5 ways to be a better man

1. Be decisive. Women despise indecisive men. Men refuse to follow indecisive men. When asked for your opinion, learn to answer in a succinct, decisive manner without implicitly asking for approval of it.
2. Be courageous. If you find yourself worrying what someone's response to your opinion will be, that is your signal to stick to your guns. No one likes or respects a coward.
3. Be active. Do something. Anything. Walk. Stretch. Run. Play.
4. Be protective. There are wolves, sheep, and guard dogs. You should be a dog. Maybe you are a big scary Rottweiler. Maybe you are a scrappy little chihuahua. Whatever you are, you must not be a sheep.
5. Be humble before God. Bend the knee and bow the head to Him and no one else. Even if you don't believe in Him, respect the theoretical concept. It will serve you well.

The mystery of credit card debt

Who could possibly fathom the mystery?

A 2015 National Debt Relief survey of 1,107 adults with credit card debt revealed some interesting differences between the sexes. In the survey, the main difference between men and women was the amount of credit card debt they carried.

For instance, 63 percent of women ages 18 to 24 carried some credit card debt, but only 36 percent of men in that age category had any debt. Similarly, 66 percent of women ages 55 to 64 carried credit card debt, but only 33 percent of men in that age bracket had credit card debt.

So why the split, and what can women do about these troubling statistics?

Adam Tijerina, consumer advocate for National Debt Relief, says several potential reasons for this gender gap exist. However, he speculates that the most likely culprit is that women are still paid less than men.

The reason is obvious. Women have a not entirely unreasonable expectation that they can expected to have their debt paid off by a man at some point in the future, so their risk tolerance is higher in this regard.

Which, of course, is exactly why men need to make it clear that they will not involve themselves with women who are heavily indebted.

Knowing the unknowable

It's shocking, I know, to discover that proud young women continue to be unable to successfully predict how they will feel about having children in the future:

Twelve years ago, I penned an essay for a Salon series called “To Breed or Not to Breed,” about the decision to have children or not. It began this way: “When I tell people that I’m 27, happily married and that I don’t think I ever want children, they respond one of two ways. Most of the time they smile patronizingly and say, ‘You’ll change your mind.’ Sometimes they do me the favor of taking me seriously, in which case they warn, ‘You’ll regret it.’” The series inspired an anthology titled Maybe Baby. It was divided into three parts: “No Thanks, Not for Me,” “On the Fence,” and “Taking the Leap.” My essay was the first in the “No” section.

So I felt a little sheepish, when, a year and a half ago, the writer Meghan Daum asked me if I’d be interested in contributing to the book that would become Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. I wrote back to tell her that I couldn’t: My son had just turned 1.

It’s embarrassing to be such a cliché, to give so many people a chance to say, “I told you so.” (And some people, I’ve learned, will say those actual words.) I fear I’ve let down other women who disavow children and who, because of my example, might face an extra smidge of condescending doubt. Worse, if I’m honest, when I hear younger women confidently describe how they’ll feel when they’re older, sometimes I feel a pinch of such condescension myself. Not because I think they’ll all necessarily want kids, or that they should have them, but because one tricky thing about your 20s is the need to make decisions for a future self whose desires are unknowable.

Most of the mothers I know used to proudly declare they never wanted to have children. Not some of them, not many of them, MOST of them. That is why the correct response to a young woman declaring that she doesn't want to have children is to laugh at her, because bearing children is the prime raison d'etre for every woman. The woman who fails to do so is, quite literally, a failure as a human being.

Alpha Mail: answering the re-ask

BT repeats a question:

While I appreciate the post itself, I find myself ticked off at the comments section and how quickly it spiraled downhill, with the exception of Cail, Cataline, and Corvinus who at least addressed the kino/physical part I was curious about.

Since Doom basically hijacked it and made it about himself, I figured I might as well re-ask the question that got ignored:

I do remember reading something a long while ago about alternating Alpha/Beta (Beta in the sense of how the rest of the manosphere uses it) depending on how the LTR is. If DHV is needed, then Alpha, but if reassurance is needed and it's not a shit test, then Beta. So if I'm remembering that right, should Mate-guarding hand ever come out and used as a tool of reassurance?

At least with you, you can give a personal example of "I've never needed to do that at all" or "I've used it sometimes".

I think the "Mate-Guarding Hand" should never be brought out in a defensive capacity when the threat posed is one presented by another male. I think I can say honestly that I've never used it beyond some immature public "see, I have a girlfriend and she's real" posturing with my first two girlfriends.

