Looking back a good decade or so, when the PUA community was still reasonably active, it is quite striking how much the attitude of the average guy towards women has changed. This is not something I base off the various toxic corners on the Internet, which I frequent with an intellectual Hazmat suit on and purely for research. Instead, it is based observation as well as observable reality.
In the mid to late 2000s, guys wanted to get laid. Many even joined the PUA community not to become lotharios. Instead, their goal was to find a girlfriend. However, they fell for the lies of PUAs who told them that you need to learn to pick up women first before you can even think of finding a girlfriend. Of course, the reality is that it is easier to get a girlfriend than a one-night stand, but that would be a different topic. I also recall that back then, guys would sometimes size each other up by asking if you had a girlfriend and if you didn’t, you better looked like a prime-alpha Chad. Then again, if you looked like that, you only had to smirk when this question came up in conversation and they wouldn’t even ask you directly. Related was that whenever I bumped into some friend or acquaintance in the nightlife of London or Berlin, they’d ask me if the chick sitting on my lap was my girlfriend. Sometimes, they asked me the next time they bumped into me at university, possibly even inquiring how I had met my supposed girlfriend.
As the PUA community collapsed, accelerated due to my explosive ebook “Debunking the Seduction Community” that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, a bigger change was afoot. The PUA community split into the red-pill commmunity and the black-pill community. The former believes that the PUAs of yore overdid it but that there are good concepts in their theories and if you approach and “project frame” you can get laid with 10s but maybe not as easily as PUAs may have made it sound. On the other hand, the black-pill community, including it’s incel-community offshoot, has a much more realistic view on the world. They look at who actually gets laid and what you need to bring to the table to succeed with women. There are some “fakecels” and “chadcels” in the incel community, but by and large, those people appreciate reality a lot more than members of the other two communities.
I think that what you witness on the Internet is only ever the tip of the iceberg of what is happening in society. Thus, whenever there is an online community, you can be sure that the number of people with an interest in it in real life is far bigger. Back when forums were still popular, you had terms like “lurker”, i.e. people who read but never posted anything. The ratio between posters and lurkers is commonly way smaller than 1:100. Also, with an ad-driven business model, there only ever were big forums around if the ads, which were displayed to lurkers just as well, made it work. The implication of the tip-of-the-iceberg hypothesis is that you should be able to see behaviors that some people put on display in, for instance, black-pill circles, in the offline world as well. I think those of us who are older than maybe 30 can all agree that if you are single nowadays, nobody bothers you anymore whereas ten or fifteen years ago that was kind of a big deal. When I was in my early 20s I did not want to have anything to do with women (having a domineering mother as well as horrible, petty and vindictive female teachers does that to you). This led some rather mediocre men around me to believe that the fact that they had a fat and ugly girlfriend meant that they were somehow better than me. Sometimes I didn’t feel like just ignoring that, in which case I pulled up my phone and showed them text messages of some hot chick who was taking the same course as the dude and I. I had women literally chasing me, begging to meet up, and some guys got so upset about this that their face literally turned reddish.
If you were a hot, single guy back in the day, chicks chased you, or wanted to hook you up with their friends, or befriend you to keep you around to assess whether they can monkey-branch to you. You were a complete oddball if you said you didn’t care about chicks. Guys in a similar boat as me often just made some lame excuse or said that they haven’t gotten over some ex yet (bad move: I did this once, and the chick invited me to her place “if I wanted to talk”). Yet, today we have reached a tipping point. More and more guys no longer view it as a worthwhile life goal to have a girlfriend, wife her up, have kids, do the husband-provider thing, get divorce-raped, and die as an alcoholic. People no longer even shrug if you tell them that you’re single whereas that used to be seen as embarrassing, i.e. if you were a “real man”, you’d certainly have a woman in your life. Conversely, since you don’t, there must be something wrong with you.
You don’t need to take my word for it. There are now industries that cater to men who are flush with cash and do not spend it on women. For context, in many relationships, the woman decides how the money is spent and you can bet that building a massive PC rig or, better yet, setting up a VR room in your apartment will not sit well with her. The fact that we now have a lot of niche industries that serve a rather well-off male audience is proof enough that there are more and more men who want to spend some of the money they make on themselves. If you look back in time, it is absolutely the case that PC gaming used to be cheaper. That’s also one of the reason why it used to be crap, compared to playing on a game console. To give you one data point, in 2005 you could pull out your Nintendo Gamecube, put in Resident Evil 4, and your PC-gaming friends would be wowed by it because it looked so good. True, partly this was due to you playing on a CRT TV, but there was little doubt that you couldn’t find something similar on PC at that time (the PC was still great for Civilization and games like that).
