The Rawness

A round-up of vacation thoughts that were interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant individual blog posts:

The Illusion of Soft Culture:

In some ways, visiting a culture that is blatantly and outrageously different on the surface is probably better than going to some cultures in that seem to only have superficial surface differences from America. In the former, you get a really extreme and intense culture shock up front, which causes you to tread carefully and pay close attention throughout because you’re always hyper-aware and conscious of cultural differences.

Places like Amsterdam and Stockholm, on the other hand, are very superficially similar to America.  You’re surrounded by trendy clothing, hip-hop music at all the clubs, guys and girls rapping along to all the lyrics and grinding on the dance floor like they’re in a hip-hop video, lots of American slang and sitcom catchphrases (“How you doing?”), Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers everywhere, Coca Cola and McDonald’s everywhere you turn, posters everywhere for the latest American movie blockbusters.  So you feel familiar right away, become careless and don’t pay attention to cultural differences as much as you should.  This underestimation of cultural differences makes accidentally offending people and crossing boundaries actually more likely than they would be in a culture radically different than America because you get really comfortable, stop walking on eggshells and start assuming that everything that’s okay at home in America is acceptable abroad.

I found something off in a lot of conversations I had abroad at first before I figured this out. Great conversations would turn stale and then weird, and I didn’t realize until later that cultural misunderstanding was responsible. What helped was when I met some Europeans who spent significant time in America, and thus knew not just the soft culture of America, but also its hard internal culture too. These people were the ones who helped explain to me the little things I couldn’t figure out.

You should always be wary of countries that have a long history of being culturally and racially homogenous (which basically covers almost every country out there except America probably). These are particularly hard to penetrate because so many aspects of their social dynamics are intuitive and unspoken. As an analogy, think of interactions with your family versus interactions with new roommates. With your family, you’ve had years developing common context, you grew up with each other, and the background to every interaction doesn’t need to be spelled out and fully explained. You develop various communication shorthands because you share so much background and have so many shared experiences.  There’s a lot of implicit understanding that can be exchanged just through a look or a gesture that would totally fly over an outsider’s head if you tried it on them. Compared to an outsider, you can read between the lines with each other more, finish each others’ sentences and seemingly read each others’ minds. You instinctively know when the other is joking or not.

Now picture times of your life when you’ve had new roommates.  You’ve shared much less common experiences and background. Suddenly explicit explanation becomes more important. There’s no implicit understanding of boundaries and personal space, there are less shared habits and attitudes, a lot of lines need to be clearly drawn in the sand, and a lot of concerns need to be clearly voiced in order to peacefully coexist. You have to tread carefully to avoid misunderstandings. There is also less patience with putting up with roommates because you are not tied to them like you are to family. Idiosyncracies that your family would either share with you or have learned to ignore from you now become an issue.

America is the country of “new roommates.” Because we’re such a mix of cultures, and have been from almost the beginning, and that mix of culture keeps changing with the constant addition of new immigrant groups, we don’t have quite the same level of implicit familiarity you find in countries where cultural and racial homogeneity where the norm for most their existence. For many countries outside of the U.S., diversity is still a new relatively concept, an experiment if you will.

European countries are countries that have been “families” for most of their existence that have only recently started allowing new roommates to move in with them. And the more culturally and racially homogenous a country remains, the more it is like a close-knit family. People are used to being implicitly understood. People are not used to explaining everything in explicit terms as possible. People are used to reading between the lines and understanding each other’s motivations for doing things, as they all come from similar backgrounds, races and shared cultural experiences.

I had lunch with some people in Stockholm and they explained to me all the differences in culture I wasn’t picking up on. I consider myself pretty good at spotting social dynamics, and even I was shocked at how much social nuances I was missing. They also explained that Scandinavians were not as used to explaining their culture to people because they didn’t have to until recently. Immigration was not as widespread as it had become recently, and it was not as popular with tourists as some other countries where the tourism industry is so huge that tourists become part of the fabric of the country’s daily life. On the flipside, American culture seems easier for outsiders to understand because we talk, dissect and explain our culture constantly and openly, in our opinion news articles, our movies and TV shows, our documentaries, and our social science books. Because we don’t assume the existence of shared backgrounds and experiences as much as most other countries, we unconsciously have become used to dissecting and explaining and learning about our cultural idiosyncracies.

The “roommates” dynamic is what is called “low-context communication,” the “family” dynamic is what is called “high-context communication.”  Americans are used to low-context communication, while most other cultures are more used to high-context communication.  In fact, this is a big reason as to why Hollywood movies and foreign films are traditionally so different.  The films of Hollywood are traditionally extremely low-context, which is why they have such broad appeal, domestically and abroad.  European films however have always been high-context, requiring the viewer to pay more attention to subtext, implication, body language and subtle facial expressions.

The Americanization of popular culture throughout the developed Western world makes Americans believe that the similarities between all cultures in the west are much deeper and more profound than they actually are, leaving them oblivious to just how different values can be from country to country in the West. (On a side note, this is also starting to happen in other places as well.  The Westernization of much of the Eastern hemisphere is starting to create the same fallacy, which is why western leaders often make mistakes in assessing the cultures and governments found in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Muslim countries. Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order talks about this problem, for example how a young Muslim may put on a pair of Levis’ jeans, put on an Ipod playing pop music, drink a Coca-Cola and take off to bomb an embassy. His superficial appearances and habits imply a total acceptance of Western lifestyle, but his core internal values are still fundamentally those of his home culture. The post-9/11 world really made this problem apparent.)

Flip-Flops

My whole time there, I did not see that fashion scourge popular among American women, the dreaded flip-flops. Not a single girl was wearing flip-flops outdoors, even to Sunday brunch. This post is a scathing critique of flip-flops. Flip-flops have even become acceptable for reporters to wear on the national news. Flip-flops have become so socially acceptable among the 20-something and younger set that members of the Northwestern University female lacrosse team wore flip-flops when meeting the President at the White House in 2005! The last straw was when a friend of mind told me he saw a young douche on the subway headed to work in a dress suit and…flip-flops!!! My friend asked what was up with the flip-flops and the guy said he just wore them on the commute for comfort. What the fuck?! Just the sound of hearing the clop-clop-clop sound of heel slapping plastic all around you as you walk around New York is enough to drive you crazy. The sight of the accumulated black dirt on a girl’s heels make it even worse.

