The Rawness

You ever feel like society’s attempts at taking the risk out of everything are also sucking out all the spontaneity and funtoo?

I consider myself to have a decent grasp on human behavior and why people do the things they do. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and even if I don’t know the cause of something for sure, I usually have at least a half-baked theory to throw out there.

Take attraction between men and women. Men basically judge women primarily on how hot they are. There are other factors too, but for the average guy, if a woman is hot enough he will start disregarding just about every other personality flaw she has at least until the novelty of her hotness wears off and her more irritating secondary aspects start becoming more noticeable.

Women, however, look more for a mix of things. Looks are important, but so are power, status, confidence, ability to provide security, social intelligence, leadership, rapport, independence and wealth.

That being said, I simply cannot understand this site. As someone very knowledgeable about the creature known as the guido, I’ve never been able to understand their ability to attract hot (although admittedly trashy) women. Many of them live at home, don’t have high status jobs, ruin any natural good looks they had with burnt orange tans and weird spiky hair and many of them still live at home and live off their parents, meaning the level of independence is pretty low.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Bonus videos: The guido outside his natural element. (Not for the faint of heart)

Keep it real, people.

From talking to a lot of my friends who are in their 20s and 30s, I’ve seen a common thread in all of us: the collector’s mentality, the need to accumulate experiences and things. The need to travel to as many places as possible. To need to collect hobbies.

Everyone has annual checklists of new resolutions. Learn a new language. Or two. Or three. Skydive. Change jobs. Go back to school and change careers altogether. Learn to play an instrument. We decide to write novels in our free time or take up a new sport. We spend hours in the gym trying to get our body fat percentage into the single digits. We have the time and means and education to pursue careers and hobbies and personal achievement goals that our parents and their parents before them could never have even dreamed of. Isn’t this the American Dream? Isn’t that why many of our ancestors traveled here to begin with? To give us choices and financial security that they themselves never had growing up?

Yet we’re a notoriously unfulfilled generation. Many of us are neurotic, directionless, struggling with feelings of inadequacy, still rebelling against our parents, still trying to find ourselves, constantly struggling with existential angst…why?

Why do we have so much already with still many opportunities to accumulate more, yet find ourselves somehow less personally fulfilled than our parents were at our ages? My parents had a fraction of the education I had. Where they lived felt so hopeless they actually felt like they had to switch whole countries and come to America, a place where they barely knew the language. They had less skills and education and had to take whatever jobs they could get while struggling to raise kids. They constantly had to do without to get by. They stayed with their respective employers until retirement. Sure they had some regrets, but they were nowhere near as consuming as those of many of the young (and some would argue spoiled and self-indulgent) people of my generation, who are already complaining about quarterlife crises. Why are our parents and grandparents so much happier and less regretful, even though they grew up with so much more responsiblity so many less toys?

Two speeches from the TED Conferences may shed some light. Before going any further, what exactly is TED? TED is an international conference that brings together a wide range of thinkers every year to talk about a variety of topics. Here’s a description of the TED Conference from their own website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 150 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

You can go to their website or check their video collection on Youtube and see more speeches.  I want to focus on two speeches in particular, which I think fit together well to provide the answers we’re looking for in this case. One speech is by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and the other is by Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness.

Dan Gilbert’s speech is called “Why Are We Happy? Why Aren’t We Happy” and it’s described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”

What “synthetic happiness” means is that when we don’t get what we want and we resign ourselves to the fact that we won’t get what we want, our mind adapts and we end up being as happy with the unwanted result as we would have been with the originally desired result. What’s important to realize is that these people aren’t simply lying to themselves to make themselves feel better about the disappointing development. These people actually become as happy with the unwanted result as they would have been with the result they originally wanted. But the problem is, this synthetic happiness only works if you’re trapped and have no other choices.

