Of pens and the company ink

One of the pleasures of becoming a man of relative wealth and power is the discovery that many of the more attractive women who ostensibly want to be "mentored" by you actually want to achieve their career objectives by rather more straightforward and horizontal means. Don't fall for it. The most easily-plucked apple is seldom the most sweet. Or the most wisely-plucked:

Clougherty and Lonsdale had been dating over the previous couple of weeks, while he was her assigned mentor for an undergraduate course at Stanford called Technology Entrepreneurship, Engineering 145. The limited-enrollment class offered a combination of academics, business skills and access to Silicon Valley that has made Stanford the most-sought-after university in the country, with the most competitive undergraduate admissions and among the highest donations. More than any other school, Stanford is the gateway to the tech world, and computer science is the most popular major. Each year, new young multimillionaires are minted, some just months after graduation.

Lonsdale, who also went to Stanford, made much of his fortune by helping to start Palantir Technologies, a major data-mining company. He was among the “top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists,” according to the course description, many of them alumni, who came to campus as mentors for E145. “Students will learn how to tell the difference between a good idea in the dorm and a great scalable business opportunity,” the E145 handbook for mentors says. “Guide them and challenge them.” Stanford students are well aware of how valuable these contacts are. Around the time Clougherty took E145, another student’s project, a virtual-payment app, attracted an investment from a Google board member who was a guest speaker in the course. It became the start-up Clinkle, with initial financing of $25 million.

After sightseeing in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty were together in the hotel room they were sharing when she started dressing for evening Mass. Lonsdale came up behind her and kissed her, touching her neck and hair and telling her she was beautiful. She had told him she was a virgin. Both agree they had sex. But what actually went on between them that night, and throughout their yearlong relationship, would become highly contested. After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault. Stanford investigated whether he broke the university’s rule against “consensual sexual and romantic relationships” between students and their mentors and, later, whether he raped her. The findings from the investigations have sparked a war of allegations and interpretations, culminating last month with dueling lawsuits, filled with damaging accusations.

When I was a young man working at my father's very successful technology company, every secretary, cleaning girl, and marketing assistant made their interest in me clear. But I never did more than take one of them to lunch once - a risk worth taking because she was even prettier than her best friend, who was the reigning Miss Minnesota at the time - because I knew a) there were plenty of girls on the girl tree who didn't work for Daddy, and, b) the moment something didn't happen to go a girl's way, there was probably some sort of sexual harassment shakedown waiting to happen.

(There was never a second date because the girl ate like a freaking HORSE. I mean, she put away about four times what I ate, and I was lifting weights and doing heavy martial arts at the time. I correctly anticipated that she would blow up, which she did within 18 months. Damned shame. She was genuinely beautiful.)

Work can be a great place to meet women. An Adobe executive once gave me an amount of stick for treating one department there like a candy store. There are hot girls just out of college in practically every big corporation's marketing department. But don't date the women who work for the same company you do and especially don't get involved with any woman over whom you have any sort of authority, or for whom you have any sort of responsibility.

Note that even the smartest, best-educated women exhibit this sort of hypergamy. And why not? It's easier than actually working.

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How to impress a woman

Science again backs up the Theory of Game:

Chaps, if you want to impress a woman, don’t talk about work. An analysis of almost 1,000 speed dates, showed that females switched off when a prospective beau started chatting about his job. Much more successful, was allowing the woman to talk about herself. And, surprisingly, interrupting her....

Professor Jurafksy’s analysis also showed that women liked men who interrupted them. He said: ‘The men would interrupt a lot. We thought interruption would usually be a sign of taking the floor and of being rude but all of these interruptions were sympathetic interruptions.

‘They would stop someone and say “Oh, that exactly happened to me too”.

‘They were attentive listening-type interruptions. And women, in a date that clicked, showed signs of engagement. They varied their pitch a lot, they varied their loudness, they got louder and softer. So, on a good date, the woman was engaged and the man was attentive.’

However, women really didn’t like men who were hesitant, with time-buying phrases such as ‘kind of’ and ‘sort of’ interpreted as a sign of awkwardness. And they really didn’t like chit-chat about work.

Translation: women like alphas who don't talk much and interrupt when they have something to say. And they dislike Gammas who ramble on, are insecure and focused on themselves, and are eager to demonstrate their competence.

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Don't. Be. That... Thing

And Gammas wonder why higher-status men despise them so deeply. Don't EVER feel bad about kicking a Gamma when he's down. If you do, kick him again by way of penance. It may be the only chance he gets to learn better.

Fortunately, most of these submen are doomed to be dead ends anyhow.

I had a fascinating encounter with a Gamma male yesterday. He was deeply concerned about the possibility that mildly insulting people would be counterproductive in a certain circumstance. When I criticized the notion, he reacted in an angry, over-the-top manner with a long response replete with serious insults that ended with a self-pitying posture of martyrdom. It was remarkable. It was HILARIOUS. As I subsequently observed on Twitter, a moderate is someone who would rather shoot at his allies than at his enemies.

Sans an understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy, I might have responded in anger. Instead, I simply pointed out that criticism is not insult and that there was no need for any ritual online seppuku, so he blithely proceeded as if nothing had happened. Now, I happen to like this guy, so I was content to let it go, but it was downright textbook, and I remain in both awe and astonishment at the vast gulf between the way in which low-rank and high-rank men are inclined to handle conflict.

To the right, the complete opposite.

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Graduating Gamma 3

Step 3: Emotional

The Gamma lives on an emotional roller coaster which goes from anxious repression to emotional outbursts which can accumulate into rage and then despair. A Gamma is effectively out of balance emotionally and which is why they are so obnoxious to people around them and especially to women.

I have a couple of ideas of why this is so, and my guess is that a Gamma was a boy who was just a little more emotionally sensitive and a bit smarter than the average boy, then experienced some combination of the following factors: a Gamma father or father figure, raised by women alone, bullied rather heavily, socially awkward and had trouble knowing how to act, overweight or possessed some other physical trait that made him overly self-conscious. I don’t think it is any one thing, but rather a combination of several influences and events beyond which slowly turns a boy who might have some tendencies towards being a Gamma into a full-blown Gamma in adulthood. If you suspect you are a Gamma you’ll probably find this list or events like this to be still painful in your memory. Take that same boy and surround him with strong, but patient men, and have him enter into a masculine profession or the military, and he’d probably turn out a Delta or a Delta with a few Gamma traits.

Swinging the pendulum

After a lifetime of Gamma reinforcement how does a man turn things around? I suggest for one month swinging the pendulum far in the opposite direction. Almost like an emotional detox, the Gamma needs to completely turn around for a time and get off the emotional roller coaster. I suggest one month of practicing the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. The first step is to get yourself a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. My favorite version is by Everyman’s Library as the language has been updated, but it costs money, so there’s a free version here, and if you want a printed book they are easy to find used or are always at the local library. This is the place to start because it isn’t a philosophical abstract but instead a portrait of an Emperor and how he lives out the philosophy in his daily life. It’s also a damn good read.

As for a definition of Stoicism I’m going straight to the dictionary:
1. the endurance of pain or hardship without a display of feelings and without complaint.

From dictionary.com:
A philosophy that flourished in ancient Greece and Rome. Stoics believed that people should strictly restrain their emotions in order to attain happiness and wisdom; hence, they refused to demonstrate either joy or sorrow.

You can read more about it on Wikipedia, but for our purposes the above are sufficient. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will take umbrage with this definition and can’t wait to spam the comments with a debate about the true definition of Stoicism and their “oh so interesting” knowledge about Stoicism. Don’t do it because it doesn’t matter here and you will be missing the point. I don’t bring up Stoicism to debate its meaning or to claim it has superiority over all other philosophies or other such irrelevant topics, only that it can be a useful tool to help one graduate from Gamma.


