If you're asking, you don't have it

I am often quite harsh on the clueless deltas and gammas of the world.  It's often hard to believe that they are truly as stupid and inobservant as their behavior indicates them to be.  But, when we look at the other side of it and view the way in which the female hamster runs amok whenever she's dealing with a man of higher SMV, it becomes rapidly apparent that the inability to think straight affects both men and women when they find themselves in potentially sexual relationships with individuals whose SMV sufficiently exceeds theirs.

We started dating when I was 19. This was the second guy I ever kissed. Aside from all the emotional stuff that went on, the physical stuff (sort of sex?) was…Really Good. Ok, so I pretty much went from 0 to 500 in this relationship, and have no real basis of comparison, but as far as I can tell, sex type stuff was really good for both of us. Emotionally: good to ok to godawful. Chemistry: through the roof....

The guy is a starving musician trying to make it big and currently has a harem of six, not counting the ONS. She asked me to play nice. So, Monday, we were all in the same place at the same time. I’m so much on edge that I can barely think straight, but I did my best to be friendly. Boy tries to give me (and assorted other female types) a hug before he goes; I take a step back. Boy asked if he could call me to get a cup of coffee next time he’s in town.  I said: ok.

I called later that night because I wanted to understand what his intentions were.

"I called later that night...." That says it all right there.  No matter how much information the individual with the short end of the stick has, they always seek more.  Why?  Because they need more in order to rationalize away the information they already have!  If you're seeking for "clarification" or trying to "understand" or think that a "conversation" is needed, congratulations.  You're the one without hand.

This is why it is a total waste of time to attempt talking anyone out of a situation where they are being used/abused by an individual of higher SMV.  They already know the situation, they just don't want to accept it.  Of course, if you're the higher SMV individual, this shows the correct way to keep a lower SMV chewtoy on the string: just throw them something with which to rationalize every so often.

Do that and it doesn't matter what you do the rest of the time.  The rationalization hamster will take it from there.

But N doesn't matter!

I could be wrong, but I am of the opinion that most women understand a past in professional pornography is unlikely to be considered a marital plus, as is the case in this unfortunate case of belated disclosure:

My wife and I have been married for five years. I recently discovered that she made between 10 and 20 porn videos when she was 19. We got married when she was 27. We have four kids from two previous marriages. I am devastated. When I confronted her about it, she cried harder than I had ever seen. She said she was lost, and it's the biggest regret of her entire life.

Apparently she was either caught off-guard or wasn't quick enough to turn the situation around and make it all his fault for watching porn.  But consider that we're probably talking an N of somewhere between 10 and 50 on the basis of the professional activity alone.  For the sake of argument, we'll settle on 30.

If women are capable of grasping that it is extremely distasteful for a man to marry a woman with an N of 30 on the basis of her career in film, then why is it difficult for some of them to understand that providing the same sexual services free of charge is not any more acceptable to men, regardless of whether or not there were cameras involved?

A basic rule of film-making is that the monster is always more frightening when it isn't shown.  So, the idea that the pornographic past is intrinsically worse than an equally high amateur N is dubious.  After all, what's worse.  A woman telling you that she did it for the money, or because she simply wanted to.  And who is more likely to be unfaithful, the woman who historically puts out for cash or the woman who historically puts out because she just feels like it?

Alpha Mail: yeah, that's projection

Sarahsdaughter asks if women provide the same projection-based tell that men do when they go on the attack.  Her blog provides a precise example of the very behavior I was describing.  Consider the following attack on her by a woman named Kathy after she wrote about female submission in marriage:

That aside, I am so bothered by you and how you come across. You seem judgmental, critical, think you know it all, and use scripture as a weapon (to shut people up and be right). Those qualities are anything but Jesus like to me. I can have conversations with lots of people who see things differently than I do but with you, there is no conversation and no respect.

This is without question the sort of psychological projection I was describing.  In launching such an attack, Kathy is clearly confessing her own guilt and ascribing her own mindset to Sarahsdaughter.  It is not even possible to claim Sarahsdaughter was judging or criticizing anyone in what is nothing more than the contemplation of a concept and its definition.  In her post, there isn't even any specific target at which one could claim any hypothetical judgment or criticism is aimed.

Kathy, on the other hand, is observably doing both, and in doing so, indicates that she is guilty of the very acts she accuses Sarahsdaughter.

Alpha Mail: in which we learn how to criticize women

Szopen tries to claim I have made a logical error by claiming that X-Y is equal to X, for certain values of Y.

