A relatively frequent problem of not just inexperienced men is their need to “save a hoe”, i.e. get involved with a woman who could be most aptly described as damaged goods, and stick to her, seemingly no matter how much money it costs them, and how much they suffer physically, emotionally, and spiritually as well. In the worst case, this leads to the complete ruin of those men. In this article, I will not just discuss captain-save-a-hoe syndrome but also the female inverse, let us call it “tame-a-thug” syndrome. Yes, I am aware that the term “Mother Theresa” syndrome is floating around. However the real Mother Theresa has absolutely nothing in common with her popular image as the hospitals she ran refused medical treatments and instead maximized the suffering of the sick. For that, she was rewarded handsomely with public and private money. Thus, I’ll stick to “tame a thug”.

To start with, we should look at the origins of save-a-hoe syndrome. I think it goes back to poor parenting, possibly due to a domineering mother, regardless of whether the father was in the picture or not. Imagine a boy spending his formative years doing chores for the mother, getting shouted at, gaslighted, and never thanked for anything. As the boy is emotionally dependent on his abusive mother, he will make excuses for her behavior to no end. This may also be one of the cases where the presence of the father is worse for the kid as such a useless man would not only be a poor role model, he would also signal that the behavior of the woman in the picture is perfectly normal. After all, if it wasn’t, then why did he not stand up for himself or his son? The lesson the little boy in the situation described above is that he has to serve a woman. Furthermore, no matter how bad her behavior is, it needs to be excused due to emotional dependency. As it so happens, eventually the boy has to leave home and make his way in the world. At this point, there will be an emotional gap to fill, left by his abusive, domineering mother. As he has been primed for victimhood for about two decades, he will easily fall prey to female predators.

The worst expression of save-a-hoe syndrome is simping. Due to the advances of technology, there is now an excess of it. In the olden days, guys who simped could at least spend a bit of time in person with women who only exploited them financially and emotionally. In today’s world, however, men visit online e-thot services and spend real money in exchange for emojis or chat messages that were most likely written by a lowly intern instead of the e-thot herself, which adds insult to injury. The best you can hope for is a shout-out on the channel by the e-thot herself, but that costs you more than a session with a hooker. For a small number of women, e-thottery is hugely profitable, at least for a few short years. Yet, I think there is so much attention on prime e-thots because there are relatively few who managed to leave a fleeting mark on popular culture. An e-thot like Belle Delphine can only exist because many of thousands of wanna-be e-thots barely make enough money online to pay for their remote-controlled vibrators.

As the echelons of e-thottery are elusive for most women who want to have their own group of simps to control, they still need to engage with men in real life. Women with this goal in mind are often found in professions that make it possible for them to interact with large numbers of men. Thus, they work as strippers, retail clerks, hair dressers, or receptionists. An unwitting male customer with the kind of psychological damage outlined above, may easily end up taking an interest in such a woman. This is even more likely if he normally does not approach women himself. As those women talk to him, he may even assume some level of sexual interest that is not there. Being starved of female attention, such a man may then make it his goal to “save” such a woman so that she does not have to engage in that kind of seemingly lowly work.

A lack of access to women, possibly paired with a sense of desperation due to a long dry spell, makes men read way too much into interactions with any random one. Yet, our captain save-a-hoe has been psychologically weakened, which makes him highly susceptible to being manipulated by a woman. It may even be that there is some kind of (one-sided) relationship unfolding where the guy is simping like there is no tomorrow, the woman is happy to exploit the man for financial gain, yet the guy is oblivious to this, and making excuses about the behavior of his supposed girlfriend, just like he used to make excuses for the behavior of his abusive mother.

Nonetheless, a captain save-a-hoe can end up in a genuine relationship with a woman, i.e. one where sex is involved. The woman remains the basketcase she always has been, though. You can probably see where this is going. Now the super simp wants to prove himself by fixing his girlfriend, which may entail buying a nice apartment, paying down her student debt, or financing her degree (or her second degree). Strangely enough, all the years of work and effort will never be rewarded. The hoe just will not turn into a housewife, no matter how hard the simp tries. In the end, the woman will just move on to another host whenever she realizes that she has extracted all the financial and emotional support the guy had to give.

