The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi 2013

The Iron Rules of Tomassi

Iron Rule of Tomassi #1

Frame is everything.

Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s

frame in which you are operating.

Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.

The concept of “frame” is yet another ephemeral idea that had need of a term in the very beginnings of the great masculine awakening that’s become the ’community’. If memory serves I think it may have been PUA Godfather Mystery who first picked up on what’s really a very rudimentary and well established psychological principle.

In psychological terms, frame is an often subconscious, mutually acknowledged personal narrative under which auspices people will be influenced. One’s capacity for personal decisions, choices for well-being, emotional investments, religious beliefs and political persuasions (amongst many others) are all influenced and biased by the psychological narrative ’framework’ under which we are most apt to accept as normalcy.

The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we’re painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame. What concerns us in terms of inter-gender relations however is the way in which frame sets the environment, the ambiance, and the ’reality’ in which we relate with both the woman we sarge at a bar and the relationship with the woman we’ve lived with for 20 years.

One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is not power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ’reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender’s internalized concept of frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you’re operating in hers. Also understand that the balance of frame often shifts. Frame is fluid and will find its own level when a deficit or a surplus of will is applied to change it. The forces that influence that lack or boost of will is irrelevant — just know that the conditions of an operative framework will shift because of them.

Pre-LTR Frame

Often I’ll see forum posts or blog comments lamenting some loss of frame — “Lost the

frame, how do I get it back?”

A lot of times guys believe that because a woman initially gave them indicators of interest (IOIs) or was ’really into them’ in the beginning that they had ’frame’. This is another unfortunate misconception about frame — and I partly blame the PUA culture for it — but frame is not interest level (IL). Simply because a woman is attracted to you does not mean she’s ready to ’enter your reality’. Her entering your frame may become a byproduct of that attraction, but it by no means guarantees it. In truth, under today’s social environment, I would expect a woman to resist tooth and nail from rushing into a man’s frame. This is why women have psychologically evolved a subconscious propensity to shit test; to verify the legitimacy of a man’s frame.

Most Game incongruities develop around a guy’s inability to establish frame and opting in to a woman’s frame. What’s ironic is that on a base level, we understand frame imbalances instinctively. If you feel like you’re being led on, or being made to wait for sex, you’re operating in her frame. Are you in the ’friend-zone’ or did you accept an LJBF rejection? You’re in her frame.

Ideally, you want a woman to enter your reality. Her genuine (unnegotiated) desire for you hinges upon you covertly establishing this narrative for her. Famous men, men with conspicuous affluence and status, and men with overwhelming social proof have very little difficulty in establishing frame — they can’t help but establish frame in a very overt fashion. A woman already wants to enter that world. She wants an easy association with a man who’s unquestionably a proven commodity and offers her hypergamy not just a actualized fantasy, but also a high degree of personal affirmation in being the one a Man of this caliber would choose above other women.

Unfortunately, you and I are not this Man, he’s a feminine idealization.

However it’s important to understand how hypergamy plays into establishing frame.

The Man who impassively accepts women’s hypergamous natures has a much easier time establishing frame from the outset. You or I may not be that be that famous guy with an automatic, overt frame control, but we can be by order of degrees depending upon our personal conditions and the conditions of the women with whom we choose to associate.

The default pedestalization of women that men are prone to is a direct result of accepting that a woman’s frame is the only frame. It’s kind of hard for most ’plugged in’ men to grasp that they can and should exert frame control in order to establish a healthy future relationship. This is hardly a surprise considering that every facet of their social understanding about gender frame has always defaulted to the feminine for the better part of their lifetimes. Whether that was conditioned into them by popular media or seeing it played out by their Beta fathers, for most men in western culture, the feminine reality is the normalized frame work.

In order to establish a healthy male-frame, the first step is to rid themselves of the

preconception that women control frame by default. They don’t, and honestly, they don’t want to.

Post LTR Frame

In most contemporary marriages and LTR arrangements, women tend to be the de facto authority. Men seek their wives’ “permission” to attempt even the most mundane activities they’d do without an afterthought while single. I have married friends tell me how ’fortunate’ they are to be married to such an understanding wife that she’d “allow” him to watch hockey on their guest bedroom TV,…occasionally.

These are just a couple of gratuitous examples of men who entered into marriage with the frame firmly in the control of their wives. They live in her reality, because anything can become normal. What these men failed to realize is that frame, like power, abhors a vacuum. In the absence of the frame security a woman naturally seeks from a masculine male, this security need forces her to provide that security for herself. Thus we have the commonality of cuckold and submissive men in westernized culture, while women do the bills, earn the money, make the decisions, authorize their husband’s actions and deliver punishments and rewards. The woman is seeking the security that the man she

pair-bonded with cannot or will not provide.

It is vital to the health of any LTR that a man establish his frame as the basis of their living together before any formal commitment is recognized. As I stated in the beginning, frame will be fluid and conditions will influence the balance, but the overall theme of your relationship needs to be led and molded by you.

Even very influential, professional, intellectualizing women still crave the right man to establish his frame in her life. They may fight it bitterly, but ultimately it’s what will make for the best healthy balance she can achieve. There’s a growing undercurrent of mid-life women questioning and regretting their past decisions to remain single into

spinsterhood. And for all their late game rationalizations, the one thing they still simply refuse to accept is acknowledging that a man’s frame, the frame their “fierce independence” wouldn’t allow for, was exactly the salve their egos so desperately want now later in life.

Gentlemen, you will establish frame in any monogamous relationship you have.

You will enter her reality or she will enter yours.

Iron Rule of Tomassi # 2

Never, under pain of death, honestly or dishonestly reveal the number

of women you’ve slept with or explain any detail of your sexual

experiences with them to a current lover.

You’ve been with how many girls?!!

Rational reader Poker ran this one by me recently:

I’ve been seeing this girl and we’ve slept together a few times… Today, in bed, I got asked, “How may girls have I been with?” and “Why won’t I be her friend on Facebook?”

How many girls question…

Here’s how I handled it — would love to know if you think this was handled properly… (using cocky-funny attitude)

Me: “I don’t tell that.”

Her: “More or less than 20?”

Me: “I have some freedom of information forms in the car — you could fill one out and get your answer in 20 years.”

Her: “Don’t you want to know how many guys I’ve been with?”

