Y0u can be the smartest, most mature, most sincere and most experienced operator out there, and it doesn’t matter. You will still play yourself at some point. It may be for a moment, it may be for an extended period of time, but everyone plays themselves sometime. It’s just the nature of life.
Sometimes it can be because you’re going through stuff and you’re just off. You’re not your usual self.
Sometimes it’s because of the nature of the other person. Maybe they’re just slicker than you, and you’ve simply met your match or your better. Or maybe something about them just makes you let your guard down and do the opposite of everything you normally do.
Sometimes it’s the context of the situation: the timing, the place, the circumstances surrounding both of you.
Regardless, if you’ve lived and plan to continue living, you’ve probably played yourself in the past and will at some point play yourself again in the future, no matter how good you get at the game of life.
If you know anyone who claims to never, ever play themselves, past or present, run don’t walk from that person. Don’t accept them as a friend and especially don’t accept them as a mentor. (Maybe accept them as an enemy though.) Such a person is suffering one of three problems:
They’re delusional. They’ve played themselves in the past and will again, but the same deficiencies that cause them to play themselves are the same deficiencies that render them incapable of recognizing they’ve played themselves. There’s actually a name for this phenomenon, The Dunning-Kruger effect, and Robert Levine in the book Power of Persuasion describes it thusly:
Why don’t some people learn from their mistakes?
There’s a self-sustaining element to the better-than-average illusion. Research has found that the least competent among us are often the most overconfident of their abilities. David Dunning and Justin Kruger gave Cornell University college students tests reflecting a variety of skills: English grammar, logical reasoning, and humor. In each area, those scoring in the lowest quartile turned out to be the most likely to grossly overestimate how well they’d performed.
Why don’t the incompetent learn from their failures? One reason D+K believe is that the skills required to succeed at a task are often the very same ones necessary to recognize failure at the same task. “The same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.”
They’re liars. You don’t need friends or mentors who lie about their failures and successes. All they’ll do is either make you feel inadequate, especially if you decide to be honest, or worse make you feel pressured to lie to safe face and retain your self-respect. Neither is a good option in the long run.
They’re stuck in an unchallenging comfort zone. Some people never play themselves because they never take risks and settle for mediocrity because it’s safer for their ego. People like this are much more likely to drag you down into mediocrity than you are to ever pull them up to greatness. You don’t want to end up settling for mediocrity as well, which is what will happen if you keep them around you long enough. Even if you don’t end up settling for their specific level of mediocrity, being around them long enough will cause you to lower your standards for greatness because human being tend to judge their progress via comparison to those around them, meaning you’ll start believing that as long as you’re doing better than them, you must be doing good.
Everyone plays themselves sometime and makes mistakes they should have known better than to have made. So long as you’re not making the same mistakes over and over again, cut yourself some slack, and promise to do better next time.
Recognize and Avoid These Three Games: Rapo, Kick Me, and Let’s You And Him Fight
First some background on exactly what games are for the purpose of this discussion.
One of the best books I read about human nature was in high school, and it was called Games People Play by Eric Berne. The book is responsible for creating the method of psychological analysis known as Transactional Analysis. According to Transactional Analysis, people have three ego states, the Parent, the Adult and the Child. Often on the surface of an interaction, two specific ego states may seem to be conversing on the surface, but beneath the surface two entirely different ego states may actually be communicating something different.
Different ego states can interact in many different ways, both above and below the surface of a single transaction. For example, in the scene below from Office Space, the boss is trying to pretend that he’s having an Adult to Adult ego state conversation. But in actuality he’s passive-aggressively conducting a Parent to Child ego state conversation.
are the flow of communication, and more specifically the unspoken psychological flow of communication that runs in parallel. Transactions occur simultaneously at both explicit and psychological levels. Example: sweet caring voice with sarcastic intent. To read the real communication requires both surface and non-verbal reading.
a series of transactions that is complementary (reciprocal), ulterior, and proceeds towards a predictable outcome. Games are often characterized by a switch in roles of players towards the end. Games are usually played by Parent, Adult and Childego states, and games usually have a fixed number of players; however, an individual’s role can shift, and people can play multiple roles.
