Tag: Alpha Game

Men on Strike: the ultimate review

An Amazon reviewer makes the quixotic choice to “review” Dr. Helen’s important new book by discussing my idiosyncracies, mostly inaccurately:

The first chapter of this book includes a section on why video games (in conjunction with porn) are a driving force behind men making the decision to not get married (it is because they cost less money than dating). It gives a description of “pickup artist theory:” a theory of how interaction between the sexes works by breaking men up into several categories (all of which are represented with Greek letters to make it sound more scientific than it is) and then ranks those categories by the sexual desirability of each category. The highest category, Alpha, is fully described as “the male elite, the leaders of men for whom women naturally lust.” It actually made it into print that the lowest men, the Omegas, are “the losers… most never surmount the desperate need to belong caused by their social rejection. Omegas can be the most dangerous of men because the pain of their constant rejection renders the suffering of others completely meaningless in their eyes.”

You read that right. Sociopathy is just a symptom of being a loser. Get over it, Lecter!

Here’s the thing, though: that particular version of “pickup artist theory” was created by Theodore Beale, who has no accredited training of any kind in psychology, behavioral science, or any other field that would lend him any amount of credibility. His blog, Vox Popoli (where he writes both as himself and his pseudonym, Vox Day), has two characters he invented named of McRapey and McRacist. Proudly displayed on the front page is a picture of a scared anthropomorphic pink rabbit, wearing a shirt that says “Rapey McRaperson” on it. Whenever someone says that racism exists, McRacist makes a blog post about how white men have it tough. Every time someone acknowledges the glass ceiling, McRapey posts a tirade about how every woman trying to live her own life is just insecure about how tough it is to get a man to do it for them.

Theodore Beale is the man that Helen Smith has trusted to help write a book on social interaction between men and women. Theodore Beale is a man who trivializes rape for a hobby. Theodore Beale is an unapologetically racist white man who literally wrote a blog post (please do not read this if you are capable of rational thought:[…] ) on female privilege, using a department store and a credit card with no credit limit as a metaphor for the fantastic life that women have by virtue of their race and sex. He began this blog post by trivializing rape and asserting that women who “threaten not to have sex with anyone” are wrong to choose not to have sex with anyone. Women are to blame not only for their female privilege, but also for their white privilege, which Beale dismisses as a non-issue whenever it affects white men.

We are only in the first chapter of this book that a publisher somehow decided was worth printing, where it is revealed that Helen Smith’s most basic assertions about modern romance are filtered through the lens of a man who proudly and openly claims that racism and sexism are tools of oppression used mostly against whites and men. One of Helen Smith’s primary research sources on the subject of men and male psychology invokes McRapey whenever he writes about men being “oppressed,” and we are expected to take this man seriously as an intelligent advocate for the dismantling of feminism as a whole.

No, this is seriously the message conveyed by Men On Strike. We are supposed to believe that Theodore Beale is an intelligent and well-reasoned man who is arguing in favor of sexual equality. We are supposed to believe that Beale’s categorization of men, arbitrarily assigned to letters of an alphabet for a language he does not speak, is an accurate portrayal of society and social interaction. We are supposed to believe this because Helen Smith presents this information alongside nonsensical statistical evidence, such as the suggestion that roughly 24% of men are Alphas who get to choose their sexual partners from the 76% of women who refuse to go a lower rung on the social hierarchy’s ladder. The logical conclusion, Smith argues, is that the remaining 76% of men are forced to compete for the remaining 24% of women. The existence of the hierarchy is not questioned: it is taken as a given truth that an outspoken misogynist has correctly identified what women universally and instinctually find attractive in men.

Helen Smith has not just written a book that is aggressively wrong on a broad range of topics: she has literally been assisted in writing this book by a man who actually believes that American society systematically oppresses men because women have the right to not have sex with someone they don’t want to have sex with. Men On Strike is not worth reading. It is not worth considering as a source of information. It is one of the most mangled attempts at statistical analysis and critical thinking that I have ever been witness to.

It is a certainly a strange sort of notoriety that triggers this sort of rabid, mindless reaction in one’s critics.  And I wish I had invented McRapey and McRapist, but as it happens, they are real, award-winning science fiction writers and fellow members of the SFWA.

As for the legitimacy of the socio-sexual hierarchy, the reason it has been adopted by more and more people as a useful means of understanding intersexual relations is that it reflects the reality they observe on a daily basis.  Credentials are irrelevant; I find it hard to think of anyone less likely to correctly identify what women instinctually find attractive in men than a highly credentialed academic of either sex.  Also, neither intersexual relations nor the socio-sexual hierarchy can be reasonably be described as “pickup artist theory”, as it is not limited to picking up women.

