As some of you already know, after the whole Vegeta (formerly Feng Shui) thing a couple of years ago, I was angry, confused, and looking for answers. So, curious about what really goes on in the minds of men, I wandered into a PUA/relationship advice for men blog ,Roissy in DC, now called Citizen Renegade. I call it “The Abyss”, because the posts and comments tend to be a swirling mass of negativity and pain, but it is a useful mass of swirling negativity and pain. It’s like a black hole in the universe of love and sexuality, but less grating than the female gripe sites. The spirit there is more proactive, and though it attracts its share of whiners, the guys who hang there are mostly legit do-ers.
I find The Obsidian Files to be more proactive and more realistic, so if I was going to tell a guy where to go for support, I’d recommend Obsidian. He’s blunt, but not as rigid, and can relate to a guy who’s struggling. He has a lot of life experience, and has seen things a guy with testicles should probably have seen by a certain age, and tends to pursue a less feminist, more nurturing class of women. Roissy is still working out whatever issues he has with flaming harpies. In my opinion, pursuit of “lawyerbitches” and the like is self inflicted misery which leads one to severe selection bias. Hopefully, his current girlfriend is helping to smooth out those rough edges. Girl must be a saint.
At Citizen Renegade though, I get a perspective that I wouldn’t normally get to see from the inside. People who like you and have an interest in seeing you happy aren’t usually going to tell you the darker bits of the truth. For that, you’ve got to steel yourself, and talk to people who hate you.
Haters may be just as irrational as people who love you, but somewhere in the middle is the balance; the truth. In the past couple of years, I’ve been called every name in the book, but I’ve learned A LOT about men. I already had a reasonable hold of reality, thanks to my Dad, but my Dad loves me. Everything he says to me is designed to help me, and barring a few issues, he doesn’t sugarcoat, but he doesn’t want to undermine my confidence. So it’s tempered somewhat. It’s not dishonest because he really does think I’m beautiful and special. Problem is, random guys I encounter may not think I’m beautiful or special, but may still want to get under my skirt. It’s those guys whose motivation I needed to figure out in order to protect myself.
So, what I needed was an honest assessment of my “worth” in the general sexual market. Roissy’s Dating Market Value Test for Women is a very good one. I scored -4, by the way. To let you know how much of a hit one takes for being fat and older, I retook the test with my features at 20, and scored 32. So I’m positive that there’s no bias against smart or decent women who are even barely reasonably feminine. I wouldn’t know how to rate the test for men.
Once I understood how others generally perceive me, I had to figure out under what contexts someone would find me woodworthy, and why someone who did might mishandle me. The reasons for woodworthiness I gathered ranged from utter desperation for anything with a vagina, to being really drunk and enjoying my personality well enough to commit humanitarian fornication, to being patently rural and having a thing for giant boobs FTW, to fat fetishism. For the rare sort of guy I tend to go for, it’s lack of concern for basic looks and more concern for grooming and hygiene, or I look like them/their mom/their favorite aunt/their first love, or someone very important whose face is burned in their memory; social relevance.
What confounded me until yesterday though, is why someone would mishandle me. I’d assigned that to the wolf chewing off his arm to escape a trap because they think I’m ugly or worthless due to my low general market value.
Confident in my having found the Holy Grail for Fat Chicks, I added Roissyisms to my arsenal of ego destroying missiles to fire back in psychic warfare with former “bitches” daring to attempt to con me back into a largely one sided relationship. Among them were, “You’re only calling me because you’re desperate, and you think I’m stupid,” and my favorite, “I’ve never been desperate/hated myself enough to shag someone I thought was hideous. What’s that like?”
From the responses, it appeared that I was winning their respect and admiration.
Then, as of last night, my Holy Grail shattered when a young lady known as Anoukange said something that slammed the fact into my fat, arrogant face, that I already had it. When you read this, have a look at Anoukange’s site and photos. She’s not a teenager, but most guys think she’s fairly hot. So they’d have no particular reason to go flying out the door immediately, right?
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Cuddling after you’ve just started to sleep together is weird, and I don’t have a cold bone in my body. I just give the guy my bed and take the couch. You can always balance the cuddle instinct by “giving it to her” caveman style and then trying to cuddle after. ….talk about sending the hamster wheel into a tailspin.
Wha???
It did not compute.
As a woman of 40, who has only had a total of 12 years on the “dating market” since 16, half of those as a spiritually but platonically married lady, I have not had vast sexual experience. I had fun in high school…a few freaky incidents under my belt, but that’s a feministically raised youth thing. Once I came into my own at about 17, I understood that casual sex felt like necrophilia for me, so after that it was fiances and the friend zone. My “casual” sex was more like promoting guys who were in what would be most girls’ friend zone, and even then I’d be frustrated if it didn’t develop further.
