Why I don’t accept most generalizations about men and women and you shouldn’t either

In a private chat, Red Pill Dad and xbtusd have been talking about their respective experiences and the qualities that might be possessed by different women at different ages. Each of them has stereotypes and generalizations supported by their experiences, yet they’re very different guys who live in different places and have led different social, economic, educational, and dating lives. Their conversation reminds me of the dangers of generalization.

Think about the tiny number of people you’ve interacted with in your life. I have maybe, I don’t know, 2 – 10 people, depending on how you count, who I’m very or pretty close to (know a lot about means I know a lot about them), maybe a couple dozen I know a little bit well, a couple hundred who I vaguely know, somewhat recently, by first name or face (could be 1,000), maybe 10,000 I might conceivably have interacted with since I was a freshman in high school (maybe a bit more, maybe less)… that’s not a lot of people, if you think about it… some of these numbers might be a little low, but even if you assume I’ve had some vague interaction with 30,000 people over the last 30 years, that’d be 1,000 a year, way too many for more than idle passing on the street, that sort of thing… 500 a year is probably too many, even counting schools… point is, however one slices these numbers, I don’t have substantial interactions with that many people, and I haven’t, in my whole life. I checked, the United States has 330 million people in it, and 330 million is a huge number, so huge humans can’t comprehend it.

I interact with a minuscule number, who have been filtered in some way… school, college, work, social inclinations, religious inclinations, big-city living. In the last 10+ years, my social world has focused on people who are doing non-mono, or don’t mind people who are doing it, and that’s done a lot of filtering, too. Can I draw true conclusions from this small, unrepresentative sample? How am I supposed to generalize based on this tiny sample? Red Pill Dad has his own socialization biases, as does xbtusd. Xbtusd has been doing non-mono for a while, and, while I don’t want to give the exact number of years he’s been involved, it’s a large enough number that his social life has recalibrated around other people interested in doing that, which means the kinds of women he meets and f**ks are different than a general sample of women where he lives, let alone a general sample in the United States. RPD’s social life hasn’t been calibrated that way, which leads him to a different set of experiences and generalizations. Many of his women come from cold approach at bars. The women who are at bars are different from the women who aren’t.

Whatever you see in the media, is based on highly unusual people, circumstances, stories. “Normal couple has a child, goes to work in the morning, hangs out with their parents, drinks coffee” never makes the news. No one cares. Wild dysfunction, crime, bizarre claims, hyperbole… these things make the news. Don’t succumb to salience bias. Just because it’s in the news, doesn’t mean it’s common, or even relevant. The news is by definition abnormal, which is one problem with reading it, or, worse, watching it.

Matt Yglesias has lately been harping on an important point for Democrats, that The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in a suburb of an unfashionable city,

Fully 6% of the American population lives in the New York City metropolitan statistical area, which is genuinely a lot. But if you add up the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas, they together add up to only about 42% of the population. The 50th-largest metro area is Birmingham, Alabama and number 51 is Rochester, New York.

Democrats, Yglesias says, are driven by young, urban, college-educated people who are very different from the median voter, and we all see the results of this sad mismatch, which Democrats are mostly blind to. Getting away from that point about political commonality, though, almost everything ever written about game and non-monogamy comes from people living in or familiar with a handful of places: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York City, London. “London” is included in the “London Daygame Model” (LDM). Neil Strauss, author of The Game, lived in Los Angeles, maybe still does. Los Angeles and London are not like other places within the United States… they are not like Rochester. The kind of women I talk to, that RPD talks to, that xbtusd talks to, are much younger and much better educated than the average, and almost any woman who talks to any of the three of us for longer than “would you like oat milk or regular milk?” is going to be more sexually open and curious than the median woman. The supposed generalizations you read online come from extremely unusual people. You are an extremely unusual person: you’ve met a very small number of the total number of people out there.

