Psychology of Seduction Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Are You a Chicken or A Pig?

  Chapter 2: Beauty & The Beast

  Chapter 3: Deep Inside the Female Mind

  Chapter 4: Emma Bovary: Having Her Cake and Eating It Too

  Chapter 5: Strings Attached? Hell No

  Chapter 6: Why Do Women Have Sex?

  Chapter 7: Superman Style

  Chapter 8: The Handsome Cabbie

  Chapter 9: Are All The Good Men Taken or Are All The Taken Men Good?

  Chapter 10: Nice Guys Finish Never

  Chapter 11: Love’s Labour’s Found

  Chapter 12: Trembling Before the Beautiful

  Chapter 13: Psychological Lovefare

  Chapter 14: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

  Epilogue: A Tale of Two Charles

  Appendix A: 10 Easy Steps to Sex Appeal

  Appendix B: Self-Quizzes

  Appendix C: Further Reading

  (Endnotes)

  Prologue

  Most nonfiction authors propose a book to their publisher, negotiate an ‘advance’ on future royalties, and then get down to the business of writing. I could never write under those conditions, facing pressure and expectation from a nervous publisher. If someone paid me in advance to write a book, I would gladly accept the cash. But I would not write the book. Thailand, here I come!

  I wrote the ‘Psychology of Seduction’ because I wanted to organize and pass on knowledge that I have acquired over the past several decades. If I make a few dollars on the side, hallelujah!, but financial gain was never my motivation. I write for fun, not money.

  Please do not lynch me for simplifying certain evolutionary concepts. There are many wonderful books which explain the nitty-gritty of evolutionary biology, such as ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ by Richard Dawkins. I do not expect most of my readers to have a strong background in evolutionary biology and I would rather not transform a book on seduction into a boring biology textbook. Should you wish to explore evolutionary biology in greater depth, the ‘recommended reading’ section of the appendix suggests some fantastic books. My goal is to help people understand the psychology of seduction and attraction, not regurgitate well-known theories of the Selfish Gene.

  Some of my attitudes in this book could be misconstrued as ‘sexist,’ while some of the seduction techniques I discuss might be labeled ‘unethical.’ As a professor at a prestigious university, I am supposed to write about less controversial topics, such as ‘A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for An Eye to Evolve.’ Boring.

  Now, a disclaimer: While I believe men and women evolved differently because they faced different evolutionary pressures, I make no assumption about which gender is objectively ‘better’ or ‘smarter.’ In my opinion - and it is just an opinion - each gender has its own strengths and weaknesses, excelling in somewhat different areas. In regards to sex, of course, men and women exhibit diametrically opposite behaviors due to the difference between eggs and sperm. While this book contains a blueprint for exploiting female psychology and behavior arising from those differences, I make no claim that you should use it for that purpose, any more than I would want you to shoot someone if I sold you a gun.

  This is not just a book for males; both men and women will benefit from understanding the psychology of seduction. Men will learn psychological approaches to seduction while women learn how to avoid them. Both genders will discover flaws inherent in the human mind which render us vulnerable to deception, manipulation and exploitation. Although I am speaking to a male audience, women will benefit even more than men from understanding their own vulnerabilities.

  Finally, I published this book anonymously. Who am I? I served my time in academia, and it felt like a prison sentence. For awhile I played scientist, but I felt like Sisyphus. In the business world I sold my soul. I am a man with many letters and titles attached to my name. But in the end, I am just a man.

  Introduction

  In high school, I was the quintessential supernerd. I was the kid who never got a date. Woman was a riddle wrapped in enigma and shrouded in mystery. I was lost.

  As a young man, I enjoyed much success; an academic sensation, a wealthy entrepreneur, endowed with wonderful friends and passionate about my hobbies. But one thing was missing; female companionship. Sex. I didn’t have a clue how to meet women. After exploring the ‘pickup artist’ community, I realized I was not alone.

  When it comes to seduction, most men have about as much luck as if they were standing in the middle of a raging river hoping to catch fish by bashing them on the head with a big stick. Applying my academic specialties of evolutionary and social psychology to the realm of seduction finally enabled me to get a handle on this part of my life called ‘dealing with women.’

  Andrea Dworkin tells us that ‘A man wants what a woman has - sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States), or own it outright (marriage in most societies).’1 Rape is illegal and immoral. Prostitution and marriage are easy to acquire; you just need some bling. This book helps men persuade women to ‘give it away,’ requiring a nuanced understanding of the female mind. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

  If you want to drive a car, you don’t need to know how the engine works. Just press the peddle and off you go - zazoom. Women (men too!) are much like cars. Occasionally you drive them a little - sex - and it doesn’t seem to matter how they work on the inside. But if you want to make a car go faster or handle better, you open up the hood, grab a wrench, and figure out how the machinery actually works. It’s the same with girls. Sure, you can go through life meeting women through coincidence - your job, your friends, whatever. And occasionally you take them for a spin - sometimes a short one, and sometimes a long one that ends in marriage. But think about your past. How often have you met a beautiful woman - the girl of your dreams - and let her walk away? Most of your relationships have been the result of chance encounters rather than aggressive pursuit.