Anyhow, Dr. Helen can be pleased that she has clearly hit a sore spot among the defenders of the Female Imperative with her new book, as these people only attack the individuals and ideas they believe to be dangerous to their pernicious ideologies.

Reviewing Men on Strike

Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike was released today.  I reviewed it at Alpha Game.  An excerpt:

With the publication of Men on Strike, Dr. Helen Smith
fires an important shot in the ongoing cultural war for the soul, and
indeed, the survival, of Western Civilization.  It is a shot she fires
in defense of the defenders, in defense of the barricades, in defense of
the gates, against the lawless barbarians marching under the banner of
the Female Imperative.

If the horror stories and red pill realities she chronicles will not be
unfamiliar to those who are regular readers of the androsphere, they are
nevertheless particularly effective when presented, largely
dispassionately, one after another in succession.  Dr. Helen does an
competent job of drawing clear links between a legal regime biased
towards women and the fearful behavior of men who no longer see
sufficient incentive to perform the roles that society has long expected
and required of them.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Mailvox: in defense of “squee”

Perlhaqr attempts what I can only see as a futile defense:

I have to admit I’m somewhat confused by your diagnosis of scalzification via use of the word “squee”.  I use that term all the time, and I’m one of Correia’s Alphas. I don’t see the ideological binding of the term, I’m afraid.

The binding is not ideological, but socio-sexual.  Now, I don’t happen to know what “one of Correia’s Alphas” might be, but I find it very hard to conceive that Perlhaqr is either a sexual ALPHA as per Roissy or an Alpha Male according to the socio-sexual hierarchy. He might as convincingly attempt to defend his predilection for hair-braiding or high heels.  Alphas do not menstruate, they do not use their iPhones to self-shoot in bathrooms, (they seldom have iPhones in the first place), and they most assuredly do not “squee” over anything.

One can be excited.  One can be pumped, jacked, or psyched. One can rejoice, one can enthuse, and one can celebrate.  But one can no more be an alpha male and “squee” than one can queef, lactate, or get pregnant.  Only gamma males like McRapey, who revel in their perverse delusions, consider it not only fitting, but downright cool, to express themselves in terms that are popularized and primarily utilized by junior high school girls.

Should he wish to lower the probability of attractive adult women recoiling in disappointment, disgust and outright horror, Perlhaqr may also wish to consider excising “OMG”, “ZOMG”, “soooooooo”, and “One Direction” from his vocabulary.

Everyone is an inequalitarian

Even the self-declared equalitarians.  How can we know?  Because, as I show at Alpha Game, even the most ardent nominal equalitarians often are, by their own inadvertent admission, observably inferior beings.

The hallmark of the inferior being is not hypocrisy, or the mere
appearance of hypocrisy.  Everyone with ideals fails to live up to them
at some point or another.  One’s failure to live up to a standard is not at all the same thing as denying the standard applies to oneself.  The hallmark
of the inferior, the sure sign of the self-admitted inferior, is the
individual who demands others live up to standards that he refuses to
accept for himself.

 Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Alpha Game: the female process

I thought these thoughts from Sarahsdaughter made for important reading for men and women alike:

I’ve come to understand that my first response is often times
1)emotional and irrational 2)based in fear (not truth) 3)not the same
response I might have later after processing information 4)should not be
verbalized until said processing of information is done.

We, as
women understand and find no issue with the fact that we need to go
through these processes in order to figure out what is true – even when
it comes to our feelings. We want to talk it through. And then, we have a
tendency to arrive at new conclusions without going back and
apologizing for emotional outbursts that were based on wrong
conclusions. 

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Mailvox: “McRapey and me”

EGA writes to describe how l’affaire McRapey has caused him to rethink his opinion of the theory of Game, particularly as it concerns the socio-sexual hierarchy:

I have read your blog for some time. Your posts at Black Gate during the fluffle started by Leo Grin’s descriptive essay on the “bankrupt nihilism” of the current wave of epic fantasy were my start. You made me laugh and cringe while arguing with R. Scott Bakker, and I enjoyed your posts on economics, about which I admittedly know very little and found many of your posts challenging, yet enlightening.

I read your blog mostly for the economics posts, and enjoy much of what you write on other subjects. I never exactly agreed with your writing on a few subjects. I am very skeptical about much of what is written about “game,” about human biodiversity and a few other subjects. In fact, I didn’t think that your breakdown of the sexual market place hierarchies synced, at all, with my own experiences or observations. And while I do enjoy some of what is written in the manosphere, Heartiste and others set me on edge.

