Confessions of a Pickup Artist pt. 1: The Good Stuff

8 things the late 2000s pickup artists were right about

The Confessions of a Pickup Artist series:

• Pt. 1: The Good Stuff

• Pt. 2: The Mystery Machine

• Pt. 3: The Bad Stuff

• Pt. 4: The Paradise Lost

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As I mentioned in my intro post, in my early 20s I learned about the pickup artists, or PUAs: an underground community of men trying to get better with women. I decided to give it a go, and this decision changed my life.

The online discourse about the seduction community is extremely polarized, with the mainstream negative coverage of feminists and disillusioned incels who tried and failed, and the obviously positive message coming from pseudonymous seduction gurus.

I believe this discussion lacks more balanced voices of active or past regular members of this community. This is why I decided to come forward with my story.

Another reason for this essay is that I see that the ways of the pickup artists are slowly fading into oblivion. The modern seduction community was started in early 90’s, then hit mainstream in 2005 as Neil Strauss’ book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists became a worldwide bestseller. I was an active member in 2009-2010, possibly close to it’s peak. According to Red Quest, fellow Substacker who writes about seduction and non-monogamy, in the following years the community steadily declined and today it remains a shadow of its former self.

Recently we have also seen emergence of the Redpill ideology on social media. While the red pill analogy of accepting the bitter truth about relationships and learning and adapting to win is the core of both pickup artistry and Redpill ideology, there are also some substantial differences (planning to cover them in another post). Most of the Redpill stuff I have seen is a corrupt, clickbait version of some parts of the seduction community body of knowledge, repackaged to cater to the mass audience of male social media users.

The indie original is better than the mainstream reboot - I believe it’s valuable to preserve what the seduction community came up with and pass it on, so the future generations of troubled young men won’t have to reinvent the wheel or reverse engineer it from the Redpill stuff.

I decided to start with the good stuff: the things that, in my opinion, the pickup artists were right about: the concepts that helped me stop being an incel and ultimately build and maintain my relationship, with some of them still relevant after many years.

If this post gets any traction, I will follow up with posts about the bad stuff: the things the pickup artists were wrong about, and about the inner workings of the seduction community: a marvelous social machine that enabled and sustained self-improvement and social skills development of pickup artists.

Without further ado, let’s get on with the good stuff:

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1. Getting good with women is a top priority

Traditionally, a young man was was supposed to focus on two main objectives in his early adulthood:

1. Finish education, get a job, build a career.

2. Find the best available woman, enter a relationship and marry her.

The sexual revolution and dating apps have made casual sex more available, but sooner or later most men eventually settle down in a long term relationship.

#1 determines the trajectory of man’s socioeconomic status, while #2 is about finding someone who will live together with him possibly for the rest of their life and will become the mother of his children. Both are extremely important as foundations for a happy and successful life in middle age and later.

It seems that putting serious effort to achieve #1 is pretty obvious for most, but for #2… not really. Mainstream romance feeds us stories about perfect relationships “just happening” randomly, seemingly without any effort from either side. Singles are gaslighted by culture and friends that they are “good enough” and sooner or later they will just somehow find someone - a relationship is waiting to “just happen” to them just around the corner.

And for some, this is actually true. Many of my high school friends effortlessly entered relationships with girls from their closest social circle. For some, if not most of them, these relationships stood the test of time and they are still married now.

However, this is where I should mention that I didn’t go to a normal high school - it was one of the top high schools in my city¹. Attending a top high school was typically correlated with a stable middle to upper-middle class family background and above average intellectual, cultural and social capital (determining if these correlations are causations is left as an exercise to the reader). This also meant that their relationship capability was above average. Therefore, the odds of success of a relationship between two people from this group were also above average, even if matched somewhat randomly and with no discernible effort from either side.

Sadly, none of this works if you are a socially awkward nerd - you are below the social threshold that allows the spontaneous relationship reactions to happen. Many of my friends didn’t understand it, and some even tried to gaslight me into believing that all I need to do is stop whining and just wait until a relationship spontaneously happens to me, as it had happened to them.

Entering the seduction community made me realize that my high school gaslighters couldn’t be more wrong. The pickup artists acknowledged that inceldom is bad, sex and relationships lead to happiness and fulfillment and all of this is just really, really important, and should become one of my main objectives in my early adulthood.

