Comment Of The Week: The Guileless Gatsby

Da GBFM riffs culture ref-wise on this post about a beta orbiter thinking he’d gotten the green light to pursue a long-time female friend:

A Beta Orbiter Gets The Green Light?

Hey heartistes!!

THE GREAT GATSBY was a Beta Orbiter who got the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and look what happened to him!

DEAD

Such are the aweosme thingz dat da GREAT BOOKS 4 MENZ TEACH lzozozozozozozozozo

That’s true. Gatsby, literature’s ultimate beta male orbiter and pedestal polisher suffering from a most awesome case of oneitis (which Nick admired as an incorrigible hopefulness in a degenerate world), did get the green light, or rather Gatsby *thought* he got the green light, but when Daisy was pressed by him for a confession of her love in the climatic hotel scene, she recused herself from deciding between the charming Gatsby and the dominant (domineering) Tom, opting instead to cry her way out of confrontation and then to collude with Tom when her complicity in a hit-and-run became clear to herself and Tom connived to pin it all on Gatsby to avoid the revelation of his own infidelity. (I haven’t read the book in a while, so I’m not sure if Tom knew Daisy was the driver, or if Daisy lied to Tom about being the passenger to save her own skin.)

For his transcendent hopefulness and blind faith in uncorrupted love and female purity, Gatsby was first betrayed, then framed, then killed. There’s a lesson there for yearning, wistfully romantic beta males with delusions of pander.*

*Well, ok, two lessons. Don’t ever deliver an ultimatum to a woman to declare her love during a heated moment. Such a move reeks of needy desperation. The very opposite of alpha male aloofness.

***

Comment of the Week runner-up is by Hook or Crook, who writes in response to a self-proclaimed omega who refuses to believe the science that says men can actually become more desirable by projecting untethered confidence.

While this could very well be the clever bait of an anti-PUA troll, I have to both comment on the legitimacy of the sentiment and offer a course correction. Yes: working out, upgrading your wardrobe and attempting to mimic all of those behaviors that attractive men exhibit (proud stature, languid movements, firm eye contact, etc.) will make people notice you, which – in turn – will make some people challenge you. ‘Faking it’ successfully means that you have gone from being background noise to being actual signal (or have gone from scenery to scene-maker, if you prefer) which means that you are now in the spotlight, warts and all. Sometimes this experience will be rewarding to you; other times it will be painful as hell. Eye contact with a cute girl (or – hell – even just a decent one) can make you feel like you’re finally growing as a man, or it can remind you that you are short, or ugly, or balding, or old. Some guys will give you the upwards Bro Nod(tm) when they see that you’ve been lifting weights, and others will sneer at the fact that your fat/scrawny/whatever ass is even bothering. So people are challenging you? Congratulations, you are no longer invisible, and you are now doing what men do: compete, fight and (eventually) fuck.

The problem, as it is (or was, as you seem to be indicating that you have given up), is with your own perception of their challenge to you. Cute girl turns her nose up at you? “Oh no!: she knows that I’m really an omega and that I haven’t had sex in years!!” Tough guy sneers at you or wants to pound your lungs into paste? “Oh shit: he knows that I was always picked on in school and that I can’t fight!” You’re presenting (or attempting to present) the attributes of a successful male, and when the world asks for your Alpha passport you shit your pants and stupidly surrender all of the marijuana that you could have easily smuggled if you just kept your cool and plowed. The problem is not that you were faking it – the problem is that you weren’t committing to the fakery. You didn’t believe that you could be cool, or desirable, so – surprise – they didn’t believe it either. You can’t walk around thinking that you’re some piece of “genetic garbage” and expect this belief to not seep into everything that you do. If you’re being challenged on your Alpha demeanor incessantly it is a huge indicator that there is strong incongruence between your words and your actions, or your actions and your posture, or your posture and your subtext etc, and this will only be hammered out through time and commitment and belief in yourself. Nobody said that this was going to be easy, and the first stage for people like you (and me as well: I’m 5″7 and was dorky as sin) is just a massive shit test from the world as it tells you to sit the fuck down and go back to being a loser, and you tell it to go home and fuck its mother.

There’s a reason why lower betas and omegas run screaming from seduction/game/et al., and its because that spotlight can burn like a motherfucker, and – for them – its better to lick their collective wounds (e.g. their genetic and social deficiencies) than to experience its harsh glare. I’d rather the world step up to me and get right in my face than have it deny my very existence, but every man must choose his own path. Your desires and your limiting beliefs are on opposite sides of the scale; the heavier one will win.

Maybe that, at the root of it, is the problem with omega males and some beta males: Their desire is weak. And their weak desire makes it easier for them to indulge self-doubt.