She’s A Superflirt

“Yo man, let’s go next door.”

“Why? It’s good here. And the bathroom is only ten feet away. Very convenient.”

“There’s a new club next door. It caters to the international crowd. Last time I was there it was filled with Russian women. And I know how you are about Russians.”

“How is it I haven’t heard of this magical land before?”

“You’re out of the loop. Time to pack up and move to the burbs.”

We left to check out club eurotrash. It was as advertised; hot foreign-looking women everywhere. I heard three different languages spoken as soon as I walked in the door, two vaguely Slavic and one Spanish. My buddy and I sat at a two seater table near the bar. The bartenders were women. The only men working here were the DJ and doorman.

We had barely settled in when a pretty blonde flitted up to us, smiling broadly. She had a delicate feminine jaw and chin, and high cheekbones. Very slender with nice sized tits. She was a hard 8.5. Later I would discover she was American, but spoke with a funny generic euro accent that she said she picked up from all her foreign friends.

She put her hand on my knee. “You’re cute. Where you guys from?”

Before I could answer she continued. She craned her head slightly upward as she spoke.

“Let’s dance! Come on, get up! It’s my birthday this week.” (Are girls now celebrating week-long birthdays? Isn’t there enough female entitlement?) She had grabbed both my hands and was guiding me up off my seat, her hips in a perpetual wriggle.

I knew this type well. The superflirt. Not drunk, but buzzed. Exraverted. Superficially confident. Used to getting her way with men. Weaponized femininity. A classic eternal ingenue. Likely had a boyfriend somewhere else and a couple of mother hens in attendance to supervise her.

The superflirt’s frame is all-powerful. Few men can resist getting sucked into it. But resist you must. I had three choices before me.

1. Brush her off.
2. Refuse to dance but attempt to get her to join us in conversation.
3. Dance with her.

Number one is fine if you want her to leave. But don’t expect to pull a superflirt out of her euphoric frame with aloofness and indifference. She’ll just waltz to the next guy willing to entertain her machinations.

Number two is a battle of the frames. Can you convince a hyper happy chick to focus on you for more than a second? All her energy is pulling her onto the dance floor, into the embrace of an envious or horny audience. You have no value to her other than your looks, and that’s weak sauce to a cute girl. She has approached you, thus stripping you of the momentum and careful planning of a male-initiated approach, and she has thrown out a hoop for you to jump through which is rigged to ensure failure. You jump, you lower your value. You refuse to jump, you look like a stick in the mud.

Number three is jumping through the hoop, but with an eye on the long game. That’s what I did.

I got up and we all danced languidly around the bar, her leading the way. (I had tried to maneuver myself in front but obstacles prevented a smooth transition.) She introduced me and my buddy to her two friends, a sausage-shaped older, short Latina and a tall, big-boobed, meaty girl. The mother hens. I tried to preemptively neutralize any future mother hennery by asking the tall girl if she was responsible for babysitting Superflirt while she had all the fun.

“No way. She can take care of herself.”

Bullseye.

I danced with Superflirt on and off for fifteen minutes. Every few seconds she would saunter away to harass the DJ, dance on the bar, or drink a free shot, courtesy of the gawking older men gathering around us. She would return and put her hands on my stomach, exclaiming with delight how hard it was, or she would tickle me. A few times she leaned in and rested her cheek on my cheek, whispering in my ear. She smelled like concentrated estrogen. Then she would recoil in mock indignation, and, without my prompting, announce she had a boyfriend.

“I have a boyfriend, just to let you know. No, really, I have a boyfriend.”

I’ll admit I was enjoying the spectacle, regardless if it led anywhere or not. Of course, I would do my best to lead it somewhere, but the superflirt is normally quarry best left to shot-buying chumps who can convince themselves they’re going home happy having danced with a cute chick for a minute.

“That’s great. So does my girlfriend.”

She cocked her head and stared at me quizzically, then giggled. “I reeeeeeeally have a boyfriend. I’m supposed to go to his place later.”

I ignored her. She hopped up on the bar again. I figured at this point she was teetering close to the edge of outright drunkenness, so if I was to make a bold move, I had to execute quickly.

