A Critical Moment

Everything was going right.  My game was tight.  She was responding with an everlasting feedback loop of positivity.  All smiles, all electrified touching on the legs, chest, arms.  Unforced laughter.  Whispers in ears as cheeks grazed.

A culmination in same night sex was within the realm of possibility.  I could practically taste it.

Then she pulled the classic last ditch stone cold shit test.

Using inviting body language, she welcomed a male interloper into our perfect night.  He dutifully took the bait and chatted her up.  She snapped her eye contact away from me and to him.  She laughed at his… what were they?… jokes?… no, she laughed at any old stupid thing he said.

He was in heaven.  Getting the girl AND sticking it to some chump who thought he had it in the bag.

But I knew better.  He was being used by her.  A compete tool in a skilled operator’s hands.  She just needed to know if I was strong enough to not get rattled.

About half the girls I have picked up have at some point attempted to pull this maneuver.  Club and bar girls are the worst offenders because it is so easy for them to recruit an all-too-willing male foil from the crowd.

It used to chasten me.

Now it charms me.

There is one way to handle this final shit test that is absolutely GUARANTEED to work every time — walk away.

First, chat up the guy in a friendly manner to show you are unaffected by his presence.  Stay for a few minutes.  Smile.  Then, leave, preferably right in the middle of something you were saying to both of them to maximize the impact of your exit.  Give no explanation or excuse.  Just walk away casually and confidently to another floor of the bar.

Can you walk away from a girl in whom you have invested three hours of seduction?

Literally 30 seconds later she joined me downstairs — by herself.

Test passed.

It was funny how compliant and eager to please she became after that.

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‘Bang’ Review

I feel like I am coming from a somewhat different perspective than the average reader of this book on pickup by Roosh V.  I have put in a lot of effort gaining as much knowledge as I could from seduction oriented books, DVDs, and websites, to advance my game in the field with women.  A couple years ago I even met Mystery of VH1’s Pickup Artist when he was in DC to see what he had to say in person.

So when I read Bang I already understood not only the concepts of pickup from meet to bedroom, but many of the specific openers, qualification tactics, and conversational routines, and have spent many nights out applying those lessons and improving my skills.  But after reading it, I was surprised to find that Roosh has brought a welcome dimension to the study of game — elegant simplicity and clear-headedness, as well as some new tactics I was previously unaware of.  This slim but powerfully condensed book lays out the foundations of game — from female psychology to the winning male attitude to the sequence of pickup from approach to sex — in a concise, detailed, and readily-accessible manner that can get any guy on the ground and running right away without spending weeks of time and thousands of dollars on a vast library of pickup material.  The occasional flashes of droll humor also make it an entertaining read.

Bang offers both useful reasoning and highly specific techniques and lines.  There is rock solid advice like this:

By now you’ve probably noticed I like asking questions or bringing up topics that stir up a little insecurity or doubt.  This is because I want her to focus on her flaws and problems instead of my own.  She’s on stage being evaluated, not me, increasing the likelihood she will do things to impress me.

And plenty of specific lines, routines, and conversation starters to ask a girl, like this:

So I’m going to grow a mustache, and I know it’s going to be popular once I start the trend again, but I’m wondering what kind of mustache I should grow.  Should it curl up or down?

For the beginner or casual player, I would recommend this book because it is short and sweet and avoids the pitfalls of overwhelming with excessive theorizing.  It is too easy to fall prey to paralysis by analysis as your head swims with new information, yet Bang does an admirable job of keeping its message focused and practical.  If you are an advanced student of seduction, Bang serves as a convenient refresher book to reference as needed.

You can order a copy of Bang here.

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Online Dating is Futile

During downtimes when I was too tired to go out and meet women I experimented with internet dating.  I found love from just a few custom tailored emails.  My friends think I hit the dating equivalent of the lotto.  From what I have heard, I agree.  Most guys struggle to get one positive response on dating sites.

I have predicted to myself for years that the online dating business model would collapse once men figured out it was worthless as a way to meet quality women.  That it hasn’t yet is testament to the difficulty so many men have approaching women in person.  The path of least resistance explains why hot women don’t bother developing their personalities and why men will shotgun shoot hundreds of copy/paste emails to anonymous women online.

Myspace, Match, eHarmony, CL… they all suck for the elegantly simple reason that online there are too many indiscriminate horny men and too few cute girls.  The dynamics are totally in the woman’s favor, ridiculously so in that it encourages massive self-assessment inflation that will carry over into real life social interactions, guaranteeing disappointment.

