I believe Game is a journey, one in which you initially stumble blindly unaware of where the starting line is. You go from the blissfully-unaware AFC to suddenly peeking under the curtain and realising that success with women is a skill that can be learned like any other, and there is a vast wealth of resources available to help you. Many men (such as myself) believe they’ve found the starting line and off they go.

The problem is, you’re not running down the yellow brick road, you’re just spinning on a sophisticated hamster wheel and getting nowhere fast. Eventually, if you’re lucky and have access to the right resources, you’ll tumble to the old saw that the pickup community is just the self-help community in disguise. That should motivate you to fix the real causes of your self-worth problems and personality defects rather than the symptoms (“I can’t get laid”).

Some people never make that leap. They persist in an never-ending cycle of diminishing returns in the quest to perfect their Game. Just do another 1,000 sets. Just polish off that routine. Just read more Game books. They become shameless pussy-hounds craving the pop of the next sexual conquest. They pour ever more water into the leaky bucket. I’ve discussed this in detail in my Creeping Death posts.

Well, while I may be a narcissist I am not unable to recognise when someone hits the nail on the head more accurately than I do. The Rawness has just written a masterpiece. Read it. I’ll pull out the sections that interest me most and comment.

His fundamental point is that Game (or more specifically the PUA lifestyle) can worsen a man’s self-worth issues by misleading him to attack the symptoms of his issues while the causes continue to worsen. The PUA lifestyle and the type of Game it encourages will exacerbate the problem by screening good people out of your life while attracting bad people. At some point it comes crashing down.

The PUA-HB dynamic is that of a codependent-narcissist. As an AFC people-pleaser you employ ineffective manipulative Nice Guy behaviours to get girls. Game replaces these with effective manipulative Asshole/Alpha behaviours that draw you into the dance of wounded souls. The PUA becomes a Compensatory Narcissist in that he models and copies the actions of a true narcissist (e.g. aloofness, assholery) without feeling it in his core. This leads to three types of interaction

• PUA-(victim)HB: The player manipulates and exploits low self-worth codependent women who need him to lean on, primarily by teasing and withholding validation through push-pull. He despises the weakness of these women and tires of them.
• PUA-(predator)HB: The player meets a more skilled narcissist than himself and is drawn into her web of tests, in which his increasing competence of passing intrigues her and gives her narcissistic supply until eventually she tires of him and dumps him, usually before sex.
• PUA-(normal)HB: The girl isn’t responsive to his games because she is not unusually needy of validation or narcissistic supply. By his refusal to be normal, she is exasperated by him and tired while for his part he finds she is not responding as his script dictates so he becomes frustrated. The relationship never progresses and thus he blows his chance to have a nice person in his life.

Thus the PUA is gradually channelled into a lifestyle that involves gamey dances with a subset of emotionally damaged women as he tries to extract sex and affection from her while she tries to extract attention and validation from him. Rarely does a balanced mutually-affirming sexual relationship ensue. This is the case whether the PUA is angling for SNLs in nightclubs or bouncebacks in street game. I know guys commited to both lifestyles. It’s not pretty. Rawness calls such men grandiosity sharks.

“grandiosity sharks are people who have to keep swimming through a sea of external validation in order to breathe and stay afloat, because much like the shark can’t breathe internally, they can’t generate validation and self-esteem internally. If they stop moving through the sea of validation for a given amount of time, or their swimming is temporarily disrupted due to a blow to their ego, they figuratively suffocate, sink to the bottom and die.”

It would be nice if the pussy-hound lifestyle was merely papering over the cracks of self-worth but Rawness suggests it’s more like swallowing the cat to catch the mouse:

“Pickup artistry does not fix the codependent; it just changes him from a codependent into a narcissist by ignoring the core issues and instead training him to switch from the faulty coping strategy of surrender to the preferred faulty coping strategy of the narcissist, which is overcompensation. It’s just trading one toxic personality dysfunction for a worse, harder-to-cure toxic personality dysfunction.”

I have spoken before about what I termed the two types of Game – light side and dark side. It springs from the matrix of male/female personality types. Recall that there are four types of man according to their combination of competence and confidence:

• Type 1: Both confident and competent. These are the solid self-actualised males who have their life together, have genuine skills they employ, balanced personalities and a sense of direction. It’s George Clooney or Cary Grant.
• Type 2: Confident but incompetent. These are the chancers and showboats in life who usually drift aimlessly but maintain the veneer of charm and charisma (because real confidence can never be delusional, it must rest upon competence) and have an exaggerated narcissistic self-regard. They are the tattooed bar tenders, rock guitarists and drug dealers of the world.
• Type 3: Competent but lacking confidence. This is the vast sea of beta males who hold down steady office jobs, watch Lost and Prison Break, dress in GAP or Next and are utterly indistinguishable from each other (to the female eye). Generally they are decent people and it’s their taxes that support the femo-centric world.
• Type 4: Neither competent nor confident. They are the dregs of society. Barely-employed, out of shape, lacking social skills, these are the omega / delta males whom society has left behind. They retreat into solo hobbies or fringe weirdo collectives (e.g. ComicCon).

The female typology is based on beauty and self esteem. So type 1 women have both, type 2 women have beauty but low self esteem. I made the point that in the normal order of affairs men and women of equal rank pair off, i.e. type 1 men pair with type 1 women. A pairing of one rank’s mismatch (e.g. type 1 man with type 2 woman) can initiate but is doomed to failure. A two-rank disparity would only happen if there were severe outside influence such as drugs, alcohol or a solemn obligation to a dear friend.

Where this intersects with the Rawness essay is that he is essentially talking about Type 2 Male – Type 2 Female pairings where the man’s fragile confidence is manufactured by painting a faux-narcissistic facade over a codependent core and the competence issues are not addressed either. The female is leveraging her beauty but lacks a sense of deservedness and thus has a constant lean-towards that the PUA can exploit by using push-pull to prop her up with validation / attention and then take away to send her back off balance.

To say these pairings are unhealthy is an understatement. Rawness also nicely explains the PUA obsession with strippers and hired guns:

“By the way, I want to point out that stripping and sex work in general are profession that attracts a HUGELY disproprortionate amount of narcissists and borderline personality disorder sufferers, which lends credence to my theory that becoming a PUA often just makes one into a sophisticated form of codependent, because why else would these guys keep being drawn to strippers and pornstars, who can be some of the most severely personality-disordered people out there?”

I have long maintained that the successful attitude towards learning Game, the actual starting line you should begin your journey from, is to develop yourself into a Type 1 man (Rawness calls this the Renaissance Man rather than Alpha) and then learn how to identify and attract Type 1 women using Game which is merely a conduit of your character and leveraging your understanding of female psychology and the mating ritual. You should avoid the Type 2 / Type 2 dance of the wounded souls. The only way to win that game is to avoid playing.

I might come back to his piece with more comments. It really is a blinder and I urge you to read it.