Personally, I have to say that I get uncomfortable when I read or hear people discussing any sort of mind control techniques, whether they be the art of the pickup or the art of the sale, or even the art of the job interview. Why can’t we just exchange information like cold mechanical robots and then make decisions only on the facts presented? Anything else strikes me as fraud.
But I appreciate that this is a personal flaw of mine, that this wish is impossible, and that I would not want it granted even if it could be. What makes human interaction interesting is our attempts to control each other’s minds, and I don’t see how you can eliminate salesmanship without eliminating those things we value about human relationships. We would be left in something along the lines of Eliezer’s catgirl dystopia, where you would never need to fear someone else’s influence because everyone else who was real had been safely sequestered where the two of you would never meet.
What makes human interaction interesting is our attempts to control each other’s minds, and I don’t see how you can eliminate salesmanship without eliminating those things we value about human relationships.
I disagree vehemently with this statement. I don’t want other people to approve of me for my salesmanship. I’m working on systematically eradicating dishonesty, secrecy, manipulation, and other forms of “salesmanship” from my personal relationships. I’m quite sure that this is going to result in me having fewer personal relationships over time, but they seem to be of higher quality. Since I started this project, I have not lost any friends to whom I was already close and someone has fallen in love with me. I have not turned into a “cold mechanical robot”. Among the things I am honest about are my emotions.
Another, purely pragmatic, trouble with personal salesmanship is that it confuses feedback. If you are being duplicitous in this way and someone disapproves of you, it could reflect either on your salesmanship or your actual characteristics and you don’t know what to change if approval is your goal—and changing your sales pitch won’t actually improve you for the better, which ought to be the real function of feedback. If I am honest and garner disapproval, I have the facts about what the disapproval was about and I can decide whether I value the disapproved characteristic over the potential approval or not.
If you are such a wonderful person that people will fall in love with you on their own accord, without being persuaded, then more power to you. Most human beings, myself definitely included, are not that lovable.
It’s not hard to see why this should be the case, either. The world is full of people optimizing their relationships for being loved. A person who optimizes his relationships working under the constraint that he cannot influence his target’s decision processes is at a severe disadvantage, and will need serious natural advantages to remain competitive.
I used to be a hopeless romantic. I credit/blame Eliezer’s writing for changing that.
It’s just the one person, and I’m not discounting the luck factor. But if no one would fall in love with me “of their own accord”, I should not lie, cheat, and steal to get them to do it anyway. That not only isn’t the kind of love I’m interested in achieving, it bears no resemblance to the kind of love I’m interested in achieving.
I am not an unusually wonderful person. I have a mixed bag of traits, and I happened on someone who isn’t unduly bothered by my flaws and is remarkably enthralled with my positive characteristics—“honesty” among the latter. That is the way it’s supposed to work; and if someone has so many flaws or so few positive traits that they can’t find anyone who’ll put up with them, the last thing they should do is add “manipulative liar” to the “flaw” column.
I am not an unusually wonderful person. I have a mixed bag of traits, and I happened on someone who isn’t unduly bothered by my flaws
I think part of the reason women have a problem with the seduction community is because they have literally no idea what it is like to be a heterosexual male. Any girl within about 2 standard deviations of the mean of physical attractiveness will have been approached on numerous occasions by men who will introduce themselves and suggest further meetings. This tends to reinforce the belief that if you just ‘be yourself’ then someone out there will recognize you as a unique and special flower and fall for you. The truth is however that a guy who takes that attitude will never meet a woman, unless he’s Brad Pitt or a rock star. The life experience of your average man and woman means that they will have great difficulty understanding each other since they literally live in different worlds.
I have a problem with the seduction community because it openly advocates treating women dishonestly.
Some schools are just as vehement about being absolutely, utterly, bluntly honest. But if you’re a reporter, which parts of the community are you going to write a story about?
I’m going by the way people talk about it here; most hint darkly, and Sirducer who has spoken most openly has explicitly advocated dishonesty. I’m glad to know there’s another side to it—I’d be interested to read more about that, if you have pointers.
I’m glad to know there’s another side to it—I’d be interested to read more about that, if you have pointers.
One example of that would be Johnny Soporno; in particular, his free “Seductive Reasoning” video series. I’ve only watched the first couple of tapes, but those made it pretty clear his philosophy is centered on liberating women from the societal slut/whore dynamic.
I know there are others, I’m just not recalling offhand anything else that’s available for free or that is this explicit (in the sense of being verbally advocated). In some of my other comments, though, I’ve mentioned that there are entire methods based on honest SOI, such as the book “Mode One: Let The Women Know What You’re REALLY Thinking”.
Edit: Soporno’s site also has this interesting article on guys who blame women for their problems.
I don’t like that analogy, anyway. I don’t think any fish would actually want to be caught by you in any circumstance, whether I’d rather women actually would want to have sex with me, as opposed to being ‘baited’ and ‘caught’ by me. (Would want ≅ CEV here; the overwhelming majority of women don’t want sex with me right now (e.g. because they’ve never met me yet) but I guess this doesn’t mean I’ll never be able to have consensual sex with any of them short of unethically manipulating them. I hope that makes sense.)
The amount of sense it makes to me correlates pretty well with how well I understand the boundaries of categories like “unethical manipulation,” “baiting,” “catching,” etc., are.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand the boundaries of those categories very well.
Any girl within about 2 standard deviations of the mean of physical attractiveness will have been approached on numerous occasions by men who will introduce themselves and suggest further meetings.
False. False false false.
This applies only to women with a certain social attitude who frequent certain social situations. (I’m bi, and therefore qualified to judge whether the women I’ve met fall into the physical attractiveness range you specify.)
Look, I have some sympathy. There are some lingering cultural norms and an average sex drive to each gender that probably make things very difficult for heterosexual men to scratch their itches, for free, with women “within about 2 standard deviations”, without resorting to either rape or the art of pickup. But you know what? Lots of people have desires they can’t satisfy ethically. This isn’t just the plight of straight men. It’s the plight of physically unattractive or shy or cautious women; it’s the plight of gay people in small towns; it’s the plight of pedophiles and zoophiles and other people with unconscionable fetishes.
I have some sympathy, but I’m not going to ethically greenlight dishonesty so you can get what you want by exploiting the poor judgment of other members of my gender. I’m just not.
Incidentally, have you heard of the whole thing where “nice guys” are in love with their female friends and pine for them in long laments that they post on the Internet? It happens to girls, too. It is not the case that no one ever falls for a guy based on his personality. It’s not even the case that no one ever falls for a basically average guy based on his personality. The difference is she probably doesn’t say anything, and she might be a little farther south of the “mean of physical attractiveness” than the more shallow type of guy prefers.
It may have been a slight exaggeration to say that any girl within 2 sd of the mean will be approached but would you accept that overall women are much more likely to be approached by men than the other way around? I would think that’s a fairly uncontroversial claim. I can’t provide direct evidence for that if you doubt it but there is supporting evidence from studies of online dating. That paper found that the median number of first contacts for men was 0, the mean 2.3 and fully 56% of men received no first contacts. The figures for women were a median of 4, a mean of 11.4 and only 21% of women received no first contacts. My guess would be that real world first approaches are more heavily skewed than that because of the greater pressure of social convention in public situations that men should be the approachers.
Anyway, it would seem your main concern is the ethics of pick up. Specifically it seems to be dishonesty that concerns you. That brings us back to the original discussion of whether your image of the seduction community reflects reality. I think you’ve picked up on the most unethical/dishonest aspects and letting that blind you to the range of other approaches that fall under the general umbrella.
Dishonesty is not a requirement of pick up. Some people might advocate it but others will strongly advise against it. Neither is it the case that the main goal of pick up is a one night stand by whatever means necessary. Again, there are elements of the community that see that as the primary goal but they are probably in the minority. It’s mostly about finding things that work to improve the chances of a positive interaction with women. It’s up to the individual to decide whether any given technique is something they are ethically comfortable with and act accordingly.
I have to say, I went Googling for PUA next to words like “honesty” and “feminism” in the hope of finding a PUA community that was loud about ethical principles, and what I found was more exactly the opposite. What I read makes me want to press the work of sex-positive feminists like Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Avedon Carol, or Greta Christina into the hands of everyone in the PUA community.
I have to say, I went Googling for PUA next to words like “honesty” and “feminism” in the hope of finding a PUA community that was loud about ethical principles, and what I found was more exactly the opposite.
In PUA lingo, the term for “honesty” is “direct game”: From a page by one Vin DiCarlo:
DIRECT GAME
I. Who can use direct game? Why use direct game? Direct game is a game based on value and self respect. It is based on honesty and disregard for societal constructs. It is completely absent of any takeaways intended to manipulate interest, direct invalidation, and disrespect. I would suggest that direct game can be used by anyone ESPECIALLY newbie’s because of it’s simplicity, efficiency and congruence with the newbie’s intentions. People also like direct game because it allows them to persist confidently without pretending to be hard-to-get.
In contrast, “indirect game” is the term for approaching someone without letting them know that you’re attracted to them, and the bulk of “material”-oriented schools focus on it, whereas “natural game” or “inner game” schools are more likely to also be “direct”.
The reason you don’t see much mention of honesty in relation to PUA, is because direct schools treat it as flat-out obvious, and indirect schools treat it as irrelevant, except where they’re making excuses for why an opening line like, “Did you see that fight outside?” isn’t “really” a lie.
I believe Soporno is the only trainer who makes sex-positive feminism a focal point in his work, although I don’t think he ever uses the word explicitly. Nonetheless, there are many natural game schools, although the google results for “natural game” are dominated by spam at the moment. TheApproach, CharismaArts, and UltimateNaturalGame are a few of the schools that are strongly or excusively “natural” in bent, and some, like Real Social Dynamics have a mixed bag of training, moving increasingly towards emphasis on natural/direct game and away from material except for overall logistics.
Viewed as an outsider, I’d say that the trend among established training companies is increasingly towards natural and direct game, away from indirect/material. In part, this is a response to the fact that “canned material” gets played out through overexposure, but also just because as the trainers get older and more experienced, they tend to get more mature outlooks on life. (A lot of these guys start really young!)
(The main reason I even follow the field these days is because competition in the increased emphasis on “inner” game aspects means that the PUGs are driven to innovate in the area of training people to believe in themselves and act confidently… which of course crosses over into my own area a bit. Back when the industry consisted mainly of Ross Jeffries, David D., and Mystery, there was really little of interest for me.)
I think it’s probably fair to say that the community is primarily ‘results driven’ - you won’t find a tremendous amount of normative ethics there. The most common ethical principle (if you can call it that) would be the idea that the ultimate goal is self improvement (inner game) - become the kind of person who is attractive without needing to rely on any kind of ‘tricks’ or dishonesty.
If the sex-positive feminists you mention had advice that would actually produce positive results I imagine it would find a positive reception. I followed a link here to Greta Christina’s blog and didn’t find anything very enlightening there in the time I looked around it but if you have specific links to material you think is representative of the ideas you would like to spread please share them. My impression is that sex-positive feminists represent a very small percentage of women and so their views are not likely to be helpful in understanding how to relate better to most women. I am open to being persuaded otherwise though.
Pickup techniques are already ameliorating the inequality by giving the loser guys a shot. Laws that encourage more equal paternal investment, and a more equal distribution of alimony and child custody decisions among sexes, could attack the problem from the other side.
Inequalities are only bad if they deprive someone of a right. You don’t have a right to sex that you don’t provide yourself—no one does. You certainly don’t have an absolute right to father children. No way in hell do you have that right.
Inequalities are only bad if they deprive someone of a right.
I do not believe that you seriously subscribe to this thesis. For example, even the most severe rich/poor divide doesn’t deprive anyone of a right—no one has a right to someone else’s money. Discrimination against women in the workplace doesn’t deprive women of a “right” to be promoted—no such absolute right exists for anyone. Any other ideas?
I do hold it, but obviously it’s more complicated than a single sentence. Severe poverty deprives people of rights to various forms of safety and health, or if not those, then to independence or freedom, that I think everyone has. Discrimination against women in the workplace deprives them of the right to be considered on their relevant merits. (If women really didn’t have the relevant merits, then I wouldn’t think the inequality needed resolution.)