We’re evolved for groups of up to 150, not countries of 330 million… these numbers and factors are also why I don’t buy red pill guys’ generalizations of women, or feminists’ generalizations of men… the generalizations are almost always built on a tiny, selective, unrepresentative sample. With the red pill guys’s talk, I usually don’t get to meet the guys, figure out if they’re cool or lame, any of those things… they’re text in boxes, with the lack of context that “text in boxes” implies. With many feminists in the media, I can see their names, look up their pictures and go, “Yup, that explains why you have some of the views you do, views that pretty girls are unlikely to have.” Pretty girls almost never write, so podcasting has helped pretty girls find their voice, and the voice of pretty girls is, no surprise, different from feminists working in the media and struggling to make $40k/year working 50 hours/week. Men and typical women can barely imagine the world of privilege that pretty girls inhabit.

For work reasons I’ve experienced a fair number of cities, at least briefly, and that’s shown me how overtly or subtly different many places can be, different enough to make generalizations about large groups (like “men” “women” “women in their 30s”, etc.) suspect. We’re all seeing the world reflecting back to us that which we put out. If I run into a super religious person, that person is unlikely to spend a lot of time with and around me. One could multiply that example by thousands of other people and see similar results. Selection bias is everywhere, distorting our perception, and showing us ourselves.

RPD and xbtusd (and every other guy) have built different social, communal, and city worlds. We’re united by our love of pussy. They have different networks and intersect with different people’s networks in different ways. The ways those networks differ help reinforce or change their world views. Cold approach guys often have many many interactions with many women, and many of those interactions are poor, and a lot of poor interactions will lead to different views than a smaller number of positive interactions. We’re probably not built for mass rejections, and our brains struggle with mass rejection (this is not an argument against cold approach or learning cold approach). For all the ranting about SJWs and wokes that I do, I also have to realize that many of them exist in networks that reinforce their wrongheaded beliefs. Everyone they know thinks the way they do. They don’t read me. Our worlds differ. Many people who are most vocal online are real-world failures. Meditate on that.

The network approach and the shotgun approach: why and when girls flake in dating

Consider two Hollywood screenwriters: one is fresh out of school and knows no one, or almost no one, in the business, but he’s written a couple of screenplays and, for the sake of this hypothetical, he’s got some talent. He gets to Hollywood and what’s he going to do? He’s got no connections anywhere in the business, although he’s read lots of those memoirs about how other guys made it, so he sends his screenplays to every single player out there. Writers, directors, agents. The vast majority don’t reply, and he doesn’t get even a rejection. Damien Chazelle, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, all the Hollywood “Chrises,” Ari Gold, they all say “no” by saying nothing. Somehow, though, someone bites, a little… Jonah Hill let’s say… and Hill or Hill’s people like the SF action pitch—reminds them a little bit of a modern Pitch Black, but could the writer make it funny, too? Maybe they’ll pay him a little bit for this, but, compared to the work he’s doing teaching spoiled brats the SAT and waiting tables, it’s a lot of money. He has no idea how to make it a comedy but he starts work, cause what else is he going to do? His other screenplays go nowhere. He starts a novel at the same time.

Then there’s our other screenwriter. He’s in the business… maybe he got in through family connections, a working writer in a school saw potential in him, he got lucky, whatever. He knows some people in the business, and he’s been working on a screenplay that he knows will be right for someone, let’s say Chazelle for purposes of this hypothetical. He’s already met Chazelle at industry functions, maybe done a little blow with him in a bathroom, whatever. Both of them think T.C. Boyle’s novel DROP CITY would make a great movie but neither has ever been able to get it made. Our screenwriter says, “You know, we could never do DROP CITY right, but I’ve got a kinda similar story, set in the ’80s though, against the AIDS crisis, we should do it.” Chazelle reads it, likes it, has some suggestions, they work on it together for a while. One or both of them know the right actors for it. Their agents like the project. In effect, our screenwriter #2 is never really rejected. He’s a known quantity to others in the business, working with other known quantities. Now, the project may fall apart… maybe Ryan Gosling hates Chazelle now for some reason… but screenwriter #2’s journey is nothing like screenwriter #1’s. If you ask each about the nature of being a screenwriter, they’ll have wildly divergent opinions.

