Unnecessary Effort and Ways Around It

The Problem with PUA Advice is a good short series by blogger Advocatus Diaboli explaining how many of the teachings of PUA are logical-sounding but based on false premises. One of the main myths he tackles is this idea that women are a mystery sauce, and that you have to work hard on "self-improvement" to get them. This myth keeps getting proliferated by both mainstream "dating advice" people and PUAs. In reality, as long as you have a decent getup and aren't slovenly looking, flirting will get you decent results, but you have to flirt a lot. AD describes this as "putting in 23 hours of work for every hour of pussy you get."

AD believes this labor-intensive process is not necessary, or at least should not be relied on exclusively. His solution? If you have a middle-class income, you can consistently get better-looking girls for a lot less effort by simply paying for sex. It doesn't have to be that much, either- you can get creative with it, and AD has written a lot on just how you can do that.

PUAs seem to be obsessed with getting "free" women, but they are investing large amounts of time for fleeting pussy. It strikes me as a scam where men have to put in huge amounts of effort, and women get to pick and choose. AD's alternative sounds much better.

The Problem with PUA Advice Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Why is the American Public becoming so Reactionary?

Between the 30s and the 80s, America was moving toward the Left. Social Security, Medicare, the welfare state, Civil Rights, Feminism, Environmentalism, and other left-like movements were all either established or became mainstream in that time period. And many, many things improved during that time period. The economic security and freedom of the average American improved dramatically. Everyone's lot in life was improving, no matter who they were. The whole country was booming and improving in every measurable way.

Then, ever since the Reagan revolution in the 1980s, America has been slowly drifting ever-more rightward. The lot of the average American has slumped. Costs of things like education and healthcare are insane, because they were not allowed to reach their natural conclusion of full government funding. Basic female rights like abortion and contraception are being threatened. Men are exposed to harsh and punitive regimes in the areas of divorce, child support, sexuality, and law enforcement.

Ever since Reagan, every president has had to work within a small "box" that has drifted slowly rightward. Even Clinton was not able to break out of this box, and had to triangulate with a reactionary House of madmen led by Newt Gingrich. Clinton was nearly hanged for getting a BJ (compare this to countries like France, where political leaders are almost expected to have lots of sex on the side.) After that, Bush II pushed all kinds of bizarre crap like abstinence education, which kids like me fell for. Now that Obama is in office, people are complaining that he is too far to the right, and that he is breaking his campaign promises in areas like Marijuana seizure and corporate pandering. The problem is, he too is confined to that little box that's almost impossible to break out of. There was a brief period of respite when the Democrats controlled congress, but now it's back to the rightward drift.

There are numerous political and economic reasons for this rightward drift, such as the 1970s oil price shocks, fears of Communism, and fears of Japanese dominance, but they themselves do not explain why America, and America alone, drifted so far to the right. After all, western Europe was exposed to all these risks as well, even more so due to its proximity to the USSR, but it didn't go all Reagan (the UK did a little bit with Thatcher, but it's still far to the left of the US).

So what caused this? Well, one major culprit is religion. You'll notice that in western Europe, many countries have state-supported religions. In fact, clergymen are actually government employees! There is a natural, deep-seated suspicion of religion in Europe due to all the shit that it caused over the past few 800-plus years or so, and this reflects in religious attendance rates, which are abysmal. Put simply, religion doesn't have much sway over Europeans. As a result, they are very unburdened by religious baggage.

Contrast that to America, where there never was a state religion. Religions basically had to compete with one another on the free market, and this led to a big battle to create captive markets. Since religion runs on fear, they amped up the fear to 11, keeping people hooked (and psychologically screwing people up, but that's beside the point.) It wasn't too difficult to stir strongly religious people into radical reactionary fervor.

Also, there is a demographic shift. In Europe, I don't think there is a strong dichotomy between people who are reproducing and those who aren't. In America, however, it's pretty clear that strongly religious people are reproducing like flies, while less religious (and importantly, more liberal) people are barely reproducing at all. So more and more people are raised with right-wing thinking; kids who barely have a handle on reality get this stuff basically shoved down their throat. I don't think this will be good for men because of the issues I discussed in "The War on Sex."

The War on Sex

In "The Prudes are Winning," Salon.com writer Tracy Clark-Flory interviews sex therapist Marty Klein, asking him how the mainstream views of sex have changed in America. He first mentions that Republicans have been quite successful at threatening rights that used to be a given, such as contraception and abortion. In fact, Arizona recently successfully passed several abortion restrictions. More - not fewer - things can put you on a sex offender list. Banning porn is becoming a legitimate topic of political discussion.

