The Ways Men Lie

How Niggas Be Triflin'

Men as a rule lie in the direction of their shame.

Corner a woman and she’ll vanish into atmosphere; a man will build his own little administrative state around the wound. He drafts declarations, revises the maps, invents reserves of strength, falsifies accounts of troop movement, and assures any citizens still remaining in the bunker that the latest retreat was tactical.

The archetypal male lie is essentially one of inflated agency: a man presents himself as stronger, freer, braver, less needy, more competent, more desired, more dangerous, more disciplined, more loyal, more indifferent, more future-oriented, and generally just more in command of events than the available evidence bears out. He lies upward, toward rank; outward, toward women; and most of all inward, toward that small and exhausted little clerk in the soul he still needs to certify him each morning as a man.

The genesis is obvious. Male dignity depends chiefly on the appearance of capacity—e.g. what can he build, endure, win, refuse, protect, provide, command, or destroy? How much pain can he take before breaking? How much humiliation can he swallow before it becomes visible in the face? Whereas a helpless woman can easily remain tragic, adorable, sacred, sympathetic, erotic, or narratively central, a helpless man will eternally read as comic, pathetic, or absent, and that means however fallible he may prove at times each man in practice is obliged to cultivate a certain private dialect to translate intermittent moments of frailty into something a bit less viscerally odious.

Typically we call this dialect masculinity.

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How Men Lie To Each Other

To his peers a man lies chiefly about rank.

He exaggerates money, access, courage, competence, sexual demand, physical danger, professional momentum, institutional proximity, and the level of respect he receives from men whose respect would matter—though pure invention remains pretty rare, as most lack the imagination for it and generally prefer the far more economical route of placing some real fragment beneath the theater lights.

Thus a mediocre hookup turns into a roster and a pleasant meeting an alliance, while one woman’s politeness gets narrated as preselection and a few months in the gym as athletic seriousness, until soon some half-formed old project sounds like half a startup and that lucky break collecting dust turns out ackshully to have been a masterstroke.

The thing is male peer groups tend to grant provisional dignity on the basis of trajectory—a man is permitted to be broke if he is building; weak if he’s training; undistinguished if he’s grinding; alone if he’s improving; humiliated if he’s learning—as stasis always will damn you in the eyes of other men a hell of a lot more completely than failure.

And that’s why probably the most common lie between men is the claim that present low status is merely transitional: that the unemployed man is merely between things, the undisciplined about to lock in, the sexually invisible working on himself, the failed artist preparing a more serious phase, and so on. Which in fairness at times actually does save him—but more often it just sedates him, as he’ll often grow so accustomed to telling others he’s in motion so they won’t despise him that he begins to tell himself the same thing to avoid having to learn whether motion still exists.

Men lie to each other enormously about effort. They understate it when they lose and aestheticize ease when they win, the optimal masculine performance requiring victory without pain or injury, competence without visible study, access without supplication, dominance without desperation, and achievement without need. Such a formulation quite crucially allows men to freely admit laziness while retaining a bit of glamor as laziness ultimately implies unused reserves, whereas the man who admits he tried with all his might and still failed owns up to the rather deeper humiliation of insufficiency.

For this reason modern man cultivates irony with the care his forebears once gave to prayer, as irony allows for participation without full exposure. It lets him want the woman, the job, the audience, the recognition, the body, the friendship, or the room’s respect while still preserving some narrow hatch through which his ego can crawl in the event of rejection, “I don’t care” now being the paper gown du jour to drape over naked need.

You see the same thing with male fear whenever it’s tactically rechristened as timing, prudence, boredom, contempt, principle, disgust, patience, or moral objection; a man will never admit he didn’t approach the woman because rejection might have turned him to jelly—just say e.g. she seemed annoying. It’s not that he failed to confront a rival because said rival might have beaten or humiliated him—just that the situation was beneath him. He didn’t publish because the audience was stupid; didn’t compete because the game was fake; didn’t ask because that would have been cringe, and so on.

Note that such excuses will generally seem entirely legitimate—that’s why they work, and why this is a canonical male deception mode. Masculine self-deception survives by colonizing mostly true observations with self-serving cowardice or indolence.

