Kay Hymowitz writes in her new book Manning Up:
SCENARIO 2: The Darwinian Playboy. These are the guys who plan to live alone and have a lot of sex with a lot of women. Though they might hang around for awhile, they will never, ever be that into you. They lard their deep mistrust of women with convenient bits of evolutionary psychology. Some saw fathers, uncles, brothers or friends chewed up and spit out by ex-wives who had cheated on them but still got the house, the kids, and half their ex’s income. Others probably never recovered from their own experience of betrayal; others are geeks who, having spent much of their twenties invisible to women, are also in a vengeful frame of mind. Some of them are devoted followers of Roissy, a philosophically sophisticated blogger who uses his multitudinous sexual encounters to analyze the amoral nature of female desire; think Hefner via Dostoyevsky. Women, no matter how determinedly enlightened and independent, are turned on by smart, dominant males — not bullies, not necessarily billionaires, mind you, but guys who know how to communicate the right mix of self-confidence, aloofness, and charisma. Love and marriage, concludes Roissy, are just “pretty lies.” “Marriage is no escape from the sexual market and the possibility that you may be outbid by a competitor with higher value,” he writes. “No matter how much you love your kids, if a divorce happens (50% chance, 70+% chance the wife initiates it) you are going to be paying child support for the new lingerie your ex-wife buys to sexually please her blogger lover. Life is a parade of worry and high wire risk, of love and loneliness, and no socially manufactured arrangement exists to insulate you from your dreaded fears. To imagine otherwise is beta.”
The quote she attributes to this blog is from this post. I notice she decided not to quote more pertinent passages from that post, which would add context and shore up the argument presented against thinking marriage is a fail-safe way to lock a girl in.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that there are a few writers contributing to the Chateau (gotta give shout outs where due), Hymowitz misunderstands (I’m generously interpreting her motives here) some of the beliefs held by the writers of this blog.
For instance, no Chateau author claimed that love is a “pretty lie”. In fact, just the opposite has been written: that love is the only thing in this world that isn’t bullshit. So right there, that small correction removes a big plank of her smear against “Darwinian (or Roissyan) Playboys” as merely heartless pump and dumpers with a chip on their shoulders against women. I mean, how can you demonize a Darwinian playboy who grasps the true nature of female sexual desire and the raw deal that is Western institutional marriage, but who also genuinely loves women and loves being in love with women? Makes it a bit more difficult, eh Kay? But hey, when confronted by a worldview that shakes one’s soul to the core, the urge to construct easily knocked down strawmen is a universal human cognitive deficiency.
Like most feminists and quasi-feminists (I include family values advocates and relationship complementarity libertardians in this bunch), Hymowitz’s hatred of evolutionary psychology is evident, and no wonder — it really does explain, rather elegantly, the behavior of men and women in the sexual marketplace. That women’s behavior can be so analyzed means that women’s actions can be predicted, and subsequently that men with this knowledge can tailor their behavior to get the most out of their interactions with women. Knowledge is a powerful thing, and knowing what’s up does, in fact, shift the balance of sexual power in men’s direction by removing the inscrutability and whimsy that has been the prerogative of women since time immemorial. Game means that it is no longer simply a matter of dumb luck when men get sex and love. Game, contrary to Hymowitz’s sneering dismissal, can increase the amount of love in the world by giving women more of what they desire in men.
Hymowitz, of course, can’t help but slander “Darwinian playboys” as wounded exes, geeks and mistrustful players. Do some men who learn about game fall into one or more of the above categories? Sure. But you could say the same for any group of men following anything. A proportion of white knighters and manginas who would agree with Hymowitz are emo geeks and limp-wristed hipsters who have to beg for table scraps from women. They sublimate their ineffectual effeteness into rage against “the Man”. You could call it a strategy. Mewling sycophantic betas occasionally hook pity fucks with sheer persistence and an effort to overwhelm their prey with egregious displays of phony sympathy. There are “real men” out there who suffered at the hands of ex-wives, or are bitter about having to return home every night to a waddling land beast, who would also balk at the concept of game.
The fact is that the majority of men who learn and use game are well-adjusted and successful in life, and simply want the tools to meet, seduce and bring more pleasure to beautiful women, or to meet and seduce that one perfect woman, fall in love with her, and minimize the chance that infidelity will tear them apart. Many men learn game simply to avoid getting dumped by women they love, and this includes wives swinging the divorce card like a sword of Damocles over their husbands’ necks. Is Kay prepared to say these goals aren’t noble, or aren’t in men’s interests? If not, why not? Kay, if you’re reading, you will be required to frame your answer without insufferable empty-headed references to honor or duty.
Speaking of shaming, Hymowitz has this to say about the supposed fate of the playboy:
Safe prediction: By his mid-40s, the Playboy is doing a comb-over for his balding head and wearing leather jackets to cover up his gut when he goes to bars to pick up women. Despite the fact that he tends to blather on about great bands of the 1990s, there are a few who are willing to sleep with him. Eventually, he’ll find himself seeing one of them and deciding to move in with her. He becomes a stepdad to her kids and begins to dislike her ex as much as she does. He’s not especially happy with his arrangement — he remembers the good old days when women appeared to him like an enormous, all-you-can-eat buffet — but now what’s the alternative?
