Tom Torero

Before you read a lot further, listen to this

(Video taken offline by his Executors)

I met Tom Torero in the summer of 2019, for a lunch arranged by a mutual acquaintance who wanted me to explain how to do lifetime bachelorhood. I tried, but I probably failed. Tom was aware of the legal hazards of relationships, but he seemed to be repeating the words, rather than believing it. He had a strong presence and a confident manner that made you want to like and trust him. Yes, I knew about the dodgy infield with the French girl. I could imagine him standing in front of a Year 10 history class. Like a lot of PUAs, he believed in love, that there was someone or two with whom one could have a long-term relationship that retained its romance, and that was what he was looking for, and was disappointed that he had not yet found it.

Tom describes how he re-invented himself in his twenties, physically and psychologically. I did something similar in my thirties, hitting the gym and going to AA Meetings. Physical re-invention is work, but it shows results quite quickly, can be enjoyable and becomes a positive part of your life. Except legs day. In my experience, psychological re-invention is a lot harder, and more fragile. I learned new behaviours and mind-sets, I can shrug my shoulders at things that in the past would have had me fuming, but the basic structure of my soul remains unchanged: I only look normal on the surface. Psychological re-inventors look as if they are in spiritual balance, but it's unstable, whereas Normies are stable. Maintaining an unstable balance all day can be tiring. One trick is to stay away from situations where you might be thrown off.

The Newsweek article could have been written about Rollo Tomassi, or Steve Jabba, or Krauser, or Richard Cooper, or a dozen other people. But it wasn't. It was written about the kid with acne and bottle-glasses, because that's who bullies go for. It was a reminder that for all his work on himself, inside, he was still that kid, and the bullies could see it. And he had nothing else, not even a day job to pay the rent and leave enough over to put aside for old age. He was 41. Being broke and unemployed at 41 is scary - ask me how I know. He was driving round Europe in a van, living off heaven only knows what. It looks like freedom and it smells like fun, but it feels like being on the run. Any therapist would have unhesitatingly referred him to someone else.

Nobody knows why people commit suicide: it's not like we can interview them.

It's a damn shame. He was a decent guy who had come a long way by his own hard work. A lot of people are expressing how much his ideas and teaching meant to them. He lives on in their memory, which is where immortality is found.

Why I've Had Enough Red Pills

I wrote a long piece about the core doctrines of the Red Pill. Crafted it over many days when I should have been doing something more useful. I’m not going to post it. I don’t understand the predicament of the men who find the Red Pill a solace. I’m a born bachelor with the attention span of a five year-old, an ACoA with a drinking problem, and an addict who managed to stay away from drugs because I knew that stuff would kill me. Somewhere in all that emotional chaos and pain I knew that nobody else could help me feel better. It took me a long time to find AA and many years later to understand that my exercise + work + culture life was not instead-of but actually-it. What can I tell you, I’m an engineer / logician not a guru / psychologist.

Sometimes I discover what I believe by contrast with other beliefs. The core ideas of the Red Pill are built on the pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology, can be read as normalising a wide range of dysfunctional behaviour, and produce a cultural-conspiracy theory that mirrors the Feminist conspiracy of the Patriarchy. I’m a Brit: I don’t do totalising ideologies, I do cock-ups, follow-the-money, and logic-of-the-situation.

So in my book, it doesn’t matter why someone behaves badly. It only matters that they do. If there are significant attendant benefits, I may tolerate the bad behaviour. If I don’t want to be around it, I walk away.

Walking away has to be legal and affordable. Always. Never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on in thirty seconds flat, if you spot the heat coming around the corner. Make an exception for the time it takes to find another job before quitting the one you’re in. The point is: you can quit your job, usually with a minimal cost, even though it takes time. Married men and Baby-Daddies can’t walk out, except at high cost.

Why did I read the Red Pill for so long? I went there because I wanted to understand why my only long-term relationship turned into a sexless habit, why she behaved they way she did, and why it had to be me who broke it up. I found those answers, though it took me a while to translate them from the original evo-psycho. I stayed out of habit, and because some of the gurus say things I agree with. But lately…

I’m a bachelor. Born that way. Never was going to do domestic relationships. Bachelors like women, but the same way they like city weekends and beach holidays: it’s a nice break, but it’s not when we pay the bills and live our lives. The Red Pill guys, and even the MGTOWs, regard life without women as less-than. Not an attitude I share. I really don’t.

St Paul was right when he said that we should live to please God, but that a married man has to please his wife. I’d rather do the secular equivalent of pleasing God: work and pay taxes to discharge my economic and social obligations, exercise, eat right, don’t spend money I don’t have buying things I don’t need to impress people I don’t like, and otherwise, do as I please as long as it’s legal. You don’t have to want to live my life, only I do.

Being Your Own Mental Point of Origin

“Be your own mental point of origin” is one of those phrases that for a long time I never really understood. Something about it kept slipping through my fingers.

Recently I saw a video called 15 Sacrifices You Need To Make If You Want To Be Rich


Alux can have some silly videos, but this is a good one, though you need to get past the Alux Lady’s voice and listen to what she is saying. It comes down to this: if you want to be rich, it’s going to take a lot of work over many years, and that work is not going to leave you a lot of time to give a wife and children the attention they deserve, or to hang out with loser friends, go for junk entertainment, and dozen other time-wasters, and even maybe for your health and sleep. You’re going to need to defer some of those things, such as family, and just plain drop others until you’ve achieved your goal or made an honest effort and failed.

This applies to a lot more than making a lot of money. It applies to training and competing for an Olympic medal; acquiring the skills and connections needed to establish yourself as an artist, writer, photographer or other creative; establishing oneself in a profession, trade or industry; or even working up from an entry-level job to one that pays enough to let live in your own place and save some money.

Now imagine someone leaving university and pursuing whatever demanding goal it was for ten years or so. Maybe they succeeded, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they know what it is to have an absorbing, sometimes frustrating but sometimes satisfying life that has nothing to do with women and children. If they were successful, they will place a high value on that. The idea that ‘all this success is just meaningless’ is a social cliche, not an emotional reality: the meaning isn’t in the reward, it’s in the competition. So they will still place a high value on the process, even if the results were disappointing. The idea that failed strivers reject all the behaviours they learned as ‘empty and meaningless’ is a cliche for losers. Nobody who has spent ten years filtering out junk, drama and losers is going to embrace any of it. They have turned into a person with self-discipline and self-respect, and those are things nobody trades.

So a lot of those temporary sacrifices are going to be permanent, but won’t be sacrifices, not to someone who has succeeded or put in an honest effort at achieving their goals. Because doing that changes the kind of person you were.

You can see where this is going. A man pursuing a goal over an extended period is going to look a lot like a MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships. If he doesn’t blow it by turning Beta when he makes his goal, he will be a de facto MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships for life. Not because he isn’t ‘Alpha enough’ to handle long-term relationships, but because he has evolved an idea of value in which the cost of LTR’s is not worth the benefit.

Anything that looks like MGTOW brand is anathema those Men’s Writers whose audience is men who want to know how to manage long-term relationships with women. That audience does not want to be told to get themselves a demanding goal. It wants to be told how to bump along with what it has, but with less pain per bump. It wants long-term relationships with women, because those are a substitute for demanding goals. (Though if they have a family and try to raise two decent kids, well, that’s a demanding goal. Such a pity most parents don’t treat it like one.) What those men want to hear is that they should not be the servants and ATMs of their wife and children. What they need to know is how to work that trick: how to have a life of their own, but no too much of a life that might cause them to look at their marriage and wonder what exactly they are getting from it that’s so much better than what they can get from their own devices? And don’t nudge and wink and talk about sex, or no-one will take you seriously.

Having-a-life-but-not-too-much-of-a-life is what’s meant by “being your own mental point of origin”. Because if you have a demanding goal, that goal is your mental point of origin, not yourself. Until you decide to change it.

Sharing MGTOWs and Silent Bachelors

Yep. I’ve been listening to Sandman. I think that means I will be banned from reading The Rational Male by its cookie. Sandman asks at one point, what is the difference between a MGTOW and a confirmed bachelor, and suggests that a bachelor will keep quiet about how he lives as a single man and why he chooses to do so, and if he does will mention how great a life he leads, whereas the MGTOW will talk about the reality and risks of domestic relationships. The bachelor gets left alone by the SJW’s and cat ladies, but the MGTOW gets a ton of shaming dumped on him.

That got me thinking, since I’m a bachelor rather than a MGTOW. A bachelor isn’t getting married or entering into domestic relationships. The same way you aren’t going to cut off your left hand. Instinctive, basic, physical. I didn’t make that decision for a reason, because I never made that decision, anymore than I decided to have brown eyes or mild lordosis. Born with it. It has nothing to do with how women behave: they could be, to the last one, faithful, loving, strong, sexy and loyal through all the good and bad parts of their partner’s life, and I still wouldn’t get married - though I might look with a little more wistfulness on married couples than I do now.

MGTOWs may have started life wanting to be part of a domestic relationship, but what they saw changed their minds. They may also have been forced to develop high-content pastimes and projects when younger (an idea tol be discussed in a later post) and are effectively lost to ordinary socialising and relationships. MGTOW’s are single for a reason, and that reason is about avoiding the downsides and risks they see as inherent in domestic relationships.

