Taki Magazine

Stalking Game

by Evan McLaren on October 22, 2009

I had been dimly aware of Roissy for some time, merely as a hip blogger that a lot of young guys with right-wing attitudes read. I never followed up with any actual reading of my own, though, so I hadn’t absorbed his general message or the outlook behind it when I encountered a post of his entitled “The Power Of Game: From Hello To Kiss In Ten Minutes.”

Game? I’d never heard of the thing, and here was a widely-read fellow confidently trotting it out as a basic tool of social approach and organization.

What’s behind this? What is “Game,” and what’s its relevance and power? Is it something in itself that’s worthwhile discussing on its own terms, or do all paths through Game lead to empty jargon and “pick up artists” with felt hats, fake tans, and gimmicky jewelry? I caught up with Welmer, the pseudonymous force behind a new relevant web outlet, to talk through some of these questions.

You’ve just started a web outlet, The Spearhead, which is open about its emphasis on “Game,” or however you’d style a self-interested male perspective on social dynamics. How did you get into Game?

I found Game by accident, but it had a great deal of relevance to me when I did, because I was in the middle of a breakup. The frank, open discussions of female sexuality really hit home at a time when I had to deal with them personally. A lot of guys live a lie—a life of willful ignorance if you will—and I was forced to stare the facts right in the face. Most men really don’t understand that sexuality drives women at least as much as it does men. For men, sex is an on-off thing. For women, it’s always there, mixed up with everything else.

Game was one of the tools I used to break out of the culturally imposed limits on male understanding of female sexuality. It wasn’t about picking up random girls in bars, but rather arming myself with some knowledge that could keep me from repeatedly butting my head against hard reality. America, oddly enough, picked up a great deal of Victorian sensibility, and that infects our perspective and behavior even today. I guess we needed something to latch onto during our identity crisis following the Revolution, and then the Civil War. Maybe it’s Dickens’ fault. Actually, I’m sure some of it is his fault—the guy was absolutely batty over the innocent virginal young woman fantasy. Game helps you break out of that mentality, which is such a massive hoax that I can hardly believe it held up for so long.

As for The Spearhead, we are all pretty much in agreement that Game is a tool rather than a philosophy of life. Most of us support it, but we have our own ideas about how it should be put to use. TS, if I may speak for our authors, is about letting men know that they have choices; that they are in fact free to follow their own hearts, provided they employ some common sense and take reality into account. If I can sum our philosophy up in a few words, it is about “Can and Cannot rather than Should and Should Not.” The other mission is to give guys a place where they can express their own opinions in safety to quite a few people—to give them a voice over the crowd.

At some level Game just a current name for an old thing, namely, male social mastery. At another level—notice the lingo and the attention to evolutionary psychology—it’s a recent and unique creation, an activity of a particular organized group and set of personalities (like Mystery, Ross Jeffries, and PUAs in general). Why do you think male social mastery is in such an eroded state? Why is the pursuit making such a comeback? Where do you think it’s headed?

Game is an ancient concept. One Christian blogger wrote a parody of Game suggesting that Jesus was the true master of Game (psychological, not sexual), and he actually made some very astute points. The evolutionary psychology, I think, is simply a new way of looking at concepts that people have been aware of for a very long time. Carl Jung, writing about the state of gender relations in America in 1911, brought up an incident in ancient Athens in which there was a trend of suicides by young women. The Areopagus announced that it would publicly display the nude corpse of the next girl who did so, and the suicides stopped immediately. According to Jung, this proved that the Athenian judges understood sex psychology. He then said that American men do not understand it as well as the ancient Athenians, and that there was likely to eventually be a national tragedy due to wrong-headed American attitudes toward female sexuality. Prophetic, I think.

What sets the new emphasis on Game apart is that it emerged after the sexual revolution and government mandated equality between men and women. Many of the guys who are now studying and expounding upon Game would have found a wife and settled down to some other interest if it weren’t for female promiscuity on the one hand and the prevalence of female-initiated divorce on the other. It is essentially a cultural response to both an opportunity and a threat: there is both a carrot (easy sex) and a stick (ruin through divorce) driving men to Game.