Let your hate flag fly, Kay! It’s good fun, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is. Welcome to the abyss. You may now check your moral high ground at the door. You’ve no need for it in the hell matrix.
I’ve got news for ya, Kay. All those things happen to most people — men and women — whether they’re married or not. And have you never heard of long term relationships? I’m a big proponent of them, occasionally spiced with the varied fling. All the presumed benefits of marriage with none of the costs. As for single moms… well, if they’re attractive and slender, they’re good for a romp in the hay. Just don’t make the mistake of marrying them or spending too much time with their kids. Keep it short and simple. I recommend two to three months of fun. You don’t want the law to presume you the legal father.
Those balding, paunchy single men are still going to ignore you, Kay, for the hotter younger tighter competition. It’s nature. That some of them without any game and limited options may settle down with a middle-aged hag doesn’t mean they’re gonna like it. Twue wuv! The alternative is for these men to keep in shape and learn game. A man’s options in the sexual market are wide open compared to the options available to middle-aged women. And that’s what really chafes your hide, right, Kay?
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Glenn Reynolds takes a stab at explaining why he links to this blog (via Vox Popoli), and comes up a bit short.
The “game” stuff pretty much is for douchebags, or at least the otherwise hopeless. It involves taking the sophisticated approach that someone with actual interpersonal skills might employ, and boiling it down to a set of simplified rules that produce a sort of cartoon version — much as you might boil down social interactions into rules for an autistic person; the result is better than nothing, but not the real thing. But although it’s a cartoon — and focused largely on picking up women in bars, a fairly limited and artificial environment to begin with — the simplification process does reveal things that might otherwise be obscured or ignored. And it’s interesting to see some of these insights going mainstream. (The other thing you learn from perusing some of these sites is just how much some men need the help. And I’m not sorry to see them get it.)
First, everyone needs to stop throwing around the word douchebag so lazily and haphazardly. Douchebags aren’t hopeless with women. Just the opposite. Douchebags are pricks and assholes — usually gauche and lower class — who inexplicably do well with women. (Well, inexplicable to anyone who isn’t a reader of the Chateau. We here know the reason why chicks dig jerks.) Think of hotchickswithdouchebags.com, or some of the cast of Jersey Shore.
Most douchebags are naturals with women, probably because they aren’t smart enough to question their unwavering self-confidence. In fact, the best naturals with women mostly occupy the left hand side of the bell curve. The truly dangerous skirt chasers are the naturals with smarts. There aren’t many of them, but they do exist. They are unstoppable forces of nature, owing partly to their concomitant suite of dark triad traits.
Second, game isn’t cartoony at all. It’s actually quite psychologically advanced, which is why less intelligent men have problems understanding it, let alone applying it to real life. Some of the negs and routines are cartoony, but that’s a crutch for newbies who need something simple to start off with. As you get better at game, the cartoonish aspects merge and disappear into your core personality, so that the game you becomes indistinguishable from the real you. And that is the ultimate goal — to seduce without forethought. To live as a seducer in every facet of life, sexual or otherwise.
Third, game isn’t just about picking up women at bars. For fuck’s sake, this is a lazy, half-brained meme that needs to die already. The reality just doesn’t bear it out. My last three girlfriends were met, respectively, on the sidewalk, at a convention and during a bike race. That’s the beauty of game; it’s suited for every environment. There is no environmental limitation on female psychology. Women don’t desire one kind of men in bars and another kind of men at the mall. There is nothing magical about the bar that makes game work. It works everywhere.
The bar meme is silly in another way. The bar is no different in actuality than many other venues for meeting the opposite sex. Online dating, for instance, is nothing but a dry bar. (Unless you like to drink while staring at a computer screen in your gloomily lit bedroom.) Same thing for the park. You meet a woman walking her cat, and you hit it off, using the same or similar techniques you use on women in bars. The only difference is that neither one of you is clutching a drink close to your chest for comfort.
And how “limited” is the bar experience anyhow? It’s dangerous to get into sexual relationships with co-workers (thanks for nothing, feminists) and most people in the cities at least don’t go to church or temple. So the bar has become the go-to meeting place for people with a lick of social savvy who prefer face to face contact over ASCII courting. This is the reality of early 21st century Mexamerica. It’s either the bar or OkCupid for many people.
Game, in fact, can *open* new venues in which to pursue women. When you have the skillset to meet and attract women, you can meet them anywhere. No playground becomes off-limits. Go to the bar? Sure, after I’ve chatted up the girl at the Trader Joes.
A lot of people new to the science and art of game (like, presumably, Instapundit), tend to equate game with the bar and club scene. That’s a misconception. Bars are where a lot of men run game because *that’s where the greatest concentration of young, single women are*. It has nothing to do with the kinds of women who go to bars or the supposed artificiality of bars. It’s simply an opportunity calculation based on target demographic. Game itself is a universal tool of seduction, and shines in and out of bars. If anything, game tends to work better in places other than bars, where girls aren’t expecting to get hit on. Unpredictability is alpha, after all.