In Stockholm and Amsterdam, I never saw flip-flops. Not once.  Also although I didn’t go to Eastern Europe, I met many Eastern Europeans while in Western Europe and not only did they never wear flip-flops, they never even seemed to even wear flats. I asked a woman, a Latvian, about whether my observation about Eastern Europeans was on point or not, and she said it was true. She said she actually didn’t even own any flats (and saw no reason to), except for one pair of sneakers she used if she had to hike or exercise. I shed a tear.

Part of me thought she was exaggerating or pulling my leg until someone showed me these two videos out of Russia:

Rules:

You can see evidence of a country’s overall national character very much in the little things that country’s people do. For example, in Stockholm no one would cross against a traffic light. Even if there were no cars coming from either direction as far as the eye could see, no one would cross unless the traffic signal gave them the okay. In NY, people are itching for any break in the traffic to exploit in order to cross the street, regardless of what the traffic signal displays. I think it speaks a lot about each country’s attitude toward symbols of authority. This country, after all, was founded on resistance to authority figures if you think about it.

Legs

The legs on women in Stockholm and Amsterdam were great. I don’t think I saw a pair of bad legs or cankles at all while there. It’s got to be all the walking and biking.

In Stockholm you walk all the time. Unless it’s an impractical distance to walk or you are in danger of being late, you are going to be walking to where you have to go. Even if you have a long distance to cover to go home, you’ll probably walk. Going to the afterparty while drunk and in your club clothes? You’ll probably still do the walk, even if it’s 15 or 20 minutes. Drunk off your ass and a twenty minutes or a half hour from home? You may still walk.

Distances that most Americans would call a taxi for are totally natural to walk for Swedish people. I walked everywhere all the time, and no matter what time it was there were plenty of other people taking long walks too. I could be walking back to my hotel at 5 AM and see someone else taking a long walk at 5 AM too, walking in front of me for 20 minutes.

I love walking, so I was right at home. While there though I thought about all my friends back home, some of whom are even gym rats and exercise freaks that will kill the cardio machine, that absolutely hate real world walking. I can have friends that crush the stairmaster daily but bitch if we have to walk a block too far from the car to the bar. Even as a gym cardio lover myself, I’ve got to say that I never got weight loss results as drastic as what I got from walking everywhere I needed to go in Europe. I would just add an extra 15-20 minutes for everywhere I had to go and instead of taking a train or bus or taxi I’d walk. Over the course of a day I must have covered miles. I also spent my mornings and afternoons doing walking tours from my guidebook and inviting total strangers along.

I hate to sound like a typical American Europhile snob (and anyone who reads this blog knows I hate that type), but even I have to admit: I totally see why Americans are so much fatter than Europeans. Gyms aren’t even fashionable there as they are here in America yet people looked great and were on average in better shape just by being less lazy and incorporating more activity in their every day lives. Cumulatively all that walking really adds up over time.

In Amsterdam, it’s not just walking but bikes also. People bike everywhere. The whole city is built to be bike-friendly, and there are actually more bikes than people, estimated at 1.5-2 bikes per person. You see businessmen in suits commuting to work on bikes, hot girls made up and dressed to the nines in eveningwear headed to and from the supertrendy club on bikes, stumbling drunk guys and girls getting on bikes and cycling groggily home. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and you will see people biking around. Apparently bike theft is so common people don’t want to invest too much in a nice bike, so you won’t see much of those multithousand dollar bikes that are popular with yuppies here. Bikes are the hot commodity there.

There is no bicycle stigma. I didn’t meet a single person there who owned a car, and you can even show up on a date with a bicycle and not be labeled a loser if you are a guy. A woman can get made up and look glamorous yet show up to her date on a bicycle too. No expectations of the guy showing up in a nice car like in America.

Anyway, it’s no wonder that great legs are so common there. No homo, but even a lot of the guys had great legs too. Guess that’s why so many of them can get away with those skinny jeans. I met one chubby, Seth Rogen sized guy there, the only fat guy I met on the whole trip. Life sucked for him, he said. I told him to come to America where he’d be “average.”

True Stereotypes:

I did my research for this trip backwards. Rather than study the cultures beforehand, I did no research on cultural etiquette. I didn’t want to be biased and arrive with prejudgments. I wanted all my conclusions to be made from firsthand experience or from things I learned directly from natives. After I came back, though, I did a lot of cultural research to see if the conclusions I made matched what the accepted stereotypes were.

Even though I was only in two cities, Stockholm and Amsterdam, I met tourists and transplanted Europeans from a lot of different countries, to the point I feel comfortable in making generalizations about more than just two European countries. Based on what I experienced myself, I think this series of links below from the site Daily Candor are the most accurate descriptions I’ve seen of European stereotypes that are true:

• What Americans Think About Europeans – Great piece, first goes into what insular white Americans thnk about Europe, then discusses what American subgroups like blacks, latinos, Asians, Indians, gays and hipsters think of Europe. Uncannily accurate.
• What Europeans Think About Each Other
• 10 things you probably didn?t know about the Dutch and the Netherlands

Muslims

Based on my readings before I arrived in Europe, I expected the political correctness in day-to-day life there to be utterly oppressive and stifling. So I was quite surprised to see how open people were about Muslim-bashing there.

It seems that in public discourse, in political speeches and initiatives and in the mass media, political correctness and avoidance of offending Muslims is the norm. The political correctness of our media has nothing on what goes on there. It’s so bad that you can basically tell when a crime story there is about a Muslim because they’ll conveniently omit any hint of name, race or religion.

So it caught me quite off-guard when I found the people on the street to be incredibly blunt about their frustration or outright dislike of Muslims. Once people felt you out and could tell you wouln’t be offended, they’d cut loose in one-on-one interactions, especially when liquor was involved. People there seem sick of the political correctness, of the refusal of Muslims to assimilate, and the supposedly disrespectful way Africans and Muslims approached the white European women.

