He could have tried to use her as a sort of wingman and preselection by answering "Yes, I am. Wanna join me and see how it goes? Just don't cockblock."
There is a lot of selection bias in what she writes. The whole point of her article was to dump on some men, especially the fool Jonathan, and low-grade men in general. And talk herself up a bit. The men who are successful or whom she doesn't view as pathetic don't get written about here.
This is incredibly common amongst women. I would wager it is their #2 past time, right after thinking about whether they are getting as much a they "deserve" from everyone around them.
Yeah highly unusual for a woman to look for/observe Daygame as a system/entity then put herself into detective mode as a potential recipient. Women rarely being systems thinkers usually either frame it as 'if I go to x club or x shopping street I sometimes get hit on'. Probably has a more male brain and an agenda to push.
I once went to a week long training in Austin. The guys were brutally honest that it would not change who I was, but every interaction gave me experience and confidence. A sigma or alpha wouldn’t have needed to be there in the first place. For me it was essential to feel comfortable in getting dates, and they were right that your true nature comes out once you get into a relationship. Supposedly men change after they have been in relationships with enough women, but that would have been a LOT for me.
When I was following the "seduction community" closely around 2000-2010, there were lots of discussions about how to respond to questions like that. It was universally agreed that the right respond to questions like “Are you daygaming?” or “You’re a player, aren’t you?” is never to deny; rather, "agree and amplify" (Google it) works a lot better. Going one cut deeper, a high-status man is not ashamed of his own desires.
Going another cut deeper: "fake it until you make it" points toward the idea that while you should learn "correct" answers to these challenges, you should also use those "correct" answers to look deep into yourself and find out why you feel shame about hitting on girls. Is that shame appropriate? Well, when a delta hits on a woman who's out of his league, it's natural and "right" for him to feel some shame, and that won't go away unless he betters himself enough to be worthy of her. But many of us feel shame for many other reasons--sometimes religious training, sometimes (speaking for myself) growing up during a time when there were only feminist voices in the media talking about how awful it is for men to see women sexually. Learning the pick-up artist answers to question like "Are you daygaming?" ought to be a first step to looking into yourself and correcting wrong ideas you might have about what's shameful and what's virtuous. (There do exist sexual pursuits that are strongly virtuous--building a family is a Good thing.) And also to honestly appraise what level of woman you're worthy of.
Changing established behaviour is difficult, unpleasant and usually ends in failure. Take the hoardes of morbidly obese Americans losing their daily battle in the Donut aisle. Daytime cold approach is a psychological chaos engine with massive initial emotional volatility. For those lacking sufficient self assurance it can be a shortcut for ego meltdowns. It is also effective. Average women dislike PUA for seeding self-doubt into their ability to fulfil the raison d'etre of filtering mate value in men and for forcing them to work slightly harder at being attractive.
Many men reflexively dislike PUA because having no balls and clinging to the relationship equity delusion they fear perceived social violation/female disapproval more than death in combat. Corporates dislike it because it upends the incentive structure for keeping men engaged in status seeking endeavours.
Actual change requires a realization that you don't want to live as you currently are. The term we use in recovery is "the gift of desperation". "Hitting rock bottom" is what the public knows. What it really is, is humility. If you don't have it, you aren't changing a bit. You're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
As Vox has said before, you don't really change who you are, you just reinforce (hopefully) better habits and become conscious of your bad ones, so you can avoid them.
It would really help a guy like this to take a job where he has to interact with multiple strangers on a daily basis.
Every job i've had in the last 30 years has been like that. Despite being an introvert, I can flash out a good comeback line in an instant because of all the forced small talk. If a woman caught me "gaming" like that and called me out, my instant response would be "yes I am, I hate doing it and would love to drop the facade. Maybe we can have a real conversation over coffee?". The real strength of that comeback is that it is the raw truth, always at the top of your mind anyway, might as well use it.
