So over on Chateau Heartiste, Mr. Heartiste is trying to explain a highly innovative pickup strategy that you may know as “playing hard to get.”
First he tries a “fishing” metaphor, quoting from a commenter on his site who wrote:
It’s like fishing. You don’t just jerk your line out of the water as soon as you can. That’s how you get a broken line and lose an expensive lure. You jerk her in slowly letting the fish tire herself out. Once she’s sufficiently submissive then it’s time for the net.
Then, presumably, you gut her and fry her up in a pan?
Heartiste doesn’t say. Instead, he moves on to another metaphor that he manages to make even more awkward than the fish one. Apparently women are like cats, who are much more likely to pounce on a string if it’s being pulled away from them than they are if the string is just sitting there.
There is some serious science behind this observation: In their Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, studies reveal, prehistoric cats were in a perpetual war with irregularly moving string creatures.
In trying to explain the whole string thing, Heartiste writes:
A cat won’t lunge for the string if it’s just sitting there in front of her, but if the string [your penis and any proxies for your penis, like your brain or personality] is moving away or zig-zagging, she’ll pounce.
Dude, have you ever met a cat? Cats have claws. They’re hunters, known for capturing and killing prey animals with a single well-planned pounce. You definitely don’t want a cat’s claws in your junk.
The shared idea behind all these pithy game theories is that women want a man who seems like he gets so much mad pussy that he can take or leave any one particular pussy. This is the man who “flips the script” and has women chasing him. Women love the man of plenty. Women are repulsed by the man of need.
I think you’ve actually just described cats, the world champions of playing hard to get.
In the comments, Heartiste’s readers somehow managed to make his creepy metaphors even more creepy.
According to Broadsman,
Some fish have a “hard mouth.” Once the hook is set, you just reel them in as hard as your rig can stand. Some women are like that – once you plant the idea that you’re going to bonk them and they buy in, it becomes a matter of logistics.
Some fish have a “soft mouth,” Once you set the hook, you can reel them in but too hard a pull, and the hook slips out and they are lost.
MILFs tend to have hard mouths. Once the appeal is there, it’s a matter of finding a room.
Young girls tend to have soft mouths. You have to be gentle in tugging them into your clutches.
Soft mouth women tend to have the more succulent flesh but it can be more difficult to catch your fill.
It apparently never occurs to Broadsman that the “hard-mouthed” women he thinks he’s “reeling in” may have actually decided on their own to have sex with him; they may be easy to “reel in” because they are also reeling him in.
trav777, mixing up a couple of metaphors, suggests that “young girls” are so eager to be fished that they “jump in the boat when they get close…no pullin teeth.”
Sentient, meanwhile, takes the fishing metaphor way too literally:
Fish are “attracted” to “lures” but you have to match the conditions and the species sought to the right lure and technique.
You can’t just paddle out in a farm pond and start tossing an offshore lure around… No matter how many “numbers” you put up in that scenario, you will never “hook” a fish… kind of like opening a HB9 in a bar at 11PM and discussing in detail your career as a mid-level actuary or the excellent gas mileage in your Honda Accord…
Successful fishermen know all about the species they are seeking (mating, migration, hibernation, etc.), know the right lures for the conditions and time of year (what they are eating, what attracts them, type of environment/bottom) and know the right techniques (depth, rate of retrieve, where in water column etc.)… It’s a science and a skill – just like pick up. It’s GAME game. It’s not a numbers game.
Apparently feeling that comparing women to animals is too flattering, Greginaurora compares them instead to plants:
When I was in college I practiced “gardening”. Open every woman I’d consider taking to bed, then don’t-close. Everywhere on campus. … I’d “plant the seed of her interest in me”, then I’d walk away and let that interest germinate. One nice side benefit of this was that I had pretty women starting conversations with me everywhere I went (post-open). Eventually, one-at-a-time, these girls would let me know they were ready and bloom for me.
Ew ew ew ew ew.
Broadsman (the hard and soft mouth guy from above) returns with a whole new metaphor — women aren’t cats or fish or flowers but MINKS — and manages to out-creep everyone in the thread with a weird, victim-blaming apologia for domestic violence:
It is a common mammalian behavor for the female to require the male to get rough with the female before mating. For example, the female mink has to be bitten and bleed from the wound before she ovulates.
