You are here: Home / Archives for 2011

Sex Is Designed To Be Enjoyable

December 31, 2011 By 52 Comments
Athol:  I’ve had a hard time writing today’s post. It all started with this comment left a few days ago…
Dex:  Athol – you might consider also building on the success of MMSL by translating it into Christianese and marketing to churches. I bet you still speak the lingo…
Athol:  I ended up writing a very long post addressing that question, and it’s a great post, but frankly probably only myself is really interested in it. So let me cut out all 1500 words and just get to my Jerry Springer “final thought” on that question…
…once I start cloaking myself in Christianese and “crossing the border” into Christendom, I’m doing so in what many will assume as a covert manner and with evil intentions. Eventually someone is going to be seriously pissed about that, and there will be retaliation. I can cross the border as an Atheist “diplomat” wearing my shiny Atheist uniform with my Science Fair badges pinned to my chest, but I cannot cross the border as a “spy”.
Even more importantly, I simply detest pretending to be something I’m not.
So I let the post rot in the editing folder all day and answered email questions, determined not to write about anything religious in nature.
A few hours ago though, I got an email from a guy in a twenty year marriage. He and his wife are Christians, involved in ministry work for at least some of the time, and he’s basically going batshit crazy because the sex is so awful. Everything apart from lights out, her lying still, quiet sex is right out of the picture. I’m not talking “vanilla sex”, I’m talking bleached and bland instant rice sex. (I just made that up, I don’t even know exactly what “bleached and bland instant rice sex” is, apart from not wanting it.)
It’s not the husband’s fault either. He had pictures in the email, and pretty much has a A+ body. I mean I’d tell him to run the MAP but, great body, 100k+ earnings, house broken, mix of Alpha/Beta, I got nothing much left to tell him. The problem was very clear, she was just highly sexually negative. She could pop out three kids, but it seems kinda like the end justified the means rather than it was something enjoyable for her. By the husbands own statement, he was deeply resentful of “all the Christian teachings on sex”.
But I walked away from the computer just kind of annoyed about it all. If I say something, I’m a religion hating atheist. If I say nothing, I’m not helping anyone. So far not even 2% of my “religious issue” emails hit the blog as a post.
And then I go all Jimmy Neutron and it snaps into focus for me.
When you are born and growing up, your sexuality is a blank slate in terms of your beliefs and socialization, but your physical body is designed to enjoy having sex. So your basic default orientation is going to be that sex is a positive and desirable experience. Unless you have some sort of physical fault that makes sex painful or unpleasant, you’re going to like having sex. If you’re inexperienced at sex, it won’t be crazy wonderful good sex, but you will like it and feel good about it.
So if you don’t like sex, if you think it’s nasty, dirty, disgusting, wrong, bestial, sinful, degrading or frightening, it’s because you have be taught to think that way about sex. And to overcome your own body’s design to find sex the most enjoyable experience possible for a human, that training either needs to be systematic purposeful education to crush sexuality, or as physical sexual abuse as a child. And with deep regret, I have to say that parts of the church specialize in both.
So yes I am angry, and you should be too. And I know and appreciate that vast numbers of Christians are just as angry as I am about these issues.
So whether or not you believe that God created our genitals to vibrate with glorious pleasure during sex, or you think evolution and sexual selection has resulted in extremely pleasurable incentives to propel your genes into the next generation, it doesn’t matter that I am… well… right. Because either way, sex is meant to be just fucking fantastic.
But most of you already know all this, so please bear with me while I try and reach that tiny minority of MMSL readers that don’t.

/clears throat, climbs up on soapbox and strikes a heroic orator pose…

If you find sex with your spouse nasty, dirty, disgusting, wrong, bestial, sinful, degrading or frightening, then you’ve been fed horseshit and told it’s chocolate your whole life. Your right to grow up and experience a normal healthy sex life has been stolen from you. You have been knowingly lied to. It’s also destroying your marriage as your partner dies a little inside every time you flinch from them.

/steps off soapbox to sounds of a recording of thunderous applause

If that makes me an angry religion-hating atheist, then so be it.
There is, however, hope. It’s never too late to learn to enjoy your sex life. Your bodies are designed to experience pleasure, so almost as soon as you stop trying to repress that natural instinct, you can start to discover a whole world of enjoyment. It will take some time to unlearn the old things and enjoy the new, and you will have to experience feeling uncomfortable and weird as some of the boundaries fall away, but it’s possible. I’m not talking about having a threesome on the pitchers mound in Yankee Stadium, I’m talking about married couples getting it on in their bedroom… or on the trampoline in the backyard with an oversupply of blankets hiding them from the passing cars.
Or put another way…
…if you think you’re going to go to hell for giving your husband a blow job, what do you think your husband thinks he’ll be getting when he’s in heaven?

Jennifer: It’s all true.  It’s really okay to like (okay loooove) sex with your husband. What he wants most is you being excited to be naked with him.

Filed Under: How To Choose A Wife, Sexual Health Issues

Dealing With Her Time Release Brain Bombs

December 30, 2011 By 16 Comments
I don’t want to give away the punchline, so watch the video first, and then we’ll get to the reader question. The video is about ten minutes long, and is not safe for work, but it’s basically only so for a bunch of F-Bombs.
So the reader question…
Reader:  This morning we got into a fight about responsibilities and getting things done in and around the house. Six months ago, I would have given in just to avoid the fight, but nowadays I stand my ground. Especially when I’m absolutely sure that I’m right.
This seems to be really difficult for her and for me too actually. Standing my ground feels very unnatural for me, especially since it escalates the fight. So I’m hoping that this tactic will prove its worth in the long run. Anyway, she was still quite mad when she left for work and the last thing she said was “You’re starting to be more like your father every day”.
It’s the first time she ever said that. When someone used to say that I was a bit like my father or even looked like him, I used to take that as in insult (my father was an alcoholic that was never really around). But my father is also quite the alpha male (a bit too much even).  So the fact that she said that wasn’t insulting to me, it was more of an acknowledgement that she sees the change. So I guess that all in all things are progressing in a positive way, even if we seem to have more fights nowadays.
Athol:  So yeah… here’s why comparing you to your father is always going to be a below the belt punch.
Whether you like it or not, you have an enormously strong emotional tie to your father. That may be a strong positive, a strong negative, or a strong reaction to the fact that there isn’t a strong connection to your father. You’re pretty much locked into him emotionally somehow.
So when she said “You’re just like your father”, it’s going to tap a deep emotional well. If you happen to react negatively to your father, it’s going to be a vicious insult because in at least some ways, you’re actually going to be like your father. So it’s a cutting statement in no small part because… well, because it’s true.
If you happen to react positively to your father, it’s going to rile you up because she’s making a clear insinuation that your father isn’t that great, and by implication you aren’t that great. So then there’s this thing where she’s implying that you’re kinda destined to suck on a biological level. You’re not even Mr. Suck Sr, you’re Mr. Suck Jr.
So there’s usually not much way around having a bad reaction to her statement. It’s exactly as Dane Cook says, designed to screw with your head. What you have to do, is see it for what it is designed to do, and respond to that, rather than to the actual comment.
The good news is that if she is reaching for the emotional terrorism as a tactic, it means she hasn’t managed to achieve her objectives by her usual tactics. Or in plain English, she throws out the “You’re just like your father” as a line when she’s losing the war.
So my reader is exactly right. He’s making progress on the whole MAP front and his Sex Rank is going up and the relationship power balance is starting to swing toward him and away from her. He’s not just folding up like a wet napkin over everything. She’s getting freaked out by that change and has been pushing back on his pushing back on her, so yes fights will have increased in the short term. But the whole “You’re just like your father.” line implies that she’s getting to the end of thinking pushing back on him will work.
What should be done now, is he should claim victory, and an immediate end to this round of arguments. “Your whole line about how I’m just like my father has nothing to do about whatever our current issue is, which means I won this argument, and you said that simply for the purpose of hurting me. Now I am totally fine with the idea of us having disagreements, and talking them through, but if you want to turn this relationship into one where purposely hurting each other is acceptable, you’re standing on the wrong side of the front door.”  Say it with total commitment and hardcore eye contact with her. Don’t yell it, just controlled anger. You’re looking to create that “Oh shit!” reaction in her.
The frame is that you are in charge of this relationship, and there is simply no purposeful hurting of each other allowed.
Of course this is all going to mess with her head, as you just announced her relationship just switched from ME/him to HIM/me. She’s going to be pretty sure that you’re cheating on her, but likely have zero evidence that you are. She wants to be in charge to ensure she can’t be hurt by you, but you just took charge to ensure that there would be no hurting. So she’s going to be seriously confused as to what is going on. At some point you may have to unveil MMSL to avoid her totally freaking out on you. But in the meantime, use this line…
“I just feel like a stronger person now.”
…which of course doesn’t really mean anything immediately. But she’ll be thinking about it for days to come lol. What the hell he did mean by that?  Detonation in 5.. 4.. 3… 2…
Jennifer: Even saying “You’re like your father.” as a compliment is going to potentially backfire on you. I agree it’s a low blow. I like the “I’m a stronger person” line too. Because if it’s true, she can’t really argue it can she.
Filed Under: Captain and First Officer, Nice Guys and Betaization

Dealing With The Yelling

December 29, 2011 By 21 Comments
Screaming matches. Don’t have them.
When you are having a screaming match, it’s more often that not your Rationalization Hamster and her Rationalization Hamster squaring off against each other and trying to win their point of view through sheer force of emotion. There may be a short term peace as one side backs down, but whoever wins the argument, also learns that the screaming fit is a strategy that will get them what they want in the relationship. So it pretty much sets a path where more screaming matches will take place.
Women are more verbally skilled than men on average, and wives that outclass their husbands’ verbal skills can find the verbal tirade a stock-in-trade strategy to get their husbands to do what they want. Of course if a husband launched into repeated tirades against his wife, that would be immediately understood as verbal abuse.
That being said, rather than complain that women verbally abuse men, I think it’s far more helpful to see it as simply her employing a strategy that is proving to be effective. We could probably spend a few hundred hours trying to convince a screeching wife she is in fact engaging in verbal abuse, to little effect. But if it suddenly proves to be a ineffective strategy, she’ll probably just stop it very quickly anyway.
It’s very obvious that there’s a communication strategy involved when you witness women in the middle of very normal lighthearted conversations with friends, suddenly switch to the “Go-fuck-yourself” tone and issue sharp retorts or directives at their husbands, and then immediately switch back to light banter with their friends. Which means they are in control of their emotions the entire time and are employing a deliberate strategy with him. They aren’t actually all that angry with him, they are simply trained to act angry with him any time they want something.
The trouble with dealing with this strategy though is that any attempt to be polite, cooperative or simply evade them, is seen as a submission display, and that empowers them to bully you further. Actually completing the assigned task is even worse as that is a direct payoff to them for yelling at you. What you have to do is render the yelling an ineffective tactic to get what she wants.
Some responses:
(1)  Ignore the content of her speech, and draw attention to the fact that she is yelling at you for no good reason.
(2)  If she’s asking you to perform a task, just calmly say “No.”
(3)  Completely ignore that she is even talking to you.
(4)  Say, “Are you finished yelling?” When she says she is, then say, “Is there something you would like to talk about?”  Emphasis on the word “talk.”
(5)  Say “I’m not interested in having this discussion with you while you are like this.” and then either you leave where ever you are, or you ask her to leave.
Whatever it is that she is trying to achieve by this tactic, just ensure that she doesn’t get it by using it. At first she will blow up at you even harder and louder, testing to see if you continue to hold your ground, but if you do, eventually she will discontinue using the tactic.
Importantly… bear in mind that what she is asking of you may well be a reasonable request, you’re dealing with her unreasonable tone and tactic. Once she can restate her reasonable request appropriately, it’s fine to do what she is asking of you. If she makes a reasonable request, in a reasonable tone of voice, it’s generally the behavior you want from her to continue, so you reward it by doing what she wants you to do.
Though do bear in mind it’s not a reasonable request that you are her servant 24/7… even if she does ask nicely. Heck Jennifer and I have the whole Captain and First Officer thing going on, and while she does play more of a support role, she’s nowhere near being my servant 24/7. Jennifer pulls her own weight for sure, but if she asks for my help, I help her.
Jennifer: I can’t stand yelling lol.
Filed Under: Captain and First Officer, Nice Guys and Betaization

The Rough Plan For 2012

December 28, 2011 By 18 Comments
Catching up on the polls on the right side bar. Had them up for around five days, roughly two hundred readers answered, of the just over six thousand unique visitors over that period. So around one reader per thirty visitors voted which is an exciting response. It would be fun to mentally multiply all the votes by thirty to inflate results, but lets not worry about that.
Has MMSL Helped?  (multiple votes possible so won’t equal 100%)
Pretty much averted us divorcing  9%
The sex is much better now  40%
We feel closer emotionally now  25%
There’s less fighting and we get on better now  35%
I think I found MMSL too late to really help  16%
No real changes good or bad  15%
MMSL made things worse  4%
Overall I think that shows a positive response to what I’m doing. For most people MMSL has some sort of positive effect. For 9% of people its a huge result.
In terms of the “What do you want to see on the blog?” question, there’s not much point trying to analyse it as the result was very clear. People want more posting and longer posts, which in my mind just adds up to “more”. Which was kind of a surprise to me in that I already felt posts were overly long!
The other desire is a forum, which is something I’ve wanted for a while, but several commentors voiced concern that it would turn into a massive time sink for me moderating it and dealing with spam. It’s very important to me that a forum stays productive and positive in tone, and I’d rather be smaller and on point, than huge and a quagmire of troll. I believe the solution is a forum that requires a nominal fee to become a member. Again, nominal fee, just a small qualifying hurdle to keep 99% of the trolls on the other side of the fence.
Coming to the “What would you like to see Athol do next?” question, there was a total lack of clarity lol. A very even spread of interest from weekend or day seminars for men or couples, DVDs, coaching and books on tape. Some of that stuff would overlap obviously, a seminar could be taped and made into a DVD etc. The books on tape interest always surprises me, but apparently there really is some interest.
As to whether or not I’m going to offer advice to single women and men, the answer is “not directly”. I plan to stay focused on married men as the primary target, but that automatically drags married women into the mix. So I’m always going to have a lot of overlap with what women are interested in. Even talking about Girl Game helps explain how Alpha and Beta Traits for men work for example. Likewise married people and single people aren’t wildly different biologically… so there will be overlap, but I’m not planning on writing a book about how to pick up chicks in bars.
Besides that, women love MMSL and there’s such an explosion of wet panties for the Captain and First Officer model, that I’d be just crazy to not tap that… er… market.
Jennifer… you guys don’t need to convince me that Jennifer is great. As far as Jennifer is concerned  I’m like that CEO/pitchman from the 80′s for Remington shavers. “I liked her shaved so much, I bought her company.”
I’m actually trying to convince Jennifer about how beloved of MMSL readers she is, as a way of encouraging her to come out and play a little more. She doesn’t understand how I can spend hours a day doing MMSL stuff and there’s a small percentage of people that would rather meet her than me. I understand it, she just needs to accept it lol.
Which comes to an idea floated that I round up a bunch of guys, train them, endorse them as trainers and turn them loose onto the world and take a cut of their earnings. It’s tempting on one level, and would ideally be run from an underground lair equipped with sharks with frickin’ lasers attached to their heads. However for the moment I don’t have those plans. For better or for worse, much of MMSL isn’t just the words, but it is the relationship of Jennifer and myself.
The most important question was the coaching one at the end. I completely expected the overwhelming majority of people to say “Not Interested”, but the breakdown between people wanting something weekly (six votes), monthly (nineteen votes) and just a “one and done” (twenty-six votes) was very useful indeed. Those numbers seem very small, but it doesn’t take that many people to turn into a reasonable and steady income flow. I do have an idea for a “one and done” appointment, that would double as the intro for weekly and monthly coaching.
The one remaining suggestion in the comments was a donation option. This seems reasonable and easy enough. Now I just have to figure out how to do it lol.
Looking ahead, it will take some time to get everything I could do, in place. Right now I have a couple of shorter books I need to finish off and push out the door, and then focus on the 2012 Primer. Then in rough order – the donation button, forum, books on tape, coaching, seminars, DVDs and on into the future.
So 2012 will be crazy busy, but it’s the transition year from “Blog Guy” to “Guy that feeds his family doing something he likes doing, and actually makes a positive difference in the world.”   As I’ve said before, MMSL is a long project for me, it’s a marathon and not a sprint. A few more years to go before I become an overnight success.
As always, I’m touched that so many people care about MMSL and want to see it succeed.
Jennifer: It was very interesting to see the poll results so far…okay, yes I did check them obsessively.  And yes, Athol does spend literally two to four hours each day on MMSL stuff..reading, writing, responding to emails, etc so it’s nice to see that it is making a difference for so many people!
Filed Under: Humor and Everything Else

Reader Polls and a Short Break

December 23, 2011 By 34 Comments
I’m going to take a short break from writing the blog. I’m exhausted and Christmas is coming so need to step away for a little bit, probably a week or so. I’m off next week and really need to work on completing a couple of shorter book projects before turning my sights on the 2012 Primer for real.
I’m at that awkward point where MMSL is earning quite well for a new blog/book earner, but it’s not nearly enough to quit my regular job just yet. But I can’t really push MMSL along the path of creating a bigger income, because I have to spend so much time working my regular job. There’s a sort of quantum leap that has to happen from one to the other.
As such, I have put up a few reader polls in the right hand sidebar, and would love to hear your feedback for what I should do next. I have books I can do now, but the next MMSL product needs to do reasonably well as I’ll probably only have the time to pick one new area in the first half of 2012. So I’d like to get that choice right. A couple of the polls allow multiple answers.
As an aside, there is a blog upgrade / switch to WordPress coming in the near future, so don’t hammer me on that one. And yes, future books will have better covers. And please add whatever comments and suggestions you have to this post. The reader polls are fairly general.
As always, I am grateful and excited to have so many people interested in what I have to say. This is a long project I’m committed to, and it is my sincere hope you are helped by it. – Athol
Filed Under: Humor and Everything Else

How Do You Rebuild When You Don’t Love Her Anymore?

December 22, 2011 By 16 Comments
Reader:  This is the next level of married game. If you’re basically an honest Beta poor bastard, you can’t fake being gone. You hang on as long as you can. And then, you’re gone. And of course, the situation improves. But every backslide, every “same old same” behavior is greeted with “now, I remember…I’m gone.” You have no normal human tolerance for working out differences. There’s just the hair-trigger of “be perfect or be alone”. Anybody coming in late would say you’re unreasonable.
So, how do you bring back love and patience, when she made you emotionally die the first time around?
Athol:  The honest truth is that it is much easier to give birth than raise the dead. So the easier route is to find someone new to love and live your life with. It’s hard enough as it is opening your heart to someone new, let alone to the person that made your life a living hell for years on end.
But, there are always potentially good reasons to try and make things work, namely kids and shared assets, so some of you will want to rebuild.
I think you have to both see and hear her admit wrongdoing and taking responsibility for her half of the marriage. She will of course sometimes do whatever the old trigger behavior was, and set you off again. When she does that, she has to be conscious of it and be apologetic. It’s going to be a lot of those two steps forward one step back sort of things, and it is vastly easier to accept her saying, “I’m sorry, that was a step back today, I did that thing again.” as opposed to a dismissive “Whatever.”
So you have to sit down together, and really figure out what she does that really sets you off, and make that a conscious awareness for both of you. So she has to take responsibility for her actions, and you have to take responsibility for the fact it’s a process to reengineer your relationship together.
Sometimes those triggers are going to be things she doesn’t always know about fully and sometimes they can be seemingly quite trivial. Even in good marriages you’re going to have buttons you can push at will on the other person that seriously pisses them off in the middle of a perfectly fine day. You just have to not push them on each other.
This may sound silly, but Jennifer never cooks sausages or peppers for dinner, in part because they are two of my very least favorite foods and in part because it triggers me when she does. There’s a long involved story behind that, but I can’t tell it without making Jennifer look like a total bitch and the queen of being in the wrong. Just accept that even good marriages have bad days, and we had a very bad day that involved these sadistic sausages with little bits of green pepper inside them. So it just pushed a very bad day over the top and I left the house for a couple hours and purposely left my cell phone at home so she couldn’t call me. Which I did intentionally to hurt her. So yeah I know all that sounds pretty and stupid, but there really is a complicated story of miscommunication behind it that I can’t talk about.
About three months after our bad day, I hear a colossal, “SHIT!” from the kitchen. I run because I thought she got burned or something. Instead Jennifer is standing in front of the stove with a bunch of peppers frying away and looking sick to the stomach. Apparently she was on automatic pilot and just regained consciousness halfway through the cooking process and realized what she was cooking. OMG I’m doing it again, he’s going to flip out at me.
As it was, I accepted her apology and just ate around the damn peppers. But she hasn’t done it since. But obviously if she kept doing it over and over, it would piss me off worse and worse.
So triggers are going to be hit accidentally from time to time, and it really helps if she knows what the triggers are and is apologetic for hitting them. Love can slowly seep back in and years later it may all be something you can laugh about together. But if she keeps purposely hammering away at the sore spot, it’s just never going to work. So you may need to move on and start over.
Jennifer:  I have PTSD about those sausages too.
Filed Under: Captain and First Officer, Nice Guys and Betaization

The Moment When You Realize It’s All Been Bullshit

December 21, 2011 By 19 Comments
Somewhere in the comments of Work On Your Weak Areas First, I said…
Athol:  “It’s when you effectively frame that emotion/thought and act like you’re heading for the door, that very likely changes her feelings for you.”
Reader Question:  Ok, I am sorry if I am dense. But what does that entail exactly? Telling her, “If things don’t change I am leaving.” (although a bit more subtly) Or just starting to go out to bars / clubs / etc and picking up girls and not coming back home until 3am on weeknights?
If the first, in my case, she would probably just say, “Well, you have to love me for who I am!” Or something similar and the second, she would assume the worse even if I was just hanging out not interacting with anyone, and accuse me of cheating.
Sorry I am at a loss on this last step… and it very well could be covered in the last part of your book, if it is, I just haven’t gotten that far yet.
Athol:  It’s really just having an obvious change of heart about her and not trying to hide it.
For example imagine you’ve been begging and pleading with your wife to change her behavior / pull her weight / come back home / break it off with him, yada yada yada. You’ve pandered to her, tried to please her, let her get away with things and so on, all in the vain effort to get what you want from her/the marriage.
It’s in the moment when you completely out of the blue, act like you’ve finally understood something you’ve been stupid about for the longest time. When you in the middle of a normal day just say “You’re never going to do that thing I want are you.” Just say it as a statement of fact, not a question. Then no matter what they say in reply, you just say, “Okay. Thank you.”
The emotional frame is that you’ve realized that while you are still married, still living in the same house, still with a joint checking account and nothing has really happened…. everything has changed because you’ve just accepted that the relationship is over. The frame is that everything you’ve believed to be true about your marriage up until this point, has in fact been nothing more than an illusion you’ve convinced yourself to be true. And now, you no longer believe in that illusion. There is no marriage.

Or for the less Zen among us, it’s the moment when you realize it’s all been bullshit.

It’s in that moment where you change direction and start the process of leaving her, that she will often decide she wants you to stay. The power of the take away is very strong. No one, but no one handles being dumped very well. Its usually the ultimate display of who is the higher Sex Ranked in the relationship.

The hard part though is quite frequently that emotional change of direction can’t be faked easily. Very often I email guys that they have to play the game tougher and not tolerate something clearly inappropriate the wife is doing, and they wiggle out of actually doing it. Then it gets worse and they still wiggle. Then it gets really bad and they snap and they are “just fucking done with the bitch.”, and start acting like they are heading for the door, which quite often results in ”the bitch” taking a big step in the direction of being docile and doting on him…
…but the trouble is they don’t actually want her anymore. Their love for her feels empty and gone. They are disgusted they have had to metaphorically bitch slap her to get what they want. Cue up the “Why do I have to act like an asshole to have her want me, when the whole time I’ve loved her and done everything to make her happy?” speech. But they are getting what they wanted finally, so somewhat annoying to leave now just as it got good.
My advice in that aftermath of the switch is to just see how it goes. When you go from pussy whipped Beta to having your balls back, it’s an uncomfortable feeling if only for its newness. It may not be permanent. Love can quietly sneak back in again.
And as always, not everything works all the time. If you get to that point of “I’m just done with her”, she might agree that it’s basically over too. So there are risks involved in doing this. But all that you’re risking is a bad relationship that’s slowly killing you. Seems kinda like a win no matter what happens.
Filed Under: How To Choose A Wife, Nice Guys and Betaization

Technology Created Marriage 2.0 (Not Feminism)

December 20, 2011 By 44 Comments
I’m going to somewhat overstate things in this post for simplicity and clarity, it’s theorycraft to an extent, but here we go lol…
The entire Marriage 2.0 edifice is driven by technology not ideology. For sure the ideology is there, but without the technology creating the environment to support the ideology, the ideology simply would have been nothing more than a handful of intellectuals thinking about possibilities rather than reality.
There are three primary technologies involved in creating Marriage 2.0.
(1)  Nuclear Weapons. Surprise! But think about it… nuclear weapons have essentially ended traditional warfare. Any war against a nuclear power simply cannot be won for fear of a last ditch ”fuck you” strike that devastates both sides. To be sure military force is still used around the globe, but it’s far more targeted and focused. Yes we were in Iraq for eight long years, and yes good soldiers died in the line of duty, but it created vastly less casualties compared to 20th Century wars.
The entire point of invading Iraq was the fear they were on the verge of making nukes. By comparison, North Korea looks like it actually has nukes, so we won’t be sending troops there any time soon. See how that works?
In terms of sexuality though, this basic lack of war creates a “problem” in that large numbers of young males that would have been sent to war and killed in years gone by, never get sent. There’s a natural sexual imbalance in the the birth rate where 105 males are born for every 100 females. So from a cynical perspective, we can “safely” lose about 5% of all males from sickness, accidents, violence and war, and there would be still enough men to go around for all the women to have one.
Looking back to say the First World War, my home country of New Zealand lost around 2% of it’s total population. But all of that 2% was focused in the age 18-30 male cohort, to the extent that around 25% of all young New Zealand men were killed.
Or put another way, at the end of 1918, there were three young men for every four young women. That sort of extreme dynamic makes most women extremely happy to have any man, so they weren’t going to be terribly picky and were going to be appreciative about having one.
Now we have a situation where it’s probably only the prison population of young males keeping the sex ratio of young men and women in check. In plain English, if everyone makes it to adulthood, there’s going to be 105 men for every 100 women, so even with a perfect monogamy system, a small number of guys are never going to have a wife. As a result, women can be pickier about who they marry and there’s generally always someone willing to step up and replace a deposed husband.
(2)  Birth Control. This one is a no brainer so I’ll be short. It used to be that women who had sex got pregnant quickly, so that very much demanded that they extract commitment from a male before having sex with him. Women got married to have a sex life. Marriage was the ticket to safe eroticism.
Birth control pills of course changed all that. Now women could have sex whenever they wanted and with whoever they wanted, without fearing pregnancy. So it’s birth control that allows promiscuity and sexual experimentation, as opposed to marriage, which now actually appears to limit female eroticism rather than create it. So rather than make an early choice in mate and stick with him, women can now play the field for as long as they want and never settle down.
To be sure feminist thinking existed before the birth control pill, but it is only after the invention and easy availability of the pill that feminism truly launches into the mainstream. If all birth control methods disappeared tomorrow, feminism would wither away and be all but gone within a decade.
It’s really the feminist push that has rewritten marriage and family law to create no fault divorce, child support and custody law. It’s the reduced family size and ability for women to have careers and support themselves, that allows a family to be split up without everyone automatically ending up in grinding poverty.
So the short version is…. birth control allows sex to not be a socially bonding experience, where before it was a bonding one.
(3)  Computers. Everything, and I mean everything comes with some sort of computer chip these days. There’s been just astounding technological advances in every sphere since the 1960s all driven by the power of computing. I’m not sure the kids of today can ever really grasp the blistering pace of change that has happened. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with paper, pencil and dice… today I can play World of Warcraft and be online with 10,000,000 players. It’s utterly astounding technology we have these days.
The downside to computers is that they save labor, and in particular the labor of males. Entire industries have gone by the wayside, or overseas, in the staggering societal changes. Cars used to be made by men, now they are for the most part made by robots. Broken cars used to be fixed by men, now they pretty much just ask the computer in the car “Where does it hurt?” and replace that.
Traditional male jobs decline and are being replaced, or at least mostly replaced, with service industry jobs. The irony of unemployed guys addicted to computer gaming is painfully acute. In a general sense, men just don’t know what the hell they are meant to be doing anymore. Once we were warriors, now we work retail.
This decline in the traditional male income support role still hasn’t been fully felt as yet I don’t think. Most men truly believe that if they hold a good job, they should have a good marriage and a happy family. Good provider = good husband = good father. But when a woman can out earn her husband, it undercuts that need for a socially contracted agreement between a man and a woman.
So to recap….
Before Nuclear War, Birth Control and Computers… there were fewer males for a female to choose from, who she choose was a very serious life changing choice from the get go, and she would then become economically dependant on her chosen male for essentially the rest of her life. The untimely death of a husband a hundred years ago, essentially meant enduring poverty for his widow.
The entire point of the Marriage 1.0 agreement and law, was in no small part to ensure that a man could not simply leave a wife in the lurch with his children. When the choice for a woman is “stay married” or “poverty”, she would want the law to ensure the “stay married” part was going to stick.

With the advent of those three key technologies though, women no longer were forced to depend on men for income, no longer directly required marriage to enjoy sex, and had a small oversupply of men to choose from. So when the choice for women turns into, “stay married” or “dump this guy and do something else more fun”, then they naturally want to change marriage law to allow that option. Thus Marriage 2.0 is born.

….okay Athol, so what’s your point?
To be sure, Marriage 2.0 does have it’s problems, and they are serious, but the game has utterly changed, and there can never be a return to Marriage 1.0 days. At least not without the complete loss of what amounts to all technological development since about 1900, maybe even earlier. The technology is driving the change in our sex lives and relationships. Not feminism or pop culture. There are no solutions whatsoever in the past to find for those concerned about the problems of Marriage 2.0. Simply none.
The solutions to the problems of Marriage 2.0 lie somewhere in the future, in whatever Marriage 3.0 is going to be. Whatever that Marriage 3.0 will be though, will also be driven by technology rather than ideology.
I am personally still trying to grasp what those technologies are going to be, and I’m for the moment sadly out of good ideas. However there is one very obvious technology we have available now that will unquestionably play a key role in Marriage 3.0, and that is paternity testing. Once you have a technology available, you simply can’t wish it away. So a prediction…
….within a decade a handful of states and countries will have adopted mandatory paternity testing laws. Within two decades it will be a standard law across all first world nations.
So hang in there, Marriage 3.0 is coming. Whatever the hell that is going to be.
Filed Under: Monogamy and Marriage 2.0

Are Women Are Evil Crazy Bitches Out To Get Us?

December 19, 2011 By 70 Comments
There was a comment on ”When Her Anger Is Just A Tactic” that I think needs a full answer. At some point in reading Manosphere blogs pretty much everyone has asked this same question
Anon:  Tell me again why I should bother with women or marriage? Remind me why I should morally and legally dedicate myself to a life of psychological head games, emotional manipulation, and sharing a house with a spoiled, selfish, immature child who subconsciously expects me to be her Daddy (and that’s assuming she’s one of the “good ones”!)? On top of that, if I don’t deliver my “Game” just right, sweetheart gets bored and “falls out of love with me”, witholds sex, has an affair, and then proceeds to crush my life into little pieces via our wonderful legal system. Riiiiiight. Maybe I’m missing something but what exactly do *I* get out of this deal again? All I see are men being required to cater their behavior to suit the emotional whims of women while trying to convince themselves they’re really clever for doing so. Why aren’t women required to just grow the Hell up, take responsibility for their behavior, and quit acting like selfish, bratty children and learn to get along with men? Or is that just too much to ask?
I’ll be honest guys – Game just makes me hate women.
Athol: You already know exactly what you get from a good marriage, you want it, but you just don’t know it is possible for you to achieve. Then it’s a small step to jump to saying you hate women and don’t want to be in a relationship with one. This is the sour grapes response.
Women are the way they are with men, because they historically have taken enormous risks in having sex with a man. We’re so used to modern medicine saving women and babies via Caesarean Section that we don’t really think consciously about the risks of pregnancy anymore. In addition to that, women expend enormous resources being pregnant, and are committed to spending them far into the future with having a child.
As a result women are hypergamous and seek the highest quality mates they can find. Which is, you must admit, a pretty reasonable strategy to pursue on the whole. Women aren’t illogical, they are following a rational strategy. They aren’t random, they have a predictable pattern of interaction with men they are interested in.
It’s a little like playing Pac-Man. At first the ghosts just chase you down and trap you, but after a while you get better at avoiding them and get a better score. However “back in the day”, top level players simply worked out the programming of the ghosts and would run set patterns for screen after screen of Pac-Man. Essentially the game could be beaten and the game actually bugs on the 256th screen and can’t be passed.
The purpose of Game is to figure out those patterns of action women take and then preempt them by running our own patterns of behavior. This all sounds manipulative on the part of Gamers, and that’s because it is manipulative. But when the end goal is you get what you want from your wife because she’s happy and excited to be in a relationship with you, most women don’t actually care that they are being played.
Even the simple things like understanding how ovulation drives female sexual behavior is a huge revelation to most men. Before you know about it, women seem terribly random and confusing. After you know about it, you can mark off nights for rough sex in your day planner for months ahead.
The other half of the problem making women seem confusing to men, is that they have a strategy of misdirection. Ovulation isn’t just ovulation, it’s concealed ovulation. Just like when a magician doing a trick wants you to pay attention to their right hand, they wave it dramatically to draw your eye to it, meanwhile their left hand does something sneaky. It’s extremely difficult to fool other magicians though because they know the magic game so well. The kicker is that most women don’t even know they are misdirecting and can be fooled by their own emotions bouncing around as their man is. You don’t think they are really that angry about the way things are stacked in the dishwasher do you?
Once you get good at this stuff, it’s almost amusing how easy it is to predict how your wife will react to you doing different things. If I absolutely pound the crap out of Jennifer in bed, 99% of the time the next day she’s cuddly and clingy. Then I lightly tease her about it because that makes her make her pouty face and snuggle into me even more. Cause and effect my love.
And yes half of what I talk about on MMSL is basic behavior tactics. If your wife is behaving like a spoiled brat, that’s because in no small part you’re allowing her to act that way in the relationship. Women tend to be responsive to men in sexual relationships, so if she’s being a bitch, look to your own behavior first and see if you are part of the problem by enabling that bitchiness… if only by your toleration of staying in a relationship with a bitch.
Importantly, this is ancient programming, and simply isn’t going to change any time soon. So learn it, or don’t learn it, but there’s no way to unknow what you already know. So you may as well push through the hump and master Game rather than stop halfway into the process.
It is very important to make a good choice in a wife, but after that, it’s really not all that difficult to keep a basically good woman happy and content being your wife by paying attention to the basics of Game. It just requires effort.
 
Filed Under: Body Agenda and Sex Rank, How To Choose A Wife

When Her Anger Is Just A Tactic

December 18, 2011 By 30 Comments
The reader asking the question I answered on How Not To Be Affected By Her Anger.
Reader:  How do you do it??  I have been working on this and it has actually worked.  I am faking it at first, because as I walk away from her when she is starting to get upset, I am actually holding back my emotions (something that she either can’t or won’t do, and admittedly,  I have sometimes reacted with equal anger to hers in the past).  If I can hold out and give her enough space she has come back calmed down and nice again.  She rarely apologizes to me, and even when she does its usually feigned, but after a recent outburst where I took your suggested approach, she actually approached me after about 15 minutes and apologized for real.   Wow!  Who is this woman and what has she done with my wife?
Thanks for the very sound  advice.  I wish I would have understood this years ago.
Athol:  Wives using anger as a routine thing, are doing so as a tactic to get you to change your behavior by evoking a submissive response in you. When it doesn’t work, it becomes a useless tactic, so she’ll stop. And obviously when you make a display of submission to her, that reduces her attraction to you.
Bear in mind I’m talking about anger as a routine thing, not an occasional response to an obvious inappropriate event. Her being angry after you attempt to drive into the garage without opening the garage door first, would be a perfectly fine use of anger. Getting yelled at four or more times a week for minor and trivial infractions means she’s just being a bully.
Note that you don’t have to actually “win the fight” in the moment, to actually pass this sort of testing. You just have to continue doing the behavior you want to do, in the face of her anger and/or fail to perform the task she is demanding of you.
And bear in mind that most women aren’t even consciously aware of themselves doing this sort of thing. They don’t even know why they turn into venomous screechtards, they can even start turbocharging their dislike of the husband by “Hating that I turn into this screaming bitch around him. I’m not like that!”
Filed Under: Nice Guys and Betaization
« Older Posts