Attention is the only tool modern men have

“Attention is the only tool modern men have,” like all Red Quest posts, are now on Substack.

“Let’s say a girl is acting bitchy,” is a good post.

“When having a boundary crossed actually means you’ll walk out, and you have zero tolerance for bullshit, it will show up as soon as the micro transgressions happen. This permeates the whole thing since your very first moment.”

The only real tool modern men have at their disposal is attention. You either give attention or withdraw it. That’s really it, and the rest is commentary, except maybe for deciding when, where, why, and how to give or withdraw attention. When a guy blows up some girl’s phone, he’s dissipating one of the only (or the only) tool(s) he has. Where and how he directs his attention is the fundamental of modern game…and I have many thoughts about modern game.

A wonderful book by David Barash, Out of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of Polygamy, lists all the tools men used to have to enforce monogamy. They could kill their wife’s lover… seriously, that used to be legal in many parts of the United States… “Until the 1970s, it was entirely legal in several states for a husband to kill his wife’s lover if he caught them in flagrante.” Today, if your wife takes a lover and has his kid and then divorces you, she still gets your money and child support. Men had physical force. They had the weight of society enforcing monogamy, and, back then, women would be ashamed for breaking up their marriage. “Historically, in many cultures, the murder of an adulterous wife and/or her lover has not only been condoned but encouraged.”

Abandoned women used to face big consequences, unlike today, when most women leave the moment they think they can get a better guy, and then are rewarded with cash and prizes by the Orwellianly named “family court” system. Once upon a time, “The bottom line: male lethality is unquestionably real, especially in the context of sexual competition, and even more when the competition is immediate and involves direct access to a man’s sexual ‘rights’ and ‘property,’ which is to say, women.”

Personally I prefer the system we have now, which doesn’t entail nearly as much death or non-consensual, but the system today also tells people monogamy doesn’t work and it’s great to f**k around.

It is pretty much a cross cultural universal that men intimidate their spouses to refrain from extramarital sex, punishing them—often severely and not uncommonly, lethally—should they do so.

That’s Professor Barash too. Obviously that’s not true today (and nor am I advocating that it be true), but imagine what a society devoted to working towards monogamy would look like. Until you have read evolutionary biology, you likely don’t understand the game. You might think you know, but you’re still acting on superstition and chance.

In the contemporary world, men don’t have violence or social censure as an option… we have nothing but attention itself. When you give a woman attention, you reinforce whatever behavior she is offering. When you withdraw attention, you convey your displeasure with that behavior.

This is also why I think most men should not use most social media, or minimize use, cause social media gives women attention and validation that is unlikely to lead to sex. A woman loves attention almost as much as a man loves sex; giving too much to her is an easy way to kill her attraction to you. Whatever is scarce is valuable. Offer too much attention and you will demonstrate that your attention is low value. High-value men are too busy building companies, making art, seducing women, and having peak experiences to offer attention, especially lame digital attention, to women who do not reciprocate their attention appropriately. High-value men are also not spending a lot of time on social media because they are in the real world, doing things, making things, building things, and having sex. If a woman is responsive online but doesn’t want to meet in person, then you’re not moving towards sex and can let her go.

It’s not impossible to use social media well, but it’s never or pretty much never a good idea to “like” women’s photos and statutes. Yet I see guys do this all the time. As more people exist primarily in the fake digital space, guys who can drive interactions in the real world will become more and more valuable.

When a woman crosses a boundary, withdraw attention. Better yet, give attention to other, better behaved women. Guys with options are very different than guys without. Girls know you have options when you shut the fuck up.

“Shutting the fuck up.” No one talks about this in today’s verbal diarrhea culture, but because no one talks about it or does it, it’s valuable.

Chicks also know you’re high value when you stop giving them attention and start directing your attention in the only places you should: your skills, your life, the women who are having actual sex with you.

Excessive texting is a waste of attention. Texting should be focused on your next meeting. You are a busy man, as I wrote above. Focus your attention on making real-life things happen. You can do a little bit of texting, that’s fine, but always be focused on making texting an unimportant adjunct to your real life. Today, this will also set you apart from other guys. Less is more, in most circumstances.

Social media is another form of attention, and most guys misuse it. Social media is an attractive nuisance. It’s attractive, because guys imagine that, if they can just get a good enough Instagram feed, hot chicks will message them for hookups. For the vast majority of guys, this will never happen. The vast majority of guys are better off learning cold approach pickup, improving themselves, improving their delivery, etc. But social media is easy and can be done without leaving the apartment. For inexperienced guys, social media takes the perceived sting out of real-world rejection. So the temptation is to take the way that seems easy (social media) but leads nowhere, instead of the way that at first seems hard (cold approach pickup, developing an attractive life) that leads somewhere.

Overall, lots of women screw around, but they’re much more secretive about it than men are. “DNA fingerprinting has recently revealed that among many species, including Homo Sapiens, females are more inclined to sexual variety than had previously been thought: that is, to polyandry.” If she’s inclined that way, you need to be ready for it.

Jealousy exists because it’s useful, “If women weren’t polyandrous—selected to engage, on occasion, in sexual relationships with more than one male—then men wouldn’t be disposed to violent mate guarding in the first place.” Today, we’ve got to be diligent about not wasting our scarce attention resources on chicks who haven’t earned them. Most guys tragically lack game and thus abundance, and their lack shows.