*The Average American Male*, a novel by Chad Kultgen

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE is a novel you should read because, good or bad, it’s different than most novels: most novels are about one of two ridiculous kinds of males: pussy beta males who need to hit the gym and ask the girl out already, or ridiculous fantasy men running around with guns and improbably saving the world. THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE is neither… though it’s billed as outrageous, probably I’ve read too much game literature, cause I read it and was nodding along, like “Okay, yeah, I get it, you’re a horny bastard, whatever, I’m well familiar with the ‘shocking’ male mind.” The guy’s got weak game but he tries and doesn’t whine about failures with chicks, not too much. THE GOOD GIRL, my novel, is also different than anything else I’ve read: in it, a player tries to seduce a girl on the streets into the non-monogamy world. The guy from Chad’s novel needs to go hang out with and learn from the guy in my novel: I should do a fan-fic mashup.

The protagonist narrator of THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE isn’t named, so we’re going to call him Richard. There are plot “spoilers” of a sort ahead, which don’t matter cause this isn’t a book you read for the plot or to figure out who killed the president, you read it for the voice, and the supposedly outrageous things the narrator says, like… that he wants to fuck the hot chicks he meets, he doesn’t want to fuck the fat ones, and he finds his girlfriend’s parents annoying. What’s he bring, though? Guys who bring things to the world find themselves in better situations, guys who don’t, don’t. Richard seems not to have a job. He seems not to have any special skills or abilities. He’s not trying to develop them, which makes him average, but who wants average? This guy needs non-monogamy, which is how he can try to f**k as many chicks as he’d like. Watching him attempt to date is like watching a six year old attempt to build a house, nothing works. I know how to build the house. I know how to do non-monogamy. That’s what this guy, who’s kind of a bitch, needs to learn. Watching some idiot struggle and flail… it’s a bit painful. Funny, but painful. He’s at a stage I passed many years ago, and am now helping other guys pass, if they so desire. I’m not selling coaching but the magic & method of what I do is in the free book. Most guys lack the skills they need, that Richard needs, but there’s no excuse for that in the age of knowledge.

Richard’s girlfriend Casey “has a fat ass. She’s a pretty cute brunette with a completely normal upper body.” Ass too fat? Go to the gym with her (Richard tries, mostly fails, she does light curls and calls it a day). Switch to zero sugar. Watch less TV, go for more walks. Richard’s complaining about his ineffective girlfriend but he’s ineffective too. Pot, kettle, black. He’s on a date with another chick, Alyna, and has this conversation,

Once we’re in my car she says, “So what’re we going to do now?” “Whatever you want.”

The need for game education is high and remains high: this guy needs to lead. The girl improbably says, “I want to see where you live.” That’s what chicks say in novels and TV shows, not as much in real life, when they rely on male guidance to get laid and get shit done. With Casey, his girlfriend, “When Casey has her period she refuses to suck my dick and she’s very uncomfortable with fucking.” He’s set weak expectations here, with the no-dick-sucking thing. He sets weak expectations and gets weak outcomes. Early in the relationship, he needs to say, “I’m a horny man and I need to get off routinely. If you aren’t down with that, we aren’t going to work.”

He mocks stuff related to Oprah, or Oprah magazine, or both, but: find better targets, dude. The cheap shots are boring. Stop eating grilled cheese and prefer women who don’t eat grilled cheese, a child’s food. “We eat lunch every Saturday at the California Pizza Kitchen”—no. Don’t. Make lunch. “We’re at Johnnies New York Pizzeria on Sunset”—no. More simple carbs. “I’m at Todd’s house in Toluca Lake. We’ve been playing Madden for a few hours”—no. I can go on like this. He plays Halo for hours at a time, just like most winners do (if every guy you know plays tons of video games, are you a winner? Are you hanging out with winners? Why or why not?) For Richard, he wakes up “with that awful empty feeling you get when you realize the person who can make you happier than anything is a fucking dream.” He’s got everything wrong, there, like trying to solve a physics problem with the wrong equation and the wrong conception of reality. He’s got the narcissism problem of thinking it’s someone else’s destiny to make him happy. What’s he doing to make anyone else happy? Is it about what you do for others, or about what others do for you? Functional people have a good balance between those. Narcissists ask only what others can do for them. A real life partner isn’t possible for them, because real people are never perfect. Richard wonders “if I’ll ever fuck a bitch who’s unbelievably hot.” I’ve done it, it’s great, I recommend it to friends, after you do it you’re still you the next morning. He wonders if he’ll fuck that bitch who’s unbelievably hot but doesn’t ask himself why an unbelievably hot bitch would want to fuck him. He’s a man expert at asking the wrong questions. Unlike they say at school, there are dumb questions. He needs less celebrity culture and more Yitang Zhang.

