Month: June 2018

Interesting text from the 20-year-old

Some of you have been following the saga of the 20-year-old; I’d given up on her, and we last texted on June 9, when I sent her a morning-after, thanks for the lovely evening text, and then she replied in kind and I never replied in turn. Not texting her since wasn’t really “game” on my part, because I was tired of chasing her, despite how much I like sex with her.

Today she wrote me, “Hey, sorry I didn’t get to see you very much before I went home for a bit. I had way more going on than I expected! Will let you know when I’m back.” Then there was a (non-sexual) callback to something specific between us.

So that’s interesting. I’m going to reply tomorrow with something like, “Cool, lmk when you’re back,” and then a reference to her callback. I’m not expecting much. Usually, chicks either drop off or we keep having sex. This chick has been a reliable responder and has showed up to some dates, but she’s not gotten reliably into the rotation.

I reiterate my assertion that “Attention is the only tool modern men have.” Most guys waste their attention.

I think I said something like this before, but the 20-year-old has some minor health issues; she does seem to have a complicated work and family life; and she might be juggling other dudes. Well, she’s certainly juggling other dudes, I just don’t know how far that goes. And I don’t care much. I can’t affect that. I can only affect myself.

She’s also scattered and disorganized, like most chicks her age. I see a lot of guys trying to read into chicks’ inscrutable behavioral clues. Sometimes the right answer is about game, sometimes the right answer is, “She’s scattered, she doesn’t know what she wants, she doesn’t care very much about guys unless she wants it.” In other words, there is no “reason” as to why she behaves the way she behaves. I think my game with her has been imperfect but fine. I haven’t done a lot wrong, apart from sub-standard (but still functional) sex the first time we did it.

When I was less experienced I thought that there is always a right answer and a meaning behind chicks’ behaviors. I have learned to love the chaotic and random hypotheses.

(Amendment: She says she isn’t coming back until August, so that’s that.)

It’s like word is getting out about how marriage is a bad deal

“The Trouble with Johnny Depp” is about the fall of a debauched star, so it’s an old story, but regular readers will recognize this:

Depp’s inner circle had begged him to not wed Heard or to at least obtain a prenup. Depp ignored his loved ones’ advice. And there were whispers that Depp’s recreational drug and alcohol use were crippling him.

Marriage is a contract. It used to be that men exchanged wealth, earnings, safety, and effort for sex and a higher degree of paternity likelihood from women. Today, sex is easy and women make their own money, so there is little reason to introduce the government into a private exchange. There is really really no reason for a wealthy, famous man to marry.

My guess, however, is that whatever personality traits or inner demons drive Depp as an artist also make him make impulsive or stupid decisions, like his decision to marry Heard. He is not the only wealthy, famous man to make bad decisions around women.

It may also be that Depp has been living in a fantasy world for so long that he has no idea what reality looks like. I’ve never met any famous celebrities, but I have met seemingly regular people who seem to have no touch with reality, and being around them is strange. I mean, it’s okay when they’re on drugs and when they come off the drugs they’ll be normal again, but it’s not good when unmoored is their default state.

Say what you will about Depp and Musk, they have the resources to recover from their bad decisions. Regular man may not have those resources.

Companies choose workers who are likely to be better workers

I’m sorry, “Companies choose workers who are likely to be better workers” is not the true headline, which is instead “Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies.” Have the writers never been around new mothers? There are a million essays, some published at the same venue, about how parenting is all-consuming (it is).

Here’s what happens: a lot of women who get pregnant and think they want to return to the workforce discover that doing so is hard, really hard, and childcare is obscenely expensive (something I think we should work on…). Often as much as $10,000 per year. A woman making $40,000 per year is probably going to see 15 – 18% of that go away in taxes, leaving $34,000. If another $6,000 goes away in childcare, it goes down to $28,000. Workers typically spend more on meals out, work clothes, etc. You can see where I’m going, returning to work, especially when talking about multiple kids, often doesn’t pencil out. The woman ends up working, just so she can pay for childcare. Meantime, in a lot of cities it is illegal to build enough space for childcare, so parents get screwed by laws and voters.

Ideal circumstances assume a fast recovery from delivery. Not every woman recovers fast. And many women would rather spend time with their kids than grind their way through the corporate machine.

This is obvious to everyone who has worked in a corporate America… there are exceptions like Sheryl Sandberg and other exceptional achievers. One of my own work mentors was a woman like that (she saw most of her female mentees leave or downshift after having kids). But those achievers usually have very high incomes that they use to buy time through child care, cleaning services, food, etc. For women making six figures, hiring help and returning to work fast can make sense. Only about eight percent of people make over $100,000 per year, men or women. That’s tiny. Half are men.