Barry Schwartz’s speech “The Paradox of Choice” touches on the same issues, and is described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

Think of it like Ramen Cup O’ Noodles in college when you’re broke. When you’re in college, you loved the shit out some Ramen noodles. And it wasn’t a case of you knowing you were eating shitty food but pretending to like it. You weren’t lying to yourself. You actually believed in your heart and mind that you loved that salty, chewy mess. Because you were broke and had absolutely no other choices, your mind actually made you love those noodles. You would sit in class craving that shit and daydreaming about those stale styrofoam noodles and stinky powdered broth and you never thought for once that you were settling for junk. It was gloriously uncomplicated.

Once you graduated from school and got your first good job and had serious food choices, though, your mind suddenly realized how shitty Ramen noodles are, even though they taste the same as they did back when you were in college. Same goes for the cafeteria food and the greasy spoon ghetto diners you loved back then too.

Choices fuck you up. Now instead of eating Ramen noodles every night and loving them, you’re a young professional with a real income and an active social life and are surrounded by tons of exotic restaurant choices and a recent Zagat’s guide plus the entire internet to help you sift through them and each place has a million affordable entries on its menu to choose from. Now you’re sampling different gourmet cuisines mutiple nights a week and you’re nitpicking them to death, whereas before when you could only afford one shitty food consistently, you really believed you loved it.

And not only do choices fuck you up and make you miserable, but now we’re programmed to gravitate towards them. We choose neighborhoods based on how many different restaurants and bars are around us. And how culturally and financially diverse are social circles will be in those neighborhoods. And how many different clothing stores and supermarkets we’ll have to choose from. And among those restaurants we’ll have a dozen different ethnic cuisines available to us, and each will have a large menu selection. The bars will have 10 different vodkas and 30 different scotches and 40 microbrews to choose from. And the supermarket with have 24 different types of flavored gourmet mayo to choose. And we’ll feel pressured to have our social circles look as diverse as a Benetton ad in order to make sure we’re living an open-minded, full unbigoted life. And our disposable income and leisure time makes us feel pressured to cram hobbies into our lives as well. We not only actively seek choice, the dilemma that causes us our existential angst, but we actually expect it to solve our existential angst, leading to an incredibly vicious circle.

So now it becomes harder to feel fulfilled because now no matter what we choose, we’re convinced there’s something better out there that we’re missing out on. As soon as we get our ideal apartment, we hear about a better complex that’s going up in a better hipper neighborhood. Soon as we order Thai, we think maybe we should have went with the new Italian place with the celebrity chef we read about in New York Magazine last week. We can go to our usual lounge to chill, but it was just okay last time. Let’s try this hot new lounge instead. But once we get there and it’s utterly wack, suddenly we imagine how good a time we’d probably be having if we went with our original plan instead. Of if we tried that other new lounge we heard about. Even when we’re content with our decisions we find ourselves daydreaming about trading up.

Even TV is a big dilemma now. Growing up we only had three major networks and a few cable channels that sucked ass. You chose something from those big networks, went to school or the water cooler, and everyone discussed the same shows because we all watched the same shit. We had no choice.

And that’s why we’re doomed to be less happy than our parents. They had a gloriously uncomplicated life, similar to those long gone Ramen noodle days of our college days, but they chose to upgrade us to the overstimulating and cluttered life of Zagat’s guides, gourmet supergroceries and megamalls thinking they were doing us a favor. Ironically, while having no choices isn’t always a picnic, having a nonstop of glut of them is turning out to be worse.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m no communist. I’m not against competition. I don’t believe striving for upward mobility is anything to feel guilty about. I think rewarding yourself materially now and again is a great thing. I think wanting more for yourself is what drives progress, which is the very engine of capitalism. But do we really need a bar with 200 fucking types of scotch to choose from?!?!

The full speeches are here if you’re curious:

Daniel Gilbert:

Barry Schwartz:

This piece from The Onion is pretty old (1999), but it’s a classic. Click the blurb below to read it:

I meet a lot of guys who complain about women claiming to like “nice guys” but actually preferring jerks. It’s a reassuring fiction that shields their egos, but it’s really not that simple.

