“Twilight: New Moon & “Call Of Duty”: Manifestations Of The Four Sirens & Four Horsemen Theories

“Twilight: New Moon & “Call Of Duty”: Manifestations Of The Four Sirens & Four Horsemen Theories

The past week saw two very interesting events that should give perceptive curious types like myself great cause for concern: the global release of the Twilight sequel New Moon, raked in some $170M over the first weekend of said release, and was heralded as a kind of triumph for “Chick Lit” movies finally able to rival a Dark Knight or Star Wars premiere in terms of box office ticket sales, with pictures of “tween” girls and middleaged Moms camping out in long lines in front of theaters for as a full week to gain entry to the smash hit novel adaptation, the brainchild of a devout Mormon Mom and housewife.

While it is no doubt a milestone achievement from a financial standpoint, what didn’t seem to garner as much press, but was even MORE compelling on the same front, was the recent release of the intense video game Call Of Duty. Within roughly the same amount of time that the New Moon premiere ran-roughly 72 hours or so-COD made TWICE as much money in revenues as NW. The core audience for video games, of course, is Male.

While there have been a number of “takes” on what all this means in the blogosphere, from Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart, to Chuck Ross of Gucci Little Piggy and Whiskey of Whiskey’s Place, and all of them have been quite informative-personally, I find all of their pieces lacking in terms of “connecting the dots”-WHY do so many Women, moms and daughters like, so strongly identify with the Twlight series? WHY are so many grownassed MEN spend as much as $60US for a video game? What does all this say to us, on the psycho/social/sexual front?

That, is what this essay, aims to address.

OK, so let’s begin, and, as always, “Ladies First”…

It should go without saying, that the current Twilight craze is nothing new insofar as “Chick Lit” is concerned; a century ago, Barbara Cartland was cranking out steamy romance novels of the time, although she never could have imagined the sheer commercial success things like Twlight and what some call “Amish Porn” gets in our time (the latter phrase referring to a series of romance novels set in Pennsylvania Dutch Country). Romance novels, Soap Operas and the like, have been a part of the Human social landscape for at least the last century, if not longer.

But what IS markedly different now, is the unparalleled reach of this genre, due in large part to the multi-media age in which we live, but another major factor, is due to what blogger Roissy calls “The Four Sirens”. According to his theory, several major, and artificial, changes to the way Men and Women relate in sociosexual terms, have come down the pike over the past four decades in particular. They are:

1. Access to cheap, safe, and highly effective contraception, such as The Pill and Abortion

2. Urban anonymity (very important, since Females are much more sensitive to what others, particularly those they know well, such as close family members or friends, thinks of what they’re doing)

3. Access to Education and Money (two strong “liberating” factors for any human being, and can and will alter the “bargaining” that must be part of any mating dance)

4. And finally, massive support from the State, from No-Fault Divorce, to Affirmative Action (Title IX would be included here), to Sexual Harassment laws and other “interventions” in the workplace, to Welfare, and more-all basically and again, greatly altering the “terms of negotiation” between Men and Women along sociosexual lines.

Roissy asserts that these “Sirens” frees up Women like never before in Human History, to truly explore-*and act on*-their true erotic desires, with little to fear from realworld consequence. After much thought on the matter, I am inclined to agree with his analysis, and would like to further contend that the Twilight franchise, is a manifestation, at least in part, of the Four Sirens Theory.

In what way, you might ask? Simple-a century ago, literacy rates, particularly for Women, were drastically lower in America than they are today, meaning that it was a smaller pool of Women Cartland and others could market their wares to in the first place because Women by and large couldn’t read. But another reason why Twilight and related “Chick Porn” works have done so well is because Women of virtually ALL ages, now have more disposable-and independent-income than ever in recorded history. And again, keep in mind, while a Woman circa 1900 might have to hide her latest Cartland novel, today, it is seen as a kind of badge of honor to be a fan of the Twilight series, and so on.

In fact, to go just one step further, back in the day all a Woman *could do* was kind of “grin and bear it” if her husband was in some way lacking in terms of wooing her into romantic ecstasy, sneaking away to read a chapter or two of Cartland’s book here and there; today, Women openly complain of the Men in their life no measuring up to the Edward Cullens of the world. Now, mind you-I’m not arguing here whether all of this is “right or wrong”; rather, I am merely noting and pointing out, to you the dear reader, how things were and how they came to be, in our time, the grand sweep of change along the FST that has already been mentioned.

But that’s only one part of the equation; without a doubt, the Four Sirens has irrevocably changed all our lives, Women and Men both, some would say for the better, others would vociferously argue for the worse. But whatever side you come down on, I think we can all agree, that it is highly unlikely that we’re “going back”-no Woman worth the name would want a rollback on ANY of the Four Sirens-and, quiet as its kept, quite a few Men would feel some kind of way about that prospect, too.

So, we’re all stuck with it, LOL. And we’ll simply have to learn to manage and cope with the “fallout”-the unintended consequences that always follows any massive, sweeping social change.

A big part of that “fallout” is laidout by Game theorist and Futurist blogger known as The Fifth Horsemen, who has come up with what he calls the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse-a rather ominous sounding theory to be sure, but one that should be carefully considered as we watch the last week’s events unfold. TFH outlines his “Four Horsemen Theory” as a much needed “corrective” to the current sociosexual marketplace, along these lines:

1. Game (meaning, that even if only a relative few Men actually learn and wield its teachings, that it will be enough to “alter” the current market)

2. Sex-Tech (meaning, the wide availability of alternative sexually-oriented technologies-like 3D and Virtual Reality consoles and the like, along with “Sexbots”, will not only cause potentially millions of Men to “dropout” of the marketplace altogether, but also has the potential to “alter” said marketplace even more and in ways yet anticipated)

3. Expatriation (meaning, those Men with the means and will to do so, leave the USA to set up shop elsewhere in more “Man friendly” environments; with airfare getting ever cheaper, and with living standards rising throughout the world, even a common laborer can easily move to say, a South American or even EU-based country with relative ease)

4. And finally, Islam. TFH argues that, among the World’s Great Religions, Islam is the only one at present, that is “Male friendly”, and will become seen by Men, even those in the West, as a viable alternative to a Feminist-inspired legal, political and social system run amok. He cites the recent installation of Sharia-based civil law courts in the UK, and so on, as evidence of the strong cultural hold that Islam offers disaffected Males. Given the events of the past decade on the world stage, it is hard to argue Islam’s ability to speak unapologetically to Men in ways that neither Christianity or Judaism does.

The Fifth Horseman concludes his analysis by suggesting that the time when we can expect a fullout manifestation of his Four Horseman Theory will be the year 2020, when Feminist-inspired legal and political moves will have gone a bridge too far in their scope and reach, and when technology will have advanced enough to be highly effective and available for the average Man; this, according to TFH, will be the time of a “backlash” or “pushback” by Western Men enmasse.

After giving his words a great deal of thought, I must say that TFH has a good deal of powerful points, and would like to also suggest that what we saw over the past week, with the unprecedented success of the video game Call Of Duty is only a foreshadowing of what is surely to come-millions of grown Men basically “dropping out” of society and in relation to the Twilight phenomenon, “not showing up” to romance the ladies. For many of these Men, as Whiskey rightly points out, there’s little reason for them to bother “showing up”-much of the entertainment landscape doesn’t cater to their needs or interests, and the realworld, with its attendant maze of confusing and diminishing-returns ways of being, offers nothing a heck of a lot of Males would want to be bothered with. Here, a fundamental flaw of Feminist thinking exposes itself: one, did they honestly think that an opposite and equal reaction to their initiatives wouldn’t happen? And two, did they honestly think Men enmasse would simply “go along to get along”, when the easiest thing for ANY Man to do, is simply “drop out”? Even Mystery says as much in his book the Mystery Method, that the easiest thing a Man can do to get out of the reproductive rat race, is to merely sit down. If Call Of Duty is any indication, put together with Twilight, guys are doing just that. And if it’s like this now, w/a mainly violent war-based video game, imagine what it will be like a decade from now with VR and 3D, fully interactive Porn right from your Playstation or Wii.

Whew…

I believe it was Karl Marx who said that the great strength of Capitalism is its ability to quickly innovate with cutting edge technologies; but that its greatest weakness was in not keeping the Human Being at the center of all the great things said technology represents. Put another way, simply put, we Human Beings are “evolved enough” to deal with the Four Sirens, and the soon to come Four Horsemen in well-adjusted ways. The “adaptations” always lag behind the emergence of the technologies, and here, wrt Twilight and COD, we’re simply going to have to assume “Damage Control Mode” until we’ve figured all this out.

That means, a continued bifurcated society along gender lines, and cutting across all racial, ethnic and class lines, too. It means the death of “courting” and dating, and by extension, romance and seduction. It means a much more mercenary sociosexual landscape-there’s even a term for it-”Combat Dating”, or the even more simpler “Hooking Up”; and it means lonely, atomized people, Women and Men alike, “Bowling Alone”, to borrow Putnam’s famed book title.
Clearly, what Women across the age spectrum long for, per the Twilight business, is to be seduced, to be wanted, by a clearly superior Man. Yet the current times in which we live doesn’t support the creation, or maintenence, of such Men-you can thank the Four Sirens for that. Moreover, it takes A LOT of hard work for Man to successfully seduce a Woman, because in order to do so he has to take considerable time to learn to see the world as Women do and then take the time to work on himself into the kind of Man Women want, and then to perfect his skills in the field, through a good degree of trial and error-and that’s only the beginning. To keep said romance going over a longer period of time, requires the Man to constantly be on his toes. No wonder so few Men learn, or want to learn, Game.

So in that regard, it’s a Buyer’s Market for the relatively few Men out there, who have the Skills that pay the Bills-they can literally write their own ticket.

On the Male side, not only is it easier than ever “Not To Be”, but it threatens a kind of social atrophy that, left to its own devices and taken to extremes, can prove troublesome-even deadly. The Unabomber, George Sodini, and Muhammad Atta, are clear examples of this.