Lots of women at least appreciate rough treatment, from just being picked up and thrown on the bed to being battered women, loving their abusive mate.
Women: As PUAs see it, they’re fish to be lured, or cats to dangle strings in front of, or flowers to plant, or minks to physically mistreat — anything but sentient beings with their own thoughts and their own motivations for things.
h/t — dashapants
EDIT: Added the h/t, and a link to Heartiste’s piece. Oops.
I meant to add: So where do they get the belief that dikpix will help them get women. From other guys of course. Obviously women wouldn’t have any idea what women do or don’t like.
It often seems that guys like this try to draw conclusions from the few times they “got lucky” — this is, met a woman who wants to get laid and has decided she’ll go off with the first marginally acceptable guy she meets. He thinks he did something really good, not that he was at least one cut above dregs.
They attribute every time they got lucky to Game. Those many, many times they didn’t? Not the fault of Game. You have to expect to get shot down! And maybe they Gamed incorrectly.
Game is like prayer. You can’t falsify it. If you gt what you wanted, that’s proof it works. If you didn’t, well, you did it wrong, or it just wasn’t meant to be–in any case, confirmation bias will kick in and you’ll just remember the times it “worked.”
So, the upshot is:
* Confidence is attractive
* Flirting with people sometimes makes them interested in you
Remind me why we need “game” to come to these startling conclusions?
Oh, here are some cat-pouncing gifs that help to underscore my points.
http://i.imgur.com/AfNIxfQ.gif
http://media.giphy.com/media/138pUPO2BTHWh2/giphy.gif
http://i.imgur.com/xqGkX.gif
https://cdn.andrewlorente.com/30a0ce91cb33539c639cc15a835d04a61bd28681
@Bico
Truth. Desperation is a turn-off no matter what the gender. A relaxed and happy person is obviously more attractive. Leave it to Heartiste to draw the wrong lessons from that.
…and suddenly that point in the metaphor is reached where the actual message gets lost.
Having said that, we start getting to the point where I make the regulars here mad as I at least understand how these guys can trick guillible men to pay them money/follow their words. I’m almost certainly going to marry the first woman who’ll have me, the fate of the childless/never married man is a fate worse than death (then again, based off how early never married men die…at least I don’t have all that much time). Sorry for taking a psychological crap in the thread, but that’s how I feel (and every experience and datum backs up…). In short, to the person above, yeah women are alpha (single women live longer than married, men are vice versa).
Having said that? The reason I didn’t go down this path is that the PUA are not just frauds, they are hatefull frauds who never understand how they de-humanize both men and women. This thread took that to the point of damn near seeing women as pure animals…
Oh. My. God. That cat caught that poor baby bat. >:( That cat is an ass.
Reminds me of the Scorpions, who somehow managed to sing the lines “The cat is purring, it scratches my skin” AND “So give her inches, and feed her well” in the same song!
Heartiste, and really all these PUA guys, strike me as the type to declaw their cats, if they cared to keep any, which is just, no, don’t declaw your cats.
I read somewhere that if a guy is staring at you and won’t stop, you should stare at his crotch. And squint. And have yourself a big ol’ viking laugh. (Don’t giggle though, because they see that as a “good thing”. Having a big ol’ guffaw at his expense is not.)
I imagine the advice would be the same for if he flashed you, but it would also be followed by “go to the police right after”.
Also @David: The second one’s my favorite for the little upper body wiggle. “WTF, hooman?! Why can I no catch deez mice?! Y U FRUSTRATE MEH LIK DIS?!”
Fishing lure: shiny plastic device crudely designed to mimic live prey, aimed at getting the target to snap at something useless and harmful.
PUA: shiny plastic advice crudely designed to mimic human interaction, aimed at getting the target to snap at useless, harmful crap strewn from Heartiste’s chum bucket.
In an ironic twist, Pan was attacking shadows on the wall as I read this thread. Also, the first night I brought him home, he tried to pounce on my bangs while I was sleeping. Yeah.
