Reminder: Don’t forget about the commenter contest.

I have to warn you, this is either going to be one of my weirdest posts, one of my most profound or both. Even if it sounds really pseudoscientific and downright preposterous at times, I encourage you to read through it and keep an open mind.

One thing I constantly hear educated black guys complain about is their experiences with black women, particularly how they constantly test them or pass them up for guys of a thuggier nature. The big complaint I hear is that black women, even those of middle class status and higher, seem to want “Tupac with a degree.” Black guys often use this as their reason for primarily dating women of other races.

Now of course most women of all races go through a “bad boy” stage, especially when they’re younger and attraction and excitement are more important to them than long-term security. One of the problems with black women though is that they tend to go overboard in this department. A bad boy to an Asian girl may be a guy who’s a liberal arts major. When black women go for a bad boys, however, a prison record and a gun are often be involved. I even found this to be the case when I was in college and hollering at educated black women. With white girls, though, the simple fact that a guy is black is often enough to confer “bad boy” status and make a guy edgy. So when a guy is faced with a choice of going for white girl and being edgy and a “bad boy” simply by being black and having a little bit of street smarts, or going for a black chick and having to be a “soldier” and risk a criminal record to impress a black chick with his edginess, it makes sense that a lot of black guys find it less stressful to date outside the race.

But I’m not writing this to excuse black men’s dating choices or condem black women, but rather to understand why this “thug lust” phenomenon is so prevalent in the black community. After doing a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology, I think I may have an answer.

One of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is that women are programmed to test men for strength and leadership. Constantly. The theory is that in prehistoric times, the world was a much more dangerous place, especially for women, who could easily be raped or killed at will. Weapons were primitive, there weren’t laws to protect rights and society was not very civilized. Women needed men that were strong and dominant to offer them protection from other men who may try to invade. For this reason, it was in a woman’s best interest to test a potential mate. If he was too weak to stand up to her and let her walk all over him, then how could he protect her and their children from other men? If he was wishy-washy in day to day activities, how could he make important decisions in a time of crisis?

Chances are, at some point in history there were not only plenty of women who were genetically predisposed to test men, but also plenty of women who were not genetically predisposed to test men. Thanks to the principles of survival of the fittest, however, the women who didn’t have the innate tendency to test their men probably chose weaker men and wound up getting their genes weeded out of existence once trouble came around and these weak men couldn’t protect them. On the flipside, the women with an innate tendency to test their men and not mate with punks were better suited for survival and ended up passing their genes to future generations of women. Thus as the human race evolved over time, women with “man-testing” genes thrived in the human population because they were beneficial to survival, while women without “man-testing” genes gradually ceased to exist because they were wiped out over time. For this reason, any woman alive today is descended from women with “man testing” genes and has these “man testing” genes too. This is why modern women constantly probe men in a million subtle ways for weakness and lack of leadership during the courtship process.

The irony is that civilization has evolved to a point where a man’s physical protection is not as necessary as it once was. Society is much more civilized, women have access to better weapons to level the playing field, policemen exist to add more protection, there are laws to protect female citizens and conquest of women and other men through brute force is not only frowned upon but actually illegal. So logically, man testing is not as necessary as it once was. However logic can’t change a woman’s genes or hundreds of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, both of which have bred her to test potential mates for leadership and strength. It is for this reason so many women are attracted to assholes. They may not be nice, but they will not stand for disrespect and will fight for their rights against other men. I also think this primal urge for men who don’t take shit plays a big role in why so many death row inmates have those women who write them love letters and are attracted to them: these men take no crap, are leaders in a bizarre way due to the fact that they refuse to conform to society’s rules and can offer a woman protection from outsiders in a way that the average, law-abiding man can’t. Even though logically a woman may know these assholes or thugs are a bad choice, biologically and culturally they’ve been bred through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to respond positively to dominant, alpha male traits on a primal, unthinking level.

Now over the past few centuries as the West has become more civilized and women have made great strides in gaining equality, Western culture has begun training women to tone down their man-testing ways. Even though the man-testing genes are still there, they seem to play less of a role in mate choice with each generation. This is why that ugly kid from Superbad and Juno can actually be a sex symbol to tweens today. Alpha traits still matter to women on a primal level, but given how safe modern Western society has become for women over the past two centuries, and how much safer society continues to become for them, it’s safe to say that testing a man for alpha status will continue to decline and become more subtle and it will be increasingly easier for beta males to thrive in the mating game.