Why is this happening? Well, according to Klein, people have all kinds of sexual hangups because of the misinformation that is being fed to them. Due to the insane emphasis on extended abstinence that I mentioned earlier, people are growing up sexually fucked-up with a huge number of hangups and neuroses, because it's an unrealistic goal. How do they cope with this? There are two possibilities: 1) Confront the reality of their sexuality and deal with it out in the open or 2) try to deny it and sweep everything under the rug. Apparently, there is a big emotional desire for the latter:

We’re looking at people who are desperately frightened and lonely and sad and upset about their own sexual impulses and they’re turning to any place they can find to comfort themselves. Ironically, the religious right and the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and Fox media, they’re offering a kind of comfort. It’s a Pyrrhic victory because the public doesn’t walk away feeling, “Oh, I have this wonderful sexuality and this wonderful body.” No, no, no. People get to walk away with, “Phew, I dodged a bullet, here are the sexual restrictions that alleviate my guilt, lower my anxiety about my neighbor’s sexuality, that make me as a parent feel less anxious.” People walk away with their sexuality diminished but they feel less anxious about the complicated world in which they live.

So you see how such neuroses drive unhinged policy, but policy is not the only area where damage is caused. Women are strongly driven by emotion, and this feeds into their treatment of men. If women see sex as disgusting, they will tend to see men as disgusting. Every man suffers somewhat as a result, especially men who end up in relationships with such women. I have not met a religious woman who was not somehow sexually hung up in a weird way, and who didn't see natural male sexuality as predatory and perverse.

This manifests in ways such as the following, where a man is unwilling to admit that he goes to strip clubs to supplement his sexual appetite:

As long as you have homes where Joe goes to strip clubs on his lunch hour and his wife doesn’t know, because if his wife knew she’d kill him, as long as you have a home like that, Joe is not going to want to go to a city council member or his county board of supervisors or his state assembly member and say, “Excuse me, I go to strip cubs, cut it out.” Joe’s going to have to say to his spouse: “Honey, don’t take this personally, but every once in a while I go to a strip cub. It’s really a lot of fun. If you want to come that’s great, if you don’t that’s OK with me, but I just want you to know that I go to strip clubs.” Believe it or not, that would be a building block toward political action on the legislative level. Because right now, people can’t go to their legislators because they’re not willing to come out.

If the average American guy today admitted that he went to a strip club, his wife would crucify him. She might even divorce him (note that the traitorous churches support divorce based on such premises). So due to the ruination he risks, he doesn't push to maintain strip clubs and other male sexual outlets, and they end up being restricted/dismantled by legislation. I think a similar thing is going on with the (almost literally) Puritanical war on prostitution.

So you see how this stuff is directly relevant to Men's Rights. Abstinence brainwashing makes women sexually frigid. They see men as disgusting, which probably means that they need harder "gaming," and less-aggressive guys are left out in the cold. Men are seen as sexual predators, which leads to severe sexual harassment laws, child porn hysteria, and porn hysteria in general. Divorce laws are made extremely pro-woman, and sex offender lists nearly include sneezing in public. Low-status men are seen as dirt and scum even more so than they otherwise would be (probably one reason why the prison system is so draconian).

And men who try to relieve themselves from their sexually frigid wives are punished harshly (viewed porn? went to a strip club? DIVORCE TIME!) Men who try to get action outside of "sanctioned" methods are punished because sex is seen as dirty and sinful (see: severely-enforced prostitution bans.) They then become mentally fucked-up themselves and become more likely to commit sex crimes. See how this stuff feeds back on itself? In the end, everybody is less happy.

Barry Goldwater was right when he said that the dominance of the Religious Right would be one of the worst things to happen to this country. And Dalrock is right in that social conservatism and feminism are practically linked at the hip. "You hold him down while I rob him" indeed.

Feminism and the Something-for-Nothing Mentality of Humans

Humans, by and large, are driven by a desire to get something for nothing. This is reflected in all advertising, which is designed to make people feel like they're getting a "good deal" (for less than it's worth).

I believe that this attitude is reflected in social movements as well. People support social movements in part because they believe they will come out on top if the movement is successful. And that is the attitude that feminism is increasingly representing.

