So stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s this guy. He’s like a prince, or an orphan, or kind of a loser — like an orphan-prince-loser-type guy.

And then there’s this girl. And she’s hot.

And then usually there’s a bad guy too. And he’s bad.

So, logically, our orphan-prince-loser-type guy has to save the hot girl, and usually does it by beating up the bad guy. He solves the super secret conspiracy to overthrow the government, or destroys the evil space ship, or has a sword fight to the death where his ear gets hacked off and he barely lives. Shit blows up. People die. The bad guy ultimately loses.

The crowd goes wild. And our former orphan-prince-loser guy is now a capital-H Hero. And what do heroes get as their reward for saving the universe? Duh. The hot girl.

What I just described to you is loosely the plot of practically every story you’ve ever been told — from Star Wars to Iron Man to Good Will Hunting to Super Mario Bros.

And, of course, every Disney movie ever made.

Sometimes there will be a wrinkle in the story too, making it “tragic.” Like the hero will even die for the hot girl (Terminator, Titanic) or the hot girl dies and the hero decides to go on a murderous rampage to for love and righteousness (Braveheart, Gladiator), or the girl turns out to be batshit insane and the hero realizes he threw away his entire life for nothing (Gone with the Wind, Vertigo). And in rare instances, the hero cannot be with the hot girl for legitimate capital-H Heroic reasons and must live a life of solemn “what if?” misery (Casablanca, Shawshank Redemption, etc.)

Yes, this practically is every movie you’ve ever watched, every comic book you’ve ever read, every video game you’ve ever beaten, every story book that your parents read to your drooling face.

And it’s fucking up your sex life.

Yes, Disney is wholly responsible for your lack of sexual confidence. And here’s why:

These stories send messages to us as we’re growing up. Some of the messages are nice, like “Trees are good!” and “Greed is bad!” Other messages are bad. They’re messages that are hammered into our drooling faces our whole lives and they give us really screwed up expectations. One of those bad messages is: You must earn the vagina.

If you want to be with a beautiful girl, you have to do something capital-H heroic, you have to stand out, be someone unique and amazing and awe-inspiring. Otherwise pretty girls will never like you. You have to save the fucking world. Then you are rewarded with vagina. That’s all you are and all you’re worth, a proud vagina-recipient. So start blowing shit up.

Obviously, the vast majority of us haven’t saved the world or blown anything up recently. In fact, the reality is that even if all of us are unique and special, none of us actually feel particularly unique or special at any given moment. None of us feel like we’ve done anything capital-H Heroic. We all feel like, well, just us. And apparently that’s not good enough.

It’s the storybook narrative. And in the 21st century, it really screws up our dating lives:

1. Men spend their entire lives believing they’re not good enough to be with a woman. Men are taught to feel an immense pressure to impress women, to perform for them, to show off their money or their cars or how many digits of Pi they can memorize, so chicks might like them. This is needy and unattractive behavior and reinforces low self esteem as well as sexual anxiety. There’s a reason most guys need to be hammered to even tell a girl they like her. They all feel like they’re not good enough to like her.
    
2. Women spend their entire lives waiting for a man to do something amazing to impress her. Or, in other words, she spends her entire life waiting for her prince charming, her knight in shining armor to come “sweep her off her feet.” Women are conditioned to believe that they’re a prize that men are supposed to win through some great achievement. And when no man is saving the world or cutting off people’s heads off with a badass broad sword in the name of her love, then she inevitably ends up disappointed. It sends the message that she’s not good enough. No man is killing himself for her vagina. Therefore her vagina must be faulty in some way.

The storybook narrative instills sexual insecurity and promotes lofty standards, which, when unmet, causes both men and women to become ornery and unaccommodating to the realities of attraction and the courtship process.

When men feel like they can never be good enough to win the vagina, they decide to come up with ways to take it. Sometimes they do it through manipulation. Sometimes they do it through over-compensation. In extreme cases, they may do it by force.

When women feel like they can never be good enough to have their vagina won from them, they try to trick men into earning it. They play hard-to-get, create a bunch of unnecessary drama, or always keep the man guessing as to their intentions.

Sex as Transaction, Sex as Performance

But I’ll be real for a second, Disney isn’t actually responsible for this stuff. The storybook narrative has been going on for most of western civilization. It’s littered throughout Shakespeare and medieval texts. Even the Trojan War in The Iliad is started because of a beef over a hottie named Helen.

Hey, girl. You want me to build a giant wooden horse and ransack the ancient city of Troy for you?

The reason this narrative has existed so long is because marriage was the economic and political building block for most of the existence of civilization. In feudal societies, the way you guaranteed security to your estate was through marrying women of wealthy (and often competing) families. If you were a man of one of the underclasses, the only way to “marry up” into wealth or greater power was through accomplishing some amazing feat, usually in war. Hence, the epic tale of valiant knights saving the princess that is so often repeated.

But we live in the 21st century. Our politics and economics are no longer arranged through marriages. No one marries for political power. Women have jobs and earn their own money. We live in free-market democracies. 99.9% of us will never see a battlefield in our lives.

Years ago, sex writer Clarisse Thorn introduced me to the idea of sex as performance versus sex as transaction. The idea was originally put forth by Thomas MacAulay Millar in Yes Means Yes (a book that, I won’t lie, made me cringe a little the first time I read it). The idea is also backed up and expanded upon in books such as Sex at Dawn and Marriage: A History.

The idea goes something like this:

Anthropological evidence suggests that in pre-history, hunter/gatherer societies were, umm, rather “loose” with their sexual morals. The idea of marriage or sexual possession was (and still is) largely anathema to most of these groups. But with the rise of agriculture, humans, for the first time in our species’ existence, had surpluses of resources. And not only did we have surpluses of resources, but men, due to their size and strength, gained a large competitive advantage at acquiring them over women. Men began to compete against one another economically, hoarding surplus resources and then using those resources to dominate the others around them. Economic hierarchies were born. City/states followed. Monarchs and lords and the feudal system followed from that, as did organized warfare and the first empires.

(Famous scientist and author Jared Diamond went as far as to call agriculture “The biggest mistake in human history.” I’m not sure I would go that far.)

The problem with this new social structure was that men, for the first time ever, had two major concerns: 1) they needed to guarantee paternity of their own children and 2) they needed to manage their political competition through marriages, alliances and familial bonds.

Thus female chastity began to matter. Fidelity began to matter. Fertility began to matter. Sex became an economic and political transaction, and women — who were now useless for war and physical labor — became pro-creating assets for men. Women provided sex and procreation. In return, their families were given resources, dowries, political alliances, land, etc.

Men now had to win the vagina.

And so they did, for about 7,000 years plus or minus.

But as I mentioned earlier, times have changed. We don’t arrange our society through marriages anymore. We can will our resources to anyone of our choosing when we die. We have legal systems in place to guarantee our assets. Women have jobs and their own incomes. STD’s are no longer lethal. Women (and soon men) have birth control and can dictate their own procreation. We live in the most non-violent period of human history. People are living to almost 90.

Treating sex as a transaction no longer makes sense. In fact, now that the economic deck has been shuffled and largely equalized, treating sex as a transaction harms the self-esteem and emotional health of both men and women.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we no longer need to use sex to fulfill our physiological and security needs. Now we can move on to using it to meet our needs for intimacy and esteem.

What Millar proposes — somewhat radically — is that we should treat sex as a performance, as an activity that is done for the sake of doing it, for the sake of self-expression and pleasure and intimacy.

When sex is treated as a transaction, it’s often in both men and women’s interests to hide or misdirect their intentions, creating the perception of higher value so they can earn as much as possible from the interaction. As I’ve detailed before, this leads to all sorts of unpleasant processes that makes dating a pain in the ass and interferes with intimacy and self esteem.

When sex is treated as performance, then it’s in the best interest of both men and women to approach it with clear intentions, without shame, and without judgment — strategies which are proven to attract more members of the opposite sex, to create more satisfying sexual relationships, and to remove any ambiguity as to each person’s intentions.

Is it possible to ever 100% reach a model of sex as performance? Probably not. Despite contraception and medicine, women will always bear more risk for sexual behavior than men. Men will always have higher sex drives than women. It’s an ideal. And as an ideal it should be strived toward even if it’s never met. For all of our sakes. And so maybe the next generation won’t have to be brainwashed by the same Disney movies we were.