Apparently Muslims hear so much about the hedonism of the West that they expect European women to be total whores that require minimum effort to bed, and often approach them in such a way. They then get disappointed when the reality turns out to not be true, or a total media-fueld exaggeration. I heard about the frustration Muslim immgrants experience over this disconnect is even worse in Eastern Europe. I heard many Europeans in these supposedly open and egalitarian cities making approving remarks when a bouncer would refuse a “ghetto” African entry, saying things like “Thank goodness.” One girl even told me “We’re not racist, they just don’t know how to act civil or treat women with decency. You’re black, but you’re classy, handsome and well-mannered. If they could be the same as you, they wouldn’t have the problems they do.” I didn’t know if I should be offended or not. It’s like when I was growing up and white kids would tell me I was one of the “good blacks” like it was supposed to be a compliment (hated that).

That being said, I began to understand their dilemma. First off, multiculturalims is quite new for them. It’s that “family” vs. “neighbor” dynamic I described earlier in the post. We in American have always had a low-context “neighbor” dynamic. Getting new “neighbors” in the form of immigrants is not as big a deal for us. For them, they are going from a longtime high-context “family” dynamic to an open door unlimited “neighbors” dynamic overnight. And to make it worse, the “neighbors” don’t want to learn any of the family’s rules or traditions or customs yet still want to take advantage of everything the family has to offer.

You can definitely feel the tension betwen Muslims (both the Middle Eastern and black African variety) and Europeans all over. I even found myself starting to experiencing some of the same discomfort. I started understanding why even in simple encounters they can be off-putting. A lot of it stems from different social customs and body language rules. For example eye contact is much more intense and off-putting from the Middle Eastern muslims I met, and the acceptable personal space was very different. A guy would have no problem standing inches from my face with an intense, eye-to-eye stare while asking me for directions or where the bathroom was. I’d unconsciously take a step back to reintroduce distance and they’d just keep closing the gap automatically, oblivious to the fact that they were too close. It wasn’t done deliberately to make me uncomfortable, they guy was just socially clueless until I put my hand up to stop him from closing the distance again.

If it made me uncomfortable and I’m a big guy who can take care of himself, I can only imagine how it made women feel. Women have to constantly keep in mind that they are physically weaker than men and can be in danger at any time, so they are extra sensitive to sensations of creepiness and personal space.

I predict a strong, grassroots opposition movement of conservatism from Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe that will blindside the sitting politicians and the mainstream obnoxiously liberal media totally off-guard in the next few years. I heard similar things have happened in Finland recently as conservatives won major election victories there last Sunday that no one saw coming.

Male Fashion

It’s harder to be a high-fashion guy in Europe. In America, the average man is so afraid of being bold and sexual in any way that he is constantly thinking in terms of what he is unwilling to wear rather than what he is willing to try. American men dress thinking how not to offend, how not to stand out and how not to be mistaken as a fag due to tight fit or bold colors. Grey, blue, khaki, repeat. Dullsville. Thus, over here, a guy like me who actually wears clothes that fit, takes a little risk with color selection and is willing to wear pointy shoes or shop at someplace other than the Gap is considered a top-notch dresser. I get complimented here as having a “European” style of dressing.

Over there every person has a European style of dressing. It’s Europe! I was told that I had to dress nice to get into the exclusive clubs there without being on the guestlist. I put on my best outfits, the ones that get me to skip lines and get into top clubs here in NY, and door people were utterly unimpressed. An outfit that an American guy would find risky was just tame and boring there. You have to dress at another level to have above-average style there.

I’m not sure if I want to ever be that metrosexual though, especially at the Stockholm level of male fashion. I’m 34 years old, fuck that. I accept defeat in that department.

Recommended Reading:

I’ve been talking about dealing with passive-aggressive people, or as I’ll call them from this point forward, Passive Aggressors, and the technique I’ve been working on to deal with them called The Rearden, based on the character Hank Rearden from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.

In this installment I described the dilemma in detail.  I also described how Europe was filled with intellectual men who were very skilled at this type of subtly acidic interaction.

In this next installment, I described the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, a scene of Hank Rearden’s trial, that inspired me to come up with The Rearden, my strategy for dealing with Passive-Aggressors. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you click the link and read the excerpt of the Trial of Hank Rearden for yourself.

This is how The Rearden works.

Passive Aggressors have a weakness that you can exploit. They desperately want to engage in confrontation for whatever reason. Maybe they feel powerless in general and have typically felt this way since adolescence and winning conflicts are a major ego boost for them. Maybe they are trapped in middle management hell. Maybe they have unresolved issues about something, and you remind them of those unresolved issues. In some form you are the embodiment of whatever it is they have issues with, be it because of your race, your culture, your personality, your archetype (maybe you remind them of the big jocks that pushed them around in high school, the cool guy that got all the girls they couldn’t, the hot chick that never gave them a time of day growing up, the optimist they always envied, the smart guy who always did better in school). For some reason, they have a need for conflict and victory in general, and something about you in particular especially triggers that need for victory.

But on the flipside, they are deathly afraid of conflict, specifically the risk of losing because losing a conflict would just reinforce their unresolved issues and sense of powerlessness. They will only do open conflict if they feel 100% sure they can win it. Open conflict, where both sides know they are in a conflict and go head to head openly, is high risk. It leads to a definitive winner and a definitive loser. It is the sign of a mature man to not only be willing to risk losing, but also, if he does indeed lose, to lose gracefully (this is a big reason why sports are considered to build character, and also why so many beta males resent athletes). Since they are immature men, they do not know how to lose gracefully without having their whole ego and self-worth shattered by the loss.