At least I knew what I was getting into.
My exact thought! Take away the metaphor and his behaviour sounds completely normal… Talking to people, making friends, ending up having sex with some of them.
‘So where do they get the belief that dikpix will help them get women.’
I don’t think anyone now believes that dikpix help anyone get women, in the same way that no one believes that yelling ‘hey baby what’s your phone number’ to random women is likely to result in a date. They only do it because they can intimidate strangers with no consequences. Unless the stranger looks up your mother on FB.
http://happyplace.someecards.com/romance/woman-forward-scummy-guys-dick-pic-to-his-mother/
Dangling themselves in front of a woman and blowing hot and cold creates a sense of urgency and confusion and makes it easier to manipulate the “mark”. It’s much like the shady salesman that puts a rush on things in order to get someone to pull out their wallet.
And of course these guys are “alpha” while women who do the same are “bitches”. Because the day that PUAs stopped using all their distracting jargon and metaphors just might be the day that they thought about how they would feel about being treated the same, realize that they wouldn’t like it, and admit that they’re losers for doing it.
I like the leaps of logic that broadsman goes to. I’m assuming that he’s referring to women liking rough treatment in the bedroom, or how some women internalize misogyny and prefer benevolently “strong” and “protective” men. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s correct in assuming that “many” women are like this, but to equate liking “strong and protective”, or liking kinks, to liking abuse ? Yeah, stretch harder, asshole.
I bet I can out alpha-logic broadsman. Many women like rollercoasters, so dare I say it, they even like being thrown off a cliff. Try to punch a hole in that logic, you pack of animals./alpha
Pro tip to PUAs – If your dating advice is literally drawn from metaphors of predation, you are doing it wrong. Very wrong.
Not too long ago PUA got mentioned somewhere else on the interwebs, and I (along with a bunch of other people) made comments about how “game” is a very handy way to idenitfy “Guys I never want to have contact with again”.
I was promptly sealioned by several dudes chiding me for my broad-brush generalization. “Sure, some PUAs are jerks, but you only noticed them because jerks are more noticeable. You’ve probably met perfectly nice PUAs and never even realized it. What if a PUA was a really nice guy? What then?”
Um, nope, actually. PUA theory inherently relies on garbage like this. If a man thinks it’s excellent advice, it’s because he’s not willing to treat women like real human beings. It is by definition coercive, predatory, and manipulative. Guys who practice it are not good guys, There is, of course, hope for them to outgrow it and get a clue, but at the moment? All of my nope.
Heartiste has also tried to make a metaphor of game using the finely honed art of yanking a woman’s ponytail:
http://www.donotlink.com/ei3o
He follows it up with a post on exactly how and why pulling a random woman’s hair is going to make her crazy for you.
He neglects to consider that maybe the reason the girl reacts the way she does in the vine is because she is friends with the guy sitting behind her. Possibly even in a relationship with him.
@Kootie, to be fair, I think some guys just have too big of an ego to take advice from “traditional” sources, so yeah, there’s some okay PUAs out there.
Their sealioning is still annoying, though. If you don’t want to be seen as dirty, then don’t play in the mud. It’s common sense, really.
Oops my mistake. In the comments of that Heartiste post the regs make it clear not to pull the hair of a stranger. There needs to be “minimal interaction” first, apparently, a “build up of attraction”.
But could someone explain how they see lust in the eyes of an obviously teenaged girl when I just see a friendly look of “did you really just do that?”
Well, I’m very sorry to hear you’re having a rough time romantically (and glad you’re aware enough to see the manipulative, dehumanizing tactics of PUA for what they are).
However, all those studies showing that single men die younger should be taken with a grain of salt. Newspapers love to quote these, the same way they fell all over themselves years ago to propagate that bogus study that claimed single women over 35 are more likely to be attacked by terrorists than get married. The methodology is flawed, because the studies treat divorced and widowed men as if they’d never married, and those situations obviously come with stresses that never-married people don’t face. Also, the lifestyle benefits (which these studies use to explain the difference) aren’t dependent on having a spouse. You don’t need to be married to make wise choices about diet, exercise, smoking, and alcohol, or to build yourself a loving, supportive network of friends and family. It could be a reverse causation – perhaps people who take good care of themselves are more likely to get married.
