Game Is Social Savviness

Humans are unique among sexually reproducing animals in the subtlety of their flirting behavior.

Covert sexual signaling: Human flirtation and implications for other social species.

According to signaling theory and a large body of supporting evidence, males across many taxa produce courtship signals that honestly advertise their quality. The cost of producing or performing these signals maintains signal honesty, such that females are typically able to choose the best males by selecting those that produce the loudest, brightest, longest, or otherwise highest-intensity signals, using signal strength as a measure of quality. Set against this background, human flirting behavior, characterized by its frequent subtlety or covertness, is mysterious. Here we propose that the explanation for subtle and ambiguous signals in human courtship lies in socially imposed costs that (a) vary with social context and (b) are amplified by the unusual ways in which language makes all interactions potentially public. Flirting is a class of courtship signaling that conveys the signaler’s intentions and desirability to the intended receiver while minimizing the costs that would accompany an overt courtship attempt. This proposal explains humans’ taxonomically unusual courtship displays and generates a number of novel predictions for both humans and non-human social animals. Individuals who are courting should vary the intensity of their signals to suit the level of risk attached to the particular social configuration, and receivers may assess this flexible matching of signal to context as an indicator of the signaler’s broader behavioral flexibility and social intelligence.

There’s a reason the apocalypse opener is so rarely encountered.

The entire study is worth reading at the attached PDF link. Essentially, humans, often men (since men are usually the courtship initiators), coyly flirt to preserve their social capital (public shame/rejection) or to protect themselves from interference by aggrieved third parties (cockblockers/AMOGs).

Whereas the standard model of sexually selected courtship signaling suggests that maximum intensity is always favored, we propose flexibility as an alternative route to reproductive success. Signalers who skillfully assess and adjust to social context (i.e., good flirts) display their quality not through high-intensity displays that index physical prowess and condition, but through sensitive signal-to-context matching that indicates behavioral flexibility and social intelligence.

Game is applied charisma, and applied charisma is best thought of as revealed social aptitude. Good flirts can read signals in a timely and precise manner, and respond to those signals with interest level gauged to the social context within which the signals occur.

Muscles, looks, and money aren’t the key variables driving, or even instigating, female attraction in most complex modern social contexts. Social savviness — the ability to flirt confidently and skillfully, aka game — is the fitness trait that really matters. Even a top 1% looking man will flounder if he lacks the social prowess of a less good-looking but more socially keen competitor.

The more social costs that can be imposed, the more covert your flirting needs to be to reduce the risk of social annihilation. Office romances have a Coyness Rating (CR) of 90%. One-on-one weeknight approaches in empty bars have a CR of 20% (you can go pretty direct there). Daygame pickups on the sidewalk have a CR, give or take depending on number of onlookers and proximity to relevant observors, around 40%. Picking up a second cousin at a family funeral has a CR of 100%.

The lower the social risk of courtship, the better direct game will work. Anonymous, thumping urban nightclubs are playgrounds of direct game. SWPL bars where a girl is surrounded by all her friends, beta orbiter and female? You had better insinuate yourself indirectly.

The key quality of Gricean implicature—for the flirt—is that it allows speakers to claim two distinct meanings at once: the surface meaning as well as the implied one. For example, the question, “Do you want to grab coffee sometime?” can be both an innocent invitation to drink coffee and a sexual overture.

Chicks dig ambiguous men. Ambiguity is a challenge to a girl’s self-conception (does he really want me?) and an affirmation of the social risk she may incur by following through on the man’s courtship attempt. A man with a highly intelligent grasp of social dynamics is likely a man who does well with women, and we all know how much women love preselected men.

A couple of final points. One, ff the “receiver” — the woman you are approaching — is much higher SMV than what you could be expected to get, your instinct will guide you to very coy (plausibly deniable) flirty game, to lower your social risk of rejection. But that’s exactly why you should try to go in with more intention; you increase the perception of your own relative SMV by flirting more intently as if you were a higher value man. Perception is king in the field. If you act like a winner, women will treat you like a winner. Maybe not right away, but in time, as long as your frame is solid.

Two, you should be adept at varying the intensity of your flirting. Tight game means attention to context. Finger her in the public restroom? Sure. Avoid PDA when friends are watching? Yes. Sexual intention must be communicated at some point between “hi” and “slip it in”, but the timing of that revealed intention, and the strength of the revelation, will vary according to circumstance, and a good player knows this.

