You're cooler than you think

I told you I would post again.

Negative thoughts about my ability to relate to other people have been a constant thorn in my side for my whole life. Over the past 2 years or so, a confluence of factors, including learning about the particular brand of social self-help pitched by the seduction community, moving to a new city where it happens to be easier to meet people from a conservative Christian background and thus who have at least something culturally in common with me, my increased status resulting from being a medical student (yes, it does exist, even if it's not enough to win a girl over by itself,) and the phenomenon of just being more comfortable in one's own skin that does happen as you enter your thirties, have given me reason to be more optimistic about this. I still become frustrated once in a while, but one thing I have learned is just how much your own self-perception influences others' perception of you.

I live directly across the street from a small supermarket, one that happens to be the closest full-scale grocery store to the university, and is therefore frequently patronized by students undergraduate, graduate, and professional. One evening a couple of weeks ago, on one my frequent saunters over there to pick up a few foodstuffs, three sorority chicks, to the best of my recollection a 6, a 7, and a 9, were wandering around the produce section chattering ditzily as they undertook the intellectually challenging task of selecting produce. I witnessed the following exchange:

Sorority chick: What kind of lettuce are you supposed to put on tacos?

Random passing undergrad dude: The shredded kind.

SC: (Oh, aren't you funny, blah blah blah, I don't really remember what she said) Want to come to our taco party?

RPUG: Sure.

Now RPUG looked like a pretty average guy. He wasn't a rock star. He didn't come across as super-alpha. It struck me that in the course of about 5 seconds, with one smart-ass comment, this guy had gotten himself invited to a sorority taco party.

My first reaction in situations like this has long been--and this time was no different--"Why can't I be that kind of guy? Why doesn't anything like that ever happen to me?" Maybe those thoughts come from the devil on one shoulder, because this time, another voice inside my head, call it the angel on my other shoulder, said "you are that kind of guy. Stuff like that does happen to you all the time, or at least it used to when you got out more." It occurred to me that I had always thought of myself as a low-social status nerd who is perceived by hot girls (and cool guys) as a low social-status nerd and is incapable of rolling with them. But something made me stop, do a reality check, and realize: when I was in undergrad, hot girls and cool guys invited me to parties all the time. I just always turned them down. "I can't go to parties where people drink and dance and listen to loud, currently popular music," I thought. "I'm not cool enough." But they didn't think I was a low-social-status nerd who couldn't roll with them. I created that persona in my own mind by acting that way.

The same thing happened when I started medical school. When everyone was new to everyone else and eager to make friends, I got invited to parties galore. But since I never went, figuring my social time was better spent at church where I was sure to meet a wife, I assume I soon developed a reputation as someone who just isn't interested in socializing and I stopped getting invited.

It's an uphill battle when you're fighting 33 years of negative thought patterns, but one thing I have to keep reminding myself of is that a decent appearance is actually easy to put on. In the past couple of years, I've learned to dress a bit more stylishly for social occasions, gotten contact lenses, and learned to use a bit of product in my hair, but even long before all that I could never have been mistaken for a Magic: The Gathering player. My freshman year of college, directly across the hall from me lived two of the biggest stoners I have ever met in my life. I'll never forget the time, early on in the year, when one of them, having somehow surmised that I didn't go out Friday night, said to me, perplexed and genuinely curious, "dude, did you just, like, hang out here?" Well, of course, I thought, don't you know I'm a nerd? But to him, I obviously looked like a regular guy, the kind who would be found at a frat party on a Friday night doing a keg stand or bumping and grinding with some drunk chick just like the rest of 'em. He didn't think I was a nerd. I did. It's actually easy to look like a socially mainstream person, and from there it's a choice to act the part.

As I said, it's not easy to change these thought patterns when they've been so deeply ingrained over so many years. But the evidence has long been right in front of my eyes--I simply chose to ignore it--that if I simply muster the cojones to blurt out the word "shredded" to some strange girls, I could find myself at a taco party.

It's all in your head.

I will never stop blogging

I'm sitting here in mid-day, with three weeks off from medical school, feeling overwhelmed despite having a totally open schedule--I have to write up the findings from my research project in the form of a real scientific paper, to be published in an actual medical journal--so I thought I'd procrastinate by posting a blog entry.

