Tag Archives: SMV

Gendernomics: Your Competitive Advantage

A running theme in Gendernomics has been the use of a company or a product as an analogy for the journey of growth a man has to undertake in order to become valued in differing social contexts. A classic way of creating a competitive advantage is through core competencies, namely a unique combination of hard to duplicate competencies. Last Saturday I did another Red Man Group podcast on Rich Cooper’s channel [1] with Rollo Tomassi, Goldmund Unleashed, Kyle Trouble and Rian Stone the topic for which was “The Importance of Game“. As part of the podcast, we discussed when each participant first became aware of the manosphere, or as it was called back when I first found it “The seduction community“. I often joke that I’ve been aware of game since the opener “Who lies more, men or women?” actually worked, and while I don’t consider this a blog dedicated to game, those early experiences do inform a great deal of my writing.

I never got really good at “club game“, which was perhaps the earliest iteration of game, complete with platform shoes, a focus on AMOG tactics, and featured quite prominently in “The Game” by Neill Strauss. I knew a lot of guys back then who got very good at it, but for the most part these were men who thrived in that particular environment. A piece of early and quite solid advice from an early PUA “Guru” who has since moved on to Purple Pill Shill was “Figure out the type of women you are attracted to, figure out what type of man they are attracted to and strive to become it, and figure out where to find those women“. This is simple and applicable advice. It’s also quite good advice, however the major issue I see with it, is that it’s the cause of the downfall for many early PUA.

Those who have read “The Game” will remember the story of Mystery’s breakdown because of his oneitis and his inability to maintain a relationship with her. This had a simple explanation, he figured out what type of girl he was attracted to, figured out where to find them, what man they went for, changed himself into that man, only to find out that he couldn’t maintain his Mystery persona over time. This is very little different from the approach cluster B women use with men, tailor their persona to the man, maintain it until the man commits to them (get her pregnant, marries her etc.) and then drop the facade. The major difference is that when women realize they have gotten a bad deal, they get out of it instantly, when men realize they have gotten a bad deal they either work themselves to death trying to improve it with little success, or engage in a race to the bottom. Continue reading →

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Red Pill Logic: A Diagnosis of Oneitis

This essay was left in the draft folder for a while, but a question relating to it came up in the last 21 convention podcast, so I decided to finish it up.

In medicine, a syndrome is a set of signs and symptoms that are correlated with each other, and the word itself stems from the Greek word meaning “concurrence”. For instance, “metabolic syndrome”, which is rapidly gaining in market share around the world, consists of increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, abnormal cholesterol levels and triglyceride levels [1]. Normally, I’m skeptical of the pathologizing that takes place in much of public discourse, as it appears to have become quite common to utilize it as a rhetorical gambit in order to paint perspectives different from one’s own as stemming not from reason but from underlying psychological or physiological conditions. However, in this case, I found it to be quite an apt description of the phenomena that this post aims to describe, namely a combination of signs and symptoms that are correlated with blue pill thinking, and especially with oneitis.

Perhaps the most interesting factor in the the oneitis disorder is that actually being in a relationship with the woman is not a pre-requsite to trigger the disorder. In fact, many of the cases that I’ve observed are by men who exist outside the woman’s sphere of awareness, the “secret admirer” type, who builds an elaborate fantasy about a woman who has no idea that he exists. Continue reading →

Office Supplies and Dominance Hierarchies

When I started my first corporate job, two of my mentors who had a tendency to contradict each other, gave me the same piece of advice “Don’t dip your pen in the company ink”. This is a piece of very simple advice that helps protect a man who is about to enter a corporate environment for the first time. Back when I finished college prior to the Victorian Moral Panic that has swept across Universities in the last few years, you got used to mixing business with pleasure on a near constant basis. This is actually a major difference between school and work, as throughout your schooling there is really no clear-cut distinction between work-life (school) and private life (outside of school).

