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 described the Rearden recently. Here’s an example where I tested it out in Europe (I’m reciting to the best of my memory, but I think this captures the gist of the conversation pretty well).

I’m sitting at an outdoor bar called L’Toosje in Amsterdam right outside of the red light district, drinking a beer at a sidewalk chair. I was using the messenger function on my Blackberry to talk to a friend back in the US. Since I had limited internet access and my cell phone cost $1 a minute to use, I found the free Messenger service to be the best option for keeping in touch with people back home and letting them know I was doing okay. I felt letting people know i was okay was especially important given the amount of time I was all alone abroad.

A guy walked over to me. “How are you doing?” he said with a mischievous grin.

ME: I’m okay. How are you?

DUTCH GUY: I see that you are…American, yes?

ME: (Oh brother, here it comes) Yes, I am.

DUTCH GUY: I find you Americans so…interesting. Do you mind if I sit?

ME: Go ahead.

He sits.

DUTCH GUY: I find it fascinating how Americans are never able to just relax and enjoy what is around them. I was an exchange student in American for a while in high school. I ran track. The whole team was black guys. I was the only white person on the team. I learned a lot about American people. It was the first time I really understood what being white was.

ME: How so?

DUTCH GUY: I just judge people as individuals. But I did not understand race and how things work until I got there. For example, my team told me to go up to this other black guy on the field and say “What’s up nigger?” I had no idea that was a bad thing to say. And they stood in the back and laughed as I did what they said and got into trouble with the guy. He almost killed me and I had no idea why! Then they came our and saved me.

ME: Were you mad?

DUTCH GUY: (Grinning) No, but I learned about how I’d never fully be one of them. They were my brothers, my team, at the end of my time there I considered them my family. I never considered myself a racist at all, but I realized there that because of the history of America, when I walked around there I was automatically assumed to be racist by the black people there. Do you think that’s fair?

ME: What does it matter what I think? It’s your problem. All that matters is how you think.

DUTCH GUY: (Still smirking) I think you Americans are naturally divided, neurotic…you disconnect from things. You isolate yourselves, even in a crowd. That’s how I knew you were American. And the worst thing, I can’t hold it against you because I know you can’t help it. (What he did here was a very subtle trick. He is subtly “forgiving” me for a trait that I never even apologized for. He’s also giving me permission to be myself, when I never even asked for him permission. The general vibe is that he’s toying with me slyly and placing himself above me with subtle power plays in conversation. His sentences place him in a position of judgment. He’s in the driver’s seat, trying to steer the conversation in a way that’s subtly condescending. But he hasn’t said anything blatantly insulting yet, so i can’t call him on it too harshly. Time for the Rearden)

ME: What are you getting at?

DUTCH GUY: I’m not trying to get at anything.

ME: You’ve come to sit with me, tell me your life story, and a bunch of negative things about Americans and then say these negative things are the reason you knew I was American. I’m impatient. Just get to the point of where you’re trying to go with this. I tend to be a very direct guy.

DUTCH GUY: (Speechless, pauses for a bit) I just feel that Americans isolate themselves and live in their own world like no one else exists. A very, how do you say, self-focused…

ME: Is that a nice way of saying narcissistic?

DUTCH GUY: No, I wasn’t saying that, I was…um…

ME: No, you weren’t saying it. You were implying it. I’m the one explicitly saying it.

DUTCH GUY: I’m sorry…I’m not trying to offend, I…uh…

ME: No, you weren’t trying to offend, you were trying to insult me without offending. That’s even worse because it’s almost dishonest.   Anyway, what are you sorry about, that you tried to insult me or that I called you on it?

DUTCH GUY: I feel like…like you misunderstand me.

ME: (laughing) I think I understand you perfectly. You saw me on a Blackberry, so you knew right away I had to be an American. [Blackberry use is a red flag that you are an American, or maybe a Brit or Canadian, when overseas. But most assume American. I only saw another Blackberry once in my whole time abroad] So you decided that me, being the American stereotype that I am, disconnected from the world, needed to be lectured by you, right? For my own enlightenment?  And I wouldn’t be sharp enough to catch on to the condescension?

DUTCH GUY: (Realizing this conversation is not going at all like he expected it to be, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself anymore. HIs smirk has long faded.) Yes, well, I saw you on the Blackberry just messaging and messaging and messaging and you know…I felt sorry for you, that you are so unable to just turn it off and enjoy where you are?

