Men use the image of female perfection to motivate themselves. And that's exactly right. That's precisely what they do.
You see that in the Tom Sawyer story. So Tom Sawyer is about twelve years old and he's still hanging around with his friends like Huck Finn. And this girl moves across the street, Becky, and she comes out and he's struck by her.
For the first time in his life, something's changed. And the first thing he does is hop up on a picket fence and show off and balance in front of her. And he's saying, well, look at me, look at me.
He's like the male bowerbird building something beautiful so the female will approve of it. And it's motivation. And that's something that I think modern women don't really understand about men.
They don't understand that at least to the degree that males are uncorrupted and not bitter because of being rejected, they're doing everything they can to kneel before the eternal image of the feminine and try to make themselves worthy. That's the chivalry story, right? That's what you should encourage in your partner. And so out of chaos emerges this first form.
It's the feminine form. It's partly the form that represents novelty as such. On one hand, it's promise.
On the other hand, it's threat that you wouldn't believe. And I don't know because I don't understand the situation with women as well as I understand the situation with men. Obviously, being a man.
I don't know if women have any idea how paralyzing they are to especially young men. A very large number of my clinical clients, but also young men I've talked to in general, are absolutely terrified of women because they're terrified of being rejected. And the terror exists in precise proportion to their attraction to the woman which is a horrible, paradoxical situation to be in.
It's often why men make such fools of themselves in front of women that they're attracted to it's because first of all, they don't see the woman that they're attracted to because what the hell do they know about her? They don't see her as an individual. They see her as the manifestation of a judgmental ideal. And then it's only in establishing the relationship with the actual woman that they can start differentiating between the judgmental ideal and the actual individual woman.
And that also requires a sacrifice. And the sacrifice is you never can have an ideal woman. So to have a relationship with any woman, you have to sacrifice the relationship with the ideal woman and you have to see the individual woman and separate her from the ideal.
And that's the same thing that happens to the hero in Sleeping Beauty, right? He sees the evil queen who actually turns into the Dragon of chaos. And it's not until he can defeat her that he can establish a relationship with the actual princess. And that's exactly the case.
I had one of my clients who ran this men's group which was quite interesting. One of the things they had the initiates do, which was very intelligent, was to go out and ask 50 women in one day for their phone numbers. Why? Plightly properly, it was a game, but it wasn't a stupid game.
And the idea was get over your fear of rejection. And how do you do that? By encountering it continually and continually and continually, so that you're no longer paralyzed by this. You lay out a small plan like maybe you go out for coffee with someone that you're romantically interested in and they're not pleasant to you.
So that's an error. It means, well, what does it mean? Well, you've construed yourself wrong. You've construed them wrong.
You've construed the opposite sex wrong. You've construed human beings wrong. You're a walking catastrophe and you might as well not even exist.
It's like that's pretty extreme. But it's not that extreme, I'll tell you. It's not that uncommon for people to have exactly that set of catastrophic responses to even a minor setback now, it's not good for them.
And I would say just because you scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave and jump into it and pull the dirt on top of you. So you don't want to start by taking yourself completely apart. But that doesn't mean people won't do it.
They do it all the time. In fact, to me, it's always a mystery that they don't do it every single time. Because the logical inference for why didn't you get someone interested in you? Could easily be because you're a failure as a human being.
And at some level that's actually true. Now, it's true in a way that's not that helpful, right, because it's just too catastrophic. But it isn't obvious at all how people can defend themselves against that cascade of catastrophizing.
I mean, after all, if you were everything you could be, then maybe everyone would be attracted to you. Perhaps not. But you get the point.
And no easy rationalization is going to let you just brush that away, especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person. Because that's even worse. Because then not only are you rejected, but you're rejected by someone who's upon whom you've projected an ideal or perhaps from whom you've actually observed an ideal.
So it's worse. You're rejected by someone that you want to have be attracted to you to validate your own miserable existence. It's not a trivial problem.
Females are very sexually selective female humans as opposed to, say, to female chimps, which aren't so part of what's occurred to select human beings for the way they are is the choices that each gender has made with regards to action and belief, but in many ways, more specifically, female choices. So it's kind of interesting. The next time you're irritated at your boyfriend, let's say, then you can just remember that untold millions of women have chosen men so that they're exactly like he is.
And so you can't really blame him for that. All right, but here's the thing that's tricky from a scientific perspective. If it is your behavior and your value structures if your value structures determine what you're interested in, how you behave, and selection pressure occurs as a consequence of your actions, then doesn't it mean that the structure of the value systems that drive your behavior have to be regarded as true or real in some scientific sense? Because the Darwinists basically say, look, the best solution is the solution that you embody.
There is no higher solution than that. And there you are embodying a solution. So in what way? I don't understand in what way that can't be regarded as real because people think of things like value structures as epiphenomenal.
They're not real. Like material is real. But I don't get that.
I don't see how that works with Darwinian thinking because you're interacting with each other all the time and you're doing that on the basis of your capacity for action and the value systems that drive that. And obviously those have some effect on whether or not you're selected by women, say, or by men, for that matter, but also by the natural world. What emotion do you feel when you're going to approach someone you're very attracted to and there's an extremely high probability that she's going to tell you to disappear? Because it's a real judgment, right? We're going to see a movie called Crumb where you'll see this in great detail, but it's a real judgment.
It's like the best judgment is, well, I don't mind your physical presence, but your genes should definitely not survive another generation, right? And that's sort of generally translated into I think we should just be friends. And you can blow that off. And people do.
And you have to because it's part of being polite and civilized. Let's make no mistake about it. There is no more fundamental judgment than that.
They're low status men. They're people that are generally regarded as losers, and there isn't anybody who really gives a damn about what happens to them one way or another. And there's a lot more men in that category than there are women.