Women in the military

Frankly, L. Frank Baum's fictional version is considerably more realistic and plausible than one commonly finds in science fiction and fantasy today.

     Well!" declared Tip, drawing a long breath, "this is certainly a surprising thing! May I ask why you wish to conquer His Majesty the Scarecrow?"

    "Because the Emerald City has been ruled by men long enough, for one reason," said the girl.

    "Moreover, the City glitters with beautiful gems, which might far better be used for rings, bracelets and necklaces; and there is enough money in the King's treasury to buy every girl in our Army a dozen new gowns. So we intend to conquer the City and run the government to suit ourselves."

    Jinjur spoke these words with an eagerness and decision that proved she was in earnest.

    "But war is a terrible thing," said Tip, thoughtfully.

    "This war will be pleasant," replied the girl, cheerfully.

    "Many of you will be slain!" continued the boy, in an awed voice.

    "Oh, no", said Jinjur. "What man would oppose a girl, or dare to harm her? And there is not an ugly face in my entire Army."

    Tip laughed.

    "Perhaps you are right," said he. "But the Guardian of the Gate is considered a faithful Guardian, and the King's Army will not let the City be conquered without a struggle."

    "The Army is old and feeble," replied General Jinjur, scornfully. "His strength has all been used to grow whiskers, and his wife has such a temper that she has already pulled more than half of them out by the roots. When the Wonderful Wizard reigned the Soldier with the Green Whiskers was a very good Royal Army, for people feared the Wizard. But no one is afraid of the Scarecrow, so his Royal Army don't count for much in time of war."

...

    Friends, fellow-citizens, and girls!" she said; "we are about to begin our great Revolt against the men of Oz! We march to conquer the Emerald City—to dethrone the Scarecrow King—to acquire thousands of gorgeous gems—to rifle the royal treasury—and to obtain power over our former oppressors!"

    "Hurrah!" said those who had listened; but Tip thought most of the Army was too much engaged in chattering to pay attention to the words of the General.

...

    "Surrender!" echoed the man, astounded. "Why, it's impossible. It's against the law! I never heard of such a thing in my life."

    "Still, you must surrender!" exclaimed the General, fiercely. "We are revolting!"

    "You don't look it," said the Guardian, gazing from one to another, admiringly.

    "But we are!" cried Jinjur, stamping her foot, impatiently; "and we mean to conquer the Emerald City!"

Let Help the poor freaks die

Given the Left's stated moral imperative of assisted suicide, it's informative to juxtapose (1) their hand-wringing over a sexually confused boy deciding to kill himself because Mommy and Daddy wouldn't entertain his self-delusions:

The mother of a transgender teen who killed herself over the holiday season is speaking out, and making it clear she did not and does not approve of what she believes was her daughter's choice to be transgender.

Carla Alcorn of Kings Mills, Ohio said in an interview that she and her husband did not 'support' their daughter Leelah Alcorn, while also refusing to acknowledge her daughter's sex, using male pronouns and referring to her as 'him,' 'he' and 'son' throughout the interview.

This just days after Leelah walked in front of a tractor trailer and ended her life, writing in her heartbreaking suicide note that because she was transgender, 'The life I would've lived isn't worth living in.'

Even more upsetting is the fact that she also shares how hopeful she once was in her letter, writing; 'When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness.'

with (2) their vocal demand for right-to-die legislation.

One of the most vociferous and courageous voices in the campaign to legalise assisted dying was Debbie Purdy, who passed away last week at the age of 51 after refusing food for a year. She had said her hunger strike was painful and difficult, but that her life with progressive multiple sclerosis was ‘unacceptable’.

News of her death came as 80 prominent public figures in the UK called for the legalising of euthanasia here, warning that already one Briton travels abroad every fortnight to euthanasia clinics even as the issue continues to be passionately debated.

If the Left was consistent, it would celebrate those who kill confused individuals who want to die. Not merely permitting, but actively aiding the freaks to die is a moral imperative by their logic. But of course, all they're actually interested in is making use of the situation as a means of rhetorically attacking Christianity.

Denial of reality should never be celebrated, for any reason. Even if one sets religion aside, "Transgenderism" is a denial of basic genetic science. The rhetorically correct response to anyone who claims to believe in "transgenderism" is: "why do you hate science".

When women play the sex card

Some years ago, a woman by the name of Theresa Nielsen Hayden declared the following about a certain male individual.

"Going through Vox Day's comments here is like reading erotica written by someone who -- well, in the immortal words of Xander Harris, "You've never had any tiny bit of sex, have you?" It's really, really obvious that VD is not acquainted with actual women. I don't just mean sexual relations. I mean he's had little or no social interaction of any sort....  It's pretty clear that VD fears and dislikes women, and that his gender theories are a back-formation. It seems perfectly appropriate that he's a fan of that patently misogynistic suspected female impersonator, Ann Coulter."

Now, keep in mind, the picture above is of the woman who said this.  Moreover, she said that about a man who was not only an athlete from a wealthy, attractive family, but a founding member of an award-winning rock band with three Billboard-charting dance hits.  How does this make any sense at all?  Why would a grotesque toad like Nielsen Hayden ever claim something so patently ridiculous?

The reason is that most men are insecure about their sexual appeal.  Women know this and they instinctively attempt to play on that insecurity in an attempt to gain the upper hand.  This is fairly automatic for them, no matter how low they are on the totem pole, because they are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the pursued, ergo, the more desirable, even if this has absolutely no possible relationship to the actual male-female interaction involved.

And consider: if an obese troll like this is going to attempt to play the sex card with a man who wouldn't dream of touching her with his worst enemy's 10 foot-pole in his scariest nightmare, what will a normal girl who is actually in your league going to do?  The answer is to maintain frame.  Ideally, your response to a woman playing the sex card should be to respond exactly as if the girl looks like Ms Nielsen Hayden, with a mixture of amusement and genuine horror.