Also, an open conflict, whether you win or lose, often gives you closure. That’s why you often see two guys get into a fight or an argument or a competition, have it out, and regardless of who wins or loses they can squash the beef and put it behind them afterwards and move on. And even become friends. Meanwhile women and especially teenage girls, because fighting or having an all-out throwdown with a woman is unladylike, spend a lot of time with doing passive-aggressive and catty conflict with each other below the surface, using cutting remarks, double entendres, reading between the lines, subtle social cues, cheap shots, etc. (think of the popular girl and Queen Bee conflicts you see in high schools). Because these conflicts are never open, they never get a definite winner or loser, just a vague sense of getting over on someone or a vague sense of having lost. This lack of open conflict and closure is why women often hold grudges so much longer than men. Since male Passive Aggressors approach conflict like teenage women, they too never have a definite winner or loser, never experience conflict closure, and thus are never satisfied, which is why ignoring them doesn’t work as far as making them stop. The beta bully never stops because he never really feels the satisfaction and closure that can only be attained from earning a solid win. They keep laying on the sarcastic and snarky cheap shots in hopes of scratching that itch to dominate and win, but the irony is that the weak, ambiguous nature of the “wins” one receives from such beta male behavior are too weak to ever successfully scratch that itch, so it never ends no matter how you try to ignore it and hope it will pass.

As an analogy, think of it like the guy who tries to get girls by being a “nice guy” rather than just putting his balls on the line and asking a girl out. He does this because he’s afraid of rejection, so using a “nice guy” approach gives him the psychological satisfaction of saying he’s actually in the game, but the inconclusive nature and mixed signals that come from never clearly scoring with the women nor clearly getting rejected by the woman keeps him in a “friend zone” that never offers any resolution. This lack of resolution keeps him sticking to his ineffective strategy and tolerating this friend zone placement for an uncomfortably long time, whereas if he just put his balls on the line he’d risk more anguish in the short run but at least he would get immediate closure by scoring or getting rejected right away.

Likewise, Passive Aggressors fear open conflict for the same reason Nice Guys fear approaching a woman honestly about their sexual interest: their fear of losing (and thereby losing face) outweighs their nagging desire to win. This is the weakness the Rearden exploits.

This is the same mentality that can be seen in the looters in Atlas Shrugged. They want to be powerful and rich and have the status and profits of a Hank Rearden, but they would never take the risks of losing by openly competing in the harsh, brutal free market that Rearden embraces because the fear of trying and losing is stronger in them than the desire to win. The sight of Rearden’s success infuriates them because he gets the gratification of being a winner, which they never experience, and he gets it through prevailing in open competition, which just reminds them of how much they’re afraid to (or lack the skill to) openly compete themselves. They want all the glory with none of the risk of losing, and since that’s not possible they resent everyone who does succeed by risking loss. Using the Nice Guy as an example again, you often see him bashing the “player” who is successful with women, calling him an asshole or acting like he is using some trickery or exploiting the poor women he sleeps with, because to admit that the player won fair and square is to admit that they, the Nice Guys, lost fair and square either through lack of courage or skill, which just hurts their self-image even more.

So what’s the solution of these ambitious cowards? They disdain that which they are afraid to do, and use subtle smokescreens to demonize and humiliate those who are willing and capable of doing it. The looters going against Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged make being an unrepentant, free-market capitalist into something to be ashamed of, into something evil, , much like the Nice Guy portrays the act of being a ladies’ man, someone who is open and unrepentant about what he wants from women and is proud of achieving it, an evil exploiter of innocent women. Similarly, the intellectual Passive Aggressor creates an environment where being in open conflict or punching a guy in the face for being a dick is shameful, evil and barbaric while sarcasm and snarkiness are the most admirable, mature way to engage in conflict. This intellectual smokescreen that disguises the true nature of the conflict is what I call The Reframing Area.

So here’s how the Rearden works:

First, do not get mad or show any negative emotion as long as you are in the Reframing Area of the conflict. This is important. If you react negatively and strongly, the person will backtrack or smirk and keep picking the scab. They may deny they were being dickish, accuse you of being too sensitive, keep “innocently” repeating the annoying behavior or even escalating it, and/or keep doing whatever it takes to keep you on the defensive while pretending to be taking the high road. They may feel a victory in getting you upset or losing your cool. Throughout the whole interaction, maintain the bemused demeanor of a much older brother dealing with an annoying little sister or a wise teacher dealing with a bratty first grader. Don’t get outright condescending, but give off the air that this whole thing is beneath you but just this once you’ll humor the situation and play along to teach the child a lesson for its own good. Once you force the Passive Aggressor into open aggression, you no longer have to follow this rule and can get as openly angry or hostile as you feel is necessary. This air is only necessary for so long as the conflict is in the conflict is not clear yet and the Passive Aggressor still has plausible deniability regarding his intentions to insult you.

Second, exercise the Three Strikes rule. The three strikes rule simply means don’t let more than three comments go by without checking the offender.  You can check the offender as soon as one strike if you want, but you definitely don’t want to let it go as far as four strikes.

Third, don’t let the true nature of the conflict be disguised. Force them out of the Reframing Area. Make them be frank about what they mean. As long as you let the nature of the conflict be defined by them, they will have the upper hand. Every chance you get, you must force them to be frank about what they are trying to say. Remember, they dread open conflict. If they didn’t, their default mode of dealing with conflict wouldn’t be passive aggression to begin with. Your goal is to force them to explicitly say in a frank manner whatever it was they were trying to say passive aggressively, to make them openly commit to the insult. This puts them in a tenuous position.

If they openly commit to the insult and their intent to insult gets put out in the open, you now have grounds to retaliate and escalate without fear of looking like you are overreacting. If they unambiguously commit to the insult now you can get mad or show negative emotion.  Their main weapon is the vagueness of the insults and the conflict, and if you take that cover away from them and lay they conflict bare, they now feel unprotected and exposed. They can now lose the conflict, and in turn, lose face.

They may be caught off-guard, backtrack, and try to catch you off-guard later by returning to the behavior again later in the conversation. One tactic they may use is to be extra-charming and friendly in order to disarm you first so that they can catch you off-guard with the verbal cheap shot later. This works both to get your defenses down and also to make you doubt your instincts by giving you mixed signals. After all, if the Passive Aggressor was just being so nice and charming to you, you may think that maybe you are just imagining the perceived insult. Do not be fooled. If the Passive Aggressor tries to go back to the sarcastic and snarky stealth insults after a period of good behavior, go right back to exposing the true nature of his statement no matter how nice he was to you previously.