ME: Who exactly are you to feel sorry for me?

DUTCH GUY: No, I don’t mean to get you mad.

ME: I’m not mad. (calm smile.) But seriously, who are you to feel sorry for me? Aren’t you Europeans always going on about Americans and how we don’t respect or understand other people’s cultures and traditions?

DUTCH GUY: ….

ME: Well I’m from New York City. Talking on Blackberries all day is my culture. Why isn’t that worth respecting? Right?

DUTCH GUY: Well, you have to understand, I just wanted to talk about things, my time in America. My best friend, he was a black guy named Darrell, and when I was there we were so close. And sometimes I think back, and I wish I could find him and get back in touch with him. On the surface, we were so different, different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, yet we ended up being great friends, almost brothers by the time I left. And I always wish I could find him again.

ME: So what is this? You have a lot of unresolved issues with America in general and black Americans in particular and now that you see me, a Black American , and this is your chance to work out all your nostalgia and issues with Americans and black Americans all at once right? I’m like a stand-in for America, for the black guys you remember in the States, for whatever? I don’t care about your issues.

DUTCH GUY: You….you’re really honest.

After that, all the smirking and passive-aggressiveness left. He magically turned into a normal person and we had a normal conversation.  He invited me to a fashion show he was throwing and gave me invite.  But I knew I would never go to the show because, let’s face it, he was a dick.  This exchange went on longer than I wanted as it is, and if he continued on the same track even one more time I’d just have told him to leave me alone, but thankfully he gave up.

There were several other exchanges in Europe where I had to use the Rearden, but that was the longest conversation, and my favorite. Overall though most of the Europeans I met were wonderful, and showed me a great time. But when Europeans do condescension, they do it on a whole other level of assholery.

Also see: Clarification on the Rearden

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:

Partying:

Here in NY, most clubs are open until 4 or sometimes later, but by then it’s usually dead. Only the really hard partiers or desperate losers trying to mack on whatever is left are still out at 4. A bulk of the party is already out the door before closing time hits, except for a few stragglers, unless it’s just an exceptional party.

In Stockholm it’s different, almost everyone stays until closing and parties hard until the end. At the clubs that are open until 5 AM, when 5 AM hits the club is as full as ever, and may even be at peak capacity still. And no one budges. The music stops, and people just stand around and some people even try to go back to the bar for a last drink. The bouncers have to force everyone out, and reluctantly they leave, but they just stand outside continuing to drink, smoke, continue conversation and maybe do some last minute macking outside. Some people move on to find an after hours party, where I drew the line since I still wanted to get some sleep and actually do daytime sightseeing too.

I found the nightclub hip-hop to be way better in Stockholm than in NY. In NY, some parties still play some great hip-hop, but overall the more mainstream, trendy places play predictable, low-risk boring stuff. It’s usually only the latest and biggest hits, with some really played-out old school rap. A hip-hop party in NY usually plays the same 12 old-school hip-hop songs, unless you are checking out a backpack underground hip-hop party where someone like Stretch Armstrong is spinning. In Stockholm, the range of hip-hop music had a lot better range, from stuff you’d hear at an underground hip-hop party to the really good new mainstream club-bangers blended seamlessly together.

My favorite club there was F12, which wasn’t in the Stureplan area so I didn’t need to have booked a Paris runway show or sell my firstborn child and left testicle to get in, yet it was still stylish, plus the crowd was still beautiful but much more down to earth and the music was great.  You can see a picture of it below:

I heard an incredible house track get blended seamlessly into 50 Cent’s “I Get Money” immediately followed by the old school ultra-obscure gem “We Rap More Mellow” by the Younger Generation, which you can play below, and made it work:

My theory is that many of these European DJs learn hip-hop better than their NY counterparts and try harder to think about making a really deep and eclectic playlist out of an inferiority complex. Every hip-hop fan I met there kept telling me how I must be so disappointed by the DJs and hip-hop I hear in Sweden and how much more progressive and eclectic the hip-hop I hear in NY clubs must be. I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.  They try harder because they imagine things to be so much better than they actually are in places like NY, the so-called Mecca of hip-hop.