I can invent similarly sounding vacuous rights to justify anything at all. For example, let’s ban cars to give everyone the right to clean air. Or, alternatively, let’s give everyone free cars: the right to transportation. Surely such a right is less far-fetched than your “right” to financial independence or the “right” to be considered, by me, on some “merits” that some organization defined as “relevant”. (Thoughtcrime alert?)
The point of this whole exchange being, of course, that your idea about rights is just a rationalization for defending the status quo of women having higher reproductive chances. No. Severe inequality can be bad for us all even when no “rights” are involved.
Look, I’m obviously not going to sufficiently explain and justify my entire novel ethical system in comments within comments within comments here on Less Wrong. Ask me about it in five years and I’ll e-mail you a copy of my thesis, okay? That is, if you’re actually interested in what I think about ethics instead of looking for excuses to put me down for not thinking you are entitled to reproductive opportunities.
Sorry, I’ll repeat it once again because your reply didn’t really address my words. Reproductive inequality is not about anyone’s personal entitlement to sex. Yes, it’s bad, and it’s bad despite being not about rights. It’s bad because it entails inequal average chances of good stuff happening to random people who were unlucky enough to be born a certain way. It’s bad in the same way that severe inborn IQ and ability gaps between people are bad. It’s not, not, not about rights or “entitlements”.
Maybe your ethical system says in advance that if some issue isn’t about personal rights, then it can’t require a communal solution. Well… then your ethical system is wrong by the criterion of my ethical system and (I imagine) those of many other people.
Could you express the problem you see and the solution you propose in more directly consequentialist language? Different kinds of inequality can lead to different problems and therefore prompt different solutions. If you want to colonise the moon, fine, but it would seem weird to justify that in terms of a “fertility gap” between the Earth and the Moon, since that would be to state a “problem” that could be solved by reducing the fertility of the Earth.
Myself, I don’t much like the socialist angle of attack that always begins with the word “inequality”. Inequality is only a problem because it leads to suffering: in our world many men suffer from being unable to have sex or offspring, whereas in a more equal world men and women would be matched more or less pairwise in percentiles of sexual market value. Yes, it would necessarily mean that some females settle for lower quality males than they currently desire, so your Moon analogy isn’t completely unfounded.
(I believe this thought is at the root of most female critique of PUA: they feel that when men deliberately increase their sexual attractiveness, it amounts to fraudulently disguising low-quality genes.)
Disseminating PUA knowledge is one way to ameliorate the problem, helping the losers rise up. Another way would be legislation to promote more equal parental investment and more equitable child custody decisions in the hope that a) women loosen up and b) alpha men start having fewer ilegitimate kids, pushing more women out into the tails.
And, of course, monogamy can be viewed as another attempt to rescue humanity from the Darwinian horror where a few alpha males get all the girls, and all lesser males are expendable labour and war fodder.
I believe this thought is at the root of most female critique of PUA: they feel that when men deliberately increase their sexual attractiveness, it amounts to fraudulently disguising low-quality genes.
IAWYC here, but I’m pretty sure they’re not actually thinking about genes.
That not only isn’t the kind of love I’m interested in achieving, it bears no resemblance to the kind of love I’m interested in achieving.
I bet if you squint a little, they would look a lot alike, actually.
Why do you think you’re special? Why are you taking the inside view? Do you think humans in general don’t want people to fall in love with them if they have to work on them to bring it about? This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
I don’t know what humans in general want, but I don’t think I’m completely alone—an illustrative cartoon—in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I’m a rare specimen? If you’re content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I’m not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won’t have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.
Also, I don’t see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there’s nothing apparently applicable to this topic.
The article is about the dangers of considering yourself a rare specimen, the talk of deadlines and cost estimates is just for concreteness.
That’s a really good cartoon, by the way, because it can make two people on the opposite sides of an argument each think it supports their own point. To me it seems like the construction of the third robot was just as wrongheaded as the first two, and that the scientist has a fundamental confusion about the nature of love stemming from romanticism. But clearly you see it differently.
I considered it illustrative not because of the third robot, but because of the second one. It had—ostensibly—freedom, but circumstances were manipulated by the scientist so it would love the scientist. The resulting love is not valuable. Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
90% of what guys want from the seduction community is the ability to confidently approach a woman and start a conversation, so that they have a chance to get to know each other, and find out if they want to do something more. As some put it, “I’m looking for the One, but I don’t know what I would say when I meet her.”
Yeah, there’s maybe 10% who, like Sirducer, just want to get laid, and are looking for a formula to do that. I have the impression, though, that quite a few of those guys end up raising their standards, when they realize that it’s just as empty as you’re saying.
Read e.g. Neil Strauss’ book, “The Game”—it ends with him being really glad that he found a woman his more-manipulative tricks didn’t work on… and yet, he never would have had the confidence to even talk to her in the first place if he hadn’t already had so much successful experience with comparably intimidating women (in terms of looks, intelligence, strong personalities, etc.)
To put it another way, actually being confident, caring, and knowing ways to please women (in and out of the bedroom) is not a trick. But for many people, the only way to get there is to first learn tricks. If they have to wait until they can do it without any tricks, they will never be able to start.
And that would be a terrible shame, for an awful lot of men and women.
There is a dramatic difference between learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then not sleeping with anyone under false pretense (via honesty or just ending the game three-quarters of the way through), and learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then proceeding to use them to get poorly-informed women to have sex. I assume it’s possible to do the first thing.
Yep. Actually, from one trainer’s blog, I get the impression there’s a paradox, though.
The trainer tells a student: go over there and get blown out (rejected). Say whatever you have to say to get those women to reject you. Paradox: the set opens, the student gets attraction, because he’s absolutely at ease, not caring about the outcome. The more outrageously he speaks and acts, the more the women perceive him as a confident guy who’s just being playful with them.
Now, the trainer says, “okay, you see how well it works when you’re confident? Now go over there and talk to those other women and do the same thing...” Student gets blown out, because now he cares.
So, it’s not quite that simple. When the entire point of the exercise is to be confident taking things all the way to the end of the process, bailing out becomes an excuse not to face the fear of the next step. And if somebody bails at LMR—the last possible moment before sex occurs—then the woman is going to be just as disappointed, if not more, than if the guy went all the way.
i.e., if you get to LMR, you already got somebody to go home with you or vice versa, and it’s very likely the case that she did so, already wanting to have sex with you!
I guess what I’m getting at, is that a premature ending can be more deceitful/hurtful than going all the way, if the entire subtext was that the woman wanted to get laid and the guy was providing her with excuses.
I’m really not that familiar with that kind of game, and find it a turnoff, as I prefer women who can be direct about their desires. Doesn’t mean I want to deprive those women of having any outlet at all, just because society’s taught them they’re not supposed to want it or be direct… even less if it’s because of their genes!
Only if your goal really is sex by hook or by crook. Clearly, not having sex will not increase your capacity to just plainly and simply get sex. But if someone finds seduction appealing because they want confidence and social skills, there is no obvious reason they have to take the suggested tricks to the point of actual sex under false pretenses in order to develop them into skills.
Kicking the air in front of someone would be more analogous to practicing your confidence tricks talking to a dressmaker’s dummy, then never actually going out and talking to women.
This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
It’s not, of course. But you should be careful not to mix the two up and, for example, give romantic advice based on how you feel relationships ought to work.
I wasn’t giving romantic advice. I was giving ethical advice, and my personal data point on why the ethical advice won’t necessarily spell romantic doom.
It’s not. What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
And if one’s goal is “have a relationship that meets criteria X”, disregarding criteria X only serves to better attain the goal “have a relationship” which isn’t what one actually wanted in the first place.
You seem to be making unwaranted assumptions about other people’s goals.
I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.
last thing they should do is add “manipulative liar” to the “flaw” column.
Again, if you want to obtain the result of getting sex, learning how to manipulate people and not being afraid to lie in social interactions is a great way to get that result.
It’s their goal, not their means of deriving methods to achieve their goal, that I would be tempted to take issue with if I tried to engage with the topic.
If your goal is to get sex and that’s all, the ethical choices are to explicitly advertise this goal and find someone who shares it, or to take the solo route. As I said, I’m not offering practical advice for the morally indiscriminate pickup artist. I’m talking about ethics.
I’m working on systematically eradicating dishonesty, secrecy, manipulation, and other forms of “salesmanship” from my personal relationships. I’m quite sure that this is going to result in me having fewer personal relationships over time, but they seem to be of higher quality. Since I started this project, I have not lost any friends to whom I was already close and someone has fallen in love with me
This is a decent strategy for a woman. But for a man …. it sucks! I know, I tried it!
So, you go up to an attractive woman you see and like the look of, and say “I think you’re cute. Can I go on a date with you?”, she ain’t gonna fall in love with you. You won’t get a girlfriend like that. Well, not unless you’re extremely good looking or rich or famous or something.
And, surprisingly, men don’t always want relationships. Sometimes we just want sex. To get sex with no strings attached, you have to lie and manipulate, or be extremely high-value for some reason. (e.g. by being a rock-star)
If you just go up to a girl and ask her for sex “Please have sex with me, I’m kind of desperate”, you really really won’t get laid. On the other hand, if you go up to her and ask her “who lies more, men or women?”, turn your back when she answers, tease her, casually drop in a mention of your many exes, take her back to your place on an excuse, promise her nothing will happen, and then repeatedly feel her up like a horny cave-man, well, you’re in with a chance.
It is indeed a shame that you have to behave like this to get laid. But it is fun in its own way.
The behaviour you advocate here is totally unethical.
To get sex with no strings attached, you have to lie and manipulate, or be extremely high-value for some reason. (e.g. by being a rock-star)
This is, as I often say here, entirely counter to my experience. Lots of women are attracted to no-strings sex; you just have to be a good person to have no-strings sex with. I think in large part people sleep with me because I accurately communicate a happy, positive, fun-loving attitude to sex from which people correctly infer that I’ll be fun to sleep with and I won’t be trouble afterwards.
I think in large part people sleep with me because I accurately communicate a happy, positive, fun-loving attitude to sex from which people correctly infer that I’ll be fun to sleep with and I won’t be trouble afterwards.
Could be! I believe that sort of thing could work, and I don’t know you, so maybe you really do have a great attitude and it really does work for you, and if so, great—enjoy the sex.
One thing that bothers me, out of context, is that the idea that people sleep with you because they can tell you’re fun to sleep with is awfully convenient. It suggests that you deserve a decent helping of sex, whereas others don’t. Now, maybe bitter ex-nice-guys like Sirducer don’t have as good of an attitude as you do. I think you probably should get some credit. But what about looks? Money? Sense of humor? The recursive confidence that comes from knowing that someone will probably sleep with you soon?
Do you really have a good reason to think that your fun-loving attitude is more important than the rest of that stuff put together?
Maybe it doesn’t work for the kinds of women you happen to be interested in, which I think says something about your taste.
Honesty doesn’t have to mean, though, saying to random women “please have sex with me, I’m kind of desperate”. As I said in another comment, the “radical honesty” movement conflates honesty with tactlessness and that’s decidedly unnecessary.
Maybe it doesn’t work for the kinds of women you happen to be interested in,
I’ve tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case. Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn’t give them a chase.
which I think says something about your taste.
What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?
As I said in another comment, the “radical honesty” movement conflates honesty with tactlessness and that’s decidedly unnecessary.
But where do you draw the line between tact and lying? For example, you approach a girl and ask her out on a date or tell her you think she’s cute straight away. Tactless? Ok, but what other honest approach can you do?
I’ve tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case.
That’s really not very many women, for club game and cold approach. Are you counting based on sets opened, or only ones where you got to an extraction attempt?
Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn’t give them a chase.
I see two problems with your statement. First, I’ve had women chase me. Second, the fact that some of them wanted to be chased didn’t interfere with honesty; I just changed myself in such a way that I could be honest.
So, your poor results might have been affected by your taste in women. I like smart girls who are sexually aggressive, or at least passionate and sexually self-aware.
That probably makes a big difference in my results, since my criteria would tend to select for women who would find honesty sexy, because they don’t like playing games.
Those women are somewhat less likely to be found in bars and clubs, but I’ve met a few, so it’s not like they don’t exist.
