I want to thank all of my regulars for contributing fine posts to my last “test of your game” post, and which has now become an ongoing series, meant to assist Men in meeting their sexual and relationship goals, by giving fairminded yet earnest critiques of their Game and where they can improve. Hopefully, as this series grows and develops, we’ll hear back from some of these Men who have taken what we have shared here to heart and give us a Good Report!

The following comes from my good friend and colleague, Ms. Susan Walsh’s website, Hooking Up Smart. Though the forum was originally designed and intended to assist college aged Women navigate the current “hookup culture” successfully, Ms. Walsh has found that, since her forays into the Gamespehere over the past year that quite a few young Men are interested in what she has to say. Hence the subject of today’s post – a young Man named Althone McGinnis. What follows below is a lengthy, albeit heartfelt letter from this young Man, filled with quite a bit of pain and disillusionment with regard to his situation. I have already offered some advice in the form of previous posts I’ve written, but his is I think, a special case that calls for my regulars to get involved as well. You can read his letter and the context in which it was written at Ms. Walsh’s site here: http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2010/04/02/hookinguprealities/the-combustible-mixture-of-sex-and-alcohol/

And now, without further adieu, Mr. McGinnis’ letter; commentary and helpful critique are most welcome.

Holla back

The Obsidian

“I’ve been lurking around here long enough. Time for a post. A very long post, but a post nonetheless. I have no homework and a whole lot of time anyhow. I think this post will be worth reading, but if you’re browsing and you have even mild ADD(or just a touch of impatience), skip this. I just wanna get my thoughts out there, and I want to explain them with as much clarity as possible.

Quick background: I’m 18, go to a small ivy(the smallest one…dead giveaway there I guess), and am very much a beta male. Prior to my arriving on campus, I had never danced with or kissed(much less screwed) a girl. Why? High school was a long sob story for me(too long for this blog) but the bottomline is that the issues I dealt with there pretty much retarded my social development. i was very withdrawn by necessity. My life was football and studying-nothing social came into the picture and I never attended a co-ed party. And hey, I got recruited to play ball at this Ivy, so I guess it sort of worked itself out, right?

I came to college determined to turn my social life around. I was sexually unsuccessful in high school, and I didn’t want college(its supposed to be the best time of our lives, right?) to be that way. So, when I came here I started drinking. I’d never drank before in my life, but I did so now with a fury. And you know what? I kinda liked it. Suddenly, I could actually approach girls and(GASP!) say things! It was a big step up for me this past fall, but I’ll admit my success rate still wasn’t very high(0%).

Like I said, I’m a natural beta. I grew up in a conservative upper-class jamaican culture. It was one where EVERYONE went to a great school(Oxford, Harvard, Cornell-you name it, I probably have a relative who went there and a couple more who work there), everyone became an educational administrator, doctor or lawyer, religion was highly influential(Jamaican roads are empty on Sundays) and relationships were highly traditional. My grandparents were married for 50 years until death literally did them part. I spent most of my early life living with them. They had what I wanted. when I was 8, on my way to Montego bay to fly back to the US and go to school, I told my Aunt flat out: I wanted to meet a great girl and marry when I was 22 and have the same relationship my grandparents did, with lots of kids. They thought it was cute, but this mentality screwed me for the environment I was about to fly into.

I do not understand this modern hook-up society. I have more in common with 50 year old men than my own peers(not a bad thing entirely-this helps in interviews but screws me socially). There have been times when I’ve heard my peers speak and felt like a total alien among them, ignorant of many pop culture references. I have always tried to take girls on dates traditionally. I was the quintessential stereotype of “the nice guy”-reliable and gentlemanly, but boring and awkward. One girl who I made a particularly strong effort to get close to for my first 2 months here at college got so mad at how “clingy” and “eager to please” I was that she flat out told me on the phone one day that “There are thousands of other guys on campus I’d rather get to know” as opposed to dealing with me and that “I don’t want you in my life anymore”.
That was it. I didn’t know why she got so angry, though a PUA theory espused by Roissy (Women Hate Betas) may explain it. I’ll get to that later.
 
I was pretty depressed for a while(say a month or so). I started drinking a little more. That girl texted me occasionally out of the blue even after that, and I don’t know why. When she told me what she did that one night I made zero effort to contact her again and basically never spoke to her again. Later, I found out that she had told her friends that I had stalked her before and after our final conversation(WTF?). That bugged me, but I’ll get to that later.