Practical Application

1. Drop all snarky, flippant, and silly comments and voices about people and things. Its fine to tell an actually joke, but stop trying to be cute and funny all of the damn time. Witty remarks are useful, but you need to take a break for a bit.
2. This month drop all online forum debates, especially when you are really emotionally invested. Go silent in your profiles unless it’s reassuring a community you are OK, ONLY if they ask.
3. Stay away from social media unless you have to get on it for a specific reason. Social media is a hotbed of emotional flame wars.
4. When in groups of friends and families and a hot-button topic comes up in which you’d typically dive into (and of course wow the ladies with your stellar command of minutia!) keep your mouth shut and simply watch and listen to the participants instead.
5. Stop watching any and all reality TV shows in which there’s a lot of screaming and emotional manipulation going on to get a rise out of the audience.
6. Stay away from news stories which you know act as a trigger for you to instantly get upset about.
7. Try to schedule some time, even if it’s just most of a single day to go somewhere solitary and quiet in the outdoors. When there make an effort to quiet your mind, drop the internal debates about politics, religion, etc., going on in there and instead focus on good things in life that you’ve been blessed with. This can be done multiple times if needed.
8. If you have a wife or girlfriend don’t be baited by the typical arguments you two have this month, and be aware of what you say before you say it if things get heated. Instead show them love as it covers a multitude of sins, and patience as you realize you have probably been just as guilty as them in emotional manipulation.
9. Kindly tell your female friends (especially that one you really want to date) to unburden their emotions on someone else. Don’t be rude, but be firm.
10. If someone emotionally vomits all over you, tries to get an emotional rise out of you, engage you in a rhetorical argument, or tells stupid and silly jokes, simply grunt in reply. I’m serious here, grunt. Don’t get baited in; don’t tell them all about how you are now a quiet Stoic. The responses you get from this will be eye opening to say the least, and are sometimes quite funny. Just be sure to keep a straight face. Please practice your grunt now.

Staying Put, Continuing On, or Seeking Help

Hopefully after one month you will have a substantial increase in clarity of thought, emotional balance and most importantly become more aware of your emotional triggers. You should be able to start controlling your actions when you become emotional. You cannot control the fact that you have emotions, but you can limit exposure to situations in which you know you will become extremely emotional, and you can work on always controlling your actions regardless of how you feel at the moment.

If after one month you feel you need to continue in stoicism and introspection then go ahead and do it for up to six months. Sometimes you need a reset to get yourself out of a behavioral pattern. Vox has said more than once that he got to a point in his life where he finally stopped doing much of anything but martial arts training for six months.  I stopped trying to date, and concentrated on working out and just thinking about life for several months before I got back into it and found success. Sometimes a man just has to step back for a while and re-evaluate his life in order to improve his actions. It can take time.

On the other hand, if after a time of introspection you find that you are becoming more upset, emotional, depressed, or even suicidal, then please seek professional help. Sometimes the shock of leaving trying to leave Gammahood, especially if there has been childhood abuse, can be overwhelming for a man, and in that case he will need more that just a good friend and introspection. It's not a statistical quirk that causes suicide rates for men to be higher than for women and you need to take care of yourself.

Leaving Stoicism

I think Stoicism is one of the greatest philosophies of Man, and it can be especially helpful for men when they get out of balance, but the point to this post isn’t to create philosophers or hermits. I don’t think that repressing joy in vain hopes of philosophical happiness is a good idea. A man should be able to have a good belly laugh with his friends, be of cheerful spirit, and show deep love and affection for his children and wife. Don’t think at a funeral of a friend or family member you can’t cry, even Jesus wept at the grave of his friend. Stoicism is a tool, not a straightjacket to use to turn you into Spock. After practicing it this month, take the positive elements from it and work them into your life. Wouldn’t you like to be known as the guy who is cool under pressure? The man in the extended family who can be relied upon to be sober-minded and reliable when there’s an emergency? An employee or businessman known to be fair and evenhanded even when chaos swirls around him?

The anti-Gamma conclusion on Emotional aspect of life: You can’t stop yourself from having emotions, but you can control your actions in response to them.

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Portrait of a Sigma

I was reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman yesterday and was a little surprised to stumble upon this remarkable portrait of a sigma in Haruku Murakami's short story "Nausea 1979", in which he meets a young man who inexplicably begins vomiting every day after receiving a mysterious series of crank calls from a stranger:

I knew this young illustrator from the time he did a drawing for a story I published in a certain magazine. He was a few years younger than I, but we shared an interest in collecting old jazz LPs. Another thing he liked to do was sleep with his friends’ girlfriends and wives. There had been quite a number of them over the years, and often he would fill me in on his exploits. He had even done it a few times while the friend was out buying beer or was taking a shower during one of his visits.

“You do it as fast as you can, with most of your clothes on,” he said. “Ordinary sex can drag on and on, right? So once in a while you take exactly the opposite approach. It gives you a whole new perspective. It’s fun.”

This kind of tour de force was not the only kind of sex that interested him, of course. He could enjoy it the slow, old-fashioned way, too. But it was the act of sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends and wives that really turned him on....

I found it hard to believe that such things could be carried off so easily, but he didn’t seem the type to spout a lot of nonsense just to make himself look good, so I began to think he might be right.

“And finally, most of the women have been looking for something like this.... What they want is for somebody to be interested in them beyond the—in a sense—static framework of ‘girlfriend’ or ‘wife.’ That’s the most fundamental rule in all this. Of course, on a more superficial level, their motives are all over the map.”

“For example?”

“For example, getting even with a husband for fooling around, or boredom, or the sheer satisfaction of attracting another man. That kind of thing. I just have to look at them to know. It’s not a question of learning a technique. This is strictly an inborn talent. You either have it or you don’t.”

He did not have a steady girlfriend himself....

I probably average a little over twenty-three hours a day alone. I live alone, I hardly ever see anybody in connection with my work, I take care of most of my business by phone, my girlfriends belong to other people, I eat out ninety percent of the time, the only sport I ever practice is long, lonely swims, my only hobby is listening to these more or less antique records by myself, and the only way I can ever get my kind of work done is to concentrate on it alone. I do have a few friends, but when you get to this age, everybody’s busy, and it’s impossible to get together all the time. You know what this life is like, I’m sure.”

“Sure, more or less,” I said.

He poured more whiskey over the ice in his glass, stirred it with a finger, and took a sip. “So then I started thinking seriously. What was I going to do from now on? Was I going to go on suffering with crank calls and vomiting?”

“You could have gotten a girlfriend. One of your own.”

“I thought about that, of course. I was twenty-seven at the time, not a bad age to settle down. But I’m not that type of guy. I couldn’t give up so easily. I couldn’t let myself be defeated by something so stupid and meaningless as nausea and phone calls, to change my whole way of life like that. So I decided to fight back. I’d fight until every last ounce of physical and mental strength was squeezed out of me.”

“Wow.”

“Tell me, Mr. Murakami, what would you have done?”

“I wonder,” I said. “I have no idea.” Which was true: I had no idea.

“The calls and the vomiting kept up for a long time after that. I lost a tremendous amount of weight. Wait a minute—here it is: On June 4, I weighed 141 pounds. June 21, 134 pounds. July 10, whoa, 128 pounds. 128 pounds! For my height, that’s almost unthinkable! None of my clothes fit anymore. I had to hold my pants up when I walked.”

“Let me ask one question: why didn’t you just install an answering machine, or something like that?”

“Because I didn’t want to run away, of course. If I had done that, it would have been like admitting defeat to the enemy. This was a war of wills! Either he was going to run out of steam or I was going to kick the bucket.

What is interesting is that Murakami accurately describes many of the attributes of a Sigma decades before the concept was articulated. The young illustrator is solitary, but successful with women despite being physically unremarkable, is likable and makes friends easily, but has little interest in a social life. He possesses unusual motivations and preferences, has strong willpower and a high level of self-discipline, and exists almost completely outside the normal social hierarchies. His interests fall on the obsessive side. He understands women on a level few men do, but has very little interest in them beyond their sexual utility and is more inclined to view them with contempt than place them on a pedestal. Relationships, both friendly and romantic, are open to him, but he instinctively shies away from them.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, Sigmas are weird, and usually quite a bit more bent than they are superficially perceived. Needless to say, this socio-sexual profile has virtually nothing to do with the gammas who are dissatisfied with their place in the social hierarchy or the omegas who are largely barred from it. They can be reasonably described as a twisted form of introverted Alpha.

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Alpha Mail: Extreme Gamma

FC asks if there is anything she can do about her middle-aged Gamma brother:

I'm enjoying the gamma posts. They explain a lot of behaviors I'd noticed without being able to put them into a coherent frame. I really liked the parenting advice today. It sounds like solid generic parenting advice since all kids indulge in that behavior to some extent. The points concerning the need to be right even to the point of turning a petty matter into a full blown argument  or social embarrassment sound very familiar.  I'm curious how you would deal with a gamma-type in your immediate family who has no apparent inclination to change.