Me: “No.”

The single most disastrous AFC move a man can make is to overtly describe past sexual experiences and/or give a number (accurate or not) to how many women he’s been with prior to the one he’s with.

This simple act, whether you offered the information or she dragged it out of you, always comes off as pretentiousness and is often the catalyst for an avalanche of emotional resentment, if not outright emotional blackmail from an insecure woman. This is a rookie mistake that will only take you once to learn.

If a woman puts you on the spot by directly asking you for this information always sidestep this COVERTLY. C&F works wonders in this situation and still keeps the air of mystery and challenge about you.

Her: “So how many girls have you been with?”

You: “You’re my first actually”

Her: “Really, how many girls have you been with?”

You:” You mean tonight?”

Her: “C’mon, how many girls have you been with?”

You: “You know, I really lost count after 50″ (or something outrageous).

When a woman asks you this question she is seeking confirmation of what she already suspects — Never give her this satisfaction. Remember, when a woman resorts to overt communication (covert being her native language) she’s generally exhausted her patience to be covert and this is a desperation tactic for an insecure woman.

While this scenario may be fraught with potential disaster, it is also an opportunity to encourage her imagination and prompt some competition anxiety.

Her: “How many girls have you been with?”

You: “I have an idea, lets fuck and then you can tell me how many girls you think I’ve been with, OK?”

A lot of Game rookies think that since they’ve only been with 1 or 2 women in their lives what’s the harm in open, honest, full disclosure? Like most Betas they bought the “open communication is the secret to a good relationship” meme long ago, so the impulse to be upfront is their default response.

They tend not to see the utility in keeping that information, or being ambiguous about it, plants a seed of competition anxiety and stokes her imagination. When she knows she’s your first, you’ve just abdicated the frame to her in any kind of relationship.

Second, if she’s your 9th then every girl up to 8 becomes a stamp in her collection to use against you in the first fight you have. Every date you take her on she wonders “Did he take #6 here too?” It’s as if you cheated on her with every previous girl up to her.

I should also add that this is the first question a BPD (borderline personality disorder) woman will ask you so she can feel horrible about herself for not measuring up to “your standards” and drag you into the emotional hell-pit with her.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #3

Any woman who makes you wait for sex, or by her actions implies she is making you wait for sex; the sex is NEVER worth the wait.

When a woman intentionally makes you wait for sex you are not her highest priority.

Sexuality is spontaneous chemical reaction between two parties, not a process of

negotiation. It’s sex first, then relationship, not the other way around. A woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. She will fly across the country, crawl under barbwire, climb in through your second story bedroom window, fuck the shit out of you and wait patiently inside your closet if your wife comes home early from work — women who want to fuck will find a way to fuck. The girl who tells you she needs to be comfortable and wants a relationship first is the same girl who fucked the hot guy in the foam cannon party in Cancun on spring break just half an hour after meeting him.

If a girl is that into you she’ll want to have sex with you regardless of ASD (anti-slut defense) or having her friends in the room videotaping it at a frat party. All women can be sluts, you just have to be the right guy to bring it out in them, and this happens before you go back to her place. If you have to plead your case cuddling and spooning on the bed or getting the occasional peck on the cheek at the end of the night, you need to go back to square one and start fresh.

I’m probably going to ruffle a few PUA feathers here, but I’ve never been a proponent of breaking down LMR (last minute resistance) with a woman. Maybe it’s a result of experiences in my rock star 20′s, but at some point I came to the conclusion that sex with a woman who’s organically turned on by me is always a far better experience than one where I had to sell her on the idea of sex with me before the act.

Now don’t take this to the binary extreme and assume I mean the only good sex you’ll ever have is a first night lay (FNL) with some tart who can’t keep her legs closed. What I mean is that if you’re still trying to figure out what the magic words are to convince some girl that she ought fuck you after 3 dates — or longer — you’re in desire negotiation hearings counselor. You are wasting your time and limiting your opportunity with better prospective women in waiting out a woman who would defer less than 100% of her real desire to have sex with you. The sex will never be worth the wait.

A prostitute would be a better alternative.

Genuine desire cannot be negotiated.

Once you get past a certain point in the waiting game, what once had the chance to be an organic, sexual desire becomes mitigated negotiation of a physical act. Just the fact that you’re having to make a case for yourself (even covertly) is evidence that there are other factors inhibiting her capacity to be sexual with you.

As I stated, barring a physical inability, this is almost always because of an unmentioned agenda on her part. It may be due to a concurrent boyfriend, it may be a natural internal caution, it may be that your process is telegraphing ’beta’ to her, or it may be that she’s filibustering you while waiting to see if another, more preferable guy pans out for her, however, none of these are insurmountable if she has a genuine desire to bang you.

Many a cheated on boyfriend knows this is true.

In any circumstance, sex with you is not an urgency for her. If she’s perceiving your value as high as it should be, she wont hesitate longer than a few dates to become

sexual — and she certainly wont tell you she’s making you wait. Hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock.

One of the more frustrating situations I often encounter comes from guys who’ve been overtly told that they’re being made to wait for sex until some circumstance or criteria is met for the woman. The standard filibuster (or loss-leader as the case may be) usually comes with the reasoning that she “needs to feel comfortable” before she has sex with a guy. Even more distressing is the guy who was getting laid, only to be told the same thing by an existing girlfriend. If you find yourself in either of these situation there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

First and foremost, sex, by it’s nature is uncomfortable. Sex that is motivated by mutual, genuine desire is a tense affair, fueled by testosterone, anxiety and urgency. When two people get together for a first dance (a precursor to copulation), it’s rarely if ever an intimate slow dance. It’s salsa, it’s grinding, it’s pumping, it’s heat and it’s sweat. What it’s not is comforting and familiar. It’s not a nice warm bathrobe fresh out of the dryer.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but sex is threatening. It needs to be, and you need to be considered a sexualized player in her personal sphere. Overtly agreeing to wait for her to become sexual is anti-seductive. It confirms for her that you aren’t a sexualized player to her; an Alpha wouldn’t wait for sex and she knows this. Worse still, it devalues her SMV as being worth less than of your utmost urgency.