There are two ways to handle a superflirt. One, nuclear negs followed by a bold sexual move that shocks her out of her attention whore programming. Two, jealousy plotlines that flip the script so she is chasing you. I wanted to do the first option, but she had stopped clambering into my lap in between dance moves. All I could accomplish was a few negs.

“Hey, stop tickling me. Do I look like a piece of meat?”

“Yes!”

“Sexual harassment! Is this how you hit on men? It’s not working.”

She twirled. I tried to keep her focused.

“How would you like it if I did that to you?” I tickled her middle and she shrieked joyously like a little girl so loudly I though my ears would bleed.

This was going nowhere. She was in full-on attention whore mode. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a leggy woman of exquisite beauty wearing a miniskirt that climbed past mid-thigh. Her makeup was expertly applied, and she didn’t smile. An expression of disdain swept across her purse-lipped face.

Had to be Russian.

I sidled closer to her table where she was standing with a couple girls and some men, and listened in; yep, Russians. She glanced in my direction. I realized why. Preselection. She had front row seats to me getting pawed by Superflirt. A man can go up as much as five points simply by being seen in the company of a hot babe.

This was one last opportunity to break Superflirt’s frame. If I could be seen by her chatting up the Russian, she might reengage and be open to a proper seduction. All her earlier boyfriend chatter suggested to me she was subconsciously looking for an excuse to step out with a new man. And nothing works like jealousy on an eternal ingenue. She has to feel a competitive threat from equally pretty women.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a good ending. I opened the Russian, asking her why she wasn’t embarrassing herself like the other girls by dancing on the bar, because it’s what all American women do. As we talked I would steal a glance at Superflirt to see if she was watching us, but she had fallen on her ass next to a bar stool, drunk as sin, and one shot away from puking. Three men rushed in to help her up. I didn’t budge. When I turned back to continue my conversation with the Russian, the doorman was saying something to her and she clopped in three inch high heels toward the door to make a phone call outside.

It was near closing time. Superflirt stumbled past me on the way to the door. She stopped to drape her arms over my shoulders, and I told her to give me her number. It was a last ditch effort that I knew had a low chance of succeeding. She was barely cognizant. But she stuck to her boyfriend script.

“Can’t. No I really can’t. I’m going to my boyfriend’s place right now! He lives nearby.”

Admiring her tight ass and perfect 0.7 waist-hip ratio as she wobbled out into the street, I figured her boyfriend either had very strong pimp hand to feel comfortable letting her get drunk by herself in his own hood, or they were heading for a dramatic breakup within the month. What a fucking headache it is dating a superflirt. Best way to keep them in line is to date two or more of them at the same time.

Feminists Still Not Getting It, Never Will

McArdle has a follow-up post to her contention that the men women love are girly.

Incidentally, I’m being accused in the comments of engaging in some sort of conspiracy to keep the Beta Man down.

These things are never conspiracies. They’re more like hindbrain blurts.

More on primate theory later, but for now let me point out that as a married woman in her thirties, I have very little possible interest in the behavior of the PUAs; I’m not their target, and they’re sure not mine.

Marriage is no plenury indulgence from the soul ripping cenobite chains of the sexual market. You are being judged always and forevermore, and you are always wishing to be judged in the best light possible, even though you may not have practical reasons for feeling so. Lest you think I’m kidding, tell me what happens to the glowing love your hubby lavishes on you if you bloat up 70 pounds in the next year. Similarly, let’s see how much love — sexually and otherwise — you feel for your husband should he find himself unemployed for years on end and devoting himself to herb gardening. The attentions of the PUA (or, as I like to call them, the freelance seducer) is just a single infidelity away. Don’t tempt disaster by thinking that dropping out of the fuck market is an acceptable lifestyle choice.

To a person with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and to a person with a sociobiology theory, everything starts to look like some primeval competition for resources on the veldt.

The dismissiveness of the anti-reductionist (complicationist? squid inkist?) never ceases to amuse. All your extravagant and high-minded appeals to human rationality, individualism, and exceptionalism are but a coat of desperately hopeful rhetoric concealing the animal motives below. To those with the eyes to see, the veldt is everywhere. Indeed, the veldt is written into the machine code of your brain. The average American woman has a hippo grazing in her brain.