Of course this is all academic advice. I've been married fo 15 years now
I read "The Game," and it was pretty interesting. It seemed to me that you could classify the nascent PUAs as: (1) the practice -> confidence guys; and, (2) the autistic groundhog day scripters. Strauss himself seemed more like type (1) but the book does include several of the type (2) guys.
I suppose both approaches work given most definitions of "work," but I'd guess that the type (2) guys inevitably run out of material and end up in situations exactly as described above -- like a guy who memorized one really good chess opening but only the one.
The guys who get the most out of learning game are the ones who are more or less solid guys already, but don't know what to do, or have misconceptions and easily-corrected unattractive behaviors that are holding them back. Sometimes a guy can really take off after minor adjustments. I think that describes about 20% who got into game during the oughts decade. (Usually they find a good woman quickly and move on from the "seduction community".) Strauss, whom I've met, probably does fall into this category. In person, he seemed like a normal, confident guy who was fun to talk with and very encouraging to his students.
There are certainly many guys with severe limitations who also try to learn game, and I have pity for the PUA trainers who have them in their pickup workshops.
I'm a low delta who took some pickup workshops and read a lot of alt.seduction.fast in the 2000's. Starting out, I had no conception at all (except crippling misconceptions) of how any couple ever went from meeting/friends to sex. The best benefit I got from the community was learning how that sequence works; the best sub-part of that was learning exactly how nonverbal escalation to intimacy works. (Emphasis on "nonverbal"; the physical part is much more important than what to say. "Tell her how you feel" usually loses; "show her how you feel" sometimes wins. Also, nonverbals won't mislead you into being dishonest or manipulative.) I didn't become a great seducer, but over the years I did successfully escalate a number of ordinary women from meeting to sex (including she who is now my wonderful wife), something I could not do before.
You're right that over a span of more than one night, you "run out of material" and need to be an actually worthy man to keep a worthy woman. But learning how to make that first night happen is just what some men need.
While I know plenty of "naturals" as the book describes them, I don't know many PUAs. Based on the book, I'd say a spread of Deltas and Gammas with Deltas skewing more towards (1) and Gammas more towards type (2).
I'd also say that Strauss was very close to becoming a full blown Gamma himself, based on what he wrote (likely unreliably) about himself in the book.
I doubt there are gamma PUAs at all. Direct rejection tends to burst their delusion bubble pretty quickly. Though I suspect there are plenty of gammas who write PUA fiction.
If a man regularly risks direct rejection and direct conflict he's by definition not a gamma.
Wolowitz of Big Bang Theory portrays an extroverted gamma who regularly runs lines despite rejections. Introvert gammas yes would rationalize not talking to women, but the extroverts will talk.
The Big-Bang Theory is the typical gamma fantasy where the secret king wins the pretty girl at the end. There's nobody that behaves like those guys in real life. Gammas are gammas precisely because they can't handle rejections and conflict, so all their gamma shenanigans are a way to skirt around that. If a gamma starts to risk open rejection and conflict in the way PUAs do, he'll stop being a gamma in the same way that if an anteater starts not eating ants he'll stop being an anteater.
That's not my point though. As I said I think that there's plenty of gammas who are not PUAs, but write PUA fiction and bamboozle other low status men. Neils Strauss might be one of them. Care to share what made you think that he was close to becoming a full blown gamma?
This is an example of agree-and-amplify. I think agree-and-amplify is a good "technique" and often the best way to respond. But this particular answer sounds way too clever. Or maybe you could pull it off; it really depends on delivery and on who you are. But for most men, a simple "yes" would be a better response than this.
I don't actually know if you meant this as a joke or as advice--hopefully the former. But I feel like commenting as if it were advice. Sorry.
Ironically, I think many women would be very intrigued by being asked to sign an NDA provided that you passed that initial 5 second judgment.
In other words Apex the Mouse could get lots of girl mice to sign NDAs. Gamain mouse, whatever his actual name was, would cause numerous calls to 9-1-1.