So when the posts on John Scalzi started, I cringed worse than I ever did when you had a similar argument with Mr. Bakker. And I wanted for Scalzi to win, at least in some fashion. I was the one who commented on his blog, trying to point out how much he was only proving you correct. Every chance he gets, he manages to do almost as you (and I) might predict, almost as if he were following a script. You know because of your experience and observation. I know how to predict him because, honestly, I am him.

I didn’t want him to lose that fight because I didn’t want to believe that what you wrote about the “gamma male” was true, which is perhaps indicative of how weak my intellectual opposition to the idea was in the first place. You wrote that it is a good thing to lose well. I don’t know how to do that. I am that guy and I hate myself for it. You wrote that it is a good thing to use knowledge you share to improve your lot, but I don’t even know how to start with that. Few things I have ever read have ever scared me or caused me to question what I’m doing with myself, but I am lost here. Hence, I’m writing to you, asking for any advice on what to do with myself now that I’m ready to admit that I’ve been looking at the whole subject of male-female relations, intellectual argument and epistemic pursuit hopelessly backwards.

P.S. I recall that in my exchanges with Scalzi, I claimed that you were
enjoying an echo chamber of sycophants. This was unfair and untrue. I
apologize for that.

His apology is accepted, of course.  Unlike the rabbit warrens, VP has never been an echo chamber and even the Dread Ilk cannot be reasonably described as “followers”, much less “sycophants”.  And EGA’s ability to admit that he was wrong is the first step forward in the journey upon which he is about to engage, in consciously developing his self-respect and improving his status as a social creature in a social hierarchy.

How does one learn to lose well?  One puts oneself in competitive situations where one is going to lose, regularly and frequently, until the sting of defeat disappears and the fear of failure is gone.  That is the point at which progress towards becoming a true competitor begins.  It is also why non-athletes are disproportionately represented among the gamma population; few athletes reach 10 years of age without experiencing a considerable amount of defeat.  I may have been a NCAA D1 sprinter who played for a #1 ranked soccer team in high school, but I was also a member of a church basketball team that lost its first game by 47 points.  (Note: if you’re a white kid without a jump shot who is going to play in a church basketball league, a Lutheran league is your best bet.  Baptist leagues, not so much.)

I’ve written before about my favorite kids team.  I was their coach for all three years they were in the scuola calcio, from 6-8.  The first year, we had one 7 year old and we were winless, losing most of our games by double digits.  It was brutal, but by the end of the season, there were no more tears and losing didn’t faze them.  The second year, they started to become competitive, winning games here and there, although they were still beaten badly by the two big teams attached to the professional clubs.  But the third year, they went undefeated, and I have never seen a more fearless and ruthlessly competitive team play any sport at any level.  It was like watching a squad of sharks dispassionately ripping apart everything that crossed their path.  It was one long glorious bloodbath.

Before the first game, some of the parents complained that I was only bringing the 8 year olds and the best seven year olds to the tournament.  So, I brought everyone and started all the little kids.  We were down 3-0 within three minutes, two of the little ones had been hurt and had to come out of the game, (they weren’t hurt badly, they’d just been hit by the ball), and my playmaker cried out, in genuine anguish, “what are you doing?”

“I’m making a point,” I said, loudly enough for the problematic parents to hear.  Their ringleader promptly stepped forward and explained that the point had been taken, so I signaled the ref and mass substituted the entire team.  The boys cheered as they ran onto the field, visibly alarming the other team, and went after them with all the gleeful fury of weasels in a hen house.  We won that game by four goals. 

In the championship game of the big tournament, it was tied 1-1 at halftime.  I knew we would win, and even told a Brazilian acquaintance whose son played for the other team as much, because my kids knew how to lose and didn’t fear it, while some of their opponents had quite literally never lost a game in their lives.  I knew that if the other team scored next, my kids would try all the harder, whereas if we scored, they would quit.  Sure enough, we scored the next goal, every head on the other side went down, fingers started pointing, and their voices started sounding accusatory and panic-stricken.  We ended up winning 5-1, beating the very same team that had beaten us 14-0 two years before.  More importantly, we had beaten a club that had beaten ours for literally generations.

One defender’s father was openly in tears at the end of the game.  I asked him what was wrong and he shook his head and smiled.  He said: “They always beat my grandfather.  They always beat me.  But my son, he has defeated them!”