To put some numbers on the table: Today, you can buy a top-of-the-line GPU with ray-tracing capabilities like the AMD RX 6800 XT for about $1,000. Top graphics cards even just a few years ago, and taking inflation into account, have never been that expensive. Guys may have wanted to buy them but their girlfriends or wives would have told them that this purchase unfortunately is not possible because “they” want to have another vacation later this year. To make this perfectly clear: hyper-expensive GPUs like that exist because there is a market demand for it. There are men who want this and are happy to buy it. (Article continues below.)
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The entire previous example is something I only realized after a work colleague told us, when sitting down for dinner before Covid, that he is going to dedicate an entire room in his three-room apartment to VR gaming. He was also giddy that he was able to preorder the Valve VR headset, which back then was the best and most expensive consumer headset in the industry. Guys, none of this would have happened ten or even five years ago, even if the technology would have been around, or similarly expensive offerings available! First of all, no guy would have boasted about something like that. Telling your work colleagues that you have a room in your house just for gaming would have put you roughly on par with someone publicly declaring that they don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom.
Gaming itself is actually a great example as well. Today, it’s a completely normal hobby. However, you used to be a pariah as a gamer. Guys didn’t even talk about this in public. In fact, I bumped into people who were so happy to hear that owned a Super Nintendo as a kid that they asked me if I wanted to borrow some of their stuff. I had a friend or acquaintance who lent me his Playstation together with Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid and he wanted me to play through the latter so that he could talk with me about it. That was when the Internet wasn’t widely available yet. That dude seemed reasonably well adjusted but he felt completely isolated because he fell in love with Metal Gear Solid and the few guys he knew who played games only cared about Gran Turismo and Tekken (I suspect he only gave me Gran Turismo to lower my defence). Some other guy, from a different circle of friends, told me about how incredibly impressed he was with Final Fantasy VII. A few days later he brought his PlayStation and that game and surreptitiously handed it to me, not even asking if I wanted to borrow it. Yes, before the Internet people who were interested in videogames apparently did feel isolated.
I would argue that today, guys are less and less concerned about (not) having a girlfriend or getting married. I would say the jig is up. On the one hand, shifts in our culture have made women overall a lot less pleasant to be around. Society nowadays pushes them towards being unfeminine. I’m hearing more and more complaints from guys that there are virtually no slim girls around anymore. I’ve also repeatedly been told by guys that they bang expensive escorts because they just aren’t attracted to the typical woman they see in their city. What more men nowadays openly admit is that it is quite expensive to have a woman in your life. When I was growing up, I was fed bullshit lines like “two people can live as cheaply as one”. That was never true. Today, though, the average woman seems to feel entitled to the entirety of your paycheck. They also aggressively push you towards upgrading your lifestyle (my wife does not do that as she’s smart with money). Suddenly, you need one or two extra rooms. My ex-wife was a perfect example in that regard as well. She oscillated between me having to buy either an expensive apartment smack in the center of the city, in one of the most ostentatious corners that, in my opinion, did not offer commensurate quality of life, or me buying a fucking house for her to sit in. The latter she pushed hard for after her sister got the guy she was seeing back then to buy a house for her. Well, I got out of that shortly afterwards and the last time I checked, her sister had just left that guy. I guess she didn’t like that house that much in the end. It probably was still a nice payday for her.
There has been a big cultural shift in the West where more and more men are learning that they can, indeed, be self-sufficient. Marriage rates are down across the board. People keep marrying later and later and in fewer numbers. Women have been told for decades that they can’t trust men. Yet, it is men who are learning that they cannot trust women. Those men also act accordingly. Too many men have seen other men getting slaughtered out there, having been little more than a resource to extract, and discarded the moment it became convenient to do so. It is thus not surprising that we are witnessing the slow death of relationships where men are, if at all, only interested in hook ups. I also remember another one of the bullshit lines I have, with variations, heard from multiple women, several in my extended family as well as easily a handful who thought they could get me to commit by messing with my head: “You need to be in a relationship because if you’re single long enough, you’ll get weird and nobody will want you anymore.” I find it hard to believe that such bullshit ever worked on men but apparently it did. The idea that if you are a single you either are or you are going to be “weird” has lost all currency. Women would be a lot better off today if we did not have the Internet because then we would not know of all those countless men who were wrecked in relationships, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We even know about the misfortunes of Brad Pitt (Yeah, just “be alpha”, bro!), and George Clooney’s marriage isn’t going so well apparently either. Nicolas Cage had to play in countless shitty movies to be able to afford his divorce and Robin Williams hung himself, presumably, because divorce had ruined him. I could spend days with adding more names of famous men here.