Secondly, always remember why women resort to overt communications (the language of men) — so there is no, or less, margin that her message will be misunderstood. If a woman, point blank says, “I’m not having sex with you until X,Y, and Z happens”, what is her medium telling you? That there is a precondition that’s more important to her than fucking you with genuine, uncontrollable passion.

You want her to be so into you that she’s willing to break the rules. The ideal situation is for her genuine passion to be so uncontrollable for you that she’d renounce her religion and throw her convictions to the wind to be with you. That might seem a bit dramatic, but you get the idea. The good news now is that she’s being overt, which means she’s exhausted her reserves to be covert and, assuming you’re not so desperate as to delude yourself, you can NEXT her and move on.

Rapport ≠ Comfort

A lot of “waiters” find all that a tough road to hoe. They want to stick it out and see if things “might develop”, and NEXTing their ’waiting girl’ seems a lot like throwing the baby out with the bath water after all the time they’ve invested in building what they think is rapport. Usually this is due to the guy not spinning (enough) other plates that would bear more fruit. However, keep this in mind; waiting for sex isn’t building rapport.

There’s a lot of confusion about rapport, most of which is due to well meaning PUAs conflating rapport with comfort. It’s a pretty esoteric term, but rapport is a connection; it’s an implied trust between two acting agents who previously had never met or only have limited knowledge of each other. You can have rapport with an animal — that’s the connection, it’s instinctual.

Comfort comes from familiarity and predictability; all decidedly anti-seductive

influences. And while comfort has it’s own merits in interpersonal relationships, it is not the basis for genuine, passionate sexual desire. For people (myself included) involved in a marriage or LTR, it’s serves our long-term best interest to convince ourselves that sex is better when your comfortable with your partner, however, the reality of it sings a different tune.

Here’s an easy illustration: As reported by both men and women alike, which of these circumstances provokes the most intense, memorable sexual experiences ? When a couple plans and arranges a romantic “date night” to ’keep it fresh’ and reconnect? Or is it the ’make-up sex’ after a horrible breakup, or narrowly averted breakup, where long dormant competition anxiety is brought back into being a very real possibility again? If you said the breakup, you’re correct! One scenario is comfortable, the other uncomfortable. One has the element of predictable certainty, the other is chaotic and uncertain, however in both situations there is definitely a working mutually connective rapport operating.

Three Strikes

The problem inherent with coming up with hard and fast Game rules of engagement is that there’s always going to be a caveat or special conditions for a guy’s particular girl of focus at the time. Even when there’s not, guys are prone to think “there’s something special about this one.” Part of the reason that Plate Theory is integral to Game is that it encourages Men to disabuse themselves of their previous Beta impressions of each woman they accidentally drew interest from as some unique little snowflake. It’s hard for your average chump to think of a woman showing base-line rudimentary IOIs (indicators of interest) and NOT think she’s predestined for him by virtue of his self-acknowledged scarcity mentality. When you’re starving in the desert, Saltine crackers seem like mana from heaven.

Risk & Reward

In Game, there is a subtle balance that needs to be recognized between risks of over-investing in a particular woman with regards to practicality and not throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water and losing on a potentially rewarding opportunity. Women, as is particular to their own Game, will naturally come down on the side of casting doubt on a man’s valid assessment of a woman’s potential value, both in long term perspectives and potential sexual satisfaction. This presumption of doubt is a built in failsafe social convention for women; “if only you’d been more patient, if only you invested a little bit more, you’d be rewarded with a great mother for your children and the best pussy of your life — don’t blow it now!”

The short version is that it’s not in women’s best sexual-strategy interests for a man to have sexual options. Women’s sexual strategy is very schizophrenic — ideally women want a Man that other women want to fuck, but in order to assess his sexual market value to other women he’s got to have exercisable options for her to compete against, or at least display indirect social proof to that effect. So, she needs to limit his options while simultaneously determining he has those options. Now add to this the hypergamous necessity of maintaining a reasonable pool of potential suitors suspended in doubt of her own SMV in order to determine the best one among them for short term sexual provisioning and long term security provisioning.

Pragmatism

In light of understanding women’s sexual strategy, it’s important for Men to adopt a mental schema of pragmatism — in the SMP you’re really another commodity in hypergamy’s estimation. I realize the difficulty most guys (particularly younger guys) have with mentally training themselves for thinking this way, so let me state that I’m not suggesting you kill your romantic, artistic souls in favor of cold calculations. In fact it’s vital you do keep that side of yourself intact for the survival of any future relationship and a more balanced human experience. Plate Theory and, really, efficient Game can seem

dehumanizing, but what Game denialists fail to grasp is that they’re already operating in a dehumanized environment — it’s the social conditioning of the feminine imperative that makes men believe that Game is inhumane, because the feminine imperative has made itself synonymous with humanity.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if you’re a great, poetic soul. Hypergamy doesn’t care about your most sincere religious devotions. Hypergamy doesn’t care if you’re a great Father to your kids. Hypergamy seeks its own level, it wants the best commodity it’s capable of attracting and maintaining. Hypergamy is above all, practical, and thus Men, the True Romantics must be pragmatists to enact their own sexual strategy.

I had a lot of shit slung at me when I initially offered up the third Iron Rule. I had the

predictable feminine doubt doctrine lobbed at me in response from the beginning.

I expected that, but to answer the question more definitively, be pragmatic.

Put it this way, with just average Game, in 3 dates you should be able to determine if her desire level is high enough to want to fuck you.

In 3 dates you’ll know if her desire is genuine or if it’s mitigated by something else — another guy in rotation, sexual hangups, filibustering, she’s in the down phase of her menstrual cycle, etc.

In 3 dates you’ll have had sex or you’ll have had the “I wanna wait / I need to be

comfortable talk.”

If you have sex on the 1st date or a same-night-lay, in all likelihood she’s really hot for, and into, fucking you based on physical criteria alone.

If you have sex on the 2nd or 3rd date, she’s into fucking you and probably wants a

relationship, but she wanted to give you a token impression of her not being ’easy’.

If she fucks you after the 4th date, you’ll do as her first alternate.

If you’re sexless after 5-6 dates you’ve probably been at it for over 6 weeks and

The Medium is the Message. NEXT.