I wish I could end this essay on a more positive note; but I’m afraid I know Human Nature a bit too well for my own good. What’s more likely to happen over the course of the next decade is that we’ll see more Twilights and CODs, more disaffection and loneliness, more bitterness and recrimination between the Sexes, as the new configuration of the Sexual Marketplace begins to once again take shape in the next decade.

Hmm.

The Obsidian
The Obsidian

Why White People Don’t Have Babies

I need to be a bit more precise that the above provocative post-title suggests-clearly, *all* White folk in America don’t have a problem making whoopee and reproducing themselves-a quick look at the Maury Povich Show will disabuse any such notions on that front. Same deal with the Mormons, who are known for their big families. So it ain’t as if *all* White people are on the way to oblivion.

Still, it IS a concern, and one that is very near and dear to the hearts of a certain segment of White Americans-though largely Conservative or some strain thereof, they seem to be comprised mainly of what some would call “HBDers”-folks who believe that, as a result of immutable evolutionary legacies, that Whites and Asians came out on the top of the cognitive and IQ heap. As I mentioned a little while back in my post “What Is Up With HBD?”, the whole question of sex, reproduction and birthrates, is a very intense area of focus for this crowd.

My nemesis, HBD blogger OneSTDV, today features a guest blogger known as The Undiscovered Jew, who writes the following as the first of an ongoing series:

“One is hard pressed to think of any other issue which draws more intense interest and worry across the entire prism of American conservatism – both mainstream and non-mainstream – than that of the white American birth rate.”

And he end today’s installment with the following parting shot:

“Clearly, social liberalism – while of course not totally irrelevant to fertility as American Mormons show – provides a rather unsatisfying explanation for the decrease. As will be verified in this series of blog posts, the origin of low birthrates lies not in social liberalism, but in macro-economic trends which forced women to delay having children.”

OneSTDV then announces that his readers can expect more to come from guest blogger TUJ, who, we can gather from today’s leadoff post, basically blames the reason for why high IQ White guys aren’t reproducing themselves (the ultimate form of “future time orientation” that they make such a big deal out of-right?), is because of “macro-economic trends” – even when, by his own hand, TUJ makes clear that Mormons don’t have any trouble reproducing.

Now, in fairness to TUJ, I haven’t read his series in full, the only person to have done so is OneSTDV-but I am very familiar with TUJ’s writings throughout the HBDsphere, and so I have a pretty good idea where he’s coming from.

Personally, I think his whole premise is flawed-again, he freely admits that Mormons-who are virtually all White and have at least the national average White IQ, which is in the high 90s-dont have problems making babies. Are they not as much as subject to “macro-economic trends” as anyone else?

Again, we see the huge glaring blindspot HBDers like TUJ and OneSTDV have and refuse to take a good, long, hard look at when dealing with the whole spectrum of HBD. The real reason why high IQ guys like TUJ and OneSTDV are staring into the abyss of evolutionary oblivion, is because as a result of their high IQs, Nature has exacted its price: one of them being, that it is very difficult for such Men to relate EMOTIONALLY to people in general, and to Women in particular.

For example, the vast majority of those in the HBDsphere are atheists-but most WOMEN are NOT. Religion is an emotive and communal pursuit and activity, both of which are things that are at the very least alien to Aspergy HBD types, if not out and out anathema to them (recall OneSTDV’s being flummoxed by the “Twlight” phenomenon). Of the relatively few atheist Women out there, there aren’t enough to go ’round for the TUJs and OneSTDVs of the world. Simple numbers game. And because Religion is such a huge turnoff for the aforementioned guys, and because “No God” is such a huge turnoff for most Women, never the two shall meet.

Another huge, pardon the pun, tradeoff in terms of evolution and nature, is a documented decrease in testosterone levels as IQ levels increase. This means that the core body of the HBD crowd are basically too introverted to make the kind of “bold moves” that Women find attractive in a Man, that separates him from the faceless crowd and makes him worthy of access to her womb. These guys think way too much, especially about things that they have little to no control over, and these obsessions come off as downright weird or even creepy to Women in general. There’s a reason why you don’t see hot chicks into things like HBD, folks.

Moreover, and using the logic the HBD crowd espouses, there may be nothing that can be done to “remedy” the real problems high IQ White guy HBDers face in terms of getting laid and making babies. Their maladies are immutable, just as immutable as the persistent White-Black IQ gap, right? The idea promoted by some, that a government program or series of programs, aimed at basically helping high White guys get laid, wouldn’t work, for much the same reason that their delusional ideas that using the government to encourage “NAMs” to reproduce less wouldn’t work-because, in a Free Society, where people, and more to the point Women, are free to choose whom they will partner with, such Eugenics-based programs run counter to everything that the Right to Freedom of Association stands for. Not only that, but the very idea of using the government as a way to remedy what is essentially an immutable problem rooted in tens of thousands of years of evolution is out and out hypocritical, since the majority of these very HBDers decry the government being used right now to underwrite the reproductive decisions of “NAMs”. I suppose it all comes down to who’s ox is being gored, huh?

Since my last post calling out the HBD community, it has been suggested by quite a few of my readers, that they are in fact, not only intellectually dishonest, but also patently disingenuous-that these guys apply the flimsiest patina of science and respectability on their deepseated biases and fears, as well as a convenient cover for why they’ve never succeeded in life. To be honest, it’s hard to argue with that perspective, because of the HBDers own refusal to apply the fundaments of the Scientific Method which they claim to revere so much. One of them being Parsimony-what’s the simplest explanation for why it is we see what we see, in this case, why high IQ White guys have so much difficulty getting laid and making babies? The fact that so much handwringing is done by this group, and so little self-awareness is in evidence, coupled with such rank hypocrisy and dishonesty in sentiment and such sloppy thinking in deed, really says it all. But in case you’re still unconvinced, let me just put this before you, the interested reader, something to think about:

This blog, The Obsidian Files, began on Halloween, 2009; it is not yet a month old. OneSTDV’s blog began at least a year prior, if not longer. Yet my blog gets more hits and posts than his does-and, get this now-more hits and post participation, from Women, than his does. That should tell him something, about why it is high IQ White guys are in such a pickle these days. A normal guy w/a scintilla of introspection and self-awareness would figure it out.

Let’s see if he and TUJ can.

Now adjourn your dumb & horny asses…

The Obsidian

The End Of An Era: Oprah Calls It Quits

By now I’m sure you’ve all heard the news: Oprah has announced yesterday that she’s calling it a day and ending her daily tv talk show on Sep 9 2010, making it 25 years since she first began the show. There has been much buzz about this on the wires, and I thought to chime in just a bit.

While I’ve always admired Oprah’s business saavy in the telecom world, I have what only be considered a thinly veiled contempt for her intellectual dishonesty on a number of issues, but especially those concerning Men. In her mind, Women can do no wrong, and Men can do nothing right.

Of course, all of this stems from her own claims of sexual abuse and the like in her own life as a young girl in Mississippi, and to be sure, this theme among others (being overweight, aging, and relationships/sexual attractiveness) has been a big draw to the country’s indeed the world’s Women, and Oprah’s milked it for all it’s worth, culminating in her backing of what some consider an Oscar-contending novel adaptation “Precious”, which is about-what else?-an overweight Black girl who’s repeatedly sexually abused.

I’ve always had a visceral reaction to Oprah, not just because of her inability and refusal to be evenhanded when it comes to Men, but also because of her “above it all/holier than thou” attitude as well; she’s a deeply biased advocate who attempts to palm off her biases as something highbrow and righteous.

And those biases, and the glaring intellectual dishonesty that undergirds them, has come tumbling outta the closet again and again in more recent years.

For example, while Oprah is all too eager to bring on Mackenzie Phillips (who in my humble opinion is a FRAUD) or another Elizabeth Smart-type to discuss their harrowing tales of sexual depravity at the hands of some Male, she was DEAD SILENT on the Duke Lacrosse Sex Scandal, where it was proven beyond all shadow of a doubt that it was false.

She has no problem siding with the NJ Women’s Basketball team when Don Imus called them “nappy headed Ho’s”, but didn’t have him on to discuss his side of the story, nor did she take into account the FACT that the “ladies”, if one can call them that, looked like the female version of THUGS, what w/tats running up and down their arms…and of course, it as left out that said team was bested by a virtually all White Women’s team, who actually looked like, uh, Women.

Then there was her All Girl’s Academy in South Africa, where she spent $40MIL of her own money to get the project off the ground-boys need not apply, of course-only to find out, less than a year later, that complaints and scandal were rife, including reports of (here we go again) sexual assault. Hmm.

But perhaps the single biggest instance of intellectual dishonesty, personal bias masquerading as higher consciousness and rank hypocrisy, came roughly a year a go, when Oprah feted one Ms. Karrine Steffans, known in Hip Hop circles as “Superhead” for her prodigious ability to perform fellatio. The former Video Vixen turned tell-all author was able to “tell all” on Oprah’s nationally-syndicated show, about how she was abused by virtually errbody in the world, and hence why she winded up as one of thee best known video girls of the Hip Hop world, and was able to parlay that into a successful and lucrative career.

Of course, Oprah couldn’t be as evenhanded to the Rappers themselves-her well known dustups involving Ice Cube, Ludacris and 50 Cent were Internet fodder for months, with Oprah claiming to like Hip Hop in genera but detesting how it “degrades Black Women”-yet has no problem having on a Woman who by her own actions has done more to harm Black Women than the aforementioned Rappers combined. She then turns around and has on fellow Chicago native Kanye’ West on her show and even to perform-”Jesus Walks”-a hit to be sure-but nowhere near the hit “Goldigger” was-which of course, never was performed.

Hmm.

As if to add insult to injury, her recent interview with rap icon Jay-Z
was so over the top I could bring myself to watch more than a few minutes, and my respect for Hova dropped a couple of notches as a result. He blames his problems with Women on his absentee dad, while never mentioning the possibility that perhaps he got his views on Women as a direct result of the people in his life that were actually there-like uh, his mom? It’s well known in the Black community that a lot of Black moms treat their sons harshly, based on the bad blood she may have with the baby daddy. But of course, that couldn’t be broached.