We apologize in advance for any nightmares this post may inadvertently inspire.

Agree and amplify: Swedish version

A study points to what may be a unexpected means of moving women out of the workforce and back into child-rearing: give the feminists what they want with regards to generous maternal leave.

On the surface, Sweden appears to be a feminist paradise. Look at any global survey of gender equity and Sweden will be near the top. Family-friendly policies are its norm — with 16 months of paid parental leave, special protections for part-time workers, and state-subsidized preschools where, according to a government website, “gender-awareness education is increasingly common.” Due to an unofficial quota system, women hold 45 percent of positions in the Swedish parliament. They have enjoyed the protection of government agencies with titles like the Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality and the Secretariat of Gender Research. So why are American women so far ahead of their Swedish counterparts in breaking through the glass ceiling?

Generous parental leave policies and readily available part-time options have unintended consequences: instead of strengthening women’s attachment to the workplace, they appear to weaken it.  In addition to a 16-month leave, a Swedish parent has the right to work six hours a day (for a reduced salary) until his or her child is eight years old. Mothers are far more likely than fathers to take advantage of this law. But extended leaves and part-time employment are known to be harmful to careers — for both genders. And with women a second factor comes into play: most seem to enjoy the flex-time arrangement (once known as the “mommy track”) and never find their way back to full-time or high-level employment. In sum: generous family-friendly policies do keep more women in the labor market, but they also tend to diminish their careers.

According to Blau and Kahn, Swedish-style paternal leave policies and flex-time arrangements pose a second threat to women’s progress: they make employers wary of hiring women for full-time positions at all. Offering a job to a man is the safer bet. He is far less likely to take a year of parental leave and then return on a reduced work schedule for the next eight years.

Regardless of what they say, and no matter what their educational level, most women vastly prefer raising children to nearly any other occupation. That's why the most popular professional occupations for women either involve actual child-rearing activities such as teaching and day care or ersatz ones such as social work, human resources, and middle management.

The reason they choose work over home life is because work pays better.  So, the answer is obvious: provide financial incentives to get them on the Mommy track. It may seem unfair - actually, it is unfair - but fairness is a small price to pay for societal sustainability.

The hunt for weakness

Sassy, a commenter at Susan's place, makes an important observation while discussing HUS's favorite television show:

One thing of female nature that I have noticed is that when we identify a form of weakness in a man, we keep our eyes out for further clues/confirmations of that weakness. Once ShoSho learned about his rather pathetic lifestyle, she continued to identify and mull over new clues. She could no longer see him as the man she fell for initially. He became a loser in her eyes, and her attraction to him began to wane. This culminated in her cheating on him.

This is true.  I have observed similar tendencies in women myself.  So, how can a man deal with this female tendency to hunt for his weaknesses?  The beta way, of course, would be to grandly reveal them all to her at once, complete with a romantic declaration of how she helps him want to be a better man and so forth.

Likely reaction: sneering contempt and reduced sexual atttraction.

What does Game theory suggest?  Game is rather like jujitsu, as it involves utilizing a woman's instinctive tendencies to serve a man's purposes rather than her own.  Consider the neg, which causes a woman to doubt her instinctive assumption of superiority vis-a-vis a man.  In like manner,  the obvious solution to the female tendency to hunt for weaknesses once identified is to make the woman doubt her ability to correctly identify weaknesses.

How can this be done?  Easily, by presenting false weaknesses to keep her instincts occupied. Not only will she miss genuine weaknesses by looking in the wrong direction for further confirmations of something that doesn't exist, but once she has traveled down the wrong path two or three times, she will be much less sure of herself if she does happen to latch onto a genuine weakness and therefore more inclined to simply let it go without disrupting the relationship.

No doubt most men will dislike the need to anticipate, misdirect, and obfuscate when they would like nothing better than to bare their souls and be accepted for whom they truly are, warts and all.  But the paradox of intersexual relations is that in order to be truly accepted, loved, and desired by a woman, a man must always keep a part of himself hidden well away from her.

How to be forever young

An aging Baby Boomer inadvertently highlights the importance of meeting your husband or wife when you are young:

I would have told you, before I was possessed, that I was fine with men my own age. The last guy I dated, after all, was someone who had been a friend when we were teenagers, a guy who, in his youth, looked like the blond ski instructors you would see on the Swiss tourist poster: “Come to Gstaad! Ski the Alps! Sleep with Rolf!” When we ran into each other again, 40 years later, we were both fatter, wrinklier and literally scarred from run-ins with serious illness. But none of that mattered. I looked at Rolf of the Mountains and I saw the face and body of the guy I had hung out with in school. Which, I now understood, was the problem. I was fine with aging when it came to old friends or people I had known for years, because I looked at them and saw the people they used to look like. Meeting men my age for the first time, I realized with a dreadful shock of self-recognition, I saw men who were too old. 

This is what many women, in particular, fail to understand.  Although looks are more important to men than they are to women, it must be recalled that what they see is not necessarily precisely what an impartial camera would insist is there.  Remember, optics are a function of the brain.  When a man of forty looks at his wife of 20 years, he does not see what the stranger at the supermarket sees.  What he sees is an amalgam of what she used to be and what she is now, which in most cases, due to the ravages of time, tends to be considerably more attractive than what others who view her more objectively perceive her to be now.

My grandmother, in her late sixties, once told me that she felt about 20 inside and was always a little shocked to look in the mirror and discover that was not the case.  She was a vivacious personality; if you simply looked at her style and listened to her speak, she still had the energy of a much younger woman.  Find your husband now, in your youth, and he will always see you as the same young woman that you feel yourself to be on the inside.

