Social Life

You can't win every fight. But how you handle the situations where you must back down a bit determines how those you're in the fight with treat you.

Jimbo commented in my article on meeting girls while staying safe in a paranoid dating society, asking me to review a recent, controversial article on the Washington Post. The article was titled "Thanks for not raping us, all you 'good men.' But it's not enough."

The article itself is a screed against the male sex, both the 'bad men' who aren't conciliatory and inclusive enough toward women, and the 'good men' who are, but who lack the spine to put the bad men in their place and don't in any event ever really change things to make the world a sufficiently female-inclusive one.

I don't want to comment much on the argument itself... I don't think I need to, given our audience. The positions and arguments are nonsensical; the beliefs hyperbolic. The vast majority of commentators in the comment section of the article take the author to task for her abusiveness toward her cowed, yoked husband.

And I'll comment only briefly on the dynamic. It looks like the dynamic you get in a long-term relationship with a strong-willed, opinionated woman, and a quiet, acquiescent man. The woman becomes increasingly emboldened, abusive, and sometimes vampiric over time. The man, with his quiet acceptance of her behavior, serves as her enabler and as a source of narcissistic supply. You can have this dynamic with the sexes reversed too: domineering husband, codependent/enabling wife, or domineering wife, codependent/enabling husband. It's an unhealthy dynamic for both parties, and it's created by both parties. A domineering partner cannot domineer without the retreat and acquiescence of the codependent one. You're only seeing one blowup fight in this article... but in my experience looking at the woman's writing style, how she frames the fight, and her pride in putting it out there and expecting to be patted on the back for her righteousness (rather than ashamed at this uncharacteristic explosion, which is how most women are when they do something nasty that is truly out of character), all that fits the pattern of a domineering partner enabled to the point of delusions of grandeur ("Fighting the good fight -- for all womankind!") by her codependent.

That out of the way, what I'd actually like to focus on in this article is the husband's reaction. Because there's a telling passage in the article about how this fight went:

"My husband of 50 years did not have to stifle a laugh. He took it dead seriously. He did not defend his remark, he did not defend men. He sat, hunched and hurt, and he listened. For a moment, it occurred to me to be grateful that I’m married to a man who will listen to a woman. The winds calmed ever so slightly in that moment. And then the storm surge welled up in me as I realized the pathetic impotence of nice men’s plan to rebuild the wreckage by listening to women. As my rage rushed through the streets of my mind, toppling every memory of every good thing my husband has ever done (and there are scores of memories), I said the meanest thing I’ve ever said to him: Don’t you dare sit there and sympathetically promise to change. Don’t say you will stop yourself before you blurt out some impatient, annoyed, controlling remark. No, I said, you can’t change. You are unable to change. You don’t have the skills and you won’t do it. You, I said, are one of the good men. You respect women, you believe in women, you like women, you don’t hit women or rape women or in any way abuse women. You have applauded and funded feminism for a half-century. You are one of the good men. And you cannot change. You can listen all you want, but that will not create one iota of change."

This fight could've been over in three minutes instead of 30, the screed avoided, and this clusterbomb of an article the author wrote never written, had the husband done the one thing his wife and I both agree he failed to do:

Grow a pair of balls, straighten his spine out, and stand up for something for once.

The only thing his wife and I disagree with is what he must stand up on -- but as we'll see in just a minute, even then, we don't really disagree.

We each fall somewhere on the 9-sided moral alignment die. Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Neutral Evil… where do you fall, and how does it impact things?

This should be a fun article. Or even an insightful one... depends how much you like personality tests.

... but most of us like personality tests, don't we?

And this one's a fairly useful one, as far as personality tests go.

A recent study discovered six 'dark' traits (egoism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism, psychopathy, and spitefulness) all stem from the same underlying 'dark core'... something the researchers dubbed 'the Dark Factor of Personality'. The result is that if you have one dark trait, you are likely to have others -- because they all come from that same dark center.

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about dark and light. I discussed the phenomenon of younger 'dark' guys who reform when older in "The Civilized Man." I talked about the choice between goodness and wickedness in "The Good King." And I went in-depth on some of the research into the 'light side' of personality in "Be the Lightbringer: Dating and the Sublime Benefits of Positivity." And of course, aside from these, we've always urged you to do right by women and other people, and avoid bitterness yourself... as much for your own sake as for others'.