Men also lie to each other through competence theater—they’ll converse as though they deeply understand money, women, fighting, engines, investing, lifting, drinking, danger, politics, negotiation, firearms, leadership, and the psychology of other men, regardless of their actual level of competence. In healthy cultures this sort of theater carries a great deal of practical utility in that it lets the boy perform adulthood until ordeal disciplines performance into something genuine, but in decadent cultures the costume tends to detach from ordeal until masculine credentialing is increasingly the realm of commercialized and performative grift masculinity while hollow competence theater tends to carry on unabated well past adolescence due to obligate participation in infinitely large late-modern competitive markets.

Another thing men lie about is loyalty. Male friendship rests on a flattering myth of inviolable brotherhood, but loyalty in practice tends to bend quite readily under risk, status, women, reputational contamination, convenience, and immediate proximity to ascent, and most men are able to call themselves loyal mostly because they’ve never been presented with a sufficiently lucrative betrayal opportunity. Note also that when defection does occur it’s invariably under a respectable heading: maturity, boundaries, neutrality, avoiding drama, family priorities, career necessity, not getting involved, and so on, and often isn’t even all that hostile, running a lot more whimper than shout.

In regards to women men lie to each other in predictable ways: exaggerate conquest, minimize rejection, fabricate indifference, downgrade the birds who ignored them, pathologize the ones who left them, and narrate failures of access as standards. With more pedestrian types there isn’t even much of a pretense—she’ll be mid after failing to respond, crazy after remembering too much, shallow after picking someone better, boring after not admiring him, “not my type” exactly when he strikes out. With sexual boasting, meanwhile, it’s mostly jockeying for rank recognition—sex of course serving as certification that some woman somewhere ratified him as viable. Men therefore lie about number, quality, eagerness, friction, and cost, with the deeper object being an image of frictionless access; he wants other men to think the world opens for him, and if there’s ever a grey area situation with consent usually won’t be entirely candid about the details with the other fellow unless reasonably sure he’s equally or more rapacious.

Most men lie to friends at least a little about the size of their penis whenever the topic comes up—and note the incentive to do so is actually a fair bit stronger than it is with women since one’s buddy both has no easy way to corroborate his testimony and most of the time will care about it significantly more than any woman he might bed.

Men lie about violence—their counterfactual selves are truly magnificent creatures, hence “I’d handle it.” “He wouldn’t try that with me.” “I would never let that happen,” and so forth. Such utterances exist largely to insure the speaker against opportunistic prey classification and are elsewise mostly theater, as real-world violence tends to be ugly, fast, confusing, expensive, and full of unwelcome information about one’s body.

Men lie to each other about principle. Some are more self-aware than others, but most of the time a fellow’s politics, morals, aesthetics, and professional commitments have far more to do with rank and positional status than he’d ever willingly admit. A man’s worldview tracks the hierarchy in which he can matter, the coalition willing to dignify him, the enemies he wants license to hate, and the women before whom he needs to seem impressive. Beyond that his “values” are mostly all performative LARPing.

Men lie a great deal through contempt, which lets exclusion cosplay as superiority. Thus whenever a man can’t enter some room, he’ll call that room decadent. If he fails to compete in some market, it must be fraudulent. If he can’t attract a woman, she’s vulgar. If he can’t ascend within an institution, it’s full of cowards. If he can’t produce things of beauty, then beauty is bourgeois. If he is undisciplined, discipline is cope.

At times the contempt is still correct.

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How Men Lie To Women

With women the classic lie is manufacturing futurity.

During courtship or seduction men invariably present themselves as more stable, integrated, decisive, financially secure, emotionally adult, healed, disciplined, and capable of continuity than they are, understanding women select at least in part for trajectory, containment, and the felt promise of a life that will not collapse at some point into getting softdicked on a floor mattress next to unpaid bills and dirty dishes.

