality as it actually is rather than as we would like it to be, then accepting this reality should be a part of it.

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[1] That is, the tools – the concrete actions recommended by PUAs under the heading “Game”, as distinguished from description and analysis.

[2] Only a man who is a pathetic slave to sex can be controlled, via sex, by a woman — or a harem of women, for that matter.  Don’t be that guy.

الألعاب

“Islam is a toolbox, Zippy” he told me. “You don’t understand how badly liberalism has emasculated modern young men.”

“It was the Mohammedans who taught me how to reject liberalism and discover my masculinity. They don’t have to be right about everything. I can take what is right and good in the Holy Koran, and ignore the things which are not good.”

How consent of the governed makes everybody gay

Some of my readers are no doubt finding this tedious, but the beatings must continue until rationality improves.

It has been suggested that modern women are attracted to bad boys (men who make poor fathers) because women themselves just have an inherently disordered nature in that respect.  Women are basically all (or almost all) just like homosexuals inasmuch as their sex drives are intrinsically disordered.

It has been further suggested (repeatedly) that to the extent that men defer to bad boys it is because those bad boys get all the chicks.  I suspect that this counter-empirical insistence reflects an obsessive focus on women and all things female.  If you think that you aren’t considered a bad boy because you don’t get female attention like the bad boys, you are probably obsessed with female attention (or its lack) and you’ve badly misunderstood the situation.

Men generally do to some extent admire/fear/respect/defer to bad boys because the bad boys get female attention — the feedback loop John suggests. But women are not the only reason for male deference to other males, by any stretch of the imagination. Women are not even a primary reason why some men defer to other men. There may be a feedback loop, but it isn’t an isolated self-referential system with no other inputs.

Female attention is one of the spoils of social dominance; it is not a primary cause of social dominance.

Men determine the de-facto deference hierarchy, and women respond to that determination. Women know that in a confrontation, contextual-alpha-dork is going to back down and submit to M Shadows — if M Shadows pays him any attention at all. Women know that in a knife fight Bill Gates is going to run away from Tommy Tats-n-Piercings. You can’t fool them into thinking otherwise.

Men, not women, determine the masculine hierarchy. Modern liberal men – that is, almost all men in the modern West – deny the legitimacy of masculine hierarchy. Even where there is de-jure hierarchy (Bill Gates over his subordinates, say), it is (required to be) fully voluntary: Gates only exercises authority by consent of the governed, over ‘subordinates’ who can up and quit any time. There is no absolutely binding command to it, just mutual self-interest and free choice. De-jure hierarchy under liberalism is not like natural masculine hierarchy: it is a very effeminate cooperation, that is, cooperation backed by no real binding authority with teeth, acknowledged as such.

Because an attempt to deny masculine hierarchy is an attempt to deny nature, liberalism cannot actually prevent masculine hierarchy from emerging. All it can do is categorize masculine hierarchy as sociopathic.

So the masculine hierarchy which emerges under liberalism is sociopathic, and the result is that modern women are attracted to sociopaths.

(Expanded from a comment to this post).

Women full of blinders

I’ve been writing recently about the dangers of treating low-life sexual perverts as leaders of men.  I’ve explained why modern men tend to think bad boys are cool, and I’ve proposed that women love bad boys because men love bad boys.  This hypothesis either has or does not have merit as an objective explanation, and I laid it out this way in one of the comment threads:

Define “bad boy” = “men who make poor fathers”.

The conventional hypothesis (CH) is that women like “bad boys” because bad boys are more objectively masculine. This hypothesis, I suspect, gives the female lizard brain too much credit for objectivity. The female lizard brain is built to be shaped by male leadership, not to operate “on its own” outside of the context of male leadership. It also begs the question[1] of what is “masculine” and fails to explain why women frequently go for the kind of bad boy Mark Richardson describes.

