When I was on an internet group called alt.romance, there were young men there who called themselves “nice guys.” These people would befriend and counsel young ladies, only to watch them pass over them in relationships and go with men whom they saw as being “jerks.” I watched these young men become more and more aggressively misogynistic as they went from “women only go with jerks” to “women make irresponsible choices in relationships” to “women are stupid and evil” to “women should be played, controlled and abused.”
Now leaving the issue of whether or not they were actually nice – their behavior obviously shows to the contrary – there is something here with much greater implications. While being a player can work in getting casual sex, in long-term relationships it is a complete disaster.
The relationship starts with a lie. What can a lie not handle? Either truth or any other competing fallacy. The process of defending a relationship that starts with a lie involves weaving an ever-more-elaborate, an ever-more-oppressive, and an ever-more-transparently-ridiculous web of deceit. This creates a hell for everyone involved, including the man who does this. Either the woman or the children – or both – eventually learn to see through the deception; and one winds up either with a hateful wife or with rebellious kids.
At this point the man responsible for the con job starts using moral or religious arguments. He has the right to neither; he is a con man. He had no ethical considerations in going for the woman; he went for her because she was hot. He deceived her and built a relationship based on deception. Neither of these are the actions of an ethical man.
So when we see young men being encouraged to play women, what we are seeing is encouragement of a highly unethical behavior – behavior that ends up being totally self-defeating. The man does not love the woman; he has played the woman. And that is a completely rotten foundation for a relationship and an even worse foundation for family life.
Now there have been any number of women in feminist movement who have taken the experience of their parents and used it to claim that love is a patriarchial racket. Love is not a patriarchial racket; playing is. Love – even love at first sight – worked for many women in the World War II generation; and their daughters who likewise believed in love did not believe anything irrational or unrealistic. Their problem has been that they kept mistaking false fronts of salesmen for goodness of character. They were being played, and women who have been played wind up in a marital hell – for the reasons stated above.
Playing and misogyny therefore work very well together. The player uses misogynistic attitudes to justify himself in playing women; and when the woman starts hating him or tries to leave him he uses that conduct to claim that women are bad. I have seen this done extensively in player cultures; and I seek to correct this state of affairs.
Particularly, I want to see women who are vulnerable to this behavior to see through it.
I was not born yesterday, and I know that women are just as capable as men of dishonest and malicious behavior. I seek to empower both the men and the women who are vulnerable to such behavior, whether it be done by women or by men. Neither men nor women are either evil or good; both are capable of both. That is because people have the capacity of choice. And anything that has the capacity of choice regardless of gender is capable of both right choices and wrong choices.
Love is not the same thing as playing, and it is wrong that women's experience of falling for fronts of players be used to impugn love. Similarly it is wrong that the behavior of women fleeing such things be used to foster misogyny. If you have pulled a con job, be ready that the next person see through the con job; and there is nothing in this that justifies slanders against women as such.
So that while playing can work for a one-night stand, it is a completely inadequate basis for a long-term relationship. That especially is the case if there are children involved. They will see you and they will judge you even if your wife does not.
What is a valid basis for a relationship? There are any number of them. Even if you have no use for romantic love, you can still found viable situations based on such things as similarities of values and interests. Even such relationships can turn sour; but they are less likely to explode in hatred and violence. Go for a woman whom you actually value and create something better than an inevitable player hell.