My brother has a very pernicious habit of asking for advice on his life which clearly reflects a fear of changing, being wrong, and taking real risks. He lives with my parents, is in his 40’s, and has never had a girlfriend. He asks for advice about "his problems", and then picks apart your opinions on his circumstances, tells you all about why your advice won't work for him, and why your opinion is wrong. This especially seems to happen while we are having drinks or just watching a movie, generally having a light, good time.  It basically pisses all over the evening.

This is a particular thorn in the side for me because I'm aware I’m needy. I instinctively want to fix people. I feel pained for him and his missed life. It's a conversational bait and switch that caught me for years but now that I recognize it, I don't know how to respond to it because a large part of me would like there to be some response that would wake him up. Engaging him on this topic at all just seems to feed into his sense of rightness. Is there any way I could shut down these types of behaviors and still try to nudge him in a better direction? Or maybe I just need to accept I'm not equipped to do that?

This sounds more like an Omega than a Gamma in some ways, but the attitude she describes is pure Gamma. However, it seems to be very hard for some people, especially women, to accept that not only is it beyond their ability to change another adult, it is neither their responsibility nor their right. FC's brother is content with his life as it is. It may not be what he ideally wanted, he may not be all that he thought he could be, but obviously he is content with it. If he wasn't, he would do something about it and he would be grateful and heedful of advice concerning how to change it.

What he is doing when he asks for advice about his life is simply making himself the center of attention. He doesn't want the advice, he has no intention of changing anything, he just wants everyone to talk about him. FC can either oblige him or she can reject his attention-seeking, but regardless, she needs to stop taking his pretensions seriously. Of course he talks about "his problems", what else does he have to talk about? His property taxes, his kids, or his wife? He doesn't have them!

FC also needs to stop feeling pain for him and his "missed life". He hasn't missed anything he really wanted. He is leading the life he has chosen. God has granted him that privilege and FC needs to do so as well. The man is in his 40s. He's not going to change now. The time to intervene was when he was 9, not more than three decades later. He has constructed his Gamma delusion bubble, now let him live in it in peace. No one is equipped to change a man so strongly rooted in his ways; even if her parents threw him out of the house tomorrow it is unlikely he would modify his attitudes in the slightest.

My practical advice would be to stop offering him advice and to simply offer sympathy if she is in the mood to put up with his narcissistic preening, and to tell him that she's not interested in hearing the same old song and dance if she is not.

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Alpha Mail: raising Gamma

Boys Mom in a Girls World is rightly concerned about her son:

My husband and I both enjoy reading your blog, having been drawn in by the economics and intrigued by the sociohierarchy stuff.  We have four boys and we're doing our best to raise them as the upper betas our demographic knows and loves  (conservative homeschooling Christians).   Our oldest, 9, is a total born and bred gamma though.  Extremely social, conscientious, has to be right, extremely defensive, runs in a fight and then justifies it later.  Nothing is ever his fault (something else he loves to discuss in great detail).  He's scared of literally everything. My husband is more the Ron Swanson-type, so neither of us know how to parent this child (who it probably won't surprise you to hear is diagnosed ADHD, and has a slightly autistic looking IQ score...unevenly high and low in different areas).

Any suggestions for helping pre-gammas to develop into something other than full blown adult gamma?  He hates team sports but does well in parkour and is otherwise your typical boy.

He's currently cowering in the corner because he thinks he might have seen a bee, which is what prompted this email. 

All right, that last bit made me laugh. I have to admit, I have no idea what the Ron Swanson-type might be, but given the female contempt for gamma all but dripping from this email, I think it is safe to say that what we have here is a nature-inclined gamma-in-the-making rather than a nurture-bred one. A few suggestions:

• Always force him to admit that he was wrong when he was wrong. Make him say the words. "I was wrong." Make him explain to you why it was his fault and make him say the words. "It was my fault because X, Y, and Z." Every time he tries to rationalize away his being at fault, refuse to accept it and dissect his excuses. Essentially, refuse to let him construct his delusion bubble.
• Call him on his revisionist histories. Every time he tries to slide one by, point out what actually happened. Force him to admit that the correct version is what actually happened.
• Don't shame his cowardice. Instead, praise the courage of his brothers and say nothing about him. When he does take baby steps in that direction, praise them.
• Don't force him into team sports, but have your husband work with him to determine if he's naturally gifted at any of them. Then slowly bring him around by having him play with one or two of the boys on the local team and point out how much they need him, how much they could use him. Obviously, if he's not good at anything, don't push him into it.
• See if there are solo sports you can get him to try, the more aggressive the better. Perhaps there are competitive parkour races?
• Have his father teach him how to fight. If his father doesn't really know, perhaps some father-son MMA classes would be a good idea. And make sure that you let him know that it is okay for him to fight and defend himself, that no matter what the school says, you'll back him up and he won't be in any trouble as long as he wasn't being a bully.
• Every now and then, let him pick and argument, then brutally vivisect his argument and show him that he's not even capable of operating on the same level. Smart kids, especially boys, need to be intellectually beaten down from time to time in order to develop intellectual humility. Be harsh, the object is to break his pride and it won't be broken easily, particularly if he's prone to historical revisionism. Multiple repetitions will likely be necessary before the lesson sticks.
• Use his social consciousness as a lever. Don't appeal to his self-respect or his honor, appeal to what other people will think of him.

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Alpha Mail: question and answer

Peter wants to graduate from Gamma male:

Now that i am calm, i really need a starting point. At this point i don't care how painful it is. I just need to know what needs to be done no matter what, so i won't feel so lost. Where i should start, what should i study, what i should start doing, what must i gradually change etc etc. Those are the question i am asking here. You could say that i am asking for guidance here.

1. Stop lying to yourself. Learn to catch when you are revising history and editing reality in order to make it more acceptable to yourself.
2. Stop lying to others. Stop spinning every story to make yourself look better. Stop exaggerating your accomplishments and minimizing your mistakes.
3. Stop the drama. Don't go overboard. Whether it is good or whether it is bad, tell yourself: "this is no big deal" and "this, too, shall pass."
4. Start working out and lifting weights. Start getting your body accustomed to the endorphin release. Within three months, you'll start craving it the way you now crave sugar and carbohydrates.
5. Don't run from confrontation. Fight or submit. That's what men do.

Jack Amok, meanwhile, relates a confrontation between an Alpha and a Gamma:

Saw an interesting ALPHA-GAMMA exchange at work today. The Gamma disagreed with the Alpha's approach to a problem, and the Alpha responded to the technical details of the Gamma's objections. They went back and forth a bit, and at this point, you could have agreed with either side (it was a problem where each solution had its strengths and weaknesses). But the Gamma apparently couldn't tolerate the disagreement and after a couple of minutes suddenly made a personal attack against the Alpha. He basically said "I don't understand how you can be so incompetent as to disagree with me" and then proceeded to talk over the Alpha's response.

The Alpha perceived a challenge to his position (or at least an unacceptable level of disrespect) and suddenly his voice and demeanor took on massive edge. He is also a huge dude. Looks like an NFL lineman. It was really a rapid change, light-switch getting flipped sort of thing. The Gamma logged off his computer and immediately went home for the day, even though it was only mid-afternoon. He was literally unable to continue working after a confrontation which he himself had provoked.

Notice the various elements of the socio-sexual hierarchy at work:

• Alpha: doesn't mind straightforward conflict, will not tolerate disrespect, is comfortable with direct and physical conflict. The political is not personal.
• Gamma: can't tolerate disagreement or criticism, bitchy, cowardly, puts himself in situations he is not equipped to handle. The political is personal, the technical is personal, everything is personal. Runs from direct confrontation.

Now, what sort of man would you rather be? And observe the Gamma is totally unprepared for his disrespect to meet with a dominant response. Unlike an Alpha, he doesn't fight, unlike a Beta or Delta, he doesn't submit. He flees.

The Sigma, of course, doesn't get into that situation in the first place because he neither knows nor cares about the Alpha's problem, let alone his approach to solving it.