Perhaps the modal fabrication in that vein is simply the implication of direction—a man will suggest by way of tone, attention, tenderness, repetition, and selective seriousness that he knows where this is going, and at the time may genuinely believe that himself! Desire creates weather, and a lonely man especially tends to mistake his own weather for climate, and so whenever a woman makes him feel warmth, hunger, novelty, relief, admiration, possessiveness, and the small redemptive glow of being looked at kindly in a restaurant he’ll often collate these sensations into something in the neighborhood of willful commitment. When invariably seasons change she’ll narrate it as deception and he as confusion, but both descriptions are probably too generous.

With the fairer sex men whether of a rakish or simpering disposition tend almost always to overstate intent, allowing women to infer seriousness, patience, exclusivity, emotional availability, and moral continuity far beyond what’s actually been decided. Deliberate predation accounts for some of this but banal opportunism accounts for far more; a man wants access now but prefers not to foreclose future optionality, and so allows her to inhabit whichever version of him is most conducive to procuring sex, tenderness, domestic care, admiration, and feminine compliance, avoiding statements precise enough to bind him and letting girlish wishful thinking do the rest.

Men perform depth, mastering through hollow imitation the womanly esperanto of attachment styles, trauma, feminism, therapy talk, spirituality, astrology, art, grief, nervous systems, accountability, inner children, and “healing.” This performance will seldom have the flavor of overt cynicism so much as exhausted instinct or patronizing amusement, and many men genuinely enjoy feeling profound when a woman provides the lighting; her listening enlarges him, endowing him with confidence in his own interior architecture. Thus deception begins when such vocabulary yields intimacy the man lacks the character to honor following orgasm, boredom, or opportunity.

Men lie a great deal about other women, hiding options whenever they need to dampen womanly anxiety and inflating options when in need of preselection. Ex-girlfriends become crazy when they remember too much; orbiters, plates, and validation bunnies become mere friends when their presence might induce unwelcome friction; ambient female attention becomes accidental when deeply cultivated. The present woman is made to feel precisely as singular as she needs to feel for his purposes while receiving no accurate map of the real competitive ecosystem in which she’s being held.

Men lie enormously about sexual discipline. They minimize porn use, novelty hunger, opportunism, jealousy, wandering attention, sexual sadism and extractive intent, and the additivity of male desire. A man may love a woman deeply and still want another woman in a way that feels internally wholly unrelated to love—but knows also clean articulation of this fact would horrify her or lower him, and so translates his actual feelings into platitudinous mewling about temptation, loneliness, stress, stupidity, weakness, meaninglessness, or “a mistake.”

Men lie a great deal about the refinement of their desire, owning far less attraction to e.g. youth, beauty, thinness, fertility cues, admiration, sexual softness, and compliance than they internally experience. While men might sincerely value humor, intelligence, loyalty, kindness, and shared principles, public language requires such characteristics to matter more than they actually do at the sexual gate. Male erotic judgment remains primitive, fast, and embarrassing, and a man conceals this because blunt male desire makes women feel inventoried and makes him seem coarse, dangerous, or low.

The most obvious example of this behavior is pretending not to desire adolescent girls whilst performing moral outrage at such desire in other men, which essentially every solitary man in a modern industrial society does more or less constantly.

Men also lie to women in an almost architectural sense through simple idealization: desire improves the woman, and makes her rarer, gentler, purer, more loyal, more mysterious, more personally fated, and more existentially salvific than she could ever possibly live up to or would ever sufficiently compel him to wash his ass. Of course he’ll usually punish her later for not remaining the object produced by his loneliness, lust, and need for proof that life once approached him with meaning, so women tend to roll their eyes at this tendency, not realizing it’s still very much the fundament of romance on the male side and an indispensable instrument of pair bonding.

With women men conceal contempt. He may resent her politics, social class, friends, sexual history, body, family, laziness, ambition, vanity, neuroticism, ignorance, or affective volatility while continuing to sleep with her, accept domestic labor from her, or keep her around simply because existence is less painful with a woman performing maintenance nearby. Masculine contempt can live beside such dependence for years, and many men despise she whose attention prevents his collapse.

Men lie about care. During pursuit they perform patience, curiosity, tenderness, wit, sexual attentiveness, moral seriousness, and a willingness to listen actively to tedious emotional blathering without wanting to step in front of a bus. Once access is secured the pursuit-state recedes and appetite, irritation, boredom, logistical minimalism, and private contempt return to baseline, and one of the oldest and probably most essential male lies is conflating the energy required to obtain a woman with both the character required to keep her and durable inclination to do so.