A bachelor can’t share his why any more than he can his brown eyes. A MGTOW’s why can be shared. Bachelors don’t have a common how in the way that MGTOWs do because the MGTOW’s how is the way he maintains his apartness. A bachelor doesn’t have to maintain his apartness: it’s part of his physical make-up.

A popular bachelor tactic is the “I’m so busy I’m a terrible boyfriend” exemplified by The Great Henry Rollins here:

This line needs a lot of self-confidence to pull off without it turning into self-deprecation or self-pity. External proof of the value of your busyness - recognised accomplishments, money, public success - also helps. Being busy at a job that doesn’t pay in a career going nowhere is not convincing.

This tactic is a conversation-stopper. Generally, bachelors don’t want to talk about why they live as they do, mostly because they are surrounded by married people and want to be polite to the unfortunate don’t want to upset the marrieds don’t want to get into shaming discussions about what a ‘real man’ does oh heck, because it’s just easier that way.

The married men have made their decision and are stuck in it except at great cost. If they’ve been it for more than five years or have two children, they know the realities, and they don’t need some snippy MGTOW telling them. At most they need another married man to say that, yep, that shit happens to all of us, and here’s what we do to get by.

The single men who want to get married are either delusional and so won’t understand any help a MGTOW tries to give; or desperately want to believe in NAWALTs and so will refuse to hear that help; or have their suspicions that all is not as advertised. That last group, and they alone, are the audience. There’s a small proportion of them, and the most anyone can do is put a body of work out there - as Sandman, Rollo and others have - and hope those who need them can find it.

The mainstream media makes content for the audience advertisers want to reach, and shrewdly guess that people who work hard, exercise, eat fresh food, buy only what they need with money they already have, don’t drink too much and don’t care about impressing people they don’t like, those people are not going to be prime targets for consumer junk. It’s not easy making content about fit, employed, sensible people, as they don’t have soap-opera lives. The only stories the mainstream wants about bachelors end with us a) getting married, b) being seen to be sad and lonely, c) like Hugh Grant...


(It’s impossible to follow that scene, so I won’t try.)

Sandman’s comment hit a nerve. We bachelors don’t do a lot of communicating about how we live our lives, the feelings and problems we have to deal with and how we dealt with them. Perhaps we should. It’s just not going to be about women, except in the same way it might be about cars. Or broadband connections.

Dear Captain Capitalism, Men Don't Demand Female Beauty

Aaron Clarey, aka, Captain Capitalism, is one of the smarter men out there. But he has a blind spot. Here it is again:

I have said it before, and I'll say it again, and the reason I'll do so is because it's true, but the most valuable commodity in the world is not oil or gold, silver or diamonds, copper or plutonium. The most valuable commodity in the world is female youth and beauty. And the reason why is very simple. Because it's true. No other commodity in the world is in as high of demand as female youth and beauty. And the reason why is that half the world's population (they would be men) demand it. And not only do they demand it, they demand it highly. They demand it so much that they built civilization to afford it win it over, so much so to the point we could say nearly all of human civilization and global historical GDP was created to get it.

Ummm. Nope.

Female beauty isn’t a commodity. We can use a commodity to create something of value: as wheat is used to create flour is used to create bread. Female beauty cannot be used to create anything. It has value to the woman insofar as she can use it to manipulate and gain advantages from others, but for anyone who is not having sex with her, her beauty has value in the way that art has value. People who say that art is a commodity are trolling you, not making a serious point.

Even for pimps, madams and hookers, female beauty is not a commodity. The commodity is sex. Beauty is a competitive advantage, a unique selling point.

For another thing, men do not demand female beauty. Don’t listen to what men say, look at what men do. They settle for… well, by definition, in a country where over half the women (and men) are overweight, most of them have to settle for Four and below. Sixes may be sexy and attractive, but they are not beautiful. Beautiful is above the Pretty Line, and that's a very small proportion of the 18-40 population. Three per cent or less, and in some places, it's zero per cent. And yet the guys line up to court and marry overweight, unattractive women. Lenny Bruce got it right: "You put guys on a desert island, they’ll do it to mud!"


Men don't demand youthful beauty. They fantasise about it. They have the same fantasy about Ferraris, holidays on some Pacific archipelago, getting a Knighthood, seven-figure bonuses, or any other form of fame, fortune and recognition. All these are unavailable to them, and any idea they could have any of it is a fantasy.

As the regular man grows older, the fantasy fades and he accepts what he can get. Until she divorces him, the boss sacks him, and the cost of everything goes through the roof while his salary stays the same. At that point he discovers that what he thought he was getting was as much a fantasy as dating Gigi Hadid.

What about the men who don't accept what they can get? They don't get into long-term relationships, and they sure as heck don't get married. We bachelors enjoy women's company from time to time, but she needs to meet our minimum standards for the time period involved in the interaction. (This is proportional to her hotness, logarithmically proportional to her ability to maintain a reasonable conversation, and inversely proportional to the sum of the work required to entertain and / or to to seduce her. This means that unavailable smart hotties don’t get lots of time, which makes sense, as it’s all wasted, since she’s not going to have sex with us. But I digress.)

The good Captain doesn't understand what motivates men. Neither does Rollo, who makes the same mistake. For the majority of men, women are not a reward, a status symbol, a source of validation, or a goal. They are an activity with costs and benefits, a resource with uses and hinderances. This is not an explicit calculation, by the way, it's instinctive, it's the immediate sensation of "Nah" or "Yea" when someone suggests something: we can invent reasons afterwards, but none have anything to do with that immediate reaction. It's probably a simple algorithm: we avoid the stuff that was tedious last time, and we do the stuff that was rewarding last time. Hence that overwhelming feeling that in all human affairs, you're only as good as your last (enter activity here).

The women I see, day in and out, on and in the trains, pavements, offices and shops of London don't inspire me to do anything. And I'm sure they feel the same way about my grey-haired ass. There's a brief moment in our lives when men and women matter to each other, for reasons that make no sense ten years after, and then it sinks into indifference, so we can get on with inventing gadgets, discovering medicines, building bridges and castles and sewers, solving mathematical problems, creating art, and all that other good stuff that life is really about. Babies are a by-product. Boeing 747's are the real product. Life is about business.

Feminine Solipsism and Masculine Empathy

I haven’t Sphered for a while, for various reasons, one of which is that I’ve really said all I need to. I do have one thing left. One of the commentators on Rollo’s War Brides post said this:

Simply put, feminine solipsism has a nasty tendency to sap masculine empathy. Sadly, when the pattern repeats itself enough, men lose the ability to connect to women on an emotional, trusting level. When emotional connection and trust is gone, what remains is the the conception of women as objects.

It has haunted me since I read it. There’s something in there I identify with, and something I think is wrong.

I’ve said before, but not clearly enough, that well-balanced adults do not need to make "emotional connections” with other adults. As children, they had their need for connection met by their parents, and as adults they are going to connect in the same way with their children. It’s the children who had bad or missing parents who become adults with un-met needs for connection. Since healthy adults are equipped to meet the emotional needs of children, the un-fulfilled people wind up trying to find comfort with other un-fuliflled people. Which does not work out well.

Well-balanced adults do not treat each other, or think of each other as objects. They have relationships of varying degrees of trust and sharing: from the purely instrumental relationship with a shop assistant, to the high-trust, high-sharing but non-domestic relationship needed for one’s attorney, to the medium-trust, cautious sharing of a domestic relationship. A well-balanced husband and wife know they are going to keep secrets from each other, and they know that the trust they have in each other is negotiable and circumstantial. A well-balanced wife / girlfriend doesn’t ask or insist her well-balanced man “shares” with her, she knows that he will tell her if it helps for her to know, and won’t burden her otherwise. A sensible man shares only as much as is needed to keep the relationship warm and functional. (If none of that makes sense, read Esther Perel.)

Pragmatic, moderated relationships like that can’t work for people with un-met childhood needs for connection. For them, relationships must be high-connection and high-trust, or purely instrumental. She’s his soulmate or she’s a waitress in a restaurant in a town he's never going to stop in again. And once he’s given up on the idea that she could be a soulmate, since he wants sex, he’s going to be having it with women with whom he has an instrumental relationship. That feels like ‘objectifying’ women to him. Well-balanced couples have sex with each other quote happily without having to believe they are each others’ soulmate. They treat sex as a shared experience that enhances them individually and hence confirms that their relationship provides value to each of them. It’s a glitch in the commentator’s thinking that sex without soulmate is objectification.

Let’s turn to the first sentence: that female solipsism has a nasty tendency to sap masculine empathy. I need to riff about empathy for a while.

“Empathy” is one of two things. One is an heuristic for anthropologists and negotiators: attempting to see the world through the eyes of the population they are studying, or of the people on the other side of the table they are dealing with. To do this, one learns what the other side values, what it believes about the physical and social world (or as much about that as needed for the purpose), how its legal and commercial systems work, and so on. One does not regard the other side’s ideas as true or false, better or worse, but as objects of study, much as one can learn Arabic and translate the Koran without becoming a Muslim. The ability to think like the other side without becoming one of them is empathy.