Honestly, though, based on the entitlement attitude you’ve been showing, I suspect the reason your “honest” approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women. The existence and success of such things as the apocalypse opener, forced IOI openers, Gunwitch method, mode one, and um, I forget what the other one is called, but that one where you alternate between escalating sexually explicit SOIs and casual conversation without giving any opportunity to object...
Anyway, the existence of all these methods shows that there are other PUAs who get results with the bold, explicit, truth, up to and including expressing a desire to have sex with the girl in the first few sentences of conversation.
To me, that says it’s not the women. It’s you.
What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?
The point is just that you’re using your particular taste to justify your ethics, when, if you valued your ethics more, you could still find women who would appreciate your honesty.
Beyond that, I think your attitude shows a flawed understanding of women: you think they respond to qualities independent of the guy those qualities are attached to. But this is not entirely true: women often come to appreciate a quality that’s possessed by a man they find attractive. Even if those 20 women never appreciated an honest man before, you still had the opportunity to make them appreciate your honesty… as long as it wasn’t an excuse to be boring.
Hell, consider Steve P. -- the guy goes around telling people in a monotone that he teaches women how to have the best orgasms of their lives; I don’t get any impression that he “games” in the least, and he’s not exactly a great looker. But women chase him because he offers a unique sexual experience. (There are some definite parallels between what he does and what I did, but I’ll not go into details here.)
My point is: if you cared as much about having something to offer women as you apparently care about what they offer to you, you wouldn’t have problems with honesty. And if all you really care about is fast sex with a desirable body, why not just pay for it in the first place? That takes far less time than developing your game, and it’s more honest, too.
The only way that I see you can get stuck in the spot where you’re saying you are is if you:
don’t value women enough to offer them any value of your own, aside from intrigue, DHV stories, and ASD excuses...
don’t care about women enough to help them get over the societal programming that makes ASD excused necessary.
are too cheap to pay for what you want in any other way,
and not only have insufficient self-worth to be perceived as an attractive man, but also no desire to improve yourself to becoming one.
So frankly, you sound like you don’t like women or yourself very much. That, IMO, is the “something wrong with this”.
But where do you draw the line between tact and lying? For example, you approach a girl and ask her out on a date or tell her you think she’s cute straight away. Tactless?
Maybe, maybe not. Most people would make either approach a DLV, but some men could make either one a DHV. (Hell, I can think of a guy I once knew who could have opened with, “Hey… you’re cute, can I have your number?” in such a fun-yet-sarcastic way that it would’ve been perceived as anything from a rapport-building “gee these other guys are stupid to approach you in such a lame way”, to a flat-out neg (i.e. “you’re not really cute and I don’t care about your number.”)
Ok, but what other honest approach can you do?
Forced IOI openers and kino-based game would select for women who are open to a physical approach but who prefer to avoid verbal acknowledgments. When you get ASD, just raise an eyebrow like, “are you serious?”, but say nothing. Or say, “Don’t worry, I’ll still respect you in the morning.” HOW you say or do this is vastly more important than the words. Lying is really not necessary… hell, talking much at all isn’t necessary, AFAICT.
(I’m not using myself as an example here; I hung with naturals once or twice in college, who tried and failed to teach me anything. But AFAICT they didn’t really say much between “Hey” and “Let’s get out of here”, although there was some time in between, some dancing and a couple of location bounces within the club. They mostly let the girls do the talking.)
In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain’t the women, it’s you. Every man can be a natural, if he believes he actually has something of value to offer. But I get the impression you don’t think you have anything to offer, and if you don’t want to grow old chasing club girls with equally low self-esteem, you might want to change that.
“honest” approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women
In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain’t the women, it’s you.
Of course! If you had perfect inner game, you wouldn’t need game.… that’s why naturals exist. They’re men with very good inner game because they had (probably early) life experiences that built their confidence and sense of self-worth up to unusually high levels. I’m not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot of. You have these attractive, sexually aggressive women chasing you all the time… btw, what planet do you live on because I want to move there!
But let us suppose, for a moment, that you’re a guy who doesn’t start off naturally confident, and doesn’t live in the pjeby Shangri-La of abundant, sexually aggressive, confident, intelligent, high self-esteem women who always chase and want to date you. Suppose that you have never in your life been approached or chased by a woman. What to do?
On thing that most guys in this situation do is they put up with no sex, then they marry the first girl who shows any interest. Screw that!
Another thing is to completely throw your dignity out of the window and pay for sex.
Getting into game with a healthy attitude is better, I think. This means realizing that some of the time, some girls want to be manipulated, and that if you don’t go out and take what you want, you won’t get it. But this doesn’t mean being an asshole—it just means realizing that you have to play the game.
Yes, eventually you’ll pick up so much confidence that you’ll be able to go natural and then yes, girls will pick up on this and start chasing you. But until that point, it will help to have some tactics under your belt.
Every man can be a natural, if he believes he actually has something of value to offer.
yes, again, I agree. In fact this is true by definition. This is like saying “any man can be a millionaire by having $ 1million in his bank account”. But it’s really really hard to change from believing that you are low value to believing that you are high value. If it were easy, if you could just think “ah, I’m going to change the counter in my mind that represents self-value from low to high”, then a million dollar seduction industry wouldn’t exist.
By the way, I’m always looking for new and better ways to improve my inner game, so if you have any tips on how you got there, do share them with us.
I’m not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot of.
No, what I had was non-neediness and non-reactivity, combined with empathy and intelligent conversation. My inner game actually sucked. I was non-needy and non-reactive because that was my response to fear of rejection. I believed no woman would ever really love me, so there was no point in pining over what I couldn’t have.
You could say I was following “The Tao of Steve”, as in “Be desireless, be excellent, be gone”… but not because I had reached some sort of true inner peace.
But let us suppose, for a moment, that you’re a guy who doesn’t start off naturally confident, and doesn’t live in the pjeby Shangri-La of abundant, sexually aggressive, confident, intelligent, high self-esteem women who always chase and want to date you.
I never said those women wanted to date me. A few did, most just wanted to get off or fulfill a fantasy. (To be clear, I didn’t sleep with these women or have intercourse with them; I almost exclusively saved “standard” sex for my LTRs or FWBs, not the girls who just wanted to experiment.)
Another thing is to completely throw your dignity out of the window and pay for sex.
If you look down on people who pay for sex (and by implication, on sex workers), this is part of your attitude problem. You believe you have no value, so you take paying as evidence to support this belief, while ignoring the fact that rock stars also pay for sex… as Charlie Sheen I believe put it, “you’re paying them to leave”.
So it’s not the act of paying for sex that throws out the dignity that you’re afraid you lack in the first place.
Getting into game with a healthy attitude is better, I think. This means realizing that some of the time, some girls want to be manipulated, and that if you don’t go out and take what you want, you won’t get it. But this doesn’t mean being an asshole—it just means realizing that you have to play the game.
You seem to be ignoring the part where manipulating doesn’t equal lying, and that being tactful, cool, and fun does not equal “manipulating”.… unless you view them through a frame where YOU are low-value!
Yes, eventually you’ll pick up so much confidence that you’ll be able to go natural and then yes, girls will pick up on this and start chasing you. But until that point, it will help to have some tactics under your belt.
You don’t even need confidence; I certainly never had it. Non-neediness and non-reactivity are plenty enough.
This is like saying “any man can be a millionaire by having $ 1million in his bank account”. But it’s really really hard to change from believing that you are low value to believing that you are high value.
You don’t need a trick—you just need to cultivate something of genuine value. What do you really have to offer women? In my case, it was conversation, understanding, and a certain class of sexual experiences. You might offer excitement and adventure. Another guy might be an artist or musician. Per the Tao of Steve, what are you “excellent” at? What could you be excellent at? Value is just being excellent at something, that offers a woman an experience.
People (not just women) want emotional experiences. They are bored and afraid and dissatisfied, for the most part. What can you give them?
Not as a trade, not as a “look at me I’m awesome”, but… what is part of your world that someone else would want to find out more about, or be a part of? I never flaunted my “fantasy fulfillment services”; I simply mentioned them in passing and never tried to talk anyone into making use of them. They had to ask me, and I was pretty tight-lipped about it, simply because I genuinely didn’t want to push it on anyone. I’d answer questions briefly, then return to whatever non-sexual topic we were on.
Then, later… sometimes much later… someone I mentioned it to would come back and make a more serious inquiry, at which point I’d tell them about my NLP theory of how you can create fantasy experiences for someone by interpreting one of their existing fantasies, and we were off to the races.
This worked for me precisely because it was not a technique. I really didn’t care. I hadn’t seen “The Tao Of Steve”, but I was desireless, I was excellent, I was gone.
This was not “inner game” or belief in my own value. It was just nonreactivity. Women don’t really care about confidence so much as they care about you NOT being creepy or needy… as long as you also have some sort of “excellence” to enjoy.
If it were easy, if you could just think “ah, I’m going to change the counter in my mind that represents self-value from low to high”, then a million dollar seduction industry wouldn’t exist.
Nor the self-help industry. The catch is that there’s more than one “counter”, and as I always say, the brain has no “view source” button to let you list them all. (Technically, they’re frames, not counters.)
By the way, I’m always looking for new and better ways to improve my inner game, so if you have any tips on how you got there, do share them with us.
My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you’re afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?
Low self-esteem, and especially the sort of compensating ideals you’re promoting, are usually based in fears of low-value qualities. But if you know what you’re afraid of and admit to it, you’ll have the chance to do something about it—either decide that it’s not really true of you, or that it is true, but you can change it.
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I seem to recall that the period in my life where women were most abundant and I was at my most non-reactive/confident, was when I was doing daily Zen meditation of at least 20 minutes, and doing an extended session once a week at the local Zen center.
My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you’re afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?
To be honest, nothing in particular. I genuinely thought hard about that question. I suppose in the past, when I was less mature, there were things.
Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me. And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You’re just doing it in a more natural and mutually enjoyable way. But I guess in the past, when I didn’t have that inner confidence, unreactivity and non-neediness that you’re talking about, direct wouldn’t have worked for me, so I needed the props and tricks of opinion openers, etcetera. Then I got laid a bit, then a bit more, then my inner unconfidence evaporated!
Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me.
So then WTF have you been advocating dishonesty, if you know it’s unnecessary?
And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You’re just doing it in a more natural and mutually enjoyable way.
I don’t think it really does anyone a service to frame it that way, except maybe as a way to convince somebody to buy your course so you can then talk them out of it.
Thing is, by framing it as “manipulation” to yourself, you are implying that you are not good enough to get a woman without manipulation—you are still maintaining a low-value frame, despite being nonreactive. You’re just framing yourself as “low-value with workarounds”, instead of “high value”.
If you frame it instead as you providing women with mystery, intrigue, drama, or something else that they value—then that immediately makes you a person of value… and flips over that “counter” in your brain that you asked about.
You’ve already done the hard work of getting competence and nonreactivity; now follow RSD Tyler’s example and realize that you really do have something to offer. Voila! You now have value.
The difference between “value” and “manipulation” is mostly in the mind of the manipulator, but it also gets subcommunicated. And I personally believe it’s better to spend a lot of time on flipping that switch, vs. learning all the many subcommunications that you otherwise have to mimic, because they’re not being generated automatically.
If it takes you 100 hours of work on yourself to flip the inner switch, it’s still 10 times more efficient than spending 1000 hours honing techniques that merely mimic the effect. Do the noobs a favor and don’t send them down the “dark path” needlessly; better yet, be Yoda and warn them about its seductive dangers. ;-)
The difference between “value” and “manipulation” is mostly in the mind of the manipulator,
Right, so first you have to learn how to manipulate women, then you realize that they like being manipulated, then you realize you’re doing them a service, then you realize that in this special case, the ability to manipulate people is a great and valuable thing to have, and it makes you a more interesting and exciting person to be around (not that you weren’t to start with), and once you’ve had this realization, you become a natural!
Of course we are starting to argue semantics now… as you say, the difference between “manipulation” and “alpha male behaviour” can be merely one of poetry. Likewise the difference between “mystery, intrigue” and “lying”.
