The Rawness

New York magazine has an article on the rise of binge drinking among today’s generation of young women. It basically asks whether notions of gender equality should extend to binge drinking.

[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.

My laptop is still down, but I can still squeeze in a few short posts here and there when I can. Ordered my Lenovo laptop and it should be here in a few weeks. My laptop repair guy swears that it’s the best PC laptop you can get, although he swears I should give up PC laptops altogether and get a Mac laptop. Maybe later in the year.

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:

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.

Earlier installments in this series can be found here:
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

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.

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

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.

To review prior installments:

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.