The application of game to this metaphor ought to be obvious, but since this is the Internet let me spell it out: the raw cold approach guys are #1. They often have limited network/friend circles. They don’t do that much cool shit, or “cool shit” as hot chicks would define it. They’re guys I’m talking to in Parties, and Festivals, parties, etc. and the network’s power, and other things like that. I have some things in common with them because I’ve done some cold approach… but for the past ten or twelve years, it’s not really been my modality… I’ve focused more on sex clubs, which are themselves a kind of network. Sex clubs + non-monogamy are also fun cause I can slot new chicks into that network, if I meet the right chicks and such. I also like doing them.

Field report: meeting an intrigued Indian doctor

Xbtusd is back, with a field report. He writes at Whatisityouseek.com.

My in-person game is generally pretty terrible (i.e. cold approach), but from time to time situations arise organically that make me feel comfortable hitting on girls in public spaces.  Last summer, we had street shutdowns that essentially turned into 24/7 block parties.  On Friday and Saturday nights, people would come out and gather, and there was a guy who used to run a mobile DJ unit, dragging around a PA system on a little trolley.  DJs die after a sufficient period of time without music and attention, like an animal denied water, so I understood why he did what he did. I’d befriended him after multiple run-ins in different parks, joining in on his impromptu dance parties.  I saw him playing and called out to him as he was walking away with two girls in tow, though it was early for a threesome.  I was with a small crew of around 8 people just out and about drinking and enjoying ourselves on the streets.  The DJ and I began chatting and immediately the two girls with him started berating me for not wearing a mask.  For clarity, I’m pro-mask, pro-vax, but within reasonable contexts.  By  last summer, it was clear  that being outside was totally safe without masks, especially with the low COVID #’s where I was.  

That said, I’m almost as annoyed by the blindly pro-mask as I am by the blindly anti-mask.  I love to fuck with people (hence this website, and me being on Twitter), so my knee-jerk reaction was to go into character as an anti-mask Trump nut.  I like this character even more given that my outward appearance makes it confusing for people.  I began ranting about how masks were stupid and that COVID was a hoax created by the government to control people.  I have become a particular fan of the rhetorical style of a now-famous whistleblower who goes by the moniker “Q” and whose identity remains anonymous.  I sprinkled in some lines like, “follow the money”.  “Who benefits”.  “The storm is coming”.  And tried not to break character or laugh for a good five minutes.  Think of Sasha Baron Cohen as Da Ali G or Borat. Being good liberals, they took this as an opportunity to engage with a lost sheep and see if they could bring him back to the flock.  Eventually I couldn’t keep the comedy going and dropped the rhetoric.  This would probably fit into the idea of “push-pull.”  There was an immediate connection once I started speaking normally and explained the nuances of my view, that I didn’t feel the need to wear a mask outside but did wear one indoors in public spaces.  I could’ve said, “Masks are like condoms, everyone says they always use them, but will make an exception this one time.”  They were both Indian doctors, and so were pro-authority and erring on the side of caution, and they believed I needed to show data to prove that wearing a mask was safe, while I viewed the proof as self evident based on the lack of a spike in cases post BLM protests (I wonder if gonorrhea cases rose: protesting seems to have a strong hookup component, after the protest).  As this debate evolved, a few pieces of logistics fell into place.

Asian guys, dating, the game, and embracing the struggle

I’ve met Asians guy who f**k lots of girls, of any and all races, and they have a few things in common: they lift or are at least fit, they’ve got good fashion/style, they have good interpersonal skills, they’re not afraid to approach chicks (or they conquer their approach fear)… there are probably a couple other things they commonly do that don’t come to mind right away, but, if you look at that list, you’ll notice that none of it is specific to Asian guys. It’s what guys who’re good at sleeping with lots of girls do. The topic is on my mind cause I’ve talked to Asian guys who’re learning the game, and at the start of their journeys, they often think they have some special stigma around being Asian, when most often they don’t: what they have is weak game, and, like any guys who do poorly with chicks, they have to learn good game, if they want to wildly succeed. And wild success is extremely possible for Asian guys. The topic arises cause of this extremely lame, but slightly interesting, article, “Men’s Rights Asians” Think This Is Their Moment. Asians have men’s rights activists?  I hesitate to call it an “article” cause the writer spent a few hours on Reddit and then boom! calls it research, but that’s what passes for journalism today. Journalists are too lazy to leave their couches.

