A few years ago, my friends and I took a trip to Miami, but I decided to drive up the day before everybody else. Unfortunately, my AirBNB host did not leave a key out for me, and I could not get into the apartment because it was late at night and he was not answering his phone. Having nowhere to stay, I decided to put my game to the test and go to the clubs to find a woman to go home with.

I went to the nearest nightclub and started talking to an attractive woman who was clearly a “club girl” – the kind of woman whose entire existence consists of being hot, doing coke, and partying. As the club was closing she invited me to go to an afterparty with her and her friend. I had nowhere else to go, so I said yes. At the afterparty, a sleazy-looking Italian guy who looked like one of the guidos from the TV show Jersey Shore approached the girl I was talking to and started talking to her. She apparently already knew the guy, and he invited her and her friend back to his apartment to do cocaine.

The girls asked if I wanted to go back to the guido’s apartment with them. I do not do cocaine and I would normally never go to a random guy’s house, especially a guy that was trying to smash the girl I was with, but again, I had nowhere to go, so I said yes. Looking back, this was a mistake. Nevertheless, the next thing you know, I, the girls, and the guido were sitting around a huge bar in his beautiful Penthouse condo. The guy poured some lines of coke for the girls and poured me a glass of very expensive, delicious tequila.

The bar had stools all around it, and I happened to randomly sit at the stool in front of his personal computer. After we had been hanging out for like 20 minutes, the guy said to me “Hey, this is my work computer and that has secret work stuff on it. Can you please sit on a different stool?”

I immediately said “no problem” and got up to sit at a different stool. I have no idea if he was flexing on me or not by telling me to move, but I did not care. I was a guest in his house and he was being friendly and reasonable, so there was no reason to cause trouble. And even if he had been flexing on me and being an asshole, I would have just left. There is no way in hell I would fight a guy in his own apartment to impress some crazy skanks.

The girl from the club, however, felt differently. She immediately shot back at the guy, “Why are you being an asshole to my friend?”

Trying to defuse the situation, I calmly said, “He’s not being an asshole. It’s totally fine. I’ll sit somewhere else. It’s no big deal.”

“No. Fuck that.” She started yelling. “I come to your apartment with my friends and this is how you treat them? My friend can sit wherever the fuck he wants.”

The guido lost his shit and next thing you know, the girl and the guido were having a full-blown shouting match in his apartment. I immediately realized I needed to get the fuck out of there. The girl was clearly a crazy, entitled asshole and the guy looked like the kind of loose cannon, so I gave up on defusing the situation and started to tiptoe towards the door. On my way to the door, the other girl grabbed me and whispered in my ear, “Wanna go back to my place?” Overjoyed, I said yes. I finally had a place to stay!

When the first girl noticed I was leaving with her friend, she stopped arguing with the guy and came with us (they eventually had an argument over me when we got back to the apartment). On the way back, the girls said they were “amazed” that I “handled that situation so well.” Apparently, not freaking out over a minor annoyance and leaving when the situation became stupid was “amazing” to them. I later realized that even though the guido had the fancy cocaine, luxurious condo, and a place to sleep that night, I “won” the girls because I did not freak out when they became dramatic.

A few years later, I told the story from that night to a different girl and when I got to the part about how the guido told me to sit in a different chair, the girl stopped me and said, “Let me guess what happens next. The girl from the club was like ‘don’t talk to my man like that’ and started being dramatic.”

I was amazed. “How did you know what was going to happen?” I asked.

“I know what dramatic bitches are like,” she answered.

Obviously, mentally unstable, coked-up club girls are extreme cases and not representative of how most women will act, but crazy girls can often help you understand the nature of regular women. The lesson here is that women are obsessed with petty drama, gossip, power games, and other bullshit men do not give a fuck about for a very important reason: women evolved to feel extremely insecure, and this insecurity makes them obsessed with power. In fact, women subconsciously view all social interactions, including relationships, as power games (by “power game” I mean a struggle between the parties for domination). This is why women will freak out over minor insults, constantly demand re-affirmations of their value, and end lifelong friendships over a birthday dinner.

And the primary weapon women use to play power games are shit tests.

