The Rawness

Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

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Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.

I had a post recently called The Power of Vagueness, which you can find here. In the first post, I focused mostly on vagueness when it came to the political arena and only touched on it slightly in the dating arena. This time around I’m going to go more into the topic of vagueness in dating.

In the mail, I got my issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special. (I have an SI subscription.) Most of the girls in it bore me because they seem interchangeable, but this one exotic-looking black girl in it named Quiana Grant caught my eye, and I actually read her interview. One part of it really jumped out at me:

I feel a secret connection with …

Chris Webber because he is mysterious to me. I love the fact that you never hear anything about him anywhere. Even when he was dating Tyra Banks, you didn’t hear anything about him. It’s the unknown. I remember living in D.C., and the Kings came to play the Wizards, and all the ladies were in the hairdresser getting their hair done and I’m like, “What’s going on?” and they told me, “Chris Webber’s coming to town, girl!” That was kind of funny, but he’s actually, um, yeah, he’s pretty great. I was supposed to go to a game when he was playing for Philly, but then he got traded and I thought, nevermind I just wanted to see him.

I love that quote, because it perfectly illustrates what I described in the last vagueness quote. Chris Webber is a good-looking, charismatic, athletic and talented athlete, but he’s intensely private. When he does make a major statement to the public, it carries that much more weight and becomes an event because he so rarely does it. In fact, for a while it even intensified scrutiny of him because the scarcity of information about him make information about him become even more valuable.

But what I really love is how you can tell Quiana Grant has used the half-blank canvas Webber has created and filled in all the blanks herself. She’s taken every dream guy trait she has and has probably assigned them to Webber.

Of course the blank canvas alone isn’t enough. You have to have something on the canvas to attract attention in the first place. If you’re too vague or nondescript you’ll just be ignored. But Webber has the fame, athleticism and good looks that get him in the door. After that, he just has to keep his mouth shut and not fuck it up.

It amazes me how often guys don’t get this. They just talk and talk and campaign with women until they just tell too much about themselves and talk themselves right into the doghouse. Several reasons why this is bad:

1. Unless you are particularly gifted in smooth conversation, you are just increasing the chances you are going to fuck up a good first impression with each sentence you say.
2. It puts the girl on a pedestal if you are trying too hard to impress her, thereby lowering your own value in comparison. When you are talking about how smart you are, how much money you make, how cool you are, all the things that make you great, all you are doing is subconsciously convincing the girl of how great she is because you just met her and are trying to hard to gain her approval. Think about it, you don’t try to convince an ugly person of how good you look, you don’t try to convince a dumb person of how smart you are, and you don’t try to convince an uncool person of how cool you are. You expect them to get it automatically. So if you are trying too hard to convince someone you are cool, the implication is that you consider them to be even cooler. If you are trying too hard to convince someone you are good-looking, you are implying that you already consider them better-looking than you. If you are trying too hard to impress someone with how smart you are, you are implying that you consider them smart enough to judge your intelligence. Good masters don’t openly try to impress students, students openly try to impress masters. When you are too blatant in seeking approval, you broadcast to the people you’re seeking approval from that you consider them your masters. You are now in a “one-down” position from them. They may like you, but they won’t respect you as much as you want.
3. You deprive the woman of her fantasy. If for some reason you conveyed a positive first impression and got her intrigued, it’s because something about you reminded her of one of her fantasies. And each time you open your mouth to talk yourself up or impress her, you just kept painting a picture different from the one she wanted to paint. You promised her the fulfillment of a fantasy with your first impression and now you’re taking it away from her. And of course she’ll resent that, even if it’s on a subconscious level.

See, most guys have women they have no interest in that are incredibly fixated on them. They consider them pests. They make no effort to impress them, yet they stick around. Then they meet women that impress them terribly and they start campaigning hard. They call and text them too much. They watch their phones in hopes they’ll ring. They meet the girl and find her to be interested at first and get confused at why they seem to lose interest with each following interaction. What guys don’t realize is that the aloof, slightly disinterested attitude they affected with the former type of woman is the one they need to affect with the women they really like. If more men could treat the women they really like the same as they treat the ones they want to get rid of, they’d have a much better dating life. (And probably, if they pestered and tried to impress the ones they wanted to get rid of the way they do the ones they obsess over, they’d do a better job of getting rid of them.)