  But before we can understand women, first we need to think about games. Here’s a question: What do championship poker player Phil Hellmuth and notorious pickup artist Neil Strauss both have in common? The answer to this riddle unlocks the biggest mystery of seduction.

  Turkey Trouble

  Scientists say our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, sharing almost ninety-eight percent of our DNA. But forget apes. Men and women are more like turkeys.

  Behaviorist M.W. Fox described an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. The polecat is the turkey mom’s natural enemy whose approach is typically greeted by squawking, pecking and clawing. General pandemonium. Even a stuffed polecat on a string enrages a mother turkey. Psychologists like to play games; they inserted a small recorder that played the ‘cheep cheep’ sound of baby turkeys in a stuffed replica of a polecat. The mother turkey took the approaching stuffed polecat beneath her as if it was her own baby. When the machine was turned off by the experimenters, the turkey went nuts, savagely assaulting the stuffed polecat.2

  Biologists call this programmed response to a stimulus a ‘fixed action pattern.’ Fixed action patterns can be as simple as responding to a stuffed polecat or as complex as intricate mating rituals. The main characteristic of a fixed action pattern is that the same behavior occurs over and over again in response to the same stimulus. It is almost like animals are running computer programs causing them to behave in specific ways when certain buttons are pushed. Cheep, cheep.

  Animals and computers are more similar than you might think. DNA is fundamentally information; a blueprint to build an organism which is good at replicating. If
DNA is the operating system, then fixed action patterns – programmed behaviors – are the software programs which help the organism survive and reproduce. Whether a mother turkey is responding to a charging polecat (stuffed or otherwise), or whether a human female is reacting to your confident sexual advance, the origins of the behavior remain the same; both animals are responding in a pre-programmed way to a specific environmental stimulus. Human beings are no more immune to fixed action patterns than mother turkeys.

  Biologists have a fancy word for all this; genetic determinism. This is a gentle way of saying that humans are a lot like robots. But this is a book about seduction, not a discourse on the philosophy of ‘free will.’ All you need to know is that women respond with predictable, programmed behaviors to certain sexual stimuli, not so different from mother turkeys. Understanding how to trigger female ‘fixed action patterns’ will enable you to seduce women. ‘Free will’ be damned.

  Men, hold the bubbly. You are just as vulnerable to fixed-action-pattern manipulation as women, but since this is a book about seducing females, not vice-versa, you’re off the hook - for now!

  Finally, a warning; this book contains enough cynicism to make Diogenes blush.

  We Just Don’t Know

  And again: What do championship poker player Phil Hellmuth, and notorious pickup artist Neil Strauss have in common? They are all playing a game of incomplete information.

  Some well-known pickup artists have compared seduction to a chess match. I disagree. In chess, you can see the opponent’s position. You have complete information about his potential moves. Seduction is more like poker. In Texas Hold’em, you don’t know what cards your adversary holds. The best strategy comes down to a series of educated guesses based on what you do know (like the cards showing on the board) and your opponent’s body language.

  When Phil Hellmuth sits across from Chris Moneymaker at the final table of the World Series of Poker, he has no idea what cards his opponent is holding. And when Neil Strauss approaches a gorgeous blonde bombshell at a trendy LA nightclub, he does not know whether she likes bald men or men with a full head of hair, quiet men or loud men, flashy men or reserved men. Her state of mind eludes him; is she looking for casual sex or does she have a serious boyfriend? In fact, other than a bare-bones psychological template applicable to all women, our friend Neil Strauss knows absolutely nothing about the woman he approaches in a club. Worse, he realizes that making an initial positive impression is extremely important, but he does not know whether he made a good impression or a bad one. She likes me, she likes me not. The pickup artist operates in a black hole of information.

  During the Second Gulf War, George Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, gave a famous speech in which he discussed the differences between ‘unknown unknowns,’ ‘known unknowns,’ and ‘known knowns.’ Rumsfeld was typically an idiot, but I never understood why late-night comedians like Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien got so much mileage out of his ‘unknown unknowns’ comment. It made perfect sense to me.

  Seduction, like poker, is a game of incomplete information. What we don’t know is far more important than what we do know. The most important piece of the seduction puzzle is Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknown’ of female interest. We can never be certain how a woman feels about us. Does she find you cute or ugly? Does she like you? Does she hate you? Does she want to sleep with you? Would she rather just be friends? The ability to make good decisions under conditions of uncertainty – incomplete information – is what differentiates the successful seducer from the average frustrated chump.

  Master seducers like Neil Strauss and Erik von Markovic (aka Mystery) learn to solve this crisis-of-information problem intuitively. After spending many years of trial-and-error interactions in bars and clubs, approaching literally thousands of women, they develop an expert intuition for reading women. For these men, ‘pickup’ is a way of life, an all-consuming hobby and, for some, even a job. But the average person (which might be you) cannot afford to spend thousands of hours learning what works and what doesn’t work, crashing and burning, to develop an expert intuition.