Yes, women are fully attuned to how well a man's type 1 thinking (see Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow") functions. They don't care how clever your response if it is even a few seconds too late. A man can literally grunt, smirk or chuckle and establish his higher status, if his timing is right and it shows confidence in his actions.
Women do love serendipity and higher-status males know exactly how to play into that.
"if women ever got what they collectively and erroneously believe they prefer, no man would ever talk to a woman with whom he was not already acquainted ever again and the human race would go extinct"
Would you be willing to spell out what women collectively and erroneously believe they prefer Vox?
They want to be in a social setting where the men are all pre-vetted for their minimum mate-value acceptability. They want the men to approach them with a reasonable level of social finesse. They want a *dance*
And then they dream of magic striking. The look. The eyes meeting. The thrill. Might happen. Might not. Often does, in the same way if you have a fireplace laid with logs, tinder, and the flue open, and you toss in a match, it will blaze up.
They aren't going to get it, mind you, but if they have the sense God gave a turnip, they'll build it for their granddaughters.
The bullet point list is how women have sent indicators of interest to men. I can't see how that extrapolates out to what women erroneously and collectively believe they prefer. Will take a hint if you got one.
"I have no doubt that there are some guys who go from zero to PUA and then parley that into some kind of seducer-hood. I would also argue that they are the rare exceptions. Guys don’t search out community forums or blogs like this because they’re getting too much pussy. They search it out because what they’ve been doing isn’t producing the results they want. When you think about this, they’ve been doing exactly what others criticize Game for – they’re working from a script."
"...“teaching PUA skills to these chumps is like giving dynamite to children.” This is probably truer than he realized, because the potential for disaster is much higher. Most guys want that silver bullet, the magic formula that will get them the girl, but it does nothing to prepare them for the idyllic (long term relationship) their beta nature has fantasized about for so very long. They don’t become Men, they become children with dynamite."
This is why one must first kill the inner beta, difficult as it may be it can be done. It requires a level of brutality though that is foreign to our current culture.
Yes. A good friend's friend wanted to get married so she researched where the kind of men she'd be interested in, (and who would be interested in her) were likely to work. She then got a volunteer job. A year later she was happily married.
The thing is the older women, and their menfolk, had all manner of venues like this organized. Artificial as all get out (like farming. Or math) and terrible for casual sex. But fabulous for the mating dance. The rules about who could approach women when (and vice versa) were clear, if constricting.
Women want the world their feminist sisters - and the simps and satanists who enabled them - destroyed. They do not even know anymore what it is, just that they are sad, angry, and confused.
Dollars to donuts, the sigmas were never fazed by the old rules, and are only mildly annoyed by the increased female retardery of the new.
But the rest of us hate it like fire, and need to figure out how to get it back.
Feminism is cancer. Only 24% of women and 16% of men call themselves feminist.
Whenever feminism is brought up by X all it does is get attacked. And 60% of the attackers are women.
Inevitably, of course, some stupid pride will say oh look at all the little boys and when I say pay attention, 60% are women can’t you see their names? They have no answer.
I am an old lady. The game is best played with rules and referees: ideally the match-making mamas and their patriarchal husbands.
The older single women can, in such a world, play "chase him until he catches you" in a wide open pool of random men, but we don't want our daughters to end up older single women.
And yes, stupid, selfish scab women*, weak men, and predators enabled the social breakdown.
He could have tried to use her as a sort of wingman and preselection by answering "Yes, I am. Wanna join me and see how it goes? Just don't cockblock."
There is a lot of selection bias in what she writes. The whole point of her article was to dump on some men, especially the fool Jonathan, and low-grade men in general. And talk herself up a bit. The men who are successful or whom she doesn't view as pathetic don't get written about here.
This is incredibly common amongst women. I would wager it is their #2 past time, right after thinking about whether they are getting as much a they "deserve" from everyone around them.
Yeah highly unusual for a woman to look for/observe Daygame as a system/entity then put herself into detective mode as a potential recipient. Women rarely being systems thinkers usually either frame it as 'if I go to x club or x shopping street I sometimes get hit on'. Probably has a more male brain and an agenda to push.