Don’t Flatter A Woman If You Want Her To Stay Pretty

If you waste ten minutes of your life scanning relationship or dating advice from female columnists, one theme you’ll often read is the belief that compliments and flattery are the way to a woman’s heart. Naturally, as it goes with 99% of the “””wisdom””” of your feminist elders, this advice is a crock. Any man who has interacted with live women in anything other than a submissive capacity will quickly learn from experience the self-defeating consequences of attempting to court women with compliments.

Reader Joe Sixpack forwards an example of the awful advice you’ll ingest from Hivemind drones, and of the glimmering shards of Realtalk that are beginning to pierce the veil of vapidity,

A Game element leaks out, of all places, a Yahoo! message board comment:

This was regarding an article that said, “Here’s a wakeup call for you: Women spend an average of 55 minutes getting ready every morning — frittering away the equivalent of 6.4 hours a week, or 335 hours a year, on looks alone, a new survey finds. ”

There is a good way to reduce these numbers. Men, tell your woman that she is pretty. I once dated a guy who told me on a regular basis how pretty I was, how much he loved my eyes, how I was the smartest girl he had ever dated, ect. Who cares if he didn’t mean all of it, it made me feel good. I started wearing a little less makeup and found simpler ways to do my hair just so I could get over to his house early before work. He still said the same things. Sadly the whole thing started to go downhill after his daughter called me mom. Now I’m married to a man who never tells me I’m pretty, smart, ect. I put on loads of makeup and wear revealing clothing around him all the time just to get his attention with no success. I have decided to use up my makeup and only replace the ones I really care for. Maybe he will notice when I’m no longer trying to dress like the playboy playmates he claims he wants.

So, the one beta guy tells her how hot/smart/etc. she is all the time. The result? She turns frumpy and obviously is no longer with him.

She is now married to a man who never tells her such things. The result? She puts on “loads of make up and wear revealing clothing around him all the time just to get his attention” and dresses “like the playboy playmates he claims he wants”.

[Ed note: Link no longer works.]

You can sometimes pry nuggets of truth from women, but it requires a facility with comprehending subtext. Women will drop clues revealing their true feelings stuffed between over-sized cushions of egoistic pabulum.

Do you want to persuade your girlfriend or wife to keep up her looks? (And if you’re a non-gay man with T readings above 0.1 ng, you will.) Then keep her on her toes.

Maxim #101: Compliments breed complacency. Critique breeds conciliation. A woman will never work as hard for a man’s approval as when his approval is most elusive.

Stupid Game Beats Nothing Game

I know this guy whose pickup technique is to go up to a woman and, with a little bit of excitement in his voice, ask “Can I have your autograph? You’re [Katy Perry], right?” He would pick a celebrity who, from ten miles away, could be said to slightly resemble his lust interest.

She would invariably answer, no, she wasn’t, and he would tell her the resemblance was uncanny. If the girl was very pretty, he would be sure to choose a female celebrity who wasn’t so pretty to compare her to, say Rene Zellweger or Ellen Page.

I saw him in action a couple of times. I wouldn’t recommend his game to anyone. It’s stupid game. Goofy and supplicating. The girls laughed in that “who is this clown?” way, I think he got one’s number, but don’t know if they reconnected.

When I asked him why he spit such horrible game, he said that at the end of the day it was his absurd gambit the girls would recall. With mockery, I retorted.

Yet, if your choice is stupid game or nothing game — staring from afar as the girlworld passes you by — then you should choose stupid game. Every time. Because stupid game man is getting more numbers, and more dates, than nothing game man. Boldness bereft of any charm is still boldness. And girls respond to boldness the way men respond to beauty… stunned, aroused, compliant.

Study: Civilized Chicks Dig Jerks

Regular readers who are familiar with the long-running CH series cheekily titled “Chicks dig jerks” will fall deeply in love (or hate) with this study, which just touched down like an F5 tingle in the Provencal lap of the Chateau Lordship.

Criminal offending as part of an alternative reproductive strategy: Investigating evolutionary hypotheses using Swedish total population data.

Criminality is highly costly to victims and their relatives, but often also to offenders. From an evolutionary viewpoint, criminal behavior may persist despite adverse consequences by providing offenders with fitness benefits as part of a successful alternative mating strategy. Specifically, criminal behavior may have evolved as a reproductive strategy based on low parental investment reflected in low commitment in reproductive relationships. We linked data from nationwide total population registers in Sweden to test if criminality is associated with reproductive success. Further, we used several different measures related to monogamy to determine the relation between criminal behavior and alternative mating tactics. Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners. We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country, and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy.

Did you hear that thpppft? That was every prostrate manlet, peeved tradcon, and jizzebel gorgon loading their diapers in unison.