Though I wouldn’t recommend this policy as a general practice, for a few women, benevolent sluttery is a nice way to avoid the general market “cock carousel” and let the good guys know that there are a few women in the world who really do love decent men more than platonically. Just understand that it’s a thankless “job”. Most guys watch too much television, and think sex with young, hot chicks is normally available to normal guys, and that they were just having a “dry spell”. Hell, some of them even think it’s normal for a hot girl to be low maintenance, and don’t understand that a low maintenance hot girl is a natural beauty with stunning genes, which is rare. It takes them awhile of being out there trying to find another you, before they realize that you’re one in a million.
Story of my life until Shai.
Anyway, due to my apparently rather limited experience, I was convinced that it was highly abnormal and pathological for a guy to just get up and leave after sex. “Casual sex” meant sex with someone you’re not in an explicit relationship with, but in execution, the incident would go something like make out, do the thing, make out and maybe cuddle a bit, bathroom if needed, do it again, into the night, fall asleep exhausted, and the awkward coffee or breakfast. No rushing happened unless sometime during the sex or the sleeping, someone’s mom called thinking their son had disappeared, there was a bad car pileup or something blew up, and he had to go pick up or sew up bodies, or time had really run out.
The coyote chewing off arm thing happened after months or years, and figuratively, not right after. That’s just…crazy. Why would a woman stand for that?
I even had escape strategies for myself to avoid sleeping next to guys I wasn’t in an explicitly defined relationship with. When I would fall asleep, which happened maybe only twice, it was brief and not restful at all. If I didn’t get out of bed in time, I’d be stuck under an arm or a leg, or downright in the clutches, lying there awake. One time I even pretended that there was a Voodoo ritual I had to do after sex.
No really. I’d get up and light a red candle and dance a little.
So after the ensuing conversation, when my illusion of relatively clean karma was crashing around my brain, and I was starting to feel like a complete moron, I grabbed for any reassurance I could get. I asked Shai if it was normal for guys to leave after the sex. He’s like, “Why would a guy stay after the sex?”
So I’m sitting there, mouth agape, freaking out.
Humble pie in my face.
Some vodka, pickles, a series of drunk SMS’s asking for forgiveness, and a deathlike sleep later, I’m okay…humbled, but okay.
I have realized though, that I was indeed a ball cutting, witch of a bitch.
So, I will no longer have the pompous pleasure of referring to any of the sweet men of my past to whom I have grossly misattributed malice, when fear and exasperation were most likely the running sentiment, as “bitches”. They are ex boyfriends. They’re ex boyfriends I probably should have demanded more of as far as manning up and planting their flag or getting lost, but boyfriends is what they behaved like, so that’s what they were.
I understand now that the bitch was me.
Wow. Great post.
I think you like to beat yourself up a lot.
Even now you’ve realised you meant more to these guys than you thought, you’re beating yourself up for not realising it.
Give yourself a break. From the sounds of it, you’re a really good person.
And you have guys you find attractive, who want to sleep with you, and also feel affection for you. That’s great. Anything more is just ego-boosting superfluity.
Thank you, SDaedalus 🙂
I beat myself up over this because I liked to think that I was a fair person…not always nice, but fair. That I’ve treated people unfairly is a problem for me.
There are also things I lost because of bad things that happened, that I’m determined to get back. A sense of balance is one of them. To do that, I had to come out of the victim mentality, which I thought I had, but that was like the one thing left.
It feels kind of weird to have been the offender. I think I understand the position of guys who screw up better now. I really had no clue of the context in which I was operating. My worldview was that of, I guess, a privileged few. I was so blind that I didn’t know that people don’t normally get a fraction of what I was getting so much as to be annoyed with outside of a commitment.
Now I see their point of view better. These guys are the type of men who probably never had to work hard to get female attention or affection, so that was the default. They were open and expressive because that’s just how it’s done, even if you don’t have a defined relationship.
So I was annoyed because, being female, I saw them as pretending to care, when they weren’t pretending. They just grew up in a feminized world where commitment means castration.
I, personally, was not and am not interested in castrating anyone. So, to avoid frustration, I should hold out for the definition of a relationship. It’s not about waiting until a certain time for the sex, just waiting until I know he trusts me enough to understand that I’m not trying to hurt him.
I was basically giving them something they don’t deserve, but they were giving me something I didn’t deserve too. Then I would get frustrated and angry because they felt overly entitled, when I allowed the situation to exist.
There’ll be no more of that.