Oprah could have really delved into why some rappers have the view of Women they do, and let them speak in their own voice-but that’s too much like actual journalism, and as we all know, Oprah don’t do that. Which is why I have no use for the lady, personally. The rappers aren’t doing anything more than what that great novel Madame Bovary did, and that was to simply tell the truth about Women’s “light” AND “dark” sides, in brutally honest fashion. Having a real dialogue just might call attention for the need for Women to be held accountable for the role they themselves play in things. And as we all know, we can never, ever do that on Oprah’s show. Only Men shall be blamed.

As Oprah’s Reign winds down, it is fair to say, that in many ways she is the living embodiment of what Maria Shriver calls “A Woman’s Nation”, and which was covered recently on the Men’s online magazine The Spearhead recently. If you read that, you’ll note another very good and in-depth article which appeared in Newsweek back in May of this year that goes into much more detail about Oprah’s show and her motivations, and raises all manner of questions.

Also, checkout The Rawness’ excellent two-part series on Oprah, which includes a powerful review of the film Precious. Part Three is due to appear soon on the site, and I tip my hat to Ricky Raw for doing a masterful job of putting together such powerful pieces of insight and erudition.

I’ll hold here. Comment and reply, holla back

The Obsidian

Japanese Booty Bandits

While commuting on the train, I ran across the following very interesting (and some may consider disturbing, depending on your POV) article by way of blogger Stopped Clock. Check it out and holla back.

New blog post tomorrow…

“Hey Babygirl, you gotta check this out…
Japanese police launch crackdown on commuter gropers

It is one of the safest cities in the world, but for teenage girls and young women, travelling on Tokyo’s vast train and subway system comes with the ever-present risk of sexual harassment from fellow commuters.

But this week the Japanese capital’s police launched a crackdown on the scourge of groping. In the first reported case, Tsutomu Yamane, 30, was arrested with minutes of allegedly groping a 15-year-old girl on Monday morning.

Undercover police officers have been dispatched to notorious train lines across Tokyo in a new offensive against chikan , a catch-all term that covers groping, sexual rubbing and surreptitious mobile phone photography.

The introduction almost a decade ago of women-only carriages during the morning and evening rush hours failed to put an end to Japan ’s chikan plague, despite warnings that convicted gropers face up to six months in prison and a fine of up to 500,000 yen (£3,300).

Police in Tokyo make between 1,500 and 1,800 arrests a year, and have recorded more than 700 cases in the first six months of this year. More than 50% of victims are women in their 20s, and about a third are teenage girls. According to one survey, nearly two-thirds of young women say they have been touched inappropriately in train or underground carriages.

Kimiko Kitagawa, a 31-year-old business consultant, joined the long list of chikan victims as she stepped off a subway train near her office in central Tokyo earlier this year. “I felt a hand grab my backside, but when I turned around there were several men rushing to get past,” she said. “I had no way of knowing who had touched me.”

Confusion and embarrassment mean the number of groping incidents is suspected of being much higher than official reports suggest. “Many victims are reluctant to come forward, as they feel too embarrassed,” a police spokesman told the Yomiuri newspaper. “We are going to concentrate on the most serious cases.”

The crackdown came in response to a recent jump in cases involving groups of men who use online chat rooms to arrange where and when to target women. At least 100 websites list prime groping locations, offering hints on how to fondle undetected and, if that does not work, evade arrest.

One site advises would-be gropers to select carriages with doors that open near platform escalators or staircases – perfect escape routes.

Several men arrested in recent months have admitted being encouraged by the websites and emboldened by the prospect of working as part of a group. A typical tactic is to position two men in front and behind a victim, while as many as six other men block the view of other passengers.

The police are targeting nine railway lines in Tokyo where groping has become endemic, especially the Saikyo line, which takes commuters between Ikebukuro and Akabane in the capital’s suburbs.

Attempts to prosecute gropers, however, have been frustrated by cases in which women, often with the help of male accomplices, make have made false accusations in the hope of securing huge out-of-court settlements.

Men who are apprehended are usually found guilty. The 2007 film, I Just Didn’t Do It, was based on the true story of a young man accused of groping who cleared his name after a five-year battle. In another high-profile case, the supreme court last year acquitted a 63-year-old professor of molesting a teenage girl in 2006. He had earlier been sentenced to 22 months in prison.”

The Obsidian

Discourses Upon The GAME: From A Personal Point Of View

Since this has been weighing heavily on my mind, I thought what the heck, might as well post it up now.

Game (noun): A complex of concepts, methods and behaviors, designed to win the SEXUAL attraction of a Woman; also called Seduction. (Obsidian)

I offer that basic definition of the term, because there continues to be a great deal of confusion surrounding it, and to be fair, we in the community have to bear a good bit of the blame for this. So, hopefully this post will serve, in some small way, to clear the air about some things, at least as far as I am concerned.

Many critics of Game seem to be under the impression that Game can be used merely to sexually use Women, in pump and dump fashion; and, they would be at least partially right. It can indeed be used in this way. But, as my definition above points to, it is not the only use of Game. Indeed, it can be applied to many uses, even in situations that aren’t sexual in nature. As I’ve said before, Ben Franklin used Game to secure America’s Independence from the British Crown; a Man of his age wasn’t likely to be boffing French honies left and right, LOL.

But there are many misconceptions and real problems within the Game community, that needs addressing so I’m going to try to do so as best I can.

Game is a powerful thing. It just is. Unlike what Women have on their side of the aisle, we guys have something far more advanced, scientifically proven, and field tested. It works. Very, very well, in fact. And because it works so very well, so consistently, we in the community bear a responsibility for how its used.

I am not against anyone having a rich and full sex life. Hands down, its one of life’s biggest pleasures. What I’m against is in how some of my fellow travellers use Game to achieve this objective.

There is a great deal of anger and outright Misogyny in the community. There, I’ve said it. And there’s no point in trying to wallpaper it or sweep this fact under the rug. It’s there. It’s real. And it doesn’t do any of us any good to pretend like it doesn’t exist, or rationalize the reasons for it. Because a guy with Game, who also has problems with Women, is a deadly combination. He can really hurt other human beings. For life. It’s that serious.

The anger many guys feel, however justified, must not have any place within Game, at least in terms of how I approach it. Why? Because once you gain access to Game, you no longer have any excuses. You can no longer say you are at the mercy of the Fates. The power, lies within your hands. Taking that power, and wielding it with anger, malice, hatred, is out and out abuse. And it’s wrong.

It’s wrong. No Woman deserves that. Just like no Man deserves to be taken for all he’s got, no Man here or anywhere else would justify such a thing.

I’ve often made analogies wrt Game and Star Wars, how there are the Light and Dark Sides of it. What predominates out there is the Dark Side, to tell the truth. Tyler Durden, Ross Jeffries, the umpteen snakeoil salesmen out there, looking like Tom Cruise in Magnolia, they abound, with the latest method, technique, routine, to get in a Woman’s pants. And then give her the boot right afterwards. Hey, you can do it, but that’s not me, Man. That’s not me.

To me, Game extends far beyond mere parroting of lines and accumulating notches on the bedpost. To me, Game is about becoming a Better Man…a Good Man. And to do that, you have to actually work on yourself, what some refer to as “Inner Game”.

I’m a big proponent of this. Because its something that will always remain with you, no matter what your age, race, education level, financial shape you’re in, you name it. Simply put, Good Men are hard to find, don’t take my word for it, ask any Woman within earshot of you, right now. They’ll tell you. Oh, they’ll only be so happy to tell you. And trust me when I tell you, the VAST majority of Women out there, do NOT have a very good or high opinion of Game. That’s not their fault. Its ours.

While I don’t think most Men will ever learn or apply Game to any measurable degree, it is fairly apparent that Game itself has become fairly widely known. It is our responsibility to present the most honest, fair and balanced face on it as much as possible. That, is the purpose, among other things, of this blog. It is why I log this post now.

I am also a big fan of what some call LTR or longterm relationship (or marriage) Game. To me, while it certainly is enticing for a Man to rip and run through a bevy of Women, in many ways, its kind of empty. The reason why I say that is because, Women are deep people. And it takes time to fully plumb their depths. Me? I like to go Long and Deep on a Woman, and not just physically, although that certainly is part of the package. I mean it wrt her mind, her heart, her spirit. That can only be done through a relationship, and this is what I personally prefer. Plus, going the distance is a challenge for any Man-hey, afterall, any Man can be an overnite hit, a one-hit wonder, the Minute Man with a Hawaiian Punch, if you will. It takes a special Man indeed who can keep it going, over time. Keeping a Woman in love, *and in lust*, with and for you, over long stretches of time-thats not something that’s discussed much in Game circles, and it needs to be, because sooner or later, most guys will want to settle down. Inshallah, I’ll do my part.

So, I just wanted to do my part to try to clear the air on where I stand on things. My Brothers, go forth and have a good time! But it ain’t killing you to show a bit of love and respect for the Ladies.

Or yourself.

I’m just sayin.

Now, adjourn your asses…

The Obsidian

A Quick Primer On The Sexual Marketplace, & Why The Femosphere CANNOT Address It Meaningfully

Over the weekend I happened across Girl Game team member Aoefe’s post “The Stock Market & Mate Selection”. It was a most timely subject, given the current state of affairs on the economic front not just for Americans, but throughout the world.

Her piece, while well written, was just basically a kind of “checklist” that a Woman would use in trying to land a real catch of a Man-no argument there, since this has always been the primary mating strategy of the Female. But, because of the deep and far reaching implications of our economically stressed times, I for one was hoping that someone out on the Femosphere-be it Girl Game, Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart, the crews of Feministing, Feminste or Jezebel, of *somebody* on that side of the aisle, would offer a comparatively cleareyed analysis of our times and how that directly relates to the dating and mating market. Needless to say, that to date, since the “Mancession” began, and Maria Shriver’s much heralded “A Woman’s Nation” report came down the pike, there has been, at best a kind of oblique nibbling around the edges by the likes of Ms. Aoefe, Ms. Bhetti (the latter of whom gives her take on the current economic situation in a new piece over at Girl Game) and Ms. Walsh (the latter having a Wharton MBA!), and at worst, the usual mocking of the “Menz” by the latter most feminist-identified sites (for example, a recent piece at Feministing openly mocks the idea of a Mancession, then turns the focus back on how bad Women have it, which is in direct contradiction of the Shriver Report-but then again, would we really expect anything less of Feministing?).