The “child support” (read: woman support) system as it current exists is grotesque in most states, but it does exist that way because most chicks need subsidies to survive through the aftermath of childbirth and having an infant. Kids under the age of six are totally dependent and needy. Parents split labor, with the guy making money and the chick taking care of the kid, because that division of labor makes sense given the needs of the child.

Corporate careers have arcs, and a disrupted arc rarely achieves its previous trajectory: there is no way to solve this problem, which is why a lot of smart women who want kids become nurses or teachers. Smart nurses can become nurse practitioners and make a lot of money. Both nurses and teachers can leave their careers for a couple years and come back without taking much of a hit. Smart, family-minded women realize this and adjust their life priorities.

From a business side, would a hiring manager prefer someone who is likely to work harder after the kid is born or someone who is going to work less hard? Yes, yes, in the abstract it’s all fine and well to denounce discrimination… in the real world, competitive firms succeed and less competitive ones fail. The biggest companies likely have more slack than smaller companies, but even they must compete. Zero consumers care about the working conditions at the companies they buy from.

I’m now old enough to have seen lots and lots of women go from career-minded to mommy-minded. And that seems like a fine choice to me. Would you rather spend time with your precious children or compete among random strangers for tokens that can be exchanged for goods and services from other random strangers?

It’s like the chicks who write this shit have never had to hire, manage, and promote people before. When you’ve had to do that, things like way different than they do from the gleaming offices of The New York Times.

It turns out that working women often underestimate the costs of motherhood. That is not surprising to anyone who’s been through the wormhole.

Three major circles: game, sex clubs, mainstream corporate

Talking to Nash the other day, I realized that I have three major circles in my life that don’t intersect much: game, or game awareness is one; sex clubs and open relationships is another; mainstream corporate work is the third. I’m interested in game, as any reader can tell. I’ve written about sex clubs and open relationships in various ways, relating to game. But the sex club and open relationship people, if they speak about game at all, denigrate it in a very mainstream way, as being creepy or predatory. I’ve never talked about or defended game in these venues. Game people online almost never speak or write about conscious non-monogamy. To my way of thinking, there should be greater overlap between game and non-monogamy, but there almost never is. If you can find any other game writers doing group sex, tell me about them.

In the mainstream corporate world, at least my part of it, almost everyone gets married; most people don’t talk too much about their erotic lives. There’s some talk around sex, especially around drink, but it’s pretty button-up, on the surface. Lots of people are vanilla / eager to appear vanilla. The less-vanilla people hide it at work. This may be different in places like New York City or L.A., but I think it’s true in most of the United States.

Underneath mainstream corporate work, there’s often an erotic sizzle that happens in certain people and at certain locations, especially when it’s enabled by alcohol. When I was younger I didn’t realize how much booze lubricates business… it also lubricates business hookups. I don’t advocate for hooking up with direct coworkers, as that invites drama and other problems, but there are many adjacent opportunities, as well as opportunities with former coworkers. Most cities also have business meetups and general conferences… they’re not just about business, but business gives everyone there plausible deniability. Business travel often excites people out of their pattern and into a tryst. For a player, the problem is that there just aren’t that many attractive businesswomen. There are some, especially on the younger side, but relatively few of my lays and lovers have come from this area.

Instead, they’ve typically come from online or in-person meetings. Many, probably the majority, have come from sex clubs or parties, but that’s because sex club one-offs are common. That environment already screens for high-libido, high-openness, experimental, and horny chicks. To me, it’s “easy mode.” It still requires some game and more social deftness than a typical guy may assume, but I think it’s easy and fun. The intersection of those appeals to me. Some guys get into game not for the lays but for the challenge. I understand that, but if I could just bang a bunch of hot chicks without game, I would do that.

(That’s like saying, “If someone dropped ten million dollars in my bank account, I’d be cool with it.” I might be cool with it, but except for 100 trust funders, that’s not how the world works.)

I got into the sex club thing in my late 20s. I’d met this chick who was around my age, and she got into them because conventional relationships didn’t work for her because she wanted (maybe still wants) too much sex.

Sounds like a weird problem, right? Only if you’ve never experienced these chicks. Very high-libido chicks exist. I know because I’ve met them, and Libido Girl was one. Sometimes they get a medical tag like “Persistent genital arousal disorder (PGAD)” or labeled as sex addicts. I don’t know, maybe for some of them their sexual desires mess up their lives. For a lot of them, I think it’s biological variation at work… for whatever reason they want serious, hard fucking at least once and preferably twice a day.