Richard’s game is abysmal. Read this for seeing anti-game in action. THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE understands that it’s possible to be a pretty worthless person and get laid a lot today, as we see with some bartenders who lift and other such guys who don’t produce much marginal value but manage to score top pussy. It’s also possible, too possible, to be an engineer advancing the state of humanity and barely able to get a girl’s attention. The men who notice this are susceptible to reading the red pill and seduction literatures, looking for answers not to be found in the mainstream, which caters to women. When the mainstream fails, it’s necessary to create your own institutions and media, which red pill has attempted, love it or hate.

What does Richard have? Not much, apart from being born in the USA, which is like being born on third base and thinking you’ve hit a triple. He’s got a functional dick, which is useful. But he plays those worthless video games I mentioned a few paragraphs back (I count at least five instances) and eats a ton of simple carbs and junk food, so he’ll be as fat as the chicks he disdains soon enough. He doesn’t try hard, yet gets above average outcomes (Alyna is an above average outcome for most men), which is the fantasy in the book: you can be a boorish anti-social dad bod and still get hot 21-year-old redheads. Right. I mean does it happen? Sure. Common outcome? Ofc not. I want him to know game, to have read THE GAME, despite the book having come out only two years after THE GAME. It’s set in LA and mentions Hollywood. Guys leading good lives have purpose and pursue that purpose effectively. They do something to solve problems. Humanity is full of problems needing solutions. Women usually don’t solve problems because they’re psychologically inclined towards raising children and gossiping (the exceptions are wonderful, thank you Katalin Karikó).

He shops with chicks, almost always a mistake unless she’s going to fuck you in the changing room. If you must shop with chicks, lingerie and swimsuits only. You’re not her girlfriend and shopping is a horrible activity, and people for whom “shopping” is a true pleasure are to be avoided: they are filling the hole in their souls with consumer goods and it never works.

At the end, hot piece Alyna has degraded into the same situation as Casey was at the start, implying the Buddhist concept of saṃsāra, “a Sanskrit/Pali word that means ‘world'” and which encapsulates the cycle of life, in which patterns repeat and recur. I’m sure Chad was thinking of samsara specifically. At the start, Richard is listless with Casey and annoyed about her uneven sexual output, which won’t improve after marriage (they never get thinner after the wedding, either). He’s operating in the world of 2007, though, so non-monogamy doesn’t occur to him. He needs to have read THE RED QUEST and to have realized that monogamy doesn’t work for him and doesn’t work for the poor chicks who’re as bored with him as he is with them (chicks tolerate boredom better “for the relationship”). Solution? Take them to fuck clubs. He’s missing key information, like early natural philosophers were missing calculus, a theory of air as a medium, etc. Without proper intellectual tools it’s hard to make progress, and Richard needs the intellectual tools I’ve developed and am distributing under an open source model. Many guys fail due to inadequate knowledge and he is one of them. He should read my book SEX CLUBS, NON-MONOGAMY, AND GAME, maybe get coaching from Redpill Dad PUA. That way, from other guys, he’d perceive the way forward toward pussy nirvana. He’s operating at a low level of existence and needs help to reach higher levels. Pussy nirvana and higher levels of existence aren’t to be found at the gay party he hilariously and foolishly goes to… gay parties are orgies. A guy who goes who doesn’t want to suck or be sucked at it should GTFO. Richard’s gay friend thinks maybe Richard will spring but no, he’s not that desperate.

There’s a better way to live, a better way to be… this guy doesn’t know it… maybe he can’t, he never will, which is sad. Jesus is here, in the form of me, showing him the way to the light, but I can’t leap backward into 2007 to help this guy.

Read THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE, read THE GOOD GIRL, leave what you think in the comments… be glad it’s not a super blue pill, super turgid book. I don’t accept the worldview, which is sad at its core, but I admire the guy, Chad, for writing it. This is a great book to rave about and hand to any woman you’ve been dating for more than six months. Tell her you love it and can’t wait to hear what she thinks. It’s got moments true to life, like, “All guys know the look of knowing you’re about to get some pussy and that’s the one on Tim’s face when he checks his watch….”

I’m too old for THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE, the first chapter is “Christmas with Mom and Dad. Same old bullshit.” Dude, one day mom and dad are going to be dead, and, assuming they love you and you love them, you’re never going to get to express or feel that again. Unless mom and dad are Boomer narcissists, then you’ve never felt normal familial love and flee from it. Chapter two, Chad is “in Denver International Airport watching this old fat bitch eat a cup of yogurt. My blood is boiling.” Look at something else, then, man-baby. Try combat sports, that’ll sap your attention for being unhappy at older women who are committing the sin of… eating yogurt? Focus on something else. Get a better girlfriend, they’re not all the same, Richard wakes up “to a phone call begging me to spend my last days off… shopping at Century City with her.” Say no to shopping with chicks, it’s not hard, I’ve done it regularly. Or get a chick not stupid enough to want to drag her boyfriend shopping.