Your logic is wrong.  I am not native English speaker so I accept that I may not express myself clearly in English and you might misunderstood me. But I still cannot understand how it is possible that you have misunderstood me.

"Y" is not criticism, is a statement which is considered a priori stupid by readers. In OTOH, it is a statement which is considered so absurd, that no one will even care to listen to arguments.

"and what do women find offensive? Well, from both her comments and our mutual experience at HUS, we know that women find criticism, among many other things, to be inherently offensive to them."

This part is blatantly false.  My experience that you can state criticism in a way that is offensive to females (or males), or in a way that is not offensive....

I rest my case. You, VD, have made logical error, and it seems to me that you are unable to understand this error because you have some assumption (based on selective experiences) that you are not aware that may be false. Hence, you interpreted my statement in a way that fit your assumptions. Just exchange "females" with "males" in my statement and think whether you would think in such a case that I wrote that "males are incapable of logic"

In fact, there is no logical error, there is merely a substantive disagreement concerning the facts in evidence.  I say his distinction is a theoretical one with little basis in reality; most women consider criticism to be a priori stupid, if not evil.  Now, if Szopen wants to defend the position that women are not intrinsically offended by criticism qua criticism, he is certainly welcome to do so.  Perhaps he could put the question to the empirical test and politely criticize every single female commenter at Jezebel or HUS over the next month and see what percentage of them do not take any offense.

Forget taking offense.  I'll imagine there would be numerous threats to never comment again and a general call to have him banned from both sites.

Now, obviously some women can handle criticism without giving any sign of taking offense, but you can rest assured that they still feel offended on some level, they simply have learned to control their emotional reaction.  But light of the possibility that I could be wrong, I welcome any  input from women to explain the magic formula involved in order to criticize a woman in a manner that will never cause her to take any offense.

The $50 trillion question

I don't think the situation quite qualifies as a marriage strike.  Not yet.  How can it, when men are now as focused on having a successful marriage as women were 15 years ago.  But the trend is clear, and there is little mystery as to why it exists:

According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

A lot of people, women especially, are still on the fence.  But they won't be for long, not once they begin to see what the real price of all those educated women and all their important careers turns out to be.  The terrible thing is that this state of affairs was not only predictable, it's not even unprecedented.

In that day seven women will take hold of one man and say, "We will eat our own food and provide our own clothes; only let us be called by your name. Take away our disgrace!"

But it's a surprisingly good article and the author is correct.  The solution is simple.  Women have only to decide to be women, not ersatz, incompetent men.  As she writes: "Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs."

Or, they can continue to cling to the myths of equality and grrrl power and descend into barbarism.  That's an option too.

What is passive-aggressiveness?

A few readers seem to have some trouble understanding what passive-aggressiveness is, why it is viewed as feminine, and why it is an indication of low socio-sexual rank for men to exhibit passive aggressive behavior.  It's really not a difficult concept, basically, passive-aggressive behavior is an intentional attack on another individual made with at least some degree of plausible deniability concerning the attack, the intent, or the target.  The reason for the plausible deniability because the passive-aggressive individual wants to be able to attack someone else without giving his target a justification for striking back.

Should he be questioned, the passive-aggressive attacker will usually affect to deny he was making an attack, or that he intended any such thing, or that the person he was obviously attacking was, in fact, the target.  So, passive-aggressiveness is a form of attack that is intrinsically cowardly, conflict-avoidant, unfair, and is customarily utilized by weaker parties who feel they are unable to win in direct and overt confrontation.

This is a perfectly reasonable conflict strategy for women, who are on average smaller, weaker, slower, and less intelligent than men.  It is also why they tend to be very skilled at it, as it suits their natural talent for the verbal and their abilities are honed by decades of passive-aggressive battle with each other beginning as young girls.  The movie Bridesmaids is dreadful, but is noteworthy for the way it shows some of the extremes of female passive-aggressiveness, such as when the women pretend to be in agreement while directly contradicting each other.  It's not funny after the first five or six examples, but it is illuminating.

Of course, this points directly to the correct way to deal with passive-aggressive behavior: confront it head on and force the conflict out in the open.  It's a basic martial arts strategy.  If he wants to kick, move into hand range.  If he wants to grapple, stay outside.  The main reason people avoid direct conflict and prefer the indirect form is the same reason that if you know you've only got a knife and the other guy has a gun, you'd better be sure it stays a knife fight.

