Comment Of The Week: Games Women Play

head games
it’s you and me baby
head games
and i can’t take it anymore

Reader Nope comments about women playing games:

Amy: “Let’s say I want to make a guy jealous…..”

1. Chicks don’t have to do this. You want him, let him know. Otherwise it’s a cruel game. He’s prolly harboring jealousy anyway but not visibly.
2. Making someone jealous on purpose is toying with them. Fuck that.
3. This is a perfect example of the fundamental differences between men and women. Men HAVE to resort to games, whereas women choose to play games because the regular way just isn’t stimulating enough, they’re bored, whatever.

You wanna make every man in the room wonder WTF? Make yourself up to your hottest, go find the ugliest, nastiest, heaviest dyke you can, and just make out with her in full view. Sweetly reject all male attention (not nuclear), then just before you bounce, abandon your dyke and grab the pointdexter in the corner, then leave together.

Easier just to not fuck with guys’ minds in the first place.

His breathless tone of indignation aside, “Nope” did make a very interesting point about gamesmanship and its relevance to both sexes as a sexual market exploit.

Men HAVE to game, women CHOOSE to game.

But before you bronze this formulation, a caveat. Men and women have different reproductive goals, and therefore different perspectives on the purpose of courtship. The value of female-specific game may seem nebulous to men, but with a long view in mind can be understood as more of a necessity to women.

Men game to give women what they want, because that’s the path to sex. Women game… to give themselves what they want, because women need to know if a man is worthy of their sex.

The point deserves belaboring. As women are the choosier sex, and as women are holistic judges of mate worth and place equal emphasis on non-visual attractiveness cues, men have to bring more to the table to get any traction with potential love interests. Therefore, game, one of a panoply of enticement strategies available to men, becomes more of a necessity than a luxury.

Women need to look pretty and fuckable to catch men’s attention. That’s it. (haters, spare us your spittle.) Women’s personality and smarts will start to matter for the long haul, but in the courtship arena they needn’t concern themselves much with “applying charisma” to attract men.

Women play games — their flavor of head games — to identify strong men. Women aren’t doing it to increase their attractiveness to men; they’re doing it because they have to deal with an information bottleneck about suitors. Men don’t have this bottleneck because most of the information they need is scanned and analyzed within a second of visual confirmation.

Women also play games because they’re bored by the parade of uninspiring betas who constitute the vast majority of men. Or they want to feed their egos with an endless buffet of external validation. These latter two reasons aren’t mutually exclusive with the primary “beta male filter” directive, but they are more frivolous and the willingness by women to indulge those urges imply an intuitive grasp of their inherently greater sexual value.

This is why the psychological strategems preferred by women, and peculiar to women’s specific needs, have come to be disparaged as the art of playing “head games”. Women play games not to appease or captivate men in the hope of mutual romantic fulfillment, but — like so many quirks of female behavior demonstrate — to gratify their egoism and to amuse themselves.