bhk100 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 10:37 am
I've only read your first post (not the replies), so sorry if I may miss some bit of context, but here are some thoughts FWIW...
Thanks for your thoughts. I think I'm in agreement with you commentary about the "redpill" advice though I'm not well-versed in its content. Similarly, I would generally be an advocate in favor the mPUA and fast-seduction materials, not because they necessarily make sure someone gets laid fast, as much as because they self-empower the initiate to be able to improve upon his life through various OTHER means, and, if that self-empowerment also causes him to exude some kind of confidence-glow which ultimately attracts viable female partners, then, that's good too!
You've emphasized the wrong part, here:
bhk100 wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 10:37 am
book_guy wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 7:10 pm
Yet I don't get laid often enough, and I hate the fact that it seems to me that women have controlled me all of my life by means of withholding sexual access. I wonder, don't they WANT to fuck simply for the sake of fucking? I've sadly learned, no, there's been no woman whom I've ever dated who actually liked fucking for the sake of fucking.
A few have promised, after long angst-ridden discussion, to initiate sex more often than they had done in the past. None have ever fulfilled that promise. I have never broken up with anyone for failing to initiate sex with me, but I have broken up with someone on the basis of the fact that she didn't keep promises. So, in some ways I may once have been a potential-incel but now find simply that I've grown out of resembling an angry incel with a manifesto. But that's probably only because I've grown out of wanting sex regularly. Or I've learned to masturbate more effectively?
(my emphasis in bold) This is a very logical, very male way to think about sexual relationships. It's also totally unhelpful and disempowering. Ask me how I know. Disempowerment and feelings of being a victim are one of the worst things that can happen to us--and only we can do it to ourselves--nobody can make us a victim.
Agreed, on the analysis. But the part you bold-ed is the part I don't actually believe in, in the first place. It's the NEXT sentence, which I'll here repeat, that makes my point much better:
I have never broken up with anyone for failing to initiate sex with me, but I have broken up with someone on the basis of the fact that she didn't keep promises.
In fact (to play devil's advocate a bit) all you've advocated, bhk100, is that I stop being male, in order to better enjoy my male drives within relationships. If only I'd stop wanting what I want, I could learn to be more happy with my unhappiness. If I would just stop hoping to get any of the things which I hope to get, then, hey, I wouldn't be unhappy about not getting them! LOL ...
I know, I know, you didn't mean it that way, and I don't actually take it that way. But somewhere in there, I have to have the right to reject a woman who fails to keep promises, on the basis of that very failure, don't I? What's the alternative? I can't imagine that we're going to start advocating for the fact that all female indiscretion of all sorts is entirely approvable and unavoidable, because as females, they have different rules, and those rules don't include requirements for moral or decent behavior. Love them as they are, not as you wish them to be, even if they're cheating on you and shooting your mother? Seems extreme. Maybe we can stop somewhere between the two extremes, I would hope. My story about sexual initiation and breaking promises was, not in actuality, a story from my life, but rather a fair metaphor for the type of actions and behaviors I was receiving from my partners.
A way to understand it is, that they were testing-testing-testing, to the point that only bad behavior ever came out of their hopper in order to see if I would put up with bad behavior. I realized this was typical feminine testing, and that if I were alpha-male enough, I'd push back against that bad behavior and thereby cause both (a) her respect for my level of dominance, and (b) better behavior from her. But it would also mean, that I was perpetuating a relationship with someone who engaged in rather bad behavior in the first place! My point of view on that was, that I didn't want to help someone like that to spend time with me. I guess that was wrong-headed in some way, so the redpill and fast-seduction people would say. I disagree. I know, I'm flying in the face of a lot of traditional Mars-versus-Venus analysis. I think women aren't as Venusian as all that. I reject "the selfish gene," Richard Dawkins be damned, and I've read the whole (poorly written) book twice through. So there. :)
So, do me the favor of not missing my main point. I'm saying I did fine with women, and then chose not to be with them. Mostly, they were 90's bitches, full of professional levels of frivolity which, so the game goes, it was my responsibility to cut through. Sure, I COULD HAVE been all frickin' alpha about it, and demanded more reliable staid behavior from them, either by actions (as you seem to be advocating) which would have brought about "build a better girlfriend" type behaviors from them; or (as I misleadingly reported in the sentence you bolded) just by words, making verbal demands. Or I COULD HAVE learned to accept the fact that, hey, females won't be rational or decent about things, love 'em for what they are, don't expect anything better, the sweet lil' ol' thangs, ain't they purdy? It therefore seems that my two choices in the face of bad behavior were to control her or to accept her, because the bad behavior was an intrinsic part of her. But I chose a third route: I judged her. I stopped wantng her, and instead judged that her bad behavior was ... well ... bad. If she's going to be immoral and frivolous, I'm going to choose another human as a partner.