Psychological fallacies are, often enough, quite harmless. If you don’t understand recency bias or the sunk-cost fallacy, you probably won’t ruin your life. Yet, sometimes it does such as when some simp pays $100k for a professional degree of his hoe-wife who leaves him, and he then wants to spend more money on her, trying to win her back. At this point, the damage is done, however. In this context, it is also interesting to look at the underlying cause of the “just world fallacy”, i.e. the belief that good deeds will be rewarded. This fallacy enables simping for a hoe as the simp believes that the more time and money he spends on his hoe girlfriend or wife, the more she will love him and thank him for his efforts, when in reality, it may well be that the correlation is entirely the other way around, i.e. she giddily gets bent over by a guy who did not even bother with buying her dinner whereas all transactions with her provider simp are transactional. Better get to grips that there are rarely any just rewards to be had in the world.

I also would like to point out that the hoes I am talking about are not generally porn-star caliber women who turn ever guy’s head. You can have some rather unremarkable if not downright unattractive women engage in systematic psychological manipulation. This makes the simping of a captain save-a-hoe even more tragic. Obviously, I do not think that it can be excused to have some hot chick ruin your life, but, given the choice, you would probably rather deal with a hot rather than an ugly chick. Clearly, the best answer here is “neither”, as you should not let women take advantage of you at all, but if you were a hardcore simp, then at least have some standards. It is not much, but your buddies may give you “mad props” if some hot slut with perky tits financially took advantage of you instead of some 6/10 any sane guy would feel embarrassed to be seen with.

As taxing as simping is on a guy’s psyche, I think that this problem can be overcome with a modicum of introspection. There is probably little to be gained if you second-guess every interaction you have with a woman. However, if you do not get much in return and your hopes of saving that hoe do not work out, over and over again, then maybe reevaluate what you are really doing. Some damaged women can have an addictive quality, however, and those are probably the most dangerous. To get out of those relationships, probably your best hope is to physically get away. Move into a different apartment, travel for a bit, or go on a hike, and forget about her. Do not reengage her at all.

I think that simps and captain save-a-hoes follow a perversion of the slayer handbook. Instead of doing what gets them laid, they live in some kind of fantasy world that is built on faulty premises. Yet, how long can you keep this up? Reality has a tendency to crush bullshit, regardless of whether it is at the personal or institutional level. Unfortunately, some men have the tendency to double down when things are not working out. In this case, you can only hope that there is no rope waiting for them at the end of the tunnel. This is not at all an exaggeration. Even plenty of high profile men have killed themselves after they realized that women do not work as they had imagined it.

Lastly, I would like to briefly cover the tame-a-thug syndrome, which is the female equivalent of the save-a-hoe syndrome. This relates to women who make sacrifices in order to “build up” their man. I do not think that this is very common at all among younger men. What occasionally happens is that Chad bangs some random chick who falls hell over heels for him. She realizes that Chad cannot quite live up to the “six figures” part of her dream of sixes, i.e. six-pack abs, six feet tall, and a six figures income. Thus, she will attempt to help the guy who is casually fucking her to improve his economic prospects. A chick I knew brought print-outs of job ads with her when she returned to my apartment for round 2, for instance. This may very well be the most she will ever do because you can forget about women taking on debt to put you through graduate school, for instance.

In a woman’s younger years, tame-a-thug syndrome is basically irrelevant. It is simply a short-lived attempt at moulding a guy she finds physically attractive into being the ideal provider. After all, she can’t make men with a fat wallet taller or more attractive, so she thinks that maybe she can do a little bit to make the tall, handsome dude who fucked her so well last night make more money. Unfortunately, that dude will quickly move on to the next woman, and if he wanted to fix his life, he would probably do it himself.

On the other hand, the tame-a-thug syndrome becomes much more common once a woman hits the wall. Women in their late 30s and beyond stand little chance in getting local Chads as those guys are fucking women in their 20s instead. Indeed, superficially not all is lost for wall-hitting women, at least in their mind. This is where trips to Africa or at least to the local refugee center come in. There, they prey on young men of the dark-skinned persuasion, but this is quite mutual. If those doctors and engineers are able to lock down a white, old fattie or, better yet, get them to adopt a child, then they can legally stay in the country and get more gibs, too. One aspect at play here is probably also the misguided mothering instinct of the woman. Childless women end up projecting their mothering instincts on something else, most commonly pets, but sometimes they also play the role of the creepy, touch-feely wine aunt at the family get-together. Quite similarly, they may focus on a young doctor-engineer from an advanced African country who is illiterate, teaching him a few words of her language or imparting her culture on him, sometimes with dubious success as some of those women may pay for their foolishness with their life. In contrast, men most often only lose time and money.

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