Here Be Dragons: A Story of Red Pilled Dating in the 21st Century.

By CW Confidence

Are you pissed off with women these days?

C.W. Confidence was...

Since he was a young boy, C. W. Confidence had been taught to view all women as authoritarian, virtuous angels who could do no wrong. He allowed women to mistreat him, abuse him and exploit him for their own selfish wishes.

But, after surviving a traumatic and complicated divorce, he decided enough was enough.

He was going to make up for lost time and date all the beautiful girls he missed out on as an ignorant youngster.

But he was forty now. Was that even possible?

“Here Be Dragons – A Story of Red Pilled Dating in the 21st Century” is the real-life tale of one man’s wild journey, from clueless desperation, through revenge-seeking misogyny, to peaceful redemption, set against the backdrop of the insane world of Sugar Dating.

Follow C.W. Confidence’s adventure as he unlocks the mysteries behind successfully dating Instagram models half his age, deals with manipulative, duplicitous seductresses behaving at their absolute worst, and ultimately discovers what it takes to genuinely attract REAL high quality women in the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CW Confidence
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781700570680

CW Confidence

Businessman, entrepreneur, coach, certified counsellor and classic car lover, Stuart (aka C. W. Confidence) is passionate about helping men aged between 30 and 55 overcome traumatic relationships and become the best version of themselves. After 15 Years as a management accountant and finance broker, and following his divorce, Stuart decided it was time to follow his dreams of becoming a writer, counsellor and business coach. Business coaching turned into business and relationship coaching, which subsequently turned into relationship coaching for newly divorced men who were trying to navigate their way through the turbulent waters of dating in the 21st century. Some of these guys had been married for decades. Things were a lot different now than they were back in the early '90s. When you couple the confusion of modern dating with the anger and cynicism that is usually felt after enduring a messy, painful divorce, emotional chaos can ensue. Stuart knows this first-hand and has dedicated his life to helping guys in similar situations overcome this chaos, and get their life back on track.

Book preview

Where Have All the Good Ones Gone?

That’s it, I’m done with this bitch!

I was lying in bed in my suburban townhouse. It was almost midnight and I needed to get some sleep before work tomorrow.

But the missus needed to talk again. She’d ghosted me for two weeks, but now she was back, finally responding to a text I’d sent earlier in the day asking her again if everything was ok. She was back to pull me into line after I’d committed yet another recalcitrance, in her eyes.

I saw that video you just posted on YouTube, she remarked pointedly. Hearing her soft French accent was usually enough to get me worked up, in a good way. She had, by far, the sexiest voice I’d ever heard in my life. Tonight it was getting me worked up again. But there was certainly nothing boner-inducing going on this time.

I was growing sick of these power plays. It was exhausting.

Yeah. What about it? I replied.

I can’t believe you made another video about us!

I sighed audibly. Here we go again. I knew which video she meant. It wasn’t the first time she’d made an egocentric critique about one of my videos ever since she stumbled upon my YouTube channel.

I didn’t. This problem happens to heaps of people. It’s not unique to us. I retorted in a deadpan manner.

The video at the centre of this latest injustice was about how to escape the so-called friend zone. Yes, I’d obviously drawn upon my own experience, including that with my little Gallic girlfriend, to offer up some advice to any others who were in the same boat as I was. But the video's advice was general in nature, and certainly not overtly about our relationship. I hadn’t even mentioned anything about my girlfriend in any way.

She’d just overreacted. Again.

Well, you should’ve talked to me about it, she blurted.

Why? I’ve already told you, this is my thing. I’m not asking you permission before I post my videos.

For the next 10 minutes, she pushed for signs of contrition from me. Something she could dig her fangs into. But I was having none of it this time. I’d learnt the hard way that apologising, or any act of capitulation - especially if it didn’t feel genuine to the girl - just made things worse. So I stood my ground.

Well I hope you have fun with your hand!, she finally yelled when she realized her emotional blackmailing tactics weren’t going to work on me this time, and promptly hung up.

That was the last time we spoke. Her final words still ring in my ears, as clear as if she had just uttered them. At the time they stung, but now, almost 2 years later, they have an almost comical tone to them.

I remember sending a half-hearted text to her later, saying we should catch up over a coffee to work this latest issue out. She never replied. I recall kinda hoping she wouldn’t….

So there I was, lying in bed. Unable to sleep after the stimulus of yet another asinine altercation with my now ex-girlfriend.

I guess I was single again.

Yay for me?

As I stared blankly at the ceiling, I made the decision that I needed a break from women. Lately, it was like I’d become a magnet for fucked up, feminist harpies who were all about controlling their latest boy-toy.