Libido Girl was like that.

If you’re a basic guy you might be thinking, “Great, I’d love it!” You do, in theory, at first. A very high libido woman will often not be able to find men who can keep up with her. So her relationships suffer and maybe her whole life suffers. Word may get around her social circle that she’s a slut, and other girls better keep their boyfriends away from her. All very unpleasant things. She may be needy with her monogamous boyfriend, who can’t get hard again fast enough.

If these kind of women can separate sex from emotion (not all women can, and that’s one reason I’m willing to do more long game than some game guys suggest), they’re often well-suited to being escorts or sex workers.

So what’s a girl with a super-high libido to do? She can try to find a guy to match her. Most guys, confronted with a wildly sexual woman, will exhaust themselves eventually. Libido Girl had gone through the up-and-down monogamy cycle a bunch of times, until she figured out that she wasn’t meant to be monogamous. She found out about consensual non-monogamy and group sex and began going to clubs. I don’t remember how she learned. She read something or a guy told her. Quickly she got involved in the scene and then began bringing other guys into it. She’d been going for about two years when I met her.

We started hooking up, and within a week or two she asked if I wanted to go to her friends’ sex party. She was a very popular guest because she was pretty (a low 7 I’d say, but good personality) and feral. Hot, low-drama, high-libido women are always welcomed. In advance she’d told me that it would be an intense experience. She was right. The party was held in someone’s apartment, and something like 14 – 16 people were there. I met most of them at the beginning. It started off like a regular party. Drinks, chitchat, hanging around. After a couple drinks most of the chicks took off their dresses or fancy clothes. They started kissing each other or their partners.

Then, pretty much everyone started fucking. It was a little bit like visting a foreign country, because everyone was just doing their thing and so it seemed pretty normal, except for the obvious. When everyone around you does one thing, it’s just the thing everyone does, and you kind of start to do it too. Libido Girl and I had sex; I couldn’t believe all the action going on around me. I understood that some people did such things, but even then I was not fully aware how a lot of chicks will behave, sexually. Then Libido Girl had sex with another girl (who she knew well), and I kind of assisted, for lack of a better term. We took a break, and then I was basically set up with this very hot chick who was part of a couple Libido Girl knew already. Libido Girl was smart, so she watched as the other girl and I fucked, then after I was fully engaged she had sex with the guy, so that I was too busy to get jealous.

It was an incredible experience. The chick I got set up with was gorgeous. I imagine that first introductions to non-monogamy and group sex are important, and Libido Girl managed mine beautifully. Libido Girl and I went to a club a week or two after and I was pretty much hooked. The club wasn’t as good as the party, but we got to meet a few cool people. Typical sex club people are in a long-term relationship, often married, and bored with each other. Sometimes the woman is quite hot, but the guy has banged her so many times that he’s indifferent to her beauty. Many times, probably most of the time, she is not hot, typically due to being overweight or too old.

Libido Girl wasn’t a real girlfriend, but she was courteous and straightforward about her desires and expectations… like a lot of girls are not. She wasn’t ever going to be a real girlfriend in a conventional sense, but eventually I began dating other women and Libido Girl was fine with it. Chicks like Libido Girl terrify normal women, because Libido Girls don’t care very much about monogamy. Libido Girl had been the source of a bunch of cheating, from her own admission, and I believe her. She had a fairly regular job, and it didn’t seem like sex totally ruled her life, but she was not like other chicks and knew it. Girls like her also like online dating, because they can get sex without affecting their social reputations.

I should clarify that I didn’t know the details about Libido Girl from the beginning. I learned them in bits and pieces over several months, or more realistically about a year. I wasn’t looking for anything serious at the time, having gotten out of a serious thing not too long before. She also figured out that I’m curious, open to different kinds of experience, and non-judgmental. If chicks think a guy won’t judge them, they’ll say a lot of things they’ll keep quiet around most guys. So Libido Girl’s cornerstone drives and life story came out, just not the way I’ve presented it. The way I’ve told her story is less flattering and, to most people, extremely threatening. She introduces sexual chaos to a world where the ideological and intellectual default is still monogamy.

I think I got into sex parties as a solution to a problem, or set of problems. The problem is sleeping with lots of different women and doing so somewhat efficiently. Most chicks who start as hookups will eventually ask, “Where is this going?” Usually that’s the beginning of the end. I’m not sure I will ever be fully monogamous again. Switching a woman’s from thinking she wants monogamy to thinking she doesn’t is hard for many chicks but can be done. Some will reject it. Many will go along with it for as long as the guy is there to lead them.