That tends to point towards part of the problem with the Mate-Guarding Hand; if it makes you look like a junior high boy who is primarily concerned with demonstrating that he is too good enough to get a girl, it's not a good move for a grown man. If you feel the need to send a message, a simple swat on the ass will convey ownership in a much more dominant way.

But you should feel any such need. Public attention from another man when you are there is a straightforward loyalty test. You should welcome the information it provides, because she isn't likely to behave any better when you're not around. If she shows insufficient loyalty, next her without hesitation or explanation. Don't try to "guard her" against her own inclinations, because that's her responsibility, not yours, just as your behavior is your own responsibility.

The only time I can remember someone trying to move in on SB in front of me was when the bassist from a popular local band literally tried to position himself in between the two of us in order to block me out of the conversation. I didn't mate-guard her, I simply tapped him on the shoulder and made a "step aside" gesture with my hand. He looked at me, at which point SB introduced me as her fiance and he promptly backed away.

Give your girl the chance to prove her loyalty, don't take it away from her. This doesn't mean you can't ever put your arm around her in public, or physically reassure her if she's feeling threatened by female interest in you, but then, such actions are not mate-guarding by definition. The question isn't really her reassurance is needed, then obviously it isn't mate-guarding. The problem is when you are trying to reassure yourself through your own actions.

HR, we have a problem

A reader who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons has a little situation:

I go to put my office Google account on my phone, but it won't set up right. So, I log in to gmail via chrome to check my work email briefly... and forgot to log out. [We shall omit the gory details, but suffice it to say that logging out would have been desirable.]

My first thought is to ignore this issue. There's a lot of web browsing we have to do. But yeah, I think: don't draw attention to a problem that may merely be overlooked. Then I think, better to go to the girl above me, and without giving details, explain [the situation]. This way I can control the narrative, show a little shame, and maybe they'll say they won't even look at that history.

I have no interest in the various mistakes or moral failings that occurred here, what I find both telling and problematic is the instinctive response. To preemptively try to fix a situation you don't even know is an actual problem yet is a very Gamma response. "This way I can control the narrative" is the key phrase that identifies that dangerously sub-optimal way of thinking.

The truth is that the reader is likely to do precisely the opposite, and not only fail to control the narrative, but create a situation that is beyond his boss's ability to overlook. Moreover, it assures the worst case scenario, which is that relevant people at his place of employment find out.

This goes to the lack of confidence at the heart of the Gamma. Instead of assuming that there will not be a problem, he assumes the worst and then seeks to make it happen. He does this because the insecurity of not knowing what may or may not happen is psychologically more painful to him than the consequences he is seeking to avoid.

I think every Gamma, or Delta with Gamma instincts, should watch the TV show Suits. Louis Litt embodies Gamma, and it is tragicomical how his constant efforts to preemptively fix problems he has created and control both the narrative and the flow of communications invariably makes things worse.

Don't be a Louis Litt. Don't try to fix things unless you are certain they are broken. Don't try to control the narrative, relax and let yourself flow with it. Wu-wei is very, very difficult for the Gamma, but most of the time, potential problems tend to sort themselves out without any action from those who foresee or imagine them.

Of pens and the company ink

One of the pleasures of becoming a man of relative wealth and power is the discovery that many of the more attractive women who ostensibly want to be "mentored" by you actually want to achieve their career objectives by rather more straightforward and horizontal means. Don't fall for it. The most easily-plucked apple is seldom the most sweet. Or the most wisely-plucked:

Clougherty and Lonsdale had been dating over the previous couple of weeks, while he was her assigned mentor for an undergraduate course at Stanford called Technology Entrepreneurship, Engineering 145. The limited-enrollment class offered a combination of academics, business skills and access to Silicon Valley that has made Stanford the most-sought-after university in the country, with the most competitive undergraduate admissions and among the highest donations. More than any other school, Stanford is the gateway to the tech world, and computer science is the most popular major. Each year, new young multimillionaires are minted, some just months after graduation.

Lonsdale, who also went to Stanford, made much of his fortune by helping to start Palantir Technologies, a major data-mining company. He was among the “top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists,” according to the course description, many of them alumni, who came to campus as mentors for E145. “Students will learn how to tell the difference between a good idea in the dorm and a great scalable business opportunity,” the E145 handbook for mentors says. “Guide them and challenge them.” Stanford students are well aware of how valuable these contacts are. Around the time Clougherty took E145, another student’s project, a virtual-payment app, attracted an investment from a Google board member who was a guest speaker in the course. It became the start-up Clinkle, with initial financing of $25 million.

