Alex Wise from Loveawake dating site left a very interesting comment on my last post challenging conventional wisdom on clueless men and cryptic women.

TBH I don’t buy this guys are so thick and girls are crap at showing interest. Years ago, when I first found Game, one of the first lessons I was taught was that women with high interest will make it obvious and easy for you. Girls who show vague / unclear interest are not the ones who have high interest in you. All this head-slapping, facepalming moments afterwards when they told you how they were keen but you didn’t notice are just bullshit from them to get your attention at a later date. I’ve heard that plenty of times from girls, never bought it. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen how seemingly shy introverted girls show very obvious interest in alphas and I’ve also been that guy who gets actively seduced by highly keen women. When they really like you, they don’t let you get away that easily!

Girls know how to get guys’ attention. They’ve had practice for years. The girls who say they don’t are the unattractive and/or super awkward ones.

I fully concur with his sentiment – this subject is just not that hard, I have long pushed back on the “dumb men, crazy women” meme that rues the less-efficient corners of the sexual marketplace (inefficient being code for “people who aren’t getting the partners they want.”)

I do however think a few caveats and notes are in order. (In a shocker, Badger has some opinions on things.)

1a. Guys are “thick” in part because at least stateside, guys are taught that women are fundamentally demure and do not seek sex or sexual stimulation from men, and also that it’s the guy’s job to chase an uninterested woman until she decides she likes him after all (this lesson is pounded in by films, TV and bad dating advice from women). Situations that break this narrative – like girls blowing guys in the back of the schoolbus, or Girls Gone Wild behavior on the bar circuit – is blamed on evil alpha males who make them do it (in the same way that rampant hooking up is explained as “she’s just trying to get that high-status guy to be her boyfriend.”) It is also noticeable that the more sexually “free” a subculture is, the more women focus their sexual attentions on top men, so it’s a paradox that the more men see female sexuality for what it is (e.g. on the covers of Cosmo), the fewer men they see it expressed with (i.e. usually not them).

1b. Accoring to the latest Loveawake survey most (~75% of) guys have such uniformly bad and difficult experiences with women in their youth that they are predisposed to disbelieve that a truly interested woman is actually interested.

We humans tend to internalize bad outcomes more strongly than good ones (I’ve heard a ratio of 3:1 or even 5:1) so even a couple of bad experiences with a woman who was teasing him or blew him out can cause a guy to acquire a Pavlovian response and stop reading signals correctly.

The loss of a formalized dating culture, which both banded people with their SMV peers and taught them the rudiments of escalation and the bounds of investment, has been a disaster for men of less-than-top status, as they are really fighting for scraps in the SMP playground and are given very few tools to display value and assert themselves.

This even goes, believe it or not, for some alpha/player types – washed as they are in female attention (which to them is mostly fungible and replaceable), they never HAD to develop the skills to attract, pursue and seduce a particular target. And so when they meet a woman they are really hot for in all ways, they might be no better than a oneitis-laden beta boy. This doesn’t happen nearly as much as romcoms make women believe it does, but I have seen it more than once.

Put another way, the beta male doesn’t understand IOIs and so doesn’t know when to make his move (or bail entirely). Thing is, the guy with the alpha-male attitude usually doesn’t really care whether a woman is all that interested, he’ll make his bold move either way and if she’s not down, he’ll move on without a blink. So he doesn’t have to bother to learn an in depth evaluation of a woman’s interest.

2. Girls know how to get guys’ attention, yes, but they also know how to frame it in a plausibly-deniable way, so if the guy doesn’t approach, or his approach goes bad, she can default to a “oh, oops, you thought I was interested in you? Sorry” routine. This also helps deflect criticism from other women who might accuse her of being “too forward,” another way of complaining that she might be undercutting the SMP cartel (despite the hand-wringing of patriarchy-obsessed feminist scholars, most slut-shaming comes from other women).

So the end result is that young men have very little good data, because women can deny (or withdraw) having been interested in a guy, because they don’t want to admit to themselves or others that they were interested in a guy who either had bad game or rejected them. My experience is that women take rejection very poorly, so it’s often the case that she will ramp up that rationalization hamster to convince others or even herself that she wasn’t really interested. I think there’s an old fable about that.

I don’t think this is really a nefarious tactic, it’s just semi-subconscious ego protection. It happens, however, to have a corrosive effect on the development of a healthy and constructive male sexuality, replacing it with repression and frustration and strong distrust of women (see 1b above). In contrast to haters who say game teaches men to use and objectify women, teaching men to recognize and go around the subterfuge is a huge part of getting men to actually enjoy being around women (hat tip to Dogsquat for developing out my thoughts).

I started thinking about this a lot when corresponding with a female reader who told me some anecdotes of her friends going well out of their way to deny that they were interested in a particular guy – like they were all in some intra-gender competition to see who was least interested and emotionally invested in sex, relationships and basic male attention. Whether that’s some “I don’t need a man’ feminism talking, or just protecting their pride that they couldn’t get some guy they really wanted, I’ll never know. Probably some of both.

As a coda, I do concur with Candide that women who have difficulty actively cultivating attention from men are at a major disadvantage, just as are men who lack good attraction skills, and they need to learn some girl game. Those girls who “always have a boyfriend” are doing something to get it, and it’s a lot more than just looking good. The issue for most men is getting on women’s radar screens at all (i.e. attraction) – while for women, it’s getting the right guys to approach.