The Other McCain

Returning to a theme that provoked some interesting comments yesterday (“Trouble in ‘Red Pill’ Land”), I notice that Adam Piggott has up a post entitled, “Do ugly men get laid?” And the answer, obviously, is yes they do. What Piggott points out is that many “incel” types blame their looks for their lack of success with women when, in fact, this is just a rationalization for their shortage of audacity. Success with women requires a certain insouciant boldness which the “incel” lacks. Such men are often described as being “on the spectrum” of austism, but rather than play armchair neurologist, I would observe that the loser tends to be an introvert by nature. Rather than seeing this as a personal problem to be overcome by self-improvement — learning how to introduce himself and make small talk — the introverted “incel” often resorts to a sort of sour-grapes rationalization about his unpopularity with women. The problem is not that he is a loser, but rather that women are cold-hearted, selfish sluts. This is the mentality that results in Elliott Rodger declaring himself “The Supreme Gentleman” before going on his revenge rampage.

 

Self-pity and envy are the worst of human emotions, as they reflect an abnegation of personal responsibility. It’s like Hillary Clinton claiming that “Russian collusion” cheated her out of the presidency, rather than admitting that she had every advantage in the 2016 election and lost because of her own clumsy blundering. Or it’s like those purple-haired SJW feminists who insist they are victims of patriarchal oppression, when the truth is they are just lazy, rude and stupid. Finding a scapegoat to blame for your problems may be emotionally satisfying, but it won’t solve your problem if the real problem is you.

What’s wrong with these guys?

A rising percentage of young American men report they are unable to find sexual partners, according to data from the General Social Survey (GSS) at the University of Chicago. The percentage of U.S. men 22-29 “reporting no sex in the past year” has increased more than 50% since 2009, from less than 10% to more than 15% of respondents in 2018, according to GSS data compiled by University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox. The declining sexual activity of Millennial generation males has reversed normal behavioral patterns. Until 2010, young females in the GSS were more likely than males to report no sexual contact in the past year; now, the “no sex” number is significantly higher for under-30 men than women in the same age cohort.

The plural of “anecdote” is data, as they say, and there is evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of cluelessness. My hunch is that a lot of these guys, like Elliot Rodger, have unrealistic expectations about the quality of female companionship they deserve. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” as the old saying goes. If the number of notches on your belt is zero, what does this say about your rank in the hierarchy? “Generation Incel” seems to imagine they should be scoring with blonde sorority girls, when they can’t even work up the nerve to ask the chubby checkout girl at the grocery store for a date. Fear of failure seems to paralyze these losers, and they become passive spectators in the sexual marketplace.

“There’s a fixation with their physical appearance and shame they have so little experience with women,” Boston University professor Emily Rothman said of her perusal of online “incel” forums. “There isn’t a middle ground of ‘what can I do to acquire the skills that I need to connect with women?’ There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of how dating and attraction work and that it isn’t solely about appearance.” If you consider yourself doomed, this will tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and this is why Professor Rothman notes the lack of a “middle ground” on the incel forums.

These guys have made failure the basis of their identity.

Meanwhile, other guys are ruining their lives by dating Miley Cyrus:

Miley Cyrus appears to have taken a subtle swipe at her ex-husband Liam Hemsworth — and, actually, most other men — while praising her new boyfriend Cody Simpson as ‘good people’.
The Wrecking Ball singer hopped on her Instagram live on Sunday evening to share some dating advice for her 100 million Instagram followers while drawing on her own experience.
With Cody, 22, sharing her live screen, Miley explained how she thought she ‘had to be gay’ due to the assumption that all men were ‘evil’.
Explaining why it took her so long to start dating Cody despite knowing each other for years, Miley said: ‘I was being a little too hardcore for him and his vibes and not allowing anyone in but now I am.’
Appearing to take a swipe at her estranged husband Liam Hemsworth, the popstar continued: ‘There are good people out there that just happen to have d**ks. I’ve only ever met one, and he’s on this live.’
Addressing her sexuality, Miley continued: ‘There are good men out there guys, don’t give up.
‘You don’t have to be gay, there are good people with d**ks out there, you’ve just got to find them.’