Sound bad? But I don't mean this in a bitter, incel-who-whines kind of way. I mean, simply, I wasn't meeting quality women, and I wasn't eliciting quality behavior from the women that I did meet. I'll take whatever responsibility goes with that -- my own poor search and hunt strategies, my weakness at behavior-elicitation, and some bad luck, of course. But I won't take the remainder of the responsibility -- they chose the bad acts. For my part, I provided a quality boyfriend, of quality material, and yet they didn't reciprocate. It was the 90's, they were busy trying to be more and more like Carrie Bradshaw of "Sex and the City" -- flighty, inept, with very expensive shoes, and a self-congratulatory RIGHT and NEED to mislead and lie because that's, you know, FEMININE. Nope.
Then again, partly, I have to admit, they just weren't hot enough for me. Somebody who is so much of a turn-on that I will put up with that kind of crap (or, more accurately, will learn to overcome that kind of crap, so I don't have to put up with it) in order to get laid by her? I guess that's the system. If she's so damned amazing that I just gotta have it, then, I'll start learning how to handle her, right? Well, I haven't ever met that woman. (I guess I have seen images of what I imagine and fantasize to be that person, but I know it's a false fantasy from porn, hence this discussion.) I'd love to have so much overwhelming "need" for the girl, that I chase after the girl AND that I accept some of her flighty behavior as something endemic to the system, something I learn to handle by defusing it. But frankly I'd rather not capitulate to the Carrie-Bradshaw gamesmanship, not capitulate in either circumstance, whether capitulation would have meant (a) exacerbating it by enabling it, or (b) contradicting it as my "job" because the male needs to somehow "demand" or "cause" decent behavior from the female.
I don't hate the playa, I hate the game.
I don't think I could have articulated any of this as cogently as I feel I'm doing, now. When I was involved in dating women, all I was experiencing was befuddlement. "Wait, you made a promise, and you broke it, and the reason is because you're a woman. So, for me to make you stop breaking promises, I have to marry you. But marriage is a promise, right?" That, or, "You said I was so meaningful to you. Why then do you reject me for sexual interaction?" I can see through all these wiles, now, a few decades after the fact. But I didn't see through them at the time, not handily enough to actually act on any perception I might have had. It was all, "geez, these people keep treating me shitty. I need better people." I look back on that decision and I don't say, "gosh golly I should have had the redpill info earlier! I so regret not being well-informed." Rather, I look back and say, "yup, I was right. Although the redpill info is probably pretty good, I needed better people."
I have a (perhaps idiotic) perception that subsequent generations are rather much better. I had the opportunity to enter a graduate program with a lot of people who were much younger than me. I was in my middle 40s, they were mostly straight out of undergrad. This program started in the middle-2000s. I saw that dating mechanics among all those younger classmates were, in my perception, a lot less screwed up than what I had undergone. This could be because I was screwed up and, no matter what generation I was involved in, I would have screwed up experiences. Or, it could be, instead, that those people were involved in less screwed up dynamics, and I was witnessing a better set of human interactions. Or it could be that those classmates weren't necessarily indicative of a generational shift, but were merely a select group of smarter or more socially adept people, by dumb luck or by highly selective criteria for that particular graduate program. Anyway, it stood in stark juxtaposition to what I had undergone as a very young adult. I wasn't seeing violence, knives, addictions, rampant cheating, all excused as "feminine" the way I had experienced in a different city at a different school during a different decade. The women seemed more secure in their knowledge that they would have to be accepted as roughly equal to the men, less whiny and less demanding, more willing to accept respect on the basis of intrinsic merit rather than the basis of manipulation; and in particular the men seemed much more likely to reject any fraud that anyone attempted to excuse as mere expression of "femininity." The men were quite comfortable demanding better behavior; and the women, or so it seemed to me, were less dependent on using bad behavior to aggrandize themselves.
I'm glad that later classmates, those closer-to-Millennial, probably had a better experience than I did. But that group of closer-to-Millennials is also the cohort from which the Incel Movement is derived. So, I'm not entirely sure whether my perception is accurate, or even whether it is indicative of a societal change or just a singular group that I interacted with. Hence this discussion. I'd really like to understand how hard the Incel has fallen, and whether I'm also perceiving that group of classmates accurately. I'd like to know, back in the 90s when I was a young buck, were those women I met really all that bad? I would, at first, like to say, "probably not, you probably were just a typically frustrated clueless male." But then, after some analysis and my best shot at fair comparison,I'm coming around to saying, instead, "probably so, I mean, don't you remember X and Y and Z behaviors?" Young women don't seem to engage in X and Y and Z any more. Do they? If so, then are the Incels justified in their whining? Or, if they don't engage in X and Y and Z, then, aren't the Incels even less justified than I would have been? Personally, I never engaged in misogyny of that sort; I always figured that something was my own fault, somehow the negatives I was experiencing had something to do with bad choices on my part. (And you pretty much have to accept that much, even if it is only marginally true, since that's the only thing you can change anyway!)