Roissy/Heartiste blog

I tried to follow a link to Roissy's blog a few minutes ago, but Wordpress says that the authors have deleted the blog. Is this a fluke or for real?

Edit: He's at heartiste.wordpress.com

Marriage and Risks

Something that always bugged me about marriage is the risks posed to you by a woman who becomes unfaithful. In the past, woman's unfaithfulness was punished, either by social ostracization, economic concerns, or legal barriers such as needing to provide a reason for divorce. Nowadays, none of those barriers exist anymore. A woman is not shamed for infidelity, in fact, if her friends see it as something good (like, say, if I'm not being a good enough husband for whatever reason, like being tired out after a long day at work) then they'll support her cheating and employ scary levels or rationalization that will make you wonder if women have any sense of morality at all. She's not threatened economically, so there goes that incentive, and she can divorce for whatever reason (no-fault divorce). So she basically has carte blanche to ruin your life. Who would enter into such an agreement? A sucker, that's who.

As Dalrock states,

a man actually loses protection from cuckolding and is placed at a disadvantage regarding custody if he marries. The only potential benefit a man gains by marrying is the moral force the marriage vows hold on his wife.

And as there's no longer any real material incentive behind the "moral force," (or really any moral incentive as I explained above) it's a really shaky thing to base your life on. The only thing holding a woman back is if other women shame and ostracize her. Which is less likely to happen nowadays and even if it does, she can always shop for friends who will agree with her.

Women don't seem to understand this. They don't realize the potential life-destroying problems a man could suffer if the wife doesn't feel "satisfied" or "happy" in the relationship. It's totally unbalanced and totally unfair. Unrestrained female choice completely supported on the backs of men.

Women seem to live in this fantasy world when it comes to marriage. They don't want to think about what'll happen if it goes bad, preferring to keep it all mysterious. I guess they don't really have an incentive to do so anymore.

Marriage and the State

Elusive Wapiti recently made an an enlightening post about the state of marriage on The Spearhead:

“A contract that binds two people together, ostensibly for the purposes of raising a family.”

A quibble: marriage as presently constituted is a three-way contract between a man, a woman, and the State.

A man is contracting with the State to support a woman, particularly if she has children, for decades, even if the woman decides to exit the contract.

This is the state of modern marriage today. Which is why I find all this debate about homogamous marriage curious…it’s not like we don’t have polyandrous marriage already, so why the fuss?

The old Christian saying about not being able to "serve two masters" comes to mind. A woman can't serve both her husband and the state. It has to be one or the other. Feminism is all about making women choose the latter, as an astute poster on love-shy.com once pointed out.

I don't know how to fix this, other than to revoke the state's dictatorial monopoly over marriage. Fat chance of that happening. Off the top of my head, the best compromise would seem to marry without getting a marriage license, but there are probably hidden legal traps when it comes to that as well. I know some states and many countries around the world are starting to make marriage-like co-habitation, where you are considered married if you cohabit with a woman for more than a certain period of time.

How to become more dominant and less controlling

I earlier talked about the difference between dominant and controlling behavior, and how people often misinterpret certain behaviors as "dominant" when in fact they come from a position of insecurity, or an attempt to desperately control things.

A person who is in control, knows he is in control. He doesn't need to nitpick, or micromanage. He doesn't react negatively to criticisms, or show anger easily. He doesn't show extreme emotions very easily, instead being somewhat cheery and light-hearted. Insecure people, on the other hand, need to constantly assert their authority and jockey for status. They respond very negatively to criticism, and are generally irritable. Extreme emotions are easy to read on them. At the core, these guys don't have their shit together.

Let's take a look at four insecure, or controlling behaviors that are fairly common:

• The need to constantly be in control of a conversation, talking over others.
• Visibly negative responses to any criticism whatsoever.
• The need to say "me too" all the time about things, instead of not giving a shit.
• The development of possessive oneitises.
  

The need to constantly be in control of a conversation, talking over others.
The first item is a common, and has a remarkable tendency to correlate with guys who lack dating success. Most of these guys are completely oblivious to what they are doing, but it's very off-putting. If people seem to respond strangely to you in social situations, check to see if you're letting them talk. Most people don't want to become friends with somebody who constantly needs to have the floor to himself. If you feel this doesn't describe you, then check to see if you do it in one-on-one conversations. You might be surprised at what you find.

How to solve this? Simply slow down and let the other person speak, but don't slow down so much that people think you're bored or uninterested. It takes some tweaking but eventually you'll get the hang of it.