Disclaimers

This rule has proven to be the single most contentious thing I’ve ever published on

The Rational Male. Only my essays on the nature of Alpha has stirred up more

controversy. For motivated, hypergamous reasons, my arguing for genuine sexual interest as an indicator of desire on a woman’s part never sits well with women. Furthermore, even many red pill men have argued that a woman’s immediate sexual interest is the sign of a slut.

My counter to these arguments is generally based in women’s observable, organic

behaviors. While it may be ennobling to consider that a woman might want to be cautious with whom she has sex, women’s biology and hypergamous nature puts that assertion to the test. Similarly it seems prudent for a monogamy minded guy to be discerning about the character of a woman who was an “easy lay” — and likewise he’ll make a liar of

himself if that natural opportunity arises.

That’s going to be a consistent paradox with this rule, but it doesn’t make it any less

tenable. Even for the more religious minded men, who’s convictions compel them to chastity, the rule still provides them with a benchmark for genuine desire. As I outlined in Plate Theory, you don’t have to be banging every girl on your roster, but those women should want to be banging you. If this is your position, ideally, rule 3 should be modified to filter for genuine, not mitigated, not negotiated desire.

Iron Rule of Tomassi #4

Never under any circumstance live with a woman you aren’t married to

or are not planning to marry in within 6 months.

You are utterly powerless in this situation. Never buy a home with a girlfriend, never sign a rental lease with a girlfriend. Never agree to move into her home and absolutely never move a woman into your own established living arrangement.

I’m adamantly opposed to the “shacking up” dynamic, it is a trap that far too many men allow themselves to fall into. My fervor against this isn’t based on some moral issue, it is, again, simple pragmatism. If you live with a woman you may as well be married because upon doing so every liability and accountability of marriage is then in effect. You not only lose any freedom of anonymity, you commit to, legally, being responsible for the continuation of your living arrangements regardless of how your relationship decays.

I should also emphasize the point that when you commit (and it is a financial commitment) to cohabiting with a girlfriend you will notice a marked decrease in her sexual availability and desire. The single most common complaint related to me in regards to how to reignite a woman’s desire comes as the result of the guy having moved into a living arrangement with his LTR. All of that competitive anxiety and it’s resulting sexual tension that made your single sex life so great is removed from her shoulders and she can comfortably relax in the knowledge that she is your only source of sexual intimacy. Putting your name on that lease with her (even if it’s just your name) is akin to signing an insurance policy for her:

“I the undersigned promise not to fuck any woman but this girl for a one year term.”

She thinks, “if he wasn’t serious about me, he wouldn’t have signed the lease.” Now all of that impetus and energy that made having marathon sex with you an outright necessity is relaxed. She controls the frame and she’s got it in writing that it is for at least a year.

Just don’t do it. Relationships last best when you spin more plates or at the very least keep each other at arm’s distance.

There was a time when the hip, counter-culture thing to do was flip the establishment the bird and cohabit with a girlfriend, sans the marriage contract. In the swinging post-

sexual-revolution 70′s, feminism was more than happy to encourage the idea until it ran into the problem of making men financially accountable for all the “free milk” the cows were giving away. However, that not withstanding, there’s still a kind of a lingering after effect feeling about “living together” that seems like a good idea to guys to this day.

Of all the reasonable excuses I’ve heard for men wanting to cohabit with their girlfriends, the most common is that they did so for financial reasons. He (or she) needed a roommate and why not one that they enjoy fucking?

That’s the cover story, but underneath it there’s the semiconscious understanding that it would be far more convenient to have a continuous flow of pussy as part of the utilities, uninterrupted by the formalities of having to go on dates or drive somewhere to get it. I can’t say that, on the surface, this doesn’t make perfect sense. Leave it a man to find the most deductive solution to his problem. However, as with most things woman, what seems like the most deductive solution is often a cleverly disguised trap.

Shacking up, just as in marriage, affords a woman a reasonable sense of comfort. It becomes at least a marginal shelter from the competition anxiety that she had to endure while living on her own and dating a guy who still had at least the perceived option to be unpredictable. Not so in the quasi-marriage that living together dictates. And it’s just this sense of predictability that allows her to relax into familiarity, and later, into dictating the terms of her own intimacy. In other words, she’s in the perfect position to ration her sexuality; to negotiate the terms of her desire in exchange for a living arrangement.

By the same reasoning, most AFCs view cohabiting as an ideal arrangement. Few of them really have the real options, much less the will to experiment exercising them, to see shacking up as anything but a great way of exiting the SMP, limiting potential rejection, and locking down a consistent supply of pussy.

Men who are spinning plates, men with options, men with ambition, rarely see cohabiting as anything but a limiting hindrance on their lives. On some level of consciousness women understand this dynamic; guys with options (the Alphas they’d prefer) wouldn’t consider cohabitation. So when a man agrees to, or suggests living together it impresses her with two things — either he’s an Alpha who she’s won over so completely that he’s ready to commit to exclusivity with her, or he’s a Beta with no better propositions than to settle into living with what he believes is his ’sure thing’.

What’s jarring for a woman is that she may start her living arrangement thinking she’s found the elusive Alpha ready to commit, only to later find he was just a clever Beta who reverts back into his former, comfortable, AFC self after they sign the lease agreement.

Now all that said, what makes more sense? To live independently and enjoy the options to live unhindered with a live-in girlfriend, or move her in and have to deal with her

every waking moment? Moving in with a woman implies commitment, and whenever you commit to anything you lose your two most valuable resources, options and the ability to maneuver.

Iron Rule I

Iron Rule II

Iron Rule III

Iron Rule IV

Iron Rule of Tomassi #5

Never allow a woman to be in control of the birth.

It’s called birth control because someone is ’controlling’ the birth.

There are presently 41 different types of contraception available for women, for men there are only 2 — vasectomy or a condom — your only line of defense against her ’choice’, the only thing separating a man from a lifetime (not just 18 years) of interacting with the decider of altering the course of his life is a thin layer of latex.

Always have protection. I’ve had far too many guys hit me with the argument that they implicitly trust their girlfriends to be on the pill or whatever, and that she “doesn’t want kids” only to be an unprepared Daddy nine month later after ’the accident’. The only accident they had was not being in control of the birth themselves. In fact I’d argue that men need to use extra caution when in an LTR since the ease of getting too relaxed with her is present.

