How and Why Modern Western Society Keeps Alphadom in Check and Penalizes Any Excess of It

I have to warn you, this will seem repetitive at times as I will cite overlapping points repeated by several sources, but I really, really want to make sure the logic behind my reasoning comes across clearly so bear with me.

Let’s start off with a passage from the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley:

In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry:The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines: Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size: Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.

As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.

In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects: The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren: In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.”

The connection between sex and power is a long one.

There are several important lessons to derive from this passage. One lesson is that an unfettered, free-for-all competition for resources usually leads to incredible inequality where only a few of the men control most of the resources, including access to women, while most men are forced to suffer in misery and celibacy. The second is that being a major alpha male in today’s industrialized West is much, much less rewarding than it was at other moments in humankind’s history. We’ve gone from legalized harems and rule with an iron fist as a reward for major alphas to societies where we expect monogamy and a degree of humility exercised by comparable alpha males today. For example we recently saw the fallout a billionaire of today like Tiger Woods faces when he cheats for banging 14 low class hoes, which is nothing in comparison to the sexual escapades of the alphas of era past described above:

To get an idea of how powerful the vagina-hoarding effect of polygamy throughout history was, consider this: today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

How did we go from there to here? From polygamous societies where high status alphas with all the resources hoarded all the women and the average man didn’t get a chance to reproduce to a society where the most powerful alphas are expected to stay loyal to one wife and risk getting half their resources taken away from them if they don’t? How did we get from the richest alphas running harems to being publicly shamed on every television network and punished for straying even once?

The Red Queen tackles this question also, emphasis added by me:

[T]he long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopardized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.

What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman’s: Women’s rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband’s affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power. Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.

Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of humanity…[M]en have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great:The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.

Democracy happened. Democracy empowered lower status men and gave them a voice. Individually lower status men may have much less power than individual high status alphas, but as a group since there are so many more lower-status men in a society than there are powerful alphas, a “one-man, one-vote” society allows lower status men to collectively exercise much more power against alpha males than any others. And what these lower-status men will use that power to do shape a society that will (1) give themselves more access to women while giving alphas less access to women and (2) place limits to the abuses an uber-alpha can get away with. So democracy leads to legal limits on polygamy which leads to increased monogamy which leads to less sexual spoils and unfettered power for alpha males and more sexual spoils and more political power for all other lower-status males in a society. This means limitations on the upper-levels of alphadom are an essential part of a strong democracy.

The character of Hopper in A Bug’s Life understood the dangers of  lower status people, who naturally outnumber higher status people, getting an equal voice quite well:

Robert Wright also comes to a similar conclusion about the relationship of democracy to both the lessening of alpha political and sexual power and the increase of the political and sexual power of lower-class men:

Polygamy. This is the natural state of our species. Then again, the natural state of our species is also a small hunter-gatherer society, with little wealth and thus, only mild inequalities of status and power among men. In this “ancestral environment,” large harems were rare; competition for women, though intense, was seldom epically intense. But then came agriculture and other sources of economic surplus. Suddenly some males could be way more powerful than others. The commensurately massive sexual rewards made men ill-inclined to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most prolific genetic replicator in the history of our species was the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had 888 offspring. He was known as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty. Get the picture?

And, in polygamous societies, low-status males weren’t exactly pacifists either. With scads of women monopolized by the well-to-do, less fortunate men could get mighty lonely and become very unhappy campers. This volatile discontent may be the reason that, as anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown, polygamy and authoritarianism have gone hand in hand. Back when the Zulu king was entitled to more than 100 women, coughing or spitting at his dinner table was punishable by death.

In this sense, monogamy meshes better than polygamy with the egalitarian values of a democracy. One-man-one-vote, one-man-one-wife.

So hoarding of women by powerful men in the form of polygamy and despotism go hand in hand, and more equitable distribution of women in the form of monogamy and democracy go hand in hand. A lot of men mistakenly believe polygamous society represents a paradise for men in general, but it doesn’t. It represents a paradise for one or a few men over all other men, who exist in a hell. Most men in highly polygamous societies are condemned to celibacy and their lives are less free and consist of extreme oppression by uber-alphas to boot.

Consider the following excerpts from this article by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa:

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…

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.)

Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy

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…

For an example of the mindset such an environment creates in lower-status men, let’s look at Muslim suicide bombers:

According to the Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, a comprehensive history of this troubling yet topical phenomenon, while suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Muslim. Why is this? Why is Islam the only religion that motivates its followers to commit suicide missions?

The surprising answer from the evolutionary psychological perspective is that Muslim suicide bombing may have nothing to do with Islam or the Koran (except for two lines in it). It may have nothing to do with the religion, politics, the culture, the race, the ethnicity, the language, or the region. As with everything else from this perspective, it may have a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don’t get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Modern democratic society is a tradeoff. A lower status man ostensibly obtains the same vote and therefore voice as a higher status man. Since lower status men outnumber higher status uberalphas, they can now create a system of laws, checks and balances called the State that contains innate limitations to just how powerful an alpha can become. Powerful men keep adapting to the new status quos and try to become more powerful regardless, and the State, which mostly represents the collective voice of the lower-status peoplee, in turn keeps adapting to find new ways to put limitations on their alphadom. It’s an arms race between uberalphas who want to become as powerful as they can thanks to human nature, and the State, which is the tool lower status men collectively use throughout history to keep uberalphas in check by limiting their access to political power and the best vagina.

Yet because most men still harbor dreams of becoming more powerful and alpha themselves, these societies are still constructed with enough flexibility to allow for social mobility as well.  Evolution has designed men to naturally seek out power, status, and as a consequence, access to better and more women, so no matter how much lower-status men desire to squash uber-alphas, they will never tolerate a society that totally crushes the ability of everyone to become more powerful.  These tensions are what leads to our society that rewards people for being a mix of both alpha and beta as opposed to other societies that reward people strictly for being super-alpha, a society that crushes you for being too beta and for being too alpha, especially when you’re sandwiched between both extremes in the middle class.

This is a big reason why I said in the last installment that middle-class men are the worst equipped to achieve pure unadulterated alpha status in our society. Upper class men have the resources to possibly buy the State or work it from the inside. Lower class men often have little to lose and are used to hardship so they are often more willing to just straight up refuse to abide by the rules of the State. Then you have men who embody both attitudes, a ton of resources to buy off the State or work it from the inside combined with a willingness to thumb their nose at the rules of the State and refuse to abide by them when necessary. The patron saint of this last category is Joseph Kennedy. Is it any wonder his family is considered the ultimate American dynasty?

But even among these groups, sooner or later they more often then not lose against the State, whether it’s the IRS or divorce court for the rich or jail for the poor. So what chance does the middle-class man have to aim for pure alpha status in a society that by design is meant to curb any attempts to be alpha for the benefit of all men?

Next installment: The two major concepts modern industrialized democracies use to limit uberalpha potential: (1) alpha-proxies and (2) renegade alpha suppression.

The nightclub we were at was on the second floor of the building, with different landings in multiple directions that allowed you to lean on a railing and look downward at people entering from the ground floor and heading upstairs. I was spending my time at the club people watching rather than actively socializing.  As I saw one unremarkable person after another enter, my eyes began to glaze over with boredom.  I was just counting down the hours, no minutes, before I’d be heading home.

Suddenly my vision sharpened. I saw a man enter that caught my attention. Let’s call him CR Alpha.  On the surface there was nothing really impressive about him. He wasn’t remarkably fit. He wasn’t remarkably unfit. He was slim but not muscular. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t particularly short either. He wasn’t incredibly handsome although he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t especially well dressed. He definitely wasn’t peacocking. He just had a basketball jersey, some track pants and some sneakers. He had a slight swagger but it was understated and not a godzilla-stomping-out-tokyo badass strut or anything like that; he had no chip on his shoulder or attitude that he was looking for trouble. He had some tattoos, but not the outrageous amount guys get when they’re blatantly overselling the bad boy image. But I could tell there was something about him.  He exuded maximum confidence and control of his domain with a bare minimum of cocky displays or overt exertion.

As I described before, the streets of Jaco were filled with a lot of crash test dummy criminal types. The kind of petty crooks who would try to sell you drugs or steal your stuff in a heartbeat if you left it unattended. They walked around trying to look as grimy and hard as possible all the time. I classified them immediately as opportunist punks, dangerous in that if they saw a moment of weakness, like you were drunk and outnumbered and a herb, they may try something, but if you were street smart and willing to show some heart they wouldn’t consider you worth the trouble of bothering. But this guy was different. I immediately identified him as a different class of criminal: a player.

I tapped my partner in crime Beethoven and pointed at the dude with my chin. “This fucking guy.”

