Our friend The Male Brain wrote in to me earlier to ask for my thoughts about an article that has apparently been making the rounds within the Manosphere community. It concerns the sentiments of famed, and notorious, day-game expert Krauser with respect to another member of the “pickup” side of the Manosphere: a chap who goes by the name of Blackdragon.

Now, the reason why I have any interest in this subject, at any level, is because I used to be a reader of Blackdragon’s, quite a dedicated one, actually, for several years.

I found his thoughts about online dating and game to be provocative, interesting, and certainly worth reading. Blackdragon approaches dating and relationships in modern America in a very logical, data-driven manner, and that tends to cause a lot of angry reactions when he criticises people’s core beliefs using data, logic, and evidence.

Blackdragon’s approach to game is almost purely online-based. He argues in favour of a purely online-based approach, using a mix of free and paid sites, to screen women according to specific preferences. His approach is to keep your profile focused on being fun and just slightly “edgy”, to send out huge numbers of very simple messages to as many women as possible, and to keep a systematic, data-driven, carefully tracked list of women with easily understood data points.

Does it work? Well, you’ll have to judge that for yourself. Blackdragon says that it does, and he has built a highly successful business around his techniques and ideas. He also has a large number of commenters and followers who swear by his method. One of my former readers and correspondents, a chap by the name of Halfbreed, used his method and swore by it.

So, yes, I would say that there is a lot of merit to Blackdragon’s approach. I know people who have used his techniques, and they do appear to work – for them.

However – I tried Blackdragon’s techniques too. They categorically FAILED, utterly, totally, and completely, for me – in the USA.

The reasons for this are very simple. First, I don’t like being photographed. I hate it, actually – a character trait which used to drive my ex-lady bananas; she managed to get me to soften up a bit about it after a few months, but boy were the fights brutal in the process. So as a result, there are very few photos of me in “fun” settings – or in any sort of setting whatsoever.

And second, I am not white or Anglo-Saxon. I don’t like black or Hispanic girls – that’s a personal preference, and if that offends you, then please send your thoughts to idgaf@myass.com. I strongly prefer white and Asian women – particularly of the Slavic and East Asian varieties, respectively.

When you use online dating, the hard reality is that if you try to open women outside of your own race, your response rates crater. Or at least, that is true in the USA.

It is not true outside of the USA, as long as you can demonstrate real value, worldliness, and masculine traits. If your profile shows that you do not live or work in a shithole country, then your response rates will be pretty decent, actually – provided you don’t look like a complete Beta schlub.

I tried a similar approach before I went to Russia in June last year. It did work – in part because, let’s face facts, women in Russia actually ACT LIKE WOMEN. (It is quite wonderful to experience that, especially during a Moscow summer. It’s like going from a smoggy ash-covered wasteland to pristine mountains and fjords.)

So – Blackdragon’s methods do work, with some caveats. And Blackdragon has, without question, been quite open – within limits that he himself has very clearly articulated – about who he is and what he does. His real name is Caleb Jones and he blogs under that name here, on topics that go beyond dating and business.

Enter Krauser PUA.

Krauser’s approach to game is completely different. He is a day-gamer, which means that he gets his lays by approaching girls on the streets, during the day, engaging them in conversations in a way that is designed to lower their guards and make them feel comfortable, and get them to go out on dates.

He demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of his method by posting lots of videos, testimonials, and evidence of his work. There can be no doubt that his approach works too.

Now, Dawn Pine (The Male Brain) and I got interested in this whole debate – it’s really more of a trash-talking contest, though, at this point – because Krauser posted up an article in which he basically shat all over Blackdragon’s past, business, looks, life, writing, and family.

You should read the whole thing before you continue here. It is too long for me to simply quote pieces from it. But basically, Krauser makes the following points:

• Blackdragon has openly stated in the past that he is a middle-aged guy living in Portland – one of the most liberal, and therefore ugliest and most crazy, cities in the entire country;
• He uses online dating – and there is no question that the women on online dating sites are at least one to two points less hot than ordinary girls in real life, and this holds even in Russia, where I can tell you personally that the girls who use those sites are not nearly as gorgeous as the ones walking around in the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg or Nizhny Novgorod;
• He’s an older guy chasing younger women, and therefore needs really tight game;
• He isn’t particularly good-looking, based on his own pictures;
• He talks constantly about living an “Alpha Male 2.0” lifestyle, in which you are totally open and honest that you do not want monogamy, and will never be monogamous, and you have one main woman and one to three side women in a “harem”;
• He talks about how to raise children in that environment;
• He posts no evidence whatsoever of any of his conquests;
• His son is a half-black kid fathered by another man through his ex-wife;
• He is “married” – in an “Alpha Male 2.0” sense – to a woman in her late thirties who he reckons is a hard 9 by the standards of most men;
• His woman, Pink Firefly, is a corporate worker drone who works really hard and is very accomplished and intelligent, and that is the kind of woman that BD is attracted to;