So what does this have to do with black women and thugs? The black woman for a long time was denied the societal progress available to other Western women over the past two centuries. Unlike other women in the West, for a long time black women did not experience the same increase in status and societal protection that would allow them to feel less dependent on the protections of a mate. Europeans invaded West Africa and took black people as slaves. Once in America, the black slave woman could be violated at will by her master and his visiting friends. This was acceptable under law. Her black husband could do nothing about this, which had to be very emasculating for him. In addition, she probably gradually began to resent him for his inability to protect her, even if logically she knew there was nothing he could actually do. This dynamic likely was passed to her daughters too, who had to grow up seeing both their fathers and their mates routinely emasculated and rendered incapable of protecting them. After slavery ended, things didn’t get that much better. The Ku Klux Klan was around in the south, lynchings and other forms of racial violence were rampant, black families could be physically intimidated and wiped out at will and the black man’s emasculation continued.

Given all the hardships a black woman faced up until very recent history, it would make sense that her need to test a man would remain strong, even as this need subsided some in Western women of other races. If anything, man-testing genes may have increased over the last several hundred years in the black community due to the hardships they faced. Getting an strong alpha male probably became much more important to a black woman than to a white woman, since unlike the white woman she did not have the same alternative protections of law, status and police available to her. I imagine that black women needed man-testing genes more than any other race of women because they were more reliant on the protection of a strong man than any other race of women because they couldn’t rely on societal protections. And out of all the strong types of black men available, I figure a thug was probably the type of alpha male that made her feel the safest. A thug was probably the type of black man most likely to stand up to the white man or other dangerous blacks even at the cost of his own life. I imagine that over the course of history, evolution and cultural conditioning rewarded man-testing genes in black women much more than it did in other races of women because strong, tough men were much more vital to a black woman’s survival. I also think that history and evolution were probably more unkind to black women who didn’t test their men for strength than it was to white women who didn’t test their men.

The second most popular type of man in the West is the beta provider. He’s not as dominant, as strong a leader or as tough as the alpha male, because he’s a beta male. But thanks to his intellectual prowess and his ability to provide financial support, he becomes the next best thing to the alpha dog. He offers a different type of security. It may not be as primally attractive to a woman as a tough, dominant alpha male, but it is a very safe and secure (if somewhat boring) secondary choice. Examples of beta male providers can be your wimpy scientists, male lawyers, educated, civilized guys, sucessful metrosexuals, nerds with poor social skills but good incomes, etc. They may not have as much to offer in primal attraction and physical protection, but they make up for it in their ability to provide security in the form of financial assistance. The catch is, a beta provider can only compete with alpha males in extremely civilized cultures were society offers women a sense of physical protection through the existence of cultural norms and legal protections. This allows things like financial security and education to become as important as alpha dog status. That is why being a beta provider can be so attractive to Western women, since society allows them the luxury of choosing a man for reasons other than brutish alpha dog status. If society ever reverted back to the dangerously harsh, brutish free-for-all it used to be in the old days, the stock of beta providers would drop drastically.

Since black women didn’t have the same societal protections as white Western women, beta providers were probably a bad choice in the black community for a long time, even as the stock of beta providers was on the rise in the white community. How much good could a square, law-abiding doctor or lawyer be to a black woman in the heart of the rural, racist south? His money doesn’t have that much benefit since many white businesses wouldn’t take it and he couldn’t move to any neighborhood he wanted, even if he could afford to. If anything, his education and intellect and legitimate financial success could be interpreted as being “uppity” and not “knowing his role,” thereby making him a target and putting the family in more danger from racist whites. For all these reasons, I think that black American women have evolved to have even more man-testing genes than other women, especially in favor of men who disregard the white man and his laws. In the black community, the tables have traditionally been stacked against the beta provider black male. Money in the hands of a black man just didn’t offer that much protection and wasn’t as valuable as being tough and macho and strong.