Fourth, don’t let the Passive Aggressor off the hook. Passive Aggressors need your help in maintaining the illusion of civility surrounding their behavior. This can be shown in the Trial of Hank Rearden from Atlas Shrugged. Remember the scene I described in my last installment, and pay special attention to the parts I put in bold:

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no – yes – that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a -” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

Like Rearden, don’t help them reframe sarcastic snarkiness as a legitimate or harmlessly benign way of communication. Don’t validate it as such by responding back with more sarcastic snarkiness. Let the nature of the statements appear exactly for what they are. Do not help them pretend that it’s just harmless conversation. Do not help them preserve an appearance of innocent jesting. Do not help them pretend that no malice is meant or no chronic toxicity exists in the Passive Aggressor when it is apparent to anyone who is intellectually honest that that is not the case.

Another way Passive Aggressors get themselves off the hook is by surrounding themselves with a social circle of enablers, people who either validate their behavior by escalating it with their own passive aggression or by never calling them out on their bullshit. Be prepared for these people in a group. The Passive Aggressor is counting on and expecting the need of other people to be polite or the tendency of other people to believe the best in others or doubt their instincts to get them off the hook. They are expecting you to think you may be overreacting. They are counting on other people to change the topic to safer areas out of discomfort when things get awkward. Basically, they expect to be “bailed out” and usually surround themselves with people who they can count on to bail them out of hairy situations, usually by engaging in the same behavior, excusing their behavior as harmless or by changing the subject for them in sticky spots.

For example if the Passive Aggressor makes a backhanded compliment toward you with a smirk like “That’s pretty good, I suppose, all things considering…” and you catch them off-guard by saying politely and without any apprehension “I’m sorry, what exactly do you mean by all things considering? I don’t quite understand. I’ve always sucked at reading between the lines.” The Passive Aggressor may respond with something like “Well, you know…I’m just saying, all things considering.” And you respond politely, “No, honestly, I don’t know. Come on, just spit it out. Are you trying to say x, y and z?”

At this point, one of the enablers may jump in and try to defuse with something irrelevant like “Isn’t this guacamole great? I love it!” Turn and respond and say something like “Yeah, it sure is.”  After addressing the attempted bailout, simply turn back to the Passive Aggressor and pick up right where you left off without a hint of malice: “So as I was saying, were you trying to say x, y and z? I just want to be clear.”

Fifth, force the Passive Aggressor to either back down or escalate the conflict to open, naked aggression. The point of not letting the Passive-Aggressor off the hook in the previous step is to force him into one of these two scenarios. You must force him into one of these two choices or it’s all for naught. The point of forcing him into one of these choices is that no matter which one he chooses, he loses. If he backs down and pretends he didn’t mean anything bad by it when at this point to everyone watching it becomes apparent that he actually did, he reveals himself as a petty coward, someone who can dish it out when he thinks its a safe target but crumbles when he gets called on his bullshit. He ends up realizing his worst fear, he loses face. You must realize that usually whenever your instincts are telling you disrespect is occurring, you are not alone and other people vaguely sense it too. Once you hit the Passive Aggressor with the Rearden, any lingering doubts they had will disappear and they will realize you are on the right side of the conflict. This is why the crowd in the Trial of Hank Rearden scene ended up laughing at the judges by the end of the scene, even if they weren’t necessarily on the side of Hank Rearden initially.

And if they aren’t on your side when the dust clears, then fuck ‘em, you don’t need enablers like that as friends. When you get the Passive Aggressor to back down, if he does so by trying to backtrack with a long-winded, disingenuous explanation of what he supposedly really meant, let him talk and talk. Don’t cut him off. Let him embarrass and bury himself with the obvious backing down. The longer he talks and tries to explain it away, the more obvious, cowardly and dishonest and petty he makes himself look. At this point if he’s smart he’ll probably be too self-conscious to try it again and the rest of the conversation should go smoothly. After that, do your best never to hang out socially with that toxic person again.

If you get the Passive Aggressor to go to the other route and escalate the conflict (which is rare because if they were comfortable with this option they would not be Passive Aggressors to begin with) then you are perfectly justified in insulting them back, laying a verbal smackdown on them, punching them in the face, or whatever you want without looking like you are overreacting to harmless behavior. At this point, you can resort to whatever your preferred method of dealing with open conflict is.

If you do get them to openly cop to trying to insult you, you now have the added option of shaming them to the group for their bitchiness and their sneaky attempts to conceal it. You can laugh and say “Oh, so that’s what you meant? I wasn’t sure, I don’t speak passive-aggressive. I’m old school, I was raised to think type of shit was only okay for my sisters.” with a wink and a smile. You can even go for the shame nuclear option with this line: Shake your head and smile slightly like you are dealing with an annoying little sister or a petulant child and slowly state “If you’re going to be a dog, be a rottweiller. If you’re going to be a bitch, wear a skirt.” This may be overkill, but if you really want to devastate, add the following two sentences to the nuclear option: “But no matter what, don’t be a weasel. No one respects a weasel.” But that’s just cruel.

Keep in mind, if this does not shut the Passive Aggressor down and he’s still trying to save face by yapping back and forth after you expose and embarrass them with the Rearden, you have to either beat their ass or laugh at them and leave. Sticking around to keep trading barbs after you succeed with the Rearden just starts looking bitchy and catty and is an easy way to turn your victory into a loss and place yourself on the Passive Aggressors level. Either say you are not going to sit around and bicker like a woman, and invite him to fight. If the Passive Aggressor tries to use this as proof that you are barbaric or put you down for choosing this option, just say “Spoken like a true coward. I expected no less.” And walk away. If you do end up fighting, make sure you fucking win. If there’s any doubt, don’t go that route. If you choose the route of leaving, simply get up and say “I don’t know when you threw in the towel and gave up on living life as a man, but I do know bitchassness is contagious. I’m out.”

Now I’m going to illustrate how I used the Rearden in Europe during my vacation with a few examples.

Recommended Reading:

Yesterday I discussed the current phenomenon of beta male confrontation, where we live in a society of passive-aggressive men whose default mode for dealing with conflict, no, the world in general, is through a constant stream of snark and sarcasm. And like I mentioned yesterday, the ways most people choose to deal with it are all less than satisfactory.