While I’m fairly sure the ladies of the previous cohort may raise their hackles at the notion that I lump them in with the latter cohort of fem-bloggers, the bottomline is, that they all comprise what I call the Femosphere, and serves as a kind of counterpoint to what some has coined the Manosphere, which is made up of Male blogging voices spanning the MGTOW and MRA corners of the Internet, to the Game and PUA oriented bloggers. They different in many ways, both camps do have quite a bit in common, and which serves to be the backbone of this essay.

For example, as noted above, there has been no “meta-analysis” of the current radically altered economic landscape and how this WILL effect the dating and mating one by ANYONE in the Femosphere; while, in the Manosphere, from Marc Rudov to Roissy in DC, there have been any number of “takes” on the situation that are easily found at the click of the mouse. Curious guys like me sit back and take notice of such a glaring difference and has to ask, “what’s up with that?”.

So, this article is gonna layout, in real basic terms, how the sexual marketplace works, the changes that have happened in recent years, and the changes that we see before our eyes right now, and why the Femosphere, with all due respect, is basically incapable of giving the kind of “meta-analysis” that one can’t help but trip over walking ten paces in any direction in the Manosphere. Ready? OK, here we go:

Astute readers of my post Why Game & Choice For Men Elicits So Much Hate will recall how I laidout the basic mating strategies of the Human Male and Female, which was deeply informed by our evolutionary past. Simply put, both sexes were exposed to environmental pressures against which they had to form adaptations to overcome; for the Male, he has to figure out a way to be noticed by the Female; for the Female, she has to figure out a way to “screen out” all but the best Male with which to mate. While both skill sets do take time and trial and error to perfect, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist-or a Wharton trained economist-to figure out which job is inherently harder-the Males have it infinitely tougher. Not only do they need to make the best showing to the Female, but they must also beat out all the other competition-which could prove deadly, and very often did.

This occurs among sperm even; millions of them fight to the death to unite with the one egg, and thus forms the basis of the sexual marketplace-eggs expensive, because of their scarcity, and sperm is cheap, because of its vast surplus. In said marketplace, Women are the “sellers”; Men, the “buyers”. And for much of Human history, and until relatively recently, it’s been a Seller’s Market. Contrary to all the boilerplate many feminists and the like try to foist on an otherwise ignorant and unsuspecting public, in truth Women have always gotten a kind of artificial market “bump”, much like the “bumps” Wall Street has received from the gov’t in the form of taxpayer funded bailouts and the like. For example-we’ve all heard of the Shotgun Wedding, right? Guy meets Girl, Guy hookup with Girl, Guy gets Girl preggers, Girl’s fam finds out, Guy is pressured to marry Girl. Now-who wins in that scenario? The Girl, of course. She gets support in the form of Guy’s resources, and is insured in this by the threat of her peeps doing something very bad to Guy if he welches out on the deal.

There are many other instances of artificial bumps in the market aimed at assisting Women historically as well, marriage in the more broader sense being yet another example. It helps Women, not necessarily Men. At least it does first and foremost-the benefits Men get got from marriage historically, were a secondary thing. From a purely Evo-Psych standpoint.

Polygamy is yet another example where the clear beneficiaries are the Women, because she’s almost assured of getting a “share” of a wealthy Man’s resources, rather than having a full “claim” on a poor Man to herself. Aside from a very small pool of Men who can put themselves in a position to gain from such an arrangement, the vast majority of Men do NOT benefit from Polygamy.

So, we see how, contrary to the arguments of the feminists, how the Female side of the SMV equation has always gotten a leg up as it were.

So, what does this have to do with the current Mancession, the Shriver Report, and the dearth of meaningful, straightahead discussion about it in Femosphere?

Very simple.

As my previous article clearly pointed out, Women are genetically wired to seek out the best Men with which to mate, and then do all they can to make him stick around after the party’s over. Doing this by necessity, means that *a lot of guys have to be eliminated from the search*. The current Mancession-where some 70-80% of ALL layoffs and firings have been Male, and the Shriver Report, which clearly says that for the first time in American history, there are more Women than Men gainfully employed, simply means that Women’s “field of erotic view”, as F. Roger Devlin would put it, just got a heck of a lot narrower. Far from giving the guy who’s down on his luck a “mercy shot”, they will follow their instincts and simply set their sights on the few remaining Alphas left in the field, and vie like made against all the other Females in the round hoping to rope him in.

This is why there has been no discussion of these types of topics along these lines in the Femosphere, BECAUSE WOMEN SEE THE ISSUE IN A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT WAY THAN MEN DO. They don’t need to figure out “workarounds” like Men do. They only need to figure out, how to get the Top Guy to stay with THEM.

Now…

Let’s go back to the site, Girl Game. It is a site found by a bunch of Women, who’s sole purpose is to give Ladies the tools with which to land the Best Guys-again, nothing wrong with that…in theory. The problem comes in when one considers what has happened in the sexual marketplace over the past four decades or so.

Aside from medical interventions like the Pill and Abortion, things like access to education and money/jobs, along with massive support from the gov’t, have made it possible for Women to make choices she could have never dreamed of only a half century ago, let alone 5 centuries ago. That she can do this all with a minimum of censure or reprisal, makes it all the better. I consider this a kind of “deregulation” of the sexual marketplace, where people, definitely Women, but as we’ll soon find out, a goodly number of Men, too-can really do as they wish. If ever there was a time when one could see our raw mating strategies at work, this timeframe, the late 20th to early 21st century, was it.

Because, while Women now have maximum choice in terms of mating, so too do Men-but, as I’ve said before, and contrary to popular opinion, not ALL of them-only a select few. This is just how Women prefer it, of course. Remember-the scarcer a resource, the higher the price.

The problem is, that the current situation, the SMP if you will, is greatly inflated-a kind of SMP “bubble”-and sooner or later it will burst-meaning that there will be A LOT of Lady Losers in its wake. They will have all the sex they can handle, but because of the Mancession and because of their own ability to provide for themselves, very few will be able to land the Man of their Dreams for more than a fortnight, if that. For one, the environment doesn’t support it, and two, of the few remaining Alphas left, they have every incentive to enjoy what is now essentially a Buyer’s Market of Poon.

This is where Game-and by that, I mean in its original parlance-comes in, because all it does is gives the Man more bargaining power at the table of the Sexual Marketplace. Of course, being gainfully employed helps, but it is NOT, I repeat, NOT, the end all be all, and we’ve all seen that to be true many, many times. Which is why my good friend, The Fifth Horseman, says that having Moderste Game Competence is worth roughly $2M. I, agree.

I’ve told the ladies at Girl Game before, and it bears repeating, that what they’re attempting to do can only, by design, “work” with a very small number of Women; by and large, unless the playing field is leveled again, the vast majority of Women, can and will LOOSE. Of course, there’ll be a lot of Male Losers, too, but that’s nothing new; what is, are little things like Glocks and Rugers, and the extreme losers will make use of these and exact their revenge on a number of ladies too. But I digress. The point is, for the first time in human history, Women enmasse won’t be the winners of the mating game. For the first time, they’ll be the losers.

I’m just sayin’.

Now adjourn your asses…

The Obsidian

What Is Up With HBD?

If you’ve been part of the blogosphere for any length of time, it won’t be long before you stumble across the “HBDsphere”, a corner of the Internet that comprises of a bunch of mainly anonymous voices who consider themselves self-styled “scientists” and who cotton to the idea that human beings evolved differently over long stretches of time in accordance to their environment; these adaptations will be different depending on the locale said groups of people-ie, different races-find themselves.

So, the theory goes, that Africa, with its ever present food and hot climate, doesn’t require as much “smarts” to survive as say, the farther reaches of China, or northern reaches of Europe. It takes more smarts to figure out how to survive the harsh winters there, and over time people evolved to deal with said environment.

What this basically means, is that both White and Asian folk are smarter than Black and Brown folk, so say the HBD crowd. Actually, if one wants to get technical about it, is that Asians are smarter than errbody else, per standardized IQ tests, which, to the HBD guys, is the end all be all of life.

Of course, somebody forgot to tell the HBD folk that if IQ was all it took to be all that, then why is it that China is the social, political and economic basketcase it is today? Why is corruption seemingly associated with being Asian? Why is that the last two remaining self-identified Communist countries today, Asian? Moreover, why hasn’t any advanced Asian country-China, Japan, South Korea-made any important discoveries or made groundbreaking inventions? The HBD guys will occasionally take a half-hearted swing at these questions, in an effort to look “fair & balanced”, but they save all their gunpowder for what they like to call “NAMs”-which means Non Asian Minority-in another word, Blacks and Hispanics.

They take their grids and graphs, flowcharts and sliderules, to “prove” that it is because of “NAMs” that our society is crumbling apart. From the economy to the War On Terror, to Sports and Entertainment, you name the societal ill, and you can betcha bottom dollah that some “NAM” is right at the heart of it. Even when few if any “NAMs” are directly involved, like, say, the utter meltdown on Wall Street last year-still, because they received loans and mortages, it’s still ALL THEIR FAULT (of course, the HBD types, being the Cognitive Masters Of The Universe, have very rational and salient reasons as to why NONE OF THEM have actually examined those who were actually able to make it possible for said “NAMs” to get those loans in the first place…yea, that’s the ticket).

A favorite topic of the HBD types is Eugenics, and especially discussing how to get “NAMs” to basically screw less. Their argument is, that not only are they outbreeding the “right people”, which basically means, people like the HBD types (of course!), but the products of their loins are almost certainly destined to live their lives on the dole and repeat the cycle over again, or, spend large swaths of their lives in prison. They talk a great deal about varying schemes that would convince “NAMs” not to have so many babies, like, for example, getting the powers that be to institute specifically targeted contraceptive programs and the like.

For such an ostensibly smart group of guys-and in the main, they ARE guys-they don’t seem to get that historically speaking, Eugenics programs don’t tend to workout very well, at least not in free democracies like the USA. And even if they did hold out some promise, Hitler killed all that noise for at least another century.

So, why all the focus on trying to prevent “NAMs” to breed?

