I feel there is a huge pressure placed on men today: the pressure to be a pimp.
The entire dating and seduction industry rests on the foundation of this pressure. The implicit message is essentially, “You’re not good with women.” And if you are good with women, you ought to be better.
Hey, guys with funny names like Mystery, Jlaix and Loverboy are having hot threesomes with strippers and models — and getting it on tape. Why aren’t you? It’s just a matter of skill.
The unspoken assumption is that all men want to have hot threesomes with strippers and models — and not just once, but consistently — as a lifestyle choice.
And while this may be arguably true, the seduction industry’s headlong charge into sexual perfectionism, lacking any consideration whatever of the needs and wants of individual men, has proven to be nothing more than self-interested opportunism dressed up in thin tissue of self-improvement lingo.
How They Do It
The seduction industry plays on men’s insecurities about their ability to relate to the opposite sex as comprehensively as the cosmetics and fashion industry plays on women’s insecurities about their relationships to their bodies. In Girl World, these carefully-cultivated insecurities keep women paying for face lifts, age-reducing mascara, and boob jobs.
And in Guy World, men’s magazines like GQ, FHM, Maxim and Stuff are only the mildest of violators — at least they bother to give their readers some credit (”maintain your buff bod”). The real culprit in Guy World is the burgeoning seduction industry, which bothers to bolster men’s egos only insofar as doing so will encourage them to open their wallets.
Part of the industry’s success comes, of course, from the very real biological drive most men feel to fuck hotter and hotter women — selection pressure, one might say, that drives our desires to at least try to hook up with women whose genes are a ‘best fit’ for ours.
But the industry (and a willing consumer society) amplifies this natural biological imperative and hypes it to ridiculous levels. From AXE deodorant commercials and the deluge of spin-offs to the nightclub and alcoholic beverage industry’s willing participation in the “get drunk and fuck” fallacy (a new banner ad campaign for Heineken Light in a can says, “Now seduction can happen anywhere”. Heineken = seduction? Give me a freaking break), it seems like every section of industry is trying to capitalize on the trend of seduction and picking up girls as “hip” by identifying their own products with a boost in a man’s seductive ability.
Why They Do It
Of course, this story is really as old as time. Back before the seduction industry got much mainstream attention (or even existed as a coherent money-making sector of the economy), advertisers were trying to identify products as boosting men’s natural “sex appeal”.
The idea being that if you drank Coors Light or wore a Rolex, you would just be so naturally “sexy” that women would come up to you and start fondling your chest and asking for your number.
Men, being flawed and insecure creatures just like women, are naturally motivated by these fallacious ideas, since “sex sells”; and men are also motivated to use sex to sell things to other men, since the profit motive inspires all men to desire fatter commissions (the better to buy Rolexes that will in turn make us more attractive to women).
The profit motive and the sex motive are, at core, the same motive — dominate, acquire, hoard, accumulate — the power on possessions, a shoring up of the exterior defenses to protect against attack by existential angst and a deep distrust of our own inalienable inner worth.
I Question Your Evaluation of What’s Best for Me
It’s great (or is it?) that advertiser are now giving men a more active role in things, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still trying to inspire jealousy and feelings of inadequacy in the rest of us. Why don’t throngs of women chase me down like in the Tag commercials? Why don’t women melt in my mouth, not in my hand, after I’ve used Wintery Ice breath strips?
I must need more seduction training.
And that’s where the industry steps in, with $50 ebooks, $300 DVD series, and $1500 weekend seminars, to make me a better man. More capable with women (because I’m not capable enough already). More of a pimp.
The idea is that, as men, we really just need to keep climbing the ladder of sex: from our first ugly girlfriend to our second less-ugly girlfriend to our third kinda cute girlfriend to our fourth totally smoking hot girlfriend, who actually turns into something more of a fuck buddy, and then we add another “spinning plate” and suddenly we’re rockstars in mLTR land (multiple long term relationships, essentially modern harems).
The problem is, I happen to believe that, for many guys — in fact perhaps for most guys — the modern harem life is not the key to happiness (reproductive or otherwise).
Now, I fully appreciate the irony of my writing this on a seduction blog that has done its fair share of perpetuating the idea that any guy can get ridiculously good with women (i.e., be a pimp), and it’s all just a matter of skill.
(My argument in my own defense is that I haven’t charged anybody for the information and advice I’ve offered, and indeed offered it in an anti-competitive spirit of improving men’s relationships with women for their own good. The feedback I’ve gotten via email suggests that the guys most helped by this site are the guys starting at the very bottom of the ladder, so to speak, those who were previously trapped in unfulfilling relationships with girls who were cheating on them (for example).)
But, all excuses aside, I have come to a place in life where I realize that although the modern harem life may be ideal for some (small subset of) men, it is by no means ideal for all men and, in fact, the pursuit of it will probably lead most men to frustration, disillusionment, violent objectification of women, anger and suffering.
Seduction’s Zero Sum Game
At this point, some suspicious guys (of which I used to be one) might accuse me of writing this whole diatribe just to throw them off the scent. Those humanitarian seduction gurus blew the doors of their social perception, and opened their eyes to a wider world, in which hot threesomes with strippers were possible even for pot-bellied high-school dropouts living in their parents’ van down by the river.
I, a nobody know-nothing anonymous blogger, am just trying to throw them off the scent, and keep the mountains of untapped hot stripper pussy to myself by enforcing the status quo of social standards.
This viewpoint, apart from being pretty paranoid, presupposes a zero-sum model of human interactions: there is a hard limit to the amount of fulfillment or enjoyment one man can get from one woman and, therefore, the men with more women are automatically and mathematically more happy, by some amount dictated by an unspecified linear equation.
I think the reality is closer to a different viewpoint: that the effects of happiness in truly fulfilling relationships are multiplicative, not additive, and multiplicative in a non-linear and in fact non-mathematical way.
I’m here to suggest that there is no limit to the amount of fulfillment and enjoyment one man can find in conjunction with one woman.
And, furthermore, that a man with the largest harem in the world, filled with the most beautiful and freshest virgins from every corner of the globe, could still be the most miserable and unloved carbuncle on humanity’s collective ass.
Regular readers of the site need not freak out at my choice of language (especially “one man, one woman”) above; I am by no means suddenly advocating for monogamy or, heaven help us, matrimony. I still feel that people ought to be free to explore their relational options at all times, save for self-imposed commitments of the carefully considered sort.
I’m merely saying that the “life’s a bitch, be it’s pimp” attitude is a bad fit for the majority of men out there.
In fact, I think the majority of Western men would actually be happier in committed, monogamous, long term relationships — maybe even with kids — provided their significant other is a respectful, loving, realistic woman.
I also believe all men need to go through a “sowing wild oats” stage, and part of this site’s mission is to lay out some best practices for that stage — but as one of my business partners said, even the biggest horndog eventually wants to settle down.
As always, I’m open to dissent.