POST THE SECOND
in which the Author reveals that PUA-style pickup game is not for everyone**
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
[your] times are in [your] hand
[so say] “A whole I planned”
— adapted from robert browning
**this fact is almost universally overlooked in “the community”, not least because noting it would drastically slash the size of the target audience to which the community’s ersatz leaders hawk their products.
—
let’s begin by throwing personality types into a sieve, sifting vigorously, and seeing what shakes out.
broadly speaking, men’s ways of striving for experience and achievement — in the very inclusive sense of the term, covering everything from boldfaced résumé mainstays to drunken escapades — lie on a continuum.
at one extreme of this continuum are what i’ll call “vertical integrators”, men who seek to build something cumulative, with many overlaid layers of significance, development, and meaning. these are the thoroughgoing monomaniacs who dedicate their lives to building specific industry-niche businesses at work, or, if they find no such calling, to creating the industry niches themselves; to developing hard-earned talents, with a flat return curve prior to virtuoso level, at their esoteric pursuits; and to building large, patriarchal families.
at the other extreme are what i’ll call “horizontal integrators”, the dilettantes, dabblers, rogues, and picaroons who look to sample as many different swatches as possible from the mottled tapestry of life. drifters in good days and derelicts in bad, these are the restless transients who defy the law prohibiting perpetual motion. at work, at play, and in (and out of and in and out of and in and out of) love, they value diversity over depth. they are like junk bonds — their values may vary greatly from one hour to the next — but they never stray too far from the notion that quantity has a quality all its own.
these two categories correspond, very roughly, to one narrowly defined dimension of the alpha/beta dichotomy, although it would be foolish to define a reductionist alpha/beta dichotomy according to them.
—
the above is not a binary, nor is it a bimodal distribution; it’s a continuum on which lies a skewed bell curve, whose median lies on the side of vertical integration.
surely there are some chameleons, who masquerade as vertical integrators just long enough to have plausible deniability for their rogue exploits.
and for each of these sneaky fuckers, we can find an antithesis: a man of predominantly conservative disposition, who periodically emerges from the woodwork to white-knuckle a few peer-pressured bouts of chemically assisted derring-do, strutting and fretting his 15 minutes upon the stage in an ill-advised attempt to catch and sing the sun in flight.
these types notwithstanding, though, most men in modern western society are vertical integrators. of the minority who prefer azimuth to altitude, most will find themselves gazing inexorably further away from the horizon and toward the sky with the passing years, as time gradually whittles away their supply of the great horizontal integrator known as testosterone.
-.– — ..- –..– – — — –..– … …. .- .-.. .-.. .–. .- … …
ok, so, who cares?
you should.
because, for vertical integrators (that’s most of you guys out there), pick-up artistry is a sweet-tasting, slow-acting poison.
if you are a vertical integrator working at building or improving a long-term relationship, then do not use mystery-method-style PUA techniques.
notice the word “techniques”. you can and should still use reputable PUA material — especially from sources that have achieved prominence based on quality alone — to strip away the pretty lies and reconstruct the real real world, from first principles.
but, unless you’re getting incredibly lucky at an oversized game of battleships, you should not proceed a1 a2 a3 c1 c2 c3 s1 s2 s3 with your long-term prospect. this sequence can and will get you laid, but in the long term it will almost certainly be counterproductive, causing you to be blown out of the water as soon as the proverbial paint begins to dry.
first, understand that PUA game is to long-term relationships what a hammer is to a phillips-head screw; although one would think it obvious from the name, many people need to be reminded that PUA techniques are designed for pick-up, not for hold ’em.
it is designed for a task whose payoffs are not cumulative. it’s pure horizontal integration — a sisyphean task, of essentially constant difficulty level, repeated ad nauseam.
can you learn to write a novel by writing 1000 opening vignettes?
can you become a chessmaster by becoming really good at the catalan?
no.
NO.
you can’t.
but the PUA fellows are telling, and selling, the notion that you can.
fool, money, parted.
worse, though, PUA techniques are not just some inert chemical in the mix of a long-term relationship. in the conception, nurturing, and birth of a long-term relationship, PUA techniques play the role of thalidomide — allowing the birth to occur, but crippling the potential and shortening the life of the bond.
why?
as stated before, women are elastic bands.
effective PUA game works by stretching those bands at an extremely rapid velocity — rapid enough to produce consistent and reliable one-night stands for proficient practitioners.
and yes, haters, it works.
so what’s the problem?
the problem is that PUA technique gets you from point a to point s3 really quickly, and then locks up like a grocery cart that’s just hit the yellow line around the parking lot.
do you want your nascent relationship to end not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the dull thud of a grocery cart ramming into your solar plexus?
didn’t think so.
neither did neil strauss, who was the best pua in the world until he met his own grocerycarterloo — when his beloved lisa leveridge, about whom he had waxed so sentimental at the end of the game, unceremoniously dumped him after the exact period of time that normally characterizes rotating polyandry.
ahem.
want to make it across the desert? don’t drive the car that goes really fast but gets six miles per gallon.
hempstead village renaissance 
2010/06/21 at 13:32
Having read the Game, I think Neil’s main problem was that he believed Lisa’s assurances that she was game-resistant.