After sightseeing in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. Stanford investigated whether he broke the university’s rule against “consensual sexual and romantic relationships” between students and their mentors and, later, whether he raped her. The findings from the investigations have sparked a war of allegations and interpretations, culminating last month with dueling lawsuits, filled with damaging accusations.

When I was a young man working at my father's very successful technology company, every secretary, cleaning girl, and marketing assistant made their interest in me clear. But I never did more than take one of them to lunch once - a risk worth taking because she was even prettier than her best friend, who was the reigning Miss Minnesota at the time - because I knew a) there were plenty of girls on the girl tree who didn't work for Daddy, and, b) the moment something didn't happen to go a girl's way, there was probably some sort of sexual harassment shakedown waiting to happen.

(There was never a second date because the girl ate like a freaking HORSE. I mean, she put away about four times what I ate, and I was lifting weights and doing heavy martial arts at the time. I correctly anticipated that she would blow up, which she did within 18 months. Damned shame. She was genuinely beautiful.)

Work can be a great place to meet women. An Adobe executive once gave me an amount of stick for treating one department there like a candy store. There are hot girls just out of college in practically every big corporation's marketing department. But don't date the women who work for the same company you do and especially don't get involved with any woman over whom you have any sort of authority, or for whom you have any sort of responsibility.

Note that even the smartest, best-educated women exhibit this sort of hypergamy. And why not? It's easier than actually working.

Do women make better decisions?

It depends entirely upon your definition of "better":

Mara Mather, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, and Nichole R. Lighthall, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Duke University, are two of the many researchers who have found that under normal circumstances, when everything is low-key and manageable, men and women make decisions about risk in similar ways. We gather the best information we can, we weigh potential costs against potential gains, and then we choose how to act. But add stress to the situation — replicated in the lab by having participants submerge their hands in painfully cold, 35-degree water — and men and women begin to part ways.

Dr. Mather and her team taught people a simple computer gambling game, in which they got points for inflating digital balloons. The more they inflated each balloon, the greater its value, and the risk of popping it. When they were relaxed, men and women took similar risks and averaged a similar number of pumps. But after experiencing the cold water, the stressed women stopped sooner, cashing out their winnings and going with the more guaranteed win. Stressed men did just the opposite. They kept pumping — in one study averaging about 50 percent more pumps than the women — and risking more. In this experiment, the men’s risk-taking earned them more points. But that wasn’t always the case.

In another experiment, researchers asked participants to draw cards from multiple decks, some of which were safe, providing frequent small rewards, and others risky, with infrequent but bigger rewards. They found that the most stressed men drew 21 percent more cards from the risky decks than from the safe ones, compared to the most stressed women, losing more over all.

Across a variety of gambles, the findings were the same: Men took more risks when they were stressed. They became more focused on big wins, even when they were costly and less likely.

Levels of the stress hormone cortisol appear to be a major factor, according to Ruud van den Bos, a neurobiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He and his colleagues have found that the tendency to take more risks when under pressure is stronger in men who experience a larger spike in cortisol. But in women he found that a slight increase in cortisol seemed actually to improve decision-making performance.But the closer the women got to the stressful event, the better their decision making became. Stressed women tended to make more advantageous decisions, looking for smaller, surer successes. Not so for the stressed men. The closer the timer got to zero, the more questionable the men’s decision making became, risking a lot for the slim chance of a big achievement.

What the researchers failed to note is that this actually explains why there are so few female entrepreneurs and why it is much more often men who become very wealthy. The higher the risk, the more likely you are to lose everything, but the higher the potential reward. It's not an accident that many of the most wealthy men have gained, lost, and recovered, large fortunes. Unless your plan is to inherit wealth, accepting high levels of risk is the only way to become very wealthy.

So, what this means is that we could probably use more women in finance and fewer women in technology. We want people chasing risk in startups. We don't want them chasing it in banks.

Girls in Games: setting the record straight

The constant media reports that women are just as likely to be gamers is bewildering to any genuine gamer. Where are they all? The truth is that it is nothing more than the usual media spinning the facts into a seriously distorted fiction. Consider this summary of last year's NPD survey:

PC gamers are just as likely to be men as they are women, with 51 percent and 49 percent, respectively. They tend to be older, with an average age of 38 years, and affluent, with an average household income of $69k. Gender differences become apparent by type of gamer: Heavy Core and Light Core are comprised mainly of men while Casual PC gamers are overwhelmingly female.