But it’s misleading to claim theory as a sole teacher. Years of messy real world experience and observation endorse sociobiological theory, while the theory offers guidelines to men looking for answers and a plan of attack. Game is, if nothing else, field tested and motherfucker approved. And that’s what gives it credibility, as opposed to the lofty academic discussions that waft like a stale fart across women’s studies departments. Once a tactic stops working, it is jettisoned in favor of something that does work. If a tactic is proven ineffective, it hardly lasts more than a few approaches before being discarded. And with the zoom zoom of the internet, proven tactics are uncovered and disseminated very quickly.

This tendency should be strenuously resisted; not everything fits into a neat primate model, whether your Preferred Primates are bonobos or silverback gorillas.

Human nature can be observed and analyzed to form a working generalizable sociosexual theory without resort to knowledge of the habits of our ape cousins. The fact that there exist those precious special snowflake exceptions that hearten rationalists and equalists alike does not disprove the rules.

My off the cuff observation was a genuine one; this whole thing sounds like what girls used to do.

Yeah, because we all know how much girls try to figure out how to pick up women. And “used to do” — what, have girls suddenly changed their nature in the last few years?

McArdle is conflating the learning process with the execution. For example, a PUA teaches himself how to walk and stand and motion such that he signals nonverbal alpha dominance which is universally attractive to women, and this process may sound odd to women accustomed to imaging courtship as something magical that “just happens”. But once the PUA is “in set” and executing his game plan it will all seem natural and unforced to the woman if he is doing it right. She won’t be thinking “oh how girly he is”; instead, she’ll be thinking “wow, this guy is kinda cute and really cool”. (“Cute” being the internationally accepted girl code for describing any man — cute or otherwise — they are attracted to but unable to verbalize exactly why they are attracted.)

And in fact, at some level the PUAs have to know that it’s not really particularly manly.

Men use many tactics to attract women. It’s just the socially approved ones that transfer wealth from men to women, like slaving away in a corporate hellhole and buying dinner at expensive restaurants, that don’t raise the shaming hackles of banal, unreconstructed feminists like McArdle. It happens to be the fact that game is successful because it co-opts a woman’s tools of the seduction trade to use against her. Qualifying? Negging? Teasing? Takeaways? Push-pull? Aloofness? All are tactics that women use naturally in their dealings with male suitors. That perhaps is why game strikes older women as girly; there are indeed elements of femininity in seduction, and it is well known that this is highly attractive to women. The classics of literature abound with examples. The best seducer must get into the mind of his quarry, and to do this requires a level of empathy that is almost transmutative.

In the final analysis, though, I doubt many men getting their dicks wet are gonna fret that they might be perceived as girly by a scornful married feminist.

Why do I think this?

Because you’re a masculine woman? nttawwt.

Because if your girlfriend (however temporary) caught you mimicking Tom Cruise in front of the mirror, or spending your spare time trolling message boards for magic tricks to impress women with . . . well, would she be more enamored, or would she slither out of bed in disgust and start looking for her clothes?

The mirror thing is a red herring. No freelance seducer spends his waking hours posing in front of a mirror to get his stance right. That’s the domain of bodybuilders. Dominant body language can be learned by observing alpha males in the field. As for reading online seduction material, I was once discovered by a girlfriend to be reading one of those forums. Looking over my shoulder, she asked me what it was about, and I explained it exactly as it was, describing the science of human social dynamics and male female psychological differences. I didn’t cringe in embarrassment or apology like some weaker betaboys would have. I was matter of fact. She became intrigued and read along with me. The only slithering that night was her receiving my meaty intrusion.

I am not against people attempting to upgrade their social skills, nor am I horrified at the thought that “beta” males will somehow sneak into the gene pool; after all, I live in the city often called “Hollywood for Nerds”.

Beta is a state of mind that can be found anywhere. It is anhedonic. Game is the cure.

But the combination of artificiality, superficiality, and manipulation in the PUA manifestos makes it really hard not to snicker.

Ok. So her beef with game can be best summed up in this:

Artificiality — makeup, zit medicine, pushup bras, high heels, wrinkle creams, nail polish, botox, bikini wax.

Superficiality — Lavish adherence to fashion and culture trends, consumption of celebrity gossip, fascination with the supernatural and occult, upholders of PC shibboleths, ingrained sexual preference for tall men, lantern jawed men, and high social status men.

