If you have to ask, it's too late

Rollo considers the Purgatorio of the friendzone:

One of the most common questions you’ll read from desperate blue pill men, not just in the manosphere, but on damn near every dating forum, to Dear Abby, to AskMen is “How do I get out of the friendzone?” Type that question into a Google query and look at the number of returns you get. The question of course is usually followed by some plea for advice or a script to follow in order to finally get with the Girl of his Dreams®, and rationally and reasonably make her aware of how he measures up to everything on her ‘boyfriend list’.

There is only one way out of the friendzone. Stop being her friend. Stop paying her attention, stop being a commitment-slut, and above all, stop telling her that you will do anything for her.

Higher status men aren't quite as liable to find themselves trapped in the friendzone because they know the number one secret of women: a woman pursues that which she really wants. A woman who is attracted to you will walk right up to you and kiss you before she's been introduced to you, offer extensive sexual services without expectation of recompense or even affection, cheat on her longtime boyfriend or husband without knowing your name, and go far out of her way on the flimsiest excuse on the off-chance that she might get to see you.

She will go without sleep for days, live a double-life, get her own apartment, fake a suicide attempt, or move across the country just to get the attention of a man she likes.

She's not recoiling from your fumbled attempt to make a move on her because she values your friendship, she's recoiling because she is not attracted to you. The way in which she "doesn't see you" is that of a prospective lover. If you want to become attractive to her, you first have to get out of her orbit, then reshape yourself into the sort of man that she finds attractive. And remember, in determining what sort of man a woman finds attractive, you must always pay attention to who she does rather than what she says.

It's not her "boyfriend list" that matters, but the common attributes of the men who make up her N-list.

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The Literary Portrait of a Sigma

"During these years Goldmund had gradually lost the rest of the adolescent grace and boyishness that had pleased so many. He had become a beautiful, strong man, much desired by women, little popular with men. His mind, his inner face, had greatly changed as well since the days Narcissus awakened him from the happy sleep of his cloister years. World and wandering had molded him. From the pretty, gentle, pious, willing cloister student whom everybody liked, another being had emerged. Narcissus had awakened him, women had made him aware, the wandering had brushed the down from him. He had no friends; his heart belonged to women. They could win him easily: one longing look was enough. He found it hard to resist a woman and responded to the slightest hint. In spite of his strong sense of beauty, of his preference for the very young in the bloom of spring, he'd let himself be moved and seduced by women of little beauty who were no longer young. On the dance floor he'd sometimes end up with a discouraged elderly girl whom no one wanted, who'd win him by the pity he felt for her, and not pity alone, but also a constantly vigilant curiosity. As soon as he gave himself to a woman—whether it lasted weeks or just hours—she became beautiful to him, and he gave himself completely. Experience taught him that every woman was beautiful and able to bring joy, that a mousy creature whom men ignored was capable of extraordinary fire and devotion, that the wilted had a more maternal, mourningly sweet tenderness, that each woman had her secrets and her charms, and to unlock these made him happy. In that respect, all women were alike. Lack of youth or beauty was always balanced by some special gesture. But not every woman could hold him equally long. He was just as loving and grateful toward the ugly as toward the youngest and prettiest; he never loved halfway. But some women tied him to them more strongly after three or ten nights of love; others were exhausted after the first time and forgotten.

"Love and ecstasy were to him the only truly warming things that gave life its value. Ambition was unknown to him; he did not distinguish between bishop and beggar. Acquisition and ownership had no hold over him; he felt contempt for them. Never would he have made the smallest sacrifice for them; he was earning ample money and thought nothing of it. Women, the game of the sexes, came first on his list, and his frequent accesses of melancholy and disgust grew out of the knowledge that desire was a transitory, fleeting experience. The rapid, soaring, blissful burning of desire, its brief, longing flame, its rapid extinction—this seemed to him to contain the kernel of all experience, became to him the image of all the joys and sufferings of life. He could give in to this melancholy and shudder at all things transitory with the same abandonment with which he gave in to love. This melancholy was also a form of love, of desire. As ecstasy, at the peak of blissful tension, is certain that it must vanish and die with the next breath, his innermost loneliness and abandonment to melancholy was certain that it would suddenly be swallowed by desire, by new abandonment to the light side of life. Death and ecstasy were one."

- from Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

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The slut sell

Steve Sailer asks the purpose of female tattoos, given that male tattoos are meant to make permanent life statements:

What's the purpose of tattoos for women who wouldn't wear the same shoes for six months? Is it too signal to the kind of guys she likes (e.g., drummers) that you are the type of guy I like? But what if after another year here she decides that while she liked drummers back in South Dakota, now she likes producers and agents? Tattoos are class markers, and might work against attractive young women rising in class by marrying well.

Is getting tattoos something guys suggest to discourage hypergamy? Or is it something that other women suggest out of the usual feminine malice?

The answer is pretty obvious to anyone who has paid attention over the last two decades. Tattoos signify the degree of a woman's publicly advertised promiscuity. This is not necessarily a reliable advertisement, but it is a sexual advertisement nevetheless. The advertisement is that the more ink she has, the easier the sexual access to her will be. (It pains me that at this point, I should probably remind some readers that not all advertising is true. Some women are more interested in being perceived as sexy than actually following through on the message being broadcast.)

This is why tattoos are considered "sexy" by men. The tattoos don't make the woman any more attractive, they simply provide an easy method of quickly identifying that she is more readily accessible than the average. So, tattoos are one way for less attractive women to better compete with more attractive women, in much the same way as wearing shorter skirts or unbuttoning an additional blouse button.