Talk about burying the lead! Casual PC gamers are not, and have never been, considered "gamers". Yes, they play games. So does Grandma and her bridge club. They're not gamers either.

The summary by The Escapist was more precise:

Core Gamers Mostly Male, Casual Gamers Mostly Female, Says NPD

Market research firm the NPD Group (who you may know as the guys who provide sales numbers for games every month) has conducted a large-scale survey of American PC gamers, and come up with some interesting observations. The 6,225 members survey were split into three groups - Heavy Core, Light Core, and Casual. Heavy Core gamers play "core" games for five or more hours per week, while Light Core gamers still enjoy core games, but do so for less than five hours a week, and Casual gamers only play non-core games. The survey found that the majority of gamers in the two "core" groups were male, while the casual group was "overwhelmingly female."

Just FYI, In order to qualify as a core gamer for the survey, respondents had to currently play Action/Adventure, Fighting, Flight, Massively Multi-Player (MMO), Racing, Real Time Strategy, Role-Playing, Shooter, or Sport games on a PC/Mac.

The largest segment is Casual at 56 percent, with Light Core at 24 percent, and Heavy Core at 20 percent. Though Heavy Core is the smallest segment, they spend a significantly higher number of hours gaming in an average week, and have spent roughly twice as much money in the past 3 months on physical or digital games for the computer than Casual PC gamers. Of all the participants surveyed, 51% were male and 49% were female.

Unfortunately, no actual breakdown by sex was provided, but we can work it out, depending upon what percentage you reasonably consider to be "overwhelming". I'll try 90 percent, although I suspect it might actually be higher.

0.56 x 0.9 = .504. Hmm, that won't work, because 50.4 percent is higher than the 49 percent female respondents reported. Perhaps Literally Wu was surveyed? Let's back "overwhelming" down to 85 percent. 0.56 x 0.85 is 0.476, which is at least statistically possible.

That means that if only 15 percent of casual gamers are male, the MAXIMUM number of Heavy Core female gamers are 0.62 percent of the population. .014 x .44 = 0.00616.

The self-deluded divorcee

Dalrock considers the case of the divorcee who overrated herself:

Yes, I am lonely, and do love men, even though my husband hurt me deeply. But, when I look at the profile photos of the men on these dating sites, they turn my stomach, and feel these men have no idea just how bad they look, older than their years on their profile, fat, scruffy, and look like they have been road hard, put away wet, and don’t have a clue that most women who are my age, will not find them the least bit attractive, surely not to date. Most just look like they are narcissists, and self centered, and think us women want to go out with a fish, or boat or souped up car, because that is what these guys pose with and many don’t even smile on their profiles. Are their teeth rotten or do they just hate life? Not sure about any of this.

What I do know is I have more self esteem and want anyone I date to clean up their act too. These men, aver the age of 50, want us women to look good, even thin and sexy, but do they? Nope.

If you don’t believe me about these dating sites.sign up for one or two, create a profile, of yourself, and then sit back and watch and wait to see who sends you a wink or a message.  These men are also rude, crude and disrespectful of women, and think that we are devoid of having a brain, or carrying on a conversation. To even try and screen out some of the men that are NOT a fit for me at all, I put in my profile that I love the theater, the ballet, the arts, as most men on these dating sites wouldn’t know what a tutu is, or who Picasso is. LOL Too bad it’s so pathetic:(

The level of self-delusion is stunning. We are supposed to be impressed by her knowing who Picasso is, but ignore the fact that she doesn't know how to spell "rode" as in "rode hard". And let's face it, the chances that she actually gives a damn about the theatre, the ballet, or the arts is remote.

However, it does tell us how older men should be handling their profiles. Instead of pictures of fish, boats, and cars, a few paragraphs of nonsense about how one goes to the Bayreuth festival in even years, and La Traviata in odd years, will probably go a long way with both women like this and their younger sisters. Few women actually care about matters cultural, let alone philosophical, but they very much want people to think they do.

It's strange that college-educated men have forgotten this, when so many of them probably once BS'd a woman with pseudo-erudite discussions of The Catcher in the Rye, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and whatever the pretentious book of the year was back in the day. It's not like it's hard to fake it; the average woman discussing a book seldom involves more than repeatedly declaring how much she loves it, how much she loves the author, how wonderful the author is, and how terrible it is that all those lesser beings know nothing about him.

It's so easy that I've gotten women to tell me that they have not only read, but loved books that don't even exist. I'll bet you could do the same thing with fictitious painters too, but I've never tried it. Young men, there is your homework assignment. See if you can inspire one woman to tell you that she loves a fictitious book, author, or painter. Report back with how many times it took you to find a woman who would take the bait. I'm betting that at least one in three women will do so.

