By David Futrelle
Hey ladies of the cis persuasion, don’t you just love it when some dude on a date with you leans in close and, in his sexiest voice, says, “hey babe, I know your deepest, darkest sexy secret: You love to vacuum your apartment when you’re ovulating.”
This scenario comes to you from an old (very old) AskMen post by actual professional “dating coach” David DeAngelo that I ran across today. It’s a masterpiece of inadvertent humor, offering some of the worst dating advice I’ve ever seen, of which the weird and completely incorrect claim about ovulation vacuuming is only the cherry on top of a huge crap sundae.
DeAngelo’s listicle purports to offer ten tips on how to “flirt with a woman sexually,” but the vast majority of his suggestions are variations on one central theme: throw blatant sexual innuendo into the conversation at every possible opportunity and even some impossible ones.
The English language is literally packed with words you can twist around to create sexual meanings. Wet, juicy, hard, fast, hot — the possibilities are endless. For example, if she says her drink is big, you can reply with something like: “Big can be a good thing, don’t you think?”
SUBTLE, DUDE.
But you don’t need to wait for a woman to use some sexy double-entendre-ready word in order to get the sexy innuendo going. Even a cup of tea can be enough.
[L]et’s say you get a woman a cup of tea; you can follow up by saying: “Looks like you’re on the receiving end today. Do you always receive or do you like to give at times too?” Crack a slight smile and she will know exactly what you are talking about.
It’s like talking to someone who responds to every single thing you say with “that’s what she said.”
While DeAngelo warns would-be pickup artists to model themselves on James Bond, not Austin Powers, a lot of his suggestions would make you sound more than a little like the Mike Meyers character, minus the fake accent (unless you’re doing that too, which is also not recommended).
One of the best ways to get the fun started is to accuse a woman of trying to seduce you. For example, if she mentions something about her house, such as: … “Do you know how to install a wireless router?” you should say: “Wow, you are trying to get me to come over to your house already?” … Women love it when you do this. Don’t be surprised if she really does try to get you to come over soon after.
Or, as Austin Powers would put it “oh, behave!”
You can also turn practically anything she says about you that’s even vaguely positive into an excuse to brag about how good you allegedly are at fucking.
Women want men who know how to please them, but you can’t come right out and say: “I’m a great lover.” Instead, use sexual innuendo to indirectly convey this message. For example, say you are at your place making a drink for a woman and she says: “Wow, you’re good at that.” Look her square in the eye and say: “I’m good at a lot of things.”
She’ll get the hint that you’re a stud and be dying to find out more.
OK, this one might possibly work. But only if were pretty clear already that she was way into you. And if you did the eyebrow thing like Pooh up there while putting on your dopiest smirk.
But the strangest bit of advice in the whole list still has to be tip #2,
“Let her know you know,” aka “The ovulation thing”
Take it away, David DeAngelo you big weirdo:
Want to know a secret about female sexuality that 99% of men don’t know? Here it is: Many women feel compelled to vacuum their house when they’re ovulating.
Some experts believe it has something to do with wanting to “clean the nest” before laying her “egg.”
So, when a woman tells you she is vacuuming, say: “Vacuuming? Are you ovulating or something?” She’ll be stunned that you know this and wonder what else you know about female sexuality.
She’ll be stunned alright, but not for the reason you think, buddy.
Of course, if she doesn’t know what you mean, fill her in. Women love it when you teach them something new — especially about themselves.
Just in case there are any aspiring pickup artists reading this post, who don’t understand why this is so wrong, wrong, wrong, here are three reasons why you should not tell women they’re secretly compelled to vacuum when they’re ovulating.
- Contrary to DeAngelo’s claim, no woman wants to hear some “secret” you “know” about the way her body works.
- Ovulation is not really a “sexy” topic so much as a “creepy” one to bring up unbidden on a first date.
- And, oh yeah, because IT’S NOT TRUE JESUS CHRIST THERE IS NO RELATION BETWEEN OVULATION AND VACUUMING WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT.
And you don’t have to take my word for it. One of the perks of doing this blog is that whenever I run across some particularly egregious misunderstanding of human reproduction I can run it past world-famous vagina expert Dr. Jen Gunter — author of the bestselling The Vagina Bible — and she will actually get back to me.
Here’s what she had to say in response to DeAngelo’s Tip #2:
I have no words. That is stupid. It is a sophomoric fantasy of a hot, horny, housewife. …
That can only be from someone who has a kindergarten level understanding of human reproduction.
Hey, that’s what she said!
H/T — r/BadWomensAnatomy
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Umm…he does know that humans don’t lay eggs in nests, right?
I hope he also knows that vacuum cleaners are a pretty recent invention, so it would be very strange if humans had evolved to use them in relation to biological cycles. I hope he doesn’t think that prehistoric women vacuumed up the crumbs of their prehistoric bon bons while waiting for the men to hunt mammoths. /s
IIRC Pickup artists are a bit obsessed with ovulation. I think this could have more to do with them, as a study I saw somewhere (will try to track it down later) found that men find women who are ovulating to be more attractive, so this is possibly a projection of the pickup artists finding ovulating women to be more attractive. Or it could just be an extreme misunderstanding.
I think that the best part is where he says that if she doesn’t understand what the hell you’re talking about with the ovulation thing then you should just mansplain it to her because women just looooove it when you mansplain their body to them!
Found a few relevant studies of men finding ovulating women to be more attractive, including the one I was thinking of originally:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513807000694?via%3Dihub
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2004.0174
I haven’t read the studies and they sound a bit sketchy, so I’m not buying it yet, but if these are true it would demonstrate the inverse of what these PUAs are saying. My guess would be, if the studies are accurate, what’s happening is that the pickup artists find women more attractive when they are ovulating, so they project that onto the women and assume that the women find them more attractive. I don’t know if that is true; but I doubt most women want anything to do with these idiots.