Berne identified dozens of games, noting that, regardless of when, where or by whom they were played, each game tended towards very similar structures in how many players or roles were involved, the rules of the game, and the game’s goals.
Each game has a payoff for those playing it, such as the aim of earning sympathy, satisfaction, vindication, or some other emotion that usually reinforces the life script. The antithesis of a game, that is, the way to break it, lies in discovering how to deprive the actors of their payoff.
Okay, so that’s enough background. The three games in question are Rapo, Kick Me, and Let’s You and Him Fight.
1. First-Degree ‘Rapo’, or ‘Kiss Off’, is popular at social gatherings and consists essentially of mild flirtation. White signals that she is available and gets her pleasure from the man’s pursuit. As soon as he has committed himself, the game is over. If she is polite, she may say quite frankly ‘I appreciate your compliments and thank you very much’, and move on to the next conquest. If she is less generous, she may simply leave him. A skillful player can make this game last for a long time at a large social gathering by moving around frequently, so that the man has to carry out complicated maneuvers in order to follow her without being too obvious.
2. In Second-Degree ‘Rapo’, or ‘Indignation’, White gets only secondary satisfaction from Black’s advances. Her primary gratification codes from rejecting him, so that this game is also colloquially known as ‘Buzz Off, Buster’. She leads Black into a much more serious commitment than the mild flirtation of First-Degree ‘Rapo’ and enjoys watching his discomfiture when she repulses him. Black, of course, is not as helpless as he seems, and may have gone to considerable trouble to get himself involved. Usually he is playing some variation of ‘Kick Me’.
3. Third-Degree ‘Rapo’ is a vicious game which ends in murder, suicide or the courtroom. Here White leads Black into compromising physical contact and then claims that he has made a criminal assault or has done her irreparable damage. In its most cynical form White may actually allow him to complete the sexual act so that she gets that enjoyment before confronting him. The confrontation may be immediate, as in the illegitimate cry of rape, or it may be long delayed, as in suicide or homicide following a prolonged love affair. If she chooses to play it as a criminal assault, she may have no difficulty in finding mercenary or morbidly interested allies, such as the press, the police, counsellors and relatives. Sometimes, however, these outsiders may cynically turn on her, so that she loses the initiative and becomes a tool in their games.
This may be a maneuver, a ritual or a game. In each case the psychology is essentially feminine. Because of its dramatic qualities, LYAHF is the basis of much of the world’s literature, both good and bad.
1. As a maneuver it is romantic. The woman maneuver or challenges two men into fighting, with the implication or promise that she will surrender herself to the winner. After the competition is decided, she fulfills her bargain. This is an honest transaction, and the presumption is that her and her mate live happily ever after.
2. As a ritual, it tends to be tragic. Custom demands that the two men fight for her, even if she does not want them to, and even if she has already made her choice. If the wrong man wins, she must nevertheless take him. In this case it is society and not the woman who sets up LYAHF. If she is unwilling, the transaction is an honest one. If she is unwilling or disappointed, the outcome may offer her considerable scope for playing games, such as ‘Let’s Pull A Fast one on Joey’.
3. As a game it is comic. The woman sets up the competition, and while the two men are fighting, she decamps with a third [or nobody at all - ed].
This is played by men whose social manner is equivalent to wearing a sign that reads “Please Don’t Kick Me.” The temptation is almost irresistible, and when the natural result follows, White cries “piteously, “But the sign says ‘don’t kick me.’” Then he adds incredulously, “Why does this always happen to me?” (WAHM.). Clinically, the WAHM may be introjected and disguised in the “Psychiatry” cliché: “Whenever I’m under stress, I get all shook up.” One game element in WAHM comes from inverse pride: “My misfortunes are better than yours.” This factor is often found in paranoids.
If the people in this environment are restrained from striking at him by kindheartedness, “I’m Only Trying to Help You,” at social convention or organizational rules, his behavior becomes more and more provocative until he transgresses the limits and forces them to oblige. These are men who are cast out, the jilted and the job losers.
What happens in love and relationships is that these individual games don’t happen in isolation, but rather, they happen simultaneously, overlapping, feeding on and fueling each other until things unravel irreparably.
