The broken attractor

Dogsquat uses pattern recognition to figure out his problem with women:

If I talk to two different women about normal stuff for five minutes – different times, different venues, with both women being equally attractive – I’ll come away being really attracted to one of them.

Here’s what I know:

The woman who I’m really attracted to has problems. She’s got a coke habit, sexual abuse issues, an eating disorder – something like that. The women and I won’t talk about that stuff, but my subconscious has picked up on certain patterns and mannerisms. Those subtle cues have rung the fire-bell hanging on the wall where my own personal White Knight hangs out. That bastard starts polishing up his rusty armor and looking around for his sword. He’s gonna go rescue this chick from herself, and he starts conspiring with my limbic system to make me attracted to her.

See? The gal with problems acts a certain, subtle way. Subconsciously, she’s broadcasting her pain/problems out into the world. Because of certain experiences I’ve had/the way I was raised, my antennae are very sensitive to certain signals. Because of those signals, I feel certain things – attraction, the need to rescue, the need to “be there”, etc.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. The man is a paramedic. He's literally wired to rescue people, which is admirable in general but definitely sub-optimal for personal relationships. He is one of the many men who are simply unsuitable to choose their own mates and would benefit from receiving strong guidance from their trusted friends and family members.

It's very important to figure out your historical pattern with women because failing to learn from history will condemn you to repeating it. And learn to place great significance in the non-verbal reactions of your friends to meeting new women. Even if they're not inclined to tell you to your face that you're making the same mistake again, they'll usually let you know in subtler ways.

Bloody peasants

I note Gmac's discussion of "the Beer Shield":

The Beer Shield is a college-born social tactic that young men pick up in dive bars and house parties. It is a fallback technique akin to a security blanket that should be shamed out of men. Keeping a beer close to your chest is a sign of insecurity. It’s no different from playing with your phone in a bar. It tells the other people around you, “Hey everyone! I’m awkward and have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing with myself right now!” It signals desperation and confusion to the opposite sex. More importantly, it’s counterproductive to an approach mentality.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is a much more serious and underlying problem on display here. By holding a beer, by drinking beer, by even being credibly identified as a beer drinker, a man is signifying that he is an illiterate peasant, of solid, but hearty stock, the sort of man thick-waisted farm girls with red faces and ankles the size and shape of overstuffed German sausages expect to meet out behind the haystacks. Civilized men who attract beautiful women drink wine, preferably red wine, although prosecco and lambrusco are acceptable alternatives in the summer heat or on Friday night with pizza.

Women see wine drinkers as intrinsically more wealthy, handsome, and sophisticated, because they are. What cultures drink wine? The French and Italian. What cultures drink beer? The German and the English. Now ask yourself this question: towards which cultures are women more powerfully drawn? Here is a hint: neither are known for winning wars or eating sauerkraut.

The amusing thing is that the wine/beer delta is such a powerful social signifier that even if you are at a bar with a group of men and you are the only one to ask for a glass of cabernet, syrah, or pinot noir instead of a "heinie" or a "bud" - notice how even the names of the hops-related beverages are declasse - some modern version of an agricultural helot is bound to make a comment on the order of "well, la di dah". This only shows that he is cognizant of your social superiority, as well as the likelihood that you are, unlike him, wearing clean underwear.

Beer looks and smells like urine, that's why they have to chill it to zero degrees Kelvin in order to make it halfway palatable. Wine looks like blood and smells like the velvety nectar of the gods. And let's face it, women have not bought 18 bazillion masturbation fantasies about men who drink piss. As we all know, women prefer bad boys, and what does a supervillain drink in his hidden mountain lair? An ice cold Coors Light or a 1945 Chateau Mouton Rothschild? A frosty Miller Genuine Draft or a 2006 Brunello di Montalcino? To ask the question is to answer it.

But don't accept my word as law, (although in this case it would clearly be the height of reason and good sense), go forth and live the science! The next time you're out in mixed company and the men are all calling for their infantile "beerz" in order to nervously suck on what are quite clearly pacifier substitutes, remain calm and order "something red" instead. Don't play wine snob and make yourself look like an ass, if you're asked, just tell the service that whatever happens to be open will suit you nicely. If you have to choose because you find yourself at some savage, godforsaken place where the proprietor doesn't already have two or three nice bottles going, choose the merlot over the cabernet; the less expensive merlots are always more drinkable than the cheap cabs.