Beethoven took notice and immediately knew who I was talking about. “Yeah, I see him.  He’s all business. He carries it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like if anything goes down, he’ll have the last word. But he’s not obnoxious about it. Like he’ll never go looking for trouble or causing unnecessary shit. Like he’s just chill as shit unless you come at him sideways. And then that’s that. No extra talk, no prolonged “man dance” where you argue and puff your chest out for 45 minutes straight but no one makes a move. He just handles his shit.”

Beethoven’s eyes stuck with the guy. “Yeah, yeah that sounds about right.”

The guy makes his way upstairs. We forget about him for a while. When I look at the beautiful girl from part 1 of this tale again, she is with him. Until he arrived, she was aloof and her expression was somewhat blank. She wasn’t acting stuck up or standoffish anything, just not particularly emotional one way or the other. But now that he was here, she was smiling, gregarious and warmer. She and her friend were only talking to him. But more important was the body language between him, the girl and her friend, who was also female. He would smile approvingly whenever they addressed him, speak a few words, but otherwise just lean back against the railing and stare at an undetermined spot in the room rather than at them. He wasn’t hugged up on the girl and she wasn’t attached at his hip. She and her friend would dance in his vicinity, almost for his benefit, but rarely directly in his line of sight. More like within his peripheral vision, so that he could keep his eye on them without having to look preoccupied with them. It was almost like there was an invisible semicircle area of personal space around him, a force field of unspoken protection, and they happily occupied the area within it, never going beyong the outer perimeter, held within his orbit by the invisible gravity of his quiet charisma much like a moon predictably orbits a planet and is content to never go beyond that orbit. He just leaned back, surveyed his domain and held these two girls in his sway with minimal maintenance.

Now you can always tell a winner mentality from a loser mentality by how they react to viewing situational winners. Losers see winners in a situation and try to visualize either how it should be the losers winning instead or try to think about how the winner doesn’t really deserve to be winning and got his gains unfairly. A man with a winner mentality sees someone winning in a situation and thinks, “Why is he a winner right now, and what can I learn from this?”  That was my attitude when seeing this guy.  I couldn’t hate, I had to congratulate.  A lot of square guys, especially from developed Western nations, would have seen this dude and say “What does he have? Why is that chick with his third-world criminal thug ass and not a classy civilized nice guy like me? The world is unfair.  After all, doesn’t she realize I’m smart, have a high IQ, am from the West, have American dollars, would treat her like a queen the way she deserves instead of ignoring her like this alpha thug does?  She must be brainwashed or low IQ trash to be content with a third-world badboy asshole like him instead of jumping through hoops for a good guy going places like me.” Even worse is the guy who puts a chick like that on a pedestal and imagines how all she needs is his nice treatment and exposure to his worldly ways to see the errors of her dating choices. That’s sucka mentality.

But there’s a saying in the hood, “game recognizes game.” Any guy with real game, I’m talking truly internalized game that comes from years in the game and not a bunch of barely tested scripts and gimmicks, would recognize that this guy deserved what he got, because he was giving her what she needed in that harsh environment. He was an alpha in the purest sense, and in an environment like that pure alphaness mattered more than anything else.  He was alpha in the way a middle class man could never be, especially in the West. The more primal and dog-eat-dog the environment, the scarcer the available resources for both the average man and woman, the harder the everyday grind, the weaker the property rights, the weaker the governmental representation, the more corrupt and powerless the police force and most importantly the more powerless and more nonexistent the middle class population, then the more women in said environment will select for pure, true alphas.

Here in the modernized West where there is a strong middle class and the average woman has more and more self-reliance thanks to feminism and doesn’t need a man as much for survival, a woman doesn’t need to select for pure alphadom as much, and probably won’t.  She may still be primally drawn to such alphas due to her genetic hard-wiring, a holdover from the more primal Pleistocene era, but she has enough counterprogramming from Western culture to ultimately balance it out.  What women in our modernized western societies are screening for, contrary to popular belief, are not the most purely alpha men but the most relatively alpha men within reasonable limits, or what I dub the Renaissance Man (credit for originally coining the term though goes to Tariq Nasheed).

To a chick surviving in the bleak, primal grind of a Jaco, Costa Rica, does she have time to seriously entertain this as an alpha male?

Is that really the pure essence of an alpha male in traditional evolutionary terms?  Or this frat guy?

No offense to any of the guys up there (Mystery, Style, Tucker Max), but most middle class men that are successful with women aren’t true alphas in the historical evolutionary sense.  They’re alphas in a relative sense, when compared to other middle-class men in their social circles.  Not only are most middle-class men not alpha males in the pure sense, but it would be stupid for them to even aspire to true pure alphadom.  Because true alphadom is a pointless goal for middle-class men in the West.

The successful middle-class alpha male is a mythical figure that can’t exist for any significant amount of time.  Our society is specifically built to put most alpha behavior in check.  The only types of men who can pull off any semblance of true alpha behavior in the West are men at the extreme lower end of the socioeconomic scale because they feel they have nothing to lose and men at the extremely high end of the socioeconomic scale because despite having something to lose they have more resources with which to get away with alpha behavior.  This is a society that keeps the peace and maintains the status quo by keeping alpha behavior in check through various disincentives and punishments.

Middle-class men in the West especially feel the pressure of these disincentives and punishments because on one hand they have enough resources and civility that they feel they have too much to lose by receiving these disincentives and punishment.  They have enough property and status and career that it will hurt them to lose any of it.  And if they end up in jail, they’re so civilized and genteel that they aren’t built for that setting the way a man from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale is.  Yet on the flip side they don’t have so much resources that they can shield themselves from the consequences of alpha behavior either, either buy buying themselves out of punishment or getting afforded a cushy punishment in the form of a country club prison stretch the way a man from the higher end of the socioeconomic scale can. For these reasons lower class and upper class men have much more freedom to push the envelope in pure alpha male behavior than middle class men do. And even for these groups in America there are limits to how alpha they can be, for various reasons.  I touched on limitations on the alpha status of the lower class already.  One of these days I’ll do the Myth of the Upper-Class Alpha Male as well.

Western middle class women are willing to enjoy these middle-class Western men because they have grown up conditioned to aspire to self-sufficient career woman status and expect to have two-income households when they marry.  So they don’t have to select mates with enough extreme wealth that can support a family singlehandedly.  Thanks to their own careers and middle-class status, they can still get a great quality of life from combining their own middle-class income with the income of a middle-class man, as opposed to the woman of the past with few big career opportunities who needed to rely totally on her prospective mate’s income and resources to improve her socioeconomic status.  Also, because of the higher expectations of monogamy in the modern West, even if a bunch of Western women wanted to effectively share a powerhouse alpha’s resources, it would be logistically too hard to pull off.  Rich men in America and the developed West are expected to be and actually are much more monogamous than rich men elsewhere in the world or throughout history because polygamy is very frowned upon here and the financial consequences to the rich man for engaging in it if caught can be very high.  Not to mention the social shaming (ask Tiger Woods).

Also, two more factors.  Rich people have less leisure time than ever, which is an important part of philandering.  They work more than ever nowadays, limiting the time they can spend on building and maintaining a harem.  Second, the cost of a decent standard of living in urban environments and big cities, the places that offer the most opportunity for rising in socioeconomic class these days, becomes a natural obstacle in harem building as well.  For a rich guy in a small town or the third world or a less expensive bygone era, maintaining a harem of extramarital women is a much less economically draining proposition than for a rich man in New York or Tokyo.  That’s why in America it takes a man of Tiger Woods’s flexible schedule and exorbitant wealth to pull off a harem of 14 women (not all simultaneously) throughout the years while a successful businessman in some parts of the world can accomplish the same feat with ease.

So rich men in America get monopolized by one lucky wife and may have one or two long-term mistresses with assorted quickies and escorts here and there.  The most access the average lower and middle-class woman can get to one of these high powered alpha men is the parting gift of occasional fling or quickie, and not the first prize of marriage or second prize of kept mistress status.  Societies like ours that strongly enforce monogamy shrink the supply of powerful alpha men women can choose from since they aren’t allowed to share these men amongst each other the way they could in a society that allows, explicitly or implicitly, long-term polygamous arrangements.  But as I pointed out, this shortage of powerful rich men available for long-term pair bonding is irrelevant because Western women don’t need such men for their survival like women in the past did.