When feminists started out, they wanted to achieve equal access to employment, freedom from sexual harassment, and other noble, practical goals, but I don't believe those things in themselves gave feminism the "kick" it needed to truly become popular among women. Plenty of women wanted to remain homemakers; plenty dreaded the workplace for legitimate reasons (office work sucks). Plenty wanted to keep their feminine charms. There had to be some other motivating force to get them to support the movement, and that was the desire to get something for nothing.

If you look at the modern-day legal system, hiring system, university system, benefits system, economic system, and just society in general, you'll notice that it's all geared toward women.

• Legal system: Women are given automatic benefit of the doubt in custody (default mother custody.) Women are recipients of both formal (Title IV) and informal (boss wanting to fill up his office with hotties) affirmative action. Women are given the benefit of the doubt in rape accusations. creating a perverse incentive to inflict suffering on innocent men, even if the charges are eventually thrown out.
• Hiring system: As stated, the soft affirmative action. Women and feminists are constantly pressuring various industries to accept more women in their ranks, despite the fact that many women just don't match up. Women are often fast-tracked to managerial positions quicker than their merit warrants.
• Benefits system: Women receive arbitrary child support awards that are often disconnected from the economic realities of the father. Men who discover that their child is not theirs are left few options once they are determined to be custodial. More on why child support is so punitive in another post.
• Economic system: TV and a large majority of consumer goods are marketed and geared almost solely toward women. Women have ancient foraging instincts and this leads to a compulsion to go shopping and buy things, and businesses have long been aware of this. It's interesting to note that if anything, feminism has magnified this female tendency by giving women direct economic power. Women never shamed other women for compulsively shopping; men were the only restraint.
• Society in general: Women are just given the benefit of the doubt. Not only that, but they have a strong lobby as they are 50% of the population. Anyone who runs afoul of the opinions of the female horde, or criticizes the excesses of female behavior, is practically crucified (see: the Slutwalks.) Women have also gained an enormous number of privileges that used to be the sole domain of men, but have acquired few of the responsibilities expected of men. For instance, women don't have to register for selective service, and are not expected to approach men to achieve romantic happiness (if a woman is single or not approached by men, it is blamed on men.)

This setup sure looks like women getting "something for nothing!" In fact, many of these "gains" came at the expense of men. How many of them are legitimate? In my opinion, very few. A lot of this stuff is very questionable if looked at from a neutral perspective. I won't deny that women have difficulties in the current system, but a large number of their gains are ill-gotten, and seriously degrade the quality of life of many innocent men.

I doubt all these freebies and benefits are an accident, since they were required to get women on board with feminism. Or, less politely, they were required in order for feminists to ram through their agenda in a society that was skeptical of their aims. Now we have a system that's biased towards women, but is everybody really better off? Or has society become more atomized and ruthless?

Health Care, the Lack thereof, and how it Impacts Young Men

This may not be something solely affecting young men, but it does affect them and their health outcomes.

In a word, the health care system in America is insane. The resources are completely mis-allocated. From a wealth standpoint, there should be no problem providing health care to everybody. Yet there are literally tens of millions of people who are uninsured, and are one serious accident away from bankruptcy.

A lot of young men I talk to seem afflicted with a combination of youthful indiscretion and frankly far-right-wing beliefs. Many don't have any health insurance at all, because they don't think they'll need it. What will they do if they, God forbid, get in a serious accident and require hundreds of thousands of dollars in surgeries? This insane level of recklessness is only one side of the coin, though. The other is the far-right-wing belief that if you can't afford health care, you deserve to die.

Why do I call this far-right-wing and not simply right-wing? Because condemning people to death for a weakness is a far-right idea. They couch it by claiming that someone who cannot afford health care must not have their shit together, but that's basically saying the same thing. It's not even a true retort because in many cases, the people who can't afford health care are upstanding members of society, and do have their shit together. They got in an accident, or suffered cancer, and their insurance company decided to cut them off because it deemed the treatment too expensive. Such people have to declare bankruptcy to fund their treatment, and that's if they're lucky.

I guarantee you that VERY FEW young guys today can afford to treat themselves for cancer, or after an accident. Many are saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt to begin with. If they want to get married, buy a house, etc. they don't have the money to pay for extremely expensive medical care! Heck, it's doubtful they'd be able to afford it even if they lived in a trailer. Yet many adhere to insane far-right-wing ideologies that could condemn them to bankruptcy and ruination at a moment's notice.

Now is not the time for far-right-wing ideologies in youth. Young men are already being impacted by the harshness of these ideologies - in addition to the heavy student loan burden, their jobs are being taken away from them by less expensive H1-Bs. Snickering twits like Eric Cantor threaten to destroy their Social Security and Medicare guarantees. In a word, they're being screwed, and screwed badly.