Many self-proclaimed “nice guys” are rarely actually nice guys. Genuinely nice people are nice to everyone unless the person gives them a reason not to be. But with self-proclaimed “nice guys,” the only people they seem to be consistently nice to are extremely hot girls they want to bang. It’s not like these guys are running around doing nice things for fat or gruesome chicks. In fact, they’re often rude and cruel to them. Being truly nice means treating everyone well, regardless of whether they have something you want, and it means doing good things for people without expecting anything in return. For example these “nice guys” will be nice to hot women they meet at bars while rudely ignoring the hot girl’s homelier friends. Self-proclaimed “nice guys” only behave that way because they expect to be rewarded with sex or a relationship in return for their niceness (or at the very least get tossed some drunken pity pussy). It’s a transparent, passive-aggressive form of seduction and women can see right through that. Nigga, please.

But I’m not here to talk about the psychology of so-called “nice guys.” That’ll be another post. What I want to talk about is another part of the nice guy equation: why women don’t just say what they want. Why do they say they want nice guys but go with jerks? Are women just liars? Truth be told, I don’t think it’s a malicious lie so much as a natural two-part human response that people have when asked a question: (1) they want to give the answer that gives the most flattering impression of them and (2) they also go as far as to delude themselves into believing at some level that this flattering fiction is actually true. Not everyone is emotionally and psychologically strong enough to reveal unflattering truths about themselves, especially to themselves. Self-deception is a very important coping mechanism among human beings.

Regarding self-deception, consider the “illusion of invulnerability” effect found in studies conducted by Robert Levine in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (this is going to seem like an irrelevant tangent at first, but be patient, I’ll bring it back around soon enough):

• 50% of college students said they were less naive than the average student their age and gender, only 22% said they were more naive
• 43% claimed to be less gullible than average, only 25% said they were more gullible than average.
• 46% believed themselves to be less conforming than average, only 16% said more conforming than average.
• 74% claimed to be more independent than average, only 7% said less independent.
• 77% said they had better than average awareness of how groups manipulate people; only % said they were below average

And so one and so on. The book gives plenty of other examples. Smokers think they’re less likely than other smokers to get lung cancer, which keeps them smoking. Sexually active women polled believe themselves less likely to get pregnant than other sexually active girls their age. People believe they’re 32% less likely to get fired from a job than their peers.

In fact, pessimists and depressed people may actually be the most realistic of us all. One study had clinically depressed people and psychologically normal people rate themselves and try to figure out how others viewed them. The depressed people were able to much more accurately gauge how others viewed them than the normal people. The normal group consistently overestimated the impression they made on others and had an inflated image of themselves. Another study had depressed and normal people participate in secretly rigged games where the results were fixed. The normal people routinely overestimated the degree to which personal skill contributed to the outcome when they won the rigged game, and routinely blamed outside factors when they lost. Depressed people were able to assess both situations much more realistically. Studies also show that the on average people with eating disorders actually have more accurate perceptions about strangers view their body than normal people do.

Contrary to popular belief, for the clinically depressed and those with eating disorders, their problems often stem not from irrational beliefs but from an overdose of reality and an inability to deceive themselves. Self-deception apparently keeps us sane. Take it away and give people unflinching reality and the average person’s mind will not be able to take it and their mental health will suffer.

So what does this have to do with the chick who says she wants a sensitive earnest nice guys like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything but actually goes for Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides? You know, the woman who says she wants a sensitive softie who puts her up on a pedestal, but goes for the challenging, aloof macho guy or occasionally the outright jerk? She may not be consciously lying. Chances are, she’s deluded herself into believing that’s what she wants because it’s a reassuring fiction that feeds the self-image she desires. She may actually believe her own bullshit. Like the people in the studies I mentioned, she wants to view herself as being smarter, more resistant to manipulation and more resistant to assholdery than the average chick. She’s suffering from that illusion of invulnerability.