And it only got worse once the welfare state came into effect in the 1960s. Once Lyndon Johnson introduced the Great Society, allowing single women with children to get money and housing from the federal government, this took away one of the black beta provider’s last bargaining chips: his money and house. Now a black woman could get that financial security from the government. Not just that, but if she did get together with a beta provider, she’d actually lose her free money, food, house and education because you had to be single to receive those benefits. The welfare system actually created an incentive against settling down with a beta provider. He can’t provide the primal attraction and physical protection an alpha male does, and now his presence is actually an economic liability. And since a man was no longer as needed for economic reasons, this helped raised the stock of thugs: the physical protection from racist whites and other blacks in the ghetto, the superior sexual prowess, the primal attraction that comes from his role as a “bad boy” alpha male and the tax-free, under the table financial benefits of his illegal money.

Even though society has changed greatly for black women in the past few decades and they no longer face the same level of racism or need for an alpha dog thug for survival, they still have generations of these thug-loving genes and cultural conditioning to fight against. And of course the glamorization of thug life through hip-hop probably doesn’t help things either. And this is why even as many black women move up socially and get more educated, they still have such a strong pull toward thugs.

Holla!

Many of these women live a secret existence that their family, friends and even, yes, their boyfriends, have no idea about. You could be meeting these women in clubs, in your social circles or at work and have no idea you’re dealing with a call girl. That fresh faced girl you see in the hottest clubs that you assume must be living in Manhattan or Williamsburg through a trust fund or on daddy’s dime? She might be a ‘tute!

The NY Times had a good article about this quiet phenomenon. But here’s a part of the article describing a call girl named Xi’an that really jumped out at me:

While it is impossible to know exactly how such a shadowy enterprise operates, what is clear is that sex is being sold for high prices.

And when it comes to price, Ms. Xi?an shared a secret. When someone pays her $1,250 an hour, he gets exactly what he would for $200, her rate when she started out. The difference is psychological, she explained: ?The more somebody pays for you, the more they?ll respect you.?

“Tell a guy you’re $100 and they’ll treat you one way ? tell them you’re $1,500 and they’ll treat you better,” Ms. Xi’an said in a telephone interview from her home on Long Island. “I’ve heard a lot of girls saying, ‘Is this girl getting $5,500 an hour because she’s more beautiful? Is she doing something I don’t?’ The answer is no. But that girl is able to look a guy in the eye and say, ‘This is what I’m worth, and this is what you have to pay if you want me.’ And you have to be able to do that, and believe it.”

It’s funny because even though Pimp Week is supposed to be over, this article about prostitution offered such a good life lesson that I had to revisit the world of sex workers yet again (Really I’m not obsessed, I swear). The life lesson is, don’t ever sell yourself for cheap in the short run in hopes for a long-term benefit.

This goes for women packaging themselves as a fuck buddy in hopes of getting a relationship later, for men packaging themselves as girlfriends with penises (aka emotional tampons) in hopes of getting sex later, for service providers charging clients ridiculously cheap prices in hopes of getting loyal, more lucrative business later or a skilled, experienced employee asking for much less than he’s worth for a salary in hopes of being better rewarded later. (This of course doesn’t apply to entry-level positions where you don’t yet have the experience or credentials needed to demand a higher salary, regardless of how skilled you may actually be. In these cases, it makes sense to be paid low at first to get your foot in the door and gain experience)

I read a marketing book a few years back called The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith (highly recommended!) that perfectly breaks down why discount customers are horrible:

Discount customers come and go. They are more likely to appear in red ink than black; your hidden costs of acquiring and serving them as clients probably exceeded what they paid you.

Discount customers refer no one to you; they don’t stay long enough to form an impression – and they are not very good judges of quality anyway. If they were, they would know that most economies are false ones, and that few service providers are low-cost providers by choice.

Discount customers are not your business; at best they are cash flow. But most likely, they are a cost that you do not need and should not incur.

The discount client is not buying you, or the quality of your work, or her regard for you and your service. She is buying your price tag. She is not loyal to people and companies; she is loyal to price tags. You cannot build a lasting business on discount shoppers, and you cannot build a satisfying business and experience with them either, because they do not value you and your work. In fact, in their continual efforts to get you to charge less, they are vividly communicating to you that your work is not worth to them what it is to you. You do not want or need these customers, and yet service businesses take them on by the millions every day. And then they wonder why their work – never mind their income – is not more satisfying.

And to prove the book right, look at what happened to our call girl Xi’an when she started off charging cheaply: “[Xi'an]‘s first employer farmed her out on Craigslist for $200. Her first client lived in a project on the Upper East Side, and afterward refused to pay.”