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2. Casual sex is real

For those of you who experienced hookup culture, the above is obvious. However, for those raised in conservative societies, casual sex can be something of an urban legend, a moral panic or a Yeti - everyone heard of it, but no one saw.

Another consequence of attending a top high school full of above-average people is that apparently they were more conservative than average. When it came to sex and relationships, the only two acceptable options would be to be single or be in a long term relationship. I have never heard even a single story or a rumor about casual sex happening at a party or two people hooking up outside of a committed relationship in high school.

In her essay about young female depression, Tove from Wood From Eden briefly described the hookup culture of Swedish teenagers in early 2000s - lots of casual sex, free condoms in schools and getting an abortion considered “the normal thing to do”. My high school in late 2000s in Poland seemed like an exact opposite of that.

It’s possible that some casual sex happened in my above-average high school, but I didn’t hear anything about it since I hung out too much with nerds and too little with normies. Nevertheless, as I brought up the topic of casual sex with my high school friends, they thought I was a lunatic and, as mentioned above, tried to convince me to calm down and quietly wait for a relationship to happen to me like a normal person would.

Most of the guys I met in the seduction community didn’t attend top schools. They knew that casual sex was real and understood my desire for it is not something I should be ashamed of. Unlike my high school friends, they didn’t consider it something abstract or only for low status degenerates.

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3. Self-improvement is a necessity

Most undergrad students (myself included) at the time seemingly adopted a philosophy of responsible hedonism: first, pass exams and graduate, second, have fun. Hardly anyone seem to consciously engage in any self-improvement in their early 20s - most of those who eventually did started in late 20s as they entered the corporate workforce and LinkedIn culture.

One common problem with self-improvement I noticed is when it is also treated as an ideology on it’s own - that it’s purpose is improvement itself, or “happiness”, “self-actualization” or other bullshit. The truth, as evidenced by evolutionary psychology, is that we are apes that are mostly motivated by sex and status. And so, I believe that self-improvement is most effective when used as a tool to support achieving life objectives related to status (i.e. LinkedIn corporate class) and sex (pickup artists).

The seduction community promoted a pragmatic self-improvement strategy of “being the best version of yourself” - improving the things you can realistically change while accepting the ones where change is hard or impossible. Pickup artists focused on short- and mid-term improvements (i.e. appearance, clothing, fitness, psychology, philosophy, social skills) and disavowed the impact of factors where improvement would be impossible, long-term or very expensive (i.e. height, social status).

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4. Touch communicates sexual interest and keeps you out of friendzone.

I remember that in my adolescence, girls would often talk about boys being ‘perverts’ or ‘molesting’ them. Part of that was probably playful teasing and a normal part of teenagers’ psychosexual development, but at the time, I was too autistic to realize that and I took it very seriously. Talking to a girl I liked, the last thing I wanted was for her to consider me a ‘pervert’ who ‘molests’ her. So, to stay safe, I avoided touching her.

I think this was further exacerbated by the impact of mainstream culture. Romance stories are most exciting when the characters are socially or culturally restrained from getting together, which allows intense sexual tension to gradually build up. Eventually the tension becomes unbearable, all restraints fall off and the characters end up kissing passionately or having sex. Think of countless variations of the Romeo and Juliet story. Watching these stories unfold numerous times can imprint them as a subconscious blueprint of a perfect romantic relationship that will be later pursued in real life.

On the other hand, there is a familiar trope in teenage comedy movies: a nerdy kid goes out with his secret crush, at some point he believes that they are having a moment, closes his eyes and goes in for the kiss, only to find out that the girl had friendzoned him long time ago and she didn’t have the slightest idea that this was a date - a bitter and embarrassing experience for both parties involved. I just never ever wanted to be that guy.

Obviously I understood that the touching, the kissing and the sexing is something that happens in relationships, but I had no idea how to get there. Subconsciously, I probably believed that it is just something that “happens” on its own, much like the rest of the relationship and whenever a right moment comes, I will somehow know what to do.

As it turned out, I never did. Having reassessed my teenage romantic attempts after getting some actual experience with women in early adulthood, I realized that in fact I had had a few intense emotional moments with girls I liked where I could have tried to kiss her and it would have probably worked, but at the time, the idea didn’t even cross my mind.

