I Live in Bedford Falls

One of my favourite movies is, It's a Wonderful Life. I'm sure many of you have seen it but for those who haven't, its a story about a man who gets to see what the world would of been like had he not been born. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a good man who runs a savings an loan, and basically through small acts of sacrifice, helps build up the community in which he lives(interestingly its a good tale on the merits of responsible banking).The town he lives in is Bedford Falls, a picture of what we would like to think is small town America. Clean, decent and neighbourly. Shakespeare had a great term for the feeling that Capra evoked in his image of Bedford Falls, "domestic awe".

In the movie, George has an evil competitor, Mr Potter, who would surely find a place on the board of Goldman Sachs today. When George gets to see what Bedford falls would be like if he had not been born, it becomes Pottersville, a sleazy, "exciting" town of violence, booze and sex. Where everyone is in it for themselves. George, seeing what the world has become without him realises his life is not worthless and gains a new appreaciation for it.

I never watch the ending of the movie, because I sob like a baby.

Now the person who most inspired me to start blogging was Theodore Dalrymple. I had accidentally stumbled onto him whilst surfing on the Internet and found what he said was the mirror of my professional experience. Whilst he has spent much of his professional career working in the British psychiatric system, I have spent a lot of my profession career working with the lower classes of Australia, and can vouch for their similarities with the British proletariat.

My own childhood resembled pretty much life in Bedford falls. My parents were working class. They were frugal but lived their life with dignity. We always had enough to eat, our houses(and gardens) were spotless and we lived in a community where people looked out for one another. Even my parents, whom I resented on many occasions, never game me the impression that they did not care for me. Even if I wanted to, I could not have been neglected and in my youth, I could remember my parents keeping the door of the house unlocked when they went to the neighbours. I thought everyone lived this way.

I was of course wrong. Although I had inklings that there were working class people that lived differently to ourselves I had not really encountered them in large numbers till I started working in my professional career. Spend any time with the bottom rung of society and the you realise that it assumes the visage of Hobb's world: nasty, brutish and short. Violence is random, sudden and without explanation. Social atomism and personal responsibility are absent. Self-gratification is the sole motive of their existence. Rudeness, outright lying and aggressive self assertion are commonplace , and after a while one becomes desensitised to them. The world of the underclass is not just materially deprived, it's different. It's horrible. The concepts of permanence and restraint are lost and human beings are motivated by their animal urgings. One can never be "at ease" with these people since they are constantly evaluating you for any potential advantage they can gain from you. Relationships are viewed from a point of potential advantage. Its every man for himself. Alliances rather than friendships. Hookups rather than love. Turn your back, they'll steal your stethoscope. Every medical history of tinged with the realisation that they may not be entirely truthful. Every relationship, an act of potential manipulation. They are the citizens of Pottersville.

Working in this environment crushes the spirit. There is a kafka-esque quality to it, to which the social services(and the Law) contribute no end. Any attempt at virtue is systematically crushed, vice encouraged. Acts of kindness, decency and self restraint are the exception and not the norm. You do literally become hard-boiled and cynical. One becomes so used and desensitised to evil, that what shocks are not acts of depravity but acts of goodness. The psychological effect of working in such an environment is "spiritual drainage, and as I have followed Dalrymple's writings for the past few years I have noted in him, like in myself, a weariness, and a revulsion at the spiritually toxic environment that makes up the life of those in the bottom(and the very top). It makes me ever grateful for the life that I have and it's also why I could profoundly sympathise with him in this post. I too know that feeling.

The problem is now that this prole culture is drifting into "respectable" society. When I read sites like Roissy in DC and The Errant Wife, I feel like I'm breathing the air of Pottersville. Prole habits are pushing aside the traditional bourgeoisie virtues and indeed many of the middle class now resemble "gilded proles": middle class incomes with untermensch habits. The bourgeoisie are dying.