I think that the key to getting good is to realize that sexual interaction in humans constitutes an exception to the rule that lying and manipulation are generally bad. We give them different names like “mystery and intrigue” or “dominant, confident behaviour” to flag this up.
Right, so first you have to learn how to manipulate women, then you realize that they like being manipulated, then you realize you’re doing them a service, then you realize that in this special case, the ability to manipulate people is a great and valuable thing to have, and it makes you a more interesting and exciting person to be around (not that you weren’t to start with), and once you’ve had this realization, you become a natural!
Or, you do what I did and assume that the only way women would be interested in you is if you have something of value to offer them, and then go about doing something to develop that value. Yes, it has taken me a long time to realize that I have value, just by virtue of being a unique person. However, I didn’t have to go through a “manipulation” stage to get there.
Instead, to the extent that you could call certain behavior options I have now “manipulation”, I chose to do them because of having an understanding of their value, and caring about the woman in question (my wife) enough to want to give that value to her.
So, in this particular example, it’s the exact opposite order to what you’re suggesting.
Of course we are starting to argue semantics now… as you say, the difference between “manipulation” and “alpha male behaviour” can be merely one of poetry.
Actually, it’s a matter of what your motivation is. Alpha males look out for the group, and do other useful things, rather than adopting those behaviors because it gets them laid. That’s the difference between manipulating and being genuine. (See also some of Eliezer’s posts about “adaptation executing” vs “fitness maximizing” for the psychology difference.)
I run the website www.theyhatethegame.com—which has been mentioned in this post a few times.
I used to be shy, insecure, and lonely. After a low point a while ago I began reading books on female psychology, evolutionary sexuality and relationship management. These books did NOT turn me into a social robot that manipulates people. They DID give me a feeling of security because they gave me the impression that we are all human—we are all the same and we all need each other.
This feeling prompted a series of social experiments over a period of three months where I determined—through trial and error—what I could do to give others the most pleasurable social experience possible. The end result was simple. I turned myself into a confident, competent person that people like because of a high level of social intuition and empathy.
My website is dedicated to giving men the tools that I wish I had when I was on my journey from “looser to winner.”
Some of you may label what I do as social manipulation (I accept that you have read more books on how to label what is and is not social manipulation than I have and that’s okay with me—I was out having fun while you were reading.) but what helps me sleep at night is knowing that I have changed. I used to not like who I was. Now I like me—and I am able to enrich the lives of those around me. Women and men.
P.S. I’m impressed with the quality of conversation going on here. I don’t get exposed to these view points often. Cheers.
I’m sure you have simply loads of data points on this, of women who you chased who really liked it and weren’t trying to remember if their favorite law firm does restraining orders, but since I’m an actual woman and do not have an interest in being “chased”, it would have displayed some politeness to add a qualifier like “some” or “in my experience”.
What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?
Yes. This displays a revolting attitude towards women. Unless (as pjeby suggested) you pay for it, or (as I mentioned in another comment) you find a woman who just wants sex with an attractive man (I’ll charitably assume you are one at least to some people) regardless of your personality. The latter sort of woman exists. She can be found on Craigslist. She is, however, immensely picky because she gets several hundred e-mails every time she posts an ad, because your desires are not remotely uncommon and you have a lot of competition. If you aren’t good-looking enough to stand out from the crowd of honest seekers of NSA sex, of course investigating other categories of women who might let you sleep with them and using every trick in the book to get them to do so would seem like the next logical choice. That doesn’t make it right.
But where do you draw the line between tact and lying?
Broadly, tact is about what topics you bring up. Lying is about what you say about the topic at hand, whatever it may be. Attempting to actually have sex implicitly brings up the topic of your motives, because if it’s had under false pretenses, consent is flimsier and the entire thing is thrown into moral confusion.
It is indeed a shame that you have to behave like this to get laid. But it is fun in its own way.
This is an honest question, but I am curious. Do you consider this type of behavior ethical? Or would you agree that you value getting laid more than being an ethical person?
This is an honest question, but I am curious. Do you consider this type of behavior ethical? Or would you agree that you value getting laid more than being an ethical person?
A lot of girls expect men to lie to them, and actually want you to. It’s a social game which is tacitly acknowledged and sanctioned by most women and the 10% or so of men who are really good with women.
An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She’ll say something like “we’re not going to have sex” or “I’m just coming in for a coffee”. If you respond honestly “actually I do want to have sex with you”, she won’t come back with you. If you say “sure”, take her back and then escalate anyway, she’ll put up more resistance but eventually give in and have sex with you.
Why? She wants sex, but she doesn’t want to feel like a “slut”, so she has to make it look like you persuaded her and she resisted. This is known as token resistance
So in this case by lying, you did the girl a favor. Lying is the ethical thing to do.
An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She’ll say something like “we’re not going to have sex” or “I’m just coming in for a coffee”. If you respond honestly “actually I do want to have sex with you”, she won’t come back with you.
Not because you’re being honest, but because you’re being tactless. Compare with this answer: “oh, darn, here I was thinking you were trying to get me alone so you could have your way with me....” and that’s just the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your comment. (Probably because I have a vague recollection of having said something similar to a girl once, a few minutes before she literally attacked me.)
ASD is a social calibration ping: she wants to make sure you’re a cool guy. It is not necessary to lie or even conceal the truth in order to be a cool guy, it is only necessary to communicate that you understand the rules of the game being played and are willing to play it. A response like the one I gave above would be an honest answer, but not a tactless one.
It is indeed a shame that you have to behave like this to get laid.
You don’t. That particular application of those principles is only required under a certain set of circumstances, for a certain set of people.
Compare, e.g. the “Johnny Soporno” philosophy of being “the man who doesn’t count”. Before I got married, I was a “man who didn’t count” for a few women, and there was absolutely no lying involved on my part. I didn’t learn that approach from J.S. -- I came by it naturally. Nonetheless, I heartily approve of the portion of his philosophy that I’ve heard: i.e., honest liberation for men and women.
I am also under the impression that JS is far from the only person who advocates strict honesty about one’s intentions… indeed, it’s a common enough concept that there’s an acronym for it (SOI, for “Statement of Intent”), and one guy wrote an entire book on it, called “Mode One”.
To get sex with no strings attached, you have to lie and manipulate, or be extremely high-value for some reason. (e.g. by being a rock-star)
Thing is, having confident SOI or being “mode one” makes you a high-value person in a lot of women’s eyes, by virtue of your confidence and honesty. In my single days, this and a certain amount of social proof (I had a lot of female friends) were the only “game” I needed.
Thing is, having confident SOI or being “mode one” makes you a high-value
Once you’re already experienced, yes. But get a newbie to SOI a girl and he’ll either bottle out or completely screw up. To get to the stage where you have the confidence in your ability to get laid that is required for direct game to work, you need indirect game, AKA lying and manipulation.
“Direct game” - being relatively honest about your intentions still isn’t full honesty. For example, you’ll still have to deal with LMR, the girl will still want to be chased, she’ll shit-test you etc, etc.
honest liberation for men and women.
honest and “sexual interaction” don’t mix very well. The honesty of direct game is a limited kind of honesty: “I’ll screw you but only if your body language sub-communicates alpha male to me”. “Honest” and “Loving, committed long term relationship” work, though.
Once you’re already experienced, yes. But get a newbie to SOI a girl and he’ll either bottle out or completely screw up. To get to the stage where you have the confidence in your ability to get laid that is required for direct game to work, you need indirect game, AKA lying and manipulation.
You’re talking about cold approach in a public social situation with immature and self-deceiving women. The situations I’m talking about were the exact opposite in all three, as I like intelligent, mature women. If I had to lie to a woman for more than say, five minutes on first meeting her, before admitting to the lie as a way to get to talk to her, I really wouldn’t be interested.
I realize some men aren’t wired that way. I’m just pointing out that if all you want is to “get laid”, then verbal alpha subcom is sufficient, especially with social proof. Before I got married, every party I went to had a room full of pivots—i.e., female friends who either specifically set me up, or at least gave social proof by talking to me. And anybody I went out with, I’d already chatted with online, and impressed verbally that way.
“Direct game”—being relatively honest about your intentions still isn’t full honesty. For example, you’ll still have to deal with LMR, the girl will still want to be chased, she’ll shit-test you etc, etc.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Girls chased me. I’ve never been much of a chaser, to be honest. I can’t remember anyone who shit-tested me. And LMR is only an issue if you’re the one doing the initiating.
In a way, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t study this stuff in those days, because I might have run into some of the stuff you’re saying here, and actually believed it. I could have used more confidence, and if I’d been better at attraction/extraction logistics I probably I wouldn’t have had to wait until I was 20+ to lose my virginity.
In college, never got past the rapport stage on cold approach, but it wasn’t a question of shit tests or anything. I could open and get rapport, but I didn’t know how to kino, escalate, time bridge, any of that stuff.
Just the logistics of pickup knowledge would’ve helped immensely there, no need for lying or manipulation. I’m pretty positive that many of those girls I talked to in college wanted me to make a move, I just didn’t have a clue how.
Anyway… lying is totally unnecessary, I don’t care how noob you are. If you can’t handle cold approach without lying, get social proof. If you’re actually worth sleeping with, you should have no problem making female friends.
SOI—statement of intent—stating outright what you intend towards a woman, anything from, “I think you might be cool to hang out with”, to “[explicit details of what I’d like to do with you in bed tonight]”.
cold approach—meeting someone you don’t know
warm approach—being introduced, already knowing them online, etc.
alpha subcom—communicating confidence non-verbally: body language, facial expressions, gesture, posture, voice tone, inflection, word choice, stories told, beliefs and attitudes expressed… everything, pretty much. Acting as-if you are an attractive and desirable man, not in the way of trying to show it, but acting the way such a man would naturally act.
shit-test—a verbal or non-verbal challenge by a woman, usually in the form of being rude or implying the man has is unworthy or “not in her league”, but this can also be in the form of a false IOI (indicator of interest). For example, a woman who speaks in an aggressively sexual fashion, without any actual sexual interest, is often shit-testing to find out if the man will respond in a way that reveals he’s more desperate for sex than he’s trying to appear. In general, shit tests are when women probe to see how confident a guy actually is, versus what he’s pretending to be. This is obviously much more an issue with cold approach than other situation, but some women shit-test their way through entire relationships.
Shit tests are a controversial subject, to say the least. Having given it more thought, I now can remember being shit tested, but I don’t think I’ve ever slept with anyone who shit tested me on initial contact. However, I also kind of agree with the trainers who say that shit testing really is an indicator of interest, in the sense that a woman only shit tests because she wants to know if the guy is “for real”—that it’s like an instinct to pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming.
Recently, my wife’s grandmother died, and she ended up shit-testing me because on an emotional level, she needed to know that I was strong and she was safe. I didn’t handle it well at first, because I didn’t realize that was what was going on; I thought she was being unreasonable and vicious towards me for no reason.
Once I understood, however, I was able to give her what she needed, and afterward she agreed with my interpretation; she just couldn’t tell me at the time, because on an emotional level it would’ve defeated the entire purpose. (This is not a regular occurrence, fortunately.)
(In female language, I’ve had women friends tell me that they want a guy who “doesn’t let them get away with anything” or “put up with their shit”. In other words, a guy who isn’t fazed by their shit tests, either by passively putting up with them, or by freaking out, but instead by setting boundaries and making her feel safe within them.)
social proof—evidence that you’re not a weird, creepy stalker or something, as demonstrated by having friends, especially female ones. esp. such proof in real-time, visual form—i.e., saying that you have friends doesn’t count for much.
pivot—female wingman, i.e., a woman who is with you to help you meet other women and/or get laid. Usually a friend who’s not attracted to you, but thinks you should get laid more often, and will spread helpful rumors or try to match you up. (At least, that’s the kind I have experience with. I never did “club game” with a pivot, just had a social network.)
LMR—“last minute resistance”—having doubts or seeking reassurance just before sex is about to happen. Often, this takes the form of a need for reassurance that the woman is not a slut or otherwise of questionable character just because she is having sex with a guy she “hardly knows”. I don’t have much experience with this because I was never in so much of a hurry to get laid. Some PUA trainers claim that you need to know someone for at least 7 hours in order to minimize LMR, and except for the women who sought me out, I’d always spent at least that much time with someone long before they dragged me to the bedroom. (Like I said, I’ve never been much of an initiator, at least outside the chat room.)