While you may or may not be correct in your sudden realization of motivations of your past partners, the sources of your stimulation are skewed:
1. Anoukange is one of the last women in this part of the blogosphere that should be turned to for sexual advice or information collection regarding sexual experiences.
2. The Roissy-sphere is mostly a collection of men with, ultimately, one motivation and a worshipful eye towards certain behaviors and philosophies. In gathering intelligence from them, you need to realize that the sample is biased. Which doesn’t make it wrong, only incomplete when it comes to life application.
Whatever you are going to do, however you are going to treat future partners, be -you-. Do what feels right, without the walls and shields you placed around yourself. Those barriers aren’t you, just a reaction to fear, fear of how you perceive yourself, fear of intimacy, fear of devaluing, whatever. I’d be more concerned with that, if I were you, than the other things you spoke about, which seem to be more of an effect than the cause.
Hi Poetry 🙂
Of course their perspective is biased towards the negative. It’s just that well, like the Bible story of Balaam’s donkey, one can’t discount a truth just because of its source. These are people who have a lot of casual sex, but that puts them in the best position to know what’s really going on out there.
Compared to Anoukange, I’m definitely not as “hot”, but apparently much better treated.
So the new knowledge has made me a better me. Now I don’t need to have feelings of hostility when telling a guy no. This just makes it easier to be gracious about it.
The type of people I attract are apparently very loving people who don’t deserve the label “user”. They just need to understand that the kind of women they apparently like, if they’re selecting women like me, function better in well defined relationships. If a guy is letting us float in limbo, we consider ourselves unattached, and don’t want to give the benefits of attachment to people we’re unattached to.
I know that you and Anoukange have had other disagreements in the past so you know, and I know, that she is nowhere near having a clue about how someone should behave after sex.
There truly is no ‘proper’ way to behave after sex. Some people really do enjoy having sex and then leaving their partner (and not cuddling) this isn’t wrong per se, it is just not the way that you (or I, for that matter) want to be treated; it would feel awkward and cold.
I believe that people–man and woman–for the most part leave their partners after sex, whether they leave the apartment or just leave the bedroom–assuming they don’t have any place that they need to be–are most often running from intimacy. As any adult knows sex doesn’t not necessarily come along with intimacy and leaving in the wake of orgasmic bliss is a way of avoiding that intimacy that might sneak up on you while laying there half-awake with someone.
And just to say – I am really impressed by the fact that you had the guts to contact these guys and say why you treated them that way, and apologise. It takes a lot of courage to do that.
Re Roissysphere rating system, you really want to have a look at this blog post. I think it’s a more accurate reflection of my observation & experience. Not all guys want conventionally cute. I used to think it was because they wanted conventional supermodels, but now I think it might be quite different.
http://hvren.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/under-the-influence/
And Nicole – I suspect our reasons for being in the Roissysphere are fairly similar – we are both trying to get a handle on how men work. But you know as well as I do that although Roissy is right to point out the flaws in the pretty lies, what he puts up to replace them are exaggerated, and not the full story either, he uses hyperbole to make his point, the truth is somewhere between the two poles. Also, we both have to avoid an inclination to believe everything we hear that is bad news for us, we have to be more objective & keep our natural instinct for self-criticism at bay.
I don’t know you but you have misunderstood what I meant by that comment. I’ve had guys be too clingy after sex, and I was illustrating that being too clingy can be smothering. That is all. Guys cling to “cute/attractive/hot” (whatever she may be according to him) after sex. Maybe you have not experienced this? I love to cuddle. I just don’t like to be consumed by his beta-ness after sex.
Jamila-
“I know that you and Anoukange have had other disagreements in the past so you know, and I know, that she is nowhere near having a clue about how someone should behave after sex.”
-thanks a lot Jamila. I would never insult you like that, you’re talking out of your ass.
Poetry of Flesh-
What the hell? Please explain your insult.
Can one of you ladies please explain to me why you choose to insult rater than ask questions and discuss? I still can’t get this through my head. Shouldn’t you clarify with me first? I do my best to not talk shit about others and treat (especially fellow ladies) kindly. I had one guy treat me poorly and it was all an act because I was out of his league so he gamed me hard core. That’s all. Once again, for the record. I have had both short-term flings and two long-term, live together, invest in property together, relationships. My two long-terms spanned my entire twenties and I lived with these men for over 10 years. I know men. Roissy phrased it meanly, but he had a point. Beta-ish men should not be up the ass of any woman, let alone a good looking one. She is used to attention and to much will turn her off. There is an art to seduction and sometimes it requires pulling back. And as Roissy himself later on that thread followed-up with, he wouldn’t leave his lover coldly, just that he would leave eventually and not stay. It leave mystery, He is right.