In addition, thanks to a strong police force, strong property rights and strong paternalistic democratic government to offer physical protection and entitlement benefits if needed, thanks to feminism altering gender role expectations and giving women equal representational votes, thanks to a strong court system to provide retribution and justice if a man tries to violate them in any way, thanks to their own careers that allow them to be self-sufficient enough to provide their own sustenance and resources, thanks to birth control and abortions, thanks to the conveniences offered by appliance technology like washing machines, food processors, blenders and trash compactors, they are free to engage in sexual escapades and mating arrangements their female predecessors never dreamed of.  Or as I like to call it, “sport fucking” or “fun fucking” whoever she wants, be it bad boy alphas, metrosexual artfag hipsters, starving artists, ad account executives, Starbucks employees, and all types of middle class and working class guys who would have normally died without reproducing in the old dog-eat-dog primal eras of the past.  Choosing non-committing alpha males for flings or weak betas with little to moderate resources, while not the optimal choice of her genetic hard-wiring, doesn’t have the same dire consequences her in the Western world that it had for humans in the primal environments of the Pleistocene era or in modern third world hellholes.

In the West, a powerful resource-rich alpha isn’t a necessity thanks to the factors I described above, and in addition such an alpha isn’t widely available thanks to strongly enforced monogamy (only one women for each man) keeping the supply low.  This is why middle-class men are able to thrive in Western society.  They are a luxury only Western women can afford.  And the ideal middle class man is alpha enough to be a prize, but due to his circumstances there are natural ceilings to how alpha he can be.  A middle-class alpha who aims to have any longevity and reproductive success can’t exercise pure alpha status.  Sure he can work hard until he moves into a higher socioeconomic status and becomes rich, and at that point become more of a true, pure alpha, but so long as he remains in the middle-class status he won’t be able to pull off true, pure alpha status.  It’s for these reasons I specifically called my self-improvement series The Renaissance Man series and not The Alpha Male series.  The choice of terms was very deliberate and the two concepts are not interchangeable.  Because I think telling the average middle class man that alphadom is attainable or even desirable while remaining in middle class status is the biggest crock of shit going on today.  The best thing for a middle-class man to be in today’s society is not a true, pure alpha but a blend of the best aspects of an alpha male and the best aspects of a beta male, with the trappings of neither. A Renaissance Man.

Back to the Costa Rican Alpha Female I described in Part 1.  If you came up to her using some cheezy negs and magic tricks, she’d look at you like you were a joke.  The first thing she’d think is, if some crazy dude came up to me and tried to attack me or force me into prostitution or some drunk tourist tried to rape me, this dancing monkey couldn’t do shit. Can he guarantee that I’ll never have to resort to prostituting myself to get big bucks or slaving away at a shitty service or hospitality job for peanuts just to barely keep above grinding poverty level and stay at the same class level? This middle-class guy with his check-to-check existence, his meager 401(k) plan, his Netflix queue that he updates religiously, his mirthless materialism that he uses to convince himself he has more status than he actually has ans he works like a dog to maintain, his DVD box sets and encyclopedic knowledge of sports stats trivia, fantasy basketball league and collection of Bill Simmons Sports Guy columns, his 367 facebook friends, his witty repartee of popular movie quotes, his blog following, his X-Box 360 or whatever other middle-class trappings he has?  He’d be utterly useless to her.

“Fun-fucking” men like that for sport the way Western women can is a luxury not afforded to women who don’t come from the same environment.  For these women, choosing the right man is a decision so critical that it means the difference between surviving and thriving or wasting away in poverty, shame and degradation.  A woman like this may view such a middle class guy as as a trick or a simp and use him for some short term material gain like some free drinks or quick cash, but that’s it.  She may maintain a correspondence with him in hopes he’s a Captain Save-A-Ho type so that she can hit him up later with some sob story about her sick babies and get him to wire money to her if he’s enough of a big-hearted sap to go for it.  And if he’s a that type of jackpot middle-class sucker who can be used for a real long-term benefit like getting immigration to the West then she may really entertain him seriously, usually by playing to his emasculated Western male ego in a way American women would never do.  This type of treatment usually blows the  middle class Western man’s mind and he’s immediately sprung and wrapped around her finger.  But she’ll never respect him fully due to the type of men she’s grown up exposed to and once she immigrates and gets a foothold in her new country to the point where she no longer needs him anymore, she’ll leave him and get with the type of alpha male she’s been conditioned to be turned on by. Oftentimes she’ll even cheat with such an alpha behind her beta husband’s back soon after arriving in her new country.  Such stories are common.

Most of the time, what the average woman in a primal dog-eat-dog environment need in their immediate future is a lower-class guy who is so badass he can physically protect her from the dangers of the ghetto, or a guy uber-rich and uber-powerful enough to immediately lift her far away from the ghetto, so far in fact that she feels she is never in danger of going back.  In the specific case of Costa Rican Alpha Female, she is so top notch, even by the standards of the world stage, she can get the best of both worlds in Jaco: the guy who is both badass and tough enough to offer physical protection and powerful and rich enough to lift her far away from her poor beginnings.  A guy like CR Alpha.

So who exactly was CR Alpha?

The next day I discussed this with our guide for the trip.  This guy knew was a street-smart American expat who now lived in Costa Rica and functioned as both our concierge and tour guide.  He had been there for years and knew the ins and outs very well, from the seedy underbelly to the well-to-do parts.  We described the guy to him to see what he could tell us.  He immediately knew who we were talking about.  “He’s a lieutenant for the Colombians here.”  I can’t remember the full details because I was pretty wasted, but he was a ranking member of a Colombian organization known as either the White Colombians or the Black Colombians, I forget which.  He was their representative and highest ranking member in CR.  He ranked pretty high in the gang’s heirarchy, and of their members stationed in Costa Rica there was none higher.  Our concierge also said things that echoed the speculations Beethoven and I made the night before.  That he carried himself as a really cool guy and didn’t walk around acting like he had something to prove, but if there was ever a problem (which there rarely was because few were willing to cross him), he handled it in a definitive, unambiguous fashion.  He was no joke, and our concierge said over the years he even used him to handle some of his own “problems” that our concierge didn’t have the clout or muscle to handle on his own (presumably for a fee or in exchange for a favor, I didn’t ask for elaboration).

But that’s true alpha.  Not a fuzzy hat and black nail polish.  Not a cubicle job or middle management office. Not blog stardom.  None of this shit is true alpha.  And that’s fine.  For reasons I’ll explain in the next installment.

Next installment, how and why modern Western Society keeps alphadom in check and penalizes any excess of it.  And the pros and cons of such a system.

Click Here for Part 3

Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

I was about to find out.

Click Here For Part 2

It amazes me how this one post continues to strike a nerve with readers so long after I posted it. It’s my first actual substantive post on this whole blog, not including my introduction post. A lot of women vehemently took issue with that post and continue to do so, and it surprises me because I don’t think I really said anything all that controversial (although I have changed my view on on aspect of the original article, but that’s a story for another post). Most of it seemed common sense, especially the part where I said getting lots of sex (quality is a different issue of course) is easy for women and not a challenge, but for men it is a big challenge, hence the different treatments for both genders when they score a lot, but even that premise angers quite a few commenters.

So last week I thought, why not do a thought experiment with a different gender double standard that touches on a few of the same issues involved in the “male/female slut double standard” but without saying so and see what answers pop up. I wanted to see what directions the discussion would go in and see if I got any answers that changed my original conclusions and also see if women would be willing to admit my original conclusions had merit when I don’t set off the “slut shaming” alarm.

Thus, last week’s thought experiment. A decent idea in theory, but there was one problem: my readers are too smart. I expected the comments to go all over the place before someone touched on the same issues I touched on in my male/female slut double standard post.

Instead Liz pops in and hits the bullseye in the very first comment!

Because it is widely assumed, and in most cases true, that a woman CAN get sex whenever she wants, just by lowering her standards a bit. That being said, a woman using a sex toy is seen as a voluntary action. She’s doing it because she wants to. A man using them is seen as doing it because he HAS to. He can’t find ayone willing to have sex with him. True or not, that, I think, is the crux of the discrepancy.

And if that wasn’t enough, Maake swooped in a few comments later and even got the tie-in I was going for:

Liz is right and that is the reason whu woman with many sexual relationships is a whore but man a hero.

It did confirm something I suspect though, and that is that sometimes no matter how much people agree with your reasoning and premises deep down, if it leads to a conclusion they find personally discomforting they’ll still fight you tooth and nail the whole way.

Procrastinate on Things You Enjoy

Pick something you are really looking forward to and get much joy from.  Now delay experiencing it.  Or miss it altogether.  Miss your favorite show.  Don’t even tape it.  That new blockbuster movie you were planning to spend the night outside waiting for to open?  See it three weeks after it comes out.  Procrastinate on the things you eagerly look forward to and do some chores you’ve been avoiding instead.  Leave that dessert you’ve been craving on your desk  and don’t eat it until the end of the day.  American Idol results tonight?  Live?  Go home and go to sleep instead.  Feel like taking a break to check email or Facebook or Twitter for the umpteenth time?  Finish your work project first and take the break in about five hours.