“open”—start a conversation and have it go somewhere, as opposed to immediate rejection or quickly fading into nothingness.
rapport stage—conversation stage where you actually start to get to know someone
kino—touching, either casual, flirtatious, or beyond
escalate—taking things past rapport, to some kind of action or relationship in the present or future
time bridge—smoothly establishing a reason for future contact, without making a big commitment or “date” out of it, e.g. talking about a cool art gallery early in the conversation, then ending by saying, “oh hey, I’m going to that gallery on Thursday with my friends, you should come check it out with us,” and exchanging numbers or email.
Whew. There is a lot of terminology, isn’t there? It really is a Conspiracy with a capital C. There are a lot of different schools, but the language tends to get shared across the board.
social proof appears to mean being seen with attractive female friends who, by their presence, act as references—“as a fellow woman, I approve of this man and voluntarily choose to associate with him”
LMR stands for Last Minute Resistance
kino basically means touching, even just socially
escalate means increasing the intensity of that touching
shit-test appears to refer to women testing men to see if they can be easily manipulated, and then discarding them if they are.
“direct game” seems to be what you refer to as tactlessness =)
I appreciate your honesty.
Personally, I have to say that I get uncomfortable when I read or hear people discussing any sort of mind control techniques, whether they be the art of the pickup or the art of the sale, or even the art of the job interview. Why can’t we just exchange information like cold mechanical robots and then make decisions only on the facts presented? Anything else strikes me as fraud.
But I appreciate that this is a personal flaw of mine, that this wish is impossible, and that I would not want it granted even if it could be. What makes human interaction interesting is our attempts to control each other’s minds, and I don’t see how you can eliminate salesmanship without eliminating those things we value about human relationships. We would be left in something along the lines of Eliezer’s catgirl dystopia, where you would never need to fear someone else’s influence because everyone else who was real had been safely sequestered where the two of you would never meet.
I disagree vehemently with this statement. I don’t want other people to approve of me for my salesmanship. I’m working on systematically eradicating dishonesty, secrecy, manipulation, and other forms of “salesmanship” from my personal relationships. I’m quite sure that this is going to result in me having fewer personal relationships over time, but they seem to be of higher quality. Since I started this project, I have not lost any friends to whom I was already close and someone has fallen in love with me. I have not turned into a “cold mechanical robot”. Among the things I am honest about are my emotions.
Another, purely pragmatic, trouble with personal salesmanship is that it confuses feedback. If you are being duplicitous in this way and someone disapproves of you, it could reflect either on your salesmanship or your actual characteristics and you don’t know what to change if approval is your goal—and changing your sales pitch won’t actually improve you for the better, which ought to be the real function of feedback. If I am honest and garner disapproval, I have the facts about what the disapproval was about and I can decide whether I value the disapproved characteristic over the potential approval or not.
If you are such a wonderful person that people will fall in love with you on their own accord, without being persuaded, then more power to you. Most human beings, myself definitely included, are not that lovable.
It’s not hard to see why this should be the case, either. The world is full of people optimizing their relationships for being loved. A person who optimizes his relationships working under the constraint that he cannot influence his target’s decision processes is at a severe disadvantage, and will need serious natural advantages to remain competitive.
I used to be a hopeless romantic. I credit/blame Eliezer’s writing for changing that.
It’s just the one person, and I’m not discounting the luck factor. But if no one would fall in love with me “of their own accord”, I should not lie, cheat, and steal to get them to do it anyway. That not only isn’t the kind of love I’m interested in achieving, it bears no resemblance to the kind of love I’m interested in achieving.
I am not an unusually wonderful person. I have a mixed bag of traits, and I happened on someone who isn’t unduly bothered by my flaws and is remarkably enthralled with my positive characteristics—“honesty” among the latter. That is the way it’s supposed to work; and if someone has so many flaws or so few positive traits that they can’t find anyone who’ll put up with them, the last thing they should do is add “manipulative liar” to the “flaw” column.
I think part of the reason women have a problem with the seduction community is because they have literally no idea what it is like to be a heterosexual male. Any girl within about 2 standard deviations of the mean of physical attractiveness will have been approached on numerous occasions by men who will introduce themselves and suggest further meetings. This tends to reinforce the belief that if you just ‘be yourself’ then someone out there will recognize you as a unique and special flower and fall for you. The truth is however that a guy who takes that attitude will never meet a woman, unless he’s Brad Pitt or a rock star. The life experience of your average man and woman means that they will have great difficulty understanding each other since they literally live in different worlds.
I have a problem with the seduction community because it openly advocates treating women dishonestly.
Some schools are just as vehement about being absolutely, utterly, bluntly honest. But if you’re a reporter, which parts of the community are you going to write a story about?
I’m going by the way people talk about it here; most hint darkly, and Sirducer who has spoken most openly has explicitly advocated dishonesty. I’m glad to know there’s another side to it—I’d be interested to read more about that, if you have pointers.
One example of that would be Johnny Soporno; in particular, his free “Seductive Reasoning” video series. I’ve only watched the first couple of tapes, but those made it pretty clear his philosophy is centered on liberating women from the societal slut/whore dynamic.
I know there are others, I’m just not recalling offhand anything else that’s available for free or that is this explicit (in the sense of being verbally advocated). In some of my other comments, though, I’ve mentioned that there are entire methods based on honest SOI, such as the book “Mode One: Let The Women Know What You’re REALLY Thinking”.
Edit: Soporno’s site also has this interesting article on guys who blame women for their problems.
I don’t like that analogy, anyway. I don’t think any fish would actually want to be caught by you in any circumstance, whether I’d rather women actually would want to have sex with me, as opposed to being ‘baited’ and ‘caught’ by me. (Would want ≅ CEV here; the overwhelming majority of women don’t want sex with me right now (e.g. because they’ve never met me yet) but I guess this doesn’t mean I’ll never be able to have consensual sex with any of them short of unethically manipulating them. I hope that makes sense.)
The amount of sense it makes to me correlates pretty well with how well I understand the boundaries of categories like “unethical manipulation,” “baiting,” “catching,” etc., are.
Unfortunately, I don’t understand the boundaries of those categories very well.
I’m aware of this book: Models: Attract Women Through Honesty.
False. False false false.
This applies only to women with a certain social attitude who frequent certain social situations. (I’m bi, and therefore qualified to judge whether the women I’ve met fall into the physical attractiveness range you specify.)
Look, I have some sympathy. There are some lingering cultural norms and an average sex drive to each gender that probably make things very difficult for heterosexual men to scratch their itches, for free, with women “within about 2 standard deviations”, without resorting to either rape or the art of pickup. But you know what? Lots of people have desires they can’t satisfy ethically. This isn’t just the plight of straight men. It’s the plight of physically unattractive or shy or cautious women; it’s the plight of gay people in small towns; it’s the plight of pedophiles and zoophiles and other people with unconscionable fetishes.
I have some sympathy, but I’m not going to ethically greenlight dishonesty so you can get what you want by exploiting the poor judgment of other members of my gender. I’m just not.
Incidentally, have you heard of the whole thing where “nice guys” are in love with their female friends and pine for them in long laments that they post on the Internet? It happens to girls, too. It is not the case that no one ever falls for a guy based on his personality. It’s not even the case that no one ever falls for a basically average guy based on his personality. The difference is she probably doesn’t say anything, and she might be a little farther south of the “mean of physical attractiveness” than the more shallow type of guy prefers.
It may have been a slight exaggeration to say that any girl within 2 sd of the mean will be approached but would you accept that overall women are much more likely to be approached by men than the other way around? I would think that’s a fairly uncontroversial claim. I can’t provide direct evidence for that if you doubt it but there is supporting evidence from studies of online dating. That paper found that the median number of first contacts for men was 0, the mean 2.3 and fully 56% of men received no first contacts. The figures for women were a median of 4, a mean of 11.4 and only 21% of women received no first contacts. My guess would be that real world first approaches are more heavily skewed than that because of the greater pressure of social convention in public situations that men should be the approachers.
Anyway, it would seem your main concern is the ethics of pick up. Specifically it seems to be dishonesty that concerns you. That brings us back to the original discussion of whether your image of the seduction community reflects reality. I think you’ve picked up on the most unethical/dishonest aspects and letting that blind you to the range of other approaches that fall under the general umbrella.
Dishonesty is not a requirement of pick up. Some people might advocate it but others will strongly advise against it. Neither is it the case that the main goal of pick up is a one night stand by whatever means necessary. Again, there are elements of the community that see that as the primary goal but they are probably in the minority. It’s mostly about finding things that work to improve the chances of a positive interaction with women. It’s up to the individual to decide whether any given technique is something they are ethically comfortable with and act accordingly.
I have to say, I went Googling for PUA next to words like “honesty” and “feminism” in the hope of finding a PUA community that was loud about ethical principles, and what I found was more exactly the opposite. What I read makes me want to press the work of sex-positive feminists like Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Avedon Carol, or Greta Christina into the hands of everyone in the PUA community.
In PUA lingo, the term for “honesty” is “direct game”: From a page by one Vin DiCarlo:
In contrast, “indirect game” is the term for approaching someone without letting them know that you’re attracted to them, and the bulk of “material”-oriented schools focus on it, whereas “natural game” or “inner game” schools are more likely to also be “direct”.
The reason you don’t see much mention of honesty in relation to PUA, is because direct schools treat it as flat-out obvious, and indirect schools treat it as irrelevant, except where they’re making excuses for why an opening line like, “Did you see that fight outside?” isn’t “really” a lie.
I believe Soporno is the only trainer who makes sex-positive feminism a focal point in his work, although I don’t think he ever uses the word explicitly. Nonetheless, there are many natural game schools, although the google results for “natural game” are dominated by spam at the moment. TheApproach, CharismaArts, and UltimateNaturalGame are a few of the schools that are strongly or excusively “natural” in bent, and some, like Real Social Dynamics have a mixed bag of training, moving increasingly towards emphasis on natural/direct game and away from material except for overall logistics.
Viewed as an outsider, I’d say that the trend among established training companies is increasingly towards natural and direct game, away from indirect/material. In part, this is a response to the fact that “canned material” gets played out through overexposure, but also just because as the trainers get older and more experienced, they tend to get more mature outlooks on life. (A lot of these guys start really young!)
(The main reason I even follow the field these days is because competition in the increased emphasis on “inner” game aspects means that the PUGs are driven to innovate in the area of training people to believe in themselves and act confidently… which of course crosses over into my own area a bit. Back when the industry consisted mainly of Ross Jeffries, David D., and Mystery, there was really little of interest for me.)
I think it’s probably fair to say that the community is primarily ‘results driven’ - you won’t find a tremendous amount of normative ethics there. The most common ethical principle (if you can call it that) would be the idea that the ultimate goal is self improvement (inner game) - become the kind of person who is attractive without needing to rely on any kind of ‘tricks’ or dishonesty.
If the sex-positive feminists you mention had advice that would actually produce positive results I imagine it would find a positive reception. I followed a link here to Greta Christina’s blog and didn’t find anything very enlightening there in the time I looked around it but if you have specific links to material you think is representative of the ideas you would like to spread please share them. My impression is that sex-positive feminists represent a very small percentage of women and so their views are not likely to be helpful in understanding how to relate better to most women. I am open to being persuaded otherwise though.
Over the course of human history, about twice as many women as men have been able to reproduce at all. How do you propose to end the inequality?
Even supposing the inequality needs to be ended, what makes you confident that it can be, ethically?
Pickup techniques are already ameliorating the inequality by giving the loser guys a shot. Laws that encourage more equal paternal investment, and a more equal distribution of alimony and child custody decisions among sexes, could attack the problem from the other side.
Point taken.
Inequalities are only bad if they deprive someone of a right. You don’t have a right to sex that you don’t provide yourself—no one does. You certainly don’t have an absolute right to father children. No way in hell do you have that right.
I do not believe that you seriously subscribe to this thesis. For example, even the most severe rich/poor divide doesn’t deprive anyone of a right—no one has a right to someone else’s money. Discrimination against women in the workplace doesn’t deprive women of a “right” to be promoted—no such absolute right exists for anyone. Any other ideas?
