The Rawness

I’ve been putting off this post for a while because there was just so much to cover. My plan was to wait until I had enough time to write a long post about the whole trip, but because such an opportunity appears to be nowhere in sight, my new plan is to just break it up into multiple posts. My trip was in three phases: Stockholm for three days, Amsterdam for four, then back to Stockholm for another four days.

Keep in mind that these generalizations are based only on 7 days of exposure, so I’m sure there are plenty of flaws based on snap judgments, but I think overall many of the generalities can withstand scrutiny. But for people with more experience on Sweden, feel free to jump into the comments section to correct me or expand on my points.

I’m woefully untraveled. My flight to Europe was the longest trip I’ve ever taken by air. I left NY with a three hour layover in Finland. Then flew into Stockholm.

I was drained from the flight and immediately took a nap on arriving. As soon as I woke up, I hopped on my laptop, looked at my list of cool places to eat and drink and party and figured out how to get to those places using Google Maps. I walked from my hotel to the obnoxiously rich and hip Stureplan area and ate at East restaurant. This was the moment where I discovered exactly how weak the US dollar currently is and how expensive Stockholm is, as a single roll of sushi and a beer cost me $50. Once I properly figured out the conversion rate and was mortified, I realized I’d have to be careful or I’d end up overspending by a huge amount on this trip.

When I first arrived at the Stureplan area, I was taken aback at how beautiful the women were. You can even go to a 7-11 convenience store and see a girl that looks like a model working the counter. No homo, but I have to admit that even the guys are really good-looking. They’re just a very beautiful people. You just can’t help but notice it. I’d love to figure out why this particular country has hit the genetic jackpot the way it has, but right now I have no clue. While the tall, blonde stereotype is a myth (there are a lot of bleached blondes, but the population of Stockholm was not particularly tall, I’d say Amsterdam fit that tall, blonde stereotype more than Sweden), the beautiful women stereotype is not exaggerated in the least. I think I saw a total of two overweight women in my whole time there, and I’m sure they were probably tourists or transplants.

The interesting thing about the sheer volume of beauty is that it really reminds you how relative beauty is, and how the human mind can adapt to and get bored by anything. First off, if I was a woman in Stockholm and I was a 6 or 7, I would either immediately move or kill myself. I saw a 7 on my third day there and I literally did a double take. After being immersed in Stockhom for three days, my mind just adjusted to the new beauty standard surrounding me. I reached a point where an average girl got my attention more quickly than a beautiful one. The thought that popped in my mind when I saw an average women there was “Wow, I actually forgot they made women like you.”

Even as a tourist, I still have a natural tendency to observe and process everything in terms of how it relates to human nature, so in Stockholm I couldn’t help but make certain observations. I spent a lot of time observing how people interacted with each other there. I think people are somewhat numb to beauty there, which works in the favor of men in some interesting ways. Allow me to illustrate by going on a slight detour in my narrative. Be patient, I’ll tie it back into my original point by the end of this post.

At the hottest clubs in Sweden there is a strict guestlist policy, similar to what NY used to have. Currently in NY, the exclusivity of nightclubs have been ruined by the bottle service epidemic, which has replaced the old guestlist and tastemaker standard that used to get you entry:

Bottle Service has become the standard (and I don?t mean that overrated Andre Balazs hotel in Los Angeles either) for most high-end clubs all across the bubble. It has been popular in Miami and NYC for at least ten years, but my sources tell me it is currently popular in many C-grade cities and they even offer it in many D-grade cities as well. The advantages are still there, primarily, Bottle Service allows a group of Investment Bankers, Hedge fund guys, commercial real estate jerkoffs, or any type of weesh 9 to 5 guys the ability to enter a club with out too much hassle. But there are many problems that Bottle Service brings to nightclubs in general and nightlife in particular. There are also a few more reasons why I am not a big fan of Bottle Service.The Crowd Bottle Service Brings