Women are insecure because, for our evolutionary ancestors, women could not survive in the wild without the protection and resources of the tribe. Women are smaller, physically weaker, and more neurotic than men, so they evolved to feel a deep, subconscious, powerful need to feel accepted by a tribe with a strong alpha male that can protect them and provide resources, including the most important resource of all: positive emotional experiences. In other words, women need to associate themselves with power and to ensure that those forces are on their side. The purpose of womens’ shit tests, therefore, are to determine 1) whether the man she is with is a competent alpha male, and/or 2) whether he still accepts her (also called a comfort test).

Women in the modern world no longer need to be part of a tribe for protection and resources but the primal, evolutionary need for power still exists, which is why women have a constant innate tendency to fling shit tests. Even women who are rich, famous, and CEOs of major corporations shit test men to alleviate their fear and insecurity. Without the feeling of being protected by a powerful man, even a famous and attractive singer Demi Lovato will claim she engaged in self-harm because she was cyberbullied on Twitter. Power subtly pervades everything women say, do, and think, and at any moment a woman’s insecurity can erupt and cause her to “check” your frame.

Men evolved to worry less about power because men can defend their position with physical combat and are also more able to survive if rejected by the tribe. But because men care less about power, they often fail to understand womens’ obsession with power, which causes men to catastrophically fail shit tests. To paraphrase the historian Carroll Quigley, “Power is like air. You do not think about it when you have it, but when it is gone, it is the only thing you can think about.” Because women do not have power, that is all they can think about.

Mens’ obliviousness to womens’ obsession with power means they often do not even realize that women are playing power games. Most men do not even know what a shit test is, so they take shit tests at face value and give up their power to be “nice” or keep the peace. Losing shit tests, however, causes them to lose the woman because they look beta. It may seem completely irrational for a woman to lose attraction to a man because he let her lead the date or let her get away with saying something rude, but if a woman subconsciously feels like her man is no longer the alpha she literally feels like she is in the jungle alone, unsafe.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche theorized that individuals at the bottom of power hierarchies (in Nietzschean terms, the “slaves”) develop an intense, obsessive fixation on the individuals at the top of the hierarchy (the “masters”). Nietzsche believed that slaves want to be ruled by the masters, but only so long as they perceive the masters to be noble and better than them. The moment the slaves sense that the masters are weak, or that there is nothing special separating the masters from the slaves, the slaves become filled with an intense resentment and seek to overthrow the masters and take their spot. Nietzsche called this obsession ressentiment (the French word for resentment) because it is a mixture of resentment, jealousy and anger.

Meanwhile, the masters do not pay attention on the slaves at all. The masters ignore the slaves most of the time, briefly acknowledge the slaves when the slaves do something for them, and then go back to ignoring them. The slaves, meanwhile, torture themselves with thoughts about the master: why don’t they notice me? What are they thinking about? Am I wasting my time chasing them or is there a chance? And so forth. You can see this dynamic in relationships all the time. The person with the less power in the relationship obsesses about their beloved, while the powerful person does not seem to give a single shit about the person who loves them. In fact, when consulting with my clients one of the hardest things I need to do is to give them this cold, uncomfortable truth: the girl you are obsessed with is not thinking about you at all.

Ressentiment has an evolutionary purpose: for the tribe to succeed, the slaves must focus their attention on the masters, but the masters cannot focus on the slaves. The masters must focus on the mission. If a master is distracted from the mission and focuses his attention on anything else, including worthless betas who were not contributing anything to the tribe, the tribe would fail. Put another way, evolution assigns different attentional roles based on one’s rank in the hierarchy. Studies have even shown that if you show primates pictures of members of their tribe, they stare significantly longer at the pictures of the high-ranking members.

Women naturally feel ressentiment towards powerful men, so they constantly consciously and subconsciously observe mens’ words, actions, and body language to determine whether they are fit to lead and whether she is still in their good graces. Women are also notice subtle power dynamics in social interactions that men might not notice (or that might not even exist). This is why a man and a woman can interpret the same situation completely differently (like, for example, the guido asking me to switch stools). Women do not consciously choose to focus on power; instead, their insecurity causes them view reality differently than men. Part of the reason women are attracted to men with strong frame is because it is nice to be able to enter a different reality where one does not need to constantly obsess about power.