One of the reasons I don't post more often is that I have so much to do in medical school. Now, it's not that I'm always working; I wind up procrastinating as much as anyone else, but as long as I have work to do I usually feel I shouldn't spend the time blogging (merely browsing my favorite blogs is more passive, and thus easier to allow myself to do.) But I like blogging when I can, no matter how infrequently I do it, and thus one of the phenomena I don't understand is permanently closing one's blog. I was thinking about this after reading that Anakin Niceguy is closing up shop. Novaseeker did the same thing in January, and I know there have been other bloggers I used to read, or at least check in on occasionally, whose names I can't remember right now, who announced an official end to blogging. (At least those guys are leaving their blogs up, though. One thing I really can't understand is deleting your blog. Unless you fear that the thought police are coming after you in real life, what harm is there in leaving it up, for posterity's sake?)

Sure, there are disadvantages to being an infrequent blogger, namely, that you lose regular readership. There was a time when I was posting nearly every day, and got a lot more hits than I do now. When it's been weeks since you've posted, people simply stop dropping by, as I myself have with Ganttsquarry and A.J. Travis. But, they may post again someday. Why foreclose that possibility by announcing that you are officially done with blogging?

All of this is not to criticize or argue with people who stop blogging; just to say that, no matter how infrequently I write a substantive post, I'll always be around.

Adventures in gynecology

For the past six weeks I've been on an outpatient rotation, which means seeing patients in the office from 8-5. My weeks consist of family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology all intermingled together. This afternoon was a gynecology afternoon. Incidentally, this is at one of the top hospitals in the country according to U.S. News & World Report.

My second patient of the afternoon was a pretty, prim and proper, professional white 30 year old woman, the kind you'd expect to meet at happy hour at the yuppie bar near the local office park. I saw that she had a hyphenated surname and heard the nurse mention that the patient didn't want us to use the stickers with her name on them because she was changing her name. I walked into the room and introduced myself.

Me: Hi, Miss Hyphenated-Surname?

Pt: Yes.

Me: I'm Dr. Abooboo's medical student for the afternoon. Would you mind if I go over some history with you before Dr. Abooboo comes in?

Pt: Sure.

Me: So, I hear you're changing your name, is that right?

Pt: Yeah, actually the name they have on there is wrong, my last name is Similarsounding-HyphenatedSurname, but I'm getting married next week, so it'll be changing anyway.

Me: Oh, congratulations. So, what can we help you with today, do you have any concerns, are your periods regular, when was your last Pap smear, etc., etc.

Pt: Blah blah blah, yakity scmakity.

Me: OK, let me go find Dr. Abooboo and we'll be back in together to do the exam.

Exit.
[I should say here that the patient was very nice and pleasant, but I don't have the ear for conveying that in dialogue.]
Enter Hermes and Dr. Abooboo.

Dr: So, I hear you have some big plans! Where are you getting married?

Pt: Well, we're having two weddings, actually. The first one's in Turkey. My fiance is Turkish.

Internal dialog of Hermes of 5 years ago: (Oh, isn't that nice, I'm happy for her.)

Internal dialog of present-day Hermes: (Another one bites the dust.)

(Sometime later)
Dr: what do you do for a living?

Pt: I'm a management consultant. My fiance is too; we both work for the same company.

So this nice, pretty, highly educated and accomplished six-figure-earning white girl will marry a six-figure-earning Middle Eastern immigrant, probably have one mixed-race baby and deposit him in day care, then spend the rest of their lives blowing their combined six-figure income on a big house in some white-flight development with a name like "The Hunt at Glen Run," a couple of BMW's in the driveway, and international luxury vacations until they die in a nursing home. If their marriage lasts.

Later in the afternoon I saw an 18-year-old white girl who was there with her mother to discuss the results of a Pap smear and colposcopy. (Colposcopy is the screening test done after a Pap comes back negative, and often involves cervical biopsy.) She was cute, freckle-faced, with slightly eccentric mannerisms, the kind you can tell is a theater chick just by looking at her. She was wearing one of those knit wool caps with the brim that sticks out which theater chicks always wear. I don't know what they're called. Both mother and daughter were quite irate because they had had multiple Paps and colpos done at one of the other big hospitals in town and had never been able to get the results. They were both quite nervous about the fact that she had had an abnormal Pap. I looked in her chart, and saw that she had already had five colposcopies. Five. This girl was a freshman in college, and evidently she had already spread her legs for enough bad boys--or maybe one who was really, really bad--that HPV had already crawled in, put its feet up, made itself right at home, even built a little bungalow and had a party going on.