The post How Disney Ruined Sex For Everyone appeared first on Postmasculine.

In psychology, there’s a well-observed phenomenon known as the actor/observer bias and it states that we’re basically all a bunch of assholes.

The actor/observer bias states that all of us unconsciously assume others to be more responsible for their negative actions than their environment, and for ourselves to be less responsible for our negative actions than our environment.

For example, if you are at an intersection and someone runs through the red light and almost hits you, you think, “Wow, what a shitty driver. That guy is an idiot.” But when it’s YOU who runs the red light and almost hits somebody, you think, “It’s not my fault. The guy in front of me was driving slow and the light changed too quickly for me to stop.”

When it’s us, it’s not our fault. When it’s someone else, they’re a shitty person.

But it gets worse. The opposite happens with positive actions, too. In our own case, we over-estimate our own responsibility for the great things we do and under-estimate the responsibility of others. For example, if someone else wins a prestigious award, we make assumptions that they got it because of their connections or some sort of conspiracy and not of their own work. But if we win an award, we assume it was all because of the great work we did.

The actor/observer is a natural bias that afflicts us all. We can be mindful and try to be better about it, but we’re never completely rid of it.

Nature Vs Nurture

But what’s interesting is when you take the Actor/Observer bias and add the nature versus nurture argument to it. The nature versus nurture argument is a philosophical debate that has been going on for centuries. It’s the debate over whether behavior is primarily determined by biology or by one’s environment and prior experiences.

The answer, of course, is it’s both. Both our biology and our environments are always determining our behavior at all times. And on top of that, our biology and our environment influence one another. For instance, having elevated testosterone will cause us to behave differently, but also being subjected to certain environmental factors can raise our testosterone.

But recently, with the discoveries of neuroplasticity and epigenetics in recent decades, most biologists these days concede that environment is overall a stronger determinant of specific behaviors than biology.

Biology defines the parameters of our behavior and creates our proclivities for certain behaviors (i.e., risk-taking, neuroticism, etc.), but ultimately our external influences and past experiences determine exactly how we behave at any given moment.

But regardless, the nature/nurture debate is still foggy. Is that person violent because they have a genetic predisposition to violence? Or did they grow up in a horribly violent environment? Why do some people come from horrible environments and become healthy, admirable people and others come from good environments and become despicable people?

These questions are not easily answered. And may never easily be answered.

The answer is always that it’s somewhere between the two but we’re never certain exactly where it is. And in these foggy nature/nurture situations, our actor/observer bias will often kick in and make us more likely to attribute the poor behavior of others to biology — the idea that they were simply born a bad person rather than influenced to do something — and attribute the bad behavior of ourselves to our environment our culture.

So if a co-worker is perpetually underpaid at work, we will attribute it to him/her being inherently stupid or incapable. Whereas if WE are perpetually underpaid at work, we attribute it to being screwed over by incompetent management.

I told you it makes us all assholes.

When the actor/observer bias comes joins up with the nature/nurture debate, I call this the biology bias — the assumption that other people or groups are biological predisposed to undesirable behavior, while our behavior is simply caused by a faulty culture.

You see the biology bias pop up in all sorts of places. Instead of dealing with the actual policy arguments of many conservatives, liberals simply whitewash them as being unintelligent and inherently selfish people. Conservatives do the same with liberals by making assumptions about how they’re inherently lazy and feel entitled. Both sides rarely stop to consider the environmental factors that caused the other side to have liberal/conservative views in the first place.

The biology bias becomes particularly dangerous in the context of racism. For centuries, Europeans enslaved Africans, Native Americans and Asians based on the assumption that they were of a different (and inferior) species, that they were somehow biologically less capable than their European colonizers. But it turns out, European societies enjoyed major geographical advantages that eventually allowed them to colonize the planet (Read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Guns, Germs and Steel for more on this subject.)

Much of this still goes on today. As T and I discussed on a podcast a few months ago, he’s been arguing with a group of so-called “Human Bio-Diversity” bloggers who believe that since the average African-American has an IQ 10 points lower than the average Anglo-American, they are therefore inherently stupider or less capable.

The Biology Bias and Sexism

“When racist and sexist ideologies sanction certain hierarchical social arrangements based on biology, that biology is usually false.”

- Theodore Kemper, Social Structure and Testosterone

In my book on dating, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, I have a whole section in the middle of the book about defense mechanisms.

We all use defense mechanisms to avoid our anxieties and protect us from dealing with our shame. For instance, if we have a lot of sexual shame we may develop defense mechanisms such as rationalizing reasons to avoid sexual encounters, over-analyzing sexual situations, or over-compensating by trying to have sex with absolutely everything and everyone.

Another common defense mechanism is to stereotype a population, especially if we feel victimized by that particular population.

Women make an easy target for the biological bias because a) many men are perpetually frustrated by women and b) there are obvious biological differences between the two sexes (of the “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” variety.)

Over the years, I’ve seen the following biological arguments made about women as a population: they will use a man for his resources and then move on (like locusts or something), they will lie and manipulate you to get you to like them more, they are overly emotional, they are less intelligent and incapable of rational thought, they seek sexual attention to make themselves feel better, they will cheat on you or leave you the minute a better option comes around, and so on.

None of these statements have any biological evidence backing them up. All of these statements only apply to certain individual women, some of whom cluster in certain locales (like say, I don’t know, sleazy clubs). All of the men who make these statements have a history of rejection or emotional trauma involving women.

Coincidence? I think not.

For me, this is the contradiction that underlies most of the manosphere literature out there and ruins it for me. Undesirable behavior from women (they’re manipulative, overly-emotional, hypergamous) is attributed to their inherent biology, while undesirable behavior from men (weak, feminized, too sensitive) is attributed to a culture forced upon them. You can’t have it both ways. Either you face up to the overly emotional, manipulative behavior in yourself as well as women, or you focus on the cultural effects on both genders. You can’t have it one way for one gender and the other way for the other.

But wait! There’s more!

Feminists are not immune to these types of actor/observer biases. These are just a few of the examples of reverse-sexism I’ve seen from the other side of the fence over the years:

If a woman fights her way to the top of the corporate ladder, it’s her ingenuity and hard work. If a man does, it’s only because he’s benefiting from patriarchy. If a man complains that a woman is being flirtatious, then she is sexually empowered. If a woman complains that a man is being flirtatious, it’s harassment. If a woman says she likes a strong man who takes care of his body, she is asserting her desires. If a man says he appreciates a woman who dresses up nice and wears high heels, he’s a pig.

Granted, many feminists side-step much of the biology bias by subscribing to the belief that culture defines everything. But they still fall victim to the actor/observer bias constantly, like the rest of us.

One could even go so far as to say that the so-called “battle of the sexes” is mostly just the biology bias in action. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Regardless of our gender, race, sexuality, nationality, religious beliefs or political beliefs, as humans our minds are bad at dealing with large populations. It’s too much data. Our minds take shortcuts in order to manage all of the information they consume. These shortcuts, if unchecked and unregulated, can easily turn us into bigoted assholes.

That goes for racists and reverse-racists. That goes for sexists and reverse-sexists. That goes for religious nuts and atheists. That goes from liberals and conservatives.

We are all equal in that we’re all biased against populations and groups who we don’t identify with. It’s unconscious and inevitable. But it’s only particularly evil if these biases are forged into long-term beliefs and later transmuted into actual prejudiced actions.

That is why practices such as mindfulness, therapy and meditation are so crucial. They help us not only become more objective about others, but also help us unravel the the biased beliefs and limitations we place on ourselves.

Or as Anaïs Nin once said: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

The post The Biology Bias appeared first on Postmasculine.

I should start off by saying the reasons laid out in this article on why young Americans should work overseas are practical and not ideological. This is not a liberal argument or a conservative argument; it’s a life argument. For two centuries, if you were young, ambitious, and college-educated, North America offered you the best opportunities. But the tides are changing and that’s no longer the case.

The odd thing is that no one in the United States seems to realize this yet. People haven’t caught on. And what does that mean? Opportunity. Tons of it.