The point here is training yourself to forego immediate gratification when you have to.  The reason many of us don’t do the things we need to do to get long-term benefits for our lives is that our lives our filled with too many instances of succumbing to short-term gratification.  These short-term gratifications are distractions from more important lasting goals.

Here’s a great article by David Brooks on Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment:

AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

Brooks then goes on to discuss how these findings on the correlation between self-control and future success could positively influence policymaking. He also notes the following:

Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That’s probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don’t work. Sheer willpower doesn’t seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn’t stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis,” is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren’t so largely ignored by educators and policymakers.

The New Yorker goes more in-depth into Mischel’s research.

The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have outlined the neural circuitry of self-control. For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

This will be a fascinating investigation to track. If Mischel is right, raw intelligence isn’t so much the primary cause of future success but rather one of a series of causes of future success, a series that begins with capacity for self-control and capacity for delay of gratification. Rather than focusing on intelligence and whether it is mostly hereditary or can be changed, it may be more beneficial to study self-control and whether that is mostly hereditary or can be changed. It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it’s actually quite the paradigm shift.

I think learning to delay gratification is an important trait that it is never too late to develop.

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”…

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

I would suggest examining your own capacity for delay of gratification and creating challenges for yourself. Can you have a bowl of your favorite candy in front of you and only eat a couple and leave the rest of the bowl sitting there? Or do you have to pick at them until they’re finished? If the season finale or most important episode of your favorite show is on your DVR, do you have to watch it the same night it aired or can you leave it sitting there all week long until you’ve accomplished the more pressing matters in your life and are ready to finally get around to watching it? If challenged, could you force yourself to not DVR-record it at all, knowing it won’t be repeated and you’ll likely have to wait around for the box set to view said episode? It’s good to practice gratification delaying exercises and seeing how they make you feel. 

Read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp book to read how he mastered women by excruciating bouts of practicing delay of sexual gratification.

An encouraging finding:

The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Also:

Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

Start with small things you look forward to and practice putting those off or missing them altogether. Then challenge yourself to practice with bigger and bigger things.

But like the article quotes above say, the best way to achieve the gratification delay and build patience is by not thinking of the gratification and distracting yourself from dwelling on what you’re missing by focusing on something else. Here’s what you should focus on: Periodically make an ongoing list of long-term goals and short-term tasks you need to accomplish. Order them from 1 to 4, with 1 being “important and immediate,” 2 being “important but not immediate,” 3 being “unimportant and immediate” and 4 being “unimportant and not immediate.” The things in 3 and 4 more often than not are usually the things you need to procrastinate on but tend not to. Tasks and goals in 1 and 2 are usually things you should be doing immediately but tend to procrastinate. So as you learn to delay gratification and practice patience, usually with items falling in the 3 and 4 categories, use the new free time to distract yourself from what you’re missing by focusing on category 1 and 2 tasks instead. Eventually eliminate all the 1s from your list and strive to keep the list of 2s as small as possible and keep them from becoming 1s. And even then keep practicing patience and delaying gratification, because new temptation is always around the corner.

[M]ore women are drinking, yes—more than 48 percent acknowledge having had at least one drink in the past month (up from 42 percent in 1992). But beyond that, the women who drink are drinking more. The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined. At the same time, men are reining in their drinking, meaning that the gender gap of alcohol consumption is narrowing all the time.

This increase in drinking among women also includes a sharp increase in binge drinking as well, defined by the CDC’s website as follows:

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is defined as a pattern of alcohol consumption that brings the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level to 0.08% or above. This pattern of drinking usually corresponds to 5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on a single occasion for women, generally within about 2 hours.

The article gets better when it starts listing specific examples.  I cringed with recognition of these types of boozy babes:

I’m out drinking one Wednesday night when I run into Gail and Melanie, two women in their early twenties who are well on their way to what my grandmother would call “past precious.” It’s their third bar of the evening, or rather they were here earlier, they left to go to a beer garden a few blocks away, and now, at 2 a.m., they are back. Both are tall and slender, both wear red dresses with their dark hair pulled up, and the bartender has been slipping both of them freebies here and there throughout the night when they weren’t being offered drinks by other eager men.

“They were like, ‘Oh. You want another beer?’?” Mel says, rolling her eyes about a group of guys who tried to get their attention earlier.

Gail laughs. “They totally admitted they were going to be outdrank by us.”

“He was like, ‘I didn’t drink until I was 21,’?” Mel continues.

Gail arches her eyebrows in disbelief. “This is how we grew up,” she says, nodding in the direction of her drink. “I’ve been drinking since I was 13, you know? We went into my friend’s liquor cabinet and mixed everything together, whiskey, vodka, rum. I remember after that being like, ‘Alcohol is really fun. I want to do it again.’?”

Mel agrees. “I started drinking at a house party when I was going into eighth grade. I ended up throwing up Doritos in the bathroom. Not that that was fun, but from there, I was like, ‘I’m curious.’?”

Then comes the stats. None of them are surprising based on things I’ve seen or anecdotes I’ve heard, but to see them all compiled in a few short paragraphs even gave me pause…for like all of a second.

One-third of all women in the U.S. have their first alcoholic sip before they enter high school. Almost half of high-school girls drink, and more than a quarter binge drink. Then throw in college. For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.

“I’m pretty sure college was a great time,” my college roommate likes to say, “but I remember none of it, sadly.” Not incidentally, we started college at the tail end of the nineties, the decade that invented the alcopop, otherwise known as “chick beer,” and MTV Spring Break. If the alcohol industry was conspiring to attract drinkers like us, it succeeded. The rate of frequent binge drinking increased by 124 percent between 1993 and 2001 at all-female colleges. When Amstel Light began marketing directly to women, its sales volume reportedly went up by 13 percent. Suddenly, alcohol commercials weren’t just of the big-breasted, mud-wrestling lineage. A Dewar’s ad from the era showed a lovely young woman donning her work clothes while a bare-chested man slept in the bed beside her. Tagline: “You finally have a real job, a real place, and a real boyfriend. How about a real drink?” I didn’t have any of the above but thought Dewar’s would suit me just fine.

That was back when the industry was just warming up. Dr. David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, believes that the real onslaught—and its effect on the beverages women consume—didn’t reach critical mass until the turn of this century. “For decades, we’ve assumed that the beverage preference for underage drinkers is beer because it’s cheaper,” he told me. “Boys are more likely to drink beer, but starting in about 2001, the girls shift. They are decisively more likely to drink liquor. This shift in beverage preference is a really big deal because it takes a lot to change the beverage preference of a group of people.”

The change could not have happened without a calculated effort. At a time when the number of cable channels and their appeal mushroomed, alcohol ads appeared during thirteen to fifteen of the most popular shows among teenagers and increasingly in women’s magazines, where according to Jernigan, in 2002 girls 12 to 20 saw 95 percent more ads for alcopops than women 21 and above. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors. “How many guys are going to drink a strawberry vodka?” Jernigan asks. “There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.”

Not that marketing should get all the credit for a woman’s relationship with drinking. Once an introduction to alcohol is made, the affair usually flourishes all on its own.

Given that modern feminism automatically equates gender equality with progress, so long as it’s in an area that men reap benefits from (for example feminists don’t really seem to be clamoring for the chance to get on the front lines of a raging battlefield oddly enough), it’s no surprise that today’s vapid feminists of the Jezebel.com and Feministing.com variety view women increasingly engaging in the hard partying and harder drinking lifestyle traditionally associated with men as some sort of gender progress.  Similarly many feminists, especially those of the Sex & The City variety viewed females embracing male-style revolving door urban promiscuity as some sort of gender progress also in the late 90s.

To see what all the recent waves of feminism from the second wave through to the Sex and the City wave to the Suicide Girl wave have combined to create, take for example the following horror story from the article:

Jezebel.com, a Website that is an avatar of a certain of-the-moment brand of feminism appealing to women too young to remember the heyday of Ms. magazine. Jezebel is very pro-alcohol. Last summer, the site stirred up controversy when a well-respected media personality invited two of its writers onto her Internet show “Thinking and Drinking”—typically a classy, semi-Socratic affair—and the younger women got so visibly shitfaced and the conversation so disturbing that some critics referred to it as “The Night Feminism Died.” (When asked why she didn’t prosecute her date-rapist, one of the young women, woozily clutching her can of beer, answered, “Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”)

The onslaught of criticism that followed, however warranted, failed to take into account the fact that, for better or worse, drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.

It’s a more maverick form of feminism, sure, and perhaps misguided—something akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated. But the paradox of a woman exerting her power by making herself, to one degree or another, incapacitated does not read as a disjunction to most of the women I spoke with. On the contrary, a woman’s control over her life—and the decision of when and how to lose that control—seems to be the point.

Reading about this trainwreck interview is one thing, but really, actually seeing it in action is a whole other level of clusterfuck to behold:

“Daddy, are you proud of me? That college education really paid off!  Look Mom, progress!” 

