Hi all! You may know me as a prolific commenter on HarvardFML; this is my new and improved means of doling out relationship advice! Got a question you want to ask, or a situation you want thoughts and advice on? Email me at somedude.harvardfml@gmail.com, and watch this space for my answer! A.J. asks,

What’s your opinion of roissy.wordpress.com?

Ah yes; Roissy has come in for a lot of both praise and criticism on HarvardFML in the last couple weeks. The rampant misogyny notwithstanding, it’s mostly accurate dating advice for men. (You’ll hear much the same stuff said by Doc Love on askmen.com and David deAngelo on doubleyourdating.com.) They clearly understand how attraction works, explain it, and show you how to make it work for you. Roissy’s conceptual alpha-vs-beta dichotomy is particularly useful. In my experience the belligerent approach to giving advice they often take makes it unlikely that those who need it most will listen, but content-wise they’re not wrong.

But I wouldn’t call Roissy right, either: the misogyny is clearly a problem.

A lot of very effective dating advice for men sounds downright heretical to feminists because it appears to perpetuate a lot of  old-fashioned and negative notions about women: women are more emotional than rational, women should be subordinate to men, women should be judged by their looks, and so on. The scary part is, the advice works really well for men who objectify women. So yeah, misogyny can actually be an effective dating strategy for men. For all their protestations, and through no fault of their own, desirable women actually fall for it pretty reliably.

There’s a seed of truth in the stereotypes. Attraction is entirely emotional and not at all rational (although that’s true of men just as much of women). Women are usually not attracted to men who are their lessers. Men are indeed attracted mostly by sensory stimuli (like looks) rather than personality. These facts have some unfortunate implications. But attraction is not a choice. We can be aware that our eyes have blind spots, and we can be aware of how our brains fill them, but we cannot change how our brains fill them, nor prevent them from making predictable mistakes when doing so. Similarly, we can be aware of how attraction works, we can be aware that attraction isn’t a reliable predictor of a good match, but we cannot choose to feel or not to feel attraction to particular people.

Is the dark side stronger? No – Quicker, easier, more seductive. While it is sadly easy to use misogyny to become more attractive to women, you don’t need to be a misogynist to use the same insights. For instance:

Since women are not usually attracted to submissive men, I would recommend that men tell rather than ask a girl out. So, “Come get coffee with me,” or “Let’s get coffee,” rather than “Do you want to get coffee with me?” The former two sound like they give the woman less respect and less choice than the latter – but that’s not so! This is a trick played on both the man and the woman. Phrasing it that way gives the man more confidence (good for him) and makes him appear more assertive to the woman (good for her). And phrased either way, the woman still needs to give an answer. The true measure of respect and choice is how the man handles a “no.”

Just because women often want guys they can look up to doesn’t mean the guys should look down on the women. So, while Roissy has some good ideas and insights, add salt to taste.

See also RelationshipsFML: Attraction and Manipulation.