Now the other problem is that even when people do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves and aren’t suffering from self-deception, if you put them on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. In the 1990s for example, KFC did focus groups and surveys in their stores where they asked regular customers whether they’d try a low-calorie, low-fat, nonfried skinless chicken if it was offered. The response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. Execs took this info back to HQ and launched a healthy chicken line that was sure to be insanely popular. Only it wasn’t. It bombed horribly. What went wrong? The people didn’t tell the truth (“I’m a fat, greasy bastard that loves me some fat greasy chicken”), they instead said what they thought was the right answer (“Yes, I would eat healthy chicken if it was offered.”). The funny thing is, a little common sense and observation of the people’s actions rather than their words would have saved them a lot of grief; basically, if these people cared so much about eating healthy, why would they be regular KFC customers to begin with?

Another example of self-serving lies to total strangers is the average Nielsen family. It’s said that Nielsen families often feel self-conscious about admitting what they really like to watch because they don’t want to look bad. So they suddenly claim to watch a whole lot of PBS and documentaries and hard news when they may really be overdosing on Tila Tequila marathons and watching I Love NY 2. They didn’t want to tell the truth and be judged, as shown in this article from today’s NY Times:

I recently completed a week as a Nielsen family, an experience that only multiplied my doubts about ratings science. My sample is biased — three friends and myself — and perhaps my circle is inordinately deceitful, but everyone I know or have met who has ever responded to a Nielsen survey has told flagrant lies about his or her viewing habits. I don’t mean small lies, such as claiming never to have seen an episode of “Three’s Company.” I mean outrageous, wholesale, novelistic fictions, which, if there were enough people in America as untrustworthy as the people I know, could skew the numbers beyond reckoning…

My friend and I stayed up late one night to fill out the pamphlet. Seldom at home long enough to watch anything, she still felt obliged to support a few names that she had heard were worthwhile — Phil Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer, Jacques Cousteau; and, together, we pretended to have seen nearly every nature documentary and news analysis show on the air.

Having told a few stretchers, we found it easy to fabricate more elaborate untruths. We decided to be married. She inked in two well-behaved children who never saw anything but “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers.” (I know another volunteer who conceived two instant children, named after her cats. They loved anything that had a fish theme.) Rather than gorging myself on sports, as is my wont, I was put on a samurai businessman’s diet of “Face the Nation” and “Wall Street Week.” The entire family lived graciously in her studio apartment, which we expanded to five rooms with a sharp $100,000 increase in my annual income…

According to my diary, I lead an ascetic life these days, estranged from wife and children. During the third week in May, the pages indicate that I watched nothing except “Bookmark,” Lewis Lapham’s high-toned book-chat show on public television. I seem to have enjoyed the program so much, I even caught a repeat broadcast and taped it on my VCR.

In fact, my week as a Nielsen volunteer coincided with the basketball playoffs, and the television was roaring for at least three hours the night or afternoon of every game. I never saw “Bookmark” that week; and I don’t know how to record on my VCR.

All the factors I describe above also apply to women when they say they want nice, sensitive sappy guys. They are either deluding themselves about what they want because that’s the kind of person they want to believe they are or they know exactly the kind of person they are but are saying what they think is the right thing to say to look like a good person or most likely a combination of the two. This is why you have to follow what Machiavelli calls the “effective truth”: judge people by the things they do, not the self-serving things they say. Robert Greene, author of 48 Laws of Power and other books, covers this extremely well in his blog:

Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. Machiavelli calls this “the effective truth,” and it is his most brilliant concept, in my opinion. It works like this: people will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way we can judge people and cut away all of this crap is by looking at their actions, the results of their actions. That is their effective truth. Take the Pope, for instance. He will sermonize forever about the poor, about morality, about peace, but in the meantime he presides over the most powerful organization in the world (in Machiavelli’s time). And his actions are basically concerned with increasing this power. The effective truth is that the Pope is a political animal, and that his decisions inevitably involve maintaining the Catholic Church’s preeminent place in the world. The religious verbiage is simply a part of his political gamesmanhip, serving as a distracting device.

