Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists alike are obsessed with the dilemma of the so-called “Nice Guy” who can’t get laid. MRAs see his plight as a symptom of a gynocratic society in which fickle, asshole-loving women are the gatekeepers of sex; PUAs see it as a sign that beta males need to learn how to imitate the vaguely aloof swagger of the natural alpha male.
And both MRAs and PUAs completely miss the point.
To see just how badly they do, let’s take a look at a recent post from the sadly influential PUA shitbag Heartiste, who uses an alleged Facebook screencap of uncertain provenance as a springboard for a diatribe against the “desperate male,” that is, the “desperate, clingy ünterbeta male” who pursues a woman, often in a weirdly apologetic, even abject way, long after she’s made it clear she has no interest in him.
But Heartiste’s example, as you’ll quickly notice, isn’t exactly a textbook case of so-called “friendzoning.” (I’ve blotted out the dude’s face; Heartiste didn’t bother.)
Be warned: it’s a teensy bit long.
Yeah, so I’m thinking that the problem isn’t so much that the dude here is “too beta” as that he’s “a creepy stalker with no sense of boundaries and the obsessive persistence of a serial killer.” It’s not even clear why he’s developed this fixation on her. He says nothing to suggest he knows anything about her other than that she’s a “pretty lady,” and she doesn’t remember ever even meeting him.
Heartiste, naturally, takes him to task not for his creepery but for violating “just about every Poon Commandment” — that is, Heartiste’s set of “alpha male” rules for getting, well, “poon.”
He also notes the fellow’s repeated promises to not “take advantage” of her if she comes over to his place. Generally speaking, when someone casually promises not to rape you on your first date, and presents this as if it’s somehow a generous gesture on their part, it’s pretty much the opposite of reassuring, as it sort of suggests that they were at least considering it as a possibility.
But Heartiste sees it as an example of excessive chivalry:
Any man who thinks promising a woman that he “won’t take advantage of her” is the way to her heart is a power tool. Chivalry works in the abstract (specifically that abstract where unicorns are a possibility); in practice it’s an abysmal failure. A woman, if asked, will always say she wants a man “who respects her need to take it slow”, but in reality, where her words meet the unstoppable force of her tingles, a chivalrous gentleman’s pose is the equivalent of downselling: “Sure, this smartphone looks fast and functional, but it actually has parts made from Fisher Price toys. Try this cheapskate badboy clamshell over here instead.”
No, dude, the problem isn’t that this guy is being too “nice.” The problem is that he’s creeping out a random woman because he refuses to accept that she’s not interested in him.
The trouble with a lot of so-called “Nice Guys” isn’t that they don’t understand when a woman has rejected them — our creepy Romeo in the screenshots here was aware that he was probably “bothering” her only a few messages in. It’s that they refuse to accept these clear if implicit “no’s” as real” no’s.” Because, on some level, no matter how lonely and desperate and “ünterbeta” they may feel, they still feel entitled to sex with a “pretty lady.”
I rather doubt that many “Nice Guys” show up for work at companies that have interviewed them and hired someone else. The solution isn’t for these guys to learn “game”; it’s for them to learn to respect a “pretty lady’s” no as they would anyone else’s.
(Sorry for not quoting, I don’t know how that’s done here)
“If you don’t mind telling – were the responses only hostile, or did it actually work in the sexual sense?”
It would would work rarely. You have to play the numbers game and talk to hundreds of people to find the one that would respond to you. I question if any of the stupid things I was wearing and the drivel pouring out of my mouth had any positive effect.
But in a literal sense, yes I was having sex a lot more often than normal. Maybe once a week or so on average to a couple weeks where I’d have it two or three times a week. (Better than the once every couple of months back when I was married, and way more often than the “never” since I gave that lifestyle up). I try to impress upon people that it’s not worth it, and it’s better to respect yourself than judge your self-worth based on how many strangers are willing to have sex with you, but that typically falls on deaf ears.
At best, it shows he’s aware of both women’s need to be careful and his own creepiness, but is hoping to handwave it away. But at worst, yeah, it comes off like a starving tiger promising not to eat you. It doesn’t exactly make me want to take the risk.
Especially after the last comment, where he claims he thought she wanted to hang out, despite literally four months of no response from her? And the “I’d only try to have sex with you if you wanted to”? Yeah, those two things add up to badness.
Re: the red flags discussion above: finally, a Borg topic I think I could write well! Assuming you don’t already have too many contributors…
(Sorry for the double-post, didn’t see Lightcastle’s question)
Lightcastle: I don’t want to elaborate too much, but you’re pretty much correct. You want to seem unimpressed, but don’t want to sound like Don Rickles.
I think it would have worked on me in college. IDK if it would have gotten me all the way into bed, but it would have kept me in a conversation. I think it did once or twice, although I don’t know if the term “negging” was around then.
I wish. One time I had a much older and very drunk man telling me to smile for him in a restaurant, with my boyfriend right there. When I told him to leave me alone, he clapped my partner on the shoulder and said “I’m sorry buddy”. Half an hour later, when a normal person would have moved the fuck on, he wished my partner luck on his way out of the restaurant.
For example, the time Osama bin Laden took down the World Trade Center. That definitely changed American policy in the Middle East, didn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t in the direction he wanted, but that’s just details, amirite?
@JoJo
You can quote people with blockquotes using the <blockquote> </blockquote> tags. Like this:
Ugh. So much stupid of my past this dredges up. I haven’t done what the guy in the OP did but I am hardly one to judge. I hope he finds some good guidance and a bit of peace. Then again I am placing my memories of self-inflicted pain onto him.