One of my best friends recently told me that the prestigious multinational corporation he worked for was itching to permanently send him to India. They wanted him to manage their expansion into that market. And, obviously, India is a huge emerging market. They gave him the Godfather offer to go — enough money to live in a mansion, with personal chefs, private drivers, everything. The irony, of course, was that my friend is a first generation Indian-American. His parents gave up everything decades ago and fought their way to the US to give their kids opportunities they would never have had back in India. They succeeded. What they didn’t expect was that that opportunity for their son they gave up everything for? It was back in India.

And such is the irony for this generation of Americans. Our grandparents immigrated to the US for opportunity. And now, in many cases, with our US education, the greater opportunity is elsewhere.

If you are college educated and under 30, there’s a significant chance that you would be better off working in a country outside of the United States and I will explain why.

Reason #1 – Your market value is higher elsewhere

So the primary argument of this whole piece boils down to this: We’ve all heard the horror stories about how college grads can’t find work or are stuck working a job they’re insanely over-qualified for. In the US, there are simply no longer enough quality jobs for everyone with a university education. We have an education surplus. It’s reached the point where many are openly questioning whether going to university is even worth it, while others call it an outright scam.

Meanwhile, you have massive emerging economies in Asia and South America that are desperate for college grads and especially for western-educated college grads.

It’s simple supply and demand. There aren’t enough jobs in the US and Europe anymore for young people. There aren’t enough highly educated people in emerging countries. Put two and two together, and your market value is much higher elsewhere.

In fact, western-educated employees are valued so highly in many parts of the world, that companies will deck you out, covering everything from your expenses, housing, transportation, as well as benefits, just to get you to come over.

Reason #2 – The quality-of-life/cost-of-living ratio is now much higher elsewhere

A friend of mine recently told me that he spoke to a luxury hotel owner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The hotel owner was desperate to hire managers with western education. He claimed that Malaysia’s education system, while good, taught obedience and that Malays did not problem solve or think for themselves. Therefore they made poor managers. He was willing to hire anyone — yes, anyone — with a western university degree and immediately put them in a management position, a position that would take at least five to 10 years in the industry to reach back in the US. Perks included paid housing (penthouse suite within the hotel in downtown KL), paid transportation, and all the benefits.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Hah, yeah, but who would want to live in a shithole like Koala Oompa Loompa?” I know. I thought the same thing… until I went there. I expected dusty markets with loud motorbikes, no electricity and spiders the size of my face.

But, as with most Asian cities, I got something totally unexpected: Kuala Lumpur is amazing. In fact, it’s probably a nicer city than the one you live in right now. Don’t believe me? Let’s just put it this way. I went to a mall in Kuala Lumpur and there was a ferris wheel and a roller coaster inside the mall. Yeah…

Kuala Lumpur’s indoor roller coaster is better than you.

The fact of the matter is that the developing world (minus much of Africa) has in many ways caught up to the developed world and caught up fast. It’s happened under our noses and we haven’t even realized it. When I started traveling the world in 2009, almost every place I went to blew my expectations away. I expected to show up to a dirt heap and get my kidneys carved out, and what I got was an amazing quality of life for my money.

Similarly, when my girlfriend, who is Brazilian, began traveling around the world a few years ago, she had the exact opposite reaction: every place she went was not nearly as nice as she expected. Why? She grew up in Brazil and assumed that the US and Europe were technological and social paradises, light years ahead of her native country. She was wrong. Over and over again, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Economists measure quality of life with different metrics. They also measure cost of living. By these metrics, usually the same countries come out on top. What nobody has measured (to my knowledge) is a quality of life PER cost of living metric. Why nobody asked me about this, I have no idea.

But it’s an easy concept to grasp. Here’s an example: $3000 per month in New York City gets you a shitty roach-infested studio apartment in a bad part of Brooklyn or Queens and a lot of fatty take-out meals. Chances are you are working 50- or 60-hour weeks and the weather sucks six months out of the year. In Bangkok, $3000 per month gets you the nicest penthouse apartment in the city, your own driver, access to some of the best restaurants and nightlife in Asia, and you’re probably working 30- or 35-hour weeks. The high-life there is probably 90% of the high-life in NYC, but you’re now living it on the same income that got you a shitty studio apartment back in Queens.

Reason #3 – The Jobs Aren’t Coming Back

I hate to be the one that breaks this to you, but the jobs aren’t coming back. Sure, unemployment rates have dropped to below 8%, but as Republicans correctly point out, this is because people are giving up on working altogether and the real number of jobs is falling. The US government keeps reporting job growth every month, but what they fail to mention is that the job growth is slower than the overall population growth.

There is a structural change in the economy. Technological improvements mean our economy can produce more value while employing fewer workers. Economists refer to this as the de-coupling of labor and growth. Technological automation and globalization has created an economy that can grow while employing fewer people. This technology and outsourcing has also developed an economy that disproportionally rewards entrepreneurs, investors and corporations. Hence the whole “We are the 99%” hubbub a year or two ago.

And with the accelerating rate of technological advancement, the problem is only going to get worse, not better. Democrats and Republicans will continue to blame the sluggish economy and shitty job numbers on each other. But know this: that if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Silicon Valley’s. And the same technology that has enriched our lives and allows me to write this and you to read it, is ultimately the culprit.

Shit’s changing, folks. And it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. We’re seeing a perfect storm of sorts: the decoupling of economic growth to household income and labor productivity with a simultaneous aging population. I don’t care who is president; things are going to be a mess for a while to come.

(If you’d like to learn more about this, I highly recommend reading this book: Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)

Reason #4 – It’s time for everyone to grow up and become global citizens

Christopher Hitchens, about traveling the world, once wrote:

What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.

This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people.

In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.

There’s a lot of alarmism in the media these days. Iran is going to start World War III. War between China and the US is inevitable. A bunch of rag-tag tribesmen in Pakistan are going to wrought nuclear annihilation on all of us. Drug runners in Mexico are going to chop your limbs off. Bizarrely named African rebels are going to drink your blood.

It’s time to get over the hype, move beyond the overblown cultural differences within the human species, and to get over, as Hitchens quotes Freud as saying, “the narcissism of the small difference.”

Living abroad has been one of the biggest personal growth experiences of my life. It’s given me the most unique and memorable experiences of my life. It’s made me smarter, wiser, more tolerant, and more empathetic. And I’m by no means unique in this regard. Just about any world traveler will tell you the same thing.

But the biggest asset has been eliminating my narcissism of that small difference. A lot of people throw around the cliché “broadening your horizons.” But I see it simply as engaging humanity. Recognizing that our perceptions of the dreaded “other” are dominated by the extremes. And that despite cultural differences, people are all trying to get the same needs met.

As a young adult, your biggest assets are time and ambition. If you fail today, you have the advantage of being able to start fresh tomorrow. The difference between a broke, jobless 22-year-old and a broke, jobless, 26-year-old is basically nothing. So use those four years to do something crazy, to shoot for the moon.

Leverage these years. Because one day you won’t be able to. The world is changing in ways people haven’t caught on to yet. And you can position yourself to be there to capitalize on this new borderless, instant-information economy.

Or you can position yourself as part of a by-gone era, serving up lattes at Starbucks, paying off that English Lit degree you never used, wondering where you went wrong, and why Obama (or whoever is in the White House) hasn’t fixed everything yet.

It’s your job to fix your life. So get moving.

Resources to help you work overseas:

• Career Hack
• Transitions Abroad
• GoAbroad.com
• British Universities North American Club
• Easy Expat
• Overseas Digest

The post Why Young Americans Should Work Overseas appeared first on Postmasculine.

I used try to convince myself that I didn’t want to have sex. Yeah, it sounds weird, but it’s true.

At least in very specific contexts it was true. Like girl-in-my-bed-with-her-shirt-off-at-3AM type of contexts.

This was back in like 2005 or 2006. My ex-girlfriend had recently ripped my heart out of my chest and carved it up with a steak knife, and suddenly semi-naked girls in front of me had the magical effect of making me not-so-interested in sex anymore.

I’d find excuses, like I was too tired, too drunk, had to get up early, and so on. I would distract us from the situation by pulling up some song on my computer or playing guitar for her. Yes, I’m cringing just writing this. But it’s true. I did it. And I believed it too, at the time. It felt real. That was the problem.