In other words, don’t be the whiner that complains when people’s actions don’t measure up to their words. Words, as you can see, are unreliable for a variety of reasons. People will lead you wrong with their words, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally. But actions will always show you the truth, and it’s up to you to pay more attention to people’s actions and react accordingly. And that’s real talk.

Recommended Reading:

I’ve been working over a theory in my head. I call it the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox. (I’m generally not good at giving short, catchy names to things, so if you can come up with a pithier name for it, please let me know). It basically states that when people are faced with a mystery, which is an initial challenge they dream of mastering but have no idea how, they will be motivated by a sincere love for it. But once they actually do conquer the challenge and get so good at it that they achieve mastery, they will no longer love it because they have deciphered it, realized it wasn’t as interesting, alluring or mysterious as they originally thought, and then begin to actively disdain it because it becomes utterly predictable to them. It’s basically the main reason why once we conquer that impossible challenge that at one point consumed and mystified us, we are rarely as satisfied as we expected to be. It’s the reason why happiness constantly eludes us, even after we get what we thought we wanted. We are driven to conquer things, but destined to get bored with them once we master them, leading us to want new things to conquer, causing the cycle to repeat.

Before I get in-depth with it, let’s start off with a quote (with emphasis added by me) from Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Strauss, a former chump with women, gets himself mentored by the world’s greatest pickup artists, reads a ton of books, compares notes with other pickup artists in training and field tests techniques until he reaches the point that he can not only pick up a woman using a prewritten scripts and stock techniques, but they got it down to such a science that they were able to reduce it all to a teachable routine that even a social misfit could memorize, practice and get results from almost immediately:

On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment. I pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers, outines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him. And women were responding to him now. It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines could be?and it was also a little depressing. The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any audience. But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at he exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being so easily manipulated. Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the same side effect.

Think about this for a sec. That comedian, the one that you admire so much for being able to make you and everyone else in the room laugh, the one you feel a special connection to, has done this time and time before and in his mind probably finds your reaction predictable and banal. The same probably goes for directors like Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock who mastered pushing audiences’ different emotion buttons at will with the same tricks repeatedly. They learned how to make an audience cheer, cry or hang on the edge of its seat on cue, and once they got their craft down audiences weren’t even a challenge for them to manipulate anymore. And like the comedian, once they mastered their particular audience, they lost respect for them. Sure they enjoy the quick ego boost gained by the public adulation and easy successes they achieve, but the lack of challenge also makes them discontent to a degree.

That’s why successful people have to reframe challenges in order to stay interested and motivated. Once they realize that making people laugh is now easy, they switch to the challenge of trying to get more money and fame than their rival comedians. Or maybe they compete to be funnier than their top competitors. Or for the movie director that’s mastered crowd pleasing, he may turn his attention to the still-unconquered challenge of winning the love and respect of his peers by getting an Academy Award. Similarly, in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, for Strauss and his fellow pickup artists the hookups and sex start becoming almost mundane in comparison to competing with other pickup artists to be the best and innovate the most techniques.

Yet all these people at one point were in absolute awe of the very thing they are now bored by. The stand up comedian, at the point he was just starting out and unsure of himself, probably believed that just figuring out how to make people laugh consistently would be his ultimate dream. He basically put audiences on a pedestal and craved their approval.  Likewise, the film director probably got a rush the first time he screened a movie for an audience and managed to push the right emotional buttons with one of his films and get the reactions he wanted, even if that audience was just his film school class or his family. Similarly in The Game, when Neil Strauss was totally clueless about women he was craving their approval and making them into mysterious goddesses in his mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox is what drove Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

And the Michael Jordan example is fitting because it leads into another aspect of the love paradox: as unchallenging and boring as mastery of something is, the easy rewards and ego boosts that come from mastery can make you become too comfortable to give it up and try something new. So even though the mystery is gone and you don’t have the same fire for the former challenge as you once did, it’s become an easily accessible source of instant validation and ego boost, and that’s hard to give up. That’s why people get comfortable in jobs that don’t challenge them. They may crave a challenge and may no longer love and respect the area they mastered, but the thought of risking the comfort and security they have to chase another challenge that they might fail at scares them into staying where they are.

