I disagree. Swagger, or what my older hip-hop heads might call ‘steez’ or ‘steelo’ or basically, style, is hard to teach. Real hard. To the point that anyone charging to teach it would be called a con artist by me.
Let’s say Marilyn Monroe walked into a beauty pagent and told all of the contestants there that she can teach them to project that certain magic on screen. Do you believe that is possible? Or do you predict a lot of beautiful women, squinting at the camera and speaking in a raspy smoker’s whisper all the while twitching their lips as if their gums itch?
First of all, okay, it may be “hard” to teach, but that’s not the same thing as impossible. Second, how do you think guys develop this swagger? Do you think it’s just in their DNA? No. They learn it by observing people around them, whether that means real people that they know, or celebrities, musicians or actors that they watch from a distance. Yeah, maybe they do it over time, starting from childhood, but it’s still a learning process. And a good teacher can show someone how to do it late in life.
You think no guy has ever been laid by imitating James Dean? Sean Connery? Snoop Dogg?
It’s harder to be a doctor than a pickup artist. A hell of a lot harder. Yet there are these things called medical schools all over the world that teach people to be doctors.
I don’t think the dropout rate at boot camp is very high. I think it’s around 10 percent. I call that a very low proportion when you consider how rigorous it is.
Well, you can certainly teach people how to max out their abilities, so to speak, but most people probably won’t be great – and a great many won’t be good – even then. Not everybody’s got the capacity to be an Olympic level runner, for instance, and some things just can’t be taught to some people – try teaching an armless man to bowl.
For instance, there’s some evidence that attraction is at least in part determined by how dissimilar the potential couple’s major histocompatibility complexes are – this is a gene family that, roughly, determines how well your immune system recognizes different threats. If there’s great variety in the parents’ MHCs, then there’s a good chance that any potential offspring is well guarded against a large variety of threats. It’s thought that information about one’s MHC is transmitted via body odour; so, if you have an uncommon variety MHC which therefore is dissimilar to a large portion of the female populace’s, you’ll be on average a more attractive mate to more partners. That’s another thing that’s hard to be taught.
Do I think that a guy on the internet lies about how much sex he’s having? Yes, yes I do. Also, he claims to “dress sharp as a box cutter” and be “brutally handsome”. So what would this guy, assuming he’s not lying through his teeth and does get laid this much, have to teach people who aren’t already brutally handsome?
I wouldn’t use the doctor example, either. Medical schools teach you how to practice medicine on a human body. Human bodies tend to have two kidneys, a stomach, a brain, etc. and have similar reactions that other human bodies do to the same stimuli. Not every woman is going to respond the same to pick up techniques… he basically says “Do this. If that doesn’t work, do this. If that doesn’t work, she’s a bitch whore skank etc. anyway”. That’s guesswork.
There are some things that can’t be taught to some people. I could have practiced every waking hour of every day but I was never going to be able to be an NBA player, and you sure as hell aren’t going to because a better basketball player at all by reading a blog about how to play basketball.
The “Pick Up Artist” thing is absolutely the most fantastic scam of the last ten years; I can’t believe people fall for this shit, and yet they do. You can rest well assured that 90% of what “Roissy,” “Mystery” and all the rest brag about is absolute bullshit. Such advice as they do give is half baloney and half the idiotically obvious.
If you actually read his site, it’s not like there’s this black and white thing where you’re either a stud or a complete failure. The “game” he describes is a complex thing with many factors. You’re not going to find him claiming anywhere on his site that being dressed sharp and handsome is the only way to get laid a lot.
Some time ago I read the book The Game by Neill Strauss. He talks about how he dramatically improved his “game” skills by learning from other guys. He gives a laundry list of girls he slept with after building up his skills. Do you think he’s just lying? Do you thing every guy out there who claims that these strategies helped him increase his number of sexual partners is just flat out lying?
There is one possible good to it: it may get shy guys to just ask a few ladies out on a date. Seriously, most of the lonely put-upon guys I have known almost never asked anybody out.
I challenged one such friend to stop worrying about who said “yes” and just make it his goal to ask out 5 girls a week. Amazingly, his dating life became too active, and he was complaining about that within four months. At first, most of them said “no.” But once he got used to it, and stopped acting like a 7th grader every time he offered a lady a drink, his social life blossomed.
But the basic “scoring” mentality is a very, very bad thing. And as much fro the guys as for the women. The substitution of physical pleasure for emotional rewards and self-esteem destroys many lives. And it seems to me that men are more vulnerable to it than women. Or maybe more men than women are vulnerable to it. I dunno. . .
Is the point of all this to maximize sexual pleasure, on the (counterintuitive but defensible) assumption that a man can get more such out of a variety of partners than one steady one? Or is winning the notches-on-the-bedpost competition an end-in-itself, here?
This is called selection bias. The people who go through boot camp already want to be Marines and have prepared accordingly, which makes it much more likely they’re going to see it through. If you put a bunch of average people through the same thing, most would turn around and walk out the door before they started, and few of them would be there at the end.
I’m skeptical that pick up artists are a movement. It seems like the new version of a lot of old things: misogynist stupidity, men trying to market dating skills to the desperate, etc. It may not be inherently good or bad, but it’s eyeroll-inducing.
I don’t want to sidetrack this too much, but why do you think that people need to let their age dictate what they should and shouldn’t do? Why should anyone decide to just become a different person because they are 40 or 50 instead of 20? Don’t you think that a man might spend his old age fucking lots of women because he wants to and finds it rewarding? Why is it OK for someone to do this when he’s 20, but not OK when he is older?
Wait, wait. Serious question here. Having one-night stands with a succession of women is not, perhaps, the noblest goal to have in life or the most productive way to spend one’s time. But:
Why is it “stupid”?
Why is it “misogynistic”? Serious question. Why is womanizing “misogynistic”? (Bear in mind that not everything feminists dislike is therefore “misogynistic.” In fact, not everything practically all women dislike is therefore “misogynistic.”)
Retarded (sorry for the usage) because of having that as a goal, mostly…I believe that if you foster a good relationship, the sex will be forthcoming, and better, to boot. I also think the conquistador attitude towards women is retarded, but there are women who are fine with it, so if those people want to hook up, whatev.
Hehehe. Don’t worry, I’ve been very careful about how much I invest in this. The dude is very lucky I’m giving him a chance, and if he doesn’t man up it’s his loss.
Anyway, the point is that the skills you need to pick up NSA sex are different than the skills you need to have a successful relationship, and getting too caught up in The Game as a philosophy rather than The Game as a set of techniques for a specific outcome can keep you stuck at one part of your life.