Don't be surprised if people look at you strangely. Men will wonder if you've come into an inheritance. Women will find themselves contemplating when you became so stylish. Attractive women whose names you do not know will attempt to press their lips against you. And in time, you, too, will learn to develop a healthy aristocratic contempt for the beer-swilling masses. My point, in case it has escaped your hops-addled mind, is that if you're utilizing the beer shield, the shield is arguably the least of your self-inflicted handicaps.

This post comes courtesy of Badger, who isn't a bad sort even if he does live in a hut and drink peasant brew.

Science plays catch-up

We needed a "scientific" study for this?

Two new studies reveal fascinating evidence that manwhores are much more attracted to promiscuous women than to less sexually available women. They don’t settle for them, they strongly prefer them. Essentially, men who are oriented toward casual sex deploy “adaptive, exploitative measures against women they perceive as vulnerable.”

First, I note that the description isn't of "manwhores", but rather, players. Susan is among those women who like to use the term as a would-be perjorative substitute in a futile attempt to convince young women that men they find attractive are not attractive, which is fine, but it's a completely inappropriate term because a manwhore is a homosexual prostitute, not a man who is sexually successful with women and is not compensated in any monetary form for the services he provides. One could make a much better case for women who provide sex after dinner dates as "womanwhores", but let's face it, that just sounds both ridiculous and redundant. Second, the concept was already covered in all the necessary detail a long time ago on Friends

JOEY: How're you doing?

RACHEL: I'm ok.

JOEY: Ooh, that bad, huh? Look, I can sense when women are depressed and vulnerable. It's one of my gifts.

However obvious, it was interesting in that it supported my contention that female intelligence is not an attraction factor for men, not even intelligent men. This is a myth that women cling to almost as strongly as men cling to the myth of male loyalty and devotion being an attraction factor for women. It's amazing, but men and women alike seem to have tremendous difficulty distinguishing what makes the opposite sex attractive from what makes an individual member of the opposite sex a wise choice as a mate. The two concepts aren't only different, they're barely even tangentially related and in some cases can be outright contradictory.

Old girls are easy

Once more, we see Game in general, and Roissy in particular, supported by the evidence:

Women over 30 are more likely to have sex on a first date than their younger counterparts, according to a new study. A third of participants (34 per cent) from the age bracket admitted that they would get intimate on a first date compared to just 12 per cent of 24 to 27-year-olds.

While this will no doubt be spun as Strong and Independent Women Knowing What They Want, it is simply basic supply and demand. Older women can't be as picky because they can't afford to be as picky. Since the demand for them is naturally lower, they can't maintain the same "price" they previously commanded. The converse, of course, is male commitment, as the more in demand a man is, the higher his "price" for commitment. I do find it interesting that a mere three years is enough to drive up the female willingness to put out immediately by a factor of nearly three. This is a strong indication that the first attractiveness wall is somewhere right around the age of 27. Which, interesting enough, corresponds nicely with the first sports performance wall for men.

This has some interesting biological implications, as it might be informative to map the female price line against the male performance line and the female fertility line.

UPDATE - As predicted, the hamsters are spinning madly away. Here is one female commenter: "they feel sexually more confident and better able to trust their own judgement. They also care a lot less about being judged by someone with double standards."

Sure they do, Rosie. Sure they do. Because when one contemplates stoic emotional equanimity, a promiscuous 30-something single woman is the very first thing that springs to mind.

Crazy Fuel

Thus Spake Omega:
There is something deeply pleasant about hitting rocks with a bat. The swing, the force, the crack, the rock spinning fast enough to hum, it all makes for a very satisfying, very boyish past-time. For whatever reason, carrying a bat around always made me feel a bit more powerful. I think that I instinctively knew that as fun as hitting things was, the bat was a weapon and if I needed to I could defend myself with it. Men are hard wired to be attracted to weapons. It does not matter if the weapon is a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, an M1911 (.45 of course), or a high quality stick, we love weapons. Somehow, we know that we are meant to take up arms in defense of our families, lives, and homes. We are meant to be aggressive. Yet for some, as a boy grows up, that drive, that fascination with violence, for various reasons, is excised like a cancer. For others it is never trained and becomes uncontrollable and destructive. Either way, a boy who does not know how to channel and use his aggression is not a man. Of the two fates, mine was the former.