This was of course total rubbish. Did he meet any girls like Lisa before Game? Nope. He fell victim to the delusion that he had finally met a woman who Loved Him As He Was before Game.
Although despite his protestations I’m sure that there were women out there capable of loving the original Neil (they just weren’t the women he wanted), the chances are that a guitarist in Courtney Love’s band would not be one of them, the experience she would have amassed with men would mean that Game would be a minimum requirement for keeping her.
I really liked Lisa as written in the book but I don’t believe for a minute she was Game-resistant, I think she was consciously or unconsciously shit-testing him with this and he failed. Her conduct in this regard really didn’t ring true, it read like she was trying to prove to him that she was different, she clearly had a lot of willpower in resisting him but that is not the same as being Game resistant, willpower can be exercised with regard to an end (getting one’s man) but what is the point if he then loses what was attractive about him in the first place.
Of course, maybe they didn’t have anything in common, but I don’t know. Lisa was a bright girl (I am assuming she got tired of him, of course the reverse may have been the case)
Let’s take the reverse situation, if the beautiful Lisa gained 50 pounds, would Neil the former PUA artist still love her? My ass he would. Game is the male equivalent of weight loss for an overweight woman.
I really liked the book but the end bit never rang true for me at all.
2010/06/21 at 13:42
I have to say, you’re a damned good writer.
And in my experience of pimps (which is more extensive than you might think) I’ve yet to meet one who quoted Rabbi Ben Ezra or indeed anything that didn’t come straight from a Tarantino screenplay.
I agree with all this btw.
2010/06/21 at 13:43
PS: do you think Roissy will do a response to this?
2010/06/21 at 14:23
Lisa left Neil for Robbie Williams.
Yeh have been warned.
2010/06/21 at 18:07
PS: I forgot to say, thank you for the linkage. Believe it or not, I am very touched and flattered.
2010/06/21 at 20:05
I lol’d.
2010/06/21 at 20:32
Although despite his protestations I’m sure that there were women out there capable of loving the original Neil (they just weren’t the women he wanted), the chances are that a guitarist in Courtney Love’s band would not be one of them
to neil’s credit, at least his experiences didn’t drive him to a compulsion to seek out the most innocent and freshfaced of girls.
—
I really liked Lisa as written in the book but I don’t believe for a minute she was Game-resistant, I think she was consciously or unconsciously shit-testing him
he painted lisa with this sort of brush, i’m sure, as a sop to the masses of critics who would otherwise have slapped the label “misogynist” on him.
remember that this wasn’t some obscure piece of PUA how-to literature; it was a new york times bestseller. therefore, strauss had to be more cognizant than he otherwise would of things like not pissing off his vast, vocal female audience.
—
Game is the male equivalent of weight loss for an overweight woman.
if more women thought like you, the world would be a better place.
2010/06/21 at 21:00
to neil’s credit, at least his experiences didn’t drive him to a compulsion to seek out the most innocent and freshfaced of girls.
Heh. Or should that be miaow.
he painted lisa with this sort of brush, i’m sure, as a sop to the masses of critics who would otherwise have slapped the label “misogynist” on him.
That is the difficulty – although I thought the book rang true until he met her, after that it didn’t, it turned into Sweet Valley High.
Whether this was because he developed oneitis or because he couldn’t portray her as she really was, it is hard to say. I originally thought the former but you may well be right, if so, probably the real story is much more interesting.
It is a very glib ending, the PUA who falls in love with the girl who is immune to game. It didn’t work for me either on the literary or emotional level because it contradicted all the information provided in the first part of the book, and indeed my own experience & observations, namely,
(i) very few women are immune to game imo and those who are are frigid, which has its own problems
(ii)high-status women in showbiz and music circles are much more receptive to game
(iii) inside a PUA, there is a madonna-lover waiting to get out, this is rubbish, most men who become PUAs (as opposed to men who read PUA stuff to get basic skills on how to chat up women) are PUAs because they like sluts, or even if they don’t like them to begin with and become PUAs following a broken heart & so forth, soon change as you point out.
Also, the thought of an angelic intellectual madonna with superhuman levels of sexual self-control playing guitar in Courtney Love’s band strained even my credulous soul. By the time he was finished he had turned poor Lisa into the young Marianne Faithfull c.1965 (and of course in reality Marianne was very far from an angel, her autobiography is a very very interesting read.)
Game is the male equivalent of weight loss for an overweight woman.
if more women thought like you, the world would be a better place.
That is very kind of you to say. I will return the compliment & say it is good to meet someone who talks common sense in such a charming way.