Passing birds will know exactly what you are talking about, you master of subtlety.
As one does.
I think he’s confusing ovulatory nesting with the instinct some pregnant women have to go into a flurry of cleaning and organizing in the days/hours before labor. It’s a real phenomenon, but it certainly doesn’t mean that women experience it during their monthly cycle. The egg doesn’t even leave the body during ovulation. Why would it care if the floor is vacuumed?
The only time I have a heightened urge to clean is when I’m sad or anxious and need to do mindless physical chores to take my mind off things.
Dudes, if you’re going to do this, you’d better be packing something to back it up.
Wait, when stereotypical 60’s dudes call women “birds” they’re not being literal?
And here I thought I only cleaned because I hated dirt. Huh.
I vacuum biweekly, and my menstrual cycle is fairly regular so I’m pretty sure that’s not it
I’ll admit I laughed at this post, but TBH the innuendo thing makes my insides squirm even while I’m giggling. It’s the bad faith/plausible deniability aspect: call the guy on it, and he can smoothly deny it, claim you’re reading into his words, and maybe spin it as you having a thing for him.
It’s utterly crass and hamfisted, but IMO it’s still an opening move for gaslighting, and I can’t believe DeAngelo doesn’t understand that on some level.
@Cyborgette
I think he understands that fully. Pickup artistry is basically training for psychological abusers, and gaslighting is one way to do that.
There’s some evopsych hearsay going around saying that ovulating women are more likely to want sex, or specifically one night stands. IDK if any of it is backed by studies.
Since pick-up artistry has a big cargo cult science aspect, PUAs naturally go around repeating the word “ovulation” at each other and making up rules on how to identify ovulating women.
As for nest building, based on my experience with guinea pigs, I now imagine a pregnant woman tearing several bedsheets into large shreds and stuffing them into a closet.
TIL the Prince of Persuasia from Bob’s Burgers is real
David, why bother to link to a post more than a decade old??
My gods, these guys actually tell each other that crap works?!?!
No wonder they don’t stop talking like that.
Apparently you can write a “dating coach” article by lifting lines from old sit coms and third rate Bill Murray movies. I can imagine a scene where Al Bundy is telling Bud how to pick up girls using those kind of lines.
I just wanted to add that that Kristen Schaal gif is perfection.
I mean to be fair, there is a monthly part of my cycle where I feel more energy and often do cleaning tasks I usually don’t want to do and have been letting go, which may or may not involve vacuuming litter out of hard-to-reach places that my cat can magically get it in.
Also to be fair, it’s the first day of my period, which is like the opposite of ovulation so… I guess my body is compelled to throw small celebrations at the removal of little eggies I didn’t want and don’t need?
@Cyborgette
I am 100% with you on that reading. I can’t decide if it’s just above or just below people who are always “just joking” on the scale of red flag fire warnings about dates.
My ovulations have about as much to do with my sexuality as my periods do, ie. none. For all these guys’ efforts to learn about women, they can’t figure such a simple thing out. Periods and ovulations and other aspects of the cycle are not sexy or about sex to women. There’s almost no connection at all unless they’re trying to conceive or using fertility awareness for contraception.
This will be news to his readers. I’ve never known any men to twist my words to try to make them sexual. It’s not true that young men with ants in their pants want to mention sex to young women all the time. This advice, which is in no way tired or trite or sexist, will certainly get some conversations going — if you know what I mean (wink, wink).
What if she tells you she has a Roomba?
Well, I vacuum every other day with has more to do with owning three cats than ovulating, which I don’t do anymore since I had a full hysterectomy 10 years ago. But men have such silly ideas about everything.
These suggestions are so pathetic and sub-Austin-Powers-y, so mouldy-cheesy, my first thought was – this has to be some kind of joke, a set-up intended to sabotage-the-dumb-MRA/PUA.
But it’s intended as genuine advice (the mind boggles). Pre-pubescent levels of innuendo? Mansplaining ovulation with fractal levels of wrong? Surely a contender for the record of fastest-turn-off-ever.
@opposablethumbs
A few other possible contenders:
A fedora
Calling someone “m’lady”
Reading PUA sites
Negging
Voting for Republicans
…And people think PUA works. How do these dating gurus explain why their strategies never work? And how does anyone still listen to them?
@Moggie
That reminded me of this SNL parody ad:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gqesEYUXr78
All joking aside, when I was a kid my family had one of the very early models of Roomba (this was around 2004 or so). It didn’t work very well for cleaning, so my younger sister and I repurposed it by making obstacle courses for it to navigate. A few years ago, I was visiting my parents and happened to look in the basement and found it. I tried to charge it up to see if it would still work, but sadly it was dead as a doornail.
Related: I stumbled across this post on Janelle Shane’s blog, which David has linked to a few times. In this post, she programs a neural network to generate pickup lines. The results don’t make much sense, but are much less misogynistic than actual pickup lines and are somewhat humorous.
Ovulation doesn’t cause vacuuming. It causes junk science.
@Naglfar
If the method fails, it’s because they didn’t do it right, and/or because women are brainwashed and don’t know what evolution has “programmed” them to want. The point of PUA is to repeatedly test boundaries until they find a target who can’t or won’t push back. If she lets them neg and harass her, chances are she won’t object as the encounter escalates to physical touch, isolation, etc. It’s a numbers game. Fortunately, the numbers are very low, and getting lower as word spreads about these tactics.
I wish sex ed included a unit on spotting abusers.
@Moggie
Then you bounce your eyebrows suggestively and say “Roomba. Room. I hear sexual intercourse takes place in rooms. Do you have a room? Sex.”