This is a video of Stephon X, who goes by stephiscold on social media. Stephon is a self-proclaimed alpha male who "helps men become cold" with so-called "red pill truths."
This video popped up on my feed and, being familiar with stephiscold, I thought I'd watch it and see if there was anything I could unpack. Needless to say, there was. Let's dive in.
"Why do we tell women what they want to hear? Because that’s what they want you to do."
Starting off strong with a classic alpha male tactic; blaming women.
"You can't just tell her, you know, all I wanna do is have sex. Even if that’s all she wants."
Given heterosexual men's general over perception of women's sexual interest (Farris et al., 2008), I'm not sure how well these guys "know" that sex is all that these women want if they aren't actually asking them.
"You can't tell her that all you want is sex because she ain't gonna give you the sex"This transactional way of thinking about sex, as something that women reluctantly "give" to men for the right "price" is rife within these types of alpha male and pick up communities.
In her 2008 book, Yes Means Yes!, Sociologist Jaclyn Friedman calls this the woman-as-gatekeeper model of consent and argues that it puts the onus of consent solely on the woman as she either does or doesn't open the gate and consent to sex. This is as opposed to the initiator, in this case a man, actively seeking consent, actively asking, listening for a "yes" instead of passively waiting for a "no."
"So you gotta tell her what she wants to hear. Which is, you're looking for something more. Even if she isn't looking for something more. Because women are fucking backwards."Blaming women like this, telling them its their fault, that the reason why he lied to them is because they're backwards, is just straight up gaslighting.
"Because the moment you tell that women, 'I ain't trying to be your friend, I ain't trying to get to know you, I'm just trying to get in your sweet, watery guts'… BEEP BEEP… she gone"
Gee, I wonder why a woman wouldn't be interested in casual sex with Stephon? Let me think. Is it maybe because he effectively said he doesn’t give a fuck about her as a human being and then referred to her body as "sweet, watery guts"?
I shouldn't have to say this, but you can have casual sex with someone and not treat them like shit. For both women and men, being sexually assertive - that is, owning and expressing your sexual desires, such as a desire for casual sex - actually predicts sexual pleasure; and sexual pleasure is associated with positive feelings after causal sex (Woerner & Abbey, 2016).
This idea that you should lie to a woman - tell her that you want a relationship when you don't - in order to try and sleep with her is sexual deception. You're having sex with someone who consented to it but only because you misrepresented your intentions. If you'd been honest, they wouldn't have consented (Pundik, 2015).
This becomes even more problematic when you realise research has found that men have a tendency to focus on saying what needs to be said in order to create a positive impression when they're trying to have sex with someone (Birnbaum, Iluz, & Reis, 2020) and that some men will also completely forgo asking for consent at all if they know that the woman will say no (Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013).
American legal scholar Jed Rubenfeld argues for the stronger view that all sex by deception is non-consensual and therefore counts as rape. As he puts it, "Sex-by-deception is always sex without consent, because a consent obtained by deception, as courts have long and repeatedly held outside of rape law, is 'no consent' at all" (Rubenfeld, 2013).
And, of course, what would an alpha male video be without a sprinkle of hypocrisy? Here is Stephon saying the exact opposite from the above video:
Which prompts the question; Which is it? Is Stephon an alpha male or not, according to his own definition? Is he teaching men to lie to women or not to lie to women? These are rhetorical because it doesn't actually matter. It just goes to show how these self-proclaimed alpha males will say whatever they can to continue grifting their audience.