Manipulation — Making a guy wait for sex, wearing sexy clothes and pretending to be offended when he notices, flaking on dates, coyness, not picking up the phone on the first or second ring, expecting paid-for drinks on dates, shit testing.

I wonder if McArdle is aware she has indicted her own gender?

By the way, the manipulation criticism is one I hear all the time from detractors of the crimson arts. It’s a tawdry conceit. All goal-oriented communication — verbal or nonverbal — is a form of manipulation. When a woman advertises her cleavage she is manipulating men to do her favors or otherwise impress her. When a man works hard at his job to buy a nice car and house he is manipulating women’s attraction mechanisms. When both refrain from picking their noses or farting in public they are manipulating people’s impressions of them. McArdle and her ilk need to get over this manipulation mental roadblock they construct to assuage their feelings of lost power. If seduction is manipulation, then women don’t want guileless entreaties. The spread pussy speaks louder than the snickering blog post.

A reframe: if soccer is the beautiful sport, seduction is the beautiful manipulation. The herculean efforts required of the vast majority of men to seduce women that strike McArdle as unseemly and calculating when compared to the relatively easy go of it women in their prime years have when setting about to seduce men is just a reflection of the biological inequality between the sexes in their value on the sexual market. Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, and all that. McArdle is mistaken to assume this disparity in degree of mating effort caused by intrinsic sex differences is proof of men’s venality or women’s nobility.

(We will return to our regularly scheduled programming of learning about actual game, rather than jawboning about its cultural significance, tomorrow.)

Aging Urban Broads: The Manliest Of Women

Yet another churlish, resentful SWPL broad is on the warpath against game, armed with the same primitive stone tools all the other anti-game broads wield.

Reading the half-baked hate, I can’t help but get the impression of a very nervous woman. A woman apprehensive that men are gaining power in the sexual market and perhaps appalled that she is not any longer the primary target of that invigorated male sexual power. I can imagine her speaking truth to her indignation by assuming the role of the wise SWPL lady to a generation of younger women, admonishing them to never settle and scolding men to grow up.

But, you know, the times they change. The cock has no interest in your feeble hate. It doesn’t believe in synthesis, or syllogism, or in any absolute. What does it believe in? Pussy. And whatever it takes to get it. It’s self-evident.

The hater, McArdle, read an article by S.G. Belknap in The Point Magazine about pickup artists and seduction technology. McArdle sneers that men who learn game to attract women are “girly”.

I find it hilarious that the pick-up artists think of themselves as especially manly.  When I read this piece, what they sound like to me is girls–specifically, girls in the 14-17 age group.

The “learning seduction is girly” sneer is one of the most tedious repressed neoVictorian sniffs at game. It’s almost as if McArdle reads the comments here and sent a private shout out (and a pizza) to a bunch of my haters (hi, spoogen!) to agree on what they thought would be the most cutting sort of jab with which to poke the PUAs.

Spending all of your time thinking about how to attract the opposite sex?  Check.  Practicing poses in the mirror to figure out which ones are most attractive?  Check. Talking about it endlessly with your friends who only seem to care about the same, one, thing?  Check. Increasingly elaborate strategems for getting attention?  check.  Eventual evolution of said strategems into rituals as mechanical as playing the opening levels of an old-style video game?  Check.  If I close my eyes, I can still smell the bubble-gum scented lip gloss . . .

Worried that all that strategizing works? Check. Worried that all that strategizing will help men date younger, hotter, tighter women? Check. Doubly worried her lip gloss not be poppin’ anymore? Check.

For a supposedly rational liberdroid, McArdle seems oddly afflicted by the effervescent romantic idealism of the “just be yourself” and the “it should happen naturally” schools of nonthought. I’ve got news for her: courtship, attraction, and seduction ARE biomechanical processes that can be extracted from the misty ether and reduced to their core components. From such knowledge, generalizations can be made about the sexes. Does this fact bother many women? Sure it does. And I explained why in this post:

Generalizations offend women in a way they do not offend men because they breach the perimeter ego defense and strike right at a woman’s core self-conception — her belief in herself as Princess On A Cloud Carried Aloft By Admiring Suitors. If it’s true that her genes account for nearly all her success or failure with the men she wants, then there isn’t much she can do to improve her chances to fulfill her deepest desires. If it’s true (and it is) that men value beauty above all else, then it is logically inescapable that she is, to an unsettling degree, interchangeable with any women who are at or above her level of physical attractiveness.

