It’s the first day of spring 2013, so I thought I’d mark it with this ditty, a very mellow Canadian alt-rock classic from my days at Crazy Go Nuts University in the early ’90s: First Day of Spring by The Gandharvas. Enjoy!
While Maker’s Mark may have threatened to water down their bourbon (they’ve since backtracked on that idea), they haven’t been as stingy with their wax seals.
Update: Maker’s Mark Responds!
Here’s their Twitter response:
@accordionguy Very nice – you found a slam dunk bottle! Each one is uniquely hand-dipped. By real hands. (Just some with a little more wax!)
— Maker’s Mark (@MakersMark) March 20, 2013
A while back, I wrote that I found a folder on my computer marked “February – Blog Later”. Yesterday’s article — the one about pickup artist Roosh V’s statement that Toronto is a terrible place for men — reminded me of one story from that folder. For that story, “blog later” means “blog now”.
February 2011: Home is a Nice Place to Visit
Creative Commons photo by Bruno Furnari. Click to see the original.
Still newly separated and even more newly released from my stay at the hospital as the result of killer flu, it was a good idea to spend time away from the apartment that the ex-Missus and I shared. She’d moved out just before the start of the new year, my week-long stay in the ICU soon followed that, after which I spent a week recuperating. The place may have looked big and empty, but it was laden with five years’ worth of memories. I gave some serious thought to moving someplace else. At that time, it could’ve been somewhere else in Toronto, but it could just have easily been Seattle, as I was working at Microsoft at the time. I had to get away, to completely different surroundings, even if only for a little while.
Luckily for me, my job at the time — developer evangelist — provided lots of opportunity for travel. I decided to run an idea by my manager.
“Everyone else on the team is married and mortgaged,” I said in my pitch. “I’ve got no wife, no kids, no mortgage, no debt — nothing holding me down in one place. Plus, I’ve suddenly got all this spare time on my hands, and I’d rather stay busy than sit around doing nothing, stewing in my own juices and doing something self-destructive or stupid. If there’s any kind of engagement that involves travel — presentations, conferences, and so on — I’d like to be on it.”
He’d gone through his own divorce years ago and understood what I was getting at: a therapeutic change of scenery. In exchange, he’d get a lot of work out of a guy who’d have nothing better to do for the next little while. Not looking a gift win-win in the mouth, he approved me for travel that would keep me on the road more than half the time. Home, as I often quipped then, was a nice place to visit.
Most of January 2011 was taken up by my hospitalization and recovery, so February 2011 was for all intents and purposes was my first month as a single man. I didn’t want to rush my re-entry into the dating game, but I figured I should at least be prepared. One of the side effects of my hospital stay was that I’d shed 15 pounds while there thanks to nearly a week’s time being fed nothing but nutrients and antibiotics via IV. Some of that weight loss was muscle, but a fair bit of it was a “spare tire” around the gut that came with the mellower pace of married life. My current clothes fit better. There was also that set of shirts that were so nice that I couldn’t bear to part with them; as if by magic, I could fit in them again. Not bad, I thought to myself, trying on my wardrobe in the mirror.
Also working in my favour: the accordion. Carrying it around had proven to be useful many times before:
Still the best accordion picture ever.
I spent most of February 2011 in Seattle and its suburb, Redmond, attending and presenting at various Microsoft conferences and functions. During the downtime, I caroused with coworkers and customers at various parties, bars and clubs. With the accordion, I was even invited onstage a couple of times to join the act: once with the Bootie DJ crew, playing along with a mashup that used the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams as a base track, and for a short set with the band at Microsoft’s big MVP party right on the pitcher’s mound at Safeco Field:
I also had my first post-separation encounter with a woman, a non-date that started off quite well, but went terribly, hilariously wrong. I’m going to save that story for another time, because that’s not what this story is all about.
The Recruitment
The actual view from my hotel room at Seattle’s Crown Plaza that night.
The first of my two trips to Seattle was a twelve-day stay in the city. I was staring out my window during some down time one night (the view from that room is pictured above), enjoying the hotel’s room service special — a bucket of three Coronas and a couple of sad, but edible chicken tacos for twenty bucks — when my phone rang.
“Hey. Joey,” the voice on the other side said, “you don’t know me, but I’m a developer and I read your blogs. That’s how I found your number. I’m downtown and wanted to see if you wanted to meet over a beer. I have something you might be interested in.”
My week in the ICU a month earlier, followed by a week of recovery had given me a slight case of cabin fever, so I was all too glad to go out for a drink. “Sure,” I said, throwing on a jacket, grabbing an umbrella and the accordion (I always take it out drinking; good things often happen), and stepping out into the damp Pacific northwestern night.
“You ever heard of The Game?” the guy asked, after the initial small talk and the start of our second beer. We met in a bar a short walk away from my hotel, not far from Pike Place Market. He was noticeably better-coiffed and dressed than the stereotypical software guy, and a good deal more glib.
“You mean the mind game?” I asked in reply. “The one where if you even think about it, you’ve lost, and you can only win by not thinking about it?”
“No…” he said, somewhat amused.
“Uh, the rapper, then?” He didn’t seem like the type who’d be into hip-hop, but you often can’t tell just from looking.
“No,” he said again. “I meant this.”
He pulled a book out of his leather courier bag:
It was The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, by Neil Strauss. I’d never heard of it before.
“I read about your getting divorced on your blog,” he said as I read the jacket notes, “and I thought I might be able to help you, you know, get back into it. The best way to get over someone is to get on top of someone else.”
“I can’t give you the book,” he continued, “but if you’ve got a USB key, you can copy my audiobook.”
“I’ve got more than I know what to do with,” I said. I had a whole stash of them in my jacket pocket from all the Microsoft events. He pulled out a small laptop, copied a folder of MP3s onto one of my keys and gave it back to me.
“Just give it a listen,” he said. “You’ll thank me later. You might even become one of us.”
“Us?” I asked, with some concern. “Sounds like you’re trying to bring me into a cult.”
“No, not a cult. Just a group of guys who’ve figured something out and share that knowledge. kind of like you: you know about software, and can write and present in front of people, which is why you’re an evangelist. I’m like that too, but instead of software, it’s about getting women. And you, my friend, are going to need this knowledge very soon as a born-again single man.”
At that point, the evening turned into part recruiting, part field training. The guy, whom I’ll simply call Technique (in the tradition of the pickup artist or “PUA” community, who often like to go by pseudonyms), decided that I was a good candidate to run through some socializing exercises, to convince me of the validity of his ideas as well as to gauge my “social competence”, a term often used by PUAs. We spent the rest of the evening approaching various women in the bar, who were both alone and in groups.
Going up and talking to strangers is not a paralyzingly frightening prospect for me, and the perspective I’d gained only weeks before, lying in an emergency room, surrounded by doctors, wondering if this is what it felt like to die, made it that much easier. I also had the accordion, and that helped.
At the end of the evening, over a final bourbon, Technique said “Not bad. You’ve got some rough edges, but you get it.”
“You were a bit harsh with that cute brunette,” I said. “What is that, the ‘asshole gets the girl’ routine?”
“Kind of,” Technique said with a grin. “That was a ‘neg’. It’s Seduction 101. Short for ‘negative’. You say something to put her down — just a little. Take her down a peg or two, knock her off her high horse, lower her self-esteem…just a little. Maybe a backhanded compliment. It makes you seem not that interested in her, which for many girls, especially the good-looking ones, is unusual. You take away the thing they trade on, which makes them want it back. The best thing is: the hotter the girl, the more effective it is. You boost your value in relation to hers — after all, who else could put a hot girl down, except a guy in her league or better?”
It might’ve been the booze, the ocean air, some post-separation bitterness still lingering in me, or perhaps even the non-date that went terribly wrong a couple of nights prior (once again, that’s a story for a later date), but at the time, what Technique was saying made perfect sense. Like Dennis Miller says: “Nobody finds Jesus on prom night”.
Aftermath
The actual view from my seat as I flew home, listening to The Game.
On the flight back home, I listened to the entire The Game audiobook. It’s really more of an autobiography than a pickup artist how-to, covering how its author, journalist Neil Strauss, discovered the pickup artist community and eventually became part of it, leading seminars showing men who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance how to pick up women in bars and clubs. It even features a couple of pickup artistry teachers from my neck of the woods: “Mystery” and “Papa”, who lived in Toronto, and “Tyler Durden” who graduated from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University.
While Strauss’ social experiments turn him from zero to hero to pickup artistry instructor — he and his friends even set up shop in a mansion off Sunset Strip — he comes to the realization that a life solely made up of pick-ups is an empty one. At one point, when he interviews Tom Cruise (he still took journalism assignments all the while), Cruise hints at that. When Scientology-crazy Tom Cruise is the voice of reason in your story, something’s gone very awry.
I lurked in a few forums that catered to the PUA and “Seduction” communities for a couple of months to see more about what Technique was talking about. The ideas seemed intriguing to someone who’d been off the market for the better part of a decade and newly single. Many of the ideas in them weren’t all that different from what I’d learned in a decade of technical evangelism and the formal evangelism training I’d received at Microsoft: they were about influence and how to exert it, in ways both overt and covert. They were also about confidence and self-respect, which I believe are important. Attraction requires respect, and you can’t respect a doormat. I saw the germs of good ideas in them. Many groups, such as Accordion City’s own Toronto Lair, seemed to act quite well as support groups for men who wanted to better themselves and pursue relationships with women.
In the end, I decided not to actively participate in these communities. In all too many of them, I saw outright contempt for women, especially from characters like Toronto’s own ultradouche, “Dimitri the Lover”. A lot the talk in there seemed to be distillable into this line by Family Guy’s Peter Griffin: “Women aren’t people. They are devices built by the Lord Jesus Christ for our entertainment.” I’m not that guy, nor do I ever want to be.
At the very least, sex should be about making and sharing a connection. To many of the people on the PUA/seduction forums, it seemed like it was about expressing dominance. They were rife with the obsession of putting men into two distinct groups, the much aspired-to “alpha males” and lowly “betas”, and women into one: “targets”. Picking up and moving on was really an expression of power, not attraction nor connection, at which point they might as well look for sex with men, as the bodybuilders in this story do (“It’s not gay to fuck a dude to show dominance”, they’ll say, “male dogs frequently hump each other to assert dominance, and dogs = alpha; the main thing that turns you on from fucking women is showing your dominance anyway”). I don’t want to hang out in a rape culture nursery.
I’d like to thank Technique again; while I don’t buy into his philosophy, he was reaching out to a fellow man in need and trying to do me a favour (or “a solid”, as the kids say these days). It’s just not my scene.
Bonus “Reading” Material
First, a funny (and recent!) comic about negging, from the webcomic Amazing Super Powers:
Click to see the comic on its original page.
Apparently someone’s put the entire The Game audiobook on YouTube. I’ve embedded these posts below. If you’re interested, give them a listen, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Categories
Kenny Loggins Died For Us All!
What, doesn’t that guy above look like a middle eastern preacher/carpenter?
In case you’re wondering, here’s a pic of Kenny Loggins:
And here’s a guess at what Jesus looked like (why was this a topic in Popular Mechanics?):
Oddly enough, if true, that would mean that Jesus would’ve made a great Klingon for the original Star Trek series:
Blessed are the honourable, for they shall enter Sto-vo-kor!
I can’t have a post that mentions Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone without including this:
Yes, this “pickup artist” and self-proclaimed “love tourist and fat shamer’s” nom de guerre is Roosh V (actual name Roosh Valizedah) but in my opinion, Douche V might be a better handle. One of the better-known members of the “PUA (Pickup Artist) Community” or the “Seduction Community“, Roosh has written many books on mastering the art of the one-night stand with titles like Bang: More Lays in 60 Days, Day Bang: How to Casually Pick Up Girls During the Day, 30 Bangs: The Shaping of One Man’s Game from Patient Mouse to Rabid Wolf, Bang Lithuania, Bang Poland, Bang Ukraine, Bang Iceland, Bang Colombia, Don’t Bang Denmark and Don’t Bang Latvia. The astute reader will notice a recurring theme. Roosh’s writings are not confined to his books — you can also check out his Twitter account as well as his blog, where you’ll be able to find gems like:
- Are You a Real Man?: “If you can’t get laid with multiple women, you’re not a real man, plain and simple. If you can’t mate with superior genes then you’re a blight on the human condition, and should be euthanized. What else is there more important to human existence than fucking? Nothing.”
- Western Culture Poisons Women. Apparently, self-esteem for women is a bad thing and must be stopped: “A few weeks ago I met a tall Polish girl who lived in America for two years. She tried to make fun of me for being alone in the club, when she was in fact alone herself. She smiled while busting my balls, as if she was getting enjoyment out of it. I hadn’t had to come up with insult retorts in quite a while, so it took me time to deploy my counterattacks. They were guided in by GPS satellites, beautifully destroying their target. Her face turned sour and she looked like she was about to cry.”
- The United States of Broken Women: “If a Puerto Rican girl likes me, she’d invite me to her home to bake a dish from her country that she suspects I might like. An American girl will offer me her Chipotle leftovers or make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, untoasted. Do I need a girl to cook delicious food for me? No. I don’t need a girl to do anything but spread her legs, but these optional things hit the provider buttons of my brain, telling me that I can put more effort and investment into the girl. They tell me to take a short break from the game and enjoy at least a little bit of time with this new person.”
- Never Listen to a Woman: “I’ve observed almost no cases where a man’s status or position has been increased from following a woman’s advice or opinions, and it’s much more likely for him to be harmed from it.”
The quote that best sums up his attitude: “I’ll be the first to admit that many of my bangs in the United States were hate fucks. The masculine attitude and lack of care these women put into their style or hair irritated me, so I made it a point to fuck them and never call again.”
Therein lies the dilemma of the pickup artist/seduction community: it’s about attracting women, but holding them in contempt at the same time.
(If you’d like to find out more, see the Jezebel article, The Angry Underground World of Failed Pickup Artists.)
Roosh’s charming views landed him a listing in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Spring 2012 Intelligence Report, titled The Year in Hate and Extremism 2011 under the section: Misogyny: The Sites. He’s listed as part of the so-called “manosphere”, a collection of “websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general.”
This photo comes from an article in Washington City Paper with the Onion-like title Blogger Stud Living in Dad’s Basement, Writing Second Book on How to Get Laid.
Roosh V used to think that Washington DC was the worst place for men in North America, but in a recent posting, he says that Accordion City now has to take that title. In his laundry list titled 15 Reasons Why Toronto is the Worst City in North America for Men, his reasons are:
- Girls are more excited about getting late night food than having sex
- Girls cockblock more than anywhere else in the world
- Girls think they are cooler than they actually are
- Girls are obese
- Girls don’t give eye contact
- You have to be approved by the “mother hen”
- Too many Asian and Indian girls
- Ugly girls are desperate while attractive girls are inaccessible
- The entrenched PUA culture is raising the egos of all women
- Last call is at 2am
- If you make just one mistake with a Toronto girl, you will be rejected
- It’s very expensive
- It’s a suburban city
- It takes a lot of work to date up
- It beats men down
Okay, I’ll agree with number 10: last call at 2 a.m. is lame. Number 7 is obnoxiously racist, but unsurprising.
The revealing one is number 14: “It takes a lot of work to date up”. It sums up Roosh’s world view: “I, as a man, can be of average appearance and bereft of charm, but you as a woman had better be hot and submissive. After all, you’re just a life support system for a vagina.”
I have to salute the women of Toronto with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for giving Roosh a hard time! Perhaps it’ll keep him away forever.
If you’ve read this far, check this out: My Invitation to Become a Pickup Artist.
The Distress of the Privileged (or: “Where’s My Dinner?”)
In an earlier post titled Why Sam is Glad He’s Not Asian, and Why He’s Being Oppressed, I talked about something that blogger Doug Muder calls The Distress of the Privileged. In Muder’s post on the topic, from which I get the express “distress of the privileged”, he cites the scene from Pleasantville in which 1950s TV dad George Parker (played by William H. Macy) comes home to find that dinner isn’t waiting for him:
I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change.
The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.
…I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.
George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.
It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.
Scott Terry, Disenfranchised White Southern Male
Starring the Four New Horsemen of Apocalypse: Propanganda, Stupid, Ayn and Rand.
CPAC is short for Conservative Political Action Conference, and it took place this past weekend in Washington, D.C.. One of the sessions was led by two brothers who are black and call themselves Frederick Douglass Republicans (Frederick Douglass, after escaping from slavery, became a leader of the abolitionist movement and was renowned as a skilled orator) held a session with the name “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You’re Not One?”. Apparently the old conservative debating technique of yelling out “A racist is just a conservative who’s winning the argument against a liberal!” isn’t working as well as they’d like.
The brothers were there to talk about reaching out to groups recently alienated from the Republican Party, namely women and people of colour, when Scott Terry, one of the 23 members of Towson University’s White Students Union (their purpose is to fight “inherent anti-white bias in academia and mainstream society”) stood up and suggested that this outreach was being done at the expense of young white southern men like himself. The video below shows what happened next:
Terry said “My people are being systematically disenfranchised” and suggested that the Republican Party be more like “Booker T. Washington Republicans” and favour a “separate but equal approach”: “united like the hand, but separate like the fingers”.
In response, the discussion facilitator said that “Booker T. Washington was the second to Frederick Douglass” and that Douglass was the original. He went on to talk about how Douglass was quite conciliatory and even forgave his former slave master, to which Terry replied: “For giving him shelter, and food?”
ThinkProgress reports (any emphasis is mine):
After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association.
ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.
When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.”
He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.
At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
He claimed to be a direct descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The panel continued to be racked in controversy, as an African-American audience member repeatedly challenged the racism on display at this event.
The Hard Part
It is difficult remember that when Scott Terry ignorantly spews such terrible things, he probably didn’t set out to be an asshole. All he wants is his dinner, and he sees that it’s being taken away from him, bit by bit. To him, respect is a loaf of bread, and giving some to people that historically didn’t get any means that he’s losing some of his share.
The challenge for 21st-century North America is going to be reaching out to people like Scott Terry and appealing to their sense of justice and fair play in order to get him to realize that he’s wearing the invisible knapsack.
It’s not going to be easy.
Categories
A Canadian in Florida
Click the picture to see it at full size.
I’m in Florida all week, visiting my Special Lady. The locals consider the current weather to be chilly, while we visiting Canadians find it rather balmy in comparison to what it’s like back home.