Now you would imagine that given a choice between Pottersville and Bedford Falls the choice would be easy. This article in Salon illustrates the depth of our corruption. Still this reply to the article is worth quoting:

When George was in Bedford Falls he called it a “crummy little town” and is one of the down sides of being from Bedford Falls—having the capacity of visualizing a different reality--the counter factual--in which one can live free from desperation, tragedy, and tyranny. You know that you’re really in Pottersville when it starts looking good and the only difference that is meaningful is the quality of the bars.

Still pockets of decency remain, and coming home from work there's been many a time when I've felt like George Bailey, grateful for the friends and family that I have. Grateful for the life that I have and the simple pleasures. Grateful for an oasis of goodness in a sea of self-inflicted evil. I know that life can be so much worse.

I work in Pottersville. I live in Bedford Falls.

A Happy Thanksgiving to My U.S. readers.

Zen

For what its worth, I've written this post for young Christian men. Hedonists simply won't understand.

As a man who is naturally Hedonistic, I'll be the first to agree that virginity is one those things that hasn't got much going for it. The pleasures of the flesh have much more worldly allure than the distant heavenly rewards of the ascetic virtue of virginity. The problem is though, the prohibition of fornication, comes from the mouth of God himself, and a man who wants the live the faith has gotta get on board. My conversion to the faith happened in my college years. (The details are irrelevant, it's proof that God has a sense of humour) and in that environment of plentiful supply of sex and social encouragement to partake, I got religion.....Lucky me : (

Now, one of the misconceptions that non-Christians are frequently guilty of, is the assumption that when a man becomes converted to the faith he ceases being a man. People seem to think that when a man begins to worship God, he ceases to have any interest in sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. As many a TV Evangelist shown, that a man with an interest in God frequently has an unhealthy interest in sex.

As a result of my conversion I took my religion seriously though reluctantly, and while the flesh always remained willing, my conscience was pretty effective at stopping me giving in to temptation. That is not to say I still did not go out with women or try push it to the absolute limit. But I imagine many must have thought me gay(If they only knew, I kept my religion personal), when I rebuffed their sexual advances. I thought my faith was a curse. Here I was in ocean of women, in their prime, but not allowed to touch. But a curious thing happens to a man when he goes out with women which he cannot have sex with, the nature of his relationship with women changes.

As the nice beta I had thoroughly imbibed the contemporary romantic ideation with regard to women. They were sugar and spice and all things nice. Now, I am naturally of a genuine and courteous nature and acted the part of the chivalrous male. As any man with even the slightest knowledge of Game could have predicted , I got rejected many times, despite doing all the supposedly right things. The psychological consequences were predictable. Repeated sexual and romantic frustration had destroyed my self-confidence around women. In your teenage years, whilst all about you are wallowing in lust, nothing more thoroughly confirms your undesirability than, when everyone else is paired, you are alone. Partnering was a way of self validation.

The other issue was of course the way I looked at women.

I don't think women really appreciate the effect of beauty on a man. It really does cast a spell over a man. When in love, a man can literally so no fault in his beloved. Women in their prime years are simply amazing. I imagine that it's why artists are painting young naked women all the time. They are simply incredible. And it's not just in their sexual allure. It's in the little things. The way they move, their smell, the feel of their skin, the way the hair falls around their shoulders and so on. It consumes a man while at the same time overwhelmingly sabotaging a man's critical faculties. The beautiful woman becomes the good woman. It is said that a woman with many faults will be forgiven if she is beautiful, it's not that she is forgiven, it's just that beauty blots out the faults. A man's brain simply stops working. I was no different.

It was with this mindset that Christianity struck me like a thunderbolt. Religion became a real and meaningful thing, not something you paid lip service to. I was compelled to live the faith, including the prohibition of fornication. Which of course meant that you could pick up and go out with a girl but you couldn't have sex with her until you were married. Bummer...... or so I thought.

However, this created a curious state of affairs in me. I was caught between two opposing forces. The flesh which wanted to be sated, and the soul which wanted to be good. My response to this dilemma was to push sex into the back of my mind whilst out on a date. Indeed, in order the keep the libido in check I would tend to concentrate on a woman's other features, the further back I pushed the beauty and sexual allure, the more pronounced her other features became. What I found was a revelation.