The best thing was that the competitive culture the kids created was, for a short time, passed down to the younger kids.  We went undefeated the next year too; four of my boys ended up being recruited by the top pro program, which was three more than in the previous 20 years.  And their pride in having been a part of that team was such that when the big club played against our club in subsequent years, they refused to take the field.  In one star striker’s case, he even put on his old training jacket over his uniform and sat on our bench for the entire game.

They weren’t any better than the kids from the best programs, in fact, they were mostly smaller, slower, and less skilled.  Two of our three biggest players were rejects who didn’t make either of the elite teams.  But they were fearless, so perfectly fearless, that it was a joy to watch them and a privilege to coach them.  I quit coaching a few years later when I found I couldn’t replicate their success to the same extent.  I definitely played a role in their success, but I now believe it was mostly the result of the tempering they had received during that season of unending defeat.  Looking back, I realize that my three most valuable players were, ironically enough, the least talented; the miniscule defensive rock who couldn’t kick the ball ten yards, but reliably brought down attackers twice his height, the single-minded lupolino who couldn’t do anything with the ball but put it in the back of the net, and the emotional leader of the team, who had two left feet and berated his own failures more ferociously than anyone else’s.

They were magnificent.  I’ve had my share of victories in athletics, as an individual and as part of a team, in a variety of sports, but I couldn’t forget those kids if I tried.  If you ask me what is a champion, I think first of them.

Just as the seeds of future failure are often sown in success that comes too easily due to good fortune, the seeds of future success are planted in our failures.  Don’t be afraid of them.  Admit failure and attempt to understand it, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.  Even when you can’t reasonably expect to succeed, you can try to fail for a different reason.

Alert the OED

Roissy coins a new term:

When men are men and women are women, the sex is more frequent. And
probably hotter, too. When men are scalzied manboobs and women are
manjawed feminists, the bedroom is an arid wasteland of dashed passion.

Sexual polarity — the primal force that adheres the cosmic cock to
the celestial snatch — is the truth of truths that belies every feminist
assertion ever made in the history of that insipid, leprotic ideology.
May the losers of the world quake and fall to their knees before its
divine directive.

This isn’t a truth borne of social constructs, or of cultural
conditionings, or of privileges of privilege. It’s a truth woven into
the fabric of our origin atoms, the glue that binds our helical
commandments and reaches outward to breathe life into the monolith of
our souls.

It is what is.

The man is a wordsmith of uncommon skill and violence.  He takes words and makes them his own in much the same way McRapey informs us he treats women.  And speaking of McRapey, it was more than a little amusing to see Roissy utilize the term “scalzied” in a sentence.

But precisely what does it mean for someone to be scalzied?  In the context given, I can only conclude that it means for a man to have become accustomed to assuming a servile and inferior demeanor in relation to women based on a mistaken impression that doing so would curry favor with them.  Naturally, I defer to Roissy if I have somehow failed to grasp his neologism in its entirety.

As for the study that is the main subject of his post, I’ll address it on Alpha Game tomorrow, since a considerable number of people have been kind enough to bring it to my attention.  Translation: thank you and you can stop emailing it to me now….

UPDATE:  Johnny is very bravely keeping a smile on his face and attempting to pretend that he thinks this is all so very much fun and adorable.  Which is great, because I certainly find it amusing too and I’m more than happy to continue to amusing him and his fellow rabbits accordingly. The thing is, he appears to be under the misapprehension that I had anything to do with whatever it was that inspired his latest inspirational message.  Unfortunately, I can’t take any credit for it.  Strangely enough, I’m responding to a post he wrote about me describing how I frequently write about him when I hadn’t, in fact, done so.  This is all beginning to get a little meta.


“Folks, as you may know, out there on the Internets there is a Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit who at the moment has an adorable mancrush on me. This means that he can hardly go a day or two without saying something about me on his Web site, usually something which reflects his own deep and abiding personal insecurities. And of course, this is his prerogative; if it makes him feel better about himself and pumps up his social status with his clutch of equally insecure racist sexist homophobic dipshit admirers, then by all means he can spout as much garbage about me as he likes. It does no harm to me (as noted before, no one outside his little huddle of bigots gives much mind to anything he has to say about anything, much less anything  he has to say about me) and I suppose it keeps him from playing in traffic. So, fine.”

Isn’t it wonderful that everyone is fine with it?  It should certainly be fascinating to see McRapey attempt to pretend The Chateau is as trivial and little-regarded as Vox Popoli.  I wonder what clever name he’ll come up with for Roissy?  I am, after all, but a humble superintelligence, while Roissy is the one of the true geniuses of our generation.

