Khaos Theory

In the recent hit movie and book “The Hunger Games,” young heroine Katniss is tossed out into a computer-enhanced, forest-like setting and left to defend herself against the elements, as well as other young people intent on killing her. In her attempts to survive, Katniss uses a bow and arrow both to defend herself, and to kill animals for food. She cleverly charms and forms alliances with those who might help her. She escapes computer-generated brushfires and man-eating beasts alike. I’d hazard a guess that the Greek poet Homer would have concluded that Katniss was woman of “areté,” which to him described a person of the highest effectiveness, using all of his or her faculties (strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness), to achieve real results.

The word areté refers to a concept defined somewhat differently by various sources throughout time. Many would say areté means, quite simply, excellence. According to dictionary.com, this word of Greek origin is “the aggregate of qualities, as valor and virtue, making up good character.” Aristotle used the term as a measure of how well something or someone fulfills its intended use. Yet he also admitted that the definition of areté is not something that can be easily agreed-upon. Finally, in his book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” author Robert Pirsig uses areté as a synonym for “Quality.”

Personally, I equate the concept of areté to reaching your highest potential as a human being. In his book Way of the Peaceful Warrior, author Dan Millmann wrote a quote that while simple, says it all. When Socrates is talking to Dan about how lousy he is in many aspects of his life while being great at gymnastics, Socrates says “Do you know what’s the difference between me and you? You practice gymnastics, I practice everything!”

It is my opinion that far too many people in this life don’t strive for areté, but rather settle for mediocrity. They live in a world where “just okay,” is good enough. If they have a job that pays the bills, and if their basic needs are met, they are happy. But why not strive for more?

Consider the idea of today’s average man: He goes to work every day for a large corporation that sees him not as a person, but as a number. He comes home and flips on the television, and watches whatever news stories Channel 4 or 7 or 12 has deemed relevant. He goes back out and eats dinner at whatever restaurant the television commercials steered him towards. Perhaps he plays softball with his drinking buddies, or maybe he takes his son to a movie. The next days he gets up and does it all again.

Now contrast this with a description from H.D.F. Kitto’s book “The Greeks,” referenced by Robert Persig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in a chapter about men pursuing excellence:

“The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom…. He can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.

“Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency… or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.”

According to relationship expert Jennifer Oikle, Ph.D., “the vast majority of women have, at one time or another, used sex to manipulate a man.” Hmm. I don’t think it takes a “relationship expert,” to reach that conclusion. All you have to do is look around at modern society and how sexualized it is, to realize that manipulation is bound to happen.

Have you ever gone to a department store looking for a specific item, and been directed towards something else by a hot saleswoman who is dressed to the nines and smells like candy? Then by the time you are finished shopping, you find you’ve spent several times as much as intended. It happens all the time. And after it happens to you, you realized you’ve been manipulated, perhaps while reading your inflated credit card bill. But let’s face it – it’s not just the ladies using sex to encourage you to do something. The creative side of the advertising industry is largely dominated by men. So when you watch a commercial with busty babes who make you want to consume more beer, buy a particular brand of car, or dye your graying hair, chances are it was a guy – who knows how guys think – who created that concept designed to use sex to sell.

But when does using sex go beyond a sales tactic and become a problem? When it crosses the line into your bedroom, and you find your girlfriend or wife withholding, or threatening to withhold sex, to demand something from you. That would be called using sex as a weapon. This kind of behavior is dysfunctional, and akin to blackmail, when a woman says that either she gets what she wants, or the intercourse gets blown to bits. It is a passive-aggressive, emotionally immature tactic used by women who can’t verbalize their feelings.

It’s important for guys to recognize when a woman attempts to use sex as a weapon, and make sure they don’t give in, for several reasons:

First, it doesn’t solve anything to give in to demands. If a woman is trying to use sex to get something from you, she likely has issues. Is she simply a bit insecure? Or does she have a much deeper problem that may require professional help? Either way, giving in to demands may feel good for a short while – for as long as you get the physical reward – but it won’t help in the long run.

Second, once a pattern of behavior is established on your part, it will be very difficult to change. Remember Dr. Phil, the Oprah Winfrey prodigy from Texas with a god-awful show about relationships? Well he did have a few good moments. One of his best quotes was “You teach people how to treat you.” So don’t teach women that you can be manipulated with sexual favors. Whether she offers up a blowjob in exchange for Manolo Blaniks (aka really expensive shoes), or she refuses sex because you went on the golf outing you had planned months before with her blessing, you have to hold your ground, and just don’t give in. Be available to talk through issues, but don’t give in to groveling. Because when sex gets traded to meet needs, rather than to build intimacy and trust, it hardly sets the grounds for a healthy, loving relationship.