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Are you Gamma? 2 of 2

The second half of the list composed by the author of Graduating Gamma to help Gamma males identify themselves:

• You constantly throw out flippant remarks with the expectations they are always amusing, appropriate, and funny.
• When telling an anecdote to a group and someone mentions they have already heard it you go ahead and tell it again because you aren’t sure if everyone has heard it.
• You routinely quote movies, comics, and even do the funny voices in every day conversation.
• When a movie or story is brought up you explain the entire plot and all of the details regardless of if the people you are with asked for the information or even said they liked it.
• You sit out nearly all competition in a group because you always have better things to do and you’d just rather talk to your friends.
• At a group event you never voluntarily play any sport if you can avoid it.
• If you start to lose at any game you find a way to quit if you can and hope to save face by degrading the game or the other players.
• If someone defeats you at a game or competition you can’t look them in the eye afterwards and try to avoid them if possible.
• If you win at a competition you explain to your opponent all of the things they did wrong regardless if they asked for the advice.
• You have at least one good female friend and are always looking for more.
• You’ll take that 2AM call or text from a female friend who isn’t looking to meet you but rather wants emotional support.
• You focus on a single “dream woman” and spend weeks, or months planning the perfect time to ask her out.
• You think women are good and innocent creatures and the ones who do wrong have no doubt been corrupted by the men in their lives.
• Fixing a woman with a lot of problems is a noble effort and you are always ready to help.
• You let women use an old mistake or bad choice of yours indefinitely to instill guilt and get their way.
• You must justify to the woman you are with in excruciating detail all of your actions and thoughts.
• Fighting back against a violent woman you think is always wrong no matter the circumstances.
• You know you could be successful with women if you tried, but that means being a jerk or a dude-bro and you respect women too much to do that, and you want to be true to yourself.
• Feelings should routinely be shared and others should take your feelings into account when making decisions.
• You routinely lie about small, personal, matters knowing you can get away with it.
• If you see a couple arguing, your first instinct is to think the guy is wrong and you need to help the girl.
• If an attractive woman in in a bad state your interest grows, because now that she’s been taken down a notch or two you have a chance.

I would add something I've noticed whenever Gammas start talking, especially about themselves. "You babble semi-coherently and ramble on to a new and tangentially related thought before you've completed whatever it was you started talking about."

It tends to strike me as an attempt to dominate the conversation without seeking to actually engage the other's interest in much the same way women do. Only Gammas do it in public postings and in emails, so that's not necessarily it. All I know is that whenever I'm dealing with a Gamma, in any communications medium, more often than not I'm left wondering "what on Earth is he babbling on about?"

Gammas also seem to have a serious problem providing direct answers to questions. They'll answer five different questions that they think you might have asked, or should have asked, while somehow failing to answer the one question you actually asked.

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Are you Gamma? 1 of 2

The author of Graduating Gamma has composed a helpful list to permit Gamma males to identify themselves:

• In the past year you can’t recall a single serious online discussion you were wrong about anything.
• In the past two years you can’t recall one discussion with any friends or family in which you were wrong about anything.
• When you are having an argument with someone and it appears you are wrong, the most common belief and defense is the other person simply doesn’t understand what you are saying.
• When discussing matters with someone and you think you are maybe, possibly being shown to be wrong you start to get snarky, crack lame jokes, and immediately try to change the subject.
• If someone holds an opinion contrary to yours, and you don’t think you have a good defense immediately to hand you start to look for unrelated ways to disqualify the other person as at least knowledgeable about the subject, and even going so far as to disqualify them as a good person or even a person at all.
• Definitions are tenuous for you and words can be redefined at leisure during a discussion. If someone quotes the dictionary and it disagrees with your definition they are arguing unfairly and the dictionary is wrong.
• When finally shown you are wrong about something it is devastating, you remember it for months or years, avoid that place or people, and consider your time there a failure as a person.
• You can’t even take a mild ribbing about anything outside of a few harmless topics from other guys, and immediately fly into a barely controlled rage and seek some sort of vengeance if you are lampooned by anyone. This isn’t upping the competition, but hatred of the other and you will avoid that person or speak badly of them.
• In contrast you’ll sit idly by as a woman openly mocks you as you are just being “nice”.
• Now that you think about it, in this last year or two you can recall several women cracking jokes at your expense, mocking you, degrading you to their friends, and otherwise holding you in low regard without any fear of consequences. 
• The thought of being at the center of a comedy roast fills you with dread.
• You think width of knowledge is more important than depth of knowledge.
• You are an expert on everything and always ready to give your opinion even when you aren’t sure—then again a Gamma is always sure of his knowledge so you probably give your opinion on most everything all of the time.
• If someone says they aren’t interested in your opinion you take it as a personal slight, they aren’t interested in you, and probably hate you as well.
• If someone tells a story you immediately have to follow up that story with one of your own, which may or may not be related to the topic, and of course is more interesting, more important and longer. If you don’t have a good story you’ll say something snarky afterwards to diminish the other story.

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Alpha-chasing or slim pickings?

I think there is an explanation considerably more simple for the increasingly common occurrence of female prison guards getting involved with prisoners than a attraction to thugs:

I saw numerous female guards lose their jobs and get walked out of the prison during my incarceration. A lot of this sort of thing is swept under the carpet by prison officials, leaving fellow guards to speculate about what exactly inspired the dalliance.

According to Tamara, the appeal is "a combination of getting away with something that is forbidden, the rush of being with someone as hardcore as an inmate, and the false sense of control that they think they have over the situation [but] not necessarily over the inmate. They may have lost all sense of control over every other aspect of their lives, and this form of relationship is something they think they have control over by not getting caught by their superiors or other inmates."

Now, "the rush of being with someone as hardcore as an inmate" clearly relates to alpha-chasing. But if you have ever seen a picture of most of these women, most of them are considerably less attractive than the norm, and less attractive than many of the women who have affairs with underage students.

Consider one prisoner's point: "As long as they get me what I want I can be whatever and whoever they need me to be. It's all a game really, a tradeoff. I know nobody does nothing for free, and if I got to sex one of these broads down to get her to bring stuff in to me, than you know what time it is."

In other words, these women are going into careers as prison guards specifically to get access to a more attractive group of men than they would otherwise have access to. It's similar to interracial dating, in which the partner from the higher status race is reliably less physically attractive according to the racial standard than the one from the lower status race.

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Graduating Gamma 2

Step Two: Spiritual

For many in the modern times the Spiritual is something to be cast off, as it only interferes with desires or perhaps even knowledge. I believe this is a mistake, especially for the Gamma who needs a firm foundation to escape his prison of dishonesty. For the secularists who are about to stop reading don’t, this isn’t a polemic against atheism or a Christian apologetic work but rather an exhortation to find one’s roots and deals with personal ethics.

I’ll lay my cards on the table and explain my position which is a very standard, Protestant, Evangelical, and orthodox one. I’m Protestant by agreeing with the Solas from the Reformation and orthodox by accepting the ancient Christian creeds, Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian.

Know what you believe and why you believe it.

The most common error I see Gammas make in regards to spiritual and ethical matters is treating it like a game of witty comments, snark, and playing at the edges of important matters without skin in the game. The second mistake is thinking width of knowledge of spiritual matters is more important than depth. This flows directly from the Gamma’s ever-present and crippling fear of being wrong somewhere and somehow. The Gamma does not understand the deep matters behind what is going on in his own beliefs, which is ironic since most Gammas vastly overestimate their knowledge and ability in most everything.

The first step is to go deep in your current beliefs, back to the foundational documents to study and know them very well. Find the founding documents of your closest beliefs and read through them carefully. For the religious this is of course their holy book, but do you not identify in some way with a denomination, or at least a philosophy of your religion? Don’t concentrate on just the latest popular Christian book if you are Christian or Dawkins latest book if you are an atheist, go to the catechism if you are Roman Catholic, the Confessions if your denomination if you are Protestant, church history if you home church, and ancient atheist philosophy if you are completely secular just to start. People lived and died by these beliefs, find out why.

If you ascribe to their beliefs you honor the ones who came before you if you read their works carefully. Don’t skim, but rather drink in with full appreciation of their insights and the flaws. Almost certainly you are going to be surprised by some of the things you find. During this process take stock of your family’s beliefs; the faith of your parents particularly if you currently reject it. Give their beliefs a fair chance, read through those documents and not how badly your parents lived up to those ideals. This discovery can be challenging as the language can be archaic, but it’s well worth the effort.

It’s important to read the original documents and not the most recent interpretation of those documents even if they are by a favorite author. I’ve found that writers I respect a great deal can be sloppy at times or interject their own pet theories into a system, and then claim that’s what the system is all about. If you claim to believe in something, or follow an idea, you need to read the original for yourself.

If you are religious pray a great deal about what you find in humility and ask for forgiveness in being arrogant and obnoxious about your beliefs. Pray for wisdom and insight. Pray for a peaceful soul when finding troubling new truths. If you are secular dwell and contemplate what you have read. Realize you are probably not nearly as smart as you’d like to think and you need to change when the truth leads you to an inevitable conclusion.

You do this because you need depth on your beliefs, not width. You don’t need to know everything about everyone else’s beliefs; you need to know yours very well and how to defend them.

