Confessions of a Pickup Artist, pt. 3: The Bad Stuff
6 things the late 2000s pickup artists were really wrong about
The Confessions of a Pickup Artist series:
Pt. 3: The Bad Stuff
In my first post in this series I described 8 things the Pickup Artists were right about:
I followed up with a post about the problems the most popular seduction style, the Mystery Method:
Unfortunately, the seduction community came up with even more bad and weird ideas. Let’s review them one by one:
1. NLP seduction
NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, is a pseudo-scientific manipulation technique developed in the 70’s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. NLP was the base of Ross Jeffries’ Speed Seduction method created in early 90’s. NLP seduction techniques were supposed to induce desired emotional states such as attraction, comfort, excitement and arousal using language, gesture and touch, effectively giving the NLP pickup artist some level of control over the woman’s emotions.
As with all pseudoscience, I was initially very skeptical about NLP: I considered it a scam and didn’t believe any of this could ever work. However, one day a fellow pickup artist proved me wrong: he told me a series of jokes, touching my arm every time I chuckled. Then, he touched my arm without saying anything funny, and it triggered a reflex: I chuckled instantly. I could not control it. I was terrified.
Even knowing that NLP can be somewhat effective, I still didn’t consider it a valid seduction method. I never met any decently successful pickup artist who based his game primarily on NLP. Also, I considered any effective usage of such techniques for seduction morally wrong; even more Machiavellian and psychopathic than the Mystery Method, and found it suitable only for the darkest of the Dark Triad personality types.
2. Direct approach in day game
By the time I joined the seduction community in 2009, the issues with the Mystery Method (see previous part) and NLP (see above) have become very apparent. At the time, the attitudes towards both Mystery Method and NLP among the community ranged from full rejection to acknowledgement of select features and techniques and combining them with other methods.
Skepticism towards Mystery Method and NLP gave way to all types of direct seduction approaches, ranging from verbal approaches in the lines of “I think you look cute”, “I like your energy” and such, to more aggressive sensual seduction styles leveraging the magic of the night club dancefloor.
The premise of direct approach was pretty appealing to young guys from various regions of the autism spectrum - there was no ‘game’, no tricks, no gimmicks, just straight brutal honesty, apparently showing confidence. The defenders of the indirect approach pointed at increased risk of initial rejection - the direct guys just called them pussies, and said that they would much rather be quickly rejected and move on, than waste precious time only to eventually find out that she was never interested anyway.
For me, direct approaches were sort of effective in night game (considering all other factors that came into play) - when a guy approaches a girl in a nightclub, what he’s up to is blatantly obvious for everyone around, so it’s just better to play along. Creating a convincing impression of not being interested as part of an indirect approach in such scenery requires advanced acting skills and jumping through hoops (see: the Mystery Method).
However, with my direct approaches in day game, I was getting rejected almost every single time. Out of dozens of attempts, I only ever got one date as a result of a direct day game approach.
Tove from Wood From Eden notes:
In Western societies there is a strong, invisible norm that flirtation should be done in the evening. Like if evenings and nights are “sexy time”, as Borat says in his eponymous film. In the Muslim world (the limit line is at the Bosporus, in my experience) there is no important difference - all time is sexy time there. But in Europe, most men restrain themselves during daytime.
In Western countries, a day game approach violates a strong social norm. Sometimes, a rejection is not personal but an automated response driven by social conformity (women are the guardians of social norms, very few of them are nonconformists).
An indirect approach solves that problem by making it seem like it’s not a seduction approach at all. However, for me it seemed as fake and scripted and manipulative as the Mystery Method, hence I dismissed the concept and never really tried to learn it.
What I failed to understand back then was the intricate way of how an indirect day game approach would actually work. I only understand it now, having recently learned more about evolutionary psychology and human nature.
A proper indirect day game approach is not fake and scripted. It’s Kayfabe, like professional wrestling: it creates a dual reality where things are both fake and real at the same time (see Abishek’s Kayfabe post below if you would like to learn more about this concept).
On verbal level, a guy is asking for advice or directions or something else. This allows him to bypass the girl’s social norm violation detector. But on non-verbal level, he communicates his interest via voice tone and body language, which allows the chemistry to kick in and the seduction process to commence.
The famous bookstore scene from the 40 Year Old Virgin is an exaggerated depiction of how all of this can possibly play out:
For young, socially deficit and possibly slightly autistic guys it’s just really hard to wrap their heads around this kind of stuff. They like to see the world as black and white and love simple, honest and straightforward solutions. But as Red Quest often writes, girls live in the land of “maybe” - they love ambiguity and thrive on complex and contradictory emotions in the seduction phase - “He loves me, he loves me not?…”.