I made sure to befriend a ton of Swedish people, both guys and girls, so that I’d have people to take me out sightseeing or for early evening drinks in the following days. One of the first things you should do, and that I didn’t figure out until a few days in, is to get a prepaid phone or prepaid SIM card to put into your existing phone, so that you’ll have a local number to make calls on and text people you meet. Having people call you at your hotel is unreliable and it’s not a good idea to give people an international number to call you at since it will end up being expensive for both of you. Get a prepaid phone as soon as possible and give out the number to as many cool people as you can and make them your tour guides in the city. These people were also helpful because they filled me in on Swedish culture (that’s how I found out about Systembolaget) and got me on guest lists at the more exclusive clubs. This tip worked so well that I’d recommend it to people on all vacations. Get a local cell phone number to give out as soon as possible.

Even better is if you can befriend people who live in Stockholm but aren’t originally from there but are instead from a nearby city like Gothenburg or the “boonies.” These type of people are great because they will know Stockholm well and often be just as savvy as a Stockholm native, but way friendlier and down-to-earth, which is saying a lot because I already found Stockholm people to be nice, at least to tourists.

Thanks to people I met and kept in touch with, I was able to get into more exclusive clubs like Berns hotel and Village, both of which were packed to the gills with beautiful people, almost to the point you couldn’t move, and had great, GREAT music, with people drinking and dancing up a storm. And really, REALLY drinking. Everyone I was with, even the daintiest girls, were drinking faster and more than me and pushing me to keep up. In no time at all the party would be all tore up.

I think I realized another reason people drink so much when partying in Stockholm, which I’ll describe in the next section below.

Swedish men and women on the make:

A reader Helena asked me on a previous post, “Dude, you have female readers – what are the guys like physically? Is that 6ft+, blond Adonis stereotype that’s making me particularly eager about my upcoming tour of N.Europe true?” Well, yes and no. I expected to see a Viking stereotype in Sweden of huge, blond giants. The guys were not quite as tall as I expected (Amsterdam fit that look more actually). But they were as good-looking as rumored. So many people had incredibly chiseled features and great cheekbones. Lookswise many of them hit the genetic jackpot, and they all dress with a high level of Euro trendiness, like a Zara or H&M mannequin come to life. Great looks, well-tailored clothing, very metrosexual air about them…but they may take it too far for your tastes depending on what kind of woman you are. For example it’s not uncommon for guys to be so vain they wear men’s makeup. And I was told by some women that it’s trendy now for straight guys to make out with other guys while out drinking. A woman told me about her straight friend that would go out with her, get smashed, make out with a guy, and still swear he was straight afterward.

When I got my first taste of Stockholm nightlife, I was shocked at how shy Swedish men seemed. The women there were absolutely stunning, and the guys seemed to just stand in the corner with their friends, stare inappropriately and just drink without uttering a word or making a move. By 2 or 3 AM though, it would be a totally different story.

The guys would drink to get liquid courage and then turn into total sleazebags. It was like Jeckyll and Hyde. They’d come up behind girls, looking visibly drunk and dancing horribly, and start grinding and thrusting on their asses. I heard guys actually open a conversation slurring things like “Hey baby, wannaaaaa fuuuccckkk…” and other off-the-wall things. They’d drink to get courage, but overdo it and just get sloppy instead, and sloppiness combined with total lack of game is a disaster.

I also saw guys use pickup lines, but not to be ironic or funny, but dead serious, like “Is your daddy a thief? Because he took the stars from the sky and put them in your eyes.” Keep in mind, it wasn’t bad on purpose to be cheeky or get a laugh, it was said in total earnest. Some Stockholm women I met set it wasn’t uncommon for them to be horny, break down and give a Stockholm guy a chance, and bring him home only to realize he couldn’t even get it up because he drank himself into oblivion (another way the liquid courage thing can backfire). So even though many Swedish guys are great-looking, their horrible lack of game often outweighs any benefits their looks give them. A female tourist even said to me “I find these guys so good-looking but they never approach and when they do the conversation is so revolting.”