The article says that there are Asian race traitors who’ve joined the anti-Asian social-justice warrior movement… and that is true. But the article also gives examples of loser brigading Asian guys who’d be better off sharpening their game than harassing randoms on the Internet. A lot of these guys are very interested in what Asian chicks do…

How to think about “future projection” on dates, and how to retain girls better

Sometime along the way to being a player, I figured out that it’s often useful to say something about date 2 when I’m on date 1 with a girl: mention cooking, for example, and say, “Come over for dinner, next time.” Then set a date, usually two days from the moment of the date. So if the date is Tuesday, shoot for Thursday, and feel out her schedule, and schedule that date.[1] Making things happen is man frame, accepting offers is woman frame. Text her the next day, “Good seeing you yesterday, and I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at [time].” She can decline the date at that point (and sometimes does, it happens, it’s all in the game). My classic strategy has been one or two bars on date 1, then try to bounce her home, if possible, and my working theory has been that she’ll respect the effort to lay her, and the boldness, even if she says no. Magnum has used a two-date model successfully, which seems to reduce flakiness and female rejection due to self-perceived negative sluttiness. He thinks the two-date model helps with retention, and he may be right about that, although if the girl feels “on” during date one, he’ll lay her or at least try.

Game is about balancing tension and comfort, and I think most guys who get into the game and studying the game are nerds who tend towards too much comfort and insufficient edge.

Join the network and create the reality-based future

You should always listen to Balaji S: though he has little to directly say about the game, he has much to say about the nature of reality and much else that is game adjacent. Today, in Bitcoin, China, the “Woke” Mob, and the Future of the Internet, he speaks to the rise of networks and networked cities and states as a means of resisting the totalizing impulses of centralized, coercive states. This gets me thinking about the “woke” world that hates and feminizes men, despite despising, on a dating and mating level, the feminized men who result. If you buy into woke and being a p***y, you won’t get laid, and yet many guys seem to buy into this nonsense and indoctrination, and a larger number of women claim to want p***y guys while f**king typical hot, successful guys. What’s going on with the guys who buy the woke narrative? Could be that most guys don’t care about getting laid—or is it that getting laid in 2021 is really hard for most average guys because they don’t get it how it works and how to make it work for them, and for that reason either don’t try very hard or quit? Yours truly, however, still does try, and still feels some impulse to resist the ubiquitous media nonsense that celebrates failure and weakness instead of winning and strength. What is to be done?

Roy Walker: “One hundred daygame lays”

Roy Walker commemorates 100 daygame lays. He finds that “As expected, there are no medals, revelations, epiphanies, or deep learning points… I didn’t even get an MPUA card. The 100^th girl, although extremely hot, felt just like all the others. I banged her, and then more or less instantly couldn’t wait to get rid of her. EE’S BREUKAN.”

His blog is more like the lads and bros telling war stories than like the educator offering lessons in how to dismantle and reassemble the mechanism. He seems like a guy who played a lot of sports and was a social leader at school… and thus unlike most guys writing about the game. Some guys need a nudge that this is possible, and the stories can provide that nudge, as well as a glimpse of the varieties and randomness of chicks, from the ones who pop right into the bed to the ones who are a titanic struggle. A guy who can’t effectively get dates isn’t going to get much from reading him as he’s too advanced, and the potential reader likely needs to work on his own value.

Paying for women (no, not that way: on dates)

Xbtusd tackles a perennial topic, coming at it from a different angle: should the guy pay on dates?

