Category: link

How Richard Hanania used The Game and evolutionary biology to overcome anxiety

It’s a story consistent with things you’ve read here on Red Quest, although few people probably want to “constantly troll people, and get them to hate you with a passion.” Instead of trolling people and getting them to hate you, it might be better to try and be right, and to grow, but the most interesting parts concern Hanania’s introduction to THE GAME, which goes beyond the game…

While in college, I read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The author was Neil Strauss, a journalist who as a New York Times columnist had achieved some level of professional success but had bad luck in his dating life. He started out by doing research on the “seduction community,” a group of men that in the early days of the internet got together to figure out how to meet and attract women

THE GAME is still the introduction many of us have to the game. Evolutionary biology underlies the game…

Continue reading “How Richard Hanania used The Game and evolutionary biology to overcome anxiety”

“The cost of sexual liberation” for women

“The cost of sexual liberation” for women fits right into the player dynamics commonly discussed around here, my favorite bit is…

Meanwhile, the female sexual emancipation Greer pursued has delivered a bonanza for every live-in-the-moment modern-day Dean Moriarty with the looks to enjoy it. In the world of online dating, sex is even more abundant than it was for Dean Moriarty: one twentysomething friend tells me that “photogenic” male friends find female attention so abundant that some are “quite sick of the attention.”

The agency of women is little discussed, of course… if women wanted to, they could choose steady, reliable guys instead of exciting players. They don’t, though, not at least until the “epiphany stage” that Rollo Tomassi writes about. Women love competing for hot, high-status men… any time an individual woman decides not to do that, she’ll avoid the “Dean Moriarty” men (no idea who Dean Moriarty was).

As a young teen I remembered hearing older people say that girls want a “nice, good” guy who will take care of them. This troubled me, because everyday life readily demonstrated that girls liked jerks and jocks (not much has changed between then and now). Guys interested in pickup and being players reconcile what is commonly said about women’s desires with what (and who) real, live women do. Women strongly prefer hot, tall, exciting guys. This is observation, not value judgment. Most of us have seen how women behave around men they find hot.

It’s still (somehow) amazing to me that the top things a guy can do to sleep with more women are work out, practice his social skills, and get a gig like bartending. Hot women prefer buff guys with social skills over the guys building civilization and society. At one point in the development of civilization, I think there was a higher degree of consilience between “guys building civilization and able to care for women and children” and “guys women sleep with.” Today that consilience is mostly absent. That may be bad, but top guys can f**k an unbelievable number of attractive chicks. Speaking of that, I need to go deadlift and do shrugs, stop pussyfooting around on the keyboard. Some chads are born, many are made.

In human sexuality, women are collectively the choosers, men the chosen. Who women choose speaks to them. Every hot woman has a phone full of guys who’ll wife her up, but she doesn’t want them. I’ve been both the guy she wants and the guy she doesn’t. I know which is better.

As men, we can study the mechanism that is female biology and psychology and figure out how to access more of what we want. That is the game. Welcome.

“Why I Left Feminism”

“Why I Left Feminism.” She recounts her erroneous thinking: “I was also under the impression that children would ‘get in my way,’ and therefore I must achieve my career goals first and foremost,” when it turns out children are the point. She “Realized Men and Women Have Different Interests,” on average.

An obsession with independence and freedom is poisonous to women… and to men. Something to be aware of, given the over-prioritization of independence among some guys I read and some readers of this work.

It’s pretty rare to read something this graceful. Much of what passes for feminist “thought” online reads like cope.

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. 

The beautiful privileges of the hot chick, and the disposability of the father

This short piece about hot chick Julia Fox is more revealing than it should be,

An older sister in one of those households worked as a dominatrix. “She would look at herself in the mirror, with the fish-nets and the PVC and the platforms,” Fox said. “And, in the back of my mind, I always knew it was an option.” In her last year of high school, she said, “I answered a Craigslist ad, when they still had the adult section, and I biked over after school and got the job.” A long-term romantic relationship with a wealthy older man, a client, followed. “I used to pray all the time that a guy would come in and take me away, and then it happened,” she said. “We were together for five years. He wanted me to marry him, and I loved him so much, but he wanted me to wear, like, Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Tory Burch. I felt like I was always playing a part.”

We get the normalization of sex work. But we also see a common bit of female fantasy, one that is nonetheless rarely represented in the media, that a man “would come in and take me away.” She’s young and hot, so she reaches out, and he does: such is the power of young hot female privilege. The writer doesn’t contemplate what happens to young guys in the same perilous circumstances… to most women, guys who they deem below them don’t exist, except as service workers, and as the people who keep their computers and phones working. Fox says, “In my personal life, I’m not having, like, crazy-wild sex.” She might be right, might be wrong, might have her internal compass set funny… she has a “five-month-old son, Valentino,” but we learn nothing at all about the father. To the chick writer and to Julia Fox, whoever inseminated her might as well not exist???

This is the middlebrow worldview, today. Sex work is good, fun, and liberating. Men are sources of cash and, should a woman need it, some semen. Being hot means a chick’ll make it in this world. The family is dead and unimportant. In current cultural conditions, is this wrong? Not, “should it be wrong?” but is it wrong? Julia says of sex, “It’s a necessary bodily function.” Yeah, cause for a hot chick, it’s available on demand, but, for the rest of us: the game. Love it or hate it, it is here, tantalizing you, to master the secrets of the p***y.

