Game debate roundup

Chuck weighs in on social conservatives, game, and discourse:

SoCons seem to be fixed on the idea that men who are trying to overcome are somehow dishonest in their behavior towards women. But I ask, is anything more dishonest than the subjugated white knights and doting fem-boys when it comes to the objects of their desire? Gamers replace “You look pretty” and “I really like you” with “You have something in your eye” and “You really like me.” All of these can be true statements, there’s no lying involved, but the frame of mind of the speaker has changed. The former were lines from a typical man in pursuit of a woman. Her gorged ego sucks them down and puts them on the pile of “lines I’ve heard a million times”. The latter are true statements as well, but they come from a man with a different viewpoint. This man, either naturally or with the impartations of Game, makes observations that aren’t “natural” to most men. We’ve been taught “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” But forcing “something nice” – as an “honorable” man would do to appease his woman – is as dishonest as anything. The thing that is lost on SoCons and other opponents of Game is that Game attempts to restore honesty and openness to male/female interactions. Game tries to make men comfortable with the truth. With Game, I don’t have to suck up to my girl just because I think that’s what I have to do to keep her interested. I don’t feed her compliments so that she won’t leave me. I tell her she’s pretty when I think she’s pretty, and I tell her she has shit in her eye when she has shit in her eye.

OneSTDV claims my and Beta Prime’s “beta revolution” is doomed to failure:

Yet, what will become of these reformed betas, those transformed by Game into sexually desirous alphas? If the disconnect of betas results from a lack of sexual satisfaction, then why does the Beta Revolution think he’ll be satisfied with a return to provider status. Game affords him a plethora of women, while his mental and moral tools provide him a comfortable and independent living. In addition, men’s relatively slow physical aging allows him access to fertile women well into his 60’s. The formerly beta man has no incentive to return to provider status, besides some nebulous connection to a cultural renaissance. Rather, it’s conceivable these former betas devolve into hedonistic and nihilistic Roissy-ites, dismissing the larger repercussions of sexual deviancy in order to pursue personal sexual satisfaction.

Beta Prime’s response:

This critique assumes that the Beta Revolution consists solely of advocating Game to betas as a means of simple sexual satisfaction, neverminding the benefits in promoting skill at social interaction (opening sets) and in maintaining fun, romantic relationships. This critique then, I think, falsely assumes that the ‘betas’ who we are trying to stir up are the same orequal to the natural alphas who, at present, hold all the sexual cards. When I say equal I mean having those same intellectual and personality qualities which, when pervasive in a society, amounts to a more functional, less chaotic existence. The natural alphas, not that they are our enemy, usually do not have the level of conscientiousness and intelligence needed to keep the motor of civilization going that the betas do.

Dennis Mangan’s response:

Admittedly, game could never provide the material for saving the West. But the idea that once a man learns how to be attractive to women, that he will forsake home and hearth and cubicle to sake his lust in the arms of prodigal women beggars the imagination. It assumes that game is utterly transformational, changing a man’s character so profoundly and changing him from nerd to Casanova so completely, that forming a harem will be nearly the only thing on his mind, and that he will abandon his former goals of forming a family, saving for retirement, and in general enjoying a quiet life.

My response:

As others have already stated, OneSTDV, your argument rests on the idea that learning game will automatically turn betas into uncaring lotharios. This is false because:

1) Merely learning game will not utterly transform a man. Most betas don’t want to be PUAs or cads, they just want a girlfriend or god forbid, a wife.

2) Being a lothario is not possible for many betas because they are either genetically incapable of it or they are unwilling to put in the work necessary. One doesn’t go from reading the Mystery Method to swooping women all the time – it takes time and hard work to reach that level of mastery. Roosh Valizadeh, a beta who transformed himself into a successful player, spent several years and expended considerable effort to get where he is today. Most betas are not going to go that far.

Novaseeker disputes Lawrence Auster’s claim that the game debate is over, citing Todd White’s response to me as full of strawmen and false assumptions:

It assumes that Strauss, like Roissy, sums up or exemplifies Game, and that no-one could ever use it for another purpose. The ironic thing is that Roissy himself, as recently as last week, had a long post here, dedicated to how one of his readers has successfully integrated Game into his marriage in order to save it – and how he succeeded in doing so without becoming an unfaithful rake. To highlight people like Roissy and Strauss, while ignoring people like Dave from Hawaii, is to set up a straw-man: a false picture that “this is all Game is”, when in fact this is not the case.