It’s as if ❤SCIENCE❤ thumped the great brass triskelion knocker on the oak doors of Chateau Heartiste, asked to be let in, and uttered upon entrance, “I’m home”.

You’ll excuse me if I allow myself this moment of grandiosity. In keeping with the tenor, it’s well-deserved.

The concordance of this study with observations put forth over the years here at CH, and with the near-daily drumbeat of news stories about women falling hard for all sorts of badboys who flout convention, the law, and others’ well-being, should give the shibbolethians who nurse an ego-wounded hatred for CH pause. The hammer blows they have been taking to the noggin must surely be leaving an impression by now.

But if morale isn’t yet up to snuff, I guess the beatings will have to continue!

criminal behavior may have evolved as a reproductive strategy based on low parental investment reflected in low commitment in reproductive relationships.

Single mommery has exploded in the last two generations. If that isn’t a sign of low parental investment and low commitment to reproductive relationships, what is? Exposure?

Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense.

laughing all the way to the end.

Paging Audacity of huge…

Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders.

It takes two to tango. And badboys tango with a lot of willing dance partners (women who inexplicably lose their attentiveness to contraception use when beguiled by badboys). That part about criminal offenders being more likely to get remarried is telling; if an asshole has a little bit of a soft spot for (ceremonial) monogamy, he’ll have an easier time finding a second wife than the niceguy who got eatpraydumped by his bored wife. It appears that Swedish women (the most evolved of white women, wags may note), when they are presented with badboys from a broken marriage, can’t wait to offer themselves as second chance redemption to such misunderstood paragons of maleness.

Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners.

There’s a rumor spread from certain sectors of female astonishment that men with significant sexual histories turn off women.

We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country

Where have the enlightened CH readers come across a variant of this formulation before?

Bleeding heart compassion has cursed blessed the country with layers of safety nets that subvert the natural cleansing of losers from contributing to the next generation. The result of all this government largesse is the substitution of handouts for husbands. When provider males who are predisposed to marry and support a family are worth less on the market than they used to be they are slowly replaced by playboys taking advantage of the sexual climate. Women who have their security needs met by Big Government (in combination with their own economic empowerment) begin to favor their desire for sexy, noncommital alpha males at the expense of their attraction for men who will foot the bills.

Prediction: As women’s financial status rises to levels at or above the available men in their social sphere, they will have great difficulty finding an acceptable long-term partner. The men, for their part, will turn away from emphasizing their ability to provide as they discover their mediocre-paying corporate jobs are no longer effective displays of mating value. They will instead emphasize the skills of “personality dominance”.

It’s clarifying to think of women as having two core sexual natures that can shift at the margins in the direction of favoring the expression of one or the other, and thus influencing mating behavior, in response to rapid and sweeping environmental cues. Scientifically, these core sexual strategies are known as r- and K-selection, the former epitomized in nature by the fast-breeding, fast-dying small mammal (mouse) and the latter by the slow-breeding, slow-dying large mammal (elephant).

For practical everyday purposes, the human female desire template is largely immutable. Feminist delusions to the contrary notwithstanding, you aren’t going to realign female nature to conform more closely with male sexual nature, (say, by making casual sex less emotionally impacting on women). However, if you had the power to perform an unethical experiment and rearrange society in the trajectory it has taken organically (or perhaps conspiratorially) in the West these past 100 years, you would begin to perceive changes, subtle at first and building to pandemic scale, in the choices and courtship rituals that women abide. You may, for example, start to see women pulling away from beta male providers and indulging more frequently their latent lust for exciting badboys.

What this study above is saying, and what CH has been saying for years based on real world experience in the urban wench trenches, is that criminality — in its milder, accessible form, jerkboy charisma — is quickly becoming a favored male trait by women, who are choosing these men using the only instrument that matters: their vaginas. When life is easy and contraceptives flow like the River Orinoco, women get bored and seek the orgasmic release of aloof, reckless, throwback assholes. Women in modern industrialized nations come to desire the sexiness over the security.

Maxim #70: Civilized, coddled chicks dig jerks.

I’ll leave it to the reader to infer the nuances of meaning from this maxim. Hint: “muh dik” is not an escape hatch.

This transformation in female mate choice doesn’t have to be huge to have a deleterious effect on civilized prosperity. In fact, changes at the margins can be enough to send the entire system careening into a tailspin. Like an advantageous allele, you move the badboy-loving needle from 1% to 2% and some serious consequences will accrue in a few generations’ time.