Accidental pregnancy is practically a cottage industry now. For a woman without

education (or even with) and without means, an ’unplanned’ pregnancy may be a pretty good prospect, especially when every law and social expectation weighs in her favor. These are Professional Mommies. When I counseled in Reno I knew a guy who married this woman who had 3 children from 2 Fathers who he himself had impregnated with her 4th. She was a Professional Mother.

Flush it

In 2002 the NBA issued a highly controversial and publicized warning to professional basketball players stating that players be advised to wear condoms when having sexual intercourse with women when on road games and to “flush the condom down the toilet” in order to dispose of the semen. This warning was the result of several paternity suits that year involving women these players had slept with by retrieving the condoms from the trash and ’self-impregnating’ with the players semen. The NBA had enough occurrences of this kind to warrant a league-wide warning that year. All of these players are now 100% liable for the welfare of these children and their former partners by default because there are no laws protecting men from fraudulent pregnancies.

To what degree is protection implicitly implied? If a man does everything in his power to avoid a pregnancy (barring abstinence or a vasectomy) and can prove his intent and the woman still becomes pregnant, even by fraud, the man is still liable for that pregnancy. Women are 100% protected and men are 0% protected. I can even go so far as to quote you cases where a man marrying a single mother later divorces her and is still expected to pay future child support for a child he did not father — even without official adoption of the child by the man.

A lot of guys would like to make a moral issue of this but it’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s dealing with the facts of what is in the environment we find ourselves in today. The fact of the matter is that unless men use prior discretion and take responsibility for the birth ’control’, not allowing a woman to be solely responsible for it, he is 100% powerless. This means bring your own condoms and flush them yourself, and yes even (especially) in an LTR or marriage. That means standing firm even when she says “take that thing off I’m on the pill and I want to ’feeeeel’ you.”

Mothers want to be Mothers, otherwise they’d decide not to be. Single Mommies are far too common an occurrence to bet the odds with the rest of your life.

The sexual revolution had far more to do with the development of hormonal means of birth control than the legalization of abortion. Condoms have been around since before World War II, but even in the Baby Boom there were far less unwanted pregnancies or single motherhood than after the advent of the pill. The pill put the control of birth into the hands of women where before it was a man’s responsibility to put the rubber on and do so correctly if both wanted to avoid smaller versions of themselves running around the house.

The Choice of Professionals

Abortion rates skyrocketed in the decades after estrogen based birth control was developed, thus prompting a need for legal and clinical regulations of abortions as well as reforming paternity laws in the 70s. There had certainly been abortions (both the medical and back-alley variety) prior to this, but if you look at the increase in abortion statistics both before and after the advent of a convenient form of birth control moderated by the women taking it, it’ll blow your mind.

And now even with the vast variety of birth control methods available to women today and 30+ years of safe medical abortions, we still see an increase in single mother families and abortion rates. One would think that these statistics would be lower in light of all this modernization and the ’leaps’ women have made culturally since the sexual revolution, but sadly no.

In fact the single mother birth rate has climbed (adjusted for population) since a leveling off in the late 80s and abortion is just as popular as ever even when new methods such as the ’morning after pill’ and RU286 are readily available. And conveniently, the social ills as a result are placed squarely on ’dead-beat Dads’ rather than the women choosing to have the children.

This isn’t a scientific problem, it’s a cultural one. Mothers want to be Mothers. Men are only Fathers when a woman decides this for him even in the happiest of marriages. I think (hope) we’ll see second sexual revolution once a male form of hormonal contraception is tested and available, but you can bet dicks to donuts that every interested party from the religious to the feminist will fight this method’s release to the public at large and come up with every sort of veiled explanation for its demonization in order to put the agency of birth control exclusively into men’s control. I sincerely doubt men will “forget to take it” or have their ’accidents’ in the numbers women do.

Controlling the Birth

It’s a much different task to put on a condom in the heat of the moment (reactive) than to simply swallow a pill in the morning (proactive). It’s arguable what the more difficult task is, to remember to take a pill in the morning or to apply a condom at the appropriate time. In the latter situation there are at least two people aware that a condom should be on prior to intercourse; is a woman equally an accomplice in her own pregnancy if she consensually has sex with a guy without a condom? They both know the assumed risks, however a woman forgetting to take her pill isn’t reviled as an ’idiot’ or negligent as a man not putting on a condom.

Taking her birth control is up to her and rarely would a guy be certain on a daily basis that his partner was faithfully taking her pill. In fact to even ask about it would be presumptuous and bordering on rude if it’s a casual encounter. When a man and a woman fail to take the precaution of putting on a condom they’re both aware of it. When she fails to take her pill either accidentally or intentionally, she is the sole party responsible for that pregnancy, but in either case she decides the course of the man’s life should this occur.

The obvious answer is to put men in control of the birth — wear a condom. However the nature of mens birth control is reactive and even in the case where a man has the condom in his pocket, he can still be thwarted by her only saying, “don’t worry about it, I’m on the pill”; the control shifts, but the accountability never does.

Forgive me for belaboring the point, but there are no accidental mothers. Consider fertility statistics and that it takes a considerable amount of negligence for a woman to miss several pills on a regular basis to ’accidentally’ become pregnant. One could also argue that even a couple engaging in condom-less sex could still be relatively confident that a woman wont get pregnant even if she’s missed several pills regularly. Again my point being that it takes effort to become pregnant. Even without any birth control at all and timing my wife’s ovulation cycles for our sex it took us 4 months to conceive our daughter.

This is why I laugh at the accidental pregnancy excuse so common these days. If a woman wants to become pregnant she can do so with impunity and contrive any excuse she’d like about accidents, but the guy is an ’idiot’ for not wearing a condom and taking responsibility for his actions, even if he’s led to believe she’s taking control of her contraception. Yet he is the one penalized both financially and socially because of her choice.

Iron Rule V

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6

Women are fundamentally incapable of loving a man in the way

that a man expects to be loved by a woman.

Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.

This pull quote comes from Xpat Rantings blog. The discourse there is brief, but insightful:

“I really, really, really hope the myth that girls are the hopeless romantics gets kicked to the curb ASAP. Everyone needs to realize that men are the “romantics pretending to be realists” and women; vice versa.”