Where had all the good women gone? Were there any good women left? There didn’t seem to be any on the regular dating sites. The last half dozen I’d dated were all clones of my latest ex-courtesan, just with different accents. It didn’t seem to matter if they hailed from Paris, Bogotá, Peru, Vietnam or the Philippines; they all had the same shitty attitude towards men.

Men aren’t to be trusted. They are something you have to pull into line, lest they become too enfranchised. They are to be dominated and kept on a short leash. That was how they all seemed to think, as though they could share one another’s thoughts intercontinentally via some unseen female-access-only interweb.

But this attitude never flew in my book. I always loved the Thich Nhat Hanh quote, you must love in such a way that the person you love feels free, and I carried that philosophy into any romantic interaction.

Shit, I’d gotten divorced because of that philosophy! The ex-wife and I just recognised our time together was over, and we amicably split ways before we began hating each other. Holding true to this philosophy resulted in a drama-free separation, and I still consider her a close friend to this day.

But this latest round of women… fuck me, they were hard work! Perhaps it was because they were all in their early to mid-thirties. Time was no longer on their side and perhaps their biological push to nail someone down ASAP was causing this needy and controlling behaviour.

Maybe, after my break, I needed to find some younger women to hang out with. Girls who weren’t so desperate to relationship-up a man. Girls that just wanted to have fun.

But these fucking dating sites! They blocked you from even contacting the younger women. The same went for speed-dating. You were forced to stay in your age bracket, as dictated by the event organisers. I’d even attempted to pull a swifty a couple of times by fudging my age on the entry sheet. But getting caught out, after having to produce my driver’s licence at the event, resulted in me being banned from attending future functions.

No matter. And this might sound a bit like sour grapes, but the cougars who frequented the speed-dating circuit were as picky and high maintenance as hell anyway. I was quite happy to let them be someone else’s problem.

Goddammit! There’s got to be another way! A loophole out of this middle-aged dating debacle I was trapped in. I just hadn’t thought of it yet.

The Ties That Bind...

I always struggled with authority my whole life. I abhorred being kept in my lane. In my personal hierarchy of needs, my desire for freedom and to carve my own path sat atop everything else. This overarching value made it difficult for me to hold down a regular 9-to-5 job.

My 15 years as a management accountant and finance broker was unbridled torture; a career forced upon me by concerned parents, nervous that my lone aspiration in life seemed to be to continue to be the drummer in my heavy rock band.

Walking into an office day in, day out, was like walking into a radioactive room. It was slowly killing me, and my health was reflecting it. I’d ballooned out 25 pounds, my skin was terrible, my energy levels low and I’d developed problems with acute anxiety. At this rate, I’d probably be dead by the time I was fifty, which was ironic given my parents' initial incentive was to steer me away from an unhealthy rock n’ roll lifestyle. Something had to change.

So, I quit my job, became a writer and a stay at home dad to my five-year-old daughter, much to my then wife’s chagrin, and decided to look into psychotherapy and counselling courses. I’d always been interested in human behaviour; what made people tick. I’d often been told I had an affable quality about me, that I was easy to get along with. But I really had no idea why, nor was I able to articulate to others what I was doing in order to create comfort and safety in others. This was my opportunity to perhaps work towards something that made an emotional impact on someone’s life, instead of just drolling out endless figures, reports and spreadsheets for corporate fat-cats to peruse for five minutes.

To this point, the only self-help book of any kind I’d ever read was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. Not being the most physically intimidating individual to ever roam the Earth, I understood the importance of diplomacy and artful tact to influence your fellow man. But now, I devoured everything I could on top of the standard course material.

As much as I was enjoying my newfound fascination however, this I’m sure, was the beginning of the end for my marriage. My wife, a very accomplished accountant and businesswoman, began to be fearful of our perceived lack of financial stability. In her eyes, we were no longer a double income family. What would happen to us if anything happened to her?

My best efforts to get her to try to see reason fell on deaf ears. By my calculations, as long as I could start earning money again in the next fifteen years, we’d be fine. We’d made out like bandits during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 through some clever trading, and then had a number of recent windfalls with some projects we’d provided seed capital for. So, we were more than sitting pretty, as far as I was concerned.

But, according to my wife, it didn’t matter that our superfluously sized house, situated in one of Perth’s most prestigious suburbs, was close to being fully paid off. Nor did it matter that, while I was at home on sabbatical, I was also taking care of all the usual household chores, tending to our fleet of cars, and single-handedly renovating our backyard. No, my wife now saw me as a financial burden she had to carry. In her business oriented mind, I’d been moved from the asset column to the liability column. And, until I started earning a stable income again, no amount of creative accounting was going to get me out of the red and back into the black.