This is not the same as the ability to recognise when other people or animals are having emotions, and what the likely consequences and causes of those emotions. This is a standard-issue survival skill, possessed, along with a conceptual framework of varying sophistication, by pretty much anything that can move and has teeth. African lions recognise “angry bull elephant” and leave before the trouble starts.

In people, emotions caused by life-events, as opposed to stubbed toes or snubbed advances, are accompanied by a mass of thoughts about life, friends, the children, whether you need to take time off from work and what will that mean for your bonus, and a bunch of other stuff that might not be considered wholly appropriate to the event. These thoughts don’t arise from the nature of the life-event, but from the particular pre-occupations of the person. It is these thoughts that women need men to divine, since some of them can’t be said out loud without sounding gauche, tone-deaf or self-centered. No-one, of course, can say that out loud, so it gets covered up under “feelings”, and a feminised, therapeutic idea of empathy-as-the-ability-to-feel-what-the-other-person-is-feeling appears. These “feelings” are not physiological changes accompanied by behaviours, but needs, wants and desires for all sorts of things, that she “feels” she needs, because there is nothing in the circumstances that make those things actual requirements. That’s what men are “lacking empathy” for not intuiting.

And this is ambiguity that’s been nagging at me to be resolved. One the one hand, exposure to female solipsism does not reduce a man’s empathy. Empathy is an ability that most of us have and some of us consciously improve. Like sprinting or anything else. Once gotten, it’s hard to lose. He still has it, in fact, it’s what is telling him about her solipsism. It’s that empathy that will make him a good PUA if he chooses to go down that route.

What does get worn down is his willingness to divine her can’t- / won’t-be-said-out-loud “feelings” about what she thinks she deserves and needs. To guess well at these, he needs to know a lot about her, and unlike his male friends, who are one-and-done as regards insight, his knowledge of her ever-changing state of mind needs constant updating. That’s a serious drain on his residual energy and it’s one he is less likely to make as he gets more doses of her solipsism. And rightly, he feels that the less updating he does, the more he may feel he is treating her as taken-for-granted and maybe object-like.

But in fact, it’s exactly the right attitude towards a woman who is that emotionally unstable. She is not a good long-term partner, though she may be a fun short-term one. No-one is supposed to keep up with the twists and flips of unstable emotions.

So now I have to riff a little on solipsism. This seems to be a nineteenth-century coinage for the epistemological idea that while we can be sure of the existence of ourselves as a thinking mind, we cannot be sure that other people have minds. At least is our theory of knowledge that starts with the premise that all we can know is what we perceive with our senses. But then, the same premise leads us to taking seriously the idea that we’re all batteries in the Matrix as well. This isn’t the kind of solipsism we’re talking about.

The idea as used in the Sphere has two strands: the first is when experience and facts are interpreted through the filters of her feelings, needs and purposes; the second is when she clearly puts the indulgence of her wants, desires and feelings ahead of anyone else’s needs. Add to this some deliberate whimsy and tactical misdirection and you have something most men will recognise from at least one of their female acquaintances. This is not so much about women, as about anyone who has few or no resources of their own and must hi-jack other people’s time, skill and money, which is a lot of corporate types, government officials and politicians.

There’s some plain English for these traits: ‘selfish’, ‘manipulative’, ‘strategic’, ‘self-centered’: to name but a few. We don’t need to abuse a technical term from philosophy. Except we do. Because try reading the original comment as translated:

Simply put, women's selfishness, manipulation and utter whimsy has a nasty tendency to sap masculine patience. Sadly, when the pattern repeats itself enough, men lose the motivation to pay any attention to the whimsical and strategic changes and purposes of women’s “feelings". When that happens to man he stops caring about a woman’s wants and needs, and focuses on how she can satisfy his.

Really harsh. Best dress it up a bit. And round off the edges. By contrast “female solipsism” sounds almost cute: they can’t help it, the poor dears, it’s the oestrogen, or too much junk culture. It’s not subject to nasty moral words like “selfish’ and ‘manipulative’.

(This brings me to the heart of my reservations about the universality of the insights in the Sphere. Well-adjusted women are very rarely solipsist in this sense. A bad day here and an hour there, perhaps. Not every week, let alone every hour of every day. The women who are more frequently solipsist will be identified quickly by well-balanced men and other men with good radar, and will wind up with men who are themselves flawed in one way or another. And that’s who’s in the Sphere - and yes, that includes me. The Sphere describes the experiences of men who wound up with the less stable, less desirable women who make less co-operative and less supportive partners. As ever, misery seeks advice and solace while happiness stays silent.)

Let’s assume a man with hung-over needs for emotional connection and (unconditional) trust and examine that idea that he should focus on how the woman can satisfy his needs. A well-adjusted adult woman cannot and would not expect to satisfy those needs: a badly-adjusted woman might think she could, but of course she cannot. This leaves the man in the position of knowing that no woman can satisfy this unsatisfiable need, and that therefore he is always going to find that his relationships with women will leave him wanting more, and this is not always their fault, but arises because he cannot have the limited-trust-limited-connection relationships that well-adjusted people have. So there is a chance that he may not bother with relationships, for the same reason that he doesn’t bother with, say, polo ponies or concert violins.

What this man has to learn to do is to have relationships that meet other needs: for sex, entertainment and company. For some men, the same upbringing that left him with unmet needs for connection and trust will also have made him develop a life that is based around solitude and cultural consumption rather than the company of people, and these men are left with relationships with women that are mostly about sex, though there may be some entertainment as well. Whether he is one of those or not, he should consider a series of short-term (up to six months or so) relationships. There are plenty of sane women who, for one or more of over a hundred reasons, need a short affair. There is no reason for him to get involved with crazy people, though he may through sheer demographics find himself involved with other men’s wives or ex-wives. The mistake our original commentator made was to suppose relationships had to be long-term. He should focus on the realities: men want sex, women want attention. Short-term relationships provide both really effectively. In a short-term relationship, you can pretend to give a damn about the ever-changing weather in her head, because you’re going to split when you get tired of it.

I think the commentator is mis-lead by his own vocabulary, and by the need to avoid accepting that he’s a flawed case himself. The behaviour of un-balanced and damaged women doesn’t affect his empathy, but it does affect his willingness to pay much attention to them after the initial excitement of meeting has faded. Because he is flawed, he’s only going to meet women who don’t deserve much trust and with whom emotional connection would be ill-advised. That’s not exasperated by her behaviour, it’s right there in her damage. Sure, he’s stuck with women he can’t really trust and should not connect with, but if he could experience what a well-balanced relationship was, he would not find that met his needs either. He’s blaming the sadness he feels about his unsatisfying relationships on the crazy women he meets, but really he should blame the fact he only meets crazy women on the fact that he came into adulthood without experiencing connection and trust with his parents.

Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men

Jack Donovan is famous for the idea that men should operate in gangs, and for being gay while saying so. He should be famous for the distinction between "being a good man” and “being good at being a man”, because that is worthy of J L Austin himself, and for his identification of the four tactical virtues: strength, courage, mastery and honour.

Being a good man has to do with ideas about morality, ethics, religion, and behaving productively within a given civilisational structure… Being good at being a man is about…showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan… [demonstrating] strength, courage, mastery [and] commitment… A man who is more concerned with being a good man than with being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

What Donovan gets is that men want the good opinion and recognition of other men because only other men know what was involved, intellectually, personally and physically, in our achievement. Women’s opinions don’t count because women don’t care about the things that men care about: strength, courage, mastery and honour. Men don’t really care about their supervisor’s opinion of them because their supervisor doesn’t give a damn about anything but how well we fit in to the machine. (Tactically the opinions of supervisors and women matter, because life is easier if neither are bitching all the time, but one wouldn’t want to base one’s entire life around keeping the wife and boss happy. Would you?)

What makes Donovan’s book refreshing is that he doesn’t blame feminism. Women only appear as sirens inviting men to wreck themselves on the rocks of all things soft and compromised. There’s a reason for that we’ve already mentioned.

His villain is modern technology and the post-industrial economy and society that it creates. This has removed most of the chances that men have to acquire and exercise the four tactical virtues: strength, courage, mastery and honour. Processes and mechanisation has removed the need for Mastery from all but a handful of mostly intellectual roles. Power steering means women can drive buses, so that Strength isn’t needed. An astonishing level of public safety and policing means that we can withdraw large sums of money from machines in the middle of the night on busy roads without a thought of being mugged - there goes Courage. The whole idea of Honour from one’s fellow man is a joke when equal opportunity legislation means he turns out to be a woman.

However, while this is the right criminal, it’s the wrong crime. Being good at being a man can’t depend on a particular mode of the economy or the exact arrangements in society. A man can have strength, courage, mastery and honour in most economies and societies - but it will look different in each one, and perhaps each may regard the others’ as un-manly.