I found this particularly thought provoking — Men are the romantics forced to be the realists, while women are the realists using romanticisms to effect their imperatives (hypergamy). This is a heaping mouthful of cruel reality to swallow, and dovetails nicely into the sixth Iron Rule of Tomassi:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6

Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation.

Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this

idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of any capacity for women to love Men as Men would like them to.

For the plugged-in beta, this aspect of ’awakening’ is very difficult to confront. Even in the face of constant, often traumatic, controversion to what a man hopes will be his reward for living up to qualifying for a woman’s love and intimacy, he’ll still hold onto that Disneyesque ideal.

It’s very important to understand that this love archetype is an artifact from our earliest feminized conditioning. It’s much healthier to accept that it isn’t possible and live within that framework. If she’s there, she’s there, if not, oh well. She’s not incapable of love in the way she defines it, she’s incapable of love as you would have it. She doesn’t lack the capacity for connection and emotional investment, she lacks the capacity for the connection you think would ideally suit you.

The resulting love that defines a long-term couple’s relationship is the result of coming to an understanding of this impossibility and re-imagining what it should be for Men. Men have been, and should be, the more dominant gender, not because of some imagined divine right or physical prowess, but because on some rudimentary psychological level we ought to realized that a woman’s love is contingent upon our capacity to maintain that love in spite of a woman’s hypergamy. By order of degrees, hypergamy will define who a woman loves and who she will not, depending upon her own opportunities and capacity to attract it.

Men in Love

I once had a woman ask me this innocuous question in a comment thread:

“Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

As would be expected, the male responses to this and her follow up comments ranged from mild annoyance of her naiveté to disbelief of her sincerity with regards to her “want to know.” However, her original wonderment as to whether men did in fact know when a woman doesn’t love them, I think, carries more weight than most guys (even manosphere men) realize. So I’ll recount my comments and the discussion here.

Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?

No, they can’t.

Why? Because men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the romantic ones.

Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves. So yes, men can’t tell when a woman doesn’t love them, because they want to believe women can love them in the ways they think they could.

One man responds:

All right, I keep hoping your rule #6 is wrong, but it hasn’t proven to be. So is the big lie that men miss not that women can provide this, but that we don’t invest this energy into

fellow men? That we don’t find men we can be vulnerable with, so that we are emotionally prepared for the trials that women will create in our homes. Is this why so many women tend to isolate their husbands or boyfriends from their male friends early on in marriage or dating?

Presuming this woman was genuinely confused (and I’m half-inclined to think she is) this is exactly the source of her confusion. Women’s solipsism prevents them from realizing that men would even have a differing concept of love than how a woman perceives love. Thus her question, “can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

I don’t necessarily think it’s a ’big lie’, it’s just a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. If it’s a ’lie’ at all it’s one men prefer to tell themselves.

Bridging the Gap

Later in the discussion Jacquie (who is one of the two female writers to make my blogroll) brought up another interesting aspect of bridging the lack of mutuality between either gender’s concepts of love:

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing? Or is it something she should strive for continuously with the hope that she can at least move somewhat closer to this idealized love? Is it even too much for her to comprehend?

As I was telling the first guy, it’s more a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. The original question about whether a man can determine when a woman doesn’t love him goes much deeper than she’s aware of. I think a lot of what men go through in their blue pill Beta days — the frustration, the anger, the denial, the deprivation, the sense that he’s been sold a fantasy that no woman has ever made good upon — all that is rooted in a fundamental belief that some woman, any woman, out there knows just how he needs to be loved and all he has to do is find her and embody what he’s been told she will expect of him when he does.

So he finds a woman, who says and shows him that she loves him, but not in the manner he’s had all this time in his head. Her love is based on hypergamic qualifications,

performance, and is far more conditional than what he’d been led to believe, or convinced himself, love should be between them. Her love seems duplicitous, ambiguous, and seemingly, too easily lost in comparison to what he’d been taught for so long is how a woman would love him when he found her.

So he spends his monogamous efforts in ’building their relationship’ into one where she loves him according to his concept, but it never happens.

It’s an endless tail-chase of maintaining her affections and complying with her concept of love while making occasional efforts to draw her into his concept of love. The constant placating to her to maintain her love conflicts with the neediness of how he’d like to be loved is a hypergamic recipe for disaster, so when she falls out of love with him he literally doesn’t know that she no longer loves him. His logical response then is to pick up the old conditions of love she had for him when they first got together, but none of that works now because they are based on obligation, not genuine desire. Love, like desire, cannot be negotiated.

It took me a long time, and was a very tough part of my own unplugging when I finally came to terms with what I thought about love and how it’s conveyed isn’t universal between the genders. It took some very painful slap-in-the-face doses of reality for this to click, but I think I have a healthier understanding of it now. It was one of the most contradictory truths I had to unlearn, but it fundamentally changed my perspective of the relations I have with my wife, daughter, mother and my understanding of past girlfriends.

I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible, but it would take a woman to be self-aware enough that men and women have different concepts of their ideal love to begin with, which is, improbable. The biggest hurdle isn’t so much in women recognizing this, but rather in men recognizing it themselves. So, hypothetically, yes you could, but the problem then becomes one of the genuineness of that desire. Love, like desire, is only legitimate when it’s uncoerced and unobligated. Men believe in love for the sake of love, women love opportunistically. It’s not that either subscribe to unconditional love, it’s that both gender’s conditions for love differ.

Iron Rule VI

Iron Rule of Tomassi #7

It is always time and effort better spent developing relations with new,

fresh, prospective women than it will ever be in attempting to

reconstruct a failed relationship.

Rollo, HELP! I fucked up big time and I want her back! How do I get her back?

Easily one of the most common questions I’ve fielded at SoSuave over the past 7 years has been some variation of “how do I get her back?” It’s common for a reason; at some stage of life every guy believes that rejection is worse than regret. Lord knows I tried to recover an old lover or two in my own past. Whether due to infidelity on her part, your own or a regression back to a Beta mindset after initiating an LTR, this is one Iron Rule you should always refer back to.

Never root through the trash once the garbage has been dragged to the curb. You get messy, your neighbors see you do it, and what you thought was worth digging for is never as valuable as you thought it was.

Even if you could go back to where you were, any relationship you might have with an ex will be colored by all of the issues that led up to the breakup.