Now I say that these ideologies are far-right wing, and not right-wing. Why am I making that distinction? Because I don't think that any decently sane conservative would support the current system, or a "You can't afford it? You die" system. A sane conservative would recognize that things like the Hippocratic Oath don't only apply to the rich, and set up a charity to guarantee health care to everyone.

It could be very simple. Have a means test. You can't afford insurance? Health insurance drops you because you're too expensive? You get care. Why hasn't something so simple been set up?

There is the argument that such a charity would make it more palatable for insurance companies to just drop people, but it's not like they aren't doing it anyway. No, the simple fact that such a charity doesn't even exist reveals a serious gap between conservative ideology and reality. Then they to normalize this absence with far-right justifications.

Then of course there's the triage argument of "oh we can't afford to treat everybody." That's obvious bullshit. Triage is only valid when there are literally not enough resources to treat everybody. Sorry to sound like a Leftist, but companies are making record profits, the richest have never been richer, and the wealth distribution disparity keeps widening. They have more than enough money to help people in need. I'm not advocating widespread redistribution of wealth, but I think there should be a minimum requirement, such as when a person needs health care.

When the health care act was signed in 2010, Republicans were in an uproar. All of them voted against it- both in the House and Senate. But even a cursory glance at the provision reveals how much safer health care will be, especially to young men, under the act. First, you don't have to buy separate insurance until you're 27. That helps a LOT and you can use the extra money to pay down student loan debt. Insurance companies can no longer drop you or refuse to take you up because of conditions that you have no control over. Yeah, you have to pay in. So what?

The Republicans just hate it because imposes a large number of regulations on insurance companies. They're not against forcing people to pay for something - see the huge military tax burden. In fact, a system similar to this was their idea. Somehow I don't think they really care about the young men they send to wars, nor do they care if a young man is ruined by college and medical expenses and lack of job opportunities. Fuck them, honestly. Not that the Dems are much better, but they at least pass things that help young men, despite their overbearing feminist tendencies.

Modern Marriage and the Dilemma Younger Men Face

As many of you know, marriage, in its modern form, is on the rocks. Fewer and fewer people are getting married, a trend that does not look to end soon. But what about people who want to get married? What about people who want to create a stable, healthy environment for raising children in?

It looks like those people are SOL. Feminists are clearly hellbent on eliminating (traditional, male-friendly) marriage; one even admitted as much to me. How does that work out in practice? Are they pushing to ban marriage? No. But they are forcing changes in the laws ("marriage reform") that make it increasingly unlikely for a marriage to remain stable, especially in the face of societal propaganda and social exposure (read: opportunities to cheat.)

You see, what feminists have claimed to be doing all along is ridding marriage law of the parts that inhibit a woman from leaving an abusive husband. Increasingly, though, their true colors are showing through. They're all but admitting that it's about making it as easy as possible for a woman to leave marriage, no matter what:

The switch to a unilateral divorce regime redistributes power in a marriage, giving power to the person who wants out, and reducing the power previously held by the partner interested in preserving the marriage.

In the vast majority of cases, it's the woman who wants out. And it's great for her, too: Presuming there is no abuse, she gets automatic child custody, which usually means that she gets the house. The ex-husband has to pay child support and alimony, among other things, all based on a decision that she makes.

This would be a great system if every husband was an abusive brute, or a loser who quit his job and cooped himself up all day playing video games. But that's far from the case. Evidence shows that women are divorcing because of vague feelings of unhappiness in otherwise functional relationships. This may not be the husband's fault at all (e.g. she may have come across a more attractive male) but it's still treated as his fault.

And this is where my critique of people like Athol Kay, Hawaiian Libertarian, and the like comes in. These people claim that you can use "game" to rescue a marriage that is on the rocks. The problem with this mentality is twofold: 1) It is not possible for every man to execute "game" properly, and 2) the incentives for female-initiated divorce continue to be enriched.

So while these guys may have had some success regaining attraction from their wives, who is to say they won't get burned in the long run anyways? Sure, if I were in a marriage and had everything to lose, I would definitely try to follow Kay's and HL's advice. But I don't think that game is enough to make marriage have a reasonable risk profile for men considering it. This is the message that the Black Pill has been trying to get across in his admittedly inflammatory posts,* and I think Ferdinand is smart enough to realize it as well.

