Everyone hates door to door preachers.
One of the most universally hated experiences I think we're all at least passingly familiar with is having some weirdo knocking on your door wanting to tell you all about their religion. Jehovah's Witnesses are the best known for it, but they aren't the only ones who do it. Cults are big on this too, or the whole handing out flowers and propaganda at airports thing. There's a lot of variations. But it doesn't matter what they're trying to sell you on, point is nobody wants anyone to try and convert them to their religion when they're having their morning coffee or trying to catch a plane or whatever.
So the obvious question to ask is, don't the people who send them out to do this know they're just going to tick people off and these people are most likely going to just be shouted at and have doors slammed in their faces? And the answer to that question is,
they absolutely know that's what's going to happen, and that's the point. Send out the fresh recruits to do something that is definitely going to make people angry at them. They come home after a day of everyone in the world besides the people who sent them out to do this telling them to go to hell so now they fear outsiders and are going to be way closer to the ones who sent them out to harass people.
Anyway, the leaders of weird religious groups aren't the only ones who know that trick. It's also the whole scam for people who claim to teach guys how to get women to be into them and various other bits of life advice. You can make a hell of a lot money selling books or ads or seminars or whatever preying off desperate lonely young men with intentionally terrible advice that's going to leave them even more isolated and lonely than helping them get happy fulfilling love lives. The former's gonna keep coming back asking for more tips since the last ones really didn't work, and the latter's gonna just be making out with their new hot girlfriends and have no reason to come back for more.
So yeah, cards on the table, I'm not here today to go off about religions weirdos, I'm here because all week long I've been seeing increasingly ridiculous discourse about "a crisis of masculinity" with grifters shouting outright lies about how mean people are to 20 year old white guys or whatever (which they're doing to scare those 20 year old white guys out of actually talking to normal people) and other people trying to say helpful things and not really getting how grifters are out there intentionally giving the worst possible advice to people.
So just to try something a little different, I'm going to try and spend the rest of this post giving actual genuine advice to these 18-30 year old straight white guys everyone's talking about as this lost generation or whatever. Teach'em how to end up with women being into you and be a proper man and all that. This
isn't exactly the kind of blog that crowd is generally going to be looking at, but hey people might share this around. And again, basically everything I am going to say here is going to run completely counter to a bunch of stuff you've been hearing forever, but again, that's because con artists have been intentionally teaching the opposite of what you should do for years, I'll try to explain all the actual logic here as I go.
Now then, I already largely covered this point, but you need to learn to recognize creeps who are trying to exploit you. If people are trying to get you all riled up about stupid pointless garbage like the demographic makeup of a movie's cast or something, that's them doing the thing trying to send you door to door talking about religion. They want you to harass people, so those people hate you, and they maintain their captive audience. And like, one of the main things that got me to write this was seeing some total freak ranting about "young men going to school and having their teachers tell them they're evil and probably secretly girls" or whatever the hell. That's not actually happening, you should know that's not actually happening, and you should recognize when someone's busting out that sort of ridiculous strawman that they're trying to manipulate you.
Next point, money. The big common myth is you need to have a whole lot of money to impress women, and from there people will push you into whatever, but it's really less about having a lot of money and more about stability. Like if you want someone to marry you, and you want to be the "breadwinner" and all that, you need to show you're winning enough bread for everyone to eat every day. New fresh daily bread. If you bring me 200 loves of bread today and then none for the next 3 months that's not gonna work out. That's gonna go moldy before I eat it. This metaphor is getting away from me here but like, you want me to settle down and marry you and have kids, I just need to know this house you want to move me into is one where I don't have to worry about getting thrown out for a missed payment and there's going to be food and whatever extra cash is needed for the whole kids thing. So, have a job you're still going to have in 30 years and be making the same amount of money from. If you're trying to take big risks for more cash by gambling/playing the stock market/getting into crypto/whatever new thing suckers people in, you're risking that security and like... this is maybe the single biggest reason I see cited for breakups/divorces.
So short version, have an actual steady job, don't gamble.
Another biggie- So much BS dating advice is some variation on this concept of women never giving you straight answers or otherwise being deceptive or not even knowing what they want, or being like alien robots you can hack with this one trick and.. yeah that's all lies. Women (and everyone else) in fact very much dislike being lied to or manipulated as a general rule! This one's pretty basic!
While we're on that subject though, don't try to go places to "meet girls." There's this super dumb idea that there are Things Guys Like and Things Girls Like, and people get stuck in this thinking. So I dunno, let's say you're way into some particular video game or TV show or working on cars or whatever. You make the mistake of thinking that is a Guy Thing, so no girls will ever be into it, you never discuss it around girls, and then you go looking for girls to date in some space you otherwise wouldn't really want to spend time otherwise. That's just dumb. There are, in fact, girls who are totally into whatever it is you're interested in, I promise, and if you get into whatever social scene is attached to it, you're probably more likely to meet someone you click with, and it's MUCH more likely that should you click with someone you continue enjoying the same stuff and don't end up as one of those couples who hate each other's hobbies. Of course this does require following the trickiest bit of advice I have.
Don't be a creep. Don't use pickup lines or invade personal space or get pushy or anything else like that. Like if you're at a point with someone where you're very clearly into each other OK sure get all flirty or whatever but if that is NOT plainly the case, don't ever act around some girl in a way that'd creep you out if some random dude started doing it to you. That said...
The whole "chivalry is dead" thing? Yeah that's a lie. Again the whole pickup artist crowd rants all the time about how women don't want you to get doors for them and all that all the time, but again, as long as you aren't being a total creep about it, no please do hold doors open for women if they happen to be right behind you. Hell do it for guys too. Especially big heavy doors if people are carrying stuff. We all appreciate not touching germ-y door handles or having people offer to help carry heavy stuff. Things like pulling chairs away from tables is dumb and a little creepy because that's a trivial thing to do for yourself, but yeah, do tiny favors for people as much as you can. Nice pro-social behavior, everyone likes that.
And kind of on the same note, this is another one that really pushes hard against people teaching you to do the opposite of what you should, but don't ever worry about whether something "is gay." It's the most pathetic off-putting thing in the world and nobody wants to deal with your stupid irrational insecurities. If there's any lack of clarity here, I'm not talking about literally being gay (although, honestly yeah don't have hangups about that either, that's just not the focus of this post is all). I'm talking about all the stupid arbitrary things guys manage to talk themselves into rejecting because their brains have been cooked by peer pressure and/or pickup artist scams into thinking they aren't "properly manly" or whatever.
First of all just buying into the whole concept is just... really immature and pathetic. Don't let other people tell you what you're allowed to be into like that. Own your interests. But also, I swear, all the stuff people go around declaring is "gay" is generally good stuff that'll make you a better person, and being a better person is, if I missed it, also good for your love life, by the way. So just quick-firing my way through a few of these...
"Being kind and considerate is gay!" We already covered this one. Nah, being nice is just all positives. How is that not just inherently self-evident?
"Cooking is gay!" If you want to be treated like a proper adult, and impress other people, knowing how to feed yourself is a pretty basic thing, and if you learn to cook well, you can cook for other people, which people generally tend to agree with.
"Personal hygiene is gay!" OK so like basic sanitation stuff is again, such an incredibly basic responsible adult thing to practice and you seem like some kind of helpless baby if you don't. Also, you know, sweaty clothes stink, stains in your underwear are disgusting, and so on.
"Fashion is gay!" Not sure how people get the idea that looking cool and stylish has any sort of downside to it.
"Masks are gay!" If you are sick, or you have been around people who are sick, and therefore have potentially caught something from them that hasn't manifested yet but may be contagious, covering your mouth and nose around other people is a basic respectful and responsible thing to do and shows you are a responsible adult interested in others' well-being. And I can't think of any downside that doesn't seem like you're just some sort of whiny adult-sized baby, which nobody wants around.