2010/06/21 at 22:46
It strikes me as a little bit of a straw man, to say that PUAs are advocating a1-s3 as an LTR approach. It’s more like, men are simply set adrift into LTRs, with the assumption that the hard part is done. And this is somewhat true, because confidence in your ability to easily replace a girl does wonders for your LTR game. But you hear many times about PUAs bemoaning the pattern of getting into an LTR, halting game, getting rusty, and then having to rescale the mountain to get their skills back when the relationships fails. The recommended solution is to never stop doing a1-s3 xtreme mountain bike tricks. So obviously the sisyphean component is there, albeit not quite in such reductionist terms.
To touch briefly on the leader/follower dynamic, you usually don’t get as good an example as Neil Strauss provides. Many PUA leaders do maintain impressive LTRs and or harems. But others keep moving continuously like sharks, never taking a break in their game. It’s the second and third tier PUAs on down who mainly experience the post-LTR game re-acquisition hump. This is especially true for technique driven game.
While I think your elastic gospel is great, I’m not convinced it’s the whole picture. To maintain a healthy LTR with a girl above his natural rank, a beta must become interally more alpha. That can be accomplished via either life experience or inner game.
The canonical work here, that fleshes out much of LTR best practice, is Daniel Rose’s Sex God Method. He mostly talks about pushing boundaries through fantasies. This goes beyond. I would suggest adding the elastic concept to his model, so that it becomes:
DEVIL
Dominance
Emotion
Variety
Immersion
eLastic
2010/06/21 at 23:44
@ jb —
It strikes me as a little bit of a straw man, to say that PUAs are advocating a1-s3 as an LTR approach. It’s more like, men are simply set adrift into LTRs, with the assumption that the hard part is done.
it’s actually worse than that; hence, the grocery-cart analogy.
PUA techniques accustom the woman to extreme dynamism, rapid change, constant defiance and realignment of expectations, and reckless spontaneity, so it’s no surprise that a woman who is successfully picked up with such techniques will expect the dynamism to continue.
most of the LTR-related writing that i’ve seen in this sphere is based on the assumption that static dominance will preserve a relationship indefinitely — i.e., once a man absorbs basic principles of leadership, dominance, and relationship management, he can then rest on those laurels for the duration of the relationship.
looking deeper, though, one sees a significant confounding pattern in the data.
specifically, all of the long-term relationship game advice i’ve seen has been written by men who either (a) have been in their relationships for a few years or less, or (b) are long married but have just recently stepped up their game, or (c) are avowed serial monogamists who generally plan to recycle women who have reached their rotating-polyandry expiration date.
we’ve got to look at the negative space here, too.
what’s largely missing from the data set is the accounts of men who have been married or in other LTR’s for more then a few years, with the same static dominance game. i suspect that these men’s accounts are missing for reasons beyond a mere shortage of such men to tell their stories.
specifically, the long-married guys are misattributing most of their renewed success with their wives to the actual dominant techniques themselves, when it is in fact the delta between their new, alpha-ized selves and their old, beta selves that is operative.
in a few years, these men will probably find that this constant degree of dominance has now gone stale.
so the point is, once that delta has been established, it needs to continue. so a PUA-type who wants to convert into a successful LTR is either going to have to dial it down a bit during the initial seduction, or is going to have to get pretty damn creative with his depravity as the relationship progresses.
But you hear many times about PUAs bemoaning the pattern of getting into an LTR, halting game, getting rusty, and then having to rescale the mountain to get their skills back when the relationships fails.
this is almost certainly not what is actually happening, unless these guys are so solidly betacore that they simply can’t grow into the persona that suits their new alpha affectations.
what is really happening here is NOT that these PUAs are “getting rusty”; they almost certainly employing the same sorts of techniques in the same ways, even more certainly if they have extensive PUA experience and these are now their first instincts.
instead, what is happening is that “the same sorts of techniques in the same ways” just don’t work anymore, because the woman has simply become habituated to them. the elastic has been held at exactly the same degree of tension for some time, and has now slackened.
i’m sure that some of the more perspicacious PUA type have caught on to the fact that these techniques have an expiration date of, at most, a few years.
however, there are three factors working against their taking the next step:
(a) most of them, even the good ones, are not terribly original innovator types; they learned by standing solidly on the shoulders of giants, making at most minor adjustments to existing PUA techniques to better suit their own style. therefore, they are ill-equipped to invent LTR strategies from whole cloth.
(b) there is a definite commercial interest in covering up the fact that the same techniques that are so effective in the short term will inevitably crash and burn in the long term. the more products they are hawking, the less willing they are to admit that those products are step 1 of a process that has an extremely large number of steps.
(c) they just don’t identify the problem correctly; they mistakenly specify the problem as one of retrogression, not realizing that the actual problem is a lack of PROgression.
The recommended solution is to never stop doing a1-s3 xtreme mountain bike tricks. So obviously the sisyphean component is there, albeit not quite in such reductionist terms.
see, the same assumption seems to be implicit here. it doesn’t matter how tight your a1-s3 tricks are; your woman WILL become habituated to them, and WILL want more. it’s the delta that matters.
fortunately, there are lots of deltas that are effective, and, equally fortunately, all but the most restlessly dynamic women can be kept enthralled by small, incremental changes.