Your choice is to struggle, or die. I choose struggle. No one is going to come in and take me away (unless it’s to the gulag, for wrongthink).

If you are wondering whether Julia Fox is smart overall, listen to this podcast, and your questions will be answered. You will also discover real-time narrative formation for chicks… the podcast message is, “There’s never been a better time to be a player”… or a worse time to be a provider. Which will you be?

Delicious Tacos talks to Personality Girl and Default Friend about getting laid and other things

Personality Girl and Default Friend have a hilarious podcast with Delicious Tacos, a podcast covering many topics, including how women don’t (maybe can’t) understand what life and horniness as a man is like, alcoholism, writing, groupies, face, sociopathy, work, and Houellbecq (the key philosopher of the last 50 years, no one else who hasn’t done pr0n counts). My replies are disjoint and won’t make sense without listening to the podcast.

Hot, emotionally mature girls aren’t on the market much and aren’t drunk or snorting coke. Guys with alcohol or substance abuse problems are attracting girls who will accept those, and it’s dangerous to draw conclusions from that biased sample… I try not to generalize too much about women based on the women I’ve been with in the last ten years, because most of them are at the very least curious about or accepting of non-monogamy, while women who want a conventional family and children aren’t going to put up with that shit. Delicious Tacos lives in L.A. (all the normal girls stay out of California). The conversation is a very big city conversation, cause normal girls who want a husband and family live in the midwest, or Texas, or Florida, or any place that it’s possible to live a middle-class existence and have a family… they’re not in the big famous cities. That’s where the sluts are, and the people who can’t afford to have kids, so they might as well do all sorts of weird sex things. I’m one of them, I’m talking about my own here, but I’ve also spent lots of time in smaller cities where women in their 20s walk around with their children in strollers and their husbands next to them. Most of them are 10 – 40 lbs overweight, which is gross, but that’s where they are.

Despite all that I have a piece coming up in the next month or two about how I was dumb to not have figured out mdma earlier in my life, cause, used judiciously, that’s where many of the easy lays are. Lots of hot chicks lack personality, or drive, or the ability to admit the sex they want and get it, and need some external aid to get there. Trying to talk to a lot of hot girls age 18 – 24 isn’t easy, cause their knowledge base consists of inane gossip and an interest in drinking and drugs. That’s it. It’s hard to build commonality from that. Solution? A lot of conversation that uses The Game + insinuations of drinking/drugs now, or in times to come. I should’ve learned this earlier… in many ways I’m a slow learner.

Very true: pussy begets more pussy. Absolutely. Sex clubs are apotheosis of this. DT gets this. He says something like, the difference between 0 pussy and 1 pussy is a million times greater than 1 and 2, and pretty much everything in game is about moving from 0 to 1. Red Quest might be less interesting cause it’s mostly about moving from 2 to a million, via sex clubs + non-monogamy.

Agree that guys who get a lot fuck a lot of chicks, almost all of varying quality levels.

Delicious Tacos should get a counseling degree and do counseling for men. He’d be great at it, and he’d get out of the corporate grind office job, become more of a prophet than he already is. I’d refer guys to him. “You want to get laid, get your life in order? Talk to this guy, Delicious Tacos.” Would he be popular, though? Most therapists seem to need to take 20 sessions to get to the obvious, because they have to wait for the person they’re talking to to get to the idea on their own… I think Delicious Tacos would be like, “Your family’s fucked up, go learn the deadlift, and get in touch with your feelings that way.” If more guys mastered the deadlift and pullup we’d have less need for therapy.

His voice is peculiarly similar to mine, as are many of his life experiences, although I’ve never had alcohol or substance abuse problems… although I have been accused of being a sex addict (DT discusses “sex addicts” on the podcast). I don’t think I am, though, because I usually have some standards, and after I get my fill I go read a book or whatever.

He says that he used to get groupies when he showed his face… but then he sadly got doxxed… I’ve speculated to other guys that, to build a bigger following it’s necessary to show some proof-of-lay and become a public figure. Krauer and Tom Torero did that. Andy from Kill Your Inner Loser has done the same. I don’t think I care enough to want to take red quest to the next level that way, but it’s useful to hear ideas echoed. Like Balaji says, “we’re going to need to build a pseudonymous economy, where over the medium to long term, you separate out your real name, your earning name, and your speaking name. And in fact, you have multiple earning names and multiple speaking games, just like you have multiple usernames at different sites.” Balaji goes on,

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Breeze gives The Talk

“Breeze gives The Talk.” Good for him, and a deft, nuanced discussion about and analysis of this stage in the seduction. 

Breeze is going places. I wouldn’t be surprised if he winds up with a quality girlfriend… but I also wouldn’t be surprised if he plunges into the f**k clubs… he feels like an unwritten book. 

There are smart ideas from Nash in the comments as well. The comments section Breeze hosts is worthwhile. 

Reveal vs Restructure: “This is why the Player’s Journey can be so traumatic for many men. They are diving deep into their inner game to confront long-suppressed demons.”

Krauser’s post “Reveal vs. Restructure” is the most important post about beginner mental state that I’ve ever read.