The guy I described yesterday who was full of backhanded compliments and subliminal insults I just chose to stop hanging out with because it was so annoying and toxic, but I realized I needed to find a way to deal with that type of behavior because in big cities like NY you’re always going to encounter it again. What makes it so tricky is that it’s barely aggressive enough to leave a sting, but passive enough that if you react to it you look like you’re blowing things out of proportion and he can always plausibly deny guilt. I find no shortage of advice on how to deal with tough guys, but nowadays they’re becoming a dying breed, especially in the big, civilized yuppified city so the advice doesn’t come in handy as often as you’d think.

There’s a theory that if you pose a problem to your subconscious mind and sincerely want to solve it, you’re subconscious mind will work on it in the background until it comes up with a solution. It’s a theory I’ve subscribed to since first hearing it (can’t remember where though). But I think that was the mechanism at play when I was rereading one of my favorite books Atlas Shrugged and everything clicked. It was during one of the most pivotal scenes of the book, The Trial of Hank Rearden. Hank Rearden is a successful businessman who has become a victim of class warfare and is subjected to a sham kangaroo court trial by the government, which is determined to punish him for defying their excessive restrictions and socialist efforts to redistribute his wealth (parts in bold emphasized by me are the parts most relevant to the Rearden technique):

JUDGE: “Are we to understand,” asked the judge, “that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?”

REARDEN: “I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

“What … do you mean?”

“I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.”

“Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognise its right to do so?”

“Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes – by refusing to buy my product.”

“We are speaking of … other methods.”

“Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters – and I recognise it as such.”

“Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself.”

“I said that I would not defend myself.”

“But this is unheard of! Do you realise the gravity of the charge against you?”

“I do not care to consider it.”

“Do you realise the possible consequences of your stand?”

“Fully.”

“It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Impose it.”

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. “This is unprecedented,” he said.

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no … yes … that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a –” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defence!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen,” said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

Rather than just spell it out for people, I’d rather let it marinate in your heads for a bit before describing it in action.

Next: The Rearden in Action

Recommended Reading:

I was supposed to make this the final part of my European trip posts, but it was taking too long to write. Not only would it be inhumanly long and earn me my usual complaints about writing lengthy posts, it was creating a long gap in my posting. So I’m breaking up what was supposed to be my final post on this topic into 3 parts.

The BMOG (Beta Male Other Guy)

I’ve always had a problem with two social scenarios. Friends acting dickish to me and confrontation of a passive-aggressive, snarky, sarcastic variety. When a stranger acts overtly dickish to me, calling them on it is not a problem, but when it’s a friend it always used to catch me off-guard or make me doubt what was happening because I would often refuse to believe what my senses were telling me. This was especially true the closer I was to the person. As for the passive-aggressive confrontation, this used to be a problem for me because people who are really skilled at it know how to be just aggressive enough to let a sting be felt by their words, but passive enough that they could deny malicious intent if you call them on it and make you look like you’re the one overreacting. And if they’re really good at being passive-aggressive or you doubt your instincts in the slightest way, they can honestly make you wonder if you are imagining insults and being too sensitive. Or maybe you are overreacting.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="191" caption="Stephen Colbert: Basic Snarky Sarcasm = "Brilliant Political Commentary""][/caption]

I always hear other men complain about having to watch out for alpha males in social situations, but I think in our feminized society this is an outdated concern. You have more to worry about from a beta male sneakily chipping away at you in a social situation with subtle, cutting remarks calculated to make you look bad while looking somewhat innocent in nature. These people have spent a lifetime honing these bitch skills, and to compete with them on it when you are not used to being in that mindset is suicide, similar to being a weekend warrior who picks up a basketball once a month at the playground going up against an NBA player. People like this, the Mo Roccas and Stephen Colberts of the world, usually spend just about every waking moment looking for an opportunity to be sarcastic or snarky, and have also gotten the balance between passive and aggressive just right to the point they can always deny having done anything wrong.

There was a guy I knew that was filled with these subliminal cheap shots, backhanded compliments and stealth insults, and it drove me crazy for several reasons. First, that type of behavior is catty and not unlike a teenage girl. It’s true beta male behavior. Second, if you return in kind and start responding with your own sarcastic comments, backhanded compliments and stealth insults, you just end up with two people looking like bitches rather than one. Both of you lose, and neither of you impress anyone, or at least anyone worth impressing. It’s a race to the bottom. Third, if you let it slide, you get a gnawing feeling of being punked and having let a person get over on you. Fourth, if you call them on the carpet, you look like an overreacting brute in a society that penalizes a man for doing real man shit.

The more intellectual a person deems himself to be, and the more arrogant he is about his own perceived intellect (doesn’t matter if the person is actually smart, just that he believes himself to be exceptionally so), the more likely he is to engage in this beta behavior. In Europe, particular Amsterdam, I found there were a lot more intellectual people there. And I mean sincerely intellectual, not the Stuff White People Like type of intellectual you find in big, American cities where people think they are brilliant freethinkers just for listening to NPR, pretending to like soccer, eating organic produce from Whole Foods and working Bush-bashing into every conversation they can. The intellectuals I found in Europe really had some interesting things to say about a wide variety of topics and showed some real intellectual curiosity.

The probing conversations I had with some of these types were a big plus of my trip. We discussed philosophy, world history, race, gender roles, happiness, great thinkers, Americas soft culture, and a host of other topics. Unfortunately, there was also a negative: having to deal with a small group of these intellectuals who were very arrogant about their European superiority and would look to engage in the beta confrontation I described above, especially once they discovered I was American.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="181" caption="Mo Rocca - Ultimate Embodiment of Snarky Beta Male"][/caption]

I found with the European variety of beta jerk, there are two stereotypes they would have about Americans. They either would think you were a stupid, testosterone fueled neanderthal that was too crude and unrefined to grasp the subtle nuances of irony and sarcasm and they could insult you to your face on all the reasons why America was evil and stupid and you wouldn’t get it. Or you were the type of intellectual American that was savvy and nuanced enough to grasp irony and sarcasm, in which case they expected you to be a Europhile and a self-hating American, a latte liberal from a big city that would agree with all the America-bashing he had to share, lament at your misfortune at being born in such a stupid, evil country and would bend over backwards to prove how much more enlightened you were than the average American neanderthal.