I have a distinct memory from high school, of a girl I was interested in, explaining how attractive women procure alcohol: she said they flirt with older guys who have fake IDs, giving the older guys the impression a hookup might be available, and then leverage that relationship to get alcohol.  I was furious when I learned this, but eventually asked the girls to ask the guys to buy me alcohol without telling the dudes it was for another dude.  Today we would call those dudes “simps,” but back then pretty much everyone was a simp.  Dudes with cars would DD (“designated driver”) for carloads of women ferrying them around from party to party and back to their houses all over town.  Often, these dudes didn’t even think they could hook up with the girls, they just wanted to be needed by attractive women for something.  To feel validated as a human and potential sexual option.  To feel seen.

That experience left a strong emotional mark on me at a formative age, and I vowed I’d never be like those pathetic losers.  In many ways that early experience served me, since they taught me to always avoid situations where you are giving away value and getting nothing.  In other ways I’ve hewed too strongly to this principle, for fear of the humiliation I associate with finding out I’ve been manipulated and turned into a simp.  

In college, I was at a school where fraternities dominated the social scene.  I joined one of the most prominent frats and had the time of my life running the school’s social life.  Frats were an interesting social element because we simped for women, but always made sure it was transactional.  We spent tons of money throwing amazing parties, providing free alcohol to women, and, in exchange, the pussy flowed freely.  Most guys wish they had the opportunity to “pay,” however indirectly, for pussy in the way we did.  And yet, there were still nuances to the game.  A rival fraternity that some friends were in, took the simping way too far.  They shamelessly catered to women, playing whatever “gay” song of the day was on the top of all the freshman girls’ iPods at dance parties, and preparing non-beer drinks (unheard of) to get all the young girls who didn’t drink beer yet, drunk.  The more they swallowed their pride and gave the women what they wanted, the more their penises were swallowed by the youngest and hottest girls.  And yet, no girl who was not a freshman would be seen dead there, even if that’s where she had spent the majority of her freshman year.

There’s clearly some line where simping works, in the sense of “doing things for women,” but when you go too far, you lower your value, and women lose respect for you. Smart guys find that line. Where does courtesy end, and simping begin? Which brings me to my question: to pay or not to pay for women on dates?  I’ve always been of the opinion that if the woman wants to split, I split, and, if not, I assume I’ll pay: but I never insist and I don’t give them any pushback.

My girlfriend went on a first date with a guy last week, and one of the things she remarked on was that while she was in the bathroom he paid the bill without her knowing.  When he was ready to go he was like, “let’s get out of here,” and when she inquired about the bill he cooly remarked that he’d already taken care of it.  Smooth.  She considers herself a feminist, and has always insisted on paying half on dates, and she historically has gone on a lot of dates.  I’ve been questioning her reasoning, now that we’re in a relationship: why not let the guy pay?

She told me she found it incredibly sexy that he paid for her, and it felt to her similar to how she’s envisioned a sex worker feels. The man desires her so much that he wants to pay for access to her body.  She used the term, “worships my body.”  

On her second date with this guy he invited her to his place and offered to pay for her car home because he lives quite a ways away, and she’d be coming home late.  Again, she was incredibly turned on by this arrangement and said, “fuck feminism, this is so hot.”  

Quite a shift, and an intriguing one.

What’s the difference between simping, and fulfilling a masculine script?

Guys online, hearing his story, might call him a simp. I’d call him successful. 

Note: For context he is 18 years older than her so he is fulfilling a more older gentleman script which might be experienced differently if they were a similar age.

Red Quest here. I think it’s generally wise to pay for early dates, unless she absolutely insists on splitting, or unless you’ve had a miserable date and don’t want to see her again anyway. Protecting value is important, but not at the expense of masculine leadership and identity… though I’ve probably flip-flopped on this issue, depending on mood and recent experiences.

