The Player's Playbook Never Changes

What forty years of dating taught me about female "empowerment"

Public domain image at Pxhere

I ain’t no spring chicken. You can’t sweet-talk yourself into my pants.

A recent dating experience re-introduced me to the romantically manipulative man, and reminded me of how much nothing changes in forty years of dating.

I met Bruce in late fall on the last dating app I tried, overpriced eHarmony, theorizing the cost might filter out lazy-asses, has-beens, and never-wases I found on other apps. It didn’t.

The washouts were a little higher socioeconomically, but otherwise identical: Flaky; too interested in polyamory; can’t hold a conversation; overweight and dresses like his dad; can’t be not-boring. The best-looking ones were always scammers.

Their only commitment was to render themselves hopelessly single with gremlin-worthy photos and profiles so empty they cast an echo. That’s right, bowl ‘er over with that red-hot sizzlin’ manhood while you squint your pudgy face into the sun with your shoulders hunched like Quasimodo.

I lowered my minimum age from 45 to 35 just in case I might be blowing off my Emmanuel Macron. I did encounter one 37-year-old who really did sound as mature as he claimed, was adamant about not wanting children and being accepting of someone a quarter-century older than he but—and it was a big one—he had a very high sex drive.

“Not even when I was 21,” I told him.

The last guy I talked to was a 45-year-old fellow immigrant. Bruce was good-looking, had a decent, verifiable job and was interesting to talk to.

But…(there’s always a ‘but’)…

When I asked what he was looking for, his response was, “To find a woman I can spend the rest of my life with.” He too, claimed he had no problem with the age difference, that he didn’t mind if I grew old and died before he did.

So, what’s the problem, right?

The previous guy spoke like a man much older than his years when we talked voice. Bruce was unconvincing. Plus, he came from a culture I know from experience fetishizes white blonde women.

He oozed terms of endearment immediately—sweetie, honey, baby, darling. I’ve had to tell everyone not to do it.

We never met F2F. Bruce always had some creative reason why he had to break an in-person date at the last minute. First his office was going out for drinks that night to celebrate a great sales month (plausible, given his LinkedIn-verified job). The next bag-at-the-last-minute: He’d wound up in the emergency room with a migraine. He hadn’t mentioned them before. I’ll admit my sympathy was a bit rote.

I forget what the third date break was. Now, he had my attention for a different reason. He wouldn’t drop the terms of endearment. Customarily this nonsense is my exit ramp, but he became a short-term research project in male phony-baloney.

He managed to make one Zoom meeting but blew off the second one. When I texted him he didn’t respond. I was quite certain I was being blown off for other women, but I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t emotionally engaged and I knew I was being played.

He texted me a few days later so I blew him off. I told Bruce I’d actually Googled, twice, first on romance scammers and later video scammers to see if I’d actually Zoomed with an AI. That’s how phony I think you are, I told him.

He texted that he ‘wanted me’, and ‘ur my girl’. He told me he loved me. I told him to go peddle it somewhere else, ‘coz I ain’t buyin’.

His last text before I blocked him was, “I love you so much.”

Brand new model, same as the last

Does that lovey-dovey crap still work anymore? It must, since just about everyone is trying to sweetie-baby-honey their way into our drawers.

Aging pimp Andrew Tate says he and his brother discovered that women were more willing to do webcam work if they thought they were in a relationship. So they each juggled multiple ‘longterm commitments’. It’s hard for naive women to understand how manipulative men are when they seek female compliance, and how driving emotional engagement early is a critically important tool.

I think of all the naive young women who actually fall for this emotional manipulation. I speak from experience as a former young woman. Not all men are manipulators or abusers so much as just people who unthinkingly string women along. Women do it too. When you’re young and insecure, on some level you want to keep someone in the background in case you need a date or to ease a lonely night.

You can’t know what you’re up against without life experience, and today’s feminism has taught young women that bad experiences are never their fault. Often they aren’t; a young girl can’t know what she hasn’t yet learned, or been taught, so she’s unprepared for the games manipulators play, whether they seek female attention (especially from a plethora of admirers), or a girl’s commitment, or, of course, sex.

My mother prepared me well but not for everything. Every generation is different.

Some women never learn just how predatory men can be. Consider how compliant progressive feminists have become to transactivists: I think some of them really believe that biological sex is ‘all in your head’ and that genital differences are no more remarkable than hair color.

Manipulators always find a way to groom women for romantic and sexual compliance: Transactivists, driven primarily by autogynephiles and misogynists, easily manipulated woke progressive feminists, already self-primed to never say no, so it became easy to persuade them to accept men in places they never belonged and more importantly, never to question it. Ironically, they’re the feminists most outspoken about ‘patriarchy’ and ‘consent’. Men cleverer than they induced them to give it up, and enforce it against non-compliant resistors (‘TERFs’).