Due to a deep depression that settled on me in my mid teens, I never learned how to use my aggression. I definitely had it, and frequently used it in school and on my cousins, but as I moved into my teens a growing sense of fear and anxiety began to push back on it. It always got me into trouble, and despite my father's insistence that I use it to defend myself, I received no training on when and how much. There were other far more severe factors that I will not mention here (suffice it to say if I had had male training it may have saved me from losing my mind), and all of it combined drove me deeper into depression. By the time I hit my twenties I was crazy. The aggression had turned inwards with no outlet. I felt helpless and I began to consider suicide. Eventually after years of depression I sought help.

So, as I approach the end of my twenties, it is no small thing when I say that I have not been depressed at all this year. There have been some bad days, but even those are better than my best days were during depression. Best of all I only occasionally think about testing the integrity of my skull with a high velocity lead slug (.45 of course). However, this is not my personal therapy journal, but a post about game, so let me explain why I am no longer depressed, and what changed.

I have spent a lot of time (and a shit-load of money) in therapy. While I do not recommend it for most people, for the genuinely crazy it may do some good. Paying someone to care is not a bad way to go if nothing else has worked. But despite learning to control my emotions, the one thing that turned everything around was aggression. If you are a guy you will have it in abundance. While there is merit in learning to calm yourself, you must learn to channel your aggression. It has to go somewhere. If you do not it will cause problems. I had a triple whammy: I could not control it, which terrified me; the terror fueled a need to bottle it up; and so I channeled it inwards (which turned to visions of sugar plums dancing in my head: .45 of course). After years of trying to understand what was going on in the course of a few week I had an epiphany and I began to channel it outwards. It was relief like nothing I had ever felt.

After the initial awkward steps, once as I got used to the idea, I found that, to stay sane, I had to have an outlet. I had to have a place to channel the aggression; I had to have a target. I was unfamiliar enough with this new need that the most obvious outlet did not occur to me. Aggression though is a fairly simple impulse and martial arts quickly came to mind as the clearest choice. I joined a local Muay Thai gym and working out there is very calming. Punching things rivals hypnosis in its therapeutic value (way cheaper too). When I go there I pour myself into the exercise. I have to. I take all the anger, fear, frustration, sex drive, and depression, and I grind it up and use it as fuel, and unexpectedly it turns into a sort of exhausted, jagged joy. I limp home feeling better than I have ever felt in my life. Aggression is medicine for men. Learning to channel it is a necessary daily practice.

The benefits are many and varied. As long as I do not let the aggression build up, it improves my focus, determination, and willpower. I can approach girls fearlessly. Before, approach anxiety felt like walking through tar, now it feels like a light breeze pushing me back. I went on a date recently and just for kicks, I decided I was not interested, walked away, and did not look back. This was a major turning point. I have always been afraid of breaking the rules, regardless of the rules' source, and I decided that I was not going to be afraid of it anymore, so I walked away. I had no reason, or justification, I simply refused to be afraid of losing. Now I talk to random strangers on the street, almost more than people I know. My game has a long way to go, but feeling no fear while conversing with an 8 and her 8.5 sister seems to me to be a good sign. My voice is louder. Tomorrow I will have my second date with a girl I approached on the street. She is a 7 and seems to be into me. Things are really looking up.

Learning controlled aggression has changed everything for me. I feel as though I am carrying a bat at all times. I can use it to nudge people and get their attention. I can swing it to warn people away. And, my favorite, I can take it to side of someone's head, should they deserve it. Knowing that I can hit back has been extremely therapeutic. Who would have thought that acting like a man would be the cure for not feeling like a man?

The sex appeal of IQ

Roissy considers it:

You’ve got two schools of thought. The first insists that smarts, like any other positive attribute, can only raise a man’s dating market value because women are hypergamous and appreciate a smarter man than themselves. The other school says that women are put off by men who are too much smarter than themselves, and that experience shows women fall for lunkhead jerks all the time, perhaps because these types of men are less introspective and more unthinkingly assertive about hitting on women.

The science I’ve read on this subject has been all over the place, but the consensus seems to be that having some smarts is a net plus to a man’s desirability.

Where do I come down on this perennial issue? I stick by the Dating Market Value Test for Men at the top of this blog. A better-than-average IQ is beneficial, but the benefits to picking up women begin to dissipate past a certain degree of brainpower, because very high IQ seems to be associated with a lack of social savviness and other off-putting personality quirks.

