A Weapon of Mass Seduction

Divorcing the Outcome: The Manhating Epidemic, The Fallibility of Advice, and When To Not Give a Shit About a Dude

I have a few related things to rant about today, so I'm going to tie them all together into one blog entry.

1.

A longtime dating advice columnist recently joined Twitter. I started following her and about 60 percent of the time I immensely enjoy what she writes. The trouble is that her smart and insightful commentary is often lamentably peppered with insults directed at the male half of the populace:

"A man who can't think for himself makes a good husband."

"If men's penises looked more like shoes, women would ask to take them out more often."

"We need to attach 'motion sensors' to men's lips. Really."

"The best boyfriend is ALWAYS the one with more money."

These would be funny quips from a comedian. But they're not from a comedian; they're from a popular dating advice columnist.

Allow me also to point you toward an excerpt from the terribly antiquated but somehow still popular tome "Why Men Love Bitches" by Sherri Argov:

"If that fateful day ever does arrive when he tells you that you are a bitch? Stop, and take a deep breath. Then enjoy the moment. Smile internally as you say to yourself, 'Okay. Now I know he truly does love me.'"

So if a guy is unhappy enough with you to call you a bad name, that's a good thing? Another example from her follow-up book, "Why Men Marry Bitches" (which, for the record, consists 90 percent of information already laid out in its predecessor, so save your money):

"Let's rewrite the fairy tale, shall we?... The storybook ending should read like this: Once upon a time there was a princess. Along came a prince who asked her if she'd like to ride on his white horse. She said, 'I'd like to take a ride on your horse, but I can't right now because I'm a little busy getting on my own horse. Go ride off into the sunset without me, and I'll catch up to you a little later.' Suddenly, the prince is dumbfounded. He's never heard anything like this before. Something clicks inside him, and it starts a fire within him that he can't put out, because she doesn't need him. And then he says, 'I have to be with her for the rest of my life.' Then they fall in love, marry, and ride off into the sunset. And then she tortures him... lovingly ever after."

And that's the end of the book. Not a supposedly lighthearted joke somewhere in the middle -- the fifth-to-last word in the book is tortures. This is a New York Times bestseller. Are we serious here? Is it just me, or has relationship advice become sorrily saturated with manhating?

This girls' club misandric mentality has trickled down and infiltrated the vernacular of the average woman too. A guy friend of mine made a Facebook post the other day about how women often go crazy after a guy has sex with them, and one woman responded, "Eat a dick. Some of us fuck like men. I.e., fuck. Get dressed. Never call again. No truly independent woman has time for the bullshit. Careers are time consuming."

The intentions behind these philosophies are well-meaning. Too many women act desperate, clingy, and needy around the men they want, and this behavior ends up chasing them away. So authors and coaches push women into believing that they don't need men by framing guys as worthless creatures secondary to more important things like careers and shoes and pink martinis, hoping this will at least sway the pendulum far enough away from neediness that maybe they'll attract a guy at some point merely by not doing what doesn't work.

But if the only cure for needy desperation that these so-called relationship gurus offer is an attitude that reviles men and glorifies their supposed stupidity and worthlessness, that really doesn't seem at all useful, especially when our goal is, y'know, to actually build relationships with these creatures. Furthermore, it's insulting to women that rather than trust them to implement advice that actually works, we offer them fables to keep them from fucking up. Why do female advice gurus assume that the members of their own gender are too dumb to understand what proactive steps they can take toward building a satisfying relationship? Why do we simply give them the lovelife equivalent of telling them not to cross the street so they don't get hit by a car?

If what you wanted was a life filled with girls'-nights-out and manhating trash talk, you wouldn't be reading this blog. You're here because what you want is a fulfilling relationship with an awesome guy who makes you happy. And that's totally okay -- that is what you are biologically programmed to want, and it doesn't make you weak or anti-feminist to admit you want a great guy.

2.

I received a negative comment or two on my Formspring a few weeks ago complaining that my advice didn't work (and calling me a bitch -- well, actually, a bith -- making me question both the geniality as well as the intellect of the anonymous questioner). It seems pretty bold in my eyes to complain about the quality of the free advice I offer to anonymous seekers limited in their question-writing to something like 500 characters (though that doesn't stop some from submitting one question written out over four or five different character-limited entries). I mean, sure, I do the best I can with the limited information I'm given over the internet, but if you're really serious about wanting to strategize for the best possible outcome in your situation, maybe it might be a better idea to book an in-person coaching session where you'll have ample time to describe the details of your predicament and I'll be able to give you a full assessment that is informed by seeing your deportment firsthand.

