Heartiste — the pompous racist shitbag and alleged pickup artist of great renown — is feeling a bit boastful again.
In a post yesterday, he links to a two-year-old Business Insider post with the clickbaity title 12 Scientifically Proven Ways To Make Yourself More Attractive To The Opposite Sex. He’s interested in Scientifically Proven Way #8: “Men should play hard to get.”
The sciencey “proof” of this old saw comes from a 2010 study of, you guessed it, college undergraduates. As Business Insider’s Megan Willet summarized it, “the study suggested that if men hold back some of their feelings at the very beginning, and create some mystery, he’ll be more likely to hook a member of the opposite sex.”
The Business Insider piece also suggests eating fruits and vegetables, keeping your teeth white, and, if you’re a woman, wearing red lipstick.
Somewhat odder suggestions: women should talk in a higher voice and men should wear a T-shirt. That is, a shirt with a giant letter T on it. Apparently, according to some study from researchers at Nottingham Trent University that I’m not going to bother to read, women find men with giant T’s on their shirts “12% more attractive,” because the T creates the illusion of broader shoulders and a thinner waist.
In other words, as is often the case in such articles, the “scientific” advice is either trite, blindingly obvious or kind of silly.
But Heartiste thinks that this whole “playing hard to get” thing is quite the revelation.
He also seems to think it was … his idea in the first place.
The mainstream media have been reading CH. “Men should play hard to get.” Glad to see the Rude Word of Game is finally penetrating block-like skulls.
Yes, dude, I’m sure this two-year old article referencing a five-year-old study that seems to reaffirm a “Game” principle that probably dates back to prehistoric days is the result of people reading your idiot blog.
I mean, my fucking cats understand “playing hard to get.”
This isn’t the first time Heartiste has tried to claim some bit of conventional wisdom as a Heartiste Original. I called him out a couple of years back for claiming he had “introduced”‘ the idea of sexual market value, which led to this highly edifying Twitter “debate.” (Sorry about the duplicate tweets; that’s just how Twitter handles embedding.)
For the record, since the lack of proper attribution is tiresome, CH was the first to introduce the concept of SMV. http://t.co/EVMUJUjNHq
— heartiste (@heartiste) October 25, 2013
1 of 2 Perpetual narcissist @heartiste thinks he invented the old, trite notion of "sexual market value" in 2007 https://t.co/8gv26x1NW9
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
2 of 2 So why, dear @heartiste, was Laura Kipnis using the phrase "sexual market value" in 2005? http://t.co/WPsHNev592
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
@heartiste Introduce, verb, bring (something, esp. a product, measure, or concept) into use or operation for the first time.(source; Google)
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
I noted that the term “meat market” was a common way to describe singles bars, and pointed out that really, the whole “dating world = marketplace” equation was “a commonplace notion that no sensible person would claim they’d thought up or popularized recently.”
@heartiste No, my argument is that you're an egomaniacal mediocrity who claims credit for shit he didn't do so as to feel important.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
@heartiste Brilliant argument there. You'll be captain of the debate team in no time.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
@heartiste Did you invent calling other people fat, too? Is that a CH original?
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
@heartiste I actually have three HB10s napping in the folds of my belly fat right this moment.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 28, 2013
@bjworthy69 @heartiste I have sent my ilk out to be repaired.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 29, 2013
Ah, well, I amuse myself at least.
And speaking of amusing: I also just discovered this definition of Sexual Market Value on Urban Dictionary; not only is it much more entertaining than Heartiste’s version, but it was also posted a year before Mr. H claims he “introduced” the idea.
After doing the calculations, I find that my SMV is 7.37482 pounds per square inch (of nose).
I think Dacron Guy is miserable because he wants women to be attracted to him for his personality, not his static electricity.
Actually, yes there is. As a linguist, I can tell you that when we hear what we think is a new term, we study it in various ways (including google, a fantastic new linguistic tool in so many ways) to find out where and when it actually came from, and attribute the term to whoever is found in any records to have used it first.
Heartiste apparently doesn’t know that a term doesn’t become new just because he’s never heard it before.
@Yutolia:
A fellow linguist! *high five*
I’m fascinated by the way new words can be coined in such various ways. Like for example the way the word “quiz” got added just through a guy in Dublin, Ireland, betting his friends that he could add a word to the dictionary, and then pasting notices all over town asking people what the word “quiz” meant. Nowadays more rigourous testing is applied, of course. CH probably just thinks that he is such an important person on the Internet that the OED should acknowledge him as the first cause of all modern vocabulary, especially the ones that relate to the “science” of The Game.
Nonono, you’re all wrong! Dacron Guy isn’t miserable at all; he’s just so alpha that he’s able to neg all three of the winsome young models at once and it’s SO working!
@Monzach:
Yay!!! *strikes and misses the high five like she always does :))
Yes, I agree – he is definitely one of these people that thinks something’s only important after he’s somehow involved in it.
That guy was really mean but your tweets and responses were simply brilliant.
‘Egomaniacal mediocrity’ – I will be stealing this, @David!
Yutalia, my students taught me the trick: keep your eyes on the elbow, and you’ll make good contact. It seems to be true.
And I do find this blog interesting and useful, but man, it makes me sad sometimes. This “heartiste” guy is just so pitiful.
Heartiste is sort of right about this. While the concept of romantic pairings as a “market” dates back at least to the work on the stable marriage problem in the 1950s, the actual term “Sexual Market Value” was developed on the old Usenet group soc.singles in the late 1990s or early 2000s, although it is unclear exactly who first used it. However, one of those who popularized it on soc.singles was a poster known as “Jackie The Tokeman”, who is either none other than Heartiste himself or is someone who has influenced Heartiste so strongly that they are virtually indistinguishable on most (but not all) topics. From soc.singles, the notion of SMV spread to the nascent PUA culture developing in usenet at that time (in groups such as alt.seduction.fast) and from there to the manosphere in general, with JTT/CH undoubtedly helping it along in various ways.
SMV is also widely misunderstood particularly by those who use it the most, who seem to regard it as some sort of unique numerical value that can be measured for each person like height (it’s not). However, there is a rigorous definition (derived from completely analogous results in labor economics) that maintains a coherent notion of “market value” and avoids that sort of reification fallacy.
great to see the name of jackie t tokeman resurface, as a useful search result at least. warms the cockles of my heart. hope he’s still writing in 2017 as well as he did at his best in the 90s, much of which i remember as being either true or beautiful most of the time. it’d be great if there were posted somewhere, a jack-built discography of his work, done under however many successive aliases, with the best stuff excerpted under one roof.com — (a house that only jack could build) . — and “incidentally” “Dude”, you forgot to mention An-day Oscny-may (in pig latin for safety), who if i’m not mistaken, was the Mitochondrial Adam of the SMV-manifesto line. render unto dan the things that are dan’s.
yours in christ,
yours in proust,
yours in klaus kinski,
cb
.
Cbianco,
I liked your poast. I will be bold. His name was Mocsny. Daniel Mocsny. PBUH.
I too would love to see a compendium of Tokeman’s finest. Not the faded simulcra known as “Heartiste”.
Your brother in Christ,
Tupac Chopra