Blackdragon evidently got wind of this rather angry and pointed rant, and posted his response here. It must be noted that BD’s response is remarkably restrained, given the sheer vituperation and mockery heaped upon him by Krauser. Instead of getting shirty, BD decided to raise a simple series of logical arguments, and made the following very straightforward, honest, and simple points:

1. No matter what you think of him, he’s been incredibly consistent over the past 9 years (and counting) that he has been writing online;
2. He is open about his mistakes, admits to them, documents them, and lets his commenters discuss them quite openly;
3. If he has been lying for so long, then it should be easy to catch him out in lies, given that everything he has to say is on public record;
4. Putting up pictures of women that he has been with, or slept with, is a non-starter given American tort law, which is frivolous in the extreme;
5. He offers a complete 100% lifetime money-back guarantee on his books, and he has a return request rate of about 3%, so clearly a lot of men get a lot of value from his advice;
6. He concedes that he plays “sugar daddy game” and (rarely) pays for prostitutes, but doesn’t see it as a big deal, since he is outcome-independent and a free man, and doesn’t care much what people think of him;
7. He closes by thanking his haters for driving business his way.

I have to say that, overall, I thought it was a pretty dignified response.

All right, so that’s the summarising part out of the way. Now let’s get to the analysis.

I will admit right away that Krauser actually makes a lot of valid points. He couches them in highly charged emotional language, but that is his problem, not mine. I have a much more dialectical writing style and I think that getting into fights on teh innarwebz is a bit like… well, this:

So let’s get down to what Krauser gets right about Blackdragon:

His approach to internet-based dating is heavy on terminology, abbreviations, and “jargon”. He admits as much and has a full-on glossary to help newcomers navigate through everything that he says. I find this jargon to be confusing and annoying, at best.

He does live in Portland, and given what I know of the city – I’ve never been there – that should immediately be a big red flag. Portland really is a shithole these days – worse than Manhattan, and competing with San Francisco and Seattle for the worst city in America. The women there are ugly, fat, liberal, crazy, and most of them are feminists (Lord, forgive me my redundancies). So when BD talks about landing “8s and above” using online dating… be very suspicious.

The point that Krauser raises about putting evidence of your conquests online, out there for people to see and analyse, is actually a valid one. This will take a moment to explain.

This is (unfortunately) the age of social media. If you have sex with a woman and enter into something that could reasonably be described as a “relationship” with her, then there is nothing wrong with taking photos of yourself with her and posting them on Instagram. That is normal, acceptable, and perfectly legal. A woman cannot sue a man for posting a photo of the two of them together, if they are both fully clothed and in public, that she herself took. All she can do is tell him to take it down. That’s about it.

Blackdragon knows about the importance of social media. He seems to ignore it, for the most part. And that’s fine, that’s his business. But the notion that there is NO legal way for him to put his lifestyle results up for critical examination strikes me as more than a little ridiculous.

It’s not easy, though. And I understand BD’s reticence to expose himself, his business, and his romantic partners to scrutiny.

Krauser’s best points hit with respect to living a non-monogamous lifestyle and raising children in that environment. Those aspects of that life are the exact reason why I have no desire to engage in that kind of life, ever.

Blackdragon argues that humans are not designed to be monogamous, and that monogamous societies come packed with some serious problems that result in unhappy, desperate people who are sexually frustrated and cannot get what they want. And he is right – if you restrict yourself only to looking at secular modern communities without significant religious and cultural pressures for women to stay faithful and for men to keep their little captains out of their lieutenants’ wives.

His argument falls apart completely when you look at religious couples, especially from evangelical Christian households. Both men and women in those households report having happier marriages, with more frequent and more satisfying sex, than secular households. The women in those societies and traditions marry younger, have MUCH lower notch counts, and understand what it means to be a woman.

And then there is the idea of raising children in a non-monogamous arrangement. Now this is where I find the entire idea to be about as appealing as a plate of cold sick.

Basically, if you are an Alpha Male 2.0, you sleep with as many women as you want. You are totally honest with all of them. You never promise any of them monogamy. You tell them up front that you will never be monogamous with them. You enjoy a life of total hedonistic freedom. You are able to keep one special “main woman” in your life. You get to have sex with other women. She gets to have sex with other men. But you make very strong binding rules that neither of you ever develops real attachment or feelings for the “others”.

If this sounds batshit insane to you, it does to me too. The reality is that those rules are actually harder to live by than the Christian ideal of the two bodies becoming one flesh and one soul over time.

The reality is that men and women give away part of their souls to every partner that they have sex with. Women give away MUCH bigger parts of themselves than men do. And a woman who has a “husband”, but is discreetly having sex with other men on the side, will lose her soul over time, to the point where her husband won’t be able to recognise her eventually.

That is the exact opposite of the Christian ethos, and that is the reason – nowadays – why I disagree so strongly with Blackdragon’s approach. It just isn’t for me. If it is for you, then hey, that’s between you and the Big Man Upstairs. It’s just not my cup of tea.

There are a couple of things that I think Krauser gets badly wrong, though.