Men aren’t compromised by feminism, or post-industrial society, or the Health and Safety at Work Act. Some are compromised by marriage, children and the need to earn a living. They may not always have been physically soft. Modern entertainment technology, plus the commuting that scatters workers to the four quarters at the end of the day, has probably lead to fewer chances for men to spend time with each other socially. But some men have always skived and tried to cheat each other: that’s why we have all the commercial law we have now. If bakers had never adulterated flour with chalk, I might have believed in a Golden Age of Manly Virtue, but they did and I don’t. There is no “crisis of manhood”, it’s always been this way, only the costumes change.

Acquiring and living the four tactical virtues is a personal project that a man pursues despite the economy he works in, the society he lives in, and the men he knows. He cannot suppose that the men around him want to be virtuous, nor that the society values virtue, nor that it will be rewarded. A man chooses to work towards being good at being a man because he cannot live as a compromised person. And it has always been this way.

Donovan does not think that men in post-modern Capitalism will ever act as a united political force. I agree. That leaves personal action, which always feels a little bathetic after some high-grade, wide-ranging social analysis.

What does a man do when he wants to become better at being a man? Donovan’s answer is to “start a gang”. Not as in the Sons of Anarchy, but as in a bunch of like-minded guys to do stuff with.

You need to learn how to read each other and work together as a group. Go to the shooting range. Go hunting. Play paintball. Go to the gym. Take martial arts classes. Join a sports team. Take a workshop. Learn a useful skill. Get off your asses and do something. In harder times, the men that you do these kinds of things with are going to be the first men you call. They will be your gang. They will be your us.

Errr, no. That’s not quite enough.

When you are on the end of a wrongful dismissal, you need a union or an employment lawyer, preferably one who knows some journalists. You need a criminal lawyer with a flair for publicity to handle that false rape accusation. When the pipes burst, you need a plumber, and when you break a bone, you need a surgeon. Your gang is unlikely to include one, and certainly won’t include all, of the specialists you need. You need huge amounts of personal fortitude to sustain the campaign, and your buddies can’t help you with that, beyond a few platitudes. Because you’re going to need a lot of cash or the ability to live on very little - and your buddies won’t help you with that. They are regular guys with regular jobs like you. Dealing with misfortune in post-modern capitalism isn’t like defending the village from raiders or saving the animals from a flood. When bad things happen in post-modern capitalism, you have to get to Krasnoyarsk with the kindness of strangers. And once you get back from Krasnoyarsk, you might hang out with the guys again, but they won’t be your gang. They will be a bunch of guys you shoot the breeze (or the paintball) with, but who, when the shit hit your fan, were no more help than some guy on the pavement last week.

That’s the difference between the mythical life of the savannah tribe and post-modern capitalism. In post-modern capitalism, each man needs his own Rolodex of useful contacts, from plumbers to employment lawyers, electricians to employment agents. He needs the time and skills to keep these contacts fresh, and any businessman will tell you that doing that can take a week or more from your month. He needs to have something useful to trade with these contacts: he needs to be in their Rolodexes. The principle is the same - he needs to demonstrate he can be useful to those other men - but the camaraderie will be missing.

Few people have those social skills. Which is why we had the Yellow Pages, and have Google now. Building that kind of Rolodex takes a long time the moment you live in a town much larger than about five thousand people. So let’s add “the social skills needed to build and maintain a rolodex” (I’m trying to avoid the n-word) to the list of tactical virtues, though it’s not one Aristotle would have recognised. His towns were small enough that “everyone” knew each other.

The Way of Men is one of the better books on masculinity today. But it still doesn’t understand just how corrosive post-modern capitalism is, and how it turns everything to its advantage.

Heck. Even Jack’s selling merchandise.

Commitment Isn’t A Gate You Can Keep

There’s a Sphere phrase that everyone repeats: women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Everyone nods wisely. Except it’s not true.

Once the sex you’re having with her is done, she gets to decide if there’s going to be a next time. And she gets to stop you half-way through. She’s a doorman at a nightclub: just because you get in Wednesday night, doesn’t mean you’ll make it in Saturday night. That’s what being a gatekeeper means.

But once you’ve committed, you don’t get to throw her out if she misbehaves. She gets to throw you out if you misbehave. There’s no re-considering, there’s no natural break that gives you the chance to say NO to further commitment. Commitment isn’t a gate: it’s a leap over the cliff.

What men keep the gates of is attention, excitement, arousal and status.

In the past there was an option b): provisioning, attention, care and support. However, women can get jobs, and they get paid more than a man does for the same job. If they can’t get jobs, they can get welfare. If they lose their job, they can find another one faster than a man can. Men stopped being the gatekeepers of provisioning a long, long time ago.

(Small edit 28/1/2023)

Hypergamy Isn’t Quite What The Fable Says It Is

Hypergamy. Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. It’s a core idea of the Sphere. Women pursue a bi-polar sexual strategy: they want a reliable, low-maintenance, provider to pay the bills, take care of the kids and haul the heavy freight (Beta Bucks), and they want excitement, tingles and random emotions with some sex thrown in (Alpha Fucks). The usual theory, taken straight from the pornographic tendency of echo-psycho, is that women are attracted to men with Good Genes, dominant Alpha male, hunter-fighter-winner types who will breed strong sons and beautiful daughters from them. So they get pregnant by the Alpha and fool the Beta into raising the children.

This fable causes large-scale reality-field distortions in nearly everyone who comes near it.

Because the truth is that most women who fool around, don’t fool around with evo-psycho approved Alpha Males. They fool around with douchebags, losers, low-income musicians and artists, drug addicts and drunks, the local Lotharios of the holiday town, with other married men, and with men who don’t stay for breakfast and even the occasional PUA. Women have sex for two hundred and thirty seven different reasons, many of which barely made sense to them at the time.

They choose losers and abusers for two reasons: first, they can’t hack the competition for the small number of over-subscribed Alphas; second, they don’t want to threaten the relationship that exists in their heads with their Beta Provider, so they don’t have flings with men who are viable partners. They choose losers and douchebags because they don’t want to feel that could be doing better than their Beta, as that would then cause them to regard him with contempt for not being as good as the next guy, and then to regard themselves with contempt for staying with him when they could do better. That then re-doubles back on the Beta Hubby, because it’s his fault she feels self-contempt. Not hers for tasting the forbidden fruit and being an ingrate.

 

(Not the Alpha she’s fooling around with) 

For additional silliness, add the assumption that women are good judges of breeding stock. If this is so - and the really crude evo-psycho theories assume it - then apparently douchebags, unemployed artists, drug addicts and all sorts of other people whose phenotypical behaviour screams “unsuitable” in fact have excellent genotypes. Which they do, if “excellent genotype” means “breeds douchebags, heroin addicts, bi-polars and low impulse control”. Maybe losers, abusers, drunks and violent men are the true inheritors of the Earth, and this civilised society thing is a dreadful evolutionary mistake.

Or not.

Maybe many women are just dreadful at spotting a good partner - which explains why 30% of them get fed up with their choice within 10 years and divorce him. Maybe many women know a good deal when they see him putting food in the cupboard, petrol in the tank, clothes in the wardrobe and mowing the lawn, and are smart enough not to threaten that for the sake of some sex and cheap thrills, so they fool around with “the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys”, all the unsuitable boys. Maybe female choice is not what makes an Alpha male - after all, in nature for the animals that do the Alpha thing (which is not many of them), the females just stand around and wait for the males to decide who’s the Alpha.

Maybe many women are morally flawed, emotionally dysfunctional and, when you get past the glamours, have un-attractive personalities. Maybe there aren’t that many Good Women out there, not now, in the present exact conditions of really existing Capitalism. Maybe there never were, and they behaved themselves in public for fear of shame, inside their houses, they made the lives of their husband and children a sheer hell of indifference, contempt and sarcasm. Maybe it was always like it is now, except now, men don’t have to marry any of them.

(Renton. Mark Renton. Who she really fools around with) 

The practical problem for many men is that they don’t want to be jerks, freeloaders, clowns and drama-triggers, and they don’t want to be around women who choose that kind of second-rate phenotype. They would rather believe they were being rejected because they weren’t James Bond, than because they weren’t Mark Renton. They are being rejected for casual relationships because they are husband material and the girls don’t want husbands yet.

Hypergamy is rarely Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. Mostly, it’s Asshole Fucks and Beta Bucks. When put like that, it may be even more threatening. It’s one thing to get James Bond’s girl when he’s finished with her, but to get Mark Renton’s girl when he’s finished with her? Not so palatable. And that’s why evo-pyscho sells: it’s much easier on everyone’s ego.

What’s Wrong Over At The Rational Male

let me unequivocally footnote here that women are absolutely capable of a learned empathy and sympathy for men. However those sympathies, like genuine desire, cannot be negotiated for. Whatever your misguided concept is about how Relational Equity should merit a woman’s sympathy or respect, those are only valid and genuine when a woman freely gives them to a man she perceives as Alpha, never as something he’s due.

That comment from this post made a rather large impression on me that it’s taken a while to understand. I feel the same way as the commentator who sniffed “seems a self-defeating statement to me”, but I still didn’t know why it got under my skin.

Then I re-read the Iron Laws of Tomassi and got it.

1. Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.
2. NEVER, under pain of death, honestly or dishonestly reveal the number of women you’ve slept with or explain any detail of your sexual experiences with them to a current lover.
3. Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait.
4. NEVER under any circumstance live with a woman you aren’t married to or are not planning to marry in within 6 months.
5. NEVER allow a woman to be in control of the birth.
6. Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.
7. It is always time and effort better spent developing new, fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to reconstruct a failed relationship. Never root through the trash once the garbage has been dragged to the curb. You get messy, your neighbors see you do it, and what you thought was worth digging for is never as valuable as you thought it was.
8. Always let a woman figure out why she won’t fuck you, never do it for her.
9. Never Self-Deprecate under any circumstance.

Compare these to Roissy / Heartiste's Sixteen Commandments of Poon (edited text):

I. Never say ‘I Love You’ first. Women want to feel like they have to overcome obstacles to win a man’s heart.
II. Make her jealous.
III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority
IV. Don’t play by her rules. If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire.
V. Adhere to the golden ratio: give your woman 2/3 of everything she gives you.
VI. Keep her guessing. True to their inscrutable natures, women ask questions they don’t really want direct answers to.
VII. Always keep two in the kitty. Never allow yourself to be a “kept man”.
VIII. Say you’re sorry only when absolutely necessary
IX. Connect with her emotions
X. Ignore her beauty: the man who trains his mind to subdue the reward centers of his brain when reflecting upon a beautiful female face will magically transform his interactions with women. His apprehension and self-consciousness will melt away, paving the path for more honest and self-possessed interactions with the objects of his desire.
XI. Be irrationally self-confident: no matter what your station in life, stride through the world without apology or excuse.
XII. Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses.
XIII. Err on the side of too much boldness, rather than too little
XIV. Fuck her good
XV. Maintain your state control: you are an oak tree. You will not be manipulated by crying, yelling, lying, head games, sexual withdrawal, jealousy ploys, pity plays, shit tests, hot/cold/hot/cold, disappearing acts, or guilt trips. She will rain and thunder all around you and you will shelter her until her storm passes. She will not drag you into her chaos or uproot you. When you have mastery over yourself, you will have mastery over her.
XVI. Never be afraid to lose her: you must not fear. Fear is the love-killer.

Rollo is all about the warning. This is the advice of a man who has seen too many bad things happen, and doesn’t trust women, or the law. It’s all about avoiding the downside. And Iron Law 6 is just utterly bleak - unless it’s a point about men wanting something unrealistic from women. When we dig into the details, however, it isn’t. He really is saying that men love romantically, and women love opportunistically. Which is a fancy way of saying that the love a wife has for her husband is the same as the love a shepherd has for his sheepdog. Every now and then he has to issue a remark like the one at the start of this post. Which convinces exactly no-one.

Roissy the player who loves the game. He thinks women need to be treated in a certain way (twenty-five words or less: “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen”) and will respond with sex and affection for the men who do so. His post on the different types of game needed for women of different ages is a masterpiece in its analysis of white Anglo women-with-jobs-in-large-urban-areas, and the tone it adopts. There’s nothing about marriage, children, birth control or anything else here, because it’s quite clear that Roissy is just not in the long-term relationship business, and given that, certain things are just simple consequences.

Rollo is “you can’t trust them, and all your love is in vain”, while Roissy is “love them, but don’t commit”. For Rollo, being in a relationship is a constant fight against her attempts to diminish and control a man: for Roissy, being in a relationship is until she gets tiresome. Rollo’s women are scheming, opportunistic, contingent, calculating, relentless and inexhaustible in their campaign to reduce their men to sexless servants. Rossy’s women are confused, emotional, game-playing, sexual and contemptuous of men who lack confidence and purpose. Rollo’s is the world of the failed marriage, the unfaithful wives of serving soldiers, the gold-digger and the manipulative shrew. For Rollo, women are a burden to be borne: for Roissy they are a pleasure to be enjoyed while they last.

There is a miasma of distrust of women in The Rational Male. It’s never obvious, from the pages of that blog, why men would bother getting married or even have short-term relationships. It’s an endless recital of the thousands of ways that women can behave like assholes, ungrateful bitches, shrews, deceivers, liars and traitors. And that’s just ugly. However true all the examples may be.

And there’s not an element of resistance about it. It’s always about how the Feminine Imperative and hypergamy are protean and invincible, never about how to trick it, avoid it, or generally fight back. And I have to think that part of the reason for this is that Rollo is married, and married men are, unless they can afford the divorce (and from what he’s said about his job, Rollo would get reamed by the Family Court), pretty much hostage negotiators for life and limited to damage control. As a single man, Roissy can walk away. As can all the single men. It's why you will never hear an older lifetime bachelor regret his decision to stay single.

What got under my skin is that the quote is way too bleak, and way too inaccurate. It just doesn’t describe the situation of a lot of people. And that’s for the next post.

Tattoos and Notch Count: Why You Shouldn't Care

Matt Forney recently wrote an article that has so far gained an astonishing 33,000 comments on RoK, explaining why girls with tattos and piercings are broken and make bad partners. It was based on his personal experience, though a follow-up article citied some academic studies that suggested his experience was not unique. As one commentator said, however, you can find an academic study that provides evidence for pretty much anything.

I'm not going to discuss whether Forney's views are right or wrong. There are pleasant young ladies in my office who have small and discreet tattoos, and in the limited world I inhabit, there are no girls with large and vivid tattos - well, until I get to the gym.

(Abby Lee Kershaw modelling a talking-point tattoo. If you live in her universe.)

I’ve never understood the heat that tattoos on, and sexual experience possessed by, women in their 20’s raises on many of the Manosphere sites. Depending on their visibility and aggression, tattoos are either a deliberate talking point (the barely-visible kind, it proves you were looking closely) or (the vivid on-display kind) a sign that you should probably leave her alone because if you were her type, she would have acknowledged you already. It all sounds like those young Indian men in the UK who want a “nice girl” from the village, not a thoroughly Westernised third-generation girl from their mixed comprehensive down the road.

I keep thinking “What are you guys worrying about? You’re not going to marry them, for Christ’s sake”. And that’s the point: those young anti-tattoo men do want to marry someone. Their complaint is that everywhere they look, they see tattoos and girls with more than a couple of notches on their belt. And in many cases, sure, if there was divorce insurance, those women would be un-insurable. Those young men should be glad those girls are disqualifying themselves as wives. And with such clear signals.

Because as far as I’m concerned, you’re not supposed to marry them. Any of them: tattoos or plain canvas, virgin or experienced, career girl or possible SAHM, sweet Polish girl or tough Yorkshire chick. You’re supposed to have sex with them, go to the movies and the ballet with them, talk about nothing over Sunday breakfast with them, go on holiday with them, and generally let them let you live a more varied life than the narrow sleep-commute-work-gym-commute-sleep cycle you would otherwise live. It’s reciprocal: without you, she would be doing the same. No-one’s using anyone. While they are with you, you should feel that they are fascinating, attractive, someone special and a general bonus to your life (that’s what men are supposed to feel about women, and if we didn’t, the whole thing really would be a business deal). After a while, she will realise you’re not a long-term prospect, or you will get tired of her faults just like the slogan says. Then it’s over.

(Original sentiment by Charles Bukowski)

I did this for a long, long time. It played out against the background of my drinking and generalised frakked-up-ness, so it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been, but I would have still “played the field”, as the phrase was, if I had been a genuinely self-confident man. Some girls didn’t stay as long as I would have liked, and I stayed with some longer than I should have. Some left me, and some I had to leave. All of them went on to other relationships and I never heard from them again.

That’s how it is supposed to be. Until, like me, your declining hormones, retreated neuroses, and sense of personal ease make it easy to retire from the fray, and live quietly as a self-sufficient bachelor. You’re not supposed to marry them. Marrying or even relationship-ing them is for the guys who can’t read the signs.

 (Reading the signs: probably not interested in a guy who blogs; also Photoshop-ed to within a millimetre of her torso; and apparently, she’s engaged.) 

Because there is no sign that says “good wife material”. Never has been, never will be. Time takes its toll on everyone and today’s good wife might be tomorrow’s shrew, just as today’s fit-and-attentive husband is tomorrow’s overweight workaholic. Equally, there’s no sign that says “will make a bad wife for you”. The most we have are probabilities. Read the signs, apply the probabilities and you will never get married, but you can still have some good relationships.

Esther Perel's Secret to Desire in a Long Term Relationship

This talk has about 5 million views. I love this bit

I want you to be my best friend, and my trusted confidant, and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence, and mystery and awe, all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge, give me novelty, give me familiarity, give me predictability, give me surprise, and we think it’s a given and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that

There’s a lot of applause at the end. What they are applauding is the mood music that she creates with her upbeat manner, ten dollar words and nifty juxtapositions. They are not applauding what she actually says about the secret to desire in a long-term relationship. It starts around 18:00 and the key quote is this:

They have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that [desire] is just gonna fall from heaven while you’re folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is just going to happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex, it’s wilful, it’s intentional, it’s focussed, and it’s present. Merry Valentine.”

Read or listen to that at least three times. If you want to keep the sex going in an long-term relationship, it needs to be premeditated, wilful, intentional, focussed and present.

Sounds wonderful. All those exotic words. The nice thing about exotic words is that they drift loosely above the ground of actual actions and materials. Ms Perel wasn’t troubling anyone with the details, and the details would have spoiled the music.