I’m kind of torn on seeing chicks like this be so candid.  In some ways it’s good because it shows the other side of the gender war that the media likes to overlook.  We only see men behaving badly stories but not women behaving badly.  I know a lot of women may read this and tell me, “Oh, they’re exceptions,” and maybe when taking the whole country into account that is true, but in NY and the other U.S. urban centers, these type of women have become the new norm, especially in the 18-34 age range.  When I was younger, had a lot less game and even less standards, these types of chicks were a godsend because they meant easy banging with mininal skill and effort.  What young guy with raging hormones and little patience wouldn’t love that?  But as I got older I realized these women are really just the equivalent of slapping a great paint job on a shitty car: sure it’s more than a lot of other people have, but it’s still nothing to be especially proud of.  And if you have any sort of standards or self-respect, you realize your shitty car with the nice pant job only impresses people not worth impressing, which makes it an even emptier feeling after a while.  Or even worse, after a long enough time lowering your standards and fucking slutty drunks, lowered standards go from being your last resort game to being your A-game.  And sure enough you become one of those low-class losers who are not worth impressing. 

When you lower your standards on a regular basis and only bang women you don’t respect, you think you’re getting over and proving something, but in actuality it sends a message to your subconscious mind about who you are.  Just like you are what you eat, you are what you fuck.  And since you’re fucking trash, your subconscious mind starts to absorb the message that you must be low value as well, and as a result starts influencing your conscious behavior accordingly.  Thus you start lowering your standards on how you look (slovenly, sloppy, unkempt, unimpressive, bland) and you lose all self-respect (desperate chasing of women, putting up with crap you shouldn’t, hooking up with unattractive women just because you’re both drunk and the opportunity is there).  That’s why so many of the guys who regularly hook up with the types of chicks like the two Jezebellers in the video above, the hipsters they deride and mock, look like unshaven slobs (lowering their standards for themselves) and regularly are at ease with making spectacles of themselves (no self-respect).  That’s why hipsters reach the point where they eventually feel no shame looking like the botched drive-by abortions found on Look at This Fucking Hipster website or are proud to be written up for engaging in crap like this or this for example.  It’s also why I started turning dow n one-night stand opportunities with stumblebum broads who were incoherent and sloppy, even if they were hot.  It was just tacky, unenjoyable and embarassing when I brought home a girl who was excited about sleeping with me, but by the time we got to more intimate settings she was nodding in and out of a stupor while taking off her own clothes.  So I’m drunk, my hormones are exploding like a volcano and my dick’s hard enough to cut diamonds and crack walnuts.  What do I do?  If we’re both drunk is it rape?  If we both start having sex and she seems awake and responsive in the beginning but at some point she becomes semi-conscious and out of it because her liquor intake is catching up with her, do I stop stroking or would that be rape?

The recent movie Observe & Report actually has such a scarily accurate scene, where [SPOILERS] Seth Rogen and hard-drinking Anna Faris go on a date that culminates in the type of sex I just described (and lived a few times).  He’s pounding away at her at the end of their date and she looks passed out drunk.  Slowly it hits him that she may not be conscious any more and he might be raping her.  He slows down and then stops, unsure what to do and slowly feeling disgusted by himself, wondering if he is a date rapist.  And Anna Faris’ character immediately slurs, without looking up or opening her eyes, “I didn’t tell you to stooppp motherrrfuckkerrr….”  Like, is it rape if she was conscious and slurs something that rhymes with “Yerrssh” when you started fucking but sort of kind of passed out before you finished?  When you actually start having to ask those types of questions, it’s time to raise your standards. Real men need at least need a little bit of a challenge in order to feel proud of an accomplishment.  And it’s scenarios like this, which are much more commonplace than older generations know,  that probably cause the girls to be so nonchalant toward their “rapists.”  Because these women are fully aware of how grey and vague the issue of consent is in such mutually drunk and debauched scenarios, especially when slutty behavior is thrown into the equation.  Shit, one of them even wrote a column for Gawker.com titled Slut Machine and had a blog called One D(ick) at a Time, so I don’t think I’m out of line calling their behavior slutty.

One interesting thing about the videos above and the Whimpster piece is how the women who date hipsters seem to hold them in total utter contempt and scorn them.  When I see hispter couples I see this emasculating scorn dynamic going on too.  What girls like the Jezebellers in the video and the woman who wrote The Whimpster piece don’t get is that yes the men they date are tools, but these men are tools that they created.  They have this love-hate relationship with hipster men.  They date them because on a social level they like them for being enlightened enough to accept their batshit crazy and ill-defined form of reactionary feminism and they accept their desire to be equal to men and they aren’t intimidated by a “strong,” defined as abrasive, narcissistic and shrewish in their world, woman.  Plus these men have no desire to be macho and try to lead them or ever pull rank on them or ever try to boss them around and take charge forcefully.  So these guys are the perfect complement to their socially constructed sense of identity.  Yet on a primal, unconscious level, they hate them because women are genetic hard-wired for hypergamy (meaning they don’t want a man who is equal in status but one who is higher), are hard-wired to seek out leadership in a man (meaning they don’t want a man who gives them 50% of more input on everything and is too democratic) and are hard-wired to respond with a dripping crotch to displays of machoness and assertiveness, because it satisfies their primal need to feel protected and secure (meaning on a primal level they don’t like guys with the same height, weight and muscle tone as them).  So for all those reasons, they don’t respect these men even though they are a perfect fit for their social side and they even grow to hate them with time.  Yet since the guys these women do respond to primally and hormonally to are socially forbidden to them by their religion of radical feminism, and more importantly, would have no tolerance for their radical feminist ways in return, they are forced to deal and make do with the type of hipster men that are cool with their radical feminist religion, even if everything else from their subconscious primal mind to their hormones to their genes utterly loathes them.  (And with time this hatred will start to surface on the conscious level too)

So look at the videos and read the Whimpster piece again.  They date and fuck these guys, yet appear to hold them in utter contempt as well.  One girl is basically calling them out for being nonassertive, but says that at least the way they rape is more acceptable because it’s not the macho kind of rape a frat boy would do.  Who is she complimenting and who is she insulting with this train of thought?  Does she even know?  It’s funny in a fucked up way, but it turns out even the way hipsters rape, using surreptitiously slipped drugs and inebriated and deranged (by feminism and college) targets is passive-aggressive.  But the irony is, they created the Whimpster and then want to punish him for having all the traits they continually reward and none of the “frat boy” or “macho” or “traditional” traits they openly deride every chance they get.  Yet they want to turn around and bash them for being exactly what they encouraged them to be, and continue to engage in the exact same behavior and subscribe to the exact same beliefs that encouraged them to be that way.  Because the alternative idea, that radical feminism sold them a bad bill of goods that created more problems than it solved for them, is impossible for them to even consider because they have devoted so much of their identity and so many years and resources to the ideology.  This is what’s known as a “sunk cost fallacy.”  Marshall McLuhan once said about humans “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”  It works for this context as well: yes these guys are tools, but these women shaped them, and now these tools are shaping them back, and the vicious circle that has been started is turning out to be a pitiful race to the bottom.

Huffingtonpost.com, a site for smelly granolas I never expected to link to in my lifetime, has some of the best highlights in print form:

These Jezebels recommend birth control methods:

Moe: Pulling out always works for me”
Tracie: “And I know it’s an irresponsible thing to day, but it’s (Pulling Out) The Most Fun Way Not To Get Pregnant”

The Jezebels on sex with total strangers:

Tracie: “People are always saying it’s not safe to go home with strange men, blah, blah blah, like Mr. Goodbar whatever”
Moe: “What’s gonna happen?’

Lizz You could get raped”

Moe: That’s happening too, but you live through that.”

Lizz: “Sometimes you don’t”

Moe: “That’s true if they have weapons.”

The Jezebels define the “rapists of our generation”

Tracie: “I live in Williamsburg, there aren’t very assertive men there”
Moe: “The thing about the rapists of our generation, is that they all use drugs, they all have some sort of drug they use on you, so it’s good to feel, and I don’t know if this has happed to me or if I just drink too much…

Moe: “It’s really hard to prosecute them (rapists), so you should try to avoid them at all costs.”

Tracie: “I once paid someone to rape me once.”

Tracie: “Well, I didn’t pay for it, I had a magazine pay for it

Tracie: “I moved here when I was 18 and you think you would encounter more rapists in a big city like this, but, I don’t know, I just haven’t.”

Moe on sexual regret:

Moe: “I guess, I like, regret being date raped”
Moe: “It seems like in terms of bad sexual experiences, that you have, the worst ones are in, always seem to be in countries where sex is not accepted. That is the good thing about New York, I’ve never has any problems with anyone here.”