Something else this trip made me realize. Growing up, we black people used to always joke about white people and their inability to dance. Especially during the late 70s and early 80s whenever we saw them try to dance to old-school hip-hop music and the R&B of the era. But now that we have generations of white people who have grown up exposed to hip-hop or have been around it for multiple decades, I have to amend that statement: white MEN on average can’t dance. I saw Swedish women doing everything to hip-hop from two-stepping, booty shakes, grinding like a stripper on a pole, the works. I already noticed the phenomenon here in the States with white women, but now I’m convinced it’s international. Apparently enough exposure to hip-hop brings out the skanky dancer in any woman, regardless of race or culture. White guys on average however, except the exceptionally cool ones, still don’t get it. They either don’t dance, dance ironically for laughs, try to dance seriously and can visibly be seen to count steps in their mind while biting their lip hard thanks to the excessive concentration, or worse, drink a bunch to get enough nerve to dance and just end up really making asses of themselves once they lose both their inhibitions and their motor coordination at the same time. If I had to give some advice to white men worldwide, it’s this: learn a simple two-step rhythm. Just learning something so simple can go such a long way and fill up a huge gap in your game.

The people I met while partying would be the same people who I hung out with during the day, so I made several groups of friends that I’d hang out with throughout my time there. They were a great resource of information as they explained Stockholm interactions to me. Just like the Swedish men are reserved and need to drink up to get courage, the Swedish women are similar, except due to the fact that they’re beautiful women it doesn’t really exhibit itself as social awkwardness the way it does with men. But Swedes would tell me that it wasn’t uncommon for a Swedish woman to be drunk and touchy-feely at the bar or club, but she would likely be shy to meet up with you again sober in the daytime the next day. She’d instead most likely tell you were she was going to be that night, and you’d meet again at night and continue where you left out, with both of you drunk and uninhibited. Eventually it would move on to daytime dates. Despite how touchy they can be when drunk, they are a very hands off people when sober. They are not as comfortable touching strangers the way Americans are.

Stockholm men, according to women I spoke to, are very judgmental of a girl who approaches a man, or a girl they see making out with a guy or getting a phone number. It is very easy to get labeled a slut there, and supposedly guys will waste no time spreading bad things about a girl. One girl even told me how she hated this, because she’d think a guy would appreciate having the burden taken off him to approach women all the time, but alas, that isn’t that case. So despite the reputation for Swedish women being among the most progressive feminist women in the world, there is still a stigma about women approaching a man first there, unlike here in the States where women can publicly be as sexually aggressive and forthcoming as a drunken sailor on leave and still suffer little in terms of reputation.

So it seems that both genders there use drunkenness to unleash inhibitions and do things they normally wouldn’t feel comfortable doing even more than we Americans do. Since they are more inhibited when sober, they have to get more drunk to counteract it when they hang out. I could be wrong about this theory though. Two Swedish women also told me that Stockholm girls, when on vacation as tourists, suddenly become as aggressive as the Stockholm guys back home. They said it’s due to the fact they can’t be as aggressive back home for fear of ruining their reputations, and also because when abroad in America in places like New York they know they’re hotter than all the natives and it makes them go crazy. (They claimed in America only L.A. gave serious competition)

This aversion by Swedish guys to being approached by women wouldn’t be so bad if they themselves seemed to have a clue what they were doing when they approached women, but on average they were horrible. Not only would they do those cheesy pickup lines I mentioned above, they’d also do things like “How you doin’?” like Joey from Friends. And keep in mind, this is delivered totally straight, not the least bit tongue in cheek. Apparently even though Swedish people like speaking to each other in Swedish, when it comes to pickup lines and curses they think it sounds cooler to deliver them in English (it doesn’t).

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="201" caption="Some catchphrases don't translate abroad"][/caption]

And it only got worse from there. Some women asked me if I ever heard of The Game. I asked them why. Apparently the pickup culture is huge there. Huge. Neil Strauss’s book is a huge phenomenon there, but they follow it too literally. They just learn it like a script and run around doing opinion openers (a trick Neil Strauss used where a man starts an interaction by asking a female her opinion on some random topic). The women were laughing about how Stockholm men have been going crazy about the book and all using the exact same routines from it verbatim, asking opinion openers left and right. And now that Strauss’s next book is coming out soon over there, the women were worried about all the new bad routines they’d have to deal with soon. Even girls who didn’t specifically know about the book The Game felt something was up. For example, two non-Swedish European tourists asked me in a nightclub, “Why is everyone here asking our opinion about stuff?” I left a party with one guy to go to another party that was open until 5 at a club called Village. When we got there he asked me “Do you know a book called The Game?” Then he started talking about opinion openers, and how they just don’t work when said in Swedish. (I think the gist of what he was saying is that the Swedish language makes them even more long-winded than usual)

He also told me about his time in New York, and how he was surprised at how the people there, especially the guys, weren’t dressed anywhere near as well as he expected, and how the quality of women were disappointing. I told them that contrary to popular belief, while New York has some of the most stylish and beautiful people in the world due to sheer volume of population, per capita there wasn’t as much hotness and style as people I met in Europe seem to think. The average New Yorker, while maybe more stylish than a local yokel in smalltown America, was not a fashion plate.

