Women Are Raised to be Friendly

In yesterday's "Reader Success Story" where one of the commenters on my blog describes his experience with cold approaching women, there was an element that deserves further elaboration:

Over a period of 2 x months I approached 100 or so girls (all hot), on the street, nothing indirect about it at all. Here is what I experienced. 

1. 90% + of the girls responded in a friendly manner. The remaining 10+ brushed me off as quickly as they could. Noone was rude or abusive. 

2. All the girls who didn't brush me off loved the compliments and attention etc. 

3. 95% of the girls told me they had a boyfriend and made their excuses. 

Do you already see the big problem?

Obviously, a lot of PUAs and their sheep-like followers mistake friendliness for sexual interests. It's up to you to decide whether PUAs say this because they just don't know any better or because it's an easy way to trick people.

Think about it: If you taught "game", you could just send a guy to talk to some random girl on the street. More often than not, she'd be friendly, but would eventually decline his advances. But instead of telling him that she's just friendly and it is squat, he'll pat you on your back and say the overly clichéd "You are so money, bro!"


Women are usually raised to be friendly. They'll politely decline requests they are not comfortable with, or they will just flake. In fact, the whole flaking phenomenon can be explained by the woman wanting you to save face in public, which is why she'll give you her number. But later on, she finds it easier to just not show up. Being confrontational on the phone and saying, "You loser, stop calling me!" isn't something many women would do.

This is why aspiring PUAs find that "cold approaching" works, but it doesn't really. She's nice to you even if she's not interested because she thinks she has to be nice. Further, if you can interpret body language properly, you'll also notice that they position themselves defensively. Just look at this:

Vince Kelvin doesn't know that crossed arms isn't a good sign.

Does any of this sound familiar?

To any PUA shills who want to jump on this thread, please ask yourself whether you really have experience that contradicts my statement. Remember, Paul Janka has sex with ten percent of the women whose number he gets. Ten percent! And that's for a Harvard-educated guy who looks like a male model! (No wonder Vince Kelvin does not get anywhere with women.)

So, dear PUA shills, how are your success rates? And how often do you delude yourself into thinking that just because she's friendly, she's interested?

In this vein, let me close with a picture I found on the blog of "Superman PUA" on a short article where he tells people to read "Why Cold Approaching is Pretty Much Useless":

A Reader Success Story

The debate surrounding my article Why Cold Approaching is Pretty Much Useless rages on. Everybody who criticized my position either hadn't read the article, or did lack real world experience. A particularly interesting encounter happened yesterday, when someone sent me angry messages on facebook. I got the impression that he simply lacks sexual experience and for psychological reasons defends a theory he has bought into which hasn't helped him much in scoring girls. I was in a somewhat confrontational mood, so I kept asking him about his "count". Of course, he evaded this question and stuck to his theories.

One of my readers, John Graham, left a great comment on my blog the other day which illustrates perfectly what the problem with cold approaching is. Since the comment thread of the original post is at around 130 already, I decided to republish it on the front page.

Here's John Graham, telling you about his experiences with cold approaching. Enjoy!


Aaron, another good article!


Cold approaching is indeed a waste of time. Allow me to qualify :


I like to meet girls during the day, as clubs don't really do it for me. Prior to attempting 'cold approach' methods, I would go out for an hour or two, browse some shops, maybe purchase a book or something, and keep an eye out for a girl who met the following criteria :-


1. Not in a big group of girls. Alone, or perhaps with just one friend.


2. Not caked in makeup, or carrying one of those tacky handbags with a 'gold' chain for a strap. Usually a gold digger. 


3. My type in terms of looks i.e, shorter, mediterranean or asian (preferably slightly 'bookish'. Smart girls are beautiful too, dontcha know?). 


4. In an environment conducive to opening i.e. bookshop, quiet coffee shop.


5. In a context that gave me a reason to talk to her, even if it's just asking if a seat at the table is taken. 


To hardcore MM technique practicing alpha males such as our friend CDG, this will all seem terribly lame and 'beta'. But guess what? Out of every 
4 or so girls I spoke to, I got a number, followed by a date, followed by sex, and sometimes followed by a relationship. That's a 25% hit ratio, all for a couple of hours spent enjoying myself in the centre of London. All of these girls were charming, kind, and didn't mess me around one bit. If I texted, they texted back. If I rang, they answered or called back. If we arranged to meet, they turned up, on time, well presented, and weren't carrying a single piece of emotional baggage to unload on me.


Having had some success with this approach, I chose to up my game, and try some cold approaches, at the behest of a friend of mine who had been following Rob Judge. We went and did it exactly as per the instructions in the e-book (I confess to skimming over, as it was dull, not that well written, and repetitive). Over a period of 2 x months I approached 100 or so girls (all hot), on the street, nothing indirect about it at all. Here is what I experienced.