Moe: “I guess third guy, I ever had sex with, date raped me, and I got very mad at him, but I wasn’t gonna fucking like turn him in to the police and fucking go through shit..

Lizz interrupts: “Why not, you see that’s the problem, why not, I am just curious?”

Moe: Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”

Tracie on why she has not been raped

” I think it has to do with the fact that I am like, smart”
“I don’t hang around with frat guys”

Moe on how she felt about her rapist:

“I always felt very like, safe around this guy even after he date raped me”

Moe on what women can take home from reading their blogs

If any of you guys use the pullout method, but you read you know, anything I wrote about Ben Bernanke, or you know, what ever, at least y’ll go to the grave with your syphilis, slightly informed, that’s all I care about

I suggest that the next writer who chooses to do a piece about the popular meme of how today’s urban young adult men are stunted man-children who refuse to commit actually take the time to learn about the boozy train wrecks they’re refusing to commit to. The marriage stats will make a lot more sense then.

By the way, Tracie Egan really did pay someone to rape her, as you can read here.  Believe it or not, I don’t hate the article. It’s well written, honest and indirectly confirms a lot of my beliefs about radical feminism that a radical feminist would never admit if I asked her directly. If you don’t believe my recurring theories that women don’t really want to be equal in power to a man in a relationship, or even worse more decisive than the man, check the opening paragraph where she describes why she wants to be raped:

I blame my recurring rape fantasy on the fact that I’m a feminist. I’ve never made any bones about getting boned in exactly the fashion that I want. But as a girl, my equipment can be trickier to manage, therefore I need to be a boss in the bedroom to ensure I get worked the right way. It gets really tiresome always being the one in charge, and don’t shrinks say that people usually fantasize about the opposite of their reality? I guess that’s why I find myself wishing that my typically sugary-sweet sexual encounters were sometimes peppered with assault. I decided that the best way to forfeit that control—while still holding on to a modicum of it for safekeeping—would be to hire someone for the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted a male whore to rape me.

Kind of like how when a person who loves food denies himself food too long he ends up wanting to destructively binge on it at some point, I guess when your ideology causes you to avoid assertive males too much, you end up going to an extreme to find assertiveness, like rape. You can read her blog here, where she used to regularly chronicle her promiscuous lifestyle and sexual exploits, at least until she announced she was engaged to be married last Fall. You can also read her take on the fallout to the above interview. To her credit, she’s a fantastic writer.

Also, don’t forget to check out this post and comment on what kind of essays you’d like to see me tackle in a book, whether it’s new topics or expansions of previous blog post topics. I’m currently in an outlining stage.

Anyway, on to the current topic. Look at the picture below:

Female Swagger

It appeared in New York Magazine’s Look Book Section a while back. As I flipped through the magazine quickly I had to stop and do a double take when I hit that page. It stopped me a cold because at first glance when I saw that shit-eating smirk, confident aura, great fashion sense and sick, dominant swagger I was impressed. It’s rare to see an American bourgeois bohemian white guy with swagger like that these days. (For an idea of what a bourgeois bohemian is, click here, here or here to get a crystal clear idea). Usually such couples featured in mainstream NY mags has a unassuming, wispy, languid and ironically dressed whimpster geek with a more dynamic and attractive female specimen that is outshining him that is clearly wearing the pants in the relationship (aka the Brooklyn Bobo couple). See this Jessica Valenti story for comparison, picture below:

 Now that’s the type of unassuming whimpster I’m used to seeing as the male half of these bobo power couples.  The kind of guy you’d never see dominating the forefront of the shot with his arm confidently gripping his woman, exuding cockiness and swagger as his woman just fawns and melts all over him, dripping with adulation, reverence and lust.  No, he’s meant to be tolerated for being as inoffensive to her feminist views as possible.  If you don’t believe me read the accompanying story.

But back to the first picture, when I did the double-take and flipped back to it, I realized that they were a lesbian couple and not a man-woman couple.  At that point it all made sense.  I have no proof to back up this claim, but I bet that Allison Michael Orenstein, the dapper dan butch in the first photo, is the more hardcore lesbian while her mate, kissing up on her cheek, Simone Saint Laurent, was probably straight for much of her life and got ”turned out” by Orenstein or a butch similar to her.  The reason I assume this is because of what a butch lesbian who excelled at “converting” straight women once told me: that metropolitan straight women, living in this world of feminized bobo whimpsters, are getting so starved for traditional masculine swagger to activate their primal lust triggers and make them feel safe to be a submissive woman that they’re even increasingly willing to turn to another woman to get their dose of macho swagger.  This butch claimed to me that the sensitive wuss has been the biggest boon to her lesbo recruitment game, and looking at the two pics I believe her.  It’s even worse when you read the stories accompanying both pics.  I also think the bobo whimpsterization and swagger deprivation of urban white men has also played a major role in white women’s increased openness to the idea of dating minority men, who tend to have a lot more swagger on average as well. 

Read the story accompanying the lesbian couple’s picture and the story accompanying Valenti’s story, and ask yourself, who is more likely to be a follower of  The Renaissance Man Philosophy, the butch lesbian in the first story or the bobo whimpster guy in the second?  The lesson here is that real women who are in touch with their natural feminine side want a man who, while capable of being sensitive if necessary, conveys that he is confident and can protect, dominate and lead them at will.  If you can’t convey these things, or worse don’t believe them about yourself, you will end up with women like Valenti.  Women who are too insecure to let themselves be led by a man.  Whose are more interested in competing and dominating a man than being a complement to him.  Women who have deep rooted issues with masculine strength and feel the need to neuter any indication of it in our society and emasculate any man in their immediate vicinity to feel comfortable.  Basically, a shrew that defines herself by her radical feminist ideology.  She’ll have you walking on pins and needles and constantly double checking the toilet seat and making sure you organized the recycling bin right in fears she’ll chew you out mercilessly.  National Corner also did a great piece on her. 

Don’t be that guy.  And don’t be too proud to take lessons from a lesbian on male swagger if need be.  We need all the role models we can get these days.

Let’s get down to it.

Understand and Merge Your Three Faces. This is one of those great insights that I read in a book at some point growing up, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the book was anymore. If anyone recognizes who originated this idea, let me know.

But the basic concept is, there are three “faces:”

1. The face of the person you see when you see yourself.
2. The face of the person you try to present to others
3. The face of the person that other people actually perceive when they see you
   

Based on that basic concept of three faces, I took it further and came up with the following observations.

People who are strong, charismatic, successful, confident and contented tend to understand and merge their “faces.” They try to manage and know their faces as thoroughly as possible and keep very similar, always fighting to keep them from drifting apart. They present themselves to others as they see themselves. And other people tend to also perceive them as they perceive themselves. It creates an exciting and fluid interaction. It inspires confidence. It’s automatically addicting once you’re around it.

People who are weak, uncharismatic, fractured, neurotic, self-pitying and miserable tend to have big gaps between their “faces” ["face-gaps"]. Here are some examples of “face gaps.”

(1) Let’s say a person sees themselves a certain way. We’ll call this face “A.” (2) He deliberately tries to present a different face to the world. We’ll call this face “B.” There is a face gap between how he sees himself (“A”) and what how he presents himself (“B”). Now (3) the final component is how other people see him. If he’s terribly transparent, some people will see him as he sees himself, face “A,” even though he is trying to present face “B” to the world. This would be an “A-B-A” face transaction. If the guy is a very good faker, others may actually believe the face he is trying to present to the world, face “B.” This would be an “A-B-B” transaction. If he’s totally socially inept or poor at image management, other people might see a totally different face altogether, face “C,” which is neither face “A,” how he sees himself, nor is it face “B,” which is how he tries to present himself to the world. He’s managed to give off an unrelated third impression instead. This would be an “A-B-C” face transaction, which is the worst of the lot. Many people who tend to view themselves one way and try desperately to present themselves another way suffer from a face gap that leads to what is called “impostor syndrome.”

The Impostor Syndrome, sometimes called Impostor Phenomenon or Fraud Syndrome, is a syndrome where sufferers are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It is not an officially recognized psychological disorder but has been the subject of numerous books and articles by psychologists and educators.

Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

There is a phrase that says “fake it ’til you make it.” People who follow this advice choose to willingly create this face gap between how they see themselves and how they present themselves to others. It works for some people but fails for others, even driving some mad. Why the different results? Because when you’re faking it until you make it, the end goal should be to eventually make both faces merge. After presenting yourself a certain way for long enough, you eventually start seeing yourself that way as well. The face gap you create when faking it til you make it should be a means to an end, and that end is the eventual elimination of said face gap as you begin to genuinely see yourself as the person you present to others. People on the other hand who live indefinitely with this face gap between how they view themselves and how they present themselves to others end up over a long enough time neurotic, sneaky, paranoid, distrustful, miserable and constantly afraid of being discovered as a fraud. I believe this is what, among other things, happened to Michael Jackson.