A discreet tattoo or three in easily hidden locations are a nice girl's way of showing a few men of her choice that she isn't always a good girl and thereby giving her a leg up in comparison with other nice girls. Extravagant tattoos that can't be hidden tend to be the sign of a woman who is either desperate for attention or sexually incontinent. Although there aren't many studies on it yet, there are indications that "tattoos may be possible markers for lethality". For example, one study found that 57% percent of young white suicides were tattooed compared to 29% of matched accidental deaths.

If you're set up on a blind date with a girl and you're told that she has a tattoo of an dove on her wrist, aren't you going to have different expectations of what the evening holds in store than if you're told she has a giant tattoo of a werewolf sodomizing a vampire on her back as well as a bloody dagger between her breasts and the twelve signs of the zodiac in various places around her body? QED.

Nota Bene: please don't even think about starting in with the blather about why the little butterfly on your ankle is deeply meaningful to you because it signifies your best friend who died in a car crash on prom night. Nobody has ever bought that transparent nonsense. You got a tattoo because you wanted to be seen as stylish and sexy, but not trashy. That's fine, so stop pretending it's some sort of massively encrypted code that no man could possibly crack.

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A female entrepeneur decides not to hire women

She should probably be deprived of her ability to make a living. There is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for women who are not enthusiastic about hiring female employees.

Over the years, I have hired outstanding women – educated, intelligent and highly articulate. Yet, I am exhausted. I have become profoundly tired of being a therapist and a babysitter, of being drawn into passive-aggressive mental games and into constantly questioning my own worth as a manager. I have had several women who quit to stay home to “figure out what to do next”. No, not to stay home and care for children, but to mooch off a husband or a boyfriend while soul searching (aka: taking a language class or learning a new inapplicable skill that could be acquired after work). Incidentally, I have not had a single male employee quit with no plan in mind.

I have had women cry in team meetings, come to my office to ask me if I still like them and create melodrama over the side of the office their desk was being placed. I am simply incapable of verbalizing enough appreciation to female employees to satiate their need for it for at least a week’s worth of work. Here is one example to explain. My receptionist was resigning and, while in tears, she told me that although she was passionate about our brand and loved the job, she could not overcome the fact that I did not thank her for her work. It really made me stop in my tracks and so I asked for an example. “Remember when I bought the pictures with butterflies to hang in the front? And you just came and said ‘thank you’? That is a perfect example!” – “Wait”, I said, “So, I did thank you then?” – “Yes! But you did not elaborate on what exactly you liked about them! Why didn’t you?” She had bought them with the company credit card and I actually did not like them at all, but I digress.

I have developed a different approach for offering constructive criticism to male and female employees. When I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff. I plan, I prepare, I think, I run it through my business partner and then I think again. I start with a lot of positive feedback before I feel that I have cushioned my one small negative comment sufficiently, yet it is rarely enough. We talk forever, dissect every little piece of it, and then come back to the topic time and time again in the future.

Some women are excellent employees. Many women are useless, unproductive drama queens. The challenge is to learn to tell the difference between the two. And the problem is that there isn't much leeway in current employment law to dismiss someone for simply being a distraction and a pain-in-the-ass.

But most of the difficulties here are caused by men who don't hold women accountable. If you are babying women and treating them any differently than your male employees, you are part of the problem.

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Women calling out feminism

Natasha Devon observes that modern feminism is anti-equality:

Today's feminism teaches British women to see themselves as victims and victims cannot exist without a villain, in this instance – men. In order for this thesis to have any kind of logic, feminists have made sweeping, inaccurate judgments about an entire demographic, based on nothing more than their gender. Ironically, the exact practice they claim to be fighting.

I'm not an equalitarian myself. But unlike most feminists, I don't pretend to be one.

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The happiness imperative

Happily married men and women really don't play the happiness card enough. Dalrock explains how it can effectively utilized:

As I’ve mentioned before after the initial empowerment fades divorced women tend to find themselves excluded from their previous social networks.  Married women tend to prefer to socialize with other married women.  Since marriage confers status on women (which divorcées lose if they aren’t able to remarry), being dropped from the married social circle and being forced to move to the divorcée social circle is a painful loss.

This simple fact has Ask Amy outraged, as a married mother wrote in explaining that she and her fellow married sister and cousins don’t find they have much in common with her single mother/divorced sister.  Ask Amy is of course free to rage against human nature all she likes, but she won’t be able to undo the status hit women take when they divorce.....

In the interest of bringing all parties together, I will offer a solution which I think Ask Amy and the letter writer can both get behind.  Instead of not inviting the divorced sister, why not promise, no swear, in front of God and everyone they know that they will include her in their outings in the future.  Then, when the time comes that honoring this promise would make them unhappy, simply leave her out.

 That should work nicely. Of course, there is always the possibility that in this particular case, the issue isn't the sister's status as a divorcée, but rather her status as a confirmed freakshow.

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Alpha Mail: status uber alles

BW sends in this Game-related joke:

A wealthy couple was sitting in an upscale restaurant. Suddenly, a gorgeous redhead approached the man., walked over to their table and gave him a big, wet kiss and then walked away.

"And who was that?” asked the wife in a huff. "That's my mistress," the man admitted.

“That's it!” snapped the wife. " I want a divorce!!!"

"All right,” said the husband. "But you realize that if we divorce now, that means no more trips to Paris in the spring and no more trips to Miami Beach in the winter. It means no more Mercedes, no more maids, no more butlers, and it we'll have to sell our house in a depressed market. We'll both have to move out and live in two smaller houses."

The wife sat there fuming, her arms crossed, when a mutual friend walked into the restaurant with an attractive blonde on his arm.

"Who's that with Jim?" asked the wife.

"That's his mistress," said the husband.

"Ours is much prettier,” the wife declared.

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