The Reality Method 2.0

Mastering Male Competitors in the Dating Game

Men compete for women’s attention.

This is as true today as it was in prehistory, and as true in humans as it is in animals; only the methods of competition have changed. Whereas men used to prove their prowess and suitability as a mate by bashing another man’s brains out, they now go about achieving a similar effect with much more refined tools.

This article will discuss those tools, and talk about how to turn the tables on overzealous male competitors, winning the lady and saving the day, all without picking up the nearest sharp rock or having to carry a “gat”.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Social Pressure — The Male Version
In a recent post I explained how other people can cause us to be emotionally reactive, and put subtle pressure on us to act in ways that are uncomfortable to us. When women do this, I call it congruency testing — the women are probing socially to see if you are actually who you say you are, and if you can stand up and pass their social challenges.

(NOTE: Modern Western women will continue congruency testing you as long as you know them, but for different reasons: in the context of just meeting you, it’s a test to see how dominant and attractive you are. If they are in a relationship with you, it’s because they need and want constant reminders of just how attractive and dominant you are — and also so they can constantly comparing your levels of dominance to those of other men around them, to see if they’d be better off with another guy).

Men do a similar thing in applying social pressure, but I don’t call it congruency testing: I call it tooling.

What is Tooling?
You’ve heard guys say of someone, “What a complete tool.” Usually this is an insult reserved for another guy.

The insult “tool” is pretty literalistic: it refers to a person who is easily manipulated, not intelligent enough to notice it, and/or obnoxious enough that those doing the manipulation don’t feel bad.

The process of “tooling a guy”, then, is the process of turning a regular guy into a tool; in the context of dating and socializing, a tool for proving that your own status is higher than his, and you are therefore more deserving of the girl.

Let’s look at an example.

Tooling In Action
You’re at a party. Everything’s going great. You’re chatting up a cute girl. All of a sudden, some guy breaks into your conversation and starts trying to tool you. He says, “Hey man, awesome shirt, did you get that on sale?”

Now, this guy is sunk even before he began, and I’ll tell you why: 1) He interrupted your conversation without introducing himself, which is a major social faux pas. 2) He made a very obvious attempt at a “subtle” insult, a dig at your own social value, which is designed to bring the social energy in the group DOWN, rather than boost it up. He’s trying to extract energy from the group, rather than add it. 3) He hasn’t used a very good line.

But still, his comment broughtsocial pressure to bear on you. No matter how much the girl likes you, she’s still going to turn to the guy and look at him, and look at you, and watch how you handle the pressure. No matter how rude or uncouth he was, it’s STILL a golden opportunity that she is unconsciously DELIGHTING in. As a woman, she is HOPING that you blow this fool out with all your big guns; but she is bound by the Laws of Femininity NOT to help or intervene in any way (unless she really, really likes you and perhaps you two have already formed some sort of incredibly connection (like a messy make-out or what have you)).

So there are a number of responses available to you in this case; the most mild would be to simply be nonreactive (as I discussed in the last article) and ignore him. He would then have to try to re-assert himself with another comment or dig or attempt to tool you, which actually serves the purpose of tooling HIM: if you try to get someone’s attention and they ignore you, and you try again, and keep trying, and they don’t give in, you look sillier and sillier.

Another response would be a subtle eye-roll, or to just look at him briefly and give him a “what-the-fuck-you-tool” look, with maybe an amused snort; you know, the one that sounds like “Ah-HEH!” This should be sufficient to blow him out, unless he’s seriously obsessed with getting that particular girl.

A third level of response is to take his comment in stride, turn it around, amplify it, and drop it back on him. This is very similar to the type of response that I recommend in congruency testing. In this case, you might say something like, “Wow, uh…thanks…for noticing…dude.” With a dubious tone and subcommunicating to the girl that he’s coming onto you. You could inch away from him subtly and give him shifty sidelong glances.

So let’s codify those levels of response: you can then memorize them, forget them, and calibrate the level of response you should apply in a given situation, depending on how serious the competitor is about trying to tool you.

Minimum Response — Ignore. An old natural friend of mine used to say “Cut them out of your reality.” Literally just imagine taking an Exacto knife and cutting an outline around their body, and giving it a shove with your hand (again, this is your IMAGINATION, don’t pull an Exacto knife on anybody) so it falls over backwards and disappears. Then act in accordance with that belief; that person doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s amazing to see people shrink away under the pressure of being totally ignored.

Medium Response — Nonverbal Rejection. The “disgusted look” or the half-snort, half-laugh of derision, coupled with a backturn. This is similar to the first level, only this time you’re LETTING HIM KNOW that you’re cutting him out of your reality, and furthermore letting him know that you despise him, and view him as far too weak to challenge you on even the most basic level. This level should be deployed against guys who are really not very socially calibrated themselves, and are making the lamest, most desperate, obvious attempts to one-up you, attempts that nearly fail just by virtue of how badly the guys deliver them.

Strong Response — Verbal Sparring. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where the fun begins: remember, take his comment in stride, turn it around, amplify it, and drop it back on him. So for a guy who says something like “These girls are here with us dude“, a good response might be:

“WOAH, man. You are like, the Alpha Male of this whole group, you OWN that part of the bar. If the Discovery Channel was in here filming I’d point you out and be like, ‘That guy is THE ALPHA of THE BAR’!”