Game, by stripping the seduction process into a flowchart for ease of learning and applying in the field, offends women’s sense of mystery and prerogative to act on intuition. Things better left shrouded in the unknown is the working preference of most women, not because they are more romantic than men (just the opposite is true), but because women are constitutionally wired to abhor the thought that men can exert calculated influence on women’s sexual desires and choices. Women want total and untrammeled choice in the dating market, and they want to prohibit men from enjoying the same extraordinary power. Game brings balance to the force, and that is highly threatening to women, particularly aging women for whom options are rapidly running out. (Reminder: Maxim #98: Marriage is no escape from the sexual market and the possibility that you may be outbid by a competitor with higher value.)

Ultimately, women hate the thought of game, (not game itself; that they love), because they want their alpha male – beta male distinctions predigested and unsullied by interference from proactive men intent on bringing chaos to the male hierarchy. This is why women love royalty and kings and princes so much; in that world, the alphas are identified and known. There is little churn. The women have only to concern themselves with competing with other women for the cocka of the top dog. But in a world of game, where the status of men is in a constant state of flux, ever-shifting and spoiling the tidiness of the women’s preferred caste systemed zero sum sexual market, there are additional stresses and concerns. Now the women have to figure out who among the millions of men trundling through their gleaming anonymous urban jungles tingling ginas left and right are the alpha males of their dreams and expectations. By muddying the waters, game makes this filtering process more difficult for women. More exhilarating, too.

McArdle imitates a snarky lip curl:

Do they send out for pizza while they talk, or would that just make Erik cry because he looks so fat in his new jeans?

Projection, it’s what’s for dinner!

She continues:

Who–over the age of 25–believes that investing most of your time and energy in attracting another person means that you’re gaining power over them?  At least the little girls eventually learn that sex and flirting are supposed to be fun.  And very few full time jobs are fun.

First, a man invests time and energy in attracting women in almost anything he does. Directly, he does this through courtship and game. Indirectly, he does this through status increasing activities which his genes have programmed him to do because it is an effective way to attract a lot of fertile age women. How does that Chris Rock joke go? If a man could get blowjobs with no effort, he’d be satisfied living in a cardboard box. That one method is considered less noble than the other and frowned upon by polite PC company is not a man’s moral crisis.

Second, in what warped fembot universe is successfully attracting women so that they have sex with you a sign of powerlessness? Is McArdle unaware of men’s ultimate goal? Hint: insert penis into vagina.

I’ve previously responded to the hackneyed hate from the likes of McArdle and her sisterhood of the traveling prigs. See this classic post. It’s nothing new. On the subject of “girly” male seducers:

12. Fallacy of Misdirected Obsession Hate

Hater: A guy who spends his life obsessing over how to get women is a loser.

A guy who spends his life obsessing over climbing the corporate ladder to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over mastering guitar and playing in a rock band to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who spends his life obsessing over pursuing financial rewards and acquiring resources to get more attention from women is a loser.
A guy who….. ah, you get the point.

[…]

16. Dancing Monkey Hate

Hater: Men who run game are just doing the bidding of women. Alphas don’t entertain women.

If you want success with women, you are going to have to entertain them… one way or the other. The same is true of women. Once a woman stops entertaining men with her body, her femininity, and her commitment worthiness by getting fat, old, ugly, bitchy, or single mom-y, she stops having success with men. We are all doing the bidding of our biomechanical overlord, and on our knees to his will we surrender, by force or by choice. You fool yourself if you believe you have some plenary indulgence from this stark reality.
Or: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

According to McArdle’s impeccable logic, I suppose the billions of women who studiously do their hair, dress in the latest fashions, wear makeup, tone their glutes, play hard to get, and consume everything from herbal elixirs to plastic surgery in order to turn back the hands of time are acting manly. Yes, I find it hilarious that all these women think of themselves as feminine.

