A couple of texts I found horrifying:
- Tony Blair’s ode to the conversion of Britain and the British, without remainder, into efficient cogs in a global economic machine. This is the “forces of conservatism” speech he gave at the 1999 Labour Party conference.
- A consumer’s guide by a DC blogger to women in different sorts of occupations. [Warning: crude sexual references.] Analysis of feminine types is an old game, and the guy’s not stupid, so in a way he deserves the positive feedback he gets in the comment section. What distinguishes his effort from older ventures in the genre though is that it’s not at all light-hearted, and it’s totally lacking in tolerance and affection. The viewpoint is strictly practical in a reductive sort of way, and it’s clear he doesn’t much like women. What’s bothersome is that that his viewpoint seems both common and functional as things are now. If sex loses all connection to the sacred, so it becomes a market commodity with self-seeking, manipulation and brutal practicality as a constant presence, how easy can it be to do much better?
A Consumer’s Guide to Women
I found the consumer’s guide to women in different sorts of occupations a repulsive diatribe with neither an occasional insight nor even a fragment of eloquence to recommend it.
No doubt my contempt for writing that is littered with obscenities is positively geriatric – but I can’t be bothered to give my full attention to a blog which is “ornamented” with expletives any more than I could persevere reading a text full of spelling mistakes and slack grammar.
Alex.
I added a warning label
To my mind it makes sense to link and draw attention to the entry if it’s characteristic. The internal evidence of the entry itself, the confident assumption of a world in which these are the attitudes that make sense, together with other indications I’ve had and the rationality of the outlook given the view of reason, reality and human relations that now seems established, made me think it was a useful specimen.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Life according to reason……….
I admit that your link invited substantive comments on the crass assumptions, brutal attitudes, and sexual nihilism flaunted in the “consumer’s guide to women”. And on that basis, just taking issue with the vulgar language of the blog was a superficial reaction. I should have talked about the “beef” in the ghastly conversation.
However, I suppose I belong to a dwindling minority that is still shocked by the “liberal” coarsening of public discourse.
Alex.
Transfixing
I find Roissy both appalling and amazing. He’s also characteristic of his generation, it seems to me—cut to the chase, let’s not be fooled by silly stuff, pushing aside all nonessentials, looking out for themselves. The mind moves like TV commercials, chop chop chop. Blunt. Impact. Whapwhapwhap. I picture people clicking buttons and getting furious that things onscreen aren’t happening faster. I find this attitude among both boys and girls, by the way. Quite amazing how rough and brutal the girls often seem these days.
All that said … 1) I don’t feel I can come down on him for being characteristic of the generation he’s a part of. Not his fault, after all. 2) He’s a very talented and funny writer, at least if your idea of “a talented and funny writer” might include a Maxim columnist. (And mine does.) 3) I have a little sympathy for the macho assertiveness, given how today’s young men were raised. Well, it isn’t macho because a key thing is they weren’t raised to be men, and they barely have any idea how to be men. They were stomped all over by moms, teachers, and girls; they had the usual “how to be a man” discipline taken away from them.
Yet they’re still guys. They’re horny, they have energy. So they invent their own form of guy-hood. I think what we’re seeing when we read Roissy (or watch hiphop) is to some extent guys who were kept from being guys acting out some fantasy of what it might be to be a guy. In the case of Roissy and his buds, they have no idea how to court a girl in a trad way, and the girls would probably horselaugh at them anyway. So they’ve come up with “Game,” this how-to-play-a-woman system that Neil Strauss wrote about. It looks antagonistic and buffoonish to anyone with an ounce of tradition in him, but what else are they going to do? They still want to be men, they still want to be able to approach and have some luck with women … Parents and teachers didn’t show ’em how, and today’s girls barely have time for them anyway …
Anyway, in Roissy I think you see a predicament and an attitude that’s quite common today, presented in a hyper-amusing or at least hyper-flamboyant way.
As for the vulgarity—well, you have no idea how uninhibited and foulmouthed today’s kids are when the grownups aren’t around. (They’re also very square, but that’s for another time …) At Roissy’s blog, we’re listening in on what today’s kids are like when they’re amongst themselves. Notice how many girls hang out there! They aren’t shocked a bit.
Protect Yourself
Michael Blowhard not only points to the social-historical conditions of possibility for Roissyism, but also notes that the girls are in on it too.