I do hold it, but obviously it’s more complicated than a single sentence. Severe poverty deprives people of rights to various forms of safety and health, or if not those, then to independence or freedom, that I think everyone has. Discrimination against women in the workplace deprives them of the right to be considered on their relevant merits. (If women really didn’t have the relevant merits, then I wouldn’t think the inequality needed resolution.)
I can invent similarly sounding vacuous rights to justify anything at all. For example, let’s ban cars to give everyone the right to clean air. Or, alternatively, let’s give everyone free cars: the right to transportation. Surely such a right is less far-fetched than your “right” to financial independence or the “right” to be considered, by me, on some “merits” that some organization defined as “relevant”. (Thoughtcrime alert?)
The point of this whole exchange being, of course, that your idea about rights is just a rationalization for defending the status quo of women having higher reproductive chances. No. Severe inequality can be bad for us all even when no “rights” are involved.
Look, I’m obviously not going to sufficiently explain and justify my entire novel ethical system in comments within comments within comments here on Less Wrong. Ask me about it in five years and I’ll e-mail you a copy of my thesis, okay? That is, if you’re actually interested in what I think about ethics instead of looking for excuses to put me down for not thinking you are entitled to reproductive opportunities.
Sorry, I’ll repeat it once again because your reply didn’t really address my words. Reproductive inequality is not about anyone’s personal entitlement to sex. Yes, it’s bad, and it’s bad despite being not about rights. It’s bad because it entails inequal average chances of good stuff happening to random people who were unlucky enough to be born a certain way. It’s bad in the same way that severe inborn IQ and ability gaps between people are bad. It’s not, not, not about rights or “entitlements”.
Maybe your ethical system says in advance that if some issue isn’t about personal rights, then it can’t require a communal solution. Well… then your ethical system is wrong by the criterion of my ethical system and (I imagine) those of many other people.
Could you express the problem you see and the solution you propose in more directly consequentialist language? Different kinds of inequality can lead to different problems and therefore prompt different solutions. If you want to colonise the moon, fine, but it would seem weird to justify that in terms of a “fertility gap” between the Earth and the Moon, since that would be to state a “problem” that could be solved by reducing the fertility of the Earth.
Fair objection.
Myself, I don’t much like the socialist angle of attack that always begins with the word “inequality”. Inequality is only a problem because it leads to suffering: in our world many men suffer from being unable to have sex or offspring, whereas in a more equal world men and women would be matched more or less pairwise in percentiles of sexual market value. Yes, it would necessarily mean that some females settle for lower quality males than they currently desire, so your Moon analogy isn’t completely unfounded.
(I believe this thought is at the root of most female critique of PUA: they feel that when men deliberately increase their sexual attractiveness, it amounts to fraudulently disguising low-quality genes.)
Disseminating PUA knowledge is one way to ameliorate the problem, helping the losers rise up. Another way would be legislation to promote more equal parental investment and more equitable child custody decisions in the hope that a) women loosen up and b) alpha men start having fewer ilegitimate kids, pushing more women out into the tails.
And, of course, monogamy can be viewed as another attempt to rescue humanity from the Darwinian horror where a few alpha males get all the girls, and all lesser males are expendable labour and war fodder.
IAWYC here, but I’m pretty sure they’re not actually thinking about genes.
Even supposing the inequality should be ended, what makes you confident that there is an ethical way to end it?
Upvoting you doesn’t seem like quite enough.
There needs to be a “this comment is strongly confirmed by my experiences” button
I bet if you squint a little, they would look a lot alike, actually.
Why do you think you’re special? Why are you taking the inside view? Do you think humans in general don’t want people to fall in love with them if they have to work on them to bring it about? This talk of “the way it is supposed to work” strikes me as irrational; you are looking at what “ought” to be, what you want to be, and ignoring what actually is.
I don’t know what humans in general want, but I don’t think I’m completely alone—an illustrative cartoon—in wanting affection that is genuine in the way I describe. But maybe I’m a rare specimen? If you’re content to have relationships where you and others model each other on a web of carefully selected half-truths, I’m not exactly going to parasail in and demand that you stop like a spandex-clad vigilante for truth and transparency. You simply won’t have anything, in having that relationship, that I have an inclination to value, promote, or normatively endorse.
Also, I don’t see how the link is relevant. The article is about deadlines and cost estimates and there’s nothing apparently applicable to this topic.
The article is about the dangers of considering yourself a rare specimen, the talk of deadlines and cost estimates is just for concreteness.
That’s a really good cartoon, by the way, because it can make two people on the opposite sides of an argument each think it supports their own point. To me it seems like the construction of the third robot was just as wrongheaded as the first two, and that the scientist has a fundamental confusion about the nature of love stemming from romanticism. But clearly you see it differently.
I considered it illustrative not because of the third robot, but because of the second one. It had—ostensibly—freedom, but circumstances were manipulated by the scientist so it would love the scientist. The resulting love is not valuable. Seduction is a subtler circumstance manipulation than that, but otherwise similar-looking.
90% of what guys want from the seduction community is the ability to confidently approach a woman and start a conversation, so that they have a chance to get to know each other, and find out if they want to do something more. As some put it, “I’m looking for the One, but I don’t know what I would say when I meet her.”
Yeah, there’s maybe 10% who, like Sirducer, just want to get laid, and are looking for a formula to do that. I have the impression, though, that quite a few of those guys end up raising their standards, when they realize that it’s just as empty as you’re saying.
Read e.g. Neil Strauss’ book, “The Game”—it ends with him being really glad that he found a woman his more-manipulative tricks didn’t work on… and yet, he never would have had the confidence to even talk to her in the first place if he hadn’t already had so much successful experience with comparably intimidating women (in terms of looks, intelligence, strong personalities, etc.)
To put it another way, actually being confident, caring, and knowing ways to please women (in and out of the bedroom) is not a trick. But for many people, the only way to get there is to first learn tricks. If they have to wait until they can do it without any tricks, they will never be able to start.
And that would be a terrible shame, for an awful lot of men and women.
There is a dramatic difference between learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then not sleeping with anyone under false pretense (via honesty or just ending the game three-quarters of the way through), and learning tricks to increase confidence/social success and then proceeding to use them to get poorly-informed women to have sex. I assume it’s possible to do the first thing.
Yep. Actually, from one trainer’s blog, I get the impression there’s a paradox, though.
The trainer tells a student: go over there and get blown out (rejected). Say whatever you have to say to get those women to reject you. Paradox: the set opens, the student gets attraction, because he’s absolutely at ease, not caring about the outcome. The more outrageously he speaks and acts, the more the women perceive him as a confident guy who’s just being playful with them.
Now, the trainer says, “okay, you see how well it works when you’re confident? Now go over there and talk to those other women and do the same thing...” Student gets blown out, because now he cares.
So, it’s not quite that simple. When the entire point of the exercise is to be confident taking things all the way to the end of the process, bailing out becomes an excuse not to face the fear of the next step. And if somebody bails at LMR—the last possible moment before sex occurs—then the woman is going to be just as disappointed, if not more, than if the guy went all the way.
i.e., if you get to LMR, you already got somebody to go home with you or vice versa, and it’s very likely the case that she did so, already wanting to have sex with you!
I guess what I’m getting at, is that a premature ending can be more deceitful/hurtful than going all the way, if the entire subtext was that the woman wanted to get laid and the guy was providing her with excuses.
I’m really not that familiar with that kind of game, and find it a turnoff, as I prefer women who can be direct about their desires. Doesn’t mean I want to deprive those women of having any outlet at all, just because society’s taught them they’re not supposed to want it or be direct… even less if it’s because of their genes!
That sounds like you are trying to say you can learn karate by kicking the air in front of someone.
Only if your goal really is sex by hook or by crook. Clearly, not having sex will not increase your capacity to just plainly and simply get sex. But if someone finds seduction appealing because they want confidence and social skills, there is no obvious reason they have to take the suggested tricks to the point of actual sex under false pretenses in order to develop them into skills.
Kicking the air in front of someone would be more analogous to practicing your confidence tricks talking to a dressmaker’s dummy, then never actually going out and talking to women.
Why is it irrational to think that the ways things ought to be is different from the way they are?
It’s not, of course. But you should be careful not to mix the two up and, for example, give romantic advice based on how you feel relationships ought to work.
I wasn’t giving romantic advice. I was giving ethical advice, and my personal data point on why the ethical advice won’t necessarily spell romantic doom.
It’s not. What’s irrational is to let your idea of the way things ought to be prevent you from acting in such a way as to achieve your desired goals given the way things actually are
And if one’s goal is “have a relationship that meets criteria X”, disregarding criteria X only serves to better attain the goal “have a relationship” which isn’t what one actually wanted in the first place.
You seem to be making unwaranted assumptions about other people’s goals.
I don’t think I’m making any assumptions about other people’s goals, I’m just saying that allowing beliefs about the way you’d like the world to be to interfere with success in the actual world is irrational.
In the special case where maintaining your belief is a high priority goal in itself that obviously factors recursively into your decisions in a complicated way. A community of rationalists who give short shrift to religious arguments for god along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without god’ and that professes a high regard for truth would at least be receptive to the idea that maintaining false beliefs is not a strongly defensible position I would think.
Valuing “a relationship meeting criteria X” is not a belief, it’s a term in a utility function. “People would be better off if their relationships had criteria X” is a belief that may or may not be justified. Determining the latter to be false in the general case does not invalidate the former.
Furthermore, your argument seems to be based on the observation “Most relationships do not meet criteria X” which is true but logically irrelevant to either of the above propositions.
Again, if you want to obtain the result of getting sex, learning how to manipulate people and not being afraid to lie in social interactions is a great way to get that result.
...and we come full circle to:
If your goal is to get sex and that’s all, the ethical choices are to explicitly advertise this goal and find someone who shares it, or to take the solo route. As I said, I’m not offering practical advice for the morally indiscriminate pickup artist. I’m talking about ethics.
This is a decent strategy for a woman. But for a man …. it sucks! I know, I tried it!
So, you go up to an attractive woman you see and like the look of, and say “I think you’re cute. Can I go on a date with you?”, she ain’t gonna fall in love with you. You won’t get a girlfriend like that. Well, not unless you’re extremely good looking or rich or famous or something.
And, surprisingly, men don’t always want relationships. Sometimes we just want sex. To get sex with no strings attached, you have to lie and manipulate, or be extremely high-value for some reason. (e.g. by being a rock-star)
If you just go up to a girl and ask her for sex “Please have sex with me, I’m kind of desperate”, you really really won’t get laid. On the other hand, if you go up to her and ask her “who lies more, men or women?”, turn your back when she answers, tease her, casually drop in a mention of your many exes, take her back to your place on an excuse, promise her nothing will happen, and then repeatedly feel her up like a horny cave-man, well, you’re in with a chance.
It is indeed a shame that you have to behave like this to get laid. But it is fun in its own way.
The behaviour you advocate here is totally unethical.
This is, as I often say here, entirely counter to my experience. Lots of women are attracted to no-strings sex; you just have to be a good person to have no-strings sex with. I think in large part people sleep with me because I accurately communicate a happy, positive, fun-loving attitude to sex from which people correctly infer that I’ll be fun to sleep with and I won’t be trouble afterwards.
Could be! I believe that sort of thing could work, and I don’t know you, so maybe you really do have a great attitude and it really does work for you, and if so, great—enjoy the sex.
One thing that bothers me, out of context, is that the idea that people sleep with you because they can tell you’re fun to sleep with is awfully convenient. It suggests that you deserve a decent helping of sex, whereas others don’t. Now, maybe bitter ex-nice-guys like Sirducer don’t have as good of an attitude as you do. I think you probably should get some credit. But what about looks? Money? Sense of humor? The recursive confidence that comes from knowing that someone will probably sleep with you soon?
Do you really have a good reason to think that your fun-loving attitude is more important than the rest of that stuff put together?
Maybe it doesn’t work for the kinds of women you happen to be interested in, which I think says something about your taste.
Honesty doesn’t have to mean, though, saying to random women “please have sex with me, I’m kind of desperate”. As I said in another comment, the “radical honesty” movement conflates honesty with tactlessness and that’s decidedly unnecessary.