I developed some bizarre beliefs around this period. One of them was that any girl you had sex with would immediately demand a serious relationship from you. Like there was some sort of binding agreement that came with a naked vagina. I rationalized that maybe I just didn’t have a big sex drive. I rationalized that it was the girls who weren’t very interested in sex, since after all, they only had their shirts off and weren’t practically raping me like the girls in the porn videos always did.

So her shirt would pop back on. I would busy myself with some song on iTunes and/or drink myself until I passed out. By morning the problem would solve itself (i.e., she would go home).

Then the next day, after she would leave, I would jerk off thinking about how hot that girl was and what an idiot I was for not going for it when I had the chance. The low sex drive excuse became inexcusable. The willingness of the girls became inexcusable. Even the expectations of relationship nonsense became inexcusable. This happened enough times and I had to come to the painful conclusion: it’s me.

The “it’s me” conclusion is one of the hardest conclusions for any of us to come to. Yet, we all probably need to come to it more often. Hell, one could even argue that one should err on the side of assuming it’s always you. At least that way you always feel empowered to do something about your situation.

We’re All Unreliable

I wasn’t alone. And neither are you. We all do this to some extent. We all buy into our own beliefs and conclusions at face value. And why not? After all, our conclusions always seem the most reasonable to us at the time.

Psychology has made some amazing strides in the past couple decades in showing just how unreliable we all are. Ancient Buddhism put a heavy emphasis on embracing “not knowing” or embracing not attaching to specific thoughts or feelings. Eastern spirituality has emphasized that we should watch our own thoughts and treat them just as that, thoughts. And western psychology has caught up and come to many of the same conclusions. There are three researchers in particular I want to cover. And ironically, they’re all named Dan.

First up, Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow shows that we are all actually emotional (and selfish) decision-makers, and that our logical mind spends most of its time finding reasons and justifications for what our emotions have already concluded about a situation.

For instance, after the horrible experience with my first girlfriend, I was afraid of sex. Point blank, that was the issue: fear. And that fear dictated my decision-making: acting like a weirdo with a hot shirtless girl in front of me. I would get weird. She would feel unwanted and insecure. I would get nervous. No one would have sex. And I’d be afraid to ever call her again. Yet, somehow my rational mind found a couple neat and tidy beliefs to justify all of this erratic behavior.

Next up, we have Dan Ariely, who in his book Predictably Irrational points out that we’re terribly ineffective at measuring the cost/benefit of most situations, ESPECIALLY when emotions get involved. We suck at making apples-to-oranges comparisons. We suck at evaluating potential downsides to situations we like. We over-estimate the value of things that come with high costs.

For instance, I meet men and women all the time that make the following mistake. First, they assume since someone was difficult for them to attract — i.e., they put a lot of thought and effort into it — that therefore person must be universally highly desirable. But this is simply not the case. Someone who is highly incompatible with you will feel difficult to attract, but that doesn’t mean that they’re worth the effort.

Conversely, many people make the mistake that since they perceive someone as very attractive, then they must invest extra thought and effort into attracting them. Men make this assumption all the fucking time and I want to punch them in the balls whenever they do. “Well, she’s hot, so I HAVE to act different around her.” No. Wrong. Incorrect.

And finally, we have Daniel Gilbert, our last Dan. In Dan’s excellent book Stumbling on Happiness, he shows us how we’re terrible at both a) predicting what will make us happy/unhappy in the future and b) judging how we actually felt in the past.

Back when I was scared of sex, I had bizarre expectations of what these women would want of me and what I was obligated to do in return. I was protecting myself in that moment. I knew nothing about what they actually wanted or even about what I actually wanted.

We think we’re constructing expectations to lead ourselves into a better future. But usually our expectations are designed to protect us from the present.

Some people dream of having the perfect car. Some dream of the perfect job. Some people start naming their first-born child an hour into the first date. Our expectations and desires about the future are diversions and protections from dealing the moment staring us right in the face.

Believing Your Own Bullshit

There’s that old self help saying that goes, “If you keep doing the same things you’ve always done, then you’ll keep getting the same results you’ve always gotten.”

The problem is that our mind has always constructed really good reasons for doing what we’ve always done. That’s why we do them! But the Three Dan’s show us that just because our mind believes something or gives us a reason, doesn’t mean it’s right or useful. In fact, sometimes it’s harmful.

Any time you want to change yourself, you are going to have to dismantle the reasoning your mind constructed to justify your past behaviors.

As the Three Dan’s have taught us, most of our reasons for unhelpful behavior are bullshit. Most of our reasoning for our behavior is to justify our prior emotional decisions. And many of our emotional decisions are based on fear or anxiety or avoiding dealing with some sort of past trauma.

I talked to a woman recently who complained about her work/life balance. She was pulling 70+ hour weeks on the regular running her own business, and even her free time was spent networking with possible clients or associates. It was driving her nuts. But her reasoning was that she needed — not wanted, not preferred, but needed — to earn over one million dollars per year before she would allow herself to start a family.

Yes, one million dollars.

Well, after some prodding — and by “prodding” I mean me and a few other people telling her that that’s absolutely ridiculous — it came out that she grew up poor with unreliable parents and spent part of her childhood living out of a car.

Bingo.

Our bullshit always sounds reasonable to us… until we realize we’re unhappy or unsatisfied and can’t put our finger on why. This is why it’s great to have friends or a therapist or a community of people around you who can challenge you on your beliefs and assumptions.

The “Why?” Game

You know how little kids incessantly ask “Why?” to everything? There’s a genuine curiosity and openness to children that drives them to question everything. And it usually drives the rest of us crazy.

I’m not sure when I started doing this. It was probably when I was high as a teenager or something. But a long time ago I started asking “Why?” about a lot of my internal thoughts and rationalizations. And then I’d take those answers and ask “Why?” again, and continue looking for the most emotionally relevant answers.

At some point, I christened it the “Why?” Game and used it with much success with a lot of my clients when teaching them how to open up with their emotions and have deeper conversations.

The “Why?” Game is great because it immediately gets at what actually matters: emotional motivations. And from there, prior beliefs, prior traumas, poor decisions, etc.

Here’s an example of the “Why?” Game with my awkward sex avoidance above:

Why do I keep passing up on these sexual situations and keep regretting it? Because when in that situation I become more focused on something else and less motivated by sex. Why? Because I don’t want to deal with all of the expectations and drama that comes from sex. Why? Because I’m not emotionally prepared for that kind of thing. I don’t want it. Why? Because I feel like my only girlfriend had expectations I couldn’t live up to (whoa). Why? Because I guess I never felt good enough for her, especially after she dumped me. Why? Because I don’t feel like I’m good enough to receive sex and affection from women (double whoa). Why? Because I grew up in a family where emotional connections were seen as part of transactions and obligations and not freely given. Why? Because my parents had trouble with many of these same intimacy issues in their own lives.

Now, granted, the above paragraph took me months of self-questioning and therapy to work out. But within a few of those months, it unfastened my weird hang-ups about my sexuality. Soon I was able to face those same sexual situations with a much clearer and more objective head, and as a result, the anxiety dropped of precipitously.

Whenever I feel stuck I’ve developed a simple habit of asking “Why?” It’s something I can just feel now. I’ll run into a situation or action where I consistently feel stuck or unhappy or obsessive. And I bust out the “Why?” question.

Usually, the answer does not come immediately. Sometimes you have to give yourself a few weeks or even months to play with the question. Just keep asking it. Eventually the answer will come up. And you’ll know it’s the true answer because you’ll feel it. It will carry a far greater emotional weight than any other explanation. Often times, it will be the one answer you want to avoid or deny, but can’t. And when it comes, coming to accept that uncomfortable answer will go a long way in remedying the beliefs and behaviors causing you to suffer.

Viktor Frankl called this process logotherapy. It has since grown to become an entire branch of clinical psychology. I think it’s just how to stop lying to yourself. How to harbor a healthy skepticism about yourself, calling yourself out on your own bullshit, undoing the mental traps we all set for ourselves yet few of us ever notice, much less disarm.

The post How to Stop Lying to Yourself appeared first on Postmasculine.

I am close to finishing my speaking tour and, as you can imagine, I’ve been talking a lot about vulnerability and why it’s so beneficial for men to implement into their lives.

Interestingly, the same couple issues and clarifications keep coming up at every stop. So I figured I’d throw up a blog post for everybody’s reference, once and for all, so I don’t have to continue explaining myself over and over.

