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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@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
But…isn’t the point of this evo-psych bullshit that it supposedly can’t be erased? If they are saying women don’t know what evolution has “programmed” them for, aren’t they basically admitting that their evo-psych is wrong?
Seconding that idea. In my school district we never had sex ed, and I watched way too many of my friends end up in abusive relationships. This would have been far less likely if there had been a sex ed unit like that (or any sex ed at all).
@Buttercup:
That’d be good, but can you imagine the conservative pearl-clutching?
@Naglfar
It’s an amazing level of mental gymnastics. Since women are supposedly programmed to want asshole rapists (and it’s just a coinkydink that that happens to dovetail exactly with their own mating strategy), then any woman who doesn’t follow that script is clearly a deviant ruined by feminism. Young straight women are socialized to seek male approval. Lumping them in with “undesirables” sometimes works as a pressure tactic.
I wish I’d been educated earlier about red flags, too. As a teenager I didn’t have the tools or the language to call out manipulation. Instead we learned from movies, books, and magazine articles that it’s romantic when a man just won’t take no for an answer. We were taught that being stalked and groomed meant you were irresistible and therefore powerful. Everything revolved around the man’s urges.
Seems to me the brainwashing goes in the opposite direction to what the PUAs say. You’ve got to be carefully taught to ignore your instincts.
Well, to be honest, I did find myself on my hands and knees with a paint scraper scraping built up wax out of the corners of my (rented) kitchen once. Considering I was almost three weeks overdo at that point (these days they would never have let me go that long past my due date) it must have been a sight. Just imagine me. To say I was “great with child” was an understatement. And TBH, I’ve never really been the type to worry about immaculate kitchens. I don’t like dirty kitchens, but I don’t need them to be sterile, either. And I had never, before or since, worried about wax build up.
When I realized what I was doing, I sat down and laughed until I literally cried. Because I knew about the pregnant lady nesting thing and I had recently decided that I had always been and always would be pregnant. The un-wax-build-up corners of my kitchen gave me some hope.
Later that night my water broke.
All that said, the impulse to “make a nest” just before you go into labor is not felt by all women and what exactly constitutes “making a nest” will vary quite a bit from woman to woman.
I hate housework and avoid it whenever possible. Anything to do with floor cleaning is what I hate most. The thing that triggers cleaning for me is having company.
So… I guess, according to this dating coach, I only ovulated when company was coming? If only! That would’ve meant that Id’ve had far fewer painful, crampy periods!
This reminds me of something my husband told me, about a lecherous former boss of his. At the time, my husband was in college, and had a part-time job in a greasy-spoon type of restaurant. This guy apparently could tell when a woman was menstruating, based on her appearance and behavoir. There was another time when a certain waitress left the room, and he said, “She’s pregnant.” Supposedly, he knew it before she did.
I didn’t bother to argue with my husband about this. Life is too short.
I only wish that ovulation motivated me to vacuum.
Ovulation only makes me exhausted, sick, and depressed/ twitchy. None of these are conducive to me wanting to vacuum
It’s really hard to believe that there’s any such link between ovulation and house cleaning, because, as Aristotle said, nature abhors a vacuum.
how does that lecherous boss think he’s established the accuracy of his intuition? has he gone round asking all the women he thinks are menstruating, to check? has he checked the ones he thinks AREN’T menstruating? I don’t see why his intuition should get credence if he hasn’t done the basics of verification, and if he has, DUDE, DON’T DO THAT.
As Buttercup Q Skullpants says, it can only be a numbers game. As I understand it, another part of the whole PUA thing is to constantly hit on anything and every female with a pulse, and they may think what they are saying is “working” because although 99 times out of 100 they very sensibly get told to “**** off” one time in a hundred they blunder into the one poor sap at such a low point in her life she’ll think “Oh Christ, he’ll have to do” of anyone who asks, no matter what they actually said.
It just seems to me that the whole PUA thing couldn’t sustain itself as it does if none of its practitioners were ever, ever successful in conning some poor woman into doing something she regretted, whilst at the same time every example I have ever seen of it ought in all rationality to be off-putting to pretty much anyone.