For example a girl may be flirting with two guys who may or may not know each other. She may be genuinely interested in one guy, but with the other guy she just keeps him around to play first or second-degree Rapo. Or she may be playing Rapo with both guys in order to get twice the attention and ego gratification. Then she may try to elevate the game to Let’s You And Him Fight, which gets extra tragic in those cases when both guys playing the game are unwittingly playing Rapo and aren’t even being considered as serious suitors. If both guys have a high tolerance for pain and are willing to play Kick Me, they’ll put up with the other two games to an unbelievable degree. Another more extreme blend of these games can come when a woman has a boyfriend or husband and is messing with a second guy, then for some reason, either because she’s sadistic or because she gets caught and wants to cover her ass, decides to engage in third-degree Rapo and accuses the second guy of rape. First guy believes her and plays a murderous version of Let’s You And Him Fight.
How do these fucked up games originate and what makes them spiral out of control? The key is to understand men and their attitudes toward orgasms and women and their attitudes toward attention. Tariq Nasheed says in the book Play or be Played:
Appreciation is a positive form of attention; and as I said before, when a woman isn’t doing anything to be appreciated for, she will resort to just getting attention. And the less game a woman has, the more in need of attention she will become.
As I stated before, attention for a woman is the equivalent of an orgasm for a man. Some men with no game will do anything for an orgasm. And some women with no game will do anything for attention. For example, a man can go on a date with a woman he doesn’t like, just so he can achieve an orgasm. And women will go on dates with men they don’t like, just to get the attention. Men aren’t as concerned with attention as women are. And women aren’t as concerned with getting an orgasm as men are.
Now of course women are interested in orgasms too, and men are interested in attention as well, but you get the general idea.
What a woman gets from Rapo and Let’s You And Him Fight are the attention fixes. These fixes become especially important when the woman’s going through a dull period and she feels she’s not getting enough actual appreciation in her life, so they’ll settle for mere attention and cheap ego boosts. The immature guys who tolerate these two games and keep coming back for more are playing a form of Kick Me, and the reason they do it is because they’ll put up with anything for the chance at an orgasm, no matter what a long shot that orgasm is.
Don’t underestimate the level of woman who’ll engage in both games. Women will play these games simply because they have they can. If men had the same options, they’d probably do the exact same thing. Plus what better way to test a guy’s strength than to subject him to some repeat rejection or pit him against some competition and see what he does?
To deal with Rapo, you have to understand the difference between persistence and desperation. Persistence is admirable, desperation is masochistic and a turnoff. To deal with Let’s You And Him Fight, you don’t have to necessarily always opt out of it. After all, if any person is worth having, you have to expect to have to compete for them to some degree. In fact, you should want to compete for them to some degree. After all, who wants someone no one else wants? However, you don’t want to be in a competition where you’re in the dark and someone else is holding all the strings. A lot of women will play the middleman and fuel a dispute between two guys using hearsay, lies and misrepresentation in order to make herself look as innocent and blameless as possible while the guys blindly take her word for it without ever talking to each other, which gets them so heated that a confrontation becomes unavoidable. Some legends claim the Bloods and the Crips war started decades ago from that very scenario (Seriously!). Even the Trojan War was a giant case of Rapo and Let’s You And Him Fight, a debacle that could have been avoided if the guys just hashed it out man-to-man early on. In Let’s You And Him Fight, if the sole source of contact for both guys is the woman and what’s she’s telling you without the other guy’s side of the story, especially if you don’t know the woman well, proceed very cautiously before doing anything rash.
When dealing with immature, extremely young or low-class men and women these games and patterns are pitifully transparent, making us believe we’re beyond falling for them. But what people don’t realize is that older, apparently mature and people of education and class who seem to have likability and character are often capable of this same behavior, and are good enough to do it on a much more subtle level, yet because of the credit we give them we get blindsided as they slip past our radar and they suck us into these same games without us realizing it until it’s too late, if we ever realize it at all.
Front vs. Clout. Understand the difference and be honest with yourself about the role each plays in your life. Ideally one should pay attention to both, but many people pay too much attention to one at the expense of the other.
I once came across an out of print book called 21st Century Fox by Paradise. I didn’t think it was very good, so I wouldn’t bother recommending it, but it did have one good idea that stuck with me, and it was front vs. clout.
