The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Guys, Never Do This

Posted on | May 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

Are you a parent? Do you have a teenage son? Have you talked to him about how to deal with girls? Because if boys are not properly instructed, they will turn out to be pathetic losers, like Tyler:

 

Who does this? Set aside, for the moment, the fact that the guy knew he was hitting on a lesbian. Who thinks that obscene text messages are an appropriate way to propose a hook-up? Even beyond that, why are you messaging the girl at all? How is Tyler a “friend” to Emily?

She is not your friend, Tyler.

This is where popular culture misleads people with romantic scripts that never work in real life. There are all sorts of ensemble-cast TV comedies about groups of 20-something friends in which the luckless guy and the quirky girl strike up a romance that begins as friendship. And so Tyler imagines that his “friend” Emily Greberman, despite her avowed lesbianism, might be secretly harboring a crush on him, or something.

She is not your friend, Tyler.

And you were never her friend, either. You were apparently hovering around Emily — the Beta orbiter — in the misguided belief that “lesbian” is a synonym for “just needs to meet the right guy.” No, sir, Tyler. Any intelligent person (a category that doesn’t include you) could have looked at Emily’s Instagram page and seen she has no heterosexual potential.

Here’s an idea I wish to share with young men, and adults who may be in a position to counsel young men: Don’t waste time on cold prospects.

Time is a young person’s most precious resource, which they are apt to squander foolishly. From the time a boy is about 15, he is on a mission to find The One, and it behooves him to learn to be opportunistic and resourceful in pursuit of that goal. Some guys are lucky, born with natural advantages in the competition, and I have in the past referred to this as the 1-in-7 rule. About 15% of guys are just natural-born Alpha males, and never have any problem finding female companionship. Such guys are generally athletic and gregarious and, while they might make errors and misjudgments in their pursuit of The One, they will never be lonely.

The 1-in-7 are winners by nature, and everything written to advise guys on how to be successful with girls — all pickup artist (PUA) “game” theory — is for the benefit of the other 85% of guys. The natural-born Alphas don’t need “game.” They can play badly and still win. Maybe that explains Tyler’s clumsiness. Maybe he’s a jock who is accustomed to being able to score more or less effortlessly (“a little up front . . . never been one to hold back”) and therefore imagines that every girl he meets is interested in him. But if that were the case, why did Tyler resort to hitting on a known lesbian? If he’s really a winner, Tyler would already have all the action he can handle and wouldn’t even think about bothering his “friend” Emily.

Tempus fugits, young man. Don’t waste time.

There is a term in PUA lexicon called “push-pull”:

For example, when you call a girl for the first time, and you don’t ask her out, and you get off the phone first, you are practicing push-pull. She is receiving mixed messages: “He seems to like me, he seems to enjoy my company, but he didn’t ask me out. Why didn’t he ask me out?” Or when you invite a girl to a group activity: on one hand, you’re asking her out, but on the other it doesn’t feel like a date, so she doesn’t know where she stands.

What this is about, really, is putting the ball in her court. It’s like what I call “stick-and-move,” a way to work a group gathering. Rather than to target one girl and go bulldozing in, you circulate the room, making introductions, a bit of small talk, and then move on. You’re a busy guy and there are lots of fish in the sea, so you don’t waste the entire night targeting one girl as if you’ve got no other prospects. This is what I call rifle-vs.-shotgun. Some guys make the mistake of aiming directly at one girl they want to get (the rifle approach), rather than playing more generally for any girl that might be interested (the shotgun approach). Girls can’t stand a guy who seems desperate, and if you crowd a girl into a corner at a party and try to monopolize her time (which is where the rifle approach leads), you’re signaling desperation. Using stick-and-move and push-pull, what you’re doing is allowing her to feel a sense of personal agency — she is actively choosing you, rather than having her choices foreclosed by the unwelcome intrusion of a needy loser.

None of this works, however, if you can’t read signals. What does attraction look like? How does a girl signal interest in a guy? How do you know whether she welcomes your advances? You can’t learn this stuff if you’re not observant, and you can’t observe female behavior patterns by sitting in your room playing Call of Duty every night, which is why so many young guys are utterly hopeless with girls nowadays. Isolation not only means you’re missing out on potential opportunities to meet girls, it also leads to a loss of social skills and — let’s face it, loser — if you had good social skills to begin with, you wouldn’t be alone in your room, so you’re degrading from a level that’s already substandard. That’s how you end up in Elliot Rodger “incel” territory. Not a good place to be.

Emily Greberman is a sophomore at Drexel University, where the annual cost of attendance is $65,892 including room and board. It seems safe to assume that Tyler is one of her classmates and so the question is, why is this guy who can afford to attend Drexel so desperate that he’s making rude overtures to a lesbian? Like, you’re a young guy from an upper-middle class background with a promising future, and you’ve got nothing better to do with your time? While we’re at it:

NEVER SAY RUDE STUFF IN A TEXT MESSAGE!

Years ago, when the Anthony Weiner scandal happened, I read my teenage sons the Riot Act on this subject. Don’t ever say anything in a text message (or email or DM) that you wouldn’t want to see published on the front page of the New York Times. Guys who think “sexting” is fun are creating trouble for themselves. Especially if you’re sending or soliciting nude photos from people, you need to stop, step back and think. Digital communications create a permanent record, and yet some guys will say stuff to girls in an online format that they would never say to her face — as if she’s never going to show this to anyone else? Fool!

This goes for girls, too, by the way. No girl should ever believe she can send nudes to a guy and he’s not going to show that to his buddies. Young people, male and female alike, are living in a very dangerous age, thanks to advances in communications technology. Parents are being negligent if they do not warn their kids about these dangers.

Look at what happened to Tyler. We don’t know his last name, but I’ll bet money that every one of Emily Greberman’s friends knows who he is, and he is now “cancelled,” as the kids say. Tyler’s reputation has been permanently damaged by his stupid text message to Emily.

She is not your friend, Tyler. She was never your friend.

If Emily were your friend, as soon as you started in on that pursuit, she would have stopped texting and called you on the phone, to explain how stupid your behavior was. Friends don’t let friends be ignorant, you see, and Tyler obviously needs to be properly educated. Exactly how someone so ignorant got into Drexel, I can’t imagine, but if Tyler had any real friends, they wouldn’t let him remain so ignorant. So now that he’s been “put on blast,” as the kids say, Tyler probably thinks he’s being unfairly victimized, but he is actually just a victim of his own ignorance.

Well, that’s 1,300 words of education, and there’s no point belaboring it endlessly. The bottom line is, guys have to get smart, or they’re going to pay the price for their stupidity. Selah.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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One Response to “Guys, Never Do This”

  1. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    May 18th, 2019 @ 10:11 am

    […] The Other McCain with some advice on how not to be a pathetic loser. Guys, Never Do This […]