Kickass women warriors

A Kurdette fighter is buried:

As Fatima Sheikh Hassan was laid to rest in an isolated cemetery amid an intense sand storm, the cries of women mourners showed both intense pride and profound despair. Fatima, whom friends said was just 17, was a volunteer with an all-female brigade of Kurdish troops, and was killed on Friday as she fought to stop Isil militants over-running Kobane, her home town on Syria’s border with Turkey. That the ground fight to save the town has fallen to teenage girls, rather than the Turkish troops amassed on the border or their US allies, has not been lost on fellow Kurds mourning her death.... at the funeral, it was the contribution of the female fighters that particularly drew attention. It showed the glaring ideological gap between the PKK, a socialist revolutionary party that champions gender equality, and the mindset of their jihadist opponents.

It does show the glaring ideological gap, but I'm trying to figure out how the fact that one side is losing and burying their dead young women is indicative of anything but the practical superiority of the side that rejects "gender equality" and is on the verge of wiping out the one that champions it.

The gamma factory

John Cleese, of the notoriously bad decision-making with regards to marriage, traces back his well-known problems with women to his mother:

“I don't want to get too dark and depressing but she was emotionally difficult. She was a tyrant.” In an extract of his new autobiography, So, Anyway, published in the magazine, he wrote: “It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women.

"My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years."

Cleese married his first wife, Fawlty Towers co-star Connie Booth in 1968. The marriage lasted ten years and the couple divorced in 1978. He married his second wife, American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981; and his third wife, American psychotherapist Alyce Eichelberger in 1992. The comedian married his fourth wife, Jennifer Wade – who is 31 years his junior – in 2012.

Notice the connection between "ingrained habit of walking on eggshells" and his multiple failed marriages. The lesson: never be conflict-avoidant with a woman. If she's looking for a fight, then give her one. Better yet, give her one that will make her conflict-avoidant in the future. The old martial arts rule applies: start nothing, finish everything.

I've noticed over the years that many women repeatedly test a man's willingness to put up with her bad behavior. They will ratchet it up slowly, almost undetectably, until one day the man's friends suddenly notice that she never speaks to him without her voice either raised in anger or dripping with contempt.

The solution for nipping this in the bud is pretty simple. Up the ante every time. She resorts to contempt, you reply with contempt and vulgarity. (This is especially effective in public; women seem to find it humiliating when men openly swear at them in front of other women.) A calm "I don't give a fuck what you think" or ominous "watch your fucking tone now" will usually deflate the assumed Queen Bee attitude with alacrity. If she decides to raise her voice, you raise yours right back; most women instinctively cower before a man who is addressing them at volume with some bass in his voice. This is basic Skinnerian programming, which means it is also advisable to be sure that she's being positively incentivized when she brings things to your attention in an appropriate manner.

In other words, if she asks you to do something politely, then do it right away, don't put it off until she's irritated and nagging. Make the effort, don't be lazy.

Another option is to simply end the evening if you're out in public and she gets obnoxious. Refuse to be seen with a woman who is openly disrespectful. If she can't be civil, then you're simply not going to take her out into civilization. Women are PERFECTLY capable of controlling themselves, the primary reason so many of them don't is because the men in their lives don't expect them to do so or hold them accountable for their behavior.

Why men prefer clean breakups

There is no lasting grief like that of a woman deprived of her drama:

So what is it about men that they can't end relationships with manners, dignity and, yes, some emotion? Why do they think it'll be easier for the woman if they don’t show their feelings, rather than shed a tear and at least come up with a lame excuse?

I've been subjected to many crass dumpings since I first kissed a boy 30 years ago, and I've no doubt my experiences are pretty standard

There are ways for men to dispatch a woman, and Rory clearly needs some practice. As does the spineless worm who dumped my sister after passionately courting her for almost six months. Literally all he said was ‘goodbye’ before walking out. No wonder she was left sobbing on my sofa for weeks.

Just last weekend, several years after the event, we had a ceremonial shredding of the love letters - great sheaves of them. And, still, she kept asking, 'Why?' During her emotional outpourings, my sister was lamenting not only the end of a long relationship but the fact there wasn't a reason for the ending.

The loss was bad enough but the not knowing why was worse. There must have been a why, it's just that the man - and, let's be honest, most men - found it nigh-on impossible to express it.

Women need closure, while men seem able to suppress their emotions and build impenetrable walls around unfinished aspects of their lives, as if those loose ends no longer exist.

