[random_guy]

It's all true. The effectiveness of the approach is amazing, I lost every single bit of respect in the female gender in the process of trying it out myself. Now I'm searching for someone on which this stuff doesn't work. I'm afraid i'll end up alone.

[cyen]

Then he launched into his canned opener: Did they think reality shows were “really real”? Sure, two groups of females on whom Bashev tried that line rolled their eyes and smirked, but three bars (and the same routine) later, he was relaxing in a lounge chair reading a shapely brunette’s palm... Within minutes, Bashev had not only number-closed but gotten a date for the following Wednesday.

If, by "it's all true," you mean - if you try the same dumb thing on 6-10 women over the course of three bars in one night, you might be successful with one, I'm very sad about your little faith in the entire female population.

If I as a woman did the reverse - approached groups of men throughout the course of a night and tried the same type of "canned opener" or "pickup artist" moves - how quickly do you think I'd lose every single bit of respect in the male gender? Probably faster than you lost yours.

[random_guy]

Nope. This terrible things work because they leverage some very powerful mechanism that is deeply and unavoidably bound into women's brain. It's not just _statistically_ valid, it's _theoretically_ valid.

If you try it ten times and works only once that means you've messed up nine times: if you do it right, it works.

[nollidge]

"very powerful mechanism that is deeply and unavoidably bound into women's brain"

Oh, do tell? What part of the brain? Please refer to the relevant studies.

[random_guy]

I have absolutely no idea how it works.

[cyen]

some very powerful mechanism that is deeply and unavoidably bound into women's brain.

What, and wow-slutty-behavior receptors aren't deeply and unavoidably bound into male brains?

[pw0ncakes]

Bullshit. At least half of pick-up artistry is seeking out the kind of trashy girl who is receptive to it. There are a lot of women who don't fall for it, including pretty much everyone one would want in a long-term relationship.

[random_guy]

I'm not talking about pick up artists: they explicitly target those kind of girls, and they've developed techniques tailored for that. I don't even know about that stuff, honestly, all I know comes from The Game.

I understand your disbelief: I didn't believe it myself before trying it first hand. I know very well that going out alone hitting on strangers requires a lot of motivation but, if you ever feel like that, I can only recommend the experience. After that you will judge by yourself.

[pw0ncakes]

No. There are a lot of really great women out there who don't respond to silly displays of dominance and who won't leave you if they discover someone more "alpha". It's not even that hard to find a great girl; it just takes a lot of time and patience.

If you want to consider basic social skills to be "game" then, yes, everyone is receptive to it, but that's not what I mean. Some bits and pieces of "game" are general social skills that everyone would benefit to know (and 85% of people have already learned) but the worldview itself is a self-perpetuating mess.

The only genuine benefit of studying game is to develop social skills; it's just important to stop there before you start believing all that horseshit (most "evo-psych" is the 21st-century analogue of the four humors). There's no harm in reading it and being aware of the ideas, but letting this culture of runaway hypersexuality poison your view of human nature is a bad idea.

Good: developing basic social skills, making friends, and developing the confidence to pursue women you like.

Bad: Tailoring your personality to the lowest-common-denominator type of person who seeks sex in a bar or nightclub. If you let that filth into your mind, the enemy has won.

[random_guy]

I'd like to be able to believe that once again.

It's really as you said, social skills and no more: it's just about trial and error - knowing a lot of different situations and mindsets and learning how to 'work' with them.

I don't really know about all the esoteric stuff that these guys often talk about: I think they've been created so that someone can make a living out of it. But if they give the guys that are buying enough confidence to actually give it a try I guess it's okay.

[vidarh]

I was bored and babysitting the other night, and "tested" the text used for the Forer experiment (the text is in the Wikipedia entry) on a phone chatline.

I took random lines from the text verbatim and added some minor flourish to introduce it and claimed to have an "intuition" on them based on their voice or their profile.

Of ca. 30 women, only one called me out on it (a registered mental health nurse...), and I got a steady stream of "OMG!" and "how did you know that about me?!?" and "wow, it's so accurate!", and demands I'd tell them more. Some even started asking sexual questions after exchanging a couple of messages with more bland statements from the Forer experiment for no particular reason.

It's downright scary how low the barrier is.

Then again, I should've been prepared for it, as 15 years or so I was seriously discussing with a friend whether to write a chat bot to pick up women after we observed you could get numbers from a reasonably high percentage (we're talking 20%-30%, though I'm sure that must've dropped by now that people are more used to being lied to online) by quite strictly following a very simple script and not deviating from it with next to no adaptation based on context.

[tokenadult]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

[devinj]

Tch, I'd probably blame the human species, not the gender. Simple tricks like these work on men, too (although not the same tricks).

[alextp]

I think the main reason people mind so much that dirty tricks work on women (and forget that even simpler tricks work on men as well) is this idealization we culturally have of women as far-away difficult perfect prize-worthy things.

If you look at women as people you stop being surprised by these things (like that story I saw on reddit a few months ago about a research on "why women have sex"). I find it sad how sexist the whole pick-up scene is in this smug superiority they seem to teach people to approach the whole business.

[yummyfajitas]

The "smug superiority" is a necessary part of the pick-up scene - it is what makes a pickup artist successful. People don't like the "dirty tricks" (read: faking narcissism/arrogance) because they reveal truths which people like to deny.

Simpler tricks (e.g., a pushup bra) do work on men. But since no one denies that men are superficial and like big boobs, revealing this fact doesn't make anyone angry.