There’s a saying in the pimp community that touches on this concept: “The player with the right clothes can get chose with his mouth closed.” Basically, if you work on your image, whether it’s your clothing, your muscles, your body language and posture, and/or your grooming, all you have to do is work on not saying anything stupid (harder for some guys than you’d think) and being enticingly vague (but not boring) and the woman’s imagination will do all the impressing for you. As long as you don’t do anything blatantly contrary to this image, you’ll be fine.

Addendum: Something else that Chris Webber understands about vagueness: not just being vague about himself but vague about his conquests also. You never see Chris Webber brag about women he’s banging. Never. Sexual bragging is an amateurish thing the average slob does and betrays not only short term thinking but also very poor social intelligence (poor social intelligence is a huge turn-off to women).

Reputation management since time immemorial has always been of paramount importance to a woman. The sluttier a woman’s reputation is, the more her social stock drops. This is why real players rarely brag about conquests for the sake of bragging. They only bring up conquests to prove a larger point. If you get the rep of being that guy who can’t keep his mouth about conquests, women know their reputations won’t be safe with you, and no matter how much they may want you they’ll feel the risk to their reputation isn’t worth it.

Compare this to Wilmer Valderrama, who pulled a truly unmackish move in bragging on the Howard Stern show about sexual conquests. He claimed to have taken Mandy Moore’s virginity, and also:

The 26-year-old claimed Lindsay Lohan was one of the best girls he’s ever slept with, Ashlee Simpson was loud in bed and he rated Jennifer Love Hewitt an “eight” out of ten when it came to sex.

He probably thought it was cool at the time, but he must have realized his mistake because he quickly backpedaled in the press afterwards. Now what are the chances that future up and coming or established starlets are going to risk their reputations for a chance to sleep with Wilmer Valderrama. He’s proven himself to be lacking discretion and social intelligence. He should have learned the lesson of vagueness from Chris Webber.

You ever feel like society’s attempts at taking the risk out of everything are also sucking out all the spontaneity and funtoo?

I meet a lot of guys who complain about women claiming to like “nice guys” but actually preferring jerks. It’s a reassuring fiction that shields their egos, but it’s really not that simple.

Many self-proclaimed “nice guys” are rarely actually nice guys. Genuinely nice people are nice to everyone unless the person gives them a reason not to be. But with self-proclaimed “nice guys,” the only people they seem to be consistently nice to are extremely hot girls they want to bang. It’s not like these guys are running around doing nice things for fat or gruesome chicks. In fact, they’re often rude and cruel to them. Being truly nice means treating everyone well, regardless of whether they have something you want, and it means doing good things for people without expecting anything in return. For example these “nice guys” will be nice to hot women they meet at bars while rudely ignoring the hot girl’s homelier friends. Self-proclaimed “nice guys” only behave that way because they expect to be rewarded with sex or a relationship in return for their niceness (or at the very least get tossed some drunken pity pussy). It’s a transparent, passive-aggressive form of seduction and women can see right through that. Nigga, please.

But I’m not here to talk about the psychology of so-called “nice guys.” That’ll be another post. What I want to talk about is another part of the nice guy equation: why women don’t just say what they want. Why do they say they want nice guys but go with jerks? Are women just liars? Truth be told, I don’t think it’s a malicious lie so much as a natural two-part human response that people have when asked a question: (1) they want to give the answer that gives the most flattering impression of them and (2) they also go as far as to delude themselves into believing at some level that this flattering fiction is actually true. Not everyone is emotionally and psychologically strong enough to reveal unflattering truths about themselves, especially to themselves. Self-deception is a very important coping mechanism among human beings.