The lopsided pursuer-pursued ratio on internet dating sites gives rise to some interesting phenomena that stack the deck against any guy choosing this as his primary pickup vehicle.  The biggest obstacles for men are:

1. Online dating is like a journey to the Island of Misfit Singles.  It’s no surprise that the virtual world warehouses sexual rejects who couldn’t cut it in public where their ugliness means they’re not even in the running.  BBWs, BBBWs, BBBBBBBBBBBBWs… you’ll find them all online, beached like a herd of walrus.  Carefully cropped 10-year-old head shots in favorable lighting are no substitute for the real deal.  Peruse Craigslist W4M and you can’t miss the fetid stench of the loser.
2. The internet is a huge fucking ego trip for any semi-decent looking girl.  There are a lot of plain looking girls in the 4-6 range who post online profiles for the instant ego stroking.  Usually, these are girls who have just come out of bad relationships and need a quick pick-me-up before venturing out to the cutthroat competition of the clubs and bars.  Because the nature of internet courtship shifts the perceived 1-10 female attractiveness scale 5 points upward, a 4 will feel like a 9 after getting bombarded with an inbox full of e-suitors.  A great illustration of this happened with one of my ex-girlfriends.  On our first date at a local dive bar (naturally) she got nervous when two girls sat near us and, according to her, started eye-flirting with me.  The jealousy caused by other women in her field of view helped keep her ego in check, ultimately making my job easier.  But when we broke up, she quickly hit a dating site and a week later during a breakup conversation with me gloated how “over a hundred men” had responded to her online personal within hours of its posting.  I tried to explain that most of those men were nerd losers, but the damage was already done.  Her opinion of her attractiveness skyrocketed, and she spent the next six months acting like a 10 blindly turning down dates with what she thought were unworthy men and crying lonely tears on the slumped shoulder of an emasculated beta male friend.
3. The internet masks the competition.  She wakes up the next morning to find 250 emails responding to her online profile.  She feels validated from the swarm of attention.  The problem?  In her self-absorption and the privacy of her home she does not experience the visceral impact of being one among many, despite the fact that all those guys who emailed her also emailed a thousand other women.  She has no concrete sense of her female competition online that could compare to what she would have in a bar watching men pass her over to hit on one cute girl after another.  The mindfuck of real women in her physical presence ready to pull away the attention of the man she is interested in should not be underestimated.
4. The internet frees men to follow the Law of Truly Large Numbers and hit on anything with an ASCII pulse.  There are zero repercussions to using this strategy online, as opposed to a bar or club where being seen hitting on every girl in the place in rapid fire succession lowers the chance of notch for each subsequent pickup attempt.  In public settings, men pick and choose which girls to hit on, and this has the aggregate effect of reducing the amount of male attention the average girl receives, thus helping to keep a lid on runaway female ego bloat.

Remedies to the problems of internet pickup might include requirements for embedded video of 360 degree full body posing, alerts to let the women know when guys in their queue have emailed other girls, and “virtual girl friends” that can vouch for guys to interested women.

For the eternal optimist, there are online exceptions to the bleak picture I’ve painted above:

Jdate – Insular, selective, niche market serving a group historically bonded by blood as well as cultural ties.  That is why it “works” (i.e., guys have an easier time getting laid) better than the mainstream sites.  That is also why, for example, a Catholic version will never work as successfully; Catholicism isn’t an ethnic religion and there are too many of them to maintain a cohesive online dating community.  Plus, Catholics love to rebel against their parents.  Dating outside the religion is one of the sacraments.  I have friends who use Jdate with great results.

Nonconformist chicks – Less interested in a man’s material possessions or job status, these types of girls flock to internet sites like Myspace and CL to find artists and iconoclasts.  The medium suits their filtering mechanism well; a witty email or clever profile is hard to fake.  They also tend to have low self-esteem which offsets the ego swelling effects of online exposure.

Fatties – The internet is great for banging fatties.  With 70% of American women overweight, so is everywhere else, including a cardboard box.

Married chicks – Craigslist made cheating a whole hell of a lot more convenient.

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Plowing

In the movies and in the popular imagination, persistence pays off.  The guy who chases and won’t take no for an answer eventually wins the love of the girl.  In real life, persistence is just a nice word for creepiness.  Guys who pursue women with great ardor are always losing the girl to guys who don’t answer her phone calls right away and keep her guessing.

But persistence *can* work if done right.  I used to give up on girls as soon as they hit me with roadblocks to our dating progress, resulting in a lot of first and second dates that never got to sex.  Eventually I learned that girls will bitch about at least one thing at any stage of dating up until insertion because it is their way of culling the weak men whose self-confidence cannot withstand the tumult.