[cynicalkane]

This is because men are supposed to be seduced easily. People who see double standards everywhere are accurate in one sense, but might benefit from revising their perspective. It's not a very good game if the sides aren't opposing.

I think we hate the dirty tricks men pull to get laid the same reason we hate the dirty tricks women pull to get love-struck men hanging on to them: in some sense we have an easy time feeling but a hard time defining, it's breaking the rules of the game. Faking confidence, lying, telling stupid stories, using parlor tricks, &c. to pick up girls is breaking all kinds of social rules, but modern society is ill-equipped to stop them. In the book "The Game", Mystery states explicitly that taking advantage of the modern society/social rules impedance mismatch is what he does (though not in those words).

[lukifer]

This is true, but not helpful. :(

[gaius]

OK, but if you're a girl, you'd be using "an approach" as well, except you wouldn't call it that. You'd just call it "wearing a push-up bra". It's a complete fallacy to think that manipulating the opposite sex by presenting an idealized version of yourself is anything new, or anything exclusive to males.

[random_guy]

The issue lays in what exactly are the 'idealised versions' that women actually like.

[dgabriel]

You don't respect any women at all because some of them like to have sex, and can sometimes be convinced to have sex with men who flirt well? And there are no other reasons to respect any women? I can't imagine writing off an entire gender.

[qq66]

What would you recommend in terms of 10 hours of reading that I can do to go out and start myself?

[random_guy]

I started with 'The Game' from Neil Strauss, that gave me the idea. From then it was all downhill, you just have to go out and try. I never used canned openings and that kind of stuff, i also never read any kind of specific 'technical' material like the Mystery method.

I think that the really important things are to grasp the concept, learn to use the feedback that you receive from them effectively and (most importantly) get over the fear of rejection that goes with the approach. Once you lose the fear everything becomes easy.

[eru]

Should come in handy when you start your career in sales, too.

[vidarh]

Don't bother with The Game if you want to learn about the techniques in a practical way, though it's fascinating reading and well worth reading for the story (it's more of a "history of game").

Especially don't take The Game as a manual. Much of what it describes is perhaps the worst aspects of "old style" game, full of manipulation and scripted material. A lot of newer stuff is far more palatable for most people, and much more "human".

Check out fastseduction.com or rsdnation.com - both are huge free resources.

fastseduction.com has archives of most of the posts referenced in The Game, as well as assorted guides and a step by step guide with references to reading material etc. for people who are new.

[barry-cotter]

Ones I've read The Game, Rules of the Game

Ones I haven't read but have read much by the author that's good Bang, by RooshV

Just haven't read, Mystery Method, Magic Bullets

Uber misogynistic blogposts: Roissy in Dc Very misogynistic blog: Rooshv Sort of clinical blog : The Man Who Is Thursday

reddit.com/r/seduction is okay too

[barry-cotter]

Ones I've read The Game, Rules of the Game

Ones I haven't read but have read much by the author that's good Bang, by RooshV

Just haven't read, Mystery Method, Magic Bullets

Uber misogynistic blogposts: Roissy in Dc Very misogynistic blog: Rooshv Sort of clinical blog : The Man Who Is Thursday

reddit.com/r/seduction is okay too

[Mz]

You have my sympathies. My opinion is that the dating game is a broken paradigm, so I don't date. <shrug>

[pw0ncakes]

Move to a city with a substantial immigrant population and date women who were born outside the US. My girlfriend is Filipina and she's not like the Roissy/SatC stereotype at all. She has actually said that Sex and the City set feminism back 20 years, and I agree.

I'm 26 and have had a pretty solid dating life, but I've never dated an American white woman.

It takes a lot of time to meet good women, though. You have to be extroverted and make a lot of friends, who will introduce you to their friends. Don't expect results for at least a year. Even in Manhattan, I know some beautiful 22+ women who've never had a one-night stand.

Also, some advice: take a 3-to-6-month hard-line break from dating. You need to purge yourself of the misogyny that combat dating creates. I took a total break after I found myself, to my horror, behaving like an asshole to perfectly nice women. After that shock, I stopped dating entirely for 3 months, and met my current girlfriend after that.

[random_guy]

(Mind that this is my experience only, so I don't pretend to be right: don't get me wrong on this one) I've been travelling quite a lot and I've been hitting on pretty much any kind of woman and the scary thing is the consistency of the response, regardless of looks, ethnicity, social and relationship status. I've discussed the matter with other guys and there are some arguing that if the woman's married/engaged it's even easier, because of the novelty factor involved. My thoughts come from the reality i've known and experienced, if you wanna call it mysogyny i guess it's fine by me.

[pw0ncakes]

There are a lot of trashy women of all ethnicities and social classes (and, likewise, men). There are also a lot of married creeps (again, both men and women) who remain "on the market". This is nothing new, and it's not very surprising.

[random_guy]

I know I repeat myself but the thing that scares me to death is that this is not about j.random college slut or the housewife looking for adventure. Or about any specific group of belonging.

[pw0ncakes]

What you have to accept is that there's no shortcut. There's no social class or group of women in which the trashy ones disappear, and there's no stereotype that can substitute for an intelligent and sober judgment of her character, which takes time.

[vidarh]

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. You're expanding the definition of "trashy" until it encompasses whatever girls people say fall for "game".

Unfortunately that leaves you with pretty much nobody.

[Rod]

Losing respect for women is not problem. A real tragedy would be if you lost your lust for them. If it makes you happy, women who know how to manipulate men say the same about us.

[random_guy]

I have to say, i lost that too.