You can easily find plenty of advice online about how important it is for a couple to communicate their desires and preferences. It can’t be stated more clearly: If you don’t have a healthy way of expressing your thoughts and emotions to each other, of speaking and being heard, then everything else will ultimately crumble. I agree with that and I think that with most couples that advice would be just what they need…

But not in every case.

In regular sex, or vanilla sex as I like to call it, there is a certain very predictable sequence: Motivation, excitement, foreplay, plateau, orgasm, resolution. Always the exact same sequence with very little variation and it always goes from a few minutes (often) to even a few hours (rarely). It is mechanical and predictable. Pleasurable for a while, boring on the long run.

In a more sophisticated sexual lifestyle that includes much more sophisticated mental play, the time frame of a sexual experience can be seen in different metrics. Our sexual encounter may not be measured as one-get-laid-session but in a much longer frame. I may be planning something that will take several days to build up…

But to make it work I may need to communicate less!

If I tell you to not think about Elvis, what do you immediately think of? Yes, Elvis. If I told you that I will surprise you this weekend with a gift, would I still be able to surprise you with a gift? No. Too much information will diminish the effect, or spoil the experience altogether. I can’t let your mind get on the way.

In my experience, sex is a game, and I like to use the word game in it’s most positive and child-like meaning: It is played because it is fun, and it is played to win. Every time I am paying attention to what is it that excites you and brings you up to higher levels of enjoyment. I also pay attention to how much I like what happens along the way.

What I like to do is to create a domino effect. I find something that you like, and you may not even be aware of yet, and I will excite that. I may create these sequences of do-this-than-this-than-that and will need to implement that sequence over a course of several days for it to reach it’s full effect. Maybe I will not do something you like or at least not do it enough to build up tension and expectation. I may frustrate you in the short term to make it more intense over time. Whatever it is that I am doing it has the purpose of building up higher and higher sexual tension…

…and I will not tell you what is it I have in mind.

Love requires thinking. Thinking gets on the way of sex.

Love wants purity, while sex doesn’t. Love is like ownership, sex is like trespassing. Love dreams about being accepted and allowed. Sex dreams about being prohibited. Most fantasies are taboos.

In the utopia of romantic novels and dating advice, love comes first and sex follows, much later. In the real world sex usually comes first and love is dragged along.

Love is a result of desire. Sex does not depend on desire, just takes it over. Love can get on the way of sex, but not the other way around.

Nobody masturbates to love. Nobody suffers from being horny.

Love dreams about what it can be. Sex gets satisfied with what it is. Love is never completely satisfying because it is based in an impossibility. Sex may be satisfying, if you know how to do it. Love and sex rarely come together, pardon the pun.

Love doesn’t require the presence of the loved one. Sex, even when alone, requires a little “hand”. Some love stories don’t even require a partner; they grow on solitude, memories, or distance. Sex is much more realistic. So love can be a search for an illusion while sex requires the truth.

Single people dream of love. Married people dream of sex.

Love can be somehow ridiculous, especially in the great romance novels and soap operas. Sex can look ridiculous if you turn the movie on in the middle of a scene.

Sex always existed – from the caves all the way to the modern brothels. Romantic love was invented during the Renaissance by the poets, and reinvented by Hollywood. The only way to control love is by programming it, with moral codes and social standards. The way to control sex is by programming it, like the porn industry does with it’s standardized positions and acts. Restrained love protects the status quo. Wild sex is a threat to the peace and stability of everyone.

There are no brothels for love, where the guy can come in and fall in love. But in every brothel they always pretend a little bit of love and romance to “warm up”. Love became a jumpstart for commercial sex.

Make love, not war, they say. Sex wants war. Hate can destroy love, but it may spark some great sex. Love talks a lot. Sex screams, groans, wispers, but does not explain anything.

The problem with love is that it lasts for too long, while sex doesn’t last long enough. The danger of sex is that you can fall in love. The danger of love is that you can fall into becoming friends. In a world of condoms, sex can be safe. But there is no condom to wrap your heart with.

A romantic connection (also called pair-bonding) is a deep emotional bond to another individual. The tendency to form a deep emotional bond to another individual is an universal feature of human life.