A little bit of persistence is effective as long as, one, there was a spark of attraction to begin with and, two, it comes from a place of non-neediness.  If you must chase a girl, always do it with a cocky grin and the mentality that if she doesn’t get on board with your program it’s no big loss.  If she accuses you of some dating breach, turn the tables on her.  With girls, offense is the best defense.

An example of persistence succeeding occurred with a girl I dated a while back.  The day after our second date I had this phone conversation with her. 

Her:  I don’t think another date is a good idea.
Me:  Where does this come from?
Her:  I dunno, you said some things about my job that I didn’t like.

This girl was good-looking so I had no intention of letting her drop unceremoniously without a fight.  But getting apologetic wouldn’t have worked.  “I’m sorry I didn’t mean it, you took it the wrong way” would have sent her running even faster. 

Me:  Next time I’ll hold up a placard.
Her:  A placard?
Me:  Yeah, a placard announcing my jokes before I make them, like, here comes a joke!  I understand, sometimes they are missed.  This way, if I tell you about a joke beforehand there’s no risk of a cute misunderstanding.
Her:  [laugh]  Yeah, that might help.
Me:  The truth is, I love your job.  It reminds me of meadows and bunnies.

What I actually did or did not say about her job was irrelevant in my world.  I plowed through her second thoughts as if the substance of her argument was beside the point, simultaneously assuming we would meet again and belittling her grievance.  Directly engaging her complaint like a debate team nerd would’ve sounded cloyingly desperate, so I evaded and in the process forced her into my mental framework.  I only threw her a bone… “I love your job”… after I had steered the conversation in the direction of my choosing.  Had I caved to her reservations, months of fantastic sex with her and all those fond memories would never have happened.

Like seduction itself, persistence is half arrogance, half marketing.  You want to get your point across without actually saying how you feel.

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“Get off me”

To the guys:  How many times have you said this to a girl you had just met and were trying to pick up?  For most of you, probably never.  And yet pushing a girl away like this is one of the most powerful moves in the player’s arsenal.  It’s like male T&A.  As soon as you do it, the girl’s eyes will instantly light up with attraction.  Oh, sure, she’ll put on a big indignant drama-fest, but her eyes won’t lie.

Pickup artists call this tactic “push-pull”.  Naturals call it “being an asshole”.  Most men don’t fully comprehend the potency of this maneuver because it seems so counter-intuitive.  Why would physically and/or verbally turning a girl away from you make her more attracted?  Isn’t the point to bring her toward you?  The way you bring a girl toward you is by flipping the script of pursuer and pursued.

The simplest attraction switches are sometimes the hardest to trigger.  When a girl is showing a guy real interest by touching his chest or leg, hanging on his every word, and inching closer into his personal space, his instinct is to lap it up like a thirsty dog.  If she teases him with sex talk he responds with eager excitement.  Then when she has lost interest he wonders why it all went south.  For the average horny guy, it takes supreme willpower to spurn an attractive girl’s sex signals.  And yet doing this will make her hotter quicker for him than anything else he could do.

The secret is that the girl *wants* the guy to push away her advances.  Getting temporarily rejected turns her on.  She’ll never admit this or understand it in any way because the rhythms of her female desire are a mystery even to herself.  For those who want to know why the pushoff works on girls, psychologists would explain it in terms of the scarcity mentality; sociobiologists would say that a desirable man who can afford to reject individual mating opportunities at his leisure is attractive to women because his actions indirectly demonstrate that he is pre-selected by other women.

The player can mimic the sexually sated, emotionally detached alpha male with calculated pushoffs.  When he is reading her palm, for instance, he could say “OK, that’s enough” and push her hand away.  When she rests a hand on his chest after a joke, he could tell her “hey, this stuff ain’t free” and casually remove her hand from his chest.  If she sits in his lap, he says “all right, get off me” and literally pushes her off.  The trick to making this work without seeming like a mean prick is to push her off after you’ve pulled her in.  Just pushing an indifferent girl away you haven’t yet drawn in with your game won’t cause her to run into your arms.

While push-pull is more overt during the attraction phase of the pickup, it continues on a subtle note right into the later stages of the seduction.  As you progress to the point of making out, always be the first to break off the kissing.  Same for groping; break it off first.  Re-initiate after a few minutes of non-sexual chatting.  This “two steps forward, one step back” process is a potent technique for making a girl feel as horny as you do.