There is also something to be said for the power of contrast. A man who displays dominant body language (learned or inherited) can strengthen and speed the seduction of women by handicapping himself with feminine flash. This flash can be expressed either through peacocking (exaggerated male fashion) or by running vulnerability game. Women are very attuned to male status, and a man can signal high status by refusing to play by the rules or fall in line with the norm. Defying a woman’s expectations is an effective seduction strategy.

Allow me to get personal for a moment. (double heh) This “men who learn the science of seduction are girly” meme has been spreading like a dumpy middle-aged ass among the cackling witch crowd lately. Perhaps a little of the old remote psychological diagnosis is in order. I wonder if these yuppie broads are projecting their deepest unmet desire for a sexy man who can properly seduce them after they daydream their way through another tepid rutting session with their pasty, doting, domestic chore-splitting beta provider husbands and boyfriends. Ya know, too much relationship exactness and complementarity is sand in the gears of the female soul.

(Note: Regular commenter Thursday has a number of insightful comments over at McArdle’s blog. Go check them out.)

Telling Girls You Were Once Engaged

If you are a man such as myself with a long and storied relationship history, it will start to worry new girls that you meet why you have decided to remain “single”, i.e. unmarried. You see, a former marriage, no matter how spectacular its failing, is a mark of success on a man; it says to a prospective mate he was able at one time to attract a woman the traditional way and bind her in the facsimile of a long term commitment. This is another one of those intractable and intrinsic gender double standards that whiners will just have to learn to accept with dignity — divorced men suffer less of a blow to their dating market value than do divorced women. The same is true of divorced men with kids, or single dads; they do not suffer nearly the same market value penalty that single moms do.

It all comes down to the biologically induced disparity in how men and women respond to the phenomenon of preselection. Men, being nearly 100% visually oriented in their attractions to women, couldn’t care less what kind of man is on her arm, or what kind of men used to be on her arm. They see, they like. Simple equation. All they care about is that she is unencumbered (or unskewered) by dicks present, and to a lesser extent, by dicks past. Women, on the other hand, rely heavily on preselection (when it is available as a tool to judge mate quality) in their attractions to men. They see he is liked, they like.

And so it goes with divorcées. Divorced men can see a boost in their attractiveness to women (as long as they avoid bringing up the ex-wife in reverent tones during pickups), while divorced women see no boost, or even a negative hit, in their attractiveness to men. Consequently, my advice to divorced men is to mention your divorcée status early in a conversation. My advice for divorced women would be just the opposite — refrain from bringing it up, and if he asks, lie. This double standard is so entrenched that even *married* men will see an increase in their pickup success.

This is why I have discovered that a man telling girls he was once engaged works to stimulate their curiosity. And female curiosity is the catalyst that speeds the chemical reaction leading to tingles. Why engaged? Because former finacée sounds sexier than ex-wife. It is pregnant with romantic and tragic possibility. She sees this man, once engaged but no longer, and her mind reels with fantasy of what went wrong. Was it irreconcilable differences? Did he cheat on her? Did she move away? Did he make demands she couldn’t meet? Did she die in a horrible car accident? Was there a vast cultural gulf? Did her family sabotage their love? What did she look like?

Don’t worry if you were never engaged. Lie. It is the sort of lie that is nearly impossible to detect, or accidentally expose. And it is the sort of lie women crave from men, and would not disrupt with arid investigative pursuit. Your job, as a man with a keen grasp of female psychology, is to lie and let her overworked hamster fill in the missing narrative. The best way to do this is to say you were once engaged to a French girl, for American women bristle from the imagined competitive threat of French girls. (When American women ask me who my favorite actresses are, I always mention Marion Cotillard and Audrey Tautou. Then I watch with satisfaction their faces flash a hint of sexually lubricative insecurity.)

HER: Were you always single?

THE DEVIL WHO REMAKES U IN HIS IMAGE: No, I was once engaged.

HER: Really!

THE DEVIL WHO REMAKES U IN HIS IMAGE: Yes. [Turn away, look pensively at the horizon] She was a French girl. We were in love.

HER: What happened?

THE DEVIL WHO REMAKES U IN HIS IMAGE: It’s complicated.

The Graphs That Bode America’s Downward Spiral

Assume the worst. Total economic meltdown. Shortages. Riots. Hyperinflation. Corruption. Rampant tribalism.

What’s your next move?