Honesty

The first undertaking is to be honest with yourself about your beliefs and why you hold them. The second is to live up to the beliefs consistently as possible.
For the secularist I recommend writing down the virtues you admire and would like to see in yourself and your children. Then keep track for a week or two how well you actually keep to your own beliefs. I think it’s safe to say that unless you admire almost no virtues you’ll not do very well at this exercise. Keep this in mind the next time you just can’t wait to pounce on someone for not upholding their own professed beliefs.

For the religious keep in mind that your dishonesty can offend those around you and yourself, but ultimately the sin is against God. If you live dishonestly, and support dishonesty in yourself and others aren’t fooling the One who really counts.

Iron Sharpens Iron

Unlike Step One: Physical in which you need to keep your mouth shut until you put up, in these matters it is helpful and even expected to go to mentors, clergy, and the learned to help you understand things. After you read through the foundational documents of your beliefs you can do the following.

I first suggest you meeting with your pastor or priest with questions.  (If secular perhaps a good mentor or old, secular friend.) Maybe they are simple and can even be handled by email. These are all non-confrontational meetings in which you are humbly trying to understand and clarify something. This is not under any circumstances an opportunity for you to take on your pastor in a dialectic (or even worse some rhetoric) with some new insight.

The second place is to enter into discussions is in online forums which encourage lively philosophical and theological debates. Two rules here:

1. Approach the matter humbly as a student, no arrogance, and seek to find answers, not score points or pontificate. Don’t make your question a sermon.
2. Never, ever be passive-aggressive in a spiritual question. You should never be passive-aggressive, but the offense here is exponential and you look like an ass.

Examples:

Right: I struggle with how God can allow children to suffer. I find this is one of the barriers to me believing he exists or at least cares at all. How do Christians answer this?
Wrong: How come the invisible sky-daddy doesn’t save all the children from harm or regrow their arms when they lose one? Answer me that, God-botherers!
Wrong (Passive aggressive): I don’t understand why God allows children to suffer. Certainly if he exists he’ll keep the good and nice Christian children from harm right? I mean you pray to him and he said he’d give you anything you ask, correct?

Right: I’ve wondered how a secularist comes to moral conclusions about weighty issues. What do you personally find works for you?
Wrong: An atheist can never know right from wrong so how do you tell me what to do or believe? Do you even know yourself what’s right?

Right: Can a Roman Catholic here please help me better understand pedobaptism? I don’t find it in the New Testament, so is there another reason for it?
Wrong: How does throwing water on your baby magically give them faith Mary worshiper?

Forgiveness

One of the most difficult things for Gammas to do is to forgive. They are so afraid of being seen as wrong or disliked they almost never forgive a slight and think that others never forgive either. They hold grudges, they are passive-aggressive towards people who have embarrassed them, or ignore them (block them on Twitter in today’s world), and they don’t even forgive themselves for wrongs. Gammas don’t forgive themselves, instead they lie to themselves and claim that they have done no wrong.  If they do happen to admit to themselves they did something wrong, they typically obsess about it to the point of exhaustion, but never deal with it. It’s big reason why their relationships are perpetually troubled, they come across as disingenuous to most people because they genuinely are, and they obsess about minor offenses because they aren’t honest and they don’t know how to forgive.

Forgiveness is a big part of a spiritual life, and life in general. Don’t be obtuse about this either, that I’m talking about a wishy-washy faux forgiveness in which one claims there’s nothing to forgive. You are not obligated to forgive someone who is not sorry and unrepentant for their actions against you, though in charity you might eventually decide to forget them. When you forgive someone whom you believe is legitimately repentant for their action, that’s the end of it. Repentance isn’t just being sorry, it means changing one’s behavior, which is a big difference. You don’t lord their past actions over them, demand penance, or other such nonsense. You move on. You should also seek reconciliation against those you have legitimately wronged. However, don’t let your attempt at reconciliation turn into an attempt at revenge against you. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean you have to date them, marry them, or even associate with them anymore beyond being civil if you are in the room with them. Forgiveness is not affection.

Being a man means being honest with yourself about your actions, taking responsibility for them, seeking reconciliation when you’ve done wrong, and forgiving those who have wronged you when they are repentant.

Integrity

Don’t give out your word easily or say you will do something you think you cannot do or will not realistically do. This isn’t a technique to dodge responsibility, but rather a way to focus your abilities into the things you can actually accomplish and do well. A Gamma will act like he can do things he can’t and has a profound inability to take responsibility for his actions and typically resorts to running, lying, and deflecting as to avoid consequences. Once you start taking responsibility for things you will find it starts to become natural though not always easy. If someone gives you a task to do and you aren’t sure you can do it, there’s nothing wrong with letting them know you may not succeed but then assure them you will give it your full effort. If you fail, take full responsibility for your actions even if someone else put you in a tough spot, but be honest about how you ended up there if people inquire.

Leading the Way

Women despise men who have no firm foundations of beliefs. They may not notice for a while if you are careful, but eventually they spot your inconsistent behavior and lose respect for you. A firm foundation and wellspring from which you draw your beliefs about the universe acts like a rock of stability which women respect even if they don’t believe the same. You’ll find the same is true with men as well. Christians routinely say, and mean it when they’d rather deal with an honest atheist than a dishonest Christian.

This is pure Game here, which is standing out in the crowd. In today’s word will not an honest and honorable man not stand out in the crowd? I hear the cynic now talking about how an honest man is naïve, and people spit on honor. Honesty is not naïve it means dealing with how things really are, and who cares if the degenerates of the world scoff at virtue? They have always scoffed and they’ll scoff to their grave and perhaps beyond.

Eternal Matters

The reason that depth is more important than width here is the gravity of the subject at hand. Even if you think oblivion awaits everyone, it’s still an eternal oblivion. If you have children then what you pass on to them can carry on for generations.

For the Gamma this lack of personal, spiritual, honesty is the underpinning of all of their problems. If you start to become honest with yourself, learn about why you believe certain things at a deep level, are ready to forgive and also repent when you do wrong, you’ll find the other steps: Physical, Mental, and Emotional become easier to correct.

The anti-Gamma conclusion on Spiritual aspect of life: The world needs more honest men and honorable men. Be one of them.


Graduating Gamma
Step One: Physical

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Intrasex assassins

A commenter at Steve Sailer's succinctly describes what women want:

There are one and more women between Cinderella and the Prince, who is handsome, charming, and has lots of money, status, and power. Cinderella acts to remove the female competition between her and the Prince so that she can take her rightful place as the Princess of the realm. The story line is generally consumed by scenes of females going at each other as they compete for the Alpha Male. The “bodice ripping” at the end of the chapters are thinly veiled rape fantasies. The Prince eventually finds Cinderella so “hot” that he cannot control himself. His lack of control excites her … because, it represents her final victory over the female competition who are unable to drive the Prince to sexual frenzy. The final scene fades as Cinderella takes her rightful place on the throne next to the Prince. Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after.

Women aren't just Alpha chasers, they are status-seeking intrasex assassin rape fantasists. And you're going to put THAT on your pedestal?

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Answer the question asked

A few of you have asked for more positive advice on increasing your socio-sexual rank rather than negative advice on how to avoid lowering it. So, here is some advice worth keeping in mind: answer the question asked.

Rank the following ways to respond to the question "do you know how I can do X?" Include Gyne.

1. Why do you want to know?
2. Why are you asking me?
3. Yes.
4. I think you really want to do Y. (Explains how to do Y.)
5. Yes, certainly. (Cheerfully explains how to do X.)
6. Yeah, of course. (Curtly explains how to do X.)
7. I was a baaaad, bad kitty this weekend!

Answers below the jump.

1. Gyne. Women have no interest in solutions, they are interested in people. They aren't interested in helping you get it done, they're more interested in understanding why you want to get it done.
2. Omega. He's worried that the attention might be a trick.
3. Alpha/Sigma. Who knows why the guy wants to know if you know? Who cares?
4. Gamma. Overthinks the whole thing and imagines it's all about what he would do in that situation, and answers a different question thereby.
5. Beta. They tend to be helpful and they don't mind who knows it.
6. Delta. Most men don't want to be bothered, but if a solution is needed, a solution will be provided.
7. Lambda. There is no situation in which they do not want to discuss the previous weekend.

The overthinkers will, of course, worry about what will happen if the person then goes on to ask "how do I do X?" The advice remains the same. Answer the question asked. It's not a man's job to go nosing in other people's business and anticipate what their future concerns might be.