Call me naive, cultural leftists, but I'm pretty sure my grandmothers wouldn't have had five abnormal Pap smears by age 18.

This girl was not happy about the prospect of future Paps and colpos. "I'm deathly, irrational afraid of needles," or something equally eccentric, she said with typical theater chick melodrama. The doctor suggested she get the HPV vaccine. She immediately blurted out "I don't believe in vaccines." Her mother feebly expressed hope that if she were with one steady partner, maybe her future risk would be minimized. This normal, white bread, suburban mother, who took it in stride that her unmarried 18-year-old daughter was sexually active, was not wearing a wedding ring.

The fall of Western Civilization continues unabated. Gynecology clinic is the front line.

A true WTF moment

Thanks to the wonder of Facebook, I have just learned that a woman from my high school class is currently married to Mike Tyson. Apparently, they wed in June, two weeks after Tyson's 4-year-old daughter died in a "tragic treadmill accident." (I never knew there was such a thing.)

Here is a photo of the happy couple:

I didn't really know the girl, but I recognized the name, I looked her up in the yearbook, and yes, that's her. Who would have known that when I was 15, I was sitting in class next to the future wife of the notorious boxer a digital representation of whom I had spent countless hours trying to defeat?

Words fail me. Come to think of it, I don't recall there being a "common sense" class in high school.

Had it not been for alpha-eyed Joe, I'd have been married a long time ago

In the previous post, Thursday left a comment stating that it doesn't make sense to assign all the blame for the current sexual dystopia to alpha males, but we shouldn't place all the blame on women either.

This got me thinking about what I think is a fatal flaw in the Roissysphere so far. It holds two mutually contradictory propositions--OK, these may never have been stated explicitly in these words anywhere, but one can definitely detect their undercurrent in the posts of Roissy et al.--namely:

1. Men are moral agents capable of choosing deliberate actions based on rational thought processes (e.g., choosing to run game and succeed with women or wallow in loneliness), while women are animals who are totally incapable of doing anything but blindly obeying their genetic programming to seek out and mate with the highest-status male they can find.
2. Women are to blame for our current situation.

Obviously, these cannot both be true. When an unruly dog bites the mailman, we don't blame the dog; we blame the owner for failing to keep the dog fenced in or on a leash. The stronger the first proposition, the weaker the second, and vice versa. If it is solely up to men to control and lead women, then women can have no responsibility for the current situation. If women are to blame, on the other hand, they must possess at least as much moral agency as men, if not more.

Interestingly, this is an idea the Roissysphere shares with some of the social conservatives they so despise. There's a conservative Reformed pastor and author named Douglas Wilson who wrote a book called Her Hand in Marriage in which he apparently says this:

When a couple comes for marriage counseling, my operating assumption is always that the man is completely responsible for all the problems. [Italics original.] Some may be inclined to react to this, but it is important to note that responsibility is not the same thing as guilt. If a woman has been unfaithful to her husband, of course she bears the guilt of adultery. But at the same time, he is responsible for it. To illustrate, suppose a young sailor disobeys his orders and runs a ship aground in the middle of the night. The captain and the navigator were both asleep and had nothing to do with his irresponsible actions. Who is finally responsible? The captain and navigator are responsible for the incident. They are career officers, and their careers are ruined. The young sailor will be getting out of the Navy in six months anyway. It may strike many as being unfair, but is is indisputably the way God made the world. The sailor is guilty; the captain is responsible.

Without this understanding of responsibility, authority becomes meaningless and tyrannical. Husbands are responsible for their wives. They are the head of their wives as Christ is the head of the church. Taking a covenant oath to become a husband involves assuming responsibility for that home. This means that men, whether through tyranny or abdication, are responsible for any problems in the home. If Christian men loved their wives as Christ loved the church, if they had given direction to their wives, if husbands had accepted their wives' necessary help with their God-ordained vocation, there never would have been room for any kind of feminist thinking within the church.