Now, I didn’t have a team of PhDs to confirm my hunches for me. All I had was my senses and my time in the company of the modern civilized American woman. I could see it all around me, what was happening. I had stories from my ancestors to compare my own experiences, and the contrast was striking. I figured change was going down, and a theory emerged.

and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy.

In the land of the deferential beta male, the rule-breaking alpha is king.

Permit yer ‘umble Poonstradamus another theory-of-everything prophecy: This *could* end well.

I’ll explain. As of now, the situation looks bleak. Criminals and cads monopolizing the prime sex years of Western women. Beta males being left with the used-up hags as recompense. r-selection creating perverse incentives that divide men from women, family from community, people from nation. A surge of bastards set to steamroll over the culture in the coming decades. Crushing debt loads piling up as once-dutiful citizens, aided and abetted by diversity, move toward a pragmatic philosophy of looking out for number one and shredding the safety net for filaments of silver.

Alpha fux, beta bux is credit-rolling bacchanalia, a temporary condition which must find its denouement in the ruin of a civilization abandoned by its watchmen and looted by its jackals.

How could this possibly end well?

Note the study participants: Swedes. People from a nation which is the pinnacle, or nadir, of feminized manboobery. This is a nation that is asphyxiating under the weight of its own feminist crackpottery. Perhaps, in a moment of hope, we can see the outline of a future Sweden where harder, sterner men — the issue of all those womb-widening orgasmic shrieks of delight squeezed from the firm choking grips of badboys — resume their place at the genetic table. Sweden’s jerkboy-chasing women may be, unwittingly, judging their emasculated beta males unfit for further propagation, and populating a future reborn Sweden with psychopath protectors of their way of life.

The Vikings (or Moors) may rise again.

***

This post went way beyond what I intended it to be — just another shiv in the crusty hides of deluded freaks. As much as I love to tune my twelve-string to their wails of pain, there is a benefit in all these “chicks dig jerks” posts for the common man who wants more, and better, love in his life. Think of the series as a field book to navigate modern womanhood. Dependability, humor, taking girls on interesting dates, paying their way… these things don’t cut it anymore. You need edge. You need aura. You need an asshole attitude.

You don’t need to commit crimes (although it can only help). You do need to be a little less deferential, and a little more inconsiderate, to the civilized Western woman if you want to make a positive impression on her.

You can already see signs, if you’re willing to look, of a trend among men toward maximizing their alpha traits (often at the expense of their beta traits) so that they are better equipped to leverage the modern mating market. It’s no coincidence that interest in testosterone replacement is sweeping through online discourse.

Our civilization is getting plundered, and women are first to the treasure chest with their grubby hands. You can lament this turn of affairs and withdraw from a fulfilling sex and love life, or you can do what is necessary to enjoy the rewards of women’s love that your civilization-building great-grandfather enjoyed when the wild sex compulsions of his time’s women were wisely constrained by better men.

You won’t stop this juggernaut of decivilization. It’s too big and moving too fast. Like the fate of empires that have come and gone before, it has to finish its preordained path of destruction. Something good may rise from the flattened earth, but in the meantime, poolside is the only sensible choice.

More Shocking News: Men And Women Have Vastly Different Personalities

I know, I know, after an evening in your smoking jacket reading Jezebel and John Scalzi with blurry eyes and tending to your rickets, you wonder how anyone could think men and women aren’t exactly alike except for that bothersome business of the genitalia.

Well, my hermetically sealed friend, you can listen to CH telling you like it is from field experience, or you can get the same revelations from ❤SCIENCE❤.

Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. We then apply these guidelines to a large, representative adult sample, and obtain what is presently the best estimate of global sex differences in personality.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Personality measures were obtained from a large US sample (N = 10,261) with the 16PF Questionnaire. Multigroup latent variable modeling was used to estimate sex differences on individual personality dimensions, which were then aggregated to yield a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis D). We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES, the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). These are extremely large differences by psychological standards.

Significance

The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology.

Sex-based personality differences are large and widespread, and result from competing evolutionary pressures placed on men and women.

In addition to their direct influences on mating processes, personality traits correlate with many other sexually selected behaviors, such as status-seeking and risk-taking (see e.g., [20], [34], [35]). Thus, in an evolutionary perspective, personality traits are definitely not neutral with respect to sexual selection. Instead, there are grounds to expect robust and wide-ranging sex differences in this area, resulting in strongly sexually differentiated patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior – as if there were “two human natures”, as effectively put by Davies and Shackelford [15].

Two human natures (you could argue for a lot more if you include racial differences in personality). This is the reason game works as a concept and as a practical guide. Women are very different, emotionally and psychologically, than are men, and game is a system which leverages this sex-specific personality contrast. Think about it: If men and women were completely alike, whatever worked for women in the dating market would also work equally well for men. But two minutes in the jungle are all you need to notice that the working strategies men and women employ to find and attract mates are very different.