For one, it IS possible to find a really beautiful woman in her late thirties who would rank an 8 or so. She won’t be a 10, especially if she was a 10 when she was 25. A few of my readers are married to, or dating, women like that. They are much more common than Americans might realise in Eastern Europe, for example, where women hit the dreaded Wall much later – at around 45-50, if they really take good care of themselves and stay off the пирожки – than they do in the West.

Now, the fact that Blackdragon claims to have found a really hot corporate woman at the age of 37 who looks like a 10, strikes me as flatly delusional. She just won’t be, man. Not gonna happen. If she was a 10 at 27, she WILL NOT be a 10 at 37.

But she will be roughly an 8.5. And that’s pretty damned good if you’re an older dude.

And, second, when Krauser claims that Blackdragon “cucked” as a young man… well, yeah. So? Every single one of us has made some really stupid mistakes in our twenties. Blackdragon is no exception.

So Blackdragon married a woman with a mystery-meat kid, and adopted him as his own. Yeah, that was stupid. He didn’t have any game or smarts back then. He made his choices, he’s lived with them, and he’s raised his non-biological son the best way that he knows how. I can’t really criticise him too much for that.

What I can criticise him for is in trying to sell a very hedonistic, selfish, self-centred pleasure-seeking lifestyle to men all over the world without ever having any regard for the human cost of what he is selling.

Make no mistake, there is a cost. Blackdragon’s entire philosophy is that all he wants to do is have fun and enjoy himself. That’s it. He doesn’t care about Western civilisation. He doesn’t care about Eastern civilisation. All he cares about is getting laid, making money, and enjoying the good things in life.

Well, okay, fine, if that’s his mission in life, I can’t help but wish him well. But those aren’t my priorities in life, and I have to respectfully part ways with him there.

The thing is, though, that Krauser isn’t actually any better. He’s in the same boat – his PUA lifestyle is about having a lot of sex with a lot of girls, and making money and teaching other guys to do the same in the process. Well, OK, fine, but he has no “skin in the game” of Western civilisation. He takes advantage of the decadence of the West, while doing next to nothing to fix the problem.

In his defence, though, he is a full-throated Trump supporter, which Blackdragon categorically is not. BD has argued since 2015 that the God-Emperor is a shyster and a con artist who has sold America a bill of goods and has delivered absolutely nothing of his promises.

He actually told his readers that he would compile a list of promises that Donaldus Triumphus has broken, and keep track of them over the course of the Trump Presidency. To my knowledge, Blackdragon has singularly failed to do anything of the sort – not least because, other than the very conspicuous case of the GREAT BORDER WALL, the God-Emperor has done pretty much exactly what he said he would do.

The real problem here, though, has to do with both Krauser and Blackdragon.

And that is this: the fact is that we’re all basically more or less on the same side. If you read Krauser’s FAQ section, you’ll see that he is an INTJ. Guess what: so is BD. So am I. So are a whole bunch of my readers.

What’s the point of getting into a bitchfight slapfest of a clown rodeo about one guy’s pickup methods over another guy’s lifestyle coaching? We’ve got much more insidious evils to fight.

Moreover, if it is an issue over who has the bigger business and online presence – well, if you believe in capitalism as the greatest system of human organisation, as Krauser seems to, and as Blackdragon agrees, then you shouldn’t have any problems with idiots paying $10K to let some “Beta cuck” teach him about how to live the life of a king. That’s free choice in action, right there. I don’t have a problem with it; caveat emptor, and all that jazz.

I do have a big problem with liars. If I spot one, I’m going to call him out for being a lying asshole.

And while I have plenty of disagreements with Blackdragon, one thing that I honestly cannot call him, no matter how hard I try, is a liar.

I can call him an opinionated asshole, but that would be like a zebra telling a tiger that he has stripes. I certainly can’t call him a lying asshole.

As for the whole money issue – look, guys, there is plenty to go around. I could start up a business tomorrow teaching South Asian men how to get hotter, better women than the ones that they have now – our friend Adam and I discussed that very idea during my guest appearance on his podcast a while back. It wouldn’t necessarily be that hard; I have stated to readers in the past that Indian women face stiff competition from cows in terms of looks, which is EXTREMELY rude and uncharitable but, it must be said, rather accurate.

And if Indian guys pay me for putting up that content, hey, great. That’s up to them. You could call them smart or desperate, that’s up to you. What you cannot tell them is how to spend their own money.

Ultimately, these flame wars within the PUA community are really pointless. The old rule, SHUT UP AND SHOOT LEFT!!!, applies quite clearly here. Let Blackdragon do what he does. If he’s lying, or his methods don’t work, or his results are absurdly overinflated, then people are going to work that out for themselves pretty quickly. A guy who has been writing very publicly and consistently online, who admits to his mistakes and tells essentially the entire world his methods and ideas, and keeps it all up there are as a matter of public record, is extremely unlikely to be a liar.

But – Krauser isn’t accusing him of being a liar. He’s accusing him of being DELUSIONAL. There’s a difference. And… the fact is, Krauser might just have a point there.