2010/06/21 at 23:55
The canonical work here, that fleshes out much of LTR best practice, is Daniel Rose’s Sex God Method. He mostly talks about pushing boundaries through fantasies. This goes beyond.
is this material downloadable, gratis, anywhere on the internet?
i’ve not heard of it, although i’ve also not read a very large cross-section of PUA material.
i like to look at myself as playing the role of unit 731 here, to a certain degree — i’ve done some very bad things, but also collected data therefrom that can ultimately be used to the benefit of good people.
specifically, i have never had a twenty- or thirty-year relationship — i’m too young too have had one, even if that were my goal — but among the whores, madonnas, and other floozies under my belt are a scandalously large number of disaffected, malcontented, excitement-starved wives.
unlike a lot of other men, i get bored pretty easily with just fucking, so instead i’ve probed the depths of these women’s minds to find out exactly what is the source of long-term discontent. so i’m working with data from both the male and female sides of the equation.
what does this daniel rose guy cite as his experience with women and relationships?
2010/06/22 at 00:29
oh, and this:
While I think your elastic gospel is great, I’m not convinced it’s the whole picture. To maintain a healthy LTR with a girl above his natural rank, a beta must become interally more alpha
well, yeah, of course, but the big obvious issue here is that most people cannot simply change their personalities through introspection, or by looking at mirrors in the morning and repeating daily affirmations, or by any other such purely psychological means.
i’m not saying that nobody can change his personality through the sheer force of introspection — i know my share of such people, most of whom are either decently successful actors (literally or in professions like sales) or people who create their own little fictional universes as they go through life. these sorts of people would have less trouble with spontaneously alpha-ing up, should they choose to do so.
however, the big elephant in the room here is that the vast majority of man have to DO THINGS, or be subjected to severe shock therapy, to produce any measurable personality changes.
analogy: to become a better boxer, a young man has to become the sort of man who is not afraid to take and return blows, mano a mano.
occasionally i coach a kid who is used to street fighting and who therefore relies almost exclusively on “sneaky fucker” techniques — one of the betas, as it were, of the fighting world.
these kids can’t just develop, in a vacuum, the proper attitude to face down an opponent with their bare hands. they have to train that attitude by going into the ring, sparring, and — wait for it — expanding their repertoire.
the point, then, is that these words about having to “alpha up” are just that — words.
just words.
big talk.
big talk is nothing without a concrete plan of action.
that plan of action is inextricable from the same sort of boundary-pushing that will perpetuate a long relationship. in fact, conveniently enough, it’s a beautiful feedback cycle.
example:
consider the continuum of public sluttiness discussed on the previous thread.
sounds fun, doesn’t it? we would all at the very least like a sexy woman dressed in slutty clothes (or two or three or six) hanging onto our arm.
now, imagine taking your woman out in public in a sluttier outfit than usual (pushing this particular slider up one increment).
now, imagine the differences in YOUR public comportment, demeanor, and inner confidence that are required to successfully pull this off.
you see where i’m going with this?
it’s a cycle:
you push the slider/elastic.
this action now REQUIRES you to be just a little more “alpha”. you’re in the ring against a slightly better opponent, and you are going to need to hang in there for three minutes whether you like it or not.
“fake it ’til you make it” is one thing, but “you better make it whether you’re faking it or not” is quite another.
2010/06/22 at 00:30
sd
Also, the thought of an angelic intellectual madonna with superhuman levels of sexual self-control playing guitar in Courtney Love’s band strained even my credulous soul
haha, yeah, my thoughts exactly.
And in my experience of pimps (which is more extensive than you might think)
i’ll bite.
2010/06/22 at 00:34
All this talk about delta is intriguing, but what about the opposite delta? A woman’s attractiveness, options, and status decrease as she ages, and therefore so does the difficulty of gaming her. We’re talking 5-15 attractive years for most relationships. The polyandry cycle is supposedly 4 years. That’s a pretty big gimme. And if at that point the relationship still hasn’t produced children, I can see dissatisfaction being nature’s way of saying “move on,” which becomes increasingly difficult to combat without resorting to elastic depravity.
About technique expiration in at most, several years: Yeah, Neil Strauss ran out of material. Technique game is like a standup comedy routine that way. Very limited. But when are passing shit tests, negging, and takeaways going to expire? IMHO, never. Not that I’ve lived long enough to test this on a 15 year timeframe.
In my opinion, a takeaway is a bulwark against the erosion, the familiarity that you’re talking about. Conversion is easy to get. Once a girl is converted, a takeaway is visceral pain. Here’s my thesis: you can skip the creative depravity, the whips and chains, the pimping and high-energy pounding, because you already have a red-hot poker you can shove into her soul any time – cold withdrawal.
When she starts showing signs of complacency, dissatisfaction, disrespect, boredom, whatever, just jam it in and sear her center of excessive well being with the experience of abandonment and loss. Then nurture her burns back to pink flesh with tenderness. Enjoy for a while while your poker reheats on the grate. Then jam it in again.
I don’t see it ever getting old. It’s not maximum LTR actualization, but it seems to work with minimal effort.