Regarding self-deception, consider the “illusion of invulnerability” effect found in studies conducted by Robert Levine in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (this is going to seem like an irrelevant tangent at first, but be patient, I’ll bring it back around soon enough):

• 50% of college students said they were less naive than the average student their age and gender, only 22% said they were more naive
• 43% claimed to be less gullible than average, only 25% said they were more gullible than average.
• 46% believed themselves to be less conforming than average, only 16% said more conforming than average.
• 74% claimed to be more independent than average, only 7% said less independent.
• 77% said they had better than average awareness of how groups manipulate people; only % said they were below average

And so one and so on. The book gives plenty of other examples. Smokers think they’re less likely than other smokers to get lung cancer, which keeps them smoking. Sexually active women polled believe themselves less likely to get pregnant than other sexually active girls their age. People believe they’re 32% less likely to get fired from a job than their peers.

In fact, pessimists and depressed people may actually be the most realistic of us all. One study had clinically depressed people and psychologically normal people rate themselves and try to figure out how others viewed them. The depressed people were able to much more accurately gauge how others viewed them than the normal people. The normal group consistently overestimated the impression they made on others and had an inflated image of themselves. Another study had depressed and normal people participate in secretly rigged games where the results were fixed. The normal people routinely overestimated the degree to which personal skill contributed to the outcome when they won the rigged game, and routinely blamed outside factors when they lost. Depressed people were able to assess both situations much more realistically. Studies also show that the on average people with eating disorders actually have more accurate perceptions about strangers view their body than normal people do.

Contrary to popular belief, for the clinically depressed and those with eating disorders, their problems often stem not from irrational beliefs but from an overdose of reality and an inability to deceive themselves. Self-deception apparently keeps us sane. Take it away and give people unflinching reality and the average person’s mind will not be able to take it and their mental health will suffer.

So what does this have to do with the chick who says she wants a sensitive earnest nice guys like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything but actually goes for Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides? You know, the woman who says she wants a sensitive softie who puts her up on a pedestal, but goes for the challenging, aloof macho guy or occasionally the outright jerk? She may not be consciously lying. Chances are, she’s deluded herself into believing that’s what she wants because it’s a reassuring fiction that feeds the self-image she desires. She may actually believe her own bullshit. Like the people in the studies I mentioned, she wants to view herself as being smarter, more resistant to manipulation and more resistant to assholdery than the average chick. She’s suffering from that illusion of invulnerability.

Now the other problem is that even when people do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves and aren’t suffering from self-deception, if you put them on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. In the 1990s for example, KFC did focus groups and surveys in their stores where they asked regular customers whether they’d try a low-calorie, low-fat, nonfried skinless chicken if it was offered. The response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. Execs took this info back to HQ and launched a healthy chicken line that was sure to be insanely popular. Only it wasn’t. It bombed horribly. What went wrong? The people didn’t tell the truth (“I’m a fat, greasy bastard that loves me some fat greasy chicken”), they instead said what they thought was the right answer (“Yes, I would eat healthy chicken if it was offered.”). The funny thing is, a little common sense and observation of the people’s actions rather than their words would have saved them a lot of grief; basically, if these people cared so much about eating healthy, why would they be regular KFC customers to begin with?

Another example of self-serving lies to total strangers is the average Nielsen family. It’s said that Nielsen families often feel self-conscious about admitting what they really like to watch because they don’t want to look bad. So they suddenly claim to watch a whole lot of PBS and documentaries and hard news when they may really be overdosing on Tila Tequila marathons and watching I Love NY 2. They didn’t want to tell the truth and be judged, as shown in this article from today’s NY Times:

I recently completed a week as a Nielsen family, an experience that only multiplied my doubts about ratings science. My sample is biased — three friends and myself — and perhaps my circle is inordinately deceitful, but everyone I know or have met who has ever responded to a Nielsen survey has told flagrant lies about his or her viewing habits. I don’t mean small lies, such as claiming never to have seen an episode of “Three’s Company.” I mean outrageous, wholesale, novelistic fictions, which, if there were enough people in America as untrustworthy as the people I know, could skew the numbers beyond reckoning…

My friend and I stayed up late one night to fill out the pamphlet. Seldom at home long enough to watch anything, she still felt obliged to support a few names that she had heard were worthwhile — Phil Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer, Jacques Cousteau; and, together, we pretended to have seen nearly every nature documentary and news analysis show on the air.