If you have the opposite problem, and don't know when to speak, well, don't just sit there like a wallflower, interject every now and then. It's best to survey the conversation and see what you can talk about, if anything. I know I've been in many conversations where I know little about the topic at hand, and it can be difficult, so this is easier said than done. In fact I'm still not 100% sure of how to deal with it. It's a topic for a future post.

Visibly negative responses to any criticism whatsoever.
The second item is a common feature not only among men suffering from dating difficulties, but a good number of men today. The hallmark of a secure man is one who does not respond negatively to criticism. If the criticism is legitimate, he takes it to heart. OK, maybe his ego is bruised a bit, but he doesn't take it personally. If the criticism is completely illegitimate, he can just rebuff it and explain why. Becoming a put-together person involves habitually being able to take cannonballs and brush them off as if they were feathers. It requires learning, but it can be done. If people who are trying to mess with you can see that you're not visibly affected, they lose interest in messing with you. Often, they themselves are being controlling (dominant people wouldn't care) and are trying to control an even more desperately controlling person. Don't oblige them. Show them that you're not a good target.

The need to say "me too" all the time about things, instead of not giving a shit.
The third item, or me-tooism, is a hallmark of attempting to desperately contain a situation. Say your clothing, or vehicle, or whatever is not up to snuff compared to others. What do you do? Well, you can react negatively and become a socially avoidant recluse. Or you can just not give a shit, and rebuff any attacks or snide provocations. As I said before, the people doing this stuff to you are people who suffer from controlling issues themselves. If you don't oblige them, you're doing a huge service to not only yourself, but any others who may end up in their wake. You truly have to not give a shit about what others think in order for this to work. Can you do it, 100% of the way? Probably not. But you have to build an "outer armor" or alligator skin that at least gives the appearance that you're not being affected by these attempts to insult you.

The development of possessive oneitises.
The fourth item ties into dating. "Oneitis" is a term for limerence, or a nearly jihad-like fanaticism over some (usually unattainable) girl. I'm not 100% sure about the trajectory of this psychological phenomenon, but I believe that once you start obsessing over a girl, it's already too late, and you ruined your chance to be attractive to her. You've created this object in your mind that you fantasize over, like a fetish of sorts, and it makes you increasingly unable to realistically relate to the actual real girl on the ground.

I think this ties in with the need to become firm enough inside to not develop such incredibly deep feelings for a girl. If you think about it, a oneitis is a controlling obsession, where you deathly fear not being able to have the girl in your dreams. It's happened countless times and led to suicides and worse.

So what's the general way to break controlling behavior and become more dominant, in control, and relaxed? I think the key is to not focus on one particular problem so much. If you have issues with being easily manipulated by others into feeling fearful, or angry, or embarrassed, or whatever, I think it is best to distract yourself with something else. Same with turning a girl into a fetish or desperately trying to keep up with other people.

Someone once told me that if you can't directly solve a problem, try to ignore it, and distract yourself with other things. Don't become overly focused on making your point in a conversation-- say the core points that you need to; you don't need to get absolutely everything across. In the end, most of the conversation will be forgotten anyway, and it's likely less significant than it appears at the time being. If you suffer from a oneitis, then distract yourself from her-- talk to other girls, ask out other girls, even if you massively screw up and fail. The experiences you get doing that will likely take your mind off her.

Distract, distract, distract, while paying attention to areas where you could improve-- and you'll probably desensitize yourself fairly quickly. It just takes time and will sting a bit. I hope this is better advice than the simplistic "just go out there and do it!" combined with pop-positivity that depresses people who see no way to start more than anything.

New video up

That's right, I finally recorded another video! More to come.

Pt. 2 of "Dominant vs. controlling behavior" is coming

I haven't forgotten about it. If you haven't yet read the first part, take a gander and ruminate. I'm going to talk about what causes a guy to have issues with controlling behavior and how to fix it, incorporating some recent revelations I've had about game.

Feminism and the fuel that it runs on

Feminism is all about freeing women from men and giving them as many choices as possible. Seemingly absent, however, is an analysis on how these choices affect men. For instance, take the example of the single feminist career woman who remains single and doesn't settle down until late in life, if ever. The gender ratio is very nearly 1:1; nature has made sure of it. This means that for every woman who is single and not in a relationship, one guy is forced to be alone, regardless of whether he wants to be alone or not. It may be a good guy, it may be a bad guy, but numerically, some guy has to eat the shit sandwich of not having a woman available to him if a woman refuses to date or decides to chase after a small number of high status men along with many other women at the expense of average men.