I’d been labelled as incompetent by her; a man no longer able to provide for his family. It didn’t matter that I was happier and healthier than I’d been in a long time. I wasn’t stepping up as a man.

Her constant jibes regarding my inability to hold down a real job started to get to me. We were seriously no longer on the same page. In fact, I would almost say we became poison for one another.

From her perspective, this was a nightmare situation. She’d married and had a kid with a loose cannon; a guy who didn’t fit into her routine-based and conservative narrative. It was supposedly dangerous for her to stay with me.

From my perspective, I felt stifled and unappreciated. Efforts to win her approval or affection all went unnoticed. It was like she was testing me, goading me to stop trying and just give up.

Eventually, her test worked, and my wife and I decided to break it off. In hindsight, we’d been beating a dead horse for at least three years. Things were starting to get seriously fucked up between us.

In a last-ditch effort to save our flagging marriage, we gave each other permission to sleep around if we felt the desire to.

Within a couple of weeks, we both managed to rekindle our lost mojo with the help of our new paramours. But these poorly thought-out flings did nothing but add drama to our lives. They were, unsurprisingly, not the answer to our problems. Our problems ran far, far deeper than just needing someone to get our respective rocks off with. Eventually, the painful breakup with my bit-on-the-side was perfect testament to just how fucked up I was on the inside.

I buried my head into my books as my wife and I finalised our divorce. The whole time my heart was still breaking from the combination of my failed marriage and my recent split from my mistress, whom I thought I loved deeply. It was painfully triggering to be studying matters of the mind, while my mind was in tatters, but I persisted through countless bouts of tears, outbursts of rage and screaming-at-the-sky sessions to finally stumble over the line.

I finished my qualifications in what must be record time, by taking on a double load whilst in the midst of my divorce. In spite of the painful triggering, focussing on my studies was the only thing that seemed to alleviate the torment. It was like a catharsis. Perfectly timed self-therapy.

However, after achieving my qualifications, and entering the world anew as a relationship counsellor, I soon became fed up with the mechanisations of the mental health machine. The industry was incredibly gynocentric, and I found it difficult to administer help and support to my clients in the method it was demanded of me; especially with men, who consistently didn’t respond well to talk therapy.

Time and time again I’d see guys around the same age as me, totally aimless and confused. They’d done everything that society had told them they had to do. Get a job. Get a girl. Marry said girl. Buy a house. Have some kids.

Then, through a combination of malaise, resentment, disconnection, disengagement, dissatisfaction and despondency, they’d lost it all. They’d taken to the bottle, lost their way, and their once loving and dutiful wife had transformed into a scornful witch, who was now filing for divorce and threatening to take the kids.

It was suicide-inducing, ego-shattering emotional agony these guys were facing. And they had no idea how to deal with it. And no amount of talking about their feelings, replaying the painful memories over and over again in group counselling sessions, seemed to help them.

Something felt off. Really off. At this stage I didn’t know how to articulate it fully, I just knew these men were being treated the same as the women were treated in the system, and it just didn’t sit right with me. Men were fundamentally and biologically different from women, and generally had different psychological drivers, so it seemed absurd to think they would react to talk therapy the same way a woman would. But the counselling and psychotherapy industry was dominated by women who had absolutely no idea, nor had the inclination to learn, what it was like to be a man in the 21st century. It was like the blind leading the blind.

Again, I felt the urge to go it alone and do things my way. Maybe my way would be full of shit, but at least I’d give it a try. All I really knew was that I couldn’t stay working within the confines of the current mental health system.

I decided I wanted to be a coach for men who had lost confidence with women. But I knew I could only help those who wanted to help themselves; the ones who were personally invested in making a change, not the ones forced into counselling by some court-ordered government mandate.

The Guru Effect

Again, I attempted to re-educate myself. My deep fascination with the dynamics of human behaviour led me to becoming a student in the skills of hostage and business negotiation, evolutionary psychology and, ultimately, pickup.

I found pickup to be particularly fascinating. It put into words the machinations behind something so dynamic that I thought it previously impossible to articulate. Guys like James Marshall and Todd Valentine were my favourite; real deep thinkers who were more about developing yourself inwardly rather than the myriad of shysters who spruiked nothing but shallow tactics.

I devoured self-development courses, online and in real life. Coach Corey Wayne became regular viewing, I bought his book and I’m pretty sure I watched the lion’s share of his two thousand YouTube videos.