The most important part of Nietzsche’s analysis is that ressentiment gives the slaves a vicious advantage. Because the slaves are naturally obsessed with the masters, and the masters naturally feel nothing for the slaves, the slaves can plot and scheme against the masters without the masters even noticing. Again, you can see this dynamic in relationships all the time. Women manipulate, control, and take advantage of men, and the men often have no idea what is going on.

It may sound scary to know that women are constantly watching you like a hawk, waiting to see if you display any weakness or insecurity. The good news, again, is that frame is phenomenological. If you project the image of a man with strong frame, women will subconsciously classify you as the alpha male, no matter what your real weaknesses and insecurities are. The challenge, however, is to project the image of an alpha male. Women evolved to “know” how an alpha male acts, so faking it does not work. A lot of guys try to act alpha by bragging, showing off, and acting like a tough guy, but womens’ subconscious brains can sense that insecurity is actually beta behavior. In that Miami condo, the women subconsciously perceived me to the alpha male because I was acting calmly and the guido was freaking out.

For reasons we will explore later, women are constantly questioning and doubting their own value to the tribe, so no matter what social situation a woman is in, she subconsciously feels like a homeless guy who stole a suit and snuck into a party at a fancy mansion. She subconsciously feels like the party organizers might figure out at any moment she does not belong there, so while everybody else is just enjoying the party the woman is subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) scanning the party to determine everybody’s status, what they think about her, who she must suck up to and who she can safely ignore, and, whether she is being subtly insulted. In essence, a shit test is a woman saying “hey, do you think I might actually be a homeless guy who stole a suit?”

Power Shit Tests

It is a tale as old as time.

Guy meets girl, girl seems interested, and they start hanging out and maybe even having sex. But slowly and almost imperceptibly, the girl starts asking the guy to do things that seem more and more pushy and unreasonable. Because the guy likes the girl and does not want to ruin their relationship, the guy does the things she asks for. But instead of liking him more, she starts to like him less. As her demands increase, her complaints and emotional distance increases, until finally, she goes completely cold.

Sound familiar? This is an extremely common story. Basically, women destroy men with what I call “power” shit tests. A power shit test is an attempt by the woman to dominate you to determine whether you are the alpha male or not. Power shit tests are the most common kind of shit test because womens’ greatest source of anxiety is their lack of power.

To understand power shit tests, it helps to understand womens’ evolutionary strategy to obtain acceptance and status in the tribe. At their deepest, most subconscious level, women, like all betas, feel the need to do two things: 1) tear down and dominate other betas and 2) obey and please the alpha male.

Women, however, face a dilemma: it is often unclear whether a particular man is beta or alpha so, when encountering a new man, women often do not know whether to kiss his ass or stomp on his head. To solve this dilemma, evolution created an elegant solution: women evolved to try to subtly dominate ALL men via power shit tests. If a woman succeeds at dominating a man, she subconsciously feels like the is a beta, which means she can safely ignore him and treat him like shit. If, however, she fails to dominate the man, she learns the man is higher than her in the dominance hierarchy and she must obey and please him. Womens’ acceptance in the tribe, therefore, is dependent on constantly shit testing men (and women) to determine whose ass to kiss.

It is much better for a woman if the man turns out to be alpha. Dominating a lowly beta and moving up one tiny spot in the tribe does not make women feel very powerful and accepted, but if the man is an alpha male, she can work for his approval and get accepted by the most powerful person in the tribe. In fact, working for the alpha male’s approval is one of the most enjoyable things women can do. Think about it: if you bribe one of the security guards at Donald Trump’s mansion, you will be slightly more able to gain entrance, but your acceptance will be much more solid and reliable if you were invited by Trump himself.

This is an important point – most men happily fail power shit tests because they want women to think they are “nice,” “reliable,” and “not like the other guys.” But by acting subserviently, they make the woman feel like they are beta, which means her evolutionary imperative to find the alpha kicks in and causes her to ignore the nice guy. Again, this is not a conscious decision women make – most women would prefer to fall in love with the nice guy who does things for them. But their subconscious evolutionary wiring makes them lose all feelings for the beta.