Marry in your twenties and you will always be young in his eyes.  Put marriage off until you are done "having fun" and playing at having a career in your middle thirties and he will never see you as anything but a middle-aged woman.

Intellectual Game

Even in intellectual discourse, the rules of Game apply.  Alastair's Adversaria considers the difference between male and female forms of debate and explains why the female form is intellectually crippling and prone to dishonesty and logical absurdities:

This ‘heterotopic discourse’ makes possible far more spirited challenges to opposing positions, hyperbolic and histrionic rhetoric designed to provoke response and test the mettle of one’s own and the opposing position, assertive presentations of one’s beliefs that are less concerned to present a full-orbed picture than to advocate firmly for a particular perspective and to invite and spark discussion from other perspectives.

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity.

In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously. Rhetorical assertiveness and impishness, the calculated provocations of ritual verbal combat, linguistic playfulness, and calculated exaggeration are inexplicable to it as it lacks the detachment, levity, and humour within which these things make sense. On the other hand, those accustomed to combative discourse may fail to appreciate when they are hurting those incapable of responding to it.

Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity, indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry. Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on wider society primarily by means of political agitation.

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

Granted immunity from this process, sensitivity-driven and conflict-averse contexts seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers. Even the good ideas that they produce tend to be blunt and very weak in places. Even with highly intelligent people within them, conflict-averse groups are poor at thinking. Bad arguments go unchecked and good insights go unhoned and underdeveloped. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing. 

This is precisely why smart women like Susan Walsh are correct to be reluctant to permit their sensitive female readers, who have been steeped in an educational culture of sensitivity-driven discourse, the "safe haven" of criticism-free conversation they desire.  It is also why those who habitually engage in sensitivity-driven discourse, of which John Scalzi's blog is a prime example, are uniformly so inept whenever it comes to arguing.

The Rabbit People have three weapons and three weapons only.  The first is to demand submission to their terms by virtue of the sensitivity imperative.  If their interlocutor is unwilling to do that, they quickly move to the name-calling and the inevitable psychological analyses, again in the hopes of the interlocutor's submission.  (This, by the way, is where most people crumble and permit themselves to be sidetracked into defending themselves against the charges that they are a raciss, sexiss, homophobiss rapiss.)  Their final weapon is exclusion, which can be seen in the way feminized atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, (unlike Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens), shun debate with potentially competent opponents, and in the way gamma bloggers like Scalzi habitually attempt to attack people and arguments without so much as identifying them or even providing links to the arguments they are attacking.

This is why men should never permit those who are inclined towards sensitivity-driven discourse a foothold in their families and organizations.  The Rabbit People instinct is to attempt to surround themselves with other rabbits as fast as possible and drive out the scary heterotopics.  This is why you'll often see rabbits at HUS begging for crackdowns on other commenters, while the rabbits at Whatever harbor genuine affection for the aptly-named Mallet of Loving Correction.  Although they claim to value dialogue and seek discourse, nothing could be further from the truth.  They actually want to dictate their mindless consensus and have it accepted uncritically by everyone; they fear intellectual competition.

And it is why I provide sensitivity-driven discourse no respect whatsoever. I don't care if you were raped every day of the year and twice on Mondays by the family cat, after which your father killed you with a knife and danced on your grave. Your personal victimization, assuming it genuinely existed in the first place, grants you neither moral authority nor intellectual credibility, much less any form of veto on what others are permitted to think, say, or feel.  Alpha Game and Vox Popoli will always be strongholds of heterotopic discourse; think of them collectively as the Wild Hunt for Rabbit People.

The etymology of "slut"

I've noticed that in addition to attempting to reclaim the word "slut" and provide it with a positive spin, some female commenters are still attempting to apply it to sexually successful men.  These latter efforts are both linguistically incorrect and etymologically ignorant.

First, there is the logic.  Numerous male bloggers have demonstrated why the male equivalent of "slut" is "stud".  It is relatively difficult for a man to be sexually successful with women.  It is relatively easy for women to be sexually successful with men.  It is all about the degree of difficulty involved, which is precisely why promiscuous homosexual men are not begrudgingly respected the same way promiscuous normal men are.  As the apt analogy has it, the key that can open a thousand different locks is a master key, whereas the lock that can be opened by a thousand different keys is a defective lock.  There is no double standard, there are two different standards, distinguished by the varying degrees of difficulty.

Of course, logic is dialectic and the female attempt to attack "male sluts" and "manwhores" is observably pure rhetoric.  So we know, per Aristotle, that the logic will be insufficient in addressing the issue and it is necessary to find another, more rhetorical means of convincing those who have adopted such terminology in a futile attempt to shame men out of sexual desire that their efforts are as misguided as they are ignorant.

Therefore, let's look at the definition of the word:

1.  an immoral or dissolute woman; prostitute.
2. Obsolete . a dirty, slovenly woman.
Origin:  1375–1425; late Middle English slutte;  compare dial. slut  mud, Norwegian  (dial.) slutr  sleet, impure liquid

Word Story: Slut  first appeared in the written language in 1402, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , that great repository of language information. At that time, slut  meant roughly what one sense of slattern  means today: a slovenly, untidy woman or girl. It also apparently meant “kitchen maid” (”She is a cheerful slut who keeps the pots scrubbed and the fires hot.”). By the end of the 15th century the sense “a woman given to immoral or improper conduct” had come into use, and it is the only meaning in use today. Interestingly, the same second meaning, a promiscuous woman, developed for the term slattern.