Take away those fancy words and use some more mundane ones. LTR sex needs to be planned - that’s what calling “spontaneity” a myth means, and it’s what “premeditated” means. It means Nookie Nights go in the diary. You both have to show up ready to do your bit. No moods, no headaches, no bad tempers, no rows to give you an excuse to avoid it. You have to show up as agreed, and you need to put yourself in the mood, and help your partner get in the mood. That’s what “wilful, intentional” mean. It means she leaves her work-and-family yakkity-yak at the door of the “erotic space” (aka “bedroom”, usually), as well as any resentments she may have about toilet seats being left up or lawns being left uncut. That’s what “focussed and present” means. It means they are thinking about nookie, not the bullshit of their lives outside the Nookie Zone. Earlier Ms Perel says “responsibility and eroticism really butt heads”. There’s no discussing the family finances, children’s school problems, or any of that nonsense.

Who on earth is capable of this? If I had to guess, I’d say that at a deep level such a couple regard themselves as co-conspirators against a crazy world, that both of them can achieve orgasm fairly readily, and that it is a pleasant but not crazy-intense experience for either of them.

How many people does that leave out? Every couple where she settled for a good provider after a few flings with Exciting Boys. Every couple where one of them can’t trust, or for whom orgasm is difficult or over-intense. It leaves out at least eighty per cent of the population: forty percent who get divorced and therefore never were trusting co-conspirators, and another forty per cent who aren’t either but prefer the awfulness of a “settling” marriage to what they think is the awfulness of living alone.

But that’s what all those erotic exotic words are for: to tease you and hide the realities. There are some thinkers, Heidegger for one, where the language, the way its used to look at the world, is as much part of the philosophy as the insights, if not more so. There are others, J L Austin for example, who use a plain and simple language as a rhetorical trick, as if to dare us to believe that complicated metaphysics could hide behind ordinary English. And there are some who use exotic words to hide the realities that, if stated baldly, would dampen the applause, reduce the book sales and reduce the consultancy gigs by half, as people realised they had no chance from the start. For all her obvious sincerity, and for all the truth of her insights, that’s what Ms Perel is doing. She’s not going to be the one to break the news to you.

You Can't Filter Out The Chaos

The men of the Manosphere complain a lot about the behaviour of the women they have met. Read closely and the majority of the stories are about women who are damaged at worst, lacking coherence in their personality (aka “batshit crazy”) or actually malicious (aka “shrews, bitches, users and abusers”). Not all women are like that, but all the women these men have met are, and since they have no idea where to find the good ones, for all their practical purposes, all women are like that. Those men should probably give up on trying to find a female live-in companion, because they aren’t very good at it.

If the older men of the Manosphere are complaining that women are all users and abusers, the younger men of the Manosphere complain that they cannot find a “nice girl” who wants to get married and raise a family. Some may reference the 1950’s as some lost Golden Age of conventional values when they do so. What these men want is a housekeeper / valet / childminder / cook who is also a sexual and social partner. It didn’t work very well in the 1950’s, and it barely works at all now. What they get are women who don’t need to make nice with a young man just so they can leave home. The girls have their careers, and independence, and credit cards and passports, and they really do need a man like a fish needs a bicycle. They don’t all feel like that, but it turns out quite a proportion do.

One way of interpreting the divorce statistics is that, in fact, about a quarter of the women in any cohort do not want to be married, and hence get out quickly before having children, or of course, are lifetime bachelor girls. At the moment the girls can’t just say they want to be single, as men can say they are happy to stay bachelors, so they adopt a number of smokescreens: “focusing on my career”, “where have all the good men gone”, “too busy to meet people”, “men won’t commit” and so on. This is not intended to fool anyone, anymore than their make-up is intended to fool us that their skin is any better than it is. It’s a mask, just like their make-up.

The truth is that a fair proportion of men and women never did want to spend their lives in domestic partnership. They put up with it because accidental children and complementary labour: he worked the big animals or the cash crops, while she managed the kitchen garden and killed the chickens. One person could not really do it all, and two struggled. Now, of course, one person can if they are paid enough or prepared to live cheap enough. And Capital likes single people: it doubles the sales of almost everything.

I can’t sympathise with the young men of the Manosphere on the lack of purple squirrels, but then I’m lifetime single and have done all my own cooking, shopping, cleaning, ironing and other chores all my life. Hire a cleaner to come in every week: there’s four of you in the flat, between you it’s no cost at all. Learn to cook, most of the best chefs are men, and you get to play with sharp knives and flames. Soldiers do their own ironing and polish their own shoes from time to time, so I figure it won’t hurt you. (As for the whole children thing, it’s a mystery to me, as is anorexia, self-harm and marriage.)

However, the complaints of the older men do serve a purpose. These men remind us that we are all flawed, that those flaws will turn into cracks and breakages, and those flaws have expressions now. Nobody gets saner as they get older, unless they get into Recovery, so a woman with red-flag behaviour in her late-twenties is going to be a liability or even a threat in her early forties.

A young man needs to know he has to filter the women he meets. He needs to know how to identify addictions, personality disorders, bad attitudes, excessive debt, other men’s children and the many other red flags. He needs to know these things are not only possible, but actually probable, and he needs his illusions about women dispelling. The young women he meets are, after all, filtering the men they meet for sexual adventurers, broke-assed scrubs, addictions, personality disorders, bad attitudes, excessive debt and so on. In contrast, they have no illusions about men. Of course, if all anyone wants is a one-night stand, there isn’t much to be filtered for, except actual violence, STDs and unwanted pregnancy.

No filters are fine enough for a lifetime live-in relationship. Everybody changes, the flaws in everybody’s souls and bodies turn into breakages, and there is always a chance that Mr/Ms Right will come along to turn heads and hearts. Looking for a lifetime partner is as silly as looking for a car that will last all your life: cars aren’t made like that, and neither are people. (The cars that do last all someone’s life? Re-built at least once, unless a Rolls-Royces or a Bentley, and cared for weekly. And towards the end of their lives, only ever taken out for show.) If two people do stay together for life, they have re-built their relationship at least once, if not more. And they had time for each other.

Relationships are not a “risk” - risk implies uncertainty, and there is no uncertainty here. You and your partner will change, will crack, will cause each other heartache and pain. It might be anything from early-onset Alzheimer’s (nobody’s fault) to a Legal-Aid funded divorce motivated by boredom and malice (somebody's fault) to sustained unemployment, a debilitating injury or just plain loss of interest. The relationship might recover, and it might not. If it never happens to you, this is not because of your superior virtue, but a long streak of good luck.

The difference between employers (or clients) and partners is that if you do not pay your taxes and due bills you will go to jail, but if you don't get laid when you feel horny, well, that’s what the Internet is for. People have to take bad jobs, but they don’t have to take bad partners. And an employer doesn’t demand a contribution to its future revenues from the staff who leave. Getting married has a thirty per cent chance of dumping you back out on the market within ten years, maybe with child support payments, maybe not. It’s also the only chance you have of raising two amazing children and still wanting to shag their mother, whom you married all those years ago.

Getting Laid For Free, Ain't Free

The Rule is: if it flies, floats or fucks, rent, don't buy. The reason is that buying planes, boats and wives (weddings) is expensive, all three have high maintenance and running costs, and unless you're very lucky, you can lose a lot of money on disposal.

What counts as "renting"? Any arrangement where the man is not responsible for the expenses and debts of the woman. Co-signed the mortgage? You've bought. Had a child together? You've bought. Married? Guess what? Sharing a flat and bed together? Grey area: if she's working and expects to pay her share of rent, you're still renting her. Given her a key to your place, let her move in some clothes and receive official mail there? Dodgy. Try not to do that.

Renting runs from one-night stands to paying escorts to living-together-without-contracts. In London, good-quality escorts go out for £250+ an hour. That's the benchmark. Pay more than that per lay and you need to re-examine your choices - unless you're very rich and are paying for very high quality, as you can in this town.

In London or a big city, Night Game costs drinks, nightclub entry and taxi fare, just to play. That's pretty much at least £60 - £100 a shot. The Notch / Night rate may be better, but even at 20% that's still around £400 a notch.

Day Game is a whole other thing. If you do it systematically, it's financially horrible. The hidden cost here is that Krauser's spare time is not free: he's an IT contractor in Financial Services and those guys make upwards of £400 a day. He could be earning six figures annually, but chooses not to. It's a rare contractor who works all twelve months a year: let's assume he could work six months a year. If I've followed his year right, he's done a three month earning stint in 2013. In nine months he gets thirty lays, so in six he gets twenty. The extra ten notches are the benefit of his chosen lifestyle. The extra ten notches cost around £25,000 in lost post-tax income. That's £2,500 a notch. Yikes! And those notches are almost all one-time: all those girls who are "on their last night in London"?

So one-night stands make no economic sense in a Big City, unless you are doing a job that exposes you to a large number of women whose social control is lowered and to whom you have tempting status or looks.