When feminism liberated women from the expectation that they should settle down with a guy when fairly young, it necessarily created involuntary celibate men. Of course, a large number of these men will find a woman later on in life, but that is only because the women are deciding to settle down. The choice has been completely ripped away from men. Many men are suffering as incels in their late teens and possibly during their entire 20s because of this, a time when they are arguably the most sensitive to adversity and need companionship the most. (As an aside, this could be partly to explain for the meteoric rise of suicide among young adult men post-feminism.)

Feminists, and sadly nearly all women, seem to fail to understand this. It's not fair to men that women get to satisfy their urges, while men are completely left alone with no choice at all. It's not even being left to fend for themselves in an unbalanced system; it's being completely shut off from the market.

And what's the response that women say to men suffering from this? "You'll find someone someday," "be patient," "look at the good sides in life," etc. They're basically expecting men to be ascetic monks with no companionship or sex needs for years, even decades, while women are allowed to freely do whatever they want. Whatever happened to the concept of ones freedom ending where the others begins?

Now how could women justify this? Well, they could just be plain clueless as to its harmfulness. And in a lot of cases, that's exactly what's going on, especially since this has been going on for several decades and has plenty of cheerleaders from both sexes. But the original women who came up with this had to have known what was going on- or did they? I feel they just had a hatred of men and wanted to gain a leg up on them at whatever cost, and didn't think through the consequences. Sadly, they had (and still have) so much support that the ill effects have been completely swept under the rug. Even many men who have themselves been screwed over and forced into celibacy cheer for the system, incapable of putting the pieces together.

And it's complicated by the fact that not all men are screwed over by it equally, or even at all. Indeed, it serves men on the top of the totem pole very well, by giving them sexual access to women who would have previously been less willing, as they were already partnered with a man. Men on top are in power, and willingly support this, so it keeps proliferating. These guys could generally care less about whether the average man has to go through long periods of celibacy before he gets anything, or that they're throwing tons of men under the bus with the decisions they make, so the problem remains unsolved.

Of course, the problem is, when you screw people over, they tend to be less willing to work for the system. Even many manginas who still buy in to the system, but have gotten screwed over by it, don't put as much into it. How, you ask? Don't they enthusiastically support it? Well, it doesn't need to be a conscious thing. Sure, they've been brainwashed into thinking this system is forward-thinking and progressive, but deep down they have been hurt by it on some level, so they lack the motivation that reasonably well-rewarded men have. These guys tend to get less hard-charging jobs, tend to not innovate as much, and tend to not earn as much as well-motivated men. They tend to channel their resultant rage into an endless variety of ridiculous causes, wasting time and energy. Ultimately, this slows societal progress down to the point where another saner society is allowed to grow and either makes it insignificant, forcibly subjects it or destroys it.

Feminists are basically eating the seed corn of society, and the behavior they espouse is ultimately the kiss of death if men don't wake up and resist it en masse.

Fallacious "you don't have it that bad" arguments

"You don't have it that bad" is one of the arguments used against dateless men that really irks me. I recently saw a discussion where someone raised the typical comparison to starving people. Typically implied (or like in this case, directly stated) is that the dateless man is just a crybaby who needs to get over himself. In other words, "man up!"

It is a meaningless comparison, because it can be used to justify silencing any complaint that a person might have with the society that he or she is in. Anyone with a vested interest in the status quo can tell someone being marginalized by it to shut up because they don't know how good they have it.

Moreover, it's a strawman, as dateless men aren't saying that they have it as bad or worse than someone without limbs or food. Who invokes this argument? Usually someone who is losing the rhetorical battle and has to resort to emotional appeals to win people back. In a cinch, it works, with some sufferers erroneously buying into the premise and admitting that they maybe don't have it that bad. Of course, others see this red herring for what it is, and heated attacks then start flying left and right, legitimate discussion disintegrates, and sufferers end up even more self-loathing and frustrated than they were before. In short, they got trolled.

This argument is nothing new, and its continued successful application is a testament to its effectiveness. For instance, it was often used on depressed people before depression was recognized as a psychiatric disorder that could be treated. It goes without saying that the results were often tragic. The same problem is happening now with those suffering from involuntary celibacy and love-shyness. They try to get help, and all people do is tell them to "man up" and that the problem is entirely their own. The sufferers never get a break and keep getting told by uncaring assholes that their problems don't really matter. What the people espousing this nonsense don't realize is that when you tell a person that a serious problem they suffer from does not matter, you're telling them that they don't matter. It doesn't take a genius to see why this doesn't end well.

In the end, this is a shaming tactic, and a deplorable one. Those using it should be treated with as much contempt as someone telling a suicidal person "jump!"