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Off the deep end

Feminism continues to roll towards its inevitable end as farce. It's now actually too insane for NPR and The Nation:

Last year, I found myself listening to an episode of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” where an assembled group of activists and writers discussed whether the Internet was ruining feminism. The discussion was occasioned by an article in The Nation, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” by Michelle Goldberg. Goldberg’s credentials as a left-leaning feminist weren’t previously in dispute, so the article’s thesis was genuinely shocking: With easy anonymity and the near instantaneous ability to whip up social media mobs, the Internet was pushing feminists to insufferable levels of stridency and infighting. When The Nation, a magazine that for most of its storied history has regarded Communism an unalloyed force for good, denigrates the current state of feminism as “Maoist hazing,” we are truly through the looking glass.

As a measure of how insane things have gotten, the NPR panel discussed one of the article’s more telling anecdotes. Actress Martha Plimpton, star of the Fox sitcom “Raising Hope,” fancies herself such a serious feminist, insofar as serious feminist means incorporating a performance of Lennon and Oko’s “Woman is the N–ger of the World” into her one-woman show at the Lincoln Center. Plimpton is also co-founder of an abortion-rights charity, “A Is For,” which had the misfortune of titling a recent fundraiser “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.”
Forget for a moment the dumbfounding irony of casting aspersions on a ‘reproductive justice’ fundraiser because it’s ‘exclusionary and harmful’ to deny anyone the womanly joys of terminating the life of an unborn child.

For this thoughtcrime, Plimpton immediately came under attack online and boycotts were threatened because the event wasn’t inclusive enough because of “constant genital policing” that offends transsexual men.

This should serve as a warning to all equalitarians. Insist on believing that 2+2=5, and it won't be long before you start rolling your eyes and shrieking about how anyone who denies that the correct answer to 37 divided by 126 is purple and is guilty of microaggressive rape.

You may not see how it does anyone any harm to pretend that everyone is equal when you know they're not, but that's just the first step to madness. And sometimes, all it takes is a single step to go off the deep end and into the depths.

Bonus points: see if you can identify the socio-sexual rank of the author, on the basis of this quote:

"Look, maybe this is me waving my male privilege all over the place, but there’s only one word for a woman who can simultaneously defend feminine virtue, upset the patriarchy, and clean out the Augean stables of third-wave feminism with a single d–k joke: Hawt. (Don’t worry, Flanagan need not worry about my intentions. It turns out I’m already married to a very attractive female journalist with balls bigger than mine. I guess I have a type?)"

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Feminism kills

Feminism doesn't just murder unborn children and inspire post-divorce rape male suicide, it causes young women to despair and kill themselves too:

Rachel Gow, a 29-year-old hospital administrator, was struggling with the fact that she was unmarried and didn't have any children. The pressure became so much for her that just before her 30th birthday, tragically she took her own life.

At that point, she'd spent four years without her mum after losing her to cancer in 2011, and she'd also been through three breakups. Though she had started a relationship with her engineer boyfriend Anton Tsvarev, 30, she feared it was ending.... It's a heartbreaking tragedy, and one that has clearly devasted all of Gow's loved ones. But what it does show is the undeniable - and understandable - pressure that young women face in their twenties.

Who is putting that pressure on them? Not men. Consider the list:

 1) Found a job we love where we can take a long maternity leave and still have a desk to come back to. Preferably with a chance of promotion

2) Made enough money to afford childcare so we can keep on working post-baby

3) Found someone to have baby with

4) Figured out if we actually want a baby

5) Had enough relationships, dates and sexual experiences to keep us going till we retire, i.e. our seventies

6) Gone travelling (everywhere). Figured out how to do this in between climbing the career ladder and earning some money

7) Fulfilled all major dreams that can’t be done once we have kids and mortgages 

The pressure to obtain degrees, high-status jobs, and ride the ALPHA carousel, then perfectly time the leap to obtain a BETA husband of sufficient means and status comes entirely from women. Feminism kills, and it kills young women too.

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Graduating Gamma 1

Graduating Gamma
Step One: Physical

This is the easiest step to diagnose and the second most difficult to deal with. If you don’t know if you need to lose weight or get in better shape, go ahead and stop reading now, find a scale and check out how close you are to the right BMI. If you are more than eight points too high then you definitely need to lose some weight. (I’ll deal with the “BMI is bullshit!” argument later). I suggest scheduling a physical to check blood pressure and cholesterol as well, along with the regular battery of blood work tests, but if the means aren’t there to go to a doctor then head the drug store and at least check your blood pressure for free. There’s no excuse for not knowing your weight, and blood pressure. You can’t honestly approach your health without the facts so go and find out even if you are afraid of what you will find.

If you already know all of your vital health info and are in excellent physical health, and cardiovascular shape then you can skip the rest of this entire post. Congratulations on doing what few in modern society can manage and even fewer Gammas ever manage to do. Well done.

As for weight loss here’s the brutally honest facts and the secret diet plan: You must expend more calories than you consume over an extended period of time to lose excess body fat.

Of course this is much easier said than done so I will now discuss dieting. I don’t care what diet you are on to lose weight and nobody else does either. Let me repeat that: I don’t care what diet you are on and nobody else does either. The goal is to lose body fat and I’m no expert in dieting so I’ll not give one single, suggestion on what diet to choose, what I will comment on is all of the typical Gamma responses to dieting.

Excuses

The most common Gamma response to diet and exercise is a litany of excuses.

• BMI is bullshit! – Maybe it is, I don’t know, but it’s a tool that can get you in the ballpark and besides this has nothing at all to do with you being fat, a lot of things are bullshit in life, and they also have nothing to do with you being fat. Stop being hopelessly obtuse and binary in your thinking; that because BMI is flawed it in any way impacts your diet and exercise efforts. 
• I don’t have the time to go to the gym – I don’t most days either, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do something every day. You have a floor, right? Get down on it for 10 minutes and do some good stretches. If you have 20 minutes you can get out a Pilates ball and work on it. You don’t have to go to the gym; you just have to do something.
• I don’t have the money for the gym – You don’t need it to work out. Walking is still free. In a bad neighborhood or snowed in? Do some yoga, youtube videos are available. 
• It only pays off it you can be JJ Watt – More binary thinking acting as an excuse. Yes, JJ Watt can afford a cabin in the middle of Wisconsin, be a hermit, and work out all day. You can’t and this has nothing to do with you working out.
• If I worked out I’d be in great shape if I wanted to – I bet you would, but you aren’t.
• American, Western diet is bullshit, man. Like GMOs, carbs, caveman, gluten, sugar, fat, protein and stuff, man. There’s no way I can do it. –  Shut. Your. Whore. Mouth. See below.  

Diets or otherwise known as: Shut. Your. Whore. Mouth.

The number one rule for men and dieting is: You do not talk about dieting. Read this previous statement again and say out loud: “I will not speak of my diet.” There are reasons for this which is that nobody cares about your diet, and nobody wants to hear about your diet. Even your mother doesn’t care. The world doesn’t need another fat guy running around telling everyone he’s found the holy grail of dieting because he read a book or a website, and has been following the plan for the last 92 ½ hours, or even 92 days.

You want to stamp a giant GAMMA on your forehead? Then pontificate at every meal and opportunity about your new favorite diet, and how most things people eat are killing them. You want to ruin the few dates you manage to get or even the opportunity to ask a girl on a date? Tell the girl across from you all about her terrible selections off the menu and how much of a better job you’ve done. Women love hearing about what they are eating is making them fat, you ladies’ man! Keep it up. Your newfound knowledge makes you the food police and everyone will appreciate your efforts, I’m sure.

That’s the easy part, here’s the tough part: You cannot comment online in any manner about the superiority of your diet, debate diets, tell others you are on a diet, or even comment on the “horrors” of the modern, Western diet until you’ve had one year of success on your current diet. ONE YEAR. You have no right as a dieter to tell anyone how to diet or what to eat until you’ve had one solid year of success on your diet, to do so otherwise is disingenuous, perhaps in the extreme. Success can be encapsulated by filling out the following sentence: In the last year I’ve been living the XXX diet and lost XXX pounds, lowered my BP and cholesterol by XXX, and feel better than ever. If you cannot honestly fill out this sentence, shut up.

That was negative, but as a Gamma I know you respond to the negative first so here are the techniques to help you out.