First off, just as a quick refresher, vulnerability is when you consciously choose to NOT hide your emotions or desires from others. This can be as simple as complimenting someone on how good they look, approaching an attractive stranger you don’t know, establishing clear and strong boundaries, or expressing your undying love to someone.

Vulnerability is the cornerstone concept of my book Models: Attract Women Through Honesty.

The benefits to vulnerability are massive, although not always pleasantly achieved. In fact, vulnerability is usually downright uncomfortable. But that’s OK. Because being vulnerable in your interactions creates a greater deal of trust and intimacy, removes games and ambiguity, creates sexual tension through bold behaviors, accelerates sexual and romantic relationships, builds self esteem and (usually) demonstrates confidence to the other person.

And no, you don’t have to be tall, rich, handsome or whatever. This is for humans. That means ALL humans. ALL relationships. It just happens to make your sexual relationships far more sexy and intimate.

People don’t realize this. But honesty is sexy. Exposing yourself is, err… sexy. Saying, “Look, let’s cut the bullshit, I think you’re great and would rather hang out with you alone,” is attractive when you say it with conviction and mean it. Saying, “This is a bit awkward, but it’s only because I feel a little nervous around you,” is, believe it or not, a universally attractive statement when it’s genuine.

The logic is simple:

The greatest demonstration of power and security is to actually make oneself defenseless, to become as comfortable with one’s weaknesses as possible.

When accompanied by authenticity and personal accountability, vulnerability is almost always extremely attractive behavior. When it’s not attractive, then it signals legitimate incompatibility. All in all, it makes your dating life 1,000 times easier and more fun to navigate.

If you want to understand vulnerability and its benefits more, I recommend reviewing a few other articles:

• Power in Vulnerability explains why vulnerability is actually a sign of personal strength and attractive.
• Vulnerability and Manipulative Women explains how being vulnerable attracts the right women into our lives and creates healthy relationships.
• A Note on Vulnerability clarifies that vulnerability is determined by intentions, not by the actual words you speak.

The Two Mistakes

There are two big mistakes people make when attempting to be more vulnerable and authentic. The first mistake is that they view vulnerability as simply another technique. They think, “Oh, I’ll just share everything bad about me and then she’ll have sex with me.” The point of vulnerability is a relinquishing of control, not a tool for further control.

Any expression of emotions or vulnerability must be unconditional, that is, without expectation, otherwise it’s just another form of manipulation.

If you share a heartbreaking story about your dog dying because you think that’s what someone wants to hear and that that will make someone like you or be attracted to you, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s not genuine, and therefore it is not vulnerable. Not only are you continuing to be fake and inauthentic, but you’re now whoring out some of your most cherished life memories for the sake of getting your penis wet. Congratulations. You are officially desperate.

Instead, you should share the story of your dying dog and the emotions that went along with it either because a) you are genuinely inspired to by the conversation, or b) as a way of relating to the emotions or experiences of whomever you are speaking to. Boom. It’s just who you are. And here it is. No expectations. No desire to control people’s perceptions of you. Just share yourself and let go.

So that’s the first mistake people make. Pretty straightforward.

The second mistake with vulnerability is more complicated and is something I lovingly refer to as “emotional vomit.”

Emotional Vomit and You

Emotional vomit is when you suddenly unload an inappropriate amount of emotions and personal history into a conversation, usually to the utter horror of the person listening.

Emotional vomit is difficult because on the one hand, it is genuinely vulnerable, but on the other hand, it’s repellant and unattractive. In effect, you’re being open and authentic about how needy and pathetic you are. And whether hidden or apparent, neediness is never attractive.

So I get a lot of emails saying, “I was vulnerable, I went on and on about how much I loved this girl, and it freaked her out. What gives?”

The difficulty with emotional vomit is that if you’re harboring a lot of neediness, then it needs to come out somehow, in some way, for you to ever resolve it. This is what I refer to as the pain period. In my article on the pain period, I give an example of me emotionally vomiting about my ex-girlfriend at the time. In fact, I emotionally vomited that one a few times to a few different people back then. And in most cases, it was met with pity and in the case of women, turned them off completely.

The mistake people make with emotional vomit is that they expect the simple act of vomiting it out to suddenly fix their issues. The point of emotional vomit is to make you aware of your issues, so you can fix them. When I went on and on about what a lying stupid whore my ex was, all of that anger didn’t fix my neediness. What it did was got me to see how angry and loathsome I had become without me even knowing it. When we’re isolated in the padded walls of our minds, it’s easy to believe we’re justified in everything we think or feel. It’s when we expose those thoughts and feelings to the light that we realize how far off track we’ve become and it allows us to readjust in the future.

And that’s what I noticed. I noticed that for how angry I was, I certainly wasn’t nearly as “over her” as I thought I was. It was around this time that I got into therapy which helped me realize that my anger at my ex went even deeper and was also related with my family.

Eventually, after more reflection and calming down a bit, I was able to realize that actually, I had placed an inordinate amount of expectations on my ex and I hadn’t been such a great boyfriend either. This effectively resolved much of the issue for me, much of the anger for her and for women in general. But it was hard and painful to get there.

The emotional vomit gave me the awareness to do my healing, but it wasn’t the healing by itself. Eventually, you have to become accountable to your own thoughts and feelings and work them out. If not, then you’re just going to continue to be that angry man, screaming about how lying stupid whores, turning off everyone you come across.

Professions of Undying Love, Blah, blah, blah

But in most of the complaints I get about emotional vomit, it involves the man professing his undying love to a woman and freaking the girl out. The men often feel cheated, as they put themselves on the line and gave these women the gift of their love and emotions.

Although getting rejected in this way sucks, I would call this a good problem to have. Because it shows you that your emotional investment is incredibly disproportional to your actual dating experiences. If I went on a coffee date with a woman, and she wrote me a six page email professing her undying love for me, I would freak out too. Yes, she’s putting herself out there and making herself vulnerable, but her emotions are completely disproportional to the substance of our relationship, and are therefore needy and a turn off.

People who do this are demonstrating anxious attachment behavior.

When men do this, they usually find a way to blame the woman (or women in general) for not appreciating them or for taking advantage of them. What they should be doing is looking at what inspired their own emotions and whether those emotions are reasonable or not. Are you daydreaming about marriage before even kissing her? Are you crying because she cancelled your date to watch the baseball game together?

The intensity of your emotion is not proportional to the depth of the relationship and should be a glaring billboard letting you know that the issue runs deeper within yourself and not with her. You’re not in love with her. You’re in love with the idea of her. You’re in love with the idea of not being alone or not being desperate anymore. The woman herself is interchangeable and meaningless.

Women sense this. And that is why this is so unattractive.

Take responsibility for your emotional vomit. Analyze the emotions inspiring it. Be accountable to them. And then build yourself up and invest in yourself to overcome your neediness. This is not a short-term get laid solution (although one must be vulnerable in those situations as well). This is a long-term life solution. So start implementing it now.

Note: If you want to get really deep into vulnerability and why it’s so important to emotional health, check out Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly.

Also: There are tons of readers who have implemented vulnerability into their own lives to great effect. If you have, or if you feel like I’ve forgotten anything, please tell us about it in the comments. Thanks.

The post The Vulnerability Primer appeared first on Postmasculine.

Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare. All of its power comes from leveraging the imperfections of the human mind and the tendency for people to make dumb decisions when they’re afraid.

The bombings yesterday killed three people and injured over 100 more. When all is said and done, probably about a dozen people will be dead. It’s tragic and upsetting.

But over 115 people die each day in the US due to car accidents. An estimated 125 die each day due to lack of access to health care. A whopping 1,162 die due to smoking-related illnesses. And 105 die each day due to suicide.

In the grand scheme of things, a bombing like this is a blip on the radar, gone as quickly as it came. Yet it generates a much stronger emotional reaction from us than anything else. Everyone is talking about it. It’s impossible to go anywhere on the internet without reading about it. Why?

Psychological research has shown that humans have a number of fear triggers, triggers that cause us to become far more afraid than the actual threat itself merits.

One is when an act of violence is random. If the act of violence is directed at a specific individual or group, it’s easy to brush it off as someone else’s problem. They may be dead, but we’re safe. But when it’s random, our minds have a beautiful tendency to always assume we’re next. It’s the same perceptual bias that keeps people buying lottery tickets, the self-absorbed notion that we’re always somehow the one in a million.

