Why women hate the player and the game
Marks recent blog post "Litmus Test" got me thinking about women and their relationship to the game and the community. When I first got into the community, I noticed that many if not most of my female friends who knew of the community (either through Mystery's VH1 show or through word of mouth) expressed either ambivalence or outright hostility to it. I learned to keep my involvement to the community to myself, and my female friends almost uniformly gave me the advice for me to "be myself." At the time, I thought such advice was foolish. But I thought a little bit about why women were so hostile to the community.
When I first started out, I bought into the "sexual-power" theory of why women hate the community. Mark talked about this in his blog post, but it's essentially a zero sum real-politik theory that holds that because in modern society women hold all the "sexual power" they are naturally inclined to be contemptuous and fearful of any attempt at men to wrest this power from them. Much of the PUA community espouses this today. But I gradually came to realize that this was likely a conspiracy theory promoted by men who were previously embittered by constant rejection, and I was among them. Most of the single female friends I knew wished that the men they met on a regular basis were more attractive - they idea that they want to keep us from being good with them is somewhat ridiculous.
I then thought that women objected to the community because it violated some idealized "hollywood" romantic view of the world. Namely, that there's someone out there for everyone and that attraction is more a matter of two people who are right for each other meeting at the right time. This is somewhat true in the sense that when people experience attraction (or chemistry) they don't often think about the processes that brought them to that state. It can seem somewhat random, and it can actually be somewhat random. Hence, the advice to "be yourself." But, I also found that most women recognize that some men are just better than others at attracting women (even independent of variables like looks or money). And, as you get older, most people stop really buying into that overly idealized Hollywood notion of romantic love, and if they still do into their late 20's and 30's, it's probably a bad sign.
Eventually I started thinking about what, specifically, my friends objected to in the community. Most of their disgust centered around the "neg" and routines. Their dislike of the neg is understandable: they are repulsed by the notion that a man can undercut a woman's self-esteem on his way of getting her in bed. They know it works among a certain subset of women, but they think it's inherently predatory to exploit a woman's emotional insecurities to sleep with her. And routines are using another man's words as your own to try to get her to sleep with you, which is just creepy.
What underlies the dislike of these two aspects of what has been popularized as "game" and "community methods" are two things: subterfuge and fakeness. Women like sex, and most women are totally okay with casual sex. I realized that women didn't object to men getting to be more attractive, what they objected to is faking your way into her vagina. To them, what it is saying is pretty much "I don't actually feel like I should be real with you, so instead I'm going to use another man's shit to get you into bed, because I really care about is your vagina."
I always hated the advice "be yourself". But then I realized that "being yourself" isn't inherently bad advice. It's just often we're unable to be honest with who we are (by expressing our desire and escalating) or we don't like who we are (our neediness and self-esteem issues). At the end of the day, what "be yourself" really means is to be honest with who you are with a woman, honest with what you want, and actually try to get to know her and how she relates to you, as a woman. At the end of the day, maybe "be yourself" was the only advice I really needed."
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