I’ve tried it on >20 women, with poor results in every case. Women want to be chased, and an honest exchange of information doesn’t give them a chase.
What about if you just want sex quickly with an attractive woman irrespective of what kind of person she is? Is there something wrong with this?
But where do you draw the line between tact and lying? For example, you approach a girl and ask her out on a date or tell her you think she’s cute straight away. Tactless? Ok, but what other honest approach can you do?
That’s really not very many women, for club game and cold approach. Are you counting based on sets opened, or only ones where you got to an extraction attempt?
I see two problems with your statement. First, I’ve had women chase me. Second, the fact that some of them wanted to be chased didn’t interfere with honesty; I just changed myself in such a way that I could be honest.
So, your poor results might have been affected by your taste in women. I like smart girls who are sexually aggressive, or at least passionate and sexually self-aware. That probably makes a big difference in my results, since my criteria would tend to select for women who would find honesty sexy, because they don’t like playing games.
Those women are somewhat less likely to be found in bars and clubs, but I’ve met a few, so it’s not like they don’t exist.
Honestly, though, based on the entitlement attitude you’ve been showing, I suspect the reason your “honest” approach flopped was a function of your inner game, not of the women. The existence and success of such things as the apocalypse opener, forced IOI openers, Gunwitch method, mode one, and um, I forget what the other one is called, but that one where you alternate between escalating sexually explicit SOIs and casual conversation without giving any opportunity to object...
Anyway, the existence of all these methods shows that there are other PUAs who get results with the bold, explicit, truth, up to and including expressing a desire to have sex with the girl in the first few sentences of conversation.
To me, that says it’s not the women. It’s you.
The point is just that you’re using your particular taste to justify your ethics, when, if you valued your ethics more, you could still find women who would appreciate your honesty.
Beyond that, I think your attitude shows a flawed understanding of women: you think they respond to qualities independent of the guy those qualities are attached to. But this is not entirely true: women often come to appreciate a quality that’s possessed by a man they find attractive. Even if those 20 women never appreciated an honest man before, you still had the opportunity to make them appreciate your honesty… as long as it wasn’t an excuse to be boring.
Hell, consider Steve P. -- the guy goes around telling people in a monotone that he teaches women how to have the best orgasms of their lives; I don’t get any impression that he “games” in the least, and he’s not exactly a great looker. But women chase him because he offers a unique sexual experience. (There are some definite parallels between what he does and what I did, but I’ll not go into details here.)
My point is: if you cared as much about having something to offer women as you apparently care about what they offer to you, you wouldn’t have problems with honesty. And if all you really care about is fast sex with a desirable body, why not just pay for it in the first place? That takes far less time than developing your game, and it’s more honest, too.
The only way that I see you can get stuck in the spot where you’re saying you are is if you:
don’t value women enough to offer them any value of your own, aside from intrigue, DHV stories, and ASD excuses...
don’t care about women enough to help them get over the societal programming that makes ASD excused necessary.
are too cheap to pay for what you want in any other way,
and not only have insufficient self-worth to be perceived as an attractive man, but also no desire to improve yourself to becoming one.
So frankly, you sound like you don’t like women or yourself very much. That, IMO, is the “something wrong with this”.
Maybe, maybe not. Most people would make either approach a DLV, but some men could make either one a DHV. (Hell, I can think of a guy I once knew who could have opened with, “Hey… you’re cute, can I have your number?” in such a fun-yet-sarcastic way that it would’ve been perceived as anything from a rapport-building “gee these other guys are stupid to approach you in such a lame way”, to a flat-out neg (i.e. “you’re not really cute and I don’t care about your number.”)
Forced IOI openers and kino-based game would select for women who are open to a physical approach but who prefer to avoid verbal acknowledgments. When you get ASD, just raise an eyebrow like, “are you serious?”, but say nothing. Or say, “Don’t worry, I’ll still respect you in the morning.” HOW you say or do this is vastly more important than the words. Lying is really not necessary… hell, talking much at all isn’t necessary, AFAICT.
(I’m not using myself as an example here; I hung with naturals once or twice in college, who tried and failed to teach me anything. But AFAICT they didn’t really say much between “Hey” and “Let’s get out of here”, although there was some time in between, some dancing and a couple of location bounces within the club. They mostly let the girls do the talking.)
In short, every piece of evidence I have tells me that it ain’t the women, it’s you. Every man can be a natural, if he believes he actually has something of value to offer. But I get the impression you don’t think you have anything to offer, and if you don’t want to grow old chasing club girls with equally low self-esteem, you might want to change that.
Of course! If you had perfect inner game, you wouldn’t need game.… that’s why naturals exist. They’re men with very good inner game because they had (probably early) life experiences that built their confidence and sense of self-worth up to unusually high levels. I’m not knocking the the natural way, or direct game, building inner game, which you seem to have been gifted with a lot of. You have these attractive, sexually aggressive women chasing you all the time… btw, what planet do you live on because I want to move there!
But let us suppose, for a moment, that you’re a guy who doesn’t start off naturally confident, and doesn’t live in the pjeby Shangri-La of abundant, sexually aggressive, confident, intelligent, high self-esteem women who always chase and want to date you. Suppose that you have never in your life been approached or chased by a woman. What to do?
On thing that most guys in this situation do is they put up with no sex, then they marry the first girl who shows any interest. Screw that!
Another thing is to completely throw your dignity out of the window and pay for sex.
Getting into game with a healthy attitude is better, I think. This means realizing that some of the time, some girls want to be manipulated, and that if you don’t go out and take what you want, you won’t get it. But this doesn’t mean being an asshole—it just means realizing that you have to play the game.
Yes, eventually you’ll pick up so much confidence that you’ll be able to go natural and then yes, girls will pick up on this and start chasing you. But until that point, it will help to have some tactics under your belt.
yes, again, I agree. In fact this is true by definition. This is like saying “any man can be a millionaire by having $ 1million in his bank account”. But it’s really really hard to change from believing that you are low value to believing that you are high value. If it were easy, if you could just think “ah, I’m going to change the counter in my mind that represents self-value from low to high”, then a million dollar seduction industry wouldn’t exist.
By the way, I’m always looking for new and better ways to improve my inner game, so if you have any tips on how you got there, do share them with us.
No, what I had was non-neediness and non-reactivity, combined with empathy and intelligent conversation. My inner game actually sucked. I was non-needy and non-reactive because that was my response to fear of rejection. I believed no woman would ever really love me, so there was no point in pining over what I couldn’t have.
You could say I was following “The Tao of Steve”, as in “Be desireless, be excellent, be gone”… but not because I had reached some sort of true inner peace.
I never said those women wanted to date me. A few did, most just wanted to get off or fulfill a fantasy. (To be clear, I didn’t sleep with these women or have intercourse with them; I almost exclusively saved “standard” sex for my LTRs or FWBs, not the girls who just wanted to experiment.)
If you look down on people who pay for sex (and by implication, on sex workers), this is part of your attitude problem. You believe you have no value, so you take paying as evidence to support this belief, while ignoring the fact that rock stars also pay for sex… as Charlie Sheen I believe put it, “you’re paying them to leave”.
So it’s not the act of paying for sex that throws out the dignity that you’re afraid you lack in the first place.
You seem to be ignoring the part where manipulating doesn’t equal lying, and that being tactful, cool, and fun does not equal “manipulating”.… unless you view them through a frame where YOU are low-value!
You don’t even need confidence; I certainly never had it. Non-neediness and non-reactivity are plenty enough.
You don’t need a trick—you just need to cultivate something of genuine value. What do you really have to offer women? In my case, it was conversation, understanding, and a certain class of sexual experiences. You might offer excitement and adventure. Another guy might be an artist or musician. Per the Tao of Steve, what are you “excellent” at? What could you be excellent at? Value is just being excellent at something, that offers a woman an experience.
People (not just women) want emotional experiences. They are bored and afraid and dissatisfied, for the most part. What can you give them?
Not as a trade, not as a “look at me I’m awesome”, but… what is part of your world that someone else would want to find out more about, or be a part of? I never flaunted my “fantasy fulfillment services”; I simply mentioned them in passing and never tried to talk anyone into making use of them. They had to ask me, and I was pretty tight-lipped about it, simply because I genuinely didn’t want to push it on anyone. I’d answer questions briefly, then return to whatever non-sexual topic we were on.
Then, later… sometimes much later… someone I mentioned it to would come back and make a more serious inquiry, at which point I’d tell them about my NLP theory of how you can create fantasy experiences for someone by interpreting one of their existing fantasies, and we were off to the races.
This worked for me precisely because it was not a technique. I really didn’t care. I hadn’t seen “The Tao Of Steve”, but I was desireless, I was excellent, I was gone.
This was not “inner game” or belief in my own value. It was just nonreactivity. Women don’t really care about confidence so much as they care about you NOT being creepy or needy… as long as you also have some sort of “excellence” to enjoy.
Nor the self-help industry. The catch is that there’s more than one “counter”, and as I always say, the brain has no “view source” button to let you list them all. (Technically, they’re frames, not counters.)
My personal advice to you would be to ask what it is that you’re afraid is true about yourself. Not are you afraid of rejection or relationships or any of that, what are you afraid is true about you, specifically?
Low self-esteem, and especially the sort of compensating ideals you’re promoting, are usually based in fears of low-value qualities. But if you know what you’re afraid of and admit to it, you’ll have the chance to do something about it—either decide that it’s not really true of you, or that it is true, but you can change it.
Also, for whatever it’s worth, I seem to recall that the period in my life where women were most abundant and I was at my most non-reactive/confident, was when I was doing daily Zen meditation of at least 20 minutes, and doing an extended session once a week at the local Zen center.
To be honest, nothing in particular. I genuinely thought hard about that question. I suppose in the past, when I was less mature, there were things.
Of course nowadays I practice almost exclusively direct game, and it works for me. And yes, you are still manipulating someone when you are doing direct game. You’re just doing it in a more natural and mutually enjoyable way. But I guess in the past, when I didn’t have that inner confidence, unreactivity and non-neediness that you’re talking about, direct wouldn’t have worked for me, so I needed the props and tricks of opinion openers, etcetera. Then I got laid a bit, then a bit more, then my inner unconfidence evaporated!
So then WTF have you been advocating dishonesty, if you know it’s unnecessary?
I don’t think it really does anyone a service to frame it that way, except maybe as a way to convince somebody to buy your course so you can then talk them out of it.
Thing is, by framing it as “manipulation” to yourself, you are implying that you are not good enough to get a woman without manipulation—you are still maintaining a low-value frame, despite being nonreactive. You’re just framing yourself as “low-value with workarounds”, instead of “high value”.
If you frame it instead as you providing women with mystery, intrigue, drama, or something else that they value—then that immediately makes you a person of value… and flips over that “counter” in your brain that you asked about.
You’ve already done the hard work of getting competence and nonreactivity; now follow RSD Tyler’s example and realize that you really do have something to offer. Voila! You now have value.
The difference between “value” and “manipulation” is mostly in the mind of the manipulator, but it also gets subcommunicated. And I personally believe it’s better to spend a lot of time on flipping that switch, vs. learning all the many subcommunications that you otherwise have to mimic, because they’re not being generated automatically.
If it takes you 100 hours of work on yourself to flip the inner switch, it’s still 10 times more efficient than spending 1000 hours honing techniques that merely mimic the effect. Do the noobs a favor and don’t send them down the “dark path” needlessly; better yet, be Yoda and warn them about its seductive dangers. ;-)
Right, so first you have to learn how to manipulate women, then you realize that they like being manipulated, then you realize you’re doing them a service, then you realize that in this special case, the ability to manipulate people is a great and valuable thing to have, and it makes you a more interesting and exciting person to be around (not that you weren’t to start with), and once you’ve had this realization, you become a natural!
Of course we are starting to argue semantics now… as you say, the difference between “manipulation” and “alpha male behaviour” can be merely one of poetry. Likewise the difference between “mystery, intrigue” and “lying”.
I think that the key to getting good is to realize that sexual interaction in humans constitutes an exception to the rule that lying and manipulation are generally bad. We give them different names like “mystery and intrigue” or “dominant, confident behaviour” to flag this up.