The distinction between work-life (corporate) and home life (outside of corporate) was a very clear-cut distinction for many years, that grew from the industrial revolution. Back when most people worked in agriculture, or hunting/gathering prior to that, there was no real split between “work” and “leisure”, because most days would be a mixture of both. With the industrial revolution came the factories, you came in the morning, left when the bell rang and came back the next morning. This was also the structure of more “white collar” professions, you came in at a set time in the morning, left at a set time in the afternoon or evening.

However, with the advent of the computer age, this has gradually changed. As constant connectivity has become ubiquitous, the line between work and not-work has been slowly worn down. Most modern corporations expect the employees to go the extra mile, for instance coming in on weekends, evenings and even to pull all-nighters in order to make deadlines. When you add in events such as Christmas parties, team-building events, conferences, travel schedules, and various other things, many employees may spend 50 – 70 hours a week in the office in some capacity, plus work from home, spend time together outside of normal work hours and normal work environments, therefore its unsurprising that the personal and business bleed together over time.

It’s also no great surprise that 38% of workers who were surveyed admitted to dating someone they worked with at some point of their career. 28% dated someone further up in the company hierarchy, and a whopping 18% admitted to dating their boss [1]. Women were more likely to date their boss with 35% of women who had dated someone at work (compared to 23% of men), dating up in the hierarchy. Continue reading →

Gendernomics: Differentiation and Features

I had another essay building on last weeks essay on responsibility and accountability planned this week, but I saw a tweet that caught my interest and started me down the rabbit hole of sexual market value again. More specifically, how what constitutes a high quality product in the sexual market place.

Christian McQueen (@TheCadClub on twitter) recently tweeted out the following:

If this trend continues it’ll be very easy for pretty girls world-wide:

1. Be in shape

2. Don’t have grey hair (dye it if need be)

3. Don’t be a hateful feminist

You’ll have your pick of great men.

I’ve touched on this idea before in Gendernomics and previous essays, most particularly in Female Sexual Strategies Part 2. The gist of my argument was that if one has a market, where a need exists and the only options to satisfy that need are poor ones, then those poor solutions can still do remarkably well. This is a function of the contrast effect more than anything, in that if you’re 6 ft 1, and go out with a group of men who are 6 ft 3 and taller, you look short by comparison.

This comes down to the fact that people would rather have a need fulfilled to a minimal degree as opposed to not having it covered at all. If you have to drive in a nail, and you can’t find a hammer at a good price, you may use a wrench or a rock. You have a need you have to fulfill, a preferred way to fulfill it (want) but you will compromise.

As I’ve mentioned, I travel a lot for work, and this means that I also end up talking to a lot of random people on various means of transport and in general. One of the most interesting groups to talk to are women in their 70s, 80s and 90s, who have daughters and granddaughters, as they tend to lament the lifestyle choices of their offspring. This is because back in their day, before egalitarian equalism, it was common knowledge what men wanted in a wife, often embodied in aphorisms like

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” – Know how to cook and take care a man.

“Behind every great man is a great woman” – Know how to support your man and help him succeed.

I could extrapolate much from these simple sentences, however our culture contains enough examples of what type of wife or husband is undesirable in comics, literature and culture. Personally my favorite examples in comics is from Andy Capp and Bringing up Father, both demonstrate the dynamic of hapless Beta male with the domineering, harridan of a wife. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, this was a funny caricature, these days such comics appear almost prescient in how gender relations have developed. Continue reading →

Red Pill Logic: Illusions of Grandeur

This post went through multiple revisions when it came to the title. This is quite abnormal for me as I usually just title a post when I start writing it and leave it like that. It started off as “Delusions of Responsibility”, then it became “Illusions of Control” then it morphed into “Toxic Doses” and then it became Illusions of Grandeur.

A major cornerstone of life that many men are raised without these days is accountability. In fact, many problems in our modern world stems from risk being disconnect from reward, power from accountability, and actions from consequences. We saw this in 2008 in our financial system where those who had made millions and more, have yet to face any consequences for their role in what almost sank our financial system.