As a side note, self-development courses were great places to meet women and practice my developing pick-up skills. After all, women are usually 80% of the attendees, so the odds are certainly in your favour. A lot of them are dealing with emotional trauma of some sort, hence why they’re at a self-development course in the first place. But hey, a brief little fling was a great way to spice up a week-long 12-hour-a-day training course…

So, all this brings me back to my aforementioned situation; lying on my bed, in the middle of the night, wondering what to do with my new found emancipation.

I could choose to forget about women for a while and focus all my efforts on my fledgling coaching business. This was what I should really do if I was to be totally pragmatic. The going was slow, but I knew that if I stuck to my guns and improved things incrementally it would eventually come good.

But I didn’t want to go into full-on monk-mode. I’d go insane. What I really wanted was a way to combine my work with casual, non-drama filled relationships with women who were just down for a bit of fun and then would leave me alone so I could get back to building my new empire. If only such a thing was possible…

Coincidently, I had discovered a YouTube channel called Entrepreneurs in Cars. While ostensibly a channel about boys enjoying their toys and tips on running your business, it soon morphed into a how-to guide on how to avoid the pitfalls that come with relationships with women. The channels content creator, Richard Cooper, had been through what looked to be a recent painful divorce and began using his channel as a platform to espouse the advantages of men being their own mental point of origin. It was here I first heard the phrases Red Pill and MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way.

As ridiculous as it sounded, the concept of allowing myself to put my own needs first was foreign to me through most of my adult life. Sure, I eventually followed through with quitting my job and becoming a writer, but that was after 16 years of playing house with my partner, and forty years of acting like a super-pleasing chump to pretty much every female who interacted with me.

It had almost killed me making the change to put myself as the priority, and resulted in being abandoned by some of my more feminist-leaning friends. But, now that I was free, I planned on staying that way. There was no going back to the plantation as the Red Pill community called it. No way of resigning to be the good little plow-horse for another unappreciative woman, and no way of being plugged back in to the feminine reproductive strategy of comfortable and safe domesticity. I was out, and it felt good to be out.

But we’ll discuss more of this, and my nice-guy ways later on in this book.

It was night time and I was settling into another Entrepreneurs in Cars vodcast. A Shocking Excursion into Sugar (Salt) Dating was the title. Seemed mildly interesting, if a tad clickbaity. And what the hell was Salt Dating?

Richard Cooper introduced his guest, who went by the pseudonym of BRob. He was a former pick up artist who had discovered a Sugar Daddy site called SeekingArrangements.com, where young attractive girls could seek out older affluent men and organise a mutually beneficial arrangement. Nothing new so far. The concept of the Sugar Baby had been around for decades, and hypergamy; the idea of marrying someone of superior caste or class, had existed since men and women were a thing.

However, BRob had discovered that, if you possessed the necessary skills required to be a successful seducer, The Site, as I would come to refer to it, was a never-ending source of smoking hot 9’s and 10’s who were more than happy to forget the money side of things for a chance to win the attention of a confident man of means.

I sat there in front of my monitor, mouth agape, stunned at what I was hearing. Was this shit even real? It sounded way too good to be true.

The video ended. I began pacing back and forth in my living room. If this was real, then it was pretty much the answer for what I was seeking; endless casual relationships with pretty girls who would fuck off and leave me alone to get on with my life and to work on my business.

I jumped on The Site to do some reconnaissance. Sure enough, my city was teeming with smoking hot young things looking for a handsome, dashing, older benefactor to bankroll their exorbitant lifestyles. I was shocked at the number of women in my area that were willing to sell their bodies supposedly for money.

Perth was always mocked for being the world’s biggest country town. Although sleek and ultra-modern in appearance, thanks to an extended natural resources-led economic boom, its inhabitants were generally still very conservative and traditional in their world views.

A common joke was that Perth was always the last to know anything, or embrace anything new, and not just because we were the most geographically isolated capital city in the world. For example, they tried using hydrogen-powered buses in the city and

Reviews for Here Be Dragons

[Ebrahim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book will place you in the driver seat of a salt dating experience and allow you to seriously feel what it's like to be doing it you yourself. This is an "experience" that puts you in an informed position from which you can as if, at the end of it, go back in time and decide what kind of future you would like to have after this intensely detailed imaginary adventure. Doing so with a power of clarity that shakes you and informs you deeply as to what much of this matter is about and shedding unusual wisdom because of the nature of the "unusual" context.

[7uyghjntfgvyhu · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Utter PUA bunk. A man living a single and abstinent life is much healthier. Nothing good comes from the immorality of pumping and dumping.