The seduction space can serve as a magnet for dark characters... even if most of the men in it are neutral- or light-oriented. The dark characters rarely reach levels of prominence within the community -- whether it's more because their methods repel the non-dark men too much, or they just don't care to help/teach other men enough to carve out a niche, I couldn't say. But there are guys like this who become instructors, or rise to this or that level of prominence within seduction communities... sometimes concealing their dark side, sometimes wearing it on their sleeves.

One of the reasons I won't teach 'dark side tech' -- things like reverse supplication, sexual power reversal, one-sided monogamy, taming/dependency, or the infamous October Man sequence --is the existence of 'dark-side' guys within the community (all the non-dark guys who'd cause damage purely by accident are the other part of the reason). If everyone was light-side, we could perhaps talk about this stuff and trust most guys to use it responsibly... but not everyone is, so this stuff stays tucked away under lock and key.

Why do people have these different dispositions? How different are the dispositions anyway -- are people just a little different from one another, or are the differences BIG? And how do these differences come about in the first place?

By pure chance, one day I came across a Dungeons & Dragons 'alignment test'. The test allowed you to sniff out where on the 'alignment scale' you fall... good or evil? Lawful, neutral, or chaotic?

I thought it would be a fun thing to play with. But in fact, it's turned out to be accurate for real people I've used it with, to quite a surprising degree.

Want to know a perfect way to get social proof, pre-selection, and women fighting over you… all in the comfort of your own home? Throw a house party!

My late twenties were some of my most glorious times. I lived with a bunch of hipsters in a huge apartment in downtown Vancouver. I was going out night after night, practicing my game, and though I was collecting loads of phone numbers, I was finding it hard to bring these girls home at the end of the night.

Being a girl is scary. Men are big, hairy, and horny. For a woman, the idea of going home with a guy she just met at a bar or on the street might bring forth visions of an American Psycho-esque chainsaw massacre. They literally risk their lives every time they isolate themselves with a guy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve brought a girl home, only to have her stop on the doorstep and say, “You’re not going to kill me, right?”

That’s why I always flip the script with a preemptive, tension-easing joke like, “You’re not a serial killer, are you? You’re not going to chop me up and feast on my sweet flesh?” Also, whenever I have a date, I try to get her to meet near my apartment and then suddenly remember, “I forgot something at my place.” I bring her inside for just a moment so she can see I don’t live in a BDSM torture dungeon (I wish!). This makes it way easier to pull later, as she’s already been inside my chateau. I call this “priming”.

After one particularly frustrating night, a thought came to me like a lightning strike from Odin. I had this glorious epiphany: “What if I brought them all home at once? What if I primed a whole bunch of girls at the same time?”

Do you talk in clear, simple ways? The most effective communicators all do. Use these tips and make your language a breeze to understand.

Early in my teenage years, I began to learn humor. Mostly I watched late night talk shows and crafted one-liners. I tried longer funny jokes too, but they usually fell flat. The lesson I learned - without realizing at the time - was simple one-line quips usually worked best.

Another early humor realization: obscure humor leaves most people confused. For maximum laughs, choose easy-to-understand humor almost anyone can relate to.

After high school I became a tire salesman. At the start, I'd give lengthy sales pitches with all the features a tire had. I'd ask customers questions like "What are you looking for in a tire?" (since most people don't know much about tires, that question usually got blank stares). My boss noticed this and told me to forget about features and focus on the benefits. The customer doesn't care the tire was laser-etched. He does want to know it grips the road when the streets are wet, or provides a smoother, more comfortable ride. So I switched to my boss's clear, concrete examples, and I sold more.

Next my boss told me to ask how the customer's current tires did for him. And he told me to ask if there was anything the customer wished his tires did better. So I did that, and instead of blank stares I'd get direct answers: "It'd be nice if they'd lasted a little longer." Or "I have trouble with them when it rains." Now that I knew what each customer wanted, it became easier to sell, and I sold more still.

When I began to write sales copy, a friend told me to throw my copy into Hemingway Editor. The editor rates a piece's reading grade level: does it read at a first grade level? A fifth grade level? A tenth grade level?

I'd seen Hemingway before and run my writing through it. Sometimes it came back as "Post-Grad." How intellectual of me! I thought at the time. My friend pointed out this actually meant the writing was hard to read. The higher the grade level, the more challenging the read. Even for the well-read, lower reading level writing is easier to process. My friend mentioned he'd whittled sales copy of his for a finance product down from Grade 8 to Grade 4, and his sales doubled. "If I can explain a complicated finance product in fourth grade language, you can do it for anything," he told me. I became a devotee of the app. I didn't just use it for sales copy; I ran all sorts of writing through it, and used it to make all my writing simpler.