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Dealing with Other Guys During Pickup

When you are out in the field, many times the girl you are interested in will be in a mixed group of men and women.  I used to not even bother with approaching girls who were in the company of men, assuming that my efforts would be an exercise in futility if one of them was the boyfriend, or figuring that the guys would know what I was up to and act to block my progress.

Overthinking leads to a point where your mind hobbles your actions with worst-case scenarios, but once you break out of that mental habit and start approaching mixed sets you’ll learn that the reality is usually quite different.

Fact: Most guys in mixed sets are NOT the boyfriend.  They may be interested in their girl buddies, but that is irrelevant.

Fact: If you introduce yourself in a friendly manner to the guys first or address the group as a whole and don’t make it obvious that you are there to steal their girls, the guys will amicably open up to you.

The best way to find out if a boyfriend is present in a mixed group is to ask the question “So, how do you guys know each other?”  This line is standard operating procedure so don’t be cautious about throwing it out there.  People will be happy to tell you the answer.  Just don’t ask it right away; that makes you look like you are trying too hard to ingratiate yourself.

If your game is tight and the girls are enjoying your company, what will normally happen is that the guys will pick up on the girls’ signals and follow suit, accepting you into the group and stepping aside (or even helping you) when you begin to focus your attention on the girl you like.  Winning over the group also serves the dual purpose of raising your social value in the eyes of your target.  Holding court with a group of strangers and keeping them engaged will trigger attraction in a girl.

The guys in a mixed group will not always be neutral entities like Switzerland.  Occasionally, they will be competitors.  You must be prepared for this as well.  The important thing to know is that direct competition with other guys in the field VERY RARELY leads to belligerence.  Even less likely will a physical altercation break out, especially here in DC, land of the overeducated Herbs who fold like cheap lawn chairs in the face of real danger.

Competitors come in three main varieties:

The Boyfriend
If one of the guys is seeing the girl you want, ask them a question about their relationship, like how long they’ve known each other or how they met.  While these questions seem innocuous, they are designed to elicit an emotional flashback in the woman that will clue you in to her level of commitment to the boyfriend.  If he does all the answering and starts putting his arm around her while she looks around the room with a bland expression you can be sure she is open to testing the waters with a new man.  If she likes you, she’ll find a way to get out from under her boyfriend’s watchful eye later in the night to slip you her number.  If she answers enthusiastically, write her off.

Some players advocate gaming a girl right in front of the boyfriend as if he were a non-factor.  If you can generate attraction easily and the girl is really into you, go for it, but in my experience most of the time the boyfriend will bristle knowing what you are up to and physically insert himself between you and her, making for a very uncomfortable situation.

The Interloper
These are the guys who crash your party and join groups you have already opened.  They are usually players or natural alphas because only those types of men have the balls to enter a mixed set.  They will test your state control.  The absolute worst thing you could do would be to appear defensive.  If you clam up, or ask what their deal is, or make it obvious that you are ignoring them and focus all your attention on the girls, you will get blown out.

There are two ways to deal with an interloper.  One way is the power play.  One time I was talking to two girls in a lounge when two guys they didn’t know approached and said hi to them without acknowledging me.  One of the guys was clearly the alpha, tall and good-looking with strong posture, so I addressed my comments to him knowing that if I could get him to scuttle, the beta wingman would follow.

I turned toward him, maintained eye contact, and said “Hey, man, we were just talking about how long you would wait to come over and hit on these girls.  We could totally see it in the way you walked over that you meant business!  But she was just telling me how you may have waited a little too long and how your shirt is just a little too striped.  They are a tough crowd, I can attest.”  I look at the girls and wink.  “Girls in this city will not give a guy a break!  But, you know, you should still go for it, this one over here has a secret crush on you.”

I did not give the guys a chance to get a word in edgewise.  The verbal barrage left them staring at me befuddled about what to do next, while the girls laughed and insisted they did not have a crush on anyone.  After a second, I moved in between with my back to them and asked the girls if they would like to learn something about themselves.  They looked horny from the dominance display that had just gone down.  As the girls talked to me, the guys disappeared.

This type of balls-out tactic is high risk, high reward.  It’s not something I do often or recommend doing because sometimes you will meet your intellectual, physical, or sociopathic match and things can get out of hand fast.  You have to feel completely confident in your abilities to disarm gatecrashers.  Showing hesitation or uncertainty will embolden your foes. They have to think you are a little bit crazy and won’t mind a fight.  Which is why I prefer option two.  Engage the interlopers with a series of logical questions.  Do not give them time to game your target.  A guy’s logical brain is his worst enemy in the fluid environment of pickup where on-the-fly emotional intelligence is needed.  Ask them questions about their jobs, sports, hobbies, where they live, etc and you’ll notice that they are almost impelled to answer your questions straight.  It’s like asking a girl about her feelings — the same unstoppable mental processes are set in motion.