Jamila, it’s not about shoulds but do’s. I’d be kind of freaked out if a guy got up and left right after the first “hit” or overall encounter. It didn’t occur to me that this is how guys, especially alpha types with nothing to lose from chilling for a bit, normally behaved, even in prior subgenerations.
I mean, I’d heard about it from other people, but we’re talking people I’ve counselled because of their intimacy issues. I didn’t see it outside of pathology.
Even with as many male friends as I have, it was bragworthy for the woman to do it again and then make him breakfast all wobbly legged. Nobody bragged about flying out of there post haste. If they did give a shag report that ended like that, it’s because he found a knife under her pillow or his dick was burning.
SD, I understand, and I don’t take Roissy’s word as gospel or something. It’s just added to my worldview as another shade of human perspective. I read that article by the way…quite interesting. It explains a lot about the power of specific sex appeal as opposed to generalized standards.
Anoukange, the problem that I and probably Jamila are having is that well…What is clingier than sex?
I mean…sex, Anoukange. Two human beings can’t get any closer without being Siamese twins. How is it possible for a guy to be too clingy after ****SEX****?
Apparently, I’m spoiled because even though I accept the reality that many probably do think that cuddliness after sex is beta or something, it just doesn’t compute because it’s outside my experience. It’s been my experience that the more secure a guy is, the more he wants to tie me down at least at the moment.
What would make me uncomfortable is that if we didn’t have an explicitly defined relationship, any kind of territorial body language seemed overly entitled. I was keeping “hand” by not allowing them to think they had me.
Still, I eventually caved in because I was just being silly. I love to smell a man’s sweat after I’ve given him a workout.
Seriously, if a guy just got up and left, I would cry, and that would be the last time he would have the opportunity to make me cry.
There is a woman on this thread who admits to sleeping with close to 80 men and I am the one she says should not be listened to regarding sex. I guess she would officially be more of an expert. Never have I insulted any of you, never do I misinterpret comments made by any of you and write an entire post about them, and twisted them into my own projected feelings.
FOR THE LAST TIME:
We were NOT talking about the guy leaving right after sex. There would be SOME cuddling but the guy could leave and it would be leaving a little mystery. No one said anything about the guy up and leaving. The conclusions you have drawn regarding my comment are WRONG. You misinterpreted me and wrote a negative post about me. You’ve attacked me before and continue to. AMAZING. I WOULD NEVER DO THIS TO YOU. Do you know what’s so funny? A fellow woman who wrote what you did, along with the insults and attacks by Poetry, Jamila, Alte, and others have made me cry. You are wrong and owe me an apology. What you have written and done is mean.
Anoukange, it wasn’t meant to be an insult, I apologize if you took it that way.
IronWynch,
I do agree that a number of things that Roissy says are quite accurate, and more “real” than the usual perspective we are given. But he, and his commenters, are rather extreme in their views. Advice and opinions from extremists usually need to be scaled back some in order to get at what’s closest to the truth.
As for the casual sex arena, I’ve more experience than the majority of Roissy’s commenters, both male and female. But I am aware that my approach and the men I sleep with are representative of a skewed population sample: they are people -I- find desirable, people that tend to be within a certain age group, certain social and economic demographic, with my particular sexual desires filtering through those that pass my inital screen. My reactions and their reactions are attributed, in part, to ideas that Roissy and others put out there, but also in part to our own experiences and ideas as we place them on our social/sexual interactions. I would never deem to come down as Roissy and Co. do and tell others that their sexual experiences (or drive towards sexual experiences) fall within this social/sexual bellcurve and there are only X, Y, Z reasons that caused it to succeed or fail.
I hope your altered approach to relationships and casual bedpartners succeeds as you predict. It will be good to read about your results… and your happiness.
Anoukange, I get what you’re saying, but there’s still this elephant in the room: you’re talking about clinginess after ***SEX***.
I don’t think I misinterpreted you, just that there’s a difference in perspective between hot girls and plain or socially ugly girls. Maybe all your life, guys have kissed your ass, so a guy being (brain cells popping as I say this) aloof in the bedroom is something different and mysterious. For me however, it would be a soul destroying nightmare come to life.
It’s not like similar things have never happened to me. I experimented a bit in high school, and things were cool and non clingy because we were friends and peers who were badly programmed. It was pathological though, and by around the middle of my senior year, I think we all understood that.