I think there is great poetic justice in the knowledge of all those great men falling hard on their face being shared far and wide. It’s not about those men, though. Before the Internet, you would not hear about any of this because you would not give a shit about it. However, women would eat up all of this because that is a big part of what their women’s magazines cover. Women have known all along how bad men have it in relationships, yet they told you all this bullshit about you “not being complete on your own” or, I don’t know, that you’ll need hip replacement surgery because of all that money in your fat wallet if you don’t hand it over to a wife in regular intervals. They have always known this and they have always gathered to talk about it. On that note: the word “trivial” comes from the Latin “trivium”, i.e. a location where three roads meet, meaning a busy crossing where woman would gather to chat about irrelevant matters; this kind of etymology is no longer politicially correct so the current attempt is to claim that this word comes from the standards of (elite) medieval education, which knew of a “trivium” as well, consisting of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; that would not really be trivial though. The exact opposite would be true.
So, what killed relationships and, in turn, freed men? It’s knowledge sharing and more and more men waking up. Once you reach a tipping point in society, the future development takes care of itself. The only way to reset this is a great societal crisis. I’m not sure if the manufactured Covid epidemic counts, though. In any case, I think we will see the price of graphics cards rise further. We’ll also see more and more men only looking out for themselves. Women were told to ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Now men are asking the very same question, and they don’t like the answers they arrive at.
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A very well written article, Sleazy.
Growing up through the early 2000’s as a teenager, I can’t count how many times I felt ashamed at myself for not having a girlfriend until my early 20’s, being relatively introverted and sexually inexperienced, and preferring to spend the majority of my time playing football and video games.
Once I did secure a girlfriend for five years (one who was extremely feminine, supportive and traditional at that), expanded my professional career, drastically improved my body and confidence through going to the gym every day, and dropped the video gaming hobby for a long period of time, it took all this for me to realize I am happiest on my own without a woman now that we’ve broken up. Pursue your own hobbies, do what makes you happy and damn what our morally corrupt ‘PC’ society dictates what ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be frowned upon.
I met my girlfriend at 21. She was 24. We stayed together five years and the last two of them were hell. She became increasingly more career focused as she aged and even though she was asian, she aged about two-decades in about two years from being constantly overworked and run-down. She became extremely unpleasant to be around as she neared 30 and I frequently find myself wondering why any man would bother himself with a woman who is nearing, or especially over this age. If you’re a man of value (i.e., you take care of yourself, you’re in shape and financially stable) you won’t have to resort to marrying some 37 year old harlot who resembles cookie-dough for once a month sex.
Being single is the greatest gift to a man. Giving up your independence, time, and freedom for a woman of today’s day and age is a surefire way to secure a future life of slavery, misery and debt. We no longer live in a society that can foster a healthy, happy life for you, your ideal wife and offspring when such an environment encourages and actively facilitates the destruction of men and the nuclear family.
I arrived at the same conclusion basically.
I had 3 relationships in my life, one 2 year, one 3 year, and one 1/2 year.
Every time after the first few months (which were nice, with lot of sex and so on) it always turned into a chore.
But because I was still somehow in the blue pilled mindset, I still tried to get into a new relationship.
But between my second and third relationship, I already got a lot of experience with escorts, I had some very good sex with them.
So after my last relationship. I asked myself what do I really want from a women.
And basically it boils down to: have good sex with an attractive women, and after that, cuddle a little bit together in bed.
That’s it, and this I can get from escorts.
So now I’m no longer searching for a relationship, and plan to stay alone for the rest of my life.
Also the Coolidge effect is quite strong in me, after I have fucked a girl for a few months, I just lose interest in her. This doesn’t seem to be so strong in all men, but for me it is like that, which makes long term relationships impossible.
MGS2 was the most satisfying story-wise for me. MGS3 was the most well-rounded and unique. I was unsatisfied with the stories in 4 and 5, but those games actually deliver as both shooters and stealth games in comparison to the earlier games. MGS2 and 3 are clearly meant to be played as stealth games. The camera angles aren’t conducive to playing it as a shooter, and the aiming/shooting mechanics are weird.
sorry. typing on my phone. meant to reply to a below thread
I’ve definitely noticed that when I meet guys in real life, both guys who can’t get laid, as well as guys who look like Chad, whom you’d never suspect would know about this stuff, are quite familiar with these online communities when you start having honest conversations about dating, and often employ some of the tactics these communities advocate. I’ve also found that women tend to bring up these communities as a way of “screening” you to make sure you’re not some Red Pill guy.