Not that she actually wants to know, but the main reason a man simply walks away without an explanation is that he knows perfectly well that no matter what he says, it's not going to make any difference anyhow. He's still going to be the villain of the piece. After all, when a woman has repeatedly shown that she has no interest in anything you say and no respect for anything you believe, what is the point of telling her why you don't want to be around her any longer?

I've told women exactly why I'm not continuing the relationship and they don't react to it any better than when I simply stopped calling them or taking their calls. By the time a man gets sufficiently fed up to want to walk away, he doesn't want to explain himself or argue or fight, he just wants out.

And in many cases, the final straw sounds a little stupid. The man knows that it's going to sound ridiculous, but the point is that it is the final straw. It's not the singular reason.

A useful phrase

Cailcorishev observes a link between Christian theology and the female predilection for control freakdom:

The traditional Christian viewpoint is that it's Original Sin. Eve violated her husband's headship by eating the apple without his permission and then encouraging him to follow her example, so her descendants are cursed with the temptation to commit the same sin. Ever seen a woman in a restaurant second-guessing her husband's order and commenting on how much salad dressing he uses? It's the apple all over again.

It is remarkable how hard many women find it to keep their mouths shut whenever someone is doing something in front of them. It doesn't matter what it is, the mere fact that a man is doing something is usually enough to inspire their mouths to shift into gear, regardless of whether they know anything about what he is doing or not.

There is one phrase, however, that enables a man to keep control of the situation in all circumstances. It's a reliable workhorse:

"I am not interested in your opinion."

This works whether she actually has a relevant comment or not. It's not defensive, it's not aggressive, it's not uncivil, it is just a very clear indication that the man has taken responsibility, he has the situation under control, and she should stop trying to intervene. It also doesn't give her any ammunition to argue the man's position, as she often will if he says "I know what I'm doing" or otherwise disagrees with her advice. If she doesn't get the message and tries to interject again anyhow, it can be repeated with a little more emphasis.

"What part of 'I am not interested in your opinion' did you not understand?"

This puts her back on the defensive, but makes it clear that it's her own fault. She was already informed to stay out of it, but she IS NOT LISTENING, which of course we all know is something that women consider to be A VERY BAD THING.

Rational argument in these situations serves no purpose whatsoever. I've seen women justify their criticism of men who point out they are doing exactly what the woman herself was doing in the same situation. Unless you're in the mood for hamster-wrestling, neutral resistance to her instinctive control freak tendencies.

The other tactic that can work, but is a bit more negative, is to turn and hand whatever you're doing to the woman and say: "if you want it done your way, then do it yourself." Then walk away and leave her to it. She'll be angry, but after a few instances of this, she'll learn to stop interfering unless she actually wants to be stuck with the task.

Back to the basics

I was at a public event yesterday, not a massive one, but about 300 people in a self-contained space. It was mostly families, so there were a fair number of people who were not paired up from the ages of 15 to 30.

There were several attractive girls and young women there who appeared to be unattached. There were also a number of good-looking young men. What I found interesting is that at no point did I see any of the young men attempt to talk to any of young women. That doesn't mean it didn't happen; I wasn't paying much attention to any of them. But I saw no signs of any young men even attempting to speak to anyone outside of their own little groups, which normally one would expect to have occasionally observed over the course of several hours.

This is the very first principle of Game a man has to accept: be proactive, not reactive. If you see an attractive girl, don't wait for "the right moment", but go and talk to her. Start with "hello". This is not necessarily with an eye to getting her number or finding out if she is taken, but simply to get oneself into the habit of speaking to attractive women as a matter of course. It's really not that hard.

If you're a single man, set a goal of approaching and speaking to seven female strangers this week. That's just one per day. Nothing fancy, no pressure, just going up and speaking to them, even if it's only to ask them the time. The objective is for it to become so natural that you will no longer suffer approach anxiety when you come across a woman in whom you are actually interested.

The triumph of the career women

Feminists crow about George Clooney's engagement:

You’re a direct, fantastic rebuke to everything “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton writes about in her book, “Marry Smart: Advice for Finding The One,” in which she counsels women to get plastic surgery in high school, “find a husband on campus before [they] graduate,” and not spend too much time focusing on their careers. On this particular point, Patton offers bleak words, a sort of Ghost of Christmas Future for any ambitious woman over 30: “You’ve been so invested in your professional super-stardom that you took your eye off the ball. You have no husband and no children, but the ship has already sailed! It’s too late. You don’t get to have everything.”