I mean, what happens to heated elastic? Pardon my ignorance of laundry, but I believe it shrinks.
The elastic metaphor is really versatile. A woman in my life had a jarring childhood, a parent with drug abuse. She married a very beta provider and favored stability over alpha flash her entire life. Her elastic was snapped early by a shocking experience.
Perhaps it would be impossible for a PUA to break a woman’s elastic and then personally reap the benefits by relaxing into betadom, but couldn’t we at least heat the elastic to shrink it?
But of course, the question is, how dynamic and challenging is the woman? And the correlation between that and hotness is, while not 1, nonnegative.
Another problem with what I’m saying is, I really have no reference point for a static existence. When I stop to consider how truly boring and unchanging most guys can be, it gives me pause.
So, I’m all for your system, despite some pedantic quibbles and contextualizations. And yeah, I have very little life experience, none at all in the circles you’re talking about.
However, I have begun to implement the rubber band system with pleasant results.
2010/06/22 at 00:57
Here is the link to Daniel Rose’s book (the title is different, it was rebranded to increase sales)
Click to access 10-10%20The%20Sex%20Revolution%20Handbook%20%5Bcompact%20PDF%5D.pdf
I don’t know how long this link will stay up.
Unit 731 – absolutely classic.
“what does this daniel rose guy cite as his experience with women and relationships?”
He has extensive experience over a long period managing a semi-rotating harem. I haven’t seen pics. I think he’s legit. I don’t know if he’s done anything other than write the book in the PUA community.
Agreed on the virtuous feedback loop of elastic depravity. Being highly introspective and logical myself, I need to work things out from first principles as well as experience them directly. This isn’t typical. That being said, I’d sooner give up an arm than the inner game stuff I’ve learned.
2010/06/22 at 00:59
All this talk about delta is intriguing, but what about the opposite delta? A woman’s attractiveness, options, and status decrease as she ages, and therefore so does the difficulty of gaming her.
yeah, but you’re making the mistake of looking at this from an outsider’s perspective.
i bet that you have disproportionately fond memories of your first woman who was ever a really, really, really good fuck.
in fact, barring massive weight gain or drug use, i bet you were (and still would be) much more attracted to her than you would have been from her looks alone.
in addition, if you were given multiple-choice from your past women for a quick, carefree no-strings fuckfest, she’s probably the one you would pick, even if you’ve had hotter women since.
why?
the delta.
now, imagine that you’ve pushed your woman through various stages of increasing depravity for many years, so that you have lovingly custom-crafted her into a perfect, wanton, submissive, reflexively obedient (though possibly feisty with her feigned resistance), insatiable little fuckslut.
guess what? don’t be surprised if you magically and inexplicably find her hotter than any other woman her age, even more desirable than most objectively younger and hotter women.
this is the point. the delta applies likewise to YOUR attraction to HER.
i’m certainly not saying that you will only have eyes for your own woman after all this (though she will for you), but it will go a long way in combating any objective losses in her beauty.
i.e., the point here is not whether she becomes “easier to game” — of course she will. the point here is that continuing to push the boundaries will also keep YOU enthralled.
2010/06/22 at 01:07
But when are passing shit tests, negging, and takeaways going to expire? IMHO, never
here i would like to present the idea that the mere presence of shit tests, at any time, indicates that the woman is pressing you to push harder on the elastic.
this applies at all levels, from the first minutes of a pickup attempt to decades into a marriage.
if your natural inclination is to push the elastic really hard, you can go through long periods of a relationship with an otherwise tumultuous woman while encountering almost zero shit tests.
a shit test is not just something you have to pass; the real, hidden purpose of a shit test is to indicate that you need to press harder and harder on the accelerator unti the shit tests start to disappear.
with shit tests, i’ve never ever understood why people are so obsessed with treating the symptoms rather than the underlying disease.
—
takeaways likewise are not a static process.
“authority” is another slider on the wonderfully diverse mixing board that is your woman. each takeaway should be an incremental push of that slider.
i.e., after “taking away” something and then giving it back to her, you should come away with MORE authority over her than you had at the start of the process. if you are just using takeaways to maintain the status quo — even if the status quo is pretty fucking hot — then in my book there is an unacceptable deadweight loss there.
2010/06/22 at 01:13
sd–
PS: do you think Roissy will do a response to this?
i would suspect not, as (a) this blog is all of about sixty hours old at this point and (b) roissy’s responses are almost invariably fiskings of pieces that are diametrically opposed to his worldview.
in particular he likes to shoot at easy targets, an exercise that would be yawningly boring if not for the quality of his writing.
this is not a criticism; i understand perfectly well his motives, both from the pure joy of watching your enemy’s house burn and from the fact that there are still many endarkened readers to whom the easy targets are not so easy.
2010/06/22 at 02:25
“here i would like to present the idea that the mere presence of shit tests, at any time, indicates that the woman is pressing you to push harder on the elastic.”