You can see the dilemma us younger men face: We want to have a healthy, loving relationship down the road (I think even BP wants it, despite his claims to the contrary) but we're faced with an environment that threatens relationship stability across the board. We're faced with an environment of reduced male mating choice, making the relationships we do get into more dull and boring. We're faced with women who, on average, aren't working nearly as hard as they should be on making themselves attractive, and as a result just don't have the "spark" that they should. We're faced with societal propaganda that both encourages and  forgives female cheating and trading up, which most women have internalized.

What to do in reponse? That is one major question of this blog.


*I think BP takes it too far when he says that "game doesn't exist." But he has a point in that game is NOT enough to rely on in marriage, especially when huge amounts of financial resources are at stake.

Problems with the "Don't Generalize" Dogma

Say a man somehow manages to get out of a toxic relationship with a woman. This may be a sexless beta-orbiter type situation where he was subjected to emotional manipulation, or it may be something more serious like an acrimonious divorce. The man is aware that this particular woman is toxic, and should be avoided. Without any exterior guidance or warning, however, he is bound to get into a similar situation again. Why is this?

The oft-cited example is of men who are brutalized in divorce court, only to line right up for marriage again. Some of these men have multiple strings of child support and alimony obligations. Other less extreme examples include the eternally-clueless beta, who keeps getting "lets-just-be-friend"-ed over and over again, without learning. Heartiste recently had an admittedly good post on this very topic, attempting to distill why it occurs.

Of course, what Heartiste doesn't mention is how many "alphas" are caught up in the same type of thinking. I know of very few "alphas" who do not get into emotionally abusive relationships with women. The core problem seems to be a societal hegemony of the "don't generalize" dogma. How many times have you been shut down by the armies of "don't generalize" people, also known as the NAWALT people, both male and female, every time you mention harmful female tendencies?

It's a problem of frame. Of course one shouldn't assume that all women are abusive because one woman is abusive. But somehow this gets twisted into seeing every new woman as a blank slate, and not remembering  the warning signs from previous experiences. I think society encourages this unhealthy attitude, which is why you see men falling into the same traps over and over again. The whole "this time it's different" belief is a natural tendency in humans that needs to be fought, not encouraged.

Female-centric societal ills: Litigation

Recently, some comments made on a Spearhead article talk about how women, by being litigious by nature, will overpower men when the government is strong enough and willing to do so in their favor. This got me thinking, and suddenly a light bulb went off. The US is known for having a very litigious society, and I always knew it myself and despised it, but the reason why the society was so litigious eluded me. It seemed to miff other people too, who would tend to just say there was a "litigious culture" and a "greed mentality." This is funny, I think. When people are unsure of why something is bad, they jump to some bogeyman like "capitalism" or "greed" to explain the societal ill, without digging deeper down. I think it's intellectual laziness, really.

What really seems to be happening is that a culture taken over by women is a litigious culture. That's why so much of our economy is being consumed in legal costs and why we have to have so many retarded warnings on things.

You'll note the female tendency to defer to a stronger power, and use extreme language when they feel their inner mental sanctum is threatened. It's like they're a step away from suing you for your every last penny if you transgress them. This is also explains why the divorce courts have become so viciously anti-male. The litigious culture created them in their current incarnation, and of course they'll side with women.

Women also have a natural tendency for evasiveness, two-facedness and conniving, backstabbing behavior. It's built into their genes as a result of being physically weaker as a protection mechanism, so it can be a good thing, but uncontrolled (as in the current society) it can really get out of hand and do a lot of damage.

This probably explains why women pursue law school so much versus other professional professions, aside from nursing. In a way, the professional schools of nursing and law exploit natural female behavior. Nursing exploits the good side of female behavior, while law exploits the bad side. I'd never want to be a defendant against a woman lawyer.

So, a female-centric culture, large amounts of women entering law school, the female tendency to create rules and laws to constrain people, and threaten people with a greater power when they feel "transgressed" is what has resulted in the legal monstrosity we see today. It's literally eating the society alive.

At this point I wonder how much other stuff people blame on capitalism that's really just creeping cultural Marxism rearing its ugly head, successfully pointing the fingers away from itself. This country's gonna implode if people don't wake up to what is really going on.

Purging Indoctrination

Over the past few months I've been noticing something about how attractive women appear. Maybe it's the internalization of an MGTOW belief set, but something has definitely changed. Oh, not in that way, they definitely turn me on, but a lot of the fantasy beliefs I used to have about women have been shattered. It's good in the sense that I crave affection a lot less, which is necessary when not being in a position to receive it, I think. Of course, the downside is occasional anger and deep-seated mistrust of various womens' motives, especially certain types of women.