The seduction community introduced me to the concept of touch escalation. I learned that:

• It is OK to be sexually interested in a woman and communicate it with touch, especially if the interaction is happening in a ‘sexy’ social setting (i.e. approaching a woman in a bar or nightclub or on a date) and she had already indicated some basic level of interest.

• Not communicating sexual interest with touch is what gets men friendzoned.

• The man is responsible for initiating and escalating the touch - typically women will not initiate nor escalate, and it will also not “just happen” by itself.

• Escalating step by step is the easiest and safest way to go. Withholding escalation to build up tension and release it with a bold move like kissing in the style of romance stories is a more advanced seduction technique and can backfire if not done correctly, just like it did for the nerdy kid from the teenage comedy movie in the example above.

• It’s OK to experiment with escalation if you are inexperienced, provided you proceed step by step. In most circumstances, going just one step too far won’t cause the lady to slap you in the face, walk out on you or get you charged with sexual assault - it is the lack of escalation and then going many steps to far that possibly could (again - the nerdy kid example).

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5. Emotions are key

Part of the discourse about modern crisis of masculinity is that, mostly according to women, men should be more emotional. The pickup artists understood that seduction is a deeply emotional process. As a result, the discussion and analysis of the seduction process was often focused on the emotions of men and women involved.

On a psychoanalytical level, this is integrating with your anima, as nicely described by Walt Bismarck:

The psychological framework of Carl Jung asserts that every man has an anima, or “inner woman”, that exists in his mind at an unconscious level. Your anima is effectively the feminine part of your personality.

A lot of times when you fall in love with a woman, especially as a young man, you are in fact projecting your anima onto her. You are falling in love with the feminine side of your own personality, and hoping the IRL girl will actualize that part of you.

(…)

A major goal in Jungian analysis is working to “integrate” your anima into conscious thought, both so you are more aware of her wants and needs and so you can separate her from the women you date and hook up with.

(…)

I suspect the average conservative chud is mostly cut off from his anima and would instinctively associate the whole venture with trans ideology or gay stuff. That is extremely dumb, as anima integration is most practically useful for enjoying women more as a heterosexual man. If you don’t integrate your anima you’re basically just masturbating with her pussy.

Pickup artists learned to be aware and analyze emotions experienced both by them and the woman they were with. They also applied psychology to control their own emotional state as well as try to induce desired emotions in the woman, to make her feel both sexy and comfortable.

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6. Cold approach is the sex and dating superpower for men

The brief post from Red Quest linked above explains it pretty well, I will just add my 3 cents here.

The normie seduction method is based on asking out women you already know. How many women are available this way? This depends on the size of one’s social circle, but for a very rough estimation, let’s use 2/3 of the Dunbar’s number of 150 to get a nice round estimate of 100.

Mastering cold approach - approaching female strangers to get their number or ask out on a date - makes it theoretically possible to approach any woman in your local area. Living in a big city of 1,000,000², with around 10% of them being young women allows cold approaching 100,000 young women - 1000x more than the estimate of women available within the social circle.

Even with bigger margin of errors for both estimates, cold approach provides a massive advantage, no matter whether one prioritizes quality or quantity.

Another problem with normie style seduction within the social circle is that the word about rejection or other seduction failure can quickly spread via gossip and undermine the man’s status within the group. The man needs to play it safe and avoid risky bold moves, which is not the most effective strategy, especially with casual sex in mind. This is especially true today, in post-#MeToo world, when dating coworkers or other professionally related women with a possible conflict of interest.

Also, for inexperienced men, all moves may seem risky and bold, and the need to play it safe may prevent them from any action or escalation, cementing their incel status. This is sort of what I experienced, sometimes slacking for weeks or months before either making a move with my secret crush or eventually not making one at all. None of this is a problem with cold approach, as typically there is no shared social circle to begin with.

Modern dating apps provide some benefits of the cold approach. However, these benefits are fully available only to a subset of men - tall / good looking / high status. Walt Bismarck’s take is that is that the incels in the bottom 15% shouldn’t be helped for eugenic reasons, however the 15%-30% men who are mostly ok, but just not fit for Tinder deserve some help, since incel rate approaching 30% is not good for the society. I am not as harsh as Walt in terms of eugenics, and I believe that learning cold approach might work better than dating apps for both aforementioned groups.

