Wayne Elise, aka Juggler, is a fairly well-known and well-regarded pickup artist. He’s been in the business for a while, and his game guides, while occasionally derivative, are grounded in the basic reality of male-female psychosocial sex differences and thus useful to aspiring womanizers. He emphasizes the “warmth & connection” part of seduction, but tends to engage in a little too much PUA strawman bashing (probably in order to attract a wider audience). I, for one, am getting tired of reading “evolved” pickup artists caricature the neg with the same ignorant glee that feminists do.
Quibbles aside, he has some good insights, and this post at his blog exemplifies that. I’ll examine it here because his analogy of seduction to letting out a “rope of personal history” is very good, and a lesson that a lot of newbs would be wise to take into account.
Imagine a stranger next to you. They reach out and take the end of your rope from you. They begin reeling it into their arms. So long as you allow it, the rope passes from the floor around your feet, through your hands and collects in the arms of this other person.
This is the beginning of someone getting to know you. The details they learn about you in the first few minutes may be give-aways such as your taste in high-fidelity stereo speakers and the fact that your mouth goes crooked when you smile. But soon they could be exposed to a slice of your dead-kitten sense of humor. Then later it could be your feeling toward relationships. Eventually it could be your sexual preferences. And on and on.
Through this process of information transfer, you stop feeling like a stranger to the other person. You begin to feel like a friend or potential lover.
This is an artsy reinterpretation of the comfort stage of Mystery’s Attraction => Comfort => Seduction three-stage process. Women feel attraction for the aloof alpha, but they also feel more bonded — and hence more open to sexual surrender — to men with whom they have mutually shared personal information. The details of a life are the building blocks of a woman’s romantic imagination.
Now, of course, you can boldly lie about your details if you’d like, but unless you are a clinical sociopath you’ll find it easier to remain internally consistent and externally congruent if you don’t deviate too far from your real life history. This goes double if you plan to stick with a girl for longer than three months.
A reader may reasonably ask, “How do you reconcile women’s love for aloof alphas with their love for ‘getting to know each other’?”
The answer is in the conversational tension, as Elise says.
People won’t appreciate learning about your life-details if you just give them up. That would make you sort of a life-detail slut. […]
People appreciate hearing the amazing things you have to say more if they desire them first. Don’t push. Instead, counterintuitively, you should resist.
Returning to our metaphor. You want to keep your conversational partner in a state of wanting more – pulling on your rope, sort of speak. While, at the same time, YOU want to be in a state of resistance – keeping the length of rope between the two of you taunt. This tension gives you control over the transfer of your life-details.
What Elise is describing here are the classic pickup techniques known as “assuming the sale”, (i.e., this chick wants to know me better, so I’m gonna hold out until she’s throwing money at me to buy my product), and “pacing” (i.e., cat string theory; cats respond more enthusiastically to string that is being pulled away from them). There is a broader category heading that all of this could be put under: Overconfidence.
People may not consciously be aware of pacing but they respond to it.
Pacing that’s too fast deflates the tension out of an interaction. Imagine throwing all your rope into someone’s arms. There’s no more for them to want or seek.
But pacing that’s too slow makes people feel bored and as if the interaction isn’t going anywhere.
Knowing the balance only comes with real-world practice. Generally, the balance will be the same for most women you meet because women, like men, share generalizable psychological properties with their sex.
Elise offers an example of good conversational pacing (and also some good shit test passing):
PUA: “That was a famous tennis player,” he adds. “He – got – mad – at – people. Probably before your time. I was just trying to guess your age.”
PREY: “How old do you think?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.”
“Why can’t you answer that question?”
“Because if I do then all the tension will leave the conversation. As it stands, you want to know my guess and if I give that up I’ll lose your interest.”
“I promise you won’t lose my interest.”
“Fine. But first, let’s sit down and make ourselves a bit more comfortable, if that’s alright. Then I’ll tell you all about yourself. I’ve been told I have an intuitive nature.”
They sit down on the couch nearby.
“Where are your friends? Perhaps they should join us.”
“Don’t worry about them. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
“I bet you can. Okay, I think you’re twenty eight.”
She hits him in the shoulder.
“Okay. Twenty six?”
“You’re really bad at this.”
“I know. My credentials might have been over-stated.”
“How about you? How old are you?”
“Older than you. Let’s just put it this way. I’m your real father. I remember your mom. She was hot back in the 80′s.”
“She still’s hot.”
“I’m sure she is. People of any age can be sexy. [ed: female ego bait. the purpose of these pretty lie pebbles is to lull the woman into a state of reception to the man’s sexy taboo-breaking.] But personally I end up dating girls who are uh…”
“What?”
“Younger, mostly.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Well, there’s a long answer to that question and a short answer.”
“What’s the short answer?”
“They’re hotter.”
“Okay, what’s the long answer.”
“I can’t really tell you. I’d have to show you.”
This is a textbook exhibition of flirting aka pacing. Women love this sort of “pulling teeth” kind of conversation because it signals to their hindbrains that the man engaging in it is not seeking their approval. And a man who is not interested in a woman’s approval is regarded by her evolved alpha male-detection cortical system as a man who likely gets plenty of female attention, and thus possesses the genes that would give her potential sons with him the same advantageous mating market genes.
Elise also illustrates bad conversational pacing with this example:
GAME NOOB: “I ride a fixie. Want to see my fixie porn?”
GIRL: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Look. I didn’t ask to know anything about you. Perhaps you can hold some thoughts back.”
“I could. But I’m not going to. I’m an all out there kinda guy. I’m going to this fab party later. If you’re lucky I might invite you.”
“No thanks.”
“Aww. You’re playing hard to get. That’s so cute.”
“Whatever.”
“I hear an accent. Where are you from?”
“Nowhere.”
“Ha. Nowhere. That’s funny. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Yes. I’ll take a piña colada but don’t even think about dropping a roofie in there. I’m not going to hook up with you.”
“Whoever said anything about hooking up? You’re more of the kinda girl I see as a friend.”
“Good.”
“Good. So what’s your name?”
Elise takes some gratuitous shots here at well-worn PUA disqualification lines (“You’re more of the kinda girl that I see as a friend”), but his overall point is that bad pacing — that is, giving away the store — can render otherwise effective PUA lines like “That’s so cute” embarrassingly try-hard and pathetically transparent.
The difference between a sour grapes disqualification and a cool-as-fuck disqualification is timing. When you’re chasing — when you’re on the losing end of a pickup attempt — your DQs will be perceived by her as spiteful sour grapes. When you’re being chased — when you have pickup hand — she will perceive your DQs as challenges and redouble her efforts to win your grudging approval.
Which, I believe, really gets at the core of why game-haters and feminists and traditionalist pedestalizers have found it easy to lampoon certain aspects of game philosophy. Yes, the neg is very easy to make fun of when you put it in the mouth of a generic, socially awkward noob, like Elise has done above, who practically assaults a woman with approval-seeking behavior and regurgitated PUA lines delivered with pressing urgency at the wrong times. But put the neg in the mouth of an accomplished seducer who understands the value of teasing women with crumbs of information, and of pulling back at just the right moments, and suddenly that same neg is explosive pussy dynamite.
All great philosophies and theories of the mind throughout history have had their old guard detractors who latched onto digestible concepts that offered possibilities of being distilled into simplistic caricatures and thus made meaningless outside of their philosophical and practical context. To this day, the neg continues to be mistakenly thought of as a brazen insult by the prestige press and their manboobed and feminist lackeys, and there seems to be no let-up to their determination to remain unschooled hicks in matters of seduction.
[crypto-donation-box]