I find myself paying attention to their negative attributes more, like how they talk, how they walk around, etc. Little imperfections here and there in the body, etc. Stuff that I used to overlook or try to cover up. What's going on I think is the "de-Disneyification" of my view of women. Disney movies had a horrible influence on me, as did media, society, and women of all stripes. No one told me that this was not real, that women are not this amazing all around.

Yesterday, I came across a post by a woman about how her boyfriend was so great, how no one could finish her sentences the way he could, how he brightened her day...in an almost Shakespearean way. It then hit me that this is what I used to crave in relationships, and why I became suicidally depressed due to being "deprived" of it. Now teenage emotions tend to be uncontrolled, but this notion of relationship fairy-tale land didn't really go away until it was nearly beaten out of me by cruel rejection after cruel rejection, being made fun of by women behind my back and being burned by women I thought I could trust.

The thing is, there's something insidious about it. It's like I was deliberately kept in the dark about the reality of relationships, with people making them seem like nirvana, especially women. And it's weird in the sense that people will tell you that relationships aren't all that, but it's almost a backhanded way of saying that they ARE all that. It's like "neener-neener, you can't have this, but don't worry it's not that great anyway... It's better than your situation, though, LOSER! We won't say that of course."

There are many people out there with vested interests in keeping men deluded as all hell about this. Keeping men craving that golden goose until they realize they bought a dead duck. Sickening, really. That's why things like MGTOW and the Roissysphere are so important, in attacking and debunking these "pretty lies" as much as humanly possible. These lies are outright evil, and can do nothing but destroy men.

The debunking of these lies is a great relief. It's like a burden has been lifted from you. In fact, it feels a lot like this:


I think this image is iconic and representative of the MGTOW movement.

Behaviors to watch out for in women, part 2

A thread on the MGTOW boards discusses a classic case of cognitive dissonance in a woman who has cheated on her boyfriend, become impregnated with another man's child, and is now asking Yahoo Answers if she should not tell her boyfriend about it. There's several nuggets in here - rationalization of infidelity, the desire to cover up the truth (further cheating in my book), and horrid and ridiculous advice from responders as a microcosmic example of current society. Most important is the disparity in message between those who have a head screwed up by society and those with a clear moral compass. Messed up message: (skank alert skank alert) "True love forgives." Head-screwed-on-right message: True love doesn't cheat! In fact, on numerous levels, cheating is a red flag - infidelity means the 'boyfriend' isn't seen as worthy mating material for whatever reason. If there's true love, it's certainly not coming from her side.

Bottom line - once a woman's heart is somewhere else, it's somewhere else, and "forgiving" her transgressions will just end up with you raising her alpha spawn.

The cynically excellent MGTOWers suggest that this woman was intentionally trying to do just that, keep her boyfriend oblivious until it is too late. Given the moral character of this woman (she's unsure if lying about CHEATING is a bad thing) it's not too far of a stretch. And the morally relativistic "answers" given show that society is more than willing to back up this twisted logic.

Thankfully, some of the answers contained sense, and the woman begrudgingly chose one (shown by her rating) as the best answer. Reality is clearly a tough pill for her to swallow, but she has to swallow it - for now. I don't trust her. She was essentially shamed into (tentatively) doing the right thing; it's certainly not her sense of conscience that did it. Given the opportunity, she would probably do something like this again, in another arena - if she thinks she can get away with it. My advice: Stay far away from any woman who shows signs of being like this.

Behaviors to watch out for in women, part 1

Chuck of "Gucci Little Piggy" has a really good post on one very widespread method that modern women use to express unwarranted dissatisfaction. And they get away with it, looking like victims in the process. "Weasel words" - engineered language designed to provoke a desired response - describe the phenomenon perfectly. I've been at the receiving end of this numerous times in my interactions with women. It was like they would use this evasive language to describe stuff that upset them, shifting blame away from them and condemning those they felt were at fault.

Personally, I think it's pathetic behavior. Guys inclined to see women as "poor oppressed womyn" will empathize with them when they employ this language, but me? It makes me scorn them. I have less and less patience for women who employ this tactic. In fact, I think it should be an automatic credibility reducer in any man's eyes. My advice: Don't let a woman ensnare you in vague emotional traps of sympathy! Keep a clear head free of female emotional manipulation at all times.