The advantages of cold approach are not obvious to everyone, because society developed social norms against it, for a reason - a society where all men could cold approach would be unbearable for attractive women, who would be approached all the time. However, pickup artists realized that in fact, the only social penalties for cold approach are:

• Higher risk of rejection (as opposed to a hypothetical society that permits cold approach) - a logical fallacy: the odds of success for a cold approach are always above zero, even if some women are more likely to reject a cold approacher just because he violates the social norm, but the odds of success for not approaching are always zero.

• Inability to openly talk about cold approaching with normies - resolved by creating an underground seduction community.

Having both social penalty issues resolved, the cold-approaching pickup artists became freeriders or pirates, exploiting the vunerabilities of the system at no cost.

7. Standards are necessary

Back in the day, I often wondered what kind of men date and marry ugly women. However, as my incel years passed by, I started to fear that someday, a relationship with an ugly woman might be about to “happen to me”, and I would face a conundrum: accept the fact that I don’t deserve to be in a relationship with an attractive woman and seize the opportunity, or reject it, prolonging my inceldom, possibly to end up forever alone?

The seduction community used the popular 10 point scale of women’s attractiveness. While some seduction gurus advocated pickiness and approaching only 8s or 9s and up, a broad consensus was that 6s and up are Hot Babes, or HBs, that are ok to approach and seduce.

While attractiveness is mostly subjective (“one man’s 6 is another man’s 8”), I think the threshold rating of 6 usually meant that the man considers the woman “good enough” - nothing repulsive in terms of appearance and nothing to be ashamed of if both were seen together or known to be in a relationship.

Normie men sometimes have different standards for relationships and casual sex, as seen in the hot crazy matrix meme:

The seduction community recognized that this is cynical and cruel for the women involved. For them, maintaining one standard was important, because when approaching women, you never know how your relationship will eventually turn out. Sex does weird things to people: it builds emotional connection and makes them infatuated with each other over time. Sometimes it also makes them pregnant (contraception is not 100% effective) which may lead the man to either a shotgun wedding or at least seeing her every week for the next 20 years to pick up his kid. Either way, it’s safe to assume that any approach could result in a long term relationship or marriage and choose accordingly.

Approach standards are another reason why mass adoption of the pickup artist strategy would be unsustainable for the society: it would leave all below-average women single and childless and exacerbate the already severe fertility crisis in WEIRD countries. On the other hand, it could possibly induce a virtuous cycle of improvement: I believe that most below-average women are capable of bumping themselves up to 6 or above with diet, exercise, clothing and makeup. I think this is sort of already happening in poor and middle income countries with more patriarchy and hypergamy and less family clan culture and arranged marriage tradition, such as former Soviet Union, southern Europe and Latin America (Stella Tsantekidou described how this is happening in Greece) - women are more attractive where men are more selective.

8. Logistics are the man’s responsibility

Logistics was the seduction community’s term for managing the location of the seduction process: arranging and planning dates and moving to a private space such as his or her place to have sex.

Similar to touch escalation, the pickup artists recognized that the man is responsible for logistics: most often the woman will not take care about it, nor will it “happen” on its own.

It seems like at least some normies struggle in this area. From what I heard from my wife, the guys she dated before me would often arrive at the spot and then have her decide where to go or ask her what she would like to do, which sometimes turned into a long discussion, or employed the strategy of “dating by walking around”. To this day, she still tells people who ask how we met how astonished she was on our first date, when I just grabbed her hand and led her to the bar I planned to take her to.

All of this is also works in relationships

Most of the advice provided by the seduction community focuses on approaching, pickup, dating and sex. There is little specific advice on how to build long term relationships, which leads some to a false conviction that the pickup artists are only interested in casual sex.

This is because pickup artists believed that sex and emotions are a foundation of a long term relationship. In a way, a relationship is basically seducing the same woman over and over again.

Of course, there is more to relationships than emotions and sex, but once a proper foundation is laid, building the relationship upon it by getting to know each other better and slowly merging both lives together becomes the easy part. Also, maintaining the foundation over time is necessary - if not maintained properly, it will rot and crumble, and eventually the whole thing meticulously built upon it will come crashing down.

Many of the relationship issues that people commonly struggle with can be mitigated by just choosing a proper, sane and emotionally mature partner. Self-improvement and seduction allows to become very selective when choosing a long term partner. For a pickup artist, casual sex becomes a realistic option, which turns out better from a relationship with a mediocre partner, but worse from a relationship with someone amazing.