The Kayfabe aspect of indirect approach caters to both female nature described by evolutionary psychology, and nurtured fantasies they get from romance novels and meet cute romantic comedies. Walt Bismarck also has a great description of how female communication looks like, and the indirect approach fits well within this framework.
Within the seduction community, I often heard that an indirect approach is easier than a direct one. What I realized was that most guys saying that were pussies with approach anxiety, too scared for direct approaches, that just leveraged the indirect approach’s lower risk of initial rejection to be able to approach at all. They managed to approach and talk to girls, but usually didn’t get anywhere seduction-wise - nevertheless, they insisted that they were “just having fun”, “practicing”, “not putting pressure on themselves” or somehow progressing otherwise.
In my experience, in terms of real seduction outcomes, direct night game approaches are the easy way, while proper indirect day game is next level stuff I eventually never got to learn and master before my game was over. So my advice is not to dismiss indirect daygame as either Mystery-level fake, or something that makes guys mentioned above stuck while not getting anywhere - I believe it can be much more than that.
3. Pickup is a skill / “All game is inner game”
Two above statements are contradicting views shared by different factions of the seduction community. Both are true to some extent, which means that each of them is false when considered on it’s own.
Joe Elvin from the Good Men Project notes how pickup is the only skill that men are supposed to have naturally, and are shamed for trying to improve it with methods typically used to learn any other kinds of skills, like books, courses, practice, mentoring etc.
Joe has a few hypotheses, but I believe the true reason for that is that women would like to be able to accurately determine a man’s true, objective mate value when deciding whether to date or have sex with him. Man’s “pickup skills” are seen as a distortion which obscures the view and prevents the woman from correctly seeing and evaluating his “true self”.
The female equivalent of above is stuff like makeup and push up bras. While the frustrated subcultures like radical feminists and incels hate both makeup and pickup and consider them fake and bad, pickup artists endorse both as valid ways to make the dating and mating experience more enjoyable for the other side.
That being said, the “All game is inner game” camp accurately points that both experienced pickup artists and natural players operate on the level of unconscious competence - they apply no conscious “skills” or “techniques” in their process and that is the ideal every pickup adept should be striving for.
I am more in the “inner game” camp, however I also know that sometimes you have to “fake it, till you make it”. Once you move past unconscious incompetence and become consciously incompetent, there is no shortcut to unconscious competence: you have to take the hard way, via conscious competence:
Also, some behaviors work regardless of whether done naturally by a confident, experienced man or as a conscious use of technique or skill. Two basic pickup techniques (as far as I remember, also parts of the Mystery Method) are good examples of that:
The 3 second rule - once notice an attractive woman, you have to physically force yourself to approach her within next 3 seconds. If not, 1. approach anxiety will build up and make it harder to eventually approach and 2. staring at a woman for more than 3 seconds may be seen as creepy and will reduce the odds of success if the approach eventually happens.
An experienced player has no approach anxiety and will just approach instantly whenever he sees a nice girl. A newbie who forces himself to approach with this technique will gain the same benefits.The 3 day rule - if you get a girl’s number, don’t call or text right away, wait at least 3 days.
A high status man usually has a lot on his plate: other girls, friends, work, hobbies. Calling a girl he just met will be far from the top of his priority list. But for an ordinary guy, getting a girl’s number might be the highlight of their week, month or year. If he decides to wait a bit before calling her, the girl won’t know if he did it because he’s a high status man, or a pickup artist, but if she’s not aware of this technique, she is more likely to assume the former.
4. Women need sexual liberation
It is often said that the methods of the seduction community are based on evolutionary psychology. While some of them are, what I saw as the pickup artist model of female sexuality was something I now consider a bizarre variation of a Freudian repressed sexuality model. It went something like this:
Women, like men, have sexual needs (true!), therefore (false implication!) women’s true sexual needs are very similar to that of men, and deep down inside, they would like to have (casual) sex as much as men do (false!). The only thing that stops them from having it are the social norms of chastity, purity and modesty. The pickup artist can therefore become a liberator who frees the woman from the shackles of social conformity and brings her the sexual freedom she has always desired.
I have heard variations of this theory numerous times, and at some point quite possibly believed it myself. The community would often discuss the Madonna-Whore complex and consider it an overarching social norm. Some even suggested simply discussing the Madonna-Whore complex with the girl, while noting that you are not one of those horrible, slut-shaming ordinary men, so if by any chance you do end up having sex quickly, you could still consider her a viable long term partner after the fact.
The above model might be related to another false manosphere belief - the Pareto, or 80-20 rule: “80% women sleep with 20% men”. With that assumption, it is reasonable to build a model that should work with the vast majority (the 80%) of women, in order to convince them that you are one of the 20% men worth sleeping with.