Stripped of their sexual allure, many women had nothing else to offer. Women whom I hung around with because of a potential sexual interest, suddenly became uninteresting; no actually repulsive. Not just that, many were down right mean, manipulative and self absorbed, some desperate social climbers, some obvious gold diggers, others seriously psychologically disturbed, and far too many coarse and undignified. Indeed, it came slowly as a revelation, that stripped of their sex appeal, a huge proportion of women(not all) were unattractive as human beings. Had my male friends possessed the moral characteristics of some of these women, they would not have been my friends.

But it also lead to a further realisation. That I was a better; much, much better person than many of the women that I wanted to bed. It slowly dawned upon me. I........ was........quality. The urge for female validation evaporated, and female qualification assumed its place.

I met so many women that disappointed, that I seriously began to wonder if there wasn't something wrong with me. I began not to give a damn about their opinion of me. Instead of being the needy beta seeking female validation, I started not rejecting women because they repulsed me. Before I would let a women into my life they were going to have prove themselves to me. Women who knew how to use their sexual allure to manipulate, were shocked when I didn't respond. Beautiful women perplexed when I spent the evening talking to her plainer friend. The perplexed look on their face proof that the world was definitely unpredictable. If I was going to commit to a woman, I wasn't going to settle for second best and many women were deeply flawed.

Being able to tame the sexual beast bought other benefits. I initiated when I pleased, the gnawing sexual urge, there, but not forcing my moves. If she became tiresome, I left. Insulting, she was put down. I maintained control at all times. Shit tests were not an issue, since if she didn't like response, I couldn't care less if she walked. The girls that met me thought I was arrogant. I had reached a point where I really didn't care at all if a woman liked me. But not feeding the sexual beast kept me hungry. I never became apathetic. What had happened is that I had inadvertently developed strong inner game. I had achieved the Zen state.

My disqualifiers of women were both looks and character. She had to be feminine, a hottie and good natured.. I like people who are nice, polite and honest. A woman who lacked grace or class fell in her desirability to me. Many a hot 9 or 10 would on closer inspection drop to a 3 when she opened her mouth or after she had a few drinks. I would be lying if I said the converse was true (for myself at least), 4's may of become 6's with good character but they would not have moved up to 10's.

This did not mean that every woman I met, liked me. Nor did women magically flock to me. In fact I'm certain I would have picked up much more had I cared more for my appearance. But my success rate went up, way up. I still got rejected, but because I was never in awe of a girl's beauty and had not invested much time in her the loss was small and the injury slight. Move on.

The practice of sexual self-control whilst restraining my libido opened my eyes and inadvertently gave me strength of character. It allowed me to appreciate a woman's beauty without being a slave to it. When the dangling carrot of sex ceases to be an incitement, you begin to judge women by other assets. Many had nothing. It seems strange and such an elementary insight, but while brain was down below I could not see it. But more importantly this change in me wasn't conscious, it sort of happened by accident.

Now it is possible to gain this insight through disciplined Hedonism. Roissy too, wrote of this insight, in one of his "Sixteen Commandments of Poon":

The man who trains his mind to subdue the reward centers of his brain when reflecting upon a beautiful female face will magically transform his interactions with women. His apprehension and self-consciousness will melt away, paving the path for more honest and self-possessed interactions with the objects of his desire. This is one reason why the greatest lotharios drown in more love than they can handle — through positive experiences with so many beautiful women they lose their awe of beauty and, in turn, their powerlessness under its spell. It will help you acquire the right frame of mind to stop using the words hot, cute, gorgeous, or beautiful to describe girls who turn you on. Instead, say to yourself “she’s interesting” or “she might be worth getting to know”............

(My bold type)

Now it would appear that that Alphadom can be approached from many directions. And it would appear that the Zen like state of the two approaches is the same. But that would be wrong. For the Hedonistic Alpha a beautiful woman's spell is neutralised by sexual satiety. Whilst the Christian Alpha neutralises through sexual self control. Is there a difference?