The study is worth reading in full, especially the authors’ methodology of breaking down the Big Five personality traits into smaller components, and the importance of measuring latent variables.

So where do men and women most differ in personality traits?

In univariate terms, the largest differences between the sexes were found in Sensitivity, Warmth, and Apprehension (higher in females), and Emotional stability, Dominance, Rule-consciousness, and Vigilance (higher in males). These effects subsume the classic sex differences in instrumentality/expressiveness or dominance/nurturance.

Feminists and equalists will try to ignore, suppress, or distort findings about sex differences like those in this study, because the notion that there is an archetypical female personality and an archetypical male personality that is biological in construct is a stake through the heart of everything they desperately want to believe about human sexual nature and the impolite and inegalitarian forms it often takes.

How is an ugly feminist supposed to exhort normal women to “lean in” when normal women don’t have any desire nor disposition nor, for that matter, talent to do so? It is a pickle.

Wordless Lamborghini Game

Vitaly rents a Lamborghini and picks up girls without saying a word.

I laughed. Some of you cried. Is it staged? Maybe. Is it plausible? Yes. And did you see the cameo appearance?

If you have a son about to enter manhood, and you want to impart a quick lesson in women, you won’t go wrong having him watch this video.

“Are you a player?”

This deceptively innocuous female query deserves its own post, because it’s something you’ll hear more than once if you a) have any sort of charming vibe or b) you live in an area where the cock carousel, and hence the broken pussies, ride high.

You want to know how to respond to this super shit test from a girl. First, judge the context and the delivery. Did you just meet her? Is she in a flirty mood? Is she a sassy girl who loves to “get one over” men?

Or, is she genuinely curious about you? Is she comfortable sitting down with you to talk, away from supervision? Do the number of hair tosses and the shine in her eyes betray a surging interest for more intimacy?

If the former (she wants reassurance you are socially skilled around women and have a plethora of mate options), there are many ways to defuse the “Are you a player?” shit test. You can’t go wrong with a rudimentary “agree & amplify”.

“Are you a player?”

“The truth comes out. Did you know you’re number 100 today? Congratulations! Let’s go find you that door prize.”

If the latter (she wants to be assuaged you aren’t going to fuck and fly), humility (feigned, if necessary) is the order of the day.

“Are you a player?”

“If holding out for the right girl makes me a player, then I guess I am. But I don’t really feel like one.”

On this subject, a reader asks,

I met this girl on eH, solid 8.5 and on the first date she put this on me:

her: are you a player?
me: define player
her: date a lot of women
me: define a lot

her: more than 6 a month
me: it depends if the month has 31 days or not
her: clever answer

However, nothing changed – I can tell in her eyes she though I was a “player”.  Also by the actions – at the end, we had a good make out, but she refused to come to my place:

me: you should come to my place
her: lol, that would be too early, what would you think about me if I came to your place on our first date
me: I don’t judge people; if a woman is ready then she’s ready.

Later the night I got the “you’re a great guy, but…” text, to which I replied with “lol” and deleted her number.

I’ve been following CH for 3 years now, and again, CH sirs, I ask, how do you actually pass the test for real, and not just for that moment?

Thanks and keep up the good word.

Since this was a first date (and not a first meet), she probably asked the question because she was beginning to feel like a conquest to you. She needed some sign from you that she was more than a passing fancy. Therefore, getting cutesy was not the best response. Playing the “define” game is fun at first, but will quickly grow tiresome because it sounds like you’re hiding something.

You didn’t allay her slut fears, so you got what a lot of “too smooth for his own good” players get: A make-out that validated the girl, followed by a preemptive, pre-sex rejection that salvaged her ego and allowed her to preserve a belief in her propriety. You ran into a classic anti-slut defense wall, and your words reinforced the bricks.

The cocksure attitude of player profligacy that will attract women has a shelf life. You can’t keep it up and expect the same results on date three that you had during minute two. At some point, she’ll want the presence of the “real you”, especially if she in any way considers you a possible long-term lover, and if she doesn’t get the real you that fun vibe which sparked her first tingles will fade until it’s replaced by doubt and emotional withdrawal.

If you have to deal with the “Are you a player?” question a lot from girls, it means you’re projecting a seductive personality too early and too strong in the interaction. You need to tone it down a little, and disqualify girls. For instance, “It’s too bad you’re a brunette, otherwise I’d be flirting with you.”