MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
First, let me be very un-player-ish and lay my cards on the table. I'm a happily married guy now, but as a dude with a high libido, I spent a good bit of my adolescence being jealous of guys my age who could pull women easily. To them, I was always the quintessential Average Frustrated Chump™. I read a good bit of the "Pickup Guide" literature at one point in my early 20s, and I just couldn't bring myself to transform my whole system of values the way these guides indicated I'd need to if I wanted a lot more cookie. Simply put, if I lived in one of the ancient hunter-gatherer societies that these and other fans of evolutionary psychology love to talk about, I'd be a shaman or teacher, not a hunter or warrior.
Clearly I was able to find someone who wanted a guy like me, rather than a calculating alpha male, and I've seen others like me do the same -- I truly believe now that there is someone for everyone. But even after I became a confident and (if I do say so myself) interesting person, meeting women who were sexually interested in me never got beyond the point of "getting lucky". I never did, and have no experiential evidence to suggest I ever could, reach a point where I could go out any night with the intention of bringing home a woman, and succeed most of these nights. ("Getting lucky" is a term that players roll their eyes at, because to them, luck has nothing to do with it.)
The one thing that struck me about all this Pickup Guide literature is how absolutely it's worded. Since we're a highly genetically homogeneous species of animal, it suggests, we all share the same instincts. Therefore it follows that all (or nearly all) straight women will respond positively to the tactics outlined, that play upon their basic instincts from the African savannah about what's sexually attractive.
Okay. But one other fact that players are fond of throwing out there seems to contradict this: It's a numbers game. Indeed, this was one of the things that turned me off to molding myself into a ladies' man -- I'm sensitive, and handle rejection pretty poorly. And on principle, I didn't much relish the idea of absorbing so much humiliation from women's rejections that I turned into a cynical, misogynistic asshole, which is kind of the groundwork for cultivating the mindset of a womanizer.
I can think of two possibilities for reconciling this apparent contradiction:
1) Players' tactics really do potentially take the panties off of nearly any straight woman, but the set and setting, or timing, has to be right. Since the player can't get inside his target's head and see where she's at mentally, there's an element of uncertainty there, and therefore the player should be ready to be rejected, not because his tactics were amiss, but because of factors beyond his control.
2) Players' tactics actually only work on a subset (though perhaps a statistically large minority) of women, but the player can't ever face this fact, lest he lose faith in his tactics and lose some confidence.
I have a feeling I'll get a lot of replies from women who'll tell me with righteous indignation that no player could ever pick them up. But the fact is that many "good" women who feel this way indeed have been picked up by players at one point or another, and are often baffled and angry with themselves when they realize they've been played, and can't believe that they fell for these tactics. So clearly, at least for some, these games do reach down to a level of women's cognition that overrides their conscious control.
But just how many?
Clearly I was able to find someone who wanted a guy like me, rather than a calculating alpha male, and I've seen others like me do the same -- I truly believe now that there is someone for everyone. But even after I became a confident and (if I do say so myself) interesting person, meeting women who were sexually interested in me never got beyond the point of "getting lucky". I never did, and have no experiential evidence to suggest I ever could, reach a point where I could go out any night with the intention of bringing home a woman, and succeed most of these nights. ("Getting lucky" is a term that players roll their eyes at, because to them, luck has nothing to do with it.)
The one thing that struck me about all this Pickup Guide literature is how absolutely it's worded. Since we're a highly genetically homogeneous species of animal, it suggests, we all share the same instincts. Therefore it follows that all (or nearly all) straight women will respond positively to the tactics outlined, that play upon their basic instincts from the African savannah about what's sexually attractive.
Okay. But one other fact that players are fond of throwing out there seems to contradict this: It's a numbers game. Indeed, this was one of the things that turned me off to molding myself into a ladies' man -- I'm sensitive, and handle rejection pretty poorly. And on principle, I didn't much relish the idea of absorbing so much humiliation from women's rejections that I turned into a cynical, misogynistic asshole, which is kind of the groundwork for cultivating the mindset of a womanizer.
I can think of two possibilities for reconciling this apparent contradiction:
1) Players' tactics really do potentially take the panties off of nearly any straight woman, but the set and setting, or timing, has to be right. Since the player can't get inside his target's head and see where she's at mentally, there's an element of uncertainty there, and therefore the player should be ready to be rejected, not because his tactics were amiss, but because of factors beyond his control.
2) Players' tactics actually only work on a subset (though perhaps a statistically large minority) of women, but the player can't ever face this fact, lest he lose faith in his tactics and lose some confidence.
I have a feeling I'll get a lot of replies from women who'll tell me with righteous indignation that no player could ever pick them up. But the fact is that many "good" women who feel this way indeed have been picked up by players at one point or another, and are often baffled and angry with themselves when they realize they've been played, and can't believe that they fell for these tactics. So clearly, at least for some, these games do reach down to a level of women's cognition that overrides their conscious control.
But just how many?
, but I have the feeling it's going to be the source of much interesting discussion!
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