The argument goes, that they’re both a fiscal and cultural drain on our society, which HBD types see as the pinnacle of Western Civilization; in fact, it can often be heard by one or more of the more vocal HBD bloggers, that these and other measures-like ending Affirmative Action and the “blackout” as to who really commits violent street crime-are needed regardless as to their political incorrectness, in order to “Save Western Civ!”. Of course, it doesn’t occur to any of these nerds, that their ideas, beyond sounding downright weird, are also highly untenable.

Which brings us to the question-exactly WHO are the HBDers? It won’t take long in such blogosphere environs to catch on to the fact that the HBDsphere is made up largely of highly educated White Males, from their 20s to early 50s; usually single, almost always atheist. And by any account, they sound very angry. In fact, if a character could be associated with the HBD bloggers, it would “D-Fens”-the character portrayed by Michael Douglas in the early 90s hit Falling Down. These guys are in many ways, like him: smart, but to a fault; in many ways, anti-social; not smart in the ways that would move him up the social ladder, and as such is a kind of highly sophisticated cog in the wheel, and when he’s cast aside as the Cold War ends (“D-Fens” works as a weapons engineer for one of California’s big defense manufacturers), and his wife leaves him for good, “D-Fens” cracks. He lacks the “soft” skills to navigate these life pressures, and he reacts…violently…when his pocket protector and sliderule are rendered useless to help him deal with life’s problems.

That, I think, is an important point about the HBDsphere; unlike “D-Fens”, these guys have a place to blow off some steam in a safe way, and to that extent that’s good. But the problem with these guys is, that for all their brainpower, individually, collectively, even comparatively speaking when one considers those dreaded “NAMs”, they never stop to consider *is there anything wrong with ME* that may have something to do with why they feel as they do.

If the HBD types were truly as interested in the subject (oh, and by the way, “HBD” means Human BioDiversity), they would take their dispassionate stellar intellects and examine the excesses and pitfalls of the right side of the Bell Curve, as well as the left-like, for example, what if any “downsides” there can be to being, well, too smart? Studies into the matter would seem to be so. In fact, even some of the heroes of the HBD Guys, like JP Rushton, has said as much, in interviews and in print-he once crudely said, you either get too much IQ, or too much penis, but not both.

It may be crude-and Rushton has gotten himself into trouble for making quite a few off-color, pardon the pun, remarks over the course of his career-but he makes a point his own, most devout acolytes seem to either shy away from, or never get around to mentioning, that Nature is full of tradeoffs. For every “advantage” there is a potential “disadvantage”, and the narrow, obsessive focus by the HBD types on IQ, doesn’t take into account that one, there are many other factors that can make or break a person or indeed a society, than merely how high or low one’s IQ score is; and two, that if there are inherent problems associated with low IQ-couldn’t the same be said of the reverse?

For example, let’s take a look at the HBDers themselves. As mentioned before, virtually all of them are atheists. Could that impact in some way on their lives? Hell yea, it could and, according to one of the HBDers’ own, a blogger known as Half Sigma, it does: not only is atheism more likely to be found among high IQ folks, *more* MEN are likely to be atheists than Women-which means, in simple math that even a lowly “NAM” could understand, that there aren’t enough atheist Women to go around for all the high IQ White guys. That means that said guys either have to figure out how to deal with the hordes of believing Women, or, look toward a life being lived…alone.

Which leads to another insight by the same HBD blogger, Half Sigma-that high IQ White Men are the biggest purchasers of prostitution and escort services in the country. To be sure, whores and escorts get clients from all walks of life, but when one stops to think about it, what HS says here would make a lot of sense. Afterall, one doesn’t need to be an egghead to know that nerds aren’t exactly the most socially well-adjusted guys around, that there tends to be, in raw numbers, more nerdy guys than gals, and that nerds don’t usually seek to be flexible in the ways in which they see the world and interact with it-all of whom have to be clear and obvious “tradeoffs” for such high IQs. Yet, no one on the HBD side never, ever, talks about this.

Half Sigma hits a trifecta when he notes that high IQ White guys tend to remain single longer, and have fewer kids when they finally do marry-and its been noted that there is indeed a correlation between high IQ and lowered testosterone levels. Looks like Rushton was right.

Perhaps the last nail in the coffin here, is in the online persona of FeministX, a Hindu American Princess blogger who fell in love with the HBD community and they most certainly love her back-they slobber over her like a hungry pack of Saint Benards over a turkey leg. She’s one of the few young Women in the community, who’s halfway decent looking and can hold a conversation of the type HBD geeks like to have, like about being put on ice after you die so you can be thawed out a century or two from now, or in getting a few digs on them nasty “proles” and so on. That FemX has basically made her bones by showing her body and appearing in a virtually all Male venue such as the HBD & Gamespheres, pretty much backs up Half Sigma’s previously mentioned posts. In a word, the smarter you are, the less likely you’re gonna be spending much time around or among lovely looking Women.

Since I done went there, let me end on that note-if there’s one thing that gets the HBDsphere’s attention more than “NAMs”, its the Wonderful World Of Game-what some call the “Pickup scene”. Here its not as uniform as the United Hatred of NAMs-Game seems to be held in high esteem by some HBDers, grudging respect by others, and reviled by still others. Still, because both schools of thought seem to agree on the power of Evolutionary Theory, Psychology and the like, and keeping in mind what Half Sigma has said and the presence of FeministX, it would make sense that there would be some convergence at some point-and, as those in the Game community know well, it attracts geeky, nerdy guys in search of getting laid.

I know there are those out there who rail against the notion that we Game types think that its a hammer and every problem is a nail-for my part, far from it-but I do think that a little Game would go a long way toward helping these guys blow off some steam in ways that really count, and would actually serve as a solution to many of the problems they claim to persist. Look, as they often say themselves, Demography is Destiny, and the Future belongs to those who show up for it-and the truth is, that these guys, as a group, are on a one way trip to Evolutionary Oblivion, if they don’t do something to see to it that their genes are still around three decades from now. That means, making babies, and to do that, one has to be able to appeal to Women who are willing not only to have sex with you, but also to carry your child to term and raise it, along with you, of course. But that requires a different kind of skillet these guys are used to dealing with-even gals like FemX need a different kind of skillet normally associated with geeks, and she’s said as much. Many times. TMI, lol.

So, since these guys aren’t interested in going the Mormon route-which HAS proven quite successful, because they can’t do the religion thing, then the next best thing, and perhaps, last best hope, for these guys is GAME. Learning just a little bit, could help these guys in the worthy-and much more doable-goal of making the world a better place, by helping them attract gals with which to start families. Of course, this presumes that Nature’s Revenge, if you will, won’t come roaring back and affirm what so many HBDers themselves say about the left enders-that they are genetically incapable of being smarter. If the right enders are genetically incapable of gaining the tools needed to woo and keep a Woman, then maybe being put on ice ain’t a half bad idea…

I’m just sayin’.
The Obsidian

Mad Men, The Wire, The Mancession & The Male Surplus (What It All REALLY Means)

Since I’ve been asked to discuss life as a Blue Collar Brotha, and because the economy is something that is very much at the forefront of all our minds, I thought I’d kickoff today’s round of posts (I’ll probably put up two or three today as the spirit moves me; poop on the idea that a blogger may only blog once a day. Heh!) on the state of our fiscal situation, how we got here, and what the future will look like. If you haven’t already figured out by now, here at The Obsidian Files I am very keen to surround myself w/truly Extraordinary Gentlemen-Outside the Box Thinkers, or “OTBs” as The Fifth Horseman, owner of the blog The Futurist, would call such Men-and I’ve always been one to look at life through a door instead of the proverbial keyhole, Occam’s Razor at the ready. Of course, like the mythical Odin, who gave up one of his own eyes so he could have the gift of foresight, knowing and more importantly, speaking the Truth does cost. But you’ll never hear me complain.

So here we go:

Those who followed me over at Roissy’s and In Mala Fide will know well my love and admiration for the crime drama, HBO’s The Wire. Critically acclaimed as one of, if not the best show ever done on television, The Wire tells the story of the American City at the dawn of the 21st Century. And that story is not a pretty one-the brainchild of Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, The Wire is Simon’s “Angry Letter” to the powers that be, a searing, gritty, in your face tale of greed, incompetence, cover your assism, and how no matter what the organization or institution-be it the school system, the political system, the police department, the labor unions, the news media or the even the drugs trade underworld-how it can and will BETRAY YOU when you need it most. Each season focused an aspect of the city, in this Baltimore, and in each season it showed how some key member who truly believed in the ideals of the institution to which he belonged, gets thrown under the bus in the end.

That The Wire also focused on a primarily Black city, also wasn’t pretty or endearing to a mostly White viewing public, and hence the rather low ratings it got throughout its first run on HBO. Simon himself has said on more than one occasion, that he believes the reason why The Wire never became a broad popular hit was directly due to the fact that it mostly depicted Black folks-and let’s be clear here-NOT of “The Cosby Show” variety-but of the “Left Behind” type of Blacks, the kinds of people we try to cordon off from the rest of polite White Society-and it is not a pretty sight. With the notable exception of Season Two, something I’m gonna focus more on in a moment, nearly every week The Wire showed the senseless, brutal deaths of Blacks at the hands of other Blacks. Talk about keeping it real? The Wire was about as real as it gets for ANY crime drama-NONE of the Law & Orders, CSIs, or NCIS’, comes anywhere close. They do, however, show Beautiful White(r) People acting like hardened, grizzled cops goin’ after the bad guys, all of whom also happen to be Beautiful White(r) People.

As mentioned above, The Wire plays out more like one long movie than a one-off episode format, where at the end of the show, everything is tied off neatly into a nice bow and then everything is “rebooted”; rather, The Wire unfolds carefully over the course of its run, and from season to season, focuses on a different aspect of Baltimore. Of all the five seasons The Wire ran, my hands down favorite season was Season Two, which focused on the Death of the American Working Class-and which featured more White folks than any other season of The Wire in the whole of its run.