The most important aspect of power shit tests is their subtlety. If a woman trying to move up the tribe tries to dominate the alpha male in an obviously disrespectful way, she may be rejected from the tribe completely (or even get her ass beat), so women evolved to try to dominate men in soft, subtle and often barely perceptible ways. By testing mens’ power in sneaky and subtle ways, women can quickly reverse course and become submissive if the man turns out to be alpha. Womens’ shit tests are like a kid sticking their hand in the cookie jar when mom is not looking – they want to be able to quickly pull their hand out and act like nothing happened if the alpha catches them. Subtley is extremely important for women - a major part of womens’ evolutionary wiring is fighting for status in subtle ways that will not cause them to get their ass beat.

Women can power shit test in many ways: they make you wait for them, they make mildly disrespectful comments, they question the relationship, they give you dirty looks, they act like they expect you to pay, they talk about other guys, etc. There is no limit to the ways a woman can shit test you, which is why it is pointless to try to learn lists of comebacks. What women are projecting is the EMOTION of “I’m the boss here and you obey me” and that emotion can present itself in infinite ways. The way to respond to a shit test is to present the opposite emotion – “No, actually I am the boss here and I am not threatened by your attempt to dominate me at all.”

One night I was trying to order a drink at a very upscale bar in New York City. I was standing next to one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and that stage in my life, I thought she was out of my league. She dropped her purse and tapped me on the shoulder and said with a thick Brazilian accent, “pick up my purse.” I knew that most men in that situation would have either bent over like a butler to pick up her purse or would have said something butthurt like “what am I, your servant?” Instead, I just smiled and said “you are funny” and kept trying to get the bartender’s attention to buy my drink.

The Brazilian woman was not happy at all. “Pick up my purse,” she said, louder. I ignored her. She picked up her purse and then started complaining to nobody in particular “Is this what men are like nowadays? They will not even pick up a purse for a lady?” She kept complaining, but nobody seemed to listen.

I finally turned to her and said “I don’t care what you say, I still think you are a nice person. What is your name?” She acted bitchy for a few more minutes, but she finally opened up and we had a deep, respectful conversation. We then left the bar together and went to a more intimate lounge where she poured her heart to me about her struggles being a model and dealing with all kinds of creeps and scammers in the industry. We eventually went home together.

Power shit tests are often hard to pass precisely because they are so subtle. It is easy to say “no” if a woman asks you to buy her a Ferrari, but it is much harder to say no to small, seemingly innocuous requests without looking like a weird, butthurt asshole. For example, if a woman asks you to buy her a drink and you respond by saying “Do I look like some kind of simp to you? I shall never buy a woman a drink who does not deserve it! Never woman!!” you will look like an overly-sensitive psycho.

To make matters even harder, women do not often realize they are shit testing you, so “calling them out” does not work. Furthermore, a woman will never admit she is playing some kind of power game because it is evolutionary suicide to admit to another member of the tribe you are trying to dominate them and take away their status. Third, womens’ shit tests are often so subtle that the actual “thing” they are doing is small and innocuous, so by complaining you look like a sensitive weirdo.

The key to defeating power shit tests, therefore, is to be aware of power dynamics and do your best to maintain the alpha male frame, but still act in a way that is reasonable, practical, lighthearted, and fun. You do not need to be an alpha male hardass in every single interaction, and it is ok to even follow a few orders so long as you establish the general frame that you are in charge. For example, if a woman tries to take the lead on a date, I will often let her head for a little while, but the moment she leads us to something lame, I will jokingly say “ok good try, but I am taking control now.”

A great way to defeat power shit tests is to play the character of a happy retard who is only interested in fun. A woman should not see you as a sexist asshole who thinks it is man’s God-given right to give orders to women, but rather as an attractive guy who does whatever the fuck he wants to do and might wander off if the situation gets boring or unpleasant. For example, if a woman tries to make you wait, instead of proclaiming “I wait for no woman!!” you can just wander off like you got distracted by something else. If she gets mad that you left her just respond by saying something like “oh, I was supposed to wait? I didn’t know that.” If a woman asks you to buy her a drink you can laugh and say “you’re funny.”