The man reason that one cannot reasonably use the term "slut" for a man is that its primary meaning is not related to its immoral or promiscuous aspect, but rather its intrinsically female aspect.  To call a man a slut is not to label him promiscuous, but rather, to label him a specific type of woman.  Hence Chaucer's choice of the term "sluttish" to refer to a man in the 14th century rather than "slut".  This has been the case for more than 600 years, which is very nearly the time in which the English language has existed.  While it is true that languages change over time, no amount of defiantly declaring that black is white or war is peace will actually change the RGB values or cause the armies to vanish.

A slut is, and has always been, a woman.  It can mean an untidy woman or it can mean a promiscuous woman.  But the one thing it cannot mean is a man; at most a man can be described as "sluttish", which is a more specific adjective than the similar, but more general term, "effeminate".  To attempt to argue otherwise is not only ignorant and illogical, but uneducated.  One might as reasonably attempt to claim that the words "mother" and "girlfriend" can be applied to a man.

Emotion, logic, and dishonesty

Over the course of the discussion of female solipsism, the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, and between logic and emotion, has repeatedly come up.  Two things have become obvious as a result, which is that 1) men have no choice but to accept the observable female inclination for solipsism, rhetoric, and emotion, and 2) women have to accept that those men who strongly prefer objective perspectives, dialectic, and logic are never going to look favorably upon women's rejection of those things even if they accept the fact of the female disinclination.

The problem is that emotion and rhetoric are both more or less dishonest in discourse, the former intrinsically and the latter practically.  This is not to say that emotions are negative, only that because they are dynamic and the truth is static,(1) emotion-based reasoning is guaranteed to be false at least part of the time.  Rhetoric, on the other hand, does not have to be dishonest, but because it is designed to manipulate and convince those who, as Aristotle pointed out in Rhetoric, "cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning", it usually has to be at least somewhat in variance with the complete truth because it is primarily designed to appeal to the emotions rather than reason.

Consider the NYT editorial written by a nurse advocating gun control.  Note that I'm not at all interested in a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control here, so don't get distracted by that, but rather considering whether the argument being presented is dialectical or rhetorical in nature.

With the hope of presenting the issue of guns in America in a novel way, I’m going to look at it from an unusual vantage point: the eyes of a nurse. By that I mean looking at guns in America in terms of the suffering they cause, because to really understand the human cost of guns in the United States we need to focus on gun-related pain and death....

[W]e need to stop talking about gun rights in America as if they have no wrenching real-world effects when every day 80 Americans, their friends, families and loved ones, learn they obviously and tragically do.Many victims never stand a chance against a dangerously armed assailant, and there’s scant evidence that being armed themselves would help....

A trauma nurse I know told me she always looked at people’s shoes when they lay on gurneys in the emergency department. It struck her that life had still been normal when that patient put them on in the morning. Whether they laced up Nikes, pulled on snow boots or slid feet into stiletto heels, the shoes became a relic of the ordinariness of the patient’s life, before it turned savage.

So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence — the lucky survivors — as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country’s blind embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it’s playing out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country.  Before leaving, make sure to look at the patients’ shoes. Remember that at the start of the day, before being attacked by a person with a gun, that patient lying on a stretcher writhing helplessly in pain was still whole.

The entire piece is nothing but rhetoric and emotion from start to finish.  It is also profoundly dishonest and manipulative.  Let's consider a few of the salient points from the dialectical perspective:

1. The writer is looking at the issue from the eyes of a nurse.  Why?  What can a nurse say about a macrosocietal issue that a statistician cannot?  Nothing, except for an appeal to emotional authority, which in this case turns out to be a false appeal because the woman isn't even a trauma nurse!  She has little more experience of gunshot victims in trauma rooms than anyone else, moreover, her emotional authority as a nurse has nothing to do with the many victims who are dead at the scene and never go to the hospital.
2. Who on either side of the debate talks "about gun rights in America as if they have no wrenching real-world effects"?  No one.  In fact, the relatively small number of daily deaths attributed by gun deaths are about the only ones that are ever discussed in terms of their effects on the survivors.  Her point would be much more applicable to daily deaths by falls in the bathroom, traffic deaths or lethal attacks by meerkats.
3. Contra her baseless assertion, there is considerable evidence that being armed often helps people avoid being victimized by assailants, armed or otherwise, and ironically, the only way for the average individual to have any chance against dangerously armed opponent is to embrace the very concept she is attacking.
4. She spends three out of 13 paragraphs talking about shoes and then makes a personal request of the reader.  Why?  Because she has constructed a naked appeal to female solipsism.  She is attempting to get the reader to imagine an emotional connection between the gunshot victim writhing helplessly in pain and themselves, and to encourage them to use that connection as a basis for the leap to the irrational conclusion that gun control could somehow prevent them from ever experiencing that pain.  The rhetorical message is "support gun control or you will find yourself in the trauma room".

Now, it would be easy to respond by going methodically through the entire editorial and highlighting all of the logical errors, factual omissions, and material falsehoods in order to try changing the minds of those who found the piece to be credible and convincing.  This is, indeed, how most male gun advocates tend to respond to such pieces.  But, as both the discussion of solipsism and Aristotle have taught us, this is unlikely to be very effective.  One should never make the mistake of utilizing dialectic when faced with a rhetorical audience; ironically, that is a logical error.  Consider an alternative response utilizing a rhetorical perspective.

