Learning the social game from a woman's perspective, and what men can learn too
How and why to be ladylike is by a woman, but a woman who says she has light autism or aspergers or something and who thus needs to be explicit about the things most women prefer remain implicit: like that women live in the land of ambiguity and "maybe," which is one reason men developed game theory and are primarily interested in game theory. Game theory mathematicizes ambiguous interactions. Overall, if you want a woman's pretty good analysis of the social world, "How and why to be ladylike" is it. Although the essay is very good, it is also missing or misconstruing a few things, which will not surprise regular Red Quest readers.
Opposition (her writing name is "sympathetic opposition") says that some women are tempted by the "being overtly sexy" strategy and they can get the following results,
another reason that men might kind of split on you, really liking you at first and then getting mad at you, is that they feel screwed over. they were being nice to you because you seemed sexually available to them, you weren’t, they feel cheated and also dumb. that’s their problem–except, you’re doing all this in the first place as a social strategy, and when the social strategy doesn’t work, that’s your problem. morally they’re probably in the wrong here for expecting something you never said you would give them but we have to talk strategically here.
She's describing the problem "niceguys" who don't understand the game have. Understanding women is important, but it is also important to understand how this sort of thing looks and feels to a man. If you are a woman, imagine being in a world in which the most delicious pastry imaginable, more delicious than any pastry imaginable, is sitting on a tray that seems like one of those free-sample trays. "Great!" you think. "This is the most amazing food in the universe." You reach for it... and just as your hand brushes the crust, a blaring alarm goes off. Red flashing lights turn on. You're confused. The pastry tray retracts. Angry security people appear, as if from nowhere, like they do in Vegas casinos when someone gets too drunk or stupid.
Suddenly, you are unexpectedly forced to make some weird, stammering apologies to the angry security people, who have heard the weird, stammering excuses before. "But, but, but," you say, "it looks like a free sample? There is no price tag on it, or cashier, or anything?" Maybe you get away this time, but the experience is shameful and humiliating, and you vow never to erroneously attempt to get the pastry again.
As you will have figured out, this is what it's like being a guy in a world full of overt female sexuality that you can't access because you don't have the game to access it.
All that female sexuality seems to be available, but, if you don't have good game, it's not. If the social and other cues seem to tell you, "This is a free sample!" and then the company is like, "THIS IS NOT FREE AND HOW DARE YOU THINK THAT," then you are going to be justifiably confused. And that is the world young guys come up in, and the world many, many women are creating (the younger they are, the more likely the woman doesn't 100% understand the world she's creating). In the normal social and economic world, not everything is made explicit: Opposition says that "morally they’re probably in the wrong here for expecting something you never said you would give them." But something can be promised without being explicitly said. That's part of what's happening here.
There are other versions of this, too... say a woman is wearing a shirt that shows off her tits. If the guy looks at them, he's a creep. Smart guys learn to focus on eye contact and not to glance at her tits. Her tits are, to use game terminology, a shit test. To actually hold the tits and put your tongue on her nipples, you have to maintain eye contact. The tits being out are a test, and being a man is a series of numerous tests, many of which are easy to fail. Men face these kinds of counterintuitive tests all the time. The tits seem like they're there to be looked at, don't they? Sort of, but that's mostly wrong. They're attracting men, yes, but they're also testing whether he can ignore them while he seduces the woman.
Young guys don't realize much of this, so they do in fact feel cheated and kind of dumb a lot of the time. No one explains any of this to young guys, except for Uncle Red Quest and other guys writing about the game. Young guys are in fact too dumb to read, most of the time, and most of what the school system tells them to read is worthless at best and more often counterproductive from a game and seduction standpoint. There are worse books than, I don't know, Catcher in the Rye, or whatever is being assigned today, but not that many.
Opposition says we should imagine we are a young woman. She's developing some level of sexual attractiveness,
which sometimes cause people to behave threateningly or at least unpleasantly towards you, and definitely put you in a lot of awkward situations you didnt ask for. & also bc you're being judged & it’s hard to get a break. what to do?