Libido Girl was unusual but not completely unusual in her non-monogamy preferences. Very high libido chicks are often poorly suited to normal relationships. So if they think about their life situation, non-monogamy can be the answer, because then they can sleep with a couple different guys and girls and still have their needs satisfied.

They just have to find the right guy or guys. Lots of guys like open relationships in theory but don’t like them in practice. Libido Girl had to break up with a lot of guys who became emotionally connected to her and wanted her to be monogamous. She’d learned not to accept monogamy, because monogamy would either break her due to her sex drive or she’d cheat on the guy.

The average chick at a sex club is not like Libido Girl. But there is a minority of chicks like her who go. You wouldn’t know her proclivities if you met her at a meeting or over coffee. She doesn’t dress much more provocatively than typical chicks. She just fucks more, more often, longer, and sooner than most chicks. If she goes on a first date with someone she likes, she’s going to fuck him (or her). She’s highly congruent in her psychology, which as all players know is not true of all chicks.

Typical people get into group sex experiments because friends bring them or they read something.

Libido Girl and I kept seeing each other casually until she moved for work. She’s gotten fat over time, like so many people, so she’s no longer of sexual interest to me. Like I wrote here, I’d guess that half to three quarters of women are up for some form of group sex. Many, practically all, women have threesome fantasies of some kind. A guy who can fulfill her fantasies is a guy who’ll keep her coming back.

These are things I can’t talk about with work friends. Sometimes I look at people and wonder how many of them are doing the same things I am, but they can’t talk about it either.

At work, I’m pretty weird by corporate standards. I’m totally uninterested in things that consume others: houses, cars, TVs, boats, “vacation” houses, most forms of purchasable consumption. Sometimes I just want to ask, “Why do you buy things?” and “Why do you exist?” But that would go from pretty weird to unacceptably bizarre. I love to workout, eat well, read. Inexpensive activities. And of course sex, a hobby that I can’t share with others on the job. Too unruly, too dangerous, too disruptive.

Friends who see my place say I basically “live like a college student,” like it’s an insult. I’m like, “What’s the point of spending all that money on furniture and bullshit?” Seriously, life is about the quality of your relationships and connections to other people. Sex is the ultimate pleasure and also creates relationships. Almost no one cares about your expensive couch or shitty art. Is it clean and functional? Then it’s good enough. The vast consumer marketing machine ingests us all. Few can resist. Even I don’t resist that well. We can all do better, as human beings.

“Women cheat because they LOVE their husbands”?

“Women cheat because they LOVE their husbands” is nonsense, fascinating nonsense but nonsense nonetheless. For guys, the “why” is less important than the all-important “don’t get married” and “DNA test for any kid she says is yours.”

If you stay with a woman long enough, you will be as bored of her as she is of you.

“Rebuilding a Sex Life Destroyed by Postpartum Depression”

“Rebuilding a Sex Life Destroyed by Postpartum Depression” is framed as female-empowerment bullshit, but guys should read it and think, “This is why I shouldn’t get married. I don’t want to end up like that dude.”

Higher-end sex workers will usually admit that their typical clients are married guys with kids who aren’t getting much at home but love their wives. That doesn’t quite describe me (I wasn’t married), but I was in that general ballpark.

A guy doesn’t want to get in this position:

he was now someone I looked to as a caretaker, someone who helped me through the daily — sometimes minute-by-minute — struggles of postpartum depression. It was difficult to reconcile that Dan with the man who had been my lover.

Guys who cohabitate will often find themselves, if not there, then too close to it.

“When you’ve done it all, what then?”

(WARNING: This post is another ramble. Skip it if you want to read anything useful.) 

“When you’ve done it all, what then?” does the stupid celebrity profile things (it’s about wanker and blow-hard Russell Brand), but it also says,

When you’ve done it all, what then? When you’ve smoked all the crack, eaten all the chocolate, had all the sex, made all the money, and been on all the talk shows—where do you go next? Because there it is, squatting on the far side of adulation: nothingness. “Celebrities,” the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman once said, “are in a very interesting position. They’ve already achieved great fame, success, and wealth, and they’ve realized that those things alone don’t bring happiness; that, in fact, they can be a real pain in the neck.” Or, as Russell Brand puts it, tunneling toward enlightenment in the 2015 documentary Brand: A Second Coming, “Fame and power and money is bullshit.”