The attitude of the discount customer is the same as that of the fuck buddy who won’t commit, the chick that keeps you in the friend zone to listen to her problems nonstop and the unappreciative, low-paying boss. In fact try this exercise: reread the above passage from Invisible Touch substituting “discount customer” with terms like “fuck buddy” or “friend zone girl” or “unappreciative boss” and the word “business” with “relationships” or “career” and you’ll see the analysis still holds up perfectly. They are not buying your quality and they will never fully appreciate you; they are buying your cheapness.

Know Your Worth.

Recommended Reading:

When last we saw the pimp Iceberg Slim, he was being tested by his newest, prettiest whore in front of the rest of his stable of older, more experienced whores. He held his ground, passed the test, impressed his existing stable and called the new whore’s bluff and told her she could leave, making her whole grandstand play blow up in her face.

Here’s what happened next:

I went back for Kim. She was packed and silent. On the way to the station, I riffled the pages in that pimp’s book in head for an angle to hold her without kissing her ass.

I couldn’t find a line in it for an out like that. As it turned out the bitch was testing and bluffing right down the line.

We had pulled into the station parking lot when the bitch fell to pieces. Her eyes were misty when she yelped, “Daddy, are you really going to let me split? Daddy, I love you!?

It’s important to note that Iceberg was ready to ride the bluff all the way to the end if he had to. No matter how much he wanted her to stay, he was only willing to do so if he could keep from kissing her ass in the process. This is a good lesson to learn for both men and women: do not be outcome driven. Outcome driven people just care about what they get in the end and don’t care how they get there. Process driven people care more about doing something the right way, even if it gets them a bad result once or twice.  In the long run process driven people end up better off.

For example an outcome driven person may just know that she wants to get her boyfriend back. She will grovel, beg, threaten to commit suicide, let him disrespect her and walk all over her, maybe buy him expensive gifts as a way to bribe him to stay, or maybe even allow him to cheat on her in exchange for her staying…basically, so long as she gets the outcome of him staying, she doesn’t care what damage she has to take to her self-respect, ego, character or reputation along the way. Not only is what she gives up way more valuable than what she gains, buy chances are she’s too stupid to even realize that she did give anything up. A process driven woman on the other hand may approach it the same situation like this: “I want to resolve my relationship with my boyfriend, but I’m not tied to any particular outcome. All I care about is that no matter what happens, I speak my mind, hold my ground and don’t compromise my ideals or values. If he knows what I want and is willing to respect that and stay, then we’ll stay together. If not, then we’ll split up. But either way, the important thing I stick to my guns all the way through.”  In the short run, she may lose this particular boyfriend, but in the long run by sticking to her principles, she will definitely end up with a good man sooner or later.

A person who would drop out of school and strip for a whole lot of cash now rather than get a low-paying internship teaching valuable skills that will lead to a real career down the line? Outcome driven. A person who would is willing to just work hard and be honest and risk not getting promoted right away rather than kiss ass, lie and backstab his way to to the top? Process driven. You get the picture.

Now in some ways pimps are outcome driven because they choose the glamour, excitement and fast money of pimping over the slow grinding climb of a “square” job. But on the other hand, within their chosen profession pimps are notoriously process driven, to the point where they even have a phrase for it: “pimping by the book.” Everything has to be by the book. Rules and standards within the pimp game are rigorously followed and enforced, and a good pimp would rather pimp by the book and risk losing a whore here and there in the short run rather than become outcome driven and not pimp by the book in order to get some immediate benefit.

Take for example how pimps deal with what is called a Choosy Suzie. A Choosy Suzie is a whore who keeps jumping from pimp to pimp, always looking to trade up for a better deal or to pit pimps against each other. Pimps have very specific rules about what to do in this situation when they do it by the book. First, the whore must pay a choosing fee to the new pimp, a large sum of money for the right to be his whore. Next, the new pimp must then go to the old pimp and let him know in a civilized fashion that his whore has now chosen him. No hard feelings. Then the new pimp and the whore pick up the whore’s possessions from the old pimp. Now this process serves a few purposes.