I am convinced that the technical lingo and forays into psychology are more a result of a different type of man taking up the role of rogue than would traditionally have been the case. There have always been hit and run types out there, but the majority of them have been what the PUAs like to call “naturals”—that is, they were pretty much born to be rakes, and usually not the type who take a systematic, programmer type approach to picking up women (or much else for that matter). But now, given social realities, there are a lot of studious types who are assiduously studying Game to give themselves a better shot with the increasingly promiscuous women who surround them. Their other choice, as many, many men complain, is involuntary celibacy or marriage to a woman who has slept with numerous men and is quite likely to divorce them on a whim, effectively ruining their lives for years.

Does Game lack an organized media outlet, as opposed to blogs and discussion boards? Does it need one?

I don’t think “Game” needs an organized media outlet, but a lot of the issues surrounding its emergence need to be discussed out in the open. Maybe Game needs to be introduced into fiction a little more, but we already had Hitch, and it would be kind of limited as a theme. However, some of the guys who write about it—Roissy in particular—are pretty talented writers and ought to have a wider voice, if only because they provide entertaining, high-quality content.

As I see it most Game material will always have a bit of a trade publication feel to it. Only a few of the luminaries will ever break into more mainstream media or entertainment, and it will be because of native talent rather than focus on Game. At best, Game could support a couple guys running a blog under the umbrella of a blog consortium along the lines of Gawker, and a few more traveling salesmen types running Game seminars and “boot camps.”

You seem to think that the issues and concerns attended to in the PUA community aren’t self-contained—they relate to bigger issues and concerns, such as civilizational health. How do the two go together?

Lately, I’ve been seeing a dichotomy between “civilization” on the one hand, and “society” on the other. What we’ve been seeing is the steady strengthening of society at the expense of civilization, which was originally designed to contain and manage society. As I see it, society has always existed, and exists even in a troop of baboons, but civilization is dependent on certain constraints and laws. Generally, we find laws and philosophies that are pretty common throughout different civilizations. The Ten Commandments is an example, the Analects, Laws of Manu, etc. These concepts were based on years of careful experimentation and observation of the behavior of society. For the last half century or so we’ve been striking down the pillars of civilization to suit the whims and hungers of society, and so the health of civilization is not very robust in the West today. Savages and barbarians can be wealthy, and they can have a great society and impressive technology (e.g. Vikings, Mongols, Bantus), and I think we are living in that kind of world, but I don’t think you can really call what we have a shining civilization.

Game is a direct result of the diminishment of civilization. It is a tool men have rediscovered that gives them a chance in the mating game now that the old rules have been done away with. That’s really how it relates to civilization: it is there only because it is needed. In the old days, when you went into Indian country, you’d carry a rifle because it was lawless and uncivilized out there. That’s how the mating game is today—a wilderness full of howling savages who might scalp you. Game is your trusty rifle.

How have you chosen contributors?

I didn’t so much choose as I appealed. I came up with the idea for a consolidated blog after seeing a number of fairly popular blogs and a fairly widespread community of commenters engaged in discussion of issues revolving around a central theme. Some bloggers, like Ferdinand Bardamu (very smart young guy), describe it as the “Roissysphere,” but I think a lot of this coalesced naturally, by accretion, because the strange state of gender relations and the family is impossible to ignore these days.

What I initially looked for was people who had their own blogs, and suggested on my personal blog that I would host and run a blog for a number of writers that would have a bigger impact than any one of us could make individually. I asked for help in naming it, and eventually came up with The Spearhead after a number of guys suggested a classical theme.

Soon, I had a number of enthusiastic volunteers, and after dealing with the technical issues we went live just a few weeks ago. I’m still getting more offers to contribute, and I’d be happy to take on at least a couple more at this point. I think it’s very important that the regular guy has a say here. My contributors come from all walks of life, including such various occupations as pilot, computer programmer, craftsman and attorney. We aren’t going to be as polished as a professional magazine, but we are volunteers here, and I think our ideas and opinions are probably closer to the American reality than your typical journalist or writer for the New Yorker.

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