I began to read game after this. I had been reading Roosh’s blog and forum since the previous summer(and yes, I did it for the travel advice. I have very seriously considered expatriation as a partial solution to my issues-I think its an idea that could help a lot of guys like me), and I discovered Roissy and a host of others that winter. I went through a pretty angry stage. I had always had periods of frustration in high school, but it hit a new level here. I hated every thing having to do with my female peers. I hated that I couldn’t seem to impress them no matter what I did. I hated the fact that girls who, to be very blunt, were not all that attractive(that girl who told me to go away that fall was a 5 on a good day) found it necessary to be spectacularly rude to me for just trying to be decent. I’m not a bad looking guy. I got an 8.9 on HotOrNot (ok, dubious source, but I’ve been objectively called a 7 or 7.5 in person). I was a runningback on a D-1 team. I was generally thought of well by my peers. Why was this so hard? All I wanted was a decent girl. Was I asking too much?

After the angry stage came the renewal stage. I understood game now. I now knew that bitterness wouldn’t get me anywhere and that I needed to hide my frustration if I ever wanted to succeed. And I went out with a renewed vigor. And I lucked out (this coming part is relevant to the article).

I met a couple of girls at the football team’s frat house one Friday. They were athletes to, so our paths crossed frequently enough. Anyway, we all get drunk and run off to another frat. Dancing and grinding ensues. I start to get particularly close to one. We make out(first kiss I’ve ever had). Things are going good. I’m on top of the world in the basement of a smelly fraternity, the legendary “Animal House” itself. Ironic.

She invites me upstairs, and here is where it gets problematic. I start to say stupid things(way too forward and aggressive-alcohol makes me excessively confident, I find) and even forget her name. Nevertheless, she proceeds to invite me to an empty room…alone. Somehow I manage to get to second base before she pulls back(PUA’s like to call this “Last Minute Resistance”). She’s standing there shirtless asking me why I think that she “just has sex with random people”? I’m too drunk to think intelligently-I just assumed she’d invited me to the room for escalation. She goes down stairs again, mills around for a while, and then her friend takes her away as she starts to show frustration. When I exited the frat house and tried to follow up with her and apologize for whatever I did wrong, they started to run. Quickly.

Over the next two to three weeks I find it difficult to get this girl out of my mind. I liked her. I did go out on other weekends, drink, and attempt to get with other girls(“oneitis” is bad, right?) but I found my success very limited. The rejections piled up.

In my more sober moments, I attempted to contact the girl I’d hooked up with. My football coach had organized a team social activity and we were supposed to bring dates. I asked her, and she lied and said she was going with another teammate(he later told me that at that point he’d not asked or been asked by anyone). I asked her to the Freshman dance, and she again said she had a date(which was true, actually). I tried on two separate occasions to dance with her when I saw her in a frat on other weekends.

On one of these occasions, she continued to pull away from me and into the arms of one of her platonic guy friends. It got to a point at which the guy(credit to him-he was half my size and I was very intoxicated and prone to do something really stupid) told me matter-of-factly “she doesn’t want to dance with you, dude” all while she rested in his arms looking back at me like i was some sort of horrific oppressor, a strange, scray outsider. That’s an image I’ll never forget right there. I’d always felt a bit like I was “on the outside” when it came to interacting with my peers, like they all just understood things about modern social society that I never would. Now the feeling had been embodied.
 
It wouldn’t be until 3-4 weeks after the hookup that I would find out what this girl’s problem was. A teammate of mine who was close to her friends said that she had told them after the incident that I had attempted to RAPE her. She said I locked the door and tossed her shirt away somewhere so she wouldn’t be able to get it.

Two problems-there was no handle on the door(found that out as I tried to open the door and felt nothing as we entered) and her shirt was right behind her(she put it back on very quickly when the LMR set in). But, no matter. The damage was done. I got worried for a bit until my friend assured me that her own friends had calmed her down and convinced her not to pursue the issue.

Keep in mind that I’m reading blogs HEAVILY this whole time. I went from Assanova to Roissy to Roosh to Feministing to Pandagon to Alpha-status to Ferdinand bardamu to here-I had been working to acquire as much knowledge as possible on the issues I was dealing with and looked at all sides. And I’d come across plenty of material on consent and alcohol. My friends told me it wasn’t a big deal, but I somehow didn’t feel that way. All that girl had to do was go to a school security officer and my reputation(and future) would be very much in jeopardy. I already had one girl calling me a stalker-now a rapist?