Little did these types know that although I was an American who was savvy and nuanced enough to grasp irony and sarcasm, thereby knowing when they were trying to put me down, I still refused to beg forgiveness for being American or apologize for my country in any way. I was as pro-American as the stereotypical neanderthal cowboy they loved to mock. This lead to some interesting confrontations.

But best of all, it gave me a chance to test out the new response I had been working on for dealing with the sneaky sarcasm and snarkiness of beta male confrontation: The Rearden.

Next: The Rearden

When I arrived in Amsterdam, I went to my hotel, the Pulitzer. I must say, the hotel itself was worthy of being a tourist attraction, it was that beautiful.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="View From The Front of Hotel"][/caption]

This picture is the Canal and dock that are situated directly before the front door of the hotel.

The actual front door of the hotel is below:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="Hotel Front Door"][/caption]

It all had a very Old World flavor to it, especially the quaint design of my room and the courtyards:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="My Room"][/caption] [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="Courtyard"][/caption] [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="448" caption="More Courtyards"][/caption]

It was set up very much like a maze, with access to various courtyards. The hotel is so beautiful that it is listed as one of the places to see in the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die: A Traveler’s Life List. I didn’t know this little tidbit until after I got back home and purchased the book, so I was totally unprepared for the beauty of the hotel when I arrived.

The duration of my stay was from Sunday night to Thursday morning. However, most places were dead. Unlike Stockholm, which was pretty much jumping every night of the week during the summer, Amsterdam is very much dead. The partying happens from Thursday to Saturday, and to a lesser extent Sunday, which is still a party night but not that jumping. There was only one really good place that Sunday night, called Jimmy Woo, which from the outside seemed like an incredibly nice hotspot. Like my first night in Stockholm, I went out early, dressed to the nines, stepped to door and…was totally dissed for not being on the guestlist. Mentioned the usual stuff, that I was from NY, on my own, ready to spend money, I was a record producer, everything. They did not budge. As I said before European guestlists are tough. Much tougher than the average NY guestlist. In fact, if you look at reviews of the club online, you’ll see most of the spot focus on how hard it is to get in and what a general disappointment it is once you enter, as it seems most of the people inside focus on showing off and profiling. I went to another club named Paradiso, had a so-so time. It’s supposed to normally be a good club, but on the night I went they chose to have a surprise pageant for Mr. Gay Amsterdam or something, so it was filled with homos that night. Yay.

From Monday to Wednesday, everything was DEAD. One of the funny things about Amsterdam, Americans have a stereotype about it being an all-day, all-night party and expect Dutch people to be these hard-partying degenerates, but the only people really acting crazy and walking around stoned on space cakes were American and British tourists so far as I could see.

Dutch people are surprisingly chill and laid back. They seem unfazed by the Red Light District. I saw mothers and young daughters being led through the Red Light district walking between the rows of whores in the windows like it was the most normal thing on earth. I even saw what seemed to be a field trip of young boys and girls walking down the corridors of whores (whorridors?) standing in windows. It was all old hat to them. They weren’t at all judgmental and believed in live and let live, yet Dutch people didn’t really seem to partake in all the vices so much themselves, or at least not the legal ones.

Even if you have no plans to patronize a prostitute, everyone needs to go to the Red Light District just to see it for themselves. It is a bona fide tourist attraction for all races, ages and genders. And there are some pretty good bars there too (my favorite being T’Loosje). What I really didn’t expect though was how anxious I got when walking around there (and it probably didn’t help that I was walking around somewhat drunk). I mean, shortness of breath, discomfort, paranoia, the whole nine. I walked briskly and was afraid to look any of the whores in the eye. And I’m not normally a shy guy or a prude. I remember the old vice-ridden, pre-Giuliani Times Square vividly from growing up where my friends and I would talk to whores for kicks, and I’ve been to plenty of strip clubs, but somehow seeing it so open, accepted and blatant in the daylight had an unexpected effect on me. Suddenly all my years of Catholic repression kicked in and I actually thought of my devoutly catholic mom strangely enough. I had a very acute Catholic morality attack and felt strangely panicked.

All that sexual energy concentrated in one area, and it wasn’t at night, in a dark smoky room or a crowded, dimly lit nightclub, it was in bright and broad daylight for everyone to see. And the passageways with the whores were very, very narrow with a rows of prostitutes in windows on either side of you, staring at you, banging on the glass to get your attention, or sometimes even opening the door to yell in your face to get you to buy sex, and the best way I could describe the experience was sexual claustrophobia; a really cramped narrow space with flesh visible in every direction, plus I’m absorbing all the intense, hungry sexual energy from all the men around me, all the emotionally detached, money-hungry energy from the whores and all the muutal contempt flying from everyone toward everyone else like stray bullets in a free-for-all shootout.

In America we prefer everything compartmentalized: sleaze is reserved for exclusively sleazy areas and nighttime hours.  You go to a strip club, massage parlor or a ho stroll, and it will usually be in a venue dedicated exclusively to vice and nothing but.  Then after you finish there you return to your normal daytime life and the two worlds never have to overlap.  It;s a setup perfect for creating hypocrites and double lives.  But in Amsterdam’s Red Light district, the world of vice was less stigmatized and fully integrated into the normal daytime life rather than hidden away in dark alleys and smoky backrooms, and it was the open merger of the vice world with the square, normal world in full daylight that caught me off-guard rather than the actual vice itself.

Once my Catholic relapse wore off, I was able to enjoy the rest of my time in the Red Light District. I often underestimate how profoundly screwed up and repressed my 9 years of Catholic schooling made me. I wasn’t sure for 15 minutes whether I wanted to be revulsed by the whores, titillated by them or whether I pitied them. Once my episode wore off, I went back to my usual self and stopped judging them altogether. The way I got that strange little panic episode to wear off was to force myself to keep eye contact with every whore I passed and force them to break eye contact first. I regained my sense of power over myself. But it’s amazing how just the aura of unrestricted female sexuality can mentally and biologically disorient us men if it comes in strong enough doses. Men who truly believe they rule the world and not women are utter fools.

