Just a teensy weensy bit ironic.

Sheesh! Thanks for the head’s up. (Interesting that I’ve never seen those in my list though.) Amazon doesn’t give you a lot of leeway for those things — an almost identical set of keywords inserted similar amounts of inflammatory separatist literature. Yet another set yielded Ann Coulter. Head banging indeed.

“Know thy enemy” is tremendously powerful though.

figleaf

Yeah, I would have figured that they were showing up in my list because I had browsed books relating to the psychology of sex, etc. (Arousal, that kind of thing; I don’t browse anything SC-related at Amazon, simply because they don’t carry any of the books worth reading). But no, seems not.

I agree about the power of knowing your enemy, though. Even considering that there’s a big difference between that material and the stuff that, IME, represents the SC as it is now, it’s good that people know that books like those are out there.

Well, yes, the early stuff is rather primitive and ugly, at least discursively. I suppose they are “the enemy” because the early stuff (and I’m not going to tell you the greatest late 80s potty-mouthed source, you’ve had enough laughs at the expense of the SC already) was a form of sorting potential partners for compliance with patriarchy. Still, it provides the sort of thing that people like, for those who like that sort of thing.

There is a bit of internecine paradigm warfare going on with the revival of “direct game”, because the hypno-oriented gurus have tended to object that “I like you and want to get to know you better” is an excellent opening line…for a well-built, good-looking guy. Anyone who has to tame his energy just to get the words out had better start with something else.

Did you actually check the books? The Layguide is one thing, but the second? That deals with things more in MRA territory, including advice on sex tourism. And it was published recently — it’s not part of the early stuff.

That places it firmly in the enemy category, as far as I’m concerned. (And yeah, I’m familiar with some of the earlier “check for patriarchy compliance” material, too.)

As for some of the other stuff only working for well-built, good-looking guys… I’m not exactly a model; I’m also on disability and under the poverty line, with a substantial history of abuse from which I’m still recovering. Still seems to work for me, though.

(Oh, and I should add: I’m not exactly a young guy, either.)

I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with indirect game (nor have I ever said that, to my recollection). But context and content are important things to consider, and that tends to be more of a problem when it comes to those techniques.

[Edit: I just noticed that I had "direct" instead of "indirect" there. Fixed.]

Yes, the second one is MRA ugly. So bad I had to order that train wreck, used, to go with my Mystery/Ross Jeffries/Neil Strauss bookshelf. I cannot fathom the mindset necessary to be a john of any kind, having lived in one of the worst nations for sex workers (Israel), I found it intruded on the public sphere and consciousness and the police had their hands full stopping the worst traffickers. So, yes, crimes against humanity.

You are (oddly) a bit of a kindred spirit, I am struggling to finish my schooling with a chronic illness and desperate to lead a “normal” life, in a high-density urban area, and I suspect that the direct/indirect split reflects subcultures, meaning that direct might work best within a subculture you identify with, since a lot of rapport pre-exists. Or you have unstoppable charisma and charm. I do deal a bit with “worthiness” fetishists. so my minimal income as a student is often a deal-breaker, but I deal with high-volume time-constrained venues (SpeedDating, etc) where people are looking for long-term involvement. YMMV.

Actually, I’ve found that subcultures really don’t have any more rapport than there is in other groups. If anything, there’s a bit less — they’re generally more on the cliquish side of things than the general social scene. And I’ve been moving toward a broader social sphere, anyway, something more mainline. I don’t deal with speed dating, though; it’s not anywhere near the type of scene with which I want to be involved. (And as far as worthiness fetishists go, yeah, I’ve met some. But I generally find the personality type to be repulsive, so that’s never been an issue; and most only seem to be that way until there’s some rapport, of course, and turn out to be quite different after that’s established.)

As for charisma and charm… I wouldn’t be able to say. I’ve just come to enjoy it more than I did in the past, talking to people I haven’t met before and all. It’s been an interesting experience, seeing how a bit of comfort with things can open up conversation after conversation — especially when it comes to things like eye contact, pure and simple.

The big thing, to my mind, is that what you believe about yourself will telegraph out, and not having your inner game nailed down will cause things to implode on a regular basis — in a really harsh way, most of the time. Outer game never covers that up. And it’s really easy to exchange those views for something that’s more along the lines of aggression, a kind of “I’m going to prove that I have value” kind of approach, which just comes off as predatory. (Using Brad P.’s categories, that’ll just mark you as “creepy,” and then you’re just done, complete and total.)

I mean, all the stuff about venue changes, isolation, etc. is worthwhile, but it’s primarily about the social aspects, not about attraction itself. When attraction comes up at all with those approaches, it’s usually incidental; it allows the spark to build, but it doesn’t create it. Not in my experience, at any rate, and that seems to be one of the reasons why Mystery’s stuff seems to have fallen out of favor in a lot of places — so I don’t think that my experiences are terribly anomalous.

Really, I’m not that hostile to the SC — I’m involved with it, after all. It’s just that I’m trying to place it in a broader context, one that doesn’t relate to, say, feminist theory any more than any other approach to gender politics; it’s more in terms of workable theories about psychology, neurology, the workings of desire and sexual fantasy, et. al. (And there aren’t too many of those out there. As with most things, 99% of it is bullshit, in the philosophical sense of the term.) There are things in the SC that are, from that perspective… well, ridiculous. Not that they don’t have some element of truth, but they’re too broadly employed, too simplified, and the explanations just don’t hold up when viewed with a critical eye. Problem is, the explanations tend to end up replacing what they’re trying to explain — which is more than a bit ironic, considering that it’s the map becoming the territory, even while paying lip service to NLP.

The main weak spot isn’t with things like kino escalation. That, I think, is where most of the material is solid. It’s with the approaches to attraction itself, which is something that I think Zan, AMP and the like do a much better job explaining.

You raise an interesting point, because Ross Jeffries’ early work was designed to generate attraction, by bringing the experience into the preferred NLP submodality of your interlocutor and making her run her attraction process. Most people who object to Zan, AMP, and–to a greater extent–Sean Messenger of LVO3 do so on the basis of their looks’ (i.e. the guru’s) generating the attraction that they then amplify. A lot of the anti-”direct” stuff takes that form: “Sure, YOU get attraction by showing up, and then go direct.” You also have a cart-and-horse problem in that Zan, AMP etc.’s inner game approach relies on positive past experience, whereas Ross’s “Nail Your Inner Game” works from the inside out, totally.

I DON’T have an answer for “inner game”, I wish I did. Klaus Theweleit’s _Male Fantasies_ provides a glimpse of the political costs when men start telling themselves narratives of betrayal, when they feel cheated of something theirs by right, when “the world” is wrong and “our brothers” right. It occurs to me that Nice Guys(tm) are budding fascists. I have only seen such fixations among the loopier elements of various Foreign Legions.

I also don’t know what to do about empathy, to the extent that I am often asked to empathize by holding off sexual interest in someone who admits to being frazzled by the plethora of sexual choices offered to her. “Empathy” in this context reads like “Let’s Just Be Friends” to a member of the SC. Of course, most men don’t have the health problems I do, and if 90% of my problem is blocked chakras, I really don’t get anywhere by blaming women. But it seems (to a great extent) that even when I was young(er) and healthy(-ier), their minimum criteria always excluded me–and I was always trying, and perhaps trying too hard.

Your point about the necessity of past experience is a good one… though my own experiences have led me on a particular tack in regard to that. I grew up with serious (likely clinical) depression since at least the 4th grade, being pretty consistently suicidal up through my attempts at college. (The main way that I made it through that was to drill it into myself that I was too weak to go balls to the wall, so I may as well stop complaining and just do what I had to do.) It led to some seriously bad situations, including one in which I ended up taking the rap for the actions of a roommate — and ended up in jail for a year, and on probation for some years after that, until the Court of Appeals finally overturned the convictions. Not many people pay attention to those decisions, though — so I still come across people who warn others about me, based on the initial trial.

At that point I was basically a catastrophe waiting to happen. I barely went out (as in, even left the apartment) for over a year, except to get groceries and go to any required appointments.

The one thing that drew me back from that was that while I was on paper, I had to go to a therapy group. The woman who ran that was probably the most empathic human being I’ve had the chance to meet, and I’m a completely different man because of it. And that, I think, is the key: getting into a relationship, even if it’s a friendship or something in a therapeutic context, in which someone else can relate to you on that level, understand you, and has the strength of character to pull you up: not by giving you advice, but because their way of moving through the world is… well, contagious. In the end, you end up becoming similar to people like that, picking up their skills and making them your own.

It takes time. Years worth of time. And that’s why NLP tends to be of limited use: it doesn’t allow for the low-level, direct connections that the process requires, much less the time. Direct game can be much more effective if you approach it gradually.

But even a good friend can work miracles that way — and, in fact, there’s some evidence that such friendships actually rewire the brain, so to speak, in terms of its limbic functions. The problem is that bad ones can be just as damaging as the good ones can be beneficial. Even more so, probably. So you have to choose carefully. Developing a sense of how other people’s emotional states feed into yours, and yours into theirs, and getting a feeling for that, helps separate the one from the other. (Though such connections sometimes involve a bit of discomfort. We’re usually most comfortable with what experience has written into us, and if that’s a negative, we can just end up reinforcing it.)

In that respect, what you mentioned about empathizing with someone? That’s probably a good place to start, even if it’s difficult. LJBF can actually be useful if you need to do some low-level retraining, if you seek it out as friendship. Think of it as the flip side of doing approaches, as getting yourself to be comfortable with not needing to approach if you don’t want to, to not be driven by it.

Now, Zan’s materials aren’t terribly good for developing that kind of thing; they’re most appropriate once you’ve gained some ground. But AMP’s power of presence program is useful. If nothing else, that helps develop the raw ability to connect, which is the most basic of the skills involved. Allowing yourself to be exposed (and thus participate in the feedback loop) is the foundation. Eye contact game also comes into play, because that’s the most effective means of entering into that loop and sustaining it (facial expressions being the secondary one; using Ekman’s METT and SETT programs can help with that, to a degree, but getting comfortable with eye contact is best).

It occurs to me that Nice Guys(tm) are budding fascists. I have only seen such fixations among the loopier elements of various Foreign Legions.

With some of them — I think you’re right. I actually saw a post from a guy who wrote that if you were on the jury for a trial of a serial killer who was targeting feminists, you should vote to acquit them, whether they were guilty or not. If that’s not the sign of a budding fascist, I don’t know what is.

But I do think that the kind of commiseration that you mentioned… well, plays into what I mentioned above about bad friendships. They don’t just have the potential to reinforce old patterns; they have the potential to draw you down even further. Anger breeds anger, and that even on a neurological level.

The title is somewhat of a misnomer, but there’s a book that I quoted in an earlier post, one that you might find of value: A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini and Lannon. There are a number of books that go into these issues, but that’s the most accessible and well-written. It provides for some good context. I’d also recommend reading Bader’s Arousal along with it, because it covers similar ground from the psychoanalytic perspective, whereas the former is more about the science. It’s a drier read, but more than worth it once you’ve got some understanding of the neurological aspects — especially in terms of how relationships can help, and how they can hurt, based on case studies from his private practice.

But this reply is getting longer than I thought it would be, so… I’ll stop before I get to the point of rambling on. If you want to follow up on any of it, feel free.

I think (with AMP) you are dealing with a much more micro-level approach than I have previously considered, so my interest is piqued. I will of course take a look at the books you’ve recommended–if nothing else, I have a pretty extensive bookshelf of BAD evo-psych, so I can add some good stuff.

I am at an odd juncture because my health issues have led to a pull-back from constant approaching anyway, I was uncomfortably (and later comfortably) poly thanks to the Internet, and now I’m at a crossroads. I was supremely over-invested (as I said) in high-volume low-rapport venues, like mixers and SpeedDating, and “failure to connect” is rife. If anything, “worthiness” and traditional masculinity would be the key to DHV in that milieu, and that’s a path that hasn’t worked for me.

I’ll have further thoughts on your take on empathy, friendship, and inner game tomorrow, but would like to let you know I appreciate them.