1. 90% + of the girls responded in a friendly manner. The remaining 10+ brushed me off as quickly as they could. Noone was rude or abusive.


2. All the girls who didn't brush me off loved the compliments and attention etc.


3. 95% of the girls told me they had a boyfriend and made their excuses. 


4. Of the 5 numbers I got, 2 never replied.


5. Of the 3 girls that replied, 2 came on a date with me.


6. Of the 2 girls I dated, neither would let me kiss them. 


Big fucking victory for direct approach there then. ¬_¬


So my ratio of 25% lay rate, using my own personality, and selecting the most suitable girls in the most ideal situations, dropped to 0% kiss rate using direct approaching. I should point out that I'm not a bad looking guy, just under 6 feet, with good physique, I'm intelligent, with good hobbies and a gift for really good conversation when the mood takes me. In other words, I really have nothing to complain about compared to a lot of the guys into PU. 

"Vince Kelvin is an Entertainer, You Fucks!!1"

I really wanted to stop making fun of Vince Kelvin, but whenever I think that it's been enough now, some more bullshit shows up in my email inbox. Some days ago, I received a notification of a new comment on my classic post "Vince Kelvin, the Joke is on you!" that almost made me spill my mango smoothie.


Even better was that this came in not long after "Sweater" from The Game shared his experience with Vince Kelvin. Money quote: "He talks about "brotherhood" and helping each other, but I think he means "Vince Kelvinhood" and helping Vince pick up."

Anyway, back to Mr Producer. He wrote:

Hey All, 

I shot and edited this video for a Dutch TV broadcast completely independent from the PUAs (never met Vince before that night), and I've gotta say that you guys as a whole take yourselves waaaaay to seriously. The guy is an entertainer! Give him a break! He enjoys making people laugh, whether it be his students, or the bbws he meets on the street. I sure as hell laughed my ass off from behind the camera...  

At least he puts himself out there, and doesn't dedicate who knows how many hours putting someone else down to promote himself. Ahem*  

Glad you thought my video was important enough to take all those screen shots from though! 

Cheers,  

Josh 

So, where shall we start? Maybe with,

Hey Josh, 

I have no problem when people try to be entertainers. In fact, this is a niche I readily support, and I regularly attended stand up comedy events. However, those are normally free of charge or virtually free. Also, I normally get what I expect: some cheap laughs at little cost, and a nice way to waste a couple of hours. 

Now, let's have a look at Vince Kelvin's business proposition. If I take your position, it is something like this: He says that he teaches you how to pickup girls, but instead he just doesn't give a fuck, and makes a fool out of himself by talking to some fatties. Honestly, if Vince had a poster that said: "PUA Comedy Gold in LA! Watch me getting shot down by fatties and scaring hot girls away in less than three seconds. Kids are welcome too. No sexually explicit content.", I'd even consider to advertise him on my blog free of charge.  

Heck, Josh, I wouldn't mind if he charged a tenner for his live performance. Probably, I'd write him a testimonial like, "By watching Vince Kelvin I managed to ruin more keyboards than by active computer use in two decades." Or maybe, "Vince Kelvin's impromptu performances are almost as good as sex, which is great because sex is not what's going to happen."

However, Josh, this is not what Vince Kelvin actually does. He doesn't charge ten bucks for standup comedy. Instead, he claims to teach you how to pick up women (and then you see him talking to rhinoceroses and getting a blow job from a whale). Stuff like this is easily worth ten bucks. However, he charges more like x times 10 to the third power bucks per person. Josh, I am sorry if the last sentence was too much for you. I hope you forgive me. 

But, anyway, Josh, tell me, whaddaya say now?

Cheers, 

Aaron Sleazy

Glitch in the Matrix, Loophole in her System!?

I thought about some of the accusations the PUA crowd made regarding my article Why Cold Approaching is Mostly Useless. It just hit me that those are the guys who love to proclaim that they have found “a glitch in the matrix”, or a “secret loophole”. Their methods don’t give you any better results than “asking girls out game”, though. It’s quite funny that this camp now accuses me of going for “low hanging fruit” when I propose a simple procedure that really allows you to get more (and "better") girls with much less effort. Now suddenly their more complicated “loophole” is preferable to my “low hanging fruits” approach.

It reminded me of some of my opponents in my short chess career. I took up chess shortly after enrolling at university, and progressed rather quickly. After about a year or so, I was playing at a 1600+ level, which is quite decent for an amateur. If you play chess with people who are above the level of wood pushers, you often find guys (you won’t find many girls playing chess) who stick to belief systems that are downright ridiculous and do little to help them improve their game. This might remind you of some other fields.