This is correct in that men do sometimes behave threateningly or unpleasantly towards women, attractive or otherwise. Obviously. To say otherwise is oblivious or moronic. Many men's resources underestimate or don't foreground the problems women face. But men probably wind up in more awkward situations than women, in terms of both awkwardness and number of situations, simply because men have to make the first move.
The easy way for a man to get a social "break" is to do nothing. In which case nothing happens. He can't just sit around and wait for offers, he has to learn how to make the offers, which is infinitely harder. Try sales sometime. Sales is a lot harder than buying. Women are so used to being buyers and not sellers that even this woman, Opposition, doesn't even conceive of the awkwardness that being a seller entails. Also, women are being judged for being sexy? Imagine how much more men are being judged for trying to make anything sexual happen for and with a woman.
Point is that the awkwardness asymmetry is not slight, it's vast. I think she's right that women do feel awkward in many situations. Notice the phrasing Opposition uses: "another option is to intentionally be less attractive than you could/naturally would be. you will get less goodies this way but also have to deal with people less." "Get less goodies." There is a lot that could be said here. "Get less goodies" is probably the most honest and important line in the piece. Opposition doesn't foreground it.
A lot of women also like quality male attention, and even okay male attention, because that attention is fun (older women sometimes write essays decrying how they feel "invisible" when they are older, inevitably without realizing that most men feel sexually invisible for our entire lives, which is a hilarious oversight from the empathetic sex, don't you think?). So dressing down is a choice, but it means women won't get so many goodies from men.
If you read Red Quest, you'll notice a number of pieces on female psychology. Most guys appear to understand women poorly. Most guys who f**k appear to understand women well. Which are you? More importantly, which do you want to be?
In a way, the original essay[1] is also about how to deal with the fact that, for a woman, almost all men want to have sex with you, but you only want to have sex with a small number of them, and how do you deal with that? That’s essentially the female question between puberty and her early to mid 30s, if she’s height-weight proportionate (HWP). The central woman problem is choosing among men. The central male problem is getting one woman at all. We are not the same.
At the same time, it’s not just about the woman, but, from a game theoretic standpoint, it's about everyone else. If she is “ladylike” and the other girls are “sex bombs” guess who gets the attention. That’s the defection scenario I think she doesn’t adequately address. That scenario is appealing for good reason. One woman in the comments says, for example, "My problem is that I just deeply enjoy being flirtatious and can't really imagine acting ladylike." There are a lot of women like that around and they're fun. Very beautiful women can more easily choose a "ladylike" demeanor and still get good guys. The beautiful have different problems from the rest of us, as do the rich (a topic for a different piece).
Women do face real problems in dating. In the old world, pre-1960s, all of society was set up to control and channel female sexuality into the most stable, likely-to-succeed formation possible. This worked really well for monogamously-inclined women who wanted and loved children. As soon as women got antibiotics and effective birth control, they shed what they called "shackles" and what someone else could call "guardrails."
And then there are dating apps, which take existing dynamics and 10x them. I saw a tweet saying that, for women, the effect of dating apps is like the effect of porn on men. Women get this incredible surge of dopamine and a (somewhat fake) sense of power. Likes, compliments, messages, dates, free food and drinks, validation: it's all there. Can you blame routine female online daters for behaving so terribly, given the infinite positive reinforcement they get?
Today, women do have many more problems, when they're young, about how to handle the enormous, incredible power and privilege that is female beauty. And we've simply abandoned men altogether, relentlessly speaking of "male privilege" as if it's a huge privilege to fight in wars, go into burning buildings, collect the trash, construct the buildings, keep the electricity on, etc. etc. Everyone talks about female problems and no one, except guys interested in game and Red Pill, speaks to male problems. Institutions have gone entirely female. Feminists have won the word and paper space, even if men continue to dominate the real physical world. Women's major problem is how to be so hot that too many guys give them weird attention. I too cry for that serious, serious problem. We should put together a committee to solve it.
[1]What? It's a good essay, so I'm going to link to it twice. I'm a disagreeable person, so most of this essay is about me disagreeing and/or deepening/strengthening, even though the essay is very good. A guy I met through Red Quest said that if I have issues with it, I should write something better. In other words, he hit me in the face with a gauntlet, challenging me to a duel! Challenge accepted.
Nice. Thank you Sir.