Well in terms of picking up women I doubt it. I think both approaches will work just as effectively, but in the longer term, especially when looking for a long term mate, I think the two methods lead to quite different outcomes.

Firstly the hedonistic approach is aimed towards easy sex and plentiful sex, the Christian approach toward finding a mate. The hedonistic approach is directed towards the sexual quality of the partner, the Christian approach to both the sexual quality and the character of the partner.
Christian men want hotties as well, but good hotties.

Commentator Roosh V has written two excellent posts on dealing with the psychological consequences of Hedonistic game. It's interesting that the men who are most practiced at game seem to despise the women who most easily give them what they want. The girls they seem to value the most are the girls who have not slept around, but as the gamesters write off a girl if she hasn't provided the goods after the third or fourth date, they're actually screening for unsatisfactory women. The predictable effect is that the women that they score are low quality. No, that does not mean that they score unnatractive women, it's just that their attractive women are of low quality. The imperative in their mindset is sexual satisfaction. The girl that doesn't provide the goods (in other words the girl that doesn't sleep around) is the one they're going to pass over. The joy of hedonism is that you get to enjoy the company of the low hanging fruit of female virtue.

The Christian approach superficially has little to recommend it. The barren desert of abstinence vs the lush oasis of sated lust: The Spartan approach vs the Persian. But it seems to toughen a man up in the way hedonism doesn't. If you can tame the beast in your pants then there's a good chance that you can beat other vices as well. The other advantage is that without the distraction of sex, a man can choose more based on character,something that is more enduring than beauty. Beauty's spell is neutralised. That's not to say that a man can't appreciate beauty but he learns to see past it, he gains the skill of seeing the woman behind the mask.Indeed the man can be more selective for the traits which mark quality in a woman. Instead of trying to have sex with her, he's trying to get to know her and then have sex with her.

When I read the HBD and game blogs and see an author say that men choose women solely on the basis of their beauty, they're using a different metric to me. I don't think many of these commentators actually realise just how distasteful a woman with bad behaviour is. But then again they can't see it. What matters when I look at a woman is both looks and the ephemeral qualities that make up "class". If there is none of that, then no matter good how she looks, she doesn't matter. After a while you really do develop a highly attuned skank filter. You learn to recognise the flakes, the disturbed, the manipulative and the easy. The problem with this though is, that your moving a much smaller pool of women, albeit it is of a higher quality. (That's the other thing, I started to avoid the the declasse and became known as a snob). It's a consequence of like being attracted to like.

And before anyone thinks I had excessively high standards, I did. I was playing for keeps, this wasn't a game. My treasure, my good name and my future children (and all that frustrated hedonism) had a vested interest in the choice of my mate. She had to be exceptional. She is.

It needs to be remembered that while sex is an act, love is a state of being, the two are correllated, not conditional. You can have all the sex in the world but not be in love. The converse is true as well, you can love passionately even without the sex. Love by its nature is other focused, it is conditional on the qualities of the other person. The other interesting thing about about it is that love is not chosen, it's an involuntary reaction to the other person, you just can't will yourself to do it. Exceptional men will only be inspired by exceptional women. The Zen master realises that skill is not just in being able to attract, but in being able to attract the right ones.

Few Good Men.

This post is inspired by a post last week over at The Obsidian Files. Obsidian, whom I've found to be a very perceptive social commentator, noted how hard it is for a woman to find a good man. Good men being definitely in short supply.

And I concur; I do think it is difficult for a woman to find a good man. As I alluded to in one of my very early posts on the subject, I've been quite amazed at the number of, what I would consider high quality women, who have presented to my rooms with reactive depression secondary to loneliness. I don't think many men realise just how crushing this is to a woman's self esteem and sense of self worth. Unlike the posse of misogynists that make up most of some of the less salubrious Game discussion forums, I don't think women are in general evil, misandric or hypersexual. Most of the girls that I met in life or in my professional capacity have seemed to me to be normal girls who want to find a good man and settle down. Now don't get me wrong, there are downright mean and nasty specimens of womanhood out there, but they probably in the same proportion as they are in men.

