Psychology of Seduction Read online

  I want to take the ‘artist’ out of ‘pickup artist.’ Seduction is a science rather than an art form. This book approaches seduction from a purely scientific standpoint, explaining human attraction within a thoroughly evolutionary framework.

  We will take a close and critical look at most of the methods recommended by the pickup artist community and explore deeper, even more aggressive seduction techniques which extend to the world of social and empirical psychology, game theory, marketing, and beyond. Instead of just throwing scientific facts at you, I want to explain the psychology of seduction so that you feel it in the marrow of your bones.

  The Morality of Seduction

  Some people, especially feminists, will object to the material presented in this book. They will argue that teaching seduction psychology enables men to manipulate and exploit women. Unfortunately, ethics is not my domain; I will let professional philosophers hash out the moral and ethical implications of seduction. But before we hand over the case to those ivory-tower philosophers, let us consider a few evolutionary differences between men and women in the mating game.

  Men are shallow creatures. To a man, looks are (almost) all that matter, especially for a short-term encounter. An owner of a major dating site recently observed that women read the male profiles, while men just browse the female pictures. Because of the male’s reliance on appearance as an indicator of fertility, he is easily duped by the modern female.

  Today, women have more weapons than ever before to seduce and manipulate men. From lipstick to silicone breast implants to tummy-tucks and Botox, the modern woman routinely alters her appearance to increase her attractiveness regardless of her age. How beautiful would fifty-five-year-old Madonna look in the Pleistocene era, absent her cosmetics and plastic surgery? Would she still be able to attract a twenty-two-year-old stud as a lover? As Shakespeare says, ‘men shut their doors against a setting sun.’ Ouch.

  Even the ugliest caterpillar hopes to become a butterfly. Women spent $38 billion in 2011 to fudge their looks, duping men into seeing them as more attractive (and younger) than they actually are. The global cosmetics industry disputes the old notion that you can’t polish a turd, betting that most ladies will try; the industry is expected to surpass $265 billion by 2017, more than the GDP of Greece. None of these figures account for plastic surgery, breast and buttocks implants or other enhancements. Worldwide, women spend over $100 billion annually on improving their looks. That’s a whole lot of lying.

  Men face a much greater challenge. Since women place less emphasis on appearance, the modern male cannot simply visit his plastic surgeon or buy cosmetics to make himself more attractive to the opposite sex. And the physical trait which matters most to women - height - is something that men can’t do much about. Try visiting your doctor and asking him to make you taller. He might call the folks in white coats.

  Women look for status, fame, wealth, self-confidence, power and dominance in a man. Want an easy way to boost your wealth and status? Sorry, there’s no pill for that, and they don’t sell status-boosting makeup at Sears. You’re out of luck.

  And it gets worse. A woman produces a limited number of eggs in her lifetime, whereas a man produces almost unlimited sperm. Eggs are large, nutritious, rare and valuable; sperm are tiny, plentiful and cheap. Since women possess the more valuable sexual resource, they get to be choosy.

  This fundamental sexual asymmetry in human reproduction - that eggs are worth more than sperm - explains why men need this book. Even an unattractive woman can find a male partner, but the opposite is seldom true.

  In the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago of coral atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski reported that some island women were so hideously repulsive that village elders prohibited them from ever having sex. Amazingly, even these ugly ducklings managed to become pregnant, which the islanders interpreted as conclusive evidence of virgin birth.7

  Men compete ferociously for access to females in a winner-take-all battle to increase their status and wealth. New research in genetics shows that there have always been more women than men, spawning a ferociously competitive environment. Like crabs in a bucket, young men must struggle to attain status and wealth to attract a mate, while women simply wait for a suitable man to come calling.

  Throughout human history, the elite 5% of men have been responsible for more than 80% of copulation. That’s a lot of fucking. Pharaohs, kings, aristocrats, religious leaders and warlords have hoarded beautiful women in harems or prevented them from marrying the hoi polloi. It got so bad in the late Renaissance and Enlightenment that the sexually-starved lower classes banded together in nations around the world to throw off the yoke of the aristocracy, guaranteeing fair access to women. Laws against polygamy replaced the harems of days gone by. Indeed, modern democracies supplanted monarchies when males of the middle and lower classes demanded equal access to females. Why should Lords have all the fun?

  My intention in writing this book is not to hurt women, but simply to level the playing field. Men with undesirable physical traits or limp personalities remain celibate, often for years. We learned as children that life isn’t always fair; the lesson is repeated for celibate men every single day. Cheap cosmetics cannot help a man increase his desirability to the opposite sex, but he can use the principles of evolutionary and social psychology to appear sexier - indeed, to become sexier.

  Understand that a woman is trying to make a sucker of you, whether she knows it or not. She is trying to exploit you for your genes or your money, sometimes both. Ideally she would like to cuckold you into investing in someone else’s bastard child. You’re no saint, either; your goal is to exploit the female reproductive resource when she is young and fertile, then drop her like a hot potato once she reaches menopause. At the height of his fame in Victorian England, forty-five-year-old Charles Dickens completely abandoned his aging wife to frolic with his eighteen-year-old mistress until the end of his days. Seduction is a game, the goal of which is to make the other person a sucker. Manipulation and exploitation permeates seduction like gristle threads a steak. If you can’t handle the cynicism, put down this book and read ‘My Fair Lady.’