In hip-hop, you often hear the slang term “fronting.” That’s when you put a lot of work into building up your exterior in such a way to hide that you’re still wack underneath. Paul Fussell, in his 1983 book Class, discusses an example of literal fronting, using a house:
Near where I live there’s a middle-class house which beautifully illustrates the dangerous proximity of dignity to pomposity. The house is actually a modest bungalow, a one-story gray box covered with asbestos “shakes” and topped by a simple peaked roof. It looks very like a one-story army barracks – nothing at all fancy in the basic fabric. But the owner, gnawed by folie de grandeur, has equipped it with a fake brick front, with, on each side of the front door, white fluted Ionic columns holding up nothing at all. (The principle that curves are classier than straight lines operates with columns as with driveways, and has been understood by this aspirant. Square columns are the lowest; round ones the next highest; round and fluted the highest of all.) Against this man’s fake, bright-red brick facing we find a maximum of “colonial” white trim as a vivid contrast – sills, shutters, canopies, etc. The house begs the observer on no account to look at its honest sides and rear but only at its front. It nicely illustrates [Thorstein] Veblen’s acute point about the apartment houses built in his time: “The needless variety of fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress…Considered as objects of beauty, the dead walls of the sides and backs of these structures, left untouched by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the building.”
Middle-class people are the most class-conscious and socially aspirant class out there, because they haven’t ensured enough distance from poverty to ever feel totally safe from ending up poor, plus they feel constantly in danger of being mistaken for poor if they’re not careful about differentiating themselves. At the same time, they feel close enough to the “good life” that they are constantly exposed to the superficial trappings of luxury and feel tempted to partake in it. This proximity and constant exposure to luxury combined with their social anxiety at being mistaken for their inferiors by their betters, or worse actually slipping into socioeconomic inferiority through one random stroke of bad luck, along with the need to keep up with the Joneses, makes middle-class people the most susceptible class to fronting. They are extra-susceptible both to engaging in it and to falling for it.
Clout on the other hand is the substance that lies behind the front. Clout is the foundation. Two people can both show up with the same Mercedes-Benz car. Thus they have the same front. But guy #1 has an outstanding car note on the car, is up to his gills in debt and lives at home with his mom. Meanwhile guy #2 has his car fully paid for, has a positive net worth, has little to no debt, owns his own house in a nice neighborhood and is building a retirement fund of cash and investments. Guy #2 has significantly more clout.
Nowadays, with conspicuous consumption and the need for spectacle being out of control as they are, people make themselves into the human equivalent of the house Fussell described in the passage above. As long as the front is maintained, they don’t care about anything of importance beyond the front. Looking important and substantial trumps actually being important and substantial. Rather than being a means to an end, it simply becomes an end. And ironically, this compulsion to look important and wealthy is exactly what keeps many people in the middle class from ever becoming important and wealthy, as they plunge deeper and deeper in debt to do it and continue to live outside of their means. Much of the real estate crash was fueled by this phenomenon.
There are a million little ways people front that are taken for granted, and they usually front according to whatever most impresses the people they are looking to impress. Thus men front with status symbols, women front with visual aids. Men lease cars they can’t afford, buy expensive suits and property they can’t afford, shop and eat at places that plunge them into debt and brag about how rich they currently are or are going to be. Women have bras that can make their tits look any way imaginable, spanks to slim them, clothes that are strategically cut to optimize their assets and minimize their flaws, bronzers to give them color, heels to make them taller, plastic surgeries and botox and hair dyes to fool you as to their genetic fitness and so on.
Norah Vincent, in her book Self-Made Man has a great passage on fronting:
A suit is an impenetrable signifier of maleness every bit as blinding as the current signifiers of attractiveness in women: blond hair, heavy makeup, emaciated bodies and big tits. A woman can be downright ugly on close inspection, and every desirable part of her can be fake, the product of bleach, silicone and surgery, but if she’s sporting the right signifiers, she’s hot. She is her disguise, not a person but a type. A suit, I found, does very much the same thing for a man. You see it, not him, and you bow to it.