But more to the point, the best and most accurate advice in the world is still never a guarantee of success when it comes to romance. Why? Because nobody is obligated to love you just because you did everything right. Furthermore, even if you do everything right and you do win the love of your desired object, there is no guarantee that he is going to do everything right just because he loves you. In fact, love is a scary thing that often makes people run away, get defensive, or screw up royally because the stakes are so high (see my recent post The Loneliness Epidemic for more on this phenomenon). I laugh when I see other coaching companies sprinkle their badly copywritten websites with words like "Today!" "Right Now!" "Get Any Guy/Girl You Want!" "100% Chance of Success!" It's like, do these people have such a failed understanding of human relationships that they actually forgot about this pesky little thing people have that's called free will?

So why do this at all? Because when it comes to building the kinds of relationships you want, you will want to know that for your part you did absolutely everything you could to stack your odds in favor of things working. You can look back on a failed relationship and say, "That guy acted like a dick," or "He wasn't who I thought he was" or even "I guess he just didn't have feelings for me," but there is nothing more heartbreaking than having to say, "I fucked up. I made a big mistake. I could have done some things a lot better."

And when you know that you did everything you could possibly do and things still didn't work out, it makes moving on that much easier. In that way, you are able to divorce yourself from the outcomes of your seductions because you know that whatever didn't work wasn't something that was in your control. I once attempted to seduce a man who lied and told me he was single when he wasn't; obviously my seduction didn't succeed because it was based on misinformation. Not my fault. I once attempted to form a relationship with a man who had such a problem with drugs and alcohol that in his incapacitated state he would start fights with me that he wouldn't remember the next day and get mad at me for having left in the middle of the night; obviously that didn't work out so great either. Again, not my fault. And after a brief period spent being mildly irritated about what happened each time, I moved on, knowing that there was nothing else I could have done in either of those situations to have effected a better outcome.

This is what the study of seduction will do for you. It won't guarantee you a stable and happy relationship with every single guy you want, because some guys are douchebags who are incapable of stable and happy relationships. It will help you weed out said douchebags by process of elimination and feel satisfied knowing that you at least gave it a shot and found out their true natures, and it will allow you to stack your odds that when a good guy comes along who is actually capable of treating a woman well, he will choose you, because you will also know how to treat him well.

3.

This is the point in your life when you get to manhate a little bit like all these so-called relationship gurus advise you to do -- when it is directed toward a specific man who is actually deserving of your disdain. When I knew I was done with the alcoholic, I told him I needed space, and then I texted him telling him I was going to Vegas for a week with a girlfriend. And I did go to Vegas, and my girlfriend and I drank all sorts of overpriced sugary pink drinks and danced atop tables to Britney songs and got men to spend money on us in the casinos and shopped for shoes and trash-talked all the guys in our lives for all the stupid shit they had done. Because at that point I had earned the right to not give a shit about the dude in my life and to chant into the heavens how better off I was without him.

Here's the difference: When I was done, I went back home, reassessed things, and said to myself, "Okay, so now that I've moved on, what kind of man do I want in my life and how am I going to go about finding him and attracting him?" Because I had faith that if I expected the next guy in my life to not be a worthless, incompetent asshole, I would have a far greater chance of finding someone who was not a worthless, incompetent asshole. And I knew that if I treated him like someone who was not a worthless, incompent asshole, he would be more likely to behave like someone who was not a worthless, incompetent asshole.

And for the record I did find another guy two months later, and he was not a worthless, incompetent asshole. In fact he's been pretty awesome so far.

Manhating -- even the seemingly subtle (but perhaps more insidious) joking variety -- is no way to live your life. If you set up a human being in your life to fail, they will. Yes, some guys are going to be douches. I'm sure you've met plenty of them by now; I know I have. But if the only consolation you hold for your loneliness and desperation is clinging to a belief that guys are worthless and can't add anything of value to your life, you're not only knowingly lying to yourself, but you're not helping yourself find actual happiness. If you didn't want a guy in your life, you wouldn't have to go out there and talk shit about them so much. You'd be talking about your career instead, instead of talking about the idea of "talking about your career instead of talking about a guy." Please, write to these so-called gurus, and tell them that gender-hating isn't cool from either side of the divide. Yeah, I know, we women put up with it for a long time and we're just doling out some long-awaited payback. But we're never going to be happy with one another if we don't call a truce at some point and acknowledge the fact that we do, in fact, need each other. You know, for that little task at hand we have, called furthering the species.

So once you're done purging last year's jerks from your system, take a deep breath and start afresh. And give the next guy in your life the benefit of the doubt that he might actually be a decent person with whom you could build a beautiful and successful way of life.

photo by Emily Strange

Oh and have I mentioned you can preorder my book now? You should go do that.

Do It Now: Seduction and the Grand Gesture

“I'm not sentimental -- I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last -- the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power."
-- Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

"Give me everything tonight
For all we know we might not get tomorrow
Let's do it tonight."
-- Pitbull & Ne-Yo, Give Me Everything

 

So I just got back from an amazing vacation in Cancun that I took with an amazing boy and I feel really terrific. I can't tell you how grateful I am that we decided to take this trip together, despite how kind of ridiculous it may have been as an idea.