  Psychologist Anders Ericsson developed the concept that ten thousand hours of intense practice can make anyone an expert in any field, an idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book ‘Outliers.’ Want to become a professional music composer? Practice composing for ten thousand hours. A professional golfer? Hit golf balls for ten thousand hours.3

  Gladwell’s neat idea inspired former commercial photographer Dan McLaughlin to quit his day job on April 5th, 2010 to embark on ‘The Dan Plan,’ an ambitious goal to become a professional golfer even though he had never played a full round of golf in his life. Logging thirty hours of golfing practice per week, Dan should complete his ten thousand hours of training by December 2016, expecting to receive his PGA Tour card through a successful performance at the Tour’s qualifying school. Dr. Ericsson, the originator of the idea that practice trumps talent, explains that ten thousand hours of ‘stretching yourself beyond what you can currently do’ is required to excel in any field. ‘I think you’re the right astronaut for this mission,’ he told the hopeful golfer. 4

  TIP: Practice, Practice, Practice

  It takes 10,000 hours of practice to build expert intuition. The more you practice the techniques described in this book in the real world, the more you will hone your intuition of attraction. You will intuitively understand what works and what does not work in any female interaction. A combination of knowledge, practice, trial-and-error is the key to success in any field, including seduction.

  This is good news and bad news for the aspiring seducer. The good news is that men who fumble awkwardly with women - demonstrating no talent whatsoever - can overcome their weaknesses by spending ten thousand hours practicing seduction. The bad news is that ten thousand hours is a long, long time.

  I speculate that many top pickup artists, including Mystery and Neil Strauss, demonstrate no innate seduction abilities. They are not naturally more talented with women than you or anyone else. Nor do they come from a background of evolutionary psychology. Their ‘pickup artist’ skills emerged from years of hard work and tens of thousands of hours of practice. When Mystery approaches a random woman in a bar, his expert intuition guides him effortlessly during the interaction, filling in missing (incomplete) information about her wants and desires, motivations and feelings. The problem is that he cannot teach expert intuition; it has to be learned by extensive practice.

  This book offers you a shortcut, an alternative strategy for quickly filling in the incomplete information surrounding female interaction. Understanding evolutionary psychology provides a much faster path to success for the hopeful seducer. Instead of investing years of your life in sleazy bars and clubs making awkward (and usually unsuccessful) advances toward women, you can discover the ‘known unknowns’ quickly by learning how the female mind works. Reading female body language and understanding the evolutionary psychology of female thought will help you fill in the ‘information gap’ faster than years of trial-and-error. When you do visit bars, clubs or (preferably) other seduction venues, you will be armed with powerful tools for understanding female behavior, enabling you to rapidly develop real-world seduction intuition. In writing this book, I want to save you ten thousand hours of rejection.

  Pickup Artist Community Under a Microscope

  In the movie Crazy Stupid Love, Cal Weaver is a middle-aged man who finds out that his wife Emily cheated on him with a co-worker. After moving into a bachelor pad, Cal visits a singles bar, where he meets a young pickup artist named Jacob Palmer, who gives him a crash-course in seduction. Shedding the sexual mediocrity of twenty-plus years of marriage, Cal blooms into a successful pickup artist, attracting and seducing beautiful women. How plausible is this story? Do ‘pickup artist’ techniques actually work?

  When I first became interested in evolutionary psychology, I quickly discovered the ‘pickup artist’ community online, exemplified by suc
h legendary figures as Erik von Markovic (Mystery) and Neil Strauss. These guys had legions of followers, best-selling books and even an MTV series; they must be doing something right. Right?

  In a fascinating little study, Oxford University evolutionary psychologist Nathan Oesch and Croatian psychologist Igor Miklousic teamed up to examine whether traditional seduction techniques advocated by notable pickup artists like Mystery and Neil Strauss actually worked. They put the pickup artist community under a microscope. Does evolutionary biology back up the Mystery Method?

  The 2012 article titled ‘The Dating Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Emerging Science of Human Courtship’ confirmed that many of the methods favored by pickup artist gurus have some grounding in evolutionary biology. Analyzing a broad range of topics and literature found in the seduction community on forums and blogs, the researchers concluded that much of what Eric von Markovic and his disciples have to say is good advice. In particular, their three-step model of creating attraction followed by building trust and ending in aggressive seduction enjoys limited scientific support. The researchers note that ‘The three reputed phases of courtship, attraction, building mutual comfort and trust, and seduction, are supported by a significant and steadily growing literature based in physiological, social and evolutionary psychology research.’ Other core tenets of the pickup artist community, such as ‘negging’ and ‘peacocking,’ may be less effective, as psychologists found no direct support for these methods among a growing body of empirical evidence. Oesch and Miklousic note that ‘many of the strategies advocated by the community are not currently supported by peer-reviewed literature.’5

  But Mystery is not an evolutionary psychologist; he is a pickup artist. Neil Strauss is a New York times columnist and author of a very entertaining bestseller called The Game, but he is no Richard Dawkins. In this book, I hope to give you a firm understanding of the evolutionary and social psychology principles underpinning seduction.