Now many men may think that women's expectations are too high, but I disagree. Women are hard wired to marry at least equal or up, so the higher up a woman is in the world, the higher the man she desires. And for a moment put yourself in the woman's perspective. Suppose you are an average guy, can you make yourself attracted to fat, classless, ho? A woman has to satisfy certain criteria before you start feeling attracted to her. As many of the game commentators have mentioned, many of the Anglo-cultured women have ceased to be attractive. Their manners, grooming, attitude and weight all repulse normal male nature. As men our "hard wiring" finds them unattractive.

I believe the the reason for the "good man shortage" is mainly due to the "success" of of several cultural factors. The widespread uptake of tertiary education by women, the prole drift of culture, particularly male culture and the change in the nature of our tertiary level education: The emphasis of this education shifting from a broad based knowledge, to a high degree of specialisation from the outset.

Now one of the unintended consequences of educating women is that we have raised the bar of what a female considers attractive in a man. In this post I discussed that triggers of sexual and emotional approval in a woman are displays of dominance in a male. Now dominance is a relative thing, for a man to be attractive he must be more dominant than the woman, hence the problem for the super alpha female is that there are actually very few men who are more dominant than her. Her dating pool is actually much smaller than that of her less dominant sister. Now dominance is a multifaceted things composed of what would would consider broadly as masculinity. It tends to encompass a whole concept of virtues, including perseverance, intelligence, strength and so on. Now a man may display levels of dominance but he needs to display them with intelligence, and if this is lacking, then he will be unattractive to an intelligent woman. Himbos are good for short term flings but are not long term committal material.

The "problem" is however, that at the moment, females outnumber males at college. We are doing a better job educating women than men and currently int the U.S. 43% of college students are males and 57% female. Assuming that women don't want to marry down, that means for every female college graduate there is only 0.75 males. Of course the picture is more complicated than this, but just on the basis of the difference in the numbers of the educated, there are going to be a lot of deeply unsatisfied and single female college graduates.

The other issue of course is not just the numbers enrolled but the quality of the education and the differing experiences the different sexes have through college. Universities have ceased to be places of generalised learning, instead they have become institutions of advanced trade, especially in the more scientific degrees. And it's in these courses that the men tend to congregate. On the other hand, the Arts degree's tend still encourage a wider range of learning(at least within the Arts) and the atmosphere of the Arts faculties tends to encourage at least the development of some kind of aesthetic sense. So what we get at graduation is extremely practically skilled but mono-dimensional males, and generally educated( but with limited practicality) women with a cultivated aesthetic sense: Skilled bores vs aesthetic belles; Nerdy/Jock Guy, Arty Chick. Of course, these are broad generalisations, but anyone who has been through the university system will recognise the stereotypes.

In our Westernised "Woman's Nations", our societies are now producing more broadly educated and smarter women than men. But given that women prefer to marry either equal or up due to their nature,it's obvious that there is going to be a severe shortage of men who will satisfy them at the psychosocial level. More and more women will assume power in our societies, but they will rule with lonely hearts. Good men will be hard to find for a long time to come.

The Dominant Female.

Continuing on the theme of the alpha submissive female, I thought I'd make a few comments on the alpha dominant female.

Like all Alphas, these individuals are able to impose their will on others and are in control of their lives. They characters posses a combination of both psychological strength and will power. These are the women, who in their most benign, compel through manners and intelligence, and in their malignant form, assume the guise of the office bitch. They are the women the media laud and they posses the characteristics of success, discipline, intelligence and drive.

Now the Alpha Dominant female is the person who calls the shots in the relationship. She dictates the terms. When challenged, she will not defend but attack. Insulted, she knows no limit in reply. Slighted, she will seek her vengeance. If the relationship is not to her liking she walks. What we have in such an individual is akin to Nietzsche's "will to power ". These women have incredible psychological strength.