That it happened at all was kind of a fluke; we didn't have the idea to take a vacation together and then start looking up hotels and travel deals. We were sitting in a surf-themed bar in midtown one night, sipping rum drinks with names like "Mermaid" and "Sandy Ass" while flatscreen tvs on the walls played scenes of ocean waves, and I was thinking how nice it would be to take a tropical vacation together. Almost immediately an email came in on my blackberry from a travel deal site I signed up for, offering an all-inclusive deal to a five-diamond resort in Cancun. (This is also a noteworthy example of the principle that you get what you ask the universe to give you, a concept I'll be expounding upon more in another upcoming post.) It was a great price and the resort looked beautiful. I showed it to the boy sitting next to me and said, "This looks like a great idea. We should go." And we did.

Too many people, when dating, try not to make any sudden moves or offer up anything that might ruin their air of nonchalance. There's certainly something to be said for an easygoing nature that doesn't rock too many boats, but here it might be prohibitive. I don't see many people my age and in my social circles enjoying grand romantic gestures together. It's too much of a risk to end up seeming uncool. Heaven forbid they do something too early on that makes it look like they're getting too serious.

Here's the thing, though. The nature of the seducer is such that he or she knows that nothing in this world is meant to last. And rather than turn nihilistic over this fact and come to the conclusion that therefore nothing is worth trying, the seducer believes that therefore everything is worth trying. They suck each love affair dry because they know that the odds are overwhelming that their passion won't last forever.

I don't say this as some noncommital, philandering maneater trying to justify a hedonistic lifestyle -- this is actually scientifically documented fact. In her book The Anatomy of Love, anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher describes a phenomenon she calls the four-year itch. Putting together data of couples from sixty-two different cultures around the world, she found that divorces tended to happen most often during or around the fourth year of marriage. "Among these hundreds of millions of men and women frm sixty-two different cultures," she writes, "individuals speak different languages, ply different trades, wear different clothes, carry different currencies, intone different prayers, fear different devils, and harbor different hopes and different dreams. Nevertheless, their divorces regularly cluster around a four-year peak."

Why does the feeling of love seem to occupy such a ubiquitous timeframe? Fisher theorizes that we evolved to fall in love for four years at a time because in primitive human societies that was the amount of time needed to rear a child through infancy. "Like pair-bonding in foxes, robins, and many other species that mate only through a breeding season," she postulates, "human pair-bonds originally evolved to last only long enough to raise a single dependent child through infancy, the first four years."

The universal love timeline runs deeper than societal constructs, however. Emotions of love, as unromantic as it may seem, are dictated by chemicals in the brain. That rush of electricity you feel in your chest as you catch sight of your object of affection is actually just a surge of a naturally occurring amphetamine called phenylethylamine (PEA for short) saturating our limbic systems. The rush of PEA you feel with your lover lasts about eighteen months to three years, because your brain can't sustain a state of basically being on speed for any longer than that amount of time, so either it stops releasing the amphetamines or its receptors become desensitized to them over time. Following that time, your brain instead starts to release endorphins, or endogenous morphines, which are natural opiates that produce feelings of attachment, security, and peace, so that you and your loved one fall into a comfortable routine.

Psychologists theorize that we evolved to feel this way because in order to propagate the species, we needed to feel enough attraction to each other (PEA) to be interested in having sex with each other long enough to effect a pregnancy, and to stay comfortable with each other (endorphins) long enough to raise a child. After that, we're kind of on our own.

Depressing truth: We were not programmed to live happily ever after. We were programmed to further the species. After the time deemed necessary to pop out a kid, mother nature doesn't really care what else goes down in our relationships.

Certainly there are plenty of cases where couples have stayed together for decades, and we can assume that they are happy enough, seemingly in some marriages more than in others. But the overwhelming trend is that if we want to keep romance exciting through the years, we are bucking our own biological system.

I'm far too young to call myself an expert on marriage or longterm relationships (my longest relationship lasted -- surprise! -- four years), which is why I prefer to call myself a seduction coach or a dating coach rather than a relationship coach, despite the obvious crossover there. Here is what I will say on the subject:

You cannot count on your relationships, or even your feelings about them, to last. Unexpected change can happen at any moment. You could fall out of love, your partner could inexplicably leave you, either one of you could get hit by a bus when crossing the street. Therefore, if there's something you want to do with that person, do it now. Not five minutes from now. Now. NOW NOW NOW.

Socially, this attitude isn't the norm. As I mentioned earlier, people generally want to seem nonchalant about their relationships early on, and things like spontaneous romantic vacations seem to clash with those notions. There's a way around this, however.