Secondly, terrorism is public. Terrorists intentionally target public places so that even if they don’t injure the most people, the most people will see it and be affected by it. There’s a symbolism to terrorism. The more significant the public event, the more magnitude the violence will be perceived to have. Had this bomb blown up at a retirement home in Wyoming, chances are it’d get far less coverage. And sadly, it would feel less significant, even if it killed more people.

Finally, terrorism takes advantage of the fact that fear sells. Humans are wired to feel like fear is more important than any other emotion, therefore we’re far more likely to share it, broadcast it, and yes, even view it. As a result, it spreads throughout society like a virus, reinforcing the idea over and over again to everyone who sees it: you’re next.

This is why we get everyone and their mom on Facebook and Twitter posting soliloquys about how upset they are. We get media outlets are pumping out article after article of unconfirmed “news.” And we get widespread voyeurism, as nobody can look away from the gruesome pictures and videos. Everybody buys into the drama. Everyone feels righteous in their horrible emotions. And everyone then continues to spread the disease of fear further.

The problem with indulging in this process is that it’s this exact process that makes terrorism powerful: our reaction to it. Terrorism depends on the victims to be too self-absorbed to look at the situation at a population-level. It depends on people becoming self-righteous and paranoid and on them becoming glued to the repetitive news coverage for 12 hours straight. It depends on people buying into the irrational belief, “I’m next.”

It’s drama on the highest scale, the ultimate reality TV show. And when you indulge in it, you open yourself up to disgusting beliefs. Apparently a FOX News employee tweeted to “Kill all Muslims.” People on Facebook are beginning to post long rants about US foreign policy or whatever their pet cause is, despite the fact we know absolutely nothing about who did this or why they did it. Tear-jerker stories abound this morning of some random dude who tried to pick up and carry another random dude who lost his leg, marathon runners who ran to the blood bank despite the fact that there was no need for blood, and of course the politicians’ obligatory platitudes about country, strength, justice, blah, blah, blah.

My initial reactions were no different from everyone else’s: shock, disbelief, fear, sadness. My cousin ran in the marathon and finished less than an hour before the explosion occurred (she’s fine). Many of my friends still live in Boston and in many ways I see it as my home town. Hell, I stood on that corner just six days before, waiting to meet a friend for dinner. It was surreal, and horrifying.

But that’s where it ends. This incident honestly doesn’t involve me. And it doesn’t involve you either. Unless you know one of the 100 and some odd people sitting in Mass General Hospital right now, or you were standing on Boylston yesterday afternoon when the blast happened; it’s not about you.

Mourn the tragedy. Feel the anger and sadness and confusion. But then move on. This isn’t about you, or me, or your aunt who used to live there and oh-my-god, my brother’s friend used to work in an office building like three blocks from there.

This is not even about country or religion. It’s about one derranged murderer, the victims, and the police.

That’s it.

Terrorism is a fact of our age. The internet and 24-hour media machine enable it. But it’s a psychological weapon. A home-made bomb does little. Hijacking a plane does little. Even blowing up an entire building does little. It’s the fear and paranoia and blame and hate of the millions of people who watch it that does something. And it does something insidious.

In World War II, the Germans attempted to bomb England into oblivion. The idea was to bomb the English population into making Churchill withdraw from the war on the continent. It was terrorism on the widest scale imaginable. People died like this every single day.

From this period, a famous English phrase came about: Keep calm and carry on. Death is only as scary as you make it. Horrible acts like this can only control you as much as you let them. Feel the emotions, express the emotions, but don’t indulge them. Don’t indulge in the pointless news stories. It will only make you more upset and less able to cope. Educate yourself. Don’t be corrupted by the fear. Don’t buy into the hate. This was a crime and we already have systems in place to deal with criminals. Just keep calm. And carry on.

The post Why Terrorism Works appeared first on Postmasculine.

Last week’s don’t-fuck-up-your-dating-life trilogy (here, here and here) was received with a lot of enthusiasm, much more than I expected. I even received a number of emails from men who, within days, implemented some of the principles in those posts by ending toxic relationships they had been maintaining with women, or finally establishing some solid boundaries.

But there was a little bit of criticism as well. And I have to admit I was taken aback by it at first. I’m used to criticism, but the lesson of these posts seemed to me so self-evident that I was surprised people were arguing against it. Most of their counterarguments came down to some form of generalizing women as being different or advantaged in dating/sexual situations.

Although I don’t believe this for a minute, it did get me thinking about an assumption a lot of men make about women and sex. I’ve seen this assumption pop up all over the place over the years and I’ve never really been able to put my finger on it or define what is necessarily wrong with it.

Until now… *cue dramatic music*

There’s a fundamental assumption a lot of men make about sex. And this assumption is often what causes a lot of skewed perceptions about women and why, as men, they’re not getting the sex/love they want.

But to explain that, I need to explain psychological needs.

Psychological Needs and Strategies

All humans possess fundamental psychological needs. If we do not meet our psychological needs, we suffer, sometimes severely. Just like we need food, shelter, and sleep to survive, we also need to fulfill our psychological needs to remain mentally healthy and stable.

Psychologists have studied a number of psychological needs, but you can really narrow them down to four fundamental needs: security, self-esteem, autonomy, and connection. To be happy, stable people, we need to meet all four of these needs consistently. If we are not meeting these needs, our minds will actually begin rationalizing ways to get them met, even at the expense of our physical or mental health. If one is never able to meet their need for esteem, they will become chronically depressed and sometimes commit suicide. If one never meets their need for autonomy, they will fall into a state of codependence or learned helplessness.

On top of psychological needs, we have psychological and social strategies to meet those needs. Some strategies are more abstract and some are obvious. For instance, sports fulfill our needs for connection, and if we win, for esteem. A healthy family unit can provide for our needs of connection, esteem and security. Learning martial arts can fulfill our needs for security and esteem. Getting good at math to impress our teacher can fulfill our need for esteem. Experimenting with drugs can fulfill our need for autonomy and connection. So on and so on.

So here’s the doozy:

Sex is a strategy we use to meet our psychological needs and not a need itself.

How do we know this? Because there is no evidence that celibacy or asexuality is actually physically or psychologically unhealthy. You don’t die from not having enough sex. In fact, there are many health risks because of sex. One could even argue that there are psychological and health benefits from NOT having sex.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have sex (I’m the last one who should argue that). In fact, sex is great. Sex is awesome. Sex makes us happier and healthier people. I’m simply pointing out that it is not a biological/psychological need, but rather simply another drive.

On the other hand, if psychological needs go unmet for long periods of time, it will absolutely fuck us up physically and psychologically. People develop neuroses, addictions, and even delusions to get their needs met. Research shows that social isolation is more harmful than alcoholism or smoking. Depression and stress are related with all sorts of terrible physical issues.

No one ever killed themselves because they were too horny. They do it because of a lack of connection or self esteem.

The idea of sex as a strategy to meet psychological needs sounds weird to many men because sex is also a physiological drive, like eating or sleeping. But unlike eating or sleeping, you can go your whole life not having sex and not being worse off for it. The fact is, in humans, we’ve actually evolved to relate sex to our psychological needs more than our physical ones.

Many men make the assumption that people are primarily motivated by sex, rather than by their psychological needs.

When you mistake sex for the sake of sex as the driving force behind people’s decision-making, you inevitably run into some fucked up beliefs. For example, it’s a fact that men have higher sex drives than women. If one believes that the fundamental reason anybody does anything is to have more sex, then it therefore follows that men are practically being oppressed and being held prisoner by their chaste female captors.

Hence, all of the complaints about how women are so entitled and have it so easy and use men for this and that and the other. Hence, sexism and douchebags. Hence, possibly even rape.

But the fact is women don’t have it easy. They don’t have the power. They’re trying to get the same needs met we are, and struggling to do so just as we are.

Men and Women And Differing Needs

Much of the mismatched understanding between men and women and sex comes from the fact that men and women usually use sex to satisfy different needs. Traditionally, a woman’s best route to a secure future and healthy children was through marrying a successful man. In the past, women mainly sought sex out as a form of security. Even today, there’s still a lot of appeal in a man who can provide a secure, stable environment for a woman.