Unless, that is, YOU WANT TO MARRY GEORGE CLOONEY.

BOOM, Susan Patton!

BOOM, ridiculous conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who recently insisted that paying women the same as men would hurt the women’s chances of finding a mate!

I guess, Amal, that you didn’t see the memo about men not liking smart women. Oh, you didn’t see that? It’s the one that gets reinforced just about every other day in pop culture, encouraging women to dumb it down from the time they’re adolescents, in the hopes that staying perky, dim and silent will make him — any him — love you.

As the Clooney/Alamuddin nuptials near, the inevitable articles will appear, talking about the “fairy tale ending” of this glittery union, surely a dream come true for a non-famous, hard-working London woman.

I wonder how long it will take for these women to realize that while he may have married a professional woman, George Clooney not only proposed to a woman who is 16 years younger than him, but spurned all of the 160 million women in America and went offshore to find his fiance.

The maturation delta

This is why women can't count on their age peers being willing to marry them when they are done having fun and ready to settle down:

I am 23 years old, male, and have had sex with only three women. Most people would agree this is very few, especially considering I have only been in two relationships. I have not had sex for more than a year. I recently got to know someone close to my age, and we got on well. I found out, however, that she had slept with more than 50 men and was unable to put this out of my head. I find myself feeling disgusted and jealous towards women who have slept with many more people than me. But, at my age, it seems all attractive women are well into double figures. I feel trapped and that the older I get, the more extreme the issue will become.

It's fine for women to declare that young men should simply man up and marry the sluts, but the reality is that the men simply aren't enthusiastic about this. The matter is usually settled by the woman dropping her standards a little and paying for her extensive experience by accepting a lower status man than she had hitherto enjoyed. Cue "alpha widow" syndrome, mutual disappointment, and so forth.

Unfortunately, there isn't any optimal solution. But it's on the men too; if you want a less experienced woman and you're not already presented with a smorgasborg of options, then you probably have to go younger or uglier than you are currently considering, and the latter is much easier than the former.

Athol Kay on Violence

Athol considers the various options a man has when faced with a violent female partner:

[Y]ou have to accept that once someone starts being willing to use Violence against you, it will continue until something breaks the cycle.

There are four possible outcomes…

(1) You do nothing, she keeps smacking you when you’re insolent. You learn to be whatever she decides is “good” and figure out ways to apologize for things that are her fault, lose all sense of a personal identity, clean up the messes she makes and generally turn yourself into a human shield if she ever looks sideways at the children.

(2) You respond with greater Violence and hit her back harder than she hits you. Well… this might work briefly, but honestly the more predictable outcome is simply an escalation of both of you playing the Violence strategy toward the full colonoscopy of emergency services and interventions. There’s not really a winner here.

(3) You quit the relationship. Actually this may not be a bad option. If there are no kids involved and no particular reason to stay, you really may as well bail on someone who displays this level of poor judgment. I’m betting she’s not exactly a peach in the other areas of her life either.

(4) You get Outside Force involved. This is the only possible route if you want to try and address the situation and also keep the relationship intact. The trick here is that you have to make this as defensively clear that you are not the abuser as you can. Video or audio of her acting violent and/or verbally aggressive, while you are clearly not doing anything other than defensively trying to block and dodge may be helpful. If you are injured and she isn’t, head to the Emergency Room and say what happened, which will then trigger a police visit to follow up on your defensive injuries.

Being more cynical about the system than Athol, I very much disagree with his conclusion. From what I have seen and read, (4) is skipping past Go and going directly to the full and aforementioned colonoscopy. If one reads Theodore Dalrymple's chronicle of witnessing violent abuse and intersexual relations as an emergency physician, it is apparent that (2) is actually the smarter bet.

Why? Because the woman is always more malleable than a system that relies upon and profits from a continuing supply of "abused" women. Any contact with the system, even voluntary contact from a genuinely abused man, permits it to manufacture an "abused" woman, even from a woman who is herself the abuser. And it will not hesitate to do so.

Men simply cannot rely upon Outside Force. It is too treacherous and too readily turned against them. Therefore, the only real options are (2) and (3), which means the only option if one wishes to salvage the relationship is (2). My disagreement notwithstanding, I must note that there is genuine wisdom in his concluding statement: "once someone can hit you and get away with it, they don’t stop hitting you."