There’s a lot of truth to this. There are many guys out there who would rather an ugly girl with no substance who’s artificially inflated to look like a ten through a cheap dye job, blatantly fake tits, radioactive orange tan, botox and plastic surgery than a genuine 8 with an honest front and substance underneath it. These are usually the guys who are obsessed with their own fronts at the expense of their clout.
All of which leads to the most important maxim when it comes to clout versus front: You are what you chase, and you attract what you are.
You are what you chase. No matter how much clout you may start out with, if you insist on only chasing front, you will eventually devolve into a being of primarily front at the expense of your clout, be it your financial assets, reputation in the community, your property, etc. In some fashion, your clout will diminish. Think of those wealthy men who chase and marry women of poor character simply for being hot. They conspicuously consume and spend, spend, spend to court her, making them increasingly dependent on front while depleting their clout. They marry and stage a nice, gaudy wedding (more front at the expense of clout). During the inevitable divorce, they get taken to the cleaners and their reputations are damaged because they’re humiliated (clout severely diminished). On the other hand, if you are chasing someone with a lot of clout, be it intellectual, financial, spiritual, you feel compelled to improve yourself in those exact same areas. Suddenly you feel inspired to improve yourself and get your act together to become worthy of and deserve that person you want.
You attract what you are.The Jersey Shore is a perfect example of front chasing front. The chicks with the bad spray tans, fake books, fake hair extensions, bad dye jobs and flashy designer clothes they can’t afford go out and attract the guys with the steroid-created physiques, bad tans, high-end bottles of liquor they can’t afford, flashy designer clothes and expensive new leased cars. What guy or girl with real clout and who isn’t obsessed with his own front is going to be attracted to that?
If you are a person primarily preoccupied with your own front, you’re going to primarily focus on other people’s fronts and ignore their clout when evaluating them. If you primarily focus on your clout, you’ll evaluate others based on their clout and be better equipped to see through fronting. And the reverse is true too: if you primarily focus on other people’s fronts, you find yourself becoming preoccupied with your own. And if you primarily focus on other people’s clout, you’ll find yourself focusing on improving your own clout. This is why two people can watch the exact same biography of the same famous figure yet derive totally different lessons: the clout-oriented person will take notes on the famous figure’s path to success and dream of emulating his climb while the front-oriented person will take notes on what the famous figure owns and go into debt trying to emulate the superficial trappings of that person’s lifestyle.
A reader once asked me, “I know women like to test men, but how do I know when a woman is being sincere and when she’s just testing me.”
The answer: Is she moving her lips? If so, chances are she’s testing you. Whether she’s being sincere or insincere, nice or mean, conscious about the process or doing so unconsciously, if she’s talking she’s testing you. And sometimes even if she’s not speaking, she’s testing you.
The main things she’ll test you for are the strength to protect her both from others and herself, the means and desire to provide for her, the confidence and dominance to stand up to her and to others and social intelligence enough to both manipulate and take advantage of social networks and to avoid being manipulated and taken advantage of yourself. The general rule of thumb is that if you can be played out or punked in any of these categories by her, then she can’t rely on you to protect her or yourself from being exploited by outside forces stronger than her.
Women are of so much higher social and emotional intelligence than men that they can test in dozens of subtle ways that men don’t even realize. Men only notice the more obvious and egregious tests, like arguments and jealousy plays. I’m skipping those, because there are plenty more that are far less obvious and occur far more often.
Here’s just one example: catering to the male ego. Many times a woman will regale you with compliments to gas your head up. The average male and his ego are so thirsty for validation that they will swallow it all up like a sponge and get gassed. She’ll tell him something like “You’re the sexiest man I’ve ever met.” Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. If you visibly let it go to your head and asked “Really?” and start grinning like an idiot, she’ll know you don’t get complimented often, meaning not many other women tend to want you, meaning you’re usually in low demand. That’s one way to fail. Your reaction also shows you’re just as typical, predictable and easy to manipulate as 80% of the male population, meaning you’re no challenge and lack the social intelligence to provide and protect her to boot. If you go the other route and act totally unreactive or worse, use her compliment as a launching pad to brag further about yourself and add your own compliments, you come off egotistical, arrogant and full of yourself and that becomes a bad sign too. Yet most men will have no idea any of this was even a test, because it was in no way obvious, confrontational, tense or argumentative, which are the only types of tests the average man is socially intelligent enough to spot.