The Zippy hypothesis (ZH) is that men — who are not natural leaders simpliciter, but arrange themselves into hierarchies as both leaders and followers – determine the hierarchy. The female lizard brain keys in on this male hierarchy (the actual one, not the formal one, thus “cool” vs nerd-king) and is naturally attracted to the men that (other) men “love”, that is, submit to, admire, judge to be dominant and high value, think are “cool”, etc.

So women find themselves (unwittingly, really, since this is the lizard brain we are talking about) attracted to the men that other men love, fear, admire, etc. Women have some control over this just as men have some control over how they respond to a woman dressed like a slut; but at the visceral level there is an involuntariness to the way the flesh responds to temptation.

So the reason modern women find themselves (whether they like it or not) attracted to “bad boys” – defined, remember, as men who make poor fathers – is because modern men go for bad boys. And the reason modern men go for bad boys is because liberalism is pervasive, the hierarchy has been destroyed, the whole world is on fire with rebellion against nature and nature’s God, and the bad boy rebel has been elevated to the highest point in the de facto hierarchy – a hierarchy which is not allowed to exist but which persists despite its prohibition.

In a combox below Dalrock writes the following insight:

One of the problems with convincing women that cads/players are low value in an attempt to discourage her having sex with him is the woman’s ability to identify the cad/player prior to having sex with him. My wife encounters this when talking to young women; their definition of “player” is the beta guy who gives them the creeps by telling them how beautiful they are. I see this same pattern on Yahoo Answers. I strongly suspect this is related to the scientific research finding that ovulating women fool themselves into thinking cads would make great dads. Telling women cads are sexual losers plays right into their blind spot, because they already want to peg the sexual losers as the cads, freeing them to pursue “true love” with that really smooth and not at all caddish guy who makes her tingle.

This is certainly a problem when we are talking in general, abstract terms, because it applies to situations where the ‘filtering’ process is up to  women.  Women should make note of this inherent problem in their filters.

But when it comes to actual, specific cads that we know on-line or in person – men whose particular claim to ‘expertise’ is their notch-count of bar skanks – we either treat them with respect and deference qua cad, buying their books and giving them naming rights over masculinity (“Game”), or we state the truth plainly: that they are the bottom-feeding perverts of the sexual revolution, and men of good will owe them nothing.

This brings me to my final point, which is that a kind of stockholm syndrome seems prevalent among some men who came by the truth through reading online self-professed cads.  That is all well and good, because God always brings forth good from the evil we do and experience.  Some saints came by their sainthood through suffering terrible diseases.

But it is one thing to be grateful for one’s enlightenment however it came about, and it is another thing entirely to make a demi-god of syphilis.

[1] Here I do mean actually “begs the question,” not “raises the question”, which is what the phrase is frequently misused to mean.

Choose your friends wisely

What followed the Roman empire was the Catholic church. What a drag. I’d rather be a Viking. […] The manosphere hasn’t proposed clear solutions because we don’t want them. We don’t want to fix Rome, we want to loot it.

On the nature of good advice

Many commenters have misunderstood the situation and are still asking questions based on a fantasy.

I’m just a blogger who goes by the moniker Zippy. It is not in my power to fix society, to make churches preach masculinity (as if that were the Church’s job as opposed to fathers’ job), etc.

If I observe a girl getting screwed by a sociopath, I advise her that it isn’t a good idea: she should not sleep with the sociopath. She answers “but what masculine man will love me?” because she, like many commenters, misunderstands the situation. It is not within my power to create a population of non-sociopathic masculine men for her.

(She shouldn’t take advice on how to be feminine from whores either.)

Yet the advice I am giving her — (1) stop getting screwed by the sociopath and (2) repent of your liberalism — is still the very best practical advice, beyond “repent your sins and be saved by Christ,” that anyone can give her under the circumstances.

It doesn’t matter whether or not that leaves a “vacuum”. By temperament I’ve never needed someone to lead me to the extent that most men feel, it is true, and therefore it is probably easier for me to see this than others. But “vacuum” or not, it isn’t a good idea to take the pervert’s disease into your person as a substitute for what is missing.  This is true for everyone, not just those of us who aren’t intimidated by vacuums.