Edited to add: The concept I'm talking about is known as relative deprivation in sociology. There is an interesting Wikipedia article on it.

P.S. The follow-up to the "Controlling vs. Dominant Behavior" post is coming. Stay tuned!

Controlling behavior vs. dominant behavior: An important subtlety

Women tend to be attracted to men who are dominant. You have probably heard of this an innumerable amount of times, especially if you've read game or pickup materials. Of course, there are plenty who dispute this, claiming that women really want a man who is equal, but in a good majority of stable cases, the man is the one in control.

How, then, does this arise, in a culture where men being dominant and controlling is frowned upon and seen as misogynistic? Are claims that men need to be dominant mythical, or is the myth in the desire for equality? How is it possible to be dominant when the laws are stacked against a man and the woman can leave him whenever she wants?

This is a complex issue, and there are many explanations for the questions I just raised, but suffice it to say that in many relationships where women are genuinely happy, the man is the dominant partner, whether the woman admits it or not. But how is that possible? Women say they don't want to be controlled-- they want to be equal, or even in the lead.

What if the truth was that women don't want to be controlled, but they want to be dominated? There is a subtlety here that is missed on many men, especially those who are trying to recover from being overly submissive pushovers.

Men who have never intrinsically known how to be dominant tend to try and control things in a way that comes off as insecure, instead of self-assured. They have a tendency to desperately try and contain things, or police women's behavior, and that doesn't come off as attractive. In fact, it comes off as petty, try-hard, and what women would call creepy.

The basic problem is that in actively trying to restrain women from doing something, you turn them off. If you tell them to their face to not do something that they want to do, they'll treat you with contempt and ignore you at best. This is especially true when it comes to behaviors that are female-group-approved, whether harmful or not.

Women tend to think in groups. It's a totally different psychology from that of most men, who tend to arrive at conclusions independently, and maybe with a little input here and there from others. With women, the consensus of the group is everything, and there is little deviation. Women will submit themselves to group reasoning, even when the results are personally harmful to them. For instance, they will tend to remain in unproductive, unfulfilling relationships if the group mandates that they must be in that relationship due to the man being "approved" by the group.

Some people call this form of groupthink the sisterhoood, and with good reason. Woe betide the man who crosses the female sisterhood-- he will be treated mercilessly and all manner of false, unfair rumors about him will spread through the grapevine.

So when you criticize a woman for acting promiscuously, or drinking too much, or partying too much, and scorn her for it, you tend to get marked as someone who is trying to inhibit her freedom, or interfere with her fun. This gets you cast onto the junk heap of men, where you might as well not have any genitalia at all because you're blacklisted as someone who won't get laid, ever. I use the example of the girl who parties too much because I have real-world experience with it, but it applies to any female neurosis that is nurtured by this society, be it the defense of bizarre and crazy laws, consistently putting out to the wrong men, waiting till infertility to have children, etc.

The reason why this criticism is rejected it because it is seen as an attempt to control female behavior, which women intrinsically don't like. They don't like being told they can't do this, can't do that, etc. To be sure, nobody likes being told that they can't do something they like doing, or should put a damper on it, but with women this is extreme. They will not - I repeat - will not listen to a man who tells them that they can't do something, or need to reign in their behavior. Their detesting of such suggestions is part natural and part cultural -- a culture that says they can do anything and doesn't put brakes on their behavior, especially when said behavior is harmful to men.

So we can see clearly that women don't like being controlled. How, then, is it possible to get them to listen to anything? With all the freedoms and liberties they have, they can just tell guys to piss right off (though they rarely respond with such intensity, the message being sent is identical).

You now understand what is unattractive to women and what is guaranteed to NOT change their behavior. They hate being told what to do and will have none of it - call it a mixture of innate and cultural female belligerence. But they can be told what to do, and they can be told to rein in their behavior. They can become normal, sane, and acceptable people. How?

By being exposed to dominant personality traits in men. These traits are less controlling, as they are charming. Male politicians have used this charm to swoon armies of female voters to their side. Of course, on the face of it, being charming doesn't sound like it is enough to convince a woman to change her mind. And it isn't. But it'll get your foot in many doors, doors that would otherwise be completely shut.

Women are by nature, emotional creatures. This is not to say that men aren't, but women are on a whole different level. The whole sisterhood thing is based on a bonding of female emotions, a subtle communication collective living in a drugged-out haze of oxytocin. It's the way women have bonded, communicated, and protected themselves since the caveman days, and penetrating it the right way is the key to getting women to side with you, both in the ideological sphere and the sexual sphere. If you align the female grapevine in your favor, you will have done something great in their eyes, and you will be loved, no matter what you do or have done. In fact, there are many examples of men committing horrific acts who are feverishly defended by women whose sisterhood grapevine they successfully penetrated.

