“Evolutionary biology underpins game,” like all past and future and Red Quest posts, is now on Substack.
Evolutionary biology underpins game. I started reading evolutionary biology even before Neil Strauss wrote The Game (and in The Game he cites David Buss and other evolutionary biology writers). I credit evolutionary biology with giving me some game awareness from an earlier-than-average age. The Red Queen, The Evolution of Desire… even Donald Symons (old-school shoutout), once I saw how differing incentives shaped average behavior for men and for women.
So. There was a post by a guy named “Riv”, who used to blog, and he wrote a now-deleted post about a date that went wrong or never went right. He wrote,
some people will say, “if she went on a date with you, the bang was yours to lose, and so you fucked up” — and i recognize that there is some truth to that.
Some people will say that and they are wrong. Girls go on dates for all kinds of reasons and are prone to change their minds for any reason or no reason. The more you experience women, the more you see what Good Looking Loser calls “sexual availability.” You may call it something else. Point of his post is:
The outcome of your interaction is already determined, in a lot of cases.
In most cases, the outcome is already headed in a given direction. But there is leeway, and all a guy can do is try to improve something in his game and then accept that he will always have losses. Many guys will micro-analyze an encounter or attempt with an outcome that the girl had already decided, because she wasn’t available for whatever reason.
Look at it from a biological perspective. Men always want sex because successful sex may lead to a child, and guys predisposed to f**king whenever possible got their genes into the next generation more often than finicky guys. Women don’t always want to have sex because children have substantial costs and it takes time to evaluate the quality of a guy. Waiting is easy and if she rejects one guy for some capricious reason, another will come along next week. Understand how men and women evolved to not have completely identical goals and preferences, and suddenly female behavior makes more sense. Or “sense,” ha.
If we had a school system worth a damn everyone would be exposed to micro economics and evolutionary biology early. Take the concepts of supply-demand, shortages, and evolutionary biology and apply them to sex, culture, and dating, and suddenly lots of things make sense.
Most guys don’t know shit about anything because they don’t read enough. Harsh but true. Get off the Internet and into the library when you’re not opening. The more a guy interacts with women, the more apparent their capriciousness and randomness becomes. Stoic philosophy was developed by guys. Not a coincidence. Stoics acknowledge that any given person can only control himself.
Since most women don’t even understand their own internal desires or states, the likelihood of there being an intelligible reason for her rejection of a guy who’s generally done things right is low. And for her that’s okay. She can follow her feelings. Someone else will pitch her tomorrow. That’s why guys pitch a lot. She can reject five guys for random reasons, then the sixth can knock her up and BOOM! genes in the next generation.
The major exception to this principle is a guy who is stratospherically valuable. If the king wants it he gets it. In modern terms, famous actors, musicians, etc. will automatically sway a “no” girl to a “yes” girl. Not 100% of the time, but a lot more than I will or you will.
For normal guys, social proof can have a similar function. What might turn a “no” or “maybe” girl into a fast “yes” girl is seeing another girl get that man. Suddenly, he’s scarce. Scarce goods and services carry high prices. For this reason, it is also good to know the male-female ratios where you live, go to school, or work. Most non-engineering universities are now predominantly female (see the preceding link for details). San Francisco and Seattle are predominantly male. Philadelphia and New York City are predominantly female. Put a normal guy in an environment with fewer men and more women, and he will do better on average than the reverse.
Social proof won’t always work, but it can. There are girls who are mature or internally congruent enough to not let other women’s valuations sway their own. But those girls… aren’t so common.
Women also have emotional modules that protect them from cads. Women simultaneously want a guy who other women want but who won’t abandon them once they’re pregnant. That’s a tricky line and explains why female behavior often looks erratic to guys, who just want more sex with more hotties. Chicks are random for many reasons, including the way their preferences change over the course of their mensural cycles and the way they want a hot, cool guy but also want a guy who will invest in their offspring… ideally both will come in one man, but often they won’t, so chicks oscillate among desires.
The desire for “hot guy” but also “investment guy” explains why women will produce both “shit tests” and “comfort tests.” Guys who are new to game and bad with women have never experienced “comfort tests,” so when they start the game they become too much of a jerk and scorch leads that could pan out with a little less asshole and a little more deftness. Guys who present as players will be rejected by some chicks who are genuinely looking for commitment.