This also seems like an area where girls who are asked, by friends or when sober, will say, “I am a feminist and want to pay half on dates.” When girls are out with a man they’re attracted to, their feminine sides are more assertive, and they’ll like the man behaving like a man, so she can behave like a woman. It’s not what the girl says, it’s what she does… and who she does.

I’ve slept with annoying “feminist” girls who will make dumb claims like “there are no differences between men and women.” If girls make those kinds of claims, I ignore them, or steer the conversation in different directions… my goal is to f**k, not to have political arguments.

After this was published, I read “The Woman Crushing on the Guy From Her Mutual-Aid Group,” which includes the line, “Noah doesn’t buy my Uber home and I’m bitter.” It’s a common mistake to underestimate women’s pettiness and entitlement.

Game and group sex are many things, but boring isn’t among them

Game and group sex, conceived of as hobbies, are rarely (and arguably never) boring. The spikes and crashes are very affecting, creating a lot of turmoil as one succeeds beautifully but also fails hideously. The subject comes up because of:

Marc Andreessen: I think people forget how boring things were before the internet. People really like to be into things. People like to have thing, something that isn’t just like go to work, come home, go to work the next day, change the baby’s diaper today, change the baby’s diaper tomorrow… people like to have a thing.

If you go back thousands of years the thing was the gods, the tribe, the family, whatever cult you were in. If you progress through to the last 2000 years people got super into the big religions, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and so forth. The rise of mass media, they got super into movies, media, and then some fringe political movements and actual cults. People got super into Scientology. But they were kind of these big movements, and a lot of other people were in them. It was never that distinctive or original to be Catholic or something. It was a marker of identity but it wasn’t a marker of uniqueness in the way that modern man looks for.

There used to be a term for activities that people would do to pass the time before the internet. The term has almost completely died and the term is “hobby.” People used to have hobbies. When I was a kid it was like “what do you do when you get home from work or school, you have a hobby.” And if you remember what hobbies were when I was a kid, it was like stamp and coin collecting. [laughs] It was like ham radio, wood-working. Maybe there were a few people who were into wood-working or stamp collecting and after the first couple months, it’s like “ok it’s just a bunch of stamps in a book, this is boring, onto the next thing.”

The internet has just killed hobbies. They’re dead, all gone, the concept doesn’t even exist. It’s funny, the concept of having a hobby died at the same time as the concept of “going online” was introduced, which is a phrase you heard constantly from 1994-2005. You would get home at night and you would go online. The big internet company in the 1990s was actually America Online; this was a big deal, Americans could go online. And starting in the mid-2000s Americans stopped going online because we’re now online all the time. The idea of not being online now is a weird thing.

Hobbies died when everybody went online. So what replaced hobbies? And to your point, what replaced hobbies was basically internet movements. The benign way to put it would be internet communities, the somewhat more intense way to put it would be internet cults, right? Now what are people into? They’re not into stamp or coin collecting. They’re into socialism online or MAGA or QAnon, or the Trump Russia conspiracy or bitcoin or Elon…

Richard: That sounds awful! [laughing] Compared to socialism or MAGA or QAnon or wokeness and Russiagate, stamp collecting sounds like an improvement!?

Marc: Yeah yeah yeah! But I’d say literally that’s what’s happening. You could paint a picture of that and say these are destructive things and everybody is crazy and all that stuff. You could also say it’s not boring! Things were pretty boring, things were pretty dull. And actually, this would be a right-wing argument. One of the right-wing arguments is that man is simply not meant to be an atomized economic function. Man is not optimized to literally be like a drone, just drifting along the waves of history and to not have a principled position on where he should stand, and not have a sense of identity on something greater than himself, a connection to community and society and all these things.

Having been in longer relationships with women, the longer and deeper relationships can feel stable and comforting, but they’re often boring, too. That’s why chicks are constantly hassling their boyfriends for expensive, out-of-country vacations, because the chick is bored and needs entertainment (which chicks derive almost exclusively from men).

