What We Can Learn From Marlon Brando

From A Streetcar Named Desire, a virtual visual manual in how to attract women by being firmly grounded in your own sense of things and telling it like it is. Study it carefully.

Stanley Kowalski is played by Marlon Brando, and Blanche Dubois is his wife’s sister, played by… uh, it doesn’t matter.

—

Blanche: Oh, in my youth I excited some admiration. But look at me now! Would you think it possible that I was once considered to be attractive?

Stanley: (healthy pause) Your looks are okay.

Blanche: I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley.

Stanley: I don’t go in for that stuff.

Blanche: What stuff?

Stanley: Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a dame yet that didn’t know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they’ve got. I once went out with a dame who told me “I’m the glamorous type.” She says, “I am the glamorous type.” I say, “So what?”

Blanche: And what did she say then?

Stanley: She didn’t say nothing. That shut her up like a clam.

Blanche: Did it end the romance?

Stanley: Well, it ended the conversation, that was all. You know there are some men, Blanche, that are took in by this Hollywood glamour stuff and there’s some men that just aren’t.

Blanche: I’m sure you belong in the second category.

Stanley: That’s right.

Blanche: I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.

Stanley: That’s right.

Blanche: You’re simple, straightforward and honest. A little bit on the, eh, primitive side, I should think. To interest you a woman would have to?

Stanley: — Would have to lay her cards on the table.

Blanche: Well, I never did care for wishy-washy people. That was why, when you walked in here last night, I said to myself “My sister has married a man!”

—

What to say? True manliness comes in not letting anyone, and especially women, sway you from what you know to be true, for you. Fuck yeah Stanley.

“Common Sense Will Send You The Wrong Way In Life”

Coming home from a night of carousing in Boston and got out of the T to come across two drunk, possibly semi-homeless, dudes in Central Square. At one point, one of them mumbled to himself: “Common sense will send you the wrong way in life, man.”

How much better of a ringing endorsement for one of the fundamental tenets of Game could you get? What women say they want and what they actually respond to are vastly different.

Almost all of it is counter-intuitive. Or, better put, counter to the media/cultural overlay we’ve allowed to cover up our actual masculine intuition… which says grab her hair, fall on top of her, and fuck her like you’re going off to battle and never coming back.

(Go check out the NY Times article “What Do Women Want?” describing, among other things, the wide prevalence of women’s fantasies of “willful submission” and the fact that they often deny subjectively what they objectively find sexually arousing…)

Not Power Over, But Simple Freedom

Was reading the latest post today over at The Rational Male on “Building A Better Beta” and one particular quote hit me:

It’s very important that the vision you have of being a “better Man” originates with YOU, not with the idealisms of a plugged in moralist or women so fearful of your new awareness that they’ll make concerted efforts to supplant it with what makes you a better servant of their insecure imperative.

How true. And I think the biggest fear most feminists have of all of this stuff we’re trying to figure out in the “manosphere” (something I only tentatively agree to associate with, at this point) is that we’ll somehow shift (back?) into what they’ve railed against from the start of their movement: patriarchal power over women. It still remains to be seen where any clear evidence of this conscious, conspiratorial banding together eons ago actually took place, but I leave that series of arguments to others of our ilk much more informed on the subject.

Yet, unfortunately, there are most likely many, many men who get into this “personal work,” for lack of a better term, as a means to avoid transcending their issues with women and “get back” at them. Yes, this probably means they’re seeking “power over.”

But as I reflect on my fundamental reason for diving into all of this stuff, back when I first serendipitously and fortuitously stumbled across The Game and The Way of the Superior Man within two weeks of one another, it was never about getting back, getting even, or learning manipulation to serve the attainment of an uneven power dynamic.

It was simply that I craved autonomy. Simple freedom… in the presence of physical beauty for which I knew there was no rational reason for my heart to race, throat to tighten, and mind to freeze. I became obsessed with overcoming this nasty, ridiculous knee-jerk response that comes from hell knows where in my genetics or my psyche or wherever. It doesn’t matter, really.

What matters is that I have this drive to learn more about myself, about women, about sexual dynamics, about manhood, all of it, in order to find freedom, on my own terms. Yes, Mr. Tomassi, I accept the challenge. Thanks for a great post…