You don’t achieve this ideal simply by being a nice guy and preaching to women to try to change their behavior. (Picture courtesy of Flickr’s Internet Archive Book Images.)

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A refrain I hear every so often is that porn gives men unrealistic expectations about sex. That may be true, but I would say that a bigger problem is mainstream movies giving men unrealistic expectations about romance.

I grew up in the 1980s watching many teen movies where the socially-awkward underdog manages to steal the smoking-hot popular girl from her handsome — but a total jerk — chad boyfriend just by being a good-natured sweetie-pie. It happened in The Karate Kid, Revenge of the Nerds, and multiple John Hughes movies (Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful). Basically any high-school movie where the main character is a guy will most likely involve him landing some popular girl who should be out of his league.

In watching these movies and TV shows, one would get the impression that women value inner beauty above all other considerations, including looks, money, confidence, and social status. Guys will inculcate this message and then go out into the world only to discover that things don’t work like that at all. “I was a sweetie-pie, but I still didn’t get the girl!” They are socialized to believe that behaving a certain way will get you girls. When it doesn’t work, they understandably get pissed.

Besides this, there is also a long tradition of sitcoms starring a shlubby guy who has a wife who is an order of magnitude more attractive than he is. Not only does this gives guys wildly unrealistic expectations of what they can expect, but it also feeds into another myth about women, one which women believe themselves: chicks go for funny guys. You see, Jim Belushi might not be conventionally handsome, but he’s funny! That’s why he was able to get such a smoking-hot wife despite being a fat guy who works in construction.

The Pickup Artist (PUA) community of yore had value in debunking some of the various myths and misunderstandings men often have about women. No, women do not always go for the guy with the most beautiful soul. They can be superficial and shallow. They don’t always mean what they say. And so on.

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Cynosura here.

Another virtue of the PUA community was that it cut to the chase. You can’t get laid? Okay, here’s how to fix that. You’ve been trying this? Here’s why that doesn’t work, and here’s what you should be doing. I nevertheless had my criticisms of the old PUA community; in ways, it was nihilistic and obsessed with the pursuit of fleeting pleasures. This is obscene when we are in the middle of a civilizational crisis. But I now find myself nostalgic for it when looking at its successor movement: the “red-pill,” tradcon manosphere as exemplified by the likes of Pearl Davis, Andrew Wilson, and the like.

For all its flaws, the Pickup Artist community was hyper-rational and dealt with the real world in terms of how women actually are. The Right-wing tradcon manosphere is all about pining for a different world and talking about how women should be. They dream of a world where women don’t work and get married at 18 to 40-year-olds. They can’t just say, “I want to get laid and it pisses me off that I can’t,” because that isn’t conservative. They have to pretend that they are against sex before marriage. They have to pretend that it’s not about them at all, but rather that they are trying to save the world — or that their ideal is actually for the woman’s own good, because if she doesn’t go along with it, she’ll be sad at age 40.

The self-improvement angle of the approach has gone out the window, and now it’s all about nagging women to change. The tradcon manosphere has all the downsides of the Pickup Artist community, but none of the benefits. You spend all your waking hours thinking about women, but then you never actually get laid.

Aside from the fact that the majority of manosphere influencers I’ve encountered strike me as sociopaths, I have two other major criticisms.

Magnolia | Tom Cruise | Frank T.J. Mackie | Respect The Cock Tame The Cunt Scene [HD]

First, there is a school of thought which holds that understanding the Woman Question is the Rosetta Stone for understanding all the world’s problems, and/or that if we fix the Woman Question, everything else will fix itself. The reality is that even if by magic, everyone was red-pilled on women tomorrow and agreed that a woman should marry young, stay home, and raise kids while her husband works, the fact would remain that we live in a society where it is practically impossible to raise a family on a single income. If you ask me, anyone talking about returning to traditional gender roles without also talking about radically changing our economic system is unserious.

How about paying women some kind of universal basic income not to work? Enough to survive, but not enough to go clubbing every night? If she wants to upgrade her lifestyle, she can either get a man or get a job. A woman presently has to get a job to survive, but if she didn’t need a job to survive, getting a man would be a more attractive option and she would still have her own spending money. Of course, tradcons would never advocate for something like that because it would be “socialism.”

You can buy Tito Perdue’s The Smut Book here.

Secondly, there are some things that you just have to make peace with or else they will eat away at you and corrode your soul. A prime example is that everyone has to accept that they are going to die someday — maybe soon, maybe not for a while, but eventually. This life will not last forever, and while it’s an unfortunate reality, you have to make peace with it. I’ve known people who haven’t and undergo panic attacks at the mere thought of death. Someday, the Sun will expand and consume the entire planet Earth in flames. That’s a bummer, as I’ve grown fond of this place — but you have to accept it.

The fact that there is asymmetry in gender relations is another one of those things that you have to make peace with, if for no other reason than for you own sanity. In different contexts, men and women have unfair advantages over each other. There are all sorts of double standards that work in women’s favor, but then again, the average woman spends seven hours a week (two weeks a year) fixing her hair and applying makeup. That’s seven hours that men can spend playing video games and dicking around on the Internet. Would I be willing to sacrifice seven hours of my free time each week in order to have women’s social advantages? As in, I lose some of my free time, but then when I go to bars, people buy all my drinks for me, I never have to pay for dates, and I’m guaranteed to win if I ever get in a custody battle. Would I take that deal? I dunno. I’d have to think about it.

The PUA community made peace with the asymmetry of gender relations and devoted itself to developing a science of how to work within it. The tradcon manosphere refuses to make peace with this reality — and it eats away at them.

Here’s my advice to incels on how to get girls the easy way: Buy a guitar, learn to play the damn thing, and then join a band. I guarantee that you will get girls. You can actually be a loser in all other areas of life, and yet that works. Girls think it’s cool to say that they are dating a guy in a band. And who knows? If your band gets a record deal and “makes it,” then she will be dating a rock star, which is even cooler. Join a band and your autistic social awkwardness will be interpreted as the eccentricity of an artist. I would estimate that 80% of rock stars first picked up an instrument at least in part because they thought it would help them get chicks. The other 20% either came from musical families or are gay and not interested in chicks.

Now, when I say that this is the easy way, it will still require hundreds of hours of practice, but the results are guaranteed. If you are lazy, buy a bass guitar. It’s easier to learn, and there’s always a shortage of bass players, because everyone wants to play guitar. Fun fact: If you ever see a female bass player, nine times out of ten she had a guitar-playing boyfriend at some point in life who could not find a bass player, so he taught his girlfriend to play. That’s the beauty of the bass guitar: It’s so easy that you can teach your girlfriend to do it.

Or better yet, get some turntables and learn to be a DJ. Club DJs get even more (and hotter) chicks than musicians. The point is to find some way to get on a stage.