Another thing that surprised him was how much muscle was valued in men in America. He said he hated American men and their muscles and how that made them a big deal with women in New York while he was there. (He was super-lean, like a top model) Apparently Stockholm women don’t like big muscles. One Stockholm woman told me they’re even afraid of big muscles. I met another Stockholm guy who had a great physique, and he told me he couldn’t get dates because of his muscles, to the point where he wanted to move because he loved working out and didn’t want to get super-skinny just to get girls. You can be slim with lean muscles, but mass is a no-no.

A girl told me that Stockholm guys watch what they eat more than the women and that it’s not unusual for them to starve themselves to stay skinny; they can be downright neurotic about it. I wonder if there’ll be a public campaign there about eating disorders for men the way there is here for women. That being said, as a man who is horribly obsessed with his own weight, I had to give them props on their incredible thinness. I was a little envious at their lack of body fat. I mean I’m considered a slim guy and I felt pretty fat there.

All is not lost though. There was a sizable minority of Stockholm guys with a strong cocky swagger, an alpha male vibe and good natural-seeming game. These guys were very smooth and laid-back and had great social skills. These guys were extremely cool and seemed to do really well in Stockholm. So don’t think the picture I painted above describes 100% of Stockholm men I met. The beauty of the bad game of a majority of Stockholm guys is that it gave a huge advantage to the minority of Stockholm guys (and tourists) who were smooth and had good game. Just being able to hold a conversation without being sober and intimidated or drunk and crass was huge to the women there.

Recommended Reading:

More stuff on Stockholm:

Drinking:

Liquor is extremely expensive there.H ard liquor drinks came out to about $20 USD a pop or more, beers came out to $10 USD. It’s not just a currency exchange thing either, I think even for Swedish people it’s not exactly cheap. If you’re American and are dealing with the shitty state of the US dollar, the problem is even worse.

My solution was to buy bunch of liquor for the hotel so that we could “pregame.” I’d spend all day walking around Stockholm sightseeing, expecting to spot a liquor store at some point and buy liquor then. I never saw one. By my third day, after two nights of spending a lot of money at bars and nightclubs, I asked someone, and he explained it to me. The government has a monopoly on the sale of alcohol, so you can only get it from the nonprofit, government-run liquor store Systembolaget. There are only a handful of them in the city. From Systembolaget’s own website, in their own words, this is their mission:

Having a monopoly is a good start. It means we can maintain a more comprehensive product range, more rigorous.

One reason only
The retail monopoly exists for one reason only: alcohol related problems are reduced if alcohol is sold in the absence of a profit motive. Our mandate obliges us to help limit the medical and social damage caused by alcohol and there by improve public health. Total alcohol consumption levels shall also be kept low by limiting availability by steering the retail outlet network and opening hours. Systembolaget also differs from other companies in that we are brand-neutral and do not engage in active marketing in an attempt to boost sales. Systembolaget also provides information on the risks associated with alcohol consumption.
Our responsibility
Systembolaget’s mandate is based on consideration for public health. Our goal is to establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby everyone can enjoy Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either themselves or other people. Systembolaget shall use its
expertise to inform customers both about the effects of the various drinks on people’s health and about their taste characteristics. Systembolaget shall inspire people to take an interest in what they drink and to adopt a healthy attitude towards alcohol.

Our mandate
Systembolaget’s mandate is to limit the medical and social damage caused by
alcohol and thereby improve public health. For Systembolaget, this means:
- restricting availability through
- the number of stores
- opening hours
- retail rules
- not attempting to maximise our profit
- not promoting additional sales
- being brand-neutral
- providing a high standard of customer service
- being financially efficient

Our vision
Systembolaget shall establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby we can enjoy
Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either ourselves or other people.