1. The response is written from the perspective of a rape victim.  Her emotional authority is considerably greater, and more solipsistically powerful, than that of a nurse who doesn't even see the trauma victims about whom she is writing.
2. The writer describes how powerless she was to defend herself from her unarmed attacker, her terror and outrage at her violation, and how afraid for her life she was when she was being victimized.   She describes how awful it was to realize that the police were not there to protect her, and how long it took before she saw a single officer.  She talks about the fear she still feels, every day, when going to the gym or the grocery store.
3. She then describes how she went to a gun range and how powerful and confident she felt when she was firing the gun, and how she doesn't feel afraid anymore as long as she has her gun in her purse.  She regurgitates some statistics about how many times guns are used to scare off rapists and home invaders.
4. She spends three paragraphs about how she has a whole new social circle at the gun range, how much fun it is to make new friends there, and mentions how she is involved with a handsome man she met there, complete with a sly remark about what a big gun he has.  The rhetorical message is "oppose gun control, buy a gun, and you will meet handsome men, because if you don't, you will be raped and murdered at the grocery store".

Now, consider which of the two responses, the dialectic response or the rhetorical one, you think would be more likely to convince the sort of individual who was convinced by the original editorial?  The need to correctly engage the audience at its preferred level of discourse doesn't only hold true for political or intellectual dispute, but for everyday discussion as well.

(1) Comparatively static relative to emotional fluctuations, if you wish to be more precise.  Don't even think about bringing up quantum mechanics or Heisenberg; if you're tempted to do that, then you're perfectly capable of following the argument without being a pedantic ass about it.

Solving the hypergamy problem

The USA, and most of the West, has taken the approach that encouraging female participation in advanced education will strengthen their economies. Events have thus far failed to confirm those assumptions, and indeed, are increasingly calling them into question. That may be one reason Iran feels emboldened to take the opposite approach:

Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. 'The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.' The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women."

According to the mainstream Western assumption, this should weaken Iran's economy and impoverish its society. So, barring a war that will render any potential comparisons irrelevant, this move by Iran promises to make for an unusually informative societal experiment in comparison with the control group of the USA. If Iran sees non-immigrant-driven population growth along with greater societal wealth and scientific advancement, it will justify the doubts of those who questioned the idea that encouraging women to pursue science degrees instead of husbands and careers instead of children would prove beneficial to society at large.

Of course, the Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.

No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society's future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?

An intent to disqualify

Lest you doubt that women are always actively seeking to disqualify men to whom they are initially attracted, consider this technological rationale for rejecting a man:

How would you
 date the RAZR-owning guy knowing that he could never quickly look up Yelp reviews 
of the restaurant you're about to eat at or never check that email you
 sent him at the last second saying you're going to be 45 minutes late? As far as any concerns about distraction, there are definitely times you and your partner can agree to 
turn off the phones for an hour and just be together. I would much 
rather have to do that than be with a guy who can only play Snake in 
black and white and make phone calls with his phone.
 I already have to keep my parents in the loop about new technologies; 
I don't want to have to tell my boyfriend about them too.

The ironic thing is that before smartphones became part of the mainstream technological standard, and therefore capable of possessing utility the average woman could understand, having one would have been seen as nerdy and therefore disqualifying. Smartphone four years ago, bad. No smartphone now, bad.

In female eyes, getting it right isn't merely a matter of substance, but of timing. A man cannot be too avant garde or too behind the times, he always has to be aware of what is the acceptable range at that particular time. But the more important thing is how wildly and stupidly shallow the young woman's reasoning is. Imagine if men similarly refused to date women to whom they had to explain technology... the human race would end with that generation.

But the reality is that she is simply using the smartphone as a lifestyle and status metric as an easy means of disqualification. That is the key point to take away from this: women are always looking to disqualify you. The key to success with them is knowing that and refusing to do it for them.

Invite her in

I was reading Badger's account of a dating disaster and it occurred to me that most of the discussion, male and female, was missing the point. If you are a man who is searching for a partner, as opposed to a player seeking to score, then the entire subject of "what is the ideal place to take a first date" is fundamentally a category error.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a chain restaurant if that is where you go with your social circle every Friday night. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with going to an elite downtown Italian restaurant if that is simply part of your normal routine. The point is that whatever you do should be a natural part of your life, because you are auditioning her for a role in it.

One of the reasons I felt relaxed about marrying Spacebunny was because she was already well-integrated into my life. On our first date we went to a soccer game, worked out, and then went to one of my favorite restaurants. Sure, the fact that we ended up closing down the place was a good sign, as was her focus on staying in shape, but the more important thing from the long-term perspective was her ability to genuinely enjoy my lifestyle, which for all its occasional flashes of glamor is essentially boring, repetitive, and low-key. Before we got engaged, she had already become a regular of the Friday night gang that met after work to lift weights, then went to the same Mongolian barbeque every week. It was a routine that the two of us continued long after most of the gang got married and went their separate ways.

It's counterproductive to focus on impressing a woman or showing her a good time. If nothing else, the energy required to maintain the charade is going to become exhausting over time. And worse, if it works, you're not going to have any idea if she's actually compatible with the way you truly live. There is no magic key to dating for the obvious reason that all men are not only different, but have different habits and objectives.

Lie to your kids

If I could give just one piece of advice this Father's Day to the fathers around the world, it would be this. Lie to your children. Don't give them a straight answer to anything. When they ask you questions with straightforward answers, throw them curve balls.

Why? They absolutely love it. At various times in their lives, my children have been convinced that hippopotamuses require a special counting system, that people in Sweden don't wear clothes, that there are fire-breathing dragons still living in the mountains of Italy, and that the Minnesota Vikings will one day win the Super Bowl. Okay, perhaps that last lie is a little bit too cruel.

But there is nothing that speaks more of family than sitting at a dinner table where the father is calmly eating his dinner, the children are screaming with laughter, and the wife is rolling her eyes with a hint of a smile on her lips. It is a father's job to protect his children, and allowing them to preserve their childish joy and innocence as long as possible is one of the greatest gifts a man can give them.