Relating to this latter point, I want to offer some considerations that will encourage men in their 30s and early 40s to refrain from self-deception upon encountering their female age cohorts who are now exiting “the Game”:
How can anyone respect, desire, and make sacrifices for someone who would allow herself to become a move in “the Game”, who would allow herself to play along and scheme and tilt it all to her advantage? What is she like? What does that show us about her?
What motivates someone to give themselves to a woman who now condescends to makes herself available to you because she intuits that her market value is now entering irreversible decline, and grasps that it’s time to “settle down,” look for “love,” and find “a good man,” a sucker who will donate the sperm and other resources that will make the next stage in her life-fantasy a success?
It is self-deception rooted in fear of low status and loneliness that motivates someone to gives themselves to a woman like that. And don’t think that she doesn’t know it. Don’t think that she won’t exploit it. The saddest part is that the sucker, the mark, who submits himself to this Sex in the City she-monster will find in her no remedy for loneliness.
After a lifetime of extra-marital sex and treating others as positional goods will she have learned tenderness and vulnerability, even when such capacities require courage and fortitude for their exercise? Is it realistic to expect this status-mercenary to now let the sucker appear to her as a person, to let him rest in her heart as beloved? Never. Has submitting herself over the course of a lifetime to the training and therapy of heartlessness and betrayal for advantage strengthened this she-Hefner to be a good mother to your children? Impossible.
Someone else said something like this: Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. Someone who is living out the destiny of a user and status whore may not be the girl for you.
Carriers of Roissyism, male and female, are re-making our social world, and their effect on personal and social integration is not neutral. Given their causal potency, indirect involvement is unavoidable. Direct involvement however remains wholly optional. If offered, decline.
Good cop
Boy, do I feel bad about that comment. There’s too much “No mercy! Rar! Rar!” to it. Let this add some balance.
Periods of transition sometimes induce a readiness to change. It would be a shame if a player from “the Game” who repented of her old ways then found no social support available to affirm her choice to forgo the manipulation of men by means of playing “cougar” or “partner” in a game of let’s play house for advantage. Friendship and love take risks. Risking direct involvement by means of friendship with someone leaving “the Game” may be the right thing to do, provided they break with the player mentality.
Nearly everyone is damaged goods to some degree. We need to cut each other some slack, and I don’t think my first comment conveyed that. I am really sorry.
The value of a blog like Roissy’s
As a Christian, I find Roissy, and others in the “seduction community” morally appalling, but nevertheless, I have read with interest, many of the “Seduction Community”‘s writings, primarily because they certainly have taken time to observe and reflect on differences in the psychological make-up of men and women, and I find much of their analysis to be truthful, and valuable, in understanding how women react to men.
Of more value, though, is F. Roger Devlin; he has written a number of brilliant essays on male-female differences:
http://thornwalker.com/ditch/devlin_shalit.htm
http://thornwalker.com/ditch/devlin_home_ec_01.htm
http://thornwalker.com/ditch/devlin_home_ec_02.htm
http://public.box.net/mensarefugee26388
Highly recommended; Devlin explains how we got to where we are today, and why most conservatives are clueless.
Thanks for the links!
Thanks for the links!
You’re welcome! I’m sure
You’re welcome! I’m sure you, and Turnabout readers, will find them of interest and value. Devlin successfully challenges the notion long-held in our culture that women are repositories of virtue, that they are any more naturally inclined towards virtuous behaviour. Balderdash, to say the least.
Women and virtue
In a normal Western society “woman as virtuous” serves a function, of course, since they have a great deal of independence and social cues are important to them. As present though it seems to mesh too smoothly with their tendency to avoid taking personal responsibility. Everything slides into everything else, so whatever happened it’s always someone else’s fault.
(Naturally, the situation is complicated. When things get really brutal, women’s caution, domesticity, and concern for children kicks in. So among underclass types women keep households more or less functioning while the men are out killing themselves and each other.)
Exactly. Devlin more or less
Exactly. Devlin more or less argues that while it has been a useful fiction; that when women aspired to wifehood and motherhood rather than careerhood, it was socially useful. Alas, everything has changed now, and now, it does more harm to men (and women, whether or not they realize) to maintain the pretense than face it honestly and openly.
Devlin in TOQ
Devlin is published in The Occidental Quarterly. In this piece, he argues against the view that women are naturally monogamous: http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol7no2/v7no2_Devlin.pdf
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol6no2/DevlinTOQV6N2.pdf