As you can see, this is potentially dangerous, and can be used for nefarious means, which many manipulative, evil men have done in the past. But many good men have used it to their advantage as well, as it opens up access to previously inaccessible women. This gaming of the sisterhood grapevine probably goes all the way back to the stone age itself.

As I mentioned, it's not enough to be charming. What else do you have to do? Well, the most effective strategy is to combine the charm with something logical, ideally something that panders to a female prejudice of some sort. I've read about one Men's Rights Activist who is using this technique to convince women to accept mandatory paternity testing. Many women are viscerally opposed to this, because they see (or instinctively feel) it as decreasing the amount of power a woman has regarding what man she chooses to sire her child. Of course, in a logical, ethical sense, this is bankrupt, as the married father should always be the biological father. Historically, however, women have gotten away with using one man for money, and getting what they see as more desirable genes for their progeny from the men who stimulate them most during their ovulation cycle (read: not the tamed, domesticated husband). Any attempt to sell women on mandatory paternity testing based on logic and ethics will fall flat, because women don't reason that way. Of course, some women will see through it and side with you, but not enough to have en-masse backing. Most women will see it as an attempt to control the excesses of their behavior and thus will resist it and vote against any change in the desired direction.

So what this MRA does is soothes the women, like a modern sort of Shaman. He treats them with good stories, and then launches into a polemic, throwing men under the bus mercilessly, condemning the epidemic of deadbeat dads who abandon the mothers of their children. He then says that the only way to combat this is to instate mandatory paternity testing so that these men can't run away from responsibility. This whips the crowd of women up into a frenzy, and makes them fanatical supporters of mandatory paternity testing.

Of course, the truth is different. In most cases, the man is the one who is cuckolded by a woman who decided to get better genes elsewhere. But this MRA is selling what are really men's issues to women as women's issues to get women to support them and vote for them. Thanks to feminism, the sisterhood grapevine is sinisterly aligned against men, but as this MRA shows, it can be penetrated with the right mixture of charm and logic to get women to work for you instead of against you.

Is it weird? Yes. Is it unfair? Who knows, it's the way nature is set up. If you want to get women on your side, you have to feed their prejudices in a way that works for you. Merely telling them what to do is seen as controlling and undesirable. Truth be told, women love being played around with like this. It's part of their being. And they hate men who can't do this to them.

This is why you see lots of men who are very unhappy with the cards that life has dealt them in places like the Love-shy.com forum. By and large, these men have great difficulties even getting women to go out on dates with them. This is in no doubt caused in part by an inability to behave in a dominant manner. Also, a lot of the legitimate criticism of female behavior seen on the forum is attacked by multitudes of outsiders as misogynistic and narrow minded. Why is this? Well, many of the attackers are men who are white knighting, who follow a different (but similar in some ways) psychology to women. But there are several women who have condemned it, and almost all of the female members have spoken against it in some way or another. A major reason why is - you guessed it - because these out-in-the-open, direct, logical criticisms of female behavior are seen as controlling, and not dominant. The other reason is of course the feminist control of the zeitgeist, but that's a topic for another post.

For those who want to become dominant but have difficulties doing so, I don't have a simple solution. In fact, I'm going to elaborate on what causes these difficulties in my next post, to try and flesh out what needs to be done if your personal psychology is game-naive and needs to be revamped. Personally, I tend to be the one whose buttons are pressed, instead of the one doing the pressing. This needs to change if I want to stop being walked all over and taken advantage of. And I am sure there are many Gen Y men who share my predicament.

So, in conclusion...

• Women HATE being told that they need to rein in their behavior, or that they can't do something. They especially despise non-dominant men who try to control their behavior.
  
  
• Women LOVE being told that they can do anything, and that they don't need to answer to anybody. They love men who play to their prejudices-- a loophole that can be used to get them to do your bidding.
  
  
• Men who can convert their controlling behavior into dominant behavior stand to gain largely in the interpersonal and sexual arena.
  
  
• Figuring out a way to turn an insecure, controlling personality into a dominant personality is of key importance.
  

Thoughts on partying, etc.

Why do people get so drunk on new years? I've been thinking about this on and off. It seems like everyone is just using it as an excuse for debauchery. I guess people are off work and so they use it for that, but it just seems so trite to me. Celebrations. Why do people celebrate an arbitrary point in the year? I guess it's something to do. Meh, 2011.