Another test is how much you think with your dick. Basically, how easy it is to steer you off-path by offering you sex, or worse yet, just the mere possibility of sex. Like if you’re in the middle of an argument where she did something wrong or you’re laying down the law about something, she suddenly cuts you off by giving puppy dog eyes, leaning in and kissing you, stroking your leg sexually or grabbing your privates, and you totally lose your train of thought and go for the sex without ever resolving your issue. If you don’t follow through on disciplining her because you lose focus and start thinking with your dick, you’ve lost. You’re now the easily manipulable type who thinks with your dick and succumbs to instant gratification and will fall for anything hook, line and sinker. Plus in the future when she’s no longer novel and new to you, you may be easily led astray into disloyalty by another new piece of ass down the line, so now you come off as potentially untrustworthy to boot.
Another test is seeing how she can make you voluntarily emasculate yourself. Many times women lull get you into a comfort zone where you’ll feel safe and in a judgment-free zone, then encourage you to do unmasculine things you normally wouldn’t, from crocheting to watching and crying at chick flicks to trying on some of her clothing and makeup just for kicks to getting done with a strap-on. I’ve heard all types of things from women that they’ve gotten men to do. And at first they’ll reward you for it and give you positive reinforcement. Then when you go too far and hit a certain tipping point of emasculation, they’ll start judging you and losing respect for you for doing the very things they encouraged you to do in the first place. And many times, you’ll never know you reached this tipping point until the damage is in an advanced or even irreparable state.
Yet another example is underplaying or not acknowledging one of your more obvious strong suits, a positive trait you may have taken for granted or are cocky about because you’re so used to being complimented for it. The test here is to see whether she can get you to fish for compliments or turn you into a validation junkie that starts seeking approval for the very thing you once took for granted. If you go for this, you reveal yourself as a false front, someone whose confident exterior is built on a foundation of sand. Tests like this are even more subtle and insidious because they simply involve doing nothing and being unreactive therefore appearing totally innocent.
Most of these tests are done unconsciously or semiconsciously and are instinctual, evolved in women through thousands of years of natural selection. Women who didn’t test men properly throughout human history chose bad men who didn’t protect and provide for them or weren’t loyal enough to stick around, so such women didn’t reproduce and pass along their poor testing instincts. Only the women with the instincts to test won the “survival of the fittest” contest.
The good news is, testing is a sign of interest. No one would bother testing you if they didn’t see potential in you. If they weren’t interested in you, they’d rather just not bother spending the time and energy testing you at all. And while testing never, ever ends until you’re dead, and probably not even then, most of it is front-loaded so if you treat it like an endurance test and pass it in the beginning, it gets a lot better. And the more intense the testing, the more she probably likes you and is seriously considering you as prospect and wants to be sure about you as soon as possible before she gets carried away and does something she regrets. So you might as well welcome it, especially since it’s an unavoidable part of relationships.
Yes, I know, this is a strange one but bear with me.
Men in the West, especially America, have relinquished much of their sexuality in exchange for horniness, which as I’ve explained before are not the same thing. Dancing is an activity that showcases sexuality and relationship dynamics, both in the animal kingdom and in human civilization.
Dance traditionally shows men leading the interaction, setting the pace, showing strength and being dominant. There’s a reason why dancing, especially with a partner, was considered an essential part of every young man’s education at one point. Just like sports were an organized activity that worked to teach men how to interact and compete with other men constructively and learn how to win and lose gracefully, dance was an organized activity that taught men and women how to relate to and court each other as well, and in addition dancing is universally considered a sign of sexual prowess.
In America, however, dancing is consider gay for some reason. Straight men, the white ones at least, hate dancing and think any interest in it is a sign of homosexuality. But this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Learning to dance and dancing at social functions were once a vital part of a young man’s education. And many of the most macho men in American history were known to be avid dancers. Andrew Jackson was known to love dancing, and he was a badass. George Washington was known to dance at social functions for as long as three hours at a time. As this site says:
George Washington was regarded as one of the finest dancers in Virginia. That is saying something as journals, letters and other first-person accounts inform us that 18th century Virginians had a reputation throughout America and England for their great love of dancing. Ladies were known to wait for hours in order to have a dance with George and he was glad to oblige even if it meant dancing all night. (One must be willing to make sacrifices for the ladies!)