Thursday reminds traditionalists and social conservatives that, yes, they got it wrong and the Roissys and Devlins of the world got it right:

Sadly it has taken traditionalists almost 100 years to even begin to realize that the series of sexual revolutions in the 20th century were primarily driven by female sexual desire, not male sexual desire. Until recently, traditionalists have tended to assume that the behaviour of women in the Victorian era was a close reflection of their unconstrained sexual nature. The signals indicating otherwise were indeed there to read much earlier, but that doesn’t mean they were in fact read. Other aspects of female sinfulness were acknowledged, but the primarily female driven nature of 20th century changes in sexual mores was not put forward by any traditionalist or social conservative before F. Roger Devlin. One might reply, as Auster does, that it is axiomatic that the sexual revolutions of the 20th Century were changes in who young women slept with. But that ignores the differing explanations as to why they started doing so. The usual social conservative/traditionalist explanation was that bad males had gotten these young girls to sleep with them because these poor females wanted love and affection (but not sex) and those bad males refused to give them love and affection unless they slept with them. Those innocent females didn’t really want the sex, you see, they just wanted to be loved and cherished, but they had to give these men sex outside of marriage or else these bad men would move on to some girl who would have sex with them. It was sexual extortion, aided by the fact that the young man could now say, “But you won’t get pregnant. We have birth control now.”

Virginia Gentleman opines on Mr. Auster over at Roissy’s:

The whole Auster thing has been very interesting to read, since I generally take a favorable stance towards his writings, even if I don’t necessarily accept everything the man writes. It does, however, strike me as unnecessary internicine warfare.

I certainly don’t mean to engage in the sort of juvenile emotionalism usually on display when a teenager shrieks, “You don’t understand me!”, but keeping that in mind, I have a creeping suspicion that, on this issue, Mr. Auster et al are simply not connected to the conditions on the ground as of late August 2009. Mr. Auster’s usual perceptive insights do seem to have failed him in this instance.

The recurring mental image is one of senior officers (Aust-rians, perhaps?) arguing that an infantryman with a fixed bayonet, elan and a commitment to the offensive will triumph over the flatbilled hordes, accompanied by the faint strains of a Viennese waltz. Meanwhile, those of us actually on the troop trains are being addressed by a burly commissar who bellows, “Next stop, Stalingrad! The one with the rifle shoots…”, with the screams of sirens mounted to Luftwaffedive bombers echoing nearby.

This is not, of course, to disparage Mr. Auster et al; I think we can be reasonably certain that the world that they grew up in simply does not exist at this point in time. It would almost be unfair to expect them to know conditions on the front lines for those of us in our late twenties-early thirties.

Meanwhile, the advice of various correspondents agreeing with Mr. Auster (typified by, “Read Proverbs twice daily; some day your prince/princess will come”) would be downright insulting if I didn’t think it was being issued with honest motivations. As for my part, I’ve got a long checklist of things that have been tried; it largely matches the advice and practices of Mr. Auster’s correspondents. What do I have to show for it? Not even so much as a T-shirt.

If we’re worried about Western Civilization, then we need those who generally agree as to its value and worthiness of preservation to be producing the next generation faster than the other side(s). After all, if you see a growing trend of Islamicization of the West, who’s going to resist it? We certainly can’t count on the multicultural cult to do so.

Adopting the words of a cinematic character in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers: “You disapprove? Well, too bad! We’re in this war for the civilization, boys and girls.” We have the destination in mind and we more or less know how to get there. All we need are the troops, and there’s only one way to get them. Refusing to use all available devices against our civilizational opposition seems tantamount to unilateral disarmament for the good guys. I didn’t favor it during the Cold War and I certainly don’t favor it now.

Finally, Tupac Chopra made me laugh with this comment:

Auster is Don Imus to Roissy’s Howard Stern.

And we commenters are Roissy’s “Wack Pack”