Chivalrous Dork Vs Showboating Badboy

If I had to condense three years of this blog into one video, this would be it. (Video link courtesy of Rant Casey – Brazil.)

Notice how the air is completely let out of the videotaping girls’ polite admiration for Prince Valiant after their attention — and fired-up tingles — are redirected to the street surfer. Even the beta chump knows his moment of glory is robbed from him, as he stands forlornly on the sidewalk, shoulders slumped, realizing he has one more girl to carry over the water. Of course, he can’t leave her stranded when he’s already helped her friend across. That would be tantamount to a declaration that his strategy of chivalry had ulterior motives. So he proceeds to complete his chore mission with perfunctory listlessness. Poor beta.

The alpha beta disparity is truly an international phenomenon.

What we’ve learned from this video:

Bravo! = warm hug plus three pats on the back.

Whoooa! = horny for love.

Who do you think the rescued girls chatted about afterward with a glow in their loins? The galoot who helped them probably received an “awww, he was nice” coupled with a flurry of condescending giggles which was code for “what a dork”. The alpha interloper probably got a “did you see that?!” and a flurry of nervous giggles involuntarily spasmed to release the boiling pressure buildup in their crotches.

The girls recording the event are speaking Russian. The studio audience would be obliged if someone could translate what they’re saying.

At the end, the videotaping girls are pretty much like, “Ok, go away beta. You and your sensible car bore us.”

Hank Moody: Chump

Our TV shows, movies and music give us hints about America as she is and where she is heading, at least as filtered through the eyes of a certain cultural or ethnic niche.

A friend told me I must watch Californication. He said the Hank Moody character closely resembled my life. Michael Blowhard, formerly of 2blowhards, also suggested I check out the show for its excellent portrayal of a man who knows how to game girls. Naturally, I was curious, so I watched all three seasons. I could see the resemblance. Spoilers below, so if you haven’t yet seen the show go whack off to cuteoverload.com.

The show is a blast. Smartly written, funny, and bawdy, with just the right amount of emotional gravitas to leaven the barrage of casual sex, cheating, whoring, drinking and coke snorting. I won’t look at Kathleen “tush toot” Turner the same way again.

Hank Moody is the oversexed main character (played effortlessly by a youthful looking David Duchovny — he was in his late 40s when filming began. One wonders just how much supposed sex addict Duchovny channeled his real life for this character). Moody (get it?) is a charming asshole given to bouts of despondency and a penchant for self-sabotage. He’s a writer with writer’s block who moves to LA from New York. His craving for fresh pussy (and his ability to get it) puts him on a crash course with his desire to fully reunite with his one true love, Karen, and their daughter Becca. You might think of the show in these terms: Hank’s multitudinous lovers are his id, Karen is his ego, and Becca a manifestation of his superego. I think the writers of the show added Becca to ground Hank lest he float away on an endless puffy cloud shaped like a mons pubis.

Any man interested in game should watch this show. Hank Moody practically delivers a clinic on how to properly seduce chicks in nearly every episode. He is the consummate cocky funny jerk women can’t help but love. For example, here is a scene where Hank is flirting with a woman he does not yet know is a prostitute (she later genuinely falls for Hank and offers pro bono services):

Hank: Come on, how come I don’t know your name?

Trixie: You haven’t asked.

Hank: Well, let’s not stand on ceremony. [He hand motions for her to say her name.]

Trixie: Trixie.

Hank: Trixie! That is a terrific name… if you’re a hooker!

Beautiful neg, said with a smile. How many of you guys reading right now would have the balls to pull off that kind of neg on a girl in a bar? You need to get those balls, because that is the kind of edgy, teasing game that fires a woman’s loins.

There are plenty more examples in the show of the right frame to hold with women. For that alone, it is worth watching. But somewhere in the middle of the first season, something began to bother me about the underlying message the show was sending. Finally, after Hank gets into yet another fistfight with a random dude who slighted some random woman, it hits me.

Hank Moody is a white knighting chump. A feminist’s dream. The alpha male who will spill the blood of other men and sacrifice his own self-interest to protect the honor of the lying whores and skanky sluts he bangs whose supposed deep-seated decency Hank can’t stop extolling, even when all evidence points to the contrary.