Relationships spread that Notch acquisition cost over a number of Lays, but add maintenance and running costs. As long as that running cost stays below £250 / week, you're ahead. The hidden cost comes from the fact that very few people go straight from one MTR to another. There might be six sexless months between each one. While an MTR is running, it's an economically-sound source of sex, but when it's not, we're back with escorts, Night Game or chastity. So to the acquisition and running costs of an MTR, you have to add the cost of sex between the one that's just finished and the next one. Cheaper, but no Aldi.

Looking at the cost of sex isn't considered polite. Men don't really want to admit that sex costs them money, and women don't want to admit that the sex they provide has an identifiable cost to the man. It's all too close to prostitution.

So here's the trick everyone pulls on themselves. They tell themselves they are not going to the club or the bar to get laid: they are going for the booze, the music and the event, and if they get laid, that's a bonus. Same with any other method or venue for pick-up. I'm going to go for a walk in St James' Park - if I happen across a pleasing young lady there, that's a bonus. If I don't, I've still had a nice walk. Go out looking to get laid and anyone will come back disappointed: so let's pretend we're not. That way, one night stands are always free, just like they were back in university.

Approaching: A Food Chain Analysis

Acknowledged daygame maestro Krauser published his stats for 2013. His food chain - as it's called in the sales business - looks like this:

Numbers / Approaches: 25%
Dates / Numbers: 24%
iDates / Approaches: 1.5%
Lays / iDate: 53%
Lays / Dates: 32%

The least informative ratio to get from the numbers is Lays/Approaches (2.7%). Gross success ratios like that look as if they should be the ultimate bottom line, but are no use for understanding what's happening. Performance ratios are meaningful if they are tied to a discrete section of the process: there's way too much going on between between an Approach and a Lay for the Lays/Approaches ratio to mean anything.

(If you think 2.7% is bad, Direct Mail routinely yields sub-1% response rates, and full-page articles in national daily newspapers for esoteric piano recitals or fringe plays have response rates below 0.05%.)

Now let's have some fun and assume this will do as a representative sample of 20-30 year old 6+ female, mostly foreign, short-term, visitors to London - which is his chosen target group. Let's start by spinning that Numbers / Approaches around. Krauser is a self-confessed half-bald medium-height guy with a Geordie accent - not a Nine. However, he's got high-grade Game, determination and experience: a handful of hot PUAs and the thirteen Naturals in the UK might do better, but that's neither you nor me. Let's assume that Krauser's getting as good as it gets.

Then it's reasonable to assume that the reason he gets 25% Numbers/Approaches is because 75% of girls are hard-line unavailable-at-the-time, and a further 18% (76% of the 25% who did give a number) are unavailable-after-second-thoughts. This gives us 93% (75%+18%) unavailable for any of the 513 reasons girls are unavailable. This leaves 7% who are Up For It If... And only 35% (weighted average) of those will convert to Lays.

(7% doesn't sound bad, but there aren't that many 20-30 y/o 6+ foreign girls on their last day / night in London (it just seems like it), so their needs might be being met entirely by a handful of PUAs and a couple of Naturals. None left for you and me.)

How transferrable is this to girls who work in and around London? Some of it is and some isn't. Lays / Date (or iDate) is a function of your game and her interest. Sure, there are serial daters, freeloaders, husband-hunters, and girls who can't tell the difference between a job interview and a date, but not all girls are like that all the time. Let's say that with K-level game, even London-based girls can be converted 35% of the time.

What takes a huge hit is the number of approachable girls, and the Numbers / Approach and Dates / Number ratios. Most of the girls who come to London do so to get away from the pressure of having relationships, though there are some who still think it's a young person's playground, and are horribly disappointed when they find out it isn't. If London was full of approachable, attractive working girls here for the party, that's who Krauser would be writing about. And he's not. So that in mind, let's say that about 2.5% of London-based 6+ girls are Up For It If...

Applying that pro-rata, we get iDates / Approaches of 0.5% and Numbers / Approaches and Dates / Numbers of about 13% each. And that's on a small population.

In the words of Pete Townsend in Who Are You: "there's got to be a better way". There is, but it's time limited, and we'll talk about it later.

All Hail The Reverend Lawrence Shannon

So there was an article on Return of Kings about this book, written by the Reverend Lawrence Shannon.  It's sharp, hyperbolic, the distilled essence of everything Rollo Tomassi, MGTOW and others are saying, so much so that I began to wonder if all the Manosphere theorists who weren't PUAs or Married Men were just re-cycling it. It was first published in 1985 and has been re-printed since, but not since 1997.

It's everything I and every other born bachelor believes about women, marriage and dating. I have believed something like it ever since I was about, oh, probably five months old. And you know what?

About half-way through, I realised I didn't give a flying toss whether the Rev Shannon was a raving misogynist, a bitter loser who lives in his sister's basement, or any other of those shaming namings. He was saying what I had always known, and he was saying it out loud and proud.

At that point it hit me: we born bachelors are simply genetically different from you married chumps. Sorry, but with a few exceptions (like maybe Roman Abramovich and Barak Obama) that's how we think about you. What you have done is literally incomprehensible to us. Self-harm, anorexia... and getting married. It's so incomprehensible we assume that you simply don't share the same values, no, it's more fundamental than that, you don't have the same hormone soup and brain structure as us. If we were scrawny green plants with yellow flowers, botanists would deem us different species (there are a lot of species of scrawny green plants with yellow flowers).

Am I kidding when I say it's genetic? Let me see if I can explain this. Not even in the alcohol-soaked depths of the most awful depression and self-pity did I ever think that that marriage would make it better. Not even in my most Gamma moments of guilt-for-being-me did I ever think that I should get married to prove I was a Real Man. Every time I heard people talking or read people writing about how I should be making commitments to women, getting married, having children, how maybe I was gay because I wasn't chasing after a bride (oh yes, but that was back in the Bad Old never-you-minds), how I was shallow and empty because I wasn't sharing my life with a special someone, and yadda yadda yadda... I would wonder why they were lying to me. I never day-dreamed about a house, a wife and mother of my children. I day-dreamed about my future when I was a young boy, of course I did, but it never included a wife and children. Any more than it included a Bengal tiger. There has never been a time in my life when I thought marriage, or even a live-in, would be a life-improving thing to do. No matter what I might have said, thought, felt, or said I thought or felt, I was no more likely to get married than I was to jump out of a fifth-floor window. I could no more do it than a sailor could piss into the wind. It's a reflex, not a policy.

So here's the Rev Shannon on what amounts to MGTOW:

Q. Having been single a long time, I nearly married one of our corporate attorneys last year when I was thirty six. I was rescued solely by the accidental discovery that she was occasionally sleeping with her uncle in New York. But for that windfall, I would have been trapped and put on exhibit in the public square with other married men. I am now happily resigned to remaining off the playing field, watching the fracas from the bleachers and, if a truly remarkable female makes her debut, running down for a quick scrimmage. I would suggest this alternative to anyone who is tired of the daily slamming of heads—the frantic grinding that occurs in the field.

A. You have arrived at the eventual hiding place of most men who have experienced the predatory female, learned something, but still enjoy the game. Most, like yourself, prefer the exhilarating breath of freedom to the sack cloth and ashes that accompany a "commitment." In the end, a predatory female, no matter how beautiful, will always be the succubus: exciting, momentarily thrilling, mesmerizing—but dangerous as a green mamba.

Here's the Rev Shannon on the Good Life:

Condition yourself physically and mentally. Most people look like gunnysacks full of doorknobs. This is partially due to heavy doses of dependency on predatory females. Work out every day and get yourself into good physical shape. Take up a sport and start running. Do what predatory females have done for thousands of years — concentrate completely on yourself. Rid your mind of the garbage dumped into it by the matriarchal society. Occupy it instead with good books, films, and a hobby that benefits you, that you enjoy. If you get horny, don't play the matriarchal society's hackneyed dating game, RENT a woman. For two or three hundred dollars you can rent a sexual partner skilled enough to turn you into a boiled chicken. Spare yourself the tedious sales pitch that accompanies dating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, period.

Damn right - though I don't have the money for prostitutes of that calibre. Reading the Rev Shannon caused me to laugh aloud. Here was someone else saying with zero apology what I have always felt I couldn't say to others. I could quote the whole damn book, I don't think there's one single thing I seriously disagree with. I have been walking around with a lighter heart ever since.

On Sponsors, Trust, Mark Minter and Mentors

The Manosphere is all a-flutter because a guy called Mark Minter is getting engaged to a fellow Manosphere poster Geisha Kate. He's 58 and divorced, she's 34 and a single mother. He was, up to about the 25th July 2013, widely admired for his heart-felt and fluent denunciation of all things marriage and American female. The reaction divides into three: "see, I told you he was a white knight all along", "he's a fraud and we have been deceived", "I wish them both the best of luck and hope the love of a good woman gets him over his anger". His ex-wife has posted long and bitter to the point where I wondered "And you had two kids with this man why?" Of course, it's the single guys who feel betrayed; the married guys who are glad he's getting over his issues; and the competition who are glad he's fallen from his perch.

