One of my biggest pet-peeves is seeing people argue at cross-purposes, and I think that’s precisely what’s going on with this debate between the Neoreactionaries and the Game bloggers: both sides are arguing against a caricature, due to the fact that – despite using the same terminology – they’re both using the terms with subtly different nuances, thus leading to an apparent disagreement, where no major disagreement actually exists.
An example of that confused terminology is the conflation of PUA with Gamer.
On the surface they’re very similar. They both write about picking up women, they both use words like “neg” and “shit-test”, and they both spend an inordinate amount of time in seedy environs which offend the heightened sensibilities of your typical Neoreactionary.
But when you dig beneath the surface, 
you find two groups of men who are as different as night and day. Case in point: just look at this fool in a furry hat. Guys like Roosh, Heartiste, Vox, or Remy Sheppard wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with him, and as for his book The Mystery Method – well, it was too depressing for me to finish, but TheRawness argues that it perfectly summarizes the Codependent-Turned-Narcissist.
If the Neoreactionaries were arguing solely against the Pick Up Artist community, I think we’d be in full agreement with them. Yes, these people are destructive to society, particularly in light of the fact that many of them are avowed feminists. From a 2011 interview in Feministe:
When [Neil Strauss and I] talked about feminism, he expressed a surprising amount of respect and appreciation. He said things like “We still are a patriarchal society”, and when I pointed out that many pickup artists hate feminism, he said that “A guy who says he hates feminism (a) doesn’t understand or know feminism, and (b) is scared of powerful women.”
Feminist boiler plate 101.
The truth about the PUAs is that they’re nothing but extremely successful pussy-beggars; they’re the top 1% of Nice Guys.
Nice Guys get a lot of flak from the Gamers for being contemptible little pseudo-males, but it wouldn’t be such a widespread phenomenon if it didn’t work occasionally. The Nice Guy is the male who befriends a woman, in the hope of eventually bedding her when a bad-boy breaks her heart. XKCD summarizes this vile deceitfulness in comic-form here:
Bit by bit, I’ll make you depend on me. You’ll think about how long it would take to build this kind of connection again. And in a moment of weakness – and loneliness – You’ll give in. It’ll feel comfortable and natural. You’ll quietly revise your definition of love and try to be happy. And sometimes you will be. On the wistfulness in your gaze and the tiny pause before you say “I love you” will hint that this wasn’t the ending you’d hoped for.
This is also known as being a “Sneaky Male”, and PUA is this behaviour writ large.
The PUA embraces the female imperative, “Whatever you say, honey!” feeding into a woman’s delusions, and debasing himself into an amusing little boy for her delight. Nothing but a heterosexual catamite.
Game, on the other hand, celebrates masculinity. As is implied by the XKCD comic, a man who practices Game tells a woman what he wants, and what he expects out of her – he leads the dance, and she delights in being his submissive partner. As DannyFrom504 points out, Game looks like this:
Now that said, most Game blogs are focused on notch-count, on sleeping with as many high-quality women as possible – and as The Social Pathologist says, occasionally they over-step their authority:
In debates, PUA’s [sic – he means Game bloggers] are liable to “pull rank” on them by virtue of their notch count, and to a degree they are justified, but only when it comes to the subject of getting women into bed. When they start pulling rank on other issues, they’ve exceeded their authority.
Personally, my notch-count is roughly on par with Saint Augustine’s¹, and also like Saint Augustine, I find the topic of Game rather dull. Important, no doubt – but I find the rarefied air of theology and political philosophy far more congenial to my lungs.
Which is why I hope that I can heal this divide.
ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ
In my estimation, Esoteric Tradition has nailed the points of contention perfectly; however, I respectfully disagree that there is any substantive difference. The second half of this essay will be structured along his bullet points.
Promotion of PUA as a way of life
As noted above, Game =/= PUA. Furthermore, Game is about more than just casual sex and notch-counts: it’s about enjoying an excess of femininity. At its inception, yes – it was just about numbers – but as the body of work expanded, Game bloggers reached consensus on what sort of woman they wanted – and surprise, surprise! – it was a traditional, feminine woman. Not the Easy Feminist Slut which the PUAs so love. Somebody who studies Game would rather have one traditionally feminine woman, than a dozen slatterns.
However, at present these women are extremely difficult to find; the female serial-monogamist is the new norm. The Gamer attitude is: “Well, if I’m not going to find a wife, I might as well get laid.” Accepting reality isn’t the same as promoting it.
Spreading the 60s Harvard feminist sexual revolution is a bad thing
Unlike Mystery and his Feminist advocacy which I quoted above, I don’t see the Game bloggers doing this.
Quite the contrary; it’s the Game community (Roosh V Forums, specifically) who organized Traditional Sex Roles Week under the #BackToTheKitchen hashtag, who organized the previous #FatShamingWeek event (where they rejected the post-modernist concept of subjective beauty standards), and whom are presently discussing #SlutShaming Week.
That’s right – the guys who are studying how to get the sluts to come home with them, are the same guys who are creating a campaign to discourage sluttery.
Sometimes the best way to stop a child from eating candy, is to let him eat as much as he wants – and it’s often the men who’ve spent the most time around sluts, who are the most starved for the company of a Lady True.
PUA tourism is just another American imperialism
This presupposes that it’s Roosh pushing this culture onto Europe – as opposed to Feminists, Soros, and the European Union.
Quite the contrary; Roosh is in Europe because it’s more traditional. If he wanted notches, he’d still be living in Washington D.C.; feminists aren’t exactly dificult to bed. Instead he wants a pursuit which is harder, but more rewarding.