  Does seduction make you evil? I don’t think so. Is a car salesman evil because he scrupulously vacuums the interior and washes the exterior before he shows you the car? Is a high-end restaurant chef evil because he presents otherwise-ordinary food made from sub-standard ingredients in a pleasing, exciting way? Seduction means presenting yourself in the most positive light, emphasizing your positive traits and obscuring (or eliminating) your negative ones. I am not teaching you how to change women, but how to change yourself. You are becoming the man that women want you to be. And what is so bad about that?

  Part I:

  The Psychology of Sex

  Galen of Pergamon, a Greek physician and philosopher during the Roman Empire, was one of the most accomplished medical researchers in ancient times. His ideas inspired a variety of scientific pursuits, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, neurology and pharmacology, even stretching into philosophy and logic. It would not be an exaggeration to call him the father (or at least the uncle) of modern medicine.

  Like other scientific authorities of his era, Galen was relatively ignorant of the female body and mind, believing that women had to have an orgasm for conception to occur. For another fifteen hundred years after Galen, learned men continued to believe that orgasm was required for conception, showing just how little the nascent scientific community understood basic female anatomy. Body and mind, woman was shrouded in mystery.

  Even after straightforward questions of anatomy were answered, the female mind continued to puzzle and confuse the almost-exclusively-male scientific establishment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Women were thought to be uninterested in sexual pleasure, fiercely monogamous, impregnably virtuous, tolerant of male indiscretions and devoted - body and soul - to their husbands. We liked ‘em barefoot, naked, pregnant -
and science seemed to agree.

  Many of the misconceptions, biases, and just plain inaccuracies about women persisted deep into the twentieth century, but over the last few decades scientists (both male and female) have taken a microscope to the female mind. What they found has shattered many of the age-old misconceptions about female sexuality.

  Chapter 1

  Are You a Chicken or A Pig?

  ‘The basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To men, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re very exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.’

  – Jerry Seinfeld

  Eggs & Sperm

  A pig and a chicken are walking down the road. The chicken says, ‘Hey pig, let’s open a restaurant!’ Interested but slightly skeptical, the pig asks what the restaurant would be called. The chicken suggests, ‘How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?’ After pondering for a moment, the pig realizes the problem and declines; ‘No thanks, Mr. Chicken. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!’

  In reproduction, women are committed like the pig, while men are just involved, like the chicken. Women bear all the costs of reproduction, from nine months of pregnancy to post-natal nursing, raising and feeding the children. After five minutes of fun, the man’s job is done; he simply hunts for the next available female, spreading his seed far and wide without incurring any of the real costs of making babies. Squawk, squawk. And you thought men were pigs!

  The difference between eggs and sperm is the difference between the chicken and the pig in a ham n’eggs breakfast. Eggs are rare and valuable - a big commitment. Sperm is cheap and plentiful - a minor involvement.

  The striking economic contrast between eggs and sperm leads males and females to pursue unique reproductive strategies. This difference explains why men stumble over each other to buy drinks for beautiful women in a club. It explains why men find most women at least somewhat attractive, whereas women find most men unattractive. And it explains why you are reading about the psychology of seduction.

  Your mother worked hard; females invest much more than males in the birth and rearing of offspring. In human females, consider that nine minutes of pleasure is offset by nine months of hardship and nineteen years of responsibility. And that’s a happy outcome; prior to modern medicine, childbirth was the most dangerous game in town, resulting in one death for every eight thousand screaming infants born to the world. Males take no risk and gestate no babies; they offer little more than a cheap dose of sperm and a rowdy good time.

  Eggs are valuable resources precisely because they are in short supply. A female produces a limited number of eggs in her lifespan, while a male churns out boundless amounts of sperm. In a moment of economic desperation, one of my female friends hawked her eggs to a sperm bank for five thousand dollars. If they offered me a hundred bucks for my gonad juice I would consider myself lucky.

  The difference in sexual economic value between the two genders suggests that females should be more choosy in selecting a mate and that males must compete among themselves for access to scarce female reproductive resources. This is the McDonalds Hamburger of evolutionary psychology, often quoted, easily learned and quickly digested - but seldom fully explained - by leading pickup artists.

  A peacock makes only one contribution to a peahen; an injection of sperm and nothing else. He does not protect her from other peacocks, house her, feed her, or help her raise the chicks. Satisfied that his work is done, the peacock simply ambles off to impregnate another peahen. If only human males had it so easy.

  Peahens must devote time, energy and resources to transform the sperm of a male peacock into a baby chick. She gains nothing from additional promiscuity, while the male can father more chicks simply by mating with any peahen that will have him. Each time he seduces a new peahen, he wins the genetic lottery by producing more offspring. Each time she seduces a fresh peacock, she wins a smidgeon of additional sperm that she probably does not need.

