It starts in high school. He’s a horny liar driven by hormones. She’s an irrational princess living in fantasy world, driven by emotions. He tells her everything she wants to hear. The fairy-tale where they ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.

Eventually, she puts out. After awhile, he gets bored of her. All her little imperfections he ignored in the name of getting laid start to really bother him. He begins to wonder if he has cheated himself, and begins to find other people attractive. Finally, he breaks her heart by leaving her and pursuing other women she knows, possibly even her friends or family.

She spends a lot of time depressed. She feels ruined by false promises and bad sex. The next man won’t find her as desirable as when she was young and pristine. The first one’s insincerity discredits every other man who uses the same lines, even if they are sincere. But eventually, life goes on. She is still human after all, with needs and desires. She moves on. She doesn’t want to let one asshole ruin her ability to trust others and have a good time being social.

And then the victim becomes the victimizer. It’s simple transference. She’s still mad at that first guy, so she projects him onto random guys she meets, and hurts them before they get the chance to hurt her, thus giving her the feeling of having ‘won’ the relationship. She finds them in nightclubs, bars, community college. She leads them on, spends their money, loves them and leaves them, or just teases them. They’re all just douchebags anyway, at least in her mind. Whether they really are, or not. Some of them don’t become douchebags until she works them over, and just like her, her victims become victimizers. It’s all nothing but a jealousy competition.

Eventually, her lifestyle catches up to her. An unwanted pregnancy, career or scholastic failure, an STD, a substance abuse problem. She ends up in counseling. After winning her trust through empathizing with her plight, her therapist finally breaks it to her: You have a victim complex. You need to start raising your standards, taking control of your life, refusing to play the same old games everyone else is playing. No more business as usual: set your mark, and enforce it.

For the nice guy from a decent background, with a good head on his shoulders, it begins later. College, maybe. He’s been socially isolated since high school glory days, if they ever even happened for him at all, gone past. The flaw in the Golden Rule is that it assumes that everyone wants the same thing. Most women want to be left alone, so they leave him alone, to his disappointment. Most of his sexual appetites are filled by porn. Women only play bait and reel games, and he’s smart enough not to chase rabbits down their holes. Maybe he has the odd encounter with the opposite sex in college, but they aren’t ultimately very satisfying, even if he brags to his friends to pump up his own hype.

Eventually he graduates, settles into a career, and starts feeling entitled to a real relationship. Marriage, family, social stability. But dating sucks for him, like it does for most men, even the handsome and wealthy young professionals: He takes some ungrateful bitch out, only to find out she’s an idiot, and then he doesn’t even get any, nor does he even end up wanting it most of the time. He wants it from some hypothetical perfect girl, but never the flawed piece of shit to whom he has actual access. Even if he does score, it’s usually with a well-used village idiot, and he feels shame afterwards.

If he has any standards at all, he finds the women who meet them to be extremely uncooperative. He knows himself well enough to know what he likes and doesn’t like in a mate, and he always feels like he’s settling, so sometimes he just gives up, not dating or being social for months or even years at at a time. Society can’t or won’t produce an equal partner for him, so instead, what they do is keep him alone and miserable until he is older, less attractive, less well-off, and more desperate. Then they try to get him to settle for someone who is beneath him, so that men of more privileged backgrounds can take all the best opportunities for themselves.

These guys who talk about getting pussy all the time… they are either liars or rapists. They exaggerate their lifestyles to try and hype themselves and make everyone else jealous. He falls victim to the competition from other males and even females, who sabotage him and lie behind his back. If he is lucky, his career is unaffected by his lack of social capital, or the emotional instability of being single and alone in the world.

There are plenty of options he doesn’t want, but the most desirable women have all the options, all the social capital, and he is always a mere supplicant, even if over-qualified. Often times, the men women ignore completely end up better off than the ones they take some interest in… just enough interest to get his hopes up and break his heart before they move on to the next exploitable target of opportunity… He has enough of a social conscience to not want to exploit women, but sometimes it seems to him that’s what they want. And sometimes he feels exploited.

It’s sad that there are actually uglier nerds even more socially alienated him, or militant feminists, whether male or female, and they consider him ‘over-privileged’… If you consider it a ‘privilege’ to waste a bunch of time, energy, and money just to find out that she’s incompatible and you don’t get any, then yeah, maybe… He tries to explain to the betas that they aren’t missing much. There are still people who say he’s gotten more chicks than them, or more attractive women than them… But every woman he ever actually got ended up screwing him around. The emotional trauma and baggage reputation isn’t usually worth the rare sex that actually happens. Even when he has a good career, money in the bank, is relatively attractive and talented, women don’t take him that much more seriously than the guy who doesn’t have any of that going for him.

The anti-marriage atheist crowd tries to brainwash him into becoming a polyamorist, or at the very least, spend a bunch of money trying. Whores play ego games, and try to make him feel bad for not getting laid. Feminists and religious people alike tell him he is going to Hell for the little sex he has actually had. A female’s desire can make a man a target… in a bad way. In a town full of white knights trying to save women from their own bad judgment, misinformationists who either break down their social enemies or hype their social allies, people who are judgmental of eachother’s relationships (Do you really think THAT’S the right guy for her?!?!) And let’s not forget about insecurely jealous lesbians and feminists who want to sabotage any kind of healthy heterosexual relationship, which they see as ‘patriarchal’. Liberal, pretentious, big city bullshit, basically

Eventually the man develops learned helplessness. He hates being alone, but doesn’t want to settle for an unsatisfying partner, and the women to whom he is most attracted physically seem to be over-privileged, under-capable, and lacking in social conscience. When he finally meets the girl from the first part of this essay, she thinks she knows what’s wrong with him, because she assumes that this terrible thing she just learned about herself must also apply to him.

“I think you have a victim complex,” she tells him, “Grow some balls. Man up.” She’s basically projecting her victim complex onto an actual victim, which is the worst form of victim-blaming there is, because it discredits the victim even as it blames them. And in the case of women, ‘taking control of your sex life’ is ’empowerment’, but for men, ‘taking control’ is rape.

But she doesn’t realize that, even though they ended up in the same place, he took a totally different route to get there. Nobody ever wined or dined him, he paid for everything the whole time. It was either that or give up and be alone. But the women from his past were all just using him for material things, just as sure as the men from her past were using her for sex. Perhaps at the time, their social lives made them feel empowered, at least more than the average frustrated chump, but looking back, they both realize what fools they have been. Really, either one of the genders involved in this story could be the victim or the victimizer, chronologically, in that order, or both at once.