They won't remember how you paid the bills. They won't remember how you taught them to read or disciplined them. But they'll absolutely remember every stupid, silly thing you told them when they were small and their eyes will light up when they do. And you know without even asking that a man is a father when a little girl he's never met before walks up to him as he sits on a park bench and asks him if it's true that people in Sweden don't wear clothes.

"Well, of course not," he answered without batting an eye, despite the t-shirt he was wearing which said "Sverige" on it. And when confronted with the evidence that he was, in fact, wearing clothes at the moment despite being Swedish, he wasn't lost for an immediate response.

"But we're not in Sweden now, are we? If we were in Sweden, then of course we wouldn't be wearing any clothes! Imagine that! Wearing clothes in Sweden?"

After the interrogation was complete and the interrogator ran off to the slide, I asked him how many kids he had. "Three," he replied. I'd never seen him before and I haven't seen him since, but I have absolutely no doubt that he's a great dad. Happy Father's Day to him and all the other dads out there.

Snowflake season

I'm being interviewed for a book that someone is writing on marriage, and among other things, the writer is interested in the basic demographics of those reading this blog. So, if you are an Alpha Game regular and don't mind, it would be helpful if you would answer some or all of the following questions in the comments.

This should be completely anonymous, so don't provide any names or any identifying information. There are no right answers, nor do I care in the least what your answers are, except that you do your best to provide accurate ones.

1. Age and sex.
2. Marital Status. M/D/S.
3. Annual income range. Example: 20k to 30k.
4. N ak total lifetime sexual partners. Blow jobs/oral counts, hand jobs don't.
5. If you are not married, do you intend to get married under the current legal regime? If you are married under the current legal regime, do you regret having done so?
6. Religious? Y/N.
7. If male, what is your self-identified socio-sexual rank? If female, on a scale of 1 to 10, how attractive are you for your generational cohort? For example, Christie Brinkley isn't a 10 for the 20-30 age range, but she is for the 50-60 crowd.
8. What are your three primary interests?

It's all about you now, so share away, you precious snowflake you! And I repeat, NO NAMES. Check to make sure you have selected "Anonymous" before you comment!

Alpha Mail: why Daddy ends up with the kids

Ghosts wonders how to tell his kids that their mother didn't care about them enough to want to retain her court-granted custody of them:

Virtually every divorced man I know has custody of his children (myself included). The story is the same for all of us: after the divorce and our "blind justice" automatically hands our children off to these women. They then use the children like pawns, with-holding visitation, threatening to go for sole custody, not to mention the anal raping we receive from the lovely child support services; but then, something happens, and we become the primary custodial parent.

Afterwards, the mothers just... Give up. They (in all the examples I've personally seen) never visit, never call, and quite rapidly sign over their parental rights. Statistically speaking, there's a higher percentage of women who are dead-beat moms than there are dead-beat dads.

You seem a hell of a lot smarter than me, so I was hoping maybe you could help me understand it, possibly in a way I can explain to my boys when they're older. They ask me why their mom doesn't love them anymore, and "because she's a cunt" isn't an acceptable answer for 7 & 9 year olds...

It's an interesting question, since I have also witnessed this process at work in the lives of the only divorced couple that I know. To be honest, it's not only not an acceptable answer for children, it's not accurate either. The process you're seeing at work here is a natural combination of female solipsism with the harsh reality of life as a single parent. One of the key changes in social behavior is that Generation X has observed the copious blunders of the Baby Boomers and while X women aren't significantly less narcissistic, self-centered, or myopic than their predecessors, they are sufficiently observant to have stopped buying into the "you can have it all" theme or to believe that single motherhood is a reasonable practical alternative to a functional two-parent family. So, they tend to be somewhat less invested in their post-divorce identity as a mother or in keeping primary custody of their children.

Being a parent is hard, thankless, and in the short term, largely unrewarding work. Yes, it's delightful when a child, unprompted, gives you a hug or says something sweet, but the job never ends and the responsibility is always there hanging over the parent's head. So, it should come as no surprise when a woman who is shallow and self-serving rapidly discovers:

1. She now has to do everything that her ex-husband of whom she previously claimed "did nothing" used to do. It's amazing how fast those previously "nothing" tasks of picking up the kids from their various activities and mowing the lawn suddenly become major sacrifices meriting beatification once a woman gets divorced.
2. All the men she thought would be lining up to date her once she was "free" aren't actually interested in her. As it turns out, most minor flirtations are not indicative of a man's willingness to subject himself to a legal raping courtesy of a woman who has already demonstrated her willingness to call in the judicial rapists.
3. Her children severely limit her opportunity to spend time with those men she meets who actually are interested in her. Somehow, this appears to surprise newly divorced women.
4. The men who are interested in her have no interest in the package deal and show no indications ever offering her any assistance with her increased burden of responsibilities.
5. The whole custody thing suddenly looks a lot less desirable post-divorce.

Now, even divorcing woman who understand this will still be inclined to claim custody because the children are her primary means of extracting income from her ex-husband and because it is socially expected of her. Even if she knows perfectly well that she intends to pawn them off on everyone around her as much as possible, she won't want to be criticized for being "a bad mother" even if she has the maternal instincts of a cuckoo. But once she has custody and the income transfer is established, her priorities reverse as her children now become a liability to her rather than a valuable asset. Furthermore, her desire to lash out and harm her ex-husband by denying him his children is gradually overcome by her desire to throw herself fully into her new single life, so she becomes more and more dependent upon his ability to permit her to live it by taking care of the kids.