Men lie a great deal to women through passivity, and prefer letting relationships rot on the vine to ending them cleanly in a way that needlessly forecloses sexual access and domestic aid. And so instead of leaving a woman men simply become colder, less useful, less sexually generous, less curious, less available, and less present emotionally, preserving enough continuity to keep the arrangement breathing and enough absence to avoid any obligations of presence, until she leaves and they experience her exit as betrayal. Male abandonment wants the benefits of departure without the signature.

Men lie by misstating their wanting as valuing. A man can intensely want a woman he does not respect, pursue a woman he would not protect, sleep with a woman he would not publicly choose, feel jealous over a woman he has no intention of honoring, and experience possessiveness toward a woman he’d discard under inconvenience. It’s very easy for male desire to generate heat without conferring honor, and while women tend to experience this as deliberate cruelty men experience it a lot more administratively as essentially the separation of columns in a private spreadsheet.

Men tend to curate their sexual history in keeping with the listener’s vanity. To one woman he therefore might present himself as sincere, wounded, fundamentally safe, and morally clean, while to a very different sort of girl becoming the rake: selected, dangerous, and difficult to impress. Vanishingly few men ever provide an accurate sexual autobiography, which in basically all cases would reduce his lovability.

Men lie hugely about personal ambition. Around one woman his ambition will look like steady provision; around another, artistic necessity or moral imperative or a life of unserious play. The ambition usually is very real, but its costume changes dramatically in accordance with the woman before whom he wishes to remain impressive.

Men almost invariably lie about change. A woman wants to believe her love, beauty, intelligence, patience, or suffering will summon the better man hidden inside the current one, and men gladly permit this belief because it grants access to erotic and domestic devotion while outsourcing discipline to her wishful thinking. He’ll let her love the best possible version of him while inhabiting probably the ~35th percentile.

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How Men Lie To Themselves

Alone men lie with the greatest freedom.

As per usual, they lie about agency first—since his dignity depends on agency, a man typically will tell himself he chose his life instead of just adapting downwards to defeat. Thus resignation becomes maturity and cowardice prudence; bitterness is narrated as realism, and avoidance as discipline; failure gets christened “authenticity,” and a lack of options “freedom.” Most male identities are constraints wrapped in a pride flag.

Men lie to themselves about not caring, as the ego survives humiliation by transmuting longing into contempt—and so he did not want the woman, the invitation, the father’s blessing, the friend’s loyalty, the beautiful house, the public honor, the room’s respect. He’s above such bullshit, which is fake anyway. The grapes were bourgeois, decadent, mid, cringe, spiritually dead, feminine, neoliberal, degenerate, or bad for civilization.

Most men lie to themselves tremendously about competence. Intelligence becomes capacity. Analysis becomes action. Diagnosis becomes control. Taste gets narrated as achievement, and contempt as discernment, and mere plans as motion. Vocabulary becomes power. The systematizing man especially is vulnerable to this habit because private models confer the sensation of superiority before execution has imposed its humiliations and entropy all its insufferable little taxes. He can understand the game better than any other player, and still lose ignominiously to men who understand nothing but have a deep somatic grasp of timing, appetite, and motion.

They lie about future discipline—about how later, eventually, they will train, write, build, quit, save, approach, apologize, leave, commit, study, publish, fight, or change. The future disciplined self is among the most addictive male hallucinations because it preserves the illusion of agency without demanding any actual hardship, allowing the imagined man of tomorrow to serve as patron saint of present wretchedness.

Men lie to themselves about rejection. Failure with women gets attributed—entirely rightly in most cases, but never all that helpfully—to female shallowness, dating apps, feminism, hypergamy, capitalism, liberalism, trauma, astrology, porn, elite decadence, or some manner of civilizational decline. This allows more editable and less operatic variables to receive less attention: ugliness, poor deportment, bad timing, weak body, low energy, malodorous crevices, visible outcome dependence, affective incontinence, unimpressive rank, bad rhythm, inability to make another body feel good nearby. The model turns into self-deception when it protects parts of him he still might work on.