Season Two of The Wire, like all of The Wire’s season’s talked at length about the excesses of Capitalism, but Season Two really brought it all home for me, being a Blue Collar Guy and Union cardholder myself, and I suspect it really hit close to home for many other viewers as well. More than any other season, Season Two showed just how the Working Class was decimated by people who didn’t know, understand or care about them, who all too willing to shuffle them off to the side in the name of more profits-for themselves. The very last scene of Nick Sobotka, looking at his old job through a chain link fence, and crying, was a powerful image indeed.

In an extensive interview with Bill Moyers, Simon says that The Wire shows everyone what happens when Capitalism is allowed to run rampant with no controls on it whatsoever; moreover, he says that in the “new” configuration of things-the manufacturing sector all but dead, etc, and with the focus on everyone going to college and focusing on “services”-the system is inherently rigged. By design, only a select few can ever “win”, and just because you got the brass ring today, doesn’t mean you’ll wake up with it tomorrow.

But Simon goes a step further-he says that not only is the new “game” (a word that plays prominently in The Wire, especially among its Black actors on the street; the word actually has several meanings) inherently rigged, but that there are too many “players” on the field-in other words, as D’Angelo Barksdale so aptly shows his underlings by teaching them about the game of chess, that the Pawn always stays the Pawn. Simon says that we have a human surplus of about 15-20 million people in the United States, much of them locked in urban ghettos like Baltimore’s Westside. And, since White folks of a certain class tends to act more along implied rather than implicit lines, the wink and nod way of dealing with this is by basically doing an Escape From New York move, leaving the wasteland to the Left Behind, and hopefully they’ll off themselves and save us the dirty work.

Let me say right here, right now, that EVERYTHING Simon has said in these regards is 100% TRUE. I say it’s true because I’ve seen, witnessed it, lived it, firsthand. And when he says that lots of Black kids “get it”, again, he’s spot on. Wanna know why so many young Brothas scoff at college? Do you really, really wanna know?

If you wanna know why Brothas are so seemingly uninterested in “higher learning” as a group, so cynical, so deeply antithetical to polite American society, you need go no further than HBO’s other hit drama, Mad Men. Set in early 1960s America, Mad Men takes a look at life in the advertising world’s heyday, through the eyes of its central character, Don Draper. In so many ways, he is the perfect metaphor of the American Middle and let’s be honest, White, Class-it can be encapsulated in one simple phrase:

Fake it till you make it.

Draper is a kind of media creation-it’s not his real name, nor is the past he’s either carefully constructed or carefully avoided, depending on the situation. He’s a pathological liar he’s so smooth his bullshitting ability makes him among the best Ad Men on the scene. He’s a serious womanizer, has a killer fashion sense, and drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney-and, as one episode so clearly showed, he doesn’t actually produce anything.

Mad Men is in my view, the flipside of The Wire-whereas The Wire shows American life and how its changed and mutated “on the ground” if you will, Mad Men shows the same thing from the view of the much vaunted Middle Classes. Draper is in every way a self-made Man, especially in comparison to the other guys in the office, but he too, perhaps more than anyone else, knows that he gives nothing of import to society, and has to keep a lie going just to maintain the illusion of living the high life.

Which, going back to the realworld, is but one of the many lessons our society has been taught in as many years. How many of us are truly living beyond our means? How many of us sling out our job titles as if that means something at the end of the day? How many of us actually produce a good or a service that people actually need? With our bare hands? That they cannot do without? How many of us well, bullshit for a living? Hmm?

I’ve done a lot of jobs in my life. Had a lot of ups and downs. But in em all, I can honestly say, without fear of rebuke or reprisal, that I can see a clear line between what I did and its results, that what I made with my hands, or sold with my skills of persuasion, was to a person who actually wanted what I had to offer. Real goods and services. Real results on the bottomline. I’ve seen literally millions of dollars pass through my hands over the past few years alone. People ate everyday because of me, which included having the wherewithall and giving a damn enough to be sure that no one died of E-Coli or other bacterial infections like the one gripping most of the Eastern seaboard right now. Five will get you ten that the majority of the hands on workers in that upstate New York food processing plant will have Hispanic sounding names. Wanna burger?

Which brings us to the big point-WHY did the Working Class in America die such a slow, inglorious and undignified death? How did it happen? Who brought it about?

The answer to that question, dear reader, is closer than you think. You only need to take a look in the mirror.

We, collectively, killed the Working Class. Because it’s considered “low” work, to be relegated to the Niggers and Spics. Poor White Trash, too, although they’re in an odd place, bein White but not being accepted because they have all the other markers of being “less than”. The reason why the trades and other hands-on work is so derided, neglected and ignored in America, is because no one wants to do that work if they can help it. To do so marks you as less than, a loser. So this is why we were only too happy to shuffle off our manufacturing and import Hispanic folks. They work for cheap and keep to themselves-away from us. It’s a win-win for errbody.

That is, until the bottom finally dropped outta the system, which we all saw earlier this year, with the literal death of General Motors-and with it, the final nail in the coffin was driven into the American Working Class, the Blue Collar salt of the earth. Toyota is now the Number One carmaker in the States, possibly the world. Chrysler again is on lifesupport, and Ford is hanging on by a thread. The Big Three are all but extinct. In just about a century.

And don’t even get me started on the Unions. They’re all but dead too, today’s unions are made up largely of pencil pushers and the heads of the Blue Collar ones, what’s left of em, are Ivy League college grads, who studied the Labor Movement. What a joke!

The idea that errbody could get a collee degree and work while sitting at a desk was even more ridiculous than other ideas to come down the pike for reasons that should by now be painfully obvious to everyone. And of course, it’s woefully unsustainable, too. The bottomline is no society can exist without people, almost always Men for the most part, willing to do the dirty work. Take a look around-our country is literally crumbling apart-the next time you cross that bridge may be your last. Well, that’s because taking care of bridges and the like ain’t…sexy. So, we get what we pay for. Maybe Don Draper can fix it.

If it sounds like I’m a Sour Grapes Hater, let me disabuse you of any such notions, not just for me, but for most Blue Collar types-we are often too preoccupied with things like, keeping the lights on, to be spending too much time hatin’ on our ostensible betters. The real deal is, that it has always been said “betters” who’ve always hated on US. They have the time, motive and means, to do so. Don’t believe me?-then I invite you to take a whirlwind tour of the HBDsphere. There, you will find countless discussion of how “NAMs” are ruining our country in countless ways. Of course, NONE of these jokers ever, talks about those who really were responsible for the fucked up situation we’re in right now. No, that would be too much like right.

Earlier, I mentioned a scene out of The Wire where D’Angelo Barksdale explains to his crew the rules of Chess. For the most part, Pawns are fucked, but, every once in awhile, one can make it down to the other side of the board and become a King. It’s an interesting metaphor about the story that is America, where anyone can come here and become a Horatio Alger. Of course, for anyone of African ancestry, a big huge asterisk had to be tacked on to said story, but who’s counting?

Anyway, the point he was making, and which I wholeheartedly agree, is that today, there are increasingly fewer avenues through which an Horatio Alger can even happen. In fact, we consider such a person today a Don Trump or a Dubya-people who were already born on third base but thinks they hit a triple. Name me a true rags to riches story in 2009 and I’ll instantly respond with names like 50 Cent or Jay-Z, because that’s perhaps the only few remaining avenues left for most such people to truly “make it”. Anything else and the people involved had a huge leg up.

Final point. We’ve heard a lot about the Mancession-but that’s only one part of the story. Like Simon said, we do have a surplus of people-but he only told a part of he story, too. The real deal is, that we have a surplus of MALE PEOPLE. And not just “NAMs” either, not even just of Poor White Trash Males-if you’re reading this and you’re a White Male and PWT, it means it’s very likely, that your number could be called, too. Men are living longer, in a time of fewer wars, occupational deaths and the like. And with the Death of the Working Class, it also means more Men having fewer things to do, mainly uh, work. Simply put, we don’t need as many Males as we have presently. And how to deal with this remains to be seen-although if the Mancession is any indication, there won’t be any attention paid to this, much less any meaningful solutions.

So, here’s how The O sees it all goin’ down:

The economy is in free fall, and will not be coming back. Entire sectors of the economy are dead. The economy, such as it is, will continue to shrink, with a kind of cannibalism among the White Collar Class continuing apace. “Careers” won’t even be 5 years long anymore-try more for 2, maybe 3, before people see the handwriting on the wall and jump ship, hoping that the next gig will give a sense of “security”. For a select few, and I mean a few, they’ll be right. For errbody else in that cohort, they’ll be nothing more than a cog in the wheel, and as soon as its time to cut expenses, they’ll be out the door post haste.

It is difficult to see any “green shoots” here. For the few who are truly creative, innovative and daring risk takers, they’ll be able to survive the bloodletting. For everyone else, God bless their souls.

For me, I’m no stranger to hard work or hard times; I WILL survive. And in a sordid, sadistic way, am enjoying the show. I can think of no better comeuppance to the powers that be.

Please pass the popcorn?

The Obsidian

Clearing The Air: A Response To Susan Walsh

I awoke this morning to find a virtual explosion of responses to my recent post, Why Game & “Choice For Men” Elicits So Much Hate. The interesting thing to observe though, was that there was little comment on the actual subject matter, but rather other things, most notably, my saying that, over the course of a recent exchange with Ms. Walsh, I had employed a Neg (for example, Ms. Walsh has yet to actually respond to the part in my post where I take up the matter of paying for dates; or the whole “Choice For Men” issue, and so on). Understandably, Ms. Walsh was perturbed by my saying this, although, by her own admission, she does not fully know what a Neg is. And of course, there was the usual Hateration that comes with Game forums and the like from assorted others.

In this post I wish to clear the air on a number of points raised by Ms. Walsh and others. The best way to do that I think, is by point for point response to her most recent post from the aforementioned thread:

SUSAN WALSH: Keith, you are an enlightened man. We have a lot of guys like you hanging out at HookingUpSmart.com. You’re certainly not going to make anyone understand here, so come on by.