However, the 80-20 rule has been debunked by research - see the meta-analysis from Alexander from Date Psychology:
Moreover, it is now obvious to me that this model lacks the key difference between male and female sexuality, backed up by both evolutionary psychology and common sense: sex is FAR more risky for a woman because 1. she can get pregnant and 2. there is always a non-zero chance that the man will not stop when she says “No!” and will physically force her into something she doesn’t want.
There might be a very small group of high libido, risk-taking women who also feel sexually repressed by the conservative norms of their society that would be accurately described by the above pickup artist sexuality model. But for the vast majority of women, a model corrected for the natural female risk aversion would look like this:
Women have sexual needs, but they need to avoid risk, so they don’t want casual sex, they just want to sleep with long term partners. This is also what the society is telling them to do, so it’s all good. They don’t need the pickup artists to liberate them from anything.
That being said, there is another small group of women for which the pickup artists actually can step in as sexual liberators: the liberal, promiscuous girls. The (in)famous Aella writes about pickup artists:
I really wanted to have sex, but often had this stupid gatekeeper thing in my brain that would shut down and prevent me from getting sex. Teaching men to do a magical series of moves that would manage to circumvent my gatekeeper and help get me laid was a wonderful thing, and I advised my male friends to try it.
Pickup artists can liberate these women - just not from the social norms (which already favor casual sex within their subculture), but from their risk-averse nature, resulting from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
The public often considers the methods of the pickup artists as something that only works with liberal promiscuous girls, and I believe that this just is one of those things.
5. Adult women are fully mature sexually
Orion Taraban, a redpill psychologist from the Psyhacks Youtube channel often says that:
In today’s sexual marketplace, sex predates commitment.
This can be true, but only for a subset of women who have reached full sexual maturity, which can be defined as readiness to have sex outside of a committed relationship - either casual sex, or sex as part of “3 date rule” or otherwise leading towards a committed relationship, which doesn’t exist yet at the time.
In contrast, we can define partial sexual maturity as a state where a girl is ready to have sex only if it happens within a committed relationship, which means that first, a sexless, yet emotionally committed relationship is formed, then sex eventually ensues.
The latter model represents an ideal teenage sexual relationship scenario - both parents and psychologists agree that this, rather than casual sex, is an optimal way of teenage sexual initiation.
The problem with above is that there is a huge variation in female sexual experiences and the age when women reach both partial and full sexual maturity. Some may reach both within they teenage years, but others may reach partial maturity in their 20’s, an quite possibly never reach full maturity (they may never need to, if they manage to marry her first and only relationship partner).
The pickup artists’ model rejected the notion of a teenage-style sexless relationship and assumed that all adult women are fully mature sexually and should be open to have sex outside of a committed relationship with the right man.
This corresponds to the reality of seduction gurus - men in late 20’s/early 30’s, with years of field experience and triple digit body counts - as well as the group they primarily targeted their content and services for - men in late 20’s, who could afford seduction bootcamps and coaching.
However, as I mentioned above, it seemed to me like the bulk of the seduction community were guys in their early 20’s, and the girls that these guys were approaching were either still actual teenagers, or early 20’s girls, many of which still in the “teenage sexless relationship” state of mind and not fully mature sexually. These girls were easily turned off by the pickup artists’ rapid sexual escalation and were really looking out for a guy that would “take it slow”.
Redpillers like Orion Taraban promote a transactional approach to relationships. Within that framework, the explanation of above would be that girls aged 18-20 are in highest demand, and can still find many men interested in entering a relationship within their preferred model - a teenage style sexless relationship in which men provide commitment upfront and wait for sex to eventually happen. While there might be some truth to it, I believe that most girls are not that cynical, and that reaching sexual maturity is just a matter of time and experience in the sexual marketplace.
Assuming all adult women are fully sexually mature and ready for sex outside of a committed relationship can be a useful filter for more mature players, but it should come with a caveat that it may also result in more rejections for younger guys whose primary target are younger girls. The pickup content was not best solution to the “How to get a teenage girlfriend?” problem most young guys actually had, but unfortunately, there seemed to be no viable alternative out there.
6. Relationships are not sacred
The institution of marriage - a sacred, unbreakable, monogamous relationship between man and woman - has existed in all cultures, from hunter-gatherers to modern western society. In the latter, an informal monogamous long-term relationship shares some characteristics of marriage.
The sanctity of marriage results in social norms protecting the institution - while married people should not cheat or divorce their spouses, single people are also discouraged from sleeping with married people or breaking up their marriages. These norms also apply for informal long term relationships, though social punishment for breaking them is less severe in such case.
All of this results in the fact that a woman who wants to reject a guy gracefully without risking any adverse reaction from his side, can simply say “I have a boyfriend”.
The above boyfriend sketches are funny, because in reality, normal guys don’t flip out like that, but politely back off.
