Game and dominance

I just went over to Roissy’s site and browsed a bit. It is of course very low, extremely repellent. But that’s not what I want to discuss.

He says that the purpose of Game is to make women believe that you dominate other men, that is, to make women believe that you are an Alpha, which will make them be attracted to you.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the little problem that Game is all about deceit. Let’s focus on the fact that Roissy is telling you to look at other people solely in terms of whether you are dominating them or they are dominating you.

For myself, I don’t let others dominate me (I’m an American—“Don’t tread on me” is in my blood and my bones), and I have no wish to dominate others. The notion is alien to me.

And obviously domination is not the same as the normal authority that superiors have over subordinates in a business or other organizational setting. Supervisors, leaders do not normally “neg”—put down and insult—their subordinates. But Roissy says that negging is central to Alpha dominance over Betas. An example he gives of negging is GW Bush calling Karl Rove a “turd blossom.” We could think of further examples of such dominance behavior, such as President Johnson (as has been reported) requiring his subordinates to attend on him while he was on the toilet.

So, apart from the question of why people would be interested in reading Roissy with his angry, malevolent, and gross persona, as well as his advocacy of deceiving other human beings (and another question by the way is how such an angry, bitter guy can get so many chicks), my question is, what is going on with people that they would be drawn to a view of life in which the central fact, the all-consuming issue, is whether you’re dominating others or not?

You know what Roissyism reminds me of? Fortune and Men’s Eyes, an off-beat, low-budget, original film from the 1970s about the homosexual hierarchy in a prison, in which the sole preoccupation is who is dominating whom. It’s a picture of a radically reductionist, Hobbesian world in which everything has been eliminated except for two factors: (homosexual) lust, and power. And that, leaving aside the homosexuality, is the world of Roissy. And again my question is, why would normal people, conservatives no less, be interested in a world view which says there’s nothing but lust and power?

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

Be sure to see Sebastian’s reply to this entry. He shows that my homosexual prison metaphor was even more apropos than I realized.

August 22

Ron K. writes:

You wrote, “We could think of further examples of such dominance behavior, such as President Johnson (as has been reported) requiring his subordinates to attend on him while he was on the toilet.”

To put into perspective how degrading that really is, compare it to the public-speaking advice given by the veteran marketer and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki:

Overdress. My father was a politician in Hawaii. He was a very good speaker. When I started speaking he gave me a piece of advice: Never dress beneath the level of the audience. That is, if they’re wearing suits, then you should wear a suit. To underdress is to communicate the following message: “I’m smarter/richer/more powerful than you. I can insult you and not take you serious, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” This is hardly the way to get an audience to like you.

Johnson, of course, didn’t want his audience to like him, but to fear him.

This also brings to mind the explanation given by Susan Dey’s character in Echo Park for her survival and success as a party stripper: always make the customer feel he’s the one who’s naked.

Funny that LBJ was a master at abasing his colleagues and underlings, yet he himself was cowed by his intellectual superiors, those “best and the brightest.” I guess they made him feel naked, where it counted.

LA replies:

It looks like Guy Kawasaki is the opposite of Stanley Kowalski.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2009 04:50 PM | Send