First, it makes it pricey for a whore to jump from pimp to pimp. In the regular dating world where the average man has no rules and standards and is often outcome driven, a girl can jump from guy to guy to guy without repercussions, and the guy who has her at any given moment will just celebrate because he is getting some new ass and doesn’t really think of the big picture. Not only will the average guy not make a woman jump hurdles in order to leave her old man for him, he will actually reward her for her disloyalty to him with gifts or affection. He rewards bad behavior and thinks that he is getting out ahead…that is until he gets burned later on in the same way. And of course he can’t figure out why it happened to him. This is the outcome driven thinking and low standards of the typical guy that allowed professional groupie Karrine “Supahead” Steffans to make life hell for so many shortsighted celebrity men with her antics and expose books. By giving the whore a price to pay for jumping ship to him in the form of a monetary investment, the new pimp is making the woman prove that she will not quickly jump ship again like she did with the last pimp. Since she is committing a disloyal act by leaving the last pimp, the only way the new pimp will take her on is if she gives him a display of extra loyalty. What the pimp has effectively done with the choosing fee is create what economists call a sunk cost fallacy, where someone has a greater tendency to stick to an endeavor and ride it out after they have already made a significant investment in time, money or effort. Sometimes a whore also has to pay a leaving fee as well to her old pimp, which further reinforces loyalty.

The second aspect of the “by the book” method of dealing with a Choosy Suzy is that it forces the two pimps to talk face to face. This is very important. Men, think of all the times when you’ve allowed a woman to pit you against another man, whether it’s a stalker ex or another suitor trying to take her from you or just some guy that tried to holler at her in a nightclub. Especially when the woman is the intermediary feeding both sides lines about what the other guy said rather than letting them hear it from each other. There are a lot of women out there that get an ego boost over men fighting over them, and will deliberately escalate a beef between two guys and let the testosterone take over. Not only does it provide her an ego boost but it also makes her the center of competition, thereby raising her value over both suitors. Pimps recognize this aspect of human nature and as a result created the rule of one pimp going over to the other pimp face to face to eliminate the middleman, in this case the whore. This keeps the whore from using exaggeration or “he say, she say” to get two pimps to fight over her, stroke her ego, raise her value and possibly injure each other. And it keeps the power dynamic squarely with the pimps.

The valuable life lessons to take from this are (1) make disloyalty or bad behavior costly, even when you’re the beneficiary of it, or you risk being a victim of the same behavior down the line, and (2) be aware of when you’re being made to dance to someone else’s tune. A lot of people, from bosses to spouses to friends will try to goad you into unnecessary, fruitless battles for their own entertainment or benefit, all the while making you believe you’re in charge of the situation.

Now back to Iceberg:

I started [to game her] when I said, “Bitch, I don’t want a whore with rabbit in her. I want a bitch who wants me for life. You have got to go after that bullshit earlier this morning, you are not that bitch.”

That [game] butchered her and she collapsed into my lap crying and begging to stay. I had a theory about splitting whores. I think they seldom split without a bankroll’.

So, I cracked on her, “Give me that scratch you held, out and maybe I will give you another chance.”

Sure enough she reached into her bosom and drew out close to five bills and handed it to me. No pimp with a brain in his head cuts loose a young beautiful whore with lots of mileage left in her. I let her come back.

Note that Iceberg didn’t just let her come back without jumping a hurdle. It’s a good practice when forgiving someone or taking them back to make them give something up or make a costly gesture. If you let someone do wrong against you and keep forgiving them just for the price of an apology, you send a message about how much bad treatment you will gladly tolerate, and you are guaranteeing that that person will continue to disrespect you again in the future because they realize there will be no repercussions for doing so.

When at long last I was driving toward my hotel I remembered what “Baby” Jones, the master pimp who turned me out, had said about whores like Kim.

“Slim,” he had said, “A pretty Nigger bitch and a white whore are just alike. They both will get in a stable to wreck it and leave the pimp on his ass with no whore. You gotta make ‘em hump hard and fast to stick ‘em for [their money] quick. Slim, pimping ain’t no game of love, so [game] ‘em and keep your [dick] outta ‘em. Any sucker who believe a whore loves him shouldn’t a fell outta his mammy’s ass.”

?..

“Slim, a pimp is really a whore who has reversed the game on whores. So Slim, be as sweet as the scratch, no sweeter, and always stick a whore for a bundle [of money] before you sex her. A whore ain’t nothing but a trick to a pimp. Don’t let ‘em [game] you. Always get your money in front just like a whore.