The mistake of mate-guarding

The Chateau explains why showing how much you care when a rival expresses interest in your woman is a problem:

Here’s where it gets interesting for philosophers and warriors of Game alike: While mate guarding may offer some temporary or discrete relationship security, multiple acts of mate guarding will paradoxically increase longer term relationship fragility. The mechanism by which this LTR instability is generated is a status feedback loop; if a man mate guards, his woman will subconsciously evaluate his romantic worth downward because (her sensitive idware will reason) only a beta male would feel the need to mate guard. An alpha male would not; his aloofness would be perceived as proof of his impenetrable high status.

Yes, when a beta male mate guards, his girlfriend will proclaim in the moment her ego-stroked thrill at his display of jealousy, but over time the accretion of those displays will erode her charitable judgment of his mate value. This is why women are viscerally disgusted by the thought of overly “possessive” boyfriends.

At the end of the day, people will do what they decide to do. There is no controlling them; the failure of one totalitarian government after another has shown that not even the threat of lethal force will suffice. The only reliable "mate-guarding" tactic is to do absolutely nothing at all, except to be sufficiently desirable that it is eminently clear that you can find a new mate whenever you wish.

You can give a woman a CS degree

But you can't make her program. A woman in technology observes a dichotomy in the current push to get women more involved in programming:

When people talk about supporting women in tech, they look at Girls Who Code  and Black Girls Code, both of which I’m sure are very worthwhile programs. What troubles me, though, is the assumption that we need to focus only on young girls – in short, we, the oh-helpful ones, are the mentors and the solution to increase the representation of women in technology is 5 or 10 years out when these girls finish college or graduate school. WHAT ABOUT THE WOMEN WHO ARE HERE NOW?

If you are overlooking the women who are here now, what does that tell the girls you are supposedly bringing up to be the next generation of women in tech that you can overlook 15 years from now? Why do we hear about 16-year-old interns far more than women like me? If it is true, as the New York Times says, that in 2001-2 28% of computer science degrees went to women compared to the 10% or so now – where are those women from 12 years ago?

They dropped out. They dropped out because programming demands single-minded focus, mathematical skill, logic, and most of all, individual accountability. They dropped out because they didn't belong in the field and encouraging them to pursue it was doing them a serious career disservice. As a general rule, women don't like competitive jobs where they are held to an objective standard, particularly when they cannot easily pass off their work to others and still take credit for it.

Throw in the fact that male programmers tend to be competitive and socially graceless, which means that relatively few of them are inclined to do a woman's job for her in return for the well-practiced flash of a big smile and a few smug coos of appreciation, and it should be no surprise that even intelligent and well-trained women don't tend to last long in the industry.

(The stark contrast between the sweet expression presented when a woman is attempting to convince you to do her work for her and the rage-filled one that inadvertently appears when she hears you tell her to "do your own fucking job" can be hilarious.)

There were two female programmers at my first place of employment after college. One was attractive, athletic, married, and competent. She wasn't a star, but she calmly went about getting the job done. The other did literally nothing for two years. She never completed a single job, rotated from task to task on a regular basis, passed off her work onto others, and somehow managed to stay employed until her complete lack of productivity finally caught up to her.

Both women had CS degrees. I very much doubt the latter is still employed in any programming capacity.

This is why Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code will fail, just like every other women-in-technology initiative before it has failed. Eventually, all the training has to come to an end and the trainee has to go out and compete with the self-motivated young men who have been coding like banshees since they were in their early teens. And remember, these are smart women, so it is little wonder that they take one look at their prospects for competitive success and promptly go in for marketing, human resources, and management.

Programming is like writing. If you CAN be discouraged, you SHOULD be discouraged.

If you're fat, it's your fault

This should suffice to shut up all the people who attempt to argue that fatties are suffering from anything but a surfeit of food and a dearth of exercise:

A new study suggests that obese women get just one hour of vigorous exercise a year, while obese men don't do much better at fewer than four hours. The findings startled the researchers, whose main focus was finding better ways to measure how much exercise people get.

"They're living their lives from one chair to another," said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We didn't realize we were that sedentary. There are some people who are vigorously active, but it's offset by the huge number of individuals who are inactive."

The researchers found that the average obese woman gets the equivalent of about one hour of exercise a year. For men, it's 3.6 hours a year.

"The data was there, but no one looked at it and parsed it the way we did," Archer said. In the big picture, "there is a great deal of variability; some are moving probably a fair amount. But the vast majority [of people] are not moving at all."

It's not that hard. Seriously, it's just not. I lead the sedentary life of a lion. For 23 hours of the day, I do nothing at all. Not a damn thing. And for one hour a day, I run, I lift, or I bike. That's all it takes. 4.2 percent of your time. 4.2 percent.