Framed

Not unlike every other blue-pill teenager in America, the high school I attended was uniquely depraved.

I started noticing that what I was experiencing in my community had nothing to do with what was happening everywhere else even before high school.  We were working class, but Eric was somewhere between working class and “white trash”, the dirty poor kid who wore an AC/DC tee-shirt for our third grade class photo.

In elementary school, the popular kids made fun of Eric (who was actually kind of a prick), and I found an odd sort of comfort in this,.  Then one day in eighth grade, I learned that Eric had sex with one of the popular girls who had made fun of him in elementary school.  Fortunately, although Shannon was the cause of my first case of oneitis three years prior, I was well into my second case of oneitis with Laura so this incident caused no heartbreak, just confusion.

In high school, from freshman to senior year my social rank progressed from hopeless dork to average, but I never got anywhere with the ladies.  On one hand this bugged me, but on the other hand I knew that something was wrong with everybody I went to school with.

You see, my situation was unique in that I was a guy who was “going places” in a high school full of girls who had no more ambition in life than to attend community college or wait tables at Denny’s.  Being working class girls themselves, they simply couldn’t appreciate a guy like me who was smart and presented value greater than the ability to peel out of the parking lot real loud.  When I got to college, a prestigious school in a nearby state that nobody in my high school even considered attending, then I would be appreciated, there the women would see my worth.

So I got to college and things improved dramatically.  In high school, hot girls hardly even talked to me, but now I had a perky little hottie named Linda who would have lunch with me, hang out even sometimes at night, and ask my advice on all sorts of stuff.  She rejected me pretty harshly when I tried to take things in a romantic direction, but at least she still wanted to be friends.

After I gave up on Linda, I found Tracy.  Tracy didn’t flat out reject me, she just told me that it wasn’t the right time, that she was pretty sure she’d break up with Bill any week now.  Before she broke up with Bill she spent a wild weekend with Steve (who went to a nearby state school), but I was always just this close.  She let me rest my hand on her thigh once when we were watching a movie.

It was a confusing time.  My Thirst for Knowledge didn’t inspire these intelligent women to like me quite as much as I expected, and I couldn’t help but wonder why all these women in whom I had no interest kept throwing themselves at me.  It also seemed weird that sometimes when I actually started liking one of the girls who liked me that they suddenly lost interest.  The only exceptions seemed to be when I was too drunk to be myself.  Why did they only want me when I didn’t give a damn about whether or not they liked what I was saying and just cornered them into a kiss?  They must have had really low self-esteem.  So low that when I’d treat them respectfully later while sober, they’d get bored.

Yet I just knew that there was somebody out there for me, a woman who would value me for who I really was.  After all, I had been assured repeatedly that there was something wrong with all the women who were turning me down, that no girl in her right mind could ever turn down a guy like me.

And didn’t they have a point?  Each and every case of oneitis turned out to have some serious psychological issues.  Captain Save-A-Ho is attracted to the wrong kind of woman, so as soon as I find some women who aren’t suffering from low self-esteem, I’d be golden.

The Seven Cities of Gold turned out to be in Europe.

Before heading to Europe, I made two promises to myself.  First, I was not going to turn into some sort of asshole.  Second, I was going to get this crap solved.

I started on the plane to Madrid.  It was a relatively empty flight, I flirted with the only attractive girl there, she gave me her number, but that fizzled out.  I hit on Ana, the girl I met in Germany a couple of years earlier who was kind enough to show me around the city.  She turned me down, but I kept seeing her because I didn’t know anybody else and had plenty of time to kill.

My first night on the town, I hit on at least fifteen women.  Rejection after rejection after rejection.  I went home that night feeling more drained than I think I ever had.

But I kept trying, hitting on women everywhere.  Soon enough I was somehow doing something right and made out with more women than I could count, even including Ana (after I bought her a rose from some lady walking through the bar).  Still, I couldn’t ever get with them outside of the place we met.  Eventually, I broke through.  My second to last night in Madrid, I had a one-night stand, and the next night Ana finally gave in all the way.

I traveled across the continent having success in places like Lisbon, Athens, and Budapest but getting nowhere in party spots like Ios or Alicante.  My journey ended in Paris, where I had more success with women than I knew how to handle.

And all the while I was just being myself.

I got back to the states, had a couple of random successes, but within a year I was back to being a very low beta.  I was the same guy who stole women right from under their boyfriends’ noses, but in Chicago, Dallas, or wherever else, I was once again a total schlub.

Obviously, just being myself wasn’t cutting it.

The Blue Frame

Deti has taken on the role of defending the guys out there who for whatever reason just don’t get it.  When a man finally wakes up and actually does get it, he’s likely from women and traditionalists (as well as natural Alphas) something similar to this:

Well, DUH! All you had to do was look around you. All you had to do was see what was working for other boys and men, and emulate that. Why couldn’t you see what was so clearly going on all around you? Why couldn’t you figure out what was attractive and what wasn’t? Why couldn’t you just be masculine? Why didn’t you ignore what those authority figures were telling you? It’s your own fault for listening to people who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about.

Deti lists many of the tangible reasons why a man might believe otherwise like bad advice from parents and cheesey ballads.  Nevertheless, as every young man hears about the seductive powers of niceness, he also encounters innumerable reasons to not believe the BS he’s being fed.  Every guy sees girls lust after the badboy but millions of us simply won’t believe that that’s what women really want.

And the reason for this is framing.  Pick-up scenarios and rhetorical discussions have frames.  More importantly, so do mindsets.