One of the first things novice pickup artists learn is to treat the “I have a boyfriend” response as a “shit test” and try to keep going until either an actual, direct rejection occurs, or they eventually manage to turn the conversation around in a favorable direction.
Statistically, persistence might pay off for the guy - the only problem with this strategy are high agreeableness/low assertiveness women who are unable to reject guys in a direct way. On personal level, this is just prolonging a conversation that’s going nowhere, but at scale, persistent pickup artists talking to high agreeableness girls who are not interested but unable to reject them directly are the reason the public considers pickup artists pushy and hard to get rid of.
On the other hand, the community was split in terms of what to do with women who actually had boyfriends but nevertheless responded to seduction. I recall intense debates about this. Some defended the social norms protecting relationships and opted to stand down. But the other group considered the girl’s relationship invalid and was OK with being the one she cheats on her boyfriend with or destroying her current relationship.
I think the latter approach was related to the sexual liberation model I described above. Sexual freedom was seen by some part of the community as a value or a virtue, and sleeping with a girl who had a boyfriend seemed like an utilitarian way of maximizing the sexual freedom in the society: pickup artist exercising his sexual freedom (or “Will to Sex”, if you like Nietzsche) himself, and also giving it to the girl, presumably trapped in a boring sex relationship, unable to express herself sexually and fulfill her deepest sexual desires.
This approach is also related to the relation responsibility framework I described in my first pickup post. Both are based on something now often written about Gen Z relationships: their fragile nature related to lack of commitment and constant looking out for better options.
For the pickup artist, the assumption that their relationship partner may walk away at any moment if she finds a better option is a “good bullshit” heuristic (false, but useful and productive), which causes them to self-improve and strive for excellence, to continuously present as the best available option for their partner. But the same philosophy also allows them to step in as the better option for a girl in a - presumably - fragile relationship with someone else.
Thankfully, I never met any girl ready to cheat on his boyfriend with me, but in this case, I believe the question that a man should asked himself in this situation would be “Would I be interested in a long term relationship (which can possibly ensue after sex) with someone who’s morals allow them cheat on their partner?”.
In my next pickup related post, I described the inner workings of the seduction community - a marvelous social machine that allowed numerous young men to self-improve, escape inceldom and find happiness in relationships.
Continue reading: Pt. 4: The Paradise Lost
Not everything the pickup guys believed or taught was crap. It's true that women do want to have sex, sometimes lots of it, I know i was, but I was constrained by the whole slut thing. That said, I still did a lot of guys when I was younger (I wonder what the number would have been if I'd done the rest?) I wasn't much interested in settling down so that had a lot to do with it. 'Direct Approach' and NLP clearly do have some benefits for some even if they don't apply to your experience.
The two most valuable lessons I got out of The Game was that these guys know female psychology better than we do, and that if you want to avoid a lot of abusers, manipulators, and sexual predators, reading this book will arm you better than anything else will. I highly recommend it for women.
Also, the methodology Strauss outlined for how to accomplish the seemingly impossible - a short, thin, bald, average-looking dude nailing hot chicks - was quite familiar to me - as I'd run across it many times in business books and books on how to be successful. It's the same outline startup entrepreneurs are encouraged to follow - with most of the writers being probably completely unaware that the PUAs use it. The business guys are the ones who invented it, anyway - the PUAs either copied it or figured it out for themselves. But it stresses constant learning and constant field work for practice, however scary that is. It could easily be applied to more productive goals--learning another skill, starting a startup, learning a new sport, writing a novel and getting published, changing to a new profession. Tom Cruise, who makes a brief appearance in the book when Strauss works with him on one of his movies, was the voice of maturity: "If only these guys would apply themselves like this to something useful and productive, it's incredible what they could accomplish!"
My sense entirely. I got two articles based on both out of this, and I recommend Strauss's book to women trying to avoid toxic men.
>> I really wanted to have sex, but often had this stupid gatekeeper thing in my brain that would shut down and prevent me from getting sex. Teaching men to do a magical series of moves that would manage to circumvent my gatekeeper and help get me laid was a wonderful thing, and I advised my male friends to try it.
> Pickup artists can liberate these women - just not from the social norms (which already favor casual sex within their subculture), but from their risk-averse nature, resulting from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
To me, that sounds like “liberating” them not from their risk-averse nature, but from their pickiness, which I find uncomfortably close to outright raping them. Surely the gatekeeper is there for a reason. If a woman were to encourage me to circumvent her internal gatekeeper, tricking her into desiring sex with me—yes, this is pure fantasy—I’d think I’m already badly abusing her and have somehow broken her into going to horrifying lengths to please me, which I definitely do not deserve. I’d also count myself as living on borrowed time; it couldn’t take long for someone to righteously beat or stab me to death.