OBSIDIAN: I beg your pardon, Ms. Walsh. But when I asked Keith as to what he would advise Today’s Young Man to do to meet ladies, his advice isn’t all that different in the least from fundamental Game. As we’ve all agreed, his problem isn’t so much w/Game but rather with some of the louder/more popular/whatever voices within the community. It’s important then that he, and anyone else who thinks as he does, to separate the two. >
> OBS: The discussion was between Ms. Walsh and TFH, and he made a > powerful point-a younger Women gets more attention than an older one. >
> SW: Wait, who the hell is TFH? Oh wait, here we go:
>
> TFH: Why is Susan Walsh debating the neg? She is a 50 year old woman, > who has definitely not been negged as part of a seduction since Game > came into being a decade ago. >
> She should be behaving in a matronly manner, at this point. >
> So again, why the claim that she gets negged while at work? >
> SW: My objection was to being negged by OBS. Blogging is my work.

OBS: Question-if blogging is your work, and part of that work is writing on the current day hookup culture, how could you not study something that is such a big part of said culture? Please explain?

SW: I am 53. I have been married
for25yearstoafellowWhartonMBAwhoisgoodlooking,highearning,
and extremely intelligent. He was, and is, a total catch.
And 100% beta male. Not going to lead a posse of men to
slay the woolly mammoth during this lifetime. He would
NEVER have dated, much less married, a 23 year-old
waitress (unless she was working her way through
graduate school).

OBS: With all due respect Ms. Walsh, do you think things might have changed dramatically from 25 years ago? For example, according to Maria Shriver’s report “A Woman’s Nation”, Women now are employed MORE than Men. Since you bring up your daughter, this means, that for Women like her, her chances of landing a guy like your hubbie is significantly reduced, and Game has absolutely nothing to do with that. So, what will she do? What are her options? That wasn’t an issue for you a quarter of a century ago. It is for her. And, to be honest, I’ve yet to see ANY Woman blogger take that issue on squarely. Please see The Social Pathologist’s recent post, which was based on my recent post, Signs Of A Good Man, which is called Few Good Men…and holla back.

Oh, and you still skirted around TFH’s point, that a younger Woman can and will garner more attention than an oler one, even when the latter has more status and money. If this weren’t so, there would be so many high earning older Women alone. I actually know quite a few, and trust me, it’s not a pretty sight to see. You’ve seen it, too. Her name is Oprah.

SW: Do I meet your requirement of behaving in a matronly
manner, whatever that is?

OBS: For me, yes, but I wasn’t the one asking the question, LOL.

SW: I have a blog that I started a year ago in response to the concerns of college women who struggle with the dearth
of relationships in the hookup culture. My motivation was
my own daughter, a young woman who has caused traffic
accidents at stop lights twice while walking. She is a 10+,
completely overwhelmed with the attention she gets from
men. She does not do PUAs. She does not do negs. She
has high mating value, and she will mate with someone of
similar status. She will NEVER mate with a PUA.

OBS: I prefer to leave your daughter out of the discussion please. Much too much personal feelings involved. What I will say is this: that Roissy, Ferdinand, RooshV and Tucker Max gets so much attention, tells me that quite a few “high mating value Women” wind up in the arms of these guys, much to a parent’s chagrin. Remember, Men are results oriented. If Game was a bunch of hookum, we wouldn’t be discussing it right now. These guys are hugely popular, because what they say, works. And it works because Women by and large-not out on the margins, but in the main-respond to it. That a fact, Ms. Walsh, and no amount of holding your own daughter out as some paragon of virtue is gonna change that, by your own admission your own site is a testament to that. So, the issue isn’t whether your own daughter will or won’t hookup with a Roissy or a Tucker, the issue is WHY so many Women respond to the Roissys and Tuckers of the world. When you understand Game, you know why. I certainly do.

OBS: Sounds like you and me, and indeed most of what
the literature of Game out there, aren’t that far apart at all. Seems to me you, like Ms. Walsh, has more problems
with *certain voices within the Game community* than
with Game itself, because, again, neither you nor Ms.
Walsh actually disagrees with the basic fundamentals of
Game.

SW: Indeed, it is not the theory that offends, but the
application of that theory. When OBS first wrote his Open
Letter to me and others, I hoped that I could find a way to
converse objectively and impassively. That has proved
difficult.

OBS: Really? I thought it was quite easy and relaxed, no hollering and shouting and denigrating each other, in the least. I was and am truly interested in hearing what you and anyone else has to say about the issue, because aside from the simple fact that it’s such a fascinating subject, it’s also something with huge implications for us all. I have no personal axe to grind against you or anyone else, and I think even you admitted that, of all the Gamers you’ve been in contact with, I’m the “best mannered”. So, what’s the problem? Please explain?

As for Game itself, please go back to my Star Wars analogy. As you said, it isn’t the Force that’s the problem, but how it’s used. On this, we agree. But let’s be clear, because I’m a big advocate that clarity is better than agreement-when you make those comments above, are you making them with reference to ME, and if so how? In what way? Please explain?

SW: Always the goal is the relentless promotion of Game,
even at the discovery of truth.

OBS: Whoa, hold on-what “truth”, Ms. Walsh? Please explain? I need clarity on this point. And, what do you mean by “relentless promotion of Game”? Again, please explain?

SW: Followed by the pithy put
down. There is not room for any other formula in your
world. After engaging in what I believed was a straight up
conversation about Game, I was informed by OBS that I
had been negged, wink, wink. What a claustrophobic
environment! But, hey, you don’t really want input from
women, so it’s all good.

OBS: Ms. Walsh, with all due respect, I will say, w/o any hint of fear or reprisal, that a Player has more intimate knowledge of, and real respect for Women, than do “Rules Girls”, “relationship advice experts” or damn near anyone else on the Female side of the aisle, because the former group actually has to take the time to understand Women; few if any Women out there truly understands Men. They THINK they do, but their actions belie their words.

That you couldn’t take the time to read ONE book on a topic you’ve written about, at least twice I believe, on your own site, is proof of what I just said above. Oh, and about the Neg business-this is from Style’s book The Game:

“Neg-*noun*: An ambigious statement or seemingly accidental insult delivered to a beautiful woman a pickup artist has just met, with the intent of actively demonstrating to her (or her friends) a lack of interest in her. For example: “Those are nice nails; are they real?”. *verb*: to actively demonstrate a lack of interest in a beautiful woman by making an ambiguous statement, insulting her in a way that appears accidental, or by offering constructive criticism. Also: Neg Hit. Origin: Mystery”. -pages 443-444

Now:

As Hugh Ristik has pointed out, alongside my own recent comments on the matter, and to which you’ve agreed, there are many ways to employ the Neg. In our case, it was in the form of offering constructive criticism, more specifically, informing you about what you don’t know. About Game. And to which you admitted was true.

Which leads to the next point-name me a Woman who on ANY level, is attracted to (a Woman’s regard or respect plays a very important role here) a Man whom she clearly outclassed in terms of knowledge, experience or intelligence? To ask the question is to answer it, if one is brutally honest with themselves.

Moreover, had you actually read The Game, you would not have bristled by my mentioning that Game is *everywhere* and ever constant, that it can be used in situations beyond the purely sexual or romantic. How so? Again, read your son’s copy of The Game. There you will find two instances where Style runs tight Game on two “Women with high mating value”-Courtney Love and Britney Spears. Women respond to Dominant Males. Just. A. Simple. Fact. Of. Life.

So, to recap: over the course of our discussion it was revealed by you that you were ignorant of Game to the extent that you hadn’t actually studied one of the most important books of the endeavor; on the other hand, I’ve read that and a plethora of other materials widely regarded by the community to be essential. For example, when I asked you what you’ve read insofar as EP was concerned, your shortlist didn’t include The Red Queen. That’s standard required reading for anyone wanting to understand Game, as is The Naked Ape, etc. And so on.

At that point it became clear who had the upperhand in the discussion, and as I recall you didn’t have too much of a problem with that. Yes, I value your input, but that’s not the same as having an informed discussion among two people equally familiar with the subject matter. As one trained in economics, could you honestly say that having an extensive discussion with someone who doesn’t even know who Milton Friedman was legit? Sure, they have their right to an opinion, and may be very good people. But let’s not kid ourselves here.

The simple point is Ms. Walsh, that you, like all Women, respect a guy who’s up on their stuff. Especially when you don’t know as much as they do about it. For Women, when it comes to attraction, that matters. A lot. *shrugs*

That I do it in a way that’s not abrasive counts for a lot, and you said so yourself: you consider me a gentleman, and that my momma raised me right, which she and my dad, most certainly did.

SW: I’ve read enough to know that Roissy, Roosh and
Ferdinand are losers, as someone stated above.

OBS: Well Ms. Walsh, that’s a value judgemental, purely subjective comment on your part, and you’re welcome to it. However, you have not offered any legitimate counter argument to any of these Men’s claims, other than simply saying that they don’t appeal TO YOU. Which again, is perfectly fine. But it doesn’t do anything to advance the conversation.

I’ve had the chance to interact w/two of these Men closely over the past year at least, and only know the other from a distance. Nevertheless, I can vouch for most of what they say insofar as Game is concerned. In fact, I’ve told you that I have on numerous occasions, openly and vociferously disagreed with Roissy, and those disagreements weren’t based on Game, but rather ancillary issues, such as Race, and differing standards of beauty, etc. In other words, when it comes to Game, the Man knows his stuff. That I take issue with him on other points and on other fronts, is completely beside the point.

Have you read RooshV’s book Bang? It’s his take on Game. Of course, he has many postings on his website that speaks to Game as well. In fact, one of my recent posts, Are You A Slob?, was based on RooshV’s post Eighteen Reasons Why Men Don’t Get Laid. Would you believe that I actually took heat from a number of Men for writing that? LOL! Go and see for yourself, my post and then Roosh’s, and then comeback and please share with us exactly what in either of what we said demarcates him, or me, as “losers”?

Furthermore, please take the last week or so’s worth of postings of Roissy’s and Ferdinand’s sites, and point out specifically what makes them “losers”? I would argue that many of their critics are such, not necessarily they-and again, I’ve openly disagreed with Roissy. Your response?

SW: OBS takes a more balanced approach, and some of his responses led me to believe he might be rational, but it’s clear he can’t risk alienating the elder statesmen of the Game cult. OBS, you give a little, but then you backtrack hard.