As I’ve mentioned before, Dutch people are incredibly tall. Average male height is 6’3 and average female is 5’7. I am 6’2 and was often meeting women who were my height with flats. Also, this is not something that is specific to the native Dutch race, the tallness was across the board and noticeable among Dutch citizens of all races. This upshoot in height among the Dutch is a relatively recent phenomenon, within the past 50 years if I remember correctly (I’m too lazy to look it up right now, sorry), so the change seems to be affecting all races there across the board. I actually saw more of the tall, blonde stereotype that people expect to see in Sweden in Amsterdam.

And everyone rides bikes. Everywhere. Even to the bar or nightclub it’s common to see men and women arriving and departing on bicycles, even if dressed ultrastylish. At 4 AM I’d see packs of guys and girls riding drunk from the bar. There are somewhere between 1.5 to 2 bikes per person there. And people tend to buy shitty ones for cheap because it’s common for them to get stolen. It’s not often I saw a really nice bike around, and I was told that fear of theft was why.

Since the nightlife was dead, I did most of my socializing in quiet bars doing early evening drinking. I met a lot of interesting people while sitting around drinking outdoors. First, Dutch people are very, very intellectual on average in comparison to the average America, at least among the people I met. They are very intellectual, both the guys and the girls, and it took some getting used to for me. In NY, I’m used to vapid conversation, and I feel like I have to dumb things down a lot. It’s not so much about what people know here, it’s that I feel there is a profound lack of intellectual curiosity in NY (I don’t want to generalize and say all of America, because I haven’t seen much of the rest of America sadly). No one is interested in anything. People don’t read books. People don’t like discovering new music or studying history, except for hipsters, and they just do it to be cool and show off and be pedantic I find. In Amsterdam, I readlly encountered a lot of intellectual curiosity. I never had to dumb down anything. This was especially jarring with speaking to women there, because here in NY I just grew used to the average woman not having much of anything interesting to say except for celebrity gossip and shoes and the latest restaurant openings. Or which Sex and the City character she was.

In Amsterdam, I found myself debating with guys about Afrobeat music, which Iggy Pop album was the best, the music Iggy Pop and David Bowie made in Berlin, the current state of hip-hop, race, culture, and other topics on a very deep level. It was funny to hear them describe dating in Amsterdam as well. Many people expect Dutch women to be really easy because they somehow think the Red Light district and drug policies are a reflection of the average Dutch person’s behavior. In actuality, they aren’t. They’re very nice, and are very willing to hang out and talk to a strange guy for hours just to be friendly, then leave without exchanging personal information. And as a guy, the Dutch men said, you don’t expect anything just because a woman is talking to you for hours. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Even dates don’t necessarily mean anything. The guys told me that they often go out on dates, sometimes four or five dates in a week, and they don’t walk into them with any expectations of getting laid. Dutch girls are just very nice and friendly and are willing to give most decent guys at least one date to feel them out.

A guy I met said that sometimes the conversations were so nice that he was happy just going on multiple dates because of the nice people he’d meet and that any sex that happened, if it happened, was just a bonus. And they are very skilled at conducting engaging conversation I found. I personally had debates with women there over favorite philosophers (Neitschze vs. Voltaire vs, Rousseau) and who was the most brilliant scientist (Tesla vs. Einstein vs. Newton). One guy’s girlfriend told me how she enjoyed reading the works of great intellectuals from centuries ago because she found it important to be reminded of how every supposedly novel thought you’ve ever had and patted yourself on the back for today was already thought up centuries ago and expressed a million times better already. The reason she found this process important is because she felt we all need to periodically intellectually humble ourselves and keep ourselves grounded so as not to become too narcissistic.  From many people this would have made me roll my eyes and come off pretentious, but she had a sincerity that sold it.

I explained to the guys I met how NY dating is different than Dutch dating. Dutch girls are very nice and will rarely blow you out of the water rudely from the very beginning. They are very approachable. The downside to this friendliness is that it isn’t always easy to tell if they like you sexually or are just being nice. You sometimes have to be very patient to find out. In NY, though, women are so incredibly rude and rarely feel the need to be nice to you unless they want something from you, so when you are a guy here and you simply don’t get dissed after introducing yourself, you are halfway there. She must be at least somewhat intrigued to even let you utter a follow-up sentence. If she smiles and reciprocates conversation and asks you questions about yourself, you know she must like you. If she returns your phone calls, makes a date with you and doesn’t flake out beforehand, you have crossed a major hurdle and sex is almost a sure thing, if not on the first date then at least by the second or third, so long as you don’t do something utterly retarded like shit on yourself spontaneously or say something exceedingly boneheaded. Because the initial screening is so damn tough, the positive is that just getting your foot in the door is a good indication that she is sexually interested.

For a perfect example of how the grass is always greener on the other side, one of the men in the group I met heard my description and unlike his friends thought NY sounded 1,000 times better. He was like “Wow, you mean I don’t have to talk about deep, intellectual topics or have probing conversations or keep wondering if she is just being nice or is interested?” “No,” I responded. “If she lets you stick around and have a conversation in NY, she’s interested. And if you make it to the first date stage and she hasn’t flaked, you have a solid chance at sex.” “Man, that sounds like heaven!” “Don’t you think that sounds a little empty and shallow?” another guy in the group asked. “It just seems like such an empty interaction. I like our girls here and the substance they have to their character.” “Screw that,” the first guy said. “I’m getting too old and impatient to do a bunch of fucking dates a week. NY sounds way better.”

Go figure.

Anyway, one last post coming up in this series and I’ll leave this vacation topic alone. In the final part, I’ll talk about how Europeans view other Europeans, how they view Americans, and most importantly, how they view the “Muslim problem,” which seems to be the main issue of the moment on the continent.

Recommended Reading:

As you’ve probably notice, posting has been more sporadic than usual.

The reason? I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time researching my upcoming vacation. I’m going to Stockholm and Amsterdam. I am putting out an open call to anyone who lives in or has been to either of those places to contact me and give me travel, sightseeing and nightlife tips. Leave them in the comments or email me at t (at) therawness (dot) com.

Thanks.