McRapey exercises his male privilege

It’s a quixotic choice, to be sure, but I suppose we all have our issues.  Apparently confessing to being a rapist isn’t enough for John Scalzi, as the male-privileged SFWA President has now taken it upon himself to publicly mock women for the sort of covers they prefer to see on the books they write and buy.

“The pose-off, while for charity, has its genesis in Jim taking pictures of himself in the poses that science fiction and fantasy book covers often put women in to call attention to the point that these positions are absurd (whereas the positions men are put in on covers are generally substantially less so).”

The irony, as I noted at Alpha Game, is that what Scalzi and Hines are mocking in their gamma male cluelessness about women is not male sexism, but rather, female preferences.  The book whose “sexism” and “objectification” Scalzi is protesting in the photo above happens to be THE TASTE OF NIGHT, by Vicki Pettersson.  It is described thusly:

“Equal parts Light and Shadow, Joanna Archer must fulfill a destiny she
never wanted. Once a photographer and heiress to a casino fortune, she
is now dedicated to the cause of good . . . but susceptible to the
seductions of evil.” 

An heiress who is susceptible to seduction and bears no responsibility for her actions… does this sound more like a science fiction novel intended to appeal to men or a romance novel aimed at a female audience?  As it happens, THE TASTE OF NIGHT
has 47 reviews, by Jenna, Rita, Angela, Courtney, Phyllis, Jessica,
Patience, Rhona, Kelley, Kelly, Shalonda, Chica, Karissa, Michelle,
Debra, and Susan, among others.  Since Pettersson is, we are informed, a New York Times bestselling author, it should be obvious that her work, and the cover of her book that John Scalzi is lampooning, (which you can download as wallpaper in various formats from her website should you be so inclined), are very popular with women and appeal to female tastes.

The fact is that it is not men, but women, who are drawn to pictures of women posed in this manner.  Men, as a rule, like to look at young, pretty, naked, feminine, women posing with their breasts and buttocks on display, not thick, thirty-something man-jawed women wearing clothes, brandishing weapons, and striking aggressive and unlikely power-poses.  The urban fantasy/paranormal market that distinguishes itself from high fantasy, epic fantasy, and science fiction by utilizing such imagery is predominantly female.  It is women to whom such covers are designed to appeal, it is women to whom such books are sold, and by mocking those covers, John Scalzi and Jim Hines are exercising their male privilege to mock the women who write urban fantasy books as well as the women who buy them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with mocking the books on the grounds of literary quality or their covers on the grounds of aesthetics.  But to mock them with the mistaken impression that one is striking a blow against male sexism is not only to insult female preferences, it is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of human socio-sexuality so profound that it should be no surprise that it took a pair of male science fiction writers to do it.

Perhaps the most amusing thing is that even after progressive women questioned their actions, prompting a little belated self-reflection, it is abundantly clear that they still don’t get it. I doubt I’m the only one to wonder if Jim Hines was initially inspired to launch his campaign after getting caught by his wife taking pictures of himself in her lingerie.

“No, honey, I don’t LIKE wearing your underwear, I’m just, um, protesting the objectifying of women in science fiction!  It’s, ah, for charity!”

And just to address the usual suspects, I will freely confess that jealousy is the only reason I am posting this.  I doubt that I could ever aspire to the transcendent gamma sex appeal that shines so gloriously from the image above.

Reddit and the Red Pill Challenge

Reddit has asked me to do what they call an Ask Me Anything interview with The Red Pill subreddit:

 Well it’s a new year and we’re starting off right. I’ve been in touch
with a lot of the prominent voices of the manosphere, and we’re still
working out particulars on a lot of these, but I’m posting the
annoucement right now because our AMA series is going to begin shortly,
and I don’t want anybody to miss them.  I’m going to put this list in the sidebar, and update it as more details arrive. Here’s our current schedule:

Date (EST)NameSite
1/15/13 10:00amVox DayAlpha Game
1/21/13 12:00pmRollo TomassiRational Male
1/28/13 12:00pmxsplatRandom Xpat Rantings
2/04/13 06:00pmRooshVRooshV , Return of Kings
2/13/13 11:00amRedpillwifeyAdventures in Red Pill Wifery

You can participate in the discussion here.  It kicks off at 10 AM Eastern, and keep in mind that although it is called Ask Me Anything, this probably isn’t the place for questions about economics, my latest book, my SFWA candidacy, or why AD should be the 2012 MVP.  And recall that it is called “Ask Me Anything”, not “I’ll Tell You Everything”.