Yes, those italics are Wilson's. The man is completely responsible for all the problems. If your wife cheats on you, it's because you didn't lead her properly. As a Christian and a social conservative who, as Ferdinand Bardamu would say, "gets it," I completely disavow this kind of thinking. Yet you've got to hand it to Wilson: he at least gets the fact that if you assume the wife is a mere untrained dog, then it is completely the owner-husband's fault when she misbehaves.

I bring this up because I think there is a gaping hole in the burgeoning school of thought that melds MRA/MGTOW with the PUA/seduction community. I think it's great that more and more men are being clued into the realities of female psychology and that we're proposing solutions to the current mess in which we find ourselves. But right now, it seems like the only solution being proposed is slut-shaming, with no thought to the idea that in a sexually sane society there will have to be restraints on alpha males as well. This is true if only as a simple matter of supply and demand: it is often said that the cads we will always have with us. But if we succeed in slut-shaming all women into total chastity (i.e., no sex before marriage and total faithfulness to their husbands thereafter,) then assuming an equal sex ratio, whom will the cads fool around with? Yet in a traditional society, restraints on alphas go much further: polygamy has never been permitted in the Christian West, and as far as I know bigamy is still a crime in every state in the USA. Think also of the common occurrences in traditional society I mentioned in my last post: shotgun marriages, prison sentences (for men) for adultery, juries routinely nullifying charges against a vengeful wife out of sympathy. Would such a society consider a man like Silvio Berlusconi "an inspiration for men everywhere"?

I would hope it would be obvious that I don't blame either men or women exclusively. I believe both sexes are capable of being moral agents, and thus both are to blame. And perhaps my personal biases are showing through here; as a natural provider beta, I suppose I could be accused of being a little too eager to find ways to sock it to the alphas. However, one can't deny that alpha males willingly allowed the current sexual dystopia to develop, and benefit enormously from it. And when talking about the kind of society we should have, however true it is that restraints on women are necessary, we can't neglect the moral requirements and limitations that must be placed on men as well.

Our real enemies: alpha males

A few weeks ago, someone calling himself Anonomega left the same comment on both In Mala Fide and Half Sigma, in response to the George Sodini incident. This comment intrigued me, though it was poorly formatted and a little obscene. I'm going to take the liberty of editing it slightly and reposting it here, in hopefully more readable form:

After pondering on Omega rage and pain, I realise it would do the Sodinis of the world good to, to paraphrase Sinead O'Connor, Fight The Real Enemy.

Gammas, Omegas, lend me your ear: your misogyny is, at worst, understandable; of this I will not argue. But stay your hand at those with the XX chromosome and heed... Yes, women ought stop having such high standards, settle more for lower males, appreciate nice guys, give them chance etc., since this is what men have to do. But consider: we can be pretty damn content with a 5, heck, even a 4.5. But what if there were many 10s not only making themselves available, but AGGRESSIVELY SEDUCING us? Would we bother with those 5s? Is it reasonable to expect us to? So in this alternate reality, if a 5 is deprived the joys of sex, romance, marriage, and motherhood, who should she really blame? The men, or a bunch of bitchy, slutty 10s who already have plenty of men, but still run around rubbing up against every halfway attractive man, simply because they CAN?

Do the "math".

Fight the Real Enemy: the ALPHAS.

All alphas have to do is pick one or two of the hottest ass they can get and f***ing MAKE DO with it, and it will trickle down to some come hither stares in Sodinis direction. But with each just-because-I-can extra lay, they brutally SNATCHED away Sodini's one chance at meager sexual contentment.

And many alphas know this! Look at Roissy's blog! They know this and they're laughing their sick f***ing asses off about it!! "Trix are for kids, motherf***er!" May I remind you these are the guys who TORMENTED YOU IN SCHOOL?! REMEMBER THAT, OMEGAS?! And when we learn how the mating game is really played, we realise they destroyed us far more than we thought they were when we were young. By beating us down, crushing our self-esteem, they were wringing out of us something PRECIOUS: our confidence, something ESSENTIAL to securing a mate, though we did not realise it at the time! Wake up and smell the locker insides and toilet water!