If you examine very macho cultures, past and present, dancing was a pastime avidly pursued by men. In the Old West, manly men danced. In African tribes and Native American tribes, it was acceptable for men to dance. In the court of Henry VIII, men loved to dance, including Henry VIII himself, and no one could say he wasn’t a dominant alpha male. Fast forward today in America and you’ll find that the most macho subcultures are still likely to be the ones where it’s still okay for men to dance, especially partner dance: Southern men line dance, black American men hit the nightclub, Latino men salsa, bachata and merengue the night away, West Indian men dance, guidos dance, and so on and so on. I’m sure there are exceptions where a culture has macho men known for sexual prowess yet the men don’t partner dance but for the most part you’ll find the correlation is spot-on.
If you watch clips of white suburban kids in the 50s and 60s dancing to rock and roll, they were great partner dancers. All the cool kids could do partner dances like the jitterbug, lindy hop, twist and so on. They watched American Bandstand and kept up on the new steps.
So why is dancing among white middle-class males in America primarily associated with gay men? Because dancing is an advertisement of one’s comfort with their own sexual and sexual confidence, and nowadays the white males most cocky or confident enough about their sexuality to advertise it in such a flagrant and open way are gay men. Dancing among white males in America is now primarily gay simply because the straight white men abandoned it. This then created a positive, reinforcing loop where, as straight men abandoned dancing and left it to gays, more and more gay men became attracted to it because it was predominately gay, which then caused more straight men to abandon it, which then caused more gay men to be attracted to it, and so on and so on.
A lot of middle class modern men are so scared to death of advertising their sexual prowess that they have to drink themselves into a stupor just to dance. Unsurprisingly, these same guys are often the ones who have to drink to get the courage to approach a woman period. This same fear of advertising themselves sexually is what leads to these same modern men scared to death of any clothing that’s not baggy or is a color outside of grey, navy blue, black or khaki.
So this is how you end up with a bunch of American white guys who know how to relate to other guys because they grow up doing lots of guy-centric activities like sports, but don’t know how to relate to a woman with confidence and dominant sexual energy because they missed out on a lot of traditional co-ed activities like learning partner dancing, something many other cultures still expect children to learn from a young age.
Meanwhile white middle-class women have no problems dancing because thanks to feminism and modern progress, they’re more comfortable advertising their sexuality than ever. Unfortunately this increased sexuality among modern women and this lack of sexual comfort among modern men combines to create dance floors where the women look like they should be working the stripper pole on amateur night and the men look like uncoordinated dweebs.
I have a bunch a theories about why this is, mostly centering around the modern post-feminism confusion over gender roles and the overall feminization of men, but that’s a subject for another post. The point is, now that you know what dancing advertises, if you’re a man, don’t dance ironically. It’s the attraction kiss of death. Would you fuck ironically? Of course not. So if an activity is designed to be a preview of how well you fuck, why would you do that ironically?
I’m not going to go as far as to recommend that guys who never learned to dance their whole lives go out and try to become dancefloor kings. That’s an unrealistic goal past a certain age. But if you can’t dance, don’t make it worse by dancing ironically. You’re better off just dancing badly but earnestly yet shamelessly giving it your all. At least that indicates that in the bedroom later there’ll be a valiant, lengthy energetic effort to compensate for any lack of finesse or style points if she decides to take you home. That’s better than nothing. But dancing ironically just indicates that if she decides to take you home you’ll probably nervously get semi-erect and have a few erratic spasms before ejaculating prematurely and crying yourself to sleep in her arms while apologizing profusely and blaming your mother issues.
Here’s a bonus test: put some music on in your room and try to dance by yourself for a solid minute. If you feel stupid or embarrassed doing so, you probably still have too many hang-ups about being overtly sexual.