This is the type of woman that is able to triumph against adversity alone. They are incredibly successful in nearly everything they undertake ........................except their personal lives.

In dealing with these women, one of the recurring themes that comes up is of their inability to find a worthy mate. Firstly, there is the problem of finding an equal and not partnering "down" and secondly there is the problem that a lot of men are quite simply frightened off by this type of dominant woman. Admittedly a lot of these women actually end up being married; they're smart enough to know that the biological clock is ticking and that they need a father for the child, and unlike their less intelligent sisters, are prepared to accept a less than perfect man . This immediate solution does however lead to long term problems.

Slowly, but surely, over time they start to show contempt to the man. "I have to make all the decisions", "He's always making mistakes", "I can't trust him with anything". Her intellectual and character superiority become self-evident to her and she begins to despise her spouse.

This is an interesting phenomena and one that really hasn't been explored much. I mean why does a woman find a man that she can boss around contemptible? Why, in the age of Feminism, does leadership of a relationship produce unhappiness in the female leader? Why is emotional weakness, lack of ambition, etc. a turn off to women? It seems to be a universal trait and it's not something that seems to happen naturally to a man.

Why are weakness, indecision and lack of ambition so off putting to women?

Personally I don't believe that there is a contingent explanation. I believe that women are wired up that way and this response is part and parcel of a feminine nature. It's in their nature to recoil when these traits are displayed in a man, furthermore these non-masculine traits seem to switch off sexual desire.(Speculation:Presumably a helpless man resembles a child and triggers off a mothering response in a woman. The mothering response is however asexual with regard to the object of its intention. i.e women don't want to have sex with children)

Recent research looking into how the brain responds to erotic images indicates that a fair amount of subconscious erotic recognition processing occurs even before a person is aware of it. Our response to the erotic is not a conscious willed activity. Or in other words, if you lack the features that switch on the sexual response, there will be no erotic attraction. Being nice to a woman in the absence of triggering the cerebral erotic response will not get a man love or sex.(Fortunately men can learn Game)

Link 1:

"In this study, we demonstrate that information that has not entered observers' consciousness, such as [invisible] erotic pictures, can direct the distribution of spatial attention.

Link 2:

As subjects looked at the slides, electrodes on their scalps measured changes in the brain's electrical activity called event-related potentials (ERPs). The researchers learned that regardless of a picture's content, the brain acts very quickly to classify the visual image. The ERPs begin firing in the brain's cortex long before a person is conscious of whether they are seeing a picture that is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

But when the picture is erotic, ERPs begin firing within 160 milliseconds, about 20 percent faster than occurred with any of the other pictures. Soon after, the ERPs begin to diverge, with processing taking place in different brain structures for erotic pictures than those that process the other images.

Now if a woman is genetically programmed to positively erotically respond to dominant male traits this raises some interesting issues. Firstly social conditioning is going to have a limited impact in modifying the response. Secondly, the more a man defers to a woman, lets her take control and seeks her approval by trying to please her, the less he appears a man and the more he appears the child: the less erotically inclined she will be towards him. Men who accept the gospel of radical feminism become less sexually attractive to their wives.

Now I believe in what might be called "Thomistic psychology". That is, men and women have different natures and needs, and that acting contrary to one's nature or having one's natural needs unsatisfied will lead to unhappiness. This idea of a "predictable female nature" was of the things that provoked my interest in the Game community. Furthermore, both St Thomas and the Gaming community taught that you can't escape nature, it forms the core essence of who you are. Your gender is not a social construct, it's innate.

Now, if you take this "natural" approach to female psychology a lot of things begin to make sense. Men who display decision, dominance, intelligence and ambition are going to trigger switches in a woman which will facilitate sexual attraction. Women with poor self control are going to follow their instincts while women with greater self-control are going to cognitively evaluate their mate with regard to his suitability. A lot of girls have poor self-control; especially when alcohol is involved and consequently a lot of regretted sexual activity occurs after drinking.

