The great Masculine LARP.

Guys will spend more time and effort pretending use use these tools to work on their problems than they will actually working on their problems, and once you can see it, you can’t unsee it.

Locker Room Bullshit

This space has a jargon, or an inside language to facilitate communication. And like all jargon, is useful to a point. That point is very early. For example, in this space there are a large amount of mental models, concepts and strategies that would take too long to write every time, and so we built a language for shorthand: Promise Keepers, The Dysfunctional Captains, Hypergamy, Alpha Fux Beta Bux … the list must be in the hundreds by now.

And each one of these terms developed in the same way. A guy would notice something in his life. Other people who also saw it chimed in. Eventually enough people described it that someone could read them all and articulate a theory that encapsulates it. They give their essay a title that’s catch and that concept becomes a new jargon.

And if this was as far as the language went that would be good. People would continue to notice things in their life, emboldening others to share their similar experiences, and finally, invested people would create more theories and essays. If they are written close enough to the experience they would get popular, and if they weren’t they would die off. The problem is that isn’t what happens. There’s a second tier of jargon, and it’s the people who use this as a means to hide from their own personal embarrassments, hide from the obvious work that needs to be done, or otherwise jam the fist of emotionally self destructive actions into the asshole of pretending it’s doing what everyone else has done in the space to thrive.

I see it everywhere. A new guy becomes infatuated with the space, tries to fit in, and takes whatever jargon they can fit into their sub par life and creates a wonderful Potemkin village of bullshit. They are a type 2 captain, they want Frame and a Vision, they have lead their family, a former Nice Guy and Alpha with a side of Beta (yes, retards actually claim this as a flex)

I hate reading it. It’s watching a guy lie to himself in real time. Guys lie to themselves, this isn’t new. What’s new is watching someone spend inordinate amounts of time to do it and seek validation from internet nobodies at the same time. It’s like watching a lazy person with some talent for scamming the welfare system to survive off government handouts. With all the effort that goes into developing a fake disability, they could have made a decent living using those talents for legitimate business.

It got so bad that at one point a self proclaimed incel (read: too ugly to fuck, to antisocial to try) managed to talk his way into being a moderator at the Red Pill. It’s a form of functional psychopathic behavior: surface level charm hiding an antisocial core. All that work at lying to get into power, but for the prestigious title of Subreddit moderator.

It’s just damned sad. Damned sad.

And the takeaway for the average guy in a subpar situation looking to leverage this space for his own benefit is to avoid jargon if at all possible.

When you write down your goals, don’t use the short hand terms, describe what you want in your own words. I talk about SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) for the same reason. Telling yourself that you want to be the best version of yourself means nothing. Being a leader for your family means nothing. Lead what? What does their followership involve? Live life the way you want to live it? Everyone does that, whether they want to or not. It’s not a goal, it’s empty phrasing, describing a feeling, you don’t know what, but you’ll know it when you see it.

Is it any surprise these guys flounder? They have no direction, no objective, only a slave to their current emotional state.

“I want to be happy.” Heroin is synthesized and condensed happiness. Literally. If you wanted to feel happy you’d be riding the black dragon, so why don’t you?

“I want to get laid.” Then you’d tell your wife you’re going out and hire a prostitute. She would be hotter and tighter than any woman you could get, and you’d spend a lot less money on her than you have on your wife’s birthday present (without obligatory blowjob). If you wanted to get laid you’d be selling crypto currency for pussy.

And most new guys have the same non-goal. They want things they cannot define and wouldn’t go for if a straightforward answer existed. What they really want is a lie. They want to feel like they are working towards a goal. They want the goal to rest in the aether, fudgeable for whatever you need that day. If you’re in a good mood, you want to feel like that time your wife made you a coffee meant you were leading your family. If you’re having a bad day you want to feel like that coffee your wife made you actually meant she felt bad about not fucking you the night before and gave it to you so you don’t have a fight again today.

You want to lose an undetermined amount of weight so that when you gain a point or lose a pound you can run a victory lap or say that you’ll never be good enough.

The goal isn’t to achieve, it’s to do nothing while life force fits itself into your current emotional state. And frankly, I’m tired boss.

And I know if I drill down deep enough it gets to the core issue. It’s the same core issue that everything comes down to: a fear of rejection. No guy wants to be told he isn’t good enough. He would rather sabotage his efforts so he can say “Well, if I would have applied myself I could have done it” than actually make a sincere and honest effort and come up short.