Women have also suffered a history of having their sexuality shamed and suppressed by society. Therefore, many of them have come to feel an inverse relationship between sex and their need for esteem. Instead, they’re far more likely to use sex to seek out their need for connection, since they’ve been conditioned to feel bad about themselves having sex otherwise.

Men, on the other hand, have traditionally used their sex lives as a status symbol with other men. If you’re a man who sleeps with a lot of women, you’re usually seen as a more successful man. Therefore, men have largely been conditioned to seek sex to fulfill their need for self esteem.

Because men and women have traditionally pursued sex to fill different psychological needs, they fail to understand each other and criticize each other for not meeting the need they want. Men think women are being clingy and manipulative, whereas women think men are being insecure and desperate.

This is why the core point of Models is to develop yourself to get your needs met on your own as much as possible. If you are pursuing sex to compensate for your neediness in self-esteem or because you feel a lack of connection in your life, then you’re going to behave in unattractive ways. End of story.

Once you’re able to meet your psychological needs with a variety of sources in your life (healthy family life, social life, professional life, etc.), then you can pursue sex from a place of power and abundance (attractive) and not from a place of neediness and desperation (unattractive).

Men and women get caught up in their own needs and then project those needs onto everyone around them. Women see men as cold and brutish because they expect them to have the same need for connection that they have. Men see women as manipulative and deceitful because they assume women use sex as a tool for self esteem like they do. In both cases, they’re wrong and mischaracterizing the people lying naked in front of them.

Wait, but what About Evolution?

A surface-level knowledge of evolution makes it easy to buy into the whole “fucking everything drives all behavior” belief. But there’s another part to the evolution story that gets no air-time in men’s blogs and dating advice.

The accepted theory goes like this: Men have small costs to sleeping with a new woman, therefore they’ve evolved to have higher sex drives and be promiscuous. Women have high costs to sleeping with a new man (pregnancy, disease, death) and therefore have evolved to have more complicated sex drives and seek out more security.

This is true to an extent. But this isn’t the whole story.

Why? Because brains.

See, humans have a massive brain. It gives us our intelligence and let’s us do amazing things other animals can’t do like language, technology and Harry Potter movies. But the evolutionary cost of having such awesome brains is that it takes human children far longer to develop into healthy adults.

People often compare human behavior to that of chimpanzees or bonobos, our closest primate cousins, in order to get a general idea of what “natural” human sexual behavior could be. And that can be useful. But whereas chimps and bonobos only take a few years to develop into adults and become fully self-sufficient, a human child needs care for 12-13 years before it can think for itself and feed itself. And even then, the little bastard needs another 6-8 years before it’s fully developed physically and cognitively.

And to make matters even more complicated, it appears having just one caretaker isn’t sufficient for optimal development.

This was a problem for nature. If we’re meant to run around and fuck each other constantly (which, by the way, we are — humans have more sex and have it more often than most other species), then what the hell are we supposed to do when these babies start popping out? Who is going to stick around and take care of them for 12 to 18 years?

Well, we are. We evolved a psychological system of emotional attachment. Totally involuntary yet universal, regardless of culture, age or race, we get deeply and strongly emotionally attached to one another throughout our lives. It starts with a child to its parents. And assuming our parents don’t fuck it up too much, that attachment moves beyond our parents and onto some (not all) of our sexual partners. This is innate and just as biological as wanting to bust the biggest nut inside a hot girl. The oxytocin, serotonin, drop in testosterone levels, lower pre-frontal cortex functioning — these processes are designed to get us drunk on love with each other long enough to at least raise a highly functioning, healthy child or two (or ten).

And so while sex is absolutely a physiological function, and in some ways is no different than eating or crapping, evolution has intertwined our drive for sex (note: a drive, not a need) with our psychological needs for esteem and connection. They’re intimately linked. And they can’t be unlinked. Even if one manages to suppress those needs, they come roaring back in the forms of neediness and over-compensation.

That’s why even the most cold-hearted player eventually has an emotional implosion with a woman, usually at the most unexpected time. That’s why women want to be romanced and swept off their feet. That’s why overuse of pornography makes you feel like a loser, because while you’re getting off, you’re just reminding yourself that you’re not good enough (esteem) to be loved by a beautiful woman (connection). That’s why the vast majority of men don’t spend all of their money on prostitutes, but instead, on going on date after frustrating date with nothing to show for it.

It’s about emotional needs, psychological needs.

Sex is not like eating. Because a) you don’t die without it, and b) it’s inevitably an emotional experience when you have it. Nature has cleverly wired us this way: to put our psychological needs first and then used sex to fulfill them in order to trick us into sticking around and taking care of one another. Sure, we may still try to get a little sumthin’ sumthin’ on the side now and again. And sure, when we break up and feel crappy, we may go on a little sex spree to feel good about ourselves.

But that’s just it. It’s not about the sex; it’s about how we feel about ourselves. That’s the way nature made it. And it’s not changing any time soon.

The post Sex and Our Psychological Needs appeared first on Postmasculine.

There were a few comments yesterday from people about my post on how to date amazing women saying it was too extreme and that everyone has faults.

Of course, everyone has faults. It’s impossible to find someone without some emotional baggage or insecurities.

The real question is, what does that person do with it? In the first two articles of this series, I pointed out how to notice emotionally manipulative behavior and how to avoid women who display it. These were women who had problems and baggage and used them as a weapon with the men they date.

In this article, I will be talking about the traits that you want to actively look for in a relationship parter when deciding to date or commit to them. To give a hint, it’s looking for people who manage their personal flaws and baggage well.

My first handful of significant relationships were mired with a lot of manipulation and victim/rescuer dynamics. These relationships were great learning experiences, but they also caused me a great deal of pain that I had to eventually learn from.

It was until I managed to find myself in relationships with some emotionally healthy women who were able to manage their flaws well, that I really learned what to look for when dating someone.

And I discovered in this time that there was one trait in a woman that I absolutely must have to be in a relationship with her, and it was something that I would never compromise on again (and I haven’t). Men are usually unwilling to compromise on superficial traits: looks, intelligence, education, etc. Those are important, but if there’s one trait that I’ve learned you should never compromise on, it’s this:

The ability to see one’s own flaws and be accountable for them.

Because the fact is that problems are inevitable. Every relationship will run into fights and each person will hit up against their emotional baggage at various times. The determinant of how long the relationship will last and how well it will do comes down to both people being willing and able to recognize the snags in themselves and communicate them openly.

Think of your girlfriend/wife/ex-girlfriend/love interest and ask yourself, “If I gave her honest constructive criticism about how I think she could be better, how would she react?” Would she throw a huge fit? Cause drama? Blame you and criticize you back? Claim you don’t love her? Storm out and make you chase after her?

Or would she appreciate your perspective, and even if she was perhaps a little bit hurt or uncomfortable, even if there was a little bit of an emotional outburst first, would she eventually consider it and be willing to talk about it? Without blaming or shaming. Without causing unnecessary drama. Without trying to make you jealous or angry.

No?

Then she’s not dating material.

BUT! Here’s the million dollar question. Think of that same girlfriend/wife/ex-girlfriend/love interest, and now imagine that she gave you constructive criticism and pointed out what she believed to be your biggest flaws and blind spots. How would you react? Would you brush it off? Would you blame her or call her names? Would you logically try to argue your way out of it? Would you get angry or insecure?

Chances are you would. Chances are she would too. Most people do. And that’s why they end up dating each other.

Having open, intimate conversations with someone where you’re able to openly talk about one another’s flaws without resorting to blaming or shaming is possibly the hardest thing to do in any relationship. Very few people are capable of it. To this day, when I sit down with my girlfriend, or my father, or one of my best friends and have one of these conversations, I feel my chest tighten, my stomach turn in a knot, my arms sweat.

It’s not pleasant. But it’s absolutely mandatory for a healthy long-term relationship. And the only way you find this in a woman is by approaching them with honesty and integrity, by expressing your emotions and sexuality without blame or shame, and not degenerating into bad habits of playing games or stirring up drama.

Suppressing or over-expressing your emotions will attract someone who also suppresses or over-expresses their emotions. Expressing your emotions in a healthy manner will attract someone who also expresses their emotions in a healthy manner.