Alpha's, higher Betas, the Real Enemy, have always been our oppressors, their cruelty fueled by nothing other than their vile despising of the weak. Yet so many Gamma-Omegas wanna lash out at the c*nts. Why? The reasons are obvious. when your beaten down and SCARED--SO TERRIFIED--of your oppressors, it is expected to direct your bitterness and hurt at softer, easier targets. I walked the path of misogyny too, and I'm not suggesting going back to women-are-angels bullsh*t. It's just that upon simple thinking, reflection, analysis, whatever, I realise that misogyny is the easier path, yet it is ultimately the more cowardly.

To any future, budding, wanna-be, halfway, or neo-George Sodinis out there: I don't, ahem, support the sort of bloodshed he was about or anything... but I'm JUST SAYING.... IF YOU HAVE TO SHOOT SOMEBODY, IF YOU HAVE TO KIDNAP AND TORTURE SOMEBODY... think on my words and ask yourself: WHO DESERVES IT MORE?! Ahem... of course, in the name of decency and morality and all that good sh*t, I would have to advocate less psychotic means. Vengeance on alphas will be a lot harder and scarier than c*nt-hatred: you may have to discipline yourself, make yourself combat ready, and ultimately become that which you hate. Heck, I can't practice what I preach! But if you put down the "Stupid Sluts Take It Up The Ass Like they Deserve" porn and pick up the barbell, it will be potentially more rewarding, for yourself and (I think) society. And Alphas will learn the one downside rule of the alpha life:

Watch Your F***ing Back.

I have to admit that, while morbid, what this commenter said really resonated with me. I, too, was a frustrated teenage boy, with no clue about how to even begin interacting with these strange alien creatures called girls, impotently looking on with envy as the more popular boys somehow won their affections effortlessly, seemingly without doing anything, as if by magic. I wasn't exactly tormented by the bad boys in school; for the most part, they just ignored me, though this was doubtless due to the fact that I didn't even try to insert myself into their world. But those about whom I entertained sadistic fantasies of torture, murder, and worse (perhaps a bit too much disclosure, but I'm assuming most of us go through such a phase as a teenager) were not the girls, they were the cooler boys who were getting those girls. It was they I wanted to hurt.

And I'm sure Anonomega articulates the thoughts of many a frustrated teenage boy/young man with his observation that all an alpha has to do is pick a woman and make do with her. Just pick one! How many betas, at the nadir of their despair, have thought, "my God, he doesn't know how lucky he is! If I could be with just one of the countless girls he could get, I'd feel like the king of the world!"

I believe this tendency to view the man who is getting the woman as the problem, rather than the woman, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. After all, in lower animals, such as wolves, how does a male gain the privilege of mating with a female? Not by doing anything to the female herself, but by physically defeating the higher-status male who would stop him.

The problem is made complicated by the fact that today, alphas have been divided into two groups: as Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide has been calling them, male alphas and female alphas. ("Female alphas" referring not to females who are alpha, but males who are alpha in the eyes of females.) As Thursday has pointed out elsewhere, some of the men who are best with women have almost nothing else going for them. In modern society, where women don't need providers, you can have a dead-end job, be up to your eyeballs in debt, and have no future to speak of, yet be a world-class ladies' man. But it wasn't always this way. In traditional society, male alphas--leaders of men--more often got the girl, and it was hard to be a player. You were universally reviled, and the lack of contraception and abortion made multiple sexual conquests extremely impractical. In the past, naturals usually did have to just pick one and make do with her.

As Half Sigma recently wrote:

When pre-marital and extra-marital sex was very strongly discouraged by society, being able to talk a girl into bed didn’t mean spreading your genes as much as it meant being forced to marry her at the end of a shotgun (or crossbow or sword or whatever weapon was used back then), or even worse, killed by her angry relatives, put in jail for the crime of adultery, etc.

Examples of this sentiment--that it's not the ladies, but the ladies' men, who are the problem--abound. It's is captured well in the lyrics of country singer Vince Gill's song, "Pocket Full of Gold," about the life of the cad:

Some night you're gonna wind up
On the wrong end of a gun
Some jealous guy's gonna show up
And you'll pay for what you've done
What will it say on your tombstone?
"Here lies a rich man
With his pocket full of gold."

And remember the ending of Mozart's Don Giovanni: the seducer is depicted, quite literally, burning in hell.