As I explained when Miley dumped Liam: Never trust a bisexual.

Having humiliated her ex-husband by publicly cheating on him with Kaitlynn Carter, now Miley’s claiming that she has suddenly found the one man in the world who’s good enough for her — and how long do you think this will last? Six weeks? Six months, maybe? Sooner or later, Miley will discard Cody Simpson, and what does that say about him?

Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see she’s bad news, and yet some guys are still foolish enough to fall into her vast chasm of craziness. These fools deserve whatever humiliation she inflicts on them.

 

Rollo Tomassi speaking in 2018.

This past spring, I traveled to Florida for the 21 Convention, a gathering of the “Red Pill” community (a/k/a, “The Manosphere”). What especially drew me to Orlando was a desire to see first-hand the men whose movement represents hope of turning back the tide of Third Wave feminism. There is only so much you can learn about people online, and the opportunity to meet these guys in person was important.

Scarcely had that event ended, however, than a schism of sorts emerged in the manosphere. There was a falling-out between the 21 Convention’s Anthony Johnson and Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi. While I don’t know the details of this quarrel, and am averse to being forced to choose sides in such a dispute where all participants are potential allies in the Culture Wars, I perceive that envy of Tomassi’s influence may be at the root of this schism. At any rate, several of Tomassi’s critics have formed a sort of alliance against him, and one of these critics, Jared Trueheart, sent me a copy of his new book The Red Pill Ideology: The Love Child of Pick-Up Artists and Feminists. Trueheart’s argument is essentially that the Red Pill movement peaked circa 2016 and is now passé, that changes in social and economic circumstances have rendered Tomassi’s insights on “intersexual dynamics” irrelevant. Well, I don’t think so.

Far be it from me to endorse every argument Rollo Tomassi has ever made, but the proof is in the pudding. That is to say, there are men who have read The Rational Male and assert that it literally saved their lives. By explaining female behavior, he helps readers understand their own romantic failures and find hope of future success. Consider one of Rollo’s controversial bits of advice (and one that Trueheart criticizes), that of “spinning plates.” The smart young bachelor, Rollo advises, should develop his options with multiple women, rather than succumbing to the temptation of “one-itis” (investing all his energy and resources in an idealized Dream Girl). This is just good common sense, especially when you consider how men are perceived from a woman’s perspective.

Two time-proven adages — “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Familiarity breeds contempt” — express the problem of the guy who clings too closely to a girlfriend (or potential girlfriend) in such a way that he seems helpless and desperate. What this looks like, from the girl’s perspective, is that this guy has no other options. No other woman wants him, and therefore his value is diminished in her eyes.

What the guy with a “one-itis” problem has done is to forfeit his power.

Despite everything that has changed in the sexual marketplace in recent decades, the fact remains that a young man who is going places in life — the guy with obvious future potential — is viewed as a highly desirable companion by young women. The labels “Alpha male” and “Beta male,” as used in the manosphere, may fail to capture this dynamic. Young women can be quite foolish in their choices, and feminism’s influence tends to rationalize and encourage female folly, but the wise young woman (the one who aspires to be “wife material”) assesses men according to their suitability as future husbands. Well, the high-quality young man is a commodity much in demand, his companionship is valuable, and such a man ought not to act like a desperate loser.

When Rollo tells guys to think in terms of “spinning plates,” he’s encouraging them to avoid a mentality that makes a guy seem like a loser. Your behavior when interacting with a woman you find attractive will tend to convey desperation if you feel you have no other options, that you must “close this sale” or be doomed to loneliness. Whereas, by contrast, if you’ve got in your speed-dial the numbers of a half-dozen girls you sometimes date, and who would be glad to drop in for “Netflix and chill,” your behavior with a new female acquaintance will tend to be more confident and casual — The Attitude:

Damone: All right… where did you see her?
Ratner: She’s in my biology class.
Damone: Did you get her number?
Ratner: No.
Damone: Did you get her name?
Ratner: No. It’s too soon.
Damone: It’s never too soon! Girls decide how far to let you go in the first five minutes.
Ratner: Well, what do you want me to do? Go up to this strange girl in my biology class and say, ‘Hello! I’d like you to take your clothes off and jump on me?’
Damone: I would. Yeah.
Ratner: Really?
Damone: I can see it all now. This is going to be just like the girl you fell in love with at Fotomat this summer. You bought forty bucks of f–kin’ film and you never even talked to her. You don’t even own a camera.
Ratner: You tell me, Mike. What do I do? . . .
Damone: This is what you do — start from the minute you walk into biology. I mean, don’t just walk in. You move across the room. And you don’t talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That’s what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Damone: That’s the idea, Rat. That’s the attitude.
Ratner: The attitude?
Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don’t care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin’. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.

That scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High ought to be mandatory viewing for young losers who don’t understand why they’re losing.

Having the appropriate mindset is as essential to winning at romance as it is to winning at sports. The problem with many young men nowadays is that they don’t have a positive male influence in their lives — Dads, older brothers, etc. — who can help them figure this stuff out. Too much of what young men think they “know” about women is either picked up from their (equally clueless) peers, or else a regurgitation of some feminist-friendly formula popularized by the media. What Rollo Tomassi is trying to do, it seems to me, is to provide his readers with the kind of knowledge that will be genuinely helpful to them. Oh, and by the way — this seems obvious to me, but perhaps it needs to be pointed out — the one thing a Red Pill guy should never do, when dealing with women, is to act as if he’s following some kind of script or using tactics.

One of the problems with the Red Pill community, which as Trueheart says grew out of pickup-artist (PUA) forums, is that once Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game became a bestseller, every would-be PUA in the country was operating according to the same script. And once all the little tricks of the PUA craft were published online, women could learn to spot a player’s game the minute he made his approach. The tactic of “negging,” for example, won’t work if the target knows it’s a tactic.

Back in the day — I speak of the late 1970s and early ’80s — it was just assumed that every guy in the disco was trying to score. There wasn’t much subtlety about that scene, and the only question was who would pair up with whom, and which guys would leave the disco alone. A lot has changed since then, but one of the constant factors is this: Male demand for sex, collectively, always exceeds the available female supply.

What this means is that men are always in competition against other men, and unless a guy is a natural winner — the true Alpha, who is irresistible to women — he will automatically lose out in this competition, unless he can otherwise develop some advantage.

This is basically an eternal problem for young men, but what has made the competition more ruthless in recent decades is the influence of feminism which teaches young women that the sexual competition is not men versus other men, but rather male versus female. According to the zero-sum-game mentality of feminism, male success is always harmful to women — he is her enemy, rather than her potential partner — and the goal of women should be not to find a desirable male companion, but rather to be completely independent of males. Feminism encourages young women to develop a hostile anti-male attitude, and young men are baffled in their attempts to understand and cope with this hostility.

What the Washington Post has called “the Great American Sex Drought” is the best evidence of feminism’s destructive “success.” Men and women are having less sex, and this is exactly the goal feminism seeks: Men are bad, and it is wrong for women to have sex with men.

Jared Trueheart suggests, and I think he may be onto something, that we can expect more men to return to religious morality in the near future. (He cites PUA legend Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh’s recent conversion to orthodox Christianity as portending such a trend.) However that may be, I don’t think it invalidates the Red Pill insights that Rollo Tomassi shares with his readers. Insofar as Tomassi is accurately describing patterns of female behavior, it does not matter whether one approves or disapproves of this at a moral level. The facts are still the facts, and while a genuinely Christian woman would not act like a party girl on the club scene, the temptation to sin is never really far away.

Jesus told his disciples: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” In other words, the Christian must necessarily be wise to the ways of the world, even as he seeks to avoid sinful temptation. The kind of secular wisdom conveyed by The Rational Male and its sequels has been applauded by Rollo Tomassi’s readers as life-saving knowledge, and we therefore ought not to disparage his work, simply because he doesn’t preach against fornication. If you want a sermon against sin, go to church. But if you want to understand women’s behavior — as it actually is, rather than what we might ideally hope it would be — I think you can learn a lot from Rollo Tomassi. And so I hope that somehow the schism in the manosphere can be mended, because it ill behooves men to be divided against each other, when feminists seek to unite all women against us.