The Goodness of Gut

There was a flurry of fuss over yesterday's post.

Clio was first in the comments box, sure she could smell a Pick Up Artist/Gamer all the way from Canada.

Invocante, however, felt sure I had corrected pegged "Confused"'s suitor as a good-hearted man initially as confused as confusing.

Kate was rightly shocked by the emailing, etc, going on behind the (alleged) girlfriend's back.

Clio expanded more on PUA/Gamer technique, and I began to panic, especially as Easily Swayed pointed out that sometimes guys DO 'make' you love them. I don't know if Easily Swayed knows this, but using dirty tricks to snare a girl is the whole point of Game.

Rosemary gave Mr. Confusion the benefit of the doubt, and then Theobromophile observed that the expensive restaurant was way over-the-top for a first date and voted "Gamer".

What was an Auntie to do?

I'll tell you what I did. I emailed "Confused By This Man" and asked her. And it turns out that Mr. Confusion did tell her what he had been thinking for eight months. The problem is, he did it with so much drama and feeling that "CBTM" was alarmed. Her gut said, in short "No way," and that, poppets, is good enough for me.

Clio has been suckered by Game, and so have I. Alas. The Gamer was so angry that I ran away (with help from my friends the police, the Sexual Harrassment Office and my spiritual director) that months later he left mean comments on a literary website I wrote for, signing them Mystery. Mystery is the name of a Game expert back home; I suspect Mr Psycho had actually taken his PUA courses. Meanwhile, I turned my experiences of what emotional and psychological abuse ("gaslighting") does to the psyche into the year-end paper for my Lonergan's Insight course. I got A+, which just goes to shows you that good can indeed come out of evil.

I have no idea if Mr Confusion is a Gamer. Never met the man. But "CBTM" thinks he might be, and I believe firmly in feminine intuition. Feminine intuition is Experiencing, Understanding, Judgment happening so rapidly, you simply don't have time to ponder it. Sometimes you just know you're in danger, and you get out. If you start to doubt yourself, you could be in for serious trouble.

If Clio is up for it, I'd like her to do a guest post on Game, the psychological dirty tricks men learn and use to break down a woman's reserve and chastity. I don't know very much about it, so I'll just outline two well-known techniques.

The first one is the "neg" or mild put-down. A man walks up to a pretty girl, someone he is relatively sure gets over-the-top compliments all the time, and says something off-kilter about her to get her attention. One neg that has stuck in my mind was by a man addressing two beauties dressed identically in white. He said, "You two look like dirty little snowflakes." It worked like magic. "What do you MEAN?" wailed the girls. Used to praise, the non-praise confused and worried them. They wanted things set right.

The second one is--well, I don't know its official name, but it's when a man showers a woman with attention and compliments and then doesn't call. He doesn't call and he doesn't call and when he meets up with the woman again he showers her with more attention. And then doesn't call. So guess what many a woman does in that situation? Right. She calls him. Suckered! And it is for the same reason as above: she wants things set right.

The saddest question women ask is "What did I do?" "What did I do?" we ask when the man who was so kind doesn't call us. "What did I do?" we ask when the man who was so kind slaps us across the face. "What did I do?" we ask when the man who was so kind kicks us down the stairs. But this is a pointless question, because we didn't do anything. We were suckered by a creep, and quite a lot of the time, if we are honest, we admit that there was something we didn't do, which was to listen to our gut's warnings against him.

I love men. They are our brothers. Life would be dull without them. They are the caffeine in the cappuccino of life. Women who go into cloistered convents are making a real sacrifice. But this does not cancel out the fact that some men will lie, cheat, steal, drug, rape--do anything, in short, to have sex with the woman they want to have sex with. Some? Many. And it has always been this way. The earliest law codes have laws against rape and seduction, and that is because they were needed.

Today only a few brave women attempt to sue men for their lies; "breach of promise" cases are rarely heard of these days. But there is something we still have: our gut. If you feel uncomfortable around a man, don't feel guilty. Just get away from him. ASAP. No man is worth sacrificing your peace of mind for.