It is very important to understand this process for fathers who are in the process of facing a divorce. They must always keep in mind there is a very good chance that regardless of the legal posture her lawyers are telling her to take at the moment, she is eventually going to want to relinquish custody to him if he plays his cards right. So, if you want your kids, the correct play is not to strike a grand paternal pose and fight to the bitter and losing end in the courts, but rather, to accede to all of her custody demands while constantly encouraging her to go out and let her freak flag fly. This may be hard, especially because it will likely involve exposing your children to the parade of losers who are willing to pump-and-dump a thirty-something or forty-something divorcee in the short term, but it is a father's best shot of eventually gaining full custody. And, if you've played your hand correctly, they'll always be with you when she's spending a special evening with Donny from work or LaDarrell from the gym anyhow.

The key is to be patient and arrange with your family and friends to always be available to watch the children at a moment's notice. And since women's moods fluctuate constantly, always have a prepared document on hand for her to sign custody over to you. It's a long game, but it only takes one moment of exhaustion, depression, and weakness, and you'll have your kids back. Even then, be as conciliatory and let her come see them as much as she wants, as Ghost knows, she'll probably drift away anyhow since out of sight is generally out of the female mind.

But to return to the actual question, the correct answer for your children is that while she loves them, she simply doesn't love them as much as she loves herself. This has the benefit of being completely true, it is something that they already recognize or they would not be asking the question, and can serve as a useful springboard for addressing a whole host of other, tangentially-related issues, such as the reason for your marital breakup, the female tendency towards solipsism, the importance of the Golden Rule, and so forth. Addressing the matter openly and honestly will also tend to have the effect of drawing you closer together, after all, she didn't just cast them aside, she also did the same to you.

However, it's also important to resist any urge to poison them against her. Let her do that to herself; as you've probably already discovered, she'll do a far more effective job of that than you ever could. When asked about her, keep your answers truthful, unemotional, and positive to the extent that is possible. Most children of divorce eventually figure out who is the responsible party, regardless of the extent of the parental propaganda to which they are subjected.

Winning the No-Win Game

Now, I absolutely love no-win situations. This may explain why I tend to find women relatively easy to deal with, since the conventional female power play is to attempt to put the other party in a no-win situation, at which point the other party is supposed to turn to the woman and submissively ask her for direction. This behavior tends to confuse most men, since they don't understand why the woman doesn't simply ask for what she wants in the first place when he has already signaled that he is willing, perhaps even eager, to please her.

What these men are leaving out of the equation is that the No-Win Game allows the woman to get what she wants and also gives her the sense of being in control of the relationship. If she asks for what she wants and then receives it, that makes her a supplicant and forces her to bear the dreadful burden of being appropriately grateful to the person who granted her request. If, however, she plays the No-Win Game successfully, she not only assumes a position of control over the other individual, but also removes herself any obligation to feel grateful to the other person. She is now providing the answer, not the request. She is the problem-solver... and it is to be left unmentioned that she created the problem in the first place. This is classic ordo ab chao manipulation.

It all comes back to female solipsism. Most women are less grateful than Charles DeGaulle or Camillo Cavour, both of whom are said to have declared how their nations would astonish the world with their ingratitude towards their foreign benefactors. Women absolutely hate feeling materially obligated to anyone - witness yesterday's post, for example - and they will go to much further lengths than most men imagine to avoid it. Throw in the dark Machiavellian pleasures of manipulation and the heady feeling of relationship hand, and it's not hard to understand why the No-Win Game is such a go-to tactic in the female playbook.

And yet, the No-Win Game is more easily countered than Darth Hoody shutting down The Miracle of Tebow. Consider this. If you happen to find yourself in a no-win situation, then what difference does it make which option you choose? Either way you lose, right? This means it makes absolutely no difference what you do! Therefore, a more useful way to look at the No-Win Game is to think of it as Carte Blanche instead. Ironically, once a woman has successfully maneuvered you into a no-win situation, she has granted you the unrestricted freedom to act at your own discretion. The game is flipped. Chao ab ordo. Remember that control freaks, by definition, cannot handle chaos, which means their manipulative machinations can be disrupted easily, either directly or indirectly, at will. Anything you do that is outside the script is almost guaranteed to produce better results than obediently falling in line with it.

What got me thinking about this was the unconscious attempt of one of Badger's readers to create a no-win situation with regards to what Badger refers to as "plate theory". Juxtapose these two statements from the same individual and figure out how men are supposed to balance them:

1. "I always notice the reactions to rejection, whether it was a playful one to slow him down, or a REAL one. The last reaction you wrote about, the calm, is incredibly appealing. It comes across confident & can make a woman feel like the guy really wants her (since he persists, despite her resistance) and he doesn’t give up that easily."

2. "Wow.. For some reason, I found Mike C’s comments really distasteful… I have no use for men with “spinning plates”

In other words, she finds the ends "incredibly appealing" but she finds the means "really distasteful" and claims that she has no use for men who accomplish those ends through such means. The problem, of course, is that it is very, very difficult, and for most men, impossible, to achieve such desirable ends through any other means. While there are certainly men who could meet sexual rejection while in a completely celibate state with zen-like indifference, Tibetan monks are seldom known to hit on Western women.

If we apply the concepts laid out above, the solution is obvious. A no-win situation has been constructed, therefore carte blanche applies. The correct thing to do is to apply the means and achieve the desired end without informing the woman of the means utilized. There is no need to lie or be dishonest, as that would be counterproductive. Simply don't talk about the means and don't offer any explanations for them or answer any questions about them. And even if one is subjected to the third degree and pinned down, carte blanche still applies. By setting up a No-Win Game, she is quite literally requiring that men lie to her.*

The confident calm that is more accurately described as indifference comes only from having options, and more importantly, knowing that you have them. This is just one of the many applications of how you can play Carte Blanche to win the No-Win Game. The downside, of course, is that if you are involved with a sufficiently intelligent and self-interested woman, she will soon begin to grasp how Carte Blanche works and you will run the risk of finding yourself in an adult relationship where requests are communicated in a direct manner, mutual obligations are established and respected, and you no longer have the freedom to do whatever you please whenever you like.