In the 2000?s we have seen a corporatization of nightclubs. Now when you go to a nighclub everyone is some kind of corporate jerkoff. Interesting people are no longer found in Nightclubs. The artists, writers, intellectuals, underground DJ?s etc have been effectively priced out of the nightclub with bottle service. The only people that can afford it are the Investment bankers, real estate types, and Celebs (and of course, underworld figures). That is why when you walk into a club you see so many striped shirts that you think you are seeing some kind of 3-D optical illusion. The funny thing is that these are the type of guys who would have never gotten into a club in the old days (nights) when you were picked out because of how you looked, dressed, if you had connections, or by reputation. So today, clubs are full of people that normally would have been standing in line in nights gone by.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are still shades of this bottle service epidemic in Stockholm, but it does not dominate the scene quite like it does in America’s big cities. Unlike New York City, true exclusivity is still practiced in Stockholm, and not just exclusivity in terms of your wallet like in NY.

But as I was saying about beauty and how people in Stockholm seem numb to it, in NY getting into a club is not just judged on how much money you’re willing to spend in the form of bottle purchasing, but also on the standard of beautiful women, as in are you a beautiful women or at least in the company of a ton of beautiful women? Actually, just being a woman in general is enough here, regardless of beauty. If she’s beautiful that’s just a bonus. This makes the nightlcubs in NY horrible because the tone is set early that women are set up on even more of a pedestal than usual, and that pedestal only gets higher if the woman is beautiful. Plus you’re surrounded by simps with bottle service incessantly trying to bribe these beautiful women with free liquor to pay attention to them, which just elevates their egos even further, makes them more unattainable and unwittingly makes the social situation worse for all the men there, including themselves.

This creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation in top nightclubs in NY. In game theory scenarios, prisoner’s dilemma problems are those where it’s in the best interest for a group of people with a common goal to cooperate. But since there is no guarantee of getting everyone in a group with a common goal to cooperate, people start defecting. Once one person defects, everything starts unraveling as each remaining player is forced to make a choice: if I stick to my sound, rational principles as everyone else around me is acting illogically and defecting, I guarantee myself a loss, whereas if I also act irrationally and defect, I’ll sell out my principles and pride and contribute to the overall shittiness of the situation, but at least I have the possibility of salvaging some type of victory.

The current nightclub situation in NY creates a variant of this which I call the Simp’s Dilemma. A guy with decent game may want to stick to his principles regarding social interaction and not behave like a simp (running around and giving women free liquor, boosting their egos needlessly, all the while lowering his own value). He may have a much superior social strategy of laying back and relaxing, acting smooth and aloof, confidently presenting himself as a prize, and not lowering your value by displaying any neediness through bragging for attention or bribing for affection. But the problem is, these superior social strategies only work if a decent amount of other guys in the social setting are behaving similarly. Thisi s just like in the classic snitching scenario of prisoner’s dilemma, where not snitching only works if everyone else doesn’t snitch either. One you know someone else may snitch, your only option to salvage any semblance of a victory is to snitch first and at that point it becomes a race to the bottom to see who can lose the least.

In the Simps Dilemma, the fact that you are surrounded by desperate guys showing off in flashy ways, boosting girls’ egos with desperate behavior and monopolizing their time by keeping them at their tables and drowning them in free booze, you are now faced with the choice of sticking to your guns and getting a guaranteed loss since it’s hard for your game to cut through all that simping, or join in playing the simp game to a degree, which may get you to hook up with a woman but lower your value and self-respect in the process. This means that you now lose even if you win because although you’ve managed to meet a woman and salvage a phone number or date, every step of the process will be excruciating because you’ve started off the dynamic by establishing yourself as a trick from the very start (A trick is a desperate, needy guy that needs to spend his hard-earned money to buy affection and attention from women). And also, the mere fact that you’re in a place so full of simps and tricks often makes people assume you to be a simp by association before you even open your mouth, simply because that is the default mode of a vast majority of men present.

Here’s a simpler analogy of Simp’s Dilemma: imagine an auction item that you want, but are determined to get a good deal on and buy on your terms. Now picture the moment the item comes up for bidding, a bunch of desperate yahoos start bidding furiously on it and driving the price up. Your original strategy of playing it cool, even though it was sound, is now useless, because it only works if others do the same. Now your choices are to give up on getting the item or acting more like the desperate bidders, which may get you the item, but on really shitty terms, which will make you feel like a sap even if you win and ruin your enjoyment of said item, since you lowered your dignity to get it and overpaid for it horribly.