I think this is probably what made Michael Jordan come back to basketball eventually. He mastered the game. He mastered the money aspect of the NBA. He beat all his competitors and easily outshone them. He mastered winning championships and All-Star Games. He was probably bored stiff and wanted that rush of conquering something else, of mastering another mystery. But when his new challenge wasn’t going the way he planned, he went back to the safe bet: basketball.

The Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox applies to human relationships too. When someone we date is new and mysterious to us, we have dopamine and a bunch of other hormones flooding our brains, the attraction is peak, we’re trying to unravel who the other person is; they are mysterious, new and exciting to us and we’re turned on like crazy. When someone or something is mysterious to us, it allows us to fill in the blanks by projecting our fantasies and desires onto them. Our grasp on them is tenuous and we fear that we may lose them at any moment if we do anything wrong. They’re too new to take for granted. Yet the more intimately we get to know them, the more the mystery wears off and those former blanks that we filled with wild, exciting fantasies get replaced by mundane, disappointing realities, and eventually people get taken for granted. Some people look for new mysteries to unravel and master, while some are happier with the comfort and security of their current situation, even if the mystery is now gone.

I was telling a friend about this theory to get some feedback on it, and he asked a good question: “I see what you’re saying and there’s some truth to it. But at the end of the day, is it a good thing or a bad thing?” Strangely enough, that question actually never crossed my mind. I never considered if it was a good or bad thing, and I’m not even sure I entirely care. It’s just human nature. It just is what it is, and it’s up to us to deal with it.

Recommended Reading:

Ghetto men have a reputation for being tough guys.  To the untrained eye it may seem that the problems many ghetto guys have with violence and the legal system are a result of them being textbook alpha males. But I think that’s not quite the case. I think these problems actually come about not totally because of manhood run wild but because a combination of testosterone running wild and the feminine side running wild.

The black community in general has a high illegitimacy rate.  And I bet if you isolated the illegitimacy rates to just the ghetto, the percentage of single mother homes would be even higher. As a result, the ghetto tends to be a very matriarchal community. There aren’t many men, and most of the men you do find tend to be young. As Tariq Nasheed says in his book The Mack Within, you hardly see older men in the hood. This is because when most guys get past a certain age in the hood, they have either worked their way out, gone to jail, entered the military or died from violence or drugs.  The few old men you do still see in the hood tend to be burnouts.  So not only do young ghetto guys lack fathers to instruct them in how to be men, but they also lack older male authority figures outside their family to look up to (most teachers are female too) in their neighborhood.

Like most young men, they have testosterone surges making them aggressive and competitive.  However they don’t have reliable older men to teach them how to channel this testosterone-fueled aggression positively, and this creates an insecurity in their male identity and causes them to create their own hyperexaggerated ideal of what a man should be. Supermacho, obnoxious, fearless to the point of knuckleheaded, overaggressive…basically the parody of manhood we see in gangster rap. It’s overcompensation to the worst degree.

But even though they are doing their best to be supernigga, they still end up doing things in a feminine way because feminine influences are most of what they know.  Most of their role models and involved family members are women, and the few men in their lives were likely raised by only women too. And it shows in how they handle conflict: grudges are held forever, they never know how to let anything slide, they think primarily with emotion and are prone to outbursts, drama and confrontation and most importantly, they don’t know how to choose their battles.

True male behavior isn’t being a drama queen, being highly prone to emotional outbursts and holding onto grudges; true male behavior is picking your battles, knowing when to fight and when to let things slide, analyzing things calmly and logically and having discipline over your moods and emotions and exercising emotional restraint. There are times when it’s acceptable to lose your shit and times when it’s not.  These are things that a true mature male influence teaches you, and such influences have almost disappeared completely from the hood.