We all encounter evidence that could potentially either support or refute our beliefs.  However, very few of us flip from libertarian to monarchist to Democrat to fascist merely because we’ve seen a John Stossel documentary, then read some neo-reactionary website, then watched MSNBC for an hour, and then sat through Triumph of the Will.  We listen to and absorb the facts we like and discount or rationalize away those we don’t.  That’s not to say that there’s no objective Truth, there is.  However, in our heads (not the real world, mind you), what matters most of all is our vision (as Sowell would call it), the mental frame through which we view the world.

If we encounter evidence that contradicts our vision, it won’t matter.  Largely because the message Deti describes got through to me before anything else, everything that contradicted what I had been told simply didn’t count.

Shannon banged Eric in eight grade, it didn’t make sense, so I ignored it.  Yes, as a bookworm I wasn’t what most of the girls in my high school were naturally inclined to find attractive, but I simply refused to notice that a guy two years older than me who set the curve in calculus and went to the University of Michigan had women clawing each others’ eyes out to get with him.

Guys who’ve successfully avoided the friendzone would have seen  my relationship with Linda as a abject failure, but considering she was the first hot babe I got much of any attention from, I saw it as evidence that being kind and understanding was the best way to get noticed by a woman.  Tracy did have issues with self-esteem, it simply didn’t register that other women I liked who had plenty of confidence treated me the same way.

In Spain, I didn’t notice that I couldn’t “seal the deal” because relative my previous failures, getting lots of make-out sessions was a definite step forward.  Yes, I was being myself, but myself at the time happened to be an exotic foreigner who spoke the language well and who had become incredibly comfortable talking to random women in settings that make others feel insecure.  I was never Alpha in the Tucker Max sense in that I was never obnoxious or ordered women to degrade themselves, but I was Alpha in the sense that I was bold and gave out DHV’s just for being able to hold a decent conversation.

But what sunk in most out of all the women I met was Ana, the girl who kissed me after I bought her a flower and who gave in only after I spent lots of time with her.

I stuck to my original goal of never becoming an asshole.  I remained a “good guy” but framed myself into believing this to be the root of my successes as opposed to something that supplemented other traits that were what turned the women on.  By the time I had gotten to Paris, I had had at least some degree of sexual contact with women from more countries than most Americans can name, I had been to wherever the tourists I met had come from or were going so I had infinite interesting things to talk about, I could converse with German, French, or Spanish-speakers in their native tongue (which impressed even Americans and Australians), I knew the city well and could serve as a guide, I was friends with the staff where I was staying so had ample social proof, and I was beaming with confidence.

But when whatever woman grabbed me close and said, “Wow, you are such a good guy,” that was what stuck in my brain because that fit into my frame of women being attracted to goodness.  It didn’t register that my final conquest kept teasing me for being a womanizer.  I thought she liked me because I was so good at convincing her I wasn’t a womanizer.

I’m convinced that my “goodness” did in fact play a role in getting these women to like me even more after they got to know me, but were it not for my ideal Alpha frame they never would have gotten to know me in the first place, at least not to the extent that they would actually appreciate my “higher” qualities.

But because of my flawed frame, my blue-pill vision, I returned to the States falsely assuming that women were attracted to me because I was such a good guy, not because I was a good guy.  My go-to conversation starters fell flat (what American SWPL can even locate Portugal on a map, much less give a damn what it’s like there?), I was left to drown in my goodness, forever emphasizing that traits that merely supplemented what chicks used to dig that was no longer the case.

Beneath the Facts

Deti accurately describes how our feminized society creates the mental frame in boys and young men into thinking that behaviors that destroy their chances with women are actually those that will bring them success.

Yes, the frame is crap.  Yes, each and every blue-pill guy has seen enough to realize that the frame is crap.

But a mindset is an extremely difficult thing to change, and when somebody’s been taught to believe something for their entire lives, every piece of evidence that contradicts their vision will somehow be discounted.  His high school is somehow weird (even though everybody they know in other schools goes through the same stuff), the girl who turned him down sophomore year attempted suicide five years later (even though the girl who rejected him junior year was perfectly stable), college girls are too superficial–wait until they enter the real world.  Young professional women don’t have their priorities straight yet, give them a few years to settle down.  Small town/big city/American/etc. women are too superficial/provincial/etc., it’s better in the city/small towns/overseas/etc.

Obviously, some women actually notice goodness, and geography makes a difference.  Fluency in French will excite some women and bore the hell out of others.

Nonetheless, wimpiness is frowned on everywhere.  Some women prefer the dude who gives the pencil-necked geek a wedgie.  Some women prefer the dude who kicks that dude’s ass for giving the geek a wedgie.  Some women will prefer whoever wins the fight between the two of them.

But none prefer the pencil-necked geek.

And that’s true everywhere.

There Is Another

Red-pill and blue-pill are both frames in terms of what’s the most effective approach for men in their relations with women.  It’s not about what’s right or wrong, it’s simply about what is.  We don’t change men’s minds by spouting out facts and studies, we re-frame the very way such facts and studies are processed.

In Deti’s more recent post, he alludes to the other, even more pernicious aspect of blue-pill framing:  morality.  Time permitting, I’ll address that in the very near future.

In the meantime, I think it’s important to recognize that we all have blind spots.  At some point in our lives, all of us just didn’t get it in some way or another.

When we remember how we were able to address those blind spots within ourselves we’ll be much better equipped to help relieve other men of theirs.