Answers

I was idling at work, consumed by the questions that have been circling around in my head: ‘Why don’t I see hotter girls?’ ‘Am I ever going to fall in love again?’ ‘What am I doing wrong, why am I not getting what I want?’ ‘Should I go out more?’ ‘What else do I need to learn’ etc. when I stumbled upon an article of Entropy. This led me to another article, called A long list of ways the seduction community can make you weird. I have to say, I find it both hilarious and confronting. I’ve recognised myself in it, also some things that I figured out myself (yeah!), and things that are typical to friends of mine.

Favourite quotes:

- Lots of sexually inexperienced guys get into the community to hopefully one day become players. This is the pot of gold. If they’re anything like how I was, they imagine it to be a lifestyle almost like a real life porn movie – lots of random, disconnected sex with various hot chicks. Guys will tell themselves this is what they want, and it sounds good when you put it like that. They think they’re never going to want to settle down and instead remain eternally and happily single, or juggle several girlfriends at once.

More importantly, they think that if they can just become players then their lives will be perfect and all their problems will disappear. Players are gods among men, right? How can they have troubles? How can anything be going wrong if you’re scoring with lots of chicks? Or they think that while they may be losers and failures in other aspects of their lives, if they could get that confidence boost of knowing they can sleep with lots of girls, then that won’t matter.

So anyways, they start doing a little better with women and they come to realize that sex isn’t that big a deal. They have a few one nights stands and find them fun, but strangely unsatisfying after a while. They come to see constantly going out to bars trying to get laid as a pain in the ass. They realize that they’d rather be in a fun, fulfilling relationship with one cool girl than get laid once a month by picking up some random drunk girl they may not even be that into. They stop seeing what the fuss with having a ‘high score’ for its own sake is all about. It could happen to you, or maybe not…

- Having a false feeling of superiority just for knowing about the Community is a poor source of self-esteem. You can come across as extremely deluded to normal people because as much as the Community sees itself as an elite secret society, it’s honestly mostly made up of below-average guys trying to catch up to the rest of the world in some very basic areas. For every one true player in the Community, there are hundreds of awkward guys trying to reach milestones that most people experienced as teenagers.

- It’s kind of strange to always be talking about hooking up with women all of the sudden. It can just be poor people skills to constantly talk about the same thing or keep turning the conversation towards the topic when it isn’t appropriate. Also, I don’t think it’s good if you’re trying to derive self-esteem from other people seeing you as an expert on gaming girls. That’s I why did this sometimes. I wanted people to go, “Wow Chris! You’re so cool for knowing this stuff!!!”

- Being in the Community can warp the way you see other males. Instead of them just being another person or a friend to hang out with, you can start to categorizing them according to a different set of priorities:

* Clueless mainstream AFCs who you look down on and derive self-esteem from for being better than.
* Mainstream guys who are alright with women. Competition. Someone to practice AMOGing concepts on.
* Non-Community guys who are naturally good with women (i.e., Naturals). These are living gods whose tricks you must learn for yourself. They are objects to learn from.
* Community guys who are good with women, or at least better than you (i.e., Pick Up Artists/PUAs). Also people to idolize, but more importantly, to extract value from for your own gain.
* Community guys at your level. Wingmen. Guys who can go out with so you’re not at the bar alone. People to learn from. More than we’d like to admit, a way to grease the wheels of your own development. A means to an end.
* Friends. People to go out with so you can practice your game once you arrive at the destination. People to give you ’social proof’. People to meet girls through. People to learn social skills from. Another means to an end.

- Before they get into the Community, the typical guy has beliefs about women such as:

* Women are special, beautiful creatures.
* Women need to be saved and protected.
* Women need to be loved and nurtured.
* You need to make women feel special.
* Women need to be wined and dined and romanced.
* Women want nice guys.
* Women don’t like sex.

A little too naive and romantic in other words. Then they get into the Community and before long they’ve been exposed to ideas like:

* Women are flaky and unreliable.
* Women are emotional and illogical.
* Women only live in the emotion of the moment, do what feels good at the time, and justify their actions to themselves after the fact.
* Women are manipulative and use guys for free drinks and dinners.
* Women are fickle and have short attention spans.
* Women are self-centered and self-interested.
* Women primarily go to clubs for attention and validation from men.
* Women constantly test men, try to devalue them, and try to make them jump through hoops.
* Women try to make men suck up to them and put them on a pedestal.
* Women think their pussies are made of gold and sell them to the highest bidder.
* Women don’t know what they really want.
* Women are confused and hypocritical. They’ll profess to dislike whorish behavior then blow a guy in a bathroom that night.
* Women are programmed to want to get knocked up by an Alpha Male then ensnare an unwitting Beta Male into raising the child for her.
* Women will cheat on their partners coldly and unemotionally.
* Women are slaves to how their friends and society sees them. They want to sleep around, but have to be discrete about it.
* Society’s expectations have given women all kinds of weird hang ups up about sex and hooking up. Their minds are full of strange rationalizations and justifications.
* Women aren’t happy for long in a relationship and you have to constantly keep them on their toes and off-balance to stay with them.
* Women are powerless to resist the right type of guy. Even if they’re married, they’ll get sucked along.
* Women are easily manipulated by simple magic tricks and talk of new agey topics.

- I don’t think I’ve met a natural ladies man who cares about having tight game for its own sake. He just sees a girl he likes and says what he has to say to get her. A way to get from point A to point B. But in the Community it’s all about who’s the best PUA, who could beat who in a PUA challenge, who can achieve some arbitrary game related goal, is this camp of PUAs better than this camp, is such and such PUA as good as he says he is? On a more local level, when guys in the Community hang out together, it’s not uncommon for petty little rivalries and jealousies to develop.

- The Community can be quite the soap opera at times (most of the time). Betrayal. Friendships falling out. Accusations of theft. Guys leaving one company/message board/local group to start a rival one. Wars of propaganda. Personal attacks across blogs, podcasts, and message boards. Very juicy stuff. The point is obvious: you’re wasting your time if you get too caught up in this shit, especially at the expense of living an actual life.

- It’s a no brainer that improving yourself as a person is a good thing, for you and for the people who interact with you. Lots of Community guys are into the larger process of self-improvement and see learning how to do better with women as one component of that. But I strongly believe you can go too far with Self-Improvement. You can read a few too many self-help books and listen to a few too many motivational CDs and become sort of flakey and unbalanced. It’s like anything: go overboard with it and you get a little off. You lose the ability to just watch a dumb movie – that’s poor productivity and the time would be better spent learning how to speed read. You can’t talk about current events because the only things you’ve read in the past three months are tomes on time management.

- This ‘give up your life’ mentality can also lead guys to shun regular relationships for the cause of improving their game. In the Community there’s a general belief that if a guy gets a girlfriend, especially before becoming a card carrying PUA, that he’s quitting. He’s betrayed the scene. He’s turning his back on his mates. He can’t hack it and is dropping out of the race. If he says it’s because the girl makes him feel happy, he’s just rationalizing what a loser he is. When well known people in the Community get a girlfriend, there’s always this sense of shock and suspicion, like how could he do something so crazy? It’s okay to have a harem of fuck buddies or be in an open relationship, but just seeing one girl? That’s wussy AFC stuff. (As an aside, I find Community advice towards relationships preoccupied with power dynamics and the guy always having the upper hand).

- Besides being condescending towards regular guys just because they’re not into being a PUA, this ‘convert the friends’ attitude has some other issues:

* Okay, to be fair, sometimes it’s just about being enthusiastic or wanting to help your lonely buddies out by sharing something that’s helped you.
* But a lot of the time it’s more about you than them…
* You want to be admired for introducing them to this awesome gold mine of knowledge.
* You want the rush of getting to be their guide and mentor into this new world.
* You want some people to go out with when you try to meet girls.
* You want the ego boost of being the wise teacher who brings the clueless chumps towards the light.
* Your own progress towards PUA-dom is slow and you think that by being a teacher to your friends you’ll give yourself a kick in the ass.
* You need other people’s approval before you feel comfortable being into the Community yourself.
* If they refuse, you get to feel superior to them for being so clueless and deluded.
* You want to intentionally put their skills with women under a spotlight and make them look bad, so you can feel good about yourself, all under the pretext of wanting to help.

- Community guys are collectively obsessed with getting over their fear of women. For many guys this is their biggest problem, not a lack of knowledge about how to get a girl. For some reason many of them get it into their head that the best way to become fearless is to go out in public, act like a weirdo, and purposely expose themselves to embarrassment and negative judgments from other people. Such stunts are accompanied by talk of tearing down preprogrammed social conditioning. The idea is that if you can do something totally ridiculous and extreme, talking to girls (another supposedly societally conditioned fear) will seem easy.

Sooo… what if you’ve seen all of this and you still wonder what to do about the whole woman thing? I’m still figuring that part out – feel free to comment – so to be continued…