Rationalizing Fearfulness

I’ve noticed a faddishness among so-called “red pill” men lately to assert with the cynical glee of a conspiracy theorist stumbling across doubleplussecret knowledge that only men with 8-10% body fat and Hollywood good looks are capable of pulling girls cold, and that any man who falls short of those physical dimensions ought to console himself with internet porn or drop out of the mating race to “go his own way”.

Men who think like this believe that the only achievable pickup is one that starts with the woman initiating an “approach invitation”, i.e., a flirty nonverbal signal that lets a man know she will accept his approach. They believe that it is exceedingly rare to find examples of men successfully approaching inattentive or indifferent girls and earning the notch.

Rubbish. Anyone who’s lived a day in his life has witnessed (or executed) a pickup attempt that began with the man making an unsolicited approach and progressed to the woman gradually warming up with romantic interest. Not only does it happen all the time in real life, but our literature is replete with caddish, not-particularly-handsome characters who not only cold approached and defiled initially indifferent women, but often took up the challenge of seducing actively hostile women.

The female “approach invitation” doubtless adds a layer of efficiency to the mating market, (a phenomenon that in theory would be more frequent in r-selection societies), but it by no means is a prerequisite for love, or lust, to bloom. If anything, women have traditionally sought to suppress their approach invitations so that only the boldest, and hence most desirable, men would solicit them. Chicks dig an entitled jerkboy who doesn’t need an air traffic controller to wave him onto a woman’s landing strip.

Two kinds of men are zealous followers of the “8-10% body fat seduction” religion: Very good-looking but socially shy and/or lazy men who have spent a lifetime relying on female approach invitations to get laid, and shut-ins with a persecution complex who have a strong psychological need to blame their romantic inertia on external forces beyond their ability to control or shape.

Blaming failure, or attributing success, with women on one’s looks is a classic case of psychological projection of innate male desire. Men desire a woman’s looks first and foremost, and so men get trapped into thinking women desire the same thing to the same degree of exclusion. Women certainly value male looks, but not nearly with the same intensity or single-mindedness that men value female looks. Evidence for this sex disparity abounds: The ugly man with a hot girlfriend is a far more common occurrence than the ugly woman with the dashing, successful man. Furthermore, we can find emanations and penumbras of the lower value women place on male looks in how women react to men who are excessively preoccupied with their superficial appearance: Simply, it repulses women.

(Excessively preening women can mildly annoy some men, but most men won’t complain because the payoff of female attention to beautification is too great.)

The strange male inverse bravado that accompanies proselytization of the “8-10% body fat seduction” religion is nothing more than rationalizing fearfulness. Men who, for whatever reasons, are fearful of boldly introducing themselves to women to start a conversation with the intent of sparking an eventual sexual flame will soothe their egos with a litany of palatable excuses for their failure to launch. And one such handy excuse that seems to work with urgent plausibility is the “I don’t look like Hugh Jackman on HGH and that’s why I can’t get a cute girlfriend.”

This particular male hamster is an endurance athlete. He spins in his wheel for a long time without needing rest because it’s easier to focus the rodent’s eye on the men with top 1% looks who get a lot of glances from women, rather than to turn the rodent’s eye inward to take painful account of one’s own timidity.

It may be a simpler task to visually isolate the good-looking men from the charmers who got their women with the nimbleness of their tongues or the social lords who got theirs with the rule of their fiefdoms, but it’s also dangerously misleading. FACT: What women consider good-looking in men is far less inclusive than what men consider good-looking in women. FACT: Women are far less likely to solicit or passively pursue men they find good-looking than are men to pursue women they find good-looking.

This means, in practice, that very few men can rely on their looks for “fool’s mate” lays. Now, obviously, there is a much larger population of men who aren’t in the top 1% of male looks who nevertheless manage to get laid and build relationships with cute girls. How do these homely fuckers do it? It’s not such a mystery if you understand and accept that men can leverage much more than their looks to attract and woo women. The mystery is further demystified when you accept that there are men bolder and more confident than you are who didn’t allow their fear to condemn them to masturbatory inaction.

In other words…

they

busted

a

move.

Male “8-10% body fat” rationalization of fearfulness to approach and risk female rejection is the mirror image of a woman rationalizing her failure to get a man to commit by blaming his “issues” instead of blaming his reticence on the more distinct probability that she wasn’t pretty or caring enough for him to lavish her with long-term love and provisioning.

Both rationalizations stem from a similar psychological dynamic to avoid self-assessment that is responsive to sex-specific corrective action.

Whenever you hear a “red pill” man drone about seduction being nothing more than waiting around for a girl who likes your particular look to bat her eyes at you, know that you are reading the whiny excuse-mongering of a man who is allergic to cold approaching. He is giving you an incomplete picture because he doesn’t want to admit to himself that he shits his pants at the thought of starting conversations with women who aren’t prescreened in advance for receptivity.

None of this post should be misconstrued as support for the opposite claim that a man’s looks don’t matter at all, or that female approach invitations won’t grease the skids to sex. Quite the contrary, all else equal, a good-looking man will have an easier go of it than an ugly man, and a man who was cued to approach will have better odds than a man who approached a woman who gave no flirty cues.

Think of this post instead as a corrective to falsely dichotomous thinking like that exhibited by adherents to the “8-10% body fat seduction” religion. A corrective that appears to be more necessary than ever, because the internet disease of ego preservation at all costs is a mind virus that infects even supposedly clear-thinking, self-anointed dissidents to the blue pill orthodoxy.

To demonstrate my good faith to my readers, here is a picture of a very ugly man who will not ever be banging hard 10s:

when fupas meet

Judgment rendered? Hold on. Imagine this man without the goony accoutrement and dressed in stylish clothes that at the least don’t blatantly advertise his obesity. Now imagine he has read this blog and learned some basic game concepts and has increased his charisma roll by +2. Let’s further stipulate that he has taken the big step of actually going up to girls to talk to them, refusing to surrender to his fear. Maybe he’s even lost twenty pounds, and looks a little less hideous at first sight.

No, he still won’t bang hard 10s, nor, for that matter, soft 6s and 7s. Probably not even lumpy 4s and 5s. But he will be able to realistically trade up from a monstrous pig-faced 0 to, say, a chubby and conspicuously female 2 or 3. And that improvement in his love prospects will feel to him, a man heretofore parched of attention from recognizably human females, like an embarrassment of harem riches.

So you can swallow the “red pill” of rationalized powerlessness, or you can slap away the hands holding these pills and confront the mating market’s challenges with your vision unblurred by drug-induced hallucination.