The connections we form to our partners are designed to keep people together. When we form a connection to a partner – we want to be near that person. And we tend to feel safe and secure when our partners are around. Overall, forming a connection was designed to help create stability. If you are connected to someone and the relationship comes to an end, the sense of loss can be overwhelming – including feelings of uncertainty, fear, and despair.

Humans are designed to form a strong connections to a romantic partner because human offspring are born extremely immature (unable to care for themselves). Individuals who formed a deep connections to their sexual partners were better equipped to raise offspring. And over millions of years of human development, evolution favored people who formed a deep emotional bond to a sexual partner. As such, people living today are all the descendants of individuals who formed an emotional bond to their romantic partners in the past.

Not only are humans designed to form a deep emotional bond to a sexual partner, but the process by which we do so is very similar to how infants form a bond to their primary caregivers.

Human infants universally form a deep emotional attachment to the person who provides the most care (usually a mother). This attachment is designed to keep infants close to their caregivers, which ultimately helped ensured an infant’s survival. When infants form a deep emotional attachment to their caregiver – children feel safe and secure. For infants, attachment figures (caregivers) provide a sense of security and comfort. When separate from their attachment figure, infants will stage a protest (crying and screaming) designed to get their caregiver’s attention.

How do infants know who to form an attachment to?

Infants form an attachment to the caregivers based on the nature and amount of physical contact they have with others. Infants form an attachment to the person who provides the most physical contact – the most kissing, cuddling, caressing, and so on.

And adults do the same when it comes to forming a romantic connection. Adults form a deep emotional connection based on intimate physical contact – kissing and cuddling, etc. If you have repeated intimate contact with another person, you will most likely form a deep connection to that person. Once a connection is formed – people want to spend more time together, feel safe and secure in each other’s presence, and they will experience loss when the relationship comes to an end.

The lesson to be learned? Be careful about whom you have repeated intimate contact with – you are likely to form a strong connection to that person. And once a connection is formed, it can be very difficult to break. Doms especially tend to forget that when they dominate someone they are creating a two-way street where both will feel increasingly connected emotionally.

Most people can read more than one book during the same week. They read one a little bit, then the other, then back to the first one without losing track of where they are on each book. Some people can read several books at the same time like that. But I don’t think someone can read fifty books at the same time and still keep track of all of them. So there is some number that is the limit of how many books you can handle simultaneously. Similarly there is a number of relationships each person can handle, and it varies from person to person.

If you are reading different books they don’t have to be necessarily about the same subject. If one book is about politics for instance, the other books don’t need to be about politics as well. You can be reading one book about cooking, another about photography, one about dieting, another about computers, and so on. Similarly humans maintain relationships of different natures simultaneously. Different people play different roles in your life. But even within the somewhat narrower range of romantic and sexual relationships you can be having different types of relationships at the same time

Some books you read in a day, during one long flight, or during a weekend. You like them for the short term and entertainment you get from them. Other books are big novels and you want to read them for a long period of time. Some books are references and you like to just go back to them every now and them when you feel the need.

When you finish reading a book don’t just drop it anywhere or leave it laying around out of place. Put it back on the shelf! Unfold the corners, make sure the cover is fine and remove page markers. Put it back on the shelf in good shape and with respect. The other books will see that is the way you treat a book and they will appreciate you more for that!

Every time you read a book it makes you smarter and more experienced, more prepared to read the next book that comes along. That is why it’s important to always read something. Even if you don’t have right now the exact book you would like to find, but there is a book of quality within reach and you have the opportunity, read it anyway for the experience it will give you.

Finally, it doesn’t matter how many times you read a book, the ending will still be the same.

A rather typical result of people’s lack of culture and depth is an overall dullness so depressing that is has to be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make them acceptable. And that, to anyone who is perceptive of real human values, just makes them all the worse. Now they are not just depressingly dull, they are also phony.

Awesomeness is not something you can lay on top of people like wrapping around a boring product. It has to be the source from where their actions and patterns come from.

Driven by fashion magazines and porn, millions of women subject themselves to acrobatic exercises at beauty spas to shave their pubic hair. They endure that gynecologic exam routine and leave happy with just a narrow patch (if any) of hair, very nicely called a “landing strip”, the harmless euphemism to suggest the destination of our desires. Pop culture, from fashion to porn, also created billion dollars industries of silicone, hair coloring, tanning, botoxes, implants, sexy clothing, and gym memberships, all trying to satisfy the cravings of millions of sexually charged consumers.

