“I Only Bang 9’s and 10’s Brah”

group of woman wearing bikini on body of water
How Would You Rate These Hunnies, Brah?

I’ve always sort of struggled with the “1-10 scale,” and that’s because, at least to me, it’s so subjective. What I consider an “8” you might consider a “5.” I see and hear guys on Twitter all the time saying stupid shit like, “I only bang 9’s and 10’s brah,” and it makes me laugh and roll my eyes.

Maybe I’m an extremely harsh critic, but I’ve never seen a “10” in the wild. I’ve never met one personally or been introduced to one face-to-face. That’s because, to me, a “10” is literally “perfect.” There are literally no flaws, at least physically, that I can see. I’ve definitely seen my share of “5’s,” “6’s,” “7’s,” and “8’s,” and I’ve even encountered what I would consider to be a “9” or even a “9.5” in the wild. In all of the years that I’ve been walking on the planet, I could count all the “9’s” and the “9.5” on one hand, and probably still have a finger or two left over.

That being said, I don’t ever recall seeing someone so ugly, so deformed, so hideous, as to be considered a “1.” To me, a “1” would be that person that no one would want to fuck, it’s really that bad. So that leaves the “2’s” on up to the “9.5” that I’ve encountered in real life.

I know I have my standards, as I’m sure you do as well. It gets really interesting when you move from the purely physical, to such things as personality, scent, and voice. I’ve met women that on initial approach, I would have rated them a solid “8,” only to catch a whiff of them, or hear them talk, or find out her personality is, let us say, “unpleasant,” and she drops to maybe a “5.” Sometimes even lower if the smell, personality, and voice are all left to be desired.

I’ve also encountered women that on initial approach I would have rated a solid “6.5,” and due to their personality, the way they smell, and their pleasant sounding voice, they got bumped up to a “7.5,” or even an “8.” Have that “6” do her hair, put on a little makeup in just the right amount, and have her throw on her “little black dress” and she moves up to an “8.5.”

You see and understand where I’m going with this don’t you? Everybody has their standards of what they find as attractive and everybody is throwing random numbers around. I’ve seen women rated as “10’s” that I would never even come close to giving that high of a mark to them. Other than seeing models in magazines (do you remember those?) or pictures on the internet, I honestly don’t believe a “10” exists.

Back in the day, Hot or Not used to let you rate people based purely on their looks. You might have been able to guess or get an age, and you might have had a name thrown in there for good measure, but that was it. It would blow me away when I saw women getting “10’s” or “9’s” as their rating, when to me, they might have made for a good “7” or “7.5” At least with Hot or Not, they would average all of the ratings out and you had a better idea of their “true rating.” Not super scientific, but at least it was something.

I even threw a picture of myself up there for shits and giggles, because aren’t we all curious what other’s think of our attractiveness? Of course I got rated as a “1” a couple of times (ouch!) and there were even a couple of “9’s” and “10’s” thrown my way (all I could figure was that I either fit that person’s particular niche, or they were just being really generous.) Turns out after about 500 ratings or so, I averaged at a “6.5” Not bad. It’s actually about where I would have rated myself in the past.

The thing is, the 1-10 scale is not only subjective in the sense of what we individually find attractive, it’s also subjective in the sense of what we think women ought to be.

A “5” is the top of the bell curve. She is average in every sense. She’s neither too thin or too fat. She’s not ugly, but she’s not beautiful. She honestly wouldn’t garner a second look if you were to meet her on the street. She’s just, average.

However, women (and men) today have changed over the years. Obesity is unfortunately the norm now. An “average” woman today is going to be overweight. Maybe not the clinical definition of obese or morbidly obese, but she’s going to be overweight. I’ve seen this firsthand on dating sites and apps where women today are describing themselves as “average” and yet to me, they are overweight. “Thin” is actually still thin, or in some cases, what I would consider “average.” Average to me has always been height/weight proportionate.

What are we to do in order to have some sort of standard when it comes to the 1-10 scale? How are we supposed to come to a concensus of what an actual “5,” or any other number actually is? Are we just “fated” to leaving the 1-10 scale as simply a matter of subjective preference and just “know beauty when you see it?”