A chick in the hood can get away with all the drama queen meltdowns and public displays of emotion and confrontation because most people, guys and girls, don’t feel as threatened by a woman and are more likely to let her just yap without serious repercussions. Or at worst just argue back and never let it escalate to a physical level (although it does happen on occasion). When guys are the ones melting down and getting overly emotional and confrontational, it’s a lot scarier and it invites a much more serious retaliation, because now you have the extra ingredients of male size. more muscle and a whole lot of testosterone, which means escalation into serious, possibly fatal, violence is a real possibility. That’s why a society of men learning to manage conflict and emotions from women is a disaster waiting to happen, because what’s acceptable for a woman in this case can get a young man arrested or killed.

Sure a lot of male tendencies are going to show on the surface. These guys are young and are bursting with testosterone after all. But look at a lot of the other behaviors that are there also. Sitting on the stoop getting their hair braided by other girls. Long t-shirts that go down to the kneecaps and look like skirts. Colorful clothes. Obsession with fashion, shopping, shoes and accessorizing. Love of jewelry. Grooming obsessions that would put metrosexuals to shame. The more you think about it, the more you’ll notice and come up with your own examples.

Recommended Reading:

• Don’t let the cover of Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within fool you, this book drops some serious knowledge:
• Also of interest is his brutally frank dating advice book for women Play or Be Played: What Every Female Should Know About Men, Dating, and Relationships, which I highly recommend:

You often hear women, especially feminists and sluts, complaining about how it’s such an unfair double standard that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women are called sluts. It’s really not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least three crucial differences.

First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. It requires a certain amount of social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women to rack up a lot of partners, however, it pretty much only requires a vagina and a pulse. So a man whoring it up and a woman whoring it up are hardly the same thing because for a woman to get a lot of partners is absolutely no challenge, hence no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline when women indulge in lots of sex partners because they can get new ones whenever they want. When men get lots of sex partners, it’s respected more because getting lots of sex partners, for men, is a challenge. This is just human nature: people gain respect for those who accomplish challenging feats while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained vices as weak or flawed.

Second, women do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He is definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around with these multiple partners. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread venereal diseases. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage. If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If one woman sleeps around with five men and gets pregnant, it could be anybody’s baby. And if a man is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he is basically investing his time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that is not carrying on his DNA into the next generations, which is a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint. Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or simply raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me. Considering that the DNA test and the birth control pill had not existed for most of human history, meaning that there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage, society for many centuries had a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break.

Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women slept with many men, in a nine month period, she would still only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women, you can get many pregnancies. The more women he sleeps with, the more pregnancies. So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men sleeping around with multiple partners rather than women.

These three reasons are probably why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against centuries of tradition here, so don’t expect any dramatic reversals or anything.

Now a lot of people are going to read all this and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy. But believe it or not, I don’t really think male polygamy is all it’s cracked up to be. Despite what most people assume, polygamy actually may benefit women more than men. Most dudes think a society of widespread polygamy (specifically polygyny, where one man can have several women) would just be a utopia of every guy sleeping with every woman under the sun. Some economists think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where po

lygamy was acceptable, most of the women would be hoarded by the most successful men. As explained in this Psychology Today article:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…..Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

When there is resource inequality among men?the case in every human society?most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish polygamy had widespread acceptance. And the truth may actually be that male polygamy benefits the average women more than the average man. Who’da thunk?

This blog is called The Rawness(dotcom). The premise is simple, it’s a blog where I share some theory about human nature and why we do the things we do and think the things we think. But I’m not presenting these theories as if I’m some kind of absolute authority or anything. What I want is give and take and people out there to agree, disagree, or fill in any gaps I may have missed. Ideally I want to learn even more from people out there than they may learn from me.

I’ll be talking about a whole mess of things, from pop culture to personal stories to politics and business to just about anything on my mind on any given day, but the common theme is always going to be what the day’s topic can teach us about human nature. I”ll be posting regularly, but not daily. I suggest signing up for email updates using the feedburner box in the sidebar so that you can get notified when there’s a new post.

Sound good? Good. Let’s get started.