And just today, Lawrence Auster at View from the Right referred to a sordid tale from his ancestry, in which his grandmother shot and killed his grandfather during an argument about an affair he was having with an another woman, and the jury let her off out of sympathy with her. In other words, they believed the philanderer deserves what he gets.

This tendency to blame and hate women that arises in some segments of the MRA/MGTOW community appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is. It could be that traditional society carried an implicit recognition that women were fallen creatures too, but was also resigned to the fact that women were going to do what they were going to do, and given the necessity of men leading and women following, thought it more important to discipline men. (Incidentally, this would contradict the Roissysphere's description of men as keys who will adapt themselves to whatever shape women choose their locks to take, but that is a topic for another entry.) And it could be that in modern society, even MRAs/MGTOWers have unconsciously absorbed the belief in female equality, so they expect women to make decisions on the same basis as men do, and become angry at them when they don't.

Whatever the case, like Anonomega, I don't advocate going out and shooting anyone, but I'm sure we can all agree that George Sodini didn't accomplish any good with his choice of targets.

Overheard at the gym: MRA/MGTOW talk from med students

About two weeks ago, I was at the campus gym lifting weights, when I heard the phrase "get married" drifting over from a conversation some distance away. I looked over, and saw a group of three guys at a piece of equipment about twenty feet away from the one I was using. They were taking turns on it and chatting as they did so. I recognized one of them as a member of the class one year behind mine in medical school, though I really don't know him at all, so I assumed the others were med students as well. The part of the conversation I overheard went something like this:

"Me, getting married?"

"I'd never get married."

"I saw a thing on the news about some celebrity who just got divorced, and his wife wound up with more than half of all his money." [I thought they might have been referring to John Cleese.]

"I just don't get why you'd do that to yourself!"

"Well, I don't know, I guess some people do it if they want to have a family, you know..."

"Yeah, but you don't have to get married to have a family."

"True, but some people still feel like they should, I guess..."

I thought this was interesting just because of how my views have changed over the past year. If I had overheard this conversation one year ago, I would have felt in response a mixture of envy, jealousy, intimidation, resentment, and despair. Envy, because I would have assumed the reason the guys were talking this way is that they were selfish hedonists who happened to be blessed with the traits that make men attractive to women, and therefore they were going to take as much as they could get (of sex) while they could get it; and I wished I had the power to attract women that way. Jealousy, because I would have thought that by doing this they were monopolizing all the girls, corrupting many who would otherwise have remained innocent and naive and been attracted to a guy like me, turning them into sluts and party girls who were out of my league. Intimidation, because I would have assumed that anyone who lived their life that way was more socially dominant than I and would see me as a pathetic sniveling little wimp for clinging to traditional morality, and that they were on the side of the culture wars which was fighting to transform our society away from what I wanted it to be and toward something that was very unpleasant to me. Resentment that they would have the nerve to do this, and despair that their side in the culture wars was winning and their victory seemed inevitable.

All of this, because a few males indirectly implied that they thought it made more sense to have sex outside of marriage than within it.

Now that I have become familiar with the seduction community and the writings of F. Roger Devlin, and been clued into the real dynamics behind sexual relationships, I see things in a different light. I don't see these guys as heroes, nor innocent victims, but they are merely reacting to their environment. They see men in the news every day having their lives ruined and everything they have taken away in divorce court, all because their wives got "bored," and they understandably want to avoid that. They weren't objecting to marriage in theory, but to what it has become in practice in our society. Notably--something that would have escaped me a year ago, when I would have focused on their supposed caddishness and superiority to me in the dating market--they weren't complaining about the idea of settling down with one woman for the rest of your life. None of them explicitly said that they wanted to sleep around, and in fact they seemed to think having a family was still an acceptable goal. Fifty years ago, in a society that still held traditional sexual morality up as a public ideal, these guys would probably have gotten married without giving it much thought.

The point is that my own journey is illustrative of just how in the dark most of our society is. I can't say for certain what all the factors were which converged over the past year to change my point of view, but for most people, it is something that still hasn't happened. It must happen, particularly among social and religious conservatives, if we are to turn this ship around. Whether this will happen in time, or on a sufficient scale, remains to be seen, but the truth, at least in raw form, is out there.