Women have multiple conflicting internal desires, and those conflicts manifest themselves in ways that seem strange to guys. Once a guy begins to understand the underlying mechanisms, he can start to accept the situation and how random chicks are. He can also realize that his algorithm is simple (f**king more hot chicks is always better) while hers is complex.
I’m rolling off topic here, but the important point is that women’s decisions are often arbitrary and beyond a certain point trying to analyze why they make a given decision becomes pointless. The woman herself likely doesn’t know. She’s reacting to pure feeling (like you, men, are when you see a hot woman and get aroused because the woman is signaling that she’s healthy and can bear healthy children). Whatever story she tells herself, or you, about why she’s done what she’s done is a post-facto rationalization.
If you get zero traction with a hundred women something’s probably wrong. If you get total traction with ten women in a row you’re not trying hard enough. Somewhere between those poles lies game. Game is the art of imperfect information.
Are guys doing game more likely to meet incoherent and incongruent girls? Seems possible: girls who know they want a guy and a family, stat, don’t put up with operator “game” guys. Those girls are also likely to be over age 25 in modern Western countries. They look for provider guys (not automatically a negative thing IMO, just a description) and if they know what they’re about they get one by filtering out hot casual sex guys.
Chicks who have a coherent plan that they genuinely want, and then execute it, will try to filter players, and they’re willing to overlook some features (often looks, presence, social dominance, that kind of thing) in order to achieve their real goal of children and house. Those girls are out there but game guys don’t get exposed much to them for obvious reasons.
Lots of girls think they want this because society tells them to want it, but many don’t actually want it, so they come off as incoherent and incongruent. Or they want it, but not when they meet a hot guy who they like. They say “I want a nice guy to settle down with” and then have sex with a random two days later. Guys notice and think, “Oh, girls are dumb. Girls are stupid.”
Not exactly. They experience internal conflict and desire that shifts from day to day and sometimes even hour by hour. It can shift based on where they are in their cycle. Guys who want casual sex are looking for girls who have shifted into an openness for casual sex, even though their superficial long-term plan might be “marriage with a sweet guy.” Guys want to be that two-days-later guy.
Girls who really like sex and are sex positive (also not a big group) aren’t as much into “game” or games per se. Their beliefs (sex is fun and we should have more of it) are congruent with their actions. These are also pretty rare. Most don’t openly advertise their beliefs because they’ll be besieged by dudes and ostracized by chicks. Chicks know that the biggest threat to boyfriend or husband investment is another chick, so chicks will socially attack other chicks who seem “promiscuous,” negative term that could also mean “sex-positive.” The male social world is a bit simpler than the female social world, and a lot of guys don’t appreciate this.
Most girls are neither looking for pure providers nor being overly sex positive. Their stated beliefs (“I want a ‘good’ guy”) often don’t match their actions (“He’s hot and I’m a little drunk, soooooooo YOLO!”), so guys think they look flakey, wishy-washy, uncertain, and incoherent. All that is really an outcome of not having interrogated their inner, evolved belief structure or what they want out of life and men.
Plus, how you as a man present yourself will affect how girls present to you. I’ve written about this before… I do the sex-positive, zero-judgement thing. I try to bring girls to sex clubs and BDSM events. That loses me some girls but gains me an entire universe of next-level game that I haven’t read about anywhere online among pickup or manosphere guys.
These curious-seeming features in female psychology emerge from evolutionary biology and the fact that men can have an almost unlimited number of babies, given a sufficient number of attractive fertile women (think Genghis Khan, sultans, emperors, etc.). Women can have a finite number of babies, usually under 10, and are therefore keen to make sure that their babies are fathered by the right guy. Female mammals have been choosy for many millions of years. We are not going to fully overcome that with a few decades of cultural propaganda, birth control, and effective other contraception.
If you want an intelligent counter-point to what I have written above, consider Against Human Sexual Selection. It argues that in most human cultures for most of human history, most marriages, kidnapping, etc. did not include (much) female choice and was instead instigated by men and family. I think it understates female choice, but I don’t think it’s 100% refutable, either.
The Red Quest 