There is a misconception out there that the playboy (and by that I mean one who is versed in ‘game’) is a one-dimensional man who is unable to form relationships with women that last any longer than the first one or two bangs.
This is false: the well-known players that I have met are all intelligent and interesting men who have no difficulty in ‘keeping women around’ after sex if they want to.
And after all, it makes sense. There is no logical reason why someone can’t have a rounded, interesting personality and also learn a few game skills to improve his success with women as well. As I said on Twitter yesterday, why not have both?
In fact, having a well-rounded personality will only improve one’s success as a playboy. And who wouldn’t want that?
There are a couple of things to take from this. The first is, if you are reading this in the hope of getting better with women and you happen to lack character or emotional resilience (I refuse to use the word ‘maturity’) then you need to get those things sorted out.
The second is that a more important question for the playboy is not ‘am I able to keep a woman around for the long haul’, but rather ‘do I want to?’
The Playboy Stereotype
Let’s take a look at the stereotype which has given rise to the view that playboys are ‘incapable’ of relationships.
Way back when ‘game’ first became a ‘thing’ in popular consciousness, when Neil Strauss published ‘The Game‘ in 2005, the playboy community quickly—an with some justification—became the focus of caricature and mockery.
In the popular imagination, the player was a man who went to nightclubs wearing cowboy boots, a flashing LED belt, a fedora and a feather boa, and did card tricks and palm reading to impress girls.
While there was a grain of truth in this, since flamboyance (or peacocking) was certainly a feature of Game 0.1, the scene very quickly normalised. In time, elegance and style were valued over looking like a character from a kid’s pantomime, and, as self-development came to the fore, the notion of building up one’s value in order to ‘back up’ one’s image quickly gained credence.
While in the past players were criticised for using ‘canned material’—that is, pick-up lines swiped from the internet—pretty soon so-called ‘natural game’ was favoured by most. That is, once you understand the overall mechanics of seduction then you can start to use your own personality and material rather than that constructed by others.
Actually, all of this happened quite rapidly. So by 2010 at least (and probably before), ‘game’ had come to mean something far more holistic than the cartoon-like impression that many had of it.
What this boiled down to was an understanding of inter-gender dynamics (informed by evolutionary biology and sociological and psychological observation), consistent self-improvement (i.e. reading, lifting, dressing well, public speaking, entrepreneurialism and generally ‘making oneself a ‘better man’), plus a willingness to approach women honestly and intentionally.
The Playboy’s Critics
Strangely, and perhaps uniquely, in 2018 the playboy faces criticism from all sides of the spectrum.
SJWs and feminists on the left despise him, of course, instinctively believing him to be inherently ‘misogynistic’ (not true).
But the conservative right hate the playboy as well. For them he is a deviant, degenerate nightmare, encouraging ‘sluttish’ behaviour in women, and accelerating the collapse of Western civilisation in the process. In their assessment he is anti-family, anti-marriage and (by extension) anti-society, and as such he is the target of open hostility.
There is another, more moderate group, also on the right, who hate the playboy as well. These people do not have quite the same apocalyptic paranoia as the neo-cons (although they might still identify as such), but tend to be those with vested interests (either personal or commercial and sometimes both) in promoting the sanctity and general ‘correctness’ of monogamy, marriage and so on.
This group tends to be less vociferous in their attacks, couching their disapproval in expressions of concern for the playboy, who they portray as ’emotionally damaged’, or ‘incapable of love’ or simply ‘immature’, having ‘not grown up past adolescence’.
All of these disparate groups coalesce around the false and dated notion that the playboy is a fake and a charlatan who is somehow not ‘the real deal’. That he is a sad, failed man in a magician’s hat and snakeskin platform boots who has learned some 1990s pick-up lines from the internet with which he attempts to impress so-called ‘thots’ who are inebriated on cheap and colourful alcohol in some perpetual, nightmare faux-Vegas nightscape
A Deliberate Misrepresentation
It is ironic that three groups that would probably rather have no association with one another at all have conspired in perpetuating this fiction.
Whether or not they are aware of the reality of the modern playboy’s actual modus operandi is interesting to speculate on, although ultimately pointless. For what it’s worth I suspect that some of these critics are dimly aware that they are simply repeating rather silly, outdated ideas, but they don’t care, since continuing to do so enables them to make their case more strongly.
In this way the far left conspires to assist the far right, and vice versa.
The Playboy’s Real Dilemma
Away from all of this nonsense, the playboy’s real dilemma is what he actually wants from his relationships with the opposite sex.
Because far from ‘not being able to keep a woman around after sex’, the proficient playboy more commonly has the opposite problem. Having become so attuned to the levers of female attraction—and because fundamentally he loves women and they love being around him too—he is likely to have girls wanting to ‘lock him down’ into relationships when he would rather remain single.
And given that many of the girls he meets are bright, attractive, intelligent and empathetic people, the temptation is often strong for him to acquiesce. At this point, his views on monogamy, on what ‘the endgame of game’ should be, are of vital importance.
When he looks around, he sees failed marriages piling up everywhere. Those of his friends, colleagues, relatives. Those of celebrities and politicians. When he reads the statistics on divorce, and he weighs the evidence. And without a doubt the most clear-headed conclusion he can come to is that monogamy is at the very least problematic, and at worst unworkable without major (and unwelcome) compromise in nearly every area of life.
On the other hand, in the looking-glass world of online discourse, the playboy is assured by intelligent and pleasant people that a monogamous, long-term relationship is the one thing that he lacks. That if he would simply drop his childish charade and join all the happy couples on the other side of the room then he would finally heal, become a ‘real man’, and . . . god help us all . . . do his bit to ‘save Western civilisation.’
And so the dilemma for the playboy is set. It is not (contrary to what some believe) that he is unable to join the monogamy party which they so extol. In many cases, it would be only too easy for him to do so.
What holds him back is the enjoyment that he derives from his free and varied sex life; the suspicion that in fact the grass over there is not as green as some make out; and, most importantly of all, his dedication to his art or craft or business . . . to the one damn thing that he really wants to do in this life over and above everything else, and which certainly has more value to him than messing around getting married with the 50/50 chance that it might end up being satisfactory.
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