Letters to the Editor
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The type of men who whine about "nice guys finish last"
I used to date one of those. He said he was a "nice guy". What he really was was a socially inept jerk. Never mind that his favorite topic of conversation was the effect of his antidepressants on his bladder - he could talk about that for hours and hours. When he got tired of that, he switched to talking about his six ex-girlfriends and his one ex-wife. Despite a high intelligence level (he was not stupid), the guy had no manners or social skills and was an embarrassment to take out in public (he would discuss his bladder and his ex-girlfriends there too). He also felt comfortable enough with me to discuss just how hot my friends are and how if he weren't dating me, he'd go for one of them in a nanosecond.
For all that, he was a "nice guy" - he didn't beat me or force himself on me or whatever. I am sure he never really understood just why I dumped him. But I heaved a sigh of relief when I did.
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Man hating isn't attractive either
Okay sure plenty of men are stupid pricks, but a warm cup of cocoa to a man? That is why you only attract assholes, you are an asshole and don't know it. Oh and the lack of doing anything to yourself screams low self esteem, which loser men go straight after like flies on shit.
You want a quality man, you have to present yourself as a quality catch, instead of a bitter angry harpy that thinks all men are second to a cup of warm chocolate.
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Surely The Explanation
is simpler than that: the law of large numbers. It's been my, ahem, personal experience back in the day, that the average guy is ten times as successful if he interacts with ten times as many women. The so-called 'nice guys' that I've known (according to the descriptions here) tend to be low-numbers men who didn't know when to cut their losses and move on.
Yes, being shot down is no fun. But like the lottery people say, you can't win if you don't play. Simple as that.
That being said, some types are more statistically successful than others. Agree with anything the girl says - "Crystals are an effective alternative healing practice. The big-money guys just don't want you to know that." "Pachouli is cool, and so are clove-cigarettes." "Yes, men are power-mad Patriarchalists. Women should be put in charge" "I too often use the I Ching to divine inner truth." (I'm dating myself, I guess.
See, the script then goes something like the girl asks what are you doing right now. Answer that you're a physics major, or into cellular respiration of earhworms, and the typical response is "Gee, you must be really smart", girl code for "FOAD for wasting my time, loser." Not saying this is the universal pattern, thank God, but you better be prepared to meet a lot of women and be rejected before stumbling upon Miss Right.
Otoh, how much cooler to reply that you're in school right now, but really, your music is the most important thing to you right now, especially since you're into the whole social awareness thing and you're rockin' against that Fascist Ronald Reagan. And yes, ladies, it does not reflect well upon your gender that the latter approach works so much better than the former. At least, it doesn't reflect well upon people of a certain age.
Ah, life, a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.
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As a feminist, there are some things I agree with
As a feminist and someone who subscribes to various postmodern gender philosophies, I think there is some validity in Mystery's approach.
Tracy Clark-Flory mentioned, in the context of talking to women, why not be yourself and say what comes to mind. She likened what he does to scheming. I think what Mystery discloses is the idea of identity being performative and existing within discursive social limits that we perform in. Essentially, we're not just performing for others in order to get the intended effect, but we perform for ourselves in order to create our identity by tempering those discursive limits.
We're not born confident. We gain it over years of habitually performing confidence - similar to his notion of desensitization. For someone who has not had a lot of social interaction with their desired sex, it's not a question of acting not-yourself, but of acting yourself tempered by a performance, until this notion of the self is the performance. What one considers scheming and lying is also identity formation.
I read a copy of 'The Game' some years ago and what I found the most intriguing was that these guys basically outline what people already do. There is nothing wholly original to their approach, they've just turned it into a social-science (just like Adam Smith turned the study of exchange into economics). This is why Mystery is always referring to pyscho-anthropology. They've used pre-existing theories to quantify and qualify how seduction works, as it has seemingly always worked. Some of these old theories are certainly phallocentric, but as too are the natural sciences.
If we look closely, we'll find that negs are concealed within our everyday conversation with people. They are a fundamental part of our communication logic, the logic of rhetoric. We shift hiearchy in order to get meaning across in a palatable form. What is communication but to seduce the signs? What is interesting however, is because now the rules of the game of seduction are disclosed, there is a potential to talk about the ethics. That is one of the outcomes of scientificizing. Think along the lines of, "how do I quantify a neg without turning it into an insult, which may in turn become violent?"
However, to paraphrase the late Jean Baudrillard, the illusion of seduction is to not know the rules of the game. There is a certain loss of the auratic experience - the desensitization as Mystery calls it. In Los Angeles, I met a few members of the Tyler Durden school of pick-up, which is a lot more aggressive and certainly is misogynistic. They considered themselves pick-up artists (PUAs) and lost the ability to hold decent social conversation. Every conversation was a game where they quantified the stakes, just as Marxists try to read the workers revolt and feminists try to read the repression of sexuality.
To master seduction is to lose the ability to be seduced yourself, which I think is a grave mistake on the side of Kantianism and Godliness. To an extent, these pick-up artists attest to a hyperrealisation of sexual relations, just as pornography has supplanted the veil of the body with a hyperrealisation of appearances. But that's what science does. It unveils reality to get us to some universal truth, but at the same time it undermines the reality of things as they are phenomenologically.