I once went to a week long training in Austin. The guys were brutally honest that it would not change who I was, but every interaction gave me experience and confidence. A sigma or alpha wouldn’t have needed to be there in the first place. For me it was essential to feel comfortable in getting dates, and they were right that your true nature comes out once you get into a relationship. Supposedly men change after they have been in relationships with enough women, but that would have been a LOT for me.
This was an easy rejoinder that only fumbles when a mere memorizer of lines has to go off script.
@Vox Day, I love the images that accompany your posts. Which AI engine do you use to produce those? I really like them.
Bing, for the most part. Occasionally CGDream.
IIRC, he uses Bing.
When I was following the "seduction community" closely around 2000-2010, there were lots of discussions about how to respond to questions like that. It was universally agreed that the right respond to questions like “Are you daygaming?” or “You’re a player, aren’t you?” is never to deny; rather, "agree and amplify" (Google it) works a lot better. Going one cut deeper, a high-status man is not ashamed of his own desires.
Going another cut deeper: "fake it until you make it" points toward the idea that while you should learn "correct" answers to these challenges, you should also use those "correct" answers to look deep into yourself and find out why you feel shame about hitting on girls. Is that shame appropriate? Well, when a delta hits on a woman who's out of his league, it's natural and "right" for him to feel some shame, and that won't go away unless he betters himself enough to be worthy of her. But many of us feel shame for many other reasons--sometimes religious training, sometimes (speaking for myself) growing up during a time when there were only feminist voices in the media talking about how awful it is for men to see women sexually. Learning the pick-up artist answers to question like "Are you daygaming?" ought to be a first step to looking into yourself and correcting wrong ideas you might have about what's shameful and what's virtuous. (There do exist sexual pursuits that are strongly virtuous--building a family is a Good thing.) And also to honestly appraise what level of woman you're worthy of.
One might say that r selected breeding pattern attempts like the pickup line approaches aren't sigma or alpha in the first place.
Changing established behaviour is difficult, unpleasant and usually ends in failure. Take the hoardes of morbidly obese Americans losing their daily battle in the Donut aisle. Daytime cold approach is a psychological chaos engine with massive initial emotional volatility. For those lacking sufficient self assurance it can be a shortcut for ego meltdowns. It is also effective. Average women dislike PUA for seeding self-doubt into their ability to fulfil the raison d'etre of filtering mate value in men and for forcing them to work slightly harder at being attractive.
Many men reflexively dislike PUA because having no balls and clinging to the relationship equity delusion they fear perceived social violation/female disapproval more than death in combat. Corporates dislike it because it upends the incentive structure for keeping men engaged in status seeking endeavours.
Actual change requires a realization that you don't want to live as you currently are. The term we use in recovery is "the gift of desperation". "Hitting rock bottom" is what the public knows. What it really is, is humility. If you don't have it, you aren't changing a bit. You're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
As Vox has said before, you don't really change who you are, you just reinforce (hopefully) better habits and become conscious of your bad ones, so you can avoid them.
That's interesting, sounds like the Game co-opted notion of 'ego death'.
It would really help a guy like this to take a job where he has to interact with multiple strangers on a daily basis.
Every job i've had in the last 30 years has been like that. Despite being an introvert, I can flash out a good comeback line in an instant because of all the forced small talk. If a woman caught me "gaming" like that and called me out, my instant response would be "yes I am, I hate doing it and would love to drop the facade. Maybe we can have a real conversation over coffee?". The real strength of that comeback is that it is the raw truth, always at the top of your mind anyway, might as well use it.
Of course this is all academic advice. I've been married fo 15 years now
I read "The Game," and it was pretty interesting. It seemed to me that you could classify the nascent PUAs as: (1) the practice -> confidence guys; and, (2) the autistic groundhog day scripters. Strauss himself seemed more like type (1) but the book does include several of the type (2) guys.
