As men get older, or as their social circles enlarge to include women of various ages, they’ll encounter a particular breed of aging beauty who at once provokes pity, annoyance and fascination. She is the eternal ingenue who has aged out of her most intoxicating years, but hasn’t aged enough to realize it. That window of time when awareness hasn’t yet caught up to reality in the Ingenue’s mind is what I call the Hag Lag.
There isn’t a man who has lived a day in his life who won’t recognize the eternal ingenue, or that moment in time when she is stricken by Hag Lag. At her prettiest and most coltish, she weaves allure like Rumplestiltskin did gold. Flouncy, bouncy and announce-y, she knows how to make an entrance, cast an entrancement, and devise an entrapment. She is usually petite, lithe, and ultrafeminine, so few men can resist skipping the LP on their mental pabulum straight to the triple X track the ingenue wants them to hear. (Naturally, she will deny deny deny ever inciting men in this way… it’s just her being her!)
Her female friends hate to love her. They envy her super female-ness and the ardor with which she expresses it, but they love the side benefits of being around her (more high value men). Her taken friends are especially cautious in her company. They see the laser eyes their boyfriends make in the ingenue’s direction.
It’s high drama until, one day, after something relentlessly wicked has crept up on her, the ingenue’s antics assume the maniachromatic tinge of undignified desperation. She has aged, and the graceful lines of her face, so delicately drawn with the sole intent of arousing men to stupendous idiocy, crater against the onslaught. She has none of the physical fortitude of earthier women to withstand even the first ticks of the tock. Her surrender is quick and merciless.
This age of Wall approach roughly corresponds to the late 20s-early 30s, give or take a few five-mimosa brunches in her past. The ingenue parties hardy, and swoons ecstatically, so you might say she has a fast strife history.
But, mentally, she doesn’t know it, or accept it. The eternal ingenue is nothing if not self-confident. Many years can pass and mock her as she struggles to cope with the loss of her only, definitive, power. This is what makes the Hag Lag a concept in tragicomedy. There she is, still doing her early 20s act, but the body and face betray the ruse. She dances and prances, kicking Klieg lights in her direction, and the wet joyous eyes once framed by delectable plush skin now strain in sad sockets, sunken, dry, and a little deranged.
She will eventually come around to her loss, but not before she has humiliated herself to the delight of romantically settled friends. God save her. She bears this punishment as penance for her short, glorious stint filling the world of men with desire and longing to merge with her larger-than-life feminine soul.
Comment Of The Week: Games Women Play
Jan 25th, 2015 by CH
head games
it’s you and me baby
head games
and i can’t take it anymore
Reader Nope comments about women playing games:
His breathless tone of indignation aside, “Nope” did make a very interesting point about gamesmanship and its relevance to both sexes as a sexual market exploit.
Men HAVE to game, women CHOOSE to game.
But before you bronze this formulation, a caveat. Men and women have different reproductive goals, and therefore different perspectives on the purpose of courtship. The value of female-specific game may seem nebulous to men, but with a long view in mind can be understood as more of a necessity to women.
Men game to give women what they want, because that’s the path to sex. Women game… to give themselves what they want, because women need to know if a man is worthy of their sex.
The point deserves belaboring. As women are the choosier sex, and as women are holistic judges of mate worth and place equal emphasis on non-visual attractiveness cues, men have to bring more to the table to get any traction with potential love interests. Therefore, game, one of a panoply of enticement strategies available to men, becomes more of a necessity than a luxury.
Women need to look pretty and fuckable to catch men’s attention. That’s it. (haters, spare us your spittle.) Women’s personality and smarts will start to matter for the long haul, but in the courtship arena they needn’t concern themselves much with “applying charisma” to attract men.
Women play games — their flavor of head games — to identify strong men. Women aren’t doing it to increase their attractiveness to men; they’re doing it because they have to deal with an information bottleneck about suitors. Men don’t have this bottleneck because most of the information they need is scanned and analyzed within a second of visual confirmation.
Women also play games because they’re bored by the parade of uninspiring betas who constitute the vast majority of men. Or they want to feed their egos with an endless buffet of external validation. These latter two reasons aren’t mutually exclusive with the primary “beta male filter” directive, but they are more frivolous and the willingness by women to indulge those urges imply an intuitive grasp of their inherently greater sexual value.
This is why the psychological strategems preferred by women, and peculiar to women’s specific needs, have come to be disparaged as the art of playing “head games”. Women play games not to appease or captivate men in the hope of mutual romantic fulfillment, but — like so many quirks of female behavior demonstrate — to gratify their egoism and to amuse themselves.
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