At the end of the day, it’s not the Gamers who control female promiscuity; this behaviour is completely in the hands of the women. To again quote The Social Pathologist:
In the West, it is the women who control sexuality and if the place resembles a brothel is because women want it to be that way. The PUA’s are simply taking advantage of the situation: they are a second order phenomenon. The primary pathogen is female promiscuity.
PUA’s are not like Jedi Masters, able to exert some some irresistible mind control over women. To think so is to deny women moral agency. No PUA advocates rape, despite feminist attempts to smear them with this charge. For every successful notch there has to be a woman who has willingly spread her legs. A while ago Roosh tweeted about his failed attempt to seduce a young Croatian girl who was studying to become a nun. You can’t run a brothel without whores.
Ed: The story is apocryphal (legends are self-generating around Roosh, apparently) but like all good fiction, there is a seed of truth in it.
Speaking and acting like you’re a gangbanger (not all do this but enough seem to)
I wish I could say this doesn’t happen, but it does. All I can say in their defence is that Aaron Clarey thinks I’m a degenerate for listening to Rock’n’Roll, and (when I’m feeling contentious) I’ll often call him a degenerate for listening to reefer-infused Jazz, sung by man-whores like Frank Sinatra.
Ignoring the damage PUA types perpetuate.
This hasn’t been an issue since 2008.
While I recall Tucker Max claiming that he always leaves girls better off than when he met them, nobody in the Game community has believed in this delusion for quite some time. Most Game blogs will openly state that any notch-count is a bad notch-count for a woman.
But – once again – it’s not the men who are in control of the sluttiness, it’s the women. Game simply hands over the tools of the Omega Sexual Degenerate to the average man. If women are going to be slutting it up, they should at least be doing it with decent guys, rather than drug-dealers and baby daddies.
And although the slutting isn’t good for the women, the empowerment of men through Game is: the book More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics explains how, statistically, the more Men who are having sex, the fewer STDs which will be spread – and hopefully, the fewer Baby Mommas, as Game advocates tend to be a bit more responsible than Leroy Jenkins.
Most of the Manosphere seems attached to Democracy
Most of the world is attached to Democracy; but who’s more likely to listen to reason: a Blue Piller, or a Red Piller? The Red Pill analysis of Feminism is fast making it clear that A)Women are irrational, and B)Every school of Feminism has been detrimental. The Manosphere’s Red Pill disproves so much conventional wisdom, that well-argued unconventional wisdom becomes far more palatable.
I would suggest the following strategy:
Start with attacking Female Suffrage,
Move on to Universal Male Suffrage,
Begin to question the whole precept of “Humanity as Final Arbiter”,
And don’t allow the Perfect to be the enemy of the Good
Responding to criticism from other Dark Enlightenment thinkers like feminists by throwing around terms like “white knight”
I took this point out of order, because it’s the most mixed-bag of the bunch.
On the one hand, this critique is valid, but misguided: a Neoreactionary shaming of male promiscuity is going to sound a lot like Feminist shaming, and Christian shaming is going to sound a lot like Churchian shaming. That the two are fundamentally different is hard to grasp without close attention.
And why would they give you that attention? The onus is on you to prove that you’re not a Feminist/Churchian destroyer.
On the other hand – and there’s no nice way to put this – philosophers in the Neoreaction often are White Knights.
Until you’ve seen the raw female Id, it’s impossible to fully understand it. Heck, I even have to remind myself every so often – the other half of the Mother Goddess is Kali the Destroyer. The earth nurtures, and the earth consumes; the womb and the tomb are just different aspects of the same force.
Women are amazingly talented at playing the victim, and the curse of our race is that Adam is so prone to falling under Eve’s spell, no matter how much she wants him to overcome. Finding that fine line between Truth and Bitterness has driven many a poet mad.
The philosophers in the Neoreaction tend to lean towards intellectual, rather than the rough and tumble, and the glorious heat of battle. They are not the sorts of men who tend to enjoy the Night Club scene – and as such, they’re far less likely to have experience with women than your average jock. This leads to a certain naïveté about women – also known as pedestalization, and White Knighting.
The only advice I can give, is to tell you about the Mystery known to all the great seducers throughout history: that women are filthy, vile, and venal little creatures, desperately ashamed of themselves, desperate to be as righteous as men, and yet eager to tear men down – they know this about themselves, and they hate this about themselves, and their secret hope (a hope they’ll seldom admit, even to themselves, because of how dearly they hold it) is that they can find a Man who knows this about them, but still manages to love them.
The second part of the Mystery is this: it is possible to know how horrible women are… and love them all the more.
Final Thoughts
While I’ll readily agree that Chastity is ideal in society, in practical terms it’s not that big of a deal. Both the Christians and the Neoreactionaries focus on it far too much. The Bible – despite an occasional passage where it condemns San Francisco and LA Sodom and Gomorrah – really doesn’t have all that much to say about sexuality.
Wait until marriage? Yeah, that’s a good idea – but humans are idiots, and most of them are going to screw it up. Thank goodness for the blood of the lamb, and all that.
At the end of the day, the Manosphere is full of men speaking Truth, and daring to live by the Truth they speak. That they fall short of an ideal is no surprise – we all fall short, at some point or another. But don’t let these minor differences drive us apart.
I don’t have all the answer – heck, I don’t even have all the answers for myself. This disagreement is in no way fundamental, and we shouldn’t let it grow into something that divides us. In all important respects, we’re fighting on the same side.
There are many paths up the mountain, after all – but there’s only one peak.
ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ
1. As a young man, he was an incorrigible rake.
The post Game Versus the Reactosphere appeared first on Stares at the World.