I suppose both approaches work given most definitions of "work," but I'd guess that the type (2) guys inevitably run out of material and end up in situations exactly as described above -- like a guy who memorized one really good chess opening but only the one.
The guys who get the most out of learning game are the ones who are more or less solid guys already, but don't know what to do, or have misconceptions and easily-corrected unattractive behaviors that are holding them back. Sometimes a guy can really take off after minor adjustments. I think that describes about 20% who got into game during the oughts decade. (Usually they find a good woman quickly and move on from the "seduction community".) Strauss, whom I've met, probably does fall into this category. In person, he seemed like a normal, confident guy who was fun to talk with and very encouraging to his students.
There are certainly many guys with severe limitations who also try to learn game, and I have pity for the PUA trainers who have them in their pickup workshops.
I'm a low delta who took some pickup workshops and read a lot of alt.seduction.fast in the 2000's. Starting out, I had no conception at all (except crippling misconceptions) of how any couple ever went from meeting/friends to sex. The best benefit I got from the community was learning how that sequence works; the best sub-part of that was learning exactly how nonverbal escalation to intimacy works. (Emphasis on "nonverbal"; the physical part is much more important than what to say. "Tell her how you feel" usually loses; "show her how you feel" sometimes wins. Also, nonverbals won't mislead you into being dishonest or manipulative.) I didn't become a great seducer, but over the years I did successfully escalate a number of ordinary women from meeting to sex (including she who is now my wonderful wife), something I could not do before.
You're right that over a span of more than one night, you "run out of material" and need to be an actually worthy man to keep a worthy woman. But learning how to make that first night happen is just what some men need.
What would you say the SSH rankings of Type (1)s vs Type (2)s are?
While I know plenty of "naturals" as the book describes them, I don't know many PUAs. Based on the book, I'd say a spread of Deltas and Gammas with Deltas skewing more towards (1) and Gammas more towards type (2).
I'd also say that Strauss was very close to becoming a full blown Gamma himself, based on what he wrote (likely unreliably) about himself in the book.
I doubt there are gamma PUAs at all. Direct rejection tends to burst their delusion bubble pretty quickly. Though I suspect there are plenty of gammas who write PUA fiction.
If a man regularly risks direct rejection and direct conflict he's by definition not a gamma.
Wolowitz of Big Bang Theory portrays an extroverted gamma who regularly runs lines despite rejections. Introvert gammas yes would rationalize not talking to women, but the extroverts will talk.
The Big-Bang Theory is the typical gamma fantasy where the secret king wins the pretty girl at the end. There's nobody that behaves like those guys in real life. Gammas are gammas precisely because they can't handle rejections and conflict, so all their gamma shenanigans are a way to skirt around that. If a gamma starts to risk open rejection and conflict in the way PUAs do, he'll stop being a gamma in the same way that if an anteater starts not eating ants he'll stop being an anteater.
That's not my point though. As I said I think that there's plenty of gammas who are not PUAs, but write PUA fiction and bamboozle other low status men. Neils Strauss might be one of them. Care to share what made you think that he was close to becoming a full blown gamma?
You haven’t met enough gammas. They operate on impulse and emotion, not logic.
You only need one.
"Are you day gaming?"
"Babe, sign this NDA and we could be tub cuddling within the hour"
This is an example of agree-and-amplify. I think agree-and-amplify is a good "technique" and often the best way to respond. But this particular answer sounds way too clever. Or maybe you could pull it off; it really depends on delivery and on who you are. But for most men, a simple "yes" would be a better response than this.
I don't actually know if you meant this as a joke or as advice--hopefully the former. But I feel like commenting as if it were advice. Sorry.
If it worked so well for Neil Gaiman, it should work for anybody.
Ha, I missed the reference. Well done.
Ironically, I think many women would be very intrigued by being asked to sign an NDA provided that you passed that initial 5 second judgment.
In other words Apex the Mouse could get lots of girl mice to sign NDAs. Gamain mouse, whatever his actual name was, would cause numerous calls to 9-1-1.