Having told a few stretchers, we found it easy to fabricate more elaborate untruths. We decided to be married. She inked in two well-behaved children who never saw anything but “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers.” (I know another volunteer who conceived two instant children, named after her cats. They loved anything that had a fish theme.) Rather than gorging myself on sports, as is my wont, I was put on a samurai businessman’s diet of “Face the Nation” and “Wall Street Week.” The entire family lived graciously in her studio apartment, which we expanded to five rooms with a sharp $100,000 increase in my annual income…

According to my diary, I lead an ascetic life these days, estranged from wife and children. During the third week in May, the pages indicate that I watched nothing except “Bookmark,” Lewis Lapham’s high-toned book-chat show on public television. I seem to have enjoyed the program so much, I even caught a repeat broadcast and taped it on my VCR.

In fact, my week as a Nielsen volunteer coincided with the basketball playoffs, and the television was roaring for at least three hours the night or afternoon of every game. I never saw “Bookmark” that week; and I don’t know how to record on my VCR.

All the factors I describe above also apply to women when they say they want nice, sensitive sappy guys. They are either deluding themselves about what they want because that’s the kind of person they want to believe they are or they know exactly the kind of person they are but are saying what they think is the right thing to say to look like a good person or most likely a combination of the two. This is why you have to follow what Machiavelli calls the “effective truth”: judge people by the things they do, not the self-serving things they say. Robert Greene, author of 48 Laws of Power and other books, covers this extremely well in his blog:

Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. Machiavelli calls this “the effective truth,” and it is his most brilliant concept, in my opinion. It works like this: people will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way we can judge people and cut away all of this crap is by looking at their actions, the results of their actions. That is their effective truth. Take the Pope, for instance. He will sermonize forever about the poor, about morality, about peace, but in the meantime he presides over the most powerful organization in the world (in Machiavelli’s time). And his actions are basically concerned with increasing this power. The effective truth is that the Pope is a political animal, and that his decisions inevitably involve maintaining the Catholic Church’s preeminent place in the world. The religious verbiage is simply a part of his political gamesmanhip, serving as a distracting device.

In other words, don’t be the whiner that complains when people’s actions don’t measure up to their words. Words, as you can see, are unreliable for a variety of reasons. People will lead you wrong with their words, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally. But actions will always show you the truth, and it’s up to you to pay more attention to people’s actions and react accordingly. And that’s real talk.

Recommended Reading:

You often hear women, especially feminists and sluts, complaining about how it’s such an unfair double standard that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women are called sluts. It’s really not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least three crucial differences.

First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. It requires a certain amount of social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women to rack up a lot of partners, however, it pretty much only requires a vagina and a pulse. So a man whoring it up and a woman whoring it up are hardly the same thing because for a woman to get a lot of partners is absolutely no challenge, hence no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline when women indulge in lots of sex partners because they can get new ones whenever they want. When men get lots of sex partners, it’s respected more because getting lots of sex partners, for men, is a challenge. This is just human nature: people gain respect for those who accomplish challenging feats while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained vices as weak or flawed.

Second, women do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He is definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around with these multiple partners. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread venereal diseases. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage. If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If one woman sleeps around with five men and gets pregnant, it could be anybody’s baby. And if a man is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he is basically investing his time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that is not carrying on his DNA into the next generations, which is a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint. Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or simply raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me. Considering that the DNA test and the birth control pill had not existed for most of human history, meaning that there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage, society for many centuries had a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break.

Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women slept with many men, in a nine month period, she would still only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women, you can get many pregnancies. The more women he sleeps with, the more pregnancies. So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men sleeping around with multiple partners rather than women.

These three reasons are probably why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against centuries of tradition here, so don’t expect any dramatic reversals or anything.

Now a lot of people are going to read all this and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy. But believe it or not, I don’t really think male polygamy is all it’s cracked up to be. Despite what most people assume, polygamy actually may benefit women more than men. Most dudes think a society of widespread polygamy (specifically polygyny, where one man can have several women) would just be a utopia of every guy sleeping with every woman under the sun. Some economists think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where po

lygamy was acceptable, most of the women would be hoarded by the most successful men. As explained in this Psychology Today article:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…..Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

When there is resource inequality among men?the case in every human society?most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish polygamy had widespread acceptance. And the truth may actually be that male polygamy benefits the average women more than the average man. Who’da thunk?