1. Practice stoicism with your diet. This is a quiet, calm acceptance of what the diet brings, including the successes and failures.
2. If anyone ever asks you about what you’d like to eat when you are a guest never tell them to modify what they are making to accommodate your diet. You have to be the one which practices self-control and deals with what is on your plate. In other words you don’t want to be known as the weirdo who nobody wants to invite over because your diet. (None of this applies to legitimate food allergies or celiac disease, etc.)
3. If you make a meal for others, be sure there’s food for all tastes; don’t force people into your diet.
4. If you start to make healthier choices, women notice and they will follow. Want a practical experiment? If you have a girlfriend, wife, or just eat around some women, regularly start picking the healthier options and you will see just like magic the women will too. Occasionally they will get upset instead, but they notice. My wife still remembers to this day that on our very first date I skipped the chips and ate the fruit. I never mentioned a thing about being on a diet, though I was at the time.
5. The same stoicism applies to your workout too. I don’t care if you like free weights vs. machines, crossfit, running, or whatever. Keep your mouth shut and just go about your business.
6. Whenever you feel like talking about your success in whatever you are doing in that first year, channel that energy into doing it even better rather than talking about it. Lead by example.
7. If you are under 30 try picking up a highly physical competitive sport when you can handle it like a basketball, or soccer league or martial arts. Competition shakes out the Gamma tendencies and is great exercise.
8. If you are under 30-40 find a less brutal physical sport like company softball, church basketball, etc.
9. If you are over 40 that ship has likely sailed if you’ve never competed, but you will have one big advantage, if you start this late your joints are likely in better shape so if you do play a sport you might do well at it because your body isn’t as worn out. If you don’t play a sport, simply exercise instead.

Living this out in the real world

The most important thing to remember is never to give up. Everyone needs to lose weight and do better at eating except JJ Watt, and he’d probably tell you he’s slacking way too much this off season. There is no time when, “You’ll be in perfect shape”. It’s a lifelong struggle filled with ups and down, and periods where you’ll likely give up for a while and then get back on the wagon. That’s how it goes, and that’s OK so long as you do get back on the wagon. Measure your success by making small strides every day, like picking the fruit over chips, or 10 minutes of good stretching and pushups when you can’t get to the gym, rather than focusing on failure or setting impossible goals.

Personally I’m down from before I got married, but I still need to lose a lot of weight. I’ve struggled with it my whole life, but the only time it’s defeated me is when I quit trying. If you never lose any weight you are doing something wrong, so try a different diet and exercise regime until one works. Here are some responses to help you:

Person: ”You don’t want any more of this? You on a diet or something?”
You: “I’m full, thanks.”
Person: ”What do you think about the diet-du jour I’m all into?!?!”
You: “I don’t know… I just try to watch what I eat.

Girl: “I love chocolate cake, you? I mean I could eat this whole thing if I didn’t stop!”
You: “Yeah, I know what you mean. I love desserts too.” *You eat one small piece in front of her*

Girlfriend/wife: “I want to lose weight, honey. I’m going to try the XYZ diet I heard about. What do you think?” **DING! DING! This is good news she’s changing for you.**
You: “Sounds like a good idea; I’ll watch what I eat too. I know I need to watch it sometimes.” *Then you stick to your diet and just help when she asks for it. Ultimately her food choices are NOT your responsibility*

Person at gym: “I’m doing this exercise thing I’m so excited about let me tell you all about why it is better than what everyone else does…”
You-interrupting: “Hey man, that’s cool and I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m here to get a workout in, so can I get back to my thing?” *walk away if you need to*

Person: “We are having a BBQ this weekend, is there anything you can’t eat? I’ve noticed you’ve lost some weight, are you on some diet? I don’t want to mess you up or anything…”
You: “Oh no, whatever you make is just fine. I’ve lost a little weight lately, thanks for noticing.”
Person: “No really, you’ve lost some serious weight these last six months, what have you been doing? Atkins? I know a girl who…”
You: *after waiting for them to catch their breath so you aren’t rude* “I’ve just been watching it some, nothing special. Thanks for the invite, I’ll see you there.”

The anti-Gamma conclusion on Physical aspect of life: Never give up. Never!

So here’s the first test for everyone who comments on this post: you cannot talk about your diet, debate diets, or tell everyone about your exercise program unless you can honestly start your first post by filling out the following sentence: In the last year I’ve been living the XXX diet and lost XXX pounds, lowered my BP and cholesterol by XXX and here’s why I think it works.

Graduating Gamma is a series written by a recovering ex-Gamma who is now happily married and living a successful life as an increasingly self-confident Delta.

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Dr. Helen on the Marriage Strike

I'm not particularly into watching videos, but this is an excellent panel being run by Dr. Helen. The perfect storm is a pretty good way to explain the reason for the rapid decline in the statistical rate of young men and women getting married. Vids and porn don't help, but notice that Matt Orr, the one millennial, immediately points out that the combination of witnessing previous generations ravaged by female-initiated divorce and a dreadful credit bust is much more important than vids and porn.

Whittle's evo-psych isn't relevant, but his point about the lack of incentive for men is. He also made a very good point about the superabundance of choice in modern society. And Klavan's statement that despite being happily married for many years, he would probably not get married today is particularly damning.

"All they really want is a man with a job," Dr. Helen says. But any man with a job is smart enough to not put his head into a divorce-rape trap. I particularly liked the way she pointed out the way that women are aggressively invading every male space and attempting to remake them to their liking.

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It's not a compliment

"I'll take it as a compliment" is an intrinsically Gamma reaction. Why? Because it is a willfully dishonest denial of reality. One does not know, let alone dictate, the motivations of others. What is relevant is the reality of the other party's disapproval, contempt, jealousy, hatred, or simple desire to insult, not the particular insult delivered.

There mere existence of an enemy can be a compliment; we tend to think well of those who are hated and attacked by evil men. And there are, of course, incompetently delivered insults that may genuinely be compliments of one sort or another.

But to unilaterally declare that X is Y is not an action of strength and confidence, but rather a weak and insecure retreat into delusion. And that sort of retreat is habitual for the Gamma male.

There are many ways one can respond to an insult. But "I'll take it as a compliment" should never be one of them. Accept reality and deal with it, don't redefine and run from it.

This exchange illustrates the problem with trying to help Gammas:

Indicates indifference to the other person's opinion to me. Deliberate positive reframe.

That's the point. It doesn't do so at all. The indifferent don't need to reframe. The indifferent don't care.

And perhaps more to the point, you're not fooling anyone with your faux-indifferent deliberate positive reframe. You're just deluding yourself.

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A victim tell

If one is looking to treat a woman in an abusive manner, apparently one has only to find a woman who loves, loves, loves 50 Shades of Grey:

Anastasia Steele's biggest defeat may not have been submitting to her abuser's sexual desires, but convincing other women that the behavior was okay. At least that's the finding of a new study in the Journal of Women's Health, which claims young adult women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are more likely to replicate the behaviors of people in abusive relationships.

In the book series, Anastasia 'Ana' Steele is constantly afraid; not only of her abusive partner, Christian Grey, but of the realization that she is losing her sense of self. Though Ana's behavior is initially survivalist, it eventually become engrained as she automatically responds to her partner's abuse. Though fictional, the storyline is a chillingly accurate portrayal of very real life relationships.

The study: In a sample of 650 women aged 18-24, researchers at Michigan State University found that Fifty Shades of Grey readers were 25% more likely to have a partner who yelled or swore at them. Readers were also 34% more likely to have a partner who displayed stalking tendencies and 75% more likely to have fasted for more than 24 hours or used a diet aid. Worse still, women who read all three books in the series were more likely to regularly binge drink and have multiple sex partners, both of which are recognized risk factors for intimate partner violence.

One thing the study couldn't determine was whether women who engaged in risky behaviors started doing so before or after reading the books.

Of course, for the purposes of a Mr. Grey stand-in, it doesn't really matter if they started doing so before or after. And frankly, just on literary grounds, anyone, male or female, who actually reads 50 Shades of Grey of their own free will and volition fully merits any subsequent abuse that might happen to come their way.

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Alpha Mail: Leaving Gamma

And learning to lose the gammatude:

As a recovered gamma and now delta who is now happily married with a good wife and a family I thought I’d offer my sure fire way to stop being a Gamma and move into greener pastures. Why Gamma and not another class? First I’m qualified, and second I have a suspicion the number one reader of Game blogs and sites are Gammas looking to escape. So here it is:

Brutal self-honesty.

I’m going to break this down into four posts which cover the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of life. Everyone wants the keys to success and in America we are damned near obsessive about finding techniques we can use for self-improvement. In reality escaping Gammahood is a moral issue as it deals with honesty, but how this plays out in the four aspects of one life will be explained.