For seducers, adopting the attitude of the grand gesture is completely normal. And one thing I have learned over the course of my studies in seduction is that you can make just about anything seem normal as long as you hold the frame that it is normal. For example, if a wealthy man started dating you and wanted to take you to Ibiza for a weekend after only knowing you for a few weeks, you might think of that as being completely normal on his part because his wealth allows him to travel all the time. As a seductress, you must incorporate the grand romantic gesture into your everyday life so that when you make one, it's completely normal for you.

Casanova was known for this. He had a reputation as a seducer with an adventurous nature, so when he suggested to a young woman that she come along on a trip with him (chaperoned, of course, in order to placate her parents), it seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary to him. Once he took a young woman and her two sisters on a surprise visit to Milan. Once there, he gave the girl a beautiful dress to wear and took all of them to dinner. In his world, things like this happened all the time, and if you had the good fortune of being seduced by him, they would happen to you too. It said more about the experience of being with him than it did about his feelings for you. In this way, he avoided any lack of coolness while still having amazing romantic adventures.

When I first got out of my aforementioned four-year relationship, I didn't have the reputation as a seductress that I do today, partly because I was entering a new social circle in which I was mostly unknown, and partly because I had just been mostly monogamous for the past four years and was in the process of getting my dating sea legs back. The first man I started dating happened to be celebrating his birthday exactly two weeks after our first date. Conventionally speaking, it was probably too early in the dating process to make a big fuss over it, but what he didn't know about me is that if I give a shit about someone, I'm going to make sure they have an awesome birthday. So when he asked me if he could hold his party at a burlesque show where I was performing, I set him up with a table, performed to one of his songs (he was a musician), and baked him a birthday cake which I had all the dancers bring out at the end of the show. He loved it -- but the detrimental part of it, for me anyway, was that although it seemed normal in my head, it wasn't yet enough a part of my routine and reputation to look completely normal to the outside world. He left me shortly after -- not, he later told me, for lack of interest, but rather because he was afraid I was going to go back to my ex. He didn't believe that the way I was with him was sincere, because at the time I had no known precedent for it. He was afraid it might have somehow been a fluke.

Nowadays it's known that that kind of thing is completely normal for me. Since then I've thrown all kinds of birthday parties for my friends, performed burlesque to many musicians' songs for their birthdays, and I have a reputation for baking cakes and cookies for birthdays, concerts, and any other occasion that in my mind seems likely to benefit from baked goods. I do it because I like it, and it's fun. And now it's no longer weird. It may still be a grand gesture, but like Casanova's trips around Italy, it's generally considered pretty normal.

That's the sucky part -- is that any change in your behavior, such as taking lovers on exciting vacations or throwing people extravagant birthday parties, is going to feel slightly weird and out of character for you the first couple of times you do it, and you will probably encounter some bumps in the road like I did with my lover who doubted my initial grand gesture. That is the small price you are going to have to pay in the beginning for the excitement of assimilating these behaviors into your everyday routine. Don't get frustrated if it feels weird at first. Just keep doing it and after a while it will become what you do, and moreover it will become who you are.

And as a seductress, you owe it to yourself and your targets to make the grand romantic gesture part of who you are. Today of all days I am so grateful that this is what I do with my life, and that I am the kind of girl who throws up her hands and says fuck it and goes to Cancun with a boy she's only been seeing for maybe eight months whom technically she doesn't even call her boyfriend (see my eyerolls over dating semantics in my blog post The Failing Love Lexicon), because goddamn, I had such an amazing time and I couldn't imagine not doing something like that just because I was afraid of being seen as giving too much of a fuck. The experience of being with you should be something that is known to be remarkable and is breathtakingly anticipated by those who desire you. Make it part of your reputation. Be known for having amazing adventures.

This quality will not only attract more targets to you, but will probably also help you in the odds of overcoming the four-year itch. Going back to the topic of brain chemistry, it is also a scientifically documented fact that doing exciting and even dangerous things with someone will cause you to fall for each other more deeply and more quickly than you would have otherwise, due to the release of a chemical in your brain called dopamine that bonds you together when that happens. If you do want to beat the odds, have adventures together.

And even if you don't beat the odds -- which, as a romantic realist, I realize is the more likely scenario (after all, the majority of relationships end at some point) -- hey, at least you milked your time together for all it was worth. There is little that's more heartbreaking than looking back at a failed relationship and wishing you had done more, said more, or allowed yourself to feel more. Whenever I'm not sure what's the right course of action to take, I often ask myself how I would want to live today if I knew the world were ending next week. Right now I feel pretty good about that.

But most importantly, you owe it to yourself to be the kind of person who does exciting and out-of-the-ordinary things with her lovers. This is the kind of life you should be living, and the kind of life I wish for you all. Don't wait for someone else to come along and do it for you -- for all you know, they're already out there waiting for you to do it for them.