Personally, I find the nobility is in the attempt. I can’t say if it’s my personal attitude towards this space, or the lesson that I learned from my time in the space, but the failures aren’t rejections. They are failures. I couldn’t tell you the ratio of men who have been in my workshops who have salvaged marriages or divorced or been divorced on, and that’s because it doesn’t matter. Every single one of those scenarios had the same goal: get men to live life on their terms instead of letting life happen to them while force fitting the bland passivity into their imagined greatness.

A guy finds us because he wants his wife to suck less. Fight less, fuck more, stop yelling at the kids, spend less money than they make and otherwise stop being the anchor. It’s a manipulative goal, but at least it’s honest. One can work with that. They can take the goal and rework it under the assumption that you cannot make people do things they don’t want to do.

Is the wife a dud because she’s a dud, or because she’s given up on a dud? Is the problem that a mans wife won’t fuck him, or that no woman would fuck him? See the switch? Wanting your wife to suck less becomes becoming a man who doesn’t put up with people who suck. It changes everything. The behaviors switch from doing things to make their wife act or fuck or calm down into doing the things a man does to enable, reward, or incentivize bad performance and behavior.

For example, a man who has a wife who sucks. She is bad with the kids and bad with her husband and on SSRI’s or whatever her problem is. So the guy takes it upon himself to ask the hard question: What kind of life would you have if you didn’t have to rely on her? This is one of the Breaking Free exercises from Dr. Robert Glover in No More Mr. Nice Guy, which is the closest thing this space has to a bible (Sorry Rollo, it’s true)

And so he maintains his house to a standard he wants. If he doesn’t have the time to do it all he either adjusts his standards, changes his house, or changes how he approaches the problem. He hires a maid. He accepts a reasonable standard, or cuts out other things he doesn’t prioritize. But the thing is, most guys find out that maintaining a house isn’t the hardest thing in the world.

And eventually, he will end up in his kitchen, finishing off the prep meals for his kids for school for the week, while also having all his meals for his next weeks cut in the fridge. He’s wearing clothes that make him look good, thinking about that new job he just got, and all the shit he no longer takes. He’s proud of himself, as he should be. He’s living life on his terms and his family is better for it. Then he looks at the sofa, sees a wife, getting fatter on snacks, doing nothing, and worse of all, as sexual as an eunuch.

And eventually, a man will have his answer. She’s the dud and he goes to his desk and pulls out the divorce file he prepared months ago and gets her signature. Of course most marriages don’t go that way. Most of the time the wife is terrified of losing a man who is worth a damn and makes an effort to stay where she is. At first she may try the bare minimum: starfish sex more often, the occasional Costco prepared meal, etc. But the man has standards now. He set them for himself and lives them. So those standards build expectations and those expectations don’t accept a phoned in wife. She steps up or he moves on.

Sometimes the wife seriously doesn’t know how to be a good wife. I would have found it funny to even state if I haven’t seen so many god damned examples. Being pleasant, fiscally responsible and sexually active seems like such a low bar that I’m amazed that women think it doesn’t apply to them. Then I think back to a doctor friend of mine who mentioned how often he has to deal with blood poisoning because a woman loses her tampon during shark week because she got drunk and now it’s causing sepsis.

I can guarantee that if a man shoved something up his ass, he wouldn’t forget that he did, no matter how drunk he got.

And for those, you get a Main Event. Another jargon statement describing the existential panic attack from a woman who wants to keep a good man but has no idea how to do it. It’s fight or flight in a marriage, and it happens often enough and similar enough that we can wrap a term around the concept.

Bringing this back to male focused action, the point isn’t that the wives respond to all these things in predictable ways and can do it for you too (for three installments of 29.95) it’s that by the time all this happens, the guy is generally checked out of all of it. Instead of the former guys that would see their woman breaking down and have a panic attack of their own saying,

Pause

Dog Walker has been out for half a year, and I’m surprised how well it’s done, with almost no marketing for it. A contemporary tale, 50 shades of grey, coming of age, except masculine coded. If you’ve heard of a promise keeper, read the story of a promise keeper learning to be better.

Okay, back

“I can fix her. I feel like a man, now that I know how much she loves me” and instead looking with pity, and making the decision; is she worth leading into being a good wife for him by doing X Y and Z to my standards?

And that’s why I hate field reports like this:

Billy