Then the guy feels deflated, because you’ve pointed out his subtle insecurities about losing his girls to you. It’s similar to saying, “Dude, I could never compete with you for girls, I would never even IMAGINE it, you are just TOO COOL man….” and you’re saying it with just enough over-emphasis that it comes off as slightly sarcastic, fading in and out between sarcasm and a genuine compliment; the girls love it because they are processing the emotional subcommunication of how ridiculous you think they guy is, while what you are saying cannot LOGICALLY be a reason for him to try anything worse (like a fight). If he responds to the emotional subcommunication by saying something like, “Are you making fun of me?” or whatever, he’s through, because then he just looks like an easily-offended whiner and his “masculinity rating” plummets.

And if he AGREES with you, he has tacitly accepted your approval, which makes him the beta to your alpha. (The process of taking advice in a social situation from strangers is submissive).

Getting Physical
A lot of guys who you’ll run into out there — especially big muscular guys who are in some ways “naturally” dominant — will try to dominate you by physically manhandling you. They will clap you on the back (as HARD as they can), put an arm around you in a bear-hug, squeeze your arms, or what have you.

They do this because touching other people without permission is a way to show lack of fear, and overall dominance (which is why, incidentally, I also advocate touching girls so early).

In my experience, you can easily get away with some of this touching of guys — patting them on the shoulder or back condescendingly, or what not — but the card I like to play is just lay back and let the guy be the one to initiate touch, because I’d rather be in the position of not having to defend my touching of a guy, since my persona is a bit “metro” anyway. Your mileage may vary. Maybe you sprinkle condescending touch in there lightly enough that he doesn’t notice, but it has an effect on everyone watching nonetheless.

Beyond reframing these attempts as if the guy is gay (”Hey, hands off the merchandise” or “Sorry dude, I’m into girls,”) you can also positively re-frame in a mocking way (”This guy makes me feel so safe and secure, he likes touching me, I think I’ll hire him as my bodyguard”) which simultaneously compliments him and puts him in a subservient position.

Of course, the “bodyguard” comment he could re-frame as something like, “Sure, I BET you want me to ‘guard’ your ‘body’”, so it’s a bit dangerous, but if he’s not smart enough to think that quick you’ll get away with it, and it’ll deflate him. And even if he does come back with that line, you could simply respond, “Hey man, you’re the one who can’t keep his hands off me,” and so on.

This is the structure of redirecting and flipping the energy of social challenges from guys; there are a number of topics that seem to come up in modern social interaction: I call these tooling topics, and below is a brief list, so you know something of what to expect.

Tooling Topics
Masculinity / Femininity / Homosexuality — Impinging a guy’s masculinity is supposed to be a huge insult in Western culture, for obvious reasons, so be prepared to play around with your sexuality and other guys’ in order to avoid getting tooled by this or that “You’re gay” or “You’re cute man” comment. Or when guys who want to fight start saying shit like, “Let’s go outside”, just mis-interpret it as a come-on, like “Man, I’m into girls, but I think there’s a gay club right around the corner…”

Social dynamics topics — Bringing to light the subtle undercurrents of the social interaction, in a funny and light-hearted way (i.e. “You’re the alpha male man” or “Wow, I love it when this guy talks to me,” or “I can’t pick up girls, dude, only you can do that awesome shit”) demonstrates your understanding of the social matrix and also that you are not emotionally phased by the social pressure being placed on you.

Fashion — You can use this either way, either tooling a guy for his fashion sense (”Dude, that shirt is AWESOME, I had one just like it back in high school….”) or flipping that same sort of line into the insinuation that the guy is overly-interested in your clothes and therefore hitting on you (”Wow, man, thanks, are your from Queer Eye or something?”)

Body Size — You don’t want to be in a position where you are comparing your own body size to another guy, because frequently the guys who you’ll be competing with will be HUGE — but rather you want to make light of the entire social dynamic of comparing muscle size. Like, “Hahaha, yeah we should definitely do some arm wrestling, and then a one-armed pushup competition, and then a POSE DOWN!”

Energy and State — Calling attention to someone’s energy and state (”Are you alright man? You look a little tired,” or “You OK man? You’re sweating,”) puts social pressure on them to either A) affirm and explain why their state and energy are suffering (which is submissive) or B) contradict your assessment (which puts them on the defensive, which is also submissive).

These are the major topics that I’ve encountered, but I’m sure there are more.

Keen observers will be clued into the overall STRUCTURE by now; it’s not a matter of knowing every topic and line a guy could use to tool you and having an answering line ready; it’s about recognizing the OVERALL structure of handling social challenges from men.

And here, in my view, to the best of my explanatory ability, is that structure:

Dealing with male competitors is really about out framing.

If you respond to the logic of the question or comment, your are fully 100% accepting the social pressure that has been placed on you, and you lose.

If you jump up a level of analysis to view the meta-frame of the interaction, and address the process of what is going on in the interaction, you therefore re-direct the social pressure back onto the questioner, or diffuse it among all the witnesses, and you win.