Next I reread Stephen King's On Writing. Suddenly all King's talk of removing adverbs, gerunds, and the word 'that', plus using simple words instead of complex ones stood out. I made all those changes to how I wrote and spoke.

Each step of the way, in every new language-based endeavor I took on, I learned the same lessons. Language works best when it is simple and clear.

The coolest guy in the room… every guy wants to be him. Yet you can't "try hard" to get there. The secret to his cool is what he does do – and what he doesn't.

When you go out to socialize, you quickly discover image is a big part of things. People make quick evaluations of you drawn from your clothes, how you carry yourself, your company and how those around you interact with you, and other signals. Those evaluations - often, snap judgments - affect how people treat you unless and until you give them reason to change their minds.

If they think you look cool, they may stare at you, try to get close to you, bump into you, or talk to you. Women may hover near you and send you approach invitations (or, sometimes, approach you themselves). Men may strike up a conversation or try to include you in what they are doing.

If they think you look lame, they may laugh at you with their friends or try to distance themselves from you. Women who think you look lame may roll their eyes at you or close their body language up to discourage you making an approach. Men who think you look lame may try to tool you to improve their position and ladder climb up over you.

And in any large group, most of the people there won't even be of much interest to most of the other people. These people - those neither at the top of the coolness hierarchy or at the bottom of it - are in the 'fuzzy middle'. They mostly just end up ignored, mentally classed as 'background noise' by other people making their evaluations.

Your mission is often going to be to not be the lame guy at the bottom, or one of the invisible guys in the middle.

Rather (often), you are going to want to make yourself the coolest guy in the room.

Compartmentalization lets you keep separate areas of your life separate – and avoid fallout from ideological clashes or failing relationships.

As you become more active socially, some things get hairier. You meet more and different kinds of people. You start to run in some very different circles. And eventually you end up with friends and connections who are completely incompatible with one another. The broader and more diverse the people in your life become, the more you need to take care who you introduce to whom.

Further, the more integrated your various circles and lifestyles are, the easier it is for problems in one to snake their way into others.

To fend off mismatches and problems bleeding from one area into another, you use lifestyle compartmentalization.

The ability to compartmentalize your lifestyle is a handy one to have. It lets you prevent mismatched acquaintances clashing. It lets you avoid friends wanting you to choose themselves or others. It keeps you out of scenarios where your girlfriends judge your buddies and try to get you to stop hanging out with them.

It's easy to compartmentalize your lifestyle, yet it's something not a lot of people do. It feels good to introduce people we like to other people we like. It's lazier too - rather than do one thing and talk about certain topics with your buddy Eric, and do another thing and talk about other topics with your buddy Kevin, and do yet another thing and talk about still more/different topics with Kate, the girl you've been seeing for a couple months, why not invite them all to hang out together and do one thing, and talk about the same things with them all?

Yet failure to compartmentalize your life leads to a more limited life - because when those different people from different walks clash, they tend to decide a.) maybe they didn't know you as well as they thought, if you have this type of friend, and b.) you're going to have to decide who you really want to be with: themselves, or those other folks?

One highly effective way to eliminate social and sexual competitors: undermine their masculinity. Yet as powerful as this tactic is, you must use it carefully…

Very slightly dark side tech here, but I’m giving it to you purely for defensive purposes.

In some situations, you will discover there is a need to defend yourself against competitor males. There are a variety of defensive measures at your disposal to deflect or declaw your social competitors, including many we’ve discussed before:

• Dealing with Disruptive Men

• The 5 Ways to Answer a Challenge in Social Situations

• Trouncing Male Competition for Girls in the Dating Scene

• 7 Reasons People Will Try to Tool You

Right now I’m going to give you one I’ve always liked personally (but try not to use on Girls Chase... because it’s kind of mean), which is to undermine competitor males’ masculinity.

Now, to pull this off, you have to be reasonably masculine. You don’t have to be a hulking brute who chomps cigars for breakfast. You just need to be a little above average on the masculinity scale. Even if you’re a sensitive man high in verbal intelligence and empathy, it is not hard to up your masculinity to where you’re a bit above average. Focus on being cool, being an asshole, and being dominant, and you’re already at least in the top 15% manliest men.

So long as you’re masculine enough for it not to seem like the pot calling the kettle black when you accuse other men of unmanliness, this tactic works like gangbusters.

You’ll use it for two things:

1. To directly demoralize social competitors, to their faces
2. To influence the opinions of women and others against your social competitors
   

Let’s have a look.