Think about it for a minute. What is the perfect man in a feminist’s eyes? He is first and foremost that charming cad who gets them wet. We all know the tingle is the necessary ingredient on the way to female fulfillment. Second, he is utterly nonjudgmental, no matter how badly the women in his life behave. Everything, ultimately, is his own fault, and he feels deeply sorry for “hurting” women, even when he can’t help but continue “hurting” them. Third, he will defend a woman’s honor at risk to his own well-being, health and reputation, even when the woman in question has little objective honor worth defending. Fourth, he will forgive everything bad women do to him, absolve them of all their sins (they know not what they do, lord, for they have mere vaginas), and fight those who would disagree.

An egregious example of Hank’s knee-jerk white knighting is in his relationship with the character Mia. Mia is an underage sexpot who seduces Hank in a bookstore and fucks him without telling him her age, then adds insult to injury by punching him in the face, hard, during sex. Later, she steals his newest manuscript (the only one he has written. no copies. what a maroon!), reads it, and passes it off as her own, going so far as to show up at Hank’s agent’s office to pitch her “new book” to a roomful of cackling skank-ho broads who, naturally, love this “new voice”. Throughout the later episodes, there is a constant undercurrent of impending doom awaiting Hank as Mia hints at spilling the beans about Hank’s statutory rape if he should ever decide to reveal she is not the author of his book. In fact, the statutory rape specter is the leaden apparition that haunts the entire show, and infuses it with the drama necessary to propel the plotline forward.

And all through this, Hank barely registers the slightest bit of anger or resentment toward Mia. If anything, he is protective of her, like a father, at one point explaining that she’s “not malicious, just mischievous”.

Hank, you silly stupid fuck, you douchebrained fool. Any sane person would agree that a woman duping a man into a possible statutory rape charge, stealing his labor of love manuscript, passing it off as her own, receiving the financial and social rewards of that book while depriving the true author of same, threatening to scream rape should the aggrieved man reveal the truth, and finally having the man’s ass thrown in jail on rape charges…

is a grade A 100% malicious bitch.

And yet, the writers felt it necessary to infantilize Mia and demonize the men who would treat Mia as the calculating succubus she is.

Is there anything more puke-inducing than unthinking white knighting? If his backasswards behavior in the face of such treachery is supposed to humanize Hank Moody, it doesn’t. It just makes him look like a chump. A fun, sexy chump, to be sure, but a chump just the same. Let’s see if the upcoming season four corrects his doleful trajectory and knocks some sense into his hyperchivalrous melon.

My point of all this is that the underlying message in Californication is not pro-male, or even pro-lothario. It is yet another shot across the bow of dignified, bold manhood, whether that manhood is exemplified in the form of the hapless but successful beta provider character played by Dean Coontz, or in the wanderlusting lothario of Hank Moody. It is not different than the message of any other TV show of the past twenty years churned out by Hollywood —

Men are stupid malcontents, and women are paragons of unassailable virtue.

The writers took the easy way out, which is too bad, because this show could have been more than merely entertaining. It could have been a cultural touchstone.

Which brings me to a larger issue. What the fuck is up with statutory rape? It’s a joke law made up by joke legislators without a scintilla of real world experience with women. Am I supposed to request age identification from every full-bodied young woman who comes onto me? There are 13 year olds out there who look like grown women. At the borderline of 16 to 18 years old, many women could easily pass for mid to late 20s. It is well known by neuroscientists and psychologists studying these things that women mature faster than men. Women’s brains gel into adult-shaped contours sooner. A full breasted and wide-hipped 17 year old hottie who flirts with me knows exactly what she is doing and what she wants. She is no child to be coddled. And yet, I could be thrown in jail if I slept with her assuming she was an older girl, even if it was something we both consensually desired.

This is abject bullshit. The law makes it a necessity to demand age identification with every young woman a man might want to fuck who could conceivably pass for a teenager. This means background checks on women in their 20s. And what about women who lie? They exist, lots of them. Is a statutory rape charge for the man the just response — the *fair* response — to a lying woman who wanted the sex as much as he?

It’s time to end the charade of statutory rape. If the “underage” woman is physically developed, and she consents to the sex, there is no rape charge, period. For chrissakes, there are 14 year olds in parts of the world getting married off and pumping out children of their own.