In other words, you know what the end result of those issues has been. It will always be the 800 pound gorilla in the room in any future relationship. As I elaborated in the Desire Dynamic, healthy relationships are founded on genuine mutual desire, not a list of negotiated terms and obligations, and this is, by definition, exactly what any post-breakup relationship necessitates.

You or she may promise to never do something again, you may promise to “rebuild the trust”, you may promise to be someone else, but you cannot promise to accept that the issues leading up to the breakup don’t have the potential to dissolve it again. The doubt is there. You may be married for 30 years, but there will always be that one time when you two broke up, or she fucked that other guy, and everything you think you’ve built with her over the years will always be compromised by that doubt of her desire.

You will never escape her impression that you were so optionless you had to beg her back to rekindle her intimacy with you. The extraordinary effort you would need to get her back is far better spent on a new prospective woman with who you have no history.

Iron Rule VII

Iron Rule of Tomassi #8

Always let a woman figure out why she wont fuck you, never do it for her.

“Rollo, I’m newly Game-aware, red pill guy and I’ve been meeting girls with more and more success since my conversion, but I can’t help the feeling that the really hot girls I want to get with a so out of my league.

Any suggestions?”

An integral part of maintaining the feminine imperative as the societal imperative involves keeping women as the primary sexual selectors. As I’ve detailed in many prior comments and posts, this means that a woman’s sexual strategy necessitates that she be in as optimized a condition as her capacity (attractiveness) allows for her to choose from the best males available to satisfy that strategy.

This is really the definition of hypergamy, and on an individual level, I believe only the most plugged in of men don’t realize this to some degree of consciousness. However, what I think escapes a lot of men is the complex nature of hypergamy on a social scale.

For hypergamy to sustain its dominant position as the default sexual strategy for our society, it’s necessary for the feminine imperative to maintain existing, foster new, and normalize complex social conventions that serve it. The scope of these conventions range from the individualized psychological conditioning early in life to the grand scale of social engineering (e.g. Feminism, Religion, Government, etc.)

One of these social conventions that operates in the spectrum of the personal to the

societal is the idea of ’leagues’. The fundamental idea that Social Matching Theory details is that “All things being equal, an individual will tend to be attracted to, and are more likely to pair off with, another individual who is of the same or like degree of physical attractiveness as themselves.” In a vacuum, this is the germ of the idea behind the ’leagues’. The social convention of ’leagues’ mentality is where ’all things are not equal’ and used to support the feminine imperative, while conveniently still supporting the principle of social matching theory.

The latent function of ’leagues’ is to encourage men to filter themselves out for women’s intimate approval.

As social conditions progress and become more complex, so too do men’s ability to mimic the personal attributes of providership and security. In other words, lesser men become intelligent enough to circumvent women’s existing sexual filters and thus thwart their sexual strategy. These ever increasing complexities made it hard to identify optimally suitable men from the pretenders, and women, being the primary sexual selector, needed various social constructs to sort the wheat from the chaff. With each subsequent generation they couldn’t be expected to do all of this detective work on their own so the feminine imperative enlisted the aid of the men themselves and created self-perpetuated, self-internalized social doctrines for men to comply with in order to exist in a feminine defined society.

The concept of leagues is just one of these doctrines. Your self-doubt about your

worthiness of a woman’s intimacy stems from a preconditioned idea that ’you’re out of her league’. The booster club optimist idea that “if you think you can’t, you’re right” is true, and boundless enthusiasm may overcome some obstacles, but to address the source of the disease it’s more important to ask yourself why you’ve been taught to think you can’t.

A lot of approach anxiety comes from your own self-impression — Am I smooth, hot, affluent, funny, confident, interesting, decisive, well-dressed enough to earn an HB 9′s attention? How about an HB 6? Our great danger is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.

I’m not debating the legitimacy of the evaluative standards of the sexual market place — it’s a harsh, often cruel reality — what I’m really trying to do is open your eyes as to why you believe you’re only meritorious of an HB 7. Looks count for a lot, as does Game, affluence, personality, talent, etc. but is your self-estimation accurate, or are you a voluntary participant in your own self-devaluation in the SMP courtesy of the leagues mentality the feminine imperative would have you believe?

The Economy of the League

As I stated above the purpose of fomenting a stratified league mentality in men serves to autonomously filter the lesser from the greater men for women to chose from, however, it also functions to increase the valuation of the feminine as a commodity.

Like any great economic entity, the feminine imperative lives and dies by its ability to inflate its value in the marketplace. Essentially the feminine imperative is a marketeer. One of the sad ironies of this, and the last, century is that the feminine imperative has attempted to base women’s SMP valuation on a collective importance to the detriment of the individual woman’s SMV. For men this is inverted; a man’s sexual valuation is primarily individualized, while men as a collective gender are devaluated in the SMP.

What I mean by this is that, as a collective entity women’s sexuality cannot afford to be perceived as anything less than the more valued prize. If all vaginas are considered the gold standard then men’s sexual default value will always be lower. By this definition men, on whole, are out of women’s league.

For further consideration lets assume that average men, most being varying degrees of Beta, are blessed with the ’miraculous gift’ of an average woman’s sexual attentions.

The power dynamic is already pre-established to defer to a feminine frame, so it’s small

wonder that men would be prone to ONEitis even with an objectively average woman.

This is the intent of the League schema — to unobjectively predispose men to commitment with women who under objective condition couldn’t enjoy the same selectivity. It’s been postulated that for a healthy relationship to exist the Man must be recognized by the woman to be 1-2 points above her own SMV. This is a pretty tall order considering the feminine imperative’s emphasis on women’s sexuality being the more valued as default. This is to say nothing of contemporary women’s overinflated self-evaluations due to the rise of social media.

Gaming the League

All of the above isn’t to say that there isn’t a kernel of truth to the notion of leagues; it’s just not the “truth” men have been led to believe. For as much as the feminine imperative would have men subscribe to leagues, it equally seeks to exempt women from the same league hierarchy by evaluating women as a whole.

Needless to say men have their own rating systems — most popularly the ubiquitously physical HB (hot babe) 1-10 scale. I should add that it’s a foregone conclusion that any rating system men would establish for women in the feminine reality would necessarily need to be ridiculed, shamed and demonized, but you knew that already.

Irrational self-confidence is a good start to circumventing and unlearning the concept of leagues; unlearning this conditioning being the operative goal. The Game-aware Man can actually use the concept of leagues to his advantage with enough guile.