…but how we rolled wasn’t about keeping hand or saving face. We were just…cool. We were pals, not really interested in any deep romantic connections. It was all about the curiosity, and it seemed a great opportunity to have people it was safe to explore with. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say Poetry likely went through a similar passage in her youth. It’s not the cock carousel, but more of a people being cool with each other, and during that a young woman kind of figures herself out and how she’s going to do things after.
Nobody here, as far as I can see, is trying to insult you. It’s just that we don’t get how a guy rolling off, or even being stingy about cuddling, adds mystery rather than panic that one may just have shagged a clever aspie.
Like going to bed with this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9HFOyxQ2xE
and waking up with this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GkK8u969Z0
It’s why I don’t take Vegeta back. He looks like #1 but behaves too much like #2…but even he was a post coital clutcher.
I’m not saying you’re wrong to want whatever it is you want, just that the idea that mystery jetting could actually be a good thing and that guys since at least my grandfather’s generation (I asked more old dudes) have been using this tactic effectively, blew my mind and scorched what was left of my already tattered snowflake. Reading the OP, I’m thinking, “Hm. This is new, and makes sense even though it would drive me personally to the convent.” Like serial killer game, it was bringing some attractive pathology into the mix.
Then when you answered, I was like, “What??? Wait…” and some ticking. Then I asked around a bit, and BOOM!!!!!!
I wasn’t saying my partners like me more. I was saying that apparently, they felt safe enough to not play that card with me. What I did by pulling away myself, and being bitchy was undermine those feelings of safety. So I was respected and feared, but this is not really what I wanted to be. I want to be loved more than they fear their worst fear. I want their worst fear to become losing me. So I was triggering small fears in place of creating a situation wherein I could get the big one.
…and by the same, I was assuaging my own petty fears to keep from having the big fear about them.
So again, I’m not trying to insult you at all. Your perspective taught me that I had been going about things all wrong. Because of your experiences of having an overabundance of romantic attention, I got to see that it was nature or compulsion, not a calculated attempt at gaining my affection in order to crush me, that caused my ex boyfriends to behave as they did. This is how a guy acts when he wants to be close to someone he finds attractive.
I was the dumbass with the fear of vulnerability limiting my perspective.
Poetry, I agree that there’s way too much sample bias from Roissy and the commenters, and they are a bit overly simplistic. Still, their perspective is valuable, and I don’t totally discount it. Seeing how others live and think, or at least what they want people to think they think, teaches me more about the world. So I glean what I can from there, and hope that I contribute something to their perspective.
Most people are pretty simple. Even complex people are relatively simple as far as needs go. It’s just that those whose needs and desires deviate from the norm have to have complex strategies to get those met. Being one of those, it’s a good idea for me to understand who to avoid.
A good bit of what I learn there is exactly that: who to avoid.
It’s bad though, to punish people for being simple minded. They can’t help it, and to be frank, they’re what makes the world go around. Without followers, is a leader really a leader?
I may not want to shag the masses, but I don’t want to see my nest destroyed by unsustainable human farming. Humans in the west are being herded into what amounts to a factory farmed society. I don’t want to see that happen, and am doing what little I can to prevent it.
The selection criteria we see in the Abyss is indicative of people who don’t select for loyalty and nurturing because they’ve been programmed to believe that it is either unnecessary or a much lower priority than beauty within the shapherds’ limited standards. So their pickup artistry energy is focussed on attracting the hot rather than the feminine. Sometimes being there is like watching a train wreck.
Still, in this one case I learned not what to avoid, but what I had apparently escaped being exposed to, due to my at least half right policies. It was my follow-up that needed some work. I shouldn’t have been treating exceptional guys as if they were normal.
Thanks for taking the time to go into it further Nicole. And I appreciate both you and Poetry explaining yourselves in more detail. I also get where you’re coming from. I behave and need things to be much different when I know the guy is quality ahead of time (as in: waited to have sex and built intimacy and trust therefore snuggling was absolutely expected) but in fast sex (I’ve had two happen quickly), there are other rules. Those are more fast and hot sex with the mystery of the night and affair becoming lost if the guy suddenly turns too soft on me and smothers me. I like guys who show their vulnerability slowly, I like to drag it out and savor it. So, having the guy leave in a non-cruel way but NOT spend the night plays well on me. I like my men macho. Cuddling is a favorite pastime of mine with the right guy.
With your willingness to go into the Abyss and your piercing self-consciousness, you’re like a re-incarnation of Shakespeare. The quality of your poetry is somewhat lower. But who cares about poetry these days?
Ugly fat cunt would be a better description. When you trip, do you roll into the street? Must be hard being a walking ball.
Thank you for the compliment. 🙂
I think people still care about poetry, but prefer to hear it rhyming and set to music these days.
@”The_King”
Butt still hurt I see.
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