Looking at TV, magazines, mainstream movies and porn, in the rare occasions when you are not horny, you could easily see that matrix of perfection and performance that is far from the reality of normal human beings. Open any of the modern sexy magazines and all you will see are things. Things made of pure visual perfection, not women with doubts, shortcomings, and fears. All you see are girls competing for your very short attention span in desperate positions and absurd clothing, or lack of it. There is nothing left to be exposed. No cavity, crease, fluid or shape was left to imagination.

The virtual woman is out there to humiliate and destroy us. She raises us up with our dreams just to let us drop flat on the ground when we can’t find her in the real world. She is looking at us in the eyes, with her wonderful eyes and mouth like saying “Take me! I am always ready, I am always happy, always horny, always yours”.

Women want wealth, passion, connection, status, respect, and love. But the virtual one poses with an ostentatious attitude, or seductive vulnerability and pretends that it is you that wants her and that she is the top prize. The virtual woman suggests a disposition she doesn’t actually have in order not to bother her consumers with the inconveniences of her needs.

The virtual woman offers the ultimate experience, Nirvana packaged as orgasm. She is the goddess in a market paradise, the last stage of a video game that men can only reach by passing through a lifetime of stages where they need to acquire success, money, BMWs, Gucci, Armani’s and prestige. This woman is the final prize for a narcissistic lifestyle. She looks so perfect that she may even seem to not require any partner, able to be a lover of herself.

Unfortunately feminism has been followed by (or degenerated into) an expression of freedom that transformed women, and men, into replaceable objects with the purpose of sexual satisfaction. The competition, fueled by pop culture, creates way more anxiety and depression than any satisfaction, sexual or otherwise. Women no longer own their bodies, now their bodies own them.

Packaged in layers of fine clothes and jewelry and spray tanning, covering perfectly shaped breasts and the finest underwear that looks like the gift wrapping for divine pleasure… You can’t even see the real woman beneath all that! You are standing in awe in front of all this perfection, feeling insufficient with your ordinary life style, and impotent with your ordinary bank account.

Our sexual desires have been programmed by others, by industries that arouse our desires to sell us the promise of satisfaction, yet never deliver.

When you meet these girls, models, porn stars, strippers, escorts, dancers… you actually find women that are insecure or not, openminded or conventional, smart or dumb, but they will never have a chance to express their real values and personalities in the movies and magazines because there is no consumer demand for women that have loving husbands, happily taking care of kids, and solving problems in the real world. These women want to love and be loved, but need to spend their time laboring at virtual and real-life brothels.

Just like luxury cars, or consumer electronics, every year they come up more perfect and more intangible. We now have web sites, escort services, and gentlemen’s clubs full of girls with amazing robotic bodies and scripted conversations. These beautiful women are paid so they don’t exist but will rather be an impossible dream. They need no food or stupid conversation, or suffering, or connection, just your cash.

Freedom and lack of education seems to liberate women and make them free to choose, but that is an illusion. In a society plagued by prejudice, religious fundamentalism, and inequality like ours, we end up with objectified women thinking they are free. They are enclosed in avatars of sexual expression that only hide lonesome insecure women, hungry for love and wealth.

When a woman get all prepared and dressed up to go to a club, she is not doing it to impress anyone in particular, she is doing it to impress everyone! She is there to impress her friends, everyone else in the club, the bouncers, the bartender, everyone.

You walk into the club not particularly impressing anyone and then when you start talking to her if you switch into trying to impress her in particular you automatically project lower value subconsciously.

Drama accomplishes a lot of things at once. It gets attention, it sends emotions through the body (emotions are highly addictive chemicals), it’s a way to be self-righteous, it’s often fun, it’s interesting and prevents boredom, it gives things meaning… and on and on. There are a lot of good reasons for drama. But most
men can’t understand because drama fulfills needs that most men don’t have.

Everyone will give you some drama. Everyone has baggage. What matter is that you baggage fits all the way under the seat in front of you. In other words, not uncontrollable and overwhelming amounts of drama and baggage. It is ok if she tells you a little about her crazy friends, but not about the reappearing assaulting and occasionally spanking ex-boyfriend who just got paroled. You get the idea.

So drama is expected, but there is a right way to deal with it:

Don’t react to it emotionally.

That is it. Don’t react. Don’t try to solve the problem. Don’t try to explain anything. Just smile, occasionally ask questions, but in general just ignore the issue. With time she will get tired of throwing her drama at you because it just bounces on you and falls to the ground. Just don’t do anything about it.