"Like yeah, I do day trading on the stock market babe."
Yes, women are fully attuned to how well a man's type 1 thinking (see Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow") functions. They don't care how clever your response if it is even a few seconds too late. A man can literally grunt, smirk or chuckle and establish his higher status, if his timing is right and it shows confidence in his actions.
Women do love serendipity and higher-status males know exactly how to play into that.
"if women ever got what they collectively and erroneously believe they prefer, no man would ever talk to a woman with whom he was not already acquainted ever again and the human race would go extinct"
Would you be willing to spell out what women collectively and erroneously believe they prefer Vox?
They want to be in a social setting where the men are all pre-vetted for their minimum mate-value acceptability. They want the men to approach them with a reasonable level of social finesse. They want a *dance*
And then they dream of magic striking. The look. The eyes meeting. The thrill. Might happen. Might not. Often does, in the same way if you have a fireplace laid with logs, tinder, and the flue open, and you toss in a match, it will blaze up.
They aren't going to get it, mind you, but if they have the sense God gave a turnip, they'll build it for their granddaughters.
The ones in the bullet-point list midway down this post: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/when-signals-are-successfully-sent
The bullet point list is how women have sent indicators of interest to men. I can't see how that extrapolates out to what women erroneously and collectively believe they prefer. Will take a hint if you got one.
Rollo has a classic article regarding outkicking your coverage:
https://therationalmale.com/2011/09/22/dream-girls-and-children-with-dynamite/
"I have no doubt that there are some guys who go from zero to PUA and then parley that into some kind of seducer-hood. I would also argue that they are the rare exceptions. Guys don’t search out community forums or blogs like this because they’re getting too much pussy. They search it out because what they’ve been doing isn’t producing the results they want. When you think about this, they’ve been doing exactly what others criticize Game for – they’re working from a script."
"...“teaching PUA skills to these chumps is like giving dynamite to children.” This is probably truer than he realized, because the potential for disaster is much higher. Most guys want that silver bullet, the magic formula that will get them the girl, but it does nothing to prepare them for the idyllic (long term relationship) their beta nature has fantasized about for so very long. They don’t become Men, they become children with dynamite."
This is why one must first kill the inner beta, difficult as it may be it can be done. It requires a level of brutality though that is foreign to our current culture.
They can catch the marlin, but can't pull it into their tiny boat and don't make it back to shore with any meat left on the bones.
The most successful marriage I know came from a party a friend and I planned to invite a man she liked. Planning and intent works. We're playing, too.
Yes. A good friend's friend wanted to get married so she researched where the kind of men she'd be interested in, (and who would be interested in her) were likely to work. She then got a volunteer job. A year later she was happily married.
The thing is the older women, and their menfolk, had all manner of venues like this organized. Artificial as all get out (like farming. Or math) and terrible for casual sex. But fabulous for the mating dance. The rules about who could approach women when (and vice versa) were clear, if constricting.
Women want the world their feminist sisters - and the simps and satanists who enabled them - destroyed. They do not even know anymore what it is, just that they are sad, angry, and confused.
Dollars to donuts, the sigmas were never fazed by the old rules, and are only mildly annoyed by the increased female retardery of the new.
But the rest of us hate it like fire, and need to figure out how to get it back.
Feminism is cancer. Only 24% of women and 16% of men call themselves feminist.
Whenever feminism is brought up by X all it does is get attacked. And 60% of the attackers are women.
Inevitably, of course, some stupid pride will say oh look at all the little boys and when I say pay attention, 60% are women can’t you see their names? They have no answer.
Feminism is cancer. Women are taking 17 times the amount of depression medication than they ever took.
I am an old lady. The game is best played with rules and referees: ideally the match-making mamas and their patriarchal husbands.
The older single women can, in such a world, play "chase him until he catches you" in a wide open pool of random men, but we don't want our daughters to end up older single women.
And yes, stupid, selfish scab women*, weak men, and predators enabled the social breakdown.
*feminists