When Pick-Up Artists Grow Up
The High Cost Of Cheap Sex
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]I[/su_dropcap] spent the better part of the previous decade . . . you know, the aughts . . . hanging out with some of the world’s most famous pick-up artists.
If you’re normal, you’re wondering, How can anyone be famous for being a pick-up artist?
Well . . . let’s just say that, with the popularization of the Internet in the late 1990s, sexually frustrated men everywhere found each other. And the first thing we realized was that . . . golly, we were everywhere!
Some of us were truly horrible people. Seduction shouldn’t be a naughty word. A few bad men ruin it for the rest of us.
But the majority of these guys — including myself — all had the same problem. Again and again, we courted women in a manner taught us by our mothers and sisters — that is, as gentlemen — only to watch incredulously as those women denied us their bodies and eagerly threw those bodies at disgusting bad boys who left ’em with broken hearts and unwanted pregnancies. (Wouldn’t that be a great name for . . . some kind of Thomas Hardy retrospective!)
A few of these bad boys realized: Holy shit . . . I can make a lotta money teaching pudknockers how to walk up to women and say hi! And thus, seduction mentoring became big business.
The terms seduction AND pick-up artist both rang nefarious for me. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t want to trick my way into women’s bodies. Too much work!
But seriously . . . I wanted women to want me as much as I wanted them. And I wanted them to demonstrate their desire for me as much as I saw them do, quite demonstratively, for guys who, frankly, didn’t deserve or appreciate their pleasures.
In 2003, I drifted into a Double Your Dating seminar, fully expecting to be greeted by a flock of smarmy peacocks. (And by the way, “Smarmy Peacocks” is not a bad name for an alt-rock band. But I digress.)
Rather, I was pleasantly surprised to be surrounded by 300-plus curious, good-hearted guys from all over the English-speaking world. A gathering of hungry minds; not just bodies. A kind of initiation into the realities of sexual attraction.
Three days of intensive study in evolutionary Biology and psychology, with examples from classical literature and popular culture. As well as mentoring from guys for whom sex was as easy as reaching for a cookie, without having to sneak it from a hidden jar.
My eyes were opened! I saw clearly that, for most men, myself included, our problems with women were of our own making. In a nut’s hell, we got nervous around hot women. And that fear made us do and say really stupid things.
One had to have room to fail again and again — like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day — in order to get it just right. And by “room to fail”, I mean, one had to unshackle himself from the shame that failure brings. Not to mention that we’re dealing here with sexual shame, perhaps the most potent form of all.
This is why there is no substitute for men helping men, in this department. No man raised by a single mother, or otherwise without proper male-to-male mentorship, can ever learn how to really be a man around women. It’s like a male dog being raised by a cat; he never learns how to lift his leg when he pees. (And that’s what I’m really talking about here, folks. Forget all that stuff about men helping men. It takes a real woman to raise a man’s leg!)
Quality Over Quantity
Several years after the seminar, I had the good fortune of being hired by one of these famous pick-up artists to assist with his seminars. We spent a lot of time together over a two-year period teaching both men and women applied evolutionary biology and psychology. In other words, we taught them how to walk up to the opposite sex and say hi — something that is, oddly, excruciatingly difficult for most people.
They say, if you want to get good at something, teach it. In fact, I got so good at pick-up, that I lost all interest in it. I am no longer interested in fucking every hot woman that comes along.
In fact, for me, it simply isn’t enough, anymore, for a woman to show up pretty. Turns out, this is common for pick-up artists as they mature. Once the mystery of seduction is unravelled, deeper connections become more important.
Oh, once in a while, I still get a boner upon meeting a hot woman. But more often than not, I lose it as soon as her syntax reveals that she hasn’t picked up a book since college; or worse, she doesn’t even try to talk, choosing rather to take refuge in her phone.
So you a pickup artist?
No, I’m not a pickup artist, Lupe. But I was a dating coach.
What the difference?
I didn’t sleep with my clients.