*With regards to the moral aspects of telling the truth that could be raised, my answer is that we are so far outside the limits of morality here that it would be nonsensical to attempt to bring them into the discussion at this point. In demanding the sort of interest that can only come from sexually incontinent men, to say nothing of indicating her own intention to engage in pre-marital sex, there is no room for morality in this discussion. This, of course, is why those who dabble in immorality are always bound to be trampled by those who are rationally amoral.

Game: you're doing it wrong

It's hard to argue with the writer's conclusion, which is that it is no wonder the average guy thinks Game is a scam. But the salient point here isn't that tubby little Douchey McDoucherson has any idea what he's talking about, it is that if you have a conventional church-and-media-and-school-instilled idea of women and what they find attractive, even Douchey McDoucherson has a more advanced understanding of the opposite sex than you. That's why he's getting better results than you do, not because women are all secretly slavering for the Lesser Potbellied Love Machine.

Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But don't make the mistake of believing that because Douchey McDoucherson is a few steps ahead of you, he has therefore reached the ultimate destination. When considering the advice of any PUA or theoretician of Game, the first thing you should keep in mind is if their objectives are in line with your own. A mismatch doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong, but it does make you unlikely to reach your own goals by following their advice.

The Orbital Leapfrog

Athol shines the spotlight on one of his commenters concerning the humiliating experience of orbiting:

I got into someone's orbit, once, back in the Blue Pill days. I did all sorts of things for her, treated her nicely, waited patiently while she ended a relationship, undertook a lot of responsibilities for her. And then, at a critical moment, I made my Move. She was shocked. She was offended. She rejected me good and hard, told me that we would only be friends at best, that "I wasn't her type." She was kind of brutal about it, as if the very idea of me dating "out of my class" was ludicrous.

So I walked away. I quit calling her. I found distraction. I quit answering her calls. I got angry with her, then objectified her, and I completely severed any ties with her. Since we had a common group of friends (we were undergraduates) the group ended up shattering when I quit attending functions, and our friends wanted to know why. She blamed me for getting mad, blamed me for upsetting the group and starting a fight with her friends, and blamed me that I wouldn't "just be friends" and keep coming to her study group.

And you know what? I survived. Not only survived, it was the first real taste of "red pill" I'd ever had.

Now, to be fair, I have seen orbiting work on occasion. But it requires an insane amount of patience and the opportunity cost is monstrous. In the case of one of my friends, it took him most of our college years, three, in fact, to land the pretty Italian dancer around whom he had been orbiting. So, while he did manage to outkick his coverage, in the end, the relationship lasted about one-third as long as the orbiting. That's far from the most effective use of a young man's prime predation years, in my opinion.

Orbiting happens when a man with lower SMV locks onto a woman with higher SMV. Gammas, particularly nerds, are especially susceptible to this sort of behavior due to their social ineptness and overly romantic natures. Their natural tendencies towards pedestalization and singular focus are exacerbated by the messages they receive from the entertainment media, female friends of the woman they are orbiting, and the woman herself. It's important to remember that women being orbited enjoy the experience, as it not only makes her feel attractive but increases her status among other women. Women consider attractiveness to be much more nebulous and subjective than men do, which is why they instinctively feel that a woman with a collection of orbiters must be more attractive than the exact same woman without them. The female instinct to attract and maintain orbiters is no weaker or less valid than the male instinct to assemble and maintain a stable.

The irony is that by orbiting a woman, the orbiter tends to reduce the probability that he will ever become sexually involved with her. But this doesn't mean his cause is hopeless. The optimal strategy for a lower SMV man infatuated with a higher SMV woman can be described as the Orbital Leapfrog. The results are by no means guaranteed, but they are much more likely and come with a much lower opportunity cost. The Orbital Leapfrog requires a likely orbiter to refuse to show the otherwise orbited object any sexual interest at all while simultaneously pursuing her less attractive friends with enthusiasm and vigor. This will usually be perceived as an insult and a provocative challenge by the higher SMV woman; if the non-orbiter is successful in scoring one or more of her friends whose SMV is closest to her in her social circle, in most cases, he will not have to make The Move because the object of his real interest will sooner or later make a move on him. Then it's a simple matter of closing the deal, preferably in a manner that doesn't restore her to a place on her previous pedestal, in which case the triumph will be a very short-lived one.

This is, of course, a rather cold strategy that can be more than a little harsh on the women being leapfrogged. But again, I don't make the rules of human behavior, I merely observe them and comment upon what appears to work and what does not. And while the Orbital Leapfrog approach will not be successful with women who genuinely put their female friendships before their egos or their interest in men, that is a sufficiently small percentage of the female population that it will be unlikely to hinder the successful application of this strategy.

And by the way, Athol is correct. Orbiters never understand the phrase "no, it's not ever going to happen" unless it is spelled out very clearly and somewhat harshly for them. One single, gentle, "let's just be friends" is not going to overcome a decade of chick flicks and "you just hang in there, champ, and eventually she'll see what a great guy you are" talks from dozens of men and women. But I am dubious that most women who are orbited actually want their orbiters to go away, as I suspect they just want to keep them safely orbiting without either breaking free or making The Move.(1)

So, don't orbit. Don't ever orbit. You may not be sufficiently alpha to maintain your own stable, but that doesn't mean you have to be a pathetic little orbiter wasting years mooning uselessly over the same unattainable woman either.


(1) Note that the capitalization of this term is a dead giveaway of the former orbiter's gamma status. Can you even imagine an alpha talking about "The Move" when he might quite reasonably make more than one move an evening... and do so successfully?