Another common face gap problem is when (1) a person sees themselves one way (face “A”), (2) tries hard to present this face to others (again face “A”), but (3) what actually gets communicated to others is something totally different (face “B”). This would be an “A-A-B” face transaction. Many people who consider themselves great people yet still are unlucky in love and friendship usually suffer from this form of face transaction. They consider themselves awesome people, try to show people how awesome they are, but something gets lost in translation somewhere for whatever reason. Maybe they get too nervous and mess up and come off creepy instead. Maybe they try to hard and come off too insecure and eager to please. Maybe their body language and fashion sense are conflicting. People who suffer from these types of face gaps are usually socially frustrated.

There are tons of combinations of face gaps and face-transaction scenarios, and it would take too long to create an exhaustive list. I just wanted to give examples of the concept, and I hope I was able to make it clear.

The most inspiring and mentally tough people tend to be the people who first understand their three faces, then work to merge them.

Some people for example either don’t realize how they view themselves, don’t realize how they present themselves to others, or don’t realize how others actually perceive them when interacting with them. Or worse, some people are guilty of being ignorant of all three faces at once. One guy thinks he’s hilarious and is unaware of how painfully unfunny he actually is to others. Or he may think he gives off a loveable bad boy persona when he’s actually coming off as an unlikeable dick with no social skills. Or a girl may think she is way hotter and bringing way more to the table than she actually is. I’m sure you get the picture. Understanding your three faces requires brutal honesty with yourself. Another great way is to get a self-improvement buddy, a friend or group of friends who will be brutally honest with constructive criticism. Everyone beforehand promise not to take anything personal, and all criticism should be constructive and useful. It’s not enough to criticize each other, you also have to inform each other what your respective strengths are so that you can lead with them.

Once you get an idea of the state of your three faces and are operating under no illusions, you need to start working toward merging them and eliminating gaps. The goal is to achieve “A-A-A” transactional state. To illustrate the merge using an example. Say (1) a guy thinks he’s funny as hell and filled with great stories (“A”). He (2) goes out trying to showcase his self-perceived funniness by telling jokes and stories at social gatherings, and thinks he’s killing it (“A,” consistent so far). But (3) he’s actually coming off to others as long-winded, unfunny, and oafish (“B”). To accomplish a merge, he has several options. After properly assessing the state of his three faces, he can proceed to find out what his strengths are. Say he discovers his strength is being a good listener, talking less and sharing good life lessons. He (1) starts seeing himself as that type of guy instead of as the life of the party (“A”). He (2) conveys himself as such (again, “A”). And (3) other people also start perceiving him as that guy because that persona plays better to his natural strengths (Again, “A”). A-A-A. Or alternatively, rather than change how he sees himself, he can choose to still see himself as funny and instead focus on working on changing how he presents that persona to others by learning how to actually convey humor well. He can study funny people and take notes on what they do, get honest feedback from others on how he can improve his humor and what his sticking points are and practice, practice, practice until he reaches the point where (1) he still sees himself as funny (“A”), (2) he’s still trying to convey himself as funny to others, but is now much better at it because of the work he’s put into it (again, “A”) and (3) people genuinely see him as being as funny as he sees himself and wants others to view him (again, “A,” hat trick).

Another thing to keep in mind is the internet. The internet can really create some horrible face gaps. Compare who you’re selling on your Myspace, Match.com or Facebook profile to who you believe you are. I’m especially aware of this as a blogger, as I struggle with who I am, what I’m trying to present myself as with this blog and what actually comes across to people reading. With all the technology, photoshop programs, online questionnaires and info manipulation out there, it’s incredibly hard not to experiment with how you present yourself to others and veer from the truth. And with all the instant feedback and limitless potential exposure, how can you not become insane about how others perceive you once you do open yourself up online? When messing with the internet, be very aware of how it’s affecting your three faces.

It’s more of a neverending struggle than a true end goal you can simply achieve once and for all, as daily life and new experiences constantly work to change our various faces and cause them to grow apart. It requires constant and brutally honest self-assessment to understand the state of your faces, and it requires the vigilance and self-discipline to keep them aligned when they start to drift apart. But it’s worth it.

Today I’m going to discuss two areas I still have problems with occasionally:

Raise Your Bragging Threshold and Stop Fishing for Compliments

A lot of guys brag and fish for compliments about the flimsiest things. It broadcasts horrible insecurity. No one likes that guy who looks for an excuse to brag about the same story every time you see him.

The level of events you’re willing to brag about or fish for compliments about also becomes the level at which you being to feel disappointment when things go wrong. For example, say you brag when your boss gives you a compliment about your work. By bragging about something so insignificant, you have given that event a strong value in your mind. So now, if that event doesn’t happen, or worse the opposite of the event happens and your boss makes a negative comment about your work, you’ll play it over and over in your head and become despondent. If you fish for compliments about your looks or brag every time someone compliments your looks, you have made such physical recognition a major event in your mind. Now if someone doesn’t compliment your looks, or worse says something negative about your looks, you make a big deal about it and get depressed. If you fish for compliments about your car, you’ll feel like a loser when no one notices your car. If you brag about every time you get a girl’s number, you’ll be depressed whenever you don’t get a number. If you brag about your job title, you’ll get flustered, embarrassed and erratic whenever someone gets it wrong. The lower and more insignificant your bragging threshold, the easier it will be to shake you and throw you off your A-game.

The other thing bragging does is create sticking points. When you brag about an occurrence, you give your subconscious mind the message that something significant and noteworthy has just happened. And as a consequence, you are training yourself to become satisfied with that occurrence whenever it repeats itself. You won’t feel much of a drive to surpass it. For example, when I was young, I would brag about getting numbers. I’d get a phone number and I’d act like I just scored a threesome with Raquel Welch and young Mia Farrow in their prime. I was creating a mindset in myself that phone numbers were a big deal, to the point they subconsciously became my endgame. As a result, once I got a number or two, I’d start to slow down because I already accomplished bragging rights. I subconsciously felt like I did all I needed to do. It wasn’t until I stopped bragging about such silly things and started treating phone numbers as no big deal that my game moved up to the next level.

The Patrick Ewing Knicks were the same way. They’d celebrate after every single basket they made. Patrick Ewing would do a layup and he’d literally be doing pirouettes down the court. Someone would dunk and the whole team would run around like idiots doing chest bumps in the first quarter. As a NY Knicks fan, I found it embarrassing. And unsurprisingly, they’d never win championships. They’d choke a lot. Michael Jordan and Bulls were different. He rarely stopped to celebrate prematurely. A basket was just a basket. He’d make it, maybe smile at most and just move on. He just treated it like the norm and it became commonplace. After a while, he even made championships seem commonplace.

What you are willing to brag about reveals the limits of your past accomplishments, you current ambitions and future expectations. So broadcast that all three of those things are high by raising your bragging threshold accordingly.

Avoid Screening Your Calls As Much As You Can

Society and technology makes it easier than ever to postpone or avoid confrontation. First the answering machine made it easy to screen calls. Then Caller ID made it even easier, as you knew who was calling from the moment the phone started ringing. This was huge for me, and I would screen all my calls for no reason. I would especially screen calls from numbers I didn’t recognize.

What I grew to realize is that the extent to which you screen phone calls is the extent to which things in your life are incongruent and out of whack. When every aspect of your life is in place, from your job performance to your personal finances to your love life to your friendships, you don’t have to screen calls. Think of the times in your life when you were most obsessed with screening phone calls. You were probably juggling multiple women and pretending you weren’t. You were probably bad about paying your bills and had a lot of creditors and collection agencies calling you. You were routinely overpromising and undelivering to friends and employers and as a result had to dodge them until you caught up on the things you promised them. And so on.

Routinely resorting to call screening puts you in a comfort zone where you allow these dysfunctions to never get fixed, or even worsen. That’s why you have to set a goal for yourself to never screen calls again. Now of course there are times when you won’t pick up your phone, like in a public library or a business meeting, but this is not the same as call screening as you would avoid that call no matter who was calling, because the timing is inconvenient and it would be offensive to people around you if you picked up at that moment. That’s fine. It’s the selective avoidance of phone calls you want to eliminate.

When you resolve to not screen phone calls anymore, this is what happens: You find yourself making sure your bills are paid, because if your creditors call, you’re going to be forced to speak to them. You start being honest about what you want from relationships, and you tell women you want to break up with them honestly rather than just avoid their calls until you hope they get a hint. Dodging them is no longer an option. Or you start honestly telling them you don’t want to be exclusive to one woman rather than secretly juggle multiple women. You start underpromising and overdelivering with your personal and professional obligations, because you know you aren’t planning to avoid the consequences later on. You start living with integrity and realizing a lot of people are more understanding than you think. When you take away from yourself the option of dodging future consequences, you suddenly find yourself acting with more character and foresight in your current transactions.

