As people point on this forum from time to time, and as a
large amount of the articles on girlschase discuss, ethics are an important consideration when it comes to seduction, and, I suspect, constitute a major sticking point for many men that defies easy, technique-based solutions.
There are many angles to the discussion, including broad social implications that go way beyond the scope of interacting with any one particular girl -- but I want to drill down into one specific question, namely, how do you weigh the idea of being a leader in relationships versus the idea of respecting a woman's (expressed or implicit) interests?
I'll start with some observations:
- Most women want, if not expect, a man to "take the lead" or "take charge" at every stage of a relationship, from courtship to mating
- Broadly speaking, it is in women's biological interests to be as "hard to get" as possible, to screen out all but the strongest potential suitors
- As most of us here know from experience, women will generally backwards-rationalize their desires, or their memory of the desires, to fit what actually happened. This seems to be hardwired in them pretty deeply down, I think it goes beyond the normal, superficial cognitive fallacies that all humans experience
- Partially as a result of the above phenomenon, women can wind up "hardwired" to desire things which may not really be in their best interest.... the classic example is how women who get raped at a young age often wind up with very painful, conflicting emotions about it, leading them to seek out similar treatment from men for the rest of their lives... but this applies to less extreme examples as well. For example, women will naturally gravitative towards men of similar race, appearance, mannerisms, etc, of the first man who gave them really good sex. All this means that, as a man engaging with women sexually, you have the opportunity to override her preexisting preferences if they're silly, and you run the risk of setting bad precedents for her if you're unscrupulous (whatever that means)
So now some of you may ask,
Why even care about this? Isn't this her problem to worry about? Well, most of us experience something called empathy, which causes us to feel, on some level, the emotions of others... I have to point this out because I know this community, like it or not, attracts some sociopaths, who don't experience this. I'm not here to judge, I'm just pointing out that most of us do, and it's not something we can turn off, so in order to preserve our own peace and happiness, we have to take other people's feelings into consideration as well.
Men of Girlschase and Skilled Seducer, how much do you think about these things when you decide how to approach dating and pick up? What are your perspectives?
- metalbird
Based on your bullet points, I think you have a very superficial understanding of how mating, and the world in general, works.
It's very easy to think that choosing the 'right' path in an ethical question can be determined analytically. Positioning things as universal preferences, and framing various goals/objectives as either diametrically opposed or completely compatible, is simply a crude way of trying to force the world to conform to your way of thinking so that you can calculate a psychologically satisfying result.
But that's not the way that mating, which is governed by nature, works. Both men and women have multiple objectives and goals during mating that may not even support eachother or seem compatible. Within the human mind there is always competition between motivations that do not resolve into some completely harmonic result. This is because nature does not see things is 'right' or 'wrong', 'best' or 'not the best', 'good' or 'bad'. Instead, it seeks to optimize specific situations by allowing motivations, ideas and even ethics to compete both inside the individual mind and between different individuals. Within any one person or group, perspectives about the world are constantly being created, destroyed, strengthened or weakened according to the different situations that the person finds themselves in and the way their actions resolve. And what seems to be an optimal action in one case might turn out to be entirely suboptimal for another situation or objective.
Women have multiple goals in mating. They simultaneously want to get married and have a white picket fence, get banged in an alleyway by two dudes at the same time, have slow missionary sex, and get tied up and pounded doggystyle. How do you resolve all this? It does not resolve. They simply have multiple motivations that at various times in their life may acquire more or less importance.
The same way that you for example might want one night stands and a wife at the same time. Do you have to trade one for the other? Maybe, maybe not. The same way that she might be able to get all the things she wants, or maybe not. Is there some perfect path through life that somehow acquires all the various things people want in one spectacular trajectory? Very likely, no. Because many of them are in fact to a substantial extent, opposed. Making one choice is like a path of evolution, a specialization, it changes you in ways that supports it so that the result can be optimised. But is the person that made a different choice despised by nature? No, nature supports them too, in as much as it is something functional. Because nature does not have the concept of an ideal, perfect, singular outcome for things. It wants many things competing, many ideas being played out, many outcomes being optimized. That is what maintains the overall health and continued development of things.
You might think that you can escape this ambiguity by living according to your own rigid ethical system and waiting for things to align so that you can have your cake and eat it too. And more power to you if you decide this. But the reality is that nature has made pretty much universal, built deep into the psyche of every human being, something that will make it very hard for you:
everyone, men and women, respect someone who goes after and gets what they want, by whatever means possible. If your ethics are fundamentally weak, inept, and disfunctional (as ethics are prone to being) you will experience your feared enemy coming and taking the loyalty of your friends and the desire of your women, and forcing you, if you want them back, to become that which you were always afraid to become. Is it not better to become what you need to be on your own choosing, rather than as a painful reaction to negative outcomes? That isn't to say that morality and ethics don't exist, but what ones serve you, and what ones are using you? The results will tell you.
...
Only you can determine what is ethical or not for you. For me, one of the things that I find to be natural for me, that is perhaps a counterbalance of some kind, is to be open to falling in love with a woman. I don't prevent it or put a lot of effort into avoiding it, although at this point it isn't often that I meet a woman who has that kind of effect on me. I know that a woman can have a lot of influence on me - it has happened - and that is the 'risk' I am willing to take to be able to enjoy the best experiences with them. I believe this openness happens to make me more attractive to them, and perhaps gives them greater enjoyment with me. But do I feel bad when I've decided to end things at whatever point? Not really. They had their chance.
But could a woman come along and make me give up seducing other women? For a substantial period at least, I think it's likely. Probably not forever. But the world does not work in timespans of forever. Nature does not know if the concept of it, and neither do I.
You should always do what seems right to you, regardless of what other people say. But with ownership of your actions comes the responsibility of guarding the quality of outcomes. Don't think that the world can be reduced to simple equations of morality, or you will soon be disillusioned with reality, which is a very poor place to be. Instead, keep your eyes open and continue learning about the truth of the world by the results that different people have when they take different actions. That's the only way to escape illusion and develop the framework of thinking that best serves you and the people you want to help succeed.