Here is how the above concepts helped me over the years in my relationship:

1. Getting good with women - In a relationship, this changes to getting good with THE woman you’re with. This means some tailoring to her preferences and desires, but not much, as there is a big list of things that all women want from their partner: be confident, don’t be socially awkward, be fit and exercise, dress well, don’t be lazy, don’t be mean or disrespectful, and so on.
   One common reason for marriage struggles and divorces is that over time, men are slacking - being an attractive partner and a good husband is no longer a priority, as career, kids and sometimes even hobbies and buddies become more important. The lesson is that being an attractive man and a good partner should always remain a top priority.
   Some would argue that prioritizing attractiveness while in a relationship leads to infidelity. I believe it is actually the other way around: attractiveness is what enables true fidelity, which can be defined as continuously choosing staying with your partner over other options. An unattractive man has no other options, and him staying in his relationship just because he has no choice other than living alone is not fidelity - it’s just unattractiveness.

2. Casual sex - Having had casual sex before marriage makes the man more immune to the regrets of the midlife crisis and reduces the risk of cheating and divorce. Nowadays, the trend of increased acceptance of non-monogamy in progressive social circles makes casual sex available for some of those living in committed relationships. For those willing to go down that road, prior casual sex experience can be helpful.

3. Self-improvement - A common theme in stag parties are gifts with a “GAME OVER” label. For some men, this is how their marital slacking begins. I’ve been married for almost 10 years, and I know that for me, the game is far from over - I continue to abide by the rules of self-improvement and strive to be “the best version of myself”, motivated by being an attractive man and a good husband still as one of my top priorities.

4. Touch - Touch escalation is a basic, natural way of seduction leading to sex that works especially well for seasoned couples - both are comfortable with the process, having done it already many times before.
   One common way of relationship degradation is when touch becomes absent and sex becomes transactional. In worst case, touching can become repulsive which results in a dead bedroom situation, as discussed by psychologist Orion Taraban here:

   Making touch escalation a man’s responsibility and priority is the way to maintain a healthy sex life in the relationship.

5. Emotions - Being aware of one’s emotions and expressing them freely as well as paying attention to the partner’s emotions is part of emotional intelligence. While this is a key part of effective seduction process, it’s even more critical in relationships, where you also need to learn how to manage difficult emotions in a wide range of non-sexual circumstances.

6. Cold approach - This one actually doesn’t help much while in a relationship. However, as noted above, cold approach allows finding a better relationship partner, which reduces or eliminates many common relationship problems that many normie relationships are struggling with. Aside from relationships, cold approach experience is helpful in career settings such as business meetings and networking events.

7. Standards - I mentioned above that husband’s slacking is one common reason for relationship deterioration. But the wives are slacking too. In the context of relationships, standards apply not only to appearance but to behavior as well. Having clear standards for both and communicating your feedback to your partner allows them to understand and improve, or negotiate solutions acceptable for both sides of the relationship.

8. Logistics - Dating and sex becomes trivial for cohabiting childless couples - they can do both whenever they want. However, things become more complicated once children come into play - each parent knows the difficulties of setting aside time for sex or childless dates. Again, here is where I believe the man needs to step in and manage accordingly.

At this point, you may notice a common theme in the helpful stuff the seduction community came up with: responsibility. What the pickup artists are effectively telling men is:

• The society is not responsible for your inceldom - You are.

• Your genes, family background and past circumstances are not responsible for your unattractiveness and social awkwardness - You are.

• Your social circle is not responsible for providing you women to date with - You are.

• The woman is not responsible for organizing dates, escalation, sex and maintaining the relationship - You are.

YOU are responsible.

As you can see, I learned a lot from the seduction community. However, the challenge in learning all of this included separating it from the stuff that sounded smart and plausible, but eventually turned out to be stupid, toxic and counterproductive.

Continue reading: Confessions of a Pickup Artist pt. 2: The Mystery Machine

1. In Poland, there are no ‘elite private high schools’, top high schools are public and admit students based on middle school exam results and grades, with bonus points for extra achievements. There is no way to game the system - top students attend top schools.

2. With that in mind, cold approach pickup is not the best strategy for men living in tight-knit rural communities.