Regarding relationships, there’s a lot I could say, but one thing I struggle with, regarding the idea that men who don’t want marriage or children should avoid relationships, is the question of whether or not a short-term, monogamous relationship can be worth it. I’ve noticed that a lot of times, it’s women that want these kinds of relationships, either because they’re traveling, or because they’re just not at a point in which they want to settle down, and even if they say they want something long-term, as you pointed out, they often end a relationship as soon as it’s inconvenient for them. I’ve found that this type of monogamous (but still somewhat casual) form of dating is especially prevalent right now in the time of COVID-19.
I have experienced, though, the slippery slope of relationships with no long-term expectations suddenly moving (because of the woman’s insistence) in that direction, but of course there’s nothing say I can’t get out at a moment’s notice, provided I haven’t moved in with her or something.
been having identical thoughts. am seeing a 38-year old ex playboy model. best looking chick, especially naked, chick i’ve had. however, she can’t get pregnant as she’s missing an organ necessary for it. plus, i wouldn’t want to knock up a 38 year old. love spending time with her, and the sex is pretty good, but part of me thinks i should end it sooner rather than later if i know we’re not gonna do the whole “grow old together” thing
I can certainly see where you are coming from. On the other hand, women have poisoned the well so much that you shouldn’t feel bad for sticking around for as long as you think you’ll get something out of it. I have seen women act in incredibly calculating ways, so any argument based on supposed morality is laughable in the Western world today.
So … which MGS games have you played and would you ever consider posting reviews of any of them? Love those games
To write proper reviews I’d have to play through them again, and more than once. I could of course do the game-reviewer thing where I watch a few video online and ramble on about systemic racism and sexism those games, but that wouldn’t be very helpful.
In brief, MGS was so long ago that I can’t even recall if I finished it, but I did finish the remake for the GameCube some years later (“Twin Snakes”). I thought it was OK. MGS 2 I enjoyed quite a bit. I found the ending, where there is this long soliloquy about “memes”, pretty well made and the codex conversations between Raiden and his chick were also pretty good, exploring a lot of topics at a depth unlike any other game I had played up to that point. Back then, reviewers weren’t quite so impressed by the codex conversations, being the low-IQ apes that they are. In 2007 or 2008 I bought a PS2 again to play three games: God of War II (blew my mind!), Shadow of the Colossus (meh) and Metal Gear Solid 3. MGS 3 was fantastic. I played through it very quickly. It was one of the rare cases where I got really sucked into a game. I loved the ending, too. This game was so good that I couldn’t quite get why there was a need for a forth one, except for purely commercial reasons. MGS 4 I played very briefly in 2014, I think. I considered it a pretentious pile of garbage, which I dropped quickly. Within the first hour the game hits you over the head by letting some black weapons dealer ramble on about what a racket war is when I just wanted to play a game. In MGS4 Kojima lost the plot, IMO. MGS V, both Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain, I’m not interested in. Lastly, the spin-off Metal Gear Rising is one of the best action games ever made, but it received a poor commercial reception, sadly. (I was thrilled when Sony hinted at a sequel a few years ago, which they backpedalled in the most bizarre way shortly afterwards.)
I mentioned that I’m currently gaming on a PS3 because I don’t have a proper Internet connection and can’t download huge patches. I got the Metal Gear HD Collection for that console for cheap and may go through MGS3 again. On the other hand, I’m not sure how well the mechanics have held up so there is the risk that it will sour me on the entire franchise.
I literally just finished MGS4 yesterday. MGS3 is still my favorite. I liked all the bond tropes that I didn’t get when I first played it back in 07. The boss fight with The End is one of the best boss fights in the entire series. The whole, go into your menu and manually change camo thing can get quite annoying (even though there are only really 4 costumes you need to toggle between) and some of the mechanics are jerky but it’s quite playable today considering I made it through the 1st game just recently. Don’t forget about having to dig bullets out of yourself and treat your burns, fractures and wounds. There is something special about MGS3, it’s the only one I’d replay again at this point. The sneaking sections in that game actually feels about right as you are not given a soliton radar and instead have to rely on ‘primitive’ technology, like the sonar and motion detector. I was playing on hard difficulty and kept having procure sustenance to go into the menu and consume the item regularly, which seemed a bit excessive. You can turn your console off for a day or two, then come back and find all your meat has spoiled while the internal clock on the console has been ticking. The story, however, is at it’s best here. So many likable characters and villains in this one.