If you are fucked up and incomplete at your core, no other person, no matter how wonderful or giving or caring, will ever successfully complete you. In the long run your neediness and feelings of inadequacy will form an emotional black hole that is more likely to suck the other person dry than be completed and cured by the other person’s goodness.
Also, expecting someone else to complete you puts you in a position where you put that person on too high a pedestal and place expectations on them no mortal person can be expected to fulfill. And you end up putting so much value on the relationship that you end up sabotaging it through pushiness and desperation, plus the power dynamic of the relationship gets all screwed up because both of you start to realize that you’re the only one in the relationship who under no circumstances will ever be willing to walk away.
You should expect other people to complement you, not complete you. You should show up complete. If you’re not complete, than set out to fix that for yourself before expecting someone else to do it for you. Being happy is no one’s responsibility except your own.
The most dangerous trap to fall into when in a serious relationship and falling in love is the emasculation paradox.
Most women want a manly man and not a wuss. But no woman wants a man who’s so out of touch with his feminine side that he’s totally incapable of connecting on an emotional level at all. So the ideal situation is a manly man that they gradually draw the emotional side out of; they want a man who is manly and in control but is capable of showing emotional and connecting spiritually at the appropriate times. So at first a man actually gets rewarded for displaying an emotional, feminine side in a relationship.
The problem with men is that we’re so used to bottling up our emotions and pretending to be above it all the time, when we fall in love and find a woman who encourages us to let our emotional guards down, we tend to overdo it. Because we find that once we try it, it can be incredibly freeing. In fact, unlike women, men don’t freely share emotions, fears and shortcomings with their same-sex friends, so when they enter a relationship where they feel comfortable doing so, that relationship becomes their sole source of emotional release and that woman becomes their primary confidante.
Thus, once the woman gets the man comfortable letting down his guard, the man often gets carried away and gets too comfortable doing so, which in turn turns off the woman because he’s now gone from a manly guy who occasionally shows he’s capable of emotion to a wuss who occasionally shows he’s capable of manliness. This of course makes her lose respect and attraction for him. And the even crueler irony is, the more intensely the man is in love with the woman, the harder and stronger he’ll fall into the emasculation paradox.
No matter how comfortable you feel with someone or how convinced you are that you are in a place of emotional safety with a partner, always remember that first and foremost you’re expected to be a man.
You should be able to have female friends in your life who are attractive but that you don’t want to sleep with. Of course, I mean you’re platonic by choice. If you’re only friends because she put you in the friend zone, and you constantly daydream of catching her in a charitable pity-fucking mood or a drunken stupor, that’s pathetic and doesn’t count.
Not every attractive woman is worth pursuing sexually just because they’re attractive. There may be some valid reasons why she’d make a great friend but an awful lover. In cases like that, rather than trying to be sexual with her just because you feel socially obligated to as a man, pursue a friendship. Not only is it a great sign of maturity as a man to reach this level, you have a good referral source for meeting more compatible women down the line.
No matter how sorry you are for something you’ve done to a woman, never cower in front of her. Not only do women not have any respect for women who cower in front of them, they’re often quite cruel to those who do.
On an unconscious level, and sometimes even a conscious one, the mindset is that if she, a little old girl, can break you down like this, how can she count on you to protect her from the harsher dangers of the outside world? At some level they’re always screening for protectors and providers, no matter how progressive or new age they seem on the outside.
This is an ongoing test that continues in a relationship from courtship to the grave.
There’s a difference between sexual and horny. Learn it.
There’s the guy who ends up in the friend zone because he holds back how he really feels from a woman and doesn’t want to be sexual for fear of scaring her away. Then at peak frustration or that point when he’s forced to act because she’s dating someone new, he blurts out all his feelings at once. But alas, it’s too late, being nonsexual has gotten him trapped in the friend zone.
Then there’s the guy who’s just horny, horny, horny from the get-go. It’s in his leer, his double-take, his nonstop innuendo, his harassment, the way he stares at a girl’s boobs throughout a whole conversation. The nonsexual guy at least gets his foot in the door; the horny guy gets it slammed in his face from the start. He comes off typical, disappointing, unchallenging and so easy to manipulate that he’s hard to respect.
As a man you should always broadcast that you’re a sexual being. But you should never consistently come off as horny.