It sounds good, but I’m kind of skeptical on any law that exists to protect people from themselves. After finding out about this law, a lot of Swedish activity I noticed previously suddenly made sense to me. I remember reading about how during the Prohibition in America, public drunkenness was worse because people had to do most of all of their drinking at the public speakeasy. Drinking at home was difficult, and access to liquor was almost impossible except through illegal means, so when people went to the speakeasy they would hit the liquor hard because it was too difficult to drink any other time of the day or at any other places, then stumble home stinking drunk.

An anonymous commenter at a Swedish blog describes the situation as thus:

I don’t agree with Systemet one bit. For those living outside Sweden who think it’s a good idea try living with it before passing judgement.

Try living with the fact that if you decide at 5pm on Saturday to have guests over for dinner and wine that Systemet already closed at 3pm. Forget about buying anything on Sundays, Systemet is completely closed. Unlike in the US where liquor stores are typically closed on Sunday, usually wine or beer can be bought at grocery stores, convenience stores (ie 7-11), beer stores, and wine stores.

Oh, and want to try out that tequila you had in Mexico that was so good? Forget it. You have to choose between the two or three that Systemet imports (and Systemet imports the most vile crap I’ve ever tasted). Getting anything special has so much red tape that people just avoid it.

What about that draught beer machine you saw in Denmark that’s also available in the rest of the EU? Forget it. Unless Systemet has approved it you can’t buy it here, and the company who makes it will refuse to ship it to Sweden (and any beer that’s made for it).

Since you’re from the US here’s an example of where this breaks down? You know all of those very good wines from California and Washington State? Unless it’s a huge wine company (ie Gallo) you won’t find them here, and when you do you have to pay a lot more than usual for mediocre wine.

Government involvement and regulation is perfectly fine with me, but Systemet is not the correct answer. The correct answer is to license individual stores/outlets for the sale of alcohol (this includes online). Don’t decide what is imported nationwide, let the individual businesses decide based on their clients. If the business is located outside of Sweden but still within the EU then the sale should be governed by EU law, not Swedish law.

While the Systembolaget monopoly is not the same as an all out prohibition, it does really restrict how and when you can get drunk, which is why I think when people in Stockholm get a chance to drink at a bar, restaurant and nightclub, they are really overboard with it. At a party here, you see at the end of the night people who are drunk off their ass, people who are just moderately drunk, people who are just tipsy, and people who are sober. In Sweden almost everyone at the end of the night was seriously wasted. And since very few people drive to parties, there’s no need to worry about designated drivers.

So I’m not really sure how this monopoly goes toward promoting safe drinking. Maybe Sweden was just that much worse before the monopoly, and what I’m seeing is the improvement, but currently they are still some hard drinking motherfuckers. Even the classiest, ritziest looking people were drinking until sloppy drunk. I remember partying at the Berns hotel (ridiculously awesome spot, if you can get in. Highly recommended.), and when it hit 3 AM, watching the partygoers try to navigate themselves down the stairs at once. It was comical to see hundreds of people who drank themselves into oblivion try to all walk down a narrow outdoor staircase at once when they’re unable to even walk a straight line.

The public drunkenness is outrageous. Walking back to my hotel, I’d just see people straggling drunk in the street all over the place. A block from my hotel as the sun was rising I had to step over two decked out girls laying on their backs laughing and screaming hysterically, unable to even stand up and walk. They just laid on their backs, cackled, and screamed at the sky, then made a futile effort to stand up before falling back and cackling all over again. Apparently no one is afraid of getting raped there.

My recommendation would be to get as much liquor as allowed from duty-free at the airport before getting to your hotel, and after arriving, map out the Systembolagets in town, find the closest one to you and re-up there periodically, so that you don’t have to depend strictly on the bars and nightclubs to get drunk.

Part 3 about Swedish partying and Swedish men will be up in a few hours

Recommended Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

The interesting thing about the sheer volume of beauty is that it really reminds you how relative beauty is, and how the human mind can adapt to and get bored by anything. First off, if I was a woman in Stockholm and I was a 6 or 7, I would either immediately move or kill myself. By my third day there a 7 would be more likely to make me do a double take than a 10. After being immersed in Stockholm for three days, my mind adjusted to the new beauty standard surrounding me. I reached a point where an average girl got my attention more quickly than a beautiful one because they were such an anomaly. The thought that popped in my mind when I saw an average women there was “Wow, I actually forgot they made women like you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Reading:

This piece from The Onion is pretty old (1999), but it’s a classic. Click the blurb below to read it: