Top 10 Game blogs Q213

The two Rs still lead the way, and at this rate, may soon be considered the three Rs.  In the second quarter, Rollo came on like a hurricane, at least in Alexa terms, moving up significantly from number nine to number five.  The net Alexa rankings for the top ten blogs improved by a cumulative -848,120, mostly thanks to Rational Male. The top ten Game blogs are below, listed in terms of estimated monthly pageviews and actual Alexa rankings.

Remember that Alexa rankings are based on links, not pageview traffic. Actual Google pageviews are listed in bold along with the percentage change from the previous quarter for those blogs reporting traffic.  Italicized traffic numbers are estimates based on previous traffic and updated Alexa rank.

1. TRoK: 2,350,00, 42,825 (-4,813)
2. Roissy: 2,150,000, 55,448 (+187)
3. Roosh:  1,650,000, 62,992 (+8,436)
4. HUS:    450,000, 146,943 (+27,735)
5. Rollo:   425,000, 162,634, (-1,414,514)
6. AG:    323,079 (+6.5%), 206,926 (-20,276)
7. Dalrock:  218,500 (-7.9%), 251,090 (+66,287)
8. MMSL:    140,000 343,966 (+103,486)
9. Keoni:    73,557 (+1.8%), 643,101 (-116,531)
10. Just4Guys: 60,000, 707,694

Alpha Game was up in terms of pageviews and rank, but was passed easily by Rollo anyhow. I was a little surprised to see Dalrock decline in Alexa terms because he's been doing some excellent, widely-cited posts of late, so I suspect their rankings are delayed and we'll see him move up in Q3.  The new group blog, Just Four Guys, featuring Han Solo and the notorious Ted D, among others, managed to crack the top ten at Badger's expense. If you know another Game blog you think belongs in the top ten, please send me the URL and your justification for it.  If you are one of the listed bloggers, please send me the three-month average pageviews for the months of April, May, and June in the comments and I will update the post.  Be sure to mention if pageviews are Google/Blogger, Wordpress, or some other metric.

Note also that MMSL is increasingly focused on its forums rather than its blog, which is why Athol's site is considerably more trafficked than it looks based solely on the blog numbers.

UPDATE: Now that was some fine guesstimation.  I estimated Dalrock at 220k for Q2 and he reported  Wordpress at 262k, 232k and 196k for the three months involved.  Averaged and corrected for Google/Wordpress (.95) and that came to 218,500.

Top 10 Game blogs Q113

White Knights undermine civilization

Yes, Mr. White Knight, white-knighting really is so bad:

I spent a long time in high school and college trapped deep within the ‘Friend Zone.’ (And if you don’t know what the friend zone is, just think about the guy who you can tell everything to, trust implicitly, yet have absolutely no desire to go out on a date with. That poor soul is trapped in the friend zone.) In fact, I was so nice that one evening, when my friends set me up with a young woman of questionable morals, rather than pick her up, I helped her get back together with her ex boy-friend.

Go me.

But you know what? I like being the nice guy. I think it is still important, and worthwhile. And while I know I’m not as nice as I think I am, I am always trying to be that guy, the one who does the right thing. It’s one of the ways I define myself.

 So why am I writing about this? Well, I’m currently working through a book (review to follow next week) and one of the things said in this book is that guys like me, the White Knights, are enabling women to continue to erode away men’s rights. And while I can understand the point being made I have to disagree because there”s a huge whole in the discussion.

Why are men supposed to be polite?  Why was chivalry important? Why did my mother and father hammer home these behaviors?

Let’s start from the simple truth that as a group, men are stronger and more aggressive than women. Yeah, I know, sexist pig, stereotypes, yadda yadda. Deal with it. Pick 15 random men and 15 random women, match them up one on one, and you’re going to find 12 or more men still standing. That’s just the way it is.

So, women are naturally going to feel about as nervous as a long tailed cat in room full of rocking chairs whenever she is surrounded by a group of men, even if she knows them. It will be even worse if they are strangers. She has no way of knowing whether they will take advantage of the power differential in order to take advantage of her. So what can we do, as men, to allay her very reasonable fears?

As Aristotle pointed out, there are people, like this gamma male, who are totally incapable of learning through the receipt of information.  It's obvious that this guy can't do it, not just because he keeps doing the same thing over and over again even though it produces results he does not like, but because his response - women's fears are very reasonable - is not even related to the claim - women are being enabled to erode away men's rights.

So fear is sufficient to override intrinsic and unalienable rights?  That's the case he is inadvertently making, and it is obviously a non-starter.  So, it is clear we cannot respond to him with dialectical reason, we can only resort to crude rhetoric.

WHITE KNIGHTS ARE HELPING WOMEN DESTROY WESTERN CIVILIZATION!  IF YOU DO NOT LIVE TO WISH IN A CAVE BEING RULED BY TOTALITARIAN THOUGHT POLICE, YOU MUST STOP WHITE KNIGHTING!

Thus endeth the lesson.

Alpha Mail: can she handle the truth?

CS wonders if he should tell a moderate chunker the real reason he's not interested in her:

Much respect to you for your recent posts in response to NK Jesmin, the nauseatingly maudlin Shattersnipe and the portly, uberreactive atheist. Recently, its starting to seem like the entire brigade of fatuous leftist ideologues is surpassing peak shriek in that their inane emoting in response to equality blasphemers like you is becoming more widely perceived as pathetic and tiresome rather than alarming.

You holding firm to the truth, no matter how offensive, got me thinking: I just went out on a date with a girl and, long story short, the only real flaw with her is that she is too heavy (not fat fat but needed to drop 10-15 lbs). We have communicated enough that I'll actually have to provide an explicit reason why I don't want to go out again. The only honest answer I could give is that she is too heavy.

Do I tell her this (even if gently hinted at in euphemistic language)? I know doing something like this sounds completely socially retarded (a couple friends have told me as much) but think about it; if I tell her "we just want different things", "we live too far apart", "I'm seeing someone else" or some other bs, her hamster will be fueled by one of these excuses and she'll fail to confront the real problem which has lead to her being rejected by me and likely any other man with at least a modicum of SMV. Plus, any other excuse I give is a lie. If I tell her the truth she'll likely cry and be upset but at least she can confront her real problem. What do you suggest?

I suggest that this is an excellent application for the Golden Rule.  It's not your responsibility to fix her.  It's not your job to convince her to stop needlessly stuffing her face.  All of us who could stand to lose a few pounds, (and I could stand to cut about five myself), know perfectly well that we're carrying extra weight and what we need to do to get rid of it.  It's just a matter of willpower and lifestyle modification.

Most men have been rejected by women before.  So, do you appreciate the truth or do you prefer the white lie?  If you'd rather have a woman tell you that the reason she isn't interested in seeing you again is that you're too short, or too poor, or too laddish, then be straightforward with her.  That sort of honesty is appropriate for an individual of your straightforward nature and she will likely expect it from you.

If, on the other hand, you tend to prefer the face-saving deception, then that is the tactic you should take. But don't insult her intelligence; if you're going this route the decent thing to do is to make it credible and give her hamster something with which to work.  The one thing to avoid doing is to tell a lame white lie, which only compounds the rejection with an insult.

Alpha Mail: Truth is worth the price

AC is a little surprised at my willingness to be forthright about the physical realities of combat:

I came across your blog via Vivalamanosphere and was stunned to discover that you're an author. The fact that you have this on your blog for all of your fans to see is mind-blowing to me:

"Of course, if we're going to start bringing reality into swords and sorcery, we should probably also take into consideration the fact that even a large, well-trained woman couldn't last thirty seconds against the average warrior.  The correct and realistic portrayal of an armor-era woman is either one who is dead and buried after her brief foray into warrior womanhood or at home, caring for the children that she started bearing in her teens.

"Awkward and combat-inefficient breast plates are the least of the problem. What it is time to retire is the absurd and ahistorical "warrior woman".

"The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous.  If you doubt me, just hand a sword to the closest woman the next time you're in a medieval museum."

This kind of talk sounds like Red Pill wisdom (reality). I would never expect this from someone who writes successfully enough to have multiple books out (and fantasy books!), especially when their pen name and blogging name appear to be one in the same.

You have my utmost respect; how do you do it? Don't you have potential publishers you alienate when you call something out for what it is like this (assuming they even matter anymore).

I'm slaving away at writing terrible trash so that I can one day refine my craft to a point where people might actually want to buy my work, but even if I am able to work hard enough to reach such a point, I can't imagine being bold enough to blog in a way which might alienate potential readers. And yet, here you're doing just that with not just a radical opinion (truth), but one that might get you thrown in jail in some parts of Europe.

It's inspiring; again, how do you get away with it? I feel like a coward now for believing I must not allow a pen name to be married with opinion, and yet I can't bring myself to stray from that when I'm still working out not writing mountains of trash.

I'm definitely going to start reading your work; in fact, I just bought A Throne of Bones. Is there a better book to start for a new reader like myself?

I don't get away with anything. Of course I alienate potential publishers.  I've been told by numerous people, including Tor authors, that Tor Books will never publish me because Theresa Nielson-Hayden has openly declared that I am a very bad, evil, dangerous, and mentally deranged individual.  I've had signed book contracts cancelled because a woman in the marketing department took offense to something I wrote on my blog.  I have lost jobs and job opportunities alike as a result of failing to toe the equalitarian line.  I just lost the SFWA election by what must be near-historic margins, with more than 90 percent of the voters supporting my opponent.

So what?  I have nothing about which to cry or even to complain.  There are always ways around the gatekeepers, and truth combined with talent and perseverance will eventually triumph in the end.  I have it easy in comparison with a great mind like Ludvig von Mises, who was blackballed from nearly every university in Europe and the United States while writing the books that upended both Marxian and Keynesian dogma.

I just keep writing and my audience keeps growing.  Today, it is one million monthly readers.  Soon it will be ten million. Every attempt to marginalize the writer who sticks to writing truthfully about reality is bound to fail in time, because truth is always more compelling than lies.  Write what you believe, write what you want, not what you think others might want to hear.  And never write out of fear.

In answer to the question, unless you are already a fan of epic fantasy, I would recommend starting with either The Wardog's Coin or A Magic Broken before diving into A Throne of Bones.  At 850 pages, it is perhaps a bit of a beast for the casual fantasy reader.

Top 10 Game blogs: Q113

While the metric utilized by Alexa is without question flawed, it does provide the rough ability to compare readerships across blogs in the absence of openly posted traffic stats.  As you can see on the left sidebar, I make both my Google Analytics and Sitemeter numbers accessible to everyone, unfortunately, the vast majority of bloggers prefer to avoid letting people know exactly how many people are reading their blogs.

But there is interesting and important information to be gleaned from open statistics, and for the Game world, a healthy reminder that despite the growth of the androsphere and the general awareness of Game, it is not even close to breaking through to the mainstream as yet.  We still have a long, long way to go. Consider the Alexa traffic rankings of those blogs more or less accounted the biggest dogs of the Game world:

Blog, est. monthly Google pageviews, (Alexa rank, US Alexa rank). Bold text indicates actual numbers.

1. Return of Kings: 2,250,000, (47,638, 16,112) 
2. Roissy: 2,150,000, (55,261, 17,302)
3. Roosh: 1,800,000, (54,556, 21,906)
4. HUS: 575,000, (119,608, 46,210)
5. AG: 303,245, (227,202, 44,033)
6. MMSL: 240,480, (230,463, 73,532) (1)
7. Dalrock: 237,295, (184,203, 74,477) 
8. Keoni: 72,283, (759,632, 181,127)
9. Rollo: 75,000, (1,577,448, 278,497)
10. Badger: 23,000, (1,161,139, 409,010)

With the exception of Alpha Game and MMSL*, these numbers are mere estimates.  However, due to the fact that I have two points of comparison with VP and AG, the estimates are at least somewhat based on realistic conversion rates. I suspect Rollo, in particular, is being shortchanged by Alexa Toolbar readers, because Alexa only shows one link to Rational Male while I know for a fact that there is more than one link to that blog from Alpha Game alone.

I also don't know if Alexa traffic or Alexa US traffic is more determinative of actual pageviews. I'm assuming the former, because I believe both HUS and Dalrock have more traffic than AG. I found it particularly surprising, (and, considering that I live in Europe, more than a little ironic), that according to Alexa, both Susan and Dalrock are more popular than Alpha Game outside the USA.  The similar, but much smaller inversion between Roosh and Roissy makes a little more sense to me, given Roosh's focus on international relations. The list also shows why Game is still so often confused with its pick-up aspect, because the PUA-focused sites remain the most popular by a considerable margin.

Anyhow, I would welcome actual numbers from any of the blogs mentioned above, be they Wordpress pageviews, Google pageviews, or Sitemeter visitors, as even one or two more datapoints would allow me to make more accurate estimates.  But I digress, as this is the sobering point that I wished to remind everyone.

Jezebel 46,681,852, (2,168,583)

This is why there is no need for internecine competition amongst Game bloggers. The truth of Game will win out in the end, because reality always eventually exposes even the prettiest, most passionate lies. But collectively speaking, we have a long, long way to go.

UPDATE: Apparently my estimates haven't been too far off.  Susan reports that HUS is running at 575k/month, as opposed to the 600k/month I estimated, in addition to Athol's 240k/month versus the estimated 175k/month.  This also settles the question about Alexa, as the global rank is clearly the one that matters, not the US one.  In the next quarterly update, I will drop the US rank.

UPDATE 2: Badger's peak was 47k/month in November, not far off from my estimate of 50k, but since he slacked off, he's been running at 23k.


(1) The MMSL Forum has 1.2 million monthly pageviews.  Since forums are not blogs, and have a very different readership patterns, I don't think it's correct to put it on the blog list as such.  But it certainly merits mention.

How to enter the lion's den

"When you go in the lion's den, you don't tippy toe in. You carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, 'Where's the son of a bitch!' If you go in any other way you're gonna lose." 
- Brian Billick

Rollo wisely admonishes those who will be drawing media attention as the androsphere begins to command mainstream attention:

 I understand the host here is contracted to the Huff-Po so the context begins in terms of what entertains women’s need for indignation. No indignation, no audience. George is hamstrung from the outset: we have the ubiquitous 50+, “I’m ok with the beta provider I married after fucking my spell of bad boys and learned my lesson so you gals should learn from my mistakes” woman (aka the Aunt Giggles, Kay Hymowitz archetype). Next we have the prerequisite “clinical psychologist” who looks like one of the mothers on Dance Moms, and rattles off the feel good humanist psychology truisms clichéd in the 1990′s. After that we have Nathan the self-identified White Knight who’s only purpose is to bolster both women’s feeble positions to better identify with any woman in the hopes that she might be watching and, God willing, anonymously seek him out to potentially hook up with him for being such a team player.

That’s a tough cast to work with so I will commend George on his effort, however, his dropping the ball here is less about his grasp of red-pill wisdom (I know and read his blog regularly), and more about the context that the MSM will allow the manosphere to be represented in. Learn this now red-pill literati before you venture into the MSM – the feminine imperative will gladly make you the red meat for the indignation that sells their advertising to women.

As I now have a considerable amount of experience with hostile mainstream interviewers, I recommend listening to this interview I did with a gentleman by the name of Thom Hartmann for an example of how to go into a situation where you are aware the host does not share your views. What you always have to keep in mind is that they are not talking to you, they are talking to their viewers/listeners through you. To communicate effectively, you have to do the same. When listening to this, note that Hartmann not unreasonably considers himself more intelligent than the average talking head. And yet, simply by being sufficiently prepared for a potentially hostile interlocutor, I am able to present a case for the seemingly unthinkable in a perfectly credible manner.

Why are men silent?

Dr. Helen poses the question:

Perhaps this is why only women seem to be speaking up. It’s safer and they typically have a feminist bent anyway. Come on–The End of Men? Seriously? That’s easy. What’s hard is speaking up about the war against men in our culture, especially if one is a man with a career. Do you speak up when you see injustice against men in public, at work, or out in the world?

I disagree. The short answer to the question is that we're not silent.  We only appear to be missing from the public discourse because the female-obsessed media is completely ignoring the leading voices of men who are speaking out against the destructive incoherence and tyranny of sexual equalitarianism.  To understand how this process works, one need only look at the difference between the way in which Roissy and Susan Walsh have been treated by the media upon its discovery of the societal consequences of Game.  Now, it is no secret that I think highly of Susan. I believe she has taken on an important and difficult task.  And it is no criticism of Susan to note that Roissy has been around longer, Roissy is the more original thinker, and Roissy is the more influential writer. I also suspect the Chateau has a larger readership than Hooking Up Smart.  And yet, to whom does the media turn when it wants to discuss the ideas that the androsphere have been producing and kicking around for years?  Susan, naturally.

Meanwhile, Roosh only surfaces in the mainstream media courtesy of his appearance on the Southern Poverty Law Center's bogus list of so-called hate sites.

It's not Susan's fault. Not in the least. She's just doing her thing and she can hardly be expected to turn up her nose and slam the door when the media literally comes knocking.  But there are a number of men who are more influential in terms of how people are thinking about the societal consequences of Game than she is, and none of them are ever interviewed by the mainstream media even as the concepts they create and the terminology they coin leaks into it.  A link from Instapundit is about as mainstream as the coverage of any member of the androsphere can reasonably expect to receive.

This is not a complaint, it is merely an observation.  It is, in fact, no more than any theoretician of Game would expect.  But it is absurd to think that men are silent when there are dozens of them writing, speaking out, and being actively followed by tens of thousands of men and women.  Men are not silent, it is only that the mainstream media wants no part of any man who is not intellectually neutered, and is determined to hear no men, see no men, and say absolutely nothing about men that might, in some way, reflect insufficiently well on women.

But the cracks in the dam are showing. And when it breaks, there will be a deluge.

As to why men are disinclined to speak up on an individual level, that is because men dislike complaining and fear retribution both personal and professional.  I myself have lost both book contracts, (from Thomas Nelson and Lion Hudson), and jobs due to nothing more than intense dislike for my published opinions. However, as fewer and fewer men have anything they fear losing, and as awareness of Game grows throughout the male population, I believe the younger generation, which has been inoculated against the female imperative by constant exposure to it, will begin to speak out against the myriad of pretty little lies.

Alpha Mail: the female process

Sarahsdaughter lays down some vital observations concerning female communication and behavior that every man needs to comprehend:

Because I have to thoroughly think through these things, I've come to understand that my first response is often times 1)emotional and irrational 2)based in fear (not truth) 3)not the same response I might have later after processing information 4)should not be verbalized until said processing of information is done.

We, as women understand and find no issue with the fact that we need to go through these processes in order to figure out what is true - even when it comes to our feelings. We want to talk it through. And then, we have a tendency to arrive at new conclusions without going back and apologizing for emotional outbursts that were based on wrong conclusions.

This is one thing game teaches men (and women) that haven't been privy to understanding women's nature prior. Ignore what women say, and observe what they do. They are not logical nor rational in their first responses to stimuli or information. And they are not prone to taking responsibility for wrong behavior.

This gets at the heart of the greater part of what is considered "sexism" today.  And yet, who is the more truly sexist, those who simply acknowledge the readily observable or those who deny it, and in denying it, remove from women the responsibility for being accountable for their words and actions.  Feminism isn't about sexual equality.  It isn't even about female superiority, per se.  It is, rather, primarily concerned with according women formal adult status and privileges without adult responsibilities.

Missing the obvious conclusion

I think the author of this article has failed to note the more significant aspect of the experiment here:

Okc_ebooks creator Sam Kriss made a fake female profile on the dating site OkCupid, through which he responds to unsolicited messages from men with quotes from @horse_ebooks, the surreal Twitter bot that streams nonsensical snippets of text. The result: dozens of conversations from horny men desperately vying to have sex with a robot.

There is no question that it is pathetic what the average man will put up with in his pursuit of sexual gratification.  But surely it is more significant, and more troubling, to discover that dozens of men cannot tell the difference between genuine female communication online and a surreal Twitter bot streaming "nonsensical snippets of text".

UPDATE: Stickwick said Devil Bunnies....

Don't try to hide it

There isn't any excuse for the foolish flirtation - or possibly worse - of the husband involved here.  But I find the insult to everyone's intelligence on the part of the wife to be more than a little annoying.  It's fine that she caught her husband out, but we're expected to believe that she isn't inherently suspicious when she spent more effort trying to break into her husband's phone than Bletchley Park did in cracking Enigma.

Even now I can’t explain what prompted me to pick up my husband’s mobile phone and trawl through his messages.

I’m not inherently suspicious and had no reason to mistrust him.

On the contrary, had you asked me to describe him I would have said he was dependable, loving and the least likely man in our circle of friends to betray his wife.

It happened on Christmas Eve and I was provoked, at first, just by idle curiosity.

Our two young sons were tucked up in bed, their stockings hung by the fireplace.

The table was set for lunch with family and friends the next day. Mark was busy in the garage.

I had flopped, exhausted, on the sofa and there on the coffee table was Mark’s swanky new mobile.

I had no real sense of purpose when I flicked across to his texts.

It was only when I realized I couldn’t access them because he had protected them with a password that the first glimmer of suspicion struck. Why would he do that?

I’m not particularly proud of myself, but at this point I turned amateur sleuth.

I decided I had to crack the code. I tried many possibilities — our birthdays, those of our sons, the burglar alarm code — but all were fruitless.

Each failure made me more determined and a little more uneasy: Mark had clearly settled on a configuration of letters and numbers that was far from obvious.

Finally, I got it. He’d used his mum’s date of birth. And as I scrolled through his messages I smiled to myself.

I can.  It's called: "she was suspicious, and apparently with good reason".  How is it supposed to be better that one "had no real sense of purpose" instead of bona fide suspicions as an excuse for breaking into someone else's device?  Now, granted, I harbor a genuine hatred for anyone touching my computer for any reason at all, (although I don't care if people use my phone), but regardless, I find it ridiculous when women attempt to pretend they aren't nosy, suspicious creatures who don't hesitate to pry into drawers, phones, computers, and devices.  And when caught, they inevitably try pretend that it was purely an accident that they were sticking their nose where it doesn't belong, about as credibly as the paedophile who attempts to claim that all the images he possesses are there for "research".

Now, I do think that a suspicious spouse, of either sex, has the right to request to see the other's telephone records or Facebook account, given the amount of affairs that have been revealed in such ways.  But that's as far as it goes.  Sometimes suspicion is warranted, but whether it is or it isn't, don't try to pretend that it is anything but what it is.

I'm also struck by a tangential thought.  If we are supposed to believe that an emotional affair is actually worse than a physical affair, doesn't logic necessarily dictate that one should simply go ahead with the latter if the former has already begun?

Lying and the long-term consequences

The regret-filled woman Susan mentioned isn't the only one to come to regret lying about her sexual history:

An unfaithful wife has been jailed for two years - almost a decade after she cried rape just to hide a one-night stand from her husband.  Gaynor Cooke, 41, had told police she was violently attacked by a taxi driver to cover up her fling with him, and her former lover was due to stand trial next month.

No-one was arrested in 2003 because a forensic sample taken from her at the time failed to find a similar profile on the national DNA database.

But when in 2011 the man, who she claimed was a stranger, was detained for a minor offence his DNA threw up a match.

The truth doesn't always come out, but it comes out often enough that it simply isn't worth the risk.  And it often comes out in unexpected, totally unpredictable ways that aren't usually at a particularly convenient time.  If you did it, just own up to it.  It's not just the right thing to do, it's the safe and responsible thing to do.

The future cost of past pleasures

Susan posts a woman's regrets concerning her past, and her lies about it:

I’m so incredibly sad. I’m living a life full of regret. I am now married to the most wonderful man – he is every woman’s dream:

First impressions: handsome, muscly, tall, the alpha male, excellent communicator.  Lasting impressions: loving, caring, kind, the provider, amazing lover.

Women throw themselves at him.. And he chose to be with me.

Unfortunately I didn’t save myself for him. I was promiscuous when I was single and my sexual past is putting a HUGE strain on our relationship. It is the ONLY thing we fight about. He loves me and cares for me, but he doesn’t respect me. I hope and pray that we can get through this. Your past DOES matter and it will always come back to haunt you.

When my husband and I first started dating he told me that he had issues with promiscuous women, and he asked me what I was like when I was single. I didn’t reveal to him my exact number, I simply said, “I haven’t slept with many guys”. Amongst my circle of friends it was considered a below average number, but on a global scale I now realise it’s a very high number.

At the time he was satisfied with my answer.. But 6 months later the topic came up again. He wanted an exact number. I did what many women do, and I lied. I told him 10 less than the actual number.

Some women are focusing on the lying.  And while I'm not excusing it, the observable fact of the matter is that if a woman isn't a virgin, she's probably lying about sex to some extent, if not necessarily 10 less than the actual number.  That being said, adding 10 to the number reported is probably a much more reasonable approach than taking a woman at her word about it.

Now, it's understandable that it bothers women that men hold their pasts against them much more severely than women hold men's pasts about them.  But that's just the way it is.  Trying to shame men and calling them insecure isn't going to accomplish anything; even if there is sufficient social pressure to cause them to remain silent and not say anything about the way the "phantom fucks" trouble them, it's not going to change the fact that it troubles them any more than a man quitting his job and staying home to play PS/3 all day is going to trouble his wife whether she says anything about it or not.

Honesty is always the best policy when it comes to sexual history, especially since there are a myriad of ways that the truth can eventually come to light.  If it causes you to lose out on someone you really like, better sooner than later.  And don't think that the passage of time is necessarily going to help, as the knowledge of having been knowingly deceived over all that time will actually tend to harden a man's mind against a woman.

A tale of two discourses

This post on modern vs post-modern discourse should sound familiar to those who will recall my previous post on heterotopic vs sensitivity-driven discourse:

Modern discourse

Following are ten key characteristics of modern discourse, what many professors and students even now consider the normal or standard way to think, study and argue in the academy:

• "personal detachment from the issues under discussion," the separation of participants' personal identities from subjects of inquiry and topics of debate;
• values on "confidence, originality, agonism, independence of thought, creativity, assertiveness, the mastery of one’s feelings, a thick skin and high tolerance for your own and others’ discomfort";
• suited to a heterotopic space like a university class, scholarly journal, or session of a learned society conference, a place apart much like a playing field for sports events, where competitors engage in ritual combat before returning with a handshake to the realm of friendly, personal interaction;
• illustrated by debate in the British House of Commons;
• epitomized by the debates a century ago between socialist G. B. Shaw and distributist G. K. Chesterton;
• playfulness is legitimate: one can play devil’s advocate, speak tongue in cheek, overstate and use hyperbole, the object being not to capture the truth in a single, balanced monologue, but to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions;
• "scathing satire and sharp criticism" are also legitimate;
• the best ideas are thought to emerge from mutual, merciless probing and attacking of arguments, with resultant exposure of blindspots in vision, cracks in theories, inconsistencies in logic;
• participants are forced again and again to return to the drawing board and produce better arguments;
• the truth is understood not to be located in any single voice, but to emerge from the conversation as a whole.

Postmodern discourse

Over the past half century, a competing mode of discourse, the one I call postmodern, has become steadily more entrenched in academe. Following are ten of its hallmarks, as Roberts and Sailer describe on their blogs:

• "persons and positions are ordinarily closely related," with little insistence on keeping personal identity separate from the questions or issues under discussion;
• "sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values";
• priority on "cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus";
• "seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge," in the eyes of proponents of modern discourse;
• tends to perceive the satire and criticism of modern discourse as "vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus";
• is oriented to " the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum";
• lacking "means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation," it will "typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition";
• "will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc.";
• has a more feminine flavour, as opposed to the more masculine flavour of modern discourse;
• results in "stale monologues" and contexts that "seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers."

When competing discourses collide

Roberts's original post describes the competing modes of discourse in rich detail and shows how differences between them play out in today's culture wars, as "offense-takers" and "offense trolls" use "human shields" and accusations of "hate speech" to silence opponents. That entire post, long as it is, merits close reading. For present purposes I highlight just one of Roberts's hypotheses: "Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked." 

It's very easy to identify the differences between these two discourse modes when one compares Whatever with Vox Popoli; see how many of each of these ten hallmarks apply in the ongoing discourse, or what passes for it, between McRapey and me.  Regardless of whether one calls it postmodern, sensitivity-driven, r/selection, or rhetorical, there are numerous fundamental and observable differences between the way the Rabbit People and those they hate and fear tend to communicate.

But don't be mistaken.  This isn't just another blog vs blog pissing match.  It's much more than that, as the known problem of mobbing in academia and elsewhere is directly related to the behaviors we are seeing exemplified here.  The same mechanics are at work in your school, your workplace, and your social circles and it is the very problem of which Aristotle warned more than two thousand years ago. 

An excursion into the rhetorical

This Twitter exchange sheds further light on the difference between the dialectically and the rhetorically minded, particularly with regards to the dialectically challenged among the latter.  Below is an excerpt, the whole exchange is posted on Vox Popoli.  For the purposes of this discussion, ignore the subject matter and focus solely on the various dialectical and rhetorical devices utilized by the two primary parties in the discussion.

voxday: Don't be stupid. You can't compare absolute numbers between nations of vastly different sizes. Look at per capita....

mushadamama: The numbers I've given ARE per 100k population. Perhaps the stupid one is one who doesn't read fine print....

voxday: No, you stupid, stupid woman, they are not. The USA is #4 in absolute terms, #27 per capita....

mushadamama: Yes, my chart is total gun murders @ 9369. Does not count accidents or suicides. US ranks 4th! My crime rate chart was per 100k.

mushadamama: Your chart, however, uses some kind of fuzzy math to come up with that ridiculous #. I can only assume it is more of a probability.

For the record, the mysterious "fuzzy math" used to produce "more of a probability" was the following equation: 9,369 divided by 311,591,917, multiplied by 100,000.  Now, if you're a woman, think about how often you dig yourself into similar positions and how many women of your acquaintance you can confirm to be capable of producing a similarly remarkable argument.  Then perhaps you might understand why men tend to regard many, if not most, women as being fundamentally irrational creatures, incapable of logic and ineducable by reason, math, or even the most basic facts.  It should also underline the supreme importance of not behaving in this manner on those occasions when you feels tempted to do so.

Keep in mind that saying "well, I was really upset" justifies these occasional lapses into complete unreason about as effectively as a man saying "well, I was really horny" would mitigate his occasional rapes of the babysitter.  It may explain them, to a certain extent, but it is unlikely to change his fundamental opinion of your character and capabilities.

Men, keep this exchange in mind when you are attempting to convince a woman of something.  Once you have successfully established that she is not, for whatever reason, capable of rationally discussing a specific matter in the circumstances, understand that there is literally nothing within the realm of the dialectic that you can do to convince her to change her position.  However, this does not mean she cannot be convinced, only that she will have to be convinced in a rhetorical manner, using a rhetorical device.

What are the rhetorical devices?  As always, the instruments that can be used most successfully on another individual are those preferred by the individual himself.  We all give away our weaknesses by our attempts to exploit the weaknesses of others.  The scientist who goes right to academic credentials can be easily trumped by an appeal to superior credentials.  The woman who quickly resorts to name-calling is susceptible to being called names.  The statistician can be won over with statistics.  It is the Bill Belichick strategy: attack the strength of the defense.

The discussion begins with a feint, a false statistical appeal.  But the seeds of its rhetorical nature are already there in the first woman's use of sarcasm, which in this particular example is a passive-aggressive device.  By the second post by the second woman, it is already clear that this is going to be a rhetorical discourse due to the  irrelevant questions aimed to discredit the other side.  Note especially her attempt to shut down the debate by the use of declarative statements; she shows her sensitivity to the suggestion of her stupidity by referring to it and ineptly attempting to turn the suggestion around.

Notice too that after being repeatedly hammered on that point, both overtly and implicitly, she begins her retreat into her tortoise shell, but not before revealing that she is entirely impervious to the very facts to which she falsely appealed in the first place.  Now, some less sophisticated observers will argue that it is a mistake to come down hard on the rhetorical, that if the reasoned argument is disguised in a sweet manner it will be more likely to prove persuasive.  But this is simply not the case, the whole problem is that the dialectically challenged are fundamentally incapable of following reason, either because their cognitive capacities are insufficient or because their emotional attachment to their position is too strong.

As I've pointed out in the past, dialectic is always preferable to rhetoric because it is more objective and tends to be more honest.  But unless the dialectically capable are going to treat those limited to rhetoric as mindless animals and place no more significance on the noises they make than we do upon the barking of dogs, we have no ethical option except to speak to them in their rhetorical language.  This may at times appear cruel, it may even be cruel.  But it is necessary, if we are to grant them any intellectual value as human beings.

Those limited to the rhetorical level of discourse are the Rabbit People.  They cannot be reasoned with any more successfully than one can cure a rabid dog of rabies through discussion.  All one can reasonably do is mitigate the damage they do to those around them by putting them down as soon as they show themselves to be a carrier.