Aaron Clarey over at CaptainCapitalism actually came up with an answer that I think actually works out if we are going to have some sort of realistic concensus as to what an actual “5” or any other number actually means in today’s day and age.

Go check it out.

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Jeremy Part 2

jeremy-spoke-in-class-today-pearl-jam-1-600x450

I mentioned “Jeremy” in a prior post. I’m going to continue the tragi-comedy that is his life here. There’s been updates since I wrote the original post and published it.

The last time when we left off the story of our hero, “Jeremy” was still living with the woman and her two kids in a joint lease apartment. He was considering leaving her, and I even had suggested that that is what I would have done, if I had ended up in the same situation that he is currently in. Did “Jeremy” finally leave? Did he tell her to fuck off? Did “Jeremy” go scorched earth on her and set it all on fire?

No.

Not only didn’t he do any of what I just questioned, “Jeremy” is basically doubling down and wants to marry this woman. He’s waiting for the teenage daughter to become an adult (which is about another year or so from now) and then he wants to marry this woman.

“Jeremy” told me how he had a “talk” with his woman. He told me how he told her that he “didn’t feel appreciated for all of the things that he has done for her, her children, and their relationship.” He reasoned with her, he rationalized with her and with himself. Apparently things are going so well at the moment, he’s decided to marry her. She knows about this of course, because he’s told her.

I was done listening for the most part when he mentioned that he wants and is planning on marrying her. He thanked me for the advice that I had given him earlier. Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself, “when did I ever tell you to ‘man up and marry that ho?'” When did I ever tell him to sit down and have a “talk” with her and give her an ultimatum? When did I ever tell him to talk to her like she was a man? When did I tell him to try and reason with her?

I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t tell him to do any of those things. I told him to get a different place to live in, change his phone number, and get the fuck out. That’s what I told him. I remember that, because I was there telling it to him. Apparently “Jeremy” is either two completely different guys, or he didn’t want to hear a thing I said.

Fuck it. “Jeremy” gets to burn. You can lead a horse to water and all of that.

It still amazes me to see grown men think and act like women are just better smelling, less hairy versions of men without penises.

Guys, women are NOT men. They never have been and they never will be men. They don’t think like men, let alone act like one. Get it through your thick skulls. You don’t talk to women like they are men. You don’t “reason” with them like you do with another man. Women don’t think and reason like men, and that’s because they aren’t men.

You will never cross that chasm. You will never truly understand how a woman thinks and why they think what they think and why they do what they do. Best give up trying to “get into their heads” and trying to understand their thought processes. Women themselves have admitted that they don’t know why they do the things they do.

Women can and do reason, they just do it differently than men do. The sooner you figure that out, the sooner you let that shit go, the sooner you can get on with your life and be content. Women are going to women because they are women and that’s what they do.

Women do what they do because they can.

The only real power we have as men when dealing with women in today’s world is this:

The Takeaway.

Take away your attention. Take away your time. And if necessary and needed, take away your presence by walking out the fucking door. Stop throwing your time, money, and attention at someone who hasn’t earned it or is behaving badly. Stop doing the “Sunken Cost Fallacy” thing. Your time and as far as I’m concerned, your dignity is more important than how much money and “work” you’ve thrown at a woman.

Newsflash: She doesn’t care how much time, money, and effort you have thrown at a relationship with her. That’s your job, it’s expected. Stop looking for relational equity, there is none, there never was any, and there will never be any.

“Jeremy” is giving up the one thing that he truly has in his situation,  and that is the ability to walk away. He is giving it up and deciding on staying in his chains of bondage that he put on himself. “Jeremy” truly gets to burn.

When “Jeremy” mentioned that he wants to marry this gal, something inside me “snapped” and then died. I turned and looked at him and said with a smile,

“You’re gonna marry her? Good for you man! Sounds like you found your One! Your soulmate! I’m happy for you! Sounds like you guys were meant to be, and don’t worry about it, everything is going to work out just fine between you two.”

I need to stock up on matches and gasoline, it’s going to be a hot summer this year.