  Stick with me here, folks, because things are about to get a little technical for the remainder of this chapter. It is time to rewind the tape. Probing the mind of the pretty Starbucks girl without understanding the basics of evolutionary biology would be like jumping into Game of Thrones halfway through Season One. To know what is happening right now, we need to know what happened before.

  In a species with high male parental investment, such as ours, women achieve reproductive success by gaining access to food and shelter, accomplished by securing parental investment in offspring. They enjoy free room and board, if you will, for making babies. But caution is advised; women must be careful in choosing mates with good genes because only high fitness males can afford the time and energy to invest in offspring. Males have less incentive to choose high fitness females because they increase their chances of sexual fitness simply by having more sex. Small wonder, then, that women have evolved to be choosy and men have evolved to read books like this.8

  Sexual Selection Theory

  ‘There are a lot of really bad places to be a single mother, but probably one of the worst ever was 1.8 million years ago on the savannah. The ancestral women who successfully passed their genes on to us were those who were choosy about who they went under a bush with, weeding out the dads from the cads. Men had a different genetic imperative—to avoid bringing home the bison for kids who weren’t theirs—and evolved to regard girls who give it up too easily as too high risk for anything beyond a roll on the rock pile.’

  - Amy Alkon

  Adorned with bright eye-catching ornaments, the males strut and swagger in front of groups of critical, selective and intensely observant females. Bowing and bobbing their nimble bodies in extravagant dances, they make loud noises to draw attention to themselves. Occasionally fights break out and the blood flows red. Females observe these macho displays with keen interest, singling out a particularly sexy male for a quick romance.

  Does this sound like Saturday night at your local hip-hop club? Actually I was describing sage grouse, which congregate in large flocks called ‘leks’ on the American high plains, strutting their stuff in competition for the opportunity to impregnate observing females.

  Before we can understand sexual psychology, first we need to figure out how animals, including humans, choose sexual partners. Welcome to the branch of evolutionary biology known as sexual selection theory.

  Even if you live in a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee and read the Bible every night, you have probably heard of natural selection, popularized by Herbert Spencer’s misleading phrase ‘survival of the fittest.’ Charles Darwin realized that death was an effective selector, trimming the ‘unfit’ from the population by their inability to survive. People who lacked a fear of heights, or a fear of snakes, or were terribly weak and slow, or stupid, died quickly in the harsh conditions of our ancestral environment. We are all descended from ancestors who were ‘fit’ enough to survive to reproductive age. How else could you exist?

  Even learned evolutionary biologists often forget that natural selection – death – was only one selection pressure that Darwin discovered. The other was sex. And it is the lesser-known ‘sexual selection’ theory that concerns us here.

  Darwin proposed sexual selection theory twelve years after the publication of his seminal work, ‘The Origin of Species.’ We can apply sexual selection theory to explain many puzzling animal traits incomprehensible within the framework of natural selection. Consider the peacock’s tail, an overused example that we will abuse some more. Male peacocks feature a large, ornately bright and colorful tail – a true work of art. Natural selection cannot explain how such tails evolved. After all, would not this gaudy, heavy instrument simultaneously attract predators while slowing down the bird’s getaway? According to natural selection theory, the peacock’s tail is an abomination which bumped the mortality rate for male peacocks. It should never have evolved.


  But sexual selection tells us something different. The gaudy tail represents a sexual signaling device. The ladies love it. If the artwork on the male peacock’s tail increases his chances of reproduction more than it increases his chances of death, then he is winning the evolutionary game.

  Sexual selection occurs in any sexually-reproducing species because of the competition within each gender group to attract partners of the opposite sex. Darwin actually identified two different kinds of sexual selection; aggressive rivalry and mate choice. Rivalry, which typically occurs between males, tends to produce weapons of combat, such as the horns of stags, the sharp teeth of otherwise-peaceable herbivores, and large, powerful muscles. Female mate choice produces ornaments like the peacock’s tail, musky smells and imaginative sounds like the chirping of birds or the song of the whippoorwill.

  For sexual selection to work, evolution must produce two changes simultaneously; one gender must evolve a trait in tandem with the opposite gender. As male peacocks evolved colorful tails, female peacocks had to evolve a preference for such tails – or else the gaudy instrument would simply be a liability for its owner.

  Applying sexual selection theory to humans explains a wide range of human traits, from large muscles and V-shaped torsos in men to long hair and hourglass figures in women. Why did such traits evolve? Because the opposite sex found them sexy. Period.

  Now we have a fundamental explanatory framework for understanding human mate choice. But humans are more complex than peacocks. We have much more than a colorful tail to display. That ‘much more’ is the subject of the next section.

  Good Genes and Sexy Sons

  ‘The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and writhe and moan.’

  - Stephen Pinker

  Like most men today, Darwin didn’t understand women. Even tremendous scientists must occasionally admit to being baffled. After formulating his magnificent theory of sexual selection, Darwin still had no clue how some female mate preferences harmful to individual survival actually evolved. This absence of explanation created a startling gap in his otherwise-beautiful theory.