Alpha Mail: respond appropriately

Indyguy asks about when it is appropriate to praise a woman:

So what if a woman actually shows tenacity or discipline that you actually DO admire?

The correct way to respond is exactly in the same way you would respond to a man. Most men make two mistakes:

1. They praise a woman for normal male behavior. "Hey, you changed the oil, wow, you must really know a lot about cars!" The fact that a woman knows that Tom Brady is the quarterback of the New England Patriots no more merits gushing over how cool she is than your male friends knowing that Charlize Theron was in, um, whatever movie she is in these days does.

2. They laugh when girls aren't funny. This is a specific example of a much broader phenomenon and is one reason why women tend to overrate themselves. Men tell plain girls they are pretty and pretty girls they are gorgeous all the time. No wonder women look down on them! Does she look like Kate Beckinsale, Marisa Miller, or Sandra Bullock? No? Then she's not gorgeous, and more importantly, she knows it. And you've just displayed your low value by trying to suck up to her by offering up the BS as a toadying supplicant.

This is the low end of gorgeous. If she doesn't clear this bar, you're DLVing.

But that doesn't mean not laughing when a girl actually is funny. By way of example, although she doesn't ever display it in public, Spacebunny has a very dry wit that can be downright hilarious at times. If she says something funny, I laugh. If it's not funny, I don't. Which happens to be exactly how I treat everyone else, including the little talking people inside the magic box. This isn't rocket science.

Consider the manufactured heroism of Jessica Lynch. The story of her heroics was pure Pentagon propaganda, but suppose she really had armed herself with a machine gun and saved a squad of Marines while shooting down ten enemy combatants. How could you ever justify not granting her due respect for that? When contemplating applied Game, it's necessary to keep in mind that these concepts are intended to be applied to social situations, which by definition are fluid, and therefore there are very, very few hard and fast rules which apply the same way in all situations. That is why its application is an art even if the underlying theories are increasingly based on science.