OBS: “Game Cult”? Quite strong words, don’t you think, Ms. Walsh? It infers that I, nor any other Man, can disagree with the party line, when I’ve already debunked that myth insofar as I’m concerned. Nice try, though. And thank you for the compliment! I do try very hard to be fair and balanced, to borrow a popular phrase. And I think it fair to say, that I’m among the relative few in the Gamesphere who DOES go out of his way to be such.

SW: Hey, whatever gets you through the night. If it’s workin’ for ya, that’s great. I do know that you won’t be getting anywhere near women the quality of my own daughter.

OBS: OK, your own daughter aside, please define exactly what YOU mean when you say “Woman with high mating value”? What does that objectively mean? Please explain? No disrespect Ms. Walsh, but what parent DOESN’T think their daughter ISN’T a “quality Woman”? Hmm? So, let’s leave yor girl out of this, and focus more on objective measures, and we can go from there. Fair enough?

Hope I’ve cleared up some things here.

Holla back

The Obsidian

The Realworld Value Of GAME

With the Mancession in fullswing – and we’re only seeing the beginning – and with the Haters of the Sweet Science occasionally coming forth to pour water on our hit parade, it’s good to ponder just how much mileage a Man can expect to get out of Game. Luckily, several very astute and clearly experienced practitioners of the Crimson Arts – Roissy, Ferdinand Bardamu and The Fifth Horseman – have chimed in on this burning question. This post will serve to bring all their insights together into one tight coherent beam of laserlike focus, garnished with my own unique take on the State of our Times, and Art, while at the same time utterly refuting and debunking the Haters, who pray for our downfall. Of course, that ain’t never, ever, gonna happen.

First, let’s get the BS outta the way – the NUMBER ONE reason why Men endure years of boredom at school and work, getting into crushing debt, brownosing until he’s well-fed on a diet of the Boss Man/Lady’s fecal matter, wastes BIG money on flashy cars, and does all the other ridiculous things that polite society tells him to do, is so he can have a shot at getting a pretty gal. The. End. And ANY Man who tells you otherwise, IS LYING TO YOU. The truth is, that the vast majority of guys couldn’t care less about the stuff they do, for real – all most Men need to live is a dorm room. Recently I watched an in-depth interview with Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. The Man’s living quarters?-a simple dorm room, simple twin-sized bunk with the GI-issue drab green blankie draped over it, a simple closet, trunk, you get the drill. I could easily live in such quarters, and so can most of the guys reading this – EASILY. The only reason why they go in for expensive cribs is because it will impress the Hotties. Or so they hope.

All that wouldn’t be so bad if it actually WORKED, but more often than not, IT DOESN’T – and the proof? How many of us know broke dudes who get more ass than the proverbial toilet seat? Now, how many of us “have it all” and either are being taken for all they got by some Chickenhead, or worse if you can imagine it, is at home working it out with Skeletor’s Left Hand? Tell the Truth, and shame the Devil, now. To ask the question, is to answer it. Remember this, all of you:

Happiness for a Man, is being between a Woman’s thighs.

Does anyone honestly disagree with that?

With the massive edifice that is The Matrix crumbling down around us at an increasingly rapid rate, it is time for Men to get a grip on reality and consider their options with cleareyed vision and acuity. The once-proud Working Class Man is extinct; I fully expect to see an exhibit devoted to him at the Smithsonian before long. And the same cancer that eradicated him is now gunning for his White Collar brethren, at an ever-increasing clip. Many of you who work in that world know exactly what I’m talking about. The bitter truth is that you are hanging on by a thread, not knowing if this coming Friday on the job is your last. You’re being asked to work harder and longer, with less and for less, and if you even fix your mouth to act like you got a problem with that, your ass is grass. Contrary to all the flowery talk they filled your head up with in college, in truth you ain’t nothing more than a high falutin’ cog in the wheel, and as soon as it gets too expensive to keep you on, you’ll be out the door, with no towel, and no kiss. Take a look at the Dow lately? It’s well over 10K points – while unemployment has exceeded 10% – for the first time in a quarter century.

Yea. It’s like that.

So, with so much out of our direct control to a darned thing about, the one thing we CAN do something about is improve ourselves, with one clear goal in sight – to get the SEXUAL ATTRACTION of the WOMAN (or Women if you prefer), OF YOUR CHOICE. F*ck what you heard, there are fewer pleasures greater in this world for a Man, than to have the love, respect and honey-dripping lust of a Woman we really want.

It is for this reason that Game is worth MORE than college degrees, job promotions, flashy cars or cribs and all the other silly, ineffectual stuff you see most guys running around like chickens with their heads lopped off trying to do. With the right information, dedication and just a fraction of the time – what, a year, two at most, to say nothing of the cost? – a Man can and will gain in a big way in terms of his social life, which for Men, almost always means, dealing with Women.

Which brings us back to our Three Wise Men. Let’s leadoff with Roissy’s thoughts on the matter:

“The great majority of men are not genetically capable of getting grad school degrees, but they are capable of learning some rudimentary game. Concepts like negs, social proof, qualification, compliance, and body language. And in the winner-take-all seduction sweepstakes, all else being equal, an uneducated man wielding tight game will beat a game-eschewing educated man waving a diploma 99 times out of 100. Bet on it.

As game, or in weightier parlance, psychosocial dominance, sits at the pinnacle of male character traits that women find attractive, a man will get more bang for his social investment buck by learning game than he would by working hard at improving himself on more conventional metrics such as career advancement, wealth generation, educational attainment, or material acquisition. He should do all those things to the best of his ability, of course, but if he could only choose one path to pussy, I would counsel him to learn the science of seduction. A grad school degree requires an additional 6-7 years of commitment after high school plus crushing debt; career advancement requires years of kissing ass and working late; wealth generation requires a lifetime of prudent financial management; material acquisitions require hard-earned money and their effectiveness at attracting and keeping pussy is questionable.

But game, the beautiful drama, needs only six months to one year of study and practical application before a man will reap the rewards of tingly ginas. When you are running game, you are saying powerful things, you are behaving powerfully. And when you behave powerfully, you really are powerful. Game is power. And it all rests on one very simple, very true, premise:

Women are mostly the same in what they find attractive in men.

And the male trait they love the most? Dominance.”

- How Much Can Game Do? Sep 18 2009 roissy.wordpress.com

Can I get an Amen?

Next up, Ferdi’s views on the matter, after he gives a masterful prognostication on the future of the sexual marketplace:

“So knowing all of this, how can you, the humble reader, put yourself in a position of power? I have but one tip: LEARN GAME. If you are interested in having a sex life at all, you MUST have game. If you want to get married and possibly make babies, you MUST have game. If you want to do anything aside from have a five-fingered pants party, you MUST have game. Game is more important than getting a promotion at your job, your college education, or ANYTHING else in this regard.”

- The Future Of The Sexual Marketplace Sep 21 2009 fbardamu.wordpress.com

Finally, we get the words of The Fifth Horseman, who keenly analyzes exactly what Game is worth in real dollars and cents to a Man; I quote:

“Moderate competence in Game is easily worth about the same SMV as having a net worth of $2 million. This is a rough estimate. Furthermore, no one can tax your Game, swindle you out of Game, or steal your Game in divorce court (as long as you don’t let this sap your confidence as a human being).

I define moderate competence in Game as the following 5 steps :

***1) Regular, consistent, and somewhat effortless ability to do approaches to women who are 8s or higher. This is the most important point of all, as without approaches, you will not create the opportunities to practice ANY other part of Game. This is also the filter that blocks most novices from ever progressing.

2) Ability to qualify the woman, as well as identify and pass her own tests easily. Be the first to end the phonecall, always be leaving, other time constraints, etc. The ability to use the occasional well-placed neg is valuable too.

3) Ability to run comfort and rapport for the requisite 6-8 hours. Have a lot of interesting stories, games, and other things to run on her.

***4) Ability to bridge from Day 1 to Day 2, and minimize flakes. This is important as flakes are frustrating, demoralizing, and discouraging. A lot of guys are very close to the brass ring, but this derails them in their quest for Game.

5) Ability to run competent seduction Game, after you get her alone. This is where Ross Jeffries NLP can be extremely useful (but not mandatory by any means).

1) and 4) cause the biggest frustration, paralysis, and ‘giving up’, hence the asterisks. But a man who becomes pretty good at these 5 points is ahead of 98% of all men, and is on par with a Beta who has $2 million in net worth (and is ahead of such a Beta if that Beta has no game and is suckered easily by feminine manipulation).”

Preach on, Brother! Preach on.

If a Man really wants to gain a true life skill that will actually serve him all the days of his Life, Game is it – not only will it help him in the realm of getting the Woman or Women he wants, for however long he wants, but it will also assist him in other areas of his life as well. As Welmer of The Spearhead recently showed, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s masterful use of GAME made the difference between the USA being what it is today, and remaining subjects of the British Crown. As I said before elsewhere in the forum, a Man with Game will move ahead in his career faster than not having it, and Franklin is prima facie proof – compare him to John Adams, who succeeded him as diplomat to France. In fact, think about this – why is Ben Franklin mentioned a heck of a lot MORE than John Adams? Hmm? And Franklin wasn’t even President! Compare Obama to Bush 43. Compare Bill Clinton to damn near errbody else.

Recently I made the bold assertion, and I stand by it, that had Dr. James Watson, great Man of Science that he was and is, understood and employed just a bit of Game, in this case knowing how to size up social situations and respond accordingly, he’s still be head of the Cold Spring Harbor Labs he created. Same deal with former Harvard U president Larry Summers. Yet Steven Pinker, who’s field of study is at least as controversial, being Evolutionary Psychology, continues to teach at the best schools IN THE WORLD. Perhaps it’s BECAUSE of his chosen field of study, not in spite of it, that allows him to keep working in a field that he actually likes and wants, unlike both Watson and Summers, both of whom found themselves out of a job.

And don’t even get me started on the hit HBO drama series Mad Men. Does anyone here honestly think Don Draper doesn’t use Game on the job? Come on.

As the Mancession marches on, Today’s Man finds himself at a most curious and unique crossroads, indeed. As the old saying goes, if you keep doing what you’ve always been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got – is it enough?

Well – is it?

Now adjourn your Gameless asses…

The Obsidian