Now some people think that the Simp Prisoner’s Dilemma works to the benefit of NY women, but even they are losers in the end, because while they get the short term benefit of free drinks and fawning, ego boosting attention, in the long run they end up just meeting a bunch of supplicating men they can easily dominate that offer no challenge. This is why I hear women here constantly complain of the lameness of their dating options in NY. Women like the existence of these guys to subsidize their liquor intake, but not as their main pool of dating options.

In Stockholm however, I saw large groups of model-caliber women routinely getting turned away by bouncers for not being on the guestlist. Women that could have easily waltzed into any club in NY, no matter how exclusive, based on sheer hotness, were routinely shot down by bouncers who didn’t even look at them twice. Beauty in a woman does not seem to equal automatic worship in Stockholm. This is the opposite of NY, where simply having a vagina regardless of beauty leads to worship, and a woman can be overweight and a homely 6 yet still have an attitude like she just booked the cover of Vogue magazine.

Also, in NY, I can often use some gift of gab to get into a club, especially if I’m all by my lonesome. And if worse comes to worse, bribing is also an option. Or I can pretend you’re going to buy a bottle and conveniently disappear after getting escorted in if I really want to get devious. In Stockholm, though, I’d sometimes get turned away from hot clubs despite trying everything. I’d bring up that I was by myself, I’d mention I was from NY, I’d dress to the nines, none of it worked. But even more interesting, even bribes didn’t work, which really shocked me. They would be adamant about the guestlist policy. I’ve heard both sides of the guestlist argument from Swedes; some would say that the guestlist is real, others would say that the guestlist was a fabrication used to keep undesirables and the uncool out. I’d say based on my time there that it’s a combination of the two. But the guestlist does truly exist to a degree because I did see some people who got turned away come back with the proper guestlist name and gain entry just minutes later. It’s definitely not a total fabrication as some people claimed.

So basically, compared to NY, there is a lot less simping going on in Stockholm. Women are beautiful but way more down to earth in terms of egos, making them way more approachable. And you don’t have a bunch of bottle service simps approaching women constantly while displaying low value and desperation and boosting their egos by buying them drinks. Well, it happens but not to the same degree and the dynamic is slightly different, as I’ll explain in part 2. Sadly, all these factors don’t help Swedish guys all that much because despite this ideal scenario, this perfect storm of social conditions, they really have on average no game at all. Zero. This also I’ll get into tomorrow.

The Stureplan area gets badmouthed by many Swedes for being excessively shallow and money-obsessed, and I can see their point, especially when compared to the more down-to-earth bohemian places you find in southern Stockholm, but because I come from New York City where the situation is much, much worse thanks to bottle service and excessive beautiful woman worship, I found it be a breath of fresh air in comparison. If you want to get an idea of what a Stureplan crowd looks like, you can check out this photo gallery here. Unlike the club photo gallery you find on a NY club website where they find a dozen or so hot women and take repeated pictures of them to create the illusion that they represent the caliber of the average woman in attendance at the club, the pictures in the gallery I linked to really do represent the caliber of the average women you can expect to see in a Stureplan club.

Once I got the hang of Stockholm, I started making friends left and right, and I started getting into places either with their connections or by just showing up to places extra early while they were still dead and the bouncers weren’t being very exclusive yet and just waiting for them to fill up. Places I went to included Sturecompagniet, Spy Bar, Hell’s Kitchen, F12, Village, Berns Hotel, East Restaurant, Sturehof Bar and some other places I don’t remember the names of.

I’ll follow up tomorrow with more insights about social interactions, how Swedish men behave and how Swedish people party in general. After that I’ll get into the class warfare in Stockholm between various sections (very big deal there), liquor availability and the difficulty in assessing and penetrating Swedish culture. I really found the country to be fascinating in its social dynamics.

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