For instance, some people believe they are superior even if they have just lost to you (again). Their accusations are that you lack insight into some of the finer elements of chess strategy, and may tell you about a so-called “weak pawn” you had here or there. The funny thing is that they could even be right, but if they have blundered away a piece, those minor strategic advantages are useless. In pickup, their accusations are normally plain wrong, though. Sure, you can get laid plenty without “showing vulnerability”. However, you can also “show vulnerability” all night long and not get laid in the end, while Joe Douche fucks his third girl in the bathroom stall.

Similarly, some people have accused me of making “ugly moves” in chess. When you have a clearly winning position, let’s say you are one piece up, you can forget about elaborate strategies. Instead, just force some exchanges, so that the material imbalance becomes more and more pronounced. (This is a method that some textbooks clearly endorse, by the way.) Sure, some may say it is not “elegant”, whatever this may mean, but it’s certainly very efficient. It has the added benefit that you can end the game quickly, and won’t give your passive-aggressive opponent the chance to pull of ridiculous psychological tricks like letting half an hour of their time pass just to annoy you. Further, if you follow a simpler strategy, you minimize the risk of blundering yourself (the parallels to pickup are obvious). There are many bad losers out there.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I was an amazing chess player. I certainly wasn’t, and I have lost plenty of games. However, I always had the decency to give up the game when I was in a clearly lost position, and I didn’t look for excuses because I didn’t see the point in mental exercises that amounted to absurd claims of “yeah, I have lost to him, but I am actually better because…”. No, buddy, you lost, and thus you can’t say that you are the better player. Whether you think you can get some “style points” for elegant wins (which probably all look crude anyway to chess grandmasters) is besides the point. It’s much better if you smash your opponent in 16 moves and less than an hour as opposed to a long and drawn out battle that takes up four hours. A win is a win is a win.

Likewise, if you get laid, but it takes you ten hours with a girl you are less compatible with as opposed to a one-hour date after dancing class with a girl you have something in common with, then I can only say that you should get your priorities straight. Something that takes longer is by definition worse even if if leads to the same result. It’s not that any of those “gamers” do better than anyone else, after all.

There is one important difference between chess players and PUAs. In chess, most players give up when they are in a lost position, and when they are in a clearly drawn position, they agree to a draw. It’s a matter of honor, honesty and decency. Those are qualities that don’t seem to be common among PUAs, though. All I see are plenty of bad losers.

Why do You Want Pickup to be Difficult!?

One of the more ridiculous comments about my rather controversial article “Why Cold Approaching in Mostly Useless” was by Mark Manson (Entropy). Just have a look at this statement and be in awe of his bizarre logic:




What bugs me the most about this though is the mindset it implies. It implies a mindset of, "Hey, you should settle for the low-hanging fruit. Take what's given to you."  

The idea that you should wait around for a girl to make eye contact, or that you have to join classes or groups to make it easier for yourself -- it's saying that you should wait around for women who want you, instead of directly pursuing the women who you want. 

For me, I approach women I want to approach for no other reason than I want to approach them. It doesn't matter if it's in a yoga class, on the street, in a night club or at a friend's birthday party. It doesn't matter if she's been staring at me for five minutes or if she has no idea I exist. I don't care and I don't really think about it. I approach based on MY INTERESTS not based on HER INTERESTS.

Let's just go through the lame rhetorics quickly and point out that "low hanging fruit" in this context means a woman who is obviously interested in you, whom you can get much quicker, and, if you so desire, are more likely to be able to keep around due to shared interests. Suddenly, Mark Manson doesn't seem to have much of a point anymore.

Another trap is that you can force your interest upon the woman. If she doesn't want you, she doesn't want you. At best you are a pan-handler, at worst a slimy insurance broker who forces fraudulent financial products upon an unsuspecting client.

What I find particularly odd is that now all of a sudden it's bad to make life easy for yourself. It's not even the case that you "settle" for anything less. After all, you will end up with much better girls if you skip indiscriminate cold approaches. You’ll find that it is much easier to get along with women who share some of your interests, and you'll probably conclude that all the "advanced game techniques" our PUAs peddle amount to an enormous steamy pile of crap.

Furthermore, let’s not forget that women actively put themselves into places where they want to meet men. They doll themselves up for dancing classes, for instance. This is just the most innocent example. It’s no big revelation if I told you that there are plenty of women who move to bigger cities in the hope of finding a decent husband for themselves. Don’t laugh! This happens on all levels of society. Young women move to the capitals of their country, or even go abroad to New York or London, not just to see the world, but also get themselves some better options than their small home town would provide. For some, just getting citizenship of a more prosperous country is motivation enough.