Now here one of the biggest misconceptions about pimps gets set straight. People think pimps are all about getting as much sex as possible. Guys go around having sex with anything that moves and brag “I’m a pimp” or “I’m pimping.” Pimps actually have a high amount of sexual discipline and try to keep sex with the whores to a minimum. What the john is to the whore, the whore is to the pimp: a customer. Using economic terms again, the pimp creates a scarcity mindset when it comes to letting whores having sex with him: he makes himself the commodity and raises his own value by having sex with the whores as little as possible. At times in the book Pimp, Iceberg describes how excruciating it can be to resist the urge to have sex with his whores at times, but he realizes that the bigger picture is to maintain his high value at all costs. And additionally, just like the whore won’t have sex with a john unless he pays her first, a pimp will not have sex with his whore under any circumstances unless she pays him first.

And sometimes not even then. Sometimes even when a whore behaves and follows orders there is no guarantee she will be rewarded each time. This is called the intermittent reward method, or random reinforcement method, pioneered by famed psychologist B.F. Skinner with his Skinner Box, and it’s one of the most potent methods of influencing behavior out there, and is the psychological reason why slot machines are so addictive, as described in this NY Times article:

The makers of slot machines may rely on the lure of life-changing jackpots to attract customers, but the machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement, or ”intermittent reward.” Children whose parents consistently shower them with love and attention tend to take that devotion for granted. Those who know they’ll never be rewarded by their parents stop trying after a while. But those who are rewarded only intermittently ? in the fashion of a slot machine ? will often pursue positive outcomes with a persistent tenacity.

Random, unpredictable intermittent rewards are a far better motivator for behavior than consistent, predictable rewards. (By the way, managers are also increasingly experimenting with intermittent reward systems in the workplace to motivate workers, so don’t think you’re immune from this type of brainwashing just because you’re not a lab rat, dog, child or a whore.) By using the powerful behavioral tools of scarcity and intermittent rewards, pimps create a mindset in their women where having sex with the pimp and being deemed worthy by him is the most valuable thing on earth to them. (A lot of men who are “whipped” by their wives are also commonly victims of scarcity and intermittent rewards, so don’t believe it’s just a tool used by misogynists.)

How valuable to the whore is the pimp’s affection, love and, if she’s “lucky,” sex? Well that leads to one last myth about pimps and whores that I’m going to dispel. A whore does not receive a cut of the money she makes. A lot of people assume she does, but she doesn’t. She gives it all to the pimp. Every last cent. His cut is 100%.

Now that is some serious brainwashing.

BONUS EXCERPTS: MALCOLM X ON PIMPS AND PROSTITUTES

The bonus excerpts below are from The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley.

Malcolm X On Wives And Prostitutes:

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early [client rush to the brothel]. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their man so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don?t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man?s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That?s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men…

I mean, I?d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husband?s ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn?t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands? innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.

Malcolm X On Pimps vs. Husbands:

Most men, the prostitutes felt, were too easy to push around. Every day these prostitutes heard their customers complaining that they never heard anything but griping from women who were being taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.

Recommended Reading:

The books below all played a role in this piece, with some specifically discussing pimp behavior and philosophies, and others discussing the general human behavior principles that pimps end up exploiting.

First is one from the blog The Situationist. It uses baseball players as a specific example.

The other is an older, but related piece from the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius.”

Not much commentary from me on this. Both links are pretty self-explanatory.

Fisher went on to become a bizarre, shadowy figure (hence the irony of the title of the 1993 movie about a child chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Over the years, his eccentricity seemed to blossom into full-blown madness as he railed against the United States, went on anti-Semitic tirades (although his mother was Jewish) and was essentially in exile from the U.S. after breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia.

Too often, in the world of competitions, a person reaches the pinnacle of his or her life at a very young age. And nothing after that can ever match what they did at age 30 or 25 or even 18. That’s tough. But if they handle the reality with grace and intelligence, what they did in their youth can be a springboard. In the case of Fischer, who was on top of the world at age 29, it didn’t have to work out the way it did. Chess isn’t that kind of game. You can be superb for years. In fact, Fischer was. But there were other things going on — invisible demons is the best way to put it, I guess — that contributed to making him a victim of his own early phenomenal success.

Long, long before the end, Bobby Fischer had lost himself, never to be found again.