Now, one of those natural needs which people seek is a mate and the Alpha dominant woman is in a non-enviable position in this regard. Without a mate her life is empty, and she is saddened by this state of affairs. On one hand she wants to be loved, but on the other, her character and strength overpower nearly all men, so its very difficult to find a mate as her subconscious erotic buttons only get pushed in the presence of an even more strong willed person than herself. As she exceptional, her pool of mates will be very small, declining in proportion to her intelligence and strength of will. On the other hand if she chooses a man less "psychologically strong" than herself, she is going to find her mate erotically repulsive to the degree in which she can dominate him. At best it ends up being a marriage of friendly convenience, at worst, she will eventually leave.

This is why the only happy Alpha woman is the woman who has found a more assertive man than herself. The only happy Alpha woman is the Alpha submissive; the Alpha dominant travels alone.

The Sex Diaries

I've often felt that you can judge the quality of a man not only by the character of his friends but also by the character of his enemies. I generally operate on the assumption that if the Left hates you, then your likely to be alright till proven otherwise. With that in mind the hatred that the feminists directed towards the book The Sex Diaries by Bettina Arndt piqued my interest.

It is a shame that Australia is such small blip on the world cultural radar, because sometimes we do produce individuals which deserve a wider audience and I feel that Ms Arndt deserves more airtime than she has been currently given.

It also needs to be understood that Ms Arndt is in no way a politically or culturally conservative, she was in the forefront of the sexual revolution here in Australia and I can remember as a child here name being bandied about derogatively by sexual conservatives and she was one of Australia's first sex therapists.

Her book The Sex Diaries was the result of her research looking into the sex lives of 98 Australian couples. It's an easily readable book, with excerpts from the diaries which the participants were asked to keep about their sex lives. While the research is anecdotal and has its flaws, I feel it has some merit and is an accurate gauge of state of marriage in Australia: It makes for depressing reading. In reality the book is not a book about sex, but a book about relationships, and the sad fact is that many relationships are clearly dysfunctional.

The biggest message that has come from the book is how sexually starved the majority of men are in their relationships and how totally uncaring many of their wives are. It needs to be noted that she also deals with sexually unsatisfied women and happy couples but as other reviewers have noted it's the sexually and emotionally starved man which makes the biggest impression.

As Arndt documents; in most cases the wife starts of with a high libido but over time her libido diminishes and her response to this is to shut of sex supply to her husband. What comes across as most disconcerting however is how just callously indifferent a lot (not all) of the women are to the husband's situation. Indeed what is really off putting is how so many men try so hard to please the woman with progressively diminishing returns.(Game advocates will recognise the fallacy of the approach)

What also seems to come across in Arndt's book is how our modern culture seems to have belittled men's sexual desire while at the same time inflating the importance of women's. Women have been taught by our feminist culture that having sex when you don't feel like it is wrong. Men have to learn to accept it: And men are. Apart from the callousness of the women what struck me was just how hard men were trying to keep the marriage going.

The book isn't all moans and groans and Arndt illustrates that some marriages are are full of sex. They also tend to be the most intimate and the partners seem the most "connected". What struck me about these relationship was that each of the partners were "other focused" while in the sexless marriages one or both of the partners was completely self-focused.

Ms Arndt is a intensely pragmatic woman who can actually empathise with the situation that the men are in. She also seems to go to pains to explain how sex is important to men on an emotional level and how men perceive sexual refusal as emotional refusal as well. Her solution to the problem of a woman with low libido is for her to " just do it" for the sake of the marriage.
Her rationale being, that even if a woman is uninterested initially, she will be interested and enjoying herself in the end.

The feminist response was as predictable. Ms Arndt was accused of being an apologist for rape, sexual assault and was denigrating women, blah, blah, blah: We've heard it all before.

Here are two book reviews that are worth a read. Link 1. Link 2
Also worth reading are some of the articles which can be found at her site. She has some very good articles on divorce and the law's current anti-male prejudice.

Ms Ardnt also talks about the diminishing female libido and how to treat it. Personally I found this the weakest part of the book, but then again Mrs Arndt has not heard about Game.