Also, people *aren’t* immune to these sorts of things. Con artists have been around a long time, for instance. The many forms of manipulation are skills, things like cognitive dissonance are a thing, and every study ever has shown you can get people to do lots of things if you’re willing to try hard enough.
I would doubt very much if there was someone who was immune to all tactics at all times.
Hi JoJo.
Sorry to hear about the sexual frustration of your marriage – mine had a desire discrepancy, too. Not as severe as yours, but it still sucked pretty hard.
But I think it may have skewed your image of what’s “normal”. Almost 80% of married couples report having sex at least a few times a month (32% two or three times a week). If you mean that you had one to three partners a week, then yes, that’s extraordinary, but having sex one to three times a week is pretty standard (assuming you’re in a relationship; including your marriage in your comparison throws some oranges in among the apples).
I’m not trying to prove you wrong or minimize your experience or suggest anything specific was wrong – sorry if I’m coming off as doing any of those things. I’m actually trying to be encouraging here: your choices aren’t limited to “lots of sex as a PUA but hating yourself”, “sexually-frustrated relationship” and “nothing”. If you’re interested, I for one would be glad to give you some non-evil advice. Doesn’t seem like too much of a derail.
Freemage, who’s been saying “you’d have to be [mentally deficient] to fall for that” around here? I’ve asked how or if it works because I can’t understand how it does and can’t imagine being talked into someone’s bed that way even when I was a teenager. Did you need to snipe at people when saying these guys are predators looking for the vulnerable? That’s how it came across.
JoJo and lightcastle – thank you.
emilygoddess — I haven’t checked for Borg draft posts yet, so idk if we have (m)any, but email me and I’ll get you set up with back end access (you can use the Borg contact form if you don’t have my addy). I’m liking the idea of doing it as a weekly or biweekly feature, so the more the merrier!
I imagine Borg could get up to a post a day (certainly a post every other day) without feeling like “too much,” so I don’t think anyone should feel like they shouldn’t contribute because they’re not needed.
Katz — thanks solely to Hippodameia’s Women in the Arts, we’re pretty consistently M/W/F currently, so we could totally get to at least weekdays, if not weekends too!
Like I said, the more the merrier! For those interested, click my nym and use the contact an admin link 🙂
kittehserf: Guh. Sorry, no, I wasn’t accusing anyone here of that, and I’m very sorry it came across that way. I should have stressed that it’s a response I’ve been coming across on some other sites, and so it’s been rankling me a lot lately, and I was venting here to what I know to be a generally friendly audience to the idea that we shouldn’t victim-blame.
Oh, gotcha, freemage! Sorry, I was a bit quick to side-eye, wasn’t I? (Is trigger-finger side-eye a thing?)
Totes fine, kittehs; I’d rather you said something and give me a chance to clarify, then leave yourself harboring suspicions. All is good.
🙂
Thought I’d be more likely to forget than harbour suspicions. The ol’ memory ain’t what it was!
I have, on occasion said, “I’m as safe as you want me to be”, but never absent some sort of contextual cues to make it not creepy.
Pecunium — I’m stealing that. And can totally see you pulling that off even just casually flirting, you have that air of being a decent person, the goofy lighthearted sort. And are probably going to argue with me, but I don’t find many people to be the safe sort that I can actually trust, and you make the cut.
Part of it is that I’m saying, “yes, you can have all the boundaries you want”, while also implying that I have an interest. It puts the ball in the other persons court.
Tsk, except you’re safer than I’d want…
In seriousness though, I like it, definitely has a sense of “I want you, for whatever it is you want me for”…not as a cold approach, obviously, but the other person seems interested? Or you’ve already fooled around some? Well, I could totally go for then providing a short list of ymmv on the safety factor.
It reads a lot better than that horrible Good, Giving and Game line, which I hate with a passion because Dan Fucking Savage turns it into not being allowed boundaries.
I agree with the rest of your post, but I’d have to disagree with that. Using minimal resources to provoke a US overreaction that proceeds to shit all over any sort of good will the US may have in the middle east and the rest of the world, and making them spend billions as well as more lives lost in the inital attack?
I’d say it worked out pretty damn well. Well, except for him getting shot and everything, but that was loooong after. So yeah.
And that was silly of me. Sorry about that.
Hard to tell how effective it was, as it depends on what his goal was. If he was trying to cause terror and destabilize the US, then yeah, he succeeded (and died a martyr’s death, so idk if that would really have been a problem to the plan, if this was the goal). Contra, if the goal was one of protesting us importing our way of life into the Middle East…failure.
While I could rant all day about our reaction, I’m not exactly an expert on bin Laden’s motives, but I’m going to guess it was a bit of both.
Relatedly, my brother was not watching the news earlier (it was on, he was reading a book), I don’t recall the exact location, but one of the providence’s we’ve recently pulled out of is falling back to warlord control. To which I just went “who saw that coming? Oh wait, I did” and kept walking through. Much as I hate it, at this point we’re going to have to stay long enough to rebuild and clean up the mess we made. But how to not fuck it up more is pecunium’s territory.
Kitteh — pretty much the only part of Good Giving Game that isn’t total failure is the giving part. We can all hope our partners are good, but that takes practice, and if you want your partner trying something new, odds are they won’t be good at it straight away. The game part has the much discussed rapey problem, boundaries, you definitely get to have them! Giving though…I find it fair enough that sexytimes should be, over the long term at least, reciprocal, for whatever definition that means in your particular relationship. One partner always being on the receiving end of the pleasure isn’t the makings of a good relationship. Now, this doesn’t mean you must put out if your partner does, but that a relationship that’ severe unequal in that regard is likely to end sooner or later.
Of course, I somehow doubt asswipe was trying to say that partners with unequal sex drives may do better looking elsewhere.