Or, you do what I did and assume that the only way women would be interested in you is if you have something of value to offer them, and then go about doing something to develop that value. Yes, it has taken me a long time to realize that I have value, just by virtue of being a unique person. However, I didn’t have to go through a “manipulation” stage to get there.
Instead, to the extent that you could call certain behavior options I have now “manipulation”, I chose to do them because of having an understanding of their value, and caring about the woman in question (my wife) enough to want to give that value to her.
So, in this particular example, it’s the exact opposite order to what you’re suggesting.
Actually, it’s a matter of what your motivation is. Alpha males look out for the group, and do other useful things, rather than adopting those behaviors because it gets them laid. That’s the difference between manipulating and being genuine. (See also some of Eliezer’s posts about “adaptation executing” vs “fitness maximizing” for the psychology difference.)
I run the website www.theyhatethegame.com—which has been mentioned in this post a few times.
I used to be shy, insecure, and lonely. After a low point a while ago I began reading books on female psychology, evolutionary sexuality and relationship management. These books did NOT turn me into a social robot that manipulates people. They DID give me a feeling of security because they gave me the impression that we are all human—we are all the same and we all need each other.
This feeling prompted a series of social experiments over a period of three months where I determined—through trial and error—what I could do to give others the most pleasurable social experience possible. The end result was simple. I turned myself into a confident, competent person that people like because of a high level of social intuition and empathy.
My website is dedicated to giving men the tools that I wish I had when I was on my journey from “looser to winner.”
Some of you may label what I do as social manipulation (I accept that you have read more books on how to label what is and is not social manipulation than I have and that’s okay with me—I was out having fun while you were reading.) but what helps me sleep at night is knowing that I have changed. I used to not like who I was. Now I like me—and I am able to enrich the lives of those around me. Women and men.
P.S. I’m impressed with the quality of conversation going on here. I don’t get exposed to these view points often. Cheers.
I’m sure you have simply loads of data points on this, of women who you chased who really liked it and weren’t trying to remember if their favorite law firm does restraining orders, but since I’m an actual woman and do not have an interest in being “chased”, it would have displayed some politeness to add a qualifier like “some” or “in my experience”.
Yes. This displays a revolting attitude towards women. Unless (as pjeby suggested) you pay for it, or (as I mentioned in another comment) you find a woman who just wants sex with an attractive man (I’ll charitably assume you are one at least to some people) regardless of your personality. The latter sort of woman exists. She can be found on Craigslist. She is, however, immensely picky because she gets several hundred e-mails every time she posts an ad, because your desires are not remotely uncommon and you have a lot of competition. If you aren’t good-looking enough to stand out from the crowd of honest seekers of NSA sex, of course investigating other categories of women who might let you sleep with them and using every trick in the book to get them to do so would seem like the next logical choice. That doesn’t make it right.
Broadly, tact is about what topics you bring up. Lying is about what you say about the topic at hand, whatever it may be. Attempting to actually have sex implicitly brings up the topic of your motives, because if it’s had under false pretenses, consent is flimsier and the entire thing is thrown into moral confusion.
I don’t suppose they were selected at random from the population, were they?
This is an honest question, but I am curious. Do you consider this type of behavior ethical? Or would you agree that you value getting laid more than being an ethical person?
A lot of girls expect men to lie to them, and actually want you to. It’s a social game which is tacitly acknowledged and sanctioned by most women and the 10% or so of men who are really good with women.
An example: you take a girl back to your place from a nightclub. She’ll say something like “we’re not going to have sex” or “I’m just coming in for a coffee”. If you respond honestly “actually I do want to have sex with you”, she won’t come back with you. If you say “sure”, take her back and then escalate anyway, she’ll put up more resistance but eventually give in and have sex with you.
Why? She wants sex, but she doesn’t want to feel like a “slut”, so she has to make it look like you persuaded her and she resisted. This is known as token resistance
So in this case by lying, you did the girl a favor. Lying is the ethical thing to do.
Not because you’re being honest, but because you’re being tactless. Compare with this answer: “oh, darn, here I was thinking you were trying to get me alone so you could have your way with me....” and that’s just the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your comment. (Probably because I have a vague recollection of having said something similar to a girl once, a few minutes before she literally attacked me.)
ASD is a social calibration ping: she wants to make sure you’re a cool guy. It is not necessary to lie or even conceal the truth in order to be a cool guy, it is only necessary to communicate that you understand the rules of the game being played and are willing to play it. A response like the one I gave above would be an honest answer, but not a tactless one.
Huh, no. If an adult isn’t willing to owning up to their desires, that’s their own friggin’ problem and it’s not my job to second-guess them.
You don’t. That particular application of those principles is only required under a certain set of circumstances, for a certain set of people.
Compare, e.g. the “Johnny Soporno” philosophy of being “the man who doesn’t count”. Before I got married, I was a “man who didn’t count” for a few women, and there was absolutely no lying involved on my part. I didn’t learn that approach from J.S. -- I came by it naturally. Nonetheless, I heartily approve of the portion of his philosophy that I’ve heard: i.e., honest liberation for men and women.
I am also under the impression that JS is far from the only person who advocates strict honesty about one’s intentions… indeed, it’s a common enough concept that there’s an acronym for it (SOI, for “Statement of Intent”), and one guy wrote an entire book on it, called “Mode One”.
Thing is, having confident SOI or being “mode one” makes you a high-value person in a lot of women’s eyes, by virtue of your confidence and honesty. In my single days, this and a certain amount of social proof (I had a lot of female friends) were the only “game” I needed.
Once you’re already experienced, yes. But get a newbie to SOI a girl and he’ll either bottle out or completely screw up. To get to the stage where you have the confidence in your ability to get laid that is required for direct game to work, you need indirect game, AKA lying and manipulation.
“Direct game” - being relatively honest about your intentions still isn’t full honesty. For example, you’ll still have to deal with LMR, the girl will still want to be chased, she’ll shit-test you etc, etc.
honest and “sexual interaction” don’t mix very well. The honesty of direct game is a limited kind of honesty: “I’ll screw you but only if your body language sub-communicates alpha male to me”. “Honest” and “Loving, committed long term relationship” work, though.
You’re talking about cold approach in a public social situation with immature and self-deceiving women. The situations I’m talking about were the exact opposite in all three, as I like intelligent, mature women. If I had to lie to a woman for more than say, five minutes on first meeting her, before admitting to the lie as a way to get to talk to her, I really wouldn’t be interested.
I realize some men aren’t wired that way. I’m just pointing out that if all you want is to “get laid”, then verbal alpha subcom is sufficient, especially with social proof. Before I got married, every party I went to had a room full of pivots—i.e., female friends who either specifically set me up, or at least gave social proof by talking to me. And anybody I went out with, I’d already chatted with online, and impressed verbally that way.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Girls chased me. I’ve never been much of a chaser, to be honest. I can’t remember anyone who shit-tested me. And LMR is only an issue if you’re the one doing the initiating.
In a way, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t study this stuff in those days, because I might have run into some of the stuff you’re saying here, and actually believed it. I could have used more confidence, and if I’d been better at attraction/extraction logistics I probably I wouldn’t have had to wait until I was 20+ to lose my virginity.
In college, never got past the rapport stage on cold approach, but it wasn’t a question of shit tests or anything. I could open and get rapport, but I didn’t know how to kino, escalate, time bridge, any of that stuff.
Just the logistics of pickup knowledge would’ve helped immensely there, no need for lying or manipulation. I’m pretty positive that many of those girls I talked to in college wanted me to make a move, I just didn’t have a clue how.
Anyway… lying is totally unnecessary, I don’t care how noob you are. If you can’t handle cold approach without lying, get social proof. If you’re actually worth sleeping with, you should have no problem making female friends.
I’m completely baffled by the jargon here. Can you provide a glossary?
SOI—statement of intent—stating outright what you intend towards a woman, anything from, “I think you might be cool to hang out with”, to “[explicit details of what I’d like to do with you in bed tonight]”.
cold approach—meeting someone you don’t know
warm approach—being introduced, already knowing them online, etc.
alpha subcom—communicating confidence non-verbally: body language, facial expressions, gesture, posture, voice tone, inflection, word choice, stories told, beliefs and attitudes expressed… everything, pretty much. Acting as-if you are an attractive and desirable man, not in the way of trying to show it, but acting the way such a man would naturally act.
shit-test—a verbal or non-verbal challenge by a woman, usually in the form of being rude or implying the man has is unworthy or “not in her league”, but this can also be in the form of a false IOI (indicator of interest). For example, a woman who speaks in an aggressively sexual fashion, without any actual sexual interest, is often shit-testing to find out if the man will respond in a way that reveals he’s more desperate for sex than he’s trying to appear. In general, shit tests are when women probe to see how confident a guy actually is, versus what he’s pretending to be. This is obviously much more an issue with cold approach than other situation, but some women shit-test their way through entire relationships.
Shit tests are a controversial subject, to say the least. Having given it more thought, I now can remember being shit tested, but I don’t think I’ve ever slept with anyone who shit tested me on initial contact. However, I also kind of agree with the trainers who say that shit testing really is an indicator of interest, in the sense that a woman only shit tests because she wants to know if the guy is “for real”—that it’s like an instinct to pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming.
Recently, my wife’s grandmother died, and she ended up shit-testing me because on an emotional level, she needed to know that I was strong and she was safe. I didn’t handle it well at first, because I didn’t realize that was what was going on; I thought she was being unreasonable and vicious towards me for no reason.
Once I understood, however, I was able to give her what she needed, and afterward she agreed with my interpretation; she just couldn’t tell me at the time, because on an emotional level it would’ve defeated the entire purpose. (This is not a regular occurrence, fortunately.)
(In female language, I’ve had women friends tell me that they want a guy who “doesn’t let them get away with anything” or “put up with their shit”. In other words, a guy who isn’t fazed by their shit tests, either by passively putting up with them, or by freaking out, but instead by setting boundaries and making her feel safe within them.)
social proof—evidence that you’re not a weird, creepy stalker or something, as demonstrated by having friends, especially female ones. esp. such proof in real-time, visual form—i.e., saying that you have friends doesn’t count for much.
pivot—female wingman, i.e., a woman who is with you to help you meet other women and/or get laid. Usually a friend who’s not attracted to you, but thinks you should get laid more often, and will spread helpful rumors or try to match you up. (At least, that’s the kind I have experience with. I never did “club game” with a pivot, just had a social network.)
LMR—“last minute resistance”—having doubts or seeking reassurance just before sex is about to happen. Often, this takes the form of a need for reassurance that the woman is not a slut or otherwise of questionable character just because she is having sex with a guy she “hardly knows”. I don’t have much experience with this because I was never in so much of a hurry to get laid. Some PUA trainers claim that you need to know someone for at least 7 hours in order to minimize LMR, and except for the women who sought me out, I’d always spent at least that much time with someone long before they dragged me to the bedroom. (Like I said, I’ve never been much of an initiator, at least outside the chat room.)
“open”—start a conversation and have it go somewhere, as opposed to immediate rejection or quickly fading into nothingness.
rapport stage—conversation stage where you actually start to get to know someone
kino—touching, either casual, flirtatious, or beyond
escalate—taking things past rapport, to some kind of action or relationship in the present or future
time bridge—smoothly establishing a reason for future contact, without making a big commitment or “date” out of it, e.g. talking about a cool art gallery early in the conversation, then ending by saying, “oh hey, I’m going to that gallery on Thursday with my friends, you should come check it out with us,” and exchanging numbers or email.
Whew. There is a lot of terminology, isn’t there? It really is a Conspiracy with a capital C. There are a lot of different schools, but the language tends to get shared across the board.
bit of googling:
social proof appears to mean being seen with attractive female friends who, by their presence, act as references—“as a fellow woman, I approve of this man and voluntarily choose to associate with him”
LMR stands for Last Minute Resistance
kino basically means touching, even just socially
escalate means increasing the intensity of that touching
shit-test appears to refer to women testing men to see if they can be easily manipulated, and then discarding them if they are.
“direct game” seems to be what you refer to as tactlessness =)
I got nothing on subcom