Drop the fantasy. Nobody is going to fix society for you, and I certainly don’t have the power to do it. All I can do is give you advice on what to do in your own small (like mine) life.

And my advice in that respect is to stop getting f***ed by bad boys.

Why are men in love with bad boys?

It is often said that women love bad boys, and the prevailing idea is that women love bad boys intrinsically: it is just inherent to the fallen female nature to find bad boys attractive.  Some time ago I proposed an alternative theory that has taken the world by storm: that women, as natural followers, love whomever it is that men love.  And in our modern liberal society men are in love with bad boys.

It is frequently said that men are natural leaders while women are natural followers.  While it is true that women generally speaking are natural and even visceral followers – all the verbal reassurances in the world aren’t going to speak to her hind brain, which knows what it sees no matter what you say – it is not true that men are natural leaders, full stop.  Men are both natural leaders and natural followers, and the natural patriarchal society is a naturally hierarchical society.

But liberalism rejects social hierarchy, so the longing for masculinity can only be filled, in modern liberal society, by men who are sociopaths.

When you give a slut a cookie …

Part of the reason that objectively understanding the math of getting lucky with Game (HT Aquinas Dad) is important is because many Christian men seem to have bought into the idea that pickup artists are woman-savvy high value “alpha” men, as opposed to the low value dirt bags and sexual garbage collectors they tend most often to be when viewed in an objective light.

Game (understood as the pickup artist’s toolkit specifically) is actually pretty lousy in terms of effectiveness, right on par with placebo.  Doing something (and learning from the experience, and being persistent, and building confidence) is far better than doing nothing; but once you extract taking action at all, persistence, confidence, and learning through experience from the equation, the part of Game that is left over (that is, Game itself) – at least according to the “best of the best” PUA themselves – doesn’t do much for your percentages.  That’s why PUA have to “make it up in volume“: the advice is always to approach, next, approach, next, approach, next, and invest as little as possible in any one woman. This is integral to Game, and as an explanatory matter it clearly accounts for most of the “success” seen with Game.

Nevertheless, many Christian men appear to have bought into the idea that a cad who beds many women (who has picked many four leaf clovers) is a high-value “alpha male”.  This is because, as Lawrence Auster once observed,

Roissyism, as everyone knows, consists of techniques to manipulate the emotions of liberal women. What is less appreciated is that Roissyism also consists of techniques to manipulate the minds of conservative men.

This lionization of the cad as a “high value alpha male” is encouragement and consolation to the sluts who sleep with him. The fact that the man she jumped into bed with is seen as high value by other men is part of the reward. Sure, she may have degraded herself in the eyes of men whose burning judgment she cannot stand and which leads her on to public expression of outrage. But at the same time she receives affirmation from the fact that according to many of today’s commenters she bagged King Solomon (content warning) not Leisure Suit Larry.

There weren’t many cultural advantages to growing up in the 1970’s, I have to say.  But one that I rather wryly appreciate now is that at least we knew a low value dirt bag loser when we saw one, and the fact that he’d slept with enough women (of one sort or another) to contract gonorrhea didn’t change the evaluation.

Mathematical illiteracy and Game

Suppose a group of men hunts four-leaf clovers.  With time and persistence they learn intuitively where to go, how to scan for them, etc.  It gets to the point where these men are each collecting many four-leaf clovers in a given year.

Because of their success in collecting four leaf clovers these men go around pronouncing that most clovers have four leaves.  For some reason lots of other men – men who, rather ironically, especially pride themselves on dispassionate logic and rational thinking – believe them.

How about earning a living playing the slots?

More confirmation (language/content warning) that according to the “pros” themselves, “Game” is basically a placebo.

Keep in mind that a placebo is, in fact, better than doing nothing at all: there is quantifiable benefit, in general, in just putting in an effort.