Yet men lie also about being chosen, because all that analytic machinery that turns so cold and bloodless under rejection has a way of melting into liturgy when her desire smiles back. Intellectually he knows a woman may just want novelty, access, rebellion, attention, money, proximity to status, protection, emotional stimulation, retribution against another man, or temporary escape—still it feels like being seen. Thus men who reduce rejection to incentives turn into Miss Cleo when those incentives flatter them.

Men self-deceive enormously about moral superiority, with men who fail to win often becoming priests of whichever realm undid them. Thus the failed seducer will defend love as the failed capitalist denounces greed and failed artist savages pretentiousness and failed academic broadsides credentialism and failed fighter reps peace and love, and usually such critiques will be entirely accurate, thoughtful, and nuanced (probably to keep up plausible deniability more than anything, but also on their own merits)— yet we all also understand intuitively that accuracy does not cleanse autobiography.

Men lie inward about honor. They imagine loyalty because no one has offered enough; imagine courage because the cost has not been calibrated correctly; imagine principle because principle has not yet blocked sex, money, safety, revenge, recognition, or a sense of belonging. Basically everyone is honorable before the storm hits.

Men lie to themselves about their anger—they talk about justice when they want revenge, truth when they crave vindication, accountability when they mean humiliation, peace when they mean surrender, boundaries when they just want punishment, and clarity when they obviously desire control. Most of the time such obfuscation ends up being counterproductive to getting both what they actually want and what they pretend to.

Men lie quite a lot about love. Possession, idealization, dependence, erotic fixation, rescue fantasy, scarcity panic, status injury, loneliness, and fear of replacement all present themselves in romantic costume. But real love requires the woman to become actual, and most women just aren’t exceptional enough to remain a consistent source of inspiration, and so this is where men start to tire. They prefer her as emblem: muse, proof, home, goddess, slut, mother, prize, wound, foe, lost kingdom, or moral excuse.

They lie about darkness. Aggression, lust, envy, sadism, cowardice, vanity, domination hunger, and simple appetite often end up treated by men as alien intrusions instead of ordinary and expected constituents of the self, which naturally leaves the man easier for such impulses to govern. The man who believes himself above power serves power crudely; he who believes himself above cruelty practices cruelty without any artistry or skill; and he who refuses knowledge of appetite just becomes appetite’s clerk.

They lie about being different from other men. Each man considers his own lust more discerning, his own ambition more noble, his own resentment more justified, his own cowardice more complex, his own tenderness less pathetic or more uncommon, and his own contradictions more operatic. Usually he is correct by a small margin from some angle or particular resolution, and the right woman will see that and overindex on it to the point of establishing a private religion for their dyad. In other respects he will be worse, and both of them will conveniently ignore that. Ultimately every man is just yet another animal explaining himself afterward, with variable levels of success.

They lie about transcendence. The clever man can graph the incentives, name the market, diagnose the woman, predict the betrayal, mock the institution, classify the rival, and still yearn very pathetically to be loved, admired, chosen, obeyed, forgiven, feared, and remembered past his expiration date. Accurate perception has endowed him with an exquisitely detailed map of the cage, but it hasn’t and likely won’t ever actually give him the key—though at times the map looks keylike enough to women and weaker men that delusion becomes very briefly a bit more tenable to maintain.

The deepest male lie is that explanation can redeem defeat: a man describes the forces that crushed him and hopes the description counts as mastery. Occasionally it does, privately, for an hour or two—and then the world continues to reward beauty, timing, courage, cruelty, inheritance, luck, discipline, and motion. His account may be correct and probably is, but correctness usually is just the token dignity life allots its losers.

Men lie to preserve the image of agency under conditions that reveal agency’s limits.

To other men, they inflate rank.

To women, they counterfeit futurity.

To themselves, they translate fear, appetite, constraint, and humiliation into stories under which they maintain some species of authorship over their lives.

A man’s lies are like his armor: rigid, flattering, heavy, hot, expensive to maintain, and most of the time utterly useless against that blunderbuss currently pointed at his face.