Fame and power and money are not bullshit (look how he’s not giving any of them up), but there is a little something to this idea, and I’ve heard variations on this theme from many famous people. When enough people independently repeat the same idea, there’s probably something to it, even if you don’t buy the whole of it. Brand is asking, what happens when you’ve achieved the goals? I’ve had a lot less sex than Brand and made a lot less money and been on zero talk shows, but I have had a fair amount of sex (a lot by the standards of normal men) and made enough money to be not too worried about money. To the extent the game is for me about “proving to myself that I can do it,” I’ve… proved it.

I ask myself, what is “the deep psychology that keeps men in the game?” Despite recent posts and stories about chicks, I feel like I’m on my way out of the game: but out of the game and into… what? I don’t know. There’s a reason a lot of players hit 35 – 40 and quit their game blogs. There is some diminishing marginal utility, and some sense of, “Oh, this again.” In the moment it can be intoxicating, I don’t and will never deny it, but especially afterwards I’m still myself, still doing what I do, still wondering what I wonder.

It’s not productive to chase “happiness” (what is “happiness?”). So what is the next goal? In my post-puberty life, the goal has been chasing skirt, and that’s been good. Sometimes I chat with guys my age who are filled with longing and fantasy they think will never be fulfilled, because they think they missed out on some experience or other when they were young. I feel bad for those guys. But I also know the reality is that, the day after you fulfill your fantasy, you will still wake up and face the day and live the life. You aren’t really different after the threesome or the hottest 9 or college cheerleader or whatever the sexual fantasy may be.

For me writing could be the answer. I’ve considered writing a game blog before, but I worried it would take too much focus away from work and the rest of my life (I was right about that). But game blogs are best written as they happen. I’ll probably end up devolving into stupid stuff like ranting about modern feminism. Not nearly as interesting as banging actual chicks. But I think I’m going to end up in a longer-term relationship at some point, with someone. The horror, right? I just have to figure out what that relationship will be about.

Most male-female couple relationships are about

  1. Sex.
  2. Bearing and raising children.
  3. (Often) the guy subsidizing the chick while she does #2.

Modern relationships are f**ked up because game-aware guys don’t need long-term relationships for sex. They shouldn’t marry regarding number two. So what are modern relationships about? Helping someone achieve a life project or becoming a better person, probably. But most chicks are utterly incapable of doing either… no wonder most long-term relationships are dysfunctional. The things marriage used to be based on are dead or radically altered. We’re part of a culture that says no one should sacrifice for anyone else’s good, including the good of a person’s children.

Modern relationships are also f**ked up because chicks used to have some brakes on their hypergamy and internal disquiet in the form of family, religion, and the social structure created by both. Now chicks have materialism, unrealistic expectations, readily available divorce, and advertising/marketing. The social structure created by those is unstable, and it leads many chicks not to marry because they can’t find the “right” guy, or, if they can, they want a better one.

So what is there, for guys? Right? Most guys chase sex, money, status… the latter two just being proxies to get to the sex.

The weird thing is “getting there.” A guy gets the sex, the money (enough), the status (enough), and… then what? I’m pretty much there. Not as there as Russell Brand or other celebrities. I’m not that delusional. But much more so “there” than the typical guy. But I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not content to just be.

I don’t know how many guys get in this state. I think most guys never nail enough chicks to think, “Okay, I’ve just nailed a bunch of chicks, now what?” It’s a self-indulgent question and problem. Self-indulgent or not, I think about it. I’ve not “done it all.” I don’t think there is such a thing. But I’ve done a lot.

The true pickup “artists” may keep going into senescence. An artist keeps making art until incapacity or the end. I don’t think pickup or railing chicks is my art, despite my penchant for making porn, sometimes called “erotic art” to chicks who need that frame. I could need a true art. A kind of weird statement for a commerce guy like me.

“Last year, I ended a two-year relationship with a man who ultimately couldn’t commit and wanted to be polyamorous.”

“Last year, I ended a two-year relationship with a man who ultimately couldn’t commit and wanted to be polyamorous.”

The article itself is titled “Dating columnist reveals how ‘Sex and the City’ ruined her life” and is as stupid as you’d expect. I only quote the sentence above because it supports “Game-aware guys being ‘poly’ or ‘open.’” I can’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing he’s a decently high-status guy who was happy to fuck the author but didn’t want to subsidize her financially. Like some high-status guys, he’s figured out that poly is an escape hatch from the “Where is this going?” conversation. She didn’t bite, but some other woman probably will.

It’s not that he “couldn’t commit.” It’s that he didn’t need or want to.

Expect to see more of this going forward. High-level guys will see “poly” or “ethically non-monogamous” (ENM) as a means of improving retention. You’ve read those ideas at Red Quest first, though.