In the old days, avoiding people was harder. Especially because people lived in small towns where everyone knew everyone else, life was much less anonymous, people knew when you were home and would call on you, and people ran into each other more because of engagement in public and civic life (bowling leagues, church, etc.) We have so many elements in our life to create distance, anonymity, isolation and screening that personal accountability has gone out the window. But not for you. Not anymore.

Introduction
Introduction explaining the premise of the series
Part 1 in the series
Part 2 in the series.

Find Good Role Models and Study Them

Misery loves company, so people often have a tendency to pick friends who share similar problems, are enables and reinforce their negative traits. Another problem with picking toxic people is that they encourage you to hate successful people. This is poison to your subconscious, because anything you actively hate, you train your subconscious mind to keep out of your grasp. You are telling your subconscious mind to keep you from ever becoming that type of person.

You’ve never seen someone who actively believes money and power are evil ever becoming rich and powerful. Even politicians who rail against the rich and powerful to get votes, if you examine their pasts, have often spent their lives pursuing status and power. Their words are just for rallying votes. But it goes for anything, if you truly grow to hate something, you will never become that thing because your subconscious mind will keep you from that goal. And your subconscious mind will do this because it feels it is doing you a favor.

If you want to be richer, study and learn to admire rich people (but those with good character of course). If you want to be popular, study and learn to admire popular people. If you want to be good with women, study and learn to admire people who are good with women. Petty, bitter whiny people instead tend to surround themselves with other petty, bitter whiny people to use as an ongoing pity party and together they spend their time actively hating the people who are experiencing success. Is it any wonder they stay stuck in a rut?

At the other extreme, don’t take it to worship level either. They’re just people. Worship is another defense mechanism of the weak. By worshiping and being overly reverential of the successful, that is yet another way people put success out of their grasp. They put the successful on a pedestal, which is another way to make them unattainable, as they achieve almost diety-like status. And people get creeped out by those who worship them, which pretty much guarantees they’ll never respect them, much less mentor them.

Find role models, study them, and if possible befriend them. Learn what you can. And don’t be a leech or a user, find something you can offer in return. Bring something of value to the table. For example in high school I had a friend Stan who was the most popular guy in school, the best player on the basketball team with lots of alpha male swagger and swimming in girls. I remember I’d occasionally see him hanging out with this chubby Indian kid who was really nerdy. Sometimes we’d meet up after school and I’d see him parting ways with the guy before coming over to us. Eventually he introduced the guy to us. His name is Marshall. I figured if Marshall was cool with Stan, he must be cool too, so the rest of us occasionally started talking to him as well.

As the months went on, Marshall seemed to get less nerdy. Whenever he did something socially awkward, Stan would immediately check him, firmly but in a reassuring way. Stan would mock him on some of his clothing choices, but in the way male pals bust on each other (that’s how guys constructively criticize, especially at that age). The social proof seemed to help the kid out too, as I started seeing him with more and more friends every month.

One day I remember asking Stan how he even started becoming friends with Marshall in the first place, as he seemed to have nothing in common with our circle of friends. Marshall’s main circle of friends always remained a small group of somewhat geeky but nice guys. Stan told me “He offered to tutored me and helps keep me on the team. He’s a cool guy.” I was surprised because of how they related in public. You’d never know Marshall was tutoring Stan. They seemed totally at ease with each other and acted like equals. At that moment, I understood Marshall’s hustle and really admired the hell out of it. He didn’t just hate on the popular guy from the sidelines, but when he got an in with him, he didn’t kiss his ass either. He got the mentoring and the social proofing, while keeping his dignity and self-respect, and reaped the social benefits from it. He learned a lot and his confidence shot up too.

Now if you can’t find living, breathing role models for whatever reason, use movies, TV, books, autobiographies and interviews as a substitute until you can find some real life ones. Minimize your exposure to any media that saps your testosterone, like an NBC sitcom or a Judd Apatow movie. Don’t cut them out, just don’t make them the bulk of your entertainment. Your mind absorbs that. Don’t immerse yourself in those “nice guys finish first while bad boy jerks always lose” fairytales that movies have become.

Watch as many old movies and TV shows and books as you can. Read biographies and interviews with old school guys. Old movies kept it real. They weren’t obsessed with assuaging the egos of losers. They gave hard life lessons. Although leading men were becoming more sensitive and vulnerable since the 60s, they were still expected to have some swagger as late as the 80s. Even 80s movies like Revenge of the Nerds were funny precisely because they were supposed to be taken as so outlandishly unrealistic. No one was expected to aspire to be a nerd the way movies today try to seriously sell Michael Cera’s characters as someone who goes from hot girl to hot girl just living his life as a socially awkward hipsterish nerd. In the 80s, his counterpart was the lead from The Last American Virgin or Corey Haim in Lucas or Ducky from Pretty in Pink. Painful to watch, yes, but they taught a valuable life lesson: More often than not, life is unfair and the weak, ugly and socially awkward lose more often than they don’t. Being your best is the key, but character and perseverance are also important.

Today though, and I think it started with John Cusack movies but hit critical mass in the late 90s onward, we got the glorification of the slacker, the geek, the wuss and the shlub. And they aren’t even losers who are good, hardworking people with character. They’re losers who are immature, petty, lazy slackers with zero ambition. We are supposed to root for them to win against the bad boy and get the girl simply because they’re losers, as if that is their redeeming factor. Is it any wonder we have so many twentysomething whimpsters who feel entitled to a girl whose out of their league and filling up websites like this one? Nice Guy Entitlement Syndrome is out of control with young men now, who feel they deserve a 9 or a 10 just for having never been an ax murderer.

So what old movies. Go to your DVR and check out the offerings from American Movie Classics, Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies and start recording right away. Don’t just look for movies you still currently hear a lot about, go for movies you never heard of in your life with names you don’t recognize. In fact, don’t even read the synopsis for some of them, just go by what has a title that grabs you. Just start recording random movies, and when you watch them, note the years they were made. Then note how the men act, how the women act, what generates attraction, what inspires men to follow other men, who the role models are supposed to be, what are held up as good male values and bad male values. Look at how the alpha males and the beta males are portrayed, and how things turn out for them. Engage it critically, not slavishly. What do you think works? What do you think doesn’t? Also, as you watch more and more of these movies, always keep in mind the years they were made and try to form an overall cultural narrative in order to trace the evolution of gender roles in media portrayals. I’ve found, in my opinion, the first very dramatic shift occurred in the 70s.

The primary purpose of this exercise is to develop more role models. Also, it’s to expand your definitions of what men can be besides just the archetype of today’s post-feminist man, and to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of each era’s male expectations. And finally, it helps you realize how so many of our current culture’s mindsets that you take for granted are very, very recent developments…ongoing experiments actually that we still don’t know the results of.

It also works with old books, like those by Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and Henry Miller.

This old movie and old book assignment was something I discovered by accident. I started watching old movies because I wanted to try a new hobby, and all my favorite series like The Wire and The Shield were ending. And after immersing myself in these movies for months I started noticing all types of things. For example, if you think I’m exaggerating about the state of men, ask yourself this: who is a current American actor under the age of 35, not including black/ethnic guys, athletes or rappers, who can convincingly pull off a tough guy role? The only guy I can think of right now is that new actor Channing Tatum. The rest are just prettyboys or wusses. Even the ones with muscles aren’t convincing tough guys, they just look like vain pampered gym rats. Deniro and Pacino for example never had huge muscles but came off way tougher than some of today’s musclebound actors. My friends and I have been rattling off names and every guy we think of turns out to be over 35 or foreign. It’s reached the point where we’re using Matt Damon as our generation’s ultimate action hero. Shia LeBeouf is being groomed to take over the Indiana Jones franchise. Shia LeBeouf, the Disney guy! We import most of our tough guys now, like Jason Statham and Christian Bale.

Is it any wonder that we’re action-hero starved to the point where we’ve seen the likes of Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone brought out of storage to resurrect old franchises like Indian Jones, Die Hard, Rocky and Rambo. Or Clint Eastwood in the recent Gran Torino. And for the two of those movies that did have young guy sidekicks, who were they? Justin Long, the smug, hipster douche from Mac commercials and Shia LeBeouf, the nebbish kid who became famous from a Disney Channel knockoff of the old sitcom Boy Meets World called Even Stevens.

You get the point by now, but in closing, let me link to two brief, great interviews with older men that are very inspiring. First is an article of quotes from Clint Eastwood where he describes what he’s learned in his life. Next is one from Michael J. Fox where he does the same. I highly suggest reading both in their entirety, they’re quick and worthwhile reads.