THE RED PLACEBO

practical thoughts on gender relations and the mating market

After the dramatic success of my manual BEAUTY TIPS FOR BRAINY GIRLS, I've often been asked if I have any advice for my male readers.

That's a topic for which I have less passion. Instead I'd like to offer some general remarks of interest to everyone. https://twitter.com/JohnSanilac/status/1241101587755327488

I see a large gap between "red pill" or "pickup artist" advice and observable reality. The red pill is a useful corrective to the Narrative, but the proponents with the most striking and exaggerated claims tend to be heard the most due to the competitive attention economy.

Nobody is looking around and asking the question "do these supposedly great pickup techniques like negs actually affect the final result?"

If you need an instruction manual on how to flirt, maybe they'll help, but my opinion from observation is that, NO, they don't matter.

How do I know pickup tactics don't matter?

Look around.

Do you see any men who would rate a 6 on looks dating women who would rate a 9? I don't, unless there's a lot of money involved.

Do you see any well-known PUAs dating women who look out of their league?

I don't.

Frankly their women don't look as good as mine, and I never use negs or any unusual tactics.

I'm sure someone will find exceptions where the advice works. But nobody smart listens to advice that doesn't work generally, expecting that it will, exceptionally, work for them.

So at a minimum the "red pill" relationship advice for men is overpromising. In the exaggerated forms I see too frequently online, it's doing worse than overpromising, it's driving a wedge between the sexes that plays into the hands of the most damaging forces in our society.

That's a point I'll come back to later (if I continue this thread long enough).

The observable reality is that couples pair up mainly on the basis of appearance, with 8s pairing with 8s, 7s with 7s, and so on, and that no magic tricks alter this result meaningfully.

Yes, there are some things that can give men a boost that aren't appearance related, but these are typically modifications to the basic score that are of less fundamental importance.

The healthy meat of the redpill advice, if you take away the exaggeration and overselling, is that men shouldn't act like wimps or simps (actually anything ending in "imp" is bad).

But binging on negs is lame beta behavior, a close cousin to nerd rage.