I find the contrast between Fischer and a later American chess champion Josh Waitzkin to be fascinating. Josh Waitzkin was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and also had his problems with early chess celebrity. But unlike Fischer, Waitzkin is very well-adjusted and a lot less eccentric. He has given up chess, but is now a world champion martial artist and author.

This story reminded me of this piece, where I talked about how loving something motivates you to master it, but mastering it too well, or solving the mystery, causes you to stop loving it. I called it the mystery/mastery paradox. You have to mentally reframe the challenge in order to stay engaged. Like once you figure out a game inside out, you change your focus to beating other masters of the game to stay engaged. Once you beat the other masters of the game, you may focus on spreading your fame or writing books about the game. It’s still about the original game, but only tangentially. I think this is what led Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

I don’t know much about Bobby Fischer’s life, but maybe he didn’t cultivate anything besides chess. From what I know, it was an all-consuming passion for him from a very young age. Maybe when he fell into his own mystery/mastery paradox and it stopped being fun for him, he had no other outlet to switch to, because being so consumed with chess from so young never allowed him to figure out his identity outside of chess.

At some point, however, it seems Josh Waitzkin did figure out his identity outside of chess. He explains it in this NY1 profile he did:

About ten years ago, to escape the phenomenon of, “Hey, you’re the ?Searching for Bobby Fischer? guy!” he spent a year living in Slovenia and traveling around Europe.

And he came to a realization.

“Transitional moments were affecting me in chess and in life. And when I took them on in one, it helped me with the other,? said Waitzkin. ?And so that became my manner of studying of chess, which was to look at my psychological being was manifesting itself over the board. So that kind of led to this way of thinking about chess, life, tai chi, the martial arts, in a manner which was basically looking for thematic interconnections, as opposed to looking at one art at a time.?…

“I didn’t grow up learning chess or competing in a protected environment,? says Waitzkin. ?I grew up kind of in a raw environment and that’s been kind of central to my life in all these things, because life as a competitor is brutal.”….

“It caught up to me, and I started to become externalized through the chess, which was very sad, very sad,? says Waitzkin. “When you?re defined by something from the age of six on, the idea of letting that go and redefining yourself completely, it?s naked and raw and terrifying.?

But the transition was eased when the Columbia University graduate discovered tai chi, and his new passion resulted in an international championship in 2004.

Now his goal is to use these two parts of his life to create a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids.

So he went from competitive chess to martial arts champion. And note how, as he masters martial arts, he already sets up his next challenge, his plan for a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids. I think this technique he has of setting up his next challenge ahead of time shows how he’s able to avoid the mystery/mastery paradox. He realizes when he’s falling out of love with something and as he masters it, he sets up the next challenge for himself.

I also think that’s why celebrities like Michael Jackson, and Bobby Fischer go insane once they achieve their goals. They only focus on mastering one thing, and once they achieve it and naturally start to fall out of love with it and it just becomes a grinding job or crushing responsibility, they have nothing else to channel their energy into. They hate what their doing, but they also love the security blanket of knowing they have an area they have mastered and are afraid to leave it behind despite how unfulfilling it has now become.

Not being prepared to channel your energies into something else is also what I think contributes to the alcoholism of the guy in this story who turned his hobby into a job, along with other people who turned to substance abuse after they turned their passion into a career and hit the top. The problem wasn’t turning their passion or hobby into a career, it was not being prepared for what the void that would come up once they mastered that hobby (doing something for a living is the ultimate form of mastery I think). They became victims of the mystery/mastery paradox.

I’m not always good at picking who’ll win, but I can usually tell at least one type of singer who’ll always lose, and that would be the dominating strong starters. Whenever people start incredibly strong early on in the auditions, whether it’s Paris Bennett or Melinda Doolittle or whoever, they’re usually doomed to lose. The people who usually win Idol or any reality competition show for that matter are usually the ones who started off under the radar and consistently gave the impression of improvement. And the people who dominated or were frontrunners from the start usually don’t win.