I suppose PUA wouldn’t be as attractive to the kind of misogynistic, toxic males with appalling self-esteem problems if the whole thing were: “It doesn’t actually matter what obnoxious rubbish you say, pester large enough numbers of women and someone, somewhere is eventually going to be stupid enough to fall for it.”
@Fetch: Those are good questions. This was a long time ago, as in the 1970s. It could be, he DID ask women. Or, maybe they freely volunteered the information. To hear my husband talk, there were some pretty crass people working there. Also, I don’t think there was much awareness of on-the-job sexual harrassment back then.
So I guess this is the reason my vacuum cleaner disappeared after I finished menopause?/snark if not obvious.
The concept does, however, remind me of a former roommate: when she was upset or felt like she couldn’t control what was happening in her life, I’d come home from work to find our apartment completely rearranged from how it was when I left.
She called it “dominating her space.” I never minded it all that much as she rarely asked for my help, except to move big furniture (the sofa, bookcases, etc) and pretty much had it all done by the time I got home.
Buttercup: my sex ed, way back at the end of last millennium, did. Including a pretty well-made short movie of a relationship that slowly over time gets worse, showing what the various warning signs might look like and how subtly abuse can creep up. And some less artful versions with teachers just explaining it.
It helped me get out of a bad spot, to know that what felt shitty and slowly getting worse was in fact not minor. (I wish I’d accepted what I’d already noticed, a couple years sooner, but of course despite all the warnings I kept hoping for change that never came.)
About vacuums: I don’t. I hate the things worse than my cats do. Instead, I mop.
Given I don’t have ovaries, Fallopian tubes, uterus etc I’m pretty sure I’m not ovulating.
Am I proof?
OP is ABSOLUTELY correct. This is hard (*wink, wink*) fact. It is supported by data indicating that sales of vacuums dropped and companies specializing therein collapsed in association with oral contraceptive use. It is also the reason contractor target women “of a certain age” with advertising. They need to have all of their carpet ripped out (if you know what I mean). /sarcasm (if it wasn’t obvious)
Since I have a cleaning service, does that mean when they vacuum I’m ovulating, or are they ovulating? Are do we all ovulate simultaneously?
I’ve never felt personally motivated to vacuum unless my mother was going to visit – maybe her ovulation motivated my vacuuming.
So many questions – if only I had a man to explain it all to me!Being a woman is so hard!
I was gonna vacuum the house today, but then I remembered that I’m on the pill so I didn’t.
I’ll try to teach my female dog to do it next time she’s in heat.
@Dvärghundspossen
My dog is spayed, so that must be why she won’t help with the housework. /s
I was in a super duper vacuuming mood Sunday, so I vacuumed my whole house. I also scrubbed the kitchen floor. I’m post menopausal, so how does that fit in the equation? Or did I add floor scrubbing because of my post menopausal status? I wish these experts on all things Lady wouldn’t leave so many gaps in their official research findings.
A minor issue in all the wrong, but what the hell kind of conversations does he think women are having? I don’t think I’ve ever announced that I’m vacuuming, and I don’t think anyone else has ever told me they were.
Oh David,
It looks more and more each day that MRA’s would rather hurt women than help men.
Look at how these guys portray Vic Mignogna as a victim.
https://promalecollective.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/support-the-petition-for-vic-mignogna/
But if you research further, it looks like his “case” can’t stand up under the scrutiny of the court of law.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/10/04/anime-voice-actor-vic-mignogna-loses-big-judge-drops-final-claims-dallas-area-studio-colleagues-defamed/
Elizabeth: generally (though there are exceptions) if you’re vacuuming for your mom, it’s because your mom ovulated.
Roughly nine months before you were born, plus or minus.
What compelled this old chicken to vacuum her apartment last time was the cat knocking over the vase she got for Christmas last year shehated but didn’t have the heart to throw away. The cat was rewarded with treats for finally pulling his weight around the house.
@Moggie
I gotta give you props for that one.