We see it in politics where the goldfish memory of the great majority of voters means that there is hardly ever a debate regarding “What has the incumbent accomplished?” but rather a series of sales pitches about what both candidates are promising that they will do. This is funnily enough a cluster-b seduction tactic as well, known as “future faking”.

It’s also quite present in intersexual dynamics, best summarized by Rollo Tomassi as “The goal of feminism is to maximally restrict male sexuality while removing all restrictions on female sexuality“. One of the core ideas of feminism is the “subject-object” dichotomy, wherein a subject can only act, and an object is acted upon. While I think this is very much flawed philosophy, in that every single human in all of history will have lived their life on varying and shifting degrees of the area in between. It does create an interesting perspective. In that it does in essence free women from the risk and consequences of the actions pertaining to intersexual dynamics, not in actuality but in social perception. However, as risk can never be eliminated, only managed or transferred, it means most of this risk has been placed on men.

Continue reading →

Gendernomics: Emergent Strategies

I use the concept of emergent strategy in the Gendernomics book when explaining and to some extent describing the various ways in which a strategy can form as a sum of individual actions.  “Strategy as a pattern” is perhaps the more interesting one, and the one that forms the foundation of the book, “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning“. This book is a critique of strategic management literature, often based in Drucker, Taylor and Porter, the titans of planned strategy, where the chief argument presented by Henry Minzberg is that in a rapidly changing world, long-term strategic planning is destined to fail. Instead he argues that the interactions of the company with outside forces over time will form the company strategy.

The novel approach by Minzberg was a stark contrast to the top-down strategic planning literature in vogue at the time. In the planned strategy camp, retreats where executives buried themselves in a mixture of analytical work and creativity to determine Visions, Missions, SMART goals, KPIs and strategies for how to move the company to new heights were the prescription for how to build a great company. Minzberg’s position was much more simply that in a rapidly changing world, by the time the executives and strategy consultants emerged from their retreat, the data they based their decisions on may already be outdated. Thus, the only way to “do strategy” in a world marked by rapid change and innovation is to train your staff well, set goals and assume that the parts will form a coherent whole.

I’ve on occasion referred to this as “Chaos theory strategy” in that order is expected to arise from chaos, and the actions, choices and thoughts of potentially thousands of people must align in order for the strategy to be coherent. A key factor of emergent strategy is that it can only be identified when one looks at the development of the company over time, historically speaking. This is a much more fluid way to think about human behavior if one takes the vantage point of extreme macro. Our cultures and societies are shaped by billions of individual decisions, chains of reasoning, emotional reactions and actions taken. Continue reading →

Gendernomics: The Contrast Effect

This has been a strange couple of weeks, we’ve found out that many Hollywood Male Feminists are creeps (which quite frankly wasn’t a massive surprise) as per the Brimstone Preacher Principle. Rollo posted two very good essays [1,2] on what “creepy” means when women say it. The red pill experienced it’s first brush between analytic and continental philosophy and Gay Lube Oil introduced me to the “Bobs and Vegana” meme [3], so all in all this entire week was a bit creepy for a multitude of reasons. In the discussion of the latter meme, the topic shifted into how something mediocre can appear quite excellent as a result of the contrast effect. The contrast effect is the reason why short men should get even shorter friends and avoid hanging out with NBA players and why unattractive women should bring even more unattractive women with them on “Girl’s night out”. For a demonstration of this effect, take 3 bowls of water, 1 hot, one cold and one lukewarm. Put one hand in the hot bowl, the other in the cold bowl for about a minute and then put both in the bowl of lukewarm water.

There is also a well-known sales technique, whereby a company advertises a cheap product to the consumer in order to bring them in, once the customer arrives at the store, they will talk down the advertised product, and instead suggest a much better product, but one that is also much more costly. Once they sense the customer’s trepidation about spending much more money, they will show the customer a product that is not quite as costly as the “high-end” offering, but which they argue is much superior to the advertised product. Continue reading →