When you approach a woman without regard to a league mentality or even a Zen-like obliviousness to it (ala Corey Worthington, the Alpha Buddha), you send the message that there’s more to you than a feminine reality can control. It’s exactly this disregard for the influence of the feminine imperative that makes the Alpha attractive; he’s unaware of, or indifferent to the rules his conditioning should have taught him earlier.

Just in the attempt of Gaming a woman obviously “out of your league” you flip the feminine script by planting a seed of doubt (and prompting imagination) about your perceived value. Doubt is a very powerful tool, in fact the very concept of leagues is founded upon men’s self-doubt. Turn that tool to your advantage by disregarding women’s social

convention of leagues.

Iron Rule VIII

Iron Rule of Tomassi #9

Never seriously self-deprecate with a woman you intend to be intimate with.

Apologizing for a lack of Game isn’t Game.

One disservice I think most men tend to overlook is an attitude of self-depreciation that they’ll resort to as a means of engendering interest in a potential woman by attempting to play to her sympathies.

Case in point (printed with permission):

Subject:

My apologies for being a complete douche

Body:

I actually wanted to call and talk to you tonight, but I just moved into my new place today and lost track of time and now its after midnight. Anyways, I was a complete tool the last time we talked. I thought about what you said to me, and I really have been lame lately. I think back to our first couple of “dates”, and I realize what a complete and boring reject I was. Those weren’t so much dates as me trying way too hard to impress you as someone that was mature (bad word choice, but I dunno what I was doing) and not myself.

Anyways, I now realize I need to get this pole out of my ass and start having fun again in my life. Which is why I have been in a drunken stupor for the last 2 weekends.

I hope we can start hanging out again, because I do enjoy your company. But I promise if we do, I will drink, relax, and not be such a wallflower. I also promise no more gay-ass text messages. I hate when people do that to me, so I can only imagine how retarded i look when I do it.

-Allen

This was an actual email passed on to me from a young woman I counseled after she blew this guy off over the course of three dates, and is one of many emails and IM texts I’ve gone over time and again with women. This is a textbook example of how men will resort to self-depreciation tactics in order to provoke an “It’s OK, I understand” sympathy response from a woman with the expectation that she’ll take ’pity’ on him for being a “flawed man” and give him a second (or third, or fourth) chance, or any chance at all.

This is a direct manifestation of men being socially conditioned to recognize and

acknowledge their weaknesses, and in confessing them they will become strengths, and ergo, attractions (since they mistakenly believe that doing so will make them “not-like-other-guys” and therefore unique). “You see? I’m really a sensitive, introspective guy willing to cop to his own character flaws, please love me.”

Iron Rule of Tomassi #9

Never Self-Deprecate under any circumstance.

This is a Kiss of Death that you self-initiate and is the antithesis of the Prize Mentality. Once you’ve accepted yourself and presented yourself as a “complete douche” there’s no going back to confidence with a woman.

Never appeal to a woman’s sympathies. Her sympathies are given by her own volition, never when they are begged for — women despise the obligation of sympathy. Nothing kills arousal like pity. Even if you don’t seriously consider yourself pathetic, it never serves your best interest to paint yourself as pathetic. Self-depreciation is a misguided tool for the AFC, and not something that would even occur to an Alpha.

People seem to get confused about how self-deprecation really functions. I’m not suggesting that a Man take himself so seriously that he can’t laugh at himself; in fact a brilliant tactic is to present a prevailing, ambient sense of seriousness, then admit to and laugh at whatever goof it was that removes you from it. Nothing endears a Man more to a woman than to think only she can break through your shell and get you to find humor in yourself. However, true self-deprecation, as illustrated in Allen’s (lower case ’a’ noted) email, is self-initiated. It’s not the “ha ha, look I slipped on a banana peel” sense of

deprecation, it’s the “I’m a complete douche, but really I’m worth the effort” apologetic sense of deprecation. There is a marked difference between being pathetic and being able to laugh at yourself in good faith.

I’m not advocating that guys never own up to mistakes or wrongs they do; you should sensibly apologize in given situations depending on the conditions and do so appropriately, however self-depreciation is another mental schema entirely.

Humility is a virtue (up to a point), but it’s simply not a virtue that a woman you’re interested in will ever appreciate in the manner you think they will, and in fact often conveys the opposite intent. Virtuous humility is no substitute for self-confidence.

If you are already involved with a woman, she may develop a socially mandated sense of appreciation, but again this is only up to the threshold of you trading her estimation of your confidence for your ability to address fault on your part. When a woman delivers a shit test based on this, and a guy submits through self-depreciation it’s damage done that’s not easily undone. Admitting fault is not a strength that inspires women — it’s still about the fault. It may be the honorable, necessary, truthful thing to do, but don’t believe for a moment women will value you more in the confession of fault.

That said, true self-depreciation is pervasive. Contemporary men have become so steeped in deprecation and male ridicule by popular media that it seems a normative way of attracting women.

The message is ’women love men who laugh at Men’. Thus, you have to be hyper-aware of it and unlearn it. You have to catch yourself in mid-sentence so to speak. Women operate in the sub-communications and when you overtly admit to a lack of confidence in yourself or your collective gender you may as well just LJBF yourself.

That’s a strong impression you wont recover from easily if ever. Women want a competent, confident, decisive Man from the outset, not one who’s self-image is that of a “complete douche” or even a partial douche. The stereotype of the quirky, but lovable guy who bumbles his way into a woman’s heart may work for romantic comedies, but not in the real world. I should also add that when you become hyper-aware of this you can also turn it to your own advantage when dealing with a competitor or you’re sarging a girl with a self-depreciative boyfriend or suitor. It’s all too easy to reinforce her estimation of a guy like this by covertly confirming it for her, while at the same time playing up your own confidence and value.

All of this is not to say that it’s wrong to recognize your own weaknesses and understanding when you’re in the wrong. It’s simply how you go about addressing it that’s the point. There are plenty of ways to assume the responsibilities of fault that aren’t self-depreciating. The easiest way is to always adopt the attitude that you’re ’getting better all the time’. This mentality fosters confidence and projects ambition, whereas self-depreciation shoves your nose in the dog shit and says “please love me anyway?”