I agree with Roissy to a point. My perspective is that intelligence is a major plus in two circumstances. First, it is a huge DHV when dealing with women who place value on intelligence. These tend to be educated women in the 1 SD+ category; it's easy to spot them because they will mention a) their academic credentials, or b) how smart they are, within the first five minutes of meeting someone new. There is nothing that turns them on faster than being corrected or seeing a man intellectually humiliate someone. Second, it can be a very useful tool for both social and sexual dominance.

That being said, one should never confuse the tool for the consequence of its use and that is the problem that most smart guys face. Most smart men think that displaying their intelligence, usually in some hopelessly dorky manner, will make them more attractive to women. This is not the case. Whereas women are attracted to muscles and strong bodies for their own sake, and not merely because they can indicate social and sexual dominance, the first group aside, they are not attracted to intelligence for its own sake, only when it is used to dominate others.

For example, if the science geek takes an arrogant attitude and openly disrespects less intelligent men as barely evolved chimpanzees, women will be attracted to him. Of course, he has to be able to back it up and few science geeks can. That's why men who are balanced, who honor the Greek ideal of developing mind, body, and soul, will tend to clean up with women, because there are few things that women find more attractive than a man who can dominate them and others both physically and mentally. However, mental dominance isn't as readily apparent as physical dominance, which is why this takes us back to the "chicks dig jerks" theme. A smart asshole doesn't hesitate to exert his mental dominance, whereas the average smart nice guy will do everything in his power to refrain from demonstrating it in any way. Needless to say, women will be attracted to the former, not the latter. Think of the "apples" scene in Good Will Hunting. That is a clear demonstration of mental dominance driving attraction; it may not be as much of a turn-on as a physical beat-down, but make no mistake, it's a beat-down and it's going to turn on most woman who witness it, especially if they happen to have any brains of their own.

It's not that women are any more interested in football games and motorcycles than physics and philosophy, it's just that they usually can't understand the latter.

Reversing the social thermostat

One of the things that separates men from women, and ALPHA from BETA, is the ability to control one's emotions and reactions. Roissy memorably linked the ALPHA ideal to a rock that lets the ocean waves crash over it with complete indifference; when the waters calm, the rock is still there, exactly as it was before.

Since supplicants and subordinates are always hypersensitive to the feelings of their superiors, a lack of sensitivity is always interpreted as dominance by men and women alike. In practical terms, this means a lack of reaction to what other people are saying. The more emotionally intense the stimulus, the more important it is to remain calm and impassive. Now, some people come by this naturally. For whatever reason, in a highly charged situation like an emergency or a competitive sporting event, I tend to feel almost as if I go out of my body and I remain much more calm than I would if the situation was an everyday one. Because that has tended to work out well for me, I try to simulate the feeling when it doesn't come naturally.

The way this can be achieved is simply by delaying your instinctive reaction. When your boss yells at you or your girlfriend accuses you of something, don't say anything, don't even allow your face to change expression. Just meet their eyes, breath slowly, and blink deliberately. Then ask them to repeat themselves. Nine times out of ten, they will immediately lower their voice and address you in a calmer, more civilized manner. This is an instinctively submissive response to dominant behavior. If they're completely out of emotional control, though, they will start shrieking and become much more difficult to understand, in which case, you continue to remain calm, explain that you can't understand what they're trying to tell you, and ask them to repeat themselves again in a more civilized manner. Sometimes they will, although they will often storm out instead. The useful thing about the latter is that you can then return to what you were doing before, since you haven't even acknowledged their demand or complaint, let alone agreed to do anything about it.

Granted, it may take a degree of natural narcissism to easily resist the male urge to respond in the face of a perceived problem. But the urge can be resisted, even by the most instinctively submissive Gamma. Remember the wise words of Calvin Coolidge: "Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you."

But dominant self-control isn't only useful in conflict situations, it's also usefully applicable to situations where a woman is attempting to get a rise out of you, either through sexual provocation or a shit test. Do exactly the same thing. Don't react, breathe, blink, ask for her to repeat herself. You'll find that you can make a woman who is striking a provocative pose to blush and stammer simply by not reacting and calmly asking her to repeat herself once or twice. Of course, because you've gone from played to player, and because women are naturally attracted to both social and sexual dominance, this will tend to create attraction even where none initially existed.

Keep in mind that the point is not to be a robot. You can smile if you like, although this is best reserved for the sexual situations and can cause problems in the conflict situations. You can - in fact, you should - speak in normal tones. And you should react normally in non-hostile situations; acting like you're partially autistic isn't going to get you anywhere. The idea is simply that the hotter it gets outside, the icier you become inside.