A great case in point is Tiger Wood’s ex-wife, Elin Nordegren. She was a model with no education, but she actively put herself into a position where she could meet men of enormous socio-economic status (by being au pair to a wealthy and well-connected family), thus trying to cash in on her looks. (And this despite being part of the elites of Swedish society as the daughter of a minister.) Surely she thought she could do better than getting, say, an accountant with a fat wallet in Stockholm.

Among au pairs, this seems to be a common motivation. Just think of the deal they get: they get to live with a wealthy family in an attractive city, help with the household, and in exchange they get a bit of pocket money. From a purely economical standpoint, it’s a highly unattractive deal. But if you imagine that it could net you an investment banker or a golf player. It’s not so bad. And if in the worst case, they end up with a divorce worth more than $100 million.

To connect the lose ends, let me ask you whether you think a guy like Tiger Woods would bother to go out and "cold approach" random girls. Do you really think so? He's just making the best of the option he has, and the average guy can do the same. You will probably not score a girl of Nordegren's caliber, but there are plenty of attractive girls out there who are looking for a decent guy, and who don't want to be approached on the streets like cheap hookers.

Oh, the Controversy!

My recent article Why Cold Approaching is Pretty Much Useless caused quite a stir. On Reddit, I had PUA shills go for my throat, on my blog another shill showed up, trying to convince some of us by changing his story to accommodate our objections. It was a sight to behold.

On PUA Zone, a forum I occasionally check, Keyboard Jockeys and guys who get laid fought it out. I got great support from those who know what pussy feels like, while the others dreamt up bizarre objections (some of which I'll address in a follow-up post). They apparently neither read nor understood my article.
To my great surprise, JWS, with whom I had clashed heads a couple of times on the old mASF forum, asked the nay-sayers some critical questions, too. I was especially pleased to see him point out that there are strong commercial interests tied to the "cold approach" paradigm. After all, if you don't get laid after a workshop, and the gurus tell you you should, what's more obvious than shelling out a couple more grand for more coaching? JWS made an excellent point, and I was glad he had made it. I hadn't considered it because I wanted to abstain from bashing the seduction industry yet again. On the other hand, every time you want to talk common sense, some shills jump on you anyway, so I might as well have addressed it in the first place.

If I am not mistaken, the thread I had started on PUA Zone is now the longest thread in the history of that forum, with something like two dozens of pages of replies. If you have the time, maybe have a look just to see the bizarre arguments people try to make to defend indiscriminate cold approaching. At the very least, though, please read on for the feedback of CharlesDexterWard, who allowed me to reproduce his comment on my blog. (The original comment is here.) Anybody who is not a PUA shill, not a commercial PUA, and not brainwashed, but simply wants to lead a healthy life and get laid will surely agree with what CharlesDexterWard has to say.

I'm so happy I found this thread. Last month I've been going out regularly in order to learn how to cold approach women in clubs, so that I can get my love life under control.

It has made me really, really unhappy.

Before reading this, I was slowly coming to many of the conclusions presented here by Sleazy and JWS.

Why did I decide to go cold approaching in clubs at all? I used to be quite good once upon a time. I was the "silent killer" Franco talked about: I saw women in the midst of everything, and they saw me. Like count Vlad in Bram Stokers movie. I got laid with new women quite frequently, but some of them were social circle, others were online, and some were actually from the clubs I went to.

I felt very powerful and in control of my life at this time. Of course, I failed with some really attractive women, but it didn't bother me that much. The power came from two things:

1) Living an awesome life. My current period of not feeling very awesome has encouraged me to analyze what I was doing with my life. I had passions, that allowed me to feel I was learning and growing. I practiced muay thai, later brasilian jiu-jitsu. I learned difficult songs on the guitar, I sculpted miniatures of ancient warriors and beasts from scratch. I bought a helmet and went riding (maybe I should become gay?)

2) I never ever went out to "cold approach" or "pick up women". I went out to spend time with people I liked, who inspired me. Usually I got entangled in new social circles, or a conversation with a previously unknown attractive woman just started naturally.

Point 2 takes a bit of courage. It requires that one stops trying and lets things take their natural course.

It is also a good idea to practice gartitude for what you have. Many people are clueless, or suffer from diseases.

Guess this PUA, Part II

Vince Kelvin isn't the only PUA who looks pretty fucked up. The guy in this picture is among the biggest bullshitters in this scene, but he tries to keep a low profile. One wonders why.

Who do you think this is?

(Note: This PUA has posted that picture on the Internet a couple of years ago, along with some others, to demonstrate his "skillz" and since then tries to take them down. But the Streisand Effect is a bitch.)