I think it has something to do with how our senses work. See, our senses aren’t geared toward noticing objects, smells and temperature. They’re geared toward noticing changes and contrast in objects, smells and temperature. It’s a subtle but important difference. The more the external stimuli change, the more our senses pick them up. For example, have you ever noticed that if you are sitting in a room, you don’t notice a certain smell? Yet if you leave the room and come back in, suddenly the smell is suddenly obvious? Same with temperature. If you just walk into a room, you’re more sensitive to the temperature because it’s a big change from the temperature outside, but once you’re in the same room long enough you notice the temperature less. With sound, we’re picking up vibrations, or movements in the air. Even when we’re watching still objects, what’s actually happening is that your eye is vibrating across the image. That’s right, our eyes are constantly vibrating on a minute level that we can’t notice, and this vibrating movement is what helps us see still objects. To illustrate this, there’s actually a laser projector that can project images onto an eyeball while tracking and matching the eyeball’s vibration. And what happens is that your eye only see the images for a split second and then they disappear. Color doesn’t exist by itself even. What we see as color is created by contrasting relationships – what the color is next to, what surrounds it. Fixed colors don’t exist. In a different context they will be changed completely.

As a survival mechanism, it makes sense for us to be more aware of things that are changing than things that are remaining the same. Paying extra attention to the changes in your environment lets you know when danger is afoot. At one point in human history there may have been human beings who gave static conditions the same importance as changing conditions, and if so, they’d have ended up weeded out of the gene pool. A new predator could have entered their field of vision and started moving toward them, and they wouldn’t pay extra attention to them. The smell of toxic chemicals could have entered a room and they wouldn’t have given it the exact same importance as the smell already in the room. Natural selection would have weeded them out. The fact that our senses register changes in conditions more than they register static conditions was an important survival tool that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors’ senses didn’t work this way.

To our bodies, if a condition exists in our environment, remains there over time and still hasn’t injured or killed us, it starts getting categorized as safe. By categorizing it as safe and ignoring it to a degree, this frees up our senses to focus on new elements that enter our environment or changes that happen around us, the things we have not categorized as safe yet.

Here’s another way to illustrate it if you don’t believe me. Say I show you a pair of shoes, describe the brand, materials and craftsmanship and tell you the cost is $100. Then I tell you they were originally $700 last week. That $100 shoe would register as a great value. Now say I gave you the same description of the shoes, down to the brand, materials and craftsmanship, and told you the cost was $100, but I told you instead that the original price was $50. Now you’d feel like you were getting ripped off. Same shoe, same quality, same price, but you can’t judge it in a vacuum, you can only judge it in contrast to something else. How many times have you bought something at a price you normally wouldn’t just because it was a huge drop in price? Advertisers and retail people call this the contrast principle.

Or imagine two sibling students. One gets straight As. The other gets straight Fs. One day the A student comes home with her usual A, while the F student comes how with a surprising C for once. The A student has the higher grade, an A, but the F student’s latest grade will register more strongly and be more noticeable because it’s a greater change. This is unfair to the A student, because given that she’s already at the top, how much more can she improve? Maybe get an A+? That’s about it. It’s all about change, change, change, and when you start off with perfection, the only change you have available to you is downward change. So those are your two choices when you’re perfect: stay perfect and get taken for granted, or change in the downward direction and have it register negatively with people.

Despite thousands of years of technological and societal advancement, our senses still work the same way as they ever did. And that goes a long way to explaining why top performers don’t win American Idol. When we first see them, they overload our senses. We go right from seeing a mediocre applicant and low-key moments to incredibly powerful vocal. Our senses are incredibly stimulated. Week after week of that brilliance, our senses categorize it as “safe” and become less responsive to it. Since the room for improvement is so small, the only option they have to register as strongly with our senses is a drastic drop in quality, except that will register in a negative way, which further defeats the purpose of winning.

And this is why I actually cringe when an American Idol contestant knocks it out of the park too strongly during the audition phase. The judges will gush at first, rave, make a huge deal, and then their senses adjust to it and it all becomes a little less impressive each time. They start criticizing them for not improving as much as the other people (which is unfair because it’s harder to improve on excellence than it is to improve on mediocre or average). The audience starts takes their greatness for granted and votes for the improving underdogs instead. In every season of American Idol that I’ve seen (I haven’t seen many), it’s never the early leader that wins the whole shebang. It’s the biggest improver. Because as I described, we’re programmed to primarily notice change, and it’s harder for excellence to change in a positive direction. Even Kelly Clarkson, the most successful Idol to date, did not dominate right away. She was considered underwhelming by the judges at first and improved a lot every week.

So when I finally get around to watching Idol on my DVR, and I see the knockout supertalent that gets pegged early on to win the whole thing, I know they’ll end up losing eventually. As unfair as it seems, overachieving and early excellence don’t always pay off.