While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a man adopting female forms of communication, it is indicative of him possessing a similar relationship to other men that women do, which is to say he is metaphorically smaller, weaker, slower, and less intelligent.  And a predilection for resorting to female tactics is a reliable indicator of low socio-sexual rank, which is why their heavy reliance upon passive-aggressive conflict makes it so easy to identify the gamma.

Rapey groks no Game

John Scalzi proves he doesn't care what people think about him by writing yet another post explaining his opinion concerning what people think about his position on the socio-sexual hierarchy and why he is not insulted by being identified as a "beta male":

 I would note as a matter of clarification that I think they are less concerned about insulting me than they are reassuring themselves that there is no possible way they could ever be beta males, whatever their definition of ‘beta male’ is. By all indications their definition is something along the lines of “a man who sees women as something other than a mute dispensary of sandwiches and boobies” and/or “a man who does not live in fear of everyone else not continually affirming his internal assessment of personal status,” gussied up in language that allows them not to have to deal with these essential facts of their own nature. But inasmuch as insulting me is part of the mechanism of reassuring themselves, I am offered the insult.

I’m not insulted because, a) I consider the source, b) I don’t mind being seen as someone who does not view women through a tangled bramble of fear, ignorance and desire, c) when I step into a room, I don’t neurotically spend my time tallying up who in the room has higher status than I do, and who doesn’t. I am a grown-up, for God’s sake. Paranoid status anxiety is tiring. Also, you know. I’m pretty happy with my life and who I am, which makes me rather less vulnerable to the presumed snipings of others, particularly those who don’t have any notable participation in my life. Yes, yes, I’m a beta male, the worst of all possible males. Fine. Moving along.

While John is a BETA by Roissy's binary sexual hierarchy, he is a delta with strong gamma tendencies in the socio-sexual hierarchy.  But Rapey McRaperson shouldn't be insulted by being identified as a low delta for the obvious reason that it isn't an insult.  It is merely an observation of his behavioral tendencies and an identification of his place on the normal human hierarchy.  And since John isn't merely comfortable with, but proud of, his passive-aggressive snarkiness, his suppliant behavior towards women, his white knighting, his discomfort with traditional masculinity and his lack of confidence in his own right to define himself, it would be all but impossible for him to consider such an accurate identification as an insult.

John is, by his own admission, happy with his life.  I think he's done very well for someone with his various handicaps.  It is not at all a bad thing for anyone that the low deltas and gammas of the world can find mates, find satisfaction in their lives, and procreate.  Civilization depends upon it.  However, it is deeply unfortunate that John is using his success to tear down civilization and support the very forces that will render future men of his rank miserable.  By constantly pushing for feminism and "equality", John is promoting a future where more men are raised in fatherless poverty like he was, only they will not get the support from the more stable elements of society to lift them out of it that he did because people like John and his readership are actively attacking those traditional elements and attempting to eliminate them, or at the very least, reduce their societal influence.  Like an ungrateful dog, John is biting the hand that fed him.

Like most men with no Game, natural or otherwise, John doesn't understand any of it.  The idea that any ALPHA fears and doesn't understand women is risible on its face.  We don't fear women in the slightest and we understand them so well that we have to overcome the instinctive habit of making use of them whenever and wherever it pleases us.  John doesn't understand that in the world he is promoting, the alphas and sigmas will maintain actual harems instead of the virtual ones we now possess, and the low deltas and gammas will be forced to go without entirely, as only omegas now do, because the elimination of the traditional strictures on female desire permits women to pursue their natural inclinations, which has never, in the entire history of Man, been to have sex with short, chubby, feminized men of low social rank.

But his biggest failure of understanding concerns the purpose of men like me and others in the androsphere.  John is again projecting his own status anxiety and other-focused mindset in asserting that anyone is attempting to bolster their own Alpha credentials by insulting him.  It is social and sexual dominance that makes a man ALPHA, not the metaphorical dunking of John's head in the Internet toilet.  Given that John is himself, contextually speaking, a lesser alpha in the SFWA community, and considering that he could no doubt exert an amount of sexual dominance over the women of that, shall we say, differently-attractive, group if he wished, he really shouldn't have too much trouble grasping the basic group dynamics involved.  Alphas need no more reassurance of their rank than to walk into a room containing women, just as John doesn't need any more reminder of his position in the SFWA than to simply show up at a science fiction convention.

Men and women alike are better off when they have an understanding of the male socio-sexual hierarchy and their current place within it, or in relation to it.  John's rank, my rank, and any other individual's rank, for that matter, is wholly irrelevant except in that they happen to provide concrete and observable examples which may help people better understand the concepts involved.