Which set me thinking. Avoiding exactly this disappointment with individuals is exactly why "we take the advice, not the advisor". Which has long been my attitude to AA's idea of sponsorship. Being an ACoA, I'm not likely to work well with the idea that someone else is going to be a repository of wisdom and experience, whose advice were better taken than ignored. I believe that we are responsible for choosing the advice we take, and that choice should be based on content, not the reputation of the advisor. This means, for instance, that I get to decide whether the damn butchers are going to operate on me when in old age, as is inevitable, they find virulent cancer knocking around my organs. I don't get to decide the exact method, and which knife they use, but I get to make the Go / No Go decision, and if they can't or won't inform me to my satisfaction, the answer is NO. That's because I already know that cancer treatments delay death by about three to five years at most, years during which I would most likely have soul-sapping chemotherapy and other barbaric treatments. If the technology changes, so might my answer.

However, this is a lonely mode of being. It means I don't trust anyone - not because I think they are malicious, but because they may be ill-advised, taking the easy way, or blinded by their own beliefs - and while those are good reasons for not taking what someone says on faith, it still means I don't trust anyone (except on trivial shit like "which way is the airport?"). Not trusting people is tiring: I'm guessing that trusting and finding that trust rewarded is energising and simplifies the world you live in. You'll have to tell me, I wouldn't know. 

And it's worse. I don't trust the advice, of course. I cross-reference it, compare it to my experience, get second opinions, experiment if possible on stuff that doesn't matter or cost much if the advice is bad. If I don't test some stuff, it's because the cost of not testing and finding it fails is small enough to carry. Which is why you will never find me jumping out of an airplane wearing a parachute - not a civilian one anyway.

I'm not sure that's an effective way to live. I think we are supposed to have people in our lives we can trust, starting with our parents, to guide us. (Of course, if the world changes too damn fast, then the Oldies can't advise because they have old assumptions about a new world. Rapid change breeds low-level wariness.) I've seen AA's do well with the a sponsor that suited them, and equally others get royally messed-up by ones that didn't. People need to trust and be trusted like they need to love and be loved. Those of us who live without trust or love on a daily basis (which does not mean we live with betrayal and contempt on a daily basis, it just means No-Bad-Stuff, No-Good-Stuff) will tell you how tiring it is, and how limiting. When you have no-one you can turn to for guidance, or for an example, you do less, experiment less, and live in more of a rut. Kinda like not knowing where to find good tradesmen, your house stays unchanged because you can't find anyone you would trust to do the building, plumbing and electrical that you can't do yourself.

I never had a sponsor in AA. I tried a couple of times before I noticed a pattern. They never bothered to ask me the basic CV questions, but assumed they knew what was wrong with me. How can you even begin to work with someone until you know what they studied, what they read, or how they spend their time? I gave up after that, and just listened to what people said in the Meetings, and took the stuff that seemed interesting to use later. To test, not to trust. I believe in AA and the 12 Steps not because I have faith, but because it works for me and I have seen it work for others. Not everyone, but enough. Which means, of course, that I don't believe in it at all. If I have evidence, I don't need belief.

We're not supposed to live like that. It's too tiring. It's emotionally flattening, it's like being in cold, grey weather all the time. We are supposed to be able to trust, like we are supposed to have a little sunshine every day.

So then Mark Minter. He upset a lot of younger men wanting a role model and a guru. The ease with which he did a 360-degree turn made some of them wonder how strong their ideas really were. Those who looked forward to more of his insights and stories were disappointed that no more would be forthcoming. A chunk of the possibility of trust vanished from the world of some people, and they rightly howled at its loss. 

I will be freaking flabbergasted if it works out for him, but I promise not to say "we all told you so". And I am a 59-year-old man, so I know exactly what he's talking about, but then MGTOW is for those of us able to live day after day with only the illusion of personal relationships and contact. There is a rush of hormones that accompanies a hug or even a smile that promises imminent intimate contact: even the thought of that rush now terrifies me. I would probably faint, or have a heart attack, if a woman touched any part of me with intent to deliver. (I can hug and kiss-cheek with the best of them, but those promise nothing.) I sure as shit couldn't go about my outwardly modest and sensible, but inwardly bullshit, life afterwards. This is what he's talking about: the endless cold blue emotional skies of the late-middle-aged bachelor. I would not wish it on anyone, as it takes self-denial and emotional endurance to live it without falling into the bottle, or over-eating or other harmful solaces. That's what Mark Minter is talking about. He doesn't want to live under those skies, as many people do not and cannot.

There's always the possibility that it's one enormous troll, or a piece of performance art, but if it's real Mr Minter is a deluded idiot. Madness, as we say in AA, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But then, I never did get the whole marriage thing, kinda like you don't get he whole cohomology thing. Except getting cohomology is much, much less risky than getting married. 

Who Da Man? Alpha Beta Bollocks

Over in the Manosphere they talk a lot about Alphas, Betas, Sigmas and the like. Try this

http://alphagameplan.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/socio-sexual-hierarchy.html

as an example.

My first problem with the usual typologies is that it's all a little too much like High School: swaggering Alphas, detached Sigmas, wussy Deltas, mass-market Betas. These ideas are supposed to come from "science", but it all sounds like a systemisation of teenage, and perhaps academic, life to me. People are not bonobos: that's why people make documentary TV programmes about bonobos, not the other way around.

So, is there a hierarchy? Don't think too hard: it's a trick question. A hierarchy implies someone who's judging, and a Man's reply to that will be "who the fuck died and put you in charge?" Men recognise hierarchy in objective achievement - running faster, lifting heavier, earning more, cutting neater code, laying tile straighter and faster, whatever - but not in the estimate of manhood. You're either a Man or a Male: it's  binary. Of course it is: Men are binary. Women and diplomats go in for fifty shades of grey. 

So let's dump the high-school hierarchy. There. Doesn't that feel better? Now let's also dump the stereotypes and classifications, mostly because they aren't relevant to the problem. We don't need to know anything about that schlubby-looking suburban pram-pushing, cargo-shorts wearing Dad at the door of the restaurant, about to inflict two tired and disgruntled children and a woman who may very well soon be his ex-wife for all the pleasure she seems to take in their company. It doesn't matter how much he earns, where he volunteers, what education he had or what culture he consumes. His political views are irrelevant. He's a disgrace, from his choice of clothes, through his slack posture to his shrewish wife. That's all we need to know, and we can tell it pretty much at a glance. We're men, it's binary: you're a disgrace or not. More to the point, you're an exemplar or not.

Let's talk role-models. When I was an impressionable young man, we had real heroes: Simon Templar, John Steed, John Drake, James Bond, Napoleon Solo, Kojak, Harry O, plus any character played by John Wayne, Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood. Not a married man among them, all dashing bachelors without visible personal lives, capable, independent, tough, smart, cool and usually with neat cars. Only the great George Clooney carries on this tradition, and a young man could do a lot worse than model himself on Clooney's characters  - even if they are more ambiguous than the earlier ones.

By contrast with these admirable figures, married men tended to turn up in comedies and soap operas, and if they were the lead characters in serious dramas, their home life was a sketch, usually featuring a supportive wife and two children on their way to school. If a male character had a detailed home life, it was the same disaster we recognise today. He was an emotional klutz and his more in-tune-with-the-important-things wife was always explaining said important-stuff to him. And of course, the domestic, Peyton Place-style drama, is predicated on on everyone behaving like personality-disordered cliches. One reason that the media seems full of negative portrayals of men is that there are far fewer heroes and those few are more complicated. The airtime has been taken by advertiser-friendly series designed to deliver a large, high-spending female audience. 

So Who Da Man? Once it was John Wayne. Feminists hated him exactly because he was such a clear role model. Steve McQueen was the coolest white man that ever lived, no doubt. Miles Davis was cool, but he's a bad role model - maybe Arthur Ashe is better. My personal heroes (Socrates, Groucho Marx, Paul Feyerabend, Craig Murray) are all men who one way or another gave bureaucratic authority the finger, and were good at what they did. 

We're looking for outward confidence, self-respect, the ability to gain trust from other people, manners, taste, discretion, the competent exercise of whatever the appropriate life-skills are for the time and place, and the ability to know who to trust. And yes, psychopaths score highly on all those things, so we need to add in the usual requirements of consideration, co-operation and contribution. Princes used to be punctual and polite and, oh yes, they killed you if you dissed them. Since killing people is frowned on, a modern-day Prince is still punctual and polite, but dumps those who diss him. Autonomy is the central criterion. If you are running around after your girlfriend, wife, daughter, mother, alcoholic brother, best mate, boss, supervisor, clients or whoever else, then you are below the Man-Line.

Sure. I know. This excludes men who are pillars of their community who have loving wives and adorable children. I have agonised about this for a long while. Now I'm sure. Married men can do many wonderful things, but forty per cent of them get divorced, which leads to daughters becoming strippers and sons flaking college. 3:2 against with a limited upside and a lose-everything downside is not a bet any sensible person would make. If it's a dumb thing for you to do in your professional life, it's a dumb thing for you to do in your personal life. A man knows that if it isn't business, it's R&R, and doesn't make dumb decisions in the first place.

Does anyone exemplify these virtues today? Aside from George Clooney? I'm going to guess that Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Putin are pretty much their own men, but theirs is a hard act to emulate. I don't know where a young man looks now for a decent role model.