Logical banter will lower their value instantly.  Eventually, they will seem boring and pedestrian and this is when you switch gears to playfully undercutting them.  If they ask you questions about your life, you can say “Hey, what’s with the 21 questions? I’m not on the market guys!”  Including them in the conversation and demonstrating your social prowess at their expense with a friendly vibe without escalating the interaction to code yellow will be a big turn-on for the women.  The girls will then devote more of their attention to you and the guys will give up and leave.

The Incumbent
If you approach a group that already has a guy in it working the magic with the girls (as opposed to guys they came with), then you are dealing with an incumbent.  Since most incumbents are average guys with no game trying to impress the girls with drinks or manufacture a connection with boring interviewer questions, it is a simple matter to subvert them.

When he is out of earshot, ask the girls how they know the guy and they will usually say “Oh, we just met him tonight.  He bought us drinks.”  Once armed with this information, you can segue into an incumbent-unseating routine: “Oh I bet you really like him if you let him buy you drinks.  You know, come to think of it, you two almost look alike.  Jeez, you’d make the perfect couple!”  She will, of course, protest, and in the act of verbalizing her protests negative feelings will get anchored to him.

If the guy is part of the conversational flow, just like with the interloper pepper him with logical questions.  Once you’ve become part of the group dynamic, steer it in the direction you want.  If you and he are gaming the same girl, call him out on his motives:

“Hey man, how’s the pickup going?  Are these girls friendly or are they giving you the bitch shield?  I need to know so I can adjust accordingly.”  This will slightly embarrass him into denying that he was trying to game the girls. Once that happens it’s game, set, match in your favor.

If he’s interested in a different girl, then let the conversation progress naturally until he is acting like a de facto wingman and the two of you are gaming your own targets.

Very occasionally, you will run across an incumbent who is a seasoned veteran of the field.  Real players who know their stuff will not fall for the traps I’ve outlined above.  They will banter right back with you until a point is reached where the two of you are in your own world playing out a high drama of verbal volley and counter-volley.  While this is entertaining for the girls, it will not move you closer to sealing the deal.  It’s best to tip your hat to a worthy opponent and recruit him as a wingman.

If you can master opening mixed sets then those times where you are approaching girls-only sets will seem like a breeze.

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Bailing on Dates

I don’t use tricks during dates like having my cell phone ring with an “emergency” call, saying I’m going to the bathroom and then escaping through the window, or telling my date “I think I’m falling in love with you” to give me an out in case it’s not going well.  It’s incompatible with being a man who doesn’t make excuses for his actions.  If a date is bombing I smile warmly and simply tell her “It was a pleasure meeting you.  Good luck with everything.”  No need to wait around hoping for sexual attraction to magically appear.  Walking off like this can even make a girl suddenly hot for you.  Don’t be surprised if you get a conciliatory call from her the next day.

Dating a lot of women gives you a sixth sense to know within minutes whether the girl is connecting with you.  If she’s not, cut the cord — time saved is time earned toward gaming new women.  I once walked away from a bad date and number closed another woman on the walk home.  There is no worse thing a man can do than to continue buying drinks and yapping for hours with a girl who is not warming up to him physically.

When a date is going particularly badly, or the girl is someone of especially poor character, I’ll get a dig in before walking off.  It’s petty, true, but it gives me pleasure to inflict cruelty on a deserving victim.  On a first date with a Desi girl she talked (unprompted) non-stop about her Indian ex-boyfriend and how her father didn’t like him and how he was overly ambitious in his career and yada yada.  After she finally came up for air I asked her a series of seemingly innocent questions about her values and her past relationships.  I then began to psychologically deconstruct her, picking apart her psyche and painting a picture of her personality.  I leaned back and waited for her reaction.  Offended, she snapped “I really don’t like you drawing conclusions about me.”
Pay dirt.
“But you make it so easy.”

Since single girls, like guys, act to hide their personality flaws when out on the town looking to hook up, and since it is hard to discern all of a person’s unsavory traits in fifteen minutes over gin and tonics in a dark lounge, I always try to insta-date the first night I meet a girl.  Bouncing with her from the club to the bar down the street to the pizza place or pool hall gives me a better opportunity to learn about her without putting in the extra effort to arrange a future date at a specified location.  This ultimately saves time and feels more natural.  Plus, same night multiple venue changing operates on the principle of time distortion, where you two feel like you’ve shared more time together getting to know each other in different environments than you actually have.

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