What’s interesting is this: Each generation questions, changes, and evolves, but somehow, we always seem to wind up back at the model men have always preferred: Unfettered, non-consequential access to multiple women, particularly the youthful.

I’m not jealous of younger women; I sympathize with them. I’m in the same boat. We’re both playing in each other’s pools. I can get younger men, they can get older men. I don’t know if it upsets them that they’re competing with attractive older women, but I don’t mind them playing in my pool. As I see it, it’s become so difficult to find anyone with whom you can be compatible that we all have to cast our nets as wide as we can.

I do understand something about older men that they don’t: The men my age aren’t any more mature than when we were twenty. Rich older men seeking naive young women are red flags for controllers.

Every generation wants to break its chains

Marriage looks unappealing to generations more sophisticated than their mothers’. It’s a big lie sold by feminism, that women should be ashamed of their inherent evolutionary drive to settle down and have children. (Gee, I wonder where that came from?)

The marriage model worked, however imperfectly, with children raised in largely stable homes. The Sixties counterculture sundered it.

The refusal of marriage and parenthood was a more radical departure for women than men, especially the encouragement to pursue a career instead. As women, but not men, realized eventually that finite fertility means they might not ‘have it all’, Millennials and Zoomers gravitated to bisexuality, expanding the pool. Eventually, the biological clock kicks in. It did even for me although it didn’t say, “Make babies!” but rather, “Settle down.”

Engaging in a lesbian relationship may make sense for young women who want a child, but with a responsible partner. The pool would seem to be more spacious with lesbians rather than man-children. Yet, ironically, the majority of identifying bisexuals end up in long-term relationships with the opposite sex.

The fundamental evolutionary drive never goes away, regardless of our attempts to subvert it. Today’s women are dealing with wanting boyfriends (however quietly since that’s not ‘cool’) but can’t find acceptable mates. Instead, they do what the young and naive do who haven’t yet learned how to parse the players from the ‘good ones’: They submit to men’s terms, such as undefined ‘situationships’ (known to Millennials as ‘hooking up’) which of course better suits men resisting the nest. Or they accept polyamory, grudgingly.

They don’t know they’re being played, just like their hippie grandmothers. ‘Free love’ worked better for men than women in the Sixties. Hippie dudes were passive-aggressive about female experimentation, as a formerly hippie friend experienced. Other women were pushed to accept multiple sexual partners, or be derided as ‘square’, ‘uptight’, or ‘hung-up’.

Today’s young women are playing the same naive game we all played with males we love who love too many. Women don’t know that if they ‘keep it loose and casual’ to please him he’s not likely ever to come around, because he’s already quite pleased.

Many younger women settle for half-assed men and piss-poor sex, especially the rough kind Millennial and Zoomer men learned from porn. But they can set the terms themselves. Not all men are players, and the ‘good ones’ often don’t know how to talk to women, so traumatized by #MeToo are they all. Standing up for what you want requires acknowledging what you won’t settle for and sticking to your guns: No matter how hot he is, or how attractive his financial position, she has to reject him if he demonstrates he’s not a serious contender. That’s hard to do when you’re younger and want to settle down but not to ‘settle’. You don’t know the signs, you second-guess your own inner warnings, and it becomes easier to believe he might come around when he probably won’t.

Whether it’s Roaring Twenties ‘anything goes’, hippie ‘free love’, the Millennial embrace of bisexuality and bi-curiosity, or the Zoomers’ love affair with kink (possibly inspired by porn) it still comes down to: What men want, not what women want. (What did Gen X introduce sexually? AIDS-era fear of sex.)

I’m in a knowledgeable place now that only comes with decades of experience. Oh, to have known then what I know now. Today I’m confident in the men I reject, the ones who’ve demonstrated for forever that they’re not serious contenders, and that the mediocre ones aren’t, as I’d hoped for too long, simply guilty of not knowing how to market themselves, but rather, of an explicit honesty: I really am as boring as my profile suggests, or I’m not serious about finding a longterm partner.

If I could persuade young women and girls to read one book, it would be Neil Strauss’s The Game, published in 2005 about pickup artists. It’s the most accurate dissection of female psychology I’ve ever encountered. Pickup artists in their heyday were the masters of female manipulation. They knew exactly how to probe women for weaknesses and guide them into the nearest bed or dark corner.

The Bruces of this world will always be with us. I laugh about my short experience, it was the perfectly stupid ending to over a year of goofballs and clueless dipsticks. He thought I was as guileless as women his own age or younger. He’s too young to understand that I wasn’t.

Just remember, ladies: Whatever your generation, none of us ever change.

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