Game is rarely boring though it can be alienating… alienating, because it can facilitate many short-term, shallow relationships, and those come at the expense of long-term relationships. For almost all of human history, virtually all relationships were long term… it should not surprise us that a sudden change to numerous, short-term, successive relationships is jarring to our psychology. In my own life I’ve been in long-term relationships and felt the call of the wild. 

Consensual non-monogamy, which is a primary topic of the work you are reading now, tries to be both exciting (new sex partners!) but also grounding (you can have new sex partners while having a primary relationship)… so, you can do some relationship building and some stranger-sex having. This ties into the Internet because “online” of course organizes and facilitates game and non-monogamy: game, in something like its modern form, comes about from guys networking online to trade ideas about how to seduce and f**k chicks. Non-monogamy has gotten more popular because people interested in having intense sex experiences can now find one another, which wasn’t practical pre-Internet. Strangers can go on dates, and a bunch of strangers can converge on a spot for meetups and sex. The Internet facilitates niche interests and communities: it helps people become more extreme, by letting us create mutual reinforcement loops. Whether this is “good” or “bad” probably depends on the community and topic… but it does mean that things like game and group sex can happen.

I disagree with Marc A. in that internet movements didn’t replace hobbies for most people: instead, most people are passively scrolling social media. Maybe that is “the” hobby, but I think of hobbies as being active. It’s easier than ever to learn how to lift weights, but the average person is fatter than ever. Information about how to get laid is easier to acquire than ever but most guys don’t seem to care, preferring, it seems, pr0n and video games, letting the machine become a substitute for the real. The social media thing is so bad that I developed bits about how Instagram is lame, and I’ll use those bits on dates, and the girls will usually agree, and some will even agree that they should stop… but they often say they “can’t.” Sex parties forbid cell phone use, which give them a very “in the moment” feel compared to most of what passes for social life today, in which people are maybe 30% in the moment and 70% waiting for something to happen on their phones. Seriously, talk to girls about what their phones are like, and if you’re close to the girl, you’ll see that she gets like 10 notifications per minute… she is incapable of thinking about anything for more than a few minutes without her phone going off. On some level she knows that’s bad, but she mostly won’t stop herself. And, if she’s hot, she doesn’t need to.

It could be that, before the Internet, a lot of people had sex for lack of anything else to do. Now it’s a more affirmative choice, so there’s less of it, because we can watch other people get laid on Netflix instead. A lot of people choose boring.

Action matters, yet we’ve lost the habit of action. The problem today is almost never a shortage of access or information. We are most often our own worst enemy. 

Lessons for men and players from The State of Affairs

The State of Affairs should be assigned reading to guys thinking about marrying but also to guys who want to be players… Esther says, “Whether we like it or not, philandering is here to stay. And all the ink spilled advising us on how to ‘affair-proof’ our relationships has not managed to curb the number of men and women who wander.” I beg you not to despair, but to contemplate the truth of that statement and think about it before you consider marrying some woman: fidelity is temporary, but some other dude’s baby is forever. What should we do with this knowledge? Consensual non-monogamy is one answer, one that I’ve elucidated extensively, probably tediously, since Perel says “infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.” Speaking of infidelity “also plunges us into today’s culture of entitlement, where we take our privileges for granted.” She says “entitlement,” but “narcissism” would be a truer, more accurate word: the ocean of attention available to women on Instagram loosens whatever bond to a man any individual woman might once have had. All her exes live in texts, waiting for her to resurrect the affair: social media dissolves the bonds of marriage and affection like strong acid dissolves metals. Women know it and will, in private, admit it… an individual man cannot keep up with the man parade on her phone, with her ADD mind as it flicks and scrolls and fantasizes. What are you going to do with this information? If you’re like most men, you’re going to ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, like most people pretend that growing atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions somehow won’t affect them… the past year has demonstrated the human organism’s capacity for denial, which knowledge cannot seem to staunch. There is “more freedom, as well as more uncertainty” today, but most countries fight against standard DNA testing at birth.

You can be the guy she cheats on, or the one she cheats with. Which do you prefer? Choose?