This should be helpful, because the ability of the non-Gamma to explain to the Gamma male why he is wrong and how his thinking can be adjusted is often limited. It's easy for the non-Gamma to see that the Gamma is wrong, but more difficult to communicate that wrongness to him in a manner that he is capable of hearing and accepting.

The fact that most Gammas are willfully delusional and lie first and foremost to themselves only makes the challenge more difficult. But one who has recovered from the mindset might be better able to make headway in penetrating through their psychological defenses.

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Trust your instincts

This email Rollo shared from a soldier describes the experience of many a beta or delta concerning female disloyalty:

One girl, leading into Christmas break, said she was going to a techno show in a city about an hour away from our school. I was planning on studying for a final, so I didn’t bother trying to go. As the date neared I realized I felt comfortable about the final and I wanted to go out that night. I asked to go with her—she said no. And this is where I could see the hamster frantically spinning its wheel.

All her reasons were obvious bullshit. I know when a girl is seeing another guy, because I’ve been the other guy. I know what the stories are like. I ended it. I was heartbroken. I wondered constantly whether I had made the right call. I missed her desperately, and I constantly questioned whether my radar had been off. My male friends (now thoroughly blue-pill, as I was attending a liberal civilian grad school) told me I was overreacting and being paranoid and jealous and not respecting her space, blah blah blah… A whole year later a girl I was friends with let slip that my ex actually was meeting another guy in the city, and fucked him the day after I dumped her.

No surprise—but I was quite upset that a few other girls I was “friends” with had known and never told me. They could have saved me a lot of grief. But then again, they were women—I don’t quite get it, but it’s like all the girls were sticking up for each other and covering for each other, even though they weren’t really close friends. It’s almost as if they felt they needed to cover up the tactics that women use, and keep the men from knowing about them—as though there was a driving need they had to keep men in the dark as to the true nature of women.

In fact, I have never been steered in the right direction in relationships by any woman. And this will bring me around to my next point—the feminine dominated civilian environment—especially academia.

The second grad school relationship followed a path that was remarkably similar to my first—in fact, looking back, I have had three major relationships, with girls who wanted to be exclusive, and they have ended because the girls were becoming involved with other men.

There is one way, and only one way, to ensure loyalty and that is a ruthless willingness to walk away from a woman. Indeed, that is arguably the most reliable ALPHA tell from the woman's perspective; a man who is attractive and is not even remotely afraid to do without her.

I was not involved in a lot of exclusive relationships; I tended to avoid "the talk" like the plague. But exclusive or not, I ended them the moment I had any sense that the woman was even flirting with other men after having expressed some form of claim on me. I didn't usually bother "breaking up" with them, I simply stopped calling them, didn't take their calls, and directed my attention elsewhere.

Taking a call from another guy when I was there late at night or simply going for an evening run with an orbiter was sufficient reason to move on. It was rather amusing, later, to observe that my instincts were always correct; usually within a matter of months, the nexted girl would have at least gone on a date or three with the guy in question.

Trust your instincts and don't ever attempt to "keep" or "guard" a woman. If she wants to be with someone else, you don't want her. There too many girls on the girl tree to concern yourself with a disloyal one.

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Prostitution is an economic phenomenon

A few years ago, I noticed that the street hookers in Spain were no longer limited to ugly Africans, but increasingly tended to be pretty Spanish girls in their late teens. So this news from Ireland does not surprise me.

Over 200 female students at Queen’s University have signed up to the Seeking Arrangement website where rich men pay cash-strapped young women, known as sugar babies, on average £5,000 for their company, or more often, for sex.

The average woman is far more concerned about her lifestyle and social status than any abstract moral concerns. So, once social status is no longer dependent upon maintaining virginity, most young women quickly determine that their vagina is an asset with a declining market value. And because women tend to overvalue credentials, "putting herself through college" is considered sufficient justification for just about anything.

But feel free to continue putting them on pedestals if you like, gentlemen. I'm perfectly aware that from the gamma perspective, even a woman who aggressively whores herself in pursuit of a useless degree from a fourth-rate university is only doing so because bad mens made her do it.

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Feminist programming

The juxtaposition of equalitarians trying to reprogram impressionable little minds while watching elite male athletes perform actions that are entirely beyond female capacities would be hilarious if it weren't for the poor gamma males who will soak it up.

This kid will probably be fine, because once he starts crushing his older, athletic sister due to his physical superiority, he'll break through the programming. The problem is the fat little couch potatoes, who will never engage in activity that would expose the lie for what it is.

I ran NCAA Division One track and field. I know the full extent of female athletic capability. I've stretched with them, run with them, lifted with them, and been on my hands and knees vomiting next to them. (Speed days were so brutal that we used to pick a color-of-the-day for lunch because we knew we'd be seeing it again that afternoon.) And while they are impressive, even elite women simply can't run, jump, or throw with the men. They simply can't. They're not designed for it.

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Praising female crime

Dr. Helen observes that when women commit crime, not only are they seldom punished to the same extent as men, they are even praised for it:

So when a woman is a predator, her behavior is to be understood, and channeled for personal growth. When a man is a predator, he goes to jail and even if he is innocent but suspected, there are often consequences as the campus rape panic shows all too well. Phillips points out that this stalking behavior in women is quite common. Why is it so acceptable in our society? Why do we allow men to be followed and abused?

Women tend to destroy property when they stalk, what makes this okay?

It would appear that crime is yet another female imperative, does it not?

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Alpha Mail: representation is not liberty

A commenter yesterday asked me several questions related to democracy, women's suffrage, and liberty:

Don't you believe that women should not be allowed a say in government?

Yes. That is the libertarian position. I can anticipate the flaws in your thinking. First, you are incorrectly conflating democracy with liberty. Second, you are failing to grasp that libertarianism concerns maximizing liberty. This cannot be done when women are permitted a voice in government, because they favor security over liberty.

How do you reconcile this position with the lack of agency above?

I don't claim women have a lack of agency. I never have. It is the equalitarians who insist that women must be held irresponsible for their decisions and actions.

So what's the point of any kind of representation then, except for you and your ilk? Eventually people who don't find that the system works to their advantage will advocate for a different one. Women will want security over liberty, the poor redistribution, minorities special consideration, etc. So it boils down to libertarian tyranny. Liberty for all, ruthless repression for those who oppose it, and ultimately, liberty for the powerful, paternalism (at best) for the rest. Might as well be clear about it.

The commenter is hopelessly confused and is conflating several distinct concepts. Let me first make a few obvious statements:

1. Voting is not liberty. Voting is merely a tool. Liberty is an end. And as the Founding Fathers' distrust of democracy aka "mob rule" shows, the expansion of voting privileges is not synonymous with the expansion of liberty. Quite the opposite, as it happens.
2. Not being permitted to vote is not a lack of agency. A new US immigrant does not have voting rights, and yet he remains fully responsible for any crimes he commits as well as any taxes and debts he must pay.
3. Most people observably act against their own best interests. The number of obese and overweight people proves that people do not eat to their own advantage, therefore it is naive to the point of foolishness to claim that they always vote to their own advantage.

Now, all government is about "paternalism" in one form or another. The question only concerns what priority is going to be forced on the governed. Is it ideology? Is it servitude? Is it security? Or is it liberty?

Maximizing liberty for all does not mean maximizing liberty for every single individual, for the obvious reason that many individuals hate human liberty and wish to constrain it. If you would have liberty, then, it is necessary to distinguish between those who love liberty and will defend it, and those who hate liberty and wish to destroy it. There is no contradiction there, in fact, logic absolutely dictates that maximizing liberty can only come about by actively defending liberty against its foes.

For various reasons, most women are naturally opposed to liberty. They instinctively attempt to restrict the actions, speech, and even thoughts of others. Therefore, they cannot be permitted influence in any society that wishes to remain even remotely free for long. Past political philosophers understood this, as do modern politicians; it is not an accident that women's suffrage and proportional representation is literally the first point in the Fascist program.

And it does not take either a genius or a PhD to recognize that there are few movements that hate human liberty more thoroughly than feminism.

Women were able to vote in the Soviet Union and Ba'athist Iraq, but how much liberty did they enjoy? I want women to be free, which is precisely why I assert that they should not be permitted to vote. They are far too inclined to vote themselves into chains. Besides, in a West that is presently ruled by an unelected European Commission on one side of the Atlantic and an unaccountable bi-factional ruling party on the other, it is ludicrous to pretend that anyone's vote, male or female, counts for anything anymore anyhow.

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