You may think a woman like this doesn’t exist. She’s a unicorn. But you’d be surprised. Your emotional integrity naturally self-selects the emotional integrity of the women you meet and date. And when you fix yourself, as if by some magical cheat-code the women you meet and date become more and more functional themselves. And the obsession and anxiety of dating dissolves and becomes simple and clear. The process ceases to be a long and analytical one but a short and pleasant one. The way she cocks her head when she smiles. The way your eyes light up a little bit more when you talk to her.

Your worries will dissolve. And regardless of what happens, whether you’re together for a minute, a month or a lifetime, all there is acceptance.

The post The One Trait to Look For In A Partner appeared first on Postmasculine.

There are a number of men out there who have surrendered to the belief that all women are overly-emotional and all women are manipulative and all women are untrustworthy and will immediately trade up the first chance they get. These men usually back these beliefs up with absurd arguments about biological determinism and make an array of logical fallacies in the process.

The fact remains, if all of your relationships end in psychological ruin, then that says more about you and less about the entire female population. Your sample size sucks. And your ability to choose a romantic partner sucks.

There are millions of beautiful, confident, emotionally stable, amazing women out there. One just has to know how to spot them and attract them.

1. Drop all games and pretenses. If you ever catch yourself thinking phrases such as: “If I do X then she will think Y,” or “What did she mean by that?” or “What is she trying to make me think about her?” or “I never know exactly how she feels about me,” or “She says A but she does B,” then let her go. It’s bad enough being in a romantic situation where the emotions and sexual interest are ambiguous — that means that one or both of you is incapable of expressing yourselves coherently. But once the meaning of the behavior itself becomes ambiguous, well, that means one or both of you is attempting to manipulate the other one and you’re setting yourself up for disaster. It may not happen right away. It may not even happen soon. But one day, you’re in for a disaster. You’ve been warned.

2. Develop a nose for needy behavior. In my book Models, I define neediness as the underpinning of all non-attractive behavior. Neediness is when you prioritize the perceptions of others over the perception of yourself.

Neediness rears its ugly head in women too. You need to develop a nose for needy behavior, that is, behavior from a woman who values your opinion of her more than her own.

What does needy behavior from a woman look like? Lying to impress you. Fishing for compliments. Being extra sensitive or dramatic in order to gain sympathy. Framing herself as the victim repeatedly to get you to “save” her. Picking fights for completely subjective and irrational reasons. Using the possibility of sex with her as a tool to get you to give her attention and affection (i.e., cockteasing).

It should be noted that we all feel needy from time to time. But there’s a certain degree of neediness that should be a clear red flag, especially if someone is needy to the point of outright emotional manipulation.

The problem with needy behavior is that if it feels normal to you, then it will seem normal in everybody else. I.e., if you regularly put out needy behavior and think it’s acceptable dating behavior, then you will fail to spot it in the women you date.

“Yeah, she lied to me about her ex-boyfriend still calling her, but I think just wanted to make me jealous. So I bought her a new handbag if she agreed to block his phone number. I think it’s a good compromise, right?”

Noooooo! You deserve to be punched in the face. Hold yourself to a higher standard and the people around you will alter their behavior to meet that standard, or they’ll simply cease to be the people around you.

3. Establish a zero tolerance policy for emotional manipulation. A lot of men are able to spot needy or manipulative behavior, but they tolerate it or even rationalize it away. These men are needy as well. The reason they tolerate or justify the woman’s needy behavior is because despite being fucked up and unpleasant, it still makes them feel important and wanted. In extreme cases, these men have such low self-worth that they unconsciously feel they deserve to be manipulated and used.

You must have a zero tolerance policy towards these behaviors. Both in her and in yourself. Be willing to walk away the moment someone close to you begins acting this way. It’s the only way to respect yourself. It’s the only way to maintain strong and healthy boundaries.

Men who excuse this kind of behavior are always going on about change. She’s going to change. She’s getting better. She’s having a hard time but I’m helping her get through it. But these justifications only continue to feed the toxic behavior. When you do this, you’re continuing to feed the victim/rescuer cycle, and, in fact, nothing has changed. And nothing will.

What’s most important to recognize is that the more manipulative behavior you have in yourself, the more manipulative behavior you will attract and encourage in each of the women you date.

It’s of insane importance to work on yourself to get yourself to a place of authentic communication with women. This means not trying to come up with funny texts or ways to convince her to see you. This means not guilting her into spending time with you or having sex with you. This means not creating drama or getting mad at her as a way to keep her closer to you.

There’s a dating karma and what you put out will ultimately come back around and wreck your world.

Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up this week’s little dating series with the most important trait to look for in a relationship partner. Stay tuned.

The post How to Date Emotionally Stable and Amazing Women appeared first on Postmasculine.

Well, the short answer is: it’s you.

If all of the women you end up emotionally involved with are psychos and find a way to make your life hell, the only thing they all have in common is you. So start by looking at yourself.

We see this pattern quite often — the quiet, reserved, “Nice Guy,” continually meets and attracts the emotionally explosive, manipulative, and sometimes hyper-sexual woman. Why does this happen? And why does it seem to happen to the same men over and over?

It happens when you are uncomfortable with intimacy and expressing your emotions openly and honestly. This inability for an emotionally healthy intimacy will inadvertently narrow down your dating options only to the women who are equally screwed up in their ability to maintain a healthy intimacy. Here are a few reasons why:

(Public Service Announcement: This article is written from the perspective of a hetero male for other hetero males. But pretty much all of it is applicable for all intimate relationships, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.)

1. Her boldness counterbalances your inhibitions. Generally speaking, it’s not considered socially acceptable for women to initiate sexual interest. Men are expected to. But if you are a man who is uncomfortable initiating interest sexually, then you are limited to the few women who are bold enough to act out first. These women must be willing to go against social norms and be less concerned with the opinion of others. While there are definitely some legitimately confident women who are willing to do this, all of the crazy ones are.

2. Their emotional instability stimulates your suppressed emotions. Men who are uncomfortable with their emotions suppress them in a few different ways. They numb themselves completely and feel indifferent towards others, or they rationalize reasons to avoid engaging others emotionally. In some circumstances, men will over-compensate by completely objectifying their relationships and sex life (I refer to these men as the fake alpha males).

When men suppress their emotions and shun intimacy, the only women whose emotions are intense enough to break through are women who are emotionally unstable. These men, by suppressing themselves, unknowingly self-select women who over-express themselves. These men tend to get particularly hooked on these over-emotional women because it allows them to experience their own emotions vicariously through the drama of the woman they’re with.

3. Her addiction to drama makes you feel important. But what really gets emotionally suppressed men hooked on these women is the drama. These women are always in a state of crisis. They’re always the victim of something. And they always need to be saved from somebody or something. This makes the man feel important and needed — two things he’s rarely felt so acutely before — because he’s gone through his life suppressing intimacy and keeping his relationships as superficial as possible.

Inevitably, the emotionally unstable woman will find a way to turn on him. Any peace and equanimity he works for, she will find a way to sabotage it. Because the sick truth is that always being in a state of emotional crisis makes her feel important as well. Her fear is the same as his: that she’s unimportant. But she achieves it through an equal and opposite strategy: drama. And so the over-emotional woman and the under-emotional man (or vice-versa) enter into a toxic unconscious dance of victim and savior, oscillating between giddy euphoria and abject misery.

These women almost always end up leaving these men, as you may have found out the hard way, like I did. As time goes on, the man is willing to sacrifice more and more of his own identity to fix her emotional problems, to the point where he loses any ability to think or choose for himself whatsoever. This destroys her attraction for him, as people who have no self-worth are the epitome of unattractive. At this point, with her man 100% pliant to her whims, the only way to keep the crises flowing is by seeking out another man to complicate things.

These women are naturally drawn to love triangles especially, with themselves being the point between two men (or two women, or a man and a woman, or whatever). Love triangles provide endless fuel for their need for drama. And it also provides endless fuel for the suppressed man’s need to “rescue” or “win over” the woman.

As you can tell, although these women are responsible for their own behavior, if you are consistently bringing them into your life by your emotional suppression, then it’s your own fault.

Tomorrow, I’ll write on how to find emotionally stable, amazing women and bring them into your life naturally.

UPDATE: Read it here.

The post Why Is Every Woman You Date A Crazy Bitch? appeared first on Postmasculine.