That said, you need to be able to tell the difference between a subconscious, impulsive shit test (like asking you to hold her drink or make you wait) and a cold, calculated, conscious attack on your power and masculinity. In the latter case, you should calmly and rationally explain to her why her attempt to emasculate you will fail, and you will leave if she keeps it up. For example, one night a woman I was dating gave me a long speech about how she was a Christian and I was an asshole for not paying for everything on every date. I calmly explained that I was a feminist and I did not see our relationship as prostitution, and that if she expected a guy to pay for everything we should break up. She accepted my explanation and it never came up again.

Women often use sex as a weapon in power shit tests. I have had women offer me sex in exchange for many things: taking them on trips, buying them things, etc. But you must resist doing things for women they do not deserve just because they offer you pussy. You might get some sex in the short term but she will lose attraction to you in the long term. For example, one night I brought a girl home I was dating and she abruptly said “take my pants off and eat my pussy.” I eagerly took her pants off, but right before I went downtown, she said “just to let you know, I am not going to suck your dick. I am tired of pleasing men first.” I ate her pussy anyway.

Back then, I did not understand power dynamics, shit tests, or frame. I was just excited to have a hot girl naked in my bed. But by agreeing to her condition that I had to please her sexually first, I had failed a massive shit test because I had let her exercise control over me. As a result, she slowly lost interest in me, and ended up never sucking my dick OR having sex with me.

While power shit tests may have served an evolutionary purpose for women it the past, in the modern world they often cause women to slowly and imperceptibly turn the men in her life into betas, which causes the woman to lose attraction to them. It is unfortunate because women generally do not WANT to turn the guys in their life into pathetic betas, and they often have no idea what they are doing. Meanwhile, women end up falling in love with losers and assholes because those guys pass the shit tests, either because they have read books like this or because they just did not happen to give a fuck about pleasing the woman at that time.

Womens’ constant shit testing often makes men weak, hollow, beta, feminized versions of themselves. These pathetic excuses for men ignore their purposes and hobbies, stop going to the gym, become “whipped,” and even change how they talk and act out of a subconscious desire to please and connect with women. If you walk into any nightclub tonight, you will see a clown show of men doing humiliating, degrading dances for women, carrying womens’ bags, doing stupid favors, indulging women in stupid and boring conversations, and acting weirdly feminine.

This effect is more pronounced with high-value, attractive women because those women have stronger frame. High value women are used to most men eventually buckling and becoming their servants, so they see themselves as the alpha in most social situations and act accordingly. They also project particularly brutal and tough shit tests. For similar reasons, oftentimes attractive, high-value guys that get lots of girls become the biggest betas because they spend so much time around high-value women with strong frames and those women beat them down and beta-ize them. I have also noticed that men who are straight out of a relationship have difficulty meeting new girls because their ex-girlfriend beta-ized them, and they need to unlearn their previous girlfriends’ beta conditioning to meet new girls.

Every man becomes a little beta in a relationship. This tendency is probably why so many cultures have a myth where a man is civilized by a woman. And this is ok – by doing things for you, the woman has earned the right to make you do certain things for her. But you must still relentlessly implement the alpha male quid pro quo and only do things for her when she deserves it, and for new women you must be ready to do almost nothing until they do something to deserve it.

Sometimes when I am around a confident, attractive woman, to fuck with her I say “I know why you are single. You turn men into little lesbian boys. At first, the guy is cool and tough, and acts like he does not give a shit about you, but you slowly break him until he becomes a puddle of good beneath your feet. He starts by acting like he does not give a shit but then he slowly becomes insecure, constantly asking where you are, and getting upset that you did not immediately text him back. And finally, even though you really liked him at first, you cannot take it anymore and you leave.”

When I give this speech, the woman’s eyes almost always get wide as they realize I am right. And they almost always answer in the same way: “You are right, but I am not trying to do it! I am not an asshole!”

“It’s not your fault,” I respond. “You are just being yourself.”

My website: http://www.woujo.com