Now, act 1 of MGS4 I was really enjoying. I thought, wow this game is going to be fun! The war zone environment and trying to stealthily navigate between two or more factions was intense. Things go way downhill from there. This game has the longest cutscenes of any of the games. And the story is so contrived and shit gets retconned all to hell. There is a lot a lot a lot a lot of cheese in this game too. I remember when they revealed that the 10 year old girl in the game, Sunny – who struggled to properly make sunny side up eggs, was a freaking computer genius who aids Hal Emmerich in various ways. Most of the emotional parts felt so forced and inauthentic. The game looks gorgeous and there is some great gameplay peppered in there, but by far it’s the worst in the series imo. It was a chore to finish it, but I managed. I would find myself surfing forums during cutscenes etc. Would never play again, even if skipping all the cutscenes.
I booted up the HD version of Peacewalker and it’s so much simpler in design yet already so much better. You can get MGSV for ps3 if you feel like playing the game at a consistent 20 frames. It has around 50 hours of gameplay or so I read, but where it’s unfinished, people have pointed out that at some point or another the narrative makes a beeline toward the conclusion.
If you want an idea of how bad MGS4 can get then watch this five minute clip where Johnny proposes to Meryl. This scene had me cringing and rolling my eyes so hard:
https://youtu.be/QofhJhJGBjw
The uploader described the video with these words: “This is probably my FAVORITE cutscene in the whole game. Enjoy it!!”
@Herkerderker
If you’re looking for some good and in depth reviews of MGS1-3 then check out Max Derrat’s videos. So far he has covered 1-3. All of the games can be summed up by their themes.
MGS1 (Gene): https://youtu.be/u-xZOTjsI70
MGS2 (Meme): https://youtu.be/c8LHpoNTaF0
MGS3 (Scene): https://youtu.be/jAJpAI_a8Yg
MGS2 was the most satisfying story-wise for me. MGS3 was the most well-rounded and unique. I was unsatisfied with the stories in 4 and 5, but those games actually deliver as both shooters and stealth games in comparison to the earlier games. MGS2 and 3 are clearly meant to be played as stealth games. The camera angles aren’t conducive to playing it as a shooter, and the aiming/shooting mechanics are weird.
A few quick additions to the article:
– I just learned that a GPU for $1k isn’t even the most you can pay. Nvidia has the RTX 3090 on offer, which starts at $1.5k. The most decked out version of it costs more than $2k.
– On the note of expensive hobbies, I remembered that several of the people I had video calls with professionally over the last eight to nine months casually mentioned their expensive hobbies. One guy had multiple very expensive-looking bikes on a wall in his apartment. Another guy mentioned that he’s really enjoying work from home because he can now put some miles on all the guitars in his collection. I’d be very surprised if any of those guys had a live-in gf because based on what I know, they tend to fight you tooth and nail if you want to put your “shitty bike”, which cost a few grand, in the apartment to prevent it from being stolen. Also, a guitar “only takes up space”, so to give them the space you need you need to make some space by kicking out your non-supportive gf.
It’s has to go back pre 1970 because welfare and social security doesn’t work without strong families and marriage. Jacking up the taxes will not help because men will just show the finger to government. They will finally realise that women are fucked no matter how you turn the deal around – that’s why they have a fhole to begin with. It’s either women are fucked, but men are happy or the whole society is fucked (including women). No sexual revolution will change it.
I think humans are generally an unhappy lot. The ideal society is to try to find the least unhappy system. That’s why it was so easy to poke holes in the patriarchy. You can do it with anyone or anything. Fact is it was better than today, so the tradeoffs are inevitable.
I think it also explains why a lot of feminists are narcissits . When your sole purpose is criticising someone/something to make yourself feel better there is something very wrong.
@ Dude & GL-&-S: “… that women are fucked no matter how you turn the deal around – that’s why they have a fhole to begin with.”
This is a very good comment! Some poeple may not like it, but is really very good nonetheless.
Women have to submit to the right kind of “authority” instead of the fucked-up world with all of its stupid bling-bling. Yet that’s precisely where their female weak spot lies. But of most (Western) men are lost due to incessant social engineering, so why follow them at all?
Another important aspect GL-&-S. raised is the core problem of suffering. Women feel crappy and disenfrenchized either way, since they suffer and they’d wish to get away from the pain. Unfortunately in this world suffering & pain (to whichever extent individually) is unavoidable, and with good reason. The pain and suffering will eventually even get far worse after one has tried to eliminate suffering and pain (by whichever means).
Pain is unavoidable in this world, properly applied it is even a blessing.