And then I figured it out. What i was dealing with was just the nature of the hook up culture. As Mystery and others have said, the basic formula of game is clear: Attraction + Comfort = Sex. I had built attraction(she had admitted that I was “hot”) but in my intoxication I failed to build comfort. Her discomfort got to a point at which she started to feel shamed for hooking up with me, and it is likely that she began looking for any potential way to exhume herself socially from the shame of it all.
Claiming rape made sense. It justified her discomfort completely and there was little risk to her in making the claim.

Had I found this out right after the failed hookup, I would have avoided her like the plague. As it is, I make no effort to go anywhere near her. I don’t need that insanity around me.
Of course, that begs the question: Why bother with this culture at all?

I’m a beta male. Its just how I was raised, there isn’t much I can do about it. I made an earnest attempt using alcohol to transition to a more “alpha” status, but the fact is that I’m not very good at this.
Women in this culture seem to use this against you. This is the basis of my theory Think about it: which group of men is more likely to be exposed to a false rape charge?
It couldn’t be the higher status alpha males, the elite 20 percenters. Sure, a scorned member of his harem may get the idea at some point to try and get back at him with a false charge. But most of the time, girls are working to be a part of his circle. They spend months, maybe years just trying to rope these guys in, and give themselves up freely in that process. The time they spend trying to get back at him is minuscule in comparison. These guys know just what to say and just how to turn these girls on so the girls are almost never uncomfortable with them, hence their continued striving to tame them.

But what about the other guys? We’re the problematic group. Many of us are reading game literature en-masse. Many of us are learning to some small extent what it takes to turn a girl on. A few of us have managed to trick girls who, after hanging out with us more extensively following(or even during) the hookup, realized what we really were. We weren’t what they really wanted. Deep down, we’re guys with relatively low degrees of experience and we don’t understand how to turn them on. We only know how to APPEAR to(with a little liquid courage). We, not the 20%, are the ones that girls will laugh at, tease, ignore and at times insult/mock behind our back. Roissy and others have postulated that women truly hate beta males. While he may or may not be 100% accurate, I don’t doubt that there is a lot of truth to these words. Romantically, it appears that they find us(and our mannerisms) very, very distasteful in the aggregate.

They realize that they were nearly duped by this “beta”, and the shame promptly sets in. They can’t be seen to have accepted such an unsuitable male. They HATE that they let such a guy take advantage of them.
So they make one of two claims. Either “they were way too drunk” or “he forced himself on me”.

The inexperienced beta male, in his attempts to reform himself, is far more likely to be exposed to this type of accusation because of who he is. He can’t build comfort, and uncomfortable girls will work quickly to seek out a reasoning for their mistake. “Attempted rape” is a pretty convenient one in today’s society, because not a whole lot of distinction is made between a guy whose intent is truly malicious(guys with date rape drugs and the like) and guys who just don’t know what they’re doing. That, and its tougher for a guy to defend himself against such a charge-the assumption is made that she is telling the truth.
Are there plenty of girls(like the one I met) who are crazy enough to put such a charge on a guy with no substantiation? I think so. I’m at arguably the best school in the country with some of the world’s smartest kids and I still run into it. What are the chances it happens at one of the other thousands of colleges/universities daily?
This all happened in winter, and Spring term has begun. I’ve been thinking-why even bother going at it again? Why take the chance approaching more girls? If you’re a guy who really and truly is behind in his game like I am(guys with my level of ineptitude are probably just a portion of the bottom 80% of guys, but a sizeable one nonetheless), is it really all that safe for you to try and change that in this culture? Even a guy with more aptitude than me9maybe he had a girlfriend in highschool or something) is at serious risk here if his game isn’t tight enough.
If you make a mistake, it could all end for you. Your life is in the hands of these girls, and with them there isn’t all that much room for error. Why take the chance? Why get rejected 99 times just for the one girl who might very well screw you over anyway?

Its a Saturday night here and I’ve already decided to stay in. I’m too young to expatriate(can’t just go somewhere where my prospects will improve), I don’t have a car on campus(limits mobility) and I don’t have a lot of money(I can’t even buy company the way lonely older men do). Maybe going ghost is the best option for guys like me after all?”