The depraved, by the standards of the time, sex scenes are banal by today’s standards. “Right after one of her loudest moans she says, ‘Spank me.'” Yeah, that might have been risque in 2007… not so today. He’s pointlessly mean to Casey, doing non-monogamy is the way to be more honest with chicks and set expectations correctly. His apparent slut savior Alyna says, “There’s more to a relationship than sex…” usually a bad sign, and whatever comes after that is likely to be bad, from a man’s point of view. There’s a bunch of cultural mimesis depicted as well.

What purpose does this guy have? I asked before, I’m still wondering it. What is an expert at, that other people aren’t? What’s his area of true specialization? What’s he doing to advance the human condition? If he’s got no skills or purpose, should we emulate him, or only laugh? I did laugh, I’m reading over what I’ve said and realize I sound like I didn’t like the book. I do like it, I did like reading it, could be that I’m missing the joke (not for the first time), but it’s a chronicle of an ineffective man, as a statement of factual observation. Would you want this guy in a foxhole with you, starting a company with you, being your wingman? Do something to solve problems. This guy doesn’t solve anyone’s problems, no wonder he’s dissatisfied.

Let’s look at what the book says of its author: Chad “graduated from the University of Southern California School of Film and Television,” which helps explain some of his lassitude and entitlement… he spent $100k+ on a worthless degree unlikely to pay off, surrounded by spoiled rich kids, all of whom want to be Steven Spielberg but aren’t. The combination of incredible expectations and the reality of a tiny hypercompetitive film industry leads to aspects of Los Angeles’s peculiar and peculiarly curdled culture. His degree is akin to the one the Wall Street Journal recently made fun of, “ ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off, Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans.” Seriously, check this crazy shit out, “Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.”

That’s not far off what USC grads with undergraduate degrees probably experience… this is a guy who’s let himself be scammed by a college, not uncommon but a bad sign overall. If he lets himself be scammed by a college, he might let himself be scammed by women, too right? Someone with Chad or Richard’s worldview, which has been this warped by the education system and personal delusion, is likely to have problems. The entertainment industry is a breeding ground for narcissists. Narcissism is a psychological pathology that rarely recognizes itself. How many will laugh at Chad-Richard, and how many will want to be him? The movie Wall Street was supposed to be a biting satire, and instead it made a generation of guys want to go into finance. Do we see something similar in THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE?

Not worth $10, worth about $6 or $7.

THE GOOD GIRL, a novel, is out today

I’ve been writing Red Quest for four years and have asked you for nothing, until now, when I ask you to buy a copy of THE GOOD GIRL: A NOVEL. It’s out today as an ebook and paperback, and it’s a great yarn:

He meets Maggie on the street, cold reading her like she’s a tarot card and hoping she’s entertained enough not just to say she’ll go on a date, but to actually appear on it.

She’s between boyfriends and more open to men than usual, but wary enough of a random man’s birdsong, however compelling the initial birdsong might appear.

He’s got a secret plan, she’s got justified suspicions, and the game that unfolds is, in some sense, The Game—the universal game all men and women play.

The tension between them can’t be resolved without destroying the game, and yet the tension and uncertainty draws them both together, propelling them towards unpredictable ends that will leave both changed, forever.

You’re interested in game and most fiction bores the pants off you: THE GOOD GIRL is the cure to those problems. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s witty, it’s surprising, it’s a journey into madness: everything you’ve been looking for in a story and not yet found. So get a copy. My last book was and is free and open source, and thousands of guys have benefited from it; this one isn’t, but I think the free balances the scales with the paid. 

The main reason to read a book or watch a film is pleasure, and THE GOOD GIRL delivers pleasure. But beneath the tension in the story there are also lessons, many of them subtle, about how to live and how to interact. We learn best through stories, and that’s what THE GOOD GIRL is: a story, one that’s in some ways ancient and in others contemporary. It’s the book I wish another guy had written. 

“Just go talk to her:” how to think about meeting women

Xbtusd returns, with the ways talking to strangers has improved his game, and life.

I’ve been privately sharing some FRs with RPD and RQ over the summer, and I’ve started to notice some things shifting; RPD, for example, reports that some of his clients don’t stick around long because a lot of them need an accountability buddy more than they need specific dating tactics and strategies. They start approaching women, and instantly their results with women get better. To that end, I have to give credit to RPD, because I’ve never met anyone who so consistently cold approaches. He gave me a lot of confidence that yes, I too could and should approach more girls. It’s been amazing to have someone who I can always come to with n00b questions and, more importantly, an accountability buddy who wants me to succeed. Who would have predicted that speaking to women would be a crucial part of having sex with them?

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.

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.

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.