As I was writing the last comment, I was thinking to myself that pushing the elastic would probably eliminate the need for takeaways and passing shit tests. The elastic method is preferable, but takeaways can still offer an attractive low energy / high return option. If you have an energy shortage.
It seems you’re using takeaway in a different sense than I do. For me, it means the LTR equivalent of a backturn. I’m not sure I could give three examples of what “takeaway” in your sense would be. Or perhaps you’re using it in the same sense, but saying they should be used to accelerate compliance, rather than maintain it. In which case I perforce agree.
“the point here is not whether she becomes “easier to game” — of course she will. the point here is that continuing to push the boundaries will also keep YOU enthralled.”
Interesting point, and no small benefit. There’s no denying Elastic Depravity is an important component of Game 2.0. I’d say it goes
.1 Ross Jeffries
.3 NLP
.5 ASF, Major Mark
1 MM, DeAngelo
1.5 Juggler, Mehow, IN10SE
2.0 Hypnotica, RSD, Daniel Rose, Roissy, ED
Something like that anyway. I’m just not convinced that ED is necessary for an LTR or should be billed as such, despite technique based 1.0 Game’s negative impact on LTRs, I’m not convinced all fundamental (as opposed to routines based) techniques get old, and I’m not convinced that ED is the complete game 2.0.
Who knows though, if this blog keeps up the pace of epiphanic overload, maybe it can invent Game 3.0. So far, I think 2.5 is not outside the realm of reasonable possibility.
2010/06/22 at 04:40
Something like that anyway. I’m just not convinced that ED is necessary for an LTR or should be billed as such
heh, “ed” isn’t the best abbreviation to use here, so let’s head that one off at the pass. it shouldn’t be hard (heh) to think of an abbreviation with slightly less damning associations.
especially since actual ed (erectile dysfunction) can be one of those signs that you aren’t pushing her hard enough.
to determine the actual necessity of this stuff, you’re going to have to take into account the natural inclinations of the woman herself.
if your woman is the dynamic type herself, then, trust me, you are going to have to keep slowly pushing those sliders, at least until she’s perimenopausal.
if she’s generally conservative and operates according to a discernible moral compass, then yes, this stuff becomes less necessary. however, in this case continuing to push the boundaries becomes more of a necessity for YOU, since otherwise these kinds of women will slowly morph into asexual frumps who will bore you to death.
so you can look at these as survival techniques, whether to keep your woman’s natural sluttiness focused on you (former case) or to keep yourself actually wanting to fuck her (latter case).
—
still, though, what’s interesting to me is that you seem to write from a standpoint of reluctance, although despite yourself you are slowly letting your eagerness boil up to the surface.
most guys’ reluctance comes from one of three things: (a) feminist brainwashing about “abuse” and/or the corresponding belief that women don’t actually like to be pushed in this way; (b) the mistaken assumption that a “sluttier” woman will also want to be sluttier with other men, too; and/or (c) fear of social consequences.
as for (a), i’m sure you’ve already moved past that, if you have even a remedial education in PUA stuff.
as for (b), well, not only is that wrong, but it’s the direct opposite of the truth. women are hydraulic — they have a limited amount of steam to expel at any given time (though the amount varies greatly from woman to woman), so you should not only let all the steam out on a regular basis, but also be a vacuum and suck out the steam she didn’t even know was there.
as for (c), good old common sense is king here.
2010/06/22 at 05:11
I don’t think PUA game was ever meant to do anything more than make consequence-free sex with hot women available for a wider male participant group than previously participated.
Long-term relationships need a slower burn. You need to actually bring yourself to the table, too. At some point, you have to acknowledge that you’re dealing with a human being, and not just a female target.
When you reach that point, … and you’ve stretched the envelope too far, …
The result is usually inevitable.
So if you’ve trained yourself to practice game, then how to avoid the inevitable fate?
This become a more relevant debate when you find yourself dipping into the chalice of love deeper than you’d expected.
2010/06/22 at 05:34
I don’t think PUA game was ever meant to do anything more than make consequence-free sex with hot women available for a wider male participant group than previously participated
i disagree.
obviously this is the focus of most of the material that is out there, but that’s more for reasons of commercial and practical expedience than for reasons of original intent.
commercially, it’s a lot easier to sell to men’s dicks than to their hearts, and it’s also a lot easier to sell a product with short-term payoff than to sell a product with long-term payoff. hence, the opportunity for immediate profiteering from the get-laid-quick schemes was, is, and will be greater.
practically, it’s a lot easier for these guys to figure out the mechanics of getting laid than to figure out the mechanics of feeding, watering, and maintaining a long-term relationship. in the former case it’s easy enough to collect a large sample size — go out, run game, analyze results, lather, rinse, repeat — but in the latter case it’s impossible to collect a direct sample size greater than 1 or 2, unless you are too old to connect with a skeptical core audience.
in fact, the only way to collect a non-negligible sample size for LTR is to go the unit 731 route. my only hypothesis for why this hasn’t happened more is that guys are too busy analyzing their own side of the equation to bother analyzing the woman’s side.