What the studies don’t dwell on is that a miserable marriage is even worse for your health than not being married.
Furthermore, if you’re going to subscribe to this belief that single women live longer while single men die earlier, is it really ethical to ask a woman to shorten her lifespan so you can lengthen yours?
Longevity aside, what is it about being childless/never married that you feel is worse than death, and specific to men? I’m curious. Young women experience an intense amount of pressure in our culture to Find “The One” Before It’s Too Late And You’re Too Old And Have Too Many Cats (a fear which PUAs and other misogynists try to exploit to keep women in line). Practically every magazine, romance novel, movie, and pop song aimed at women plays the same tired drumbeat. I haven’t seen a similar pervasive pressure to get married directed at men, but maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places.
@Buttercup
That’s funny, my brother and I were talking about this the other day. He’s thirty-one and single; I said that he was lucky he was a guy, otherwise he’d be getting the “when are you going to get maaaarrried?” prods from everyone. He laughed and told me that kind of nosiness knows no gender. He’s actually behind the accepted curve by about five years. Most of his coworkers and friends are settled down (either married or long term partnered) and the majority have at least one child. He doesn’t feel like a pariah or anything for being alone, but he does confuse people sometimes. And he gets annoyed when people start trying to throw him a pity-party because he hasn’t conformed to the norms.
I’m also reminded of my daughter’s old art teacher. I was chatting with her and a few other moms while the kids finger painted, and she mentioned that she’d been strong armed into accepting a blind date with a friend of a friend. The guy sounded great on paper, but she was put off because he was forty and never married. “I mean, what’s wrong with him?” she asked. I suggested that maybe he just hadn’t found the right person and didn’t want to settle, but everyone else seemed to think that being that age and never partnered was weird.
Brother and I are both in a conservative part of the South, so this stuff could all be a product of local culture. I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of “dude, what are you waiting for?” attitude didn’t exist elsewhere in the U.S., too (I’ll have to ask Mr. FM about this later. He was 38 when we got hitched, and he’s lived all over). Even if it’s not an overarching cultural narrative, it still sucks to have those expectations and pressures foisted onto your shoulders.
I’m quite lucky in that I don’t really get the “get maaarried and have bay-bees!!!” schtick. I’m 26. My parents are older and I know that they WANT grandkids in the next few years, but because their parents pressured them to produce offspring (and they didn’t marry until they were both 30) they are refusing to do it to me and my brother. Which is good, because I’m 26 and there is no sign of a suitable bachelor on my radar. Doesn’t help that neither me or my bro are fussed about sex and relationships right now. I wouldn’t say I’m asexual, and I WOULD like to partner up in good time, but I’m really really not that bothered. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is, for the time being.
*my parents are older than other parents of my generation would be, I mean. They’re heading towards 70.
Guys get some pressure for marriage, but it’s primarily two sources:
1: From a woman who wants a commitment. This is mostly second-hand pressure–she’s getting the aforementioned ‘when are you gonna get married’ crap from all sides, and has decided to just try to get with the program. This has dropped dramatically over the last few decades, as women have been more inclined to resist that tide of messaging, and thus not try to get the guy to ‘put a ring on it’ before they’re actually ready to do so.
2: Internal response to being the ‘third/fifth wheel’ as time goes on. Married folks usually live life differently from single folks; ditto parents and those without kids. So if you’re single and all your friends are getting married and settled, you start feeling odd hanging out with them, because they’re into things that just have no relevance to you. You end up tagging along on stuff that seems to you like ‘errands’ (or even ‘chores’), but which they are treating like a day out. (Example: Furniture shopping, which is infinitely more enjoyable when you’re doing it as part of ‘building a home together’ rather than just ‘I need to stop sitting on old milk crates’.)
@ freemage:
Yeah, this. I’m still living it because now even though I’m married, because we moved to a community with lots of church-going young families with kids. We are older, without kids and on top of it, I’m an atheist and husband is a pagan.