"Caring about the environment is gay!" OK again, there's all the basic decency and maturity angles here, but since I'm aiming this in particular at like, heterosexual guys who want to get married and have kids and all that, let me again remind you about the importance of the whole stability thing. Whatever woman you're hoping to land and have kids with is going to want to have a stable home environment that's nice and comfortable and still going to be there decades later. If your nice home is going to flood from rising ocean levels or become unbearably hot/cold from climate change or you can't freaking eat because such and such's climate has been too wrecked to get it anymore, that's going to suck in the longterm, and if you don't care, well you're a shortsighted loser and that's a big ol' turnoff.
"Liking that She-Ra reboot or whatever is gay!" OK if you are into a show, and it seems like a "girly show" maybe find some of these girls who are into the "girly show" and you can bond over how much you both like it?
I could keep going, but the pattern should be obvious here. For real, it's always stuff it's good to like that some idiot starts claiming "is gay." It's never "driving ridiculous oversized pickup trucks is gay! Think about it, they've got this really wide stance and they're all about taking big loads in the rear!" or "liking Donald Trump is gay, look at all these dudes kissing the ass of their big strong daddy!" or something.
For real though the big dumb pickup truck thing is another one of those things where people have somehow been convinced it's manly when it's actually pathetic. Same with massive SUVs and jeeps and such. There's no actual practical reason to have one of these things. There are situations where it's practical to own a truck, if you actually have some professional reason to... well pack big loads into the rear of it to haul places, but the "manly" ones all suck at that (especially those stupid ugly "cybertruck" abominations. All those giant tailgates way off the ground do is block people's views on the highway, tall vehicles in general are just tip-prone, and while I have no interest in shaming people for their anatomy, the whole "big vehicle to compensate for a 'small penis'" in at least the metaphorical being an insecure little baby sense has been around since before you were born for a reason. If you do have a job where you need to like haul lumber around you get either an old school truck from before they started making them all oversized baby toys, or go for one of those new (or at least, soon to be approved for the U.S.) kei trucks. They're practical and efficient and can get into small spaces and get good mileage and such. Women will be impressed by your practicality. And also think your truck is cute.
Oh and that reminds me of this thing that was making the rounds not too long ago!
I don't know where the hell the idea came from that women find the bodybuilder look attractive? Like sure, everything is SOMEBODY'S fetish, and on an intellectual level I can appreciate the concept of body building on the same level as like being a contortionist or getting full-body tattoos or hundreds of piercings. Just using your body as a canvas and all. But aesthetically, no it's just really gross having a body that looks like a skeleton with a bunch of weird arbitrary round lumps stuck to it and vacuum-packed skin, sorry. And intellectually it's even more off-putting because I know that getting a body like that requires some combination of taking steroids, which have some nasty side effects, messing your diet up, and depriving yourself of water. Real unhealthy stuff you're probably doing to compensate for insecurities.
And hey, speaking of "being strong" and security, a lot of men get hung up on this sort of thing because they "want to be able to protect their families." And like, hey, sure, you want to maintain a level of general physicality where you'd be able to physically carry your loved ones out of a burning building, that's cool, that's practical. But your potential future wife is never going to be attacked by a weight bench. There's a limit to what's practical. And some guys get the idea that they need to own one or more guns, to "protect their families" from... their neighbors arbitrarily deciding to become murderous or something? That one's gonna be an active turn-off. You clearly can't properly assess real threats vs. goofy fantasy scenarios (and you might also be a massive racist or something). The only things anyone really needs protecting from these days are fascism and unchecked capitalism. And like... hey sure, personally I'm asexual but remove those threats from my life and I'll go on a date at the very least. But yeah, getting shredded? Stockpiling munitions? No, those are actively hurting you, dating pool wise.
And... I guess I accidentally saved the best for last maybe but like... don't be afraid of women? So many guys just get a weird complex where they're afraid to even talk to girls, just generally, in their day to day lives? Get out of your head about that. We are normal freaking human beings just like you. You can just have normal conversations with us with no special preparation. Really. The whole treating women like an alien species thing is one of those pickup artist lies to keep you desperate. It's fine.
#dating advice
#basic human decency
#are the straights okay
#ok i know my regular audience calls stuff gay in a positive way but please bottoms don't all run out and buy big awful pickup trucks ok?