in any case, i’m giving the PUA guys the benefit of the doubt here. if you are correct, and this really was their original intent, then, while they have certainly enlightened their share of guys, they have also badly misjudged the characteristics of their core audience.
in particular, the core audience of PUA stuff consists of people who are actually cerebral enough, and willing enough, to sit down with a bunch of theory and get cumulatively better at it. not surprisingly, almost all such people tend to fall into my builder / vertical integrator category above, and so, while they may indeed enjoy the ride of fucking a few sluts, most of them are actually looking to build an LTR.
the men who are most naturally suited to pure PUA stuff — the scatterbrained, impulsive, devil-may-care horizontal integrators — are for the most part simply not going to have the patience or attention span to sit down with PUA theory and learn it. not to mention that most of these guys are already getting lots of pussy.
in fact, i would hypothesize that very few members of the PUA guys’ core audience actually have the exclusive intention of just fucking a variety of women, without wanting to build long-term relationships.
if you subtract out the men who have found the PUAsphere while picking up the pieces of a broken relationship — men who are, at least temporarily, numb to any sort of emotional benefit that may accrue in a long-term relationship — then the number of people remaining, with both (a) the patient and meticulous personality required to study and master this sort of nuanced material AND (b) the desire to just fuck as many women as possible without the ultimate goal of a LTR, will be perilously close to zero.
in fact, the current situation of the PUAsphere is a lot like that of an experimental drug — the long-term consequences are simply not known, since no one has been taking the drug long enough to participate in a longitudinal study.
the one thing for which i would pay good money, among all PUA related things, would be a “where are they now?” exposé in twenty to twenty-five years.
2010/06/22 at 05:38
Long-term relationships need a slower burn. You need to actually bring yourself to the table, too. At some point, you have to acknowledge that you’re dealing with a human being, and not just a female target
please elaborate on what you mean by this; there are too many things that it could mean.
2010/06/22 at 05:45
@Gorbachev
This become a more relevant debate when you find yourself dipping into the chalice of love deeper than you’d expected.
oh Gorbachev. I did warn you. Hopefully johnnyfive will be able to give you some advice to keep the relationship going.
2010/06/22 at 07:01
@ sd, gorbachev —
one way to prevent hitting the proverbial wall after an unusually fast seduction is to be the yellow line itself, rather than to be the person pushing the grocery cart.
gorbachev, i haven’t read all of your posts, so feel free to correct me if i am in error, but i get the sense that you’ve got a pretty solid sexual hold on this girl, but that you are still feeling regular flashes of beta.
in this case, rather than trying to keep amping up the sex game, you should leverage your current sexual power, and use it to establish authority over her.
there are many ways in which you can do this, and it’s not my place to try to choreograph every step of a dance that isn’t mine. however, the basic idea is that, having wormed your way far enough into her libido, you have now reached the beginning of a critical time period in which you have to establish the connection between your dominance of her in the bedroom and your growing dominance of her outside the bedroom.
in your case, this is probably the only practicable route for taking her firmly in hand.
the development of this connection is a lot like that of language learning in children: the earlier, the better. if you want this relationship to grow without serious interruptions, especially with the backdrop of pernicious feminist go-girl influence (an even bigger factor than usual, if she’s a super-high-class woman), you are going to have to start taking your control of her sexuality, break the capsule that surrounds it, and allow it to metastasize slowly but surely to the rest of your relationship. and you’re going to have to do it NOW.
i can give examples, if you like, but they will in all cases be more suggestive/general than prescriptive/specific.
but the general idea is this:
* flip the script
* gradually get her to a place where she views absolutely everything sexual, from mere kisses on the cheek to _________, as something you give her when she’s a good enough girl
* gradually increase your demands in exchange for such “favors”
* watch your authority over her, and concomitantly her respect for you, explode
yeah.
2010/06/22 at 07:07
btw, if you doubt the effectiveness of the above, stop for a second, think, and realize that this is exactly the same mechanism by which domineering wives extract increasingly onerous favors from their husbands.
in fact, these wives are really good at it — they can force hubby to turn lead into gold at the mere distant possibility of sexual “favors”. oh, the stories i could tell you about these hotwife types. o tempora o mores!
the secret, of course, is that this is the way that these wives really feel — they really are so unattracted to hubby, by this point, that they honestly feel that the smallest of sexual pittances is worth, say, a diamond tennis bracelet.
the mindfuck here is that you have to get to the point where you “deign” to indulge the girl’s sexuality, if she’s a good little slave girl.
the second mindfuck comes when you wake up one day and the quote marks around “deign” are gone.
2010/06/22 at 09:20
Yeah, I think your comment on necessity is about right. The girl I’m with now is low dynamism. I don’t see her ever morphing into asexuality, but boredom would be a problem without the … elastic freak method. Yeah, ED was a disaster.
I’m not reluctant to get started on EF. It’s more like, I want to keep it in context with the rest of Game theory. I’m not worried about a, b or c.
The deign to fuck concept puts together a couple of concepts that have been floating around, that I’ve seen before, but never integrated into their full significance and possibility. Good stuff. Quadrants, DtF, EF, lacquer altruism…
Have you crossed the Rubicon from deign to fuck to 3-somes and beyond, open harem management? I have the feeling it could work.
2010/06/22 at 09:48
The deign to fuck concept puts together a couple of concepts that have been floating around, that I’ve seen before, but never integrated into their full significance and possibility. Good stuff. Quadrants, DtF, EF, lacquer altruism…
stay tuned.
Have you crossed the Rubicon from deign to fuck to 3-somes and beyond, open harem management? I have the feeling it could work.
there is no such rubicon, just as there is no “step function” between winter and summer, or between not bald and bald, or between parading your woman around in a tight dress and pimping the pussy.
these are all sliding scales.
2010/06/22 at 12:56
Ah yes, I keep forgetting the Slide Rule.
By the way, have you seen this and this:
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/gods-perfect-beta/#comment-181142
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/gods-perfect-beta/#comment-181144
I calculated women’s social perceptiveness and body language reading advantage at between .8 and 1.3 SD. That’s similar to the IQ difference between blacks and whites, which LGDL has referred to as the great sociological constant. It’s enough to create an underclass and overclass in the relationship manipulation market.
2010/06/22 at 17:57
This blog is to Roissy as reading your psychology textbook’s section about Freud is to reading Freud. Excellent. I’ll be coming back for more.
2010/06/23 at 22:38
Damn, j5, you’ve got some good stuff here. I liked your commenting over at Roissy’s but this is even better.
> i can give examples, if you like, but they will in all cases be more suggestive/general than prescriptive/specific.
but the general idea is this
….
[etc]
Include all details. I’m not sure if you’ve codified the J5 Method a la the Mystery Method; it’s to have many eager readers.
Incidentally, I’ve actually met Daniel Rose. The guy is a short Asian dude… who includes in his harem blonde professional Southern girls a foot taller than him. He’s built like Bruce Lee, and trains just as hard.
2010/06/24 at 04:30
I’d have been very surprised if Daniel wasn’t for real. Still it’s very good to have confirmation. Thanks.
2010/06/24 at 05:44
phenomenal thread, great blog.
question on the elastic theory and its reliance on delta: seems like it’s not something that can continue forever. (Unless it’s a long-cycle push-pull thing. Periods of retreat as well as advance.) Maybe that’s the peril of applying a somewhat simplistic analogy from mathematics or materials science to the complexities of human nature. But where does it end? if it’s about the delta and the elastic expansion, doesn’t that present a natural bound, a finite and short life-span, to a relationship based solely or mainly on that kind of behavior? Or else, snap. I think Gorb is right, you have to mix in real love and respect, some of those good-beta qualities that women really value mixed in with the alpha attractors in their ideal mates.
2010/06/24 at 10:23
I think Freak Slider game works as a name. Freakdom is both what’s most impressive about J5 to the ladies and what sent him down the rabbit hole. Slide is both central to the descriptive theory of female nature and verb for the decadent slide of the practitioner, that is its most spectacular feature. Plus, it captures everything necessary to revive an LTR, which is what the author intends to impart to his audience.
2010/06/24 at 12:13
maurice #33 —
we’ll get there.
as of this writing, my blog is less than five days old; at the moment, we are still on first principles.
you were one of those kids, weren’t you. heh.
2010/06/26 at 04:30
maurice #33
Or else, snap. I think Gorb is right, you have to mix in real love and respect, some of those good-beta qualities that women really value mixed in with the alpha attractors in their ideal mates.
yep, those are the “beta sliders”. i’ll write more on those when my schizophrenic thoughts congeal a little more.
the basic idea is that the beta qualities are essential in producing longer-term bonding with a woman.
it’s possible to create bonding in a woman with nothing but alpha qualities, but the resultant bonding will dissipate in a very short time — it won’t prevent the woman from seeking other mates. an exclusive long-term relationship can’t be managed solely with alpha qualities, unless those qualities are coupled with violence and/or physical control.
in fact, the beta qualities will increase long-term bonding in a woman, but only if they are kept below the level of the alpha qualities by a certain amount.
for instance, think of affection. affection is certainly a beta quality.
imagine how repulsive pure affection is to a woman.
now imagine the power of sprinkling (sprinkling — not pouring) spurts of strong affection into a sexual relationship in which the man is otherwise dominant and selectively cruel.
that’s the formula that keeps ’em coming back.
in fact, more accurately, it makes them keep themselves coming back.
more later.
2010/06/27 at 17:30
[…] Five – “Hold ‘Em“, “Opening Doors“, “To Whatever Self be […]
2010/07/02 at 12:52
Interesting.
Never heard anyone in these parts show “beta” as anything but bad.
2010/07/16 at 10:27
[…] the prayer above. it’s possible that i’m too much of a horizontal integrator to make things last once i’ve built them. whether this is by natural temperament or by the […]
2013/06/23 at 06:56
I need to to thank you for this great read!! I definitely
loved every little bit of it. I have got you bookmarked to check out new stuff you
post…