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“Beef-Only”

brown bull on green glass field under grey and blue cloudy sky
FIGHT ME.

A little while ago, I was reading a thread on Twitter, and a guy in the thread dropped this little nugget of gold. There’s a lot to unpack in that post and I’m not going to go into it too much. Suffice it to say, it got me thinking. I’ll let you guys read it for yourself and do your own unpacking of it.

Here’s a few thoughts that I had about it though:

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

I’ve encountered a lot of people on the Internet of Beefs, which is pretty much all of social media these days. You can’t have a conversation with them, you can’t talk to them unless it is in support of whatever their beef is. Think about binary thinking and lack of nuance here. Everything is black or white, everything is us versus them. The beefs that people have range from the large scale, global type of stuff, such as climate change, down to the absolutely ridiculous like, if you don’t have kids, your opinion counts for less to society at large.

I swear sometimes that people have nothing better to do in their lives except try and stir up outrage. Imagine that your life is so great, so absolutely “normal,” that you have to go out onto the internet and pick a fight over nothing. Beefing for the sake of beefing.

To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting – all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.

This is one of the parts that drives me nuts. The fact that you have to literally duck your head and monitor what you say, just so that you can avoid a conflict with someone who literally has nothing better to do than stir up conflict.

The article goes on to describe what are known as Mooks and Knights:

A mook is an involuntary anonymous, fungible, angry figure desperate to be seen as significant. I was a mook over a year ago. I’ll admit it. I was raging for the sake of raging. Being a mook is mostly about taking sides in somebody else’s fight, whatever that cause may be. It’s mostly opt-in, which means you get to decide if you want to participate or not. You get to choose if your stress levels go up or not. You get to do this every time you engage.

Knights are the guys who have the cause that the mooks fight for. Here’s the thing though:

The conflict is happening for the sake of conflict itself. The goal isn’t to end the fight, but to keep it going, ideally without end. A war without end. A beef that never ends. Fighting for the sake of fighting. This is outrage culture.

The only reason for the fight is to sustain the fight, there really isn’t a strategy to all of this except to sustain and stretch out the beef. The knights are the instigators for the most part and the mooks are the cannon fodder and combat soldiers.

Why the beefing?

The mark of a knight of the vast round table of the Internet of Beefs is the relentless pursuit of the Holy Grift. A mercantile mission for the end of history…..

[P]ush come to shove, that the grifting motive will rule behavior rather than ideological ends. The grifters keep the culture war going…

It’s all about making money and getting the clicks basically. In many cases I think it’s all about trying to remain relevant. Especially when you are a knight of the Internet of Beefs and you need to make sure that the cash keeps flowing in.

While the mooks fight, the knights make money.

And there it is. Have a knight write a tweet or a post of some beefy outrage, whether it’s “real” or not, whether it truly matters or not, (in my experience, it usually doesn’t matter) add a link to the knight’s latest course, book, or seminar, click send, and there you have it. Agitate the mooks and get them fired up so that the dumpster fires get started and then bystanders as well as other mooks join in the foray and links to products and services get clicked. Money is made.

Get people agitated and they want to buy something to alleviate their agitation. It’s one of the oldest sales tricks in the book. It’s similar to creating a problem for someone and then selling them the solution to the very problem you created for them.

I’m not shitting on guys who want to make money, by all means, make your money. Do your thing. I’m just choosing to opt-out of the Internet of Beefs. I’m choosing to not be a mook anymore.

I don’t need to engage in the ‘rage. I don’t need to buy another course or book or whatever it is that is being sold. I’ll be fine without it.

Opting out is a great thing:

Your stress levels fall dramatically. Life tends to “slow down” somewhat. Colors, sounds, and the taste of things has become more vibrant. Maybe that last one about vibrancy is only something that I have experienced, it may not apply to you, but hey, you can always find out for yourself by trying the opt-out route. At a bare minimum, it won’t hurt you to try it.

Please give that article that I linked